Citizens Unite Against Citizens United | The Nation.

YellaDog.org is boycotting Target because of their massive campaign contribution to a group supporting ridiculously anti-gay teabagger candidate for Governor in Minnesota.

Their CEO, by the way, has a long history of contributions that skew not just to Republicans, but to far right wing Republicans including Michele Bachmann!

Lots of places to shop, Target.  The last thing I want is some percentage of my next bath towel purchase going to support fascists and tea party crazies.

I’m also making sure my Facebook status lets the world know about this boycott too.

We need to somehow draw a line between secrets that truly have national security implications an secrets that have policy implications. And we need for our State Secrets regime to explicitly state that making documents secret on a false basis of National Security when the real reason is policy implications or political embarrassment or difficulty is illegal. AND, we have to get a lot more merciless about telling the truth.

Anytime the idea that if the American people knew “X” they would… ANYTHING, that should be a critical flag that the American people mist have access to that information.

At the same time we as Americans need to toughen our skins about our willingness to sometimes do business with people we know are crooks and murderers. The Pakistani intelligence service comes to mind. They need to know that if out government thinks it is aiding the Taliban that the American people are going to know if thinks they are aiding the Taliban. Doesn’t mean we can’t work with them if the government feels it should, but it needs to become unconscionable that the government would withhold it’s opinion on the basis of whether the American people would continue to support the effort if they knew that we’re paying millions of dollars over here that is being funneled to the people we’re paying millions of dollars to shoot over there.

The government is not a person. It has no fifth amendment rights. When officials behaves as if it does, for any purpose that isn’t explicitly and solely for critical national security reasons, they need to be held accountable for their role in eroding our democracy.

We think of unemployment as a phenomenon that happens to people, but in economics the labor that people can provide is an capital asset just like a machine or a vehicle. Unemployment means that there is more capital than is needed to create the goods and services being demanded by the market. Therefor some of that capital doesn’t get employed. It is “unemployed.”. We see it in people, but also in shuttered factories, estuaries lined with mothballed container ships… and excess savings sloshing around the global markets looking for a place that needs it just as desperately as the people looking for jobs.

Inflation is the opposite phenomenon, when the demand for goods and services outstrips their supply.

If there is more supply than there is demand, we have two choices. The ugly one is to reduce supply. That is exactly what unemployment is. The other is to increase demand. Keynesian economics tells us that we can use short term government investment in our economic infrastructure and other government spending to increase demand. But there is another option.

The other option is that we can do things like increasing the minimum wage, strengthen unions and other collective bargaining forces, and make other moves that increase demand and reduce supply at the same time. Money doesn’t HAVE to flow through government to become demand.

Once government is fully funding our infrastructure needs (which admittedly, it isn’t) then any more that it spends on infrastructure will end up exasperating future problems by, actually, making the supply process even more efficient, requiring even less resources, etc.

Given this, it is extraordinary that as unemployment gets worse and worse, so many people start to fear inflation… which at this point we should only be so lucky as to have!  Inflation would mean that money and labor are both being so much utilized that they can’t keep up with demand.  That would be a welcome problem to have right now.

Schroedinger explained a central paradox of quantum mechanics with an analogy of a cat inside a box and a situation that boils down to the idea that anything you do to detect whether the cat is alive or dead, kills it.  So you can’t ever know whether it is alive or dead because any attempt to find out, makes it dead.

Business school students and entrepreneurs find a similar paradox in business.  Profits are a result of a well run business.  If you focus on running your business better, increased profits usually follow.  If you focus on increasing your profits, they disappear.  This is why, contrary to what every business student thinks as a child, business plan’s don’t start out with the objective of “make money”.

Our political class has not figured this out yet.  When things happen there is a reality of what happened.  At the end of the day there is going to be a public perception of this reality.  The idea of “spin” is born of a desire to manage the public perception of this reality.

The political class has gotten so focused now on spinning the public perception of reality that they have completely lost sight of the actual reality in the first place.  They now make all of their decisions on the basis of the impact it will have on the public perception of reality and, like the physicist who has to see whether the cat is alive or dead, or the business leader who is willing to do anything under the sun to increase profits, they are ending up doing exactly the things that they shouldn’t be doing and they end up damaging public perception instead of managing it.

The Sherrod case at the USDA puts this into stark relief.  When Fox News started pushing the made up story that the White House was incompetent because they harbored a racist, the White House immediately became incompetent by demanding, with no due diligence, with no investigation, with no questions, that this person resign.  They were so desperate to manage the perception of their competence that they actually had her pull her car off the road she was driving on so she could text message them her resignation.

Our entire system of governmental checks and balances exists to protect balance the rights of individuals with the demands of mobs.  But there was no balance at all here.  The mob said they would be considered incompetent if they didn’t fire this woman so they fired her immediately!  Immediately!  This was an incompetent thing to do, and as the incompetence became clear just as immediately when the mob’s information turned out to be patently false.

Now how do they look?  They look incompetent, which is exactly what they did not want to look!  But had they actually been competent, they would have come out of this situation looking competent, because they would have been competent!

This is by no means a unique situation for this administration.  This same dynamic has plagued the Obama administration since the campaign.  They have consistently and persistently reacted to charges of incompetence by becoming incompetent instead of ignoring the charges and focusing on actually being competent!

It isn’t even unique to this administration.  Both Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s entire presidential campaigns were so focused on how the public perceived them that they abandoned all reality of what they were… and ended up being perceived as people who would abandon all reality of who they were to manipulate public perception!

And this isn’t unique… to any of them at this point.  This problem has completely swamped the entire Republican party, and great huge portions of the Democratic party are infected too.

Politicians desperately need to learn that the only way to appear competent is to be competent!

So many Republicans have changed their ideas on so many major issues that it’s hard to keep up. With the return of Congress this week, two of those issues – campaign finance disclosure and climate change – could play out in the Senate over the next month.

What accounts for the shifts? Evolving principles? Pressure from the right? Political Strategy 101, block Democrats and President Barack Obama so they’ll fail and look bad? Maybe a slightly more subtle approach — find fatal flaws in a compromise that under other circumstances (say if a Republican president wanted it passed) you would support, on the theory that the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the halfway decent or the baby step forward? All of the above? Here are seven reversals that hold clues:

Seven Things Republicans Were For, Before They Were Against Them.

This chart is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

This chart almost needs no explanation.  This recession has increased the number of unemployed people trying to get each job from an average between one and three over the last decade to six now.  And that improvement you see leading into April is almost entirely due to temporary Census Bureau hiring.  The census push being over, some 700,000 of those people are re-entering the rolls of the unemployed, so this ratio is heading right back up.

When there are six times as many people wanting work as there are jobs it is unspeakable for Republicans like Orrin Hatch to accuse them of being on drugs or lazy.  Does this bastard not understand the nature of the crisis this country is in?  Does he have no freaking idea of how much damage his party has done to the American people?

Glenn Beck cries on TV that he’s had it and he can’t wait for his crazies on the right to take him up on his plea to start shooting.  Lets hope that when they do, they have some sense and target people like Hatch.

Since 1960, Republicans have held the White House 28 years, while Democrats have held the White House 21 years.

In 15 of the years the Republicans held the White House the unemployment rate got better while in 13 years it got worse.  In other words, 54% of the time Republicans were in office the unemployment rate got better and it got worse 46% of the time.

In 17 of the years Democrats held the White House the unemployment rate got better while in 4 years it got worse.  In other words, 81% of the time Democrats were in office the unemployement rate got better and it got worse 19% of the time.

Says volumes.

Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite the recession. Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants.

via Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’ – NYTimes.com.

This is the whole goddamn point!  Americans work in mines.  Americans work in fields.  Americans work in chicken processing plants.  Americans work in textile mills.  Americans work in dumps, and sewers, and subway tunnels, in floating sardine processing plants… Americans will work anywhere, just like anybody else!  The key, and infuriating, part of this paragraph is the phrase “low-wage jobs”!  What the hell is a low wage job?  Why is the market supposed to obey all the laws when we’re negotiating with farmers over what to buy their produce for but they don’t have to obey the laws when they are negotiating what to pay people to grow it and pick it!

I mean, this is the whole fucking point!  It is the whole point.  The flood of illegal immigration hasn’t just happened.  The government has deliberately turned a blind eye to it for decades, at the behest of farmers and other unscrupulous business people, because politicians don’t mind 10% American unemployment when 100% of Americans benefit from the lower prices on produce we can have when it is grown by, essentially, slave labor!!

We have laws about minimum wages, and worker protections, and social security, and benefits, and overtime, because we think they are the right thing to do!  But we turn around and ignore them if it means we can buy lettuce for $.25 a head less!

I’m fine with providing the illegals with a path to citizenship if we actually seal the border.  And when they become citizens they can work in the fields if they want, protected by all the laws that protect every other American worker and when we go to the grocery store we will pay for our food what it costs to grow it without treating people like animals!

For the next few days there will be raging accusations from proponents and opponents of gay marriage about the Defense of Marriage Act being considered unconstitutional.  Most of them will have nothing whatsoever to do with the decision itself, which has nothing to do with the moral arguments that will be bandied about.

The whole point of our three branches of government is that there are to be checks and balances that limit the power of the government to undermine the Constitutional rights of the citizens.  This decision very succinctly documents that courts have checks and balances that limit what they can do too, and what those limitations are.  For example, the courts may allow the government to limit rights that would otherwise be Constitutional when it has a legitimate rationale for doing so.

So, the court did decide in this case that DOMA limits Constitutional rights.  But in order to do something about it, it also had to find that the rationale the government gave for limiting the Constitutional rights were illegitimate.  When Congress enacted DOMA it offered four rationales for doing so.  The government itself has since concluded that none of those four rationales are legally defensible and the court’s decision provides documentation of why they are not.  The government did offer up two new rationales for DOMA in its defense in the case at hand, but the court found that neither of those rationales are legally defensible either and, of course, provides ample documentation as to why they aren’t.  None of these factors have anything to do with whether or not the court feels that gay marriage is or isn’t a good thing, whether it is moral or amoral, etc.

The decision basically says that DOMA tramples on Constitutional rights and that none of the interests the government has provided for doing so hold water.  Conservatives should rejoice, but they won’t.