Occupy Wall Street and the Tea party protests indicate growing anxiety. The people have grievances. They have a right to petition to have those grievances addressed. For decades, federal government has been less and less responsive to the needs of the middle class. Issues which have needed addressing for decades now threaten our very freedom, if not our way of life.

Big government and big business have unintentionally worked against progressive change for years. The pressure for change has built up to a head. The main reasons:

• Healthcare costs have skyrocketed, a drag to our economy, bankrupting many families. We spend much more on medical with less results than other industrial nations. Big drug and Big insurance have us by ‘the you know what’. Not a free market. if it were, I bet costs would come down.

• Energy policy has been controlled by lobbyists for more than 30 years. The land is strip mined, our water is being fouled and now our climate is deteriorating before our eyes. Politics may trump science (so far). But unfortunately, politics cannot trump nature. Politics cannot trump and our imperative to change our energy infrastructure. Big government in cahoots with Big Oil and big Coal, of course, are pouring millions of dollars into maintaining the dying status quo!
• Housing and commercial real estate values were pumped up and crashed. Commodities skyrocket and plunge. Dot com stocks boom and bust. Bubbles are damaging to our economy and add no value to the GNP. Allowing banks to speculate and pump up their trading over the last 30 years was a ruinous mistake. These cycles of wealth destruction put a hurt on Main Street! The great recession has smashed us small business entrepreneurs.
• Government manipulation and corruption: The revolving door between government and big business. Elected representatives and their assistants leave office and work for the same big corporations they oversee as congressmen, and then run for President, ala Newt Gingrich or a Mitt Romney.
• Huge super PACS (political action committees) spend vast sums of money to influence public opinion. The super-rich minority spends $billions anonymously, which can speak with more power and more loudly than anyone ever did before. Money rules. Not a democracy at all.
• Big banks received a bailout from the government, and even MORE! access to cheap credit from the Federal Reserve. Then they gave themselves multi million dollar bonuses. No pain at all! While millions lose their jobs, homes and small businesses gets their credit lines chopped. (I smell fraud.)

  Meanwhile the middle class has taken the hit. Lost home equity, jobs, savings and hope. The top 1% has experienced exponential income growth since 1975 while the 99% has barely budged. Economists tell us this is because government policy, tax structure, and massive borrowing by both private and public sector has become more and more skewed to give the top 1% and big corporations an unequal advantage in many many ways.

  
  Between 1947 and 1975, “middle class” income and the 1% income tracked together and our economy grew beautifully year after year. My father moved from a shabby 4 story walk up to a nice house in the suburbs. The difference between then and now is that income taxes were steeply more progressive. The top 1% paid a few more percentage points. The middle class was paid enought to buy what they made!!! (Henry Ford, that great capitalist, promoted that concept)

• Congress is useless and can’t legislate their way past 1993. They are beholden to the modern election machine of finance and wealthy special interests. The laws we need never get passed. The laws they pass are preposterous and their attitude is despicable. They won’t act responsibly. They must be voted out so we can get some reality again.

I don’t blame President Obama, not when he has a do-nothing congress opposing his every move. I am happy about the newly announced government/business/institution collaboration to energy retrofit 1.6 billion square feet of buildings. I think someone said its the equivalent of 1200 Empire State buildings. My favorite living President Bill Clinton is working on this too. It means the better part of 100,000 jobs and since it requires no public money, only public policy, its an awesome solution!

The Energy Savings predicted were overstated by an order of magnitude, however. They claimed a $4.4 billion improvement will generate $40 billion in energy savings a year. whoops! [What is it about politics that makes counting so difficult?]

In the building efficiency business usually expect a 1-2 year payback, for a savings more like $4 billion / year, not to mention the reduced carbon emissions. Damn good, a better investment than most anything else I can think of! No wonder these companies are on board, it only makes good investment sense!!! {full disclosure: some of the team are clients of mine} Oh yeah, this makes us less dependent on imported foreign oil!

How can we deal with these issues? There’s a lot of work to do, but I am optimistic. Americans are resourceful. I have every expectation that next year will be a good one for all.

Here is a good read on how and why we must rectify the situation or risk further withering of the America Dream. Please sign the petition(s).

More reading on another site.

Its spreading: heres another

Is this our flag?

Benjamin Franklin would be very upset that the Republican presidential candidate, Governor Rick Perry, says that The Feds printing of new money, increasing the money supply, is a crime, a counterfeiting operation, if you will.

Not only that, but he suggested Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, would be harmed in Texas for what he does. Perry is disrespectful of this nations history! He might be Texas’ governor but he is ignorant /dishonest about a monetary concept developed and tested by The First American himself, B.F. Franklin!!! These are not the ideas of a serious or sober leader.

B Franklin is one of my Most Admired Men of history. He was a true polymath, a renaissance man. Historian Commager said that “In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.”

Those tax breaks only benefit the rich and powerful, so why do they say closing tax loopholes is bad?
It’s BS designed to divert attention away from the facts.

Perhaps 10% of our deficit and our debt can be blamed on those special deals alone. Our system of taxation is outdated and this demonstrates that it has needed overhaul since the Reagan white house.

John Kerry made a comment that tells me that he can see through the smoke and mirrors of the Republicans.

Mitt Romneys statement that

corporations are people

(!?)

is only partly wrong. Corporations are not People, but in the eyes of the courts, they are!

http://tinyurl.com/3jplh4k

Why did we have such economic problems? An inability to calculate? Our leaders politicians, who dont demonstrate any abilities to separate fact from dogma, don’t do percentages.

Why are they still debating climate change in the US congress? They don’t do scientific method because they flunked science in school.

Our politicians mirror the falling standards in math and science education in this country. The chart below illustrates how far behind we are.

The truth : According to Wikipedia’s Cap and trade definition, it is where

…an aggregate cap on all sources is established and these sources are then allowed to trade amongst themselves to determine which sources actually emit the total pollution load.

What about this constitutes a tax? Why do so many neighbors of mine think it’s a tax? Answer: TMFN — Too much Fox News. Lying Fox News.

This is a free market “mechanism”. You can make money trading these credits, creating new ones and selling them on the market to an Emitter/seller, i.e. A party who operates/ owns a hydroelectric generating installation could sell credits to a party which operates/owns a fossil fuel generator. This does not make me think of a “tax”. The profits go to the swiftest and most useful, and not government bureaucracy.

Further misinformation from opponents: Cap and trade will drag the economy down and eliminate millions of jobs.

Yes, it _may_ actually hurt the job market, in a small way, for a few years. But it will stimulate investment in new technology. It will cause some pain in the business-as-usual, fossil-fuel dependent sectors. Yes, that also means some oil and gas companies will die. Too bad. But for the greater good.

Here is what the Annenberg Public Policy Center said:

According to projections by the Energy Information Administration and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the net effect of the House cap-and-trade bill will likely be to slow future job growth. Using 11 different possible future scenarios, EIA projects that future job growth might be constrained by something between 388,000 (under the most optimistic assumptions) and 2.3 million (assuming everything goes badly) 20 years from now. CBO also says employment would likely be lower than it would without the legislation – but only “a little.”

(The worse case scenario (unemployment 0.8% higher in 2030 than the “left-alone” scenario) assumes that we are completely unable to execute any carbon trades with the larger international partners, like China and India). But the American economy will be more competitive (and larger) if we do something rather than nothing. Doing nothing risks that might cost us a lot more than the risk of 0.8% higher unemployment.

Wall Street Journal reports on pros and cons of Carbon trading

FYI
Here is a map of Current Cap and trade jurisdictions

Whats interesting to me is that the three states with the
highest carbon emissions, Texas, Indiana and Pennsylvania, are not joiners. Tsk, tsk!

Hartmann tells a story of how the struggle between corporate power and individual rights has gone on for centuries, and has never been satisfactorily resolved. Much legal history in this book: corporations (starting with a milestone case in 1886 where the Southern Pacific Railroad claimed and (strangely), sued Santa Clara, California, arguing that they were being unfairly taxed, that corporations are protected by the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of all persons to equal protection, without respect to color or creed. (it was passed after the civil war ended, to keep former black slaves from being treated as property) After that, corporations had all rights of a natural person (i.e. free speech, etc.)

Corporations can’t be jailed and they are immortal. If a corporation hurts or kills someone, they can’t be held accountable by jail or a death penalty. They are only answerable to their shareholders, so profit takes precedence over good citizenship. Not good for us real persons.

Corporations are concentrating power (with money). Because they pay much less in taxes than individual citizens, they have an advantage. This is where it gets disturbing. Keep in mind that taxes are an extremely contentious subject, especially today.

Corporations spend a lot of money spreading information through advertising (or mis-information).

Look at News Corporation, the owner of Fox News. They have a large audience eager to believe what Fox says about taxation. But there is a corporate agenda at work. They are expressing corporate opinion, disguising it as unbiased reporting.

Fox News hates the left, and tell us that President Obama is a radical, that he was not born in the US, that he and the Democrats are conspiring against the people. But their “conservative” slant is a sham! They are in it to divert attention from what is important. By diverting attention to these side issues, they are actually enhancing big corporate power and .

News Corporation loves to talk about the “TEA” party”. Islamic mosques in Manhattan and gay marriage? How awful. Privatizing social security? Repealing medicare improve it? Great, lets roll the clock back. It would help large corporations profits,

NO APOLoGIES to Big oil and big coal companies. We don’t need more public subsidy of gas and oil. We do need a more sustainable infrastructure and building stock.

Remember that President Bush and his allies were in charge for 7 years before our national economy started south. The so-called conservatives have no right to complain. They got a trillion dollar tax cut in 2001, they started an unnecessary trillion dollar war in Iraq. They bailed out the banks with a 700 billion dollar program.

Leftist conspiracy? Socialist President? Hunh?

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the “military-industrial complex” was a necessary evil, shielding us from the possibility of war with the”communist bloc”. Eisenhower correctly predicted that this would lead to a corruption of our government.

Then the cold war ended. AS it happened, the “military-industrial complex” is ever more entrenched. Most ironic, this powerful lobby, before 1941, used to be exclusively tied to the Democratic party. Now they have their tentacles securely locked on the Republicans as well. In fact, since Eisenhower, the Republicans have been the hawks and not the Democrats. Funny how time changes everything. We live in an oligarchic times.

Knowledge is power. How much knowledge do the voters really have? Given the level of education we voters have in this country, its wonderful how we maintain our democracy.

Lastly, I think the reporters at Fox News should be ashamed of themselves. Their recent report about Shirley Sherrod being a racist and getting her wrongly blamed and fired for it is a sham.

Take this distraction: American politics.

We have a terrible engineering and environmental disaster as a result of BP Oil’s sloppiness and lack of foresight. They took chances and sadly, have lost.

Now there’s a clip on the news, of the US Representative from Texas, Joe Barton, apologizing to the chairman of BP Oil. Apologizing for President Obama making BP take full responsibility for the blowout and the damages.

Barton is the clown in this strange comedy of errors. We the people did not have much oversight over deep water rigs and OUR waters. Somehow, we never considered what might happen if and when something like this would happen. But risk was downplayed and there was no plan. It is an error to believe that big corporations can fully regulate themselves.

(The engineers at BP might have raised a flag, but no one paid them any mind.)

Now here comes a clown, apologizing to BP for ruining the Gulf of Mexico and the coastal environment for our children’s children. I am ashamed of that guy.

Distracted from what is wildly important. And the politicians do not have a clue.