Think About This:
1. Banks receive subsidies to the tune of about 80 Billion dollars per year to make student loans.
2. Private Health Insurers receive 50 Billion in Medicare/Medicaid subsidies as extra money beyond how much it would cost the government to provide the same coverage.
3. Private Military Contractors (PMCs, or mercenaries) are paid much more per person than a soldier to do the same job. They each usually make more money even than David Petraeus when he was running the entire war.
What do these cases have in common? In each case, in the pursuit to transfer as much of what might be a public good as possible over to the private sector, in the rush to idolize the market and kill off the government, 50-100 Billion dollars per year has to be paid to private companies to do the same thing the government could do itself without paying all or most of that money. So what does it say that Banks, Insurers, and Military Contractors all require such massive infusions of billions of taxpayer dollars on a constant IV drip, all in order to do the same thing that the government could do (lend to students, pay doctors, fight a war) for much less? It says that A) there is such a thing as market power and B) there is such a thing as economies of scale and C) Government doesn't pay bloated executive salaries. Therefore, among many other reasons, government is more efficient than the private sector in the delivery of these public goods, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars wasted per year, in checks written to banks, insurers, PMCs, private prison companies like the GEO group, charter schools, and on and on in a failed pursuit of ideological purity, despite this being the perpetration of an ongoing fiscal disaster.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Health Care Key Points
Please see my key points on Health Care, concise and with references, at:
http://salsa.missioncollege.org/files/moglen/HealthCareKeys1.doc
http://salsa.missioncollege.org/files/moglen/HealthCareKeys1.doc
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Private Equity Parasites and the Lesson of Mervyn’s
Private Equity Parasites and the Lesson of Mervyn’s
This month Mervyn’s, a popular chain of middle-class retail clothing stores, is just about finished with its going-out-of-business sale, its departments so ransacked the hottest deal-making is for their shelves and display tables. We can and must glean economy-wide universal lessons from this unnecessary bankruptcy, lessons with concrete policy implications.
Was Mervyn’s worthless when Cerberus Capital Management bought it from Target in 2004 for $1.2 Billion? Was it a doomed entity in 2005 and 2006 when it had a combined 300 million in profit, even despite being hit by Cerberus’ vastly increased lease payments they forced the retailer to pay for its own buildings?
You see, when the three Private Equity (PE) firms, Cerberus Capital Management, Sun Capital Partners, and Lubert-Adler acquired Mervyn’s, they split it into two entities, the retailer, and the real estate. Then they bled Mervyn’s dry with increased lease payments, debt, and dividend payouts. As an introductory proposition we should expect PE firms to layoff workers when they make an acquisition. But another common practice is to load it with debt.
This is being played out in the Sam Zell-Chicago Tribune parasite-victim relationsip, where that media company was also saddled with disproportionately enormous debt and quickly driven into bacnkruptcy.
To give you some idea of the debt’s disproportionality, “At their peak in 2006 they (PE firms) acquired 667 companies worth $372 billion. But debt levels soared: From 2005 through the third quarter of 2008, private equity firms loaded a staggering $741 billion of debt onto their companies' balance sheets.”
Besides layoffs and debt, the strategy includes high dividend payouts to the acquirer and/or other forms of forced extractive payouts (e.g. the real estate entity in the Mervyn’s deal). According to BusinessWeek, the “private equity firms took a total of $137 million in "distributions" directly from company coffers” in the Mervyn’s deal.
Overall, Mervyn’s charges the PE firms “stripped it of real estate assets, nearly doubled its rent, and saddled it with $800 million in debt while sucking out more than $400 million in cash for themselves.”
And Mervyn’s is not alone: Linens ‘n Things, Sharper Image, Goody’s Value City, and many others went bankrupt shortly after being bought out. “Of the 105 big U.S. companies that have filed for bankruptcy this year, 66 have been owned by buyout shops or been spun off by them.”
So one can safely say that easily half the major corporate bankruptcies are of firms recently bought and owned by PE firms.
So, what gives? Is the PE firm a parasite that buys firms with real products, real customers, profits, employees, and real estate, and systematically shuts them down? In a word, yes. Exactly. They favor short-term gain over long-term viability. Mervyn’s has laid-off 30,000 workers since 2004, when Cerberus acquired the store.
Is there a difference between how Cerberus (who also own Chryler) ran Mervyn’s and how Mervin G. Morris, who founded the company in 1949, ran Mervyn’s? Think about the time periods: Mervyn’s went through lean times and fat for almost six decades before they were fatefully acquired by a crony company that had no intention to run it, only a zeal to gut it for quick personal gain – sending them careening into bankruptcy.
The broadest point is this – in the Public vs. Private sector comparison, we can stipulate that the private sector will run some activities more efficiently than the government, despite infinite case studies to the contrary (Medicare and Social Security program administrative costs being vastly less than their private counterparts, public vs. privately owned prisons, the military vs. the mercenaries, etc).
However, if the laissez-faire/ privatization proponents want to put forward the private sector as a replacement to some government-run activity, they will have to first admit that the private sector can not possibly do a better job than government unles they first actually run the business, as opposed to buying it with the purpose of systematically bleeding it dry as quickly as possible, as if job one was firing all employees and closing all retail branches.
And these PE firms’ business practices are not unique in the narrative of businesses being bought in order for the private sector to destroy them and shut them down as fast as possible. General Motors went around the country in the first half of the last century, bought out and shut down major municipal streetcar systems (in what is known as The Great American Streetcar Scandal) for the purpose of replacing clean efficient public transport with dirty, smelly buses and more importantly, profitable passenger cars. Battery patents key to the electric car have been owned at various times by big car companies and oil companies, both of which just lock away technology so that it never will see the light of day.
Now, what is left of Mervyn’s is suing their former owners, Cerberus. This will be an important case to see if the courts will put curbs on PE firms’ behavior. If they fail to do so, it will be left to Congress and, conceivably, State Attorneys General to quell these destructive parasites.
Is there something else lost in this unnecessary bankruptcy? Mervyn’s was a place middle-class shoppers could pick up clothes that were above the quality you often find in Target or Ross, at prices that were reasonable. In many cities and towns, there is no close replacement. Even here in populous San Jose, I can’t name an interchangeable source. Macy’s is much higher priced, and mall boutique stores are worse. Target and Ross, as mentioned, are, like Marshall’s, hit-and-miss and harder to navigate for what you really want, and Wal-Mart is multiply objectionable.
But these are the concerns of real people in the real economy, like the 30,000 Mervyn’s employees tossed aside by Cerberus. People who own and manage Cerberus like Bush I’s VP, Dan Quayle, and Bush II’s former Treasury Secretary John Snow have other concerns: short-term extraction and personal enrichment at the expense of long-term sanity, equity, or widespread economic health.
This month Mervyn’s, a popular chain of middle-class retail clothing stores, is just about finished with its going-out-of-business sale, its departments so ransacked the hottest deal-making is for their shelves and display tables. We can and must glean economy-wide universal lessons from this unnecessary bankruptcy, lessons with concrete policy implications.
Was Mervyn’s worthless when Cerberus Capital Management bought it from Target in 2004 for $1.2 Billion? Was it a doomed entity in 2005 and 2006 when it had a combined 300 million in profit, even despite being hit by Cerberus’ vastly increased lease payments they forced the retailer to pay for its own buildings?
You see, when the three Private Equity (PE) firms, Cerberus Capital Management, Sun Capital Partners, and Lubert-Adler acquired Mervyn’s, they split it into two entities, the retailer, and the real estate. Then they bled Mervyn’s dry with increased lease payments, debt, and dividend payouts. As an introductory proposition we should expect PE firms to layoff workers when they make an acquisition. But another common practice is to load it with debt.
This is being played out in the Sam Zell-Chicago Tribune parasite-victim relationsip, where that media company was also saddled with disproportionately enormous debt and quickly driven into bacnkruptcy.
To give you some idea of the debt’s disproportionality, “At their peak in 2006 they (PE firms) acquired 667 companies worth $372 billion. But debt levels soared: From 2005 through the third quarter of 2008, private equity firms loaded a staggering $741 billion of debt onto their companies' balance sheets.”
Besides layoffs and debt, the strategy includes high dividend payouts to the acquirer and/or other forms of forced extractive payouts (e.g. the real estate entity in the Mervyn’s deal). According to BusinessWeek, the “private equity firms took a total of $137 million in "distributions" directly from company coffers” in the Mervyn’s deal.
Overall, Mervyn’s charges the PE firms “stripped it of real estate assets, nearly doubled its rent, and saddled it with $800 million in debt while sucking out more than $400 million in cash for themselves.”
And Mervyn’s is not alone: Linens ‘n Things, Sharper Image, Goody’s Value City, and many others went bankrupt shortly after being bought out. “Of the 105 big U.S. companies that have filed for bankruptcy this year, 66 have been owned by buyout shops or been spun off by them.”
So one can safely say that easily half the major corporate bankruptcies are of firms recently bought and owned by PE firms.
So, what gives? Is the PE firm a parasite that buys firms with real products, real customers, profits, employees, and real estate, and systematically shuts them down? In a word, yes. Exactly. They favor short-term gain over long-term viability. Mervyn’s has laid-off 30,000 workers since 2004, when Cerberus acquired the store.
Is there a difference between how Cerberus (who also own Chryler) ran Mervyn’s and how Mervin G. Morris, who founded the company in 1949, ran Mervyn’s? Think about the time periods: Mervyn’s went through lean times and fat for almost six decades before they were fatefully acquired by a crony company that had no intention to run it, only a zeal to gut it for quick personal gain – sending them careening into bankruptcy.
The broadest point is this – in the Public vs. Private sector comparison, we can stipulate that the private sector will run some activities more efficiently than the government, despite infinite case studies to the contrary (Medicare and Social Security program administrative costs being vastly less than their private counterparts, public vs. privately owned prisons, the military vs. the mercenaries, etc).
However, if the laissez-faire/ privatization proponents want to put forward the private sector as a replacement to some government-run activity, they will have to first admit that the private sector can not possibly do a better job than government unles they first actually run the business, as opposed to buying it with the purpose of systematically bleeding it dry as quickly as possible, as if job one was firing all employees and closing all retail branches.
And these PE firms’ business practices are not unique in the narrative of businesses being bought in order for the private sector to destroy them and shut them down as fast as possible. General Motors went around the country in the first half of the last century, bought out and shut down major municipal streetcar systems (in what is known as The Great American Streetcar Scandal) for the purpose of replacing clean efficient public transport with dirty, smelly buses and more importantly, profitable passenger cars. Battery patents key to the electric car have been owned at various times by big car companies and oil companies, both of which just lock away technology so that it never will see the light of day.
Now, what is left of Mervyn’s is suing their former owners, Cerberus. This will be an important case to see if the courts will put curbs on PE firms’ behavior. If they fail to do so, it will be left to Congress and, conceivably, State Attorneys General to quell these destructive parasites.
Is there something else lost in this unnecessary bankruptcy? Mervyn’s was a place middle-class shoppers could pick up clothes that were above the quality you often find in Target or Ross, at prices that were reasonable. In many cities and towns, there is no close replacement. Even here in populous San Jose, I can’t name an interchangeable source. Macy’s is much higher priced, and mall boutique stores are worse. Target and Ross, as mentioned, are, like Marshall’s, hit-and-miss and harder to navigate for what you really want, and Wal-Mart is multiply objectionable.
But these are the concerns of real people in the real economy, like the 30,000 Mervyn’s employees tossed aside by Cerberus. People who own and manage Cerberus like Bush I’s VP, Dan Quayle, and Bush II’s former Treasury Secretary John Snow have other concerns: short-term extraction and personal enrichment at the expense of long-term sanity, equity, or widespread economic health.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
My most apt analogy to the two roads diverging before us
My most apt analogy to the two roads diverging before us:
We are facing a choice that I think is best described by this story.
You, representing yourself and all Americans, have just seen half your neighborhood burned down by a crazed arsonist.
You must now choose between two agents to solve the crises in flames all around you.
One is the fireman, hose in hand and backed up by a fleet of fire trucks.
The other is the crazed arson, eyes glinting with the imminent power to set more infernos, in his hands a can of gasoline and matchbook.
As half our country looks to the fireman, we also look on the other half, baffled, unable to comprehend how they actually want to turn to the same forces that unleashed our nation's destruction. And all we can think is, are these people crazy? Are they on crack? Are they insane crackheads?
*********************
It is an amazing time we are living in, and all the more so an amazing time to be teaching economics at the college level. Where one year ago, five years, ten, twenty years ago regulation was always a bad word, now everyone regardless of their political-economic leanings calls for more regulation, be they left, right, center, Democrat, Republican, they all say regulation of the financial sector is superior to the anarchic deregulatory environment that has been pressed by the laissez-faire (L-F) crowd. Today I would not be surprised if Ron Paul starting calling for some sort of regulation.
And it is a sign of the times that it was announced today, October 13th 2008, that Paul Krugman, one of my favorite Economists (Sorry Paul I think the illest is still Joseph Stiglitz) was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize. The same award was given in 1976 to Milton Friedman
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/.
Friedman is of the "Chicago School" L-F free-market purist school. In fact he was a pillar of that school and much of the inspiration behind Naomi Klein's groundbreaking book and tour about "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." In other words, Friedman's theories and Krugman's could not be any more diametrically opposed. Krugman's Nobel prize is a pure reflection of the recognition that the "drown the government in the bathtub" philosphy is an abject failure.
I've often said we should try every extreme right wing idea in politics and society short of direct ethnic cleansing. We should try their ideas deregulating the economy, privatizing government out of existence except as a power to enforce authority through military, prisons, and police (the first two of which are already highly privatized as it is).
We should deport all the illegal immigrants, criminalize abortion, put away every offender of a victimless-crime to multiply our prison system by ten. We should do all the things the right-wingers want. Why? To see what type of third-world country we then will become. Privatize education like they do in Nigeria so only the paying rich can attend school. Kids fit well in the mines anyway.
I've often said we should implement their every right-wing policy, just to see how much of a banana republic we can become and realize that we should never ever try any of those ideas again. And I've often hoped we wouldn't have to run such a terrible experiment because we can see how the Washington Consensus (L-F/ right-wing/ destroy government/ privatize/ induce IMF riot) has destroyed every economy and society it has touched, with zero success stories. In other words, can we learn from the the essence of the turning from Friedman-ism to Krugman-ism?
But now I realize I don't have to invest such schadenfreude http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=schadenfreude
in that risky rightist fantasy proposition. Because we've had the last eight years in which exactly that experiment was being conducted on our society, and we have the disastrous results, the final verdict, burning our economy, safety, and standing in the world, all around us.
We are facing a choice that I think is best described by this story.
You, representing yourself and all Americans, have just seen half your neighborhood burned down by a crazed arsonist.
You must now choose between two agents to solve the crises in flames all around you.
One is the fireman, hose in hand and backed up by a fleet of fire trucks.
The other is the crazed arson, eyes glinting with the imminent power to set more infernos, in his hands a can of gasoline and matchbook.
As half our country looks to the fireman, we also look on the other half, baffled, unable to comprehend how they actually want to turn to the same forces that unleashed our nation's destruction. And all we can think is, are these people crazy? Are they on crack? Are they insane crackheads?
*********************
It is an amazing time we are living in, and all the more so an amazing time to be teaching economics at the college level. Where one year ago, five years, ten, twenty years ago regulation was always a bad word, now everyone regardless of their political-economic leanings calls for more regulation, be they left, right, center, Democrat, Republican, they all say regulation of the financial sector is superior to the anarchic deregulatory environment that has been pressed by the laissez-faire (L-F) crowd. Today I would not be surprised if Ron Paul starting calling for some sort of regulation.
And it is a sign of the times that it was announced today, October 13th 2008, that Paul Krugman, one of my favorite Economists (Sorry Paul I think the illest is still Joseph Stiglitz) was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize. The same award was given in 1976 to Milton Friedman
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/.
Friedman is of the "Chicago School" L-F free-market purist school. In fact he was a pillar of that school and much of the inspiration behind Naomi Klein's groundbreaking book and tour about "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." In other words, Friedman's theories and Krugman's could not be any more diametrically opposed. Krugman's Nobel prize is a pure reflection of the recognition that the "drown the government in the bathtub" philosphy is an abject failure.
I've often said we should try every extreme right wing idea in politics and society short of direct ethnic cleansing. We should try their ideas deregulating the economy, privatizing government out of existence except as a power to enforce authority through military, prisons, and police (the first two of which are already highly privatized as it is).
We should deport all the illegal immigrants, criminalize abortion, put away every offender of a victimless-crime to multiply our prison system by ten. We should do all the things the right-wingers want. Why? To see what type of third-world country we then will become. Privatize education like they do in Nigeria so only the paying rich can attend school. Kids fit well in the mines anyway.
I've often said we should implement their every right-wing policy, just to see how much of a banana republic we can become and realize that we should never ever try any of those ideas again. And I've often hoped we wouldn't have to run such a terrible experiment because we can see how the Washington Consensus (L-F/ right-wing/ destroy government/ privatize/ induce IMF riot) has destroyed every economy and society it has touched, with zero success stories. In other words, can we learn from the the essence of the turning from Friedman-ism to Krugman-ism?
But now I realize I don't have to invest such schadenfreude http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=schadenfreude
in that risky rightist fantasy proposition. Because we've had the last eight years in which exactly that experiment was being conducted on our society, and we have the disastrous results, the final verdict, burning our economy, safety, and standing in the world, all around us.
Voting Recommendations for CA Propositions - November 4th is Voting Day
Northern Californians and All Americans:
2008 Propositions Voting Recommendations from an Economics Professor
Politically I am very progressive and pro-Obama.
Prop 1 Yes
Prop 2 Yes
Prop 3 Yes
Prop 4 No
Prop 5 Yes
Prop 6 No
Prop 7 No
Prop 8 No
Prop 9 No
Prop 10 Yes
Prop 11 No
Prop 12 No
http://ravenodin.blogspot.com/
2008 Propositions Voting Recommendations from an Economics Professor
Politically I am very progressive and pro-Obama.
Prop 1 Yes
Prop 2 Yes
Prop 3 Yes
Prop 4 No
Prop 5 Yes
Prop 6 No
Prop 7 No
Prop 8 No
Prop 9 No
Prop 10 Yes
Prop 11 No
Prop 12 No
http://ravenodin.blogspot.com/
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Letters to the SJ Mercury News Editor and Congresswoman Lofgren
Thesse four letters were email 9/7/08
I don't know right now if any were published.
By the way, check out my articles at http://www.helium.com/users/410399/show_articles
1
Editor,
I was surprised that Jim McCandless (Monday 9/8/08, letters) gripes about having to see articles by Krugman, Steinem, and (voicing a leftist viewpoint, he claims) the far right extremist Pat Buchanan. How I wish I picked up the paper that day if this is true. Everytime I see the Merc, articles and editorials by right wingers like Hansen and Navarette clog it up and render it unreadable. ON the day McCandless’s letter was printed, I count 7 total letters printed. Four (the majority) were unabashedly pro-GOP. The fifth was largely pro-Palin, with a barely detectable tongue-in-cheek swipe at her. Another was apolitical (on lighting in Los Gatos) and the last appeared leftist, and was conveniently cut off mid sentence very early in the letter, another casualty of media consolidation. Why right-wingers would see the corporate media as advocating anything other than the same failed radical free market purist agenda is a mystery.
2
Margaret Fletcher (9/8/08, letters) blames Democrats for the budget impasse. If the state GOP can find inefficiencies to cut, I’m on board. But the only cuts that come close top budget-balance are to cut education and health. The real sources of the deadlock are: we require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget or a tax, and GOP legislators signed the Grover Norquist no new tax pledge. So it seems the only way out is for Democrats to agree to cut vital life-saving programs. We should pursue this elitist class war the GOP is waging and achieve the GOP cheap labor dream of turning society into the third world. For example, who hires illegal immigrants? Answer: rich right-wing business owners.
3
We should pursue the GOP cheap labor dream of turning America into the third world by trying their most extreme ideas: deport all illegal immigrants. Schools are open only to the wealthy - for them a voucher actually leads to an education since they can afford the rest of their private school tuition. Bleed our country dry with childish whimsical wars of choice, borrowing from the Chinese throughout and throwing off occasional trillions to our wealthiest fraction of one percent. All consumer regulations should dissolve; no one except aristocrats should have health care. No one should pay taxes or expect roads, bridges or FEMA to function. Destroy the lower-income 99% and give everything to the top 1%. Third world, here we come!
4
I would say we should try the GOP dream of changing America into a third-world country, but we already gave them a chance for the last decade. For six years they controlled every aspect of government and drove America into the ground. At the beginning of this reign of willful incompetence I said it will be interesting to see how they blame the left for the problems the right causes while running everything. I was wrong; their strategy is not so much to blame the left for the scandalous disasters of the right. Instead they admit the GOP caused the disasters, yet only the GOP can clean up the mess. With a compliant media, they are getting away with this absurd logical quagmire.
Email to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren 9/17/08
Thank you for voting yes on 6604.
It is amazing the lengths to which the media will go to trumpet the non solutions of offshore oil and ANWR that might bring down gas a nickel per gallon in more than a decade. At the same time there is a total blackout on communicating to America that many experts believe regulating speculators will lead to a 50% decrease in the price of oil in a matter of weeks.
Let's please try this. I know the veto threat looms - the fight must be won through the media. Someone must use whatever pedestal of notoriety they've achieved to say simply, let's try this solution. Everything else is window dressing in comparison.
If regulating speculators fails to achieve the expected results and takes two months to lower gas prices only 40%, do you think the American people would be dancing in the streets for that type of failure?
Think about this - the only argument I've seen against this is (false) that transportation, airline, trucking compaines need this market to be unregulated to hedge costs. Look who is sponsoring the stopoilspeculationnow.com effort: it is the very transportation, airline, trucking companies these phony free market purists claim to protect. The airline and truckers want oil speculation regulated, and so would the American people if the media gave it one-tenth the attention they give to non solutions, or they did to the arcana of the Iowa Caucus system.
David Moglen
Assoc. Economics Professor
Foothill and Evergreen Valley Colleges
I don't know right now if any were published.
By the way, check out my articles at http://www.helium.com/users/410399/show_articles
1
Editor,
I was surprised that Jim McCandless (Monday 9/8/08, letters) gripes about having to see articles by Krugman, Steinem, and (voicing a leftist viewpoint, he claims) the far right extremist Pat Buchanan. How I wish I picked up the paper that day if this is true. Everytime I see the Merc, articles and editorials by right wingers like Hansen and Navarette clog it up and render it unreadable. ON the day McCandless’s letter was printed, I count 7 total letters printed. Four (the majority) were unabashedly pro-GOP. The fifth was largely pro-Palin, with a barely detectable tongue-in-cheek swipe at her. Another was apolitical (on lighting in Los Gatos) and the last appeared leftist, and was conveniently cut off mid sentence very early in the letter, another casualty of media consolidation. Why right-wingers would see the corporate media as advocating anything other than the same failed radical free market purist agenda is a mystery.
2
Margaret Fletcher (9/8/08, letters) blames Democrats for the budget impasse. If the state GOP can find inefficiencies to cut, I’m on board. But the only cuts that come close top budget-balance are to cut education and health. The real sources of the deadlock are: we require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget or a tax, and GOP legislators signed the Grover Norquist no new tax pledge. So it seems the only way out is for Democrats to agree to cut vital life-saving programs. We should pursue this elitist class war the GOP is waging and achieve the GOP cheap labor dream of turning society into the third world. For example, who hires illegal immigrants? Answer: rich right-wing business owners.
3
We should pursue the GOP cheap labor dream of turning America into the third world by trying their most extreme ideas: deport all illegal immigrants. Schools are open only to the wealthy - for them a voucher actually leads to an education since they can afford the rest of their private school tuition. Bleed our country dry with childish whimsical wars of choice, borrowing from the Chinese throughout and throwing off occasional trillions to our wealthiest fraction of one percent. All consumer regulations should dissolve; no one except aristocrats should have health care. No one should pay taxes or expect roads, bridges or FEMA to function. Destroy the lower-income 99% and give everything to the top 1%. Third world, here we come!
4
I would say we should try the GOP dream of changing America into a third-world country, but we already gave them a chance for the last decade. For six years they controlled every aspect of government and drove America into the ground. At the beginning of this reign of willful incompetence I said it will be interesting to see how they blame the left for the problems the right causes while running everything. I was wrong; their strategy is not so much to blame the left for the scandalous disasters of the right. Instead they admit the GOP caused the disasters, yet only the GOP can clean up the mess. With a compliant media, they are getting away with this absurd logical quagmire.
Email to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren 9/17/08
Thank you for voting yes on 6604.
It is amazing the lengths to which the media will go to trumpet the non solutions of offshore oil and ANWR that might bring down gas a nickel per gallon in more than a decade. At the same time there is a total blackout on communicating to America that many experts believe regulating speculators will lead to a 50% decrease in the price of oil in a matter of weeks.
Let's please try this. I know the veto threat looms - the fight must be won through the media. Someone must use whatever pedestal of notoriety they've achieved to say simply, let's try this solution. Everything else is window dressing in comparison.
If regulating speculators fails to achieve the expected results and takes two months to lower gas prices only 40%, do you think the American people would be dancing in the streets for that type of failure?
Think about this - the only argument I've seen against this is (false) that transportation, airline, trucking compaines need this market to be unregulated to hedge costs. Look who is sponsoring the stopoilspeculationnow.com effort: it is the very transportation, airline, trucking companies these phony free market purists claim to protect. The airline and truckers want oil speculation regulated, and so would the American people if the media gave it one-tenth the attention they give to non solutions, or they did to the arcana of the Iowa Caucus system.
David Moglen
Assoc. Economics Professor
Foothill and Evergreen Valley Colleges
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Top MCs
I always saw this as a blog where hip hop, politics & economics could all be discussed, even if overlaps were few and far between. So in the spirit of integrating the overlooked interest, here is a list of my favorite MCs.
Top MC's:
1. Sage Francis
2. Aesop Rock
3. Slug (MC in Atmosphere)
4. Qwel
5 Mikah Nyne
6 Abstract Rude
7. Josh Martinez
8. Gift of Gab (MC in Blackalicious)
9. Sleep
10. Grouch
11. Eligh
12. Busdriver
13. Lateef
14. Mos Def
15. Coley Cole (One of 3 MCs in Lost and Found Generation)
16. Ex-I (one of many MCs in Thunderhut Project)
17. Aceyalone
18. Lyrics Born
19. Common
20. Nas
21. Tupac
22. Redman
23. Eminem
24. Chino XL
25. Promoe
26. RZA
I'm sure there are some omissions and the order may be a bit rough, but it's enough to get you started (obviously you can google any of these names) if you're looking for an answer to the conundrum of monotonous graphic commercial mainstream rap and are willing to experience the artistry of underground hip hop.
Top MC's:
1. Sage Francis
2. Aesop Rock
3. Slug (MC in Atmosphere)
4. Qwel
5 Mikah Nyne
6 Abstract Rude
7. Josh Martinez
8. Gift of Gab (MC in Blackalicious)
9. Sleep
10. Grouch
11. Eligh
12. Busdriver
13. Lateef
14. Mos Def
15. Coley Cole (One of 3 MCs in Lost and Found Generation)
16. Ex-I (one of many MCs in Thunderhut Project)
17. Aceyalone
18. Lyrics Born
19. Common
20. Nas
21. Tupac
22. Redman
23. Eminem
24. Chino XL
25. Promoe
26. RZA
I'm sure there are some omissions and the order may be a bit rough, but it's enough to get you started (obviously you can google any of these names) if you're looking for an answer to the conundrum of monotonous graphic commercial mainstream rap and are willing to experience the artistry of underground hip hop.
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