For further review

The lede didn't grab me ...

WHEN was the last time you saw an anti-smoking ad?

... because my immediate and then also considered answer was "the last thousand times I watched any baseball or basketball game for at least fifteen consecutive minutes."

But apparently, my evident non-membership in the article's target audience notwithstanding, there are all kinds of shenanigans associated with that lawsuit thing a few years ago, against Big Tobacco. I am too tired, right now, to really get what's being described in the article, but superficially, it appears to be: billions of dollars won, then lost, and it's probably only going to get uglier.

As in, way uglier.

Let's hope a night's sleep and then some coffee will make it at least a little better. But I'm betting on nightmares.

[Added] Sadly, related.

Line of the Day: 2014-02-25

A Goldman spokesman, after being told that @GSElevator had been unmasked, said in a statement, “We are pleased to report that the official ban on talking in elevators will be lifted effective immediately.”

Who knew a PR flack for a firm like that could make a joke in public?

(source | @GSElevator)

Smells like SOCIALMALISM!!!1!

And that smells gooooood.

Go, Liz Warren.

How broken is our tax system when ...

... Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, of all people, is complaining about a loophole for the super-rich?

Of the many injustices that permeate America’s byzantine tax code, few are as outrageous as the tax rate on “carried interest” — the profits made by private equity and hedge fund managers, as well as venture capitalists and partners in real estate investment trusts. This huge tax benefit enriches an already privileged sliver of financiers and violates basic standards of fairness and common sense.

Record scratching noise.

When I read that lede and looked at the byline, I Googled just to be sure she was who I thought she was. Which was worth it, because interestingly enough, the top result, after the Wikipedia and the images links, was a profile headlined "Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s Kinder, Gentler Capitalism."

So, good for her, limousine liberal, Obama-hater, search engine manipulator, or whatever. And here's a useful image from the profile, which "she’d borrowed … from Harvard economist Larry Katz," but again, so what, glad to have her putting it out there:

“Thirty years ago, the Anglo-American capitalist system was the apartment block everyone in the world admired,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild told a gathering of business and political influentials gathered on the 28th floor of Bloomberg LP’s Lexington Avenue office tower on Thursday morning.

“Now, that apartment block has really nice apartments up on top. In the middle, they’re kind of cramped and dowdy, and on the lower floors, they’re underwater. But the worst part of it is—the elevator’s broken.”

Looks like the National Weather Service bought a thesaurus

With tax dollars taken from hard-working job creators and our beloved bankers, no doubt. And what's with those socialist "wind power" things, National Weather Service? If we had a real American preznit, there would be pictures of Old Glory flapping in the bluster breeze.

I think Howard Zinn might fail to see the humor in this

(vide | pic. source: The New Yorker/Michael Shaw | also? just sayin: top result.)

Heh. That Krugman.

... while it’s true that the finance guys are still making out like bandits — in part because, as we now know, some of them actually are bandits — ...

(From "Robots and Robber Barons.")

Line of the Day: 2011-12-01

Swiped from Lee Fang's Second Alarm.

Cartoon of the Day

Swiped from Joe Romm's "Top Ten Occupy Wall Street Cartoons." He got them from BuzzFeed, which has fifteen.

Wonking out on #Occupy

I thought this diavlog between David Roberts and Julian Sanchez touched on a lot of the thoughts I've had floating around in my mind the past month or two. More precisely, David and Julian, in their disagreements, seem to speak to the contradicting reactions I have been having.

If you're thoroughly fired up by the Occupy movement, this conversation probably won't appeal to you. If you're sympathetic to the emotion but hesitant or skeptical about other aspects, it may. They do not really come to any conclusion, but I think they do a good job of articulating a number of important points.

(alt. video link)

Great video, great idea: "Keep Wall Street Occupied"

(alt. video link)

No doubt the banksters will call up their favorite Congressional mouthpieces to huff about how this is illegal, abuse of the postal system, and therefore terrorism. Which should only make you want to do it more.

(h/t: Shoq, via @dvnix)

(not a post related to Malcolm Gladwell)

On a note related to the previous post (my linking to which, it must be admitted, more than anything tends to reinforce the point of Daniel Kahneman's article), I encourage you to read "Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence." Here's an excerpt:

The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

The part near the end about those involved in the stock market is particularly instructive. Some funny illustrations, from Tim Enthoven, too.

[Added] Uncle Eb also liked the article, and added some artwork that I just had to swipe.

Though, of course, we shouldn't be too harsh on eagles for their poor judgment. That could be construed as America-hating, after all.

Cover story

“Fighting Back,” by Barry Blitt. From the New Yorker, 24 Oct 2011.

Or, to put it another way:

"... message enough for many."

Charles Blow on OWS.

This has energized two groups who are notoriously apathetic and lacking in civic engagement — the young and the poor — and has done so outside the existing architectures of power and politics.

Yes.

And numbers from the sidebar: "Not Quite 99 Percent, But Most."

Banksters in a nutshell

Remember that three-page memo describing how to "avoid making taxpayers liable in the future for the kind of reckless speculation that caused the financial crisis and resulting bailout …"?

Wall Street firms have spent countless millions of dollars trying to water down the original Volcker proposal and have succeeded in inserting numerous exemptions. Now they’re claiming it’s too complex to understand and too costly to adopt.

Line of the Day: 2011-10-21

We haven’t had a shortage of demands and solutions. We’ve had a shortage of mass movements.
    -- Stephen Lerner, in an interview by Ezra Klein

Apologies for it actually being LOTD from three weeks ago. Hat tip to Frank Pasquale, via James Kwak, via Brad DeLong.

"We Are The 99%" -- free bumper sticker

Get one of these ...

... for free, from Democracy for America (alt. link).

[Added] Sadly, these are not available.

But maybe if you write to Clay Bennett and ask really nicely ...

The above via the Center for American Progress, in an email inviting me to read an article titled, "The Legitimate Gripes of the Other 99 Percent/Amid the Cacophony of Protest Emerges a Coherent Set of Valid Complaints."

Today's GOP: Big Balls? Small Brains?

Oh, you guessed it. Why not both?

Forty-four of your Republican Senators, led by Richard Shelby of Alabama (pictured at left), have "sent a letter to President Obama" calling for "common sense reforms" to his proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Here is the best:

• Establish a safety-and-soundness check for the prudential financial regulators, who oversee the safety and soundness of financial institutions. This would help ensure that excessive regulations do not needlessly cause bank failures.

Emph. added.

Thers and DDay have more detailed analysis of this latest hamstringing attempt by the GOP.

(pic. source | x-posted)

"Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%"

A very good article by Joseph Stiglitz in VF.

Some excerpts:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t: Ken Layne | x-posted)

Grownups in charge! (Of demonizing Elizabeth Warren)

Paul Krugman encourages you to read a fine piece by Joe Nocera on the woman who may (should, by most non-wingnut accounts) become the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Basically, she'd be in charge of (1) implementing and enforcing reforms to make sure the banksters couldn't again do what they did leading up to the crash of 2008, and (2) stopping them from doing some of what they've been doing since.

And what does the Party of Fiscal Responsibility™ have to say about this?

To listen to the House Republicans, you’d think the financial crisis of 2008 was like that infamous season of the long-running soap opera “Dallas,” the one that turned out to be a season-long dream. Subprime mortgages? Too-big-to-fail banks? Unregulated derivatives? No problem! With the exception of their bête noire, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Republicans act as if nothing needs to be done to prevent another crisis. Indeed, they act as if the crisis never happened.

So, naturally, they're starting to groom their portrayal of her as the next America-hatin', MoreEvilThanSatanHimself figure to be flogged. Probably going to be a lot of highly-focused hate coming from the RWNM this summer.

I'd recommend starting with Krugman's post as an introduction. And don't fail to follow the other link he offers, to a post by Simon Johnson. Johnson is a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he's none too impressed with what he's seeing from some in the White House, particularly Tim Geithner, regarding their lukewarm support for Warren and the need for reform overall.

(pic. source | x-posted)