Month: December 2010

“What power has law where only money rules?” —Petronius, 66 AD

From Economist’s View, to break the lock that big money has on politics:

• “Political corruption in America is staggering.”

• “Powerful forces, many of which operate anonymously under US law, are working relentlessly to defend those at the top of the income distribution.”

• “The Republican Party’s real game is to try to lock that income and wealth advantage into place.”

With help from golfing buddies in elected office, over the last 25 years more than 90 percent of the total growth in income went to the top 10 percent.

Only 9 percent of income growth is divvied up among the lower 90 percent.

About 25 percent of the newly elected Republicans are millionaires. 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million.  Wealth in the Senate grew 16 percent, from $2.27 million to $2.38 million in 2008 alone.

In 1973, the average U.S. CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker. Three years ago, the ratio had ballooned to $275 to $1.

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.'” —Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter 50 years ago.

Lawrence Lessig:

America’s economic future depends upon restarting an engine of innovation and technological growth.

Corporate America has come to believe that investments in influencing Washington pay more than investments in building a better mousetrap.

That will only change when regulation is crafted as narrowly as possible. Only then can regulators serve the public good, instead of private protection.

We need to kill a philosophy of regulation born with the 20th century, if we’re to make possible a world of innovation in the 21st.

In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.

There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane.

Lynn Parramore:

The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.

“It’s very hard to get any agreement if there’s no consensus on what the underlying facts are.”

Jerry Brown via Huffington Post:
He was California’s youngest governor and now its oldest.

Very gradually, the productivity rate of our country declined. “We used to export oil,” Brown noted, not long after the Arab oil embargo. “Cars, television, cameras, watches… We had no peer.”

Then the decision was made to expand war abroad and to pursue a Great Society at home, a strategy of “guns and butter.” We began to decline, Brown said, as we did not fund these projects “from current dollars, but from fiscal gimmickry, borrowing from the future.”

“This country,” Brown declared, “has pursued a path that Rome and Germany after World War I have pursued, running the printing presses of money.” Three percent a year growth in wealth declined in the ’70s to less than one percent, and “we began to fight over our decline in purchasing power.”

The Republican response to this decline was ‘to avoid regulation and taxes.’ This was the time, Brown said, that “the credit card came into vogue.” Private and public debt accelerated to prop up the slowing economy that was once the giant of the planet.

Japan, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, all manufactured cars, watches, and other products of great quality, entering “the latter part of the century with great momentum.”

Our great cities, he said, were declining, and poverty was on the rise.

It’s time, he said “to reindustrialize.” Surely, he argued, we don’t have to rely on a war to revitalize the economy. Time, he said, to invest in new technologies, protecting environment, educating people, to make America “once again a society with upward momentum.”

“Our leaders,” he declared, “can’t tell us the truth. We’re in decline.

Washington Post:

The United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies – Britain and Israel, to name two – are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

More than a dozen Washington Post journalists spent two years developing reports on Top Secret America.