Your cheatin' heart will tell on you

(Elvis rarity: outtake of "Your Cheatin' Heart")

A few days ago, "entrepreneur" and Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban criticized Barack Obama at HuffPost for not consulting "entrepreneurs" as economic advisors:

Notice anything missing?

Not a single entrepreneur. Yes Warren Buffett started a business, but he will be the first to tell you that he "doesn't do start ups". Which means there isn't a single person advising PE Obama that we know of that knows what it's like to start and run a business in this or any economic climate. That's a huge problem.

If we are going to solve our current economic problems, our president needs to get first hand information on the impact his proposed policies will have on real Joe the Plumbers. People who are 1-person companies living job to job, hoping they get paid on time. We need to know what the impact of his policies will be on the individually owned Chrysler Dealership in Iowa. The bodega in Manhattan. The mobile phone software startup out of Carnegie Mellon. The event planner in Dallas. The barbershop in L.A. The restaurant in Boston.

Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business.

Well, today we find out more about Cuban's personal experience as an "entrepreneur":

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed insider-trading charges against Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, over his sale of shares in Internet company Mamma.com after he learned it was raising money through a private financing.

The SEC alleges Mr. Cuban sold his entire 6% ownership stake on June 28, 2004, immediately after learning that Mamma.com was raising money through a private investment in private entity, or PIPE. The next day, after the markets closed, the company announced the PIPE financing. When the markets opened the morning of June 30, shares of the company dropped by 9%. By selling his stake, Mr. Cuban avoided more than $750,000 in losses, the SEC alleges. (Read the full text of the complaint.)

I'm pretty sure the Obama team won't be calling you anytime soon for economic or financial advice.

On the other hand, you might find some Republicans willing to listen to you.

Bastard.

Never an honest word, but that was when I ruled the world.

(Great live version of Viva La Vida)

I worked at and gave guitar lessons at a music store from '68-'70. The owner, a nice fellow, was a John Bircher. He had his "Take my guns . . . cold dead hands" bumper sticker on the wall, and he knew I didn't share his political outlook, and we talked about it pretty openly. Essentially he was a Libertarian, but he didn't get the 'free' aspect of the '60 cultural changes.

He once told me "Spiro Agnew is the smartest politician around." I know he was a pompous prick. And I had left the store by the time Agnew's sorry ass was indicted for bribery, so I didn't get to ask my former boss how that was working for him.

I had the same reaction tonight when I read this idiocy at RightWingNutHouse:

Phil Gramm is still one of the smartest men ever to serve in the United States Senate. This despite his clueless statement that the US is in a “mental recession” and that Americans are a bunch of “whiners” about the economy.

Really? "Smartest" and yet "clueless"? Even the above writer seems to see that Gramm might be 'out of touch':

Well things may very well look that way to the former Chairman of mortgage giant USB and a guy who gets $50 thousand a crack to regale fat cat businessmen with stories of how stupid our government is and how the private sector is always smarter. I’m sure from the vantage point of someone whose idea of rough economic times is cutting back on the number of manicure’s he receives a week from 3 to 2, things are just peachy.

Ya think? For starters, it's UBS, you tool. And the irony is, as usual, lost since you know that Gramm "gets $50 thousand a crack to regale fat cat businessmen with stories of how stupid our government is and how the private sector is always smarter" and you can't seem to interpret your own writing to see that he's just plain, stupidly dismally wrong.

Ah the private sector . . .

Here's what Gramm did for the private sector:

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Gramm was instrumental in pushing major banking deregulation in 1999 that critics say has contributed to the current mortgage crisis.

The bank deregulation law, known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, was the most important update in banking laws since the New Deal. Its most important feature: breaking down walls between commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies.

Gramm's critics say the deregulation of commercial banks contained in the law made it easier for banks to push risky subprime mortgages on lower-income customers.

And:

Gramm used his prominent position in the Senate to promote less federal oversight of the energy industry. Democrats single out a provision pushed by Gramm in 2000 that exempted energy trading on electronic platforms from federal regulation.

The provision was dubbed "the Enron loophole" because it was backed by the Houston-based energy trader Enron, on whose board Gramm's wife Wendy sat at the time. Democrats give Gramm full credit for the proposal; Gramm says that he used language that was "essentially the same" as a provision approved months earlier by the House.

California officials blamed the provision for precipitating the electricity crisis in California in late 2000 and 2001. More recently, Democrats say that energy traders have used it to drive up energy prices. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., likens the action to taking "the cop off the beat."

Here's what a real economist says about Gramm:

Phil Gramm’s career was the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has. He’s a sorcerer’s apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system.

And about Gramm's educational bona fides:

Thank you for sending the Gramm dissertations. I have read them through with considerable interest.

Phil’s is a curious document. It is mainly an exercise in the history of economic thought, though I doubt that Gramm thought of it in those terms at the time. His topic is an issue in the theory of consumer demand, namely, what is the precise meaning of the idea that consumers have well-formed and unchanging preferences? His method is essentially, a critical review of literature.

For a Ph.D. dissertation, especially one which is not mathematical (and it isn’t), this one at 79 pages is short. It contains no advanced mathematics, no data or analysis of data, no archival or otherwise original research. It is based solely on published sources available in any well-equipped library at the time, and there is only one reference to anything written after 1960, which for a thesis submitted in 1967 is astonishing. The writing style is for the most part graceless and involute, marred here and there by misused words like “fecundities.” It is belabored and repetitive, with chapters that overlap each other. It is basically an extended discussion of a single idea.

. . . On the whole, Phil Gramm’s thesis could have been condensed to an interesting article at some point in the development of twentieth century microeconomic theory. My guess is that the proper moment for that article would have come in the late 1940s, or some twenty years before Gramm actually wrote his dissertation. By the time he did write it, the mathematical character of the field had long since outpaced the very modest display of technique here, and the concerns Gramm writes about would probably have already been considered antique in most quarters. It would be interesting to know if Gramm got anything published out of this, and if so, where.

. . . It is equally clear to me that Phil got his degree in order to move on and do something else. Had he stayed in economics, he probably would not have prospered.

Except that he has prospered.

Meanwhile, back at RightWingNutHouse, a commenter explains what is causing the economic woes:

Gramm is correct. If Americans aren’t whinners than why do we sit still as the elites propose tax increase after tax increase?

If we aren’t weak minded cretins why are we watching the government bail out financial institutions who carried out their bidding when Congress passed the Community Redevelopment Act. An act intended to grant loans to blacks, hispanics, etc who couldn’t hope to meet the requirements for a normal loan.

So we now see 2,000 foreclosures daily, up 50% from last year but equal to only two tenths of a per cent of all mortgages. Yet this will cost American taxpayers a trillion dollars so our senators and politicians can have sweetheart loans.

And what do we get? More of the same manure from both parties. Amnesty? Restricted drilling? Earmarks? Unending deficits and printing presses rivaling Zimbabwe?

As usual, not hidden far beneath the surface, is racism. The Community Redevelopment Act? Um, no. And if Gramm isn't an 'elite', then I don't know who is.

Another commenter sets things straight:

The truth is that the federal reserve system (not part of our government, but a private monopoly) started the whole thing by flooding the market with liquidity – inviting debt, both good and bad.

We, as Americans have no say and either does our government. They print as much money and create as much liquidity as they want. They answer to no one and are siphoning off the wealth of the middle class.

When Americans begin to understand that we have no control over the federal reserve, then they will begin to realize that the federal reserve actually controls us.

Most in government and many in the media know this but won’t say a word.

The stupid, it just burns sometimes. No mention of a certain war in Iraq that costs $536 billion and keeps going up.

Ain't that America, for you and me

(Video from Jeralyn at Talk Left)

Economic signposts: In 1967, I had completed my first year of college.

I worked part-time for $1.35/hr, which was $0.10 more than minimum wage of $1.25. Gas was $0.21/gal. My Mom & Dad bought their current house for $27,900.

Proportions: Gas = 17% of minimum wage. House = 22,300 x minimum wage.

Today, CA minimum wage is $7.50, and gas in our area is $3.86/gal. Mom's house is worth (according to Zillow.com) $600,ooo.

Proportions: Gas = 51% of minimum wage. House = 80,000 x minimum wage.

That's progress, just in the wrong direction.

Things Have Been Tough Without The Dum Dum Boys

The recent tempest over Glenn Beck's post-hemorrhoid surgery remarks regarding the parentage and moral stance of Franklin Roosevelt is merely one thorn on the rose of invective that this dreamily Grandpa-slapping pundit has to offer his viewers.

Why, he even writes columns. Let's have a peek inside this powerful mind of our times, shall we?

After some heartwarming anecdotes, one involving locking three live pigs inside an abandoned foreclosed house (in an apt metaphor for his own thought processes), we get to the real raison d'etre for the column - Democrat bashing and Republican talking points. Color me surprised.

'Now, I'm not a former first lady, but I am a thinker, so let me ask the obvious question: Exactly how does helping a low-income family stay warm stimulate the economy? Are they going to suddenly run out and buy an exotic vacation where they'll spend their days brainstorming ways to employ hundreds of people?'

Let me walk you through this, thinker Glenn. It's not such a difficult concept to grasp if you really, really try.

You see, there is this thing called 'working poor' - People and families, some of them working two jobs and increasingly longer hours in the Nu-Perfect America, but never quite making it to the winner's circle past the economic finish line.
Now, as fuel costs (for one) increase due to the myriad reasons that such things do, the percentage of income that these folks have available to save or spend on their other needs (food, shelter, retirement...trifles, really) decreases, and this impacts their ability to contribute to the economy in a subjectively meaningful way.

If people in these circumstances don't have to worry about themselves or their children freezing in the dark when they come home at night, perhaps...Just perhaps there might be a personal incentive to work harder on prevailing over their situation, rather than succumb to those fertile grounds for a welfare state, depression and inertia.

The inability to see this as an 'economic stimulus' issue and couching it as an 'energy issue only' is a convenient oversimplification that neglects to take into account the dependence of the North American economy on energy.
No 'go', no 'grow', no 'd'oh'.

Will some abuse this to the point of dependency? You bet...Just like some corporations become addicted to their strenuously lobbied financial largesses provided by the state through bailouts and tax rebates, it can happen.
Is that a reason not to grant it? Of course not, for much the same reasons that we may reject accepting the premise that if we were to cut off or sharply reduce such regular 'corporate welfare' it would immediately be injurious to the state, and thus all its inhabitants.
If people should not beseech the state for assistance, neither should corporations.

Some of this also falls under a topic that Republicans often struggle with - Giving a shit about their fellow humans in less fortunate straits than themselves.
The 'I've got mine' attitude, so brazenly worn as a symbol of success and self-reliance but really signifying nothing more than unenlightened selfishness, is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to personal growth in the West.
How can you truly profit if your brothers and sisters go without?

Now, let's get down to the shilling floor:

'...how about we put some lasting trust back into the system by slashing government spending and finally sending the signal to businesses that taxes won't be going through the roof next year?

After all, no business owner -- including small-business owners like me -- are going to start expanding if they believe that our tax rates are about to skyrocket. That's why we've got to take away that uncertainty, cut corporate tax rates -- which are the second-highest in the developed world -- and watch as American businesses once again bail us out by creating thousands of jobs that pump billions of tax dollars back into Washington.'

Quickly dispensing with this blatant touting for his corporate masters, so hard on aging knees, the facts are this: economies, even the most successful ones, cannot continually expand without some sort of eventual contraction.
Since the last seven years in America have seen massive tax cuts paired with disinvestment in infrastructure brought on by hard budgetary choices at the state level, never mind such artificial expansion - In order to keep even meagerly solvent at current levels, a heightened degree of reinvestment in the supporting fabric of the nation is inevitable.
The good news? This is a recoupable expense that creates eventual economic opportunity and growth. Funny how investing in your infrastructure works to make things better, hmm?

Unfortunately, those timorous souls who dithered and dallied, fretting over the perfect golden opportunity to expand after over half a decade of spoon-fed tax cuts (as opposed to their compatriots who took their tax savings offshore to invest in foreign economies) will just have to wait until the next boom cycle to get off the fencepost. Hard luck - No guts, no glory.

The fact is, Glenn, whether you and your rich friends like this or not...There's a certain degree of maintenance that has to occur in a capitalist democracy.
It's not all just 'take' - In order to maintain the flow of income, you have to give back a little.
Think of it as greens fees...The difference between playing on a PGA-class course and a schmeggy pitch-and-put is correlative to how much you put into its maintenance.

Unless you like digging your balls out of deep holes, that is.