John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

1) They Say it's Wonderful
2) Dedicated to You
3) My One and Only Love
4) Lush Life
5) You are too Beautiful
6) Lush Life

Kevin Mahogany - Please Send Me Someone To Love

BILLY ECKSTINE - A COTTAGE FOR SALE

BILLY ECKSTINE - A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE

Billy Eckstine - Everything I Have Is Yours

No Banks Eaten Today

FDIC did not close any banks today.  I hope they are not saving up for a BIG ONE!

Game Over For The Climate

James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”  This from "The New York times"  --  please follow link to original.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html


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Game Over for the Climate

By JAMES HANSEN

Published: May 9, 2012

 GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

This is from "Autoweek"  --  one of the most important autosports people EVER has died  --  Read, follow link to original.

by the way  --  if you have ANY interest in automobiles  --  subscribe to Autoweek!
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Carroll Shelby: 1923-2012

 By: Pete Lyons on 5/11/2012

Auto legend Carroll Shelby died Thursday night at Baylor Hospital in Dallas at the age of 89.
Carroll Shelby's shadow stretched out Texas tall across nearly the whole of the world's automotive landscape. A natural as a race driver, he won three U.S. sports-car championships in Ferraris and Maseratis, and for Aston Martin he won the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans with British co-driver Roy Salvadori.
Turning automaker in the 1960s, he fathered the Cobra, an Anglo-American hot rod of crude conception but stunning effectiveness that swept the tracks of North America and wrested a world manufacturer's title from Ferrari. Additional success came with his makeovers of the Ford Mustang, which resulted in Trans-Am racing titles and the ferocious Shelby GT350 street car. As a team owner, he presided over Ford's epic 1966 and '67 Le Mans victories.
Shelby is believed to be the only person to win Le Mans as a driver (with Aston Martin), a manufacturer (class victory with the Cobra Daytona coupe) and team owner (Ford's GTs).
Not everything this Texan touched turned to trophies, but his solid record of achievement, plus his talents as a promoter, made his name an icon of high-performance worldwide.
In the 1980s, he parlayed all of this into a venture with Chrysler that produced a number of specialty cars and trucks, including the Shelby Can-Am one-design racer, all dedicated to a biggest-bang-for-the-buck philosophy.
Beyond that, Shelby grew his business into a multifaceted “skunkworks,” doing advanced research and development for other clients. From 2005, these included Ford, with whom Shelby patched up an old grievance so that they could partner on a fresh range of super-hot Shelby Mustangs. He also resumed production of old-style Cobras and, less successfully, launched a newer sports model dubbed the Shelby Series 1.
Yet, impressive as his accomplishments were on the automotive scene, that was only one of a bewildering set of arenas through which he moved with equal facility: ranching, real estate development, hotels, food production, aircraft dealing. In every field that caught his interest, he was able to exercise a powerful combination of intelligence, curiosity, vision, timing, guile, cunning and charm, plus what he described as “the work ethic.”
Not the least of Shelby's secrets was an easy, natural manner, a flashing grin and an almost old-fashioned sense of courtesy, which quickly made firm friendships and networks of important contacts.
At the same time, the sharp pencil he applied aggressively to business dealings led some to dub him “Billie Sol,” after a notorious Texas swindler.
Perhaps the most remarkable, most inspirational fact about Shelby's life was that he worked so hard despite a serious physical limitation—a hereditary heart defect that led to four hospitalizations in 15 years for surgery, then a 1990 heart transplant.
Six years later, at age 73, he received a kidney from one of his sons, Mike Shelby.
In company with so many of the world's outstanding achievers, Carroll Hall Shelby had modest beginnings. He was born on Jan. 11, 1923, in the small east Texas town of Leesburg, the son of a rural mail carrier. When Shelby was 10, the family moved to Dallas, where his father became a postal clerk and the boy discovered auto racing.
“I used to ride my bicycle to the old bullrings around Dallas when I was a kid, 12 or 14 years old,” he recalled decades later. “So I've always had my interest in cars, that's always been my No. 1 interest.”
Finances did not permit expressing that interest in sanctioned competition, but Shelby did what he could on the streets. His first car was a family hand-me-down, a 1934 Dodge that he immediately determined would do only 87 mph, tops. His next ride was no less disappointing, even after he shaved the head. “It was a '38 Willys, old four-cylinder Willys. Wouldn't outrun anybody, but I used to try to.”
The Shelby need for speed was finally serviced by the Army, which allowed him to put his hands on his second great love, airplanes. Admitted to a pilot-training program for students who didn't have college credentials, he graduated as staff sergeant pilot.
“Chuck Yeager, Bob Hoover, myself—a lot of guys came out of that program that were good aviators,” Shelby said with pride. However, he was disappointed that, as he put it, “I never got a shot at gettin' shot at.” He spent the whole war stateside, flying training missions for bombardiers and navigators.
With discharge came an end to flying, temporarily anyway. With a wife and children now, Shelby began a restless series of entrepreneurial ventures. At various times, he was an owner-operator of a trucking business, a roughneck in the oil fields and a chicken farmer.
Shelby came to auto racing relatively late, in 1952 when he was 29, but he came on strong. After first trying a Flathead-powered hot rod on a drag strip, later that summer he accompanied a buddy who owned an MG-TC to a sports-car race on an airport course at Norman, Okla.
“He was a friend of mine from high school, Ed Wilkins. He wasn't going to race it himself; he was just up there to spectate. After we got up there we decided that I'd drive it. So it was really just kind of a lucky accident that I drove my first race.
“I raced against the other MGs and the Jowett Jupiters and so forth and won that race. Then they had the Jaguar race and I raced the MG in that and I won again. I wore the tires out on it. It was fun.”
Two more road races later in the year brought him two more wins, a four-for-four record that was only a taste of things to come. In 1953, in hotter iron such as Jaguars and Allards, the Texas meteor won nine out of nine. For the 1954 season he turned pro, which was a distinction of major importance to the SCCA in those days. He was in great demand by wealthy Ferrari and Maserati owners such as Temple Buell, John Edgar and Tony Parravano, and the American eventually attracted the interest of John Wyer, manager of the Aston Martin factory team.
To Shelby, racing appeared to be mainly a lark, informal and lighthearted. Arriving late at a track one day, he jumped into the cockpit without changing out of his work clothes—a set of striped farmer's overalls. They became his trademark. After a race, the tall, skinny, curly-haired chicken farmer would disappear just as suddenly, likely as not with a pretty woman on each arm.
But at work in the cockpit, Shelby was all business.
“The Texan is a first-rate conductor and takes his motor racing extremely seriously,” concluded Gregor Grant, founder and editor of Britain's Autosport magazine, after watching the lanky Yankee run the 1955 Targa Florio in a Ferrari Monza. He was a “hard worker . . . who goes to bed with the hundreds of corners imprinted in his mind.” And his driving was “clean as a whistle.”
Shelby's Ford GT-era team manager, the late Carroll Smith, recalled conversations with his boss' old teammates. “As a race driver, his mechanics loved him. [They felt] he drove every bit of a race car you could give him.”
In 1956, he won 18 out of 20 U.S. races and his first SCCA national championship. Sports Illustrated named him Driver of the Year. In 1957, he won 19 races straight, his second SCCA title and a Driver of the Year award from the New York Times, the first of two such honors. His good friend, Ferrari importer Luigi Chinetti, arranged an audience in Maranello.
“Old Man Ferrari offered me a job and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Ferrari, I have a family, three children, what kinda money?' He says, ‘Oh, it's an honor to drive for Ferrari.' And I said, ‘Well, I'm sorry, I can't afford the honor.' And I had a deal with John Wyer, anyway, and I had another deal with Maserati. I had a choice of four or five different offers. So I turned Ferrari down.”
This and other incidents were blown up a bit in later years, when Shelby's Cobras were going against the Commendatore's Prancing Horses, but there was a genuine animosity between these two titans of motorsport. Shelby used to say that he respected Ferrari for his automotive accomplishments, but not as a human being.
However, crusty Shelby was said to cherish a warm friendship with Enzo's son, Dino.
Shelby was a Formula One driver for two seasons. In 1958, he ran a 250F Maserati in four Grands Prix and scored the only world championship points of his career with a fourth-place finish in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. The next year—the same in which he and Salvadori drove to victory at Le Mans for Aston Martin—he ran that company's obsolete, front-engine F1 in another four events but without success.
This was also the year when, at age 36, Shelby first experienced the angina that would end his driving career. He continued racing through 1960 and won his third title, USAC's United States Road Racing championship, but he drove with nitroglycerine pills ready to jump-start his heart if necessary.
“You ever try nitro?” Shelby asked in a 1990 interview with Autoweek. “It knocks the top of your head off. It dilates your arteries and veins and gives you a headache for 30 seconds. You don't want to do it in a race car. That's why it was not hard to give up drivin'; nitro gives you an incentive to quit. I wanted to build my car anyway, and make a go of my Goodyear distributorship.”
Shelby had maintained commercial interests all along. As he once noted, he was a child of the Depression, and the experience was formative. He'd always had something going—from paper routes, delivering for drug stores on his motorcycle and caddying on golf courses in the beginning, to buying and selling cars during his racing career. With Jim Hall and his brothers, Shelby was a partner in a Dallas dealership.
Now able to concentrate on business, he soon had a Goodyear race-tire distributorship and, at Riverside, Calif., America's first race-driving school (with Peter Brock as the first instructor). He also served as consulting editor for his publisher friend “Pete” Petersen's Sports Car Graphic magazine. Later, he started up businesses to manufacture cast wheels for both cars and motorcycles. But all of these were stepping stones to realizing a long-held, major dream: Shelby wanted to produce his own sports car.
“I prob'ly started thinkin' about it in '54, '55,” he recalled. He'd been driving Max Balchowsky's Old Yeller specials and had a firsthand impression of what the combination of a big-inch Detroit engine and a lightweight, European-style chassis could do.
Shelby's familiarity with the various English sports cars so popular in the 1950s bred a certain focused disdain: “I could see that, compared to the little ‘taxicab' engines they had, one of our new V8s took up about the same amount of room and put out about four times as much horsepower and didn't cost any more money.”
After a preliminary venture with a handful of Chevrolet Corvette chassis rebodied by Italy's Scaglietti, he finally arranged a marriage between a new small-block engine being launched by Ford and the British-made AC Ace. Shelby's prototype Cobra first bared its fangs in February 1962, and the small, ferocious two-seater was an immediate sensation with the media and the public—and with impatient racers.
Famously, Shelby kept repainting his single-press tester in different colors before its next assignment, creating the illusion of a substantial fleet of finished Cobras.
The first competition appearance of the new marque was that October at Riverside, when a Shelby American Cobra handily led the new 1963 Corvette for an hour until a wheel hub broke. The part was redesigned, and Shelby's “snakes” began a domination of production-sports-car events that lasted for several seasons, both in North America and overseas. The highlight year was 1965, when Cobras became the first American-conceived cars to win the international manufacturers' championship for Grand Touring cars. To do so meant beating Ferrari, a special satisfaction for Shelby.
“What we did was take a bunch of California hot-rodders and we whipped Ferrari's ass,” as he put it. “The Cobra was the most archaic chassis, probably, with its two buggy springs and a pushrod engine, to ever go over there and win a world championship.
“But the reason that it was so successful was because of people like Phil Remington, Ken Miles, Pete Brock . . . ah, I could name 50. There isn't time to name everybody who should get credit.”
There was a second-generation Cobra with Ford's big 427 engine and a more sophisticated coil-spring chassis, but by this time, the old hybrid concept had run its course, and Shelby American was moving into other racing fields. In 1965, the team took over the running of Ford's sophisticated, mid-engine GT40s. The immediate payoff was the previously troubled coupe's first victory, at Daytona that year. The team went on to win Le Mans the following two years, beating not only Ferrari but also a rival Ford GT operation by Holman-Moody, the stock-car powerhouse.
Throughout the rest of the decade there were further racing ventures, some more successful than others, while at Ford's request, Shelby also developed and produced the GT350, a two-seat, high-performance modification of the 2+2 Mustang. A big-block GT500 followed.
But as the 1970s opened, Ford dropped out of racing. Shelby American tried to pick up the slack with a program for Toyota but was not very successful. In any case, “performance died,” as Shelby put it, and he eventually had to close down his famous company.
Shelby spent the next dozen years in a variety of nonautomotive activities, including land speculation and development, a safari operation in Africa and a plant to manufacture chili. During this period, he twice had to have coronary-bypass surgery, but he refused to let his illness slow him down.
In the meantime, automobile performance had come back to life, and in 1982 Shelby Automobiles was formed in conjunction with Chrysler to manufacture and market high-energy versions of that company's smaller sedans and midsize trucks. Production began in 1986, but disappointing sales forced a stop at the end of 1989.
Reluctant to disband his group of talented people, Shelby kept them going on special projects, such as a Dodge-engined SCCA spec racer called the Shelby Can-Am, while he transformed the company into a specialized R&D facility.
He was eager to do more, but during the 1980s he was in hospital twice more for carotid surgery. Despite his ailment, Shelby continued to live a full life, and in February 1989, he married for the fourth time. But his strength continued to fade, and in June 1990, he finally received a new heart.
“It's a first-time installation,” quipped Dan Gurney at a subsequent roast for his friend. Sixty-eight-year-old Shelby gleefully reported feeling like a young man of 34—the age of the unfortunate donor, who had collapsed at a Las Vegas craps table. The following May, Shelby drove the Indy 500 pace car and passenger Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 150 mph.
That same month, haunted by children he'd seen dying during his time in ICU, he started the Carroll Shelby Heart Fund (now called the Carroll Shelby Foundation) to raise money for youngsters in need of transplants. For that and other reasons, admiring parents sent him photos of kids they'd named Shelby. His Los Angeles office became literally papered with hundreds of the photos.
Older youths now benefit from the Carroll Shelby School of Automotive Technology, located at the Northeast Texas Community College in Mount Pleasant, not 20 miles from the racer's birthplace.
Like many high-profile men, Shelby seemed to have trouble staying married. The second of five wives was the movie and TV star Jan Harrison. His third wife was Sue Stafford. The fourth was Swedish-born Lena Dahl Shelby, who died in a 1997 highway accident. Only months later, he married Cleo Patricia Marguerita Shelby, a vivacious Briton who was always by his side, even as she pursued her interests in flying, art and jewelry.
Shelby's survivors consist of his wife, Cleo Shelby; his sister and only sibling, Anne Shelby Ellison; daughter Sharon Lavine and sons Michael and Patrick Shelby (all three from his first marriage to Jeanne Fields); six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Of Carroll Shelby's legions of close friends and respectful associates, one of his greatest admirers was Al Dowd, who joined in the Cobra days as a mechanic and who kept on working for Shelby for decades as an administrator. Why did he and others show so much loyalty? Interviewed for a 1990 Autoweek profile on his boss, Dowd put it this way: “I guess because we love him. Can't put my finger on it. He's a neat person. I like him.”
Lew Spencer, once a Cobra race driver and later Dowd's fellow in the Los Angeles business office, spoke of the same personal affection. “There's an esprit de corps, almost a love affair. Carroll is a human magnet because he has a good feeling for people, a great understanding. He can pull the best out of you, so you excel in what you're doing.
“I've always said that if you had 20 people in a basketball court, all up at one end, and if Carroll walked in the other end, without any sort of introduction or announcement, within five minutes everybody would be gathered around him. When we travel, you see it; people walk up to him and start a conversation, even if they've never seen or heard of him. He attracts people to him.”
Spencer went on to say that working for Shelby was exhilarating. “He is a visionary in many ways, and a doer. He's an idea man—Carroll gets great ideas—and he does not like details. He doesn't like an office. He's not interested in sitting around on a day-to-day basis. He wants another challenge, to move on to something exciting. That's part of the fun of working for him, it'll always be moving, nothing stagnant. There's a feeling of fun, also a respect for the accomplishments of the man.
“He is an entrepreneur who borders on the con man—he is a legitimate con man. You have to be in this business. It's the old American success story. When he gets knocked down—like with the chicken business [which was hit with a poultry disease]—he's flat, he gets back up.”
Don Landy, who handled Shelby's overall business holding company, Shelby American Management Co. in McKinney, Texas, described his boss this way: “He's one of a kind. An original Texas gunslinger. Life never gets boring. Carroll is a risk taker, has been all his life, in everything he's done.
“He can be cantankerous, gruff, direct and outspoken, but to get to know him is to love him. He creates tremendous loyalty in people around him. He's really a very caring individual, which may be completely opposite to what he appears to be.”
Team manager Smith spoke of his fellow Carroll fondly as “the best man I ever worked for—the only man I could ever work for. He has leadership qualities; he can inspire you to do more than you're capable of doing. He gives everyone an enormous amount of rope, picks the right people and leaves 'em alone to get on with it. Keeps the BS and the politics away from the racers.
“An excellent judge of people—including of mechanics, although he's no mechanic himself—especially of drivers. He's never made a mistake with a driver. He's got enormous loyalty to people who have done a good job for him,” Smith said.
“And he has an absolute desire to win. He wants to win so bad that it's catching. If he went back to racing tomorrow, I'd go back in a minute. Because I truly enjoy winning, and I enjoy working with a man who wins with style and grace, and who doesn't forget how to have fun while doing it.”
Shelby himself, in the 1990 Autoweek interview, said he felt grateful for “being able to do the things that I've wanted to over practically a lifetime and been lucky enough to have been successful enough out of them that as I grow into, ah, into old age that I can look back with satisfaction over a life well spent. I really consider myself a damn lucky individual. I don't think you can ask for much more outta life.”
Funeral plans were in process. Donations to the Carroll Shelby Foundation are encouraged in lieu of flowers. Information about the foundation can be found at www.carrollshelbyfoundation.com.

Family values: Staying together for the kids (I just fathered in New Zealand)

This from "Feministe"  --  take your "family values" and shove them up your ASS!  Do you need any more proof that these "family values" people really mean, "family values for MEN"? 

That and the fact these people HATE WOMEN!!

Please follow link to original
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Family values: Staying together for the kids (I just fathered in New Zealand)

By Caperton on 5.11.2012

 

Give Alabama politician Bill Johnson an award for combining two of the Republican party’s favorite family values: traditional families, and being fruitful and multiplying. Wanting to keep his family together, Johnson invited his wife of eight years and her three children to come with him as he moved to New Zealand to be with the numerous babies conceived of his sperm.

Johnson’s wife, Kathy Hale Johnson, told the New Zealand Herald that that Johnson recently returned to live in New Zealand where he donated sperm to at least 10 women without her knowledge.
“He wants me to move over there. He’s not coming back,” she told the newspaper.
She said Johnson plans to apply for residency so he can stay in New Zealand, and that he intends to donate sperm to additional women.

Johnson began donating sperm in 2011 while in Christchurch as a disaster-relief contractor. So far, he’s donated to at least 10 women, three of whom are currently pregnant.
Johnson told the New Zealand Herald that he was unable to have children with his wife and that the urge to have biological children was “a need that I have.” The Herald also reports that fertility specialists recommend that donors not donate to more than four families; some women say Johnson misled them about the number of women he’d impregnated. Johnson says he had planned to tell his wife about the pregnancies after the babies were born.
A conservative Christian who opposed gay marriage in his 2010 Alabama gubernatorial campaign, Johnson has said that he feels a responsibility to the babies made with his sperm, despite the fact that he mostly donated to lesbian couples and thus the babies will have two parents already. He’s returned to Christchurch to await the blessed event(s).

“He’s back there now. He says he has a commitment to them. He says he created these children and he has a responsibility to them,” [Kathy Johnson] says.
“I said ‘what about your commitment to your wife.’ He walked out.”

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/05/11/staying-together-for-the-kids-i-just-fathered-in-new-zealand/

A Visit To Some assembly Required

It's time we paid a visit to "Some Assembly required  --  as usual, please follow link to original
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 The Last Word: What is “structural unemployment” and has it ever been sighted in the wild? Structural unemployment (SU) a polite term used by some economists (on the right) to say “technology and financial engineering has rendered most of the unemployed superfluous. We don't need them. The unemployed are not skilled enough to get a job and not smart enough to learn a new skill and thus the rich shouldn't have to pay taxes to support the lazy louts.”

 Your Millage May Vary: Education pays! Just not as much as promised. Remember, the number of people holding advanced degrees who are on food stamps has tripled in the last 5 years.

 Fear Itself: The European Financial Stability Facility will give Greece enough euros to keep the country going for a few more weeks because they are afraid not to. Of course they're not really giving Greece the money, they are paying it to the ECB via Greece and charging it to Greece's account. The ECB is insisting on continued austerity: “Greece has to be aware that there is no alternative to the agreed consolidation program if it wants to remain a member of the euro zone.” Big if. Besides, Greece owes about 400 billion euros to private bondholders, public bodies such as the IMF and ECB. Just who is in the driver's seat is a good question.

 Counting The Ways: America is, once again, becoming a bedroom community – the Republicans just can't get their minds out of other people's bedrooms. Romney's against same-sex marriage. Republicans in Minnesota want to join North Carolina's ban, while the GOP in Maryland and Washington State are trying to overturn state approval of same-sex marriage. Around the country there are over 400 bills pending aimed at women's reproductive rights – contraception and abortion. Unemployment? Nah, that's not a priority.

 Yes, But... The US House of Representatives (a wholly owned subsidiary of GOP, Inc. David & Chrles Koch, prop.) on Wednesday night approved an amendment to prevent Obama from taking executive action against the Defense of Marriage Act or state constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage.
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There's more  --  go there.http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

Dr. Krugman's latest column  --  please follow link to original
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Easy Useless Economics

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 10, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/opinion/krugman-easy-useless-economics.html

 A few days ago, I read an authoritative-sounding paper in The American Economic Review, one of the leading journals in the field, arguing at length that the nation’s high unemployment rate had deep structural roots and wasn’t amenable to any quick solution. The author’s diagnosis was that the U.S. economy just wasn’t flexible enough to cope with rapid technological change. The paper was especially critical of programs like unemployment insurance, which it argued actually hurt workers because they reduced the incentive to adjust.

O.K., there’s something I didn’t tell you: The paper in question was published in June 1939. Just a few months later, World War II broke out, and the United States — though not yet at war itself — began a large military buildup, finally providing fiscal stimulus on a scale commensurate with the depth of the slump. And, in the two years after that article about the impossibility of rapid job creation was published, U.S. nonfarm employment rose 20 percent — the equivalent of creating 26 million jobs today.

So now we’re in another depression, not as bad as the last one, but bad enough. And, once again, authoritative-sounding figures insist that our problems are “structural,” that they can’t be fixed quickly. We must focus on the long run, such people say, believing that they are being responsible. But the reality is that they’re being deeply irresponsible.

What does it mean to say that we have a structural unemployment problem? The usual version involves the claim that American workers are stuck in the wrong industries or with the wrong skills. A widely cited recent article by Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago asserts that the problem is the need to move workers out of the “bloated” housing, finance and government sectors.

Actually, government employment per capita has been more or less flat for decades, but never mind — the main point is that contrary to what such stories suggest, job losses since the crisis began haven’t mainly been in industries that arguably got too big in the bubble years. Instead, the economy has bled jobs across the board, in just about every sector and every occupation, just as it did in the 1930s. Also, if the problem was that many workers have the wrong skills or are in the wrong place, you’d expect workers with the right skills in the right place to be getting big wage increases; in reality, there are very few winners in the work force.

All of this strongly suggests that we’re suffering not from the teething pains of some kind of structural transition that must gradually run its course but rather from an overall lack of sufficient demand — the kind of lack that could and should be cured quickly with government programs designed to boost spending.

So what’s with the obsessive push to declare our problems “structural”? And, yes, I mean obsessive. Economists have been debating this issue for several years, and the structuralistas won’t take no for an answer, no matter how much contrary evidence is presented.

The answer, I’d suggest, lies in the way claims that our problems are deep and structural offer an excuse for not acting, for doing nothing to alleviate the plight of the unemployed.

Of course, structuralistas say they are not making excuses. They say that their real point is that we should focus not on quick fixes but on the long run — although it’s usually far from clear what, exactly, the long-run policy is supposed to be, other than the fact that it involves inflicting pain on workers and the poor.

Anyway, John Maynard Keynes had these peoples’ number more than 80 years ago. “But this long run,” he wrote, “is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the sea is flat again.”

I would only add that inventing reasons not to do anything about current unemployment isn’t just cruel and wasteful, it’s bad long-run policy, too. For there is growing evidence that the corrosive effects of high unemployment will cast a shadow over the economy for many years to come. Every time some self-important politician or pundit starts going on about how deficits are a burden on the next generation, remember that the biggest problem facing young Americans today isn’t the future burden of debt — a burden, by the way, that premature spending cuts probably make worse, not better. It is, rather, the lack of jobs, which is preventing many graduates from getting started on their working lives.

So all this talk about structural unemployment isn’t about facing up to our real problems; it’s about avoiding them, and taking the easy, useless way out. And it’s time for it to stop.

Spain And The EU

According to The New York Times, the EU is warning Spain about their deficit.  There is no warning about TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT unemployment.  All they care about are THE BANKS  --  as far as the EU is concerned, the people can go to hell  --  and they are  --  rapidly.

Who will those proud, thrifty, and clean Germans sell their crap to when the rest of Europe can't afford it?

How long before the fall of the Euro?

How long before the shooting starts?

I really hope it doesn't come to that.

Oh yeah  --  how long before J.P. Morgan Chase either fails - or "needs" a bailout.

Until we reign in The Banks, work toward a more equitable society, and teach our discredited "Masters Of The Universe" some manners - and the fact there really are RULES - these various crises will continue until there is nothing left.

Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

From Robert Reich - please follow link to original
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Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

http://robertreich.org/


Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.
Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.
Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.
The Republican bedroom crowd doesn’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.
Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.
We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”
Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.
What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.
It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.
Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.
They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.
We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Jazz Icons Count Basie live in '62

Count Basie - All Of Me

Carmen McRae Round Midnight

Cal Tjader and Carmen McRae Don't You Worry 'bout A Thing

Carmen McCrae_Besame Mucho

Sarah Vaughan - You Go To My Head (1961)

Lee Konitz & Red Mitchell - Just One of Those Things

RICHIE KAMUCA LEE KONITZ "LIVE" AT DONTE'S "STAR EYES" w/ DOLO COKER, JAKE HANNA

Lee Konitz - Five, Four And Three

Occupy Galt's Gulch

Here's a post from "The Epicurean Dealmaker"  --  please follow the link to the original.  It might just be worth your while to read some of his other posts.
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“Each of us in this room has warmed ourself at fires we did not build, and each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig.”

— Mark Shields, as heard, October 1997

I am not ashamed to confide, O Dearest and Most Equable of All Readers, that I have had a version of this particular post marinating in my brain for more than five years, from almost the first time I began laying finger to keyboard at this modest opinion emporium. Lord knows I have had numerous opportunities to release it over the intervening period, what with, in sequence, 20-something investment bankers, 30-something hedge fund traders, and 50-something private equity mavens each trumpeting to the stars the overweening brilliance and talent of their professional accomplishments to any and all who would listen, and to many who would not. For those among you who have noticed, the exposure and ridicule of hubris among the Great and Good, the not-so-great and not-so-good, and the patently pathetic yet surprisingly lucky has been an overarching concern and even gleeful entertainment in these pages. It is somewhat of a hobby of mine, undertaken and cultivated, if for no other reason, than to remind Your Humble Servant that he should indeed try strenuously to remain as humble as he can. Because he sure as shit isn’t anywhere near as clever or accomplished as he would like to pretend to be.

To date, what has typically stayed my hand is an acknowledgement that any efforts to puncture the iron-clad self regard of the self-appointed financial elite would be doubly futile. First, because they would blink stupidly at me (metaphorically) for completely missing the point of their unquestionable magnificence, and second, because it has always seemed to me that the only people impressed by these individuals’ autofellation have been themselves. In other words, my targets have historically been both too impervious and too self-evidently ridiculous to bother.

What has tipped my hand at last has been the appearance, at Megan McArdle’s blog site, of a really excellent guest post by entrepreneur and investor Jim Manzi. Mr. Manzi’s capitalist credentials are indisputable, so I was both impressed and heartened to read the words he excerpted there from his newly published book:

Many entrepreneurs hold the opinion that “I did it all on my own,” which may be well adapted to leadership success in certain situations, but it is objectively myopic. The entrepreneur relies on an ecosystem of venture capitalists, risk-taking purchasers, and so on. This ecosystem itself rests on a deeper foundation of collective, government-led enterprise. The delivery of our software, for example, depended on the existence of the Internet, which is the product of a series of government-sponsored R&D efforts, in combination with subsequent massive private commercial development. Government funding has been essential to much of the university science that entrepreneurs have exploited. Honest courts and police are required for functioning capital markets and protection of assets; physical infrastructure is required for the roads and running water without which we would not spend much time thinking about artificial intelligence software. At the absolute foundation, national armed forces protect the whole system against external aggression. All of our exciting technical and economic innovations ultimately require men to stand watch all night looking through Starlight scopes mounted on assault rifles—and die if necessary—to protect our commercial, law-bound society. Would you do this to protect a billionaire hedge-fund manager who sees his country as nothing more than lines on a map?

Add to this, in my world, the foundational infrastructure of global financial institutions and markets, the extraordinarily complex socioeconomic web of laws, regulations, and conventions which protect, foster, and enable investment and speculation, and the enormously capable and complex bureacratic platforms from which most traders, investment bankers, and investors operate, and you begin to appreciate that these self-proclaimed supermen resemble Prometheus wresting fire from Mount Olympus for the benefit of mankind far less than spoiled rich kids born on third base who grow up convinced they hit a triple. (Not to mention that most of these clowns got rich on a flying trapeze constructed over a free safety net composed of the taxes, retirement savings, and future debt repayment powers of tens of millions of their otherwise completely uncompensated and unrewarded fellow citizens.)

So let me just say that I remain completely unpersuaded that traders, bankers, and private equity investors who have made fortunes over the last ten years deserve to be unconstrained, unregulated, and untaxed because they did it all themselves. Bull—if I may be so bold—fucking-shit. Go pull the other one, sweetheart. I’ve worked in finance for more than two decades. You can’t fool me.¹





* * *Now don’t get me wrong, children. I think America, for all its various and distressing faults, is a remarkable country. In most countries in most ages of the world, the rich made their money the old-fashioned way: they stole it or they inherited it. For the last 200 years or so, we have run an experiment here and in a few countries abroad where capitalists have been allowed to create vast wealth for themselves and others based on sheer effort, talent, and—undeniably—loads of good luck. This is a remarkably heartening history. It is the unyielding bedrock for the Rawlsian contract which we all seem to enter into at birth, a contract which states that we will not unnecessarily constrain or prevent the great accumulation of wealth in our fellow citizens, as long as we have, ab initio, some non-trivial reason to believe we ourselves could be such a winner.

Jim Manzi puts it well (emphasis mine):

the fundamental tension of democratic capitalism [is that] winners... require shared resources produced by the losers. That is, the market economy requires broad social consent. Why should those who lose out in market competition give it?

Why indeed? Because they hope and expect that they, too, have some chance to be winners. If society evolves in such a way that winning becomes hereditary, or winners can rig the game in their favor, or losers have no chance to become winners because the gap is too wide, watch out. Social contracts are only worth the paper they are written on. And paper can be torn up.

The Mark Shields quote featured above remains graven on my brain, more than 15 years after I first heard it at an otherwise forgettable conference. It is true on its face, to anyone who will admit it. The rich and the successful in any society enjoy their spoils and their comforts at the sufferance of those whose lives, sweat, and blood have helped them earn it. This is what makes the Randian fantasy of capitalist übermenschen living self-sufficient lives in a remote canyon in Colorado—or, for the less self-reliant, modern titan, a condominium on Lake Geneva—so ridiculous. Most of the fat, pampered hedge fund managers and private equity moguls I know couldn’t survive a week without access to Whole Foods’ prosciutto bar, much less potable water, heat, and edible foodstuffs.

The complex, modern, secure, comfortable, and predictable society which we all enjoy at this time in history comes at a cost. It is expensive. And yet that cost, at least in this country, is subsidized for the rich by millions of fellow citizens who charge them less than market rates solely in the hope that they, too, might win the lottery of hard work and success.² It would behoove you sundry Masters of the Universe—tech entrepreneur, corporate executive, and financial titan alike—to remember this fact. Because the rest of us have not forgotten it.

And we vote.
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For those who still believe in the right wing idea of  "extreme rugged individualism", please remember, "The West" was not "won" by "lone cowboys", but by farmers, teachers, shopkeepers.  By folks who built towns, cities, and opened SCHOOLS.  They "won" the west.  The other guys were just fodder for cheap, escapist novels, written for boys living in those towns and cities, for boys stuck in "The East", boys who wanted "romance" and ESCAPE.  The dime novels the "Western Heroes" inhabited were equivalent to the video games of today.

Dime novels, western movies, comic books, video games  --  it's all the same crap.  Unfortunately, too many of our current "Masters Of The Universe" actually believe the crap they've been fed.  Too many lack even the slightest idea of what a society is  --  they seem unable to think critically when it comes to their greater self interest.  Too many seem to be saying  --  "let them eat cake".

The Political Economy of Citadella

The following from "Naked Capitalism".  Please follow link to original.

Here we are  -  in a form of "neo-feudalism".  Soon, even the "lords" and "ladies" will see the dead end it has become.

I wonder how many new wars (as opposed to the same old ones) will be started out of boredom, or a fit of pique?
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Dan Kervick: The Political Economy of Citadella

By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/04/the-astonishing-case-of-the-impenetrable-zero-bound.html“>New Economic Perspectives
Imagine a world and a society in which 500 people own everything – absolutely everything. These blessed few live in the Citadel, a mighty bastion of comfort with fortified and impregnable walls. The walls surround the Citadelians’ collections of lavish homes, spacious and opulent gardens, gorgeous pleasure arenas, and well-outfitted factories and workhouses.
Yes, factories and workhouses. These mighty 500 pay 100,000 other people to do various kinds of work for them. The work consists in transforming some of the resources and goods belonging to the 500 owners into a variety of consumable products, and also in using some of those products along with other raw materials to perform sundry services for the 500, services that include the production of splendid works of art and intellect.
The labors of the 100,000 workers yield more delights than can possibly be enjoyed by the 500 owners as the latter live out their luxurious but all-too-finite lives. The result is that the 500 owners in the Citadel are absolutely sated. They have no need to hire any other people to do any additional work. They already possess riches beyond the limits of enjoyment and desire.
The industry of the 100,000 workers also produces a surplus beyond what is needed to meet the quenched consumption needs of the 500 owners, and that surplus goes entirely to providing a few goods and services for the 100,000 workers themselves. That is how the workers are paid – with the products of their own labor. The workers are permitted to produce just enough extra for themselves to make it worthwhile for them to do the work offered by the owners rather than remain unemployed outside the Citadel walls.
And there indeed are millions and millions of people in Citadelia outside those impassable walls, living on the land owned by the 500. Yet all but the 500 owners and the 100,000 laborers inside the Citadel have no significant employment at all, and their lives are utterly impoverished. The owners permit the naked millions to forage for subsistence in the vast plains and forests that belong to the owners and lie outside the walls of their compound, and they also permit the wanderers to build rude shelters from dead grasses and fallen twigs.
But that is all they permit. Despite their sumptuous and sybaritic lifestyle, the owners are frugal savers of their unused property. They are determined to preserve and maintain possession of everything they own, including all of those assets that are not in use for their own present consumption or for the present payment of their workers. They are determined to keep all of their superabundant property in their own possession, in perpetuity, to be handed on down to their posterity. Also, the owners are wary of permitting production lest the rude millions improve their material conditions and powers enough to become threats to the power of the owners and rulers of the Citadel. They enforce their strict property regime with vigor and extreme prejudice, and do not permit the unhappy millions to engage in any significant productive transformations of the vast unexploited resources beyond the Citadel walls.
The system is frozen in place because the owners possess a monopoly of force – a monopoly not just in theory, but in unchallengeable practice. The owners possess a battery of laser blasters they built in an earlier period, and that are sufficiently powerful to discipline the 100,000 workers and keep them under the owners’ control. The laser blasters are installed throughout the Citadel along with surveillance cameras, and are operated remotely by codes that only the owners know. If a worker becomes unruly or insubordinate, she is summarily blasted into oblivion with a short burst from one of these potent armaments. And any worker who shows the smallest hints of inordinate curiosity about the workings of the laser blasters, or a budding interest in using the tools and raw materials of the workhouses to design weapons of any kind, is dispatched just as expeditiously.
Among the jobs performed by the 100,000 workers is the task of shooting, burning, laser blasting or otherwise punishing any of the millions of unemployed humans who turn themselves into pests and threaten the property of the owners. The owners send frequent patrols of stolid and reliable workers outside the walls to hunt, terrify and discipline the nomads. They also propel unmanned flying machines out beyond the Citadel walls and into the exterior wilds to survey the activities of the wanderers, and to annihilate them on the slightest suspicion of threatening activity, or for so much as a gesture that breaches the ordained demeanor of prostrate obedience.
The millions of vagrant foragers outside those imposing walls, wandering unclothed and stupefied through the wilderness, would love to possess lives like those of the 100,000 lucky workers, about whose more prosperous existence they have heard many stories and legends. When the owners are in need of new workers, they issue a call throughout the land. All eagerly apply for consideration. Everyone wants to be selected, and the owners can always choose from the very strongest and brightest among the nomads to find the choicest workers.
Thus is the tale of Citadelia. I now have some questions for theoretical economists. How would they describe the economic conditions of Citadelia? More specifically:

1. Would economists classify the conditions of Citadelia as a depression?
2. Are the markets in Citadelia routinely clearing?
3. Is Citadelia an economy in equilibrium?
4. Could the mass unemployment of Citadelia persist for a very long time?

And here is a question for the rest of us: Could we be living in Citadelia? Obviously, the conditions of the Citadelia story are extreme and fantastic. But in our world right now many millions of people – particularly young people – are involuntarily unemployed. The plague of unemployment is devastating large parts of Europe, The United States, the Middle East and Africa. Could it be that a chief reason for this persistent joblessness is that the owners of these regions and their resources, having sated most of their own personal desires, have no urgent need to employ more people to produce more goods and services, or to generate more profits? And could it be that the unemployed do not themselves own enough of the world’s property to create their own opportunities for productive work? And even if the owners of the world’s property are not exactly sated, might there be degrees of satiety such that when that degree is high enough, and when wealth is concentrated in too few hands, these circumstances have the effect of stifling economic development?
Notice that the unemployment in Citadelia could be relieved in two ways: If the owners were less exclusively concerned about their own well-being and property interests, and were more concerned about the well-being of others, then they might simply give away most of the land outside the walls, and liberate the natural industry of the foragers to begin improving that land, cultivating it, mining it and building on it. Also, if the owners were insatiable, so that no matter how much they had they always wanted more, then they would always be providing increasing amounts of work. They might gradually expand the walls of the Citadel over time, incorporating by stages more and more of the hinterlands into their enclosed civilization. But the combination of the owners’ satiety with their fixed determination to hold all of the property that is already theirs, works to prevent Citadelia from growing.

Weds.

To put it another way   ---   the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Tuesday

It is Tuesday.  Woke up and went to my computer in an attempt to find some "inspiration".  The same "inspiration" some of our "guitar gods" get when they steal licks directly from other performers.

To my great surprise, I found there is no "new" news.  It's all recycled "stuff".  A lot of right-wing-crap pretending to be "news".  Day after day, month after month, even year after year we hear, read, see, the very same propaganda on radio, TV, and our newspapers.

I've been reading, seeing, and hearing, some of this shit for over 50 years. 

The right wing has kept up this anti-American crap since I was a kid.  From 1932 on, they've tried to discredit FDR, rewrite history, and ignore the greatest boom in our history.  They've opposed EVERY particle of our "safety net", they have opposed Women's Rights, they have opposed Civil rights  ---  heck, they have opposed ANYTHING promoting equality.

Anti public schools, anti Social Security  --  heck, they even oppose direct election of Senators.

These morons oppose EVERYTHING that makes life even a tiny bit easier for working people.

If you stop to think, they oppose "The American Dream", the Constitution, and our Republic.

The rich are VERY short sighted, and their racist, bigoted "allies" just know how to hate.  Depending on who they are, they hate black, brown, and even white people.  Without someone to hate  --  it seems they have no reason to live.

So  --  no new posts today.  Perhaps I will put something up later.  Perhaps it will be dated today.  Perhaps it will offer a "new outlook" on US politics, "The Great Recession" (AKA - The Lesser Depression).  Perhaps some "new" news on Greece, France, the EU, China, India, North Carolina (a third world country), etc.   ---   but, it will be just a reworked article from 1, 2, 3, months, years ago.

Good luck folks.

The Answer Isn’t Socialism; It’s Capitalism that Better Spreads the Benefits of the Productivity Revolution

This from Robert Reich - follow link to original.

He is the closest thing to a "centrist" we have today.  Everyone else is well to his right - including Pres. Obama.

read this and tell me you disagree with his logic.
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Sunday, May 6, 2012

Francois Hollande’s victory doesn’t and shouldn’t mean a movement toward socialism in Europe or elsewhere. Socialism isn’t the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations. 

The answer is to reform capitalism. The world’s productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits. The result is widening inequality coupled with slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment.

In the United States, almost all the gains from productivity growth have been going to the top 1 percent, and the percent of the working-age population with jobs is now lower than it’s been in more than thirty years (before the vast majority of women moved into paid work).

Inequality is also growing in Europe, along with chronic joblessness. Europe is finding it can no longer afford generous safety nets to catch everyone who has fallen out of the working economy.

Consumers in China are gaining ground but consumption continues to shrink as a share of China’s increasingly productive economy, while inequality in China is soaring. China’s wealthy elites are emulating the most conspicuous consumption of the rich in the West.

At the heart of the productivity revolution are the computers, software, and the Internet that have found their way into the production of almost everything a modern economy creates. Factory workers are being replaced by computerized machine tools and robotics; office workers, by software applications; professionals, by ever more specialized apps; communications and transportation workers, by the Internet.

Some work continues to be outsourced abroad to very low-wage workers in developing nations but this is not the major cause of the present trend. This work now comprises such a tiny fraction of the costs of production that it’s becoming cheaper for companies to do more of it at home with computers and software, and even bring back some of it (“in-source”) from abroad.   

Consumers in rich nations are reaping some of the benefits of the productivity revolution in the form of lower prices or more value for the money – consider the cost of color TVs, international phone calls, or cross-country flights compared to what they were before.

But most of the gains are going to the shareholders who own the companies, and to the relatively small number of very talented (or very lucky and well-connected) managers, engineers, designers, and legal or financial specialists on whom the companies depend for strategic decisions about what to produce and how.

Increasingly, via stock options and bonuses, the owners and the “talent” are one and the same. While many other people indirectly own shares of stock through their pensions and 401-K plans, 90 percent of the value of all financial assets in the U.S. belongs to the richest 10 percent of the American population.

Meanwhile, a large number of low-paid service workers sell personalized comfort and attention – something software can’t do — in the retail, restaurant, hotel, and hospital sectors (most U.S. job growth since 2009 has occurred here.) Others – temps, contract workers, the under- and partially-employed, fill in where they can. A growing number are not working.

The problem is not that the productivity revolution has caused unemployment or under-employment. The problem is its fruits haven’t been widely shared. Less work isn’t a bad thing. Most people prefer leisure. A productivity revolution such as we are experiencing should enable people to spend less time at work and have more time to do whatever they’d rather do.

The problem comes in the distribution of the benefits of the productivity revolution. A large portion of the population no longer earns the money it needs to live nearly as well as the productivity revolution would otherwise allow. It can’t afford the “leisure” its now experiencing involuntarily.

Not only is this a problem for them; it’s also a problem for the overall economy. It means that a growing portion of the population lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going. In the United States, consumers account for 70 percent of economic activity. If they as a whole cannot afford to buy all the goods and services the productivity revolution is generating, the economy becomes stymied. Growth is anemic; unemployment remains high.

That’s why “supply-side” tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are perverse. Corporations and the rich don’t need more tax cuts; they’re swimming in money as it is. The reason they don’t invest in additional productive capacity and hire more people is they don’t see a sufficient market for the added goods and services, which means an inadequate return on such investment.

But more Keynesian stimulus won’t help solve the more fundamental problem. Although added government spending has gone some way toward filling the gap in demand caused by consumers whose jobs and incomes are disappearing, it can’t be a permanent solution. Even if the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes, deficits would soon get out of control. Additional public investments in infrastructure and basic research and development can make the economy more productive – but more productivity doesn’t necessarily help if a growing portion of the population can’t absorb it.

What to do? Learn from our own history.

The last great surge in productivity occurred between 1870 and 1928, when the technologies of the first industrial revolution were combined with steam power and electricity, mass produced in giant companies enjoying vast economies of scale, and supplied and distributed over a widening system of rails. That ended abruptly in the Great Crash of 1929, when income and wealth had become so concentrated at the top (the owners and financiers of these vast combines) that most people couldn’t pay for all these new products and services without going deeply and hopelessly into debt – resulting in a bubble that loudly and inevitably popped.

If that sounds familiar, it should. A similar thing happened between 1980 and 2007, when productivity revolution of computers, software, and, eventually, the Internet spawned a new economy along with great fortunes. (It’s not coincidental that 1928 and 2007 mark the two peaks of income concentration in America over the last hundred years, in which the top 1 percent raked in over 23 percent of total income.)

But here’s the big difference. During the Depression decade of the 1930s, the nation reorganized itself so that the gains from growth were far more broadly distributed. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 recognized unions’ rights to collectively bargain, and imposed a duty on employers to bargain in good faith. By the 1950s, a third of all workers in the United States were unionized, giving them the power to demand some of the gains from growth.

Meanwhile, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and worker’s compensation spread a broad safety net. The forty-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime also helped share the work and spread the gains, as did a minimum wage. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid broadened access to health care. And a progressive income tax, reaching well over 70 percent on the highest incomes, also helped ensure that the gains were spread fairly.

This time, though, the nation has taken no similar steps. Quite the contrary: A resurgent right insists on even more tax breaks for corporations and the rich, massive cuts in public spending that will destroy what’s left of our safety nets, including Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, fewer rights for organized labor, more deregulation of labor markets, and a lower (or no) minimum wage.

This is, quite simply, nuts.

And this is why a second Obama administration, should there be one, must focus its attention on more broadly distributing the gains from growth. This doesn’t mean “redistributing” from rich to poor, as in a zero-sum game. It doesn’t mean socialism. The rich will do far better with a smaller share of a robust, growing economy than they’re doing with a large share of an economy that’s barely moving forward.

This will require real tax reform – not just a “Buffet” minimal tax but substantially higher marginal rates and more brackets at the top, with a capital gains rate matching the income-tax rate. It also means a larger Earned Income Tax Credit, whose benefits extend high into the middle class. That will enable many Americans to move to a 35-hour workweek without losing ground – thereby making room for more jobs.

It means Medicare for all rather than an absurdly-costly system that relies on private for-profit insurers and providers.

It will require limiting executive salaries and empowering workers to get a larger share of corporate profits. The Employee Free Choice Act should be an explicit part of the second-term agenda.

It will require strict limits on the voracious, irresponsible behavior of Wall Street, from which we’ve all suffered. The Glass-Steagall Act must be resurrected (the so-called Volcker Rule is more ridden with holes than cheese), and the big banks broken up.

And it will necessitate a public educational system – including early child education – second to none, and available to all our young people.

We don’t need socialism. We need a capitalism that works for the vast majority. The productivity revolution should be making our lives better — not poorer and more insecure. And it will do that when we have the political will to spread its benefits.

Hey Joe - Patti Smith

Neil Young, Patti Smith & Guests - Helpless