My Head May Well Explode!

Which Temple, Robert? These people are all worshipers of the Golden calf and always have been. Where your heart is, there will be your treasure. Wall Streeters are heathens. Treat them as such.

Throw The Money-Changers Out of The Temple

Posted on Nov 19, 2009
Wall Street profits are an obscene affront to Scripture, as Robert Scheer details in an interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!”
Democracy Now!:

Partial rush transcript from Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the economy. A pair of new government reports released this week paint a startling picture of where the country is, more than a year after the economic meltdown. On Tuesday, the New York Comptroller’s Office said Wall Street profits are set to exceed the record set three years ago. The four largest firms—Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase—took in $22.5 billion in profits through September. The top six banks set aside $112 billion for salaries and bonuses over the same period. In a recent interview, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, defended the bank’s massive profits, saying Goldman is, quote, “doing God’s work."


Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture has revealed that far more people are going hungry in the United States than previously the ought. The Department estimates 50 million Americans, including a quarter of all children, struggled to get enough to eat last year. The number of children who live in households in which food at times was scarce last year stands at 17 million, an increase of four million children in just a year. 


Our next guest has been closely following the impact and causes of the economic meltdown. Robert Scheer, editor at Truthdig.com, author of many books, including The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. His latest column is called “Where Is the Community Organizer We Elected?” He joins me here in Burbank, California. 


Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Scheer. OK, just talk about these figures, from hunger to Goldman Sachs. 


ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, I mean, the whole thing about the profit of Wall Street that makes it particularly obscene is that we gave them that money. Your previous guest talked about how China is carrying $800 billion of our debt. We’re running up a $1.4 trillion deficit. And what happened was, we threw a lot of money at Wall Street. In particular, in relation to Goldman, we had this buyout of AIG, $180 billion. We’ve guaranteed the toxic assets of these enterprises. And that money, in a really truly shameful way, was passed on directly to the very companies that you mentioned that are giving themselves profits. So there’s something—yes, I’ll use the word “obscene.” 


It’s also interesting that he should say he’s “doing God’s work,” Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs. And my goodness, if Scripture is clear on anything, it’s condemnation of those who take advantage of the poor. 

You know, after all, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple. Scripture is devastating in its condemnation of usury, the immorality of usury. And yet, in your promo, you mentioned Chris Dodd is trying to get a bill passed that would cap interest rates. You know, where is the Christian right? Where are the Christians? Where are the Jews, for that matter? Or the Muslims? At least the Muslims, in their religious practice, don’t believe in interest as a principle, but the idea that we’re jacking up credit cards to 30, 35—this is loan sharking. And we can’t even get a bill passed through Congress that would cap interest payments. 


The other thing is, their rationalization is they’re somehow saving the economy. It’s the old blackmail thing. 
They ruined the economy; they got the legislation, the radical deregulation they wanted, that permitted them to become too big to fail—Citigroup and these companies; and then they turn around and say, “If you don’t throw all this money at us, the economy is going to go into the Great Depression.” But they haven’t solved the main problems. Mortgage foreclosures this month are higher than they’ve been in ten months. We have the commercial housing market exploding, you know, apartment building rentals exploding, going into mortgages. And so, you know, they are not dealing with the fundamentals. What has happened is an incredibly expensive band-aid was put on this. And these people don’t even have—they’re not even embarrassed. 


And the reason I wrote that column is they’ve also captured the President. And, you know, I voted for this president. I even contributed money that I didn’t have to his campaign. You know, I still feel great that he’s the President. You know, I’m biased. I like the guy, you know. I like everything about him.


AMY GOODMAN: Yet you ask, where’s the community-organizer-in-chief?


ROBERT SCHEER: I am appalled. This is not a minor criticism. I think the guy is betraying—betraying—his own presidency, the promise of his presidency, because he has taken these thieves—and I use the word advisedly. You know, I think people like Lawrence Summers, who pay themselves—you know, maybe he’s not legally a thief, but, you know, a guy who pays himself, or gets paid from hedge funds and other people, $15 million in ’08, while he’s advising Obama about the economy. And he’s the guy who, more than anyone else, when he was Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, pushed through the radical deregulation that allowed these businesses to get in all this trouble and refused to regulate derivatives and all that sort of thing. And then these guys are made the head of the—what? They’re going to save us now? 
 

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Thankful Progressives

With some of my reasons for thankfulness added in dark red....

THANKSGIVING

27 Reasons To Give Thanks

We're thankful President Obama is thinking long and hard about committing more troops and money to Afghanistan.

(and I will whole-heartedly support a huge increase in troops under the following conditions: 1) There is a policy regarding our involvement in Afghanistan and what victory would look like; how does Obama and his war team define it. Part of that policy had better say whether or not we have (or ever had, for that matter) a policy to capture or kill the people whom, we are told, are responsible for the worst attacks on American soil since the war of 1812 and I'm not talking about KSM. OBL and the crazy Egyptian corn-ball who speaks for him these days. The policy must also include an exit strategy and a time-line created in conjunction with our allies. The attacks on 9/11/01 affected the whole world, not just Americans. However, what we would beg Obama not to do is to commit just enough troops to keep the war going so the Goopers won't call him a wimp but not enough to accomplish the only goals ever articulated to the American people and "our" Congress; to get the guys who conspired to hit us on 9/11, the elimination of Al Qaeda, world wide.)

We're thankful President Bush feels liberated now.


(I'm not so sure I feel that way. Heaven only knows what kind of nightmarish crimes the next administration will feel comfortable committing since nothing happened to Bush or to Cheney or to any of their brother trolls and murderers! Trust me, the failure to bring to justice the war criminals who committed crimes against the constitution and, therefore, against the people of the U.S., will lead to an even worse nightmare for many more of us in the not too distant future.)

We're (not) thankful Dick Cheney has elected to move from his undisclosed location to the media spotlight.
 

I find that having Old Dick out of his hidey hole is a good thing. He is a constant reminder to many of us old, moderate independents why we went screaming to the left of center early in the BuCheney administration. The man is terrifying on so many levels it just ain't funny, but here's what it all boils down to: Either Vice is still trying to scare the crap out of the American people for purely political reasons, if not personal financial reasons as well, or the old fool really believes the psychotic babble he keeps spewing and he really needs the rest of us to be scared witless with him. The latter is certainly understandable in a setting other than on TeeVee news where he is labeled the "former vice president of the U.S." So far as it goes, the label is correct, but if that's as far as it goes, then the label in incorrect. "Former vice president of the U.S., thank God," would be as correct as one could get.

Some knotheads in this country actually believe that God,  no matter what  it's called, should be thanked that Dick The-extremely-paranoid Cheney was our v.p. on 9/11.  I'm not here to argue that point one way or the other, though I fail to see how it mattered one way or the other since there is no official record of Cheney having done anything to prevent any of attacks that happened nor none that might have happened on that day.

I would, however, state my strong belief that having him as v.p from inauguration day, 2001 until he and George walked out of the Capital Building, free as birds, on inauguration day, 2009 is probably the most god-awful thing we've had inflicted on us as a people, a nation, since the civil war. 

Let Cheney speak!!! Please allow it to be obvious to all that Cheney is still wanting to have that fight again. No matter what they tell you, Kidos, the civil war in the late 1800s was about slavery. The current civil war is as well. What's changed is the ease with which one can be identified as a slave. It was easy telling black people from white people back in the day.

Not so much anymore, as slaves come in all colors. In these days, un-free people come in all colors and exist across several socioeconomic levels. What's worse is that corporate America has learned ways to enslave the peoples' money. Take, for example. all of the retirement "schemes" which have left soon-to-be-retirees looking at working for as  far into the future as the eye can see and people who were retired on a modest income having to try to return to the work force. All we need now is for the slaves with their "slave/ very insecure" money to wake the hell up to their own identity. Then, I will be thankful.

We're thankful Al Franken has gone from playing self-help guru Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live to helping rape victims receive justice from their employers.

(Damn time someone did!!)

We're thankful for the healing power of beer.


(And wine and coffee in Amsterdam.)

We're thankful there are some on the right who think Glenn Beck is "incoherent," "mindless," "erratic," "bizarre," and "harmful to the conservative movement."


(Not enough people, unfortunately. We are playing seriously loose and free with our sanity, these days. I would be thankful if more Americans demanded that all news media be more honest and do their damn jobs for a change.)

We're thankful for long hikes on the Appalachian Trail.




(Not me. I will never think of the Appalachian trail again that I won't have to also think about that goofy governor and his goofy affair. )

We're thankful Michael Steele understands that he can't "do policy" and that no one has any reason to trust his "words or actions."



(Hey, what up with dat? Steele has yet to figure our that he is just another GOP lawn jockie. A man I actually did admire, Colin Powell, found out the hard way.)

We're (not) thankful for "birthers," "deathers," "tenthers," or "tea baggers."

(Yep, I am of two minds on the a fore mentioned nutcases. TeeVee news seems to want us to believe that these people are having a positive affect, in that more independents are moving to the right. I would disagree with that. Those people make me want to move to Cuba. Not really. Exaggeration for effect. )

We're (not) thankful conservatives believe they love America so much that they can root for our President to fail and for our nation to lose out on hosting the Olympics.


These people have proven that they are not Americans but Rethugs.

We're thankful NFL players refused to "bend over and grab the ankles" for Rush Limbaugh.

Me to!

We're thankful six companies have resigned from the Chamber of Commerce due to its denial of climate change science.

(Me to, but only six? Geese!)

We're thankful Falcon "Balloon boy" Heene wasn't actually in the balloon.

(I wish the entire family and all the anchors who breathlessly reported the story for hours had been in the balloon. We have become Rome.)

We're thankful Lt. Dan Choi and Lt. Col Victor Fehrenbach bravely spoke out against Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

(Me too. Hope it matters.)

We're thankful Shep Smith doesn't always drink the Fox News kool-aid.
  
Me too. Can't watch him because I don't watch Fox anymore. Haven't since December 2001. I did tune in for the Beck experience just to see what all the fuss was about. Scared me so bad I have almost given up TeeVee altogether or watch SyFy. Sy Fy can't top the on-going saga of a man who has, for some reason, been given a big old microphone in the form of his own TeeVee show while he has a mental meltdown on live bers of people who tune in to watch this?TeeVee. We have become Rome! Look at the numbers of people who tune in to watch this? 

We're thankful more than 80 companies refused to lend their sponsorship to Glenn Beck's hateful rants.

(Damn, only 80? Who the hell supports this guy? They must be punished in the only way they understand. $$$$$$)

We're thankful there are progressive organizations in D.C. lobbying for a two-state solution in the Middle East.


(They might want to think about a two state solution for us. )

We're (not) thankful for the filibuster.

(But we will be when we are in the minority again. In the meanwhile, I want the entire debate televised live so the less informed among us can see what a filibuster is and how much we are paying for our senators to read the phone book. )

We're thankful that more than 20,000 of you stood up to Bill O'Reilly's harassment machine and called for impeachment hearings against torture advocate Jay Bybee.

Me Too!!!

We're thankful that Iran's authoritarian rulers live in fear of their own population.


Me Too. Just wish the authoritarians over here were as afraid as the ones in Iran.When the government actually fears the public, Democracy is arriving.

We're thankful we'll no longer have to listen to nativist rhetoric on CNN and global warming skepticism on ABC News.


Didn't listen to it to begin with?.

We're (not) thankful for bailed out CEOs who think they're doing "God's work" by doling out billions in bonuses.


(Me either. Actually, I won't be thankful until said CEOs are working their butts off for minimum wage, living in a run down trailer park, with no healthcare.)

We're thankful for the legacy of the Liberal Lion.


ME TOO. Still sad at his passing.

We're thankful Bill O'Reilly won't be following us home for Thanksgiving.
 
He had better not be anywhere aroud me. I consider him armed and dangeorus.


We're thankful a "wise Latina" sits on the Supreme Court.

I'll reserve judgement. I want to watch her for a few sessions before I say I.m grateful for that.

We're thankful our boss helped rescue imprisoned American journalists in North Korea.


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Let The Sun Shine In......

Stewert Rips Faux Noise A New One

 But never fear, all will be forgotten in the next 5 minutes because they all apologized and everything will get back to normal, forthwith. We all know what "normal" means at Fox.

As much as we all might value BuzzFlash, a picture, or in this case a videotape, is worth a thousand words.

BuzzFlash has launched "a get America to Turn Off FOX" campaign -- and other online sites have gathered tens of thousands of names opposed to FOX. And several sites, including Media Matters, have regularly documented FOX's deceitful and dishonest coverage.

But, as we all know,  it takes Jon Stewart, with his visual images proving his case, to really erode FOX's credibility and undercut the influence of the FOX brand, which we all know is unfair and unbalanced but for some reason the corporate mainstream media defends.  In fact, the MSM scurried to FOX's defense when the White House correctly noted that the very same corporate "journalists" in D.C. and NY often take their cues from phony FOX coverage.

So, it was with hearfelt thanks that we saw Stewart bring FOX to their knees, actually forcing them to admit that they had used footage from a spring Teabagger rally to make Michele Bachmann's latest freak show gathering in D.C. appear much, much larger than it was.

What allows Stewart to be so devastating to FOX is that he assembles clips that would be damning in court, as they are in the court of public opinion. And these are reports aired on FOX, so how can they accuse their own reporting of being manipulative, incendiary and false?

So it was that after Stewart aired the kind of old Soviet Union style FOX propaganda "news" clip to pump up Bachmann and the Teabaggers, Hannity was forced into the rarest of FOX admissions: Stewart was right -- he had caught them in the act that they so often commit and rolled the tape to prove it.

According to a late November 11th New York Times Internet story, Hannity confessed on Wednesday night to “an inadvertent mistake":

On his show on the Fox News Channel Wednesday night, Sean Hannity admitted to using scenes from a different rally to illustrate a report on a health care protest last week....

Wednesday night Mr. Hannity admitted that “we screwed up” in using the “incorrect video.” He called it “an inadvertent mistake.”

Mr. Hannity did not address specifically how the mistake came to be made but he said somewhat ruefully: “It pains me to say: Jon Stewart was right.”

The cumulative, well-documented charges of FOX's manipulation and creation of partisan stories -- even promoting, sponsoring, and covering Teabagger events as if FOX were one and the same with the barbarians at the gates -- has started to take a toll on the FOX brand.

I've never seen them this defensive before. Even right wing media baron Rupert Murdoch found himself condoning Glenn Beck calling President Obama a racist, while denying that anyone on FOX News compared Obama to Stalin, which they are documented as doing. That ended up with a Murdoch spokesperson forced to "clarify" that Murdoch really didn't say what he said. Got it?

American corporations depend on what is called "brand identity." FOX has -- by being ubiquitous, using flashy television techology and graphics, and reinforcing a warped world view to a small segment of the American population -- has managed to get the mainstream media to regard it as a legitimate news channel.

Time will tell, but it appears the cumulative exposures of the fraud that is FOX News are starting to impact the "brand identity" of "fair and balanced." And if it loses its luster of credibility among corporate news networks, its influence will be considerably diminished.

And while others have laid the groundwork (don't forget to join the BuzzFlash "Get America to Turn Off FOX Brigade") Jon Stewart has the most impact because he airs the video proof, and some 70% of Americans get their news from television.

Jon Stewart, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News notes, is doing the investigating and exposing that the corporate media should be doing. And you have to add that Stewart has growing stature as a debunker of media charlatans -- and the mainstream media watches him.

FOX will no doubt be hiring Lou Dobbs, now departing CNN for a more compatible venue.

If that's the case, Dobbs may be the right wing nut job tonnage that tips FOX "News" irreversibly into a tarnished "brand name," with its credibility sinking ever lower.

Whatever happens with Dobbs, the growing defensiveness and tarnishing of FOX will be in no small part due to the visual -- and witty -- evidence aired by Jon Stewart -- backed by an army of Internet researchers and campaigns.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Seems the problems with communications are getting worse rather than better

Nevertheless, one can never really tell. Just when all seems lost, a fool, given enough rope, will hang himself. Whole groups of fools will hang themselves.     

However, this from Dissident Voice for your political edification?

Our Information Dilemma

by James Keye / November 9th, 2009

What is to be done when the major means of communication with the majority of a nation’s people is under the control of select groups that consistently distort and fabricate the information delivered?


This is the situation that the whole world faces. The major points of contact with the information that the world’s people require in order to make personal and societal decisions are primarily: TV, radio and print media, and internet sources that are driven by these sources; other internet sources are more correctly called propaganda tools regardless of their ideological position.


The primary “news” sources lay claim to some degree of neutrality and veridicality; but, they only pretend “neutrality” on issues that do not directly concern their owners or the self-interest of individual reporters and “news” departments. They use the cheap device of giving “equal time” and authority to positions whether or not there is any valid reason to assume equality; they always distort and ignore news that would negatively impact the economic and political elite.


The consequence is that there is no consistently reliable source for vital, informing descriptions of the conditions of our world. We cannot act with any confidence that the information upon which we must act is accurate. While we know we are being lied to, there is no source that stands as sufficiently honest and unbiased that we can use it as a reference to measure the maelstrom.


Of course, some people with enough time, experience and determination can often piece together descriptions of events in ways that they might reasonable trust as veridical, but there is little or no way that their efforts can be generally disseminated – or for that matter, separated from the propaganda that is boiling up as a substitute for real information. So, regardless of the motives, of which there are many (to be looked at more closely in moment), the result is the almost complete impossibility of the general public having the information that they require to act in response to the actual events and processes going on in the world. This is the loss of a most basic survival tool: accurate information to inform action in the environment.


Insidiously, the non-news part of media acts to set the base-line expectations for the “news” itself. ‘Every’ person in TV dramas carries a gun, drives a Land Rover, uses a satphone and lives in a million dollar house or condo; even if they have a 50K job doing what, in the real world, might be some form of accounting. ‘Everyday-people’ have al Qaeda sleeper cells in the house next door to them. Serial killers roam the streets of every neighborhood. And personal success and satisfaction is never ever seen as a moment of quiet reflection.


If we average the content of the lives we see portrayed on our “home theaters” and compare them to the actual modal lives of American citizens, the disconnect rises to the level of the pathological: the stories that we tell about ourselves have absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the lives we lead, even as we attempt, as we always have done, to model ourselves after them. For every film like The Remains of the Day, there are hundreds where the moral choices are drawn in crayon and gratuitous blood.


People embrace the entertainment media, giving it 50, 80, even 100 % of their non-working life (and many times part of their working life) not so much to be entertained, but to be part of the common human experience. If people felt fully connected to flesh and blood people, then they would not spend 5 hours a day watching 2-dimensional electronic representations of people that they can’t know, can’t touch or ask a question. If people felt informed and competent in the execution of their lives, then they wouldn’t so desperately seek the slick and phony “competence” of media “heroes.”


The professional news media is now only an extension of this pattern. To a large extend it is competing with fictional stories, with the carefully rehearsed control of emotional content and production values, while at the same time purporting to discover and extract accurate descriptions of events and behaviors that talented and powerful interests wish to remain hidden. My critique in no way is intended to suggest that this social role and responsibility is easy, only that this vital role is being thoroughly mishandled and abused.


The reasons for the abuse run from the most mundane to the most violently draconian. Reporters and editors have often been the targets of the forces who wish not to be reported on. In 2006, 81 journalists were killed (other accounts give the number as 110) and 871 were put in jail worldwide. 2007 saw 86 (95) killed and hundreds more jailed. The assumption is made that the vast majority of the journalists so treated were acted on in response to their reporting things that someone really didn’t want to see made public. A message was being sent: speak and die; this would distort what is reported on.¹


But there are many other ways to motivate the distortion of information. Limbaugh is reported to have a 400 million dollar contract! Top TV “news” anchors are all in the 6 to 8 figure range. These amounts of money create organized interest groups deep within the media beast with a disproportionate voice in how stories are framed so that the “news” show can ‘get its story’ day after day. The self-interested corporate ownership of media has its own influence.


At the other extreme the public must be appealed to to watch and listen. This has become about polling and presentation, personality and production values, matching expectations and desires more than giving the most straightforward accounting of events no matter where the chips may fall – there must be no chips, though sparks are good, i.e., there must be no real consequences, just shiny things to distract attention. If real substantive stories with real consequences that led to human action were presented, people might come to expect, and eventually demand, substantive information…. And then there would be the danger of the numbers a couple of paragraphs above going up – it is a tough decision: package a dishonest product, have sycophantic fame and make lots of money… or tell the greatest truth that can be divined from the muscular digging of evidence and be ignored, rejected, threatened, fired, jailed or killed.


What matters, what gets lost in the wailing over this and that specific crime against the public good, is exactly that, the public good. Just as wind sailors died from the lack of specific vitamins, so societies die from the lack of accurate information on the vital details of life. A social order cannot sustain on lies. It is just so simple: the biophysical world in which we live requires that it be responded to from veridicality. The ‘vascular system’ through which is pumped the information necessary for societal and individual survival is diseased and failing. The informational nutrients of life delivered by it cannot be trusted and we accept them with reluctance even as we must, at some level, accept them.


What hope there is in this model of our informational dilemma comes from those who will not give up trying to organize, out of the cacophony, some bits of the real. So long as this impulse is alive there is always a corner to be turned. Like the creature that collects tiny drops of water, one at a time, from the morning dew in a rainless land, those who have the ability and inclination to organize some more truthful image of our present time must do so to stay mentally alive. As those people spread their efforts and share their methods for making sense of the intentional chaos perhaps, just maybe, a critical mass can demand even more.

For comparison, there are 50 to 100 teachers for every journalist. Teaching can be very dangerous in regions of deep social conflict and tyrannical governments, teachers are jailed and killed for their teaching, but the numbers are generally small and certainly far below the proportional rates for journalists. I couldn’t find a source that totaled the numbers of teachers killed or jailed for their professional activities, but a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation gives me numbers perhaps half those for journalists, almost all in the most troubled places. This would make journalism about a hundred times more dangerous given the smaller numbers. [↩]

James Keye is the nom de plume of a biologist and psychologist who after discovering a mismatch between academe and himself went into private business for many years. His whole post-pubescent life has been focused on understanding at both the intellectual and personal levels what it is to be of the human species; he claims some success. Email him at: jkeye1632@gmail.com. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.

This article was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 9:02am and is filed under Disinformation, Media, Philosophy, Propaganda. ShareThis

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Let The Sun Shine In......

American CEOs ARE Robbing Their Own Companies Blind...

as well as the rest of us.

Honest to Pete, how much money do these a-holes need? This is truly sickening. It simply must be stopped if for no other reason than national security. 


Hey, I'm all for "sin taxes," even though I have had to pay them quite a few times in my life. So how about taxing greed. It is, after all, one of the seven deadly sins. Also, according to one of my econ. professors, it is also the human character fault for which any economic system must provide huge penalties or face collapse. 

ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2009) — Chief executives in 35 of the top Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their "ideal salaries" in 2008, according to a new type of theoretical analysis proposed by a Purdue University researcher to determine fair CEO compensation.

---

See also:

Science & Society

• Industrial Relations
• Economics
• Consumerism
• Ethics
• Privacy Issues
• Social Issues

Reference

"One of the most pressing economic and corporate governance issues of the day is how to determine fair pay packages for CEOs," said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. "The proposed theory allows us to compute what the fair pay is for a CEO, including bonuses and stock options, under ideal conditions."

U.S. corporations, Standards and Poors

The ratio of CEO pay to the lowest employee salary has gone up from about 40-to-1 in the 1970s to as high as 344-to-1 in recent years in the United States. However, the ratio has remained around 20-to-1 in Europe and 11-to-1 in Japan, according to available data, he said.

Using the new analysis method, Venkatasubramanian estimated that the 2008 salaries of the top 35 CEOs in the United States were about 129 times their ideal fair salaries. CEOs in the Standard & Poor's 500 averaged about 50 times their fair pay, raising questions about the efficiency of the free market to properly determine fair CEO pay, he said.

"You might ask why a chemical engineer is concerned with economics and CEO salaries," Venkatasubramanian said. "Well, it turns out that the same concepts and mathematics used to solve problems in statistical thermodynamics and information theory also can be applied to economic issues, such as the determination of fair CEO salaries."

Findings appeared Tuesday (Nov. 3) in the online open-access journal Entropy. The paper, "What is Fair Pay for Executives? An Information Theoretic Analysis of Wage Distributions," is available for free downloads from the Entropy site athttp://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/11/4/766

A key idea in his theory is the economic interpretation of the concept of entropy.

"There have been many attempts to find a suitable interpretation of entropy for economic systems without much success," Venkatasubramanian said. "Just as entropy is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics and uncertainty in information theory, what would entropy mean in economics?"

Venkatasubramanian identified entropy as a measure of "fairness" in economic systems, revealing a connection between statistical thermodynamics, information theory and economics.

"As we all know, fairness is a fundamental economic principle that lies at the foundation of the free and efficient market system," he said. "It is so vital to the proper functioning of the markets that we have regulations and watchdog agencies that break up and punish unfair practices such as monopolies, collusion and insider trading. Thus, it is eminently reasonable, indeed reassuring, to find that maximizing fairness, or maximizing entropy, is the condition for achieving economic equilibrium."

Using the new theory, the ideal pay distribution is determined to be "lognormal," a particular way of characterizing data patterns in probability and statistics.

"This is the economic equivalent of the Boltzmann distribution for ideal gases, which describes how the gas molecules are distributed at various energy levels," Venkatasubramanian said. "One may view our result as an 'economic law' in the statistical thermodynamics sense. The free market will 'discover' and obey this economic law if allowed to function freely and efficiently without collusion-like practices or other unfair interferences."

The publication comes at a time when Congress is grappling with the issue. The Federal Reserve announced a plan on Oct. 22 to eliminate excessive pay packages that might encourage bankers to take reckless risks. The Obama administration pay czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg, has announced plans to reduce executive pay at companies that received the most federal bailout money, slashing the base salaries of those top executives and setting top pay at $200,000 for AIG executives in the financial products division.

Until now, however, there has been no scientific way of determining executive pay.

OMG! Now, Wall Street will hate science as much as the religiously insane do.

"We now have a rational quantitative basis for setting the fair base pay scales for the top management, and any added incentive pay package might then be linked to measureable and meaningful performance metrics that promote long-term survival and growth for the organization," Venkatasubramanian said.

Fair pay for an average S&P 500 CEO should ideally be in the range of 8 to 16 times the lowest employee salary, Venkatasubramanian said.

"It's interesting to note that Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and an outspoken critic of executive pay excesses, drew an annual salary of $200,000 in 2008," Venkatasubramanian said. "This makes his pay ratio 8-to-1, assuming a minimum employee salary of $25,000 per year, which fits the ideal benchmark estimate for fair CEO pay almost exactly. Mr. Buffett's instincts about fairness seem to be amazingly accurate. The top pay set by Mr. Feinberg for the AIG executives is almost exactly the amount recommended by the new theory."

As a contrast to the United States, average CEO pay ratios were about 11-to-1 in Japan, 15-to-1 in France, 20-to-1 in Canada, and 22-to-1 in Britain in 2006.

"These ratios are not that far off, when compared to U.S. ratios, from the ideal benchmark estimates from my theory," Venkatasubramanian said. "Even in the United States, the CEO pay ratios in the 1960s and 1970s were much more reasonable and in general agreement with the ideal values. So the executive pay excesses appear to be a recent phenomenon. This appears to be another valuation bubble -- the CEO valuation bubble -- much like the ones we have witnessed in stocks, real estate, commodities, etc."

Damn straight! It all began in the 1980s.....a time almost as bad as this, except we had not just blundered our way into two wars neither of which was, certainly in retrospect, all that necessary in terms of national security and damned near bankrupted the nation giving no-bid contract to cronies, political and/or.personal contributors or old employers. While everyones's focus was on the messes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Israel and Palestine, it was party time on Wall Street and everyone knew it would be two years before Bush was ever elected. 

During the '80s there were more people on the street, whole families, than there had been since the Great Depression. Now we have Hoover-villes popping up all over. There was also a nauseating ostentatious wealth that emerged toward the end of the Reagan/Bush era. 

Enron, Anderson, Worldcom and other corporate giants going belly-up as a result of corporate- dingo behavior should have been a huge red flags for all of us. I would be willing to bet that relatively few Americans know how those matters were settled legally and otherwise.

Anytime major companies go under, like freakin' dominoes, the corporate world bears very close and, careful scrutiny for the next decade, at least, kind of like a probationary period. Disastrous corporate crimes do not happen in a vacuum.

But that is not what happened as the Bush administration came into office. Just the opposite happened. The SEC was told to back off and Wall Streeters predictably went criminally insane, if not simply morally bankrupt and ethically empty.

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention that quite a bit of the merging of corporations began during the Clinton years, with a republican congress. It sped up to a maddening pace under Bush and a republican congress. Many of the mergers should be undone as they are cutting down on competition. 

O.K. so we, having a supposedly free market capitalistic economy, can't tell people how much they can make. But we can sure tax the hell out of whatever % a corporate officer  makes above what the lowest salary in the corporation is, close all loopholes, tax everything, not just the so-called salary. 

This would be a good policy in that it would not only help with funding those things we need badly to fund as a nation, but it contributes to the health of the corporation and, therefore, the nation as a whole. 

William A. Masters, professor and associate head of Purdue's Department of Agricultural Economics, said, "This paper tackles an important problem in a new way. Venkat is a brilliant engineer who sees patterns that others miss. It's wonderful to see this kind of cross-disciplinary investigation, broadening the range of ideas and mathematical tools being applied to crucial issues like CEO pay."

---

Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University. Original article written by Emil Venere.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

U.S. Fails To Measure Up On Human Index!

Development: US fails to measure up on 'human index' (The Guardian's words, not mine.) 

Click on over. Get a load of the Internet address of the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa/print

International Aid and Development! Wonder if we stand a chance of getting any aid? LOL 

Seriously, maybe some countries who had the good sense to have universal healthcare years ago will take some of us in as political refugees, running from politically powerful people who, apparently, want us to die. 

I wonder, will the Netherlands take me? New Zealand, maybe? Belgium? 

In all seriousness, Peeps, this is damn sad. Why is universal healthcare not a national security issue? It sure as hell ought to be! I have long since given up on the D.C. politicians doing anything because it is the socially responsible, morally right thing to do. What I cannot understand is why people don't see this issue for what it really is as well, and includes the other two reasons: a matter of national security. 

Never mind the threat of bio-terrorism, a real pandemic, not of man's making, could shake the economy as bad, if not worse than 9/11 did. Over 10 times the number of people killed on 9/11 die every year from the common flu in this country.  I can think of quite a few potential disasters without the help of a terrorist and quite a few more that would qualify as terrorist attacks. My point is, is doesn't matter whether it's Al Qaeda or Hurricane Katrina, the H1N1 virus or a dozen or more people infected with Small Pox entering major airport hubs and taking public transportation in major cities, thus starting the dreaded Small Pox epidemic (if not worse) of the 21st century. The results on the economy, social fabric and, not only the most vulnerable in our society, but individuals from all walks of life and every socio-economic strata could be truly dreadful. 

Our social institutions are in trouble for a number of reasons. Among those institutions are hospitals nationwide. As medical corporations that run hospitals attempt to keep profits up and costs down stuff is gonna happen. Under-staffing for one: Less nurses in the trauma centers and E.Rs could be a matter of life or death for "Joe, the Plumber," Lenny, the stock broker, and Glenn, the over-paid loud mouth. This is one part of the infrastructure that we all still share, in spite of what one might think after watching that show about a concierge physician. Talented, learned people are becoming fed up. I'm talking about R.N.s, young M.D.s, and the like, not MBAs. 

Still, it is the CEOs and other corporate bosses who are raking in the dough to such obscene levels. I think that the people should refuse to pay for congressional insurance policies of any kind, nor should we pay for insurance for congressional staff. Either congress agrees to forgo their health insurance policies until Medicare is available to anyone who wants to buy into the plan or we will all refuse to pay taxes, period. When there is Medicare for all, we insist that all our public servants will have it as well.  

As Buzzflash commented about this article: (this is not an exact quote), It seems that there are politicians, elected officials and, of course, the bottom-line sucking, corporate dingos who own many of our elected officials who want to "kill us with greed," among other things, I'm sure.  Why, in the name of All, should we tolerate it?

Sad that we have to read this in a foreign news paper. Nevertheless, we thank, as always, our friends in many lands who help us see more clearly. The fog of war is thick over here. 

·Nation slumps from 2nd to 12th in global table
·Richest fifth take home $168,000, poorest $11,000

• Ashley Seager
• The Guardian, Thursday 17 July 2008
•  larger | smaller

Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.

These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world's number-one economy has slipped to 12th place - from 2nd in 1990- in terms of human development.

The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the US, paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5bn each day on healthcare - more per person than any other country.

The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.

Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.

And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.

Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.

There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.

One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.

As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.

"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.

"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."

The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.

In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.

It also reveals 14% of the population - some 40 million Americans - lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

And while in much of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia, levels of enrolment of three and four-year-olds in pre-school are running at about 75%, in the US it is little more than 50%.

The report not only highlights the differences between the US and other countries, it also picks up on the huge discrepancies between states, the country's 436 congressional districts and between ethnic groups.

"The Measure of America reveals huge gaps among some groups in our country to access opportunity and reach their potential," said the report's co-author, Sarah Burd-Sharps. "Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.

"For example, the state human development index shows that people in last-ranked Mississippi are living 30 years behind those in first-ranked Connecticut."

Inequality remains stark. The richest fifth of Americans earn on average $168,170 a year, almost 15 times the average of the lowest fifth, who make do with $11,352.

The US is far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare. The country has no federally mandated maternity leave.

The US also ranks first among the 30 richest countries of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of the number of people in prison, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population.

It has 5% of the world's people but 24% of its prisoners.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

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Let The Sun Shine In......

So, what's Up With The Christian and New Athiests Screamers

I'm Not Easily Categorized Either.....

http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/937#comment-59429   (original article)

....in that I am not a "true believer" in either extreme. I find myself criniging while listening to Hitchens as well as Tony Perkins or Pat Robertson. I have studied the scriptures of quite e few religions, philosophies, beleif systems and practices. I see the wisdom in all of them. I also see how anyone of them can be misued and abused on people in such incredibly cruel ways. That can be said of almost anything, can it not?


We all have a belief system whether we like it or not.


The thing is that change, with a capital "C," is upon us and Obama did not bring it.The very idea that he did is laughable.


This change has been coming for quite sometime. There is no turning back and there never has been. To be blunt, lots of people are scared witless about that. All of us will, to some extent, rely on our belief systems and support system duing the trying times ahead.

However, the more rigid and extreme the doctrines and aplastic the brains that cling to them, the worse off we all are. Scared people have been known to do stupid things. As an old friend of mine used to say, "adrenalin really is stupid juice, isn't it?"


Therefore, now is really not the time to scare anyone unnescessarly, especially about things they either really do worship (need desperately for life) or say they do. Prosylethyzing is a real problem, admittedly. Some christian sects believe that it is their holy obligation to convert other people to their belief system. Under our constitution, they have a right to speak with anyone who agrees to listen. They do not have a right to codify their belief system and insist that others believe and act as they do (or believe they should) under penalty of law. It is the latter for which we need be watchful.


Judaism has never prosylethized to my knowledge, as most Islamic sects do not. I have never been acosted by a Hindhu or a Buddhist attempting to brainwash me, although I know quite a few and have met quite a few Hindus and Buddhists over the years.

Talking about screeching "new athiests" and foaming-at-the-mouth prophets of doom for everyone but them? Both leave me queazy at best, truly nauseous at worst. In those, as well as other instances of lewd social/political discourse, while I understand where it comes from, cause me to fear for my country and long for the quiet of solitude.

While we ponder the obvious opposites and the splits within the splits regarding "God Almighty," The high prients of the temple of capatalism have been terribly corrupted, just in case no one noticed. (snark). Religions, dear Buzzers, are not found only in buildings denoted as religious in nature, like churches, temples, mosques, ashrams and the like.

Free marketeers have more zeel for their belief system than most evangelicals I've encountered. Not all of us worship the same god. Not by a long shot.  

Let The Sun Shine In......

What Happened to Kennedy's Brain

Very strange, eh?