The McConnell-Trump Economy in Kentucky

Yeah, it's an isolated anecdote, although it explains and confirms a lot of things we've been seeing over the past year, so anyway:

I was in Kroger this morning, in a white, well-off section of Louisville, where I noticed that there were no baggers.

The poor cashiers were struggling to handle long lines of shoppers, backed up because the cashiers had to do the bagging, too.  And because on the busiest grocery shopping day of the week, there were only four checkout lines open.

Recently this Kroger had closed four checkout lines and replaced them with self-checkout, thus eliminating at least four cashier jobs, not including the departed baggers.  There was no waiting at the self-checkout, because everybody hates them.

And even though everyone in line whom I could see and hear was being patient and polite, the stress on the cashiers was evident.

Just as I reached the cashier, an elderly woman in her 70s, her phone buzzed.  She said, apologetically, "may I beg your indulgence?  I have to take this call. My mother just fell and broke her arm."

I'm a liberal Democrat, not a child-caging repug, so of course I said "please, go ahead."  It was the hospital, just texting to let her know her 94-year-old mother had broken her shoulder plus her arm in three places and they were prepping her for surgery.

She kept working.  And she kept thanking me.  And I kept reassuring her that we must support everyone caring for elderly or disabled loved ones.

What the FUCK kind of economy requires a woman in her 70s, with a 94-year-old mother undergoing emergency surgery, to KEEP WORKING instead of going to the hospital to be with her mother.

The kind of economy Mitch McConnell and the Pumpkin Traitor are working to create: Lords and Serfs.

Also, fuck Kroger for trying to force us all into self checkout by eliminating jobs. 

First, Let's Kill All the Bosses

This weekend I saw an NBC promo that featured some CNBC analyst purporting to advise people who are having problems with their boss.

Short version: stop forcing your boss to "explain your behavior to other people."

Fact: If your boss is spending even five seconds "explaining your behavior to other people," then you do indeed have a big problem.  Your big problem is that your boss is an asshole.

Your boss is an asshole because your boss is undermining and sabotaging you by publicly disparaging your skills and professionalism.

More broadly, your boss is an asshole because 45 years ago repug/conservative capitalism began to flip the New Deal system of powerful labor/worker that prevented owners and bosses from abusing workers to one that allows employers to treat employees as serfs without rights.

It's Labor Fucking Day, people. Let's stop giving bosses power.  Let's stop putting employers in charge. Let's stop pretending owners are "job creators."

If every boss, employer, owner disappeared tomorrow, the work - the actual work of keeping the economy humming - the work would continue without a hiccup.

Workers create jobs. Workers build and run the economy.  Workers are irreplaceable.

What would a worker-centered economy look like?  Let's start with what we lost 45 years ago and build on that.

• Criminalize non-worker interference with organizing and collective bargaining. Every workplace that votes to unionize gets a union. Every unionized workplace requires collective bargaining.
• Repeal all pro-rentier, anti-worker legislation, regulations and tax breaks.
• Permanently bar from all government contracts, tax breaks and subsidies all corporations that take anti-worker actions (not just layoffs and off-shoring but also a worker-management pay ratio of more than 50 to 1). 
• Ban all future and reverse all previous mergers/acquisitions that give any entity control of more than five percent of any economic sector. Criminalize anti-trust behavior.
• Minimum wage of $25 per hour, indexed to inflation.
• Social Security equal to minimum wage, and available at age 55.
• Medicare for All or Single Payer medical insurance.
• Universal Child Care.
• Construct 100 million new units of affordable housing.
• Build mass transportation that gets every worker to their workplace.  

This is fun!  Let your imagination run wild!  No pro-worker policy or program is too much!

Debunked Repug Myths

They're not myths; they're deliberate lies.

Via Down with Tyranny:

The Bottomless Pit of Minimum Waage

via Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Repugs Wrong on Everything Still, Again, Always: Jobs Edition

And now that they're in the majority in Congress again, they'll take credit for every good thing and blame President Obama for every bad one.  Repugs really are the Eddie Haskell of American politics, as someone smarter than me said back in the Clinton years.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

Now that the economy is improving, we have the wherewithal to assess some of the predictions made by conservatives that this or that progressive policy would doom the recovery. At TNR Adam Nathaniel Peck looks at three of the more common ones and finds them almost entirely lacking in merit:

On January 1, 13 states raised their minimum wages as part of a larger nationwide effort—not only by progressives, but moderates and even a few conservatives—to help low-income workers who were struggling to make ends meet.

Still, such hikes were not without opposition. Notably, fast food companies sounded the alarm over the possible consequences of minimum wage hikes—namely, that consumers would pay higher prices and companies would be forced to cut jobs….

Six months after California’s minimum wage rose to $9, the state’s job growth continues to outpace nearly every other state in the country. In November, California added more than 90,000 jobs, its highest single-month total in almost two decades.

The Golden State is not alone. Of the 13 states that saw minimum wage hikes go into effect on January 1, all but New Jersey saw positive job growth in 2014. And as a group, those 13 states averaged significantly higher job growth than states that did not raise the minimum wage.

Then there’s the argument that allowing long-term unemployment benefits to expire, as Congress did at the end of 2013, would be good for the unemployment rate. Wrong.

2014 has come and gone, and the rate of long-term unemployed has shown exactly no relationship to the loss of benefits. The unemployment rate had been falling at a steady pace for years even with 99 weeks of benefits, and in the last 12 months the rate of decline has not quickened—meaning that the upside of eliminating unemployment insurance for nearly 5 million people was a fiction, and families were left without a safety net.

And finally, we have the suggestion that Obamacare would lead a vast number of companies to reduce the hours their employees worked to avoid Obamacare mandates:

A recent study from the Urban Institute concluded that, nine months since the insurance marketplace opened, there was little evidence that employers were hiring more part-time workers because of Obamacare.

There was some evidence of job losses related to the ACA in 2014, though: States that refused to expand Medicaid are expected to lose out on thousands of jobs and millions of federal dollars over the next several years. A George Washington University report estimates that North Carolina will lose out on 43,000 jobs by 2020, while a White House Council of Economic Advisers report said that rejecting expansion will cost Florida 64,000 jobs by 2016.

Think we’ll hear any mea culpas from the false prophets on these three topics? I sincerely doubt it. 

And the repugs are still, again, always lying about it, per Digby:

Before it's all over the Republicans will all be patting themselves on the back for saving the country from another depression. It's what they do. The GOP presidential candidate will run on tax cuts and slashing spending. After all it will be morning in America and you deserve to get some of your hard earned money back.

The Republicans mess everything up, Democrats do their dirty work and cut spending and enact painful "reforms" then the Republicans take credit for it, turn into Santa Claus and roll back into power promising free money for everyone. It happens over and over again. 

Get Your Workers' Bill of Rights While It's Hot

If you notice, as you are driving around NOT shopping today, that there are protests at the WalMart, that's because minimum wage workers are taking their lives in their hands to demand their greedy employer treat them like human beings.

Walmart-style slave labor does not have to be the standard.  In civilized places, workers have the power.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

So, what? Do these uppity, chronically stressed workers think The Economy exists to serve people instead of the other way around? Employees — I'm sorry, Associates — are supposed to genuflect and cross themselves at the sound of their master's voice, and ask how high when Job Creators says jump. What are those Left Coast socialists smoking?

Politico:

Meet your new union reps: the statehouse and City Hall.

San Francisco’s new law, which its Board of Supervisors passed Tuesday by unanimous vote, will require any “formula retailer” (retail chain) with 20 or more locations worldwide that employs 20 or more people within the city to provide two weeks’ advance notice for any change in a worker’s schedule. An employer that alters working hours without two weeks’ notice — or fails to notify workers two weeks ahead of time that their schedules won’t change — will be required to provide additional “predictability pay.“ Property service contractors that provide janitorial or security services for these retailers will also need to abide by the new rule.

What's worse, these subversive notions have a way of spreading east from the Left Coast like viruses. Call out the dragoons.

Speaking of predictability, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is predictably miffed about the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.” For struggling hourly workers, taking classes, caring for families, and raising children (and managing day care logistics) is something The Economy expects you to fit in between work shifts at multiple, part-time, low-paying, no-benefits service jobs where shift schedules vary a lot. But that's just the way it is and the way The Economy likes it. With labor unions weakened and workers disempowered, setting working conditions once governed by collective bargaining agreements now falls to local Democrats. That is, if you can find any that aren't Republican lite.

SNIP 

Earlier this year, 32-year-old Maria Fernandes of Newark, NJ died of asphyxiation while catnapping in her car between shifts of her four part-time jobs. The Economy did not attend her funeral.

Poverty Capitalism

The wealthy have always fed off the bodies of the poor, but it took capitalism not only to raise exploiting the poor to a fine art, but to make doing so appear as civic virtue and fiscal responsibility.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times:

Sentinel is a part of the expanding universe of poverty capitalism. In this unique sector of the economy, costs of essential government services are shifted to the poor.

In terms of food, housing and other essentials, the cost of being poor has always been exorbitant. Landlords, grocery stores and other commercial enterprises have all found ways to profit from those at the bottom of the ladder.

The recent drive toward privatization of government functions has turned traditional public services into profit-making enterprises as well.

In addition to probation, municipal court systems are also turning collections over to a national network of companies like Sentinel that profit from service charges imposed on the men and women who are under court order to pay fees and fines, including traffic tickets (with the fees being sums tacked on by the court to fund administrative services).

When they cannot pay these assessed fees and fines – plus collection charges imposed by the private companies — offenders can be sent to jail. There are many documented cases in which courts have imprisoned those who failed to keep up with their combined fines, fees and service charges.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga. active in defending the poor, told Ethan Bronner of The Times.

A February 2014 report by Human Rights Watch on private offender services found that “more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.”

Like the municipal fire departments who depend on "subscribers" rather than tax dollars and end up watching while taxpayers' homes burn to the ground, this is just another way that austerity economics ensures that the rich never have to pay their fair share.

And as always, austerity kills.

Poverty capitalism and government policy are now working on their own and in tandem to shift costs to those least equipped to pay and in particular to the least politically influential segment of the poor: criminal defendants and those delinquent in paying fines.

Last year, Ferguson, Mo., the site of recent protests over the shooting of Michael Brown, used escalating municipal court fines to pay 20.2 percent of the city’s $12.75 million budget. Just two years earlier, municipal court fines had accounted for only 12.3 percent of the city’s revenues.

What should be done to interrupt the dangerous feedback loop between low-level crime and extortionate punishment? First, local governments should bring private sector collection charges, court-imposed administrative fees and the dollar amount of traffic fines (which often double and triple when they go unpaid) into line with the economic resources of poor offenders. But larger reforms are needed and those will not come about unless the poor begin to exercise their latent political power. In many ways, everything is working against them. But the public outpouring spurred by the shooting of Michael Brown provides an indication of a possible path to the future. It was, after all, just 50 years ago — not too distant in historical terms — that collective action and social solidarity produced tangible results.

Read the whole thing.

The Real Price of Inequality

Economic inequality doesn't just mean that some people are way richer than others.  It means that the bigger the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, the more damage it causes to the economy and society, harming everyone.

It's already driven the U.S. into the ranks of the Third World.

Down With Tyranny:

Lately you've been hearing a few political leaders, particularly Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Brian Schatz and Bernie Sanders in the Senate and some of the Progressive Caucus members in the House, talking about steeply rising income inequality. They're talking about the kind of inequality that's part of vicious cycle that inevitably leads to oligarchy, plutocracy or outright fascism, in which a few families, through an accumulation of wealth and power, can dictate the laws and even the societal norms and control the mechanisms of enforcement to such an extent that they can virtually enslave an entire passive population.

It can't happen here? The manifestations are already undeniable. The greed and rapacity of the .01% has become so overbearing and their refusal to pay their fair share of taxes so debilitating that a UNICEF report I ran across this morning, a report that would have scandalized an empowered middle class anytime between the time Harry Truman was president until the beginning of the new normal under Ronald Reagan. The report goes a lot deeper than the shocking chart at top of the page which ranks 29 developed countries according to the overall well-being of their children. The 5 countries ranked at the very bottom include 4 of the poorest-- Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Greece-- plus the U.S., which is both one of the richest and one with the least economic equality. Those 5 countries, along with Italy, Portugal and Spain, have child poverty rates higher than 15%. The only countries that have allowed the child poverty gap to widen to more than 30%. are Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and, of course, the United States.

Some of the manifestations of America's rush to the bottom:

• The only developed countries with infant mortality rates higher than 6 per 1,000 births are Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United States.

• Only in Greece, Hungary, Portugal and the United States does the low birthweight rate exceed 8%.

• Only Canada, Greece and the United States have childhood obesity levels higher than 20%. The United States had the highest proportion of children overweight at both the beginning and end of the decade, reaching almost 30% by 2009/2010.

• Romania, the UK and the United States have the highest rates of teenage births (above 29 per 1,000).

• Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the United States are the only countries in which the homicide rate rises above 4 per 100,000. Almost all other countries fall into the range of 0 to 2.5 per 100,000.

Not Just Rich Parasites, Not Just Corporations, But Whole Industries Are Stealing Our Economy

Firedoglake:

Here are the five industries that are robbing people like you and me.

Demand Your $6,000 Per Year Back

We all know the rich are robbing us blind and have been for decades, but now we finally have a number: The average American family pays $6,000 in subsidies to Big Business. Big Business like Exxon Mobil, which keeps posting record-breaking profits in the range of $40 billion annually - before the subsidies they steal from us.

Paul Burchheit at Nation of Change:

That's over and above our payments to the big companies for energy and food and housing and health care and all our tech devices. It's $6,000 that no family would have to pay if we truly lived in a competitive but well-regulated free-market economy.

The $6,000 figure is an average, which means that low-income families are paying less. But it also means that families (households) making over $72,000 are paying more than $6,000 to the corporations.

1. $870 for Direct Subsidies and Grants to Companies

2. $696 for Business Incentives at the State, County, and City Levels

3. $722 for Interest Rate Subsidies for Banks

4. $350 for Retirement Fund Bank Fees

5. $1,268 for Overpriced Medications

6. $870 for Corporate Tax Subsidies

7. $1,231 for Revenue Losses from Corporate Tax Havens

Much More Than an Insult

Overall, American families are paying an annual $6,000 subsidy to corporations that have doubled their profits and cut their taxes in half in ten years while cutting 2.9 million jobs in the U.S. and adding almost as many jobs overseas. This is more than an insult. It's a devastating attack on the livelihoods of tens of millions of American families. And Congress just lets it happen.

Click the link for the nauseating details.

The Technical Term is Parasites

Just one of the parasitic rich does more harm to the economic and social fabric of the nation than every recipient of food stamps, unemployment compensation, welfare and public education put together.

They are a clear and present danger and must be denied access to financial tools of destruction.

Via Digby:

In a recent defense of the 1 percent, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw admitted it might be bad if the rich got richer by sucking cash from the economy without giving any value back. A new study suggests many of the rich -- especially bankers and CEOs -- are doing just that.

Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argue in a study responding to Mankiw that most of the rise in income inequality over the past few decades is due to the soaring pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers who are milking money from the markets rather than generating much in the way of economic production.

"A substantial part of the extraordinary rise of top 1 percent incomes is not a result of well-functioning markets allocating pay according to value generated, but instead resulted from shifting institutional arrangements leading to shifting of rents to those at the very top," Bivens and Mishel write.

The technical term for this is "rent-seeking." Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, suggested in his recent paper, "Defending The One Percent" that there wasn't much of this going on, that the 1 percent are just richer than you, and getting even richer all the time, because they are better than you.

But he does admit that rent-seeking could be a problem:

If the top 1 percent is earning an extra $1 in some way that reduces the incomes of the middle class and the poor by $2, then many people will see that as a social problem worth addressing. For example, suppose the rising income share of the top 1 percent were largely attributable to successful rent-seeking. Imagine that the government were to favor its political allies by granting them monopoly power over certain products, favorable regulations, or restrictions on trade. Such a policy would likely lead to both inequality and inefficiency. Economists of all stripes would deplore it. I certainly would.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened in the past 30 years, as Bivens and Mishel show, with numbers.

Keeping the Poor Poor

The dirty little secret of capitalism is that the richer the rich get, the poorer everybody else has to get.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

The state of Louisiana (and the voters themselves) have cut off funding for the last operating ferry in New Orleans. Big deal, right? Who takes the ferry anymore? The answer here is a lot of poor African-Americans coming to work in New Orleans from their homes on the west bank of the river. The ferry has about 1 million pedestrians and 175,000 cars on average. The drivers will be fine, but what about the walkers? How are they supposed to get to work? Part of this is a general American indifference or hostility to public transportation, but of course that feeling has its racial competent, whether it is Atlanta suburbs turning down MARTA service because it was afraid of black people coming into town or the reduction of public transportation services anywhere, since they disproportionately affect the poor and in the United States the poor are usually people of color.

As Charlie Pierce reminds us:

... income inequality is the only story worth following in the American economy. To hell with the Dow. To hell with the NASDAQ. To hell with the S&P index. And, as the blog's First Law Of Economics tells us -- Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. If, in our haste to declare ourselves recovered from the Great Swindle Of 2008, we accept the current level of unemployment, and a permanent level of income inequality that touches every aspect of our society, and not in a good way, then what we are doing is curing our head cold through decapitation. Civil government cannot endure with the level of income inequality that we seem willing to tolerate, or at least, that we seem willing to see as being inevitable. Civil government becomes a farce and, eventually, an unendurable one. And it starts, as everything usually does, in the schools.

Only well-regulated capitalism - the market economy we had from World War II until 1970 - expands the middle class while shrinking both the super-rich and the super-poor. Cancel the rules, and you get lords and serfs, with nothing in between.

Privacy, Spying and the Lost Cash Economy

I'm not yet eligible for Medicare, and yet I can remember when it was not just possible but common for people to live a middle-class life without a credit card, loan or even bank account.  They got paid in cash or checks they could cash at the grocer, and paid cash for everything, including rent and a used car. The utility companies had local offices at which you could pay your bills in cash. You could even travel by air using cash to buy your ticket at the airport. Hotels accepted cash without ID. Unless the store clerk knew you personally, there was no way for anybody to find out what you'd bought or how much you paid for it.

Sure, it was more trouble and time-consuming than clicking a mouse, but there was no paper trail - or rather pixel trail.

Now the cash economy is no more.  Unless you are willing to live on the very margins of the economy, you cannot survive without a bank account and credit cards.

Which means that soon Homeland Security will know everything about every penny you get and every penny you spend.

DS Wright at Firedoglake:

As the Obama Administration continues to expand the policies of the Bush Administration, the newest theater of the War on Terror is your checking account.

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

Is the real war on privacy or on restraints of State power?

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of “suspicious customer activity,” such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN.

The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before, helping them look for patterns that could reveal attack plots or criminal schemes.

Now let’s talk about why this is hilarious and has nothing to do with stopping terrorism financing.

There is a company called HSBC that laundered money for Mexican Drug Cartels, Iran, and Al-Qaeda. They even helped launder money for the bank that helped fund the 9/11 attacks. So you would expect a government really concerned with terrorist’s financial activity would crackdown hard on a bank facilitating terrorist attacks on the United States right? Wrong.

HSBC paid a small fine representing a few weeks profit and went on about their business. No jail time for money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels and not even a hint that their charter to operate was in jeopardy. And that makes sense if the War on Terror is about preventing dissent in America, not stopping terrorist attacks. Now intelligence agencies will be able to track your every purchase and transaction to ensure you are a good citizen.

Emptywheel has more on “this batshit crazy plan”.

No More Magic Buggy Whips

I call Big Coal's favorite lie of "clean coal"  the Magic Buggy Whip Myth for its combination of denial and magical thinking. But it's worse than pretending the equivalent of dry water is a potential reality. Coal is a dead industry walking, kept upright with tax subsidies and fearmongering.

 

David Atkins at Hullabaloo: 

Investing in renewables creates more jobs than exporting coal

Another piece of evidence that we don't have to choose between economic growth and responsible action on climate change:

Per dollar invested, efficiency and renewables generate many more jobs than fossil fuels.

Modern coal terminals are highly mechanized facilities, with towering, ten-story cranes pivoting massive arms above coal storage piles 60 feet high. At the ends of these arms, huge rotary shovels bigger than a house dig up the dusty coal and deposit it onto conveyor belts that snake away to bulk carriers three to four football fields long. Few workers are needed to operate these gargantuan “stacker/reclaimers.”

A currently proposed installation near Seattle provides a good example of the phenomenon:

As estimated in official project documents, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would support only 257 steady jobs, including office workers, at full build-out. That’s just one new job for every $2.6 million invested, assuming the terminal can indeed be built for its advertised price. If you include “induced jobs” that may be added in maritime and railroad industries, the total increases to 430. But extra expenditures would occur in these areas, say for necessary railroad upgrades, so figure about one new job created per $2 million spent...[I]nvesting the same $665 million in energy efficiency or renewables would create twice as many jobs at minimum. In solar manufacturing, for example, figure several hundred more jobs than at the coal terminal. For solar-installation and energy-efficiency companies, add at least another thousand...

The savings in energy costs that steadily accrue after these clean-energy projects are completed can be recycled through organizations to create even more jobs, setting up a multiplier effect that stimulates greater prosperity. Such investments also lessen dependence on fickle foreign sources of fossil fuels, whose costs can skyrocket if supply lines are threatened.

Then, too, these are jobs in construction, maintenance, building supplies and finance that will be difficult, if not impossible, to ship overseas. The wages and salaries earned will largely be spent in local communities, enhancing local economies.

The only reasons not to engage in an Apollo Program for clean energy is the corrupting influence of Big Fossil Fuel lobbying, and an ideological group of anti-spending advocates paralyzing the entire political process. Given that we are a nation desperately in need of both good jobs and immediate action on climate, the failure to take these steps is political and moral malfeasance of the highest order.

Want to beat the living economic fuck out of China? Put every coal miner to work building solar panels and windmills.

Worse Than the Tsars

When I say the U.S. is becoming a serfs-and-lords economy, I mean a serfs-and-lords economy.

 

Maddowblog:

* Wow: "Steven Nafziger and Peter Lindert report that the contemporary United States has a less egalitarian distribution of income than did Russia on the brink of the Revolution of 1905."

As Other States Legalize Pot, KY Still Stuck on Legalizing Hemp

It will be just too perfectly ironic when Kentucky finally legalizes hemp - the one non-intoxicating crop that can replace the coal economy - just as the rest of the nation legalizes the real cash crop: marijuana.

Janet Patton at the Herald:

The new priority for Kentucky farmers has a lot of history: Agriculture Commissioner James Comer announced Wednesday that his top agenda item for the next legislative session is hemp.

Comer, a Republican, told the Interim Joint Agriculture Committee that he will push for a strongly worded resolution by the General Assembly urging Washington to revise drug policy to allow U.S. industrial hemp cultivation.

"We just want the freedom to be able to grow a crop that we know will grow well in Kentucky," Comer said. Congress should "get out of the way and let the private sector create jobs in rural communities manufacturing this product."

He said if Congress acts this year, the first hemp seeds could be planted in Kentucky in spring 2014.

"If the United States Congress and the federal government gives us the permission to do this," Comer said. "We just want to pass the legislation, set an example to Congress. We are serious about this. ... Get out of our way. Let us do this in Kentucky. It will help farmers, and it will create jobs."

Earlier Wednesday, Comer reactivated the Kentucky Industrial Hemp Commission, which had been dormant for a decade. He was named chairman of the new commission, which includes Sen. John Schickel, R-Union, and Rep. Tom McKee, D-Cynthiana, University of Kentucky Agriculture College Dean Scott Smith, hemp activists, farmers and entrepreneurs.

For more than a century, hemp was Kentucky's top agricultural product and a major profit center for the state.  Hemp is native to Kentucky, and to this day grows wild in fence rows and suburban backyards.

For decades, forward-thinking Kentucky politicians of both parties have been trying to get hemp authorized for commercial growing. Hemp is a renewable, easily-grown substitute for dozens of wood-based products like paper and petroleum-based products like rope, carpet, clothing and furnishings. It promises profits and jobs that could easily eclipse that of the doomed coal industry at its height.

Yet while Kentucky still struggles to get federal approval to grow non-intoxicating hemp, Colorado and Washington just legalized marijuana (which also grows like a weed in Kentucky) and are now poised to get a huge jump on Kentucky in the future pot industry.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/11/14/2407570/state-hemp-commission-revived.html#storylink=cpy

Kentucky: always 20 years behind.

"We bet on American workers and American ingenuity"

Billionaire investors like Mitt Romney wanted Detroit to fail. It was the federal government and unions that saved the industry that saved the economy. Remember that the next time some rich parasite starts blathering about "job creators."



Full transcript here.

Eliminate the Billionaires

Not because they do society no positive good, but because unlike the lillies of the field, they cause tangible harm

Down With Tyranny:

... from Vermont's Independent Senator Bernie Sanders:

"We now have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income distribution in our modern history."

"Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of America - 150 million people."

"Today, the 6 heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, own more wealth than the bottom 30% – 90 million Americans."

In finishing up his chapter, "Tax Cuts Aren't A Solution To Every Problem," Joshua Holland, author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, decided to borrow from Larry Beinhart's Tax Cuts: The B.S. and the Facts

In 2008, Beinhart took a look at a fog fact about taxes. He compared two sets of data, historic income tax and GDP growth rates in the United States, and concluded, “The brute facts” are as follows:

• High income taxes correlate with economic growth.

• Income tax increases are followed by economic growth.

• Moderate income tax cuts are followed by a flat economy.

 SNIP

As surely as water rushes in to fill any opening or crevasse, wealth rushes in to take over any society it is embedded in. We've all seen in recent years how a few wealthy families and their corporate enterprises have sought to undermine American democracy. When I say all billionaires must be "eliminated," I'm not talking about violence-- God forbid; I'm talking about going back to sensible, equitable tax policies that serve society rather than a handful of wealthy parasites.

SNIP

Next Tuesday Blue America will be hosting a live chat at Crooks and Liars with Raúl Grijalva. It's worth watching his speech on the floor of Congress yesterday about the dangers of Dark Money the very wealthy are using to undermine democracy.

Read the whole thing.

"Knowledge Without Affection Leads Us Astray Every Time"

For those of us who have read Wendell Berry for decades, who know him as that Henry County farmer with a way with words, it's easy to forget the man is a national treasure.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

The National Endowment for the Humanities chose the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, activist and philosopher to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It is the federal government's highest honor for scholarly contributions to the humanities.

SNIP

Berry, 77, delivered a searing indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our survival. You can — and should — watch the video of Berry's lecture and read the full text of his essay, titled "It All Turns on Affection." Both are online at NEH.gov.

SNIP

"Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment," Berry said. "At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny."

Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now "never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage 'to strengthen the economy.'"

Corporate industrialism, he said, "has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature."

Read the whole thing.

Watch the video and read the lecture here.

The Leech Economy

It's not what the repugs say it is.

By email:

In the old days, if a "doctor" thought that your skin looked too red, the standard prescription was . . . leeches. Fever? Leeches. Rash? Leeches. Bruise? Leeches. In fact, if you seemed to have an unfortunate tendency to get angry, the treatment for that was – you guessed it – leeches.

This was not some passing fad. This went on for 2,700 years, throughout Asia and Europe, and then the New World.

The leeches actually were grown on leech farms. Doctors bought the leeches in lots, and kept them in an earthenware jar with little breathing holes in it. Whenever a patient "needed" one, the doctor would apply it to the patient. And then the leech would suck the patient's blood out.

Yuk.

So, basically, whatever was wrong with you, the doctor would attach a blood-sucking parasite to you, and that was supposed to make it better.

And that actually sounds very much like the right-wing's economic policies. Whatever might be wrong with the economy, let's just drain all the blood out of it, and see if that helps.

Unemployment? Let's cut teacher jobs. Deficit? Let's cut police and firefighter jobs. Trade imbalance? Let's cut sanitation and public transport jobs. Banking crisis? Let's cut nursing jobs.

Just bleed that sucker.

Yesterday, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman described right-wing economics in a similar way: "suicide by economic crisis." The greedheads who run Europe are exploiting the economic crisis in weaker countries like Greece and Spain to wipe out pensions, benefits, unions and public healthcare everywhere. They don't just want to tear the social safety net. They want to nuke it.

The saddest thing about that is all of the pain that it inflicts on the vulnerable and the needy. But the next saddest thing is this:

It just doesn't work. Bleeding a patient with leeches doesn't make him healthy. Even if you bleed him dry.

And now the greed-heads are coming for us, with their Ryan Budget and their Medicare vouchers and their Social Security cuts and their Medicaid block grants and their student vouchers and their privatization. Now, they're coming for us.

Well, here is my answer:

No.

Now get lost, you leeches.

Courage,

Alan Grayson