The NY Times has an article called "Going Dutch" in which an American explains where his Dutch taxes go.  He at first resented the 52% tax, but then started to get surprise checks in the mail including a big one to use for vacations on top of the pay he would continue to receive from his employer while on vacation.  Check out the beautiful Dutch hybrid that melds a capitalist free market with a little social well being.
Going Dutch

The story of the Dutch fits into the theme of "What Makes Us Free?" that I'm continually pondering.  "Purebreds and Mongrels" is a theme I've also written on before.  The economist Milton Friedman and his spawn concocted a junk theory of free market capitalism and proceeded to anoint it with holy oil and decree it pure.  Economists who disagreed were considered mongrels. These mongrels growled that the markets were chaotic and hardly pure.  So they argued that it was probably a good idea for the state to herd them a little and create an atmosphere where people didn't "fear the future".  The state should "liberate" its citizens from that fear. Some people, like the Dutch, devised a system to alleviate "fear" by having some safety nets. You can't get turned down for health care and there are no co-pays. If you get sick, you don't lose your house.     When you retire, you can live a decent life.

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Join Dave and I on Democracy's Edge Talk Radio as we cough up fur balls of truth and round up the stray news and ideas that drifted away from the Fat Cat News, the Corpulent Corporate Press and Bloviators of Blather.

In hour #1, we'll riff on Matt Taibbi's wonderment and why there is so much "peasant mentality" going on.  Also who is your nominees for weasels of the week?  Which real or fake person is the most annoying person of the week?  Matt Taibbi has his favorite. Who should Obama name to the Supreme Court.  Anita Hill?  Why do hedge funds get to decide stuff and did you hear what Dick Durbin said about who runs Washington?  The coup is complete.  And there is a fungus amongus.

In hour #2 our Democracy 101 section, we welcome Phillip Cafaro, Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State.  We talk about how we can survive with a growing population and a penchant for profit over people.  What has Thoreau got to say about it? 

In hour #3, one of our favorite guests will be on, Stephen Kinzer, the former NY Times foreign correspondent whose latest book "Overthrown" is a must read and a chilling eye opener.  Why was the invasion of Iraq a really bad idea, but our invasion of Grenada maybe not so bad, if there is such a thing as a good invasion?  Why in the world did we invade Panama?   Is it time to get out of the empire business? 

This will start my "Fun with Henwood" series.  Doug Henwood wrote a book called "Wall Street" back in 1997.  I discovered it while reading Nomi Prins' "Other People's Money".  She called his book "visionary" and it was in its prediction of bad times from bad behavior.  It is also written from a very left point of view and so has a direct, shooting straight from the hip, irreverent, and humorous style.  (He calls Greenspan's writings in the Ayn Rand "Objectivist" newsletter, "demented jottings".)
In the chapter on Market Models, Henwood explains modern economic theory and its belief in the purity and perfection of the market.  These words like pure and perfect make the market sound like some kind of temple with the high priests of finance ritualistically washing their hands and waving incense bombs.  Ironically with all this purity, Henwood points out that there is a very crude side to the players on Wall Street.  He says "Despite their reputation for sophistication most Wall Streeters hold a raw selfish view of the world."

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Free trade is not fair or honest.  Multi-national food and chemical monopolies and the finance flim flam artists that support them are dangerous to the health of people around the world.  And even though it is sad that the miscreants on Wall Street breed at all, I still do not wish their children to inherit a world filled with famine and disease.  (The miscreants' children should also not inherit much money, but that's another essay and another letter to my Senators).  So I was unhappy to learn there is yet another corporate welfare bill making its way through the U.S. Senate and yet another letter I had to write to Jon Tester.   

 U.S. SB 384 (Lugar-Casey) cynically named "The Global Food Security Act" aims to throw most of its weight towards genetically modified crops to the tune of 7.7 billion in research. Annie Shattuck of "Food First" reported on this and Raj Patel ("Stuffed and Starved") alerted me to her post.  http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2418
The Union of Concerned Scientists have weighed in on SB 384:

"Past government-funded GM crops have been a colossal failure in all but one regard - they have opened up markets to GM crops abroad. Agricultural development funding under Lugar-Casey is simply more corporate welfare. These funds will pry open markets for U.S. biotech firms, but will do little to help curb hunger."

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From today's LA Times we get this story. "What recession? Places like Sioux Falls, S.D., prove resilient"

"One chunk of the nation has avoided much of the current economic misery: the region from North Dakota to Texas, most of it sparsely populated. This area includes five of the six states that analysts at Economy.com have classified as not yet in recession. And other states in the Rocky Mountain West -- from New Mexico to Idaho -- are facing relatively mild downturns...

For decades, Sioux Falls was a modest agricultural outpost, a place for farmers to pick up new equipment or have a fancy dinner. Its main employer was a hog-butchering plant. But in the early '80s, Citibank and other financial companies began to open branch offices here to escape New York usury laws that hampered their efforts to expand into the credit card market.

"People were very proud," [Mayor] Munson recalled. "It lifted the whole being of Sioux Falls to say we can get a corporation like Citi to come here."

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Michael Winship of "Bill Moyers Journal" quotes from William Greider's new book "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of our Country":  "That's No Angry Mob, It's a Movement"

As for President Obama, "I understand his political dilemma. And I sympathize with it. But he's trying to govern by convincing people that we will be able to get the old good times back. And my view is that the good times ain't comin' back.

Greider has been a great investigative reporter for over 40 years at publications like The Washington Post and Rolling Stone.  He wrote the definite book on the Federal Reserve "The Secrets of the Temple".   In other word, he knows what he's talking about.

The good times aren't coming back and that may be a good thing if "good times" mean being almost run over by a Hummer on my way across the parking lot of Mall of Murica to buy another fashion handbag.

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My client Francie writes about how the recession has affected the below-the-line (crew)  people working in the entertainment industry.  I read part of it on my radio show a few weeks ago.  It's a poignant story of what working people are giving up.  Not the Hollywood you see on the main stream media.  Nor the Hollywood liberals that right wingers assail.  No, mostly hardworking union people and the non-union people that service the productions from the seamstresses to the caterers to the assistants.  If you get to visit a set you see carpenters hauling lumber and electricians working on lights.  You see the Teamsters driving the crew back to base camp where they get their daily lunch and costumers bringing in the  actors' shirts that they ironed the night before.
This Is Hollywood?

On our narrow street of once-modestly-priced, 1950s cottage homes, there are 23 kids, 16 of them between the ages of 5 and 9. After-school wars are waged in the street on tiny little bikes filled with light-saber-wielding, Nerf-gun-toting speed demons. In the setting sunlight, mothers in their 30s and 40s, home from work, stand guard on the corner, drinking coffee and sometimes $4 wine from Trader Joe's, yelling "Car!" when an unwary commuter approaches. Where I grew up, the moms watched from the front stoops and wine was reserved for the racier sacraments, but otherwise it's a lifestyle familiar to our mothers--albeit a little nicer around the edges.

Most passersby will only see the idyllic scene that is our street. They won't hear that the conversations, more and more, are about how we'll make next month's mortgage payments and, if we can't, whether we could afford to rent somewhere in the neighborhood so the kids could keep going to their good public school.

Gone are the days of planning vacations, plotting tiny additions to our tiny homes, weighing whether tumbled marble in the shower really does raise resale values.

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Join the Feral Cats of Freedom as we cough up fur balls of truth from the crap we've digestted from the Fat Cat News, bloviators of blather.  Today from 2PM-5PM Mountain Time.  Live streaming at Democracy's Edge Talk Radio

We will have local SEIU organizers on at 2:30PM PM Mountain Time.  There is a rally in Bozeman today to support EFCA at noon.  Busy day for me.  Dean Baker has an excellent piece at tpmcafe on the war on EFCA and the false information from the Fat Cat News.

At 3PM (5PM Eastern) , Discussing Pakistan with Robert Naimon Senior Policy Analyst and National Coordinator at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes a blog on Huffington Post.

At 4PM, my guru, Glen Ford of blackagendareport.com will talk about the "Economic "N" word"  i.e. nationalization.

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I only listen to NPR morning news while I make coffee and am away from my Sirius Left radio.  It inevitably makes me angry.  This morning they had on a "cute" story from two guys from "This American Life" who reported on the bank bailout followed by an interview with one of those ubiquitous "business professors" they get on.  And this guy was actually a banker turned teacher.  Teacher of what?  How to sell bullsh*t?  The guy blames us for all this mess. And he had a graph to prove it.  That ended the story with no one even vaguely commenting on the reams of wrong in that story.  National Pablum Radio is worse than right wing radio.  It makes just enough sense to get into the public mind set.  It sets the conventional wisdom.  This is what the corporatocracy wants.  It's all our fault.  That way when we have all the safety nets yanked from us, we will all look at each other and say,  "We had it coming, Chester.  We shouldn't a oughta have bought that consarned TV set".  Here's the story.   Taxpayers are on the Hook cuz it's Their Fault

This is yet another example of the business bias of NPR. Having a banker on to tell us that it's our fault is manipulative.  No, Mr. Beim, It's stagnant wages made possible by the attack on unions that shoved people into the open arms of the credit card companies aka banks that's a big part of the problem. Neither did regular working taxpayers borrow money from China and Japan to give the upper one-tenth of one percent tons of America's wealth that never trickled down. Our coporatocracy did that.

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In the 1st hour join the feral cats as we cough up fur balls of truth from the baloney that we've digested throughout the week from the Fat Cat News.  Join Dave and I at Democracy's Edge Talk Radio
Each week for three hours we ask you to join the resistance and become fighting ferals; doing battle with the conventional wisdom weasels.  Each week we stalk our prey; the flim flam artists who have put our nation up for sale and are trying to sail away with the loot. 
Who are our adversaries,who are our competitors, and who are our friends?  Are you a Franklin or an Orthogonian, as Rick Perlstein might ask?   That is;  are you an elitist prig or a straight shooter? As Jefferson defined it;  Are you an aristocrat or a democrat?  Are you a gun toting latte drinking pickup driving lefty?  Or a  Book reading Beer Drinking Volvo driving righty? Are you a Cylon or Human?
Which side are you on, my friends?  Which side are you on?  Our call in number is 406-522 TALK.
How do we fight back?  Guns and bullets or Pots and Pans? 

In our 2nd hour we welcome Dr. Arjun Makhijani.

Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

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From labor journalist Sam Pizzigati's webiste "Too Much" we learn that Max Baucus has other things on his plate other than health care.  www.toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html

U.S. Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus from Montana is now drafting legislation that would end the uncertainty over the future of the federal estate tax -- and lock in place the current George W. Bush bargain-basement tax rate on the fortunes America's super rich leave to their heirs. A generation ago, the top estate tax rate on grand fortunes stood at 77 percent. The Bush 2001 tax cut has lowered this year's top rate to 45 percent. Senator Baucus wants that 45 percent made permanent. After deductions, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted last week, the actual tax rate on large estates amounts to far less than 45 percent. If the Baucus freeze becomes law, the Center calculates, estates over $20 million would face taxes that average "less than one-quarter" of estate value. Senator John Kyl from Arizona wants to see estate taxes even lower. His proposal would drop the estate tax to 15 percent. Under current law, estate taxes will revert back to pre-George W. levels -- a 55 percent top rate -- in 2011. The Baucus approach would, over the next decade, cost the federal Treasury $609 billion. The cost of the Kyl plan: nearly $1 trillion. The only beneficiaries: the three out of every 1,000 Americans who die with fortunes large enough to trigger estate tax liability.

This is the opposite of what we should be doing right now.  

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Yes, we did what Howard Dean, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Thom Hartmann  and this fall, Barack Obama, told us to do.  We got off the couch and got active.  Back in 2004, We went out and got ourselves three hours of alternative independent very lefty labor oriented talk radio on the same channel as Rush and Sean.  In our area we have 63 hours of right wing Ayn Rand loving talk radio to our 3 hours.

Each week on "Democracy's Edge" (named after Francis Moore Lappe's book by the same name) the Feral Cats of Freedom with co-hosts Diane and Dave call on their listeners to help them cough up fur balls of truth from the baloney that we've all digested throughout the week from the Fat Cat News, the Corpulent Corporate Press and the Bloviators of Blather. 

We have had on voices that were in the wilderness but now seem to be getting heard.  We had on Dean Baker almost 2 years ago.  We've had Glen Ford (blackagendareport.com) on a year ago telling us about the 150 trillion "mother of all bubbles" caused by "the banksters."   Francis Moore Lappe, Sam Pizzigati, Ari Berman and Katha Pollitt of "The Nation", Melvin Goodman "Failure of Intelligence" , Rick Perlstein "Nixonland",  General Robert Gard, NY Times Foreign Correspondent Stephen Kinzer, Harvey Wasserman, Stephen Zunes.

This week we've asked Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute return to talk about the "lost science of money".

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In "Obama's Challenge" by Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, he hopes that Obama's administration will not be done in by "the undertow of bad ideas".  One of those bad ideas is clearly "the bad bank.  Dean Baker weighed in on this on Tuesday and Paul Krugman takes it on on his blog today:  krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Bad
As the Obama administration apparently prepares to launch Hankie Pankie II -- buying troubled assets from banks at prices higher than they will fetch on the open market -- it occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be appropriate: under Bush, financial policy consisted of Wall Street types cutting sweet deals, at taxpayer expense, for Wall Street types. Under Obama, it's precisely the reverse.

This is a turn on the famous Galbraith quote  "Under capitalism "man exploits man.  Under communism, it's just the opposite." 

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For 4 years I've driven one hour each way to Bozeman, Montana to do a weekly liberal labor talk radio show on a Clear Channel AM station.  This is what we were all told to do in 2004.  We were supposed to take our country back.  We were supposed to, as John Edwards asked "step up, not step back".  Howard Dean told us to join the party and make a difference.  Well, my co hosts and I have been slogging through right wing callers and Ron Paul conspiracy theorists each week in an effort to try and figure out how to talk to each other.   How can we get a liberal message out while respecting our neighbors differing opinions?  Our station hosts 63 hours of conservative talk and our 3 hours of liberal. 

We have had on great national guests like Dean Baker, Glen Ford of blackagendareport.com, Francis Moore Lappe, Melvin Goodman, Stephen Zunes, Charlie Derber, Ari Berman, and many others.  But our reach was only one county in Montana.  We could podcast, but that was it.  This week we add another Montana station so we will reach two counties.  And we will begin live streaming on the internet. 

The show's name is "Democracy's Edge" named for Francis Moore Lappe's book of hope for democracy at the far reaches of our country.  "Democracy is not something you have, it's something you do."  We are the Feral Cats of Freedom coughing up fur balls of truth from the baloney that we've digested throughout the week from the Fat Cat News and Bloviators of Blather. 

Tomorrow will be the last time that we Border Collies of Sanity will round up the strays that got away from the Fat Cat News.  We will round them up and vacinate them for Bushollocis for the last time. 

Then in the 2nd hour (at 3PM MST) we will be interviewing Rick Perlstein.  Perlstein, as most of you know here, won the LA Times Book Prize for "Before the Storm:  Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus".  And now he has another winner, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America".
"Nixonland" is my kind of history book.  After reading Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States", it is difficult for me to pick up a "great man" biography.  I want to know about the people of the era.  And this is where Rick really delivers.  Stories of the ruptures between hard hats and war protesters break your heart as they scare the heck out of you.  The incidents of hippies being shot at random and little children shot on the streets makes you shake your head in disbelief
 
Rick also has a blog over at ourfuture.org called The Big Con.  We should support that site. http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009010316/bushs-legacy-failure-conservatism

Join us and call in every Saturday from 2-5PM Mountain Time.  406-522-TALK
http://new.kmmsam.com/onair_page.php?id=14

We have got to take back the media and get people to start thinking for themselves again.

Yet again, with his now famous scowl and earnest delivery, Tom Friedman brandished his latest metaphor on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday, January 11.

"One of the things lost in this discussion is the fact of where this crisis started.  It started in the banks.  The banks are the heart of our system.  They pump blood to the industrial muscles."

He then went on to give us the conventional wisdom that money has to begin to flow to America's entrepreneurs in order to unclog those arteries.  But in James Galbraith's "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too", Galbraith argues that the heart of our system lies elsewhere. It is the social contracts that government made with its people in social institutions created by the New Deal and The Great Society and even some institutions created by Richard Nixon. But these were attacked by the Free Market fundamentalists starting in 1981.   And what happened is that the social contract  is coming undone to the point where our system is now on life support.

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