"The Royal Scam" - Steely Dan
From their boats of iron they looked upon the promised land where surely life was sweet.
- Steve Ratner, who oversaw the GM bailout, had a piece in the New York Times last Sunday that I wanted to comment upon. The shocking thrust of his article was that globalization has losers as well as winners. No shit! Ratner notes the continued bleeding of manufacturing jobs to low wage markets overseas and, seemingly, laments it. But he rejects any attempts to protect domestic manufacturing jobs via tarriffs or any government intervention, like industrial policy, to stem this decline. Indeed, he offers really no solutions at all -- just a half-hearted endorsement of more education and possibly tax credits for creating good jobs. It doesn't amount to much. Here's a pretty good critique of the piece. At some point, the free trade zealots are going to have to describe how we preserve a middle class society in a world in which jobs can be sent overseas with very little effort. I am not sure what the answer here is, but I am pretty convinced that unfettered globalization will not inure to the benefit of the vast majority of Americans.
- Evil Governors (Part 1) - This story makes me really happy. If we can shove this anti-union law up John Kasich's ass a great good will have been done. If the further result is that cops, firefighters, and teachers will go out and start voting for Democrats 75-80% of the time, this will really represent a major misstep by Republicans.
- Evil governors (Part 2) - I see that Florida's asshole crook of a governor is backing off his promise to create 700,000 jobs -- now he is promising to boldly stop Florida from losing jobs. The Republican gubernatorial class of 2010 is really quite a bunch.
- Watching this incident last night during the Republican debate, I couldn't help but think that if Rick Perry were the manly man his supporters claim him to be he would have knocked Mitt Romney on his lilly-white ass for touching him.
What's going on with you?
