Mitt thinks he’d have a better chance of become president if he was Latino. In the first video of the Actually… series Rosie Perez explains why it will take more than being Latino for Mitt to win the election.
When lies go unchecked, we all lose. Actually.org spreads the truth, because the truth matters—even in politics. Our team calls ’em like they see ’em, and we hope you’ll support the truth by sharing Actually.org videos before Election Day.
Actually… is a partnership between American Bridge and JCER. Schlep Labs is a project of JCER. Actually… was produced by Amy Rubin at Barnacle Studios http://blog.barnacle.is
Apples are an all-American success story-each of us eats more than 19 pounds of them annually. Photo credit: Wikipedia
Noticed any increase in food prices yet?
Here in Texas, all meat prices are up, but especially beef. Beef ranchers in Texas sold off their herds because they couldn’t feed them during the drought, except with very expensive imported hay. That held prices down for a while, but now there is a lot less beef to be bought. Prices rise.
Drought also hammered corn crops this year, and last year. To keep corn markets growing, corn state legislators had gone whole hog into using corn for alcohol to be added to gasoline. That demand didn’t drop with the crop decreases, however, and we’ve been hearing for months how corn-into-alcohol pressures food markets.
Lucio Machado picks Golden Delicious apples in a Washington orchard. Goodfruit.com
Drought hammers our fruit crops, too. Comes now news from Washington state about the added wrinkle: Washington’s apple crops bend the tree boughs — who will pick them?
Two key problems: First, the crackdowns on immigrant workers reduced supply dramatically. Second, citizens or documented workers find higher pay in the turnaround in construction.
Result: Apples may stay in the trees, boosting apple prices to consumers.
Wholly apart from the foolish denial that we need to do something about global warming, the added policy flaws of shutting off immigration flow on the chuckle-headed and wrong assumption that immigration hurts the economy, and the continued denial of our too-modest economic recovery, will now cost you money directly at the supermarket.
PASCO, Wash.—Washington state is enjoying the second-biggest apple crop in its history, but farmers warn they may have to leave up to one-quarter of their bounty to rot, because there aren’t enough pickers.
“I’m down 40% from the labor I need,” said Steve Nunley, manager of a 3,000-acre apple orchard for Pride Packing Co. in Wapato, Wash. Mr. Nunley said he has 200 pickers right now, but needs close to 400. He has increased pay to $24 for every 1,000-pound bin of Gala apples they pick, compared with $18 last year. Even so, he expects to have to let tons of fruit fall unpicked this season.
Washington’s bumper crop, forecast at 109 million boxes of Red Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith and other varieties, comes as drought and poor growing conditions have led to dismal harvests in parts of the U.S. Michigan lost much of its apple crop this year, and poor conditions have depressed the yields in New York state and North Carolina.
And:
But Washington’s farmers can’t fully cash in on their good fortune. The national crackdown on illegal immigration has shrunk the pool of potential farm workers in the state, while at the same time, the modest economic rebound has given immigrants more opportunities than before in construction, landscaping and restaurants.
* * * * *
Not far away, outside a church in Pasco, a migrant from Mexico’s Michoacán state, 47-year-old José Carranza, said he planned to skip the fruit harvest this year. Mr. Carranza believes he can do better in construction work, which is picking up.
How bad is it, really? Take a look at several other pieces on this issue, recently:
The Daily News (Batavia, New York), September 22, 2012: “Fewer farm workers locally due to light apple crop”–The record hot spring followed by bitter cold temperatures in late April killed many of the buds that later produce apples. The apple crop in Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota was largely destroyed by the spring weather. However, Washington State, the nation’s top apple-producer, has a bumper crop this year.Jerome Pawlak, owner of Save-A-Lot grocery stores in Albion and Holley, said some farmers have already called him to say they won’t be bringing in crews this year to cash checks, go shopping and use the Western Union service to wire money home.
“There will definitely be an economic impact on all of our community,” Pawlak said about the smaller farm labor force this harvest. “It’s definitely being felt here.”
How much additional will you be paying for goods this year because of GOP “we-can’t-afford-to-be-great-anymore” policies, or racist immigration policies? Will your modest tax cuts offset that expense?
Perhaps we should pay a bit more in federal money to help fix the real problems, and stop pretending that the price of everything is the same as the cost.
You know the aphorisms: A conservative economist is a person who can tell you price of any item or service, but doesn’t know the value of education, parenting, or good social structure, and ignores the costs of doing nothing.
And the Tom Magliozzi Law (of the Car Guys): The cheapskate always pays more.
Studies from the Federal Reserve indicates immigrants boost our economy greatly; making life tough for immigrants, or hoping they’ll “self-deport,” damages our economy.
Remember the old School House Rock? Disney finally put all of the old episodes out on DVD and Blu-Ray. Short songs with animation explaining grammar (“Conjunction Junction”), or math, or history, or economics.
Schoolhouse Rock! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the most popular was a later production that explained how a bill becomes law in the U.S. Congress, “I’m Just A Bill.” You may remember how it was parodied byThe Simpsons, too, and others.
I didn’t see the whole debate, but from what I saw, it was different this week. Obama’s problem was that he didn’t expect to have to nail Jello to a tree, and didn’t; tonight, Biden nailed the Jello, made it stick on the tree, and made it bleed.
Obama’s own words, with animation provided by Lucas Gray, a veteran animator from The Simpsons and Family Guy.
Andre Tartar wrote about it at the New York Magazine website:
Your average campaign ad involves lots of black and white B-roll, ominous music, and floating newspaper headlines. So this nearly 4-minute illustrated reel by Lucas Gray, a veteran of the Simpsons and Family Guy animation departments, is a welcome bit of color. Using audio from a speech President Obama gave at the Associates Press Luncheon in April, “Why Obama Now” is a jaunty mix of cartoon Americans driving their Model T Fords off the assembly line onto the American Dream, graphs and charts sprouting up as the president rattles off statistics, and little bobblehead meanies providing comic relief: Bush and Cheney with a pile of gold (the Clinton surplus), Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, and the rest of the conservative pundit gang. It also includes the best (though not most convincing) explanation of trickle-down economics we’ve seen yet: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the sparrows.”
(Yes, there is a bias. Several biases exist there simultaneously, actually, so we should say there are biases. The most important for you to know about are the biases for good science and accuracy, especially historical accuracy.)
I posted a short excerpt from a recent column by economist Paul Krugman, explaining why GOP reliance on magic to fix the economy probably won’t work. Commenter David Xavier took issue with Krugman’s analysis. David’s comment brought home to me just how badly many self-described conservatives misunderstand basic economics, especially the keystone free enterprise principles of supply and demand.
My explanation of why supply side economics can’t work came out for the 21st time at least. Let’s make a post of it, in hope that more people may read it and view it, and understanding may increase.
David Xavier said:
Krugman wants the government to spend as this will drive demand. But “demand is constituted by supply”. To buy something you must first produce and sell something. The selling is what gets you the money, but the production of value adding output is what first allows you to sell. Without value adding activity, there is nothing to sell and therefore there is no basis for demand.
I replied:
Well, there’s the problem. You don’t understand either the law of supply, nor the law of demand. You’re talking “supply side” economics, which we discovered didn’t work way back in 1982 through 1988.
Supply does not stimulate demand, ceteris paribus. It’s the other way around. Henry Ford’s Model A didn’t created demand for transportation; the demand for transportation, coupled with a demand for transportation that didn’t involve horses and their natural effluents, created a demand for a horseless carriage. Ford created a machine that met that demand, and could manufacture it in enough quantity to matter.
Demand is not “constituted from supply.” Demand comes from needs, and wants. If supply can be created to meet that demand, demand can be met from supply.
But demand comes first, as Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist, well understands.
If consumers have no money to buy, the quantity supplied cannot matter in the least. If there were no demand for transportation at all, Henry Ford is sunk.
The law of supply explains how producers go about meeting demands — if prices are higher, they are happier to supply more. Again, if consumers have no money to purchase the good or service offered, the amount of supply is completely irrelevant.
Before Henry Ford’s mass production of automobiles created a demand for gasoline, gasoline was cast off from oil refining as a waste product from the production of kerosene for lanterns. Refineries from Standard Oil dumped millions of gallons of gasoline into rivers — no demand, the massive supply simply did not matter.
And as we can see from that example, demand not only creates the market, it can make a product considered to be waste, into the economic equivalent of gold.
Without demand, supply is simply excess manure, or gasoline by-product from the production of kerosene, to be dumped into a river (and thereby pollute the hell out of the river).
You’re right to say that without value-added activity, there is no economic activity. But tell that to Mitt Romney, who thinks finance is the magic, and not production.
A key problem with all of Republican economics is the ignoring of consumers, and ignoring the reality that consumers need money to stimulate demand. Tax cuts can’t help the hungry, who cannot eat tax cuts, nor the unemployed, who cannot take to the bank tax cuts on non-existent income.
Your odd myopia — maybe blindness — to the reality of how economics works, is shared by a lot of so-called conservatives. It’s a tragedy; it’s a tragedy I hope voters will put an end to, soon.
Did you ever notice that no supply-side economist has ever won a Nobel? Have you noticed that few supply-side economics articles are available in journals? Has your search for the numbers to back up the Laffer curve been as unproductive as they have been for everyone else — including Arthur Laffer? (Laffer promised to publish an article explaining how supply side economics work, as soon as he got the numbers together. That was in 1982. 40 years later, there is still no real intellectual foundation for GOP claims of tax cuts creating wealth. Those studies that have been done suggest tax rates maximize revenue when taxes hit about 70%, more than three times the rates Laffer proposes. History shows a much different story than Laffer claimed: Tax cuts in the Harding and Coolidge administrations led to bubbles that collectively burst in October 1929, leading to the Great Depression; tax cuts in 2001 led to bubbles in housing and the stock market, which burst in 2008, leading to our Great Recession.)
Right now, businesses are sitting on a pool of about $2 trillion, profits they’ve accumulated since 2008. If supply side economics worked, that money would be invested in manufacturing and service creation, and we should have an unemployment rate in negative numbers. The disproof of supply side economics is our current situation. Employers have plenty of supply of money, but they refuse to hire without demonstration of demand from consumers. Unemployed consumers, lacking money, cannot make that demand up from thin air. Magic does not work, in the real world of supply and demand, in economics.
Nota bene: Videos come from a delightful series on economics created and put up on YouTube by Dr. Mary J. Glasson, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Glasson’s series is available at YouTube and covers almost every topic in an entry-level survey undergraduate economics course. Look for “mjmfoodie” at YouTube.com.
Despite the few details he leaked in the Denver debate — which contradict almost everything he and his campaign had said earlier, not to mention the GOP platform — Mitt Romney offers not much in the realm of a program to do better than President Obama in economics, in pulling the nation out of our economic doldrums. Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman explains:
Winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman – Tavis Smiley Productions image
As many people have noticed, Mr. Romney’s five-point “economic plan” is very nearly substance-free. It vaguely suggests that he will pursue the same goals Republicans always pursue — weaker environmental protection, lower taxes on the wealthy. But it offers neither specifics nor any indication why returning to George W. Bush’s policies would cure a slump that began on Mr. Bush’s watch.
In his Boca Raton meeting with donors, however, Mr. Romney revealed his real plan, which is to rely on magic. “My own view is,” he declared, “if we win on November 6, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”
Are you feeling reassured?
In fairness to Mr. Romney, his assertion that electing him would spontaneously spark an economic boom is consistent with his party’s current economic dogma. Republican leaders have long insisted that the main thing holding the economy back is the “uncertainty” created by President Obama’s statements — roughly speaking, that businesspeople aren’t investing because Mr. Obama has hurt their feelings. If you believe that, it makes sense to argue that changing presidents would, all by itself, cause an economic revival.
There is, however, no evidence supporting this dogma. Our protracted economic weakness isn’t a mystery; it’s what normally happens after a major financial crisis. Furthermore, business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly since the official recession ended. What’s holding us back is mainly the continued weakness of housing combined with a vast overhang of household debt, the legacy of the Bush-era housing bubble.
By the way, in saying that our prolonged slump was predictable, I’m not saying that it was necessary. We could and should have greatly reduced the pain by combining aggressive fiscal and monetary policies with effective relief for highly indebted homeowners; the fact that we didn’t reflects a combination of timidity on the part of both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, and scorched-earth opposition on the part of the G.O.P.
But Mr. Romney, as I said, isn’t offering anything substantive to fight the slump, just a reprise of the usual slogans. And he has denounced the Fed’s belated effort to step up to the plate.
For more than a year Romney’s been pushing tax cuts as a solution to everything. It’s rather late to back out of that now.
Tax cuts can’t stimulate the economy — we tried them for 8 solid years, and they crashed the economy. One can make a great case that the Obama economy is not soaring because he agreed to extend the tax cuts, in return for getting about half of the stimulus we needed. At some point, people hurting in this economy will realize that they can’t benefit from a tax cut if they aren’t paying huge taxes, and they aren’t paying huge taxes if they are unemployed.
Tax cuts cannot be revenue neutral. They hurt deficits. For months Romney’s been talking about defense spending and tax cuts that add between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in to the deficit. If he wishes to argue that deficits hurt, he’s in trouble. If Obama argues that deficits should be used to help people, Romney will be unable to make the math work on his plan if he tries to reply.
Economic theory isn’t with Romney. Can he make that big of a snow job on voters? Even if he does, the economy won’t take it.
Now’s a good time to beef up on the high school economics most of us took, or the college class we took. Can you see any way to make an austere, Spain-style economy work in the U.S. without putting us into a death spiral?
Teacher and education blogs were all atwitter — and Twitter was all ablog, I suppose you could say — about the opening this past weekend of the movie “Won’t Back Down.”
“Parent trigger” laws bubble up in discussion a lot recently — laws that allow a group of parents to petition a school district, or the state, and say that they want to take over a local school. Conservatives and other anti-teacher groups promote these laws as a means of education reform. Generally, in the few cases in which a school is taken over by parents, teachers and local administrators are fired, and the school operates much like a charter school.
“Won’t Back Down” professes to be “based on a true story.” I am reminded that both “Psycho” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” also professed to be based on a true story — the same story, in fact. I’ve written about this before — based on a true story, except not in Texas, no chainsaw, no massacre, nor was there a hotel and a shower. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is more carefully based on a true story — there is a Mississippi River; or The Bald Soprano — there are bald people, and there are sopranos. But I digress.
The film has a cast of some great star power — Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter. It was produced by the documentary group that also produced Al Gore‘s “Inconvenient Truth,” and then moved to the popular but wildly polemical “Waiting for Superman,” another hit on teachers. They should have stopped with that one, instead of raising the ante (raising the “anti?”).
Audiences don’t like films that cast teachers as villains, it would appear.
(Reuters) – Education reform film “Won’t Back Down” opened Friday to terrible reviews – and high hopes from activists who expect the movie to inspire parents everywhere to demand big changes in public schools.
The drama stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a spirited mother who teams up with a passionate teacher to seize control of their failing neighborhood school, over the opposition of a self-serving teachers union.
Reviewers called it trite and dull, but education reformers on both the left and right have hailed the film as a potential game-changer that could aid their fight to weaken teachers’ unions and inject more competition into public education.
Even an Oscar-caliber leading cast couldn’t save this one. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s latest film “Won’t Back Down,” also starring Viola Davis and Holly Hunter, set the record this past weekend for the worst opening of a film that appeared in more than 2,500 theaters, making a mere $2.6 million [via Box Office Mojo].
Yes, all three of these former Oscar nominees — Hunter having won a golden statuette in 1994 for “The Piano” — now have a pretty bad blemish on their resume. But they aren’t to blame, say industry watchers, who are reacting to the film with a resounding face palm. “‘Won’t Back Down’ wore the dunce cap last weekend, mostly because its marketing was almost non-existent,” says Jeff Bock, box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations.
“Record for the worst opening?” Ouch.
Back to the “based on a true story” issue: We may understand why the screenwriter and director of the first Texas Chainsaw movie, Tobe Hooper took the liberties he did to add elements to the story. He knew the original story of a disturbed man in Wisconsin who was jailed for corpse mutilation. He knew that was the foundation for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” How to update it, to make the story bankable from the box office? Move it to Texas, add a chainsaw with all its terrifying whine, and add in the standard teenager murder story elements; maybe put a mask on the villain/evil beast, to make it more terrifying — there is great terror in being pursued by nameless, faceless folk as Orwell showed us. Both Hitchcock and Hooper fully understood that the real, dull story, wasn’t something people would pay to sit through while eating grossly-overpriced popcorn.
“Won’t Back Down” suffered from sticking too close to the facts. If you’re going to claim the antagonist is psycho, you have to give them a big butcher’s knife or a chainsaw, and a costume, in order to make really, really scary.
Teachers just are not that scary in real life. Teachers are not the villains, in real life.
National Review’s Rich Lowry likes the movie because it pokes unions in the eye — it’s all about crushing unions, isn’t it, Rich? (Most teachers not unionized, many “unions” banned from collective bargaining.) (via Oregonian) Lowry: ” . . .a film featuring a hooker with a heart of gold, or pretty much any romantic comedy.” Teacher bashing as romantic comedy?
Our best bet to get the economy growing at a fast enough pace to create jobs for the unemployed, and create jobs for new graduates from high school and college, is to get a Congress that will vote for employment bills instead of making legislative gridlock.
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, 2012 – from US Atlas
On almost every issue, Powell runs circles around Cantor. In debates, for example, Powell challenges Cantor to explain his votes to extend perks to Congressmen, while shorting the pay of active duty military and veterans — to no avail, Cantor won’t explain. What could he say?
Especially, what could Cantor say to a decorated veteran like Powell?
No, this isn’t the Welsh former soccer player Wayne Powell. The Welsh Powell would probably represent Virginia better than Cantor, too, but he’s still managing Leamington FC, last I heard.
“Flood losses are increasing at an alarming rate while the insurability of floods provides unique challenges for the industry, according Swiss Re’s latest report, “Flood – an underestimated risk: Inspect, inform, insure”.” …
“No other natural catastrophe impacts as many people as flooding with an estimated 500 million people affected every year. Insured flood losses are also increasing significantly; 1970’s annual claims were between USD 1–2 billion, whereas insured flood losses amounted to USD 15 billion in 2011. Recent flood events in Thailand, Australia and the Philippines have shown that floods are now rivalling earthquakes and hurricanes in terms of economic losses.” …
“Population growth, demographic change, a higher concentration of assets in exposed areas, greater vulnerability of insured objects and climate change are all contributing to the increasing costs of flood damage. The rising costs of floods are creating challenges for the insurance industry and the economic viability of flood insurance is currently an issue under scrutiny.”
During the last weeks of this campaign there will be debates, speeches and more ads. But if I could sit down with you in your living room or around the kitchen table here’s what I’d say:
When I took office we were losing nearly 800,000 jobs a month and were mired in Iraq. Today I believe that as a nation we are moving forward again. But we have much more to do to get folks back to work and make the middle class secure again.
Now, Governor Romney believes that with that even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy and fewer regulations on Wall Street all of us will prosper. In other words he’d double down on the same trickle down policies that led to the crisis in the first place. So what’s my plan?
First, we create a million new manufacturing jobs and help businesses double their exports. Give tax breaks to companies that invest in America, not that ship jobs overseas.
Second, we cut our oil imports in half and produce more American-made energy, oil, clean-coal, natural gas, and new resources like wind, solar and bio-fuels—all while doubling the fuel efficiencies of cars and trucks.
Third, we insure that we maintain the best workforce in the world by preparing 100,000 additional math and science teachers. Training 2 million Americans with the job skills they need at our community colleges. Cutting the growth of tuition in half and expanding student aid so more Americans can afford it.
Fourth, a balanced plan to reduce our deficit by four trillion dollars over the next decade on top of the trillion in spending we’ve already cut, I’d ask the wealthy to pay a little more. And as we end the war in Afghanistan let’s apply half the savings to pay down our debt and use the rest for some nation building right here at home.
It’s time for a new economic patriotism. Rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong, thriving middle class. Read my plan. Compare it to Governor Romney’s and decide for yourself. Thanks for listening.
Kennedy’s speech at Rice University, “We Choose to Go to the Moon,” was on September 12, 1962. That was also the ninth anniversary of his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. She let him go out of town to talk rockets?
It is said God looks out for drunks and babies; can we make a case that our government works better with more drunks in elective office? David Frum discusses. (I actually have some thoughts and experience in this area . . . when to find time to discuss?) There’s a video there, but not in a format I can embed here easily — go see.
New studies on colony collapse disorder affecting especially commercial beehives suggests insecticides, and substances related to insecticides, may be hammering our bees; worse, EPA has known about it, but kept quiet. Reported readably in New Yorker, 50 years after that magazine serialized a book named Silent Spring. Rachel Carson’s Ghost joins Santayana’s Ghost pacing America, nervously, as if to awaken us all . . .
Modern conservatism: Some 20 or 30 percent of us who never matured much past middle school, claiming to represent 99 percent, trying to win an election by a tenth of a percent so that some 4 percent of us can tell everybody else how to live, and where to put 100 percent of our money.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
