Wisconsin poll: encouraging
Ok, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner is a Democratic firm, and they did the poll for the AFL-CIO, but still, they’re reputable and smart and their findings are a pleasant surprise: 41% of Wisconsin voters approve of Gov. Scott Walker, and 51% disapprove, a gap of –10. Strongly approve less strongly disapprove is even worse for Walker, at –12. Walker’s net favorable of –10 is exactly reversed for the legislature’s Dems, who are 10 points in the positive column. Unions are even better liked: 53% favorable, 31% unfavorable, for a net of +22. The Tea… Read More
More Wisconsin
Back in Brooklyn now, but I did want to tie up a few loose ends and post some pix from yesterday’s scene at the Wisconsin State Capitol. First, a couple of comments, then some pix. It looks like much of the Wisconsin budget shortfall came from some spending initiatives and tax breaks pushed through by Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature: an economic development fund, health savings accounts, and tax breaks for employers. In any case, what Walker sees as a $137 million deficit, and the state’s independent fiscal auditor sees as a $56… Read More
Whew!
Those market worries about Egypt yesterday? History! The Financial Times reports that “Investors return to risk as Egypt fears ease.” Today is, as they say, a “risk-on” day. Why are market participants seen as rational evaluators of anything? My five-year-old is more emotionally stable than your average trader.
Egypt: the nub of the issue
Headline from this morning‘s DealBook, the M&A newsletter from the New York Times, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin: Will Egypt Crisis Hurt Deal-Making? Isn’t that the first question that leapt to your mind too?
Marx crushes Hayek
Yeah, everyone’s ngram-ing, so why not me? The number of mentions of Karl Marx vs. Friedrich Hayek in a sample of the books in Google’s database. The original Google chart doesn’t scale nicely, so I’ve retouched it some using Adobe Illustrator. But the relative trajectories are unchanged. To see the Google original, click here: Marx vs. Hayek. They just can’t stop talking about the Old Man, can they? He’s come down some since the mid-1970s, but you’d think that Freddie would have come up a lot more.
BHO, community organizer
Maybe there really is something to Obama’s background as a community organizer after all. For some reason, I picked Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals off the shelf a little while ago. I got the book years ago, when I thought I might write a piece on the unfortunate influence of Alinsky and community organizing on the American left, but abandoned the project because I couldn’t bear to read Alinsky’s prose. But as it happens, I opened to this passage, titled “Compromise,” on p. 59: [T]o the organizer, compromise is a key and… Read More
Hard times all around
From a WSJ article on the shrinkage of Wall Street’s bonus pool this year: “Jonathan Beckett, CEO of yacht brokerage firm Burgess, said demand for weekly yacht rentals in the Caribbean this winter is ‘quite poor,’ in part because of Wall Street.” Lamborghini sales are down too, alas.
Tom Hayden doesn’t like that letter
Tom Hayden didn’t like that open letter to him et al. His response—sent to John Halle, organizer of the letter, but not as I erroneously said at first addressed to him in the polite “Dear John” salutational sense—follows. (The subject heading of the email was, inexplicably, “Weirdness.”) Gotta say, this is a beaut: “I supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, and am glad I did so. At the time I also said progressives should disagree with him on Afghanistan, NAFTA, global warming and Wall Street….” Well, what’s left to support, Cde… Read More
Wikileaks: a CIA-Mossad project
My god, there is just no end to lunacy. I just learned from contested terrain (which cited my comment that the Wikileaks affair proved the conspiracy theory of history to be wrong) that Wayne Madsen thinks (“CIA, Mossad and Soros behind Wikileaks”) that Julian Assange is a CIA agent in the pay of George Soros, with some help from the Mossad. So all that chat about how the woman who accused Assange of some variety of sexual assault is herself a CIA agent—well, forget that. Because Langley is pulling Assange’s strings. And why would Langley… Read More
Bill Gates, business genius?
Reading Diane Ravtich’s excellent takedown of (private school grad and college dropout) Bill Gates for his interventions in public education reminded me that the only reason people listen to him is that he’s thought to be some sort of business genius (as if business genius were translatable to pedagogy or anything else). If he’s that rich, he must be smart, eh? But he’s really not such a business genius. Well, he’s a business genius of a sort, but not of the sort of heroic entrepreneur that’s usually lionized. His first foray into… Read More
WikiLeaks: so much in the open
Looking over this latest batch of WikiLeaks, I’m struck by how few surprises there are, and by how much of importance goes on pretty much in the open. An attentive reader of the news with a decent knowledge of history basically knows most of this stuff already. I don’t mean this in the sense in which the bourgeois press is using it—by using the epithet “old news” to dismiss the significance of the revelations. What they want to dismiss is the truth that the U.S. (like most other nation–states, though they’re not… Read More
Pacifica hires anti-union law firm
Pacifica laid off the Morning Show staff at KPFA allegedly because of a budget crisis—and they hire an expensive corporate law firm to deal with the consequences. How community broadcasting of them! Read all about it here.
Demented press release of the day
This just in. Gosh, sometimes I wish I lived in their fantasy world… Plenty to be Thankful for… if you’re Big Labor Doug, Who has more for which to be thankful this year, small businesses or Big Labor? The failure of Big Labor to move it’s job-killing Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act through Congress despite naming it a top agenda item is certainly on businesses’ list. Still, small businesses and workers are struggling to make ends meet as labor bosses continue to work to force unionization on workers to pocket union dues and… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 