The Nazi legacy is an understandably heavy burden for Germany, even today. This leaves Germans emotionally vulnerable to comparisons to their 20th century forebears. And with the country exercising ever-more influence over its European Union allies, cutting remarks that include such comparisons are blossoming like mushrooms after a spring rain. So how to deal with it? For Germany’s Die Zeit, Bernd Ulrich writes that in order to operate as the ‘U.S. of Europe,’ Germans will have to grit their teeth until this particular phase of European history passes.

For Germany’s Die Zeit, Bernd Ulrich writes in small part:

It doesn’t take much to figure out why so many Nazi comparisons are being made right now: For the first time since 1945, Germany is stepping up with all its power, not because it wants to, but because the European debt crisis has made the economically-strongest economy into the most politically powerful. Germany is now profoundly intervening in the domestic affairs of others.

The country is gradually taking on the role in Europe that the U.S. has long played on the global level: As the country that used and occasionally abused its power, was to blame for everything, was supposed to save everyone, and had to endure insults for how it went about doing it. What evil hasn’t been imputed to the Americans? The CIA was behind every evil, and Americans were constantly being accused of imperialism.

But there was one thing the Americans could never be accused of: sending six million Jews to their deaths and plunging half the world into war. In the case of Germany, ranting against the leading power that is at once quite understandable, human and often justified, very often takes on an entirely different pallor, which serves to put an end to any discussion or serious exchange.

For quite a while, Germany’s new role will continue to result in a proliferation of Nazi comparisons. Like it or not, we will have to bear it and wait until it passes. However, in such stoicism there is also a serious problem. That has to do with the German historical paradox, which may be described as follows: The only way Germans can prevent their past from repeating itself is by never being absolutely sure that it won’t.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR GERMAN AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

“The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1983 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1986 and 1997, more than forty people were gunned down by spree killers in at least twenty incidents of workplace rage.”

Now the phrase has gone beyond referring to postal workers. Kids who murder their teachers and fellow students? Going postal. On a recent radio talk show aired on XM a caller referred to Josh Powell’s unspeakable evil act of blowing up his house, killing himself and his two young sons (who he chopped with hatchets after saying “I have a surprise for you” as they entered the door and a social worker was locked out) as “going postal.”

But it does refer to the 80s when murder seemed to undergo a shift: yes, there been assassinations, murders, mass murderers and serial killers from time to time, and state sanctioned mass murder in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union — but this seemed to be the beginning of the lash-out workplace mass murders. Each murder got tons of publicity and — to use the accurate cliche — gave other rage-filled or unstable potential killers ideas on how they, too, could get back at their perceived enemies and the world by creating a big body count.

“Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal” is a masterful documentary examining not just the string of postal mass murders starting with one of the first in Edmond, Oklahoma on August 20, 1986 when 14 employees were shot and killed at the post office by postman Patrick Sherrill, who took his own life with a shot to the forehead. It also puts it in a larger context.

Context: most of the people involved had no criminal records. Context: some of those who became killers had faced what some co-workers later insisted was bullying, targeting, harassment and abuses by management. “Murder By Proxy” at no time condones the killers, but it seeks to find the “why” underneath the “how shocking.”

Though superb use of archival and some rarely seen footage, top rate editing, and expert interviews, “Murder by Proxy” traces how these killings that seemed to inspire later mass killings in other areas of American life seemingly reflected a major shift in the relationship between individuals and society as well a between workers, management and government. These changes are political and economic: the film traces some of the shift to the Ronald Reagan era, with Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers, which many experts believe ushered in a decline in labor union power and accentuated management workplace power.

But “Murder By Proxy” is not a partisan political film.

It answers some of the questions of what led up to someone walking into a post office and tossing aside all standards of humanity and empathy would wipe out not just people the killer had clashed with but virtually anyone nearby who breathed. It’s like the workplace became one big, shooting gallery video game rage-filled employees used to vent.

“”Murder by Proxy” answers the question: what can bring a person who seems totally normal to the point of becoming a mass murderer? But, even more importantly, some interviews explore efforts to try and rectify at least part of the problem.

PERSONAL NOTE: I know the impact of this kind of tragedy a too well. On July 18, 1984, James Huberty, an unemployed security guard and survivalist, walked into a high traffic McDonald’s restaurant on San Ysidro Boulevard in the San Ysidro section of San Diego, California and opened fire. His shootings resulted in 22 deaths (including his own via police sniper). He snuffed out the lives of innocent men, women and children (including a boy outside riding his bike). Nineteen others were injured. I was interviewing the Consul General of Mexico in downtown San Diego in my job as staff reporter on the San Diego Union when I got the page (before cell phones) from the city desk.

Then San Diego Union City Editor Marsha McQuern (one of the very best journalists and editors I worked with in my career) called in everyone and their mothers to report and edit this major story (I did some reporting and was drafted to work on the desk). And here is what stays with me forever:

“Murder by Proxy” communicates the grief and tragedies such as this. These aren’t just numbers. These are lives. And when each life is obliterated, several linked lives are changed forever. It was wrenching enough covering “The San Ysidro Massacre.” But it was not much better a year later when the paper assigned yours truly and other reporters to go back and talk to victim’s relatives and see how they were doing. The answer? Not well at all. Part of their lives were brutally murdered as well the same day Huberty butchered the men, women and children in the McDonald’s (which McDonald’s Corporation quickly tore down, donated the land and rebuilt up the street — fearing a copy cat massacre one day).

In the case of Huberty, books have been written to try and find out the why (unemployed, couldn’t get an appointment at a mental health center) he did what he did.

“Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal” provides a good explanation of why some things that happened provided a trigger for tragic postal massacres that happened — and what legislators can do about it. But politics nixes needed solutions.

Writer-Director Emil Chiaberi’s “Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal” is required viewing as a vital history of the chain of massacres that inspired other massacres in non-postal areas of American life, a chronicle of the conditions that fostered some of the workplace conditions that seemingly set off employees, and a film that explores ways to try and change some of conditions that could contribute to workplace massacres.

Here’s the film’s trailer:

“Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal” will be opening in select cities around the United States — but you can also buy a DVD copy of it by going to this website. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Earlier this week, a live online video chat featured President Obama and Jennifer Weddel, the wife of an unemployed engineer whose husband has been out of a job for three years. Weddel asked the president: “Why does the government continue to extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my [engineer] husband with no job?”

Caught off guard, Obama tried to deflect Weddel’s argument by inquiring what type of engineer her husband is. When Weddel replied “semiconductor,” Obama resorted to elusive double talk before promising to review his case further. To add to Obama’s embarrassment, Wedell is unemployed in Texas, a tech industry hub.

The problem that the president unexpectedly faced is that semiconductor engineers are in one of the categories which IT industry executives have been telling Congress can’t be found in the United States. And the White House, apparently without bothering to check the facts, has acted on industry misinformation. From the El Paso border this summer to the United States Capitol in January where he gave the State of the Union address and at every stop in between, Obama has aggressively called for increasing the 65,000 H-1B visas issued annually.

The Weddel-Obama dust up set off a flurry of Internet postings and analysis among organizations that have insisted for years that no shortage of American engineers or any other classification of worker exists. After all, when there are so many million unemployed Americans, how can there be shortages?

Indeed, the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-partisan Washington, D.C.-based research organization that favors less immigration, found that 1.8 million Americans under age 66 have engineering degrees but not an engineering job.

The study, “Is President Obama Right about Engineers?” is based on data collected by the Census Bureau from the American Community Survey. Dr. Steven Camarota, its author, found the following: 1) 101,000 U.S. engineers looking for a job can’t find any type of work at all; 2) 244,000 engineers are unemployed and have stopped looking for work and 3) 1.5 million engineers have jobs but don’t work as engineers.

In his numerous supportive speeches about lifting the visa cap, Obama has repeatedly referred to the foreign-born workers he wants to bring to the United States as “highly skilled.” But Dr. Camarota’s research revealed that in 2010 there were 25,000 unemployed Americans with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or Ph.D. degree and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working but not as engineers.

Another important consideration: in the two decades since its inception, is that the H-1B visa has been used for non-engineering fields like teaching, pharmacy and even football coaching as happened a few years ago at Tennessee’s Austin Peay University. No job is safe.

Today’s lesson is that every story has two sides. The administration has listened closely to the business elites who want more visas. Now, the hour has come for the White House to pay equal attention to unemployed Americans’ pleas.

Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. His columns about immigration and other social issues have been syndicated since 1986. Contact him at joeguzzardi@capsweb.org. His column is licensed to run on TMV in full.

My father, who is 85, grew up believing that all Americans can succeed through hard work and education, and that people who didn’t weren’t trying hard enough. He still believes that.

I grew up with the same belief, but its implicit promise of reward based on merit didn’t turn out to be true for my generation or its children. Our economic circumstances have diverged so radically from those of my father’s, you’d think we belonged to different families.

Dad is representative of wealthy, very conservative 1 percenters. A lifelong Republican whose hero is Ronald Reagan, Dad believes unions and the protections they offer workers “destroy incentive.”

I joined a union, when one was available, because it won a guarantee of 12 hours off between shifts.

Dad belongs to some of the most expensive and exclusive private golf clubs in the country. Women still aren’t allowed at one of them.

I belong to the library.

Dad and his wife have pared down from three houses to one, a five-bedroom, three-story, luxury house with a mother-in-law apartment and a guest or servant’s apartment, inside a gated community in one of the country’s most expensive zip codes. Before he retired, he also had a chalet in Colorado and a mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway in Florida.

I live in a small, two-bedroom house that could fit inside the first floor of his with room to spare all around, in a poor town plagued for decades by joblessness, which made it affordable for me.

Dad started his career in the late 1940s, during an economic boom. Much of his working life coincided with a robust economy whose opportunities were largely reserved for white males.

My working life, which began in the 1970s, coincided with stagnant wages, steeply rising living costs, lower earnings for women and massive job cuts.

Dad and his wife own three luxury cars. I drive a used car that had 40,000 miles on it when I bought it.

Dad has his suits custom made by a tailor from Hong Kong who comes to the United States to measure his clients and show them swatches.

On the rare occasions I buy clothing, it’s usually from a discount outlet or Costco.

Dad acquired an extra $300,000 in cash from the private golf clubs he has belonged to for some 50 years. When a member hits his 80th birthday, he told me, the clubs return the hefty initiation fees they charged when the member first joined.

I saved up $10,000 in an IRA.

When Dad wanted to cut expenses, he sold vacation houses worth millions. When I had to cut expenses, I gave up health insurance, cable TV and a cell phone.

When Dad buys something, his thinking stops at, “I can afford it.” When I buy something, I question whether my community, my country and even the world can afford the consequences of millions of choices like mine.

Dad assumed that I would get married and be supported by a husband. I assumed that I would have a successful career and support myself. Neither of us foresaw a future for me of just scraping by.

Fortunately, I don’t envy Dad his wealth or his lifestyle. My choices, if I had his kind of money, would be very different. But I do resent the emotional burden of keeping his beliefs about the huge difference in our circumstances from coming between us. This includes ignoring, or downplaying as a joke, the hysteria-ridden, far-right rants he forwards to me. The last one compared President Obama to Marx and Hitler – simultaneously.

His mink-lined cocoon of luxurious comfort has nurtured a sense of entitlement based on the illusion that he earned all of it through his own efforts. Class, race, gender, and economic trends had nothing to do with it.

The other side of that coin is the belief that people who aren’t rich and successful weren’t as talented or didn’t work as hard. It’s a judgment I have to push aside from myself every time I see him.

During the past eight years of involuntary unemployment or subsistence on low-wage jobs, as my savings dwindled and it was obvious I was in trouble, he said nothing.

Meanwhile, my mother and my sister, fellow 99 percenters, have surreptitiously slipped twenty-dollar bills into my purse or coat pocket to cover the gas and tolls whenever I drove to see them. They aren’t rich, they don’t want to be paid back and they don’t wait to be asked. They understand.

My father has never asked whether I needed help. .

Dad understands that ideas he has believed in all his life, what he thinks are the reasons for his success, are under attack. I’ve tried to keep our disagreement about that at arm’s length when it comes to him.

But it’s become impossible to ignore this truth: that policies based on the beliefs of 1 percenters like my father have hurt me and hundreds of millions of others.

Our national family suffers from the same kind of disconnect and discord. If my experience is any indicator, the 1 percenters will never acknowledge that the playing field needs leveling, that the rules must be unrigged and some of the financial burdens shifted to those best able to bear them.

So, painful as this may be, we must understand how personal a fight this is, and prepare for invective. Some of us also will endure the ache of estrangement, especially acute when sharing a holiday dinner table with someone you’ve loved a long time, someone unwilling to help bridge a widening gulf even in his own family.

To protect her father’s privacy, the writer has asked that her name not be published.

Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam.

Now, Sam was a bright young man who wanted to work and save money so he could go to school and become an electrician. But the only job open in his small community was at the gas station. So, for two years, Sam pumped gas, washed windshields, checked dipsticks and tire pressure, smiled and chatted with all the customers, gave them free drinking glasses when they ordered a fill-up, and was soon known as the best service station attendant in town.

But then the Grand Caliphs of Oil said that Megamania Oil Empire, of which they all had partial ownership, caused them to raise the price of gas.
“We’re paying 39 cents a gallon now,” they cried, “how can you justify tripling our costs?” they demanded.

“That’s business,” said the Chief Grand Caliph flippantly. But, to calm the customer fury, he had a plan. “We will allow you the privilege of pumping your own gas, washing your own windows, checking your car’s dipsticks and tire pressure, and chatting amiably with yourselves,” said the Caliph. “If you do that, we will hold the price to only a buck or two a gallon.”

And the people were happy. All except Sam, of course, who was unemployed.
But, times were good, and Sam went to the local supermarket, which was advertising for a minimum wage checkout clerk. For three years, he worked hard, scanning all groceries and chatting amiably with the customers. And then one day his manager called him into the office.

“Sam,” said the boss, “we’re very pleased with your work. You’re fired.” From corporate headquarters had come a decision by the chain’s chief bean counter that there weren’t enough beans for their executives to go to Europe to search for more beans.

“But,” asked Sam, “Who will scan the groceries?”

“The customers will,” said the boss. “We’ll even have a no-hassle machine that will take their money and maybe even give change.”

“But won’t they object to buying the groceries, scanning them, bagging them, and shoving their money into a faceless machine?”

“Not if we tell them that by doing all the work, the cost will be less,” said the manager.

“But it won’t,” said Sam.

The manager thought a moment, and then brightly pointed out, “We’ll just say that the cost of groceries won’t go up significantly if labor costs were less. Besides, we even programmed Canmella the Circuit-enhanced Clerk to tell customers to have a nice day.”

Now, others may have sworn, cried, or punched out their supervisor, but this is a G-rated fairy tale, and it wouldn’t be right to leave Sam to flounder among the food. By cutting back on luxuries, like food and clothes, Sam saved a few dollars from his unemployment checks, and finally had enough to go to a community college to learn to become an electrician. After graduating at the top of his class, an emaciated and homeless Sam got a job at Acme Industries.

For nine years, he was a great electrician, often making suggestions that led to his company becoming one of the largest electrical supplies manufacturers in the country. And then one day one of the company’s 18 assistant vice-presidents called Sam into a small dingy office, which the company used for such a day. “You’re the best worker we have,” the AVP joyfully told Sam, “but all that repetitive stress has cut your efficiency and increased our medical costs. In the interest of maximizing profits, we have to replace you.”

“But who can do my job?” asked Sam.

“Not who,” said the manager, “but what. We’re bringing in robots. They’re faster and don’t need breaks, vacations, or sick days. Better yet, they don’t have union contracts.”

“So you are firing me,” said Sam.

“Not at all. We had to let a few dozen other workers go so there would be room for the robots, and we won’t be hiring any new workers, but because of your hard work, we’re reassigning you to oil the robots. At least until we design robots that can oil the other robots.”

For three years, Sam oiled, polished, and cleaned up after the robots. Sometimes, he even had to rewire them. And then the deputy assistant senior director of Human Resources called him into her office.

“No one can oil and polish as well as you can,” she said, but the robots are getting very expensive and we still have several hundred workers who are taking lobster and truffles from the mouths of our corporate executives, “so we’re sending all of our work to somewhere in Asia. Or maybe it’s Mexico. Whatever. The workers there will gladly design and assemble our products for less than a tenth what we have to pay our citizens.”

“You mean I’m fired?!” said a rather incredulous Sam.

“Not fired. That’s so pre-NAFTA. You’ve been downsized.”

“Downsized?!”

“If you want, we can also say you’ve been outsourced. How about right-sized. That’s a nicer word. Would you prefer to be right-sized?”

By now, Sam was no longer meek. He no longer was willing to accept whatever he was told.

“The work will be shoddier,” said Sam. “There will be problems.”

“Of course there will be,” said the lady from HR. “That’s why we hired three Pakistani goat herders to solve customer complaints.”

“Our citizens won’t stand for this,” said a defiant Sam.

“As long as the product is cheaper, our people will gladly go to large non-union stores and buy whatever it is that we tell them to buy.”

And she was right.

[Walter Brasch is an award-winning journalist and former university professor. His latest book is the social issues mystery novel, Before the First Snow, available at amazon and other book dealers.]

At a time when President Barack Obama seems to have handled relatively well diverse foreign policy challenges, many inherited from his predecessor, his handling of the economic policy and the Wall Street have remained a big question mark. Obama’s continuing reliance on U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and kowtowing to the bankers, makes one wonder whether the President has learned his lessons.

All eyes are now on Noam Scheiber’s blockbuster book on the Obama economic team. Here’s a sneak preview of his forthcoming book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery. Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic and Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.

Excerpts: “Obama was finally shedding the caution of his first three years in office. Even before the deficit negotiations collapsed, he’d begun criticizing Republicans for their aversion to ‘shared sacrifice.’ He gave an impassioned speech about economic inequality and vowed to ensure that millionaires paid their fair share in taxes. ‘It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett,’ he famously said.

“For voters contemplating whether he deserves a second term, the question is less and less one of policy or even worldview than of basic disposition. Throughout his political career, Obama has displayed an uncanny knack for responding to existential threats. He sharpened his message against Hillary Clinton in late November 2007, just in time to salvage the Iowa caucuses and block her coronation. He condemned his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, just before Wright’s racialist comments could doom his presidential hopes. Once in office, Obama led two last-minute counteroffensives to save health care reform. But, in every case, the adjustments didn’t come until the crisis was already at hand. His initial approach was too passive and too accommodating, and he stuck with it far too long.

“Given the booby traps that await the next president—Iranian nukes, global financial turmoil—this habit seems dangerously risky. Sooner or later, Obama may encounter a crisis that can’t be reversed at the eleventh hour. Is Obama’s newfound boldness on the economy yet another last-minute course-correction? Or has he finally learned a deeper lesson? More than just a presidency may hinge on the answer.”

For the complete article published in The New Republic please see here…

Photo above courtesy http://www.escapeintolife.com/author/ADavis/

For a global business community still experiencing economic pain, Facebook’s humongous $100 billion Initial Public Offering has been an emotional shot in the arm. For French business newspaper Les Echos, columnist Philippe Escande praises the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as being at the heart of what still makes the American business sector the greatest in the world.

For Les Echos, Philippe Escande starts out this way:

It is an improbable story – one that could happen only in the United States. That of a twenty-year-old kid who in 2004 founded his own business just to prove he can, and eight years later finds himself the leader of a business valued at $100 billion. One hundred billion dollars is as much as McDonald’s and two and a half times that of General Motors. All this for a sophomoric prank that today employs no more than 3,000 people.

That is the magic of the U.S. financial sector, which is now being so widely criticized. To all those who think that the stock market serves only to accommodate rapacious speculators who enrich themselves while asleep, getting richer whether the market rises or falls, the Facebook story is a reminder of the two basics of investing: the long-term and risk. The long-term, because the value attributed to Facebook, the profits of which are minimal but the cost of doing business for which is still modest, is an anticipation of future performance. It is the idea that this company, which has quadrupled its revenues in two years, can in a single decade become a giant worth tens of billion of dollars. Which is precisely the gamble Amazon’s stockholders have made over the last ten years, and who are concerned about its weak returns but fascinated by the explosion in sales. For Facebook, as for Amazon and Google, growth potential seems unlimited.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR FRENCH AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

But in the comments section he goes too far:

As a matter of sheer economics, the gravy train in which low skill laborers could make fantastic livings in manufacturing was unsustainable. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and huge swaths of the country are finding it hard to make a decent living. Blaming that on the 1960s counterculture isn’t very helpful.

My response:

Why? Those “Low Skill Workers” may not have had a college education but that doesn’t mean they weren’t skilled. As an engineer I appreciated the skills of those “low Skilled” people I worked with. And what created the economic miracle that was the US in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It wasn’t the wealthy it was those “low skilled workers” that had money to spend. The wealthy don’t create jobs it’s those “low skilled workers” with money to spend that create jobs.

James is still a believer in supply side economics.  He is also guilty of thinking that only the college educated are skilled.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Speaking to CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien after his victory in the Florida Republican primary, Romney blurted out, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

Taken in context, the remark wasn’t quite what it seemed to be because the candidate, in another of his breathtaking flip-flops, said in the course of the interview that he was confident that the government safety net would take care of the poor and could be repaired if it doesn’t, which was a sharp reversal from his previous position and one at odds with conservative Republicans who carp endlessly about how undeserving the poor are of any government help.

Predictably and correctly, the news media, Democrats and many Republicans are painting Romney as out of touch (he made a similar remark in October), but they miss a larger point: The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are well taken care of and worse yet, that the welfare state is working just fine, thank you.

The facts are these:

The nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent (46.2 million) in 2010, up from 14.3 percent (43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. A large percentage of those millions are children, and people with annual incomes under $25,000 — some 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance.

The government’s definition of poverty is based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four. Most Americans (58.5 percent) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.

There certainly are welfare queens and others among these many millions who are too lazy to work, as well as people who receive government aid and spend assistance money not on food but drugs and other vices. But the vast majority are poor not by choice, and the government safety net is full of holes despite a welter of programs, including Medicaid, LIHEAP, Food Stamps, unemployment payments and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, all programs that many Republicans want to cut back or eliminate altogether.

On January 22, which is light years in the past considering Romney’s serial vacillations, he asserted that safety-net programs have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

Romney’s own tax plan probably would have a devastating impact on the safety net.

Under the plan, the Bush tax cuts and taxes on corporations, the wealthy, and upper-middle class investors would be sharply cut while tax breaks that help the poor would expire. The result, according to the Tax Policy Center, would be a $69 tax cut for the average individual in the bottom 20 percent and a $164,000 tax cut for the average individual in the top one percent to be paid for through unspecified cuts to domestic programs which mostly go to the poor and the elderly.

So we’ll take it on faith that Romney is not concerned about the poor but seems to be awfully concerned about the rich, no?

Are young people in America less stridently nationalistic than their predecessors? Columnist Fyodor Lukyanov of Russia’s Gazeta, citing recent Pew Research Center polling data, asserts in this detailed evaluation of U.S. public attitudes, that there is a declining tendency on the part of the U.S. population to believe in American exceptionalism, and concludes that U.S. foreign policy will be increasingly focused inward and toward the “near abroad” of Mexico and Latin America.

For Gazeta, Fyodor Lukyanov writes in part:

The age breakdown of answers to the question of American exceptionalism – measuring the assertion that the United States is the greatest country in the world – is interesting. The largest number of those who share this belief (64 percent) is among the oldest, the “Silent Generation,” (which reaches a height of 72 percent in the 76-83 age range). Baby-Boomers are split precisely in half, and among Generation X, only 48 percent are proponents of American exceptionalism, with the youngest – the Millennial Children, being the most skeptical – 32 percent. A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to the question of patriotism: Seventy percent of Millennium Children answer positively to the question of whether they consider themselves “very patriotic.” The remaining numbers range from 86 percent to 91 percent. Seventy percent is without a doubt high, but that level has fallen consistently since 2003, when 80 percent of young people felt the most patriotic.

In assessing the source of national success, the nation is united. The vast majority of Americans of all ages consider freedom to be the central source of this success, followed by hard work, natural resources, military strength, democratic governance, free markets, and religious and racial/ethnic diversity.

What is telling is the fact that the older groups tend to place more significance on military power than the younger, and the younger groups believe democracy and religion to be relatively less important.

Of course, these statistics don’t allow us to predict U.S. foreign policy for the next ten to twenty years. Especially since foreign policy is formulated by the ruling class, which even in a democracy isn’t guided by the will of the people. And yet, a trend is detectable.

Young people, who are now entering active public life and building careers, are distinguished by a greater openness, tolerance and a positive outlook. But at the same time, they have a declining tendency toward patriotic bravado and perceive the theme of American greatness more calmly and with far less pathos. Furthermore, a more positive attitude toward immigration is evidence of a sober evaluation of necessity.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR RUSSIAN AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.

The strongest case against judicial activism — against “legislating from the bench,” as former President George W. Bush liked to say — is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.

The Citizens United justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators, going back to the passage of the landmark Tillman Act in 1907, who sought to prevent untoward influence-peddling and indirect bribery.

If ever a court majority legislated from the bench (with Bush’s own appointees leading the way), it was the bunch that voted for Citizens United. Did a single justice in the majority even imagine a world of super PACs and phony corporations set up for the sole purpose of disguising a donor’s identity? Did they think that a presidential candidacy might be kept alive largely through the generosity of a Las Vegas gambling magnate with important financial interests in China? Did they consider that the democratizing gains made in the last presidential campaign through the rise of small online contributors might be wiped out by the brute force of millionaires and billionaires determined to have their way?

“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Those were Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words in his majority opinion. How did he know that? Did he consult the electorate? Did he think this would be true just because he said it?

Justice John Paul Stevens’ observation in his dissent reads far better than Kennedy’s in light of subsequent events. “A democracy cannot function effectively,” he wrote, “when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”

But ascribing an outrageous decision to naivete is actually the most sympathetic way of looking at what the court did in Citizens United. A more troubling interpretation is that a conservative majority knew exactly what it was doing: that it set out to remake our political system by fiat in order to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Seen this way, Citizens United was an attempt by five justices to push future electoral outcomes in a direction that would entrench their approach to governance.

In fact, this decision should be seen as part of a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system against their opponents. How else to explain conservative legislation in state after state to obstruct access to the ballot by lower-income voters — particularly members of minority groups — though voter identification laws, shortened voting periods and restrictions on voter registration campaigns? Conservatives are strengthening the hand of the rich at one end of the system and weakening the voting power of the poor at the other. It’s a clever set of moves if you can get away with them.

Those who doubt that Citizens United (combined, it must be said, with a comatose Federal Election Commission) has created an entirely new political world with far broader openings for corruption should consult important news reports last week by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo in The New York Times and by T.W. Farnam in The Washington Post. Both accounts show how American politics has become a bazaar for the very wealthy and for increasingly aggressive corporations. We might consider having candidates wear corporate logos. This would be more honest than pretending that tens of millions in cash will have no impact on how we will be governed.

In the short run, Congress should do all it can within the limits of Citizens United to contain the damage it is causing. In the long run, we have to hope that a future Supreme Court will overturn this monstrosity, remembering that the first words of our Constitution are “We the People,” not “We the Rich.”

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Via Zerohedge

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

The GOP: Preaching the Prosperity Gospel
by Tina Dupuy

One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society,” I think “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts — he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people, and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests — it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week, Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that — and if you created enough jobs doing that — it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash — it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid — they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Just look at this report by my friend Justin Ver Burg:

P.S. Ventriloquists aren’t the only ones looking for work. These days you see a lot of dummies clamoring for jobs, too (it’s election year).

WASHINGTON — I wish Mitt Romney’s cavalier dismissal of poverty in America could be chalked up as just another gaffe, but it’s much worse than that. The Republican front-runner seems dangerously clueless about the nation he seeks to lead.

When I first heard the now-famous quote — “I’m not concerned about the very poor” — I thought it might be fodder for a snarky column about the wee little Mr. Monopoly who lives inside Romney’s head and blurts out things like “Corporations are people, my friend,” or “I like being able to fire people.” But I realized that being “very poor” is no laughing matter to millions of Americans.

Putting Romney’s words in their full context makes them worse. Here is what he said on CNN:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

For my part, I’m concerned about what sounds like shocking ignorance about the extent of poverty in this country and an utter lack of urgency about finding solutions.

According to a U.S. Census Bureau report released in September, the poverty rate began rising sharply in 2007 as the recession took hold. By 2010, the report says, 15.1 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line — 46.2 million people who apparently do not merit Romney’s attention.

A substantial plurality of these poor people — about 20 million — are non-Hispanic whites. Roughly 13 million are Hispanic and nearly 11 million are African-American. These figures show that minorities are overrepresented among the poor, but also that poverty is by no means some kind of “minority problem.” It’s an American problem.

And even these numbers are somewhat misleading, since the official poverty threshold is set at a level that many researchers consider unrealistically low. Imagine supporting a family of four on $22,314 a year — food, shelter, clothing, transportation — and being told you’re not poor.

A better measure, in my view, is the number of American families getting by on incomes that equal the poverty level plus an additional 25 percent. By this standard, fully one-fifth of the nation is poor.

Romney says we have a safety net. That’s still true, despite the best efforts of his party to rip it to shreds.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the most important support for people living in poverty — the food stamps program — continues more or less unchanged. Let’s also assume that Romney, as president, manages to “fix” Medicaid and Social Security in a way that does not reduce the benefits they provide to poor people, and that Romney’s tax plan is altered so it does not raise taxes on the lowest earners, as many analysts say it would.

In Romney’s worldview, case closed. No need to be “concerned” about poverty as long as people are not starving.

What our society ought to be concerned about is making sure that poor people have the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Liberals and conservatives might disagree on how best to accomplish this goal. We can argue about the role government should play versus the private sector. We can dispute the merits of traditional public schools versus charter schools. What we cannot do is simply write off up to one-fifth of the nation’s human potential, as if it were a footnote in a corporation’s annual report.

I’m not blaming Romney for our decades-long failure to address structural poverty. The fact is that our system tends to award benefits to those who wield political and economic power. Romney was clumsily trying to pledge fealty to the interests of the middle class. President Obama, in speech after speech, has been doing the same.

But there was something disturbing about the icy way in which Romney, even when trying to clarify his initial remark, continued to insist that the poor receive government help and therefore need not be a focus of his policies. Even some conservative Republicans were taken aback, with Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., saying Romney should “backtrack” and make clear he does not want the poor to languish in “government dependency programs.”

DeMint suggested earlier that Romney take pains to show more empathy. I worry — and the nation should worry — that he can’t show what he doesn’t have.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com. (c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Warren Buffett’s complaint about his secretary paying more in taxes than he does is having a global ripple effect. According to columnist Helena Garrido of Portugal’s Jornal De Negotios, the debate on tax fairness in the United States should be food for thought in Portugal, where the economy is in a tailspin and thanks to widespread tax evasion and tax avoidance, tax revenue has plummeted.

For the Jornal De Negotios, Helena Garrido writes in part:

The question that small enterprises raise about the recent tax control initiative is always the same: what about the others? Why have tax administrators limited the tax planning that larger enterprises have to deal with? In an environment of austerity, it is a problem that concerns most Western societies: the lack of equity.

In the United States, where the debate about tax fairness is red hot, tax inequality is in the public square. Even before this major crisis hit in 2007, it was reported that Warren Buffett pays lower taxes than his secretary, whom Barack Obama has transformed into a symbol of fiscal inequality. Last week, the most serious Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was obliged to disclose his tax returns, which showed that his effective tax rate was 13.9 percent in 2010 – on an income of $42 million.

What would we discover if we found out how much in taxes larger fortunes in Portugal pay?

Of course the battle against tax evasion must be a cause of the whole of society. Each of us must be aware that for every person who fails to pay their taxes, there is someone else who has to pay double. But for that, one would need to know that the tax authorities treat everyone the same and have effective weapons at their disposal.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR PORTUGUESE AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

After spending all that money to win Florida big, the $21.7 million-a-year man takes a victory lap and disgorges a perfect line for attack ads on him in the future.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” he tells CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Must be some kind of esoteric Bain math, where you add 95 and 1, leaving room for the U.S. Census latest estimate of 15.1 percent of Americans living in poverty.

Asked about the poor, Romney writes them off at the ballot box as Bain would a bad investment:

“The challenge right now–we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor.?.?.we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

Obama’s people will be counting on Romney’s tin ear for income disparity to keep providing spontaneous proof that, despite all the pandering, he is more comfortable in a world of gated communities and tax avoidance.

In dirt-poor South Carolina, he kept saying “I’m concerned about the poor in this country,” but that didn’t go over too well…

MORE.

The copyrighted cartoon above is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

One day after his massive — and massively purchased – victory over chief rival for the 2012 Republican nomination former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Florida, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney cut short the positive news spin on his victory by making a gaffe that is a Chistmas, Hanuka, Kwanza, Easter, Birthday gift to Democrats: a gaffe fitting right into the narrative Democrats hope to roll out to voters of Romney as a rich, out of touch, country club Republican. To Democrats, Romney may be more than just the 2012 Republican Party nominee: he may be the gift that keeps on giving.

Here’s the quote:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich; they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Here’s the video of his potentially damaging interview on CNN:

Gingrich pounced on Romney’s comments:

How bad was this gaffe? The Washington Post:

Just two weeks ago, Romney appeared to have shifted on the social safety net, saying in South Carolina, “I’m concerned about the poor in this country.” But on Wednesday, he took a different tack.

In any political campaign, he said, “you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich — that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor — that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.”

Romney’s difficulty connecting to Americans’ economic troubles — combined with his own extraordinary wealth — will be a major focus of the Obama campaign, if Romney is the Republican nominee.

Update: “President Obama has destroyed the middle class,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded in a statement. “We look forward debating President Obama on how his policies have failed the middle class.” Romney himself argued on the campaign trail that he was taken out of context.

Sen. Jim DeMint said Wednesday afternoon that Romney needed to address his remarks and “backtrack.”

“I know he does care about the poor,” DeMint told Roll Call. “But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs.”

Why is this bad for Romney:

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what some other journalists and pundits are saying:
–Jonathan Chait:

Why does Romney say this? He wants to inoculate himself from the charge that his program would disproportionately help the rich. (A charge that happens to be true, but never mind that, either.) But disclaiming any intention of helping the rich is dangerous stuff in a Republican primary. So he has to balance it off by disclaiming any intention of helping the poor, either. The rich and poor — both doing great! (Also, Romney will be sure that neither rich nor poor are permitted to sleep under bridges.)

The positive side of this is that Romney is not singling out the poor as parasites, in the classic tradition of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”, Phil Gramm’s welfare wagon, or countless others. Romney’s profession of indifference to the poor is a relatively decent sentiment in the context of modern conservatism. On the other hand, the idea that the middle class and not the poor is “hurting the most” is utterly absurd. It’s also worth noting that his budget proposal would require enormous cuts in programs for low-income people.

It may not be true that, at a personal level, Romney doesn’t care about the poor. He probably does. But his platform doesn’t. In that sense, his slip-up was a gaffe in the classic sense of admitting what he actually thinks.

–The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg:

As a bunch of us have been writing around here for a while, the under-emphasized dynamic in this race isn’t that Romney isn’t conservative enough (though that’s obviously a real concern out there) it’s that he’s simply not a good enough politician. He may be the most electable on paper. He’s certainly a nice guy, decent father, smart, successful etc. But, every time he seems to get into his groove and pull away he says things that make people think he doesn’t know how to play the game. That can be reassuring to some, who take it as proof he’s not another politician. The problem, for others at least, is that because he isn’t a natural politician he breaks the language where it needs to bend. He uses language — “I like to fire people!” “It’s nothing to get angry about” etc — that doesn’t make him seem like an unconventional politician. Rather his language makes him seem like a caricature of a conventionally stiff country club Republican.

A case in point, here he is this morning talking about how he’s “not very concerned about the very poor” (video here). I get the point he’s making. It’s a point that Bill Clinton won the presidency with — but with language that attracted voters. Romney’s language won’t do anything of the sort. And the concern is, after nearly a decade of running for president, if he can’t get this stuff down now he never will.

–John Avlon:

As if to prove the point that this nomination race is far from over, Mitt Romney took to the airwaves Wednesday morning and promptly stepped on his lip…..

….This set off a predictable firestorm within minutes. It resonated because it seemed to perfectly capture the unfair caricature of Romney as a distant, out-of-touch plutocrat—not just Mr. 1 percent, but Mr. 0.1 percent. And whenever a quote riffs off established narratives, it quickly takes on a life of its own.

…..Never forget the scarring impact a father’s stumbles can have on a son. Mitt’s father, George Romney, was an enormously admirable man and governor of Michigan, one of the last leaders of the progressive wing of the Republican Party. But when he ran for president in 1968, he was famously loose-lipped, slipping into malapropisms that required constant clarification. His campaign was ultimately—infamously and unfairly—sunk when he said he’d been “brain-washed” by the military on a trip to Vietnam. It seems that the son has over-learned the lessons of his father’s failures.

Mitt Romney is the opposite of loose-lipped. He is highly disciplined and scripted to the point of seeming robotic. His avoidance of press conferences in this campaign is an attempt to avoid misstatements just like this, which he fears will come back to haunt him.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor” will enter the political lexicon as an instant classic, alongside $10,000 bets and corporations being people. They all riff off the same core stereotypes, which will make it harder for Mitt Romney to connect with the middle class. That’s why this morning’s misstatement will leave a lasting mark.

–Michelle Malkin:

Romney looks tired here in this CNN interview this morning. Too much post-primary partying, I guess. But it’s exactly the time he needs to be on guard and on his A-game. Instead, he fumbles the post-Florida football and gives ammunition to all of his opponents on both sides of the aisle by reinforcing the perception and reality that he is gobsmackingly out-of-touch. This could easily have been a Saturday Night Live parody.

-Red State’s Eric Erickson in a post titled “The National Review’s Candidate Won’t Stop Digging”:

. So much for the GOP condemning class warfare. Romney’s folks are going with it too. Where Obama goes for “fair shares”, Romney wants to focus only on those hurt “most.”

But the coup de grace came late today when, to mitigate the damage, Romney reminded everyone he supports automatic hikes in the minimum wage — a truly conservative position.

The National Review sure does know how to pick them. Glad they’ll be defending him in the general. I’m not sure I’ll waste my time. Sure, I’ll vote for him. But I think I’ll focus on House and Senate races so when the buyers remorse sets in on those who backed Romney we’re not completely screwed down ballot.

Some Tweets by Andy Borowitz:

BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz
Romney: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. They’re all working at my house.”
2 hours ago
Andy Borowitz
BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz
Romney: “I misspoke before. The reason I don’t care about the poor is because they’re ugly.”
3 hours ago
Andy Borowitz
BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz
When Mitt Romney says what he believes it never ends well.
3 hours ago
Andy Borowitz
BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz
BREAKING: Romney Proposes Letting Poor People Eat Cake
5 hours ago

–Charles Johnson:

Obviously, Romney isn’t really saying that he doesn’t care about people living in poverty; he’s arguing that a social safety net exists that can take care of them.

But to phrase it like this, after all the criticism of his immense wealth, shows someone who’s incredibly out of touch — and at the very least, insensitive….

…Romney is infamous for the blatant dishonesty of his campaign ads; for example, his very first ad featured a deliberately out-of-context quote from President Obama. And when called on it, Romney’s staff refused to retract the ad, gloated instead that it had “worked.”

With this gaffe today, Romney can only hope that his opponents behave more ethically than he does.

–Ed Kilgore:

Now like everyone in politics, Mitt knows “the very poor” don’t tend to vote in big numbers, and when they do, they tend to vote Democratic. He also knows a lot of people who are objectively poor like to think of themselves as middle-class. And on top of that, he knows that the fidelity of his party to the interests of middle-class Americans is perpetually suspect.

But Mitt, Mitt, you don’t say these things out loud. Indeed, as your consultants will tell you when they stop gnashing their teeth at this remark, Republicans are supposed to respond to any question about the distributional effects of their policies by intoning “class warfare” and changing the subject.

It’s this tone-deafness that makes a lot of Republicans nervous about Mitt Romney as a general-election candidate. He often simply forgets which memo to bring up in his memory banks when he’s on the spot. This time, it was the polling memo, and that was a mistake.

Greece might finally start to pull away from its woes in the next few days because of a likely deal with its creditors to roll over at least €200 billion of government debt. That would make it easier for a second tranche of €130 billion to come in later this year.

But Greece’s economic problems are far from over. They hang like a Damocles sword over the Eurozone that includes all large European countries except Britain. The sword’s edge is the severe austerity program imposed on Greece by Germany, the only major player with a still strong economy although its prospects, too, have chilled slightly for 2012.

Germany’s Angela Merkel emerged as the economic queen of Europe this week, when she pushed through a new treaty to impose draconian budget discipline on all 27 European Union countries, except Britain and the Czech Republic. France’s Nicholas Sarkozy is in but was shoved back to second chair.

The treaty could take five years to jump the various hoops of European legislative processes. But a lament is already sighing in Brussels that the pact makes Keynesian style economics illegal, including bailouts and deficit spending for the public good. Some see new dangers because of this.

Whatever the later outcomes, news of the likely Greek accord and the somewhat vague Brussels pact have reduced jitters on the markets. There is cautious optimism that Southern European governments might get a long enough breathing space to push away prospects of default on debt and start restructuring to restore economic growth.

One reason for this positive note is that Greece seems to be winning its war with creditors with Merkel’s help. She has been adamant that creditors must take a haircut to share the cost of bailouts with tax payers and share the pain of those forced into austerity. Lenders made bad decisions when they overloaded Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland with debt. They are also partly responsible for the ignominy of lowered credit ratings, suffered even by France.

Lenders fought back with barrels blazing. But they are now constrained to take a 50 per cent drop in the value of their loans to Greece plus a drop of as much as three per cent in returns compared with the past 18 months. The rescheduling would be done at little less than four percent, down from over five per cent and more.

This bitter pill is being swallowed partly because Merkel has given in on another front. She was absolutely opposed to the European Central Bank acting like a lender of last resort to all 17 Eurozone members, similarly to what the Federal Reserve does for all the American States. The Fed actually prints money to provide liquidity. The ECB cannot print money but has used a couple of other ruses to provide almost unlimited credit to Eurozone banks for three to 10 years.

This has injected stability into Europe’s financial system by providing a psychological floor to the jitters of investors and improved the atmosphere for a Greek agreement in coming days and follow up to this week’s Brussels pact. It gave the signal that the EU and its component Eurozone are moving towards fiscal harmonization over time similar to a fiscal and economic union that would override national laws.

There could be many a slip twixt cup and lip but success can no longer be ruled out. A €500 billion European fund will enter into force in July, a year earlier than planned, to help heavily indebted members. At a European summit in March, it could be melded into another fund, making up to one trillion euro available for government bailouts. Another half trillion may become available through the International Monetary Fund, including money from non-European countries that fear excessive financial instability in Europe.

Absent new shocks to the global financial system, alleviation of the Euro crisis would help the world economy to mend led by mild recovery in the US, recession avoided in Europe, powerhouse growth in China and a return to growth in India.

Photo via cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com

In this case, Amazon wants to protect its bundled product, the Kindle. The Kindle is to Amazon as Office or MSIE are to Microsoft, extensions of an infrastructure franchise. Over at Google, it’s two pronged: Google+ and Android. At Apple, it’s the iTunes ecosystem.

Two of those businesses – Google and Amazon – engineered their dominance in part through the use of APIs, providing free access to their data in order to propagate their services (and brands). Now that they are super-major players, they are rethinking (restricting access to) those same APIs. The result is pissing off developers (Google’s changes in free services) and causing partners to bail (Goodreads and Amazon). In both cases, the alternatives are not straightforward or 100% substitutable. The result is friction of the economic kind and a diminished marketplace for consumers.

This is not what tech-opia envisioned.

But it is the nature of digital goods, which are more like public goods than retail goods made of atoms. Digital goods also have network effects which lead to a winner-take-all market structure.

Public goods, like software and information, have high fixed costs and really low marginal costs. This means the cost of creation is wrapped up in the first product sold. Everything else? Marginal costs of replication and distribution, which are (relatively) low. In the case of digital goods, approaching zero low.

Public goods are non-rival. You and I can both “own” the good at the same time, without duking it out to see who gets to drink a single bottle of, for example. This means we can both buy a Kindle book without any impact on a warehouse and only marginal impact on Amazon’s server farm.

And they are non-excludable. The owner has a hard time making everyone pay because copies are perfect and easily created; DRM is the attempt to make digital goods act more like non-digital ones. This is the principle underlying SOPA and PIPA and ACTA (and all the laws that came before).

The firms that supply public goods — such as water, sewer, electricity, telephone infrastructure (wires), cable (wires) — have historically been regulated because, contrary to common mantra, society is better off when there is only one set of expensive infrastructure : not 10 cable companies digging up the streets in NYC but none interested in Ellesnburg WA (because the population density is insufficient). Hence the term, regulated monopoly.

Compete, instead, on providing services over that infrastructure. We got used to this system when alternatives to AT&T’s long distance service were finally available. And the cost of long distance calls plummeted.

Alternatively, citizens decide to supply some services themselves — like fire departments, armies, roads and lighthouses — through their governments. Sometimes ROI isn’t the right measure.

Am I arguing that the government should run Amazon or Google? No. But I am pointing out — arguing — that the nature of digital goods is different. The economics are different. Laissez faire works best when markets are perfect; these markets clearly are not.[1]

The question is what form of regulation/oversight should citizens demand, not whether there should be any. Prohibiting/regulating bundling as a way to extend reach might be a good step. It sure would have been a smart move in the finance sector, now wouldn’t it? [2]

[1] See Adam Smith, not American political rhetoric. Smith abhorred monopolies.

[2] See repeal of Glass-Steagall and other legislation/regulation that allowed banks to bundle services under one shell, erh roof.

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