Republican Convention Crap

[theFrey]

A little something to clear up any confusion from the opening of the RNC.

[quote]August 30, 2004

USWA Says Bush [size=18]Misleads[/size] Voters by Citing Endorsement from individuals of independent West Virginia Union

Kerry Enjoys Overwhelming Support of Steelworkers Nationwide

(Pittsburgh, PA) – The United Steelworkers of America (USWA) solidly supports John Kerry for President says USWA International president Leo W. Gerard, responding to a Bush campaign rally where the President was accompanied by a few steelworkers proclaiming support for the Bush Administration. The USWA represents more than 1.2 million active and retired members.

Gerard said that the handful of workers supporting Bush are members of the Independent Steelworkers Union (ISU), an organization of 4,000 workers employed by Weirton Steel in Weirton, West Virginia. The ISU, however, following the lead of the USWA supports the candidacy of John Kerry.

• Members and retirees of both unions have suffered major hardships during the current Bush Administration:

• More than 1,500 ISU members have lost their jobs since Bush took office

• More than 9,000 ISU and 250,000 USWA retirees have lost health care benefits, and had pensions cut since Bush took office

• More than 350 ISU members are now on layoff.

“While we respect the right of any individual to express a viewpoint anytime, the opinions of a handful in this case do not reflect the views of hundreds of thousands of active and retired steelworkers who have been severely hurt during the Bush Administration,” said Gerard.

“Unfortunately, this campaign event by the Bush team has prompted an angry reaction by many our members,” added Gerard. “It’s just another reminder how this President plays foot-loose and fancy-free with the truth.”

In addition to bowing to pressure from the European Union unions to end the tariffs, the Bush Administration also resisted the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee program, which only proved successful due to the tireless efforts of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) The actions by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation has also preemptively taken over pensions of facilities in the Ohio Valley, significantly reducing benefits and undercutting steel industry consolidation efforts.[/quote]

Bush mislead people??? What are the odds? Heavens to Betsy! I am sure it was just a great big ol’ misunderstanding. I am sure the fact that that man had on a shirt that only said Steelworkers and had nothing else visible to denote his little splinter group was pure chance.

*theFrey scans the skys for those pesky flying donkeys*

[lizard]

Well, I have been spared the morbid fascination of watching the convention, because I have not had television since the cable went out during that last hurricane (ok, tropical storm) that hit us in SC on last sunday morning.

I enjoyed seeing pics and reading about the massive protest march in Salon Mag. and the NYTimes. Perhaps it is better this way, cable news is soooo “Fox news” that it makes me foam a bit at the mouth.

[theFrey]

Yesterday at the RNC they called Michael Moore a ‘disengenous’ film maker.

Today’s theme at the RNC was ‘the compassionate party.’ 😆

Helllllllllooooo, reality check here. On what planet has the Bush adminstration shown compassion?

Oh, my bad…. I forgot about all the compassion they lavish on big corporations. Silly me, when I think about compassion I keep forgetting that multibillion dollar companies and overpaid CEO’s need love too. 😛

[lizard]

I read Micheal Moore’s piece in USA today, and it is quite well mannered. But it must be weird for him to attend a convention where he is the focus of some of the vitrol.

But the more that the republicans focus on the evils of hollywood and documentary film makers the more wacky and out of touch they seem with the very real problems that people have. Remember the republican convention in texas that did in George senior??? That was hilarious! Alot of zealots with odd facial hair ranting about Woody Allen (who wasn’t running for anything) the whole time.

[Headgehog]

[quote=”lizard”]Perhaps it is better this way, cable news is soooo “Fox news” that it makes me foam a bit at the mouth.[/quote]

Try [i]The Daily Show with Jon Stewart[/i] on Comedy Central. It has the same amount of legitimate news as FOX, and it’s supposed to be humourous! Oh yeah, and it is actually impartial as it mocks everyone equally.

[theFrey]

Molly Ivins, noted political humorist, has stated that the ability to see both sides may well be the downfall of the democratic party.

Think about it, how often have you ever, ever, ever heard your average ardent republican admit to party fault?

Oh, and for the record, I am a democrat some years and an independent some years, and only ONCE was I a republican supporter and that was before I could legally vote. But…. that is because, I look at the issues and do not blindly follow any party line.

Right now I am in bed with the democrats because they are the only bright spot on the Labor horizon…. they aren’t always, but they are never as bad as the republicans.

[Anonymous]

You’ll enjoy this:

[url=http://homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/dsbush.html]GWB: Words Not Action[/url]

elmey

[theFrey]

I saw several of these Republicans for Voldemort t-shirts at Dragon Con. Oh, and I wore my Kerry badge into the dealers room and was offtered discounts at several tables. Truth. Ask Mike, he was with me. 😀

[url]http://www.goats.com/store/images/rfv_preview.gif[/url]

[url]http://www.goats.com/comix/0308/goats030808.gif[/url]

[Anonymous]

Hell let’s just use some recent ones, since this list could get awfully long if I went back further than a month or two.

“Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYN’s aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”—Sept. 6, 2004, Poplar Bluff, Mo.

“That’s why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental—supplemental funding, which is money for armor and body parts and ammunition and fuel.”—Erie, Pa., Sept. 4, 2004

“They’ve seen me make decisions, they’ve seen me under trying times, they’ve seen me weep, they’ve seen me laugh, they’ve seen me hug. And they know who I am, and I believe they’re comfortable with the fact that they know I’m not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups.” —Interview with USA Today, Aug. 27, 2004

“I didn’t join the International Criminal Court because I don’t want to put our troops in the hands of prosecutors from other nations. Look, if somebody has done some wrong in our military, we’ll take care of it. We got plenty of capability of dealing with justice.”—Niceville, Fla., Aug. 10, 2004

“So community colleges are accessible, they’re available, they’re affordable, and their curriculums don’t get stuck. In other words, if there’s a need for a certain kind of worker, I presume your curriculums evolved over time.”—Niceville, Fla., Aug. 10, 2004

And Cheney this week became a Terrorist when he informed the USA that if Kerry is elected, we will get attacked far worse than 9/11

[theFrey]

2) Chances are if you have taken introductory economics in college,
you have either used the textbook written by Paul Samuelson or are familiar with his work to some degree.

The New York Times reports today that Samuelson, 89, has written an article questioning whether outsourcing of jobs can be a net plus to the U.S. even on economic terms. The crux of his argument is that in areas in which Americans have enjoyed an economic edge, it is highly doubtful that the export of jobs will lead to
compensating incoming economic activity. Samuelson also calls for
more help for those who are left behind in this changing economy:

September 9, 2004
An Elder Challenges Outsourcing’s Orthodoxy
By STEVE LOHR

At 89, Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and
professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
still seems to have plenty of intellectual edge and the ability to
antagonize and amuse.

His dissent from the mainstream economic consensus about
outsourcing and globalization will appear later this month in a
distinguished journal, cloaked in clever phrases and theoretical
equations, but clearly aimed at the orthodoxy within his
profession: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve; N.
Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic
Advisers; and Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading international
economist and professor at Columbia University.

These heavyweights, among others, are perpetrators of what Mr.
Samuelson terms “the popular polemical untruth.”

Popular among economists, that is. That untruth, Mr. Samuelson
asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is
the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of
international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of
call-center and software programming jobs.

Sure, Mr. Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that “the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers.”

That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is “only an
innuendo,” Mr. Samuelson writes. “For it is dead wrong about
necessary surplus of winnings over losings.”

Trade, in other words, may not always work to the advantage of the American economy, according to Mr. Samuelson.

In an interview last week, Mr. Samuelson said he wrote the article
to “set the record straight” because “the mainstream defenses of
globalization were much too simple a statement of the problem.” Mr. Samuelson, who calls himself a “centrist Democrat,” said his
analysis did not come with a recipe of policy steps, and he
emphasized that it was not meant as a justification for
protectionist measures.

Up to now, he said, the gains to America have outweighed the losses from trade, but that outcome is not necessarily guaranteed in the future.

In his article, Mr. Samuelson begins by noting the unease many
Americans feel about their jobs and wages these days, especially as the economies of China and India emerge on the strength of their low wages, increasingly skilled workers and rising technological prowess. “This is a hot issue now, and in the coming decade, it will not go away,” he writes.

The essay is Mr. Samuelson’s effort to contribute economic nuance
to the policy debate over outsourcing and trade. The Journal of
Economic Perspectives, a quarterly published by the American
Economic Association, has a modest circulation of 21,000 but it is
influential in the field.

Indeed, Mr. Bhagwati and two colleagues, Arvind Panagariya, an
economics professor at Columbia, and T. N. Srinivasan, a professor
of economics at Yale University, have already submitted an article
to the journal that is partly a response to Mr. Samuelson. Theirs
is titled “The Muddles Over Outsourcing.”

The Samuelson critique carries added weight given the stature of
the author. “He invented so many of the economic models that
everyone uses,” noted Timothy Taylor, managing editor of the
Journal of Economic Perspectives.

For generations of undergraduates, starting in 1948, the study of
economics has meant a Samuelson textbook, now in its 18th edition, with William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, as a co-author since the 12th edition. Because he has taught at M.I.T. for six decades, the elite ranks of the economics profession are filled with Mr. Samuelson’s former students, including Mr. Bhagwati and Mr. Mankiw.

According to Mr. Samuelson, a low-wage nation that is rapidly
improving its technology, like India or China, has the potential to
change the terms of trade with America in fields like call-center
services or computer programming in ways that reduce per-capita
income in the United States. “The new labor-market-clearing real
wage has been lowered by this version of dynamic fair free trade,”
Mr. Samuelson writes.

But doesn’t purchasing cheaper call-center or programming services
from abroad reduce input costs for various industries, delivering a
net benefit to the economy? Not necessarily, Mr. Samuelson replied.
To put things in simplified terms, he explained in the interview,
“being able to purchase groceries 20 percent cheaper at Wal-Mart
does not necessarily make up for the wage losses.”

The global spread of lower-cost computing and Internet
communications breaks down the old geographic boundaries between labor markets, he noted, and could accelerate the pressure on wages across large swaths of the service economy. “If you don’t believe that changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the tooth fairy,” Mr. Samuelson said.

His article, Mr. Samuelson added, is not a refutation of David
Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage, the Magna Carta of international economics that says free trade allows economies to
benefit from the efficiencies of global specialization. Mr.
Samuelson said he was merely “interpreting fully and correctly
Ricardoian comparative advantage theory.” That interpretation, he
insists, includes some “important qualifications” to the arguments
of globalization’s cheerleaders.

Those qualifications are not new to Mr. Samuelson. He noted that in
a different context, he touched on similar matters as far back as
1972 in a lecture he delivered shortly after he won his Nobel
Prize, titled “International Trade for a Rich Country.”

For his part, Mr. Bhagwati does not dispute the model that Mr.
Samuelson presents in his article. “Paul is a great economist and a
terrific theorist,” he said. “And in markets like information
technology services, where America has a big advantage, it is true
that if skills build up abroad, that narrows our competitive
advantage and our exports will be hit.”

But Mr. Bhagwati, the author of “In Defense of Globalization”
(Oxford University Press, 2004), says he doubts whether the
Samuelson model applies broadly to the economy. “Paul and I
disagree only on the realistic aspects of this,” he said.

The magnified concern, Mr. Bhagwati said, is that China will take
away most of American manufacturing and India will take away the
high-technology services business. Looking at the small number of
jobs actually sent abroad, and based on his own knowledge of
developing nations, he concludes that outsourcing worries are
greatly exaggerated.

As an example, Mr. Bhagwati pointed to the often-repeated estimates that, because of the Internet, as many as 300 million well-educated workers, mostly from India and China, could now enter the global work force and compete with Americans for skilled jobs.

In their paper, Mr. Bhagwati and his co-authors write that such an
assessment of the education systems of India and China “almost
borders on the ludicrous.” In an interview, Mr. Bhagwati said, “You
have a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean they are qualified.
That sort of thinking is really generalizing based on the kind of
Indian and Chinese people who manage to make it to Silicon Valley.”

The Samuelson model, Mr. Bhagwati said, yields net economic losses only when foreign nations are closing the innovation gap with the United States.

“But we can change the terms of trade by moving up the technology ladder,” he said. “The U.S. is a reasonably flexible, dynamic, innovative society. That’s why I’m optimistic.”

The policy implications, he added, include increased investment in
science, research and education. And Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs.

“You need more temporary protection for the losers,” Mr. Samuelson said. “My belief is that every good cause is worth some
inefficiency.”

[Author]

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