This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close

By Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone Magazine
 26 September 12

The press everywhere is buzzing this week with premature obituaries of the Romney campaign.

New polls are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to the presidency is all but blocked. Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama's widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That's left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger.

Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn't come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out somehow. Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful, insightful editorial today that blames the painful, repetitive and vacuous campaign process for thinning the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons and demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain: READ MORE

Mr. Davidson's Planet: NPR/NYT Guru Adam Davidson's Discredited Economic Principles

Adam Davidson's economic principles are alien to a just and prosperous society.

January 12, 2012

You’d be hard-pressed to find a discipline that shapes our world more than economics, and yet none has weaker foundations or more misguided evangelists. The rise of economic guru du jour Adam Davidson, the co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money” and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, is perhaps one of the most disturbing illustrations of this unfortunate fact.

The Curious Field of Economics

Not too long ago, I asked Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz how many economists he met still adhered to the Chicago School free market approach, otherwise known as Neoliberal economics, that was proven to be severely flawed by the recent economic crash.

“About 60 percent,” said Stiglitz.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“For the most simple human reason of all,” Stiglitz told me. “People don’t like to admit that they’re wrong.”

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This is where giving money to "Job Creators" goes wrong!

This is where we go wrong.  Believing that the industrial age brought goods and services.  It didn't!  What goods and services could any industry bring anyone,  if no one could afford them?  Henry Ford made cars because he hoped he could find a market for them,  not just by selling them to people who could afford them,  but by making the cars cheaply enough so that more people could afford them.

Before Henry Ford set up his assembly line production methods,  people were making cars,  but since only the wealthy could afford them,  they would not make very many.  Part of the high cost of owning a car was,  because there were so many "proprietary" models,  you could only get parts from your cars maker,  who owned the specifications and knowledge needed to make repairs to their product.  So they could charge whatever they wanted and you had no choice but to pay.  Henry Ford,  not only standardized the parts,  he also raised his employee's wages,  to make them his customers and a sales force of sorts as well.

Republicans want you to think that someone,  anyone,  can simply create a new product and presto the jobs appear.  How many new products,  over the years,  have been created,  for which no market could be found?  Or which no market would support?  Scads!  The products either cost too much to find a wide enough market,  or ran up against competition from people who were able to produce it cheaply enough,  to find wide market acceptance. 

Betamax was superior to VHS,  but the makers refused to lower their prices,  to where the average person could afford it.  So,  the lesser VHS,  came in cheaper and was snapped up by the masses.  The producers of movies and shows saw the VHS market swelling,  while the Betamax market was slow and stagnant,  so they began producing movies and shows in VHS format.   By the time Betamax decided to lower their prices,  few if any users owned any of their machines.  So there was less produced to play on that format.  Mostly they'd sold Betamax to producers who needed their higher quality for production.   Unfortunately these "rich" consumers,  weren't enough to support mass marketing of the Betamax machines,  so they went out of business,  creating no new jobs,  and in fact costing many people their jobs.

This is where we are today with our entire market.  New products are few,  because consumers who can afford them are few.  In fact,  many products that already had a wide market,  are too expensive now that so many people have lost their jobs,  so the products have lost their market.   When you have to front millions of dollars to bring a new product to market,  you'd better be sure that there are millions of consumers clamoring for it.  If not,  you'll soon be bankrupt,  even while millions of people stand,  looking in store windows,  wishing they had the bucks to buy it if they could.  If these big mfg's lose money they've borrowed from banks,  then the banks must tighten their lending.  That means more lost jobs all around.

So,  as you can see,  new products alone don't create new jobs and may take jobs away!  Keep giving money to "job creators" who have no market and you're just wasting your money!  Sure,  they'll bring new products to market,  but with only the 1% able to afford them,  they'll soon be filing for bankruptcy,  costing their bankers and investors money and forcing them to tighten up on new lending.  Which puts existing jobs at risk.