Roldo Bartimole writes:

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory,” said the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
This seems so appropriate for Cleveland this week.

The city levies taxes without really knowing the consequences. Or caring.

They levy taxes without a vote. For hundreds of millions of dollars.

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

The brouhaha over the city’s admission tax that damages small entertainment outlets is a good example. It’s a small tax. With penalties and interest it can add up – in at least one instance – to $400,000. Mayor Jackson’s administration came up with that figure for the Beachland Ballroom, a hand-to-mouth small business.

Jackson needs the money to help another business – the Browns and billionaire owner Randy Lerner. Sounds unfair to me.
Back when the city wanted to build a stadium for the Cleveland Browns it seemed an easy tax to pass for City Council. Who could it hurt? Isn’t it just a matter of pennies?

No. Big dollars, it turns out.

The Council passed a two-cent increase on an already high tax of 6 percent admissions tax. For the Browns.

The added tax goes to pay for bonds on the money-losing stadium.

How much? $1.2 million a year was the estimate. A total of $36 million over the term legislated. To insure bondholders of the city’s responsibility the legislation also called for ALL the city’s admission tax to be available if needed. Or $159 million Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Plain Dealer columnist Mark Naymik did us a great service in alerting us to the damage being done to our parks. The city of Cleveland unloaded a number of parks to the state in the late 1970s.

I fear the paper may be going in the wrong direction now. Toward a quick solution. The wrong one.

The task should be to force the State of Ohio to do the job it promised to do when it took the parkland from the city. And that was to operate them efficiently and to the benefit of citizens of northeast Ohio. No more, no less.

There should be no excuses as to why Ohio cannot do the job.

The administration of Gov. John Kasich is fluffing off too many tasks that are the state responsibilities at the same time diverting revenue from local communities. This is a plan for disaster. Ask Californians.

The state has more access to money than the city or Cuyahoga County.

The parks can be used by all Ohioans. They are a state asset.

They should be a treasure for the state.

No excuse should be allowed to alter the fact that Continue Reading »

Venkatesh Rao wrote:

For quite a while now, I have been looking for the right set of frames to get me started on understanding geopolitics and globalization. For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things. On the face of it, this seems reasonable. Nominally, nation-states subsume economic activity, with even the most powerful multi-national corporations being merely secondary organizing schemes for the world.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization. As a result, this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts, but I won’t be reviewing them. So if you want to follow the arguments more closely, you may want to read some or all of these. The investment is definitely worthwhile.

The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins, a history of the East India Company, a rather unique original prototype of the idea

Monsoon by Robert Kaplan, an examination of the re-emergence of the Indian Ocean as the primary theater of global geopolitics in the 21st century

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783 by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a classic examination of how naval power is the most critical link between political, cultural, military and business forces.

The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, an examination of the structure of the world being created, not by the decline of America, but by the “rise of the rest.”

The Lever of Riches by Joel Mokyr, probably the most compelling model and account of how technological change drives the evolution of civilizations, through monotonic, path-dependent accumulation of changes

I didn’t settle on these five lightly. I must have browsed or partly-read-and-abandoned dozens of books about modernity and globalization before settling on these as the ones that collectively provided the best framing of the themes that intrigued me. If I were to teach a 101 course on the subject, I’d start with these as required reading in the first 8 weeks.

I have been curious as to whether or not members of the various Tea Party factions have an understanding of the events of 16 December 1773 beyond the Walt Disney version?

Do they know that this was an anti-corporate, not an anti-government action?

Probably not.

I need to incorporate more of Vi Hart’s fun into my math tutoring…

Matt Taibbi wrote:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

Have any of my readers engaged in a fruitful discussions with the willfully ignorant?

0531: The City By Derf

0510: Flash mob plays Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

For Writes Like She Talks…

A Buddhist contribution to global ethics is different from both of these. It is based on observing and understanding the world with mindfulness, concentration and insight. It begins with an awareness of the nonduality of subject and object, and the interconnectedness of all things. p. 2

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Instead of making general plans to reduce calories, you make highly specific plans for automatic behavior [implementation intentions] in certain circumstances, like what to do when you’re tempted by fattening food at a party. An implementation intention take the form of if-then: if x happens, then I will do y. The more you use this technique to transfer control of your behavior to automatic processes, the less effort you will expend. p 229

[For instance, I might make implementation intentions such as: if I am watching any video, then I will not eat; if there is a buffet at a party, then I will not eat in the room where the buffet is; if there are bowls of food at a party, then I will sit as far away from the bowls as possible. JH]

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Esquire’s Tom Junod on Russia Today’s Alyona Show to talk about The Lethal Presidency.

My hometown and Cincinnati both end up in the left and right leg holes. Go figure…

Matt Taibbi writes:

Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting “free stuff” post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

Via Mano Singham…

I left Mano a comment sharing two personal, and quite possibly apocryphal tales regarding radars.

The Catch-22 of dieting: In order to not to eat, a dieter needs willpower and in order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat. p. 226.

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Republican Willard Mitt Romeny, of course, spoke at the NAACP under the cover of the African Americans he brought with him.

[Updated @ 0756]

Ralph Nader, speaking to Time Magazine on Jill Stein, said:

TIME: What do you mean by the Green Party’s “majoritarian agendas”?

NADER: They’re for single-payer, everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. That’s been a majoritarian position for years. Living wage? Overwhelming. Anti-war? [About] 70% want us out of Afghanistan now. The Green Party stands for bringing the soldiers back and curtailing the American empire. Cutting the military budget? A majority of Americans think that the military’s budget is too big and should be cut. Getting rid of special tax breaks for corporations? Overwhelming support. Renegotiating NAFTA and WTO? Majority support. I can go on and on.

TIME: So why doesn’t the Green Party have a majority-sized following?

NADER: That’s the conundrum. A minority party fostering a majority agenda. The reason is that the two-party duopoly has every conceivable way to exclude and depress and harass a third-party. Whether it’s ballot access. Whether it’s harassing petitioners on the street. Whether it’s excluding them from debates. Whether it’s not polling them. And with a two-party, winner-take-all electoral system, it’s easy to enforce all those. Unlike multi-party Western countries where you have proportional representation, the voters [in America] know that if you get 10% of the vote, you don’t get anything. Whereas in Germany, you get 10% of the parliament. So voters say, ‘Let’s just vote for the least worst.’

Jill Stein and the Green Party are looking better and better for those of us who no longer buy the bull shit of holding our noses when we vote.

[Update @ 0756: I left the following comment at Writes Like She Talks post marked Jill For President–No, Really:

Good morning Jill,

Great minds do think alike.

This morning I wrote:

Jill Stein and the Green Party are looking better and better for those of us who no longer buy the bull shit of holding our noses when we vote.

That the Green Party slate is madeup of two women is a bonus in my mind, but I’m voting the majoritarian platform first.

Do all you can to make today a good day,

Jeff

The New York Times has this to say about Stein this morning.]

Tom Junrod writes in Esquire:

You are a historic figure, Mr. President. You are not only the first African-American president; you are the first who has made use of your power to target and kill individuals identified as a threat to the United States throughout your entire term. You are the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our military operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy, and, some argue, of our foreign policy. You have authorized kill teams comprised of both soldiers from Special Forces and civilians from the CIA, and you have coordinated their efforts through the Departments of Justice and State. You have gradually withdrawn from the nation building required by “counterinsurgency” and poured resources into the covert operations that form the basis of “counter-terrorism.” More than any other president you have made the killing rather than the capture of individuals the option of first resort, and have killed them both from the sky, with drones, and on the ground, with “nighttime” raids not dissimilar to the one that killed Osama bin Laden. You have killed individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and are making provisions to expand the presence of American Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Pakistan and other places where the United States has not committed troops, you are estimated to have killed at least two thousand by drone. You have formalized what is known as “the program,” and at the height of its activity it was reported to be launching drone strikes in Pakistan every three days. Your lethality is expansive in both practice and principle; you are fighting terrorism with a policy of preemptive execution, and claiming not just the legal right to do so but the legal right to do so in secret. The American people, for the most part, have no idea who has been killed, and why; the American people — and for that matter, most of their representatives in Congress — have no idea what crimes those killed in their name are supposed to have committed, and have been told that they are not entitled to know.

This is not to say that the American people don’t know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don’t support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen … indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all.