Tag: Film

McCain’s Economic Cure is the Worst Idea We’ve Heard So Far

Trish

Just when you thought Republicans couldn’t come up with anything worse to do to this country, along comes proof they always, always can. Did you think George Bush’s tax rebate, which will plunge our government even deeper into debt, was awful? Well John McCain has a plan to postpone impending economic disaster that will not only do nothing to help in the long run, but which will hasten global warming to boot.

John McCain wants us to burn more gasoline. Yes, he wants us to take to the roads this summer and burn, baby, burn. Our incentive? Artificially cheaper gas prices that come, not at the expense of oil company profits, but at the price of our crumbling infrastructure and ballooning deficit.

Yes, you guessed it. He wants to cut taxes on gasoline.

McCain wants to have artificially cheaper gas prices that come, not at the expense of oil company profits, but at the price of our crumbling infrastructure and ballooning deficit.

It also was unclear how McCain would pay for his proposed gas-tax holiday, which would run from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon; 24.4 cents for diesel. The idea would cost the federal Highway Trust Fund, already at risk of going broke next year, billions of dollars…

“That takes $11 billion away from infrastructure spending on roads and bridges, which are badly in need of help as we saw with last summer’s bridge collapse,” said James Kvaal, domestic policy adviser for the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group.

So how do we deal with the problems caused by our national carefree summer road trip? Dunno.

“The senator is not planning to raise taxes,” [McCain’s chief economic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin] said repeatedly…

Of course not. Republicans don’t tax and spend, they borrow and spend.

Holtz-Eakin said money would be taken from general funds to ensure that the Highway Trust Fund didn’t run short. But the budget deficit already is projected at $500 billion.

And according to some economists, we are too far gone now to ever get back to the balanced budget Bill Clinton achieved and left in the care of George W. Bush.

[Rudy Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute], a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said…”Those deficits are going to look awfully big as the new president takes office, and it will be very hard to do what President Bush did — claim the budget balances in 2012, or maybe ever again if you do honest projections.”

Emphasis added.

There’s one other teeny, tiny flaw with McCain’s logic. Who are these people that are going to pack up the family and drive? Surely it’s not all those folks facing foreclosure, or the ones being laid off, or trying to figure out how to pay three times more for bread and milk at the grocery store. I guess they should just listen to McCain and forget all that impending doom. Heck, let’s go to DisneyWorld! Let’s pack up for Branson! Maybe we’ll swing by Vegas while we’re on the road. I’ll go warm up the Navigator and you kids grab your iPods. It’s going to be a long drive.

No Impeachment Or War Crimes Charges For Bush – Only ‘Punishment’ Will Be Treatment in Oliver Stone Biopic

Jon Ponder

What fate will befall George W. Bush as retribution for leading the United States into the worst debacle in our military history, illegally authorizing torture, deliberately betraying a secret CIA operation tracking the black market for terror weapons or the drowning of New Orleans on his watch?

It’s safe to say it won’t be impeachment, at least not while he remains in office, and it is surely wishful thinking to suggest he might be tried for war crimes later on.

No, as it was with Richard Nixon, whose malfeasance pales in comparison with Bush’s, the only “punishment” awaiting Bush is to grow old in disgrace — and to be the subject of a fictionalized biographical film by Oliver Stone.

Hollywood is buzzing about the film, which is titled “W.” (pronounced “Dubya”), starting with the fact that Josh Brolin, son of James Brolin, the spouse of uber-liberal Barbra Streisand, has been signed to play the title character. Now the film-biz trade rag Hollywood Reporter has obtained the first couple of pages of the script for Stone’s movie, which in the real world might be be called a “scoop” but in this town it is called, “promotion”:

Even before a single talent deal was signed or locations scouted, Oliver Stone’s “W” was hotter than a Texas afternoon in July. Conservative pundits were ready to pounce on the provocateur for what they said was agenda-driven filmmaking, while Stone and his partners said they were simply telling the story of the Bush White House without varnish or sugar-coating.

As Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni report in THR today, both turn out to be right — sort of. According to four Bush scholars who read a draft of the script, the tale has elements that are unquestionably accurate (like when George Jr. comes home drunk and nearly gets into a fistfight with his father) and elements that are just plain made-up (like when the president and his advisers discuss high-level policy in a casual, even frat-house, sort of manner).

Rather than just let the experts judge, we decided to offer the first few pages of the script, in which Bush and his advisers prep for the “Axis of Evil” speech, here on Risky Biz — with the caveat that this comes from a draft of the script dated in mid-October and, according to sources close to the project, may have changed in the interim.

Here are the script pages in PDF.

Turn Off the Light for Earth Hour

Trish

We like easy ways to do good things for the planet and it doesn’t get much easier than this.

On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., join millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour…

Last year’s Earth Hour, which only took place in one city — Sydney — had the same impact as taking 48,000 cars off the road for the same hour

Earth Hour was created by World Wildlife Fund in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.

Before you dismiss this idea, know that last year’s Earth Hour, which only took place in one city — Sydney — had the same impact as taking 48,000 cars off the road for the same hour. Tell me that doesn’t add up.

Some of the places in this country already on board to participate are:

  • Atlanta — Coca Cola Headquarters and the Georgia Aquarium (largest in the world)
  • Chicago — Sears Tower, John Hancock Building, Soldier Field (Chicago Bears stadium), Boeing Headquarters Building, Merchandise Mart, Drake Hotel, Chicago City Hall, C N A Building, Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building, Chicago Theater Marquees, Hard Rock Cafe marquee at Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs)
  • San Francisco — San Francisco Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, San Francisco Town Hall, Hewlett-Packard Company headquarters (Palo Alto)
  • Phoenix — City government buildings

If you’re doing something creative with your time in the dark (that’s not X-rated), the folks at Earth Hour are providing information on how to make your event a success.

Update: Now I know why actions like these are important. I went whole-hog and refrained from the computer, TV, and even radio, sticking to the spirit of the thing, which was to not use any power (I decided even my wind-up emergency radio with the built-in flashlight would be cheating). Time passes very slowly when all you can do is sit in the dark and reflect on why you’re sitting in the dark. I decided it must be what fasting for a cause is like. It focuses your thoughts on the reason you’re uncomfortable. Even though I finally gave up and walked the dog for the last half-hour, I still spent the whole time thinking about global warming and about the impact that using each of my appliances, and my car, has. This morning, I’m still thinking about it.

So I would say this was a good thing. You think you know this stuff, and on an intellectual level you do, but actually going through the exercise is valuable. If you missed Earth Hour, take one of your own. Tell yourself you will refrain from using electricity for one hour. Your mind will automatically focus on why and the contemplation will be illuminating. Pun intended.

The Peanut Butter Plan to Save the World

Trish

If you’re like me, you’re tired of looking for ways to help global warming and only finding instructions to use compact florescent light bulbs. Like I haven’t been doing that for 10 years?

But here’s a new one that I can totally get behind: eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Besides the obvious reasons (they’re so gooood), you can help the planet. Look what you save when you choose a PB&J:

  • 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets
  • Almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas compared to a ham sandwich or a hamburger
  • 280 gallons of water over the hamburger
  • 12 to 50 square feet of land from deforestation, over-grazing, and pesticide and fertilizer pollution
  • A whole bunch of fuel compared to wild-caught seafood
  • A whole bunch of fuel, pollution, antibiotics, hormones, and other really bad stuff over factory-farmed fish

The people at the PB&J Campaign are starting PB&J clubs. Email them at pbj@pbjcampaign.org if you want to start one of your own in your workplace or school.

Buck and I like our peanut butter extra crunchy and our bread whole-grain. Like Elvis, we enjoy a PB & Banana, but hold the mayo and don’t fry it.

The Dirty Little Secret of Globalization

Trish

On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton tries to distance herself from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) worked out by her husband’s administration more than a decade ago. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and the Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, sums up where globalization has brought us.

When corporate America tied its future to globalism, it made a deal with the devil. The record profits reaped by outsourcing U.S. manufacturing abroad came at a high price: the risk to the good names of the country’s biggest companies.

“Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many knockoff handbags and other luxury goods are made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not paying for quality goods anymore — we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers.”

…In today’s globalized economy, top companies have lost control of the quality of the goods that display their logos. They are powerless to prevent a recurrence of the toxic-toy tragedy–and they are terrified that their brands could be dragged through the mud when the next epidemic of dangerous products strikes.

…The problem is a business model in which companies outsource manufacturing under short-term, low-cost contracts to the firm that will follow their design standards most cheaply. All that is really Fisher-Price about Dora the Explorer is the design–the product itself is made in a factory over which the company has almost no control. It doesn’t manage the working conditions, environmental standards, or safety practices. As a result, it no longer controls the product itself.

…Fisher-Price didn’t want lead used in its products. But it did want to drive the best bargain it could with toy manufacturers in China and to be able to shift to new suppliers if it found a lower price. Faced with this pressure and already located in the cheapest labor market in the world, subcontracting manufacturers realized the only way to cut costs was to cut corners, and lead is a cost-effective corner to cut.

The joke is on the companies who exploit cheap foreign labor. It’s also on those of us who are willing to shell out big bucks for new items with the right labels.

So brands no longer mean what they used to: Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many of the knockoff handbags and other luxury goods you can buy on the street in Shanghai–or even New York City–are actually made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not really paying for quality goods anymore–we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers producing inferior products using shoddy safety and environmental standards.

Bush Tops ‘Heckuva Job’ With Clueless Comment on Financial Meltdown: ‘I Want to Thank You, Mr. Secretary, for Working Over the Weekend’

Jon Ponder


Former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan says the U.S. economy is in the worst shape in 60 years:
It is now official: George Bush has Katrina-ized the U.S. economy.

“The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War,” Greenspan said in a Financial Times commentary.

“It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities,” he said, referring to the meltdown in the US sub-prime home loan market and subsequent massive losses for the banks holding the debt instruments.

“The crisis will leave many casualties,” he said, his remarks coming after Bear Stearns, the fifth largest US investment house collapsed Friday and was taken over by JP Morgan Chase for a fraction of its value of only a week ago.

But Pres. George W. Herbert Hoover Bush says his government has stabilized the crisis — and it wasn’t even all that difficult. It just required putting in a little O.T.:

“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” Bush said as he met with his economic advisors at the White House. “You’ve shown the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation.”

Actually, many analysts and critics said, by focusing on Paulson’s working hours instead of on the fear gripping Main Street and Wall Street, the president seemed to show just the opposite — that he has failed to grasp the gravity of the country’s economic crisis.

“He has no idea what’s going on. Even by his standards, he’s wrong,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who said he had been trying to get the president to pay more attention to the economy for more than a year.

Bush’s “working over the weekend” line also suggested a comparison to another disaster in which he was accused of acting too slowly: Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the president was ridiculed for praising FEMA Director Michael D. Brown for doing “a heck of a job” — even as thousands remained stranded in floodwaters in New Orleans.

Our worst fears are confirmed. This makes it official: George Bush has Katrina-ized the U.S. economy.

Economists Alarmed: McCain Would Stay the Course on Bush Tax Policies

Trish

Like peas in a pod. Wait, weren’t the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

If you’ve been deluding yourself that having John McCain as our president couldn’t be all that bad since almost anything beats what we’ve got now…I have some bad news. McCain would be even worse.

How can any responsible or intelligent person — anyone able to operate a toothbrush, say — look at the economic mess we’re in and decide that the answer is less revenue?

…budget experts say his numbers do not add up.

McCain’s promises to reduce wasteful spending if elected president in November would not begin to cover the costs of his proposed tax cuts, analysts say.

He also has not yet explained how he would rein in the health-care and retirement costs expected to swamp the federal budget as some 77 million people retire from the U.S. work force in the coming decades.

On top of that, a President McCain would inherit a $400 billion budget deficit, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost nearly $200 billion per year and a similar bill for interest payments on the $10 trillion national debt.

Many experts said McCain’s proposals would make the fiscal picture worse.

It’s funny how different McCain the senator was from McCain the presidential candidate. Suddenly, being Bush all over again makes sense to the “maverick.”

He angered conservatives when he opposed President George. W. Bush’s income-tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 on the grounds that they favored the wealthy and were fiscally irresponsible. He now supports making them permanent, echoing Bush in saying that allowing them to expire would amount to a tax increase.

How can any responsible or intelligent person — anyone able to operate a toothbrush, say — look at the economic mess we’re in and decide that the answer is less revenue? This is madness.

But it’s good for Exxon/Mobil.

McCain also wants to slash corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent and allow businesses to immediately write off capital expenses. He has called for reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax, initially targeted at the wealthy but now snaring many middle-class taxpayers.

These tax cuts would shrink annual federal revenues from $4.55 trillion today to $3.4 trillion in 2018, according to Len Burman of the Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center.

Federal revenues would account for 15.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the lowest level since 1950.

Ah yes, 1950. Let’s turn back the clock and all return to a time when John McCain was a strapping 14-year-old, fresh from his home in Panama but poised to attend prep school in Alexandria, Va. Things were simpler then, or so they tell me since I wasn’t born yet. So enough memory lane. The next president cannot propose any more tax cuts unless he or she wants to officially bankrupt America.

Bush Almost Admits Recession; Can Global Warming Be Far Behind?

Trish

After losing 63,000 jobs in the 29-day month of February, the current occupant was finally forced to admit there’s a problem with the economy. Gee, the total collapse of the housing market, the weakest dollar in modern times, and consumer confidence at 33 percent might be good indicators too.

“Turn out the lights. The party’s over. We are in a recession,” said the chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal

“Losing a job is painful and I know Americans are concerned about our economy. So am I,” Bush said during a hastily arranged White House appearance on the heels of a gloomy government economic report that said employers slashed jobs by 63,000 in February, the most in five years.

The Labor Department’s report, released Friday, also showed that the nation’s unemployment rate dipped to 4.8 percent as hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps discouraged by their prospects — left the civilian labor force. The jobless rate was 4.9 percent in January.

Bush’s idiotic solution — sinking us deeper in debt by issuing everyone a tax rebate — isn’t seen by anyone with the sense God gave celery as a cure.

“Turn out the lights. The party’s over. We are in a recession,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal in New York.

Don’t count on debt-laden households to spend their way back to growth. As for banks, they are preoccupied with cleaning up their balance sheets after seven months of credit turmoil, which means they are unlikely to throw open the cash spigots. The federal government is mired in debt as well.

Like I said, no one with any sense would think a tax rebate will do anything but deepen the hole we’re in. But Bush is a one-trick pony. Got a problem? A tax cut must be the answer.

“I know this is a difficult time for our economy,” he said. “But we recognized the problem early and we provided the economy with a booster shot.”

Congress passed and Bush signed a stimulus package that will send tax rebates to many families and businesses. But some fear it will come too late – or that people will use the money to save or pay off debt, rather than go on a spending spree that will boost the economy.

Bush gently urged people to do the latter. “When the money reaches the American people, we expect it to boost consumer spending,” he said.

Sorry Georgie. I’m putting it toward my car payment. The sooner I pay that off, the more I can put against my mortgage.

How about you? Are you planning to buy more cheap crap from China with your tax rebate or pay down your debt? Leave a comment; I’d like to know.

SFB*: Bush Incoherent at News Conference

Trish

What did he say?

“We’ll see the effects of this pro-growth package,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “I know there’s a lot of, here in Washington people are trying to – stimulus package two – and all that stuff. Why don’t we let stimulus package one, which seemed like a good idea at the time, have a chance to kick in?”

* In the text-speak sense of the term.