Eric Cantor (R-VA) is Proud to Stand Up for Conservative Values Like Corruption. Be a Patriot Tell Congress to Impeach Eric Cantor (R-VA)

Eric Cantor (R-VA) is Proud to Stand Up for Conservative Values Like Corruption. Be a Patriot Tell Congress to Impeach Eric Cantor (R-VA)

During his State of the Union address, President Obama said “send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress; I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact.” The remark stemmed from a 60 Minutes investigation showing that House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) profited from information he received in private briefings during the economic crisis of 2008.

The Senate, in a rare display of bipartisanship, opened debate on an insider trading ban by a vote of 93-2. However, the bill has since become bogged down under a sea of unrelated amendments.

Over in the House, meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) — who reportedly blocked Bachus from bringing up a ban on congressional insider trading in committee — wants to expand the legislation to include bans on other sorts of transactions, such as land deals. UCLA Law Prof. Stephen Bainbridge notes that this is likely an attempt by Cantor to kill the bill by making it so overly broad that no one will vote for it:

    [Cantor's] now trying to extend the STOCK Act “so it includes land deals and other types of transactions and not just stock trades.” Classic taking a good idea too far. The problem is insider trading in stocks, not insider trading in land deals. Cantor obviously hopes that including a vast array of economic activity within the bill, exposing members of Congress to disclosure obligations and other restrictions, as well as increasing their liability exposure, will make the bill sufficiently unpopular so as to prevent its passage.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act has picked up 273 co-sponsors, after languishing for months with nearly no interest.

Like many conservatives Cantor thinks he is clever and real Americans are idiots. He might be partially right. Cantor campaigned on doing the right and moral things for the USA. So far all he has done is block economic progress to make President Obama look bad and to keep Washington in the hands of special interests. Maybe Cantor is delusional, imagining himself Rush Limbaugh's hand maiden.

Another Dirty Secret Newt Gingrich Does Not Want Anyone to Know - The GOP candidate holds up his old nonprofit, Earning by Learning, as a way to teach kids the value of a buck.

Another Dirty Secret Newt Gingrich Does Not Want Anyone to Know - The GOP candidate holds up his old nonprofit, Earning by Learning, as a way to teach kids the value of a buck. Here's what he doesn't mention.

For a politician who once proposed relocating children from single-parent households to orphanages, it was not all that surprising when Newt Gingrich recently declared that, if elected president, he'd ease child labor laws to allow poor kids to work as janitors.

What's notable, however, is the newly minted GOP presidential front-runner's explanation. Gingrich argues that poor children lack role models who can instill in them the value of hard work—something that, say, a part-time job cleaning bathrooms could easily remedy. Making his case to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, last week, Gingrich touted the work of an educational nonprofit he founded in the early 1990s called Earning by Learning (EBL). The program offered cash—$2 per book—to students as an incentive to read over the summer. What he failed to mention is that his group also led to a formal ethics complaint amid concerns about not just who was funding Gingrich's program, but where that money was really going.

As Gingrich tells it, the program started that first summer in 1990 with 9 kids and ended with 30. "What happened was simple," he said. "The ice cream truck comes by. The kid who's in the program walks up and buys their own ice cream. Their friend says to them, 'How come you have money?' He goes, 'Well, I read.' So kids are showing up to the program saying, 'I demand that you let me read!'"

The point of the story is that private initiatives often succeed where government programs fail. EBL was a lean, mean, private machine. "The overhead is entirely voluntary," Gingrich said of the program in 1995. "The only money goes to the kids. So if you have $1,000 at $2 a book, you can pay for 500 books. Whereas, in the welfare state model, if you have $1,000, you pay $850 for the bureaucracy."

But that description turned out to be false. A 1995 Mother Jones investigation revealed that the program's all-volunteer army came at a hefty price. The group paid its Atlanta volunteers $500 each; nearly half of the total budget of the Houston branch of the program went to one salaried staff position.

A Wall Street Journal report earlier that year was even more damning, revealing that most of the money in the program's endowment in Georgia was being kicked back to Gingrich's friends, including Mel Steely, a former Gingrich staffer who was at the time working on an authorized biography of the House speaker. According to the paper, "90% of the $20,000 raised in the past year went to Steely and two other professors who help him evaluate the program. The children earned less than $10,000, from money leftover from prior years."

The Los Angeles Times piled on, noting that "reading program funds were used to reimburse Steely for travel, lodging and meal expenses during three trips to attend Gingrich's Saturday morning college course." The overhead, in other words, was actually quite substantial.

Much of the funding came from Gingrich himself, in part because he had nowhere else to spend the proceeds of his 1995 book To Renew America. After Democrats cried foul over his decision to go on 25-city book tour hawking the book, Gingrich announced that he'd donate the receipts from the tour to Earning by Learning instead.

But EBL was also, as such charities tend to be, a magnet for activists and groups looking to curry favor with the GOP whip-turned speaker of the House. As Michelle Dally Johnson noted for MoJo, the list of donors was "heavy on conservative activists, elected officials, and party donors, but light on educators and people noted for volunteerism." Some of them were also donors to GOPAC, Gingrich's political action committee, which was itself the subject of multiple ethics investigations. The Houston Automobile Dealers Association, which helped sponsor that city's EBL affiliate, admitted that the relationship gave them more access to Gingrich; the group's president was later invited to testify before Congress about the luxury tax.

It was that overlap between political activism and private enterprise that ultimately led Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to formally request an ethics investigation into Gingrich and Earning by Learning in 1996.

House rules prohibit members from using their Congressional resources (such as office space) for personal endeavors. In 2010, for instance, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) was censured by his colleagues for, among other things, using official House stationary to solicit funds for City College of New York, which was naming its school of public policy after him. Miller, at the behest of Ralph Nader's Congressional Accountability Project, alleged that Gingrich had violated those standards through Earning by Learning.

The case concerned Donald Jones, a Wisconsin-based telecommunications entrepreneur—and a major donor to Gingrich's political action committee—whom Gingrich had invited to work out of his congressional office three days a week in a voluntary capacity (through Gingrich, he'd even received a Congressional ID badge). Jones was there to help work out the wording of the major telecommunications bill that was signed into law the next year.

"That the Speaker would apparently allow a telecommunications executive to act as 'Telecommunications director for Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich' in negotiations over telecommunications legislation—which may affect Jones' own holdings directly—is cause for alarm," Nader's group wrote.

But Gingrich's somewhat contradictory excuse, as explained to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was that Jones wasn't working on telecommunications—he was in Washington on behalf of the speaker's Earning by Learning program, for which he served as the president of the Wisconsin chapter. (His telecommunications company, US Cyber, provided the 800 number for EBL, which Gingrich helpfully plugged in floor speeches.) According to Gingrich, "95 percent" of Jones' time at the Capitol was devoted to Earning by Learning.

But that explanation was also problematic. As the Congressional Accountability Project noted, "Earning By Learning is a non-profit organization with no official ties to the United States House of Representatives." Granting office space and official resources would therefore violate House rules. Either Gingrich was using his education nonprofit as cover to allow a top donor to draft legislation directly affecting his own company, or he was using official resources to help out his private endeavor.

With Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.), a Gingrich ally, in charge of the House ethics committee, the speaker got off with a slap on the wrist, in the form of a formal "letter of admonition" and no further sanctions.

But the controversy over Gingrich's Earning by Learning program spoke to the larger issues at play in Gingrich's dealings. Jones, in his role as an informal adviser, donor, and volunteer at EBL, was illustrative of just how interconnected Gingrich's private and public ventures, collectively known as "Newt Inc.," really were. (In another, related instance, Gingrich transferred money from a scholarship program an ally had set up for inner-city students*, known as the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Fund, to his political action committee, GOPAC.).........

Will Newt's lack of ethics, money funneling, twisted sense of morals, failure to live up to the promises of E-Learning, letting down the kids, his doubletalk denials and spin make any difference to America's conservatives? Of course not. Conservatism is by definition is unregulated rampant corruption. Democrats are the lightweights in corruption and with a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress America has a much better chance of taking at least some of the funny money out of politics.

Incredible, Here We Are in The 21st Century and All The Republican Presidential Candidates Are Recycling Discredited Justification For More Inequality

Incredible, Here We Are in The 21st Century and All The Republican Presidential Candidates Are Recycling Discredited Justification For More Inequality 

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; women couldn’t vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.

Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. “Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”

Sound familiar?

Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner’s thoughts but mimics Sumner’s reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to “coddle” people in need. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says, ”I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.”

Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Mitt Romney doesn’t want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he’s dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires create jobs.

Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done… It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered.

In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly-based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the core of our economy and democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.

But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.

That conservatives continue to espouse anti-egalitarian views and wrapping themselves in the flag, and sometimes the Bible is not without ironic humor. None of these people could compete in a pure merit based society. Newt used elected office to make contacts with corporate America and charge millions for lobbying, not for producing well made goods or quality services. Bachmann has collected farm subsidies and Medicaid. Mitt has used every government tax loophole and tax subsidy available, and he started life with a silver spoon in his mouth. Herman Cain came from a modest background, but once he made it into corporate America's boardrooms he has been coasting ever since. These people could not survive without standing on the accomplishments of others. Mitt never made anything, he bought and sold businesses and made a lot of people jobless. Ron Paul started life with a family that was prosperous for its time, he had tons of advantages over millions of other, smarter Americans. 

National Rifle Association Radio Smears Occupy Movement With White House Shooting

National Rifle Association Radio Smears Occupy Movement With White House Shooting

Sorry Fox and Friends, in the race to gin up political controversy following the arrest of suspected White House shooter Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez the National Rifle Association's (NRA) Cam and Country was the clear winner. Maybe it's time to send a Fox News talent scout to check out their operation.

Wednesday evening, hours before Fox and Friends attempted to smear the Occupy movement by referring to Ortega-Hernandez as the "Occupy shooter," NRA radio host Cam Edwards was using the White House shooting to attack gun control groups.  Not surprisingly neither Fox and Friends or Cam and Company had their facts straight.

Edwards spent the beginning of yesterday's show interviewing PJ Media contributor Bob Owens and asked him about a recent blog post in which Owens reported that Ortega-Hernandez "was suspected of being at Occupy DC."

After complaining about press coverage of an anti-Obama protester that showed up to an August 2009 Obama rally with an AR-15 rifle, Cam suggested that Ortega-Hernandez shows gun control groups are ignoring "left-wing insurrectionists".

    EDWARDS: I noticed that even the gun control groups like Violence Policy [Center] and others, they love to talk about the right-wing insurrectionists, but when a guy who has been hanging out at Occupy DC is now accused of taking a shot at the White House, I don't see anything in their timeline about those crazy left-wing insurrectionists.

    OWENS: Well, of course not. And being one of the crazy right wing insurrectionists that Media Matters has cited on more than one occasion, I'm not surprised at all. They have a message and a narrative that they have been working on for years and years and they aren't going to let a little thing like a fact get in the way of that narrative.

But there's simply no evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to Occupy DC. While there were reports that the Secret Service searched the Occupy tents on Monday, the Washington Post reported Wednesday afternoon that investigators "have found no connection between him [Ortega-Hernandez] and the Occupy protesters." Speaking on Fox and Friends, Michelle Malkin offered her thoughts on Ortega-Hernandez saying, "the guy was just completely off his rocker and had nothing to do with any coherent sense of political ideology."

Edwards references the Insurrectionism Timeline that is maintained by the Coalition To Stop Gun Violence, not the Violence Policy Center. It's ridiculous to ask them to add Ortega-Hernandez based on Edwards own imagined connection between Ortega-Hernandez and left-wing politics.

As for Owens' inclusion in Media Matters research on violent and insurrectionist rhetoric, we'll let Owens words speak for themselves:

Bob Owens: "Go To Your Congressman's Office... If You're Willing To Do The Time For The Crime, Have A Swing At Him." In a March 24, 2010 post on his blog, PJ Media (formerly Pajamas Media) contributor Bob Owens suggested that assaulting members of Congress was an acceptable form of protest:

    No matter what you think of Obamacare and the craven ideologues that passed it, is totally unacceptable to threaten their relatives or friends and put them in danger.

    Go to your Congressman's office and scream at him in the most colorful language possible. Hang him in effigy at protests. If you're willing to do the time for the crime, have a swing at him.

    Better yet, throw a shoe... after all, the left values such behavior as a form of "vigorous dissent," and will no doubt ask for any charges against you to be dropped.

    Perhaps one day stronger action will be required if Progressives continue to trample on our liberties in their blind quest for power. But that time is not now. [Confederate Yankee, 4/24/2010]

Bob Owens: "I Pray For Peace. But I Prepare For War." In a July 31, 2010, post, Owens wrote:

    Our would-be ruling class has abandoned the principles that founded this nation. They are attempting to establish a state of affairs where the people serve the government and the government determines your success or failure. Corruption no longer matters. Sovereignty no longer matters. The rule of law no longer matters.

    They have won in a bloodless coup.

    Or so they would like you to think.

    Whether they actually win or not depends upon how much you love your family and your nation and the principles that made this nation great. Our founders themselves believed in the right of revolt, and knew better than any of us that governments must be replaced from time to time. They were wise enough to provide us with a constitutional framework that will outlast any government, including this one. We can dispose of this government, and restore the Constitution that has served us and the rest of the world so well for so long.

    We stand at the brink.

    [...]

    The question for you, my fellow Americans, is simple.

    Will you fight, or will you surrender your liberties?

    I pray for peace.

    But I prepare for war. [Confederate Yankee, 7/31/10]

Bob Owens On Media Matters Employees: "I Hope They Do Feel Threatened."  In an August 3, 2010, blog post titled "Closer to Midnight," Owens suggested political allies conduct a "serious review of our capacity for violence" and wrote that he hoped Media Matters employees "feel threatened":

    Propagandists for the elitists at Media Matters seem troubled by A Nation on the Edge of Revolt [an Owens blog post].

    They portray it as a threat when "Conservative media figures openly discuss armed revolution."I have not yet been swayed to the point of view that an armed conflict is inevitable, TN_NamVolunteer.

    But we are close enough that one would be wise to prepare for a possible conflict, just as one would prepare for any coming storm. [Confederate Yankee, 8/3/2010]

As a gun owner and someone who supports the general right to have a firearm for home protection, The NRA continues to be a huge embarrassment to gun owners. The NRA are generally insecure assclowns who like to talk tough - this is supposed to prove their manliness. The NRA sees anti-gun conspiracies everywhere when there are none. They went on a gun buying spree after Obama was elected because he was supposedly going to take everyone's gun. Obama has not passed one  - repeat not one - restrictive gun law.

Staten Island cop bragged of being a gangsta on MySpace

Paramilitary Policing of Occupy Wall Street: Excessive Use of Force amidst the New Military Urbanism

GOP Senate Candidate Josh Mandel Wants To Frack Ohio State Parks Now

Mitt Romney refused to help decorated Iraq war veteran become a cop

Rupert Murdoch's Anti-American Fox News Hosts Businessman To Call For Tax Cut Obama's Already Passed

Rupert Murdoch's Anti-American Fox News Hosts Businessman To Call For Tax Cut Obama's Already Passed

Fox News is bound and determined to portray President Obama as anti-business, even when reality tells a different tale. For example, today they hosted a businessman to demand that Obama offer a tax deduction "per job" employers create -- but Obama's already enacted such a deduction, and is now calling to expand tax breaks for businesses that hire new employees.

Fox & Friends Saturday today hosted Ryan Blair, an entrepreneur and CEO, to talk about a letter he wrote to President Obama with suggestions for jump starting the economy. Blair called on the president to "give me a deduction per job I create" in order to "get me off the bench and into the game" (emphasis added):

    ALISYN CAMEROTA (co-host): You say unemployment will be solved by stimulating innovation and creating new entrepreneurs. Great. How do you do that?

    BLAIR: Well, you know, it's real simple. You educate people on entrepreneurship, you get in there, you roll up your sleeves, and you give the incentives. So, for example, let's say I'm taxed at -- I make $10 million this year, and I'm taxed at 15 percent, or my rate goes up based on the amount of jobs that I actually create. And it's real simple -- you can figure out how to give me a deduction per child? Why can't you give me a deduction per job I create? Literally costing no debt money, just get me off the bench and into the game. Right now I'm not. I'm going to sit on the sidelines and save my money as much as I can because I'm uncertain. That's the wrong sentiment to be creating within the rich right now. Get them to work.

While Blair spoke, Fox News ran text stating, "Millionaire Explains The Problem w/ Jobs Plan."



What Blair and Fox & Friends failed to mention: Obama has already done this. The president has long championed this idea; he signed a bill that made it law; and he's calling for an extension of the policy through his American Jobs Act.

Do the math. Rupert Mudoch hates America. Murdoch has made America hating right-wing nut Roger Ailes the head of Fox News. Fox News constantly runs commentary that misleads the American public from everything about economics to cultural issues and public policy. Murdoch and the anti-American Ailes are trying to sabotage democracy by disseminating misinformation that is clearly against the best interests of the average American. Isn't it time for all patriotic Americans to keep the radicals at Fox News out of their homes and away from their kids.

The Perverse Conservative Meme of The Week - Obama and ATM Machines

Right-Wing Republican Media Attack Obama For Accurate Remarks On Business' Investment In Automated Machines

Right-wing media have seized on recent comments by President Obama to claim that Obama "blame[d] ATMs for high unemployment." But Obama's full comments show that he was suggesting that businesses are investing more heavily in automated machines than in hiring new employees, a view shared by economists.
Obama: "[B]usinesses Have Learned To Become Much More Efficient With A Lot Fewer Workers"

Obama: "[T]here Are Some Structural Issues With Our Economy Where A Lot Of Businesses Have Learned To Become Much More Efficient With A Lot Fewer Workers." From a June 14 interview on NBC's Today:

    ANN CURRY (host, NBC's Today): You're here encouraging private sector hiring. This just after The New York Times just past -- this past Friday reported that since the recovery began, businesses have spent just 2 percent more on hiring people, while at the same time spending 26 percent more on equipment. So why, at a time when corporate America is enjoying record profits have you been unable to convince businesses to hire more people, Mr. President?

    OBAMA: Well, I don't think it's a matter of me being unable to convince them to hire more people. They're making decisions based on what they think will be good for their companies. A couple of things have happened. Look, we went through the worst crisis since the Great Depression. We are now in a process where the economy is growing again, and we've created 2 million jobs over the last 15 months. But it's not as fast as it needs to be to make up for all the jobs that were lost.

    The other thing that happened, though, and this goes to the point you were just making, is there are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport, and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate. So all these things have created changes in the economy, and what we have to do now -- and that's what this job council is all about -- is identifying where the jobs for the future are going to be; how do we make sure that there's a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist; how do we make sure that capital is flowing into those places with the greatest opportunity. We are on the right track. The key is figuring out how do we accelerate it. [NBC, Today, 6/14/11]

Right-Wing Media Seize On ATM Remark To Attack Obama As "Completely And Utterly Ignorant About Job Creation"

Fox Nation: "Obama Blames ATMs For High Unemployment." A June 14 Fox Nation post embedded video of Obama's comments under the headline, "Obama Blames ATMs for High Unemployment." [Fox Nation, 6/14/11]

But Economists Agree With Obama's Suggestion That Technology Advancements Have Displaced Workers

NFIB Economist: Shift To Automated Production "Displaces A Lot Of Workers At Once." In a June 9 New York Times article, National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) chief economist William Dunkelberg cited the mechanization of farming as an example of mass worker displacement by automated production. From the Times:

    Of course the shift to more automated production predates the Great Recession. And in the long run, better technology lowers prices, raises living standards and helps workers move into higher-paying jobs. This was the case with the mechanization of farming, which a century ago employed 41 percent of the American work force.

    "We don't have 11 million unemployed farmers today because over time farmers and their children transitioned into different sectors," says William C. Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. "We don't usually have this kind of shock, though, that displaces a lot of workers at once."

    Better technologies may eventually offer better job opportunities, but only if people can upgrade their skills quickly enough to qualify. That is hard to do in the short run, especially when so many displaced workers need to be retrained at once. [The New York Times, 6/9/11]

Harvard Economist: "If You're Doing Something That Can Be Written Down In A Programmatic, Algorithmic Manner, You're Going To Be Substituted For Quickly." The Times further reported:

    Usually economists cheer on capital spending, and have supported Congress's tax breaks for capital investment, like bonus depreciation, which lets companies expense the full cost of purchases immediately instead of waiting several years. That is because capital and labor can be complementary: a business that buys a new truck often hires a new driver, too.

    But with the rising costs of hiring, companies like Vista are finding ways to use capital to replace workers whose jobs are relatively routine.

    "If you're doing something that can be written down in a programmatic, algorithmic manner, you're going to be substituted for quickly," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. [The New York Times, 6/9/11]

Barclays Economist: "Firms Are Just Responding To Incentives. ... And Capital Has Gotten Much Cheaper Relative To Labor." The Times further reported that chief United States economist at Barclays Capital Dean Maki stated, "Firms are just responding to incentives. ... And capital has gotten much cheaper relative to labor." From the Times:

    Two years into the recovery, hiring is still painfully slow. The economy is producing as much as it was before the downturn, but with seven million fewer jobs. Since the recovery began, businesses' spending on employees has grown 2 percent as equipment and software spending has swelled 26 percent, according to the Commerce Department. A capital rebound that sharp and a labor rebound that slow have been recorded only once before -- after the 1982 recession.

    With equipment prices dropping, and tax incentives to subsidize capital investments, these trends seem likely to continue.

    "Firms are just responding to incentives," said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. "And capital has gotten much cheaper relative to labor." [The New York Times, 6/9/11]

NY Times: MIT Economics Professor Said That "Jobs In The Middle Are Being Lost To Automation And Outsourcing, And Now Job Growth At The Top Is Slowing Because Of Automation." From a March 4 Times article:

    David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being "hollowed out." New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

    "There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment," Professor Autor said. "Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no."

    Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation. [The New York Times, 3/4/11]

Vista Technologies Managing Director: "You Don't Have To Train Machines." The June 9 Times article further quoted Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies, as saying that hiring employees "has some hidden costs, as well as the expenses of salary and benefits" and that "you don't have to train machines."

This is becoming a pathetic pattern by those pretend patriots who call them selves conservatives. They twist facts, lie, manufacture a narrative that bears little resemblance to reality and move on to the next falsehood or smear or hatchet job. Conservative do not and have never loved the USA. They love their egos, money and the sound of their own voice. Their foreign policies caught 4000 Americans killed for a lie. They created the worse economic disaster in  80 years. Just judging by their actions one could swear conservatives are one of America's worse enemies.