Hannah Blog

But then, we all know “appearances are deceiving.” Anyway, it strikes observers that Republican calls for small government are inconsistent with legislative efforts to place restrictions on the most minute of personal behaviors and interactions, even inoffensive ones. These efforts seem like a huge intrusion. Never mind that, in the long run, they are ineffective and that may even be the legislator’s intent — a sop to some irritating busybodies that need to be thrown a legislative bone.
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It needs to be remembered that what the Cons are after is a rotating elected kingship in whose name unlimited powers can be exercised by an unelected coterie of supporters (a shadow cabinet?). Since Richard Nixon, in surrendering the position in response to a violation of the law, demostrated or set the precedent that the chief executive is subject to the rule of law, the Cons hit upon the subterfuge of assigning sovereignty under the umbrella of the war powers of the commander-in-chief of the military. Which is why the AUMF was so quick off the block, even before the PATRIOT Act delivered more authority over the domestic population.
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We are all familiar with the expression that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But, what we assume this means is that things don’t always turn out as planned or even that good intentions are not enough.
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It has been posited that the esoteric (my term) economy has been hijacked by terrorists. I think that’s probably a stretch. What we have in the U.S. is a coterie of petty potentates aiming to hold on to what little power they have by inflicting damage as they run. Terrorists aim to get power; our petty potentates are barely holding on.
That’s the conclusion of what follows.
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George Packer, writing in the New Yorker about how journalists are or are not covering the current economic depression, complains that the focus is mostly on some of the elites, rather than the victims of the downturn. Aside from his essay being typically self-referential as is so much social criticism these days, he hears that focusing on victims never did help in the past, but it doesn’t register.
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What’s the Fed reserving or preserving?
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Yes, labor force participation is back to what it was when the contributions of most women to the economy weren’t counted. That people aren’t getting paid doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing. Sometimes it’s just a counting problem — an accounting problem.
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Matt Taibbi lays it out in Rolling Stone.
Noone should be surprised.

Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.

That’s the subject of an email communication from Senator Jeanne Shaheen to her “dear friends.” It starts out with the sentence:

I think you’d agree with me that Congress needs to be promoting economic growth and innovation

Well, I might, if it weren’t for the fact that, at least recently, the Congressional track record of even doing its job has been really bad. And, isn’t “promoting … growth” a Republican platitude most recently championed by the Club for Growth? Never mind that there’s no evidence that the growing reliance on money has contributed much to the general welfare in the last four decades.

On the other hand, the rest of that sentence is a real turn off:

not putting barriers toward free market success.

“free market” raises a red flag. While it is true that Congress has, for over two centuries, focused on doling out free goods from the public treasury (free land, free minerals, free water, free air) to be taken (extracted) by favored individuals to market for a profit, the depletion of the public treasury tells us that’s got to stop.
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OK, let’s agree that increasing the public debt is a bad idea at any time. That leads to the question why a country that issues its own currency even has a debt. Why are we borrowing our own dollars back at a premium from people who, obviously, have no other use for them and haven’t thought to return them where they came from?
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