Excerpt:

Sen. Grassley appeared on MSNBC today to discuss economic regulation where he said greed is human nature.

And when asked if the banks are in any position to protest if they’re not going to make as much money, Grassley comes back with this:

Greed is human nature. We shouldn’t blame greed any more than you’d blame gravity when a plane has an accident and goes down.

I’m sorry Senator, but I think we can blame greed for the mess we’re in. Greed and the unwillingness of the government to put a check on it.

You can watch the comment here at about the 3:05 mark.

Sen. Grassley says greed isn’t the problem. Yet, in 1980 on average CEOs earned 42 times the salary of the average workes and now they earn about 476 times that salary.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Ezra Klein makes a great point in a story at the Washington Post.

It’s time to start getting angrier and demand real health care reform. Our ineffiecient health care system means businesses have to pay more and workers make less.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

An agriculture expert spoke at Marshalltown Community College about the benefits of buying food locally.

Ken Meter, President of Crossroads Resource Center based in Minnesota completed a study of food production in Marshall County. He discussed the potential economic benefits for the county of buying more food locally.

He noted that, according to numbers from the U.S. Census, which may not be totally accurate, only 46 farms sell directly to consumers in the county. Further, there are only 13 fruit orchards covering 25 total acres, and 13 vegetable farms covering only 43 acres.

Meter said there were some encouraging signs, such as the number of farms now selling directly to consumers increasing 35 percent in the past few years. Sales have increased 16 percent to approximately $228,000.

“It’s a rising force and because it’s a rising force, some efforts to cultivate that and let it occur seem appropriate,” he said.

Still, Meter’s research indicated Marshall County residents spend approximately $104 million each year on food. Nearly 90 percent of that is spent on things produced outside the area.

Finding ways to encourage direct interaction between producers and consumers will not only help locally by keeping more dollars in the community and creating jobs locally, it will help in other ways as well.

Stop by your local farmer’s market over the weekend and enjoy some fresh food and help your local economy.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Marc Ambinder poses the question should Obama install Mitt Romney as GM’s chairman. Obama has said

The government can’t hope to fix G.M. and sell it off without getting under the hood. Over decades now of restructuring plans at the company, two things have demonstrably not helped get much done: Money and time. The government can’t simply give more of each to the automaker. What’s needed is forceful, even ruthless, leadership to insist on the changes that everyone–the managers, the union leadership, the dealers, everyone–has known were necessary for about 20 years now.[…]

Here’s a modest proposal to drive things along: Obama should install Mitt Romney as GM’s chairman. Romney grew up outside Detroit and around cars; his father, George W. Romney, saved American Motors from collapse in the 1950s–by killing failing brands and focusing on compact cars! George Romney successfully took on the Big Three with a “dinosaur fighter” strategy. The son would bring to GM that legacy, the turnaround expertise and credentials he developed at Bain & Company, and the outsider’s eye that GM desperately needs. He would also usefully jack up even further the stakes and the drama of the undertaking.

And he would create a political firewall for the turnaround. An alliance with Romney to save GM would give Obama and Henderson the protection they need to move briskly to shrink the company. Why would Romney do it? Maybe because the chance to renew an American icon, preserve America’s manufacturing capacity, and save tens of thousands of jobs would mean something to him. Maybe because it would give him a platform to demonstrate what an effective leader he can be. Maybe because, along the way, it would allow him to save the Republican Party by proving that it stands for something besides…whatever it is that it stands for right now.

It would be a win for Romney because if he leads GM back he would be a top candidate in 2016. It would be a win for Obama cause it shows his bipartisan approach and would patch over a possible issue in 2012.

With all that said, it probably would never happen because it makes sense.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Image by mherzber via Flickr

The Cedar Rapids Gazette applauded the action by the state legislature on flood recovery efforts.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Are you fired up? Sen. Majority Leader Mike Gronstal was fired up yesterday when he was discussing Iowa’s economic future and helping Iowans recover from last summer’s historic floods.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

I saw this on a friend’s Twitter…

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman discusses the economy, U Iowa law school’s Levitt Lecture. Today, 4 pm McBride Auditorium Free

Wish I could go.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Matt Taibbi’s latest piece for Rolling Stone about the bailouts is a must read. Taibbi has a talent for digging through the BS and showing how stupid people are.

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company’s CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: “The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now,” he said. “When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too.” In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being “consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio down.”

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else’s financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

This diary at MyDD talks about the growing income equality in the United States.

Unequal societies have throughout history been prone not just to social upheaval but also to economic turmoil. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating after 1980, the US began undoing a series of policies that dated to FDR led to what historians call the “Great Compression” a flattening of income so that by 1964 the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay was 24:1, the narrowest in the nation’s history. Before the financial meltdown the ratio was around 400:1, or back to levels last seen in the late 1920s. And this is actually down from a high of 525:1 in 2000 (the reason is that executive compensation is largely paid in stock). In 1970, the top 1% of Americans controlled 8% of the nation’s wealth, by 2000 they controlled 15%. In 1973, the income of the top 20 percent of American families was 7.5 times that of the bottom 20 percent. By 1996, it was 13 times. By 2006, it was 18 times.[…]

On almost every measure, Americans grew apart over the past 30 years. The chasm between rich and poor is not just wider but also deeper. As Paul Krugman noted at height of the market turbulence this past month “we are a banana republic with nukes.” These results aren’t by accident. In 2009, the US is far poorer as a collective society than we were in 1964 despite our many technological comforts. The Reagan economic model gave us cheap imported electronics but at a cost of being able to send our kids to college. The harsh reality is that the United States is a cleft nation as a result of the Friedmanistic economic policies pursued by Republican and Democrat alike since 1968 and cleft nations have a propensity to fail. It is not, I think, a coincidence that 2008 saw an economic meltdown when income inequality in the United States reached the same levels in 2008 that we last saw in 1928.

Related Posts: