From Bloomberg:

Senators from both parties said the Democratic president should avoid filling the [Supreme Court] vacancy with an “ideologue.”

Allow me to translate: No liberals, please. Roberts and Alito, ideologues, are conservative ideologues, and therefore not ideologues. Are you getting this? It’s easy once you understand how we talk without saying what we really mean.

Here’s more: It is said that conservatives cannot handle nuance. Here is Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) on the coming appointment:

“I think the criteria should be to follow the law, not to make the law.”

Once again, translating: “Don’t upset the existing power structure.”

But the idea that the Supreme Court should “follow the law” is absurd. Cases come before the court because of differing interpretations of the law, which is vastly complex. If “the law” were written down somewhere so we could look it up when we needed to, we wouldn’t need a Supreme Court.

This is an academic exercise, but I think worth doing. It is a contrast between our perceived system of governance, and the real one. Here’s perceptions:

The people are all-powerful. We elect representatives who write and execute laws, and who appoint judges who interpret those laws. We have three branches of government, each held in check by the other two.

Obama recently said that in approaching Iran, it is important to know that “Iran is a very complicated country with a lot of different power centers.”

True about Iran and true about our country as well, as Obama well knows. What I am trying to do here is to recognize various power centers that exist in our country, and put them in order of the amount of power they exercise. It’s a useful thought exercise.

The corporations – these are a wide variety of entities that operate in different sectors (finance, oil, communications, etc. ) but who often enough support one another. Their power extends far beyond our borders, and our military often does their bidding under the guise of humanitarian interventions.

The mainstream media Since it is owned by the corporations, it is a merely subset.

Military and intelligence agencies – these are vast, mostly secretive, and are largely funded in secret.
The president, or the executive branch. It is powerful, but submits to the will of the corporations and the military. Mainstream media, owned by the corporations, ‘vets’ presidential candidates and determines who is “viable” and who is not.
Wealthy families and individuals these are people with massive fortunes who exercise great sway over tax policy and are usually virtually in control of the localities where they live. Most people do not recognize their names, for instance, ask any Montanan who Denny Washington is.
Think tanks These are intellectuals who are funded by and serve corporations and wealthy families. They are a safe harbor for government officials while they are out of power. They also have large sway over favored opinions of government officials, providing pseudo-science to support public policies that favor their funding sources.
The Senate – more powerful than the House because its members have longer terms, and because a minority there can usually thwart a majority in the lower house. Cannot be ‘gerrymandered’.
The House of Representatives Our most democratic body, and most susceptible to swings in public temperament. Gerrymandered.
Large land owners This is odd, as they could also be called a subset of “wealthy families”. Ownership of land conveys power, as in Montana, where though ranchers are a minority, and not our wealthiest citizens, they usually hold a large share of seats in the state legislature, often the governorship, US Senate and House seats as well. They are, in Montana, also known as the “Department of Livestock”, an unelected organization the elected governor never trifles with. Interesting.
The “courts” Oddly, ordinary citizens still have the ability to challenge power centers through the courts, and often do so. Corporations are trying to bring this source of power under control with their campaign to demonize “trail lawyers”, that is, people who sue corporations.
State Governments Powerful, but no power beyond their jurisdictions, and little sway over federal officials.
Municipalities Mini-fiefdoms having locally focused power, but little beyond city limits. These tend to be very democratic.
Public opinion As of this moment, public opinion means virtually nothing in our democracy, as it is easily swayed and manipulated by the other powers. But if it is focused and enraged, it can thwart every other power center. Witness: The USSR. Not the USA, however. Odd that the USSR was more democratic than us.
Other communication sources This would include the “alternative media”, the Internet, town halls and public meeting forums. Note that the Internet was once seen as a great source of organizing power, as when protesters used it to upset the corporate apple cart in Seattle in 1999. But it has largely been neutralized, and corporations are hard at work to bring it under their control.

That’s all I can think of right now. I expect that others would add others, such as state and local police, labor unions, and the NFL? You tell me. Also, I expect everyone would re-order and re-word what I wrote.

Add: Organized crime -not sure where it fits, but it exists everywhere. As noted in comments below, I overlooked religious institutions, academia, lobbying groups. Academia is largely subordinate to other power groups, as it is merely training the next generation of managers of the existing institutions. (There is constant pressure exerted on colleges to avoid dabbling in freedom of expression – i.e. – Horowitz.) Non-corporate lobbying groups exert their power on Congress, but Congress itself is subordinated to other more powerful forces. But they are very good at getting money out of the treasury. Religious institutions don’t appear to me to have much power over government, though fundamentalists that vote en masse to exert more influence than those that merely attend to spiritual needs of followers.

Wilson is a city in North Carolina of about 48,000 people. Its residents were fed up with Embarg, a Time Warner company, and the poor service it was providing for internet, TV, and wireless phone signals. They decided to do for themselves what Embarg would not do for them – provide low cost high-speed wireless services.

Brian Bowman, the city’s Public Affairs Manager: “I have a 10Mbps up/down connection at my house. Can’t get half that from the cable company. I buy it directly from the City of Wilson. After less than a year of residential service, almost 3,000 Wilson citizens are subscribing to Wilson’s fiber optic network. Local businesses can get up to one Gbps.”

Here’s Embarg’s reaction:

Embarg: “We would love to deploy DSL everywhere. We try to make smart financial decisions not only for shareholders but customers. In the very rural areas, sometimes it would take two, three or more years to even pay for the investment.”

This is odd – two or three years to pay for an investment is not outlandish. But Embarg is up against it, in that Wilson can quite easily do for itself what Embarg will not do. It’s not new technology, not rocket science. It’s something any community in the country can and should do. But right wing economics demands that if a private concern cannot make money providing a public utility, the public has to suffer.

So, Embarg and Time Warner did what any free-market loving company would do – the went to the state legislature to shut down Wilson’s city-provided services.

Rather than admit defeat to the pesky local service and go quietly, Time Warner Inc. and Embarq decided to take the fight to the state government, lobbying for several years to get the state government to pass laws to try to destroy the local effort. And sure enough, thanks to a lot of hard work (and money), the cable companies are close to getting their wish — North Carolina’s State Senate have proposed bills to not only effectively crippling or banning the local service, but also to prevent such services from getting funds under the broadband portion of the national Stimulus law.

Says Bowman:

“If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they’d open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don’t want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field.”

This is not untypical right wing thinking – private companies know all about free markets, and don’t much like them. They use their money and influence to 1) get regulations protecting themselves from competition; 2) prevent regulations that affect them negatively, and 3) buy access to the commons.

It should come as no surprised that Wilson could provide itself with better service than Embarg, and at a lower price. The rest of the world is years ahead of the American telecommunications industry in providing high speed wireless services. Our companies are too busy in a turf war to think much about customers.

Arlen Specter has switched parties, and is now a Democrat. He was one of two or three remaining moderate Republicans. Since the Democratic Party has a whole wing full of moderate to rightist Republicans, he’s in good company.

I wondered for years about Specter – he’s the man who originated the “Magic Bullet” theory in the JFK assassination. It’s plainly ludicrous, but since it’s official truth, it’s probably in all the kids’ history books now, and Lee Harvey Oswald will officially be the assassin forevermore.

Lately I came to understand the nature and need for a cover-up of the true events of 11/22/63, and realized that Specter was operating on a higher plane than I ever gave him credit for. So no more mystery.

The switch is politically motivated, and hardly philosophical. And liberals are a far cry from holding any kind of majority in the senate, so sixty or 59 votes means nothing. It’s mostly a move designed to save the career of an aging senator, a good and smart man who will probably die in office.

The object of this game is simple – creative writing. Just let it flow. Come up with the most disjointed logic you can to get to a totally offbeat song that you really want to hear anyway, and do it by writing a special request to Kasey Kasem.

I’ll go first:

Dear Kasey, Last week I was playing ‘go fetch’ with my dog Sinbad. We play in the street here in front of our house in Millard, Arkansas. Sinbad is an Irish Terrier, and I got him for my tenth birthday. He’s ten now, and I’m twenty.

Sinbad enjoys running after the stick – in fact, he’ll do anything to get that stick. He’ll run in front of a truck or go down a sewer drain. One time he even went through the open window of a passing car. Boy was that scary. The driver stopped and threw Sinbad out and then said some very bad words before driving on.

Yesterday we were playing fetch. I had a new stick, maple. It had just come in the mail. Sinbad was anxious, like something was wrong. I threw the stick, but he didn’t run after it. I went and got it myself, and threw it again, and he still didn’t go after it. I thought something was wrong. I looked into his mouth, checked his paws. Nothing. I sniffed around his rear end. Nothing unusual. Then I heard it. Next door at the Hamilton’s, there was a loud pop.

Sinbad barked and went running off, and I followed. He went to the front door of Mrs. Hamilton’s house and barked some more. No one answered. I knocked. Nothing. I opened the door. There on the floor was Mrs. Hamilton, covered with blood. The back door was open. The garage door was too. I heard a car speeding off. Sinbad went to the body and sniffed around her face, and sure enough, Mrs. Hamilton was alive! I called 911, and the ambulance came and took her to the hospital. She’s recovering now, and is going to be all right. And we owe it all to Sinbad.

Kasey, would you play “Lady Godiva’s Operation” by the Velvet Underground? It’s for Mrs. Hamilton, who’s lying in her bed today recovering from her wounds. I think she’d really like it.

And Sinbad is fetching again, just like before. Sinbad, go fetch!

Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard law professor and currently chair the five-person Congressional oversight panel for the $700 billion bailout fund. She was on the Daily Show

Jon Stewart: Why isn’t the first thing we do is to say that no one will be allowed to be too big to fail. That is a license to commit poor banking practice.

Warren: So what you’re asking is if we can get this bus pulled out of the ditch – the economy – what does the road look like going forward? This really is the big question.

Let me start that question in 1792. Young country, George Washington is in his first term, and we have a credit freeze. There’s a financial panic. Every ten to fifteen years, there’s a financial panic in our history. You can just look at it. And there’s a big collapse, big trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out. Until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression, and people say you know, we can do better that this. We don’t have to go back to this boom and bust cycle.

We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations: FDIC Insurance, it’s safe to put your money into banks; Glass-Steagall, banks won’t do crazy things; and some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis …

Stewart: A couple of recessions in there, some down times …

Warren: But no crisis, no banks failing, no big crisis, that sort of thing …

Stewart: S&L…

Warren: Now wait a minute. I said fifty years. Because then what happens is we say regulation is a pain, it’s expensive, we don’t need it. So we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric. The first thing we get? We get the S&L crisis. 700 financial institutions fail.

Ten years later what do we get? Long term capital management, when we learn that when something collapses in one place in the world, it collapses everywhere else.

Early 2000’s we get Enron, which tells us that the books are dirty.

And what is our repeated response? We keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.

We have two choices. We’re going to make a big decision, probably over the next six months. The big decision we’re going to make – it’s going to go one way or the other. We’re going to decide, basically, hey, we don’t need regulation. No, it’s fine … boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust and good luck with your 401K. Or alternatively, we gonna say you know, we’re going to put in some smart regulation, it’s going to adapt to the fact that we have new products. And what we’re going to have going forward is some stability and some real prosperity for ordinary folks.

Stewart: And that’s socialism.

This has been a work in progress today as I do other things. This is the third graph I have done – each requires that I input data into Excel, draw a graph, scan the graph and load it into WordPress. I hope I am done with that.

The lines are, top to bottom:

Total Federal Government Expenditures (Gay blue)
Total Revenue (Purple hue)
General Fund Expenditures (Navy Bluish hue)
Income Tax Collections (Dark Blue)
Payroll Tax Collections (Green)
Social Security Expenditures (Tan)
Corporate Tax Collections (Brown)

All are inflation-adjusted – 1980 = 100.

Conclusions:

1) The more lines, the harder to interpret, and the narrow space allotted by WordPress makes matters worse. The colors assigned by Excel are too close together in the blue range.

2) Total revenue (purple) has taken serious hits in the early 1980’s and early 2000’s, due to tax cuts. After taking those hits, it climbs back up to the same line it was on before the tax cuts took effect. In other words, we are on the left side of the Laffer Curve. Furthermore, tax cuts do not produce increased revenue. Never have. That’s Reaganist mythology.

3) Social Security revenues (green) and expenditures (tan) run a straight line. Revenues outpace expenditures consistently, though not so much as indicated on the chart, as “Payroll Tax” (green) also includes Medicare receipts.

4) Corporate revenues have been relatively flat – that sector is carrying less and less of the burden. The “corporate tax is paid by consumers” set has had their way, no matter popular opinion. Corporations have a lot of power, I might add.

5) At one time, in 1999, we ran a true surplus – it is that little purple point you see above the blue line around 1999. It means that revenue from all sources exceeded all expenditures. That was probably an accident, dot-com bubble and all that. Clinton didn’t plan it, I’m sure. It’s even perilous, as people begin to clamor for thing like health care and infrastructure spending when there is a surplus. That’s why the surplus was quickly undone in the 2000’s.

6) Income taxes shot up in the 1990’s, and this was after a tax increase during a recession. This confounds the right wing, as the tax hike should have had the opposite effect.

7) Dave Budge says “You can’t draw any conclusions from this. Too many variables. (He was commenting on an earlier version I put up, but still, I take that to mean that it did not demonstrate that he is correct in his economic outlook. Otherwise, it would be highly demonstrative of practical use of right wing economics.) As it is, it pretty much shows that right wing economics is the result of flat-earth thinking.

PS: Anyone who wants to play with this some more, let me know in the comments below and I will email the Excel file to you.