Mexico has gone through periods of phenomenal economic growth, when the government was relatively focused. The people are highly industrious. When the government is as it is now, with 50% dire poverty, what are the options? The employers here love the arrangement since there are no obligations to do much for employees or follow any labor regulations. The Populist manifesto I discussed is just the type of things The Money Party hates. Rational demands for respect for labor, whomever is doing the work. If our role was protector of the hemisphere, we'd make sure that Mexico wasn't selling off it's treasures on the cheap to others and also we'd stay out of their elections, in particular, and their politic in general other than to urge clean government. Of course, that would presume clean government here...NOT!

We could have a 100,000,000 person nation humming along at 7-8% growth, a great neighbor and trade partner. But we're too caught up in the same corruption that goes on in Mexico to realize that. It's a limited pie with ever diminishing portions. There is no creativity in The Money Party approach.

I wrote this in response to reading your article on the general media circus.

I it almost axiomatic to assume that when someone says they're all for children, the kids will be neglected and when they're all over quality education etc., they're really talking about starving the school system.

From the Populist manifesto:

"The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.” 1892 platform

Same as it ever was...

Please do not use derogatory terms on this site, which is primarily an economics site.

While we're going to acknowledge this is glorified labor arbitrage against the teamsters, their union, warehouse workers, i.e. Hoffa is calling it like it is, and the border statistics are brazen as well, that's where we draw the line.

There are plenty of U.S. citizens of Hispanic ethnicity here, and this is all about flooding labor markets, wages and eroding further U.S. workers power and rights.

Right, while the media works up America in a frenzy over one crime, the statistics of people suffering in the U.S. are ballooning, including child poverty. Now I have issue with illegals coming here, having a lot of kids and living off of social services. Yes, I know that's a GOP talking point but the statistics are there to back it up.

That said, focusing on that masks the reality plenty of white children are in poverty. If someone is a single mother, they are simply screwed in this country in terms of trying to raise their kids and have a career. There is little support for families and reports of discrimination against single mothers to even get hired.

How long has this ridiculous story dominated the headlines on all news outlets? I'm fairly certain it's over 14 days where it's crowded out any other story and really going on 3 years.

What the fascists in the media need to report on are the illegal wars in the world the NWO implementation and Soetoro's illegal usurpation of the White House.

However, there's some independently produced stuff that is carried on some public radio stations that are affiliated with NPR. BBC is sometimes good reporting on U.S.A. politics. The worst is the little news breaks on the C&W and R&R stations that so many working guys listen to in the background.

Online, cable or broadcast, you have to make an effort to be selective.

And, yeah, that's the key to all of it. You just cannot take any of the standard news sources without a large dose of critical thinking. Same thing is true of all the presumably independent online sources.

I support net neutrality. I THINK that's what I support, although the devil seems to be in the details what with the giants pushing for this and that. Concentrated-ownership media would love to co-opt "net neutrality" to mean whatever they say it means.

The bottom line is that I compare the content of all news sources to determine if it jibes with what I see and hear around me. You don't always have to agree with the slant of a webpage to find information there, but you always do have to separate the information from the spin.

You develop a sense of smell, and you can tell when you're nearing a factory pig farm.

Yes! I'll settle for the 1892 platform of the Populist Party!

You betcha!

What happens to our third party movements is that they get sidetracked into cultural issues. Buchanan destroyed the Reform Party in the name of his cultural war. Perot side-stepped all cultural issues. The way to resolve cultural issues is by direct voice of the people ("Initiative and Referendum").

The Populist Party I guess was overtaken by the Progressive Party ("Bull Moose"), which fell into the Third Party spoiler trap by running Teddy Roosevelt (a refugee by now from the GOP), which gave the 1912 election to the progressive-leaning Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Then everything became muddled with World War I. The Sixteenth Amendment (FIT) was finally ratified in February 1913. Shortly thereafter, the Seventeenth Amendment made senatorial elections direct by popular vote. Anti-trust had been in effect for some time, since Teddy Roosevelt's presidency.

By 1920, it was back to business as usual, Democrats versus Republicans, as Prohibition came in and distracted everyone -- winning their peurile victory not by popular vote, not by referendum, but by stampeding of public opinion and aggressive manipulation of the two-party system by a single-interest group.

Huzzah, cultural war! "In the mean time, in between time, ain't we got fun!"

Moralizing = hypocrisy rules!

And that's my main example here: Prohibition. No candidate running for office should ever have been asked for an opinion on prohibition! Prohibition was the first great irrelevant wedge issue, where people confused morality with politics.

(History informs us that legislators who voted for prohibition immediately adjourned to a speak-easy or even into the Senate cloakroom for a a bourbon!)
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The great success story was the Republican Party, which was anything but the Abolitionist Party, although it was formed to represent free labor as the basis of the nation ("Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men"). However, it is noteworthy that the Republican Party received a tremendous boost from the Supreme Court shortly after the election of 1856, (which Republican John Fremont lost to Democrat James Buchanan), thanks to the Court's radically pro-slavery and mostly unpopular Dred Scott decision.

My point here -- an important point -- 44 Republicans were elected to the House in 1854 and, four years later, the Republicans won a majority in the House in 1858. That was before the nomination and election of Lincoln in 1860.

We pay way too much attention to the presidential circus -- it's part of our silly celebrity culture.

We need much more focus on independents and 'minor' party candidates (winners!) in congressional elections!

That's the key. Also, constitutional amendments! Political structural reform. If you have any black-powder guns, you know how a ramrod works. Try that on the Supreme Court with a Judiciary Reform Amendment. Let them judicial activism their way out of that!

But FIRST ... stop watching that major network news! Bad habit! (If there happens to be anything worth watching, Robert Oak will give the heads-up in his weekend round-ups!)
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What does this have to do with economics? It's history, relevant to the Federal Reserve Act and the Sixteenth Amendment (FIC). But I admit to my bias -- I would love to see a new Reform Party rise up in this country before I die, fully acknowledging that it may ultimately wipe out one of the two existing parties. (I don't much care which one!)

"A nation-state was supposedly an organized group of people, citizens, by birth or naturalized who as a group stood up for their common interests." -- Robert Oak

Anybody remember the high-toned arguments in favor of ending "trade barriers" back in the 1990s? The highbrow argument was that nation-states would dissolve and, since wars had always been between nation-states, the WTO system would spell the end of warfare around the world. The corresponding lowbrow (actually hitting below the belt) argument was and is that if you oppose fast-track "free" trade, that proves you are a racist, or, it proves that you are an economic coward, afraid of competing to make a living.

Another claim for the emerging WTO world-system was that democracy would break out all over, following the growth everywhere of middle classes. This in turn would mean greater civil liberties for everyone in all nations.

Soon, everything was to be so wonderful  that national borders would become superfluous like borders between two jurisdictions as you drive along a main thoroughfare  through any major metropolitan area in the world

"Oh, look at that sign, we just entered People's Republic of Korea, I never would have noticed. Looks exactly like Los Angeles, doesn't it? There's Homey's Burgers! Oh, and look! There's an ATM on the corner! We can get rid of all our old dollars there!"

The WTO world system was sold to us by the same professionals using the same marketing tools as are used to sell cars or computers. It was a carefully planned campaign, fueled by profits already gained (since the 1950s) through labor arbitrage and emergent global finance-capitalism, based on fractional-reserve central banking.

The campaign was global. In the U.S.A., it was a matter of buying the Supreme Court, the Congress and the White House ... and selling the people. It wasn't necessary to convince a majority of the people, because it was easier to assure that no poll results would be published widely showing that the people were opposed to the removal of trade barriers. All that was necessary was enough support from academia and from the mass media, that the illusion of public support was great enough that buying of the institutions of democratic government went mostly unnoticed.

There are as many problems today as there were and are holes in the arguments of pro-WTO propagandists.

Among the problems is one huge issue, namely, that the institutions of democracy -- including civil liberty, regulated markets and representative government -- are struggling to survive in all democratic (small 'd') constitutional nation-states.

Nation-states are the traditional containers of common interests.

Traditional nation-states are like bottles -- transparent, fragile.

Here's the bottomline: Nation-states are the repositories of democracy, because they are the traditional repositories of common interests. Of course, nation-states can hold military dictatorships or kingdoms or Islamic Republics or People's Republics. Nation-states are like the bottles and you can put anything in them.

In the old nation-state system where the only containers were bottles, if you wanted a nation-state where a people stand up for their common interests, you need to protect all the bottles. That's what the U.N. is supposed to do: protect all the bottles.

Bottle-breaking ideology: cans are better, less fragile

Suppose now there is an ideology to go around and break all the bottles, because bottles are selfish, bottles cause wide-spread thirst, and, anyway, it's better to mix all the contents together ("multiculturalism") and let private entities like banks gather the spilled stuff up and put it into cans where it can be kept safely and sold in a free (unregulated) market to everyone.

Mopping up all the spilled stuff will create middle classes everywhere, and, with multiculturalism. these middle classes will soon all earn the same low wages, which will assure the creation of a global middle class. Just as the rise of a middle class in Europe had led to democratic institutions and civil liberties, the global middle class will do the same for the entire world! 

(Does this remind you of Marxism? Or Nazism? Or any other ideology that claims to be the ultimate reform movement for the entire world through a political agenda?)

This outcome -- breaking all the bottles, mopping up the spilled mix and canning it all to keep it safe and out-of-sight -- is much better than keeping stuff in these old fashioned bottles that are so transparent and also so fragile

"We have all the clean, safe renewable energy we need. We don't need the catastrophic risks and highly toxic waste of nuclear." -- BlueRock

Maybe. Maybe not. There are arguments on either side. It probably comes down to what is meant by "all the energy ... we need"? If we want not to be in denial, we should be thinking of what are the needs of world population projected out at least half a century and what is the development expectation for that world population. Even if we limit ourselves to planning just for the U.S.A. (and, IMO, that is what we should do), we still must consider global numbers and implications. It really isn't such an easy, open-and-shut case.

I don't know the answer about nuclear energy -- the crazy economics of it, the difficulty of any cost-benefit analysis. I don't get that far. What stops me is that I see the huge arsenals of nuclear weapons, and I wonder if industrial nuclear power, as such, is worth discussing.

If some extraterrestrial beings should be beaming down today, what would they think about this dominant, presumably intelligent species that cannot really explain to anyone (least of all themselves) why they are sitting on enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over. And then they expend more energy arguing over industrial nuclear power than they do considering the abolition of nuclear weapons!

James Lovelock, (probably the principal founder and promoter of the Gaia movement) begins his book, Revenge of Gaia (2006) with this quote:

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.    (King James Bible, Matthew 23:24)

Lovelock comes forward with a prescription for the current transitional period (about the next 50 years) that will see us safely into the next transitional period (from about 2060 out to sometime in the 22nd Century). His prescription is that the only way that the people of earth -- and perhaps the planet itself or herself (Lovelock uses feminine adjectives for Gaia) -- will be able to manage a "soft landing" to the industrial and post-industrial eras is to include nuclear fuel as a source of power to fill in as other available fuels are exhausted over the next half-century.

Those who favor Lovelock's idea may call it the "soft landing" strategy for the transitional period, that is, the period bridging industrial and post-industrial eras across to the beginning of an era when the people of Earth may manage a return to an era of relative stability and sustainability of human civilization on Earth.

Those who oppose Lovelock's idea call it "Lovelock's Folly."

(Both those who oppose and those who agree are part of what we can call the "Green Community" or "Green Movement," that is, they are all environmentalists and see things from an ecological point of view.)

Here is a link to Lovelock's book (American edition), available as PDF through the Scribd service --

Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia via Scribd.com

Here is the other side, a paper from the website TransitionCulture that is a book review of Lovelock's work, the review being titled 'Lovelock's Folly' --

'Lovelock's Folly' (review of Lovelock's book)

This may seem pretty weird to an American audience, but I believe that these arguments are well-known and have been debated widely in Europe, from France to Russia, over the last five years. Considering the Japanese disaster, those who talk of 'Lovelock's Folly' have likely won the latest round in the ongoing match.

It's hard for Americans to understand European govenments with their proportional representation and multiple parties, including such as the still very important Green Party in Germany (essential to any Social Democratic majority, when that rolls around again). Just like here in the U.S., European democracies are currently struggling with immigration issues, upsetting established political parties and alignments.

Here's background on Gaia:

Gaia is a hypothesis or a social movement, or both. As an hypothesis, Gaia is like environmentalism (activist ideology), but as an hypothesis, Gaia is like ecology (branch of science studying living phenomena or living beings in their environments and their environments as wholes). The hypothesis of Gaia is a matter for scientific debate. The movement of Gaia is a grand narrative or ideology.

The hypothesis springs from systems theory and goes like this: there is a Earth system, which is a living system (see, Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life) in the sense that it behaves as a unitary integral self-regulating system, comprised of physical, biological and human components, with feedback loops and whatever else systems engineers and scientists like to see when they study systems.

The ideology of Gaia goes a little farther, believing that Earth is a living system with some kind of intelligence or ability to adapt to changes in a way that we can only call intelligence, or perhaps 'soul'.

Where is the economic aspect in all this?

I think it is important to follow and to understand the energy debates and discussions going on around us and throughout the world. I wish we had a congress and administration (and SCOTUS) that would get us through elementary decisions about finance and economics -- rational decisions that should not be impossible for a government truly in tune with the common interests and views of the people of this nation -- rather than playing politics with their ideological agendas, vying for huge political donations from foreign-international-transnational special interests, putting the credit of the United States at risk (lip service to the fictional debt ceiling), and, doing nothing for necessary reforms.

That's why I think this topic is legitimate here at EP. It's one of the things that we, as a nation, should be discussing, if we could ever get beyond the logjam that gives us constant bad news on jobs, for small business, on infrastructure, for trade imbalances and national accounts.

That's 3 now. A French Journalist is filing an attempted rape charge against Strauss-Kahn from 2002 in France. AP:

Tristane Banon, 31, says she plans to file a criminal complaint Tuesday accusing Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her in 2002.

Believe this or not, Strauss-Kahn is filing a slander lawsuit against the woman who has been telling the story since 2007.

One would think three strikes you're out, regardless of the women's backgrounds and other issues. (The first being the one who felt "forced" to have an affair with Strauss-Kahn at the IMF or lose her position).

Surely there is a 4th considering these stories coming out.