dagblog - Comments for "What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014"

Oddly, we have the Federal

jollyroger — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 02:30:47 +0000

In reply to What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014

Oddly, we have the Federal government, which possesses the power (cf, Bankruptcy Code) to void contractual obligtations enforcing them, and the states, to whom such altering or abridging of the obligations of contract is explicitly forbidden doing just that.

Absent the entry into bankruptcy (which, of course, is not available to the state as an entity) how do these legislatively enacted changes stand up to the "contract clause"?

Time for more op-eds about a

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 03:27:46 +0000

In reply to What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014

Time for more op-eds about a "principled" third party.

I hadn't read this until now.

Bruce Levine — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:20:58 +0000

In reply to What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014

I hadn't read this until now. Important stuff, nice work.

Yeah, I was also scratching

Michael Wolraich — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 17:08:16 +0000

In reply to What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014

Yeah, I was also scratching my head when I read that column.

Matt Taibbi on Raimando,

NCD — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:10:52 +0000

In reply to What Passes for Democratic Heroism in 2014

Matt Taibbi on Gina Raimando, Rolling Stone, 2013:

The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast....

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. ...The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information,

Don't be surprised if after the next inevitable crash of our current 0% Fed bubble, pol's like Raimando and the entire GOP say Social Security is insolvent, and must be turned over to the hedge funds (that also coincidentally fund their campaigns), who need another system to game for fees and profits until it too goes bankrupt..