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Michael Maiello's picture

What If Obama Loses?

I'm pretty bad at the politics part of politics.  Sure, I can read opinion polls and guess at what messages will play well in communities I know well, but I don't have a great crystal ball for predicting how groups of people will react to major events.

When I look over at the Republican ticket I see one threat (Mitt Romney) and a lot of nothing else.  I also think Romney is eminently beatable and that so long as the economy is improving, even if it's improving too slowly, Obama has to be the odds-on favorite to win in 2012.  But, hey, anything can happen, right?

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Michael Maiello's picture

Corporate Power and American Democracy

Writing a weekly column and blogging here adds up to a lot of spilled words every week.  I'm even starting to sense an evolving theme that wouldn't have been the one I'd necessarily chosen if I'd set out to write a whole bunch of little pieces that were going to add up to something.  Don't worry, I'm not going to go all meta on you here.  Just introducing the idea I've been struggling with -- the role of the economy as an organizing factor in society and the role of corporate executives as the most influential, powerful and unaccountable leaders.  My column for

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Michael Maiello's picture

Will Barack Obama Work For GE?

Update: after considering Genghis' comments, I edited the headline here and I want to add one thing, for those of you who have already read the post.  Even according to the Times story I linked to, Obama and Geithner are right now skeptical about the idea of a repatriation tax holiday.  It also looks as if the lobbying effort for this dates back to 2010.  So, yes, I probably did get ahead of myself.

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Michael Maiello's picture

Obama's Down and Out On Wall Street

Apparently, President Obama is having trouble raising Wall Street money for 2012.  One anonymous champion of capitalism even complains that it's because "Obama simply doesn't like rich people."  I figure a statement like that will draw cackles around here.  If Obama doesn't like rich people, who the heck does he like?  And, if he treats the people he dislikes as well as he's been treating the rich, how do I get on the big guy's bad side?

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Michael Maiello's picture

Corporate America Breaks Up With The Middle Class

American businesses are breaking up with the middle class.  This won't be news around here, though it might stir up some controversy over at The Daily today.  In my column this week I looked into some of the potential implications of two big changes in American business.  They used to rely largely on domestic middle class consumers to make their profits.  This was true even in the 1990s, when the main effect of globalization was overseas exploitation in order to sell cheap goods ba

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Michael Maiello's picture

Obama's New Stimulus, (He's Still Not Getting It)

I was delighted to see this Bloomberg story about the White House pursuing additional stimulus after the failure of QE2 and the recent rise in unemployment.  But the method he's pursuing -- a temporary holiday for the employer portion of the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, is not going to fix things, even if the Republicans go along with it.

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Michael Maiello's picture

Legalize Drugs, Gambling and Prostitution

My social libertarian side comes out in my column for The Daily today.  I've always been a live and let live and let your freak flag fly type of person.  I think that people who want to live an atypical life should enjoy being chemically, sexually, physically and emotionally adventurous, so long as that's what they want to do.  If we only get one go at life, there's probably no point in returning your rental body without a few dings in it.

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Michael Maiello's picture

Is Obama Giving Up?

Over the weekend, Austan Goolsbee went on the chit chat shows to tell people that the economy is out of the emergency zone, that slipping into a Great Depression is no longer what we all fear and that the government isn't going to do anything else dramatic to put Americans back to work, to say nothing of raising wages and living standards.

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Michael Maiello's picture

Big Brother Obama

My column for The Daily today is about the reinstatement of The Patriot Act and how the fact that the government can and will spy on 300 million Americans is now just an accepted fact of life, and is no longer something that inspires serious debate.  I believe that we will live with The Patriot Act forever and that government and corporate abuses of privacy are just going to get worse.

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Michael Maiello's picture

Go Lose Yourself, David Brooks

Sorry for the second entry of the day, but I don't seem to be crowding anyone out today and David Brooks really ticked me off this morning.  I probably should let that emotionally stunted geek get under my skin, but I think it's a pretty horrible thing when somebody takes to The Freaking New York Times to specifically tell ambitious and hopeful college graduates not to follow their bliss, not to pursue their dreams and not to find themselves, as Brooks did today in a rhetorical back alley abortion called "

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TypeTitleAuthorRepliesLast updated
Blog entryVeep Paul Ryan Open Thread Michael Maiello4911 years 7 months ago
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