Tesla (TSLA) Showcases Model X is a post from: Green Stocks Central

Let the hype begin for Tesla’s Model X, the electric crossover vehicle slated for launch in 2014.  Some might say it’s a bit early to begin s Read more …

 
 Transcript | Download mp4 | Download mp3

Tell us what $40 means to you and your family. What would you have to go without or give up if Congress doesn’t act?

Meanwhile …

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has also called for extending unemployment benefits, calling it “a moral obligation.” This comes as Republicans in Congress are working to cut back the amount of time that people receive unemployment compensation. From Catholic Bishops, Other Religious Groups Lobby For Unemployment Insurance Extension,

On Monday, Bishop Stephen E. Blaire sent a letter to members of the House of Representatives urging them to focus on the economic security of workers at year’s end.

“When the economy fails to generate sufficient jobs, there is a moral obligation to help protect the life and dignity of unemployed workers and their families,” Blaire wrote. “Therefore, I strongly urge you and your colleagues to find effective ways to assure continuing Unemployment Insurance and Emergency Unemployment Compensation to protect jobless workers and their families.”

Compare And Contrast

Here we have two similar situations. One has the Catholic Bishops upset over an Obama administration ruling on birth control. The other has the Catholic Bishops upset over Republicans cutting unemployment benefits. Compare and contrast the furor, the corporate media coverage, the Republican statements, the conservative outrage machine, etc…

I’ve talked with many domestic U.S. manufacturers over the past decade or so– mostly small and mid-sized manufacturers (the backbone of America’s industrial base). 

One particular manufacturer whom I knew well was the president of a family-owned company that produced printed circuit boards.  His firm had been around since the dawn of the computer age, manufacturing circuit boards for both commercial and military applications.

He used to tell me all the time that his workers and his factory were incredibly efficient and productive.  He would say, “I can compete with anybody in the world…But what’s killing me is China’s currency peg.”

What he meant was that, because China deliberately undervalues its currency (in violation of world trade law), its manufacturers can export goods at an artificially reduced price.  Essentially, my friend’s firm was competing against the full resources of the government of China.

Eventually, my friend had to close his factory.  He was one of the last printed circuit board manufacturers left in the U.S.  Losing his factory meant that the U.S. was now more reliant than ever on obtaining printed circuit boards from China.

I think back to my conversations with him now, after having attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC this week.

Specifically, I’m thinking of Newt Gingrich’s speech yesterday.  In the midst of an address about “changing the trajectory” of the “Republican establishment,” Gingrich started to lay out his vision for transforming the United States.  After a quick aside about the pitfalls of unemployment insurance (“Never again shall we pay somebody 99 weeks for doing nothing”), the former Speaker of the House turned to manufacturing.

Here was his solution for manufacturing:

“Now if we’re serious about manufacturing, we have to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, which is a job killing agency.”

When I heard that, I thought back to my friend who manufactured printed circuit boards.  He happens to be a Republican, and a retired Marine officer.  I’d never heard him complain about the EPA.  But I did recall his frequent frustration about China.  He said he believed in free trade, and what China was doing was protectionist.  It was not acceptable, and Congress needed to act.

This is why I find Gingrich’s assertion disheartening.  What he should be saying is: “If we want to get serious about manufacturing, let’s start standing up to China when they violate our trade agreements.  When they illegally dump product, when they illegally subsidize their steel and glass and paper exports with tens of billions of dollars, when they illegally undervalue their currency, let’s enforce the laws we have on the books and say NO MORE.  Rules are rules.  Let’s preserve the free market.”

To be fair, Gingrich did mention China once, at the top of his speech:

“This is not about being revenue neutral, this is about maximizing economic growth to put Americans back to work and to create the most dynamic economy on the planet and to rebuild our manufacturing base, so we can pull away from China and we become once again the dominant country on the planet.”

Along those lines, Gingrich did float one idea that could be helpful to manufacturers, a suggestion about revising U.S. tax law:

“You go to 100 percent expensing, so all new equipment at every level, farmer factory, doctor, business, all of that gets written off in one year.  The goal is to make the American system the most modern, most productive in the world.”

Revisions to tax policy are one of a number of important steps that the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) has outlined in a plan to save U.S. manufacturing.

The only other speech I saw was that of Mitt Romney.  Interestingly, Romney has been talking tough on the campaign trail when it comes to China, threatening to designate them as a “currency manipulator” on day one of his presidency.  However, he only made two passing mentions of China:

“I will approach every spending decision by asking a few important questions: Can we afford it? And, if not, is it worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?… I will cut off funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which supports China’s barbaric One Child Policy.”

Romney never mentioned manufacturing in his speech, an unfortunate omission.  And while it’s timely to cite the issue of U.S. indebtedness to China, it’s ironic that Beijing is mentioned so prominently.  In actual fact, China only owns about 8% of publicly held U.S. debt, which means Beijing possesses far less leverage than is commonly believed.

All in all, it would have been helpful to hear both Gingrich and Romney focus more on manufacturing’s outsized contributions to the U.S. economy, and why (for example) they would push for Buy America policy and much-needed infarstructure investment after taking office as president.

There’s much this country urgently needs to do, and rebuilding U.S. manufacturing should be at the top of the list.

Lately the water cooler conversations at my religiously affiliated nonprofit social service agency have been focused on trying to understand the new HHS contraceptive mandate. My younger, female coworkers and enlightened male coworkers are giddy with anticipation. For as long as any of us have been working here, we haven’t been able to get coverage for our birth control and have even had to struggle to get our employer to cover contraception prescribed for conditions like polycystic fibrosis, and dysmenorrhea.

When a coworker with a cancer-causing condition needed contraception, she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t afford the medication out-of-pocket with her meager nonprofit salary. I called our HR Director on her behalf. It took weeks to get an answer. Meanwhile my coworker couldn’t fill her prescription and her condition got worse. Recently I found out that another coworker has been paying $90 a month out-of-pocket for the contraception she needs to treat her polycystic fibrosis.

HR then told us that we would have to ask permission of the agency’s CEO on a case-by-case basis. It reminded me of when I first got my period at age 12. My cramps were so bad that my pediatrician recommended low-dose contraception. My non-Catholic mother said that my very Catholic father might not allow it and that I would need to ask him for permission. The only difference here is that we are not young girls and the CEO is not our father.

I pursued my coworker’s issue with our agency’s lawyer. She acknowledged that the agency had to cover the contraception in this situation, and she finally intervened and informed HR that they needed to cover it. A year later, I too needed to get contraception for dysmenorrhea, so when I asked for coverage I ended up in battle with a male HR employee that knew nothing about the earlier situation. It was embarrassing to have to reveal my medical condition to him. The ground I thought I covered last year had been lost it seemed, making it a continuously frustrating battle.

When I finally got a clear answer, I requested that the agency develop a protocol and send it out to our thousands of staff throughout the city. They refused.

We’re relieved that with today’s announcement from President Obama, by this time next year, the HHS mandate will allow us to make our own decisions about whether or not to take birth control. We will consult our own consciences, informed by our own health needs, and our own religious and moral convictions, not the religious beliefs of a distant religious figure. As U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently said, “whether or not to take birth control is the woman’s choice, not her boss’s.”

Due to concerns about job security the author of this post has chosen to write under a pseudonym.

Learn more about birth control coverage: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Rich Santorum surges to a 38-23% national lead over Mitt Romney in the latest PPP poll.  Indeed, “Santorum gets to 50% in the Newt free field to 28% for Romney and 15% for Paul.” (Of course, the field is not Newtless… yet.)  Per usual, I am inclined to throw cold water on momentary buzz, in this case the excitement over discovering a potential consensus NotRomney.

Most would say that Santorum’s most surprising and impressive win to date was the Colorado caucus.  Although weather and Romney’s overconfidence may have been factors in that win, there were likely deeper factors at work there.  However, it is not clear those factors would benefit the GOP in a general election.

Seth Masket’s statistical breakdown of the Colorado win confirms a fair amount of the conventional wisdom about Santorum’s victory there, i.e., he won conservatives and his voters were more enthusiastic.  But another graph shows another result that is perhaps not unexpected, but telling:

Romney’s caucus vote correlates highly with the 2010 primary vote for U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton. Norton, you may recall, was the candidate with the solid resume, lots of insider support, and a huge monetary advantage whom the activist base nonetheless didn’t like, and she lost to a Tea Party-backed conservative. Sound familiar?

Indeed it does.  Norton lost to Ken Buck, who lost in the general election.  That loss is generally attributed to Buck’s comments on social issues like abortion and homosexuality, not to mention what was perceived as a gender-based attack on Norton herself.

Team Obama has pretty openly declared that one of its two playbooks would be to exploit social issues in hopes of winning Western swing states like Colorado and Nevada (where Sharron Angle similarly lost in 2010).  Santorum has an expanding library of exploitable quotations on social issues and consistently criticizes the more libertarian factions of the party.  In the remaining GOP field, there may be no candidate who more strongly plays into this Democrat strategy.

However, lest you think I am implicitly shilling for Romney by dumping on Santorum, note that Obama’s other playbook (2004 over 2010) is based on defining Romney as an inauthentic plutocrat, in hopes of holding the Rust Belt, including Ohio.  The latest Rasmussen poll has Santorum as the better candidate against Obama.  The latest Susquehanna poll has Romney and Santorum in a dead heat in Pennsylvania, but Romney as the marginally better candidate against Obama (which may change quickly if Santorum continues to surge).  And PPP may well show the same surge in Michigan (although a GOP win there in November still strikes me as a long shot, regardless of candidate).

This is why a growing regional divide among the right  – and having a candidate with broad appeal to more than one region, especially in a general election – matters.

–Karl

I find myself in agreement with some of the Greek left wing parties. I think cutting the minimum wage in Greece by 22% is wrong. It is too far too fast when the Greek economy has stalled for lack of demand. There are other easier cuts in spending that they might make, but only if they also take some positive action to stimulate the economy. That means getting out of the Euro.

I think it wrong that the EU tells Greek politicians what budget they should set. It removes the last vestiges of proper democratic accountability in Greece. The surprise is not that it triggered six resignations by Ministers,  but that it did not trigger the resignations of most of the rest. However, it all makes perfect sense if they are to remain locked into a single currency where other countries have to pay a lot of their bills. They need to resolve the issue of Who governs? They need to persuade all the voters in Euroland of a new political architecture which shifts decision making to the centre if they are to have any chance of getting the politics to reinforce the bureaucratic imperatives of a shared money.

There is a passive sullen response from much of the Greek establishment. They follow EU and IMF orders because they are told they have to. They are totally dependent on the next loan or hand out, so they feel they have to accept what they are told. Unfortunately for them too much of the “assistance” comes in the form of loans, and not enough in the form of grants. This leads to bigger debt problems. The Greek establishment then retaliates in the only way left to it, demanding a larger “hair cut” on the debt.

There is a fundamantal dishonesty in all this. If all concerned want the Euro to stick together they have to pay more for Greece. Surely it is more orderly and seemly to pay more up front, instead of pretending to lend them money and then conniving at default on the debt at a later date?

The Germans know from bitter experience just how dear it is to pay for a single currency in a state which struggles to keep up with the rest of the zone. They found they had to put billions into East Germany when they went for a premature currency union in 1990. They did not do that by “lending” money to East Germany. They just paid up. They do not want to do the same for Greece, because they do not have public consent to do so. Yet all the time Greece stays in this union, there are liabilities building up for German taxpayers. They may end up being paid by default rather than by voluntary grant, but it will come to the same thing.

At CPAC, she was the star:

And at least in terms of reception, she did win today. Palin’s speech got the biggest reaction of any at CPAC — much more so than any of the presidential candidates. The audience gave her standing ovation after standing ovation and some even yelled “Run Sarah run!” — more telling of the GOP field’s inability to connect with voters than any poll.

Palin zeroed in on President Obama. The current state of the economy “is not a failure of the American people,” she said. “It is the failure of leadership. We know how to change that, oh yes we do. Oh yes we can,” she said, echoing Obama’s campaign line.

There wasn’t this much excitement over any of the other three. Palin has what it takes to beat Obama.

See what I mean about CPA losing it’s conservative stripes?

Mitt Romney Conservative? Are you serious? Did you forget Romney ran against the Reagan record and his dad George Romney hated Barry Goldwater’s brand of conservative politics?

This is a sad day for conservatism.