ISIS Member Spotted in Downtown Lexington?

<SNARK!>Ha!
Posted by Liberal In Kentucky on Wednesday, September 16, 2015

On a Plate a Short Story on Privilege

Thank American Taxpayers for Your Smart Phone, Not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs

Described by the business community during the Cold War as "a magic formula for almost endless good times." it was the defense and university funding that developed computers and code.  The truth is the birth of the Middle Class, and the IT revolution of today was almost entirely funded by the taxpayers.

"The federal government has played a critical role in supporting the research that underlies computer-based products and services. From less than $10 million in 1960, federal funding for research in computer science climbed to almost $1 billion in 1995. Federal expenditures on research in electrical engineering (which includes semiconductor and communications technologies—necessary underpinnings for computing) have fluctuated between $800 million and $1 billion since the 1970s. Such funding has constituted a significant fraction of all research funds in the computers" -Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research

Truman's Air Force Secretary said that government subsidies were't the right word.  "Security" was when it came to government funds developing new technologies and new products.  It's far easier to sell the subsidization of the wealthiest and corporate class if it's seen necessary to the security of the public.

"The NSF ended up funding the bulk of theoretical work in the field (by 1980 it had supported nearly 400 projects in computational theory), much of it with great success. Although funding for theoretical computer science has declined as a percentage of the NSF budget for computing research (it constituted 7 percent of the budget in 1996, down from 20 percent in 1973), it has grown slightly in real dollars.1 Mission-oriented agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, tend not to fund theoretical work directly because of their emphasis on advancing computing technology, but some advances in theory were made as part of their larger research agendas." -National Academia Press

The federal government (taxpayers) has paid the tab for the last 65+ years of technological innovation - simple because quarterly capitalism can't convince temperamental shareholders that maximum return on quarterly returns aren't necessarily beneficial to the overall society.  Those in the business community know this, and shift the costs of R&D under the umbrella of defense spending.

Take the incredible apparent example of infrastructure spending with fiber optic cable - an infrastructure we know benefits communities but shortchanges investors:

"Karl Bode, an ISP industry watcher and author of a the blog DSL Reports, believes Verizon has had a change of heart. “I think ex-Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg was very bullish on fiber,” he says. “But after retirement, he was replaced by executives who wanted to focus more heavily on wireless, given the lower cost of deployment and the absolute killing that can be made charging users a significant amount per gigabyte.”

But he also blames the money men. “Investors in this country are simply too myopic to wait the required length of time to see adequate returns,” Bode says. “These services are certainly profitable, they’re just not profitable enough quickly enough for short-sighted investors.” -Wired

And it's no secret that companies want to stifle innovation and cheaper prices - they advertise this fact:


Kentucky had to bond the installation of fiber infrastructure out - putting the taxpayers entirely on the line for losses for example.  It's the first of it's kind across the county - and it should result in remarkable results for Kentucky - but private investors didn't fund it.

This post isn't so much to hail the system we have of State-Capitalism, but to dispute the idea of the efficiency of markets and wonders of the market.  It's as much of an illusion as the idea of the Confederacy was in 1864.  It was a Confederacy of the mind only.  The reality of both was and is much different.

Almost all of the technical innovations in IT/computer science, aerospace, biology, medicine and genetics have come out of the state sector - provided by tax payer money.  Quarterly dictated investors are just too short sighted.

Noam Chomsky on the Entire R field - They're All Crazy

Noam Chomsky sums up what we were all thinking. The entire Republican field is totally nuts.

The Human Science Behind Anti-Vaxxers

Frank Zappa Owns Religious Zealot Loon

9/11 Truther Gets Shutdown by Noam Chomsky

Owned:

Bernie Sanders in Reno Nevada, Entire Speech Here

Liberal in Kentucky now has it's own domain!

Please put this in your bookmarks!

www.liberalinkentucky.com

Blogspot will forward you to the new address automatically.

Fancy Farm 2015:

Fancy Farm 2015 speeches.

Videos from KET:

Governor Steve Beshear:



Attorney General Jack Conway:



Matt Bevin:



Sen. Mitch McConnell:



My favorite Fancy Farm speech of all time - Gov. Steve Beshear 2008:

When Things Went Wrong? When Money Got Weird:

When Things Went Wrong?  When Money Got Weird.  When the U.S. economy was latched onto by Wall Street there wasn't much that was new - besides lots of debt - and ways to hide it:

Ken Burns: Confederate Flag about Resistance to Civil Rigths

The famous Ken Burns Civil War series is to be re-released this fall, make sure to watch. It's more relevant now than ever:

Poverty Creates Stress and that's Bad for Everyone

No surprise here. Poverty has devastating effects for the entirety of a society:

Upward Mobilty and Social Capital

The American Dream, or the American Mirage? A great Piece from NPR explaining the plight and rise of "some" immigrants:

Progress! Mark the date, June 26th 2015!

 

Harvard Business Study: Companies Aren't Trying to Invest in Their Workers

A great Harvard Business Review study about wage stagnation.  The summary?  Companies aren't even bothering investing in their workforces:



A snippet from the piece:

"Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity.

The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees."

From Chomsky:

"From roughly 1950 until the early 1970s there was a period of unprecedented economic growth and egalitarian economic growth. So the lowest quintile did as well -- in fact they even did a little bit better -- than the highest quintile. It was also a period of some limited but real form of benefits for the population. And in fact social indicators, measurements of the health of society, they very closely tracked growth. As growth went up social indicators went up, as you'd expect. Many economists called it the golden age of modern capitalism -- they should call it state capitalism because government spending was a major engine of growth and development.

In the mid 1970s that changed. Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized. The power of the economy shifted to the financial institutions, away from manufacturing. And since then, the majority of the population has had a very tough time; in fact it may be a unique period in American history. There's no other period where real wages -- wages adjusted for inflation -- have more or less stagnated for so long for a majority of the population and where living standards have stagnated or declined. If you look at social indicators, they track growth pretty closely until 1975, and at that point they started to decline, so much so that now we're pretty much back to the level of 1960. There was growth, but it was highly inegalitarian -- it went into a very small number of pockets. There have been brief periods in which this shifted, so during the tech bubble, which was a bubble in the late Clinton years, wages improved and unemployment went down, but these are slight deviations in a steady tendency of stagnation and decline for the majority of the population."

The rest is here:

The Problem with the U.S. Tax System

What's wrong with our tax system? David Cay Johnston explains in this great piece below.

A snippet: 

"If you go back one year to 2011, and you take - there was a little higher income in 2011 than 1966, for the vast majority, and just count that as one inch, they got $59 more income after all those years, they got one inch. The plutocrat class, this is the small group at the top of in this case 16,000 because it's a different statistical measure, 16,000 households in a country of 316 million people, compared to that one inch their income is up five miles, just a bit under five miles, one inch to file miles.

All the gains are going to the top, and it's not because everybody else got lazy or stupid, it's because we cut taxes at the top. We changed the rules. We put in place all these hidden subsidies I've been exposing for years that take from the many and redistribute upward to the few...

...YOUNG: Well, a ballooning capital gains pie lifts all boats, I mean, that this will trickle down to jobs.

JOHNSTON: That's - if that were true, and that's what the data showed, I'd be all for it. What the data show isn't trickle down by Niagara up. And more and more capital is being invested in unproductive ways. It's being used in this high-speed trading and to froth the market, which I've been writing about for years, and there's now an excellent book out by Michael Lewis explaining as an insider how this stuff works and how we have a bunch of dishonest markets."

Hillary Clinton Sets Major Trap for Republicans

Hillary dares Republicans to go against her immigration stance. (See the NPR story below)

Who was that communist President that gave amnesty to millions of people by the way?



Oh yeah...

Jon Oliver on Bud Light

"All" of this:

Jim Jefferies Gun Ownership/Gun Control?