{"id":20878,"date":"2016-03-25T14:39:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T21:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=20878"},"modified":"2016-03-25T14:40:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T21:40:05","slug":"open-thread3252015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/25\/open-thread3252015\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread&ndash;3\/25\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Yesterday I grew the green cloud for the fourth day in a row.&nbsp; I think Republicans are now afraid to get within a block of me.&nbsp; Today I&rsquo;m leaving shortly for PT\/OT with Courtney.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t be back until lunch time, so this is today&rsquo;s only article.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today&rsquo;s took me 2:33 (average 5:02).&nbsp; Drooling!!&nbsp; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2016-03-25-CE2504A965A9\" target=\"_blank\">click here<\/a>.&nbsp; How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/mediamatters.org\/video\/2016\/03\/22\/watch-an-international-correspondent-push-back\/209469\" target=\"_blank\">Media Matters<\/a>: <font color=\"#000000\">Watch An International Correspondent Push Back On O&#39;Reilly&#39;s Anti-Muslim Fearmongering<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#ff0000\"><strong>Barf Bag Alert!!<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" class=\"video-embed\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"360\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/mediamatters.org\/embed\/209469\" width=\"480\"><\/iframe><\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">O&#39;Lielly, the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, and Republican politicians and pundit use fear to promote hate, but the European journalist would not buy into it. How about it, Lona? Are Europeans &quot;under siege&quot; or are you putting it in its proper perspective.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/03\/25\/us\/north-carolina-law-antidiscrimination-pat-mccrory.html\" target=\"_blank\">NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>A day after Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/03\/24\/us\/north-carolina-to-limit-bathroom-use-by-birth-gender.html\" target=\"_blank\">signed a sweeping law<\/a> eliminating anti-discrimination protections for all lesbians, gays and bisexuals and barring transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match the gender they were born with, the battle lines were clear in a bitterly divided state.<\/p>\n<p>On social media and in public rallies, civil rights groups, businesses and politicians expressed dismay at the law, which was passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by the governor within just 12 hours during a hasty special session on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>American Airlines, which employs 14,000 people in the state and has its second largest hub in Charlotte, along with other companies with operations in the state, including Apple, Dow Chemical, PayPal, Red Hat and Biogen, all issued statements critical of the new law.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Our future as Americans should be focused on inclusion and prosperity, and not discrimination and division,&rdquo; Apple said in a statement. &ldquo;We were disappointed to see Governor McCrory sign this legislation.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"McCrorystanFlag\" border=\"0\" height=\"378\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/McCrorystanFlag.jpg\" style=\"border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px\" title=\"McCrorystanFlag\" width=\"650\" \/><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Welcome to The Republican Fascist Theocracy of McCrorystan!<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/books\/6-ways-reform-our-corrupt-financial-system\" target=\"_blank\">Alternet<\/a>: <\/font><\/p>\n<p>The following is an excerpt from the new book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rewriting-Rules-American-Economy-Prosperity\/dp\/0393254054\/?tag=alternorg08-20\" target=\"_blank\">Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy<\/a> by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W. W. Norton &amp; Company, Inc., 2016):&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&hellip;<\/p>\n<h6>End &ldquo;Too Big to Fail&rdquo;<\/h6>\n<p>We have yet to undertake the reforms needed to end too big to fail and thus reduce the potential for failure of large financial institutions to damage the broader economy. Banks that are backed by the government and are so big that their failure will cause the entire economy to contract don&rsquo;t need to internalize the costs of their failures and can reap huge benefits from risky bets. They have a perverse incentive to take on excess risk, knowing that should a problem arise they will be bailed out, with losses being borne by others. This, of course, is exactly what occurred in the 2008 financial crisis, the impacts of which still reverberate throughout the economy.<\/p>\n<p>Despite recent experience and the Dodd-Frank reform, banks are still not only too big to fail, but also too big to manage&mdash;evidenced by repeated failures like the &ldquo;London Whale.&rdquo; And even when they are not too big to fail, they can be too interconnected, too interlinked to fail: with excessive linkages (e.g., those associated with CDs and derivatives), the failure of one institution can lead to a cascade of other failures&mdash;stoppable only with a government bailout. That is why interlinkages need to be transparent and regulated.<\/p>\n<p>The Financial Stability Oversight Council should assess large, systemically risky financial firms with an additional capital surcharge above what regulators currently assess under the Basel Accords in order to make failure less likely and more manageable. Moreover, being too big to fail (or too interconnected to fail) gives banks an advantage: they don&rsquo;t have to account for the costs their failure poses to the system as a whole, and get a subsidy as a result. The surcharge corrects for a market distortion that otherwise would favor such banks, even if they are not more efficient than smaller ones.<\/p>\n<p>A surcharge would force banks to internalize the true cost of their risks and improve economic efficiency, while insulating taxpayers from the costs of failed institutions. And, to avoid the unproductive debate over how to exactly quantify &ldquo;systemically important financial institutions,&rdquo; the requirements should be graduated rather than set to a specific level.<\/p>\n<p>Further, if firms are incapable of producing &ldquo;living wills&rdquo; that the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation believe show how they can unwind in bankruptcy without causing massive costs to the rest of the economy, then these institutions need to be broken up along business lines and by size so that potential failures can be better managed. In addition, living wills and their analyses should be made public. The wills have to be designed to work not just in normal times but also in the abnormal times associated with a financial crisis. Some doubt whether meaningful living wills can in fact be constructed, given the kind of turmoil that can arise in the midst of a crisis. If this is the case, then the only recourse is to begin the process of breaking up the too big to fail institutions in the same way we once broke up Standard Oil and AT&amp;T.<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">That&#39;s the first of six steps needed to reform our corrupt financial system, I agree with them. Click through for the other five.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/0325Cartoon.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"0325Cartoon\" border=\"0\" height=\"404\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/0325Cartoon_thumb.jpg\" style=\"border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px\" title=\"0325Cartoon\" width=\"654\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I grew the green cloud for the fourth day in a row.&nbsp; I think Republicans are now afraid to get within a block of me.&nbsp; Today I&rsquo;m leaving shortly for PT\/OT with Courtney.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t be back until lunch time, so this is today&rsquo;s only article. Jig Zone Puzzle: Today&rsquo;s took me 2:33 (average <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/25\/open-thread3252015\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}