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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (51984)	8/28/2013 10:06:29 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By JBTFD Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

I just found out our biggest problem; one of the states which can read somehow ended up voting for Rmoney. "To use one measure, the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress test of eighth-grade reading, all but one of the top 10 states were in Obama’s column in 2012. Of the 19 doing worse than average, 14 were red states." Dana Milbank: Embracing misinformation on Obama By Dana Milbank, Published: August 27 A poll of Louisiana Republicans released last week contained some strange news for President Obama: Twenty-nine percent of them said that he was responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina — in 2005. This was slightly more than the 28?percent who said President George W. Bush was to blame. An additional 44?percent thought it over but just weren’t sure. This is a preposterous notion. Everybody knows Barack Obama couldn’t have been responsible for the Katrina response because he was in Indonesia in 2005, learning about his Muslim faith in a madrassa. He had moved to Indonesia directly from his home country of Kenya, stopping in the United States just long enough to fake the moon landing. When I read a report about the poll on the Talking Points Memo Web site, the first thing that came to mind was the famous campaign-trail quotation from the man who actually was president in 2005: “ Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning.” Evidently, they is not, at least not in Louisiana. Yet ignorance alone does not account for this bizarre finding. The Katrina result, from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, is somewhat suspect because it is from an automated, push-button polling method. Yet the finding, if unscientific, is revealing: It shows that a substantial number of Republican voters will agree to something they know to be false if it puts Obama in a bad light. The Katrina question is consistent with the many surveys finding an appalling amount of misinformation embraced by the electorate. Seven in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. One in five thought that Obama was Muslim. In another famous poll, Americans were three times more likely to be able to name two of the seven dwarfs than two Supreme Court justices. Earlier this year, Public Policy Polling found disturbingly high levels of belief in UFOs and aliens, and the believers were bipartisan: Twenty-two percent of Mitt Romney voters said Obama was the Antichrist, and 13?percent of Obama voters said the government allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. But Obama’s presidency has provoked a particularly steep rise in the proportion of Republican conspiracy theorists. A Pew poll last year found that 30?percent of Republicans and 34?percent of conservative Republicans thought Obama was Muslim — roughly double than thought so four years earlier. Gallup polling in April 2011 found that 43?percent of Republicans thought Obama was born in another country. Obama conspiracy theories have flourished in the Deep South, where wealth and educational levels are both low. This makes sense: Where voters are least informed, they are most susceptible to misinformation peddled by talk-radio hosts and the like. For this reason, voters in reliably Republican states, which tend to be poorer, with lower test scores, are more vulnerable to misinformation. To use one measure, the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress test of eighth-grade reading, all but one of the top 10 states were in Obama’s column in 2012. Of the 19 doing worse than average, 14 were red states. This is what makes the Katrina question so interesting. Certainly, Louisianans are on the low end of the education rankings, fifth from the bottom in math and third-to-last in reading. But this question got around the ignorance question by asking Louisiana Republicans about a topic they know intimately. All but the most clueless had to know that Obama, a first-term senator in 2005, was not responsible for the botched storm response that Louisianans experienced up close and personally. It’s a notion so demonstrably false that they wouldn’t have heard anybody arguing for it on Fox News or talk radio. Yet 29 percent of Republican primary voters (the sample size was 274) reflexively endorsed the falsehood. Why? “Obama derangement syndrome is running pretty high right now among a certain segment of the Republican base,” Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, told me. “There’s a certain segment of people who say, ‘If you’re going to give me the opportunity to stick it to Obama, I’m going to take it.’?” In other words, a large number of that 29 percent who said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response knew that he wasn’t but saw it as a chance to register their displeasure with the president. Obama has driven a large number of Republican voters — Jensen puts it at 15 to 20 percent of the overall electorate — right off their rockers. And to that, there is only one thing to say. Heckuva job, Barry.

To: i-node who wrote (51984)	8/28/2013 7:29:55 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

How Highly Paid CEOs Rip Off Their Companies and the Public Via Fraud and Walk Away With Their Pockets Bulging Just one example of a corporate culture that rewards executives for behavior that hurts workers, taxpayers, and shareholders. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Jeff Wasserman August 27, 2013 \| After exposing CEO scoundrels for 20 years, it’s hard to keep them all straight. The guy who cooked the books to buy a golden shower curtain blends together with the one who used ill-gotten Iraq war windfalls to pay for his wife’s racehorses and plastic surgery and the one who cashed in on subprime mortgages and sailed off on a yacht before the bubble burst. But then you stumble into a story that makes you realize you can still get riled up. At first you tell yourself it’s not breaking news and nobody will care so just forget about it. But then you find yourself fuming about it to your husband over breakfast. And then you’re grousing about it over drinks with your friends. And then you decide you have to write about it. For me, this is the Charles Heimbold Jr. story. Now some may say this story stuck in my craw because Heimbold obtained a position I covet: U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Serving my country and my grandfather’s beautiful homeland while grazing on magnificent smorgasbords—that’s a gig I’d love. But unfortunately the way to get those gigs seems to be to pay politicians more money than I’ll ever have. That’s what Heimbold did. As CEO of pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, Heimbold contributed $ 367,200 to Republican candidates or campaign organizations in the 2000 election cycle. By September 2001, he was President George W. Bush’s man in Stockholm. But that’s not what got me riled. While Heimbold was enjoying the Land of the Midnight Sun, federal agents were combing through the books at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Something was fishy. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department eventually accused the company of various accounting tricks to boost earnings and stock prices. Bristol-Myers Squibb settled their SEC case with a payment of $150 million. The Justice Department agreed to defer prosecution (essentially putting the firm on probation) as part of a deal in which company executives forked over an additional $300 million and promised to be good boys in the future. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2002 that 27 current and former Bristol-Myers Squibb executives had said the accounting tricks were carried out under strong pressure to meet Heimbold’s high earnings targets. Those tricks appear to have paid off well for the former CEO. A perennial pay leader, in 2001 alone Heimbold cashed in $70 million in stock options. What would those options have been worth had Bristol-Myers Squibb not been cooking the books? We’ll never know. We do know he was never forced to pay back a dime. Heimbold’s story is actually not that uncommon. In a report I co-authored at the Institute for Policy Studies, we analyzed 18 extremely highly paid CEOs who led companies that had to shell out more than $100 million in fraud-related settlements. Eleven of the CEOs had left their firms before the fraud charges were fully resolved. This finding is part of a larger IPS “performance review” of CEOs who made the annual top 25 highest-paid lists over the past 20 years. Theoretically, these CEOs should be the cream of the crop of American corporate leadership. But instead of stellar performance, we found that nearly 40 percent were bad performers -- even by the most narrow, incontrovertible definitions. Twenty-two percent led firms that crashed or got bailed out in the 2008 crisis. Another eight percent had to pay massive settlements for fraud. And yet another eight percent wound up getting fired. Even the guys who got the boot didn’t suffer too much. The size of their average golden parachute: $48 million. And so the Heimbold story is just one example of a corporate culture that rewards executives for behavior that winds up hurting workers, taxpayers, and shareholders. Unless we change that culture, we’ll see many more CEOs take the money and run.