Timothy Karr — What Ted Cruz Doesn’t Want You to Know (via Moyers & Company)

What Ted Cruz Doesn’t Want You to Know (via Moyers & Company)

By now it seems pretty clear that Senator Ted Cruz has a plan to occupy the White House. But he doesn’t want people to know too much about it. And he definitely doesn’t want you to know about the special interests that have already begun to bankroll…

---

Paul Blumenthal — Here's The Real Reason We Aren't Done With Shutdowns

The Huffington Post

Here's The Real Reason We Aren't Done With Shutdowns

Paul Blumenthal

Nate Silver — In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

Nate investigates why the president had such an overwhelming tech advantage.

Even without the Bay Area’s vote, Democrats would still be favored to win California by solid margins. So why does any of this matter? 

The reason is that Democrats’ strength in the region is hard to separate out from the growth of its core industry — information technology – and the advantage that having access to the most talented individuals working in the field could provide to Democratic campaigns.

Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic employees at these companies are based on fund-raising data. (The Federal Election Commission requires that donors to presidential campaigns disclose their employer when they make a campaign contribution.)

Among employees who work for Google, Mr. Obama raised about $720,000 in itemized contributions this year, against only $25,000 for Mr. Romney. That means that Mr. Obama took almost 97 percent of the money between the two major candidates.

Apple employees gave 91 percent of their dollars to Mr. Obama. At eBay, Mr. Obama took 89 percent of the money from employees.

Over all, among the 10 American-based information technology companies on the Fortune’s list of “most admired companies,” Mr. Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates.

Mr. Obama’s popularity among the staff at these companies holds even for those which are not headquartered in California. About 81 percent of contributions at Microsoft, which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., went to Mr. Obama. So did 77 percent of those at I.B.M., which is based in Armonk, N.Y.

It does not require an algorithm to deduce that the sort of employees who might be willing to donate substantial money to a political campaign might also be those who would consider working for it.

The New York Times | FiveThirtyEight

In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

Nate Silver

Congressional Committee-Placement Strategy Shows Just How Totally Broken Our Democracy Is

Some very revealing information comes up in the middle of Bill Black's testimony in this RT video interview

The House Finance Committee is gargantuan (05.40 in video) .. because it's members receive the most campaign contributions from finance lobbies - the dominant contributors to BOTH parties, by far. Therefore, both parties place on the HFC those members currently most in need of extra campaign funds, as a re-election strategy, NOT to best serve the US electorate.

What does this little observation reveal?  It shows that the two political parties have completely perverted the most fundamental operations of Congress, for managing re-election metrics, NOT to serve the mission given Congress by citizens of the USA!

It's not just the tail wagging the dog, it's the fleas managing the tail that wags the dog!

One has to also conclude with fair certainty that the identical campaign contributors who dominate contributions to both parties also game the same dynamic mentioned above, to choose two of their candidates every 4 years as alternate choices for President. We should have such options!

I'm still trying to best summarize for myself what this implies. 

Political parties have co-opted our very Congress, as a venal hedge against narrow re-election risks, and in the process have knowingly made a complete mockery of the Constitutional mission of Congress to serve the welfare of the American people.

And, it is likely worse, with the same gaming process filtering our options for who becomes President of our supposed democracy.  Congress itself - and each political candidate - is now simply another hedging strategy for the finance industry!  To add further insult to injury, the entire finance industry itself is more trouble than it's worth to the USA.

Remind me why we are running a national Congress?

When our institutions in an operating theater are this badly compromised, the only rational hope is to review & focus our hierarchy of strategies, because all resources thrown at distributed tactics will only produce Pyrrhic victories. The situational dynamics are stacked so heavily against National Public Purpose at this point, that only rigorous convergence to key strategies gives any hope of success.

Wandering, rambling Committee Testimony in the current Congress illustrates how effective Pyrrhic victories are as a strategic distraction.

Yet Bill Black's video testimony reveals that most of what's said in these committee meetings is a perverted, dog & pony show. One minor consequence of the perversion is that literally no member of Congress has any available talents, expertise, preparation, training or practice matched to their committee placements in Congress!

Our policy apparatus has come to resemble the old habit of landed gentry buying positions in the military officer corp, with complete disregard for any matching of talent to demands or responsibility of office. Disastrous failures revealed the fault in that placement policy for the military. Are we waiting for adequately national levels of failure to demonstrate that the same policy won't serve us any more usefully in Congress either?

We need people in Public Office who have talents in something other than getting themselves elected, by any means possible.

And we need that before tragic, complete failure visits the USA.

Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., recently mentioned JPMorgan's woes while introducing a bill prohibiting bank execs from serving on the boards of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks.

Jaime Dimon of JP Morgan currently sits on the New York Fed’s board, which is a conflict of interest.

“The people regulating the banks are the exact same people being regulated,” said Sanders at a press conference. “If this is not a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse, I don’t know what is.”

Democrats Barbara Boxer of California and Mike Begich of Alaska are cosponsors of the bill, which seems unlikely to advance.

"If it seems shady though, don't blame the Fed. Congress intentionally set the central bank up that way in 1913."

Let's see.  Where have we heard that type of excuse before?  By the way, it's not true.  Fed boards were long dominated by regional business, not bank representatives or academic economists.