I hope you will buy my booklet, read it and if you like it send to those on your own e mail list. I invite your comments (brokerberko@yahoo.com).
My computer guru, Paul LaFlamme, has arranged for my booklet to be available in paper back format ($10.99) in several weeks. It is currently available in PDF format ($5.99) and (see below.)
Testimonials:
Dick, I read your book this weekend. I hardly know where to start. You did an excellent job of putting into one short book a compendium of the virtues which only a relatively short time ago all Americans believed. It’s a measure of how far we have fallen that many Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, no longer believe in what we once considered truisms. I think your father would have agreed with every word, but the party he supported no longer has such beliefs.
I would like to buy multiple copies of your booklet..
You did a great job. I know your parents would have been proud and that your family today is proud.
Mike
You wrote a great book. The brevity is one of its strong points and I know it was hard to include that in and still keep it brief. Your father in haste once wrote an overly long letter to our client, then said in the last sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
,
I indeed marvel at how much wisdom you have been able to share with so few words. Not too unlike the experience in reading the Bible. I feel that with each read of "A Conservative Capitalist Offers:…." one will gain additional knowledge and new insights…
Regards,
Larry"
"A Conservative Capitalist Offers: Eleven Lessons and a Bonus Lesson for Raising America's Youth Born and Yet To Be Born"
By Dick Berkowitz - Non Expert
I wrote this booklet because I believe a strong country must rest on a solid family unit.Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" has morphed into "A Confused, Dependent and Compromised Generation."
I hope it will provide a guide to alter this trend.
If you Buy My Booklet - Half The Proceeds Go To "The Wounded Warrior Project!"
You can now order a .pdf version from www.brokerberko.com/book that you can download and read on your computer, or even print out if you want.
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Bill Whittle, whittles on Obama ":http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56 '
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Sabato, 0ne of the best. (See 1 below.)
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Does PBR symbolize what has gone wrong? (See 2 below.)
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A lot has been made about unemployment and most particularly the likelihood the most recent were fraudulent and were constructed to help bale out Obama..
What the figures never reveal is that there is an increased probability new hires do not make what they did in their former jobs and this helps explain the drop in family incomes. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Romney Wins Debate, but How Much Does It Matter?
October 4th, 2012
It’s pretty obvious who turned in a stronger performance in the first presidential debate last night. And it certainly wasn’t the incumbent. This may have been Mitt Romney’s best debate ever, and it almost certainly was Barack Obama’s worst. The question is, will it matter and, if so, how much will it matter?
Romney, who has been persistently trailing by a few points in the national polls and in the key swing states, was more concise, focused and confident than President Obama on Wednesday evening. Obama, given several opportunities to counterattack on some of Romney’s points, appeared unwilling to do so, retreating to bland, small-bore, Clintonian talking points. Among the weapons that the president left on the stage was any reference to Romney’s now infamous “47%” comment. Perhaps the Obama campaign had a strategic reason for not using that line of attack, but whatever the reasoning was, it sure seems like a mistake. Even the president’s strongest allies didn’t bother to defend his exceptionally weak performance.
This was not, however, a scintillating debate. Much of the back-and-forth centered on policy disagreements and references (“Dodd-Frank”) that many voters don’t know or, honestly, don’t care about. When debates become a battle of studies versus studies, voters nod off. Perhaps we’re missing something, but it doesn’t seem like, 25 years from now, there will be any moments from this debate included in any reporter’s list of “top five debate moments.” And just because Romney won handily — and the press will report it that way — that does not mean voter preferences will necessarily change all that much. Often, voters can judge one candidate to have won a debate, but not change their ballot choice as a consequence.
One plus for Romney coming out of the debate tonight is that it seems Republicans, at least as far as we could tell from Twitter and instant polls, clearly felt that their guy won the debate, while Democrats didn’t seem impressed with their candidate. In an election that might come down to turnout and enthusiasm, we suspect that Republicans will have a little more pep in their step around the water cooler today than their Democratic friends. That may or may not matter in the coming weeks.
In reality, we won’t know who really “won” the debate until we see how the debate affects the race, and we won’t know that until we have complete poll data for several post-debate days. History cautions us not to overstate the importance of any debate; if this one really does move the numbers in a significant way for Romney, it will be more exception than rule in the relatively short history of televised American presidential debates.
Do debates matter?
Prior to Wednesday night’s debate, Newt Gingrich called the face-off in Denver “the most important single event in Mitt Romney’s career.” Gingrich was one among a chorus of observers who made similar pronouncements about the candidates’ first clash. But can a debate really be a game-changer? Chart 1 below details Gallup’s polling before and after the first debate in each presidential cycle since 1960.
Chart 1: Gallup presidential polling before and after first presidential debate, 1960-2008
At first glance, it is easy to see that there is always some survey movement before and after a debate, but of course one poll is not a perfect indicator of the political landscape. Plus, these data have a caveat: before 1992, Gallup polled less often, making it harder to judge the polling results in 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988 (Gallup polls daily now). But if we look closer at these numbers, there is one trend that seems typical: the race generally tightens after the first debate. This wasn’t really true in 1984 or 2008, but in every election between those years, the gap between the two major party candidates in Gallup narrowed in the days following the candidates’ first clash.
The most recent election that is comparable to this one, 2004, saw John Kerry close the gap between himself and incumbent George W. Bush following the first debate. To a certain extent, Kerry’s improvement probably had something to with his debate performance: The conventional wisdom was that Kerry had won, and his victory allowed him to somewhat consolidate the anti-Bush vote. However, Kerry never actually took the lead in the final weeks of that contest, at least according to the RealClearPolitics national average of polls. Romney, after repeating Kerry’s opening debate win (as judged by the press), will hope to recreate the Democrat’s bounce — and then some.
There are other observations we can make about before-and-after polling. Our nation’s first televised debate, on Sept. 26, 1960, has long been viewed as a seminal event in American political history, and the story goes that John F. Kennedy got a boost out of the debate and went on to win in November as a result. Considering the less consistent polling of that era, we can’t know that for sure, but Gallup’s numbers do seem to suggest that Kennedy went from being tied with Richard Nixon, more or less, to having a small lead in the aftermath of the debate. The race ended as nearly a national tie — Kennedy won the popular vote by less than 0.2 percentage points, though he captured more than 300 electoral votes (see Rhodes Cook’s story in this week’sCrystal Ball about how close that election truly was).
One year where the first debate appears at first blush to have made a big difference was 1980, which featured two classic debate moments: Ronald Reagan’s famous line against Jimmy Carter — “There you go again” — and Reagan’s defining question for the American people: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The debate is sometimes seen as pivotal in catapulting Reagan ahead of Jimmy Carter in the closing days of that election (it was the only debate that cycle). But considering the circumstances in the 1980 election (-7.9% GDP growth in the second quarter, the Iran Hostage Crisis negotiations falling apart right before Election Day, stagflation, etc.), there was clearly more than a debate working against Carter. Did the debate help Reagan? Probably. But did it single-handedly elect him? Certainly not. Even without a good debate performance, Reagan had so much going for him that year that he likely would have won.
When looking at the pre- and post-debate polls, it’s important to remember that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. In every election there are myriad factors that voters must consider before choosing their candidate, and a debate performance is unlikely to be the first thing on a voter’s mind when he or she enters the voting booth — particularly because, in recent years including this one, the last debate is two weeks before the election.
In the new book The Timeline of Presidential Elections, political scientists Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien review voter intentions before and after the debates. For the most part, their data indicate that debates don’t have a dramatic effect on voters’ choices and that conventions are more important than debates in determining the course of elections. They also note that it is unclear whether debates are more impactful than other events in the final stretch of the campaign season.
In the 10 previous elections that have featured televised debates, it seems to us that there were three years when the outcome might have been different if not for the debates: 1960 and 2000 (those elections were so close that it’s possible that any number of factors, including the debates, was decisive in the outcome); and 1976, when Gerald Ford’s “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” mistake in that year’s second debate arguably stalled his big fall comeback, dooming him to a narrow loss to Carter. (Several decades ago, one of us examined the private campaign polls for President Ford, taken by Robert Teeter during October 1976, and they clearly showed the severe impact that the “free Poland” gaffe had on Ford’s chances.)
It’s also important not to overstate the importance of the debates in the eyes of actual voters. Quinnipiac’s Oct. 2 poll found that a whopping 93% of likely voters intended to watch the debates, which seems to suggest that voters do think the debates are very important. But at the same time, 86% of those likely voters said that they didn’t expect the candidates to say anything that would change their mind; similarly, a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that 62% of voters said that the debates are “not important” or “just somewhat important,” compared to 22% saying the clashes will be “quite important” or “extremely important” in determining which candidate they supported.
Given the polarized electorate — which Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz has written about at length — we believe poll respondents when they say that the debates probably won’t change their minds. But we don’t believe polls that indicate that the vast majority of likely voters watch the debates. A recent Princeton study by Prof. Markus Prior noted that self-reported debate audiences are about twice as large as Nielsen estimates, meaning that many people who say they watch the debates actually don’t. Our suspicion is that many voters know they should watch the debates even though they don’t — so they cover for themselves by equating news reports they see about the debates with actually “watching” them.
Nielsen’s ratings figures help to confirm the idea that many of the likely voters who told Quinnipiac that they were going to watch the debates probably won’t. Ratings for the first debate have generally declined over the years, as shown in Chart 2:
Chart 2: Nielsen ratings for first presidential debate, 1960-2008
Notes: Ratings indicate the percentage of households that watched the debate.
Source: Nielsen
Put another way, 52.4 million people watched the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008. About 130 million voted. Therefore, our guess is that well under half of 2012’s actual voters watched Wednesday night’s debate, no matter what the pre- or post-debate surveys say.
Conclusion
If anything, the first 2012 debate provides a good case study about how important debates actually are. If Romney cannot significantly move the polls after turning in such a strong performance against Obama, what is left on the calendar to change the numbers in his favor? (Maybe the two jobs reports or an unscheduled October/November surprise?) Meanwhile, if Romney does make significant gains — cutting into or even erasing the president’s national lead and gaining ground in the swing states, particularly in vital Ohio — will Obama be able to recapture momentum in the debates to come? At least we now have a reason to stay tuned.
One thing is for sure: If Democrats were becoming overconfident, thinking that the election was in the bag, this debate should get them refocused. And it should also calm all those anonymous Republicans quoted in news stories complaining about the Romney campaign. Of course, it’s the poll numbers that matter. We’ll see where they are next week, and we will adjust our perceptions of this contest accordingly.
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2)Banish Big Bird? Why not just bail out everything?
By Mark Steyn
Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney's debate coach. As he put it about halfway through "That's Life":
"I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly ... ."
That's what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that's what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn't going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes
Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy's performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt's assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. "WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress's stuff leave big bird alone," tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for "finally getting tough on Big Bird" – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.
Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it's no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their "safe house" in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president's Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes." The butchers of Darfur aren't blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven't given enough cookies. I'm not saying there's a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary ... well, actually, I am.
Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let's go back to his central thrust. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting receives nearly half-a-billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who, in turn, disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don't know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Sen. Jim DeMint, the President of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Sen. Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: they've been in "public service" their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.
Mitt's decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counter-arguments from Democrats: 1) half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? 2) everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it's sold nigh on a billion bucks' worth of merchandising sales (that's popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.
Conversely, if this supposed "public" broadcasting brand is capable on standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS's output – the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials – whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist Party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.
(Full disclosure: Some years ago, I hosted a lavish BBC special, and, at the meeting intended to sell it to PBS, the executive from "Great Performances" said he could only sign off on the deal if I were digitally edited out and replaced by Angela Lansbury. Murder, he shrieked. Lest I sound bitter, I should say I am in favor of this as a more general operating principle for public broadcasting: for example, "A Prairie Home Companion" would be greatly improved by having Garrison Keillor digitally replaced by Paul Ryan.)
The small things are not unimportant – and not just because, when "small" is defined as anything under 11 figures, "small" is a big part of the problem. If Americans can't muster the will to make Big Bird leave the government nest, they certainly will never reform Medicare. Just before the debate in Denver, in the general backstage melée, a commentator pointed out Valerie Jarrett, who is officially "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs," a vital position which certainly stimulates the luxury-length business-card industry. Not one in 100,000 Americans knows what she looks like, but she declines to take the risk of passing among the rude peasantry without the protection of a Secret Service detail. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a private jet to fly him home from Washington every weekend.
The Queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does the Queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as many people want to get a piece of as Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney administration, rolling back the nickel'n'dime stuff – ie, the million'n'billion stuff – should start on Day One.
Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver. So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale? Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett's security detail? Could Leon Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?
And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe Elmo's guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.
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3)-The jobs numbers: never mind the quantity, check the quality
Behind modest jobs growth, the real story is full-time jobs with good benefits are still disappearing. America's going part-time
Job seekers in line in New York City, 2008. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty
It's heartening to see Friday's news that the unemployment rate edged down to 7.8% last month. But let's not get too caught up in celebrations. We need to look beyond the sheer quantity of jobs being created and into the qualityof those jobs – something neither presidential candidate seems very interested in talking about.
Buried in the Friday's jobs report is evidence that a disturbing trend continues: the creation of more part-time jobs, many of them low-wage, taking the place of solid middle-class careers. Positions in sectors like manufacturing continued to decline last month, replaced by new jobs in the healthcare, warehousing and retail industries. A lot of these jobs don't allow workers to rack up enough hours to earn healthcare benefits – let alone break out of poverty.
The key data in the new report can be found in a table called "A-8". It shows that more workers are in stuck in part-time jobs because their hours were cut back or they're unable to find full-time positions. The number of workers in this category shot up to 8.5 million in September – an increase of 581,000 from last month. This month's figure is nearly double what it was in September 2007, the eve of the recession.
It's distressing to think that after 20th-century labor struggles won the battle for the 40-hour work week, the 21st-century struggle is a fight for enough working hours to make a living wage. That's not what I'd call progress.
Here's another sobering number: since September 2007, the number of Americans working full-time has declined by about 5.9 million, while the number working part-time jobs has increased by 2.6 million. (The blog Zero Hedge drew up this powerful graph in June to illustrate the trend.) During the recovery, job gains have been concentrated in lower-wage occupations, which grew nearly three times as fast as mid-wage and higher-wage occupations, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project.
The growth of part-time and temporary work is usually a leading indicator – meaning, a sign that the job market is beginning to heal. But we've reached nearly five years after the recession officially hit, and it's time to face the fact that these employment trends are more structural than cyclical.
From academia to the retail sector, from government to warehouse work, employers are less and less committal when it comes to their workers. Offering part-time work – or even full-time jobs masquerading as freelance gigs – allows companies to offer stingier benefits packages or none at all. Those in low-wage or minimum-wage jobs often have no retirement security or health insurance. That means relying on Medicaid or even emergency room visits for illness or accidents – causing stress on workers and shifting costs from employers to taxpayers.
Benefits aren't the only problem. Workers desperate to work full time now may also be sentenced to a lower-wage fate in the future. According to a recent study by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, women who work in part-time jobs have fewer training opportunities and are less able to advance and increase their pay over time.
Job growth projections show that we can expect the trend to continue. The healthcare and social assistance sector is expected to add the most jobs by 2020, with retail close behind, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Large segments of both industries are notorious for low-wage and precarious work. Home care workers, for example, lack minimum-wage and overtime protections, while the retail trade has faced hundreds of lawsuits for wage theft.
In the retail sector, employers increasingly want an on-call workforce that they can hire when demand is high and ignore when business is slower. Workers at companies like Walmart are reportedly "fighting for hours" at their stores, patching together irregular schedules for meager paychecks.
Of course, access to fewer hours at one job means hustling for more shifts at another. About 6.9 million Americans were working multiple jobs in September, according to Friday's jobs report. No wonder a large chunk of our workforce isn't getting enough sleep.
Continuing on this path means becoming an ever more precarious, part-time nation when it comes to our working lives. But solutions to the part-time problem aren't easy to come by. Many companies are loath to create good jobs in an uncertain economic climate, and it's cheaper and less risky to take people on part-time.
The irony is that companies seeking to cut costs are sabotaging their own bottom lines by offering unsteady employment. People working part-time involuntarily have less money to spend on goods and services, and are less able to stimulate the economy. It's a vicious cycle. Short of another economic boom that tightens the labor market, the only hope is organizing for better conditions in the workplace and the political arena.
Workers seeking more steady employment could join allies in campaigns for earned sick days or home care workers' rights to push for new protections. They could propose that part-time workers earn the same hourly pay as their full-time counterparts, and pro-rated benefits, as they do in many developed countries.
Winning these kinds of rights would be a heavy lift in a political environment obsessed with job quantity instead of quality. But to avoid a descent into low-wage, part-time nationhood, we need to dream big – like those agitators pushing to limit the workday many years ago.
• The National Employment Law Project, one of whose studies is referenced above, is a client of BerlinRosen, the communications agency for which Moira Herbst works
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