Charlie Rose

MBurke  11/02/2010 03:15 PM Report

I am embarrassed for Mr. Zakaria. His appallingly superficial analysis of the role of librarians and information technology make it clear that he would benefit from a research consultation...maybe from a librarian?

winter  11/01/2010 02:02 AM Report

Too much focus on government and not nearly enough on corporate who afterall is the defacto government and gets an in perpetuity get out of jail free card. All these powers of hiring and charging consumers budgets are better and more practically attributable to corporate since this government is giving me a tax break while my utilities, cable and insurance bills keep going up with little to no

regulatory authority prepared to put a stop to the market bearing everything corporate is asking for. The great lie that America's educational system is failing to fill positions because of a lack of skills is one of the most effective distractions from the corporate cultures indifference to anything resembling social consciousness. No, anyone, and they are somehow an anyone, who would ship jobs overseas for the labor cost savings and keep the difference and not even pass the cost savings along to the consumer must be a globalist privateer w/o a country at best and a traitor at worst. Somehow the tea party patriots ignore that its corporate who ships returning soldiers jobs overseas. The conveniently interchangable terms taxpayers and government are used selectively by the mobs who fail to understand that taxpayers or government treasuries actually don't find themselves appreciating from all the alleged crookedness but corporates coffers overflow even in this economy. Their apologists have all the phony explanations for the ever increasing disparity of income kicked can I'm not buying any of it. And the religious right's biggest boogeyman, One World Government, has been manifestly practised by multi national corporations for decades now.

....What happened to the audit of the fed? Did someone bury it? That happens alot; Blackwater, W.Virginia miners,

I'll bet you can think of one.

JohnGelles  10/31/2010 03:27 AM Report

This comment is as of midnight and Halloween begins in 18 hours. I am concerned with HOW TO RESTORE THE AMERICAN DREAM -- both the Time Magazine piece by Zakaria and his CNN version that aired six hours ago.

Fareed would like to see the heavy spending-investing by Uncle Sam to accomplish more R&D and more effective education and training in the skills we need to be leaders tomorrow as we have been when the Cold War kept our hubris in check.

To pay as we go -- for the above plan -- Zakaria proposes a VAT-like sales tax of 5%. This would harden the dollar and tend to make our spending kosher.

The spending would look a bit like German industrial policy and Obamanomics as "authoritarian capitalism"-- Chinese style.

As mabraham wrote in this discussion on 10/26/2010,

..... "What FZ basically is saying is that we need an industrial olicy, and that is when the fit hits the shan.

In the current political climate no politician will dare say that because he will be dragged to the woodshed. I.e. 'this is America -- we are not European Socialists' ".

So we have: (a) the need for enormous spending by Uncle Sam; (b) the idea to follow pay-go rules budgeted revenue to match the spending; (c) the nonsense that the plan would amount to modern socialism when it is clearly modern authoritarian capitalism; and (d) the Gelles idea from functional finance and Bernankian quantitative easing that the VAT-like tax would be counter-productive.

Take your choice.

Charlie Rose' archive of shows and their comments is spread among several interviews -- making it somewhat fragmented. Please read all fragments if you can.

I think Charlie and Fareed fail to see that "pay-go" and other deficit hawk fear mongering is not what we need most. WE NEED TO SPEND QUICKLY before unemployment gives more political power to those who value unemployment as a whip hand over the voting middle class -- who ought to make Gelles President so I would guarantee their income like the thousands of golden parachutes guarantee the incomes of the already rich.

How could this work -- you say? It would work because we would PRODUCE what the income would buy -- meat and potatoes.

To sum up: Bernanke can avoid the taxes that nobody can accept with a smile. The PLAN for Zakaria-Obama spending -- to finance American industry, education, training, and future-- would end the threat to our future the same way we prevailed in WW II.

So why is Zakaria, Obama and YOU in this audience BLIND to the need for tax-free, debt-free solutions? Why do you allow unemployment by mistake threaten the future of democracy on earth? Where is your love for Abraham Lincoln and the wisdom of greenbacks in modest measure !!!!

JohnGelles  10/30/2010 10:28 PM Report

It's Saturday October 30th. Fareed Zakaria is broadcasting on CNN his ideas on HOW TO Restore the American Dream.

It's easy--government SPENDING on R&D, on education and re-education of our inventors and designers and craftsmen and line workers who turn genius into retail sales. This means very high spending-- and returns of training costs that may remain uncertain for months and even years.

The Zakaria solution-- an innovation tax on consumption-- NOT on investment and profits within the production cycle.

Is he right?

NO! Taxes are not necessary or common-sensical (EXCEPT to raise supply or reduce demand where necessary to prevent hyper-inflation). Rather than TAXES, we need tax-free government spending and lending to pay for contract performance that engages private (and some government) producers. This can follow Federal Reserve liquidity injections -- which reduce political resistance by people forced to pay taxes they believe are unfair and too high.

In one sentence of the Zakaria analysis, Fareed admits that MORE MONEY is needed to initially pay for solutions. That us the truth.

We really need to arrive at a greater consensus among our leaders or greater genius and persuasive force by our leaders -- especially the President.

JohnGelles  10/27/2010 05:36 AM Report

Fareed Zakaria's concentration on "automation" -- which allows corporation's to sell into huge markets with work forces of fewer employees every year, and on "globalization" which enlarges the markets they sell into and lowers the cost of employees, makes eminent sense in these days of anger and confusion over who killed America, the terrorists or the Americans themselves, in Congress and the corporate boardrooms now exposed for all to see how the system is not working for better outcomes year over year as it should.

Charlie Rose made him add "political friction and enmity" to "automation" and "globalization", to form a three legged stool upon which to rest the machine that is beating up on our middle class and may destroy democracy itself if it is not re-engineered.

AUTOMATION ought to be our best friend. IF we focused on the THINGS seniors and babies consume, we would see that these THINGS can be easily supplied by AUTOMATION -- as the number of workers declines and the number of their dependent parents and children increases.

Our major problem is that we are constrained by financial concerns that are out of date and out of sync in the new era of abundant super mass production of THINGS and inadequate monetized demand to make the system rational.

The conservative mind that cannot comprehend money as a system, to raise both supply and demand at the same time, is blinding Charlie Rose, all he guests, Fareed Zakaria and all the world except the few monetary reformers like myself who love Ben Bernanke when he prints money -- and hate him when he is afraid to tell the American people the truth about monetary systems of production and how they MUST BE reformed -- if economic democracy is to be born and political democracy is to be saved from suicide.

Charlie Rose looks his guests in the eye and asks, HOW DO WE CREATE THE NECESSARY JOBS. The guests fumble the question and give no answer -- except to say WE CAN'T. The answer is -- we create the jobs with new and more money. Then we create the THINGS, the new money will demand in the market, with AUTOMATION. GET IT? CAPICHE? Do you understand me?

As was said in Cool Hand Luke, what we have is a failure of communication. The President has a helluva nerve to refuse to deal by demanding taxes from the rich to lower a deficit when what we need is investment by the rich to create the growth in supply and demand we are really short on. The only taxes we need are those that are obviously part of an anti-hyper-inflation regime.

Taxes to fund government are ridiculous. PRODUCTION of the things government buys is what allows government to be funded -- WHEN THEY HAVE A RATIONAL MONETARY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION!

Please notice that I have just set fire to myself to become a human torch and get your attention. It's hot as hell inside this flame. And I have a feeling you're not even looking this way.

The GD tea party of freaks and goons has your attention. They are even more ignorant than the conservatives they wish they were.

But what about Charlie and Fareed? Are THEY the problem or solution. They want an audience. How about wanting jobs this minute, supply next, demand next, and high technology applied to law and economics as well as medicine and arithmetic.

I'm so p'd off at all of you I'm angry enough to join the tea party I just cursed. Flipper 4, here or near here, asked for love and harmony. I'm with him. But its love, harmony, and money-enough to do the job, I want. Ben Bernanke wants to give it to us. WHY CAN'T WE SAY YES?

mabraham  10/26/2010 06:26 PM Report

What FZ basically is saying is that we need an industrial policy, and that is when the fit hits the shan.

In the current political climate no politician will dare say that because he will be dragged to the woodshed. I.e. "this is America we are not European Socialists".

Even Steven Rattner the other day on this program felt compelled to say that Obama had no intention to emulate European style industrial policies.

robdverity  10/26/2010 05:13 PM Report

The only fiscal and moral stimulus in O's arsenal is to remove our arrogant and simplistic banana republic arse from Iraq, Af-Pak, Okinawa, Germany, et al.

The financial wise-guys have reduced us to third world status. It's time to 'own-up' and come home. They're laughing at us. The impotent cop with his pants down fumbling for his weapon and lost prestige. Pathetic and becoming moreso daily.

charlizecourriers  10/26/2010 04:45 PM Report

Why on earth did FZ leave Newsweek? Can he really handle the tremendous intellectual burden of writing for Time and then explaining it all on this show?

REMant  10/26/2010 04:28 PM Report

I couldn't make heads or tails of this and had to read the article which I did not find in any way remarkable. Some observations tho re this interview:

IT really got started long before the war. It may have been low-tech, but it had considerable impact. The 1890 census was tabulated on punch cards. The co that became IBM was founded in 1896. The cards, themselves, had been developed to automate weaving in the 18th c. Tho it was the development of random access memory, esp electronic memory, and computer communication, ie, the "nets" and with it email, etc, that really launched what we call IT. Govt was involved in some of this, but not all.

As I've said globalization presses downward on prices as new workers enter the mktplace, as well as, through economies of scale.

Pensions and health care got out of control because they were transferred from savings to pay-as-you-go as on the Social Security model, and it was prompted in large part by the tax code.

The only way that govt spending would have been stimulating is if it turned out to have resulted in a productivity increase. It is not clear that fixing roads and bridges would do much in that regard.

I thought, BTW, there was something funny about that magazine cover.

concertoind  10/26/2010 03:32 PM Report

I enjoyed the previous comment from Flipper4 which states:"We can no longer accept the notion that human value is based upon the premise that individual talent must leverage out or exploit large segments of our population." True globalization must stop the "dog eat dog" approach to survival. That said, my other reaction to last night's discussion concerns Zacharia's appalling opinion that technology has erased all need for librarians. I am a college librarian and am at the front line of the enormous changes happening to this profession. Contrary to the opinions of those who think new technology has supplanted any need for librarians, I know that this new technology has made my job very different but still as vital as when we had only non-digital materials in our libraries. The job is more complex, challenging and needed than ever. It seems, as in the past, that only librarians really know what they provide the end users of the library in today's technology-driven world. Very briefly,we manage and assess the ever-changing world of databases, decide the best way to search and access these databases successfully, and how to digitize the content, whether new or archival, in a logical way that will remain stable and scholarly in quality. We try to do all of this with inadequate budgets, out-of-date copyright laws, and a lack of appreciation or understanding from our administrators and the misinformed media. The students, faculty, and public, however, do appreciate libraries and librarians. I know that because I am busier than ever trying to meet their needs. Don't write librarians off yet - or you do this at the peril of losing control of society's documentation and compromising scholarship.

flipper4  10/26/2010 02:44 PM Report

Continued from last comment.

"John Henry was a Steel Driving Man"

"Bill Gates is/was a Computer freaking genius"

We must no longer accept or rely upon the experiment called Social Darwinism. Sure Bill Gates and many others in the top .001% have added more intrinsic technological/applicable value than a large percentage of the rest of us combined. However, that does not mean Bill is out there procreating thousands of "mini mees".

The point to all this? In 20 years we will be left with a realization that no one quite expected. All our great industrial/technological achievements as a species, if we survive, will be taken for granted.

This will leave us in yet another spiritual quandary. If steam engines can outwork us, and robots (or if you prefer) computers can out think us, what is our intrinsic value?

So, in between now and 20 years from now, do we really need to keep making people feel insecure about their ability to survive? Do we really need to steal people's pensions, rape the environment, start wars, bottom out the economy and all sorts of other means to crack the capitalistic whip?

Perhaps you think I am headed toward a speech about renewing plans for the leisure society. Instead, I'd like people to consider the following:

If I told you that in 20 years, we will no longer be the strongest, smartest, most creative or even funniest life-form on the planet, what could you do over the next 20 years -- as a leader, as a parent, as a youth, as a cab driver, as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a ditch digger -- to demonstrate why our species has intrinsic value?

My answer would be to love my neighbor as myself, to love my child's picture on the refrigerator as much as the greatest work of art, to love the perfectly imperfect nature of ourselves, to protect our world and each other from harm. We must rise to the occasion of our own forthcoming apparent insignificance and remind ourselves that every last one of us is significant. If you find a nest has fallen from a tree, place it back. If you find a country is being destroyed by floods and disease, send help. If you find a neighbor is lonely and defensive, invite them to a party. If you find a co-worker is lost and confused, give them encouragement. If you find someone does not share your belief system, find a way to get along through mutual respect.

We are all significant. From Down syndrome to Einstein, from Shiite to Sunni, from landscaper to President, and from pessimist to optimist, we all give one intrinsic and valuable thing to each other -- love. Unlike intelligence, muscle, or talent; true love cannot be debased by an American Idol judge, or labeled by an IQ test.

I'm glad we have Einstein, Gates, Edison, Bell and all the rest to demonstrate our unique history. However, in the end, we will realize that Jones, Smith, Lee and Doe are just as significant.

flipper4  10/26/2010 01:25 PM Report

Fareed is widening the political window to the next 20 years (about the limit of his model), which of course, is an eternity in our "democracy", but the blink of an eye in history.

What Charlie and Fareed and Arianna and everybody 'seems' to "know", that Obama is accused of not "viscerally" understanding, is that he was supposed to take his moral authority from the election and order a series of dramatic infrastructure work projects for the 21st Century.

What they seem to forget is that he was supposed to do this after Bush trashed our economy. Yes, Obama could have used his stimulus money moderately differently, but he also had to be a political pragmatist to get any stimulus through at all. With so many cookies devoured from our economy by the Bush admin., the war, the bankers and the mortgage bubble, the republicans, like they always do, left the pile for democrats to clean up at the back of the parade. You can mostly blame the oil industry, because they had the most to lose if Obama had inherited a less debt ridden economy. If that had been the case, Obama with much less effort, could have converted our energy based economy from petroleum to green.

Let's be real adults and speak in real terms about the World Bank, IMF and Federal Reserve "agenda" for America and the world.

1. Break the unions, minimum wage, social security safety nets, and pensions so that we once again become competitive with the other workers of the world on a wage scale.

Response: The latter can be done without the former.

How? Raise minimum wage in other countries. Protect

and/or install social security, pensions and unions in

all

2. While the wage difference is minimized between nations, direct each nation's economy into a limited number of specialties. Simultaneously develop a "gentlemen's agreement between nations that recognize we must not constantly cannibalize each others' economies -- instead we must cease wage/monetary warfare, political manipulation, corruption and warfare. In other words, nations must think of "self interest" in the broader sense that "Karma" will knock your country upside the head if your definition of "self-interest" does not take into account your effect upon other nations. (No, I am not religious)

3. Develop friendly international competition in each specialty by only including a limited number of nations in a competitive division. You can think of this as a boxing weight strategy. India, Indonesia and China are Heavy weights. Other countries are mid-weights, still others are flyweights. Break them down even further based upon natural resources, transportation location, and commitment to education, human rights, environmental stewardship and commitment to the ideals of this strategy (including reducing corruption, monetary interference, etc.,)

This will result in global homeostasis. We can no longer accept the notion that human value is based upon the premise that individual talent must leverage out or exploit large segments of our population. We know that one day science will make us all fairly equal. We should no longer experiment with the slow