Search Results for "confidence" : 12

Newsweek just published an article about how a lack of confidence doomed Bear Stearns. Here are a couple of interesting points from the article: “A company is only as solvent as the perception of its solvency,” Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney Bernanke declared the subprime crisis contained last year even as […]

Not long ago, President Bush visited Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis to turn up the spigots. The Saudis, however, didn’t bite and stated that the price of oil may be the least of our concerns. ”The concern for the U.S. economy is valid, but what affects the U.S. economy […]

I met Judge Michael Donnelly at an event in Cincinnati where he spoke about some of the issues he was seeing in the justice system. He opened my eyes to a few of the challenges our judicial system faces, so I asked him if he’d answer a few questions. 

1. Transparency in the plea-bargaining process is a major platform of your campaign. Can you explain why?

I was lucky: I managed to get through college with only a small amount of debt.

I was able to do this because I was fortunate enough to have middle-class parents, I attended a state school, I received scholarship help, and I got into a co-op program that helped me cover some of the costs.

At the time, I didn’t realize what this would allow me to do. I didn’t realize that it would allow me to take some risks I would never have been able to otherwise.

It allowed me to fail. Not just once, but numerous times. And failure, believe it or not, is critical to success.

This is why I want to talk about how student debt levels today are not only hurting students and recent graduates, but are hurting our businesses—and our country.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday that charter school operator White Hat Management can take possession of publicly paid for assets of charter schools and charge the public to buy them back. This case arose when school boards in the Akron and Cleveland area fired White Hat Management, a company […]

Corporate special interest groups have hit upon a very powerful framing of the economy and government that involves something they call “redistribution”.

It has been played over and over in the media more than any annoying pop ballad I can remember. So much so in fact that I bet you could describe the framing w/o me saying a word.

It looks like this:

You earn your money. It is yours. Then the government takes it away in the form of taxes (often referred to as theft) and gives it to someone who hasn’t earned it (redistribution).

When people you know say “socialism,” it is this process of taking from the “deserving” to give to the “undeserving” they are talking about.

I state this argument as strongly as possible here because this is what we’re up against. Professional, audience-tested propaganda.

If we, when you are talking to people, fall into arguing the side that wants to “redistribute,” you will be seen as someone who wants to use government to take away and give to the “lazy” or “undeserving”.

There is an easy way to flip this framing and talk about the actual situation with people you never thought you could reach.

All you have to do is talk about distributing it right to begin with.

Here in Cincinnati we’ve been engaged in a fight to not become the largest metropolitan region (2.1 million people) in the country without an abortion clinic. When someone posted an update about the fight to one of our local politics forums, it attracted comments like the following painting right-to-lifers as “pro […]

Monday night Ohio Governor John Kasich delivered his state of the state speech.

Governor John Kasich speaking with attendees at the 2016 First in the Nation Town Hall (photo by Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0)

He cribbed the biblical Reagan “city on a hill metaphor” to describe Ohio:

All of these things have helped Ohio move up to higher, more solid ground, and, if you look, the clouds are moving apart and the sun is beginning to shine, and we can get a glimpse of the summit ahead. We’ve got much further to go, but the success we’ve had gives us the confidence to climb higher. We’re not hopeless, we’re hopeful. We’re not wandering, we have direction. Let’s keep going.

As an Ohioan, I’d like to tell a different story.

It’s a story that appears in bits and pieces in city & school financial reports, in letters to the editor and editorials, in economic analyses, but the full story has largely hid from public sight because it’s not a single sensationalist event.

It’s not a story about a person or administration because you have to go back further than that to see the pattern.

You have to go back further than that to see how a state gets budgeted back to the stone age.

The pattern is simple but takes place over a long period of time: shift tax burden, create deficit, blame government, defund government, repeat.

And unfortunately, it’s a story that’s not just happening in Ohio, but at a national level and in many states across the nation because it’s being pushed by influential corporate groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The story begins in 2005 …

To paraphrase an NPR announcer I overheard this morning: A sure sign that a crisis is occurring is when you are trying to figure out things you never thought you’d care about. In the interest of “knowledge is power” and “knowing is half the battle,” I thought I’d post a […]

Something kept bothering me the other day as I listened to an interview on NPR discussing the evidence in the Bruce Ivins anthrax case. I thought about it and thought about it and then it hit me what it was: I didn’t believe the story. Now bear with me for […]