Class warfare, part 3 zillion

Yet another state has proposed raising taxes on low-income residents to pay for new corporate tax breaks. Leading lawmakers in Missouri want to eliminate a property tax credit for low- and moderate-income seniors and people with disabilities in order to help finance new tax credits for businesses.
Sadly, swaps like this are increasingly common; both Michigan and Wisconsin have cut low-income programs this year to pay for business tax breaks.

Because clearly low-income old people and disabled people dont need all that money

Fidel is Dead rumour!

From the incomparable Boz:

Update: I decided to include "Fidel is dead" in the title so that people searching for the rumors can read about the more important news on the island. I should just put "Rumor: Fidel is dead" into the title of everything I write. Apparently it draws attention.

 Priceless

And his blog is well worth following if you want an eccentric & interesting summary of political news & stories from Central/South America.

Talk about ambitious

Only a small oversight, mislaying $29 billion dollars:

Not only mislaying $29 billion, but telling an inquiring MP and journalists about it, with documentation. Awesome! (and how could you not love a blog called The Devils Excrement?)

London's burning, again

From GK Chesterton:

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

Yes, yes, very clever. Not exactly a good reflection of what's happening, tho.

Meet the new world, same as the old world

From the inimitable Eric Blair*:

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first
mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap.



*aka George Orwell of course

Orwell, right again

Is it inevitable that anything will decay into its' opposite? Contemplating the violent racism of Israel, it's hard not to conclude so. To quote one of its founding fathers, Uri Avnery:

THE ARCHBISHOP of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.

A protestant priest in Berlin decrees that a Christian who employs a Jew will be banished from his parish.
Impossible? Indeed. Except in Israel – in reverse, of course.
The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs – including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis – whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens - have publicly supported this edict.

.Welcome to America

We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we're just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that's politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it's politically risky to fight back. Ugh indeed.

Financial bubbles aplenty

 "there are too few good investment opportunities in the world of real goods and services"
---

Another way of saying this is that too much money goes to the top; too much demand for financial assets, not enough demand for actual 'stuff'.

The Republican mantra is that low taxes are good for capital formation; what they neglect to acknowledge is that you can have *too much* capital formation.

My tomato plants need water, but submerging them is obviously not a good idea.

Ireland - sacrificial maiden before the dragon

This is a fascinating, and quite accurate, analysis of why Ireland is screwed, blued and tattooed:
Morgan Kelly in the Irish Times

Basically, German (and French) banks prefer to crush Ireland like a grape in order to scare Spain into obeying orders. The cost to Ireland ... well catastrophic won't be the half of it.

Paying your way

courtesy Kevin Drum:

Wage slave, lay down your chains

One of the most important facts about present-day American politics is that poor people have essentially no political “voice” in Washington. They do, however, vote. And they’re also human beings with moral worth and interests who count

Reading this made me realise*, this last century has been in part a story of how the power elites have learned to fission, delude and sucker poor people into voting against their own interests, and in subverting and/or crushing groupings of poor people trying to exert their own political power. This is largely true every in the first world, but is so nakedly and breathtakingly visible in US history as to be a perfect object lesson. The vicious hatred and unbelievably cruel treatment of the union movement in this country, both historically, and still being enforced, is pretty much a perfect example.

If this line of thought is carried much further, I might turn into a 'bomb-throwing radical' hahah. I do wish I'd realised this stuff 40 years ago, or not been so deafened myself as to fail to hear those who were saying it at the time. Plus de souvenirs, plus de regrets.



* or remember!

Hope and pray

Well I can only hope that President Mubarak displays a shred of honesty, and departs, rather than crushing this in the usual tyrannical rivers of blood ... if he can, that is.

One thing that astonished me is that my (few) Egyptian friends, who are all of military occupation or background*, are unanimously of the opinion that his government is now so rotten and dishonest as to need immediate replacement. If army officers of long provenance feel like this, what are the odds of the army NOT enforcing a crackdown, if those orders are passed down? I really hope I don't find out.


*and are all wargamers, unsurprisingly.

Welcome to the new Fascism

This just left me flabbergasted:

Yep, my older child has made a few choice observations during this first week of high-school: where to start? First of all, she was none too enthusiastic about the form we were asked to sign giving the US military permission to add her barely-out-of-middle-school name to their roster of potential recruits. (For pity’s sake. Could we hurry up and ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, already? Seriously.) OK, OK, at least they asked permission. 

I mean, wow. Just wow. And given that its a US High School, you just KNOW that anyone who doesn't give permission is going to be singled out for humiliation after it is 'accidentally' leaked'. Purely optional, my arse.

Lifted from Obsidian Wings

This letter from Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare to his students is so good I'm just going to include it in full here:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.
Swindle – what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.
Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.
This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.
Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.
I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English. Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.
Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.
You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves. Equally important, you need to start talking to each other. It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again. There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity. Lots. Get to work. See you in class!

Krugman on tax cuts:

This has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

Except, oops, too late on that last

Not Funny?

From the Washington Monthly:

Last week, the Georgia House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to consider a Republican proposal to "prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings." I'm not entirely sure what the point is -- it's not as if there's been an outbreak of involuntary microchip implantation -- but GOP officials nationwide have a tendency to worry about imaginary threats, so I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising.
The legislative hearing led to remarks from a local woman, who claimed to have personal experience on the matter.

"I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip," the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn't want to take. [...]
She spoke of the "right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices."
She continued. "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission," she said.
It was not funny, and no one laughed.

I'm sorry, I may be calloused and cynical, but I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious, not least that the elected politicians took this seriously.

Patriotism

Is this not awesome?   Harry Potter billionaire J.K. Rowling on why she chooses to continue living in Britain even though she could reduce her tax bill considerably by residing elsewhere:

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s.
....A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

Not Working

Sometimes this place seems crazy.

To get a law passed, you need to submit a bill to the House of Representatives, and get 218 (half plus 1) votes for it, submit a -separate- bill to the Senate and get 51 (out of 100) votes for it, reconcile any conflicts between the 2 bills, get them voted on a 2nd time in both parts, then get it signed by the President - if he vetoes it, you then need (I think) 290 votes in the House to overcome this. That all more or less makes sense, in a cumbersome eighteenth century horse&buggy sort of approximation to sense. It certainly ensures there will be no hasty Muldoonian legislation rammed through in an eyeblink.

However, it turns out, that 41 Senators can 'filibuster' - i.e. indefinitely block - any bill,without a final vote, so effectively you need 60 votes in the Senate, to get any bill passed.

That's pretty Rube Goldberg, but I can sort of see some point in terms of giving a large minority protection against a majority ... at least in principle. It seems to have worked fairly well in less ideologically fanatical times, up until, oh, about 1994: and since then, as party discipline has become less lax, it has been working progressively less well. But, fair enough.

What's absolutely crazy - I mean, totally beyond comprehension, just drug-sniffingly hallucinatorily mad - is that a single Senator has the power to 'hold' or block anything by withholding his consent for a vote, but this appears to be the case. We had an instance of this a couple of weeks ago, when a vile slimeball called Shelby put a hold on 30 or more appointments to various government positions (which apparently need ratification by the Senate), because he wanted some government contracts to be directed to his state, rather to a different part of the USA where the contracts could be more cheaply & efficiently completed. Well, that's pretty naked greed, but I guess you have to expect a certain amount of that from politicians, who fairly universally favor naked self-interest* over ... anything, really.

And now there is another crazy delusional fool, by name of Bunning, who is blocking a bill permitting the payment of unemployment benefits to the unemployed (and also various government infrastructure projects, such as highway and bridge repairs) on the basis of (a) they are just lazy and not looking for jobs, and (b) the government is paying for it with deficit financing (something he apparently had absolutely no objection to when Bush was crippling the country with deficits for the last eight years).

And apparently nothing can be done about this, unless they find some sort of bribe to shift him. This, when his own state (Kentucky) has 10% unemployment and the whole country is grinding through a terrible economic constraction, seems beyond just vicious, cruel and spiteful - it seems utterly, incomprehensibly savage and insane.

*not to mention egos so bloated as to obscure any flicker of intelligence thoroughly.

Politics

But as a friend of mine likes to say, "Republicans are evil and Democrats are idiots."

I'm starting to wonder if this isn't right. Man, I need to disengage from the minutiae of political ... well debate is the wrong word for it, more like drunken pub arguing, but on TV & the Internet. It seems to hothouse everything, and contribute ... well, nothing

Retrograde America

One thing only occurred to me over the weekend, about the American politico/social environment - and to be honest, I feel a bit retarded for not having twigged to it 20 years ago.

Simply, America had its revolution 200 years ago, unlike say England & the Continent, and the ideas that got embedded were a lot more weighted in favour of large land owners, fat cat mercantilists, and social stability, and quite disdainful of the common clay of working people ... and while the 19/20th century social revolutions that brought up the power of the working class didnt completely skip the USA, to a huge extent all of it was just suppressed/oppressed/killed off.

I mean, I know how the Union movement was anathematized and slaughtered (quite literally), and driven into a headlong bullheaded opposition to corporations, which still lingers, but it hadn't quite sunk in, the extent to which all of the accompanying social evolution just got kinda ... missed.

More later I hope - this week bids fair to be frenziedly busy (everyone trying to cram stuff in before the end of the year budget thing!)