Month: May 2010

“The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.”

Political spending by banks goes to Republicans. Securities and investment firms give more money to Republicans. Oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their spending on Republicans.

Paul Krugman:

The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.

Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s.

Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry. From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect?

We are utterly silly terribly wrong. Nothing is more important than a citizen’s vote. Assemblies are our best effort and only prize. There’s blood for that. Walk on it.

Billionaires captured rulemakers to arrange their base tax rate at just 15%.

The Challenge of Closing Tax Loopholes For Billionaires

The House has already tried three times to close it only to have the Senate cave in because of campaign donations from these and other financiers.

Aw, crap. We are crops of convenience. We are living day to day. Not to forget at work and going to work. Gas and sales and eats. Endless fees. Extractive penalties. Bad habits of budgets. Hidden habits of bonds. Crumbling results.

The entire nation seems to function at 25% efficiency managed by 90% nuts.

The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

Bet you didn’t know God has a plan for Canada – a very specific, pre-ordained role for the end times spelled out in the seventy-second psalm, verse eight, written long before Canada was discovered, long before Jesus was born: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” They call it the Dominion of Canada. No?

provocative tidbit

When the invasion of Iraq was first debated, one couldn’t fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a certain age who came out in support of the war. Radicals as adults, but often from conservative backgrounds, now beginning to confront their own mortality, and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy, their palpable thrill about military might suggested that, deep down, they secretly feared progressive principles were for pussies. Now here was their chance, before it was too late, to prove their manhood.

What if the country is no longer a democracy at all?

Professor Wolin declares that managed democracy is a new form of government, a totalitarian government.

Capitalist elite have merged with governmental powers to create totalitarianism.

Instead of an active role, the people are spectators, – a mere matter of political puppets, the audience of American Idol – who vote, but are not part of the process.  [review]

Yes, one could blame it all on cluelessness.

[link]

What the modern-day libertarian is, in reality and in practice, is a 24-carat hypocrite. Laissez faire is embraced with uncompromising zeal, while political and cultural freedoms for the rank and file are blithely swept away.

…elites and their hacks…

Supply-side, Trickle Down, Free Market, Reagan, Bush, Limbaugh, Palin, Tea Party: Nuts without facts.

1. Between 1933 and 1980, after the New Deal, GDP grew 4.5% per year.
2. Between 1980 and 2009, real GDP grew 2.7% per year.

It’s fibs Republicans do.

What third-world style and corruption gives BP our oil?

The Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately … end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines [not to mention the dead and scarred] and has been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action.

The company’s executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

Every backroom will always bite. Our current White House reworks it:

Nobody in this government will be satisfied until BP stops the leak, the oil is cleaned up and the affected people along the Gulf are fully compensated.

BP, as a responsible party, is charged with capping their leaking oil well and paying for the response and recovery.

Reform will come and reform will go, but the only secure way to power is by negotiating with the money power.

Dana Blankenhorn:

In the years around a genuine political crisis, and that’s what we’ve been in since 2005, this can be hard to see, hard to fathom. There is great fervor on both sides. The question for money is always, who will set the rules.

Each generational turn of the wheel in American history has been followed by just such a negotiation.

Money lost the struggle only once, as Andrew Jackson closed the Bank of the United States. This was followed by economic collapse driven by the states’ uncontrolled issuance of bonds. Money won’t make that mistake again, especially since Europe is playing the 1837 Game right now.

Republicans put the money power in charge after the Civil War. The progressive era was a continued effort to negotiate with, and struggle against, the money power. The liberal era forced the money power to accept a new normal of regulation in exchange for profit. And the Nixon era overturned the compromise.

During the Bush Excess money set the rules alone. It was the only force at the table. That’s why the ambulance crashed.

Money has no principles, no limits. The ideology of money, put in place by Reagan, was always self-defeating. Money must always compete, it must be challenged and channeled, or its raging water is just a flood, destroying everything before it.

When a crew from CBS News tried to film an oil-covered beach in Louisiana, they were stopped and threatened with arrest by a group of BP contractors and members of the Coast Guard.

Heard from Germaine Greer lately?

The Female Eunuch was part of a process that was already a hundred years old and is now called, for no obvious reason, the second wave of feminism.

And the revolution is really yet to begin.

The hard part is finding people who care.

Dave Pollard thought, “That’s what I should say when people ask me “how to save the world”. For a whole series of reasons:

In our individualistic western society, we try to do far too much alone. We need to organize, to cooperate, to collaborate. But we’re all so busy, so distracted, we don’t (most of us) have time or energy to learn what needs to be done, or to help get that work done. Finding others who can help, and know and care to do so, is even harder.

Enthusiasm drives a huge proportion of human endeavour. If we don’t really care, we will be hesitant to act, and we’ll give up easily in the face of adversity.

In my book Finding the Sweet Spot two of my key points are: (a) never start an enterprise alone; first find partners who share your passion and have complementary skills, and (b) the work you’re meant to do lies at the intersection of what you do uniquely well, what is needed in the world that no one else is precisely meeting, and what you have passion for.

We all need love to keep us going. Finding love is all about finding people who care.

Before we can care about something, we need to know about it. The important issues in the world today are complex, and it takes a lot of work to really know about them. So finding people who know, and who also care, is really hard.