Month: December 2011

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mattress graves

“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

“Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”

…he used a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

…Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd.

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

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stripped wages

1 in 4 earn less than $9 per hour.

I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents.

He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families.

Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.

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our country cracking up

Jon Taplin:

I awoke this morning to read that a candidate for the Presidency (Newt Gingrich) believes we should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and Iran because he fears they are about to launch a nuclear missile to be “detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, (which) would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity.

Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones.

Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States.

Most scientists regard this as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic even if these two pygmy powers had such a rocket, and yet this man could seriously be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. This is like Ron Hubbard running for President on the Scientology ticket.

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wealth defense industry

via Huffington Post:

Jeffrey Winters, author of the 2011 book Oligarchy.

Winters coined the term “wealth defense industry” to describe this veritable army that serves the super-rich, and in a recent article in the American Interest he explained that it “is comprised of lawyers, accountants, wealth management consultants, revolving-door lobbyists, think-tank debate framers and even key segments of the insurance industry whose sole purpose is income defense for America’s oligarchs. “

It’s “a multi-billion dollar industry per year, and it feeds completely on the need of wealthy people to defend their wealth,” Winters says in an interview.

The paramount goal is simple and specific: “To not pay taxes and to keep as much of their fortunes as they possibly can across generations.”

The means are extremely complicated and expensive, typically involving individually tailored, painstakingly crafted techniques — or “structured tax products”– based on arcane interpretations of the nation’s 70,000-page tax code.

Those schemes often involve moving money through offshore tax havens and anonymous shell corporations — generally with the goal of sheltering the money and creating paper losses that can be applied to the client’s tax bill.

“The wealth defense industry arose as part of the demand on the part of wealthy people, but it’s now taken on a life of its own and is proactive.”

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falsity astounds me

Our culture’s support for Republican errors via NYTimes:

this point is worth emphasizing once again. As Krugman notes:

…the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit.

All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.

The entire debate has been fake.

If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.

“So the idea that those at the very top, who now are richer than anybody has ever been; we now have people who are richer than any people have ever been in the history of the world; why they can’t pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes in crazy.

“Five days after George W. Bush became president, [five days!!] Alan Greenspan testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and said ‘we are in danger of paying off our national debt too fast. We have a projected $5 trillion surplus going into the next ten years and we very well may pay off the debt too fast, the federal government is in danger of having too much money.

“Then as soon as we started losing jobs and we’re in a recession, Bush said, ‘well we’re in a recession, we need to cut taxes because the economy’s bad.’ So in addition to ‘every time you cut taxes you increase revenue’ and ‘every time you cut taxes you decrease revenue’, there was also, ‘every time the economy’s doing well you have to cut taxes’, and ‘every time the economy is doing bad you have to cut taxes.’

“And then, when it needed one more element to become absolutely dangerous, and Dick Cheney provided that. Cheney said, ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. So Bush takes the biggest surplus in history and turns it into the biggest deficit in history, hands off a $1.2 trillion projected deficit to Obama, and an economy, here it is, I’ve done my job, we’re shedding 750,000 jobs a month.

“This is the most incomprehensible economic theory I’ve ever heard.”

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stacked against

“We overestimated capitalism’s ability to function properly without strong democratic checks.”

Gary Segura:

Elected officials and university administrators have felt no compunction about using force to prevent political dissent….

Contrast these actions with how our nation has dealt with the investment bankers, mortgage lenders, and hedge fund managers who wrecked the world economy.

It is hard not to conclude that the fix is in.

The degree to which our political and legal systems favor the wealthy and powerful is breathtaking in scope and arrogance.

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so it’s slow and slower

Tumors are not industrial.

The panel decided that men who have PSAs of 10 or less and Gleason scores 6 or less “should no longer be told they have cancer”.

Men with these criteria are not candidates for treatment, but for active monitoring, if you can find it.

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that thing that grave

My experience, my recovering:

There’s cancer to care for.
What’s good for me is she died in our bed,
sleeping delighted,
stunned day to day in our love.

And also, there’s Hitchens:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span.

However …

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without embarrassment

Bill Moyers:

Those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else.

They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else.

And they succeeded beyond their expectations.

After their forty-year “veritable crusade” against our institutions, laws and regulations—against the ideas, norms and beliefs that helped to create America’s iconic middle class—the Gilded Age is back with a vengeance.

Second_Bill_of_Rights:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

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story of the mask

The mask, a sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes, was created in 1982 by Alan Moore and the artist David Lloyd.

At Occupy sit-ins in New York, Moscow, Rio, Rome, Athens and the gatherings outside G20 and G8 conferences in London and L’Aquila, the V for Vendetta mask has been a fixture.

Alan Moore is ‘baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased’ that his creation has become an emblem of modern activism.

“I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”

 

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flawed campaign platform

So it is perhaps unsurprising that our recent economic crisis had some characteristics of boom-and-busts in less developed nations. It was triggered, in part, by 1 percenters on Wall Street persuading regulators to remove restrictions on their casino. It led workers to pile on debt to supplement falling incomes. It ended with a vast deployment of tax dollars to bail out fallen plutocrats. And our political system seems unable to deal with the aftermath.

NY Times asserts Republican are misguided protectors of the 1%:

The Republican right is pushing back hard against the 99 percent movement and its focus on the widening chasm between the fortunes of the few at the summit of the income scale and everybody else.

Newt Gingrich, who led the field of Republican presidential candidates last week, argued that the concept of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is ‘un-American’. His rival Rick Perry, who led the Republican pack in September, answered a question about taxes and inequality by saying “I don’t care about that.”

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where’s yo wealth?

“The [rich media propaganda] tells you ‘I’m the cow that gives you milk’. Well yes they may be the cow that gives you milk, but we’re the grass that feeds that cow.”

In the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, medalist John Carlos and his teammate Tommie Smith raised the fist salute to represent Power-To-The-People on the medal podium.

The Sports Moment That Changed The World.