Selectively Predictive

Once upon a time, we heard a lot of blather from the "right" about what we could infer about future events, based on our observations of things happening in a certain place, at a certain time, and in a certain order.

My example here is when Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice were always going on about "the obvious nexus" of Al-Qaeda, Iraq, and WMD.  They put these things together like the pieces of a matched set, and they used it to sell a specific plan of action.

Not to shift gears too abruptly here, but how come the rubes are always willing to buy all the phony shit using the Nexus Argument, and then completely ignore something that's real, and should be just as obvious about the Nexus of Economic Desperation and Access to Firearms?

From Crooks and Liars:

The 38-year-old woman entered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission office in downtown Laredo on Monday afternoon and demanded to speak to a supervisor, said investigator Joe Baeza of the Laredo Police Department.

The woman, whom he declined to identify, pulled out a handgun and started walking through the office, threatening several employees, he said.

And now there are 2 motherless kids in critical condition in a Texas hospital.

(Re)Stating Some Of The Problems

Fix yourself a sandwich and let the awesomeness wash over you like the warm autumn sunshine.

This is kind of a golden oldie now, but it seems never to grow stale - I guess I'm a hopeless wonk with a shameless crush on Elizabeth Warren.

Beating A Dead Horse

Sometimes you just have to keep going over the same ground, and revisiting the same arguments ad nauseum just to stay even with the epidemic of ignorance in the American Body Politic.

Repubs in general, and their PseudoCon wing in particular, just refuse to let go of their fairy tales.  Especially the one about "Tax Cuts Generate More Tax Revenue By Creating More Tax Payers".

Simply put, this is total bunkum.  I know this because while I generally kinda suck at Math, I can manage some basic arithmetic, which is what the TeaBaggers (eg) like to believe is all they need to make their "common sense" judgements on tax policy.

So here it is:
Bush Tax Cuts 2001 - 2011 (remembering that Obama agreed to extend them thru 2012)
Conservative estimates say these cost us about $800,000,000,000.00; or about $80 Billion/Year.

If each job created by the Bush Tax Cuts pays an average of $30k per year, then the Feds collect about $6,000.00 in taxes.

So, if we divide $80 Billion (cost) by $6,000 (revenue), we need to have created more than 13,000,000 jobs per year, which means we needed to have added over 1,000,000 jobs per month in the last 10 years.  When was the last time this economy showed a net increase of a million jobs in any month in the last 10 years?  When was the last time we showed an increase of a million jobs in any quarter?

But, let's back up a little and say that I'm using wacky numbers and that my calculations are just way off the mark.  OK; for grins and giggles, let's say I'm off by huge margins.  Let's say the cost is only half of what I'm citing, and that the jobs created are paying 50% better than $30,000 a year.

Now we've got a cost of $40 Billion per year divided by revenues of $9,000, which means we only needed 370,000 new jobs per month over the last 10 years.  Again, when was the last time we had a string of jobs reports that said we'd added 370,000 new jobs for any number of months in a row?

Reality: In the 118 months of W Bush and Obama, we've averaged a net increase of 17,144 jobs per month.  I don't care how you look at it, a decade of deep tax cuts has failed to produce what the proponents of this policy promised us.  We have to find it in ourselves to admit that it's a failure and that it belongs in the dumpster with The Great Society and The Domino Theory and a whole host of others that sounded good, but turned out to be little more than political flim-flam.

Fair warning: From here on out, if you try to float this shit by me, I will not preface my remarks by starting off with, "I'm sorry but..."  I will straight-up call you stupid to your face, and I really don't care what else happens.

Beyond Wisconsin

Hat Tip: JR in Boulder

I believe there are ways to get what you want in this world without being a complete asshole about it.  Took me a long time to figure that out, and to build the skills I needed to stay within that construct.  Unfortunately, hardly any of that matters anymore.

Case in point:  The guy who runs the joint where my wife works has said on more than one occasion (and out in the open for all to hear), "I have the power here.  If you want any kind of power, you'll have to take it away from me."  That's not quite a direct quote, but very close to it.

That's the dominant thinking in the executive suite now - actually it's been that way for a while.  For the guys who've clawed their way up over the last 12-15 years, it's become a zero sum game.  They believe with all their hearts that the only way they can win is for everybody else to lose - it's a binary universe where everything is either all one way or all the other way, so there are always and ONLY two diametrically opposed choices (which always seem to comprise a set of false alternatives, but that's a different discussion).

I don't like it of course, but my way of thinking has fallen out of favor (and is not bloody likely to make a big comeback soon), so I have to play in the other guy's house now.

Chris Hedges explains.

Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison.

And this is what I need to know about right now:

The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.

The Turn Around

via Political Carnival:

Yes, it's class warfare alright.  It's the guy making $500k convincing the guy making 35 that the guy making 50 is fuckin' him over.

Classic.

About Wisconsin - update

Oh look.  Here's something else it's not supposed to be about.

From Democratic Underground - with an embedded link to the HuffPo article.

While there has been significant attention devoted to the fact that Walker's 144-page budget repair bill would strip away collective bargaining rights for public employees, the site "Rortybomb" points out a less noticed provision that would allow the state to sell or contract out any state-owned energy asset in no-bid deals with private corporations.

About That Wisconsin Thing

To be clear, I don't much like unions.  I also don't dislike them.  My thing is always about the balance of power.  I don't like anything that gets too big or too powerful.  So it's about trying to make sure there's always something to act as a counterweight to whoever holds the majority position in the power struggle du jour.

For whatever reason, Gov Walker has picked this fight.  There is, to be sure, a problem with all or most governments' budgets in that they're not taking in enough revenue to cover all the outlays - again, for whatever reason(s).

My point is that the real fight in Wisconsin has practically nothing to do with the current condition of the state's budget.  It's important to remember that almost nothing is ever really about what a politician says it's about.

Walker has proposed a budget that asks public employees either to take a hit on salaries and bennies, and/or to do without any increases - and it appears there's not much push back on any of that.  So we can kinda put aside all of this deflecting nonsense about how the unions are busting the budget with outrageous demands, or killing the chances of the noble politicians to get things back on track, or whatever the consultants have told them say.

What we're left with is another baldfaced attempt to chip away at everybody's rights.  Plain and simple.

Something else to remember:  we're deep into the Supply Side Economy.  It's a fairly simple notion.  If you flood the market with a huge supply of anything, you force the price down.  That goes for Labor too.  The greater the number of people trying to get a given job, the less you have to pay whoever you hire for that job.

The Return To Serfdom

I've been worried for a while that we're heading back to the 18th century, when everything was owned by an aristocracy, and there was practically no such thing as a middle class.

Turns out we're probably a lot farther down that road than I thought.

Here's an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's Griftopia:

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

We are so fucked.