Seasteading

Lurching towards the logical extreme, this is not unexpected:

PayPal-founder Peter Thiel was so inspired by Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand's novel about free-market capitalism - that he's trying to make its title a reality.

So we'll have a colony of wealthy residents living outside the territorial limits of the US. They're not subject to our laws and regulations, and they get to "live free" in this Randian paradise.

Makes me wonder about a few things - not the least of which is piracy.  I think if I were an enterprising individual who was already involved in something illegal like the drug trade, I might deem it worth the risk to raid one of these little settlements now and then, just to see what's available.  Better yet, some kind of protection racket might be quite profitable for me.

Just wonderin'.

Corporate Personage

Here's Willard employing a Debate Stopper as he tries to make the point for lowering Corporate Tax rates.
(A Debate Stopper is a meme; a statement of "political fact" - usually in simplistic terms - intended to require agreement on the speaker's basic premise, allowing the speaker to go on to make a conclusive statement of policy).



The problem, as always, is that if your basic premise is false, then your conclusion cannot be true.

And here's the fallacy: If a corporation is a person; and it is entitled to the same rights and privileges of all other people, then it must be subject to the same responsibilities and liabilities as any other person.

A corporation is allowed to own another corporation, but a person is not allowed to own another person.

A corporation is not - cannot be - a person.

Go, Dylan

Who's Is It?

I posted the other day: "Obama owns it now".  Well, as usual, the spin competition ramped up in a hurry, with one of Washington's all-time great gaffemeisters (John Kerry) calling S&P's decision to downgrade US Debt "the Tea Party Downgrade".

The Repubs and the wingnut bloggers jumped on it and started the usual whine-a-thon about those mean old Dems calling people names and shit, blah blah blah.  But a coupla things here:  First, it's kinda cool that Kerry was finally able to make a point without fuckin' up the delivery.  Second, there was a significant number of Tea Partiers who said out loud that they thought default might be a good thing, so why are they pouting now when people are identifying them with the downgrade?  And third, how long before the Dems get tired of reminding everybody about all the bad shit the Repubs have gotten us into and decide not to use any of it as a campaign issue?

S&P's Downgrade

There's a paragraph in their reasoning saying basically that S&P doesn't feel comfortable with a high rating for US Government Debt because of their concern for the politics of the Debt Ceiling debate we just went thru.

If I can take as a given my thinking that Wall St is moving away from the GOP because of the Tea Party nutbags, then it makes a lot of sense that the downgrade is actually S&P sending a signal to the GOP that they need to get their shit together.

If your interest burden goes up because of the S&P downgrade, and S&P says it's because they don't trust the political process, and it's the Tea Baggers making the political problems, then who ya gonna blame?

It's possible the Tea Baggers kinda fucked up in reverse tho'.  Imagine how popular they'll get when somebody figures out how to spin it back and say the Tea Party was absolutely right about everything because look - we scared Wall St half outa their socks.

The grand shift in power continues and it just gets weirder as we go.

Hang Onto Yer Hats

This shit just makes me sick to my stomach.

"The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing -- that the worst was behind us," said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. "Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn't work, and we may be headed back to recession." --CNNMoney

"Conventional wisdom..."?  That's Corp Code for happy talk.  They've been sittin' there in their Executive Suites jackin' each other off, collecting nice fat checks at taxpayer expense, pretending that what they tell the Press Poodles to say has some actual relation to the truth.

And the crap about "the stimulus hasn't worked..."?  What exactly do they think was holding this shit up in the air this whole time?  The stimulus is gone, and now there's nothing to supplement what little demand there was.

I imagine right now, Geithner et al are having lots of phone conversations in very blunt language and urgent tones about taking huge amounts of the cash that Big Corp has been sitting on for 2 years and pouring it into the markets tomorrow to try to stop the bleeding.

!Wild Speculation Alert!
I can also imagine a guy like Jamie Dimon lickin' his chops at the prospects of a leveraged buyout of significant government assets.  And we're not talkin' about the NYC Water Dept or the 10 biggest airports.  We're talkin' about dismantling the whole bureaucracy and auctioning off the pieces.

But where do we start?  The standard play here would be to ramp up the Blame-The-Victim machinery.  The narrative should begin with "The American worker just isn't properly equipped to compete in the global marketplace blah blah blah."  Then you need to point at the schools.  A lot of this is already in place of course; this just makes it easier to topple the whole system, and make us more accepting of a corporate-style takeover.

Disaster Capitalism is now here.

And BTW, Dammit

If anybody (particularly anybody who self-identifies as a conservative) really wants to do something that might actually prevent another Debt Crisis, one thing to do is pretty simple: Amend the War Powers Resolution to require real-world financing proposals be enacted before the 90-day Freebie Period lapses.

Double Dip

I'm tryin' hard to figure out how the Debt Deal doesn't make things worse.  An awful lot of people are stuck in this kind of economic limbo, where treading water is about all they can hope for in the near and mid term; and when the average age of the American worker is close to 52, "middle term" can easily mean the remainder of your working life when the economy is stuck in the doldrums.  So while there's a fair stack of good news for households in the $200K+ category, that leaves a huge number of "middle classers" at risk of losing buoyancy and slipping under.

Here's the thing:  There's no substitute for demand.  The law is the law, and no combination of ideology and happy talk is going to change the simple fact that demand drives inflation and inflation is what makes capitalism work in the first place.  You can argue all you want about regulating the thing appropriately, but that's a different conversation.  If your premise is false, your conclusion CANNOT be true.  Demand is everything.  Every time we've tried to move away from that bedrock principle, we've seen some extremely bad shit pile up on us.

So if we take this debt deal at face value (not particularly valid, but ya gotta start somewhere), then what I see is an attempt to remove about $200 Billion worth of demand from the system every year for 10 years.

Here's my clever representation of this dynamic as a DOS batch file:
10: demand goes down, prices go down
20: prices go down, wages go down
30: wages go down, demand goes down
40: GO TO 10

No matter what, Obama owns this thing now.  What exactly he owns is up for debate.  And of course, the main point is to look at what affect this acton and the politics of this action will have on campaign contributions for 2012.

Contributors get people elected.  Big Contributors (eg: Target) that have aligned themselves  too closely with political issues that proved to be unpopular have taken occasionally severe beatings.

I think the strategy is for the White House to continue sending very strong signals to the business community to the effect that "this next part of the shift is on; this is for real and the smart money is backing policy that is fact-based, pragmatic and market-driven - not the Looney Toons bullshit coming from the wingnuts who think everything'll be fine if we just close our eyes and pretend it's 1954."

What if Obama really is playing way over all of our heads?  Maybe he's giving us the impression of the rope-a-dope, or the 3D chess master (remember that the Press Poodles aren't really all that bright - their job is to smash-fit whatever is going on into a prepackaged narrative).  What if Obama is actually working towards a position that forces the Tea Party GOP to isolate itself to the point where it consists of nothing but Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul, Pat Robertson and The Koch Bros?  But if that's true on the Repub side, then it can just as easily mean he's in the process of stripping away the the hardcore leftie base of the Dems.  All of which translates to the emergence of a "new political entity" - which probably isn't really new at all.

As always, we'll see.  Or at least we'll see something that may or may not be what actually happened.  Maybe we should call this Quantum Politics.  We see only the evidence that something MIGHT have happened, and we're left to theorize as to whether or not it was "real".

Balanced Budget Nonsense

Bruce Bartlett is becoming a real hero for me.

Historically, those supporting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution were only interested in balance per se. That is, requiring that revenues and expenditures be as close to equal as possible. The view was that if the states – almost all of which are required to balance their budgets annually – could do it then so could the federal government.

One problem is that the states don’t really balance their budgets. All have separate operating and capital budgets and only the operating budget is required to be balanced. By contrast, the federal budget lumps together operating and capital expenses, such as roads and buildings that will last for decades. Moreover, the states are notorious for using gimmicks to give the appearance of budget balance even though they run deficits.

Some Not So Revoltin' Developments?

Recent developments in the "debate" over raising the debt ceiling seem to confirm that the Repubs are really struggling with some serious structural problems. I think it's possible that Obama has pulled off an amazing thing, even if all he did was to let the Repubs dance at Center Stage long enough for people to see how crass and cynical they've become.

I doubt any of the Repubs changed their minds about the debt ceiling. In fact, I doubt most Repubs have any real objection to raising the limit at all, even tho' an awful lot of people have to have been worrying about the deficits and the debt for a good long while. If anything's actually changed, it's just that McConnell and Boehner and Cantor have taken such a public beating, they have to put up some bullshit strategy that makes them look a little less stupid and lets them believe for a while that they can get back out in front of their own party before it evaporates. Right now, this looks like nothing less than a complete breakdown. And it's prob'ly because the Repub Leadership got an attitude adjustment from the mega-donors who aren't gonna sit by and let the PseudoCons fuck up what's left of a good thing. (Obama's fund-raising numbers indicate something significant is happening, so maybe he's managed to strip off some of the big money providers - of course we won't find much info on that because the Citizens United thing means most of the money can stay incognito)

So now (for once) Obama doesn't have to beat the Repubs, because the Repubs are beating the Repubs. I think the indicator to watch is Michelle Bachmann's campaign. She's the Queen of the PseudoCons; the leader of the Radical Rowdies. We'll hafta wait and see what DumFux News comes up with, but so far, they've seemed reluctant to promote her in a big way. And it's possible that Fox has to divert too much energy to defending itself because of the whole Rupertgate thing, and so they'll be less of a factor. Dunno, but I'll bet the big donors are slappin' Roger Ailes around now too. It promises to get funner and funner.

Finally, here's a question: Why has the DNC/Obama Campaign quietly released this little commercial now? First, it's always a good idea to hit 'em with the hard sell right after some good news. But mainly, if I'm right in thinking a bunch of the big donors are shifting away from the Repubs, and if the Dems wanna re-assert their brand as "The Party of the Little Guys" in order to keep us from recognizing them as the same kind of Coin-Operated Politicos as anybody else, then they need something to demonstrate that they have "huge numbers of regular folk, sending in their nickels and dimes".

Made In China

(Anticipating the standard response to this revoltin' development): Let's be sure we figure out a way to make "the unions" out to be the bad guys here. We have to remember that no matter what happens; if it's bad and it's something the "Libruls" don't like, then we need to Blame America First. And if it's bad and it's something the PseudoCons don't like, then we Blame Americans.

Whatever it is, we must never be allowed to look past our own biases to see a problem resulting from a policy or a law or a regulation or the lack of regulation that was put in place at least at the behest of a lobbying effort - if not something that was bought and paid for outright as the result of the decisions of some sliver-spoon fuck in the executive suite of some very large and very wealthy corporation.

We must be kept distracted. While we're busy bickering on a level that's really nothing more than Red Team vs Blue Team, these Dons of Corporatopia are free to continue bleeding us dry.

Nostalgia Warp

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?  Yeah.. Me neither.

Ah Yes, I Get It Now

Today, Stan Collender is the smartest guy in the room.

Here's his lead-in to his blog post at Capital Gains and Games.

On the one hand, many Congressional Republicans are insisting that they don’t have to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling because the presumed dire consequences of not acting won’t be that bad. On the other hand, they’re also insisting that not raising the debt ceiling will indeed be harmful and, therefore, the White House had better agree to do what they want.

Spectacular.

Well, It's About Time

In keeping with the spirit of bi-partisanship, Congress and the White House have just announced a compromise aimed at resolving the main differences between The Ryan Plan and ObamaCare.

As usual, we're not sure the American public actually had a Senior Death Match in mind, but hey - at least we're making a little progress (?)  Oy.

Hmmm

The population in the US grows at about 9 or 10 or 11% per year.  (The rate of growth is starting to slow a bit, but the Census Bureau predicts we'll be at about 392 million people by 2050)

Some questions:
Why is it hard to find out what the actual numbers are when I ask, "how much is the Federal Gov't expanding? "

What's an appropriate rate for a government to expand relative to the expansion of population?

If government is supposed to operate more like a business, and our Debt-to-Revenue (using GDP) ratio is right around 1:1, and there are many many very large and profitable companies running much higher ratios, then what's the big fuckin' problem?

No Surprises

This is certainly not news.

Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.

Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.

What's their secret? The report speculates, but does not conclude, it could have something to do with the ability members of Congress have to trade on non-public information or to vote their own pocketbooks -- or both.

It would be news if anybody in congress actually did something about it.  The story does mention that a few Representatives have been trying to move legislation that could address this problem, but they've been at it for over 4 years now and it's gone nowhere.

Something else that would be news is if the Press Poodles would actually pick it up and at least put it in front of us.  But of course, that's not gonna happen.  News media are all owned by companies who benefit from the same inside information.  The parent companies contribute heavily to the re-election campaigns of these Congress Critters, who of course will then either pass bills that benefit those contributors, or kill regulations that restrict those contributors; the companies make more money, the Congress Critters get a nice little spiff because they have information the rest of can't get; and the contributions continue to roll in.  It's a Closed-Loop System that you get to pay for, and that you're not allowed into.  Such a deal.

And here's the kicker:  this is exactly where a truly unfettered Free Market takes us.  Everything is a commodity; everything has a price; everything is for sale.

Related: from Robert Reich.

Gutless

The very concept of taxation has gotten so politically toxic, our esteemed "leaders" have adopted a strategy of using code words and phrases rather than risk being the subject of public wrath if they dare utter any form of the term "tax".

David Frum:

But what this default talk looks like is that the GOP wants a crisis, not a deal. A deal would involve real pain for real voters: Medicare reductions, farm spending reductions, military reductions, and revenue measures. A crisis creates an exciting substitute for such a deal – especially if the GOP can temporarily and delusively convince itself that it can pin the blame for the crisis on President Obama. That will not be true. The whole world will see that the crisis was avoidable, and will see who insisted on forcing it. And however high you imagine the financial and political price – it will be higher.

It's been going on for a while of course, but it seems we've become so accustomed to the nonsense about how burdened we are; and how the gubmint just takes and takes and takes, that we've made it impossible for analysts and politicians even to say the words.

Frum is trying to make a good point about the difference between what his guys are saying they want and what their actions are saying about what they want, but I think he knows that if he so much as mutters "increased taxation" under his breath, the Tea Harpies will swarm down on him and pluck out his eyes, and nobody will hear what he's trying to say over the ruckus.

The same thing popped up in remarks Obama was making a little while back - maybe a coupla weeks ago.  He was talking about budgets, and he mentioned spending several times, but as he listed the spending cuts, he turned a brilliantly perverse phrase that stuck in my brain. He said (approx), "we also need to look at cutting spending from the standpoint of revenue".

Ever the optimist, I'd like to think all this means they're starting to talk about sensible tax increases in the meetings, and they're just trying to wink at us to let us know they're trying to get something done that includes fixing the revenue problems.

And BTW:
4,000,000 miles of streets and roads
75,000 dams
88,000 miles of coast line
12 super carriers
2 1/2 wars
1,431,000 people on active military duty (plus 200,000 in Nat'l Guard units)
800,000 miles of sewer lines
1,000,000 miles of water lines
95,000 Schools & Colleges
650,000 Cops
1,200,000 Fire & Rescue

All of that requires oversight and maintenance, and expansion to keep up with growth. Contrary to the kind of Wal-Mart mentality that passes for critical thinking these days, you don't get Great for Cheap.  

If we spend the money necessary to bring it all back up to acceptable standards, we’d see an economic recovery that’d blow your lip up over your forehead.

Today's WTF

From The Agonist:

SUMMARY: for most of the past week it looked like the White House might be winning its gamble that public pressure on House Republicans was paying off, in terms of apparent voter outrage about Medicare and Social Security cuts in the Ryan Budget. But a Gallup Poll released this morning shows the public favors the Republican's over the Dem's approach to the budget by 48% to just 36%.

Weak leadership on the Dem side plus a strong and consistent message from the Repubs, and we get - what?  What do we get?



Same ol', same ol'.  Repubs run around saying all manner of scary things about what's bound to happen if we vote for Dems, or if we don't go along with whatever nutty idea they've come up with lately - and somehow it seems like we always just go along.  But in 2006 we kinda found our balls and voted for a big bunch of Dems even tho' Darth Cheney warned us that the terrorists would attack us if we did that.  We did it anyway and  the terrorists didn't attack.  Then they told us voting for Obama would encourage our enemies, and our taxes would go up, and the economy would fall off a cliff, and, and, and.  Did any of that happen?  No. Why?  Because they're lying.  Can you point to anything these sacks of shit have predicted in the last 10 years that actually panned out?  Can you point to anything they made a big deal out of in that same time period that turned out to be A TOTAL FUCKING LIE!?!

But here's the real point, made pretty well by a commenter on The Agonist's post:

At least the supporters of Austerian economics have the courage of their convictions. If you don't know which of two paths is the better one, but the guide to the path on the left is a timid uncertain coward who won't even go with you, most people will follow the guide for the path on the right. Unfortunately he will rob, rape and kill you at the first opportunity. But sometimes that seems like a kinder fate that the death by 1 million disappointments and betrayals that Obama Reid and Pelosi have in store for us.

Sweet screamin' Jesus, Democrats.  Ya gotta get up on your hind legs once in a while.

Real Differences?

Here's a story about how "Liberals" are wired differently from "Conservatives".

Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.

Notice how careful the wording is.  I'm thinking the author wanted to avoid inviting the inference that somehow liberal people are better equipped to cope with the world; that libs are operating at a higher level of consciousness in some way.

Not only am I willing to infer exactly that, I'll take it a step or two farther (big surprise) and say that many of the so-called conservatives in politics and punditry are working on a level low enough to qualify for a subsidy from Purina.

The amygdalae are where your fear lives (emotions are mainly centered in the amygdalae).  That 'emotions center' helps in threat situations (eg) by telling your renal glands to give you a quick shot of adrenalin - fight or flight reactions and all that.  But that emotional response can also become a real problem if you fixate on the fear.  You get anxious or neurotic or even paranoid.  Starting to sound familiar?  Do you think politicians don't know about these things?  Do you think a politician wouldn't try to take advantage of this knowledge by deliberately spurring those fear reactions?

I've wondered about the ridiculous lengths we've been going to as we try to cope with the crazy changes we've been through - especially since 9/11.  I think some of this nonsense is getting clearer now.  It seems we've been in the grips of a full-blown National Anxiety Attack for almost 10 years.

All of this also fits nicely with Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine too.  I've had that book for a while; maybe I should actually read it(?)

A Little (re-)Education - updated

If you control the story of your country's history, you have a much better chance to mold its future.

One of the things Ayn Rand warned us about is what she called "the amputation of history".  She was talking about how power structures manipulate us through propaganda - and one of the main points they rely on is that most of us don't remember our history lessons from school.  Of course, the Right Radicals have been telling us for 30 years that all the schools suck; that they never taught us anything straight.  So we're open to the suggestion that what we learned wasn't the true story, and we're also open to accept a substitute version that The Party is more than happy to supply.

Think about some of the ridiculous things we've heard from Haley Barbour and Michelle Bachman lately.  Barbour made claims that race hatred in Mississippi wasn't really all that bad; and Bachman spun a whopper about how the founding fathers worked so hard to end slavery.

Now think about what they're telling us about the Boston Tea Party - how it was a revolt against taxes.  It wasn't anything of the sort.  It was actually a rebellion against the tyranny of a government that was being used by a mega-corporation to impose croney capitalism on people who simply wanted a chance to compete on a level field.

BTW: in case you're some kind of bone-head Libertarian who insists that this is just an example of 'counter-propaganda' and you can't trust anything you hear; go blow a rock.  There are actually ways of discovering the truth about things, and there's this little matter of critical thinking that requires you to accept facts when they present themselves in some reasonable way.

I love this kinda shit (assuming I haven't been April-Fooled of course).