Politics And Capitalism

"Conservatives" love to carp about "lefties" bringing politics to the marketplace until of course some bonehead like Dan Cathy at Chick-Fil-A steps on his own dick.  But even then, it's still not supposed to be about the stupid politics of being stupidly anti-gay; it's supposed to be about the "freedom" of a very powerful business empire to fuck over anybody it chooses to fuck over.

(God love The Onion)

"The Queer-Hatin' Cordon Bleu is our company's way of showing our firm commitment to strong, Christian family values," said Chick-fil-A spokesman Robert Gary, before adding that the vehemently anti-gay rights sandwich comes served in a combo with waffle fries and a medium soda for just $6.95. "From the very first morsel of this savory meal to the very last bite, customers can envision gays burning in hell with their sodomizing cohorts, and know that our sandwich is on their side.”

If I needed another reason to avoid fast food, this is it.

Communist My Ass

Mr Jefferson said some things that get clearer and wiser the more I revisit them.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

-and-

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

We hear a lot about how China is this big and powerful and scary thing.  We also hear lots of criticism of China's "Communist System" and how these dirty commies may be doin' great capitalistic things, but they're still just a buncha dirty commies blah blah blah - well, they aren't really.  At least not completely.  Not when there's a story about the grandson of one of China's old guard Party People, who's been hangin' like a rock star as he matriculates at Harvard, cuz suddenly it's kinda hard for me not to see it as another example of the amazing resilience of the very human propensity towards aristocracy.

From NYT:

One Chinese friend of mine was a judge in corruption cases, and made a good living taking bribes from defendants. Another friend, the son of a Politburo member, was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year simply to lend his name to a real estate company.

Officials have a maddening sense of entitlement. When I lived in China, my wife and I once attended a party with many middle-age officials (including one now in the Politburo) and a crowd of trophy female secretaries. One cabinet minister mistook my wife, who is Chinese-American, for a secretary and crassly made moves on her. Let’s just say that my wife ruined his evening.

The scale of corruption has become mind-boggling. Zhang Shuguang, a railways official,managed to steal $2.8 billion and move it overseas, the state news media have reported. A Chinese central bank report suggested that 18,000 corrupt officials had fled China and taken $120 billion with them. The average take was almost $7 million per person.

The backdrop is the staggering wealth enjoyed by the elite. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe water, but one tycoon’s home I visited had an indoor basketball court, a movie theater and a pond with rare fish worth up to tens of thousands of dollars each.

In Chinese, the words for power (“quan”) and money (“qian”) sound alike, and in China one often translates into another.

The Old Made New Again

Reading thru this today from The ArchDruid, via The Agonist:
(while trying to find a new way of saying "forget your history and you'll have to relive it")

The first of these shifts was the Great Depression or, more precisely, the feckless response of both American mainstream political parties to the economic collapse that followed the 1929 stock market crash. In the crucial first years after the crash, Democrats and Republicans alike embraced exactly the same policies they are embracing in today’s economic troubles, with exactly the same lack of success, and showed exactly the same unwillingness to abandon failed policies in the face of economic disaster. Then as now, the federal government launched a program to bail out big banks and corporations—it was called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in those days—and pumped dizzying amounts of money into the upper end of the economy in the belief, real or feigned, that the money would work its way down the pyramid, which of course it didn’t do. Then as now, politicians used the shibboleth of a balanced budget to demand austerity for everybody but the rich, and cut exactly those programs which could have helped families caught by hard times. Then as now, things got worse while the media insisted that they were getting better, and the mounting evidence that policies weren’t working was treated as proof that the same policies had to be pursued even more forcefully.

And then I had to go reread the Kipling piece:

The White Man's Burden --Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Say What?

(hat tip = Crooks and Liars)

One of the great opening paragraphs of all time:

Wisconsin is the only state that's been bleeding jobs for a straight six months, and the Walker administration is truly puzzled. Gov. Walker followed every single recommendation in the Wingnut Book of Corporate Wishes, resulting in a huge pile of manure, and yet he still can't find the free market pony. If only there was something he could do to change things - you know, things like go back in time and not lay off all those teachers and public workers whose spending helped stimulate the economy:

A coupla things that stand out for me - in keeping with the usual Repub habit of taking full responsibility for your actions, and then blaming everything on everybody else when your chowderhead policies take the economy into the shitter, just like everybody you're now blaming told your dumb ass they would.

First, at about 1:40, "the federal government failed to act".  I tho't he told us the federal government was one of the big problems and that he wouldn't be needing them for anything.

Second, by about 2:00, he's flipped all the way over and starts reciting practically every point the evil libruls have always said were essential to a healthy economy, all of which Mr Walker has done nothing but deny and refute - basically, Education and Infrastructure and Living Wage Jobs.

Yo, Guv - if this where you were going anyway, then what the fuck have you been doing for the last 2 years!?!

Yikes

I really do try to stay positive, but this kinda thing keeps popping up and I'm right back to  thinking it's just not gonna end well.

Can You Spot The Difference?

E-Con

Here's another good one from Firebrand:

The Atlantic Cities ran an interesting piece today about corporate relocation battles. The short of it is that states compete with one another to bring in specific corporations by giving away huge sums of public money. Right now, Ohio and Illinois are fighting over the Sears corporate headquarters, with both states offering around $400 million of public money to the corporation. Incentives like these amount to around $50 billion a year in state and local spending.

Companies have been playing this Labor Arbitrage game for a long time, with the emphasis on paying very low wages overseas, and counting on relatively cheap fuel and zero tariffs to make shipping easy.  Maybe they're starting to see that they're causing themselves to have some real problems because of it.  Or maybe they just see that it's time to apply the Principles of Arbitrage here at home in a bigger way.

Unions are on the ropes, so one angle is to propose opening a plant in the Rust Belt (eg), but make sure everybody knows the company simply can't afford to pay union wages, so "If you want a job, you'll have to work for shit - that's the only way - after all, we've got lots of people in Cambodia doing this work right now for 16 cents an hour; you wanna bitch about us doing you a favor at 8-and-a-quarter?"

I think we can look forward to a lot of really shitty things happening as States and Counties and Cities continue to hack away at every government expense trying to find ways to buy those jobs.

Welcome to Pottersville.

Something To Watch For?

I've been wondering when the smart guys on Wall Street would wake up and start to see the Occupy thing as a customer service issue, and apparently, some of them are doing just that.

From Mother Jones:

Founded in early October by former British diplomat Carne Ross, the 60-person Alternative Banking Group has become a repository for OWS-friendly financial insiders. It includes current and former investment bankers, traders, and lawyers for the securities industry, but also many laymen—including housewives, people who used to sleep in Zuccotti Park, and guys with piercings who wear Che Guevara T-shirts. The group shares Occupy Wall Street's website, its nonhierarchical structure, and its distaste for partisan politics. "I'd say the one thing that everybody agrees on is that the system isn't working," O'Neil says. "And there is nothing about being a Republican or a Democrat in that statement."

Early in the piece, there's a reference to a reform proposal put out by Jon Huntsman that I think has some merit - which prob'ly means the Wrong Wing Media will never let it see the light of day.

The Tyranny Of Capitalism

Separation of Powers was the great new idea that made the US Constitution one of the best things ever.  Here's a pretty good look at how easy it is to slide back into a system that has always ended up having to be overthrown by violent rebellion.

Part 1(at about 5:30 - the main point): Part 2 isn't up yet. Watch for it at The Real News.

OWS Evolves

Maddow is way too "lefty" for me on lotsa things, but she's about the smartest there is when it comes to spotting and then connecting the dots; and articulating the politics of it all.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cuz God Made It So

I repeat - I'm a capitalist because God's a capitalist.

But we have to do it better; we have to get back to an understanding that the system has to serve the people, not the other way around; and we have to adjust the model so it's comprised of interlocking closed loops, rather than a series of disconnected linear dead ends.  Unfortunately, we've been suckered (again) into believing that the only way to make it work is to continue removing the controls.  Well, guess what you get when the free market system is completely unfettered - you get exactly what Americans had to fight a revolutionary war to throw off in the 18th century.  Aristocracy and entitlement, despotism and cronyism, inequality and slavery - any crappy thing you care to name that one human can do to another human.

Lastly, we have to remember that capitalism is a lousy substitute for democracy.

Elizabeth Warren

I'm a Capitalist because God's a Capitalist.  And I favor regulation because God favors regulation.

This Is What You Call A Recovery?

To go along with Bush's Jobless Recovery, now we get Obama's Wageless Recovery.  And it kinda makes sense in a weird, Compendium-of-Official-Horse-Shit kind of way.  We already have the Non-Denial Denial, and the Non-Apology Apology - now we can add the Non-Recovery Recovery.

NYT

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

It gets harder and harder for me to justify voting for Obama again.  I'll probably stick with him because the alternative (so far) just seems too terrible to contemplate.  That could change tho'.  Everybody has to decide; at what point are you willing just to let the fuckin' thing burn?

USA USA USA

A return to the bad old days of Protectionism, and of Unions that were too big and too powerful isn't a good idea either.  So don't try to play that binary bullshit on me.  What I'm talking about is making an effort to get some sanity and balance back into the system.

Legislative / Judicial / Executive

Management / Labor / Government

Company / Customer / Vendor

Ya gotta have balance.  If you let any part(s) of any system overwhelm the other(s), then the system becomes unstable.

The guiding principle is that when anything becomes too big and too powerful, it has to be beaten down and brought back into balance.  I'm pretty sure that's what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be.  All of history before the USA was about playing and replaying all that imperial crap; "we're God's chosen people"  Well shit, how many empires were "chosen by God" before us?  How many of them are still around?  Is God just really lousy at choosing empires?

I'm pretty sure the people who started this country had the same ideas that occur to me, and they tried to set up a system aimed at resisting the temptations of power; to make it as hard as possible for any one entity to dominate the others; to ensure that we'd at least have the means to prevent the ruinous drift back into monarchy and empire if only we could muster the will.

Over time, of course, people forget.  We get sold on a different idea of how it's supposed to be.  Politicians and Marketeers blur the lines and turn meanings upside down.  We end up believing it's our patriotic duty to support policies that do damage to our founding principles.

And now we have giant multi-national Mega-Corporations taking the place of the old lines-on-a-map Nation States.  (This is nothing new, btw)  People who sit at the top of these Mega-Corps are not called Barons or Captains or Kings for the hell of it, or because it makes them seem quaint or whimsical.  We call them Barons and Captains and Kings because that's how their organizations function, and that's what they are.

300 years ago, Nation States were family-owned private enterprise military organizations that subcontracted out for food, clothing, shelter and trade goods in exchange for protection.  Whenever one of those contractors pushed a little too far into somebody else's territory, the Crown would try to hold up its end of the bargain by invading or otherwise making war on somebody to protect the interests of the merchants, which were in turn, the interests of the Crown.  Government and Business both gradually morphed away from the Inherited Entitlement System towards a more egalitarian system, but there's always a kind of gravitational pull; always something inside us that wants us to return to what our faulty and selective memories perceive as a better time; fueled by the relentless energy of profit-at-any-cost (an oxymoron if ever there was one).  We have to resist that backslide, and remember always that good people continue to fight and bleed and die - sometimes for the noble cause, but mostly for the good of the multi-national companies, and to further the interests of an Entitled Aristocracy that is again coming to believe it owns the government - and owns it by God-given right.

If you want the power, you have to take the power.

Listeria

The story about the Listeria outbreak is several days old now, and I have yet to see or hear hardly anything at all on the aspects of food safety inspection - except on some of the blogs I read.

AGAIN - where the fuck is the reporting?  There was one piece a day or two ago that briefly mentioned the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, and said food handling/processing facilities were supposed to be inspected at least once every three years, but apparently, nobody has brains enough to go to the FDA and ask about the status of inspections at Jensen Farms!?!

This one, from The Guardian, is typical.

From the Business Section, NYT.

Every article at least hints at the industry policing itself.  Apparently, we're deeper into an era of privatization and free market self-regulation than I thought.  In the NYT piece, the food safety manager at CostCo is calling for better Quality Control measures from the growers and handlers, but he says nothing about an actual food safety inspections regime on the part of any level of government.  I'm not saying every food item should be tested, but there are sampling techniques that work astoundingly well in manufacturing (eg) that could be applied to cantaloupe or potatoes or practically anything else.

So I'm asking American Business to tell me what the calculation looks like: how many people have to die before it becomes cost-effective for you to stop killing your customers?

FInally, here are a couple of dots that can be connected to this story:
1) All those annoying emails about how grand it was once, back in those golden days when we could do as we pleased and we didn't have to worry our little heads about anything.
2) Tort Reform; particularly Product Liability.

Do you really think this shit just happens at random?

Smart Is Good

I think it's getting safer for people to be smart again. I'm hoping this anti-intellect thing is passing into the dumper where it belongs.



And btw: maybe it's just that I've felt starved for really smart policy arguments for a very long time, but I think Elizabeth Warren is really sexy.

The Job Creators

Add this to the growing litany of Repub bullshit: "Government never created even one job."

(hat tip to John Gorman)

Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.  From the late 1600's thru about 1875, it was a recognized clinical condition; a mental illness.  It fell from grace as Clinical Psychology grew into a real thing.

In light of some of the cultural and political developments over the last 20 years or so, it seems maybe we'd do well to bring it back as a diagnosis.

Bill Boyarski has a great piece at truthdig a while back that hit a couple of chords:

What the tea party, the House Republicans and Noonan have in common is something very simple: They believe the United States should not be led by Barack Obama and that we should not accept the change and progress that his election represented. This belief goes beyond arguments over the debt and the deficit. It is deep and irreconcilable. It is the reason why the right won’t compromise.

But when I look at the Tea Partiers playing their little games, and TheoCons who bomb women's clinics and shoot doctors, and the Islamic idiots who insist on operating under 10th century rules, and now this Breivik dipwad in Norway, what I see is a major spasm of panic that a lot of people experience as they get more desperate to maintain their positions of privilege and power.  In "the west", we get to add the complicating factor of people trying to maintain the supremacy of white folks.

Trends of the last few years indicate Tom Friedman is indeed the wrongheaded douche his reputation says he is. So maybe once we wake up and realize we're all 3rd-worlders now, we'll start to see that we're more similar than different after all.  It's possible that the economy forces this reality on us.  The study of Economics (and the management of an economy) are more art than science, but "the economy" is reality itself.

Cultural struggles and political games get us caught up in a lot of wishful thinking.  We start to believe that slogans and bumper stickers will somehow change the law of supply and demand.  Or that by voting for a particular candidate, we can actually get something for nothing.  Or that the natural business cycle of expansion and contraction can be negated if we adopt a particular economic ideology.  But guess what - that up and down business cycle?  That's the economy breathing - and it's generally considered a bad idea to stop breathing.

I don't know how to tie this up in a neat little package - I'm just making some observations right now.

Reasons

One important reason why our economy is fucked up.

One very important reason why our political system is fucked up.

The Tax Swindle

Middle Class Americans have to be distracted while the Ownership Class continues to pick their pockets.

A good way to keep them from noticing how badly you're fucking them is to scapegoat some other group (in this case the poor and the working poor), which makes them think you're actually on their side, which enlists their help in your efforts to fuck them over even more.

It's classic.  People of a particular authoritarian bent, who are in positions of privilege and power are always advocating the most severe remedies "for the good of the country"; and those remedies somehow always end up being imposed on (and to the detriment of) the very people who should benefit from those remedies the most.  And lately, all this self-sacrifice for the common good is being sold to us under the guise of Ayn Rand-type philosophy.  Guess what?  Rand HATED the notion of self sacrifice; and she especially HATED the rationale of sacrifice in service to the collective.  Rejection of all things communal, and a complete disdain for sacrificing the Self are at the very heart of Rand's construction of Objectivism.

I'm off the point a little, so let's bring it back to the bullshit currently being peddled by DumFux News and their network of echo chamber media lizards.

via The Atlantic:

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.