I Fought the Law, and the Law Yawned

It appears that perhaps, our long national nightmare of accountability has finally come to an end.

The Conservative will tell you it's all about taking personal responsibility. 

Unless, of course, you're talking actual jail time.

Then, it's about partisan witch-hunts. Heck, even a few democrats are acting  this way about it. Like the President.

Sort of.

I mean mixed messages, folks. Obama has released a bunch of memos detailing the opinions of the various lawyers who decided whether or not waterboarding and other little fun pastimes could be considered torture, and whether or not the Geneva Conventions should be obeyed or ignored, depending on the individual you were dealing with. But "let's not prosecute?" Why tell us they've broken the law, and then tell us we won't go after them?

The Repugs have come up with their own twisted version of accountability - they're saying that if we can declassify these secret documents, then we can also declassify the documents proving exactly which potential terrorist horrors all of our horrors have prevented. Which will come back to bite them, I think. What if there weren't any incidents prevented? What if all we have to show for all this stupid, self-righteous behavior is a great deal of international legal egg on our faces?

And all of this "all in the past" nonsense: fine. I will consult a lawyer who will come up with some sort of (pardon the pun) tortured legal finding that says robbing banks is OK. I will rob a bank based on this. I will admit it publicly. Then I can use the (admittedly inaccurate, or probably illegal) opinion my lawyer has come up with, and the local DA will look at it and go, well, it all happened in the past, so we shouldn't bother with this? I kind of doubt it.

We are still trying to capture Nazi war criminals, even when they're past the point of being punishable for much more than a two or three-month sentence (they're kind of old, you know), but by God what they did was wrong and they should pay. Better still, their crimes should be made public, so that we can all remember the horror that happened.

Our own dear elected officials allowed torture, mistreatment of prisoners, etc., but "that was all so long ago. Let's look to the future."

I'm sorry, but if you're going to hand out evidence of criminal activity that all can see and read, then you damn well better act on it as if a crime has been committed. Because if you don't, transparency and accountability mean very little. The rule of law is only as strong as those who enforce the laws. If a lawyer tells you you can kill people, does that make it legal? Or only if you're the President, and the people you want to kill might be bad guys? And if the President gets to define who and what a bad guy is without trial, isn't that a little too much power for one person to have? Especially one who already has quite a lot of power to begin with?

Just asking...

Raging Cretinous Has-Beens

Here's to Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly: we salute you, o idiots of the major media!!! I would add other media luminaries to this list, but I need to keep it manageable. Your consistent, ass-hatted opinions are keeping America safe for the Michigan Militia! Unfortunately, everyone else is going to have to buy a few bullet-proof vests.

First, the "Tea Parties:" I learned from Thom Hartmann last week that the Boston Tea Party was staged, not (as my history textbooks would have it) because the poor, benighted colonists were being overtaxed on something as common and important as tea, but because the British East India Trading Company was not going to be taxed at all for importing tea to the Colonies, thus killing competition between BEITCo and any other tea company.

Kind of like when Wal Mart comes to town and gets a ten-year-long property tax holiday, because they're going to employ a lot of locals (which they will, because all the local business will be going under).

So, once you get past that little semantic difference of opinion, you're then left with a fairly crazy conspiracy theory: Obama is planning on taking away all the guns, nationalizing all the banks (so?), and essentially forming a Muslim States of America. His own statements notwithstanding (about America being a secular state that has religious people living in it - oh, my GOD, I had no IDEA), loonballs like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are running around with their mouths hanging out all over the place, telling "Patriotic Americans" (AKA knuckle-dragging inebriates with too much time and/or too many firearms on their hands) that it's time to think about armed insurrection.

Wow. Wasn't it just yesterday that criticising the President's war plans was tantamount to treason? (that's the last President, by the way, not the current one)

So, if criticising one President's war plans is treason, what do you call telling people to arm themselves and prepare for war against their own government? A friendly argument? An agreement to disagree?

A joke in poor taste?

And thus we have a spate of random shooting sprees. One guy specifically said in his (attempted, as it turned out) suicide note, that if you're going to kill yourself, because the world is becoming a socialist state, take out a few liberals along the way. I'm not saying all the shooting sprees are specifically politically motivated - though when you're broke, laid-off, and desperate, and the wackos tell you that the guy in charge did it, well, then you might think about going after the guy in charge.

Shame that it wasn't the current "guy in charge" that screwed everything up. But, you know, that's just semantics...

This Just In - OPEC Says Oil Tastes Great!

In a story in Reuters today, OPEC displayed a deep schizophrenia when talking about it's primary source of revenue.

The General Secretary for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Abdullah al-Badri, blamed industrialized nations and their factories for Global Warming, then suggested that revenues from taxing oil should go to environmental issues, but then lambasted developed nations for trying to wean off the their respective populations off of OPEC's product.

So, oil doesn't cause global warming, but coal and natural gas do?

It's enough to give you whiplash.

Even the head of Royal Dutch Shell says that maybe people should stop buying penis-replacements and just get some sort of car that works and will get them from place to place without the huge carbon footprints.

If you're going to tax petroleum products anyway, make sure you use those revenues to fund environmental needs in your country.

But God forbid that you stop buying big cars that need lots of gasoline to run.

    "It's the damned United Auto Workers' fault for GM and Ford and Chrysler all going belly-up."

    "It's the damned poor people with their sub-prime loans that have caused this banking problem."

And now, we have:

     "It's the damned industrialized nations that are causing global warming, not oil."

I'm still confused.

The implications of this are, of course, staggering. Next thing you know, the polar ice caps melting will be because polar bears have too much sex, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be blamed for all the junk in the ocean. 

Yes, I'm Depressed

So, my last post sounded (after I read it the next day) a little depressed, perhaps a little gloomy. So in the spirit of trying the cheer everyone up, I submit the following links, so that you can experience my renewed sense of optimism:

On the economy:

Paul Krugman interviewed in Newsweek

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone

Jake DeSantis in the New York Times

Matt Taibbi in Alternet, responding to Mr. DeSantis

Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times this morning

I could go on, but I'd hate to lose too many readers to suicide.

Then there's the wars:

Fort Hood soldiers

Karzai legalizes rape in Afghanistan

Iraqi insurgents don't see why they should stop

Okay, enough.

I do try to approach every day not as if it's going to be my last, but with a sense of "anything can happen, and it might be good." While this often leads to disappointment, it also occasionally leads to good news. For example, the Spanish are looking to try some of our prior administration's best and brightest for war crimes and crimes against humanity. With apologies to Monty Python, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" It was a good thing to hear about on an otherwise dismal day, at least as far as world economic news was concerned. The other good news was that the head of GM was forced to resign by President Obama, and the conservative pundits immediately went into full lathered-up mode, decrying socialism, nationalised industries, and other conservative bugaboos. Anything to piss off a Republican, is what I always say.

One comment on the above articles, though: interesting how Paul Krugman, who has been lambasting the current President way less than he ever did with former White House Occupant Bush, is suddenly the man to listen to. Why is it we never saw an article in Newsweek or Time magazine titled "Paul Krugman Says: Bush is Wrong"? Hmm......

Stupid Human Tricksters

When Carter spoke of a national malaise, I wonder if he saw it coming.

Since all this began pretty much during my lifetime, I keep wondering what it was I thought I was seeing while I was seeing it. I've read Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew (after reading his equally infuriating What's the Matter with Kansas?), and, while I certainly agree with his theses and conclusions, I worry whether, at this point, if there's anything we can do about any of it?

And the answer of course, is yes, we can. Not the way President Obama wants to do it, but the right way, the grass-roots way. Call your Senators and Congresscritters and tell them that we've finally overstepped the bounds of taste and sanity in bailing out billion dollar entities that have spent the last twenty years or so figuring out ways to keep most of the money they've handled, even when it wasn't their money to begin with. Call your local media outlets (assuming you have any local media outlets left) and scream bloody murder about the poor stenography that they're trying to pass off as journalism. Write to the President, the Chairman of the FCC, and pretty much anyone else you can think of, and say that the concentrated ownership of large media is unacceptable, and if the government is going to subsidize anyone, it should be local newspapers.

While it's good that the government is finally telling GM that they need to get their damn act together when it comes to how the company is run, the main thing GM really has yet to learn is that oil doesn't grow on trees. 

(and even if it did, global warming will make the trees shorter and less productive)

And, of course, we're asking the good old autoworkers at GM and elsewhere to take a pay cut. And that's not even said with a hint of irony while we try to take back bonuses paid to people who (on average) made about nine million dollars a year while coring the economy with a chainsaw, and who now complain about not being able to keep their lousy million-dollar bonuses.

And we have to not say, the sky is falling. Because while the sky is falling, all you can do is stand up straight and hope your head can stand the blow.

The conservatives have done their job well. They've managed to drag as many millions out of the system for themselves and squirreled away the money while complaining about being taxed too much, thus gutting the functions of government. The liberals have done their job equally well, by being the loyal opposition, but not much of an opposition, since none of them can agree on enough of anything to get the job done well, but just well enough not to offend anyone, thus gutting the government. And if that's not playing into their opponent's hands, I don't know what would (one can also argue that the liberals are just as guilty as the conservatives in sneaking a little cash out for themselves). The monetarists have finally seen their system collapse before their eyes, and either a) want to continue how it was done before; or b) want to make sure the systems that were in place before the collapse are financed properly so they can build up to a bigger collapse in a few years. And everyone wants more regulations, but no one is willing to give the regulations teeth, so what's the point? 

Give up while you still can, and move to some other country, and wait to watch as the United States of America, that great experiment in democracy, shoots itself in the foot repeatedly, all the while complaining that the bullets cost too much and buying a gun is overregulated and going to the emergency room counts as primary care.

Unfortunately, I think I might be optimistic.

Cause I'm the Taxman

(with apologies to the Beatles)

I'm hearing a lot about how Obama's gonna "tax the rich." To which I reply, "so?"

When you think about it, the folks who have been hit hardest by all the taxes we currently have are the poor. Social Security is now running around 6.2%. So, no matter how many kids you have, 6.2% of your income goes to Social Security and 1.45% to Medicare. Once you hit $106,800, the Fed stops taxing that income for Social Security. To illustrate it with a number, someone making $100,000 per year, they will pay $7,650.00. Someone making $200,000 would pay $9,521.60. The AIG folks who received a $1,000,000 bonuses for fixing the mess they made would pay $21,121.60. So, someone making 5o times what a garment worker in Soho makes, only pays 2.1% of their income in Social Security and Medicare taxes, while the garment worker pays 8.65% of their income. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

After that it's sales tax. And sales tax in Washington State, King County, runs around 9%. So anything other than unprocessed food is going to cost you 9% more of everything you buy. For poor people, that's not as much, but still.

Then there's fuel taxes. Poor folks tend to buy older cars that have poor gas mileage, so they buy more fuel (and create more pollution) than their wealthier counterparts. And fuel taxes are collected to pay for road repairs and bridge and tunnel maintenance. Except that we haven't been paying for those things, except for maybe the occasional pothole.

And there's the Estate Tax (known to the Republicans as the Death Tax). Enacted originally in 1916 (same time as Income Tax) it tends to affect a very small percentage of families in the United States, and since 1987, it affects less than three-tenths of one percent of all estates in any given year. It provides for approximately one percent of the federal revenue. What if we brought it all the way back, but exempted estates worth less than $15 million?

Now, there are some new proposals that worry me. Since people are trying to buy more fuel-efficient cars, the gas tax isn't creating the revenue they would normally see, so they're now talking about a mileage tax, and the way a mileage tax would work... Well, would you like the government knowing how far you've gone, and where to? Didn't think so.

So what's the solution? Tax the rich a little more, use the taxes to construct new infrastructure and to finance a new generation of industries, such as mass transit and research into renewable resource energy systems. Then you get a lot more paid middle-class workers paying regular taxes into the revenue of the federal government. We may have to deficit spend for a while to do this, but hopefully it will be worth it.

Get people educated, give them the opportunity to be the leaders of tomorrow, and maybe we have a country I can be proud of again, and not the potential Third World, plutocratic cesspool we're slowly sinking into.

Money, Money, Money

Why do we put Friedmanite bankers in charge of regulating banks and globalist free-traders (who are also Friedmanite bankers) in charge of handling Keynesian stimulus money?

On the one hand, we have Tim Geithner, a former employee of the Federal Reserve bank (think Federal Express is a government institution? neither is the Federal Reserve ["the Fed"]), our boy-genius Treasury Secretary playing with TARP funds, Ben Bernanke (his former boss and head of the Fed), playing with TARP funds, and Lawrence Summers (Clintonista, NAFTA supporter, and pretty much an a$$hole, who once famously said that Africa is "vastly underpolluted"), deciding how the stimulus package should be divided.

Nice progressive values, there, buddy...

Overall, Lawrence Summers has proved, time and again, that he doen't know anything about anything, but by God he's got an opinion, and a lot of people want to hear it. A friend of Enron, he worked with Kenneth Lay and Alan Greenspan to deregulate California's energy markets, thus causing the bankruptcy of the state of California, and putting Gray Davis' head on the block.

While everyone talks about how Obama is President, and what he says will be what goes in his administration, the people he hired to throw money at the problems of the American public tend to be more squarely in the "business knows what's best" category of economists.

Bonuses, bonuses, bonuses, bonuses, life is but a dream...

AIG got bailed out so they could pay all the folks who were losing money on AIG's phony insurance policy scam things that they were selling. Credit default swaps, I believe. So, AIG got a bunch of money. So they could pay back CITI, Chase, Wachovia, B of A, etc., etc., all of whom have either been bought by other banks or been bailed out by the Federal Government (us), and the banks who bought the failing banks also got bailed out. Because AIG wasn't going to be able to pay them back. Oh, wait...

I know, confusing conspiracies abound. Then there's the bonus money, paid to executives of AIG as "retension bonuses" to keep them from leaving the firm and running off to make some other firm fat, dumb and happy until the rug got pulled out. Except, of course, that many of the folks being paid retension bonuses are either quitting or will be fired. And the other top talent is staying on so that they can maintain the wonderful fiscal order of AIG's books for at least another year.

My head hurts.