Observations on current events

Economics:

Richard D. Wolff: The Truth About 'Class War' in America
"...Since the end of the Great Depression - and especially since the 1970s - the class warfare waged by business and its allies (most conservatives in both parties) was successful. For example, at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.
Over the same period, the tax rates on the richest Americans fell from 91 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, and 70 percent in the 1970s to the current low rate of 35 percent. The richest Americans won that spectacular tax cut. Middle- and lower-income Americans won no such cuts, while paying a higher proportion of their income for Social Security that the rich were required to do. In plain English, the last 50 years saw a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation from business to individuals and from rich individuals to everyone else...
...Republicans and conservatives carefully avoided using 'class war' to describe those tax-shifting achievements over the last half-century. They wanted us to believe that all they cared about was economic growth and job creation. But when Obama now proposes modest increases in tax rates on rich individuals ('modest' because they don't begin to return to the tax rates in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s), the Republicans and conservatives howl 'class warfare.' Obama claims that higher taxes on the rich reduce the need for spending cuts that would slow growth and increase unemployment. Republicans and conservatives argue that raising taxes on corporations and rich individuals punishes those who create jobs and thus will hurt efforts to reduce unemployment. Neither logic nor evidence supports their arguments. Last Friday, the US Federal Reserve reported a record quantity of cash on the books of US businesses (hoarding over $2 trillion). Despite the currently very low taxes on businesses and the rich, that cash is NOT being invested and NOT creating jobs. Nor is it being distributed to anyone else who is spending it either. Washington could tax a portion of that cash and spend it to stimulate the economy. That would be especially effective if the taxed cash were spent to hire the unemployed rather than leaving the cash idle in businesses' hoards..."

Protests over the corrupt nature of the economic system seem to only bring the contempt of the media (by their omission of coverage) and the wrath of the NYDP...

MSNBC: Lawrence O’Donnell rips ‘unprovoked police brutality’ at ‘Occupy Wall Street’
"MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday condemned the 'unprovoked police brutality' that occurred at the 'Occupy Wall Street' protest over the weekend.
Video recordings showed female protesters being rounded up in an orange-colored mesh pen by police and subsequently sprayed with mace without any provocation, and other protesters being dragged across the street by police.
'The reason that man is being assaulted by the police is because of what he has in his hand,' O’Donnell said, while showing a video clip of a man with a video camera being tackled by police. 'He’s holding a professional grade video camera. Since the Rodney King beating was caught on an amateur video camera, American police officers have known video cameras are their worst enemy. They will do anything they can to stop you from legally videotaping how they handle their responsibility to serve and protect you.'
'Everything those cops did this weekend to those protesters they’ve done to someone else when no video camera was rolling,' he later added..."


Social Media:

Mat Honan: Unlike: Why Facebook Integration Is Actually Antisocial
"Facebook really changed things up last week. Oh sure, it's as disrespectful of my privacy as ever, but now it's enlisted the entire web to help. So I'm done with anything that requires a Facebook login.
Facebook made some big changes in terms of how things look and work, but its inexorable drive to drag us all into publicly sharing everything from everywhere with everyone all the time remained consistent. The most noticeable new features that reflect that are Timeline and Ticker. Ticker delivers real-time updates of your friends' actions, while Timeline archives everything you've ever done on Facebook. But the big change, the true assault to your privacy, is under the hood: Open Graph.
Open Graph is a development tool that lets third-party apps and sites report your activities back to Facebook. It's meant to extend or replace the Like button. It's a way for sites and services to jack directly into Facebook from anywhere. If companies use Open Graph, they can publish to your Ticker and Timeline, too, effectively sending tattle-tale updates on anything you do to everyone you know, in real time. And then Facebook gets to keep that data forever. It is the ultimate collection tool, a way for Facebook to monitor you, wherever you go..."

Bankster Mortgage Fraud:

Center For Public Integrity: Countrywide protected fraudsters by silencing whistleblowers, say former employees
"iWatch News tells the story of a pattern of fraud at Countrywide Financial Corp., once the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and a high-ranking executive who blew the whistle and, she claims, was fired for her trouble. The story is the product of a 10-month investigation that included review of thousands of pages of court documents and interviews with former company insiders..."


Buying Influence Is The Most Effective Investment:

Reuters: STUDY: 25 Of Highest Paid CEOs Earned MORE Than Their Companies Paid In Taxes, Others Spent More On Lobbying Than Taxes
"Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday.
It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.
At a time when lawmakers are facing tough choices in a quest to slash the national debt, the report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning Washington think tank, quickly hit a nerve.
After reading it, Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for hearings on executive compensation.
In a letter to that committee's chairman, Republican Darrell Issa, Cummings asked 'to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today.'
He also asked 'why CEO pay and corporate profits are skyrocketing while worker pay stagnates and unemployment remains unacceptably high,' and 'the extent to which our tax code may be encouraging these growing disparities.'
In putting together its study, IPS chose to compare CEO pay to current U.S. taxes paid, excluding foreign and state and local taxes that may have been paid, as well as deferred taxes which can often be far larger than current taxes paid.
The group's rationale was that deferred taxes may or may not be paid, and that current U.S. taxes paid are the closest approximation in public documents to what companies may have actually written a check for last year..."


Nukes:

Alexander Higgins Blog: Experts: Fukushima ‘Worse’ Than Chernobyl -Tokyo Evacuation Can No Longer Be Ingored
"Many in the alternative media, including myself, have been reporting on radioactive hotspots across Japan, including across all of Tokyo, with radiation levels higher than Chernobyl evacuation limits...
...Radiation soil tests from 150 sites in the Tokyo metropolitan area finds Cesium radiation up to levels limits nearly twice the Chernobyl dead zone evacuation limit of 500,000 Bq/Sq meter..."

Of, By, And For The Well-Heeled Corporate Interests?

John Nichols: ALEC Exposed
"...Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to 'develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,' ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.
The details of ALEC’s model bills have been available only to the group’s 2,000 legislative and 300 corporate members. But thanks to a leak to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who helped organize protests at ALEC’s Spring Task Force meeting in Cincinnati, The Nation has obtained more than 800 documents representing decades of model legislation. Teaming up with the Center for Media and Democracy, The Nation asked policy experts to analyze this never-before-seen archive.
The articles that follow are the first products of that examination. They provide an inside view of the priorities of ALEC’s corporate board and billionaire benefactors (including Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch). 'Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made inhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifto law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,' says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. 'This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.' The full archive of ALEC documents is available at a new website, alecexposed.org, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has provided powerful tools for progressives to turn this knowledge into power. The data tell us that the time has come to refocus on the battle to loosen the grip of corporate America and renew democracy in the states.

'Business Domination Inc.,' by Joel Rogers and Laura Dresser

'Sabotaging Healthcare,' by Wendell Potter

'The Koch Connection,' by Lisa Graves..."

WTC - Not Treated Like A Crime Scene or a Toxic Zone:

10 years later, I think it is important to recall the EPA's Whitman telling Americans the air was safe to breathe at the WTC, even though she had neither the data nor the analysis to back up such a statement. In fact, the area was so toxic, many rescue and cleanup workers have subsequently died.

NPR's Talk Of The Nation: A Look Back At 9/11 In 'I Heard The Sirens Scream'
"...was talking about the unique chemical signature left after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a chemical that had never been seen before.

Laurie GARRETT: Yeah, there was one diphenyl compound produced that has never been seen on Earth before. But the big deal is I was talking about how the closest analogy would be a volcano, but volcanoes are acidic events. And it's always remarkable that people can inhale the plume of a volcano and not have any particular long-standing health problems.
In this case, it was quite the opposite. The reason is that a volcanic emission and all naturally occurring plume-like emissions are acidic, tend to be down around pH three or four. The plume from ground zero got up as high as pH 13. Most of the time, it was around pH 11. That's Drano. That's lye. And there is nothing in your body that clears highly alkali compounds.
So all the little pieces of glass, all the microscopic bits of the building, the computers, were all coated in an alkali solution, if you will, and the body had no way to get these out. So instead of this escalator that creates mucous in an acidic exposure, and you go...
(SOUNDBITE OF COUGH)
GARRETT: ...and you cough it up. In this one you cough and cough and cough and nothing ever comes up, and that's World Trade Center cough.
And what happens with all these little bits of glass and so on that you inhaled, they become encapsulated in your body, and they move and rip up different parts of your organ systems, your lungs and so on. That's why we're still seeing people dying.
As recently as June, we had another declared World Trade Center victim, and I think we'll see more..."


Politics:

Mike Lofgren: Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
"...A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that 'they are all crooks,' and that 'government is no good,' further leading them to think, 'a plague on both your houses' and 'the parties are like two kids in a school yard.' This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ('Government is the problem,' declared Ronald Reagan in 1980)...
...As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass...
...2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries...
...3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP...
...It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets..."