How Can One Not be Out of My Mind for 10 August 2009

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.- – Buddha

When I said last fall some silliness about America being freed, liberated, I was at best exaggerating, certainly speaking prematurely and proven wrong by numerous subsequent acts by the current administration. I apologize for unjustified enthusiasm.

Some dope reporter thinks Philly’s two papers are case studies of the apparent or perceived or believed “last stand” of journalism. His mendacity is demonstrated by the use of the terms “journalistic worthiness” and “lenders”, the latter without any awareness of what an awful, destructive roles the lenders play, the destruction their foolish borrowers set into play. The journo’s hero is the same shithead who thinks it’s good for his paper to hire John Yoo. More knowledgeable (factually speaking) people fully know Yoo has nothing to say that is worth paying for. Too, in my opinion, “journalism”, in the broad sense, is safe. The papers, by and by, are committing suicide by their refusal to provide anything of importance to their readers, to wit, accurate, important news, analysis of any depth. (The newsmagazines are doing the same but moreso.) However, for the minute to minute crap, the web and cable are as fine as they want to be; the infrastructure is fully in place. As for depth, there are magazines — “Infinite Debt”, anyone? — and books which, by and by, are not suffering  and stand to gain from the dailies’ downfall. Snap quiz: If we lose this dope, we have lost what, if anything?

And here’s another prime example of the Big Media failing us on a major story. Listen, the media’s failings are pretty much the rule, not the exception.

Speaking of health insurance coverage or lack thereof: Big Journo has a vested interests  — financial ties — to the insurers so of course objectivity, reporting, facts — all to be ignored, thereby establishing the societal necessity of these assholes. The story is here.

Speaking of media mendacity: There are the poor, the middle-class and the only class whose pain matters to Big Media: Multi-millionaires and those wealthier. Again, journalism like this is essential to…? Not many people, really.

Again, the GOP hates programs that work. And that’s the most lucid they get; most of the time, they’re crazy like this: The insurers’ heads should be consulted on reform since they’re experts? Yeah, experts at wrongfully denying coverage, mis-managing both healthcare as well as their own bloated bureacracies and  the necessity for providers to bloat up their staffs, not to mention bankrupting providers. Flash: Our system works despite these assholes, not because of them, and that’s why, I’m sure, Obama feels a need to get more unearned wealth to them.

How it works, the really short version:

How are the big banks moving back into black? By stealing your money via bailout moneys and increased fees. And I’m sure this is fine with the Administration because surely the banks have spread more than sufficient wealth around to ensure that they will be free to do what they want at our expense. And what’s really amazing, to me, is that the GOP is even worse!

Liar: Will Smith.

Palm Pre? Sounded too good to be true? That’s because the corporate hype wasn’t supported by reality. The truth is here.

“Recovery” is a pretty fungible concept. Our “recovery” includes banks hemorhaging but appearing profitable, job losses slowing to a very limited degree. To me, recovery means an economy at least where it was a year or two ago, personal wealth-wise or, better, functional in a post-New Deal sort of way, lightly policed and controlled. Using the word “recovery” in any other way is just a lie.

Another fungible word: “Profit”. To me, a company’s one profitable quarter doesn’t make it profitable where its losses up to that point are a quantum or three greater than the minuscule profit. Here‘s an example. Simply, a single profitable quarter does not a profitable company make. (And in our example, this company is far from being in the black.)

Can we get rid of these America-hating idiots and scumbags? Please?

Rainy Friday; Out of My Mind for 29 May 2009

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. — Henry Ford

(Love) Taibbi + (hate) Palin = This.

Classic craziness paranoia.

Historic thieves: Goldman Sachs.

Wow! Yum! 3-D printer’s output is… sugar!

Did an East German spy’s fatal shooting of a demonstrator set West German politics on a more lefty course in ’67?

From the Duh Dept.: Making things with your hands (as opposed to using your hands to type or move a mouse) is important.

Query: All them Big Banks: Aren’t they still all insolvent or nearly so, still sitting on loads of crap? It’s just that Big Finance and Our Leaders  and Big Media are, um, obfuscating? I mean, is that problem actually resolved or not?

Update: We’re still losing Afghanistan. Hey, didn’t we think we were co-opting the Taliban when they were in charge and all the time they were letting Osama bin Laden run wild and stuff, resulting in 9/11??

In a sane, fact-based world — the one Big Media and the wingnuts ignored — the GOP would not be allowed to make any accusations against Sotomayor anything like those the same wingnuts claimed were unfair to hurl against their beloved Clarence Thomas (except they were, um, accurate in Thomas’ case). Their ^&%$ing lies about her are exposed here; you paying any attention, Big Media water-carriers for a failed party?

My nightmare!

Truth! Out of My Mind for 20 May 2009

Proof torture doesn’t work: Our torturers had a mandate to use torture to fabricate proof of a connection between Saddam’s Iraq and Islafascist terrorism (as opposed to Iraq’s domestic-only terrorism) and they failed to do so.

Usury is still legal, gratuitous (as opposed to productive) debt is still big business. And again, those who aren’t indebted with credit card debt will be punished for not being indebted; that’s how fucked up the credit card business is. Really, I don’t quite get the idea of, in a weak economy, impoverishing those who haven’t otherwise been hurt. Also, this silliness that the meltdown has slowed in America means happy days are here again; when this music stops (if or when it actually does), we are so not going to be anywhere in the state we were a year or two ago.

Police brutality, out of control: cops take down stuffed animal.

If someone realizes that they were a dope, isn’t proof that they were a dope and what they said was dead wrong, and given that failure, why listen to them, past, present or future?

I love distraction, or couldn’t you tell? Only way I can work well 🙂

Never too late to learn, even from an old book....

Trump Entertainment Goes Back into the Toilet

Donald Trump happens to be one of my historical poster boys for the Global Economic Meltdown. His wealth wasn’t so much created as stolen as he pioneered and mainstreamed, as it were, getting wealthy from a continuously money-losing enterprises. In the old days, if your business was in the toilet, you were in the toilet. The Donald changed that. Your business can now suck and you nonetheless become a multi-millionaire. Goodbye, incentive  for good management.

And now, his enterprise again hits the skids. Talk about revolving doors….

How the Rich Get Richer

Not by earning it so it must be by theft, huh?

For nearly 700 lucky Merrill Lynch employees, 2008 was a million-dollar year, even though the brokerage firm lost $27 billion.

On Dec. 10, the day before Bernard L. Madoff was arrested, his wife, Ruth, withdrew $10 million from a brokerage firm partly owned by her husband, according a state regulatory complaint filed in Boston.

Splash News

Bernard L. Madoff with his wife, Ruth, in March 2008. Mrs. Madoff withdrew $15.5 million before her husband’s arrest.

 

It was her second withdrawal in less than three weeks — the first one, on Nov. 25, had been for $5.5 million, the complaint said.

Ultimate Blago

Joe the Plumber Doesn’t Fear Obama’s Tax Plan Because He Cheats on his Taxes Anyway

Barron’s:

THE IRS LATE FRIDAY, AFTER CONSIDERABLE PRODDING, released a tax study that sullies the reputation of one of the presidential campaign’s most beloved icons: small-business owners.

The Internal Revenue Service has discovered that these oft-lauded entrepreneurs are masters of tax evasion. If this is indeed the case, the two presidential candidates should be threatening them with manacles, not wooing them with fiscal confections. In fact, the small business owners already have given themselves a huge tax break, under-reporting on 57% of their income.

The IRS resisted releasing the document for so long that I entertained the thought that the gentle persuaders were playing politics! That style of aberrant behavior supposedly vanished from Washington, D.C., eons ago, along with Richard Nixon. A spokesman assured me that he had “moved heaven and earth” to get me the document that already had been leaked to Tax Notes reporter David Cay Johnston back in August.

By all rights, the study should cause pink cheeks on the campaign trail. After all, both candidates continually heap praises on these entrepreneurs, lionizing them as the nation’s engine of job creation and innovation. Both Barack Obama and John McCain promise to reward this beloved, self-reliant constituency with multiple forms of tax relief.

In fact, they don’t need McCain or Obama or even the U.S. Congress to lower their taxes, because they’ve already done it on their own. Seldom have our elected tax cutters been more aggressive. I believe I’ll skip voting for either McCain or Obama and instead write in “Mr. or Mrs. Small Business.”

It gets better. Johnston, a tax expert with two books to prove it, says small-business owners under-report on 88% of their capital gains. In other words, up to 12% of their gains are tax-free. Sweet deal. But then again, who among us has capital gains anymore?

The result of this do-it-yourself tax policy is hardly chump change. University of Michigan economics professor Joel Slemrod, director of the school’s Office of Tax Policy Research, estimates that the Schedule C cheaters save themselves about $68 billion a year. The other side of this coin is that wage slaves pay higher rates to make up for the scofflaws. This makes me more angry than envious.

The Internal Revenue Service estimates that, on an annual basis, taxpayers of all stripes, owing to either Charlie Rangel-style confusion or some other strain of evasiveness, underreport $345 billon. The IRS later captures $55 billion of that through audits and other enforcement measures, leaving the Treasury with a net annual tax gap of $290 billion, including evasive Schedule C filers.

That astounding number isn’t new; it has been kicking around for years. When April 15 approaches, congressmen in search of cheap publicity often rail about it. But they never follow up with any action, for much the same reasons that candidates are reluctant to fulminate about it on the trail: Words like “audit” and “IRS” send chills down the spines of all taxpayers, the innocent as well as the guilty. You will not get their votes if you promise more audits, because voters simply hear “Reign of Terror.”

This is too Freaky Cool!

Everyday People

The Times:

Sarah Palin’s wardrobe joined the ranks of symbolic political excess on Wednesday, alongside John McCain’s multiple houses and John Edwards’s $400 haircut, as Republicans expressed fear that weeks of tailoring Ms. Palin as an average “hockey mom” would fray amid revelations that the Republican Party outfitted her with expensive clothing from high-end stores.

Cable television, talk radio and even shows like “Access Hollywood” seemed gripped with sartorial fever after campaign finance reports confirmed that the Republican National Committee spent $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue in September for Ms. Palin and her family.

Advisers to Ms. Palin said on Wednesday that the purchases — which totaled about $150,000 and were classified as “campaign accessories” — were made on the fly after Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate on Aug. 29 and needed new clothes to match climates across the 50 states. They emphasized, too, that Ms. Palin did not spend time on the shopping, and that other people made the decision to buy such an array of clothes.

***

That possibility was brought to life, for instance, on “The View” on ABC, as Joy Behar, a co-host, noted the McCain campaign’s outreach to blue-collar workers — like an Ohio plumber who recently chided Senator Barack Obama over taxes — after another co-host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, defended the expenditures.

War Room:

It’s not cheap to dress like a real, small-town American. And, apparently, those real-American fashions can be best found at places like Saks Fifth Avenue’s New York City and St. Louis branches, Neiman Marcus, Barney’s, Bloomingdale’s and Atelier.

Politico’s Jeanne Cummings did some digging into the details of the Republican National Committee’s financial disclosures, and reports that the RNC “has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.”

Included in the list of expenses Cummings discovered:

• $49,425.74 spent at Saks Fifth Avenue
• $75,062.63 spent in one shopping spree at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, near the site of the Republican convention
• $9,447.71 spent at Macy’s in Minneapolis
• $295 in apparent expenses for clothing for Palin’s youngest son
• $4,902.45 spent at Atelier, a men’s clothing store

In a statement, spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said, “With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses. It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.” (As a colleague asked upon seeing that statement — is it possible that the problem with the McCain campaign is that, collectively, they have absolutely no sense of irony? It put out this statement after weeks of talk about ACORN and Bill Ayers?)

These expenses aren’t necessarily legal, Cummings reported, writing that they “raised questions among campaign finance experts about their legality under the Federal Election Commission’s long-standing advisory opinions on using campaign cash to purchase items for personal use.”

Obviously, the optics of this aren’t great for the McCain campaign or for Palin, especially given the country’s economic woes and the work the campaign has done to portray Palin and her family as salt-of-the-earth middle-class types. The $8,672.55 the McCain camp paid last month to a makeup artist who works on McCain himself but is best known for her work on “American Idol” won’t help much either.

Again: John Sidney McCain III paid $8,672.55 to be prettified.

 

“I don’t think Joe the Plumber wears Manolo Blahniks,” Ms. Behar said.