Terrified plutocrats

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Have you noticed this?

Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.

The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Perkins lamented public criticism of the “one percent” — and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.

It's the kind of thing that leads a solid citizen like Mr. Perkins to suggest this:

"But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"

Personally, I think that's terrific, sir. Because it means that the worst among us are not happy. It means they're terrified to be alive. Considering the leverage they have to make life miserable for almost everybody in the world, I would hate to see them enjoying themselves too much.

But there's something even more exquisite about this situation than mere, mundane karma. It seems that there's a relatively new meme going around right-wing circles about Obama, the coming Socialist Revolution, and guillotines, such as this (Achtung---very scary site!):

- The use of guillotines for “governmental purposes” was lobbied for and passed in the U.S. Congress

- The information we received is that 15,000 are currently stored in Georgia and 15,000 in Montana

- Are the beheadings by muslims today meant to desensitize us against U.S. Government beheadings in the future?

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. – Revelations 20:4

Interestingly to me, his sort of musing isn't confined to the outermost precincts. Take this for example:

If the Left ever gets the revolution it wants, the owners of multi-million-dollar downtown lofts surely will be among the first to the guillotine. 

Perhaps they will be comforted by the words of Robespierre: “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.”

Or maybe The Left will figure out that people who hold virtually all wealth and power on the globe are wetting themselves in Terror because they now have the world they've always dreamed of. And that they belong in Arkham Asylum.

More and more, I'm tickled by the idea of a Guillotine Lottery.

Constitution 2.0 beta

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You've probably read about this Job Creator's unprecedented new idea for voting rights: a dollar paid in taxes equals one vote in elections.

I have a counter-proposal, stolen from a blog comments thread (can't remember where): every million dollars buys you a ticket in the guillotine lottery.

Exécution de Marie Antoinette le 16 Octobre 1793, artist unknown, via WikiMedia Commons.

Origins of the Opt Out movement

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Apropos of this, my "product rollout" of the Opt Out movement is behind schedule. That is OK with me, and it also serves as a demonstration of opting out. In this case, I have opted out of rushing myself. Opting out of self-imposed, imaginary urgency generally has been my first major success with applying the concept. I believe the contagion of phony urgency is a blight on the life of most people; the quality of my own life has greatly improved in direct relation to my success of opting out of this unasked-for, nonconstructive stress.

See? Opting out is easy. Here's how it works: you identify a condition imposed on your life that thwarts the authentic aims of human life---your own in particular---and opt out of it. Opting out is just a simple, elemental exercise of free will. It's one of the two acts of will an individual can exercise: the deliberate choice not to do something. (Since visitors to this blog are all in the fast reading group, they can infer the other way to exercise will.)

The origins of the Opt Out movement, for me, go back to an undated entry in an electronic notebook file midway through the Stupor Mundi phase of this blog during the Bush Junior administration. In thinking about Republican demolition of New Deal institutions and demonization of its ideals, I came upon the Wikipedia article about Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:

1. Freedom of speech 
2. Freedom of worship 
3. Freedom from want 
4. Freedom from fear

My intent was to promulgate a set of post-Reagan freedoms that could be exercised beneath the radar of the surveillance state. (Let's ignore the unwarranted arrogance that would allow Stupor Mundi to express such a conceit.) My problem with the Four Freedoms (4F---just like FDR!) was that they're really not freedoms, and two of them are different than the other two.

The first two are constitutional rights in the United States, and they're understood by all except the most reactionary to be universal human rights. By definition, a right is inalienable, but the freedom to exercise the right can be abridged by any actor that has coercive power.

The third and fourth are aspirational sentiments, one dealing with material sustenance and the other with psychological wellbeing. Whether they are rights is debatable. Whether they're universally achievable by the will of every human under the sky is not debatable: they aren't.

Beyond the general woolliness of FDR's Four Freedoms is that use of the term freedoms (versus rights) carries the unstated assumption that these laudable aspirations are something to be dispensed by governments instead of asserted by regular people. Stupor Mundi's Four Freedoms would have to be liberties that can be exercised without the permission of any government or corporate authority. As a personal historical footnote of trivial significance, I present an early draft of the SM 4F:

1. Freedom to spend your discretionary income wherever you want to, or to save it.
2. Freedom to change the TV or radio station, or to turn it off.
3. Freedom to not answer your telephone, or not to own one.
4. Freedom to vote for or against whomever you wish.

I do feel these are useful, liberating ideas that everyone should keep in mind. And in fact, they're behind a lot of the opting out that a person can do. But they're obviously not universal or encompassing enough to form the basis of a philosophy or social movement. So the SM 4F lay fallow in my notebook, but not forgotten. Then, later, the following things happened:

• People who call themselves liberal and moderate took nominal control of the executive and legislative branches and yet permitted a neo-Confederate federal nullification clique to push the nation further into authoritarianism than it was under Bush.
• The Occupy Movement scared the living cocoa wheats out of everyone from Glenn Beck to Hillary Rodham Clinton. 
• I read Havel's Power of the Powerless, which introduced me to the concept of parallel structures.
• It finally dawned on me that the concept of opting out of various terms and conditions of web-based services was the only meaningful way to push back against forces that want to fully monetize every human transaction.

So, about a year ago, I realized that an inherent property unifying the SM 4F might be the negative half of each expression. The liberty not to spend money, for example, or the freedom to deny access to intrusive communications media. These are acts of opting out.

Opting out is inseparable from individual responsibility, and it implies the intentional acceptance of consequences. But so does opting in. In the world that has grown up around us, I think opting out has much more potential as a tool of self-actualization, mutual support, and greater personal tranquility.

Free advice for a miserabler hurensohn with a pink tie

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My best guess about the Tea Party nullify-Obama movement and its activities has been that their period of useful idiocy to their paymasters will lapse when corporate oligarchs begin losing money or, alternately, when the political environment becomes too unpredictable to assure a constant and growing return on investment. There have been signs that the day is approaching, with outfits like Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chamber of Commerce making moderate-sounding noises with respect especially to Tea Party intentions to interfere with raising the US debt ceiling. TPM ran the first direct story on the topic today, which I think is significant.

To be clear, I don't think anyone mentioned above is becoming more "moderate." But I do think that there is a growing demand for things to return to post-Reagan normal, meaning that Republicans play conventional bad cop to the Democrat good cop in the march toward globalization and its manifold "benefits" (such as destruction of national sovereignty in the areas of labor law, environmental protection, consumer rights, finance, etc.). So given my pessimistic view of things, I'm not sure there's any benefit to sweeping the Tea Party aside. But I have a plan for Herr John Boehner, galaxy-class sack of chickenshit and all-around SOB, that could exile them to the wilderness in short order.

Although there would be some scheming and logistics involved, not to mention more guts than Boehner ever had at his disposal, it's pretty simple: expel every one of them from the Republican Party.

I don't know the pertinent law, but I'm reasonably sure that nobody can run as a Republican (or Democrat) without sanction by the controlling party committee. For the sake of argument, let's just say that's true. So here's how it would work. If there really is a "silent majority" of Republicans who would vote for a clean CR if there were no danger of being primaried by a TP goon, then simply bring the clean CR to the floor to pass with Republicans and Democrats. But first make it clear to everyone in the caucus that a vote against it will mean that you may no longer promote yourself as a Republican. No more campaign funds or other party support. Most importantly: no rebellious TP'er will be slated as a Republican House candidate in 2014, whether as an incumbent or as a primary challenger.

US election laws make it very difficult for a third-party candidate to make the ballot. And with an irritated donor base consisting of corporate chieftains who don't like being ignored by peckerwoods and no-nothings, one would expect to see campaign money backing GOP party regulars in a majority of the cases.

The risks are self-evident, including a split of the right-wing vote to an extent that could lose a significant amount of GOP seats in swing-type districts. But in gerrymandered "safe" districts, I can't think of any reason why a new "moderate" Republican couldn't win the seat of an incumbent Tea Partier.

Republicans would surely lose the House. But let's face it, they've rarely controlled the House since the Great Depression. Yet the GOP has marched the whole country toward the end of the plank of representative democracy since Ronald Reagan smirked his way into the hearts of disillusioned Baby Boomers (i.e., dudes who couldn't tag enough pussy in the 1970s). Business as usual could return, and we could resume the lurch toward rule by transnational corporations---Republicans dragging regular people there kicking and screaming, alternating with the silky persuasive stylings of hip hierarchs like Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Boehner: feel free to take my advice, but not that you owe me one jumbo Swiss bank safe deposit box stuffed with stocks, bonds, and lots of green stuff from Lloyd Blankfein's wallet.

There *are* no liberals

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My heading is an exaggeration, since Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alan Grayson qualify. But this is a point I've been trying to make more and more for the past 8 years. This piece by RJ Eskow makes the same point, but mostly not as directly as it could be made. Here's the guts of it:

Since his re-election, Barack Obama has proposed to cut Social Security, echoed the deficit hysteria of the right, continued to negotiate NAFTA-like trade deals in secret (hidden from Congress and the public but available to 600 “corporate advisors”), and continued to privatize the military/national security state. (He has also pursued the most aggressive anti-whistleblower presidential campaign in American history.)

And yet 85 percent of registered Democrats either “somewhat approve” or “strongly approve” of Obama’s performance, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. While the level and intensity of Democratic support has dipped somewhat, these figures are still surprisingly robust for a President who moved to cut Democrats’ signature achievement – Social Security – and whose other economic policies are so out of line with his party’s base.

Eskow's point is that corporations are using social policy to distract liberal voters from issues of economic justice just as conservatives have been doing with "Kansas" for decades. Democrats and progressive-type voters will tolerate an awful lot of right-wing economic engineering from their liberal heroes as long as they are on the right side of the gay-marriage and immigration arguments.

Since Day 2, the Clintons, in my view, have been the archetypal smiling-faces-sometimes conservatives---every bit as despicable to me as Joe Lieberman. They know how to charm you into silence as you watch them steal the silverware. President North Star earned a lifetime membership in that club of vipers upon following his terrific New-Deal-type inauguration speech rhetoric with centrist appeasement... as if Social Security is his to compromise away. At this point I think I'd rather have Rand Paul than Hillary Clinton as the next president.

Democrats are Tylenol: they keep the fever low enough that the virus can stay in command.

Real Scandal No. 1: Global Banking Conspiracy

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Even at the ten-foot-pole distance I keep from news media I am still hearing echoes of the "IRS scandal" in which field personnel applied certain keywords to screen for potential tax-evasion schemes by possibly illegitimate nonprofit political groups. Arguably, depending on the specifics, the story could be important enough to continue dissecting. I don't buy it, though: problem discovered, plausible explanation extracted, congressional hearings held, officials held accountable with loss of jobs, and dire warnings of jackbooted IRS thugs hiding in the hosta patch.

I've heard no echoes, though---not even on The Liberal NPR---about

the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments.

The Libor scandal is last year's news, so corporate media and political celebrities long ago directed everyone to look forward instead of indulging in fingerpointing and recriminations in order to avoid Tearing The Nation Apart With Partisan Bickering. So, fair enough: no echoes.

But have you even heard a peep about this one anywhere outside of Rolling Stone?

Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

Matt Taibbi reported on the ISDAfix, um... fix in April. I understand that this was literally months ago (as of today, at least). But, seriously. Considering Libor and ISDAfix only, this is an issue of price fixing and insider trading that rigs markets encompassing about $880 trillion in financial assets. According to my arithmetic, that's getting close to $1 quadrillion.

If you are interested in the parallels between the crime syndicate and international financial institutions, I recommend that you read Taibbi's whole piece. If you're not that interested, at least keep in mind the figure of $1 quadrillion when you hear Tea Party conservatives complaining about the (phony) looming Social Security bankruptcy or marveling about which planet a stack of dollar bills in the amount of the (falling) federal deficit would reach.

Think about it next time you hear Fiscally Responsible Moderates lament the fact that public-sector pensions, mass transit, and safe bridges are no longer luxuries "we" can afford, because transnational financial pirates routinely loot the funds supporting such projects.

At the very least, do click through to the Taibbi story and read the first paragraph. It's a perfect Fifty50 footnote for any story I tag with the label sympathy for the wingnut.

The best-case scenario sucks anus

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Ever since liberals discovered that President North Star isn't too damn proactive about being liberal---maybe around the time of his stimulus initiative---there's been an annoying denial meme. There are several flavors.

One varietal is that Obama is "naive" about bipartisanship and the good faith that supposedly validates it. This idea is based on the premise that "he doesn't understand that he's dealing with maniacs."

A related variant is that Obama has been a tactical blunderer, always pre-negotiating his policy proposals with himself in order to present a reasonable centrist position that everyone should be able to agree upon without rancor. His losing tactics are the consequence of his belief in the good faith of the "maniacs."

One other variation of the denial meme is that President North Star would really do this or that progressive thing, as we all wish he would, if only it were possible in the "present political climate." Unfortunately, the situation forces him to aim low.

As I say, all of these ideas are forms of denial by people grieving a betrayal of their expectations.

Obama is not naive about the politicians who are deranged by the fact that he's a (two-term) presidential usurper---he's the Jackie Fucking Robinson of major league politicians, and even had to deal with the indignities of racist campaign tactics from Hillary Rodham B. Anthony Sojourner Truth Isis Clinton and her loathsome taxidermied pachyderm dick of a campaign manager, Mark Penn. So, no, if he's betraying the expectations of liberals, it is not because he's naive about his political enemies.

Obama is also not tactically incompetent at politics. His mastery of retail politics is obvious, considering those three certain things he had to overcome in order to be elected to his present office---he's black, he has a Muslim-sounding name, and he's a Democrat in a bombastically conservative "post-911" political ecology. His approval ratings have soared the more he speaks like a progressive. Destroying the right-wing ideologues, rubes, and crypto-Confederates in Congress should be simplicity for a youthful, media-savvy Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer with considerable rhetorical skill.

And finally, no, Obama is not constrained by the "politics of the possible." (Refer to the previous two paragraphs.) He knows how to lead and he knows how to go over the head of Congress to the American public.

To borrow a phrase, I think these denial memes amount to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by liberal Obama partisans. Here's what I think is the truth: President North Star is pursuing the exact policies he is looking for and, to a large extent, achieving them. Obama is arguably no more liberal than either Clinton---willing to embrace corporatism, globalism, and Reaganomics while surrendering the concepts of public goods and services, meaningful progressive taxation, and government as the necessary protector of American human rights.

As pertains to the sequester, but also to the longer political game over the next 4 years, I'm bummed to agree with Heather Digby Parton:

Look, he's never been straight with the American people about this, I don't care what anyone says. He never admits that he's put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he's been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he's willing to make "tough choices" and will do things "his own party won't like." He never comes right out and says what her means about "entitlement" cuts.

President North Star has already conceded on fundamentals. His fans will consider it a victory if we "only" have to settle for raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages, and indexing their benefits to the chained CPI.

Here's our partisan ecology today: Democrats are Republicans; Republicans are Confederates; the Tea Party is the Brownshirts; and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democrats.

Concerning pawns and corporate theft

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Hasbro Corp., heir to the Parker Brothers board game portfolio, was in the news this week for a group-participation publicity stunt having the goal of stimulating sales of back stock and endless permutations of new, special-edition merchandise to shut-ins.

If I cared about this, I'd say that cats do not belong on the Monopoly board. Prowling the estate to ambush rodents and squirrels, yes. Purring in your grandmother's lap, swaddled in her paisley shawl, sure. (On YouTube? Hell no!) I'll interrupt myself by adding that the Monopoly board is no place for a Scotty dog, either. And, too, I'm not so partial to the battleship. The animal kingdom should be represented on the board by, say, a lead-based vulture and a water moccasin.

Predictably, intrepid journalist types will eat up an "exciting campaign" like this, and in the current particular case may even pretend to look for deeper social meaning:

Consider the kitty cat’s victory as both an expression of what economics should really be about – supporting our ability to do what the heck we want with our time – and as a vote of confidence in our national need to relax a bit.

True. Economics should really be about doing "what the heck we want". For instance, packing a Glock 17 in a tavern, or not paying any taxes to support the amenities of US citizenship, or paying your lawmaker's campaign committee to help make sure minorities and old people can't vote in the next election.

Monopoly is a game that transforms bloodthirsty, exploitative conduct into cute fun. And a good time is had by all! (Boomp boomp!) The domestic clothes-pressing iron has, on at least one documented occasion, been used as a weapon of cold-blooded murder (by a killer cartoonist!). And so, both as a symbol of the forced domestication of modern females and the weaponization of consumerism, the iron befits the Monopoly board well, being equally at home on Baltic Avenue, Boardwalk, or in Jail.

Personally, I think there's a much more fascinating story about Monopoly that isn't widely known. We could argue that an economic monopoly is corporate theft through application of The Law Of The Jungle. But one author argues with dead certainty that the board game Monopoly is theft---that is, it became private "intellectual property" through an act of theft from the public domain.

According to this outstanding article I read in Harper's a few months ago, called "Monopoly is Theft," the "official" history of the game began in 1933, "invented" by "an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker" named Charles Darrow. It's a stirring saga of an irrepressible entrepreneur and a scrappy-but-failing board game company, except (as author Christopher Ketcham informs us) it's not true. One obvious problem with the corporate history of Monopoly is that the game had already been around for 30 years, under a different name---The Landlord's Game---but very similar design:

The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: Monopoly began life as an "open source" educational tool for teaching people the economic philosophy of a 19th century socialist! And the objective of the game was to thwart the monopolist, not to become one. Then the game was shoplifted from the public domain by Depression-era capitalists, and eventually mutated into such lucrative niche varietals as "University of Illinois Monopoly" and "Rockopoly". The article is quite long, but really informative and captivating if you have any interest in economics, intellectual property law, or American history. I definitely recommend printing the article out, in full, preferably on your company's laser printer.

Image retrieved from http://www.slowfamilyonline.com/tag/landlords-game/, reproduced here for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Special to Gurlitzer

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Concerning your remark about the Trillion-Dollar Doubloon:

I never thought of it that way, but I think "economic semantics" is a very fitting metaphor for the concept. Unless you're talking hard currency, which is basically no different than any other form of barter, I think it's generally accurate to say money is a symbol of value, taken on faith in the probability of new wealth being created in the future through the extraction of raw materials and/or labor to be performed. The acceptance of a national fiat currency in return for work performed might be seen as an implicit investment---whether willingly or not---in growth of the economy.

A government may wisely "run the printing presses" if there isn't enough money in circulation to support consumption and productive investment. The objective is to increase the nation's money supply---a completely reasonable and even necessary duty under certain circumstances. A Congressionally imposed "debt ceiling" means that the Treasury cannot "run the printing presses" without Congressional approval, not even for spending that Congress has already authorized with appropriations. This is a stupid policy that should not be on the books. The Trillion-Dollar Doubloon would be an alternate way for the Treasury to increase the money supply, but without Congressional approval. It's widely been judged to be a legal option, and the specific workflow for doing it has been described elsewhere.

For reasons he and his advisers know best, Bronco Bummer declared that he wouldn't invoke that executive prerogative. I'm not clear whether or not he took it off the table for the duration of his reign, but I'd guess he has. So now we get another sequester. (Notice how no one is calling it a "fiscal cliff" this time? I wonder why.)

Trillion-dollar doubloon

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This Business Insider article gives the clearest explanation of the economics in back of that trillion-dollar platinum coin that is proposed as a way to ignore the (probably unconstitutional) deficit ceiling. If you have any interest in "the deficit" or "the unsustainable national debt," it is worth reading in full (not overlong).

The author, Joe Wiesenthal, does a good job explaining what money really is. The minting of a trillion-dollar coin by Treasury would be---except for one insignificant detail---exactly the same action as "injecting money" into the supply through quantitative easing or "running the printing presses" by the Federal Reserve. The only difference is that the Fed doesn't first strike a denomination of currency to represent the money-supply expansion. Whether it has Treasury strike that trillion-dollar doubloon or not makes no economic difference other than the amount of metal and labor that go into the coin. That's it---it really is.


It's a separate question as to whether expanding the money supply at any given time is constructive or reckless. Both Democratic and Republican administrations do it as a matter of course. In fact, that's how the Bush administration paid for two unfunded wars! Regardless, as a matter of practice, minting the coin would be no different from any other monetary stimulus---the wisdom or foolishness of it arises from the policy objectives (or lack of them), nothing else. The only reason this policy lever is even being talked about, of course, is that a loophole in the commemorative coin law makes this a feasible way to avoid an illegal default on the national debt as threatened by kamikaze GOP congressmen.

An interesting detail is that the coin law was drafted by a former director of the US Mint (Clinton era), who provided key technical information for Wiesenthal's article. I'd bet anybody a tall beer that this gentleman knew exactly what he was doing when he helped to craft the language of the law, loophole and all.

Voodoo economics

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In a dream last week I was granted an important revelation:

We now have more empirical evidence for the existence of real-world zombies than we do for the validity of supply-side economics.

First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

Update: post title changed to the obvious, which I started to do several times during composition but forgot.

Your right to peacefully assemble

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I am perversely thankful to the Bush/Cheney administration for pulling the friendly mask off the authoritarian homunculus living at the core of Movement Conservatism. I assume they dropped the pretense of neighborly Reaganism because they felt they were dealing from a position of unassailable strength---strength that can be reinforced when ordinary people "dummy up" due to a gnawing fear of government reprisals. Still, the illusion of certain democratic customs such as the freedom to peacefully assemble must be maintained in order to support the traditional story line that America is the greatest nation in the 6,000-year history of Earth, because at least we know we're free.

From my vantage point it seems that we are now seeing historic new limitations on the right to peacefully assemble. It appears that those limitations are triggered when nonviolent protests start to seriously interfere with The Spectacle that is the establishment media narrative about political economy. So as a result, we wake up to an image of "The World's Policeman" (so to speak) waging chemical warfare on University of California - Davis students sitting peacefully as part of an Occupy protest. Even when the state has a legitimate law enforcement interest in removing nonviolent protestors from a site, no manner of intentional (i.e., premeditated) brutality is justifiable. The world may note that the victims don't appear to be rowdy, body-painted, bongo-playing dopers, not that such an appearance would justify brutality anyway. My point is that the people being sprayed are probably pretty much like you and your neighbors (or their kids).

The risk that establishment interests take when deploying this kind of force is that ordinary Americans---the Silent Majority of the 21st century---may actually both note and remember with revulsion images like the one above (shot by one Louise Macabitas and found in an online photostream). With that thought in mind, watch this YouTube clip:



I suggest that you watch the whole thing, but especially around 6:15 in the video. These brave kids, as well behaved as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances, pull off something amazing with nothing but words and The People's Microphone. And, to the establishment, it is much more threatening than bongos, throwing bricks, or setting fires.

In coming weeks I'm afraid we'll see more incidents involving movement infiltrators and provocateurs for the purpose of marginalizing the protestors. Even worse, I also feel that the despicable SOPA legislation now before Congress is aimed not at "online pirates," but online protestors. This legislation, which I've intended to write about and will try to get to, will give both government and industry powerful tools for suppressing online political dissent under cover of "protecting creator's rights." YouTube is dead in the SOPA crosshairs. And, finally, look for a huge push to formally outlaw the recording or photographing of police activity occurring in the public domain.

Also, look for Officer Pepper Spray to become America's next Joe The Plumber.

I should note that I found the media embedded above at Balloon Juice.

Would you like some fresh-ground strychnine on your salad, Sir or Madame?

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You probably know that former pizza mogul Herman Cain has a tax-reform plan he calls 9-9-9, a triple-decker version of a federal flat-tax program affecting personal income, purchases, and salaries payed by employers. He claims it will make the administration of taxation dirt simple while reducing everyone's tax burden.

Paul Krugman's blog links to a Tax Policy Center analysis of Cain's 9-9-9 proposal with respect to its impact on US taxpayers. Anyone who learned about regressive taxation in school can correctly guess the results.

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000.

So give it up for our GOP executive superhero of the week and his outstanding Plan 9-9-9 From Outer Space! Or at least do that if you wish to carpet-bomb the economy with kryptonite and dull your hunger pangs by eating lead paint chips.

By the way, the Tax Policy Center is no hippie commune; it's a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. I don't know anything about the latter, but Brookings is a right-leaning think tank that is about as Establishment as you can get.

Friday Night Fish Fry

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Or, in my case, 16-day weekend. Fuck the Prayer Meeting tonight---arf!



Just closed out the fiscal year in the lab I work for, so I'm seizing an opportunity to take 2 weeks off, end-to-end, for the first time in memory (excluding medical leave for recreational activities such as torn tendons, broken bones, and surgery).

I intend to spend most of my time off in meatspace, my preferred domain, demolishing stuff, feeding birds, pedaling a bike, and taking photos---but there are two blog "initiatives" I want to take. One is trying to get my pathetic keyword (i.e., "label") taxonomy under control---you know it's a mess when you have a couple dozen keywords with only one or two links. Keywords are supposed to help you, my most intelligent and discerning readers, navigate this site. The other effort is less trivial: making a transition to a different interpretive framework for my observation on political economy and mass culture. I have been mulling this for a long time because I've concluded that my ideas and way of expressing them become trite when accepting the default narrative frame maintained by everyone from Drudge to FireDogLake, Fox to PBS, Limbaugh to Scott Simon. Time to get asymmetrical. More soon; if not, please gently remind me. Thank you for your attention in this matter. Now please allow me to finish my homemade electrochemical chili in peace, won't you?

Seven Day Weekend, Jimmy Cliff, Elvis Costello & The Attractions (1986, from "Out Of Our Idiot," Demon Records - Fiend CD 67), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Interesting: Jimmy Cliff gets top billing on this cut. Was he still a bigger star than Elvis Costello in Thatcher-era UK? Also: on this compilation disc we learn that Elvis was the original Napoleon Dynamite (as credited on his 1982 recording of Imperial Bedroom), a full 22 years before that movie was released about the goofy kid using the same monicker, which in my opinion is slightly underrated by IMdb users (I'd give it a solid 7.3).

The new national currency: stupidity

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I see that liberal bloggers from Balloon Juice to TPM are in high dudgeon because the Tea Party supports a bill to withdraw 1$ bills from circulation and replace them with dollar coins. For some reason they consider this idea to be outrageous. John Cole denounces it as "just weird" and Josh Marshall claims that such a change would be "a huge pain in the butt (perhaps literally) for every American."

The criticism, you see, is that dollar coins are a huge waste of money because nobody uses them, and consequently $1 billion worth are stockpiled in vaults where they do no work but cost tax dollars to store and secure. It must be true: even NPR said so back in June!

Critics of the dollar coin seem to think that eliminating the greenback would force them to carry several pounds of coins in their pockets from now on. Why exactly would that happen? Can you think of any reason why a person would have to carry more than four dollar coins at one time? One, maybe: when the 7-11 cashier or bartender has no fives in the register. Happens every day, doesn't it?

If you've fed a parking meter or vending machine lately, you know that neither provides much of a service or product for less than a dollar. To get a few hours of parking or a plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper you need to have 6 or 8 quarters handy. In my experience, vending machines spit out a used dollar bill about as often as they accept it.

Needless to say, this looks to me like some pointless piling onto the Tea Party by some self-righteous nincompoops. I've often said that liberal ideas are too important to entrust to liberals. Likewise, dumb ideas can easily find a new home in a liberal skull.

Last night I emailed Josh Marshall about his post to ask if he was serious, and to explain what exactly would be the drawback of widely circulating $1 coins. He broke my heart with no reply. Because there isn't a good one, if these ninnies were to think about it for two minutes. So you say a cashier doesn't want to accept 1$ coins? Tell the shift manager you'll shop at Walmart until their policy changes. And if you, the shopper, doesn't want to accept a $1 coin as part of your change, then leave it in the jar for Jerry's Kids! Oh, but your change includes four 1$ coins? If you're not rich enough to leave them in the tip jar, then I guess you'll become an eager adopter of this strange new monetary artifact, just like everyone else.

As an alternative approach, you could ask the cashier for a whole roll of dollar coins, then take it home and fuck yourself to sleep with it! (And by "you," I mean "the indefinite you." Thank you for your attention in this matter.)

The wealthy elites "smash and grab," too

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I know we're all supposed to dutifully wind down our attention to the Steve Jobs resignation and join around the national hearth to watch Hurricane Irene lash East Coast homosexuals and liberals with the beastly righteousness only nature can dispense. Also that our Federal Reserve chairman thinks our economy will continue to grow over time even though he sees some "clouds on the horizon" because unemployment is still over 9%.

But the fallout from global austerity economics has not abated just because the Brits have swept up the broken glass from their mid-month wave of rioting. In a comment from an August 13 post, Marginalia of London noted that the looting was a political act despite the fact that the rioters may not have realized it. I agree.

Everybody knows that rioting, looting, and arson are heinous acts that punish the innocent much more than any legitimate object of political opprobrium. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic responded with scolding in high dudgeon: shame on the nihilistic children; shame on their useless parents; the problem is that nobody knows how good they really have it any more; et cetera.

But most of us are still waiting for celebrity pundits to tut-tut the misbehavior of the elite global financiers who have been "looting with the lights on" for a decade or more:

[England's] riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable.

Click through to read the entire Guardian piece by Naomi Klein---it's a pippin. I copped the link from Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice, who also notes that PM David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson were both members of the obscenely wealthy and destructive Bullingdon Club during college years.

Klein's most interesting point, in my opinion, is another one of those truths that are hidden right in front of our noses: that Western media are quick to laud the high political ideals of rioters, looters, and insurrectionists in Bad Countries like Iraq, for example, because

this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves.

As the article says, though, London isn't Baghdad. Maybe not (fewer minarets, for one thing), but maybe turning London into Baghdad is part of Premier Cameron's and Chairman Murdoch's 10-year Great-Leap-Ahead Plan. It's almost as if Western nations are deliberately avoiding the tested, straightforward solutions to depression economics (i.e., stimulus and employment programs) in order to do some social engineering through the magic of Disaster Capitalism. If corporatists love anything more than tax cuts for themselves, it's political crackdowns.

Meanwhile, under the radar

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I saw this post by David Dayen linked to Heather Digby Parton's Hullaballo blog. It illustrates the other major crime of professional malpractice committed by the corporation-directed media that provide most of what most Americans accept in good faith as news.

The gist of it is that Republican lawmakers are being confronted at their August "town hall meetings" by ordinary people who are firmly demanding to know why legislators (John McCain, for example) believe that reducing taxes on corporations or wealthy people will help the economy in the absence of evidence. But there's not a peep about it on CNN, Fox, or NPR. Dayen's point is that last summer the media were all eyes and ears as "tea partiers" disrupted these town hall meetings last August, even brandishing or carrying concealed weapons in some cases. And why not? I leave this question as an exercise for the reader.

Dayen highlights examples published in the hometown press of conservative strongholds such as North Dakota, Tucson, Wilkes-Barre, PA, and Lincoln, NE. Dayen also claims that someone has compiled more than 100 such stories from around the nation, but unfortunately he doesn't provide a link to document that. But that's what the New York Times and the CNN national news desks are for, I'd think. Not a peep, though.

To me, the interesting thing is that these appear to be examples of everyday people who, without any help from the national media or national political leaders of either party are piecing together the story for themselves... the story being that the conventional wisdom we're being force-fed about deficits, debt ceilings, and "job-creating" rich people may be starting to wear thin.

In front of their own noses, too

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Adding onto yesterday's observations on Krugman's blog post about media malpractice in reporting on the impact of the S&P downgrade, I'll point to another Krugman piece from today. This one addresses the same phenomenon---straightforward lying about the reality right in front of everybody's noses---but pertains to elite economists who lie about their data in very transparent ways.

So this one on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a guy named "Narayana Kocherlakota," argues that the Fed should tighten the money supply---raise interest rates, that is---because he wants us to believe that taking money out of the economy will reduce unemployment. But, always the good-natured wag, Krugman points out that:

The Fed dissenters are obviously looking for excuses to pursue tight policies; they’re looking at the facts only in search of support for their prejudices. As the old line goes, they’re using evidence the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Economists do it as much as the media, whether famous neoliberal intellectuals or Federal Reserve policymakers (usually the same guys, anyway). I enjoy reading about Krugman peeing on their lamppost.

In front of our noses

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This Krugman blog post highlights a virtually unreported detail about the past week of financial-world turmoil on the heels of the S&P downgrade of US debt:

A week ago, before the S&P downgrade, the interest rate on US 10-year bonds was 2.56 percent. As I write this, it’s 2.24 percent, with the yield on inflation-protected bonds actually negative.

You would think this would amount to strong evidence that the downgrade totally failed to shake confidence in US debt.

Yet people who listen to radio and TV reporting tell me that most stories attribute the stock plunge to the downgrade, and are telling listeners that the case for immediate spending cuts has gotten even stronger.

Get it? This is how the corporate narrative works. The Situationists figured it out more than 40 years ago:

[They] argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

Their term for the narrative and its associated creations and fabrications was The Spectacle. Sounds correct to me.

Be that as it may, I call it criminal malpractice by the news media. Ordinary people who consider themselves to be very well informed because they follow the "nice" media CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and NPR are being deliberately misled. I call it deliberate deception because I know what a fucking news editor is really supposed to do for a paycheck.

One might think that our very own President North Star would have been hammering this point home for the past day or two, or maybe that he'll get around to it next week. But in order to do that, he would have to be a leader of sorts, with a few guts inside his skin. Where have you gone, Huey Long? Our nation turns its longing eyes to you. Goo goo goo joob.

Won't need to search in Pakistan this time

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So Vice President Biden made news today by telling House Democrats today that the teabaggers have "acted like terrorists" during the debt ceiling standoff. President North Star will probably give him a scolding for saying so, but what he really should be doing is setting up a secure conference call with SEAL Team 6. Maybe a nice black-helicopter tour of the Potomac for a few properly selected chiefs of think tanks and cable news operations would be just the thing to lower the temperature in the glistening swamp on a hill. JK LULZ!!!

Meanwhile,at the bottom of the TPM piece linked above, we learn that Republican National Committee (RNC) chair "Reince Priebus" has "tweeted" that VP Biden has "more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives 'terrorists'. I demand an apology." Haha! I hope Biden gives "Priebus" an apology by way of his posterior annular ring.

By the way, I never make fun of a person's name, but I'll make an exception here. What the fuck kind of name is "Reince Priebus" supposed to be? I mean, really? And I'll add to that rhetorical question the amusing discovery made awhile back by some unnamed wag: if you remove all the vowels from his name, you're left with RNC PR BS. If that's not evidence that witty time travelers from the future have modified our current timeline, then I'm a monkey's uncle and so are you.