Oct. 20, 2013 – The Weekend Line - Thomas Friedman Shills for the Billionaires

10/20/2013 3:17 PM

Whew, dodged that shutdown..uh-oh, here comes another one, over the Budget, due December 15th…

”No new taxes” versus “We will only negotiate if new revenue is on the table.”
And none of that ‘lower taxes raises federal income’, Laffer Curve crap. That’s how we ended up with this national debt to begin with. A wonderfully appropriate name for a provably bad theory.

The Republicans have had a two-plank platform for over thirty years: “Cut Taxes. Cut Regulations.” Honestly, the simplicity sells but the reality is the destruction of the United States. Yet these simpleton slogans show up everywhere. They added a third plank on Jan 20^th, 2009. It added a different ‘N’ word to their platform.

Thomas Friedman needs to ask his billionaire-family wife (oh, you didn’t know?) how much ‘income’ she would get each year if corporate taxes were cut to zero, as he recommended in his column last week.

“Golly,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, would  soon say, “I only make $40,000 a year. Sure, I wear Savile Row suits, always eat out, live in a huge apartment in a tower on Manhattan when I’m not at the corporate home in the Hamptons, and have a limo and a driver wherever I go, unless I’m flying somewhere in a Gulfstream. But, those are all JPMorgan’s business expenses for having a $13Billion-dollar loser like me be the CEO. None of that is my income.”

And not only would the corporation pay no taxes, as Friedman recommends, but Jamie Dimon wouldn’t either, cause he'd have hardly any income. And neither would any of the Wal-Mart billionaires, and neither would the Kochs, or any other corporate executive.

Just another reason I have zero respect for Friedman.

Meanwhile, the strange thing about those CEO salaries is that making them public almost guarantees they’ll get paid more. 

Sure, they already make almost 300 times what their lowest company employee makes. Sure, that spread is over ten times as wide as it was in the early sixties, when the American economy was booming.  Of course it’s obscene, demoralizes workers, creates an entire class of people who have no idea what real life is for 99.9% of America. Which is why the SEC created a new disclosure rule that corporations, especially their CEOs, hate.

But apparently, the psychology is that no one wants to hire a cheap CEO. So if they keep salaries secret, it becomes the social crime it’s been, and if their incomes become public, it turns into a seller’s market and the price goes through the roof.

And soon, with that ever-increasing income for those titans of industry (really?), these swelled heads will be able to bid to own their own politicians. At least, if the Supreme Court rules the same way they ruled in Citizens United. That is, in favor of the fantasy that “money = speech”.  

Personally, I’d like to dig up the rotting corpse that carried the rotten, racist mind of William F. Buckley, whose case of Buckley v. Valeo started the disaster that is the current “Candidate For Sale” market. Buckley’s zombie ideas of racism, “I got mine”, supply-side economics,  and the idea that, well, that conservatives have any new ideas, are wonderful icons for the TeaBagger edition of the zombie show “The Walking Dead”:

“What do we want?”

“Brains!”  

“When do we want them?”

“...Brains!”

So sad, their complete lack thereof. (and thanks, Al F.)

Speaking of TeaBaggers (and until they call my party by its name, the Democratic Party, I’ll call them by the name they first called themselves: “TeaBaggers.” Oh, yes, they invented it. Note that’s a National Review link.) Anyway, can’t tell the loonies without a scorecard, so definitely review this piece in today’s NYTimes, especially the accompanying graphic maps of which factions from where voted for funding the United States of America. (Hint: It wasn’t the TeaBaggers.)

I had a lot of other stuff to vent about, but in a fit of cleanliness I threw out that stack of newspapers for the recycling, so I’ll have to stop here. 

On a lighter note, two good friends and I went to the ‘Music and Comedy Festival Supreme’ yesterday on the Santa Monica Pier. And combining music and comedy, Monty Python’s stylings and punk’s ‘White Wedding’, I shot this to remind us, “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.”

10/20/2013 4:35 PM

10/20/2013 4:42 PM

  

Evening Line - Can't Tell the Players Without A Scorecard (Egypt edition)

8/10/2013 5:07 PM

The Evening Line for Saturday

I’ve got a stack of newspapers behind my chair, a variety of subjects to write on, but one article this morning really jumped out at me, and I’d like you to read it. It’s about the situation in Egypt

The thing I want to draw attention to is your/my lack of knowledge of all the religions and their factions at play in Egypt, and for how long. Among Muslims, there are the Shiites (the tiny minority) and the Sunnis (vast majority, including recent President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,) but within those, there are the extremist Sunni Salafists, (not to be confused with the Alawite Shiites over in Syria, Assad’s minority ruling sect) and their Nour Party.

Christians of various sects, but mostly Coptic, make up 10% of the population, eight times the number of Shiites.

How’s this all going?

“Since the coup, Christians, who make up an estimated 10% of Egypt's 83 million people, have been targets of deadly attacks by Islamists who accuse them of supporting Morsi's overthrow. Shiites, believed to number less than 1 million, fear reprisals from Salafists, a long-repressed radical Sunni sect that rose to prominence under the Brotherhood and views Shiite Islam as heresy.”

See? The problem with Morsi’s election, and the Brotherhood’s take-over of the Egyptian legislature, was what so many fundamentalists cry out for, in their home countries.  

 “Lawmakers pushed through a new constitution that made Sunni religious doctrine the basis for most laws.” 

Like so many here want to replace our Constitution with the Ten Commandments, or the Bible (which Bible, I have no idea.)

And what was the result of this new, Sunni-exclusive constitution?

“In June, Morsi attended a rally at a Cairo stadium where a succession of Salafi clerics called for holy war in Syria. One described Shiites [President Assad’s ruling sect] as "filthy"; another called them "nonbelievers who must be killed."

When Morsi took the stage, he drew cheers by announcing he would break diplomatic relations with Assad's government. And he said nothing about the anti-Shiite rhetoric.”

The article goes on, about lynchings of Shiites in Egypt, sometimes overseen by Salafist Sunni clerics. Of police in full gear coming to the lynchings and not intervening until the victims were dead.Of fear by the minority of the majority.

When I hear the fear fanatics here in the US screaming about the Muslims, first I ask, “Which Muslims?” Because the same sect that is the oppressed minority in one country is the oppressor in others. The Sunnis run Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but the Shiites run Iran, and the Shiite minority are the oppressors of the Sunni majority in Syria, which is one of the reasons there’s a civil war there. Exactly the opposite of the Sunni minority lording over the Shiite majority for years under Saddam in Iraq.

“Well, what do you expect? They’re Muslims.” To which, I like to remind folks of Northern Ireland, full of fine Christians, killing each other for centuries over which version of Christianity is correct, as imposed by which political state.  

I remind Americans of our “papist” president who was assassinated not so long ago.  Of the Catholics run out of various states throughout the 1800s, of the Mormons, both killing and being killed over their version of Christianity. And what of the Quakers?

From LearnNC.org:  

"Puritan Massachusetts was a difficult place for Quakers to live. The Puritans did not believe in religious tolerance. They believed that there was only one true way to be Christian, and that was by being a Puritan. They passed several laws that made Quakerism illegal in Massachusetts. They imprisoned Quakers who would not leave the colony. In one case, four Quakers were executed for refusing to stop preaching Quaker beliefs or to leave the colony."

One of the reasons why open religious warfare doesn’t occur in the US anymore is that the US finally adheres to its Constitution, and “make[s] no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting  the free exercise thereof”.

As so many conservatives desire, the US is a free market when it comes to religion.

What I read, between the lines, is this:  to scream to ban any religion, whether a sect of Christianity or a sect of Islam, is to fail to set the example of tolerance our Constitution’s authors knew was necessary to a United country, and which seems, even in the face of the Far Right Fundamentalists in America, seems to be succeeding.  

8/10/2013 5:53 PM

8/10/2013 6:03 PM

The Morning Line – Two Good Reads, and a Rant

8/6/2013 11:22 AM

Yesterday got away from me, and I haven’t gotten to the papers this morning. Been playing with my Raspberry Pi and a replacement USB hub. (Don’t worry if that didn’t make sense. It’s the cute product name for a computer I own.) But my nose is no longer seeking revenge on me, and the morning run was good.

Instead of a long rant, let me tip you to two people I’m reading regularly. First, Paul Krugman. Yes, you’re reading his columns in the NYTimes, but are you reading his (mostly) daily blog entries? I have learned more about economics and its real-world effects since I started reading it than from any of the Econ I took in college. Excellent, readable, and provides a door to other opinion sources in economics. Which is only, maybe, the most important policy area in America right now.

The other one to read is local boy made good, Dave Dayen. His is a focused voice of outrage pointed at the financial disaster that is Wall Street. That includes mortgage fraud, bank bail-outs, too-big-to-convict, and the efforts to prevent Elizabeth Warren from being Elizabeth Warren. Great stuff. After a long stint covering the news beat for FireDogLake. com, he’s now writing longer articles for a variety of national magazines and web sites, like The Nation, The New Republic, and Salon.

Dayen’s pieces go into deep, precise, outrageous detail on things like the banking industry’s legislative effort to cover its ass by moving every deed, every mortgage in America (includingyours) into a database the industry would own and control, called MERS.

Go read his stuff.

OK, now my quick rant, running off from Dayen’s pieces on the extension of the MERS, which seems to be the next step towards Amexica.

A few years back, the Supreme Court ruled in  Kelo v. New London that a local government could take private property from one entity and give it to another, claiming that the second one would generate more money from it.

Now, banks have intentionally shredded the legally-required paperwork (called ‘deeds’) that can support their foreclosure efforts, resulting in huge questions of ownership over thousands, perhaps millions of homes in the US.

Soon, the banks and the government will choose who owns what, and that little piece of paper you’re waving, your deed, won’t be worth squat.

I see a trend line towards a major problem that plagues third-world countries, whether in Central and South America or in places like China and India, the problem of establishing property ownership.

I read articles from time to time about how moneyed, connected interests take land away from people who’ve been on it for generations. Other ones about how local wars are caused by the impossibilities of determining which family member is responsible for which inherited part of the family property that great-great-great-great-grandfather was given by the maharajah for service in wars hundreds of years ago. I see news about Brazilian businesses that can’t expand because they can’t prove that the building they built and operated out of for four generations belongs to them, to use as collateral to expand or improve their business.

Why the hell are our Congress and our lending industry working toward this level of ownership confusion? It’s been identified as a major drag on the economies of so many countries in the world. The short-term expediency of retroactively making the crimes of the Banks no longer crimes will result in less, not more, economic growth in this nation…but of course, it means fewer fines for the banks, and less chance that Jamie Dimon will go to jail.

8/6/2013 12:11 PM

8/6/2013 12:17 PM

The Morning Line – Pulling Up the Ladder of Success

8/2/2013 11:02 AM

Writing’s been sparse. My nose hates me right now. But I’m still reading the news, and here’s what I see:

America has given up on the old American Dream. The new American Dream is “I got mine, and will now pay lobbyists to eliminate that path to success.” Granted, it’s not catchy, (I’m working on it) but it’s the frame that reality seems to fit.

Specifically, people who aren’t already successful, and don’t already own homes, are being actively screwed by the current system, whether they’re poor, or immigrants, or students, or “lower middle class” or some combination thereof. Most of the screwing is coming from the right, but, sad to say, the left has often participated, as in the removal of credit card debt from debts that can be discharged through bankruptcy.  

Here are the high (low?) points:

Good paying manufacturing jobs are gone, and the Republicans are doing their best to make the few public service jobs that are left, like police and fire and teachers, more insecure and less valuable every day.

To get a good job in the private sector,  you need, at minimum, a college degree, maybe even an MBA. By the time that’s over, even at a public university, most students are more in debt than their parents ever were when they bought  a house.  So students’ll take whatever job, at whatever wage, to try to pay off that loan. Which suppresses wages in the private market, continuing to increase the profit margins for the companies they go to work for.

Meanwhile, because of these loans, and these crap wages, a lot of these students can’t afford to move out of their parents homes. 36% of folks ages 18 – 31 are living with their parents, an all-time high.

By the way, did I call them student loans? They’re actually indenture contracts: they cannot be forgiven, they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, they do not count towards your credit rating (although failing to pay them counts against,) and they cannot be renegotiated to different, more favorable terms.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned before, a lot of low-income people can’t get bank accounts. I didn’t say “don't”, I said “can't”. On the up-side, the New York state Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has opened an inquiry into this (mostly as a result of the story in the NY Times), but who knows when any of these folks will be able to join the land of the financially-recognized?

And regardless of whether it’s a job or a credit card, your rights as a worker or a consumer are pretty much gone. You are required to sign a contract to get the job, the credit card or the cell phone, and that contract includes signing away your right to sue. Arbitration, rather than court, is the only place where most disputes can be brought these days. And since the corporations pay for the arbitrators, guess who always wins. 

PS: The Supreme (Republican) Court recently ruled that these agreements prevent class-action suits, so even if 50,000 people figure out a company is overcharging, they each have to go to arbitration alone. Because no lawyer will take a case over a couple hundred dollars. Meanwhile, having cheated 50,000 people out of $200, the company reaps $10 million in illegal gains. Who says the game’s not rigged?

While actual Consumer Prices have remained almost flat for the last few years, (look it up,) the asset investments needed to get ahead in America have gone through the roof: Education and Health Care, which are investments in self, and Housing, which is a ‘real’, leverageable investment. These have rapidly moved beyond the reach of the entire middle class, resulting in devastating inequalities, to the extent that America no longer leads in upward mobility, but actually has almost no upward mobility anymore, only marginally more than Mexico and Turkey.

And what little that can be done to turn this around is fought tooth-and-nail by the Republicans and their corporate masters. While several states (including California and New York, two of the biggest) have announced lower group rates for individuals and small employers, as a result of  ObamaCare’s health insurance reform , the House Republicans yesterday voted for the 40^th time to defund ObamaCare.  And GOP party leadership announced that they would refuse to fund the federal government at all, to prevent a single dollar of health care support to be spent on ObamaCare.

Republicans have no plan to help Americans with health care costs, the number one cause for personal bankruptcy. They’re more than happy to see you bankrupt, still owing for your student loans and the credit card debts you ran up to pay for your child’s illness or injury.  That way, you’ll be willing to work for slave wages. Haven’t you heard, the fast-food workers are walking out ? The companies will need these indentured college grads to be scabs and cross those picket lines.

8/2/2013 12:25 PM Gotta go pick up my niece at LAX

8/2/2013 3:16 PM

So what to do about all this? Well, get politically active, get engaged, get out there and vote for better representatives in government.

Which is why the same people are working so hard to make the lower middle class, the poor, the students and all non-white citizens unable to vote. Especially since they got the Voting Rights Act overturned.

“Voting Rights? You don’t need no sticking Voting Rights.”

Depressing enough. Need a palette cleanser? Something to remind you of the goodness in people (current GOP leadership excepted)? Here’s a sports figure obituary. No, really. Read this.

8/2/2013 3:30 PM

8/2/2013 3:40 PM

Banks, Commodities, and Werner von Braun

7/31/2013 7:58 PM

The Evening Line – from this morning’s NYTimes

I’m fighting a head cold or something, but got in a run anyway, which wiped me out, and then spent a few hours trying to stabilize a computer set-up. All that by way of saying I meant to write this this morning.

Millions are denied checking accounts because, somewhere, sometime, they bounced a check or had an overdraft. Millions. Due to records kept in databases they’ve never heard of, including a big one owned together by all the big banks, including JPMorgan.  “[L]enders just don’t want to take a risk on these clients.”   

Two quick points: First, these are the same banks that would lend hundreds of thousands in mortgages to a person with no money, and did it millions of times, but they can’t open a checking account for some paycheck-to-paycheck working stiff?   

And second, following their logic, since we know them for the abject banking failures they are, that overran their debts and so we had to float them a trillion dollars in overdrafts, can we NOT give them any more business? “None of the banks listed below may participate in any way in the issuance of any public entity’s bond or collateral obligations.”

I can dream, can’t I?

Meanwhile, JPMorgan is being fined for corrupt pricing practices < > selling energy from the powerplants it owns. WTF? The story here isn’t another bank manipulating commodity prices. GoldmanSachs got caught at it last week, being so greedy it even made the Daily Show last week.

The real story is that the Fed gave banks a loophole in the regulations, so now banks can own commodities and commodity suppliers. Whether it’s aluminum or electricity, now that all the money is going to five banks, and they are allowed to own commodity suppliers that they then trade futures in, soon these banks will just own…everything. As I pointed out yesterday, they’ve got legislation queued up to ‘own’ the legal records of property ownership, and now they can own any other commodities, not just provide markets for trading them.

And that fine that JPMorgan is going to pay, that $410 million dollars? That’s just for manipulating the electricity market. Not for owning the power plants, which used to be illegal, but faded away same as Glass-Steagall did. And since there’s no admission of guilt, just a settlement, it’s a “business expense” tax deduction.  And it’s only 6.3% of JPMorgan’s profit…this quarter.

Here’s a silly suggestion: How about rewriting the fines on the banking regs so that the fines aren’t specific amounts, but percentages of income based on the prior year’s profits? Whenever I hear some crime having a penalty of “$10,000 or up to a year in jail, or both,” I always think “To that banker, $10,000 is nothing, but a year in jail is worth real money.” So why not just make the penalties dependent on the incomes of the criminals?

And again, Blythe Masters dodges the bullet. At the end of that article about JPMorgan’s $410M fine, the energy regulatory agency decided not to charge her with multiple felonies. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, she invented the Credit Default Swaps that everyone was trading to insure all the mortgage securities, which all blew up when both ends of all those swaps had no money to pay off the failures of those securities.  She’s said "I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools."

When I read this, I was reminded of Tom Lehrer’s tribute to Werner von Braun , the German who designed the V-2s that Nazi Germany rained down on London in WWII: ‘  “Once za rrrrockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat’s not my deparrrtment,” says Werner von Braun.'

Baseball: The Reds finally won, 4-1 against San Diego, but Pittsburgh beat St Louis, so Reds are still 6 games out, but a game closer to the second-place St. Louis. Who (whom?) they play at home starting Friday...

More tomorrow...
7/31/2013 8:52PM