It's Labor Day 2011

Lucrum fidelitas nullus

In the past year, the unbridled greed and service of self that characterize U.S. society in the 21st century have become breathtaking in their scope, and nauseating in their depth.

A partial list: 

• Between the 2nd quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2011, S&P 500 corporations saw a 45.8% increase in profits; during the same period, hourly wages in the private sector were off by 0.2%. Average weekly earnings saw an increase of 0.6%, simply because civilian employment figures showed a drop of 0.5% and there was more overtime.
• Congressman Paul Ryan's attack "budget" aimed to turn Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security into a sieve instead of a safety net. The fact that his fellow Republicans in the House forced passage of this piece of garbage with no hope of it ever becoming law speaks volumes about who they really work for: There are no corporate tax increases in Ryan's asinine proposal, only cuts to programs that serve the poor and vulnerable. And some jackass in what passes for the press in the U.S. these days called Ryan courageous for it.
• Oil companies are reporting record profits, but House Republicans refused to entertain the idea of eliminating $53 billion in zero-royalty drilling over the next 25 years and $36.5 billion in direct taxpayer subsidies over the next decade. In 2011, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell posted a combined $18.2 billion in profits for the first quarter. That's a 40% increase over 2010.
• S&P downgraded the U.S. debt from AAA to AA+, specifically citing the tantrum thrown by Republicans in the House over raising the debt ceiling as a major factor in the move. S&P called the behavior unpredictable. It was treasonous. It was also effectively ignored by the corporate media, conveniently.
• Corporations paying no federal income tax on record-breaking profits received tax refunds totaling billions of dollars.
• In states across the country, the full ramifications of Citizens United were felt as elected officials were bought by corporate "persons" and ALEC-written corporatist legislation was introduced and passed by the ream. Jobs? We don't need no stinking jobs. We need voter suppression/ID measures. We need corporate takeover of essential public services. We need to eliminate public education in all but name in favor of voucher schools so that money can be made, and the Word of the Profit can be spread among the young. We need to sell off the commons to our handlers without bids. We need to bust all unions, starting with the public employees and teachers because we can, followed by the rest as soon as we can draft the right-to-work laws.

It's stunning that private sector workers believe, because their employers treat them like pieces of furniture, that public employees, by God, deserve to be treated the same. How does it make anybody's lot better when government sets an example that lowers standards for everyone? People actually seem perversely proud of getting screwed by their employers, at least when they're talking about the evil of public sector unionism. The justification for union busting in the public sector is that profit sector workers are getting sodomized by profit sector corporations. Puh-leeze. The idea that "every dollar that comes out of a public worker's pocket is one that doesn't come out of a private worker's pocket" is horseshit. The taxes that generate that dollar will still be paid by common people, not corporations, and it will go to corporate welfare, not back to the people.

It really boils down to the incontrovertible fact that corporations are not people. The only moral imperative a corporation has is to profit, regardless who gets hurt or impoverished in the process. Left entirely to their own devices, corporations attempt to eliminate things that constrain their ability to profit in any way they see fit. Corporations are not people. They are reptilian, and their unrestrained appetites are perhaps the truest and most widespread evil in the world today.

The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil, 21

The Evil Workingman

Cartoon by Ben Yomen

The building gradually goes quiet as the staff leaves for home. While the hum of the ventilation system takes over from the murmur of office business, he saves the file he's been editing and stands to chase down a cup of stale coffee to zap.

It's his favorite part of the day. No phones ring in the cube farm after 5, and he can work uninterrupted by colleagues who can't conceive that the urgency of their word processing impairment isn't several orders of magnitude greater than whatever it is he might be working on. Working for the public means wearing another new hat just about every week as people and jobs disappear from the state service; one of his current collection has "I am your Help Desk" written on it. He does what he can, but some days it eats into his schedule so badly the only way to get everything done is to stay late, off the clock. Being frugal with the public's dime.

He has recently come to the conclusion that, as an employer, until they turn off Fox and start paying attention, the public will suck.

When the microwave beeps, he takes the mug back to his cube and sets it on the desk, trying to ease back into "terminal" mode as he sits down. Taking a ginger sip of the scalding coffee, he realizes as the document rolls back up that there's no more work in him tonight. His eyes are sandy, his mouth tastes like the inside of a running shoe, and there is a bone-deep fatigue that comes only from pouring your awareness into a computer for hours on end.

Out of gas, he thinks. Which reminds him of the drive home, which reminds him of the drive in this morning. Which unfortunately reminds him of a clip of Rush Limbaugh demanding that House speaker John Boehner (R-*hic) put Barack Obama "in his place" for having the effrontery to ask to hold a joint session of Congress so he could present a jobs package at the same time NBC is presenting the Republican candidates debate, another miraculous battle of wits between weaponless combatants. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry that the whole thing appeared as though Limbaugh demanded and the Boner delivered. Breathtakingly full of shit.

He wonders how much money would it take to buy one state back from these thieving ALEC droids? How much for the whole country?  More than we've got, maybe. He starts shutting down to leave.

As he waits for the screen to die, his tired mind starts running a dreary, familiar treadmill: how did they convince so many people that government and public workers are the enemy? He's read letters to the editor and comments online bordering on and sometimes crossing the line into threats of physical violence. The idea that private sector employees are somehow going to be better off because some punk-ass governor busts public employee unions is a lie, but it's a very successful lie.

We are all being taken for a ride, he thinks, and they have us at each others' throats while they steal everything that isn't nailed down.

It's simple, he thinks, grimacing with a final sip of acrid coffee: private sector workers are being screwed by the corporations and companies that employ them, not by me. If a private sector employer takes away their contribution to health insurance and 401k's, cuts wages, or better yet just sends jobs overseas and gets a tax break for doing it, the government is not doing its job.

"And that would be," he says aloud to the empty computer screen, "because the government is no longer here; it has moved on."

There is no answer, just silence at the end of a very long day. Or the beginning of a very dark night.

Job-killing de-regulation is strangling people all over the country

Republican Presidential hopeless Mitt "How's My Hair" Romney had the following to say when asked why he supports entitlement "reforms" over progressive tax reform as a means of deficit reduction:

"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend."

Everything corporations earn goes to the people? I guess I missed the memo on that one. As a public employee for the state of Wisconsin, one of "the people," I'd like to know where the hell my cut is, Mitt. I'd like to know when Charles and David Koch are going to stop their hostile takeover of my state and pay me. I'd like to know when our ass-hat Governor is going to go to his corporate handlers and convince them to put some of the millions they've used to destroy fair elections in my state to work feeding, clothing, housing and caring for the people who will soon be unable to do those things for themselves.

I am sick to death of hearing how the evil unions and liberals are at fault for the screwed up mess our political system and economy are in, and how the nice corporate fascists are everybody's friend. I had nothing to do with it, yet I take the blame because I have the audacity to belong to a union (which is essentially castrated for now). The kinds of overt attacks we're seeing today were perpetrated on working folks in the 20s and 30s. Think for a minute about where THAT ended up. In his Ignorance Index post of 7/15 on Campaign for America's Future, Robert Borosage answers the coporate meme that "job-killing regulations . . . are strangling employers all over the country" with the following:

Borosage opines: 

In reality, the whole mantra of “job-killing regulation” could only come from a party command center that rivals Orwell's Ministry of Truth, touting “ignorance is strength.”

We just lost 7 million jobs in a devastating recession largely caused by Wall Street’s excesses – aided and abetted by what turned out to be "job killing DE-regulation." 

So . . . repeat after me:
Job-killing de-regulation is strangling people all over the country . . .
Job-killing de-regulation is strangling people all over the country . . .
Job-killing de-regulation is strangling people all over the country . . .
Job-killing de-regulation is strangling people all over the country . . .

Profit Margin

Tea party republicanism, which means ALL republicanism today, is based entirely on, and driven entirely by, profit. Greed, if you will, has become so central to the party's philosophy that they felt compelled to attack the US economy, make that world economy, simply to prevent taxes being raised on the Ayn-Randians, corporatists and fascist scumbags who overwhelmingly populate the top 2% of the economic food chain. Their handlers see themselves as the ruling class and have since the turn of the LAST century, so this is nothing new. (Google "plot against Roosevelt").

They are launching attack after attack on the common people and workers of this country, both nationally and at the state level. While they characterize themselves as the entitled cream of the crop, it's important for the rest of us to remember: Shit Floats.

Time to flush.

Dice

The Boston Tea Party was sparked by a corporate bailout, not high taxes

December 16, 1773: John Adams and a band of marauders posing as native Americans raid British ships in Boston Harbor, throwing their cargo of British East India Company tea into the ocean.

They were protesting the taxes levied by the British Parliament on their favorite cuppa, or so most folks have been taught. That, like most historical assumptions by the modern Teapublican party, is butt-end-forward.

What Adams and the original tea partiers were protesting was not a high tax on tea. It was in fact British government subsidies that allowed the East India Company to sell their tea more cheaply than their competition in the colonies, who had been smuggling untaxed tea from the Netherlands. From tax historian Joseph J. Thorndike, writing on taxhistory.org:

The Tea Party was part of a longer protest against British taxation of the North American colonies. The conflict had its roots in the French and Indian War (known as the Seven Years' War in Europe). Having run up a huge debt fighting the war -- and defending the colonies from external threat -- the British thought the colonists should help pay it back. But the colonists had other ideas, and they resisted British attempts to collect new taxes. In 1765 they objected to the Stamp Act, insisting that Britain could levy taxes only to regulate trade, not raise revenue. London capitulated. The next year Parliament took another run at the colonial purse, imposing the Townshend duties on a variety of goods imported into the colonies, including paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. Once again the colonists organized boycotts and protests, and once again Britain backed down. But rather than repeal all the Townshend duties, Parliament chose to retain the tax on tea, chiefly to underscore the government's right to impose such a levy.

For a while the colonists seemed content to ignore that imperial assertion. But in 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which left the Townshend duty on tea intact, but repealed another tax on tea imported to Great Britain for subsequent reshipment to the colonies. This amounted to a tax cut on colonial tea, promising lower prices for colonial consumers.

Bostonians responded by dumping their cheap imported tea into Boston Harbor.

So . . . what the original Tea Party was actually agitating against was precisely the kind of government-supported corporatism that its modern counterpart has whole-heartedly embraced. Thorndike continues:

The Tea Party was prompted by a corporate bailout. What's not to like about cheap tea? Plenty, at least when it comes as part of a corporate bailout. Because that's what the Tea Act was: an 18th-century version of corporate welfare.

After Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, colonists seemed to ignore the assertion of the right to tax the colonies. Boycotts petered out, and colonial consumers began buying tea again. But not all that tea was taxed. A large portion -- by some estimates as much as 90 percent -- came from smugglers, who sold Dutch tea unburdened by the British duty.

Meanwhile Parliament was struggling to rescue a corporation it had deemed too big to fail: the British East India Company. The company was saddled with a large debt and even larger inventories. Its warehouses were stocked to the rafters with unsold tea (among other things), and lawmakers soon hit on a brilliant idea: lower the tax on company tea, permit its direct exportation to the colonies, and let the company undercut the smugglers.

The original Tea Party was no more a movement of the folk than the Tea Party of today. Even though modern marchers, shouters, and protesters might be deluded commoners, they are bought, paid for, and lied to by a global cabal of corporate fascists who fully intend to take the United States down and feast on its corpse.

Incentive to create jobs: Taxes

If taxes are returned to appropriate levels, corporations will plow profits back into growth and JOBS WILL BE CREATED. Further tax cuts will only mean more of the same or worse.

If the Republicans block a timely increase of the U.S. debt ceiling . . .

they will deliver a broken, impoverished and discredited USA into the hands of the Democrats for the next 50 years, and destroy economies the world over in a global Depression that will make the 1930s seem like a day at the beach.

Furthermore, if Barack Obama caves in to their demands to destroy Medicare and Social Security in exchange for a vote to raise the debt limit without corresponding increases in revenue, the Depression is only going to happen later rather than immediately. One of the country's creditors is its own Social Security fund; another is Medicare. Even if these programs are gutted or destroyed, someone still has to take care of the people they covered, and it won't be the wealthy.

You can't spend what you don't collect. Cutting spending without raising revenue will not lower the existing debt; we need to raise taxes. We need to get rid of the entitlements of the wealthy and the corporations and force them to shoulder their fair share of the burden that they helped to create by refusing to pony up.

The rich are not entitled to a free ride. They made their goddamned money off the backs of the middle class they are hell-bent on destroying. If they succeed in forcing the US into default, everybody, including corporate "persons," is going down.