Category: Economics

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Class War – America is fighting a class war, and losing

February 10th 2019

Gabriel Zucman is an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Berkeley. Don’t let the “assistant” throw you off; he is one of the leading analysts of global wealth inequality in his field, and has co-written nine texts with the renowned Thomas Piketty, in addition to a large volume of other works.

Emmanuel Saez is an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Berkeley, has also authored dozens of papers on wealth inequality, including with both Zucman and Piketty. He advocates a high marginal income tax rate (70-90%) on incomes over ten million as a way of equalizing the huge disparity caused by runaway capitalism.

How bad is that disparity? Zucman released a working paper the other day in which he showed the richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now own more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent.

The obscene increase in wealth for the 400 richest Americans came at the harshest expense of that bottom 60% of the country. Their share of the nation’s wealth dropped from 5.7% in 1987 (and that was one of the worst rates of inequality in the developed world) to just 2.1% now. They have less than half what they did 32 years ago, and it all went to those undeserving billionaires.

It’s perhaps not surprising that both economists are working as advisors for the Elizabeth Warren campaign. She sees wealth inequality and the subsequent twisting of the rules as the biggest threat to America. While she advocates for a high marginal income rate for the highest earners (77% on $10 million/year or more) she also proposes a 2% wealth tax on estates worth more than $10 million, 3% on estates worth more than a billion. Zucman and Saez estimate that such a plan would raise about $275 billion a year on average in its first ten years.

The pushback has been frantic and immediate. The Private Bank of JP Morgan snapped that such a plan was unconstitutional, overlooking the fact that wealth taxes were about the only form of taxation available to the federal government prior to 1917. Property tax is perhaps the best known example of a wealth tax. So is the estate tax.

Other flacs for the rich declared that the tax wasn’t feasible because it was so difficult for a rich person to know how much his assets were.

Um, No. Just No. You don’t get to be a billionaire without hiring some very smart people who know exactly where every dollar of those assets lie. And you have a raft of other very smart people who can ensure the highest possible return on investment for all that money.

The fact is the ultra-wealthy have stopped having any positive affect whatever on the general economy (and it’s always been questionable as to how beneficial they actually were) and have now become voracious and parasitic, a risk to their host. Even the ultra-wealthy who are uneasily aware of the destructive nature of their class, such as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, can’t give back anything near what they take. Most simply take, and give one half of one percent of their income to charity to try and justify their presence. They spend more in the system of legalized bribery that is the American elections system than they do on actual Americans, and have bought a large portion of elected officials, zombie representatives who oppose high marginal tax rates, wealth taxes, universal health care, workers’ rights, environmental protections, public transportation, a strong social safety net, and anything else that might stand between them and a high appreciation of their already obscene wealth. And to hell with all the rest of us.

The disparity of wealth is already the highest its been in American history. It’s as high was it was in France in the 1780s, or Russia in the 1910s. That’s a very dangerous place for any society to be, especially when the rich overreach and make it nearly impossible for most people to make a decent living.

That’s when you start getting revolutions, and trust me, nobody wants that. No sane person who understands history. The satisfaction wrought by the guillotine is only transitory, and it takes a while for conditions to improve to where they were before the revolution. Even the “successful” revolution in America needed thirty years for the colonists to enjoy the standard of living they had before they broke away from England.

Polls show that between 70% and 85% of Americans approve of Warren’s plan. Similar numbers support similar plans by Bernie Sanders, or the one proposed by Ocasio-Cortez.

Tell everyone not to vote for any multi-millionaire candidates, or any candidate who receives “dark money” from PAC—they are not on your side, cannot be on your side. They work for the people who are trying to take everything from you.

The people are speaking loud and clear, It’s time for the ultra rich to listen, and consider options that they can live with.

The alternative, horrible as it is, is absolutely inevitable otherwise.

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70% — Go Suck Lemons!

January 27th 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lit a match under the collective arses of American plutocracy and their ‘umble servants in the right wing media last week by proposing a new top marginal income tax rate of 70% on income over ten million.

One assclown, purportedly one of Trump’s top economic people, got on TV to ‘explain’ that a little girl selling lemonade at a dollar a pop would have to turn around and give 70 cents to the government. Oh, the horror!

Well, the wealthy class hire the very best fools and liars to safeguard their interests, don’t they? Since right wing economists don’t know anything about the actual economy and prefer to scare folks instead, let’s explain what really happens to that little girl in the hellish socialist landscape of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In the real world, the one where kids set up lemonade stands, it’s usually a one-day thing. If it’s a warm day and the kid has a good location, she might sell 20 or even 30 cups of lemonade. She pockets all the money which she will proceed to blow on ALEX toys or, if she’s responsible, save toward a cruiser bike. Mom and Dad, who provided the stand, the lemonade, the cups and the water, are just happy to acquaint their kid with the notion of working to earn money. Unless the kid happens to be African-American and has some really vile neighbors who try to shop her for selling food without a permit (yes, this has happened) officialdom will take no notice. The IRS will not be coming around to seize her glitter and her plush toy unicorns.

So what are the circumstances under which the kid might have to shell out 70% on a cup of lemonade?

Well, none, actually.

In the real business world, she has to buy the lemons, sweeteners and cups, pay the water bill, amortize out the cost of the stand, pay various permits, plus social security and unemployment, and pay rent on the place she sets up her stand. After she’s done all that, she’s maybe making 30 cents on each lemonade sold. The overhead is all deductible, and she doesn’t have to pay taxes on that.

So if she was in the 70% bracket on income, she would be shelling out 70% of 30% on each dollar of revenue, or 21%. That’s still pretty steep, and she would have to cut back on the pink glitter fingernail polish. That seems an awfully cruel thing to do to a little girl.

But it turns out that even Republicans aren’t that malevolent. You see, under the present tax schedule (and AOC isn’t proposing any changes there at this time) she doesn’t pay any tax at all on the first $9,699 of her income from sales.

To make $9,699, she would have to sell 32,330 cups of lemonade. Assuming she takes Sundays off, that’s a bit over 100 cups a day. That would be quite an accomplishment, especially if she lives in, say, Milwaukee, where January sales might be less than brisk.

When she sells that 32,331st cup of lemonade, she’ll will owe income tax. The tax rate is 10%, so she would actually owe seven cents.

But there’s a personal deduction. $12,200 for a single taxpayer. There’s higher brackets for married and head of household, but we’re talking about a non-empancipated minor here.

So after she is sold 40,773 and one third cups of lemonade, she finally has a federal tax liability! Seven cents! Alert the bankruptcy lawyers!

Let’s suppose she made $520,000 from her lemonade stand. At this point, even Kramer would have trouble imagining that it’s just one little girl at one stand. She would be busier than the Deadwood whore house on payday!

So she’s opened new stands and hired people to run them. On the other hand, she’s enjoying economies of scale, so it’s likely she still makes 30 cents on each lemonade sold. Even if the money is coming in without her lifting a finger for most of it.

There’s all kinds of legal and otherwise tax dodges available for someone who is hitting the current top bracket of $510,000, as she has, but let’s suppose she’s very grateful to President Trump for giving her this incredible opportunity, and wants to pay every dime that she’s liable for on paper. Her federal tax burden would be $159,544. To get to that point, she will have sold 1,700,000 cups of lemonade. An enterprise that vast would be fully automatic, and it’s probably been six months since she even touched a lemon. She has people to do that for her. My god how the money rolls in! All she has to do is phone her head accountant once a week. And she’s paying a federal income tax of about nine and a third cents per cup. Mind you, she’s very patriotic and doesn’t want to take further tax relief, even though her account is telling her she can cut her tax liability in half through legal means.

So when does this hypothetical 70 cents per cup of lemonade kick in?

Well, it never does. She can sell up to two and a third million cups of lemonade per year and federal tax is about 9-10%. But when she sells that 2,333,334th cup, watch out! That’s when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pounces! That’s when the dread 70% marginal rate kicks in. For each cup beyond that, she will owe 21 cents. Not 70 cents. 21.

Keep in mind she already pulled in ten million bucks and is working a half-hour a week on her business if she’s conscientious. She got college covered, paid her parents’ mortgage, and a couple of new cars, and she still has plenty left over to buy the local plush unicorn toy store franchise. She can afford to pay twenty one cents per cup of lemonade sold!

Most economists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan. It’s not as steep as the 70% top marginal rate under Reagan (which started in the $190,000 range) or the 93% under Eisenhower, a time of unparalleled growth in America. Paul Krugman thinks the top rate should be 80%, and some economists have gone further, suggesting a tax of 100% on annual income over $100,000,000.

So when some weird right wing fruitcake solemnly declares that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to turn America into Venezuela or Cuba, show them this, and ask them why they don’t mention other failed economic hellholes like Kansas or Wisconsin, which enjoy every low tax rates, even on lemonade.

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End Game – It’s us or him

December 21st 2018

Even by the vicious, arbitrary, capricious and sometimes insane standards of the Trump administration, the past 48 hours were beyond belief.

First, there was the Michael Flynn sentencing. Judge Emmett Sullivan was expected to give the seditious and disgraced General a slap on the wrist as a result of supposedly very valuable evidence provided to the special council’s office in relation to Trump and Russia. But Flynn, whose common sense is the equal of his sense of loyalty to his country, ran his mouth to the press, whining that the FBI fooled him into thinking it was OK to lie to them because he thought the 11 separate interviews they hauled him in for were just friendly chats. Koffee Klatches. They talked about the latest Vogue magazine, you know. Just more proof the FBI was evil. Sullivan’s patience snapped, and he let Flynn know just how big a pile of human shit he really is, delayed sentencing, and let it be known if he spread any more right wing bullshit, he would be treated as a near-traitor.

That happened just a day after California Congresswoman Jackie Spier penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Did Putin Buy Donald Trump?” She didn’t actually use either the word “traitor” or “kompromat,” but the concepts were definitely intrinsic to her narrative.

So now even the mainstream press is starting to use the word “treason” in relation to Trump. It’s about time.

Trump made Spier’s case for her by suddenly and unilaterally announcing that all troops would be pulled out of Syria, a sudden action that betrayed the Kurds (again) and no doubt delighted Putin. Make no mistake: I’ve argued for pulling troops out of Syria right along, but I don’t for an instant believe that Trump went about it the way he did because he gave a shit about the troops, let alone the Syrians who are dying by the thousands. He did it because Putin wanted him to. And time is running out for him to do stuff like that.

This in turn caused Jim Mattis to quit in disgust. No flowery language about it being an honor and privilege to serve Trump; just a letter that boiled down to, “I can’t help you, get yourself a defense secretary who will do your bidding.” I used to joke about how it came to be that the only adult in the Trump administration, the sane thoughtful one, was known as “Mad Dog” but that Mad Dog might be one of the very few to leave that benighted administration with his reputation as an adult and an American still intact.

It is scary to contemplate Trump’s foreign policy now that his only remaining advisor is John Bolton.

Then Trump blew up the Continuing Resolution. This was a kick-the-can-down-the-road measure to keep the government running while the ludicrous impasse over the Wall continued. Nothing too unusual there: it’s been pretty much what passes for Republican governance since 1993. They love America but hate the United States, and don’t want to pay for anything other than a big military and an economy that consists mostly in the form of raping the workers. So they’ve been running government by extortion, whittling down any stake Americans might have in their own country.

Trump, apparently upset that such intellectual luminaries as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh no longer loved him, changed his mind after most of Congress had left for their indeterminable vacations, so the government will have a partial shutdown at least until January 10th. It will cost billions, and Trump should reflect on the fact that the Secret Service agents following him won’t be getting paychecks for Christmas.

Even the most stupid mob boss knows you gotta pay your muscle. But then, Trump is extraordinarily stupid.

The stock market is showing signs of a possible crash, having lost 4,000 points this past month. Investors are no longer confident we will survive Trump. That’s not a very comfortable thought.

Then there is the Whitaker thing. The swindler-turned-top-cop had a Department of Justice board of unknown parties say he was not required to recuse himself in the Mueller investigation, then they put out another statement an hour later saying he was supposed to recuse himself, and then an hour after that Whitaker said he was going to disregard the advice to recuse himself.

Kremlin watchers thought as of yesterday that Rosenstein was still overseeing the investigation, since Whitaker didn’t want to go to jail for obstruction, but was acting on the QT since if he did recuse himself, he would get the Jeff Sessions treatment. Now nobody knows that the hell is going on. In some ways, that’s the most terrifying development of all, since it smells like Trump is preparing to purge Mueller’s ass.

Finally, there was the Trump Foundation. A judge shut it down, effectively labeling it a criminal enterprise. I had to shake my head at the wonder of it all. Remember all those Republicans who prattled on endlessly about the Clinton Foundation because it took money (legally) from foreign concerns. For all the huffing, they couldn’t find any quid pro quo, unless you count the ridiculous conspiracy theory about the Canadian government selling uranium to Russia. (Would Trump hesitate to give Russia uranium if Putin asked him for it?). Are they apoplectic in rage over the open criminality of the Trump Foundation?

Hmm. Apparently not. Like cheating on wives or banging porn stars or blowing up the deficit or bombing kids in other countries, or screwing kids domestically, it’s only bad if Democrats are accused of it.

The people who worked directly for Trump aren’t the only ones who trashed their reputations; any Republican who whined endlessly about the Clinton/Obama “scandals” and is silent now can expect decades to pass before anyone wants to hear their thoughts on much of anything again.

Meanwhile, the country is now in deep crisis, and when Congress returns, it may have to put aside the budget and the wall and all that, and drive Trump from office.

It’s him or us.

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Parasites – America being bled dry

October 31st, 2018

Chuck Collins of the Guardian had an article today ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/us-wealthiest-families-dynasties-governed-by-rich ) that should surprise few and alarm many. Titled “The wealth of America’s three richest families grew by 6,000% since 1982,” the subhead is “Three US families have a combined wealth of $348.7bn.” If you’re curious, the three families are the Waltons of Walmart, the Mars candy family, and the Kochs.

Granted, they satisfied three great American lusts: cheap(ish) Chinese clothing, mediocre American candy, and fossil fuels. They spotted a need, and filled it. The American capitalist dream, writ large.

The like to say they are makers and not takers, the Ayn Rand litany used to justify unbridled greed. Most of them inherited their wealth, and have an army of managers, accountants and lawyers to support their ultra-privileged positions in society, and a similar army of propagandists and lobbyists to legally barricade their positions, a governmental and media fortress devoted to persuading the public that because they are fantastically rich, they are superior and thus deserve to be fantastically rich.

Government and the law are twisted to support them, protecting them from civil and criminal retribution for their increasingly rapacious actions.

“Tort reform” is a euphemism for altering the law to make it impossible for groups of people they have cheated and sickened to sue them. Tax reform took the hundreds of cheats, swindles, and illegals dodges Fred Trump and his wastrel children committed and made them all legal under present-day law.

Media amalgamation ensured that virtually everything in the way of news that Americans are exposed to are bland, corporate pablum, or raving neo-nazi right wing bullshit.

The article continues:

The top three wealthiest billionaires in the US – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population combined.

This is possible because the bottom fifth of US households are underwater, with zero or negative net worth. And the next fifth has so few assets to fall back on that they live in fear of destitution.

Three individuals, according to the article, are wealthier than the bottom 50% of the American population—some 170 million other people—combined. Twenty percent of the population have zero or negative assets, and another twenty percent live paycheck to paycheck, two weeks from being broke. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have more money than all those people.

The article note that allowing for inflation, the wealth of the top 1% has increased sixty-fold since 1982, which coincidentally is when Reaganomics first kicked in.

Even Paul Volcker, no socialist, worried, “We’re developing into a plutocracy.” Much the way Stephen King is developing into a novelist.

The Founders feared the rise of an aristocracy as much as they feared the threats to a democratic government from the churches, corporations and authoritarians. To that end, they favored strong estate taxes (Jefferson proposed that the Constitution include a 100% estate tax on all real property!) and, while not willing to impose progressive income taxes, did worry about the potential for accumulation of wealth.

Since Reagan, estate taxes have all but vanished, and there has been a massive tax shift from corporations and the wealthy to the middle class. How vast? In 1952%, the median 40% of wage earners paid 4% of their income in federal taxes, about 20% of federal revenues. Corporations made up about half of federal revenues. Now, the middle class pay about 60% and corporations less than 25%, and in return for that large tax burden, they get a government spending trillions on a bloated and largely useless military, and scheming to steal the common funds used for old age pensions and what scant medical coverage they have. In the meanwhile, they are ‘entertained’ by propaganda outlets that moan endlessly about how good the penniless have it because they don’t have to pay taxes.

Even as we talk, the Republicans in Congress, in a great, grand finale of a “fuck you” gesture, are trying to eliminate most of the remaining taxes the wealthy and corporations have to pay, another three trillion dollars over a ten year period. But no worries: they plan to cover part of the cost by stealing your pension fund. And Republicans, in a grim, desperate hope that they can fool the people one last time and steal everything else they own, are campaigning on promises to protect insurance companies from out-and-out raping their customers with pre-existing conditions, and still promising to balance the budget (they’ve already more than doubled the annual deficit) and oh, yes, by spending a few billions to send an amazing 15,000 heavily armed American troops to protect shivering, frightened, craven American right wingers from a bedraggled group of families with grand parents and children, all on foot, some barefoot, who are walking towards America, still well over a thousand miles away. You have to be a particularly abject sort of coward to fall for this “threat,” and a particularly vicious, cynical and cruel despot to pretend it’s a threat.

It cannot continue. Regulated capitalist societies lead to unchecked aggregation of wealth and then implode, without exception. And the present aggregation of wealth in America is the greatest the world has ever seen. So the plutocrats are spending billions to persuade the American people that only by sacrificing themselves, their wealth, their livelihoods, and their standard of living, can they help the plutocrats avoid the very destruction the plutocrats are causing.

These parasites—and anyone who makes $100 billion is taking far more than they are giving—have to be checked, or they will destroy the host. You are the host, and you are being bled dry.

Bring back progessivity in taxes. Bring back a strong estate tax. Eliminate Citizens United and make campaign spending from a common fund. Make it easier for people to sue corporations that have cheated them or sickened them. Stop lionizing opulant filth like Donald Trump.

That, or die like a dog in the gutter, convulsed by the actions of a million fleas.

Or perhaps a half dozen fleas, each the size of a hyena.

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Unreality Show I’ll Take Door Number i for $100, Alex

October 12th 2018

Who would have thought, three years ago, that we would have a black entertainer meeting with the President in the Oval Office and arguing for the repeal of the 13th amendment?
Trump has achieved the trifecta of crazy: Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and now Kanye West. A pity Charlie Manson is dead: he could have visited and argued for lowering the age of consent to six.

This spectacle would have been grotesque and awkward under the best of circumstances, but it occurred almost to the minute that a major hurricane was devastating the Florida panhandle coast, completely leveling one town and inflicting major damage from Florida to North Carolina. Even as the Trump administration was arguing that 4C increase was inevitable, so we all might as well get used to it.

At least this time touring Melania Trump didn’t show up wearing a coat that proclaimed her lack of concern; she was off in Africa, wearing a British RA-style pith helmet, recreating “Call Me Bwimbo”. Oh, wait, that’s Bwana. Second look. No, it’s Bwimbo. The woman has a gift for wearing “Fuck You” as a fashion accessory. After getting some light criticism over that, she flounced off, calling herself the most bullied person in America. Easy solution, babe: file for divorce.

Was it really just 23 months ago that people were saying in hopeful tones that Republicans in Congress could keep Trump in line and blunting his more egregious impulses?

Nah. They saw Trump apparently getting away with the most blatant lies and viciousness, and decided they knew a winning approach when they saw it. Now they’re all lying their heads off. As the election nears, it’s a race to the bottom.

You see campaign ads all over the place swearing up and down that Republicans want to protect Medicare, and that Democrats are goddless commie Muslims who want to allow billions of Mexicans to come in and take over the country. They boast about how Trump saved the economy by maintaining employment and growth trends previously seen over the past six years under Obama, and carefully don’t mention the trillions in new debt for the latest tax giveaways to the rich (including the additional $3 trillion last week that the same Republicans who voted for it last week aren’t mentioning now), or the fact that despite the fact that they are fracking and drilling the living shit out of America and working to turn national parks into oil reserves, the price of gasoline is a dollar fifty above what it was last year.

It got so bad that NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece yesterday effectively calling the entire party liars. Such a column would never have seen the light of day a few years ago, but that was before the GOP went mad and abandoned all principle. At least the NY Times belatedly remembered they were a newspaper and what that meant.

Trump had an ‘op-ed’ in the disreputable USA Today that has to be read to be believed. The Washington Post stated that nearly every single sentence included a misstatement or flat-out lie.

In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, is running for Governor, but as SS he retains the power to purge voter rolls. Which he is doing with a vengeance, some 26,000 names over the past few weeks, over such criteria as whether a middle initial is included on the written name but not in the signature. While African-Americans make up 32% of Georgia’s population (and a somewhat lower proportion of the voting population for obvious reasons) they make up 70% of the voters being purged. Oh, and the SS office isn’t bothering to tell the voters they have been purged. Let it be a surprise on election day. Similar, if less egregious stories abound in other states saddled with Republican rule.

Of course, Trump hates a free press, but isn’t above using the more whorish and lower segments of that press to attack the rest. The National Enquirer has been prostituting itself for him for years now, and Fox News is nothing more than the propaganda arm for the GOP. It’s a shameful thing to see in America, which once was proud of its free and independent press. Now the government has fascist whores pretending to be reporters to spread lies and stifle dissent.

It’s no surprise that news that Saudi Arabia lured a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, into the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and proceeded to torture, murder and dismember him. It’s widely believed that it was ordered by the vile despot Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seized power last year with the somewhat clandestine help from the Trump administration (Chief Wastrel Jared Kushner was on hand to oversee the coup and possibly offer friendly advice and hidden funding).

Trump’s reaction to this was muted, partly because he doesn’t mind seeing journalists being killed for doing their job and partly because his business interests are heavily intertwined with bin Salman’s. Even as most of the corporate world pull away from the swinish and vicious Sauds, Trump is going ahead with another arms deal so Saudi Arabia can massacre a few thousand more Yemanis.

Iran is a vile theocracy, but it’s only the third worst in the region, behind Israel and Saudi Arabia. Guess which of the three the US condemns solely?

Kavanaugh, perjurer, liar and partisan ratfucker, has already established a new precedent, becoming the first sitting justice in Supreme Court history to be under active investigation for violation of judicial practices and ethics, based on his sworn Senate testimony. He managed this odiferous distinction on just the second day on the court. It will get worse.

Trump is submitting written answers to Meuller’s investigative team, about his only remaining constitutional recourse. His lawyers knew he can’t go a minute without lying, so spoken testimony under oath would be a legal death trap, and this at least gives the lawyers time to write and finesse the answers, in the hope they can make Trump at least technically not liable for perjury. We’ll know soon enough if these lawyers, not the most brilliant legal team over assembled, can come up with anything that won’t result in immediate indictments.

OK, admit it: after all that, Kanye West sounds pretty sane, doesn’t he?

At least harmless, right? Right?

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Fascism Rising – Trump and Kavanaugh aren’t bugs; they’re features

September 23rd, 2018

One of the many sub-plots in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s brilliant Maniac involves the character Jed Milgrim (played by Billy Magnussen) a “colorful douche” who is a scion of a vicious, powerful, wealthy family, and who stands accused of a heinous sexual assault involving urination. It’s nearly impossible not to think of the Trump family while watching this, not only because of the nature of the crime, or the resemblance Magnussen bears to one of the Trump scions, but because of the calm assurance of the family that in order to protect their power, prestige and wealth, it is perfectly reasonable to commit perjury, blackmail and bribe people (including family members), and stand well above the law in pursuit of their own interests. They are used to dismissing people who they have wronged and who want to fight back as greedy little scuttlers, and resent a legal system that doesn’t just let them destroy such rabble.

The haughty, self-assured mien Magnussen wears is one we have seen far too often, not just in this White House (including many of its nominees from the world of wealth and privilege) but in the faces of the broadcasters on the right-wing media, and the people who trot out endless columns of right wing think tanks to assure us that “identity politics” and “takers” are only showing resentment of their betters, and Americans should not believe people who profess to stand for the people when America’s ultra-wealthy stand ready to defend the people from the people.

Congruent with this, I’m presently reading a book by Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains – The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. I’ll have a full review of the book upon completion of reading it,

America has always had a class of aggrieved plutocrats who believe their property rights trump the civil rights of all other Americans. This dates back to John C. Calhoun and his vigorous defense of America’s biggest economic phenomenon prior to the civil war: slavery. MacLean notes that slavery made North Carolina the richest and most powerful state in the union prior to 1860, and created more one percenters in Mississippi than in New York.

The power of this elite was held in check by the Civil War and various economic crashes, culminating in the Crash of ‘29 and the Depression, resulting in the New Deal.

MacLean explains how a libertarian economist of the 1950s, James McGill Buchanan, created a reality in which vast sums of money could be spent organizing the plutocrat class and using propaganda and control of the media to convince Americans that they were incapable of self-governance and should let the natural leaders of society (the “businessmen”) run things.

It was fascism, pure and simple, although that is a word they never, ever acknowledge and attack all who use it. Governance through corporation.

The biggest problem with fascism is the same that one sees with other unaccountable forms of governments, such as theocracies and monarchies: corruption sets in quickly, and the rot spreads until it finally kills its host.

But as long as there is power and money to be accumulated, corruption isn’t seen as a bug—it’s seen as a feature.

The fascists have taken over the GOP, with the nightmarish and Kafkaesque results that we see in the paper every day, of people grimly determined to fight unions, civil libertarian groups, workers in general, women, and any group that can organize, collectivize and perhaps challenge their power.

MacLean writes, “Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?…Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D.C.”

As you watch this week as the Republicans cling like grim death to the Kavanaugh nomination, hoping to push this vile corporatist down our throats to consolidate their power they way they have with Thomas, and Gorsuch, and you wonder how they can possibly continue to support Trump, reflect on the fact that they are no longer just an American political party: they are a fifth column, enemies to the Constitution and determined to finish a slow coup they have been conducting against America for 40 years.

They know Trump is a bad president. Even without the corruption, the sheer scale of his incompetence and inability to lead would, in a normal party, be enough to impeach him. They see the weirdness and chaos as inconveniences; the fact that Trump is utterly corrupt is what makes him so valuable to them. They know he’s a thief, a crook, a swindler, and possibly a traitor. But so are they, even if they dress it up in self-serving rhetoric, and as for being traitors, they are much closer in spirit to the most corrupt plutocrat of all, Vladimir Putin, then they are to anything readers might recognize as American values. Treason is betrayal against those you owe fealty. By their lights, betraying America is not treason.

Perhaps the saddest element of this is the people they have roped in to support them. The racists. The Evangelicals. The Xenophobes. The growling, disaffected population that feel they deserve a place at the table and the fascists are more than happy to promise them that place.

They’ve always been useful idiots for demagogues. Nothing new there. What is new is what will follow.

Should the fascists win, they will discard these people like used condoms. Not only are their beliefs and impulses bad for business, but they can reorganize and pose a threat to their masters. And they cannot be trusted: they’ve already betrayed America. It would only be a matter of time before they revolt against Trump’s New Order.

And the worst of all is that they would become our allies in a common cause.

If you can vote in November, vote like your life depends on it. It does.

We can avoid having to fight a Fascist Fifth Column again.

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Nothing to Fear but…: A review of Fear

Fear: Trump in the White House

Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster September 2018

Yes, I know the title of the book is Fear, and I should have regarded that as fair warning.

But FFS, I thought I would at least get through the Prologue without being reduced to mindless, numbing, existential terror!

In a well-reported vignette from the book, “On the desk was a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, known as KORUS.” Woodward goes on to relate the immense strategic, tactical, economic and diplomatic damage the United States would suffer as an almost immediate result of a sudden, unilateral withdrawal from KORUS.  

Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser, spotted the draft and stole it from the President’s desk, counting on Trump’s sparkler-like mind to forget about it. And in fact, he did.

Woodward writes, “It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.”

That’s pretty scary right there.

Woodward goes on to relate a power struggle, with Trump and Kushner on one side, and Mattis, Cohn, and Porter on the other. Trump was determined to destroy KORUS, but only intermittently, and Kushner’s agenda was focused on real estate and Israel, so he didn’t seem to be behind the memos to destroy the pact.

So who was behind it? Woodward doesn’t know. Possibly even Trump doesn’t know.

That’s very scary. An unstable, mercurial president who is easily manipulated is bad enough, but when nobody even knows who is pulling his strings, that is truly terrifying.

Fear is a surprisingly easy read, broken up into 42 easily-digested chapters. A lot of them won’t taste very good, but that’s not Woodward’s fault—he just reports what he saw. And he saw a lot.

Just how crass, craven, amoral and reckless with the truth is Trump? This vignette, from the Chapter detailing Trump’s contentious relationship with NATO, sums it up nicely:

A staffer who sat in on several calls that Trump made to Gold Star families was struck with how much time and emotional energy Trump devoted to them. He had a copy of material from the deceased service member’s personnel file.

“I’m looking at his picture—such a beautiful boy,” Trump said in one call to family members. Where did he grow up? Where did he go to school? Why did he join the service?

“I’ve got the record here,” Trump said. “There are reports here that say how much he was loved. He was a great leader.”

Some in the Oval Office had copies of the service records. None of what Trump cited was there. He was just making it up. He knew what the families wanted to hear.

It’s been a week since the pre-release reviews of this book rocked the Trump White House. Since then, the op-ed by Anonymous came out, Trump called Woodward a liar and Woodward promptly produced a tape showing he talked to Trump, Trump made fist-bumps to celebrate 9/11, and his son Eric, poster child for post-partum abortion, made a stunningly anti-semitic remark about Woodward. Trump declared the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico an “unsung sucess” and promised to bring that same high level of preparation and competence to the Carolinas when Florence makes landfall late tomorrow.

I feel sorry for the Carolinas and wish them well.

It seems like in any given week, Trump manages to recapitulate the worst of Nixon, Reagan and Bush the Lesser.

As I finish Woodward’s latest and perhaps greatest, I’m reminded of another President: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”

In those dark days, reality was what we feared, and Franklin Roosevelt was what stood up to it.

In these dark days, Trump is what we fear, and we have to stand up to him. Woodward is one of the strongest voices yet to do so.

We have nothing to fear but Trump himself.Nothin

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Labor Day – Time for Labor to Rise Up

September 2nd, 2018

It’s Labor Day.

It’s a good time to talk about democratic socialism.

Senator Bernie Sanders, of course, has been a democratic socialist since the 1960s. Back then, he was considered a progressive liberal, slightly to the left of LBJ. He hasn’t moved left: the country has moved drastically to the right.

Despite the best efforts of Democratic centrists and the corporate media, he did astonishingly well in the 2016 primaries, rising from a 3% no-chancer to a 40% existential challenger to the smug and somewhat tepid Hillary Clinton, forcing her to accept a compromise party platform that included fighting for a minimum wage of $15/hour and fighting for universal health care rather than the patchwork Obamacare.

She promptly abandoned both positions after the conventions, and millions of working and poor people stayed home. A small, but very stupid segment of Bernie voters actually voted for Trump. Clinton unexpectedly lost the rust belt states where Bernie ran well and where Trump pushed his false populism the hardest.

The lesson was unmistakable; there was a groundswell of support for leftist, New Deal-type policies. Not a bad compromise $12 an hour like Hillary wanted, but an indexed $15 an hour. Not the weak compromise Obamacare, far better than what America suffered under the old system, but far short of Medicare for all.

Democratic centrists will forget about workers’ rights the day after Labor Day: democratic socialists make it a centerpiece of their platform. Most importantly, they will stand up to the Republican fascists, the thieves, the liars, the authoritarians and the traitors that the captive corporate media keep insisting are “conservatives.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat incumbent House Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District. An unalloyed leftist, she called for a “political revolution” including higher education for all, gun control measures, an end to private prisons and the abolition of ICE. She won, upsetting Crowley, an eight-term entrenched Democratic centrist who was being groomed for party leader, another Democratic Washington General to the GOP’s Harlem Globetrotters.

People have gotten tired of Democrats who talk a good game about rights and worker rights, but are nothing but ineffectual foils for the out-of-control Republicans. She will win in November, and the media will express surprise. After all, socialists can’t win.

Except they are, more and more, as a growing revolt against the fascistic policies of the GOP takes root.

More recently, a Democratic Socialist scored a major upset in the Florida primary for governor. The race was seen as a contest between two tepid centrists, and Politifact ( https://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2018/aug/27/fact-checking-florida-primary-candidates-governor/ ) lumped the eventual winner in with the “also runnings,” dismissing him with just once sentence: “Gillum, an African-American who has emphasized his working class roots, has drawn the backing of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the party in a state that Sanders overwhelmingly lost in the 2016 primary.” A week later, Politifact hasn’t even updated that.

Andrew Gillum, of course, won. The corporate media said,“He can’t win, because he’s a socialist.” But he won. And not by a tiny margin.

He is African-American, and that rises the fear of the GOP to a blind racist panic. They look at what Fox News calls “Soros-backed Gillum” and see a potential Obama, only an Obama who isn’t a tepid centrist. Gillum looks as ready to fight for his beliefs as a cat with its back arched. He’s the worst nightmare the GOP could have.

His GOP opponent, Ron DeSantis, immediately unleashed some dog whistles marveling at how articulate Gillum is (He is definitely more articulate than the brain-damaged Trump) and coming up with the singularly oddly-phrased, “We can’t let him monkey this up.” Some neo-Nazis promptly jumped in with a truly vile robo-call that had a purported Gillum speaking in a minstrel voice while jungle noises sounded in the background. DeSantis promptly condemned the tactic, but the tone has been set. This is the party of Trump, a liar, a racist, a tin-horn dictator and a possible traitor, and the rot spreads from the top. And DeSantis describes himself as “A Trumpist, through and through.”

Gillum will win, and the media will be astonished. He’s a commie! He can’t possibly win!

Even the Guardian is playing that game, as they did in the 2016 primaries. Gillum, at most a New Dealer, is “Left wing”. DeSantis, a proud Trumperdoo, is described as “conservative.” Trump is about as conservative as a rabid dog.

The Democratic Socialists of America (dsa.org) describe themselves thusly: “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.”

I take a similar tack: People should not be existing to support the economy. The economy should exist to support the people.

They support strong unions, good wages, abolition of Citizens United, and Medicare for All. And they will fight for them.

If you share those beliefs, support DSA and other candidates willing to fight for those beliefs. The “Third Way Democrats” had their chance, and showed they aren’t willing to fight. It’s time to move on.

Be wary, however, of frauds, morons and charlatans. The DSA had one candidate this summer who claimed to be a Columbian immigrant. Turned out she was born in America, and while her father was from Columbia, he was naturalized before she was born, which made her memories of being raised in a remote Columbian village rather farcical. Every party gets those: the Dems had John Edwards, the Greens have Jill Stein, and the Republicans…well, the Republicans seem to prefer frauds, morons and charlatans. They are, after all, the party of Trump.

They are a danger, and gravitating to a weak center isn’t going to stop them. If you want to fight these fascists, you have to start right now.

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Blame Canada — Or maybe it’s Canadian Bacon

Blame Canada — Or maybe it’s Canadian Bacon

By on Sunday, June 10, 2018

June 10th 2018

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) just defined the term “custard head” by agreeing that if the summit between Pissmop and Little Rocket Man blow up, it’s all Canada’s fault. The only reason he won’t replace “custard head” in the dictionary is because it’s much easier to spell and pronounce than is Krishnamoorthi. Still, his constituents, in a deep blue district, need to peer closely at their Congressman and ask themselves if the man is secretly an idiot, or maybe just had one too many that morning.

You expect this sort of lunacy from the Trump administration, and most of the Republicans in Congress, who are so busy trying to conclude their coup against the United States that they basically don’t give a wet shit how crazy Donald is, so long as they can finish off the New Deal and those pesky Civil Rights that they hate so much.

It’s easy to dismiss Krishnamoorthi as a custard head. It’s kind of the default state of Trump supporters these days. There’s also the crooks and the traitors, but they tend to be a subset. Most Trump supporters are fools. Either they know what he is and don’t care, or they don’t know what he is. Either state requires a heroic amount of stupidity.

“Krishnamoorthi was cuing off shameless Trumpenflak Peter Navarro, who actually said out lout, “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door, and that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference…That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did, and that comes right from Air Force One.”

OK, I immediately thought of the song, “Blame Canada” from the animated movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

But I also thought of Michael Moore’s foray into fictional satire, the movie, “Canadian Bacon.” In it, a US president (Alan Alda) is tricked into a near-nuclear war with Canada by a lunatic businessman (GD Spradlin) whose business failure he blames on Canadian tariffs. As the crisis mushrooms (so to speak) Alda’s character tries to phony up a new cold war with the Russian president, a fellow named Vladimir, and when that fails, proposes an international war on terrorism, a concept his cabinet dismisses as too absurd for words. He doesn’t want a war with Canada; he is educated, and knows what happened whenever the US tried messing with Canada. It never went well.

It’s depressing how sane and intelligent the characters, even Spradlin’s, are, compared to what we have in reality now.

Michael Moore made that movie 23 years ago. Obviously this is all his fault.

OK, so if Trump screws up in his meeting with Kim Jung Un, it’s Trudeau’s fault. He made Trump look weak, foolish and brittle, qualities nobody had ever suspected of Trump before the all-powerful Trudeau destroyed him.

I suspect that Trudeau, who is widely viewed in Canada as a kitten with some housebreaking issues, is Trump’s go-to foil, someone he can blame for if the talks are so catastrophic that even Trump can’t put lipstick on it. Trudeau is a lightweight who is a bit too cozy with oil and some other vested interests. He does great photo op, and has a knack for crowd-pleasing moves. Machiavellian and possessed of great personal power he is not. If his last name was “Smith” he would probably be in the Civil Service, in charge of teaching French in Newfoundland and Labrador. Yes, Canada has a province called “Newfoundland and Labrador.” It used to be just “Newfoundland” but someone decided a mouthful like that needed four more syllables. It’s not quite as goofy as “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim”, but it is in the same league. Oh, wait. No, it’s in the Canadian League. But I digress.

I spent some time trying to think of historical parallels to this. I’m sure there are some, since many leaders in history have been childish, bratty, and incapable of normal human relationships. Most of them have been (wisely) forgotten by history. A fellow named Dr. Robert Sternberg wrote a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Foolish, and identified five fallacies associated with bad or unwise leadership. These fallacies were, in order given: Unrealistic Optimism; Ego-Centrism; Omniscience; Omnipotence; and Invulnerability. All involve large amounts of self-deception, slopping over into delusion.

Hmm. Looks like Trump is what the baseball scouts call “a five-tool player”. He makes Louie Gohmert look sane. That’s terrifying. He makes Krishnamoorthi look smart, even as he makes him sound stupid. That’s pretty scary, too.

Now, I’ve said in the past that I never expected this summit to take place. I figured someone in the Trump administration would figure out a way to put the brakes on this diplomatic disaster. But I keep underestimated the Republican capacity for servility and cowardice when it comes to Trump. They really are pathetic.

Trump, barring a massive political insult even he can’t ignore, will come back, gloating over his great victory. He will have convinced North Korea to destroy its nuclear arsenal, and in return, all America will have to do is destroy its own nuclear arsenal, cede Hawaii to North Korea, and become a province of Russia. Hawaii, because volcanoes and it will annoy the shit out of Barack Obama, and Russia because…well, that had nothing to do with Korea. He was going to do that anyway.

Chuck Schumer, a bit of a kitten himself, tweeted, “Are we executing Putin’s diplomatic and national security strategy or AMERICA’s diplomatic and national security strategy? After the last few days, it’s hard to tell.” No, actually, it’s all too easy to tell. Trump is a fool, a crook, and a traitor.

Now, Kim might greet Trump by telling him “I like Trudeau because he makes you look weak and stupid.” And during negotiations, speak to his aides (well, his sister) in Korea, with the only English word in clear being “Mueller” interspersed with giggles.

At which point, Trump will declare war on Canada, and then attack Mexico because someone handed him the map upside down.

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Milkin’ It — Why Canada Won’t Be Cowed By Trump

By on Saturday, June 9, 2018

June 9th 2018

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

In the chaotic and insane presser Trump gave at the G6+1 summit in Québec he railed about the Canadian tariffs of 270% on American dairy products. He howled that this was a devastating blow to America’s brave, patriot dairy farmers, or words to that effect. Canada was screwing America inside out, an insult not to be borne!

Oh, those awful, awful Canucks. (Truth in Advertising time for those who didn’t already know: I’m a Canuck). Two hundred and seventy percent! No wonder America’s going down the tubes! It’s probably why the US budget will have an extra trillion deficit next year!

Well, it was almost lost in the avalanche of sheer nonsense that Pissmop uttered during that strange press conference, but what makes his whines about Canadian dairy pure nonsense is this one inconvenient fact: The US actually enjoys a trade surplus with Canada in dairy. It’s about a 5-1 trade surplus, at that. Granted, the market, in both directions, is minuscule—about $600 million US—but it still means that the US exports about a half billion in dairy to Canada while Canada exports about $100 million to the US. Now, in case Trump is reading this, I’ll type it very slowly: The US does not have a trade deficit with Canada over dairy, the stuff that comes from cows, and for some reason, hens. It actually sells more than it buys. Have someone with actual business experience explain it to you, Donald.

So why is Fearless Leader pissing and moaning about Canadian cows? The best reason anyone can think of is that Canada has a regulated, efficient and effective dairy industry, whereas the American one is in such an intense state of cutthroat competition that there is a huge oversupply of milk, with the result that the “gate price”–the price distributors are willing to pay to take it off farmers’ hands—is lower than what it cost the farmers to produce the milk. And that’s with the cows doing all the work.

American dairy farmers overproduce, hoping that having more to sell means that more will be bought, and they will thus get a bigger share of the market. Anyone who has taken Econ 101 in high school knows this is utter nonsense, and someone who knows anyone who took Econ 101 in high school will probably be able to explain it to Pissmop.

Milk is milk is milk; there isn’t a great variation in quality from one farm to the next, despite what the advertising says, so the market is free to select the lowest price, knowing the quality will be about equal to the stuff selling for a few pennies more per gallon or liter. Which further drives down prices.

What will happen is what is happening: small farms are being driven, and the big dairy companies are buying their stock, overproducing yet more to destroy the remaining small farmers, and eventually they will turn on one another, and classic economics suggest we’ll eventually end up with a consortium of three-to-five big companies that will collude to artificially raise milk prices and limit supply. This is known as “the free market”, a market in which suppliers, consumers, and the product are anything but free in any sense of the word.

Not only are American farmers going broke competing with one another, but last year they cumulatively threw away forty three million gallons of milk—literally dumped into holes in the ground.

In Canada, they have this thing called “Supply management.” The Canadian Dairy Commission (and doesn’t the name just scream “Nazi socialism”?) set national quotas on supply, and coordinate with the ten provinces to ensure a stable market in which supply very nearly matches demand. (I don’t know if it applies in the Territories, despite that being nearly half of Canadian real estate—I haven’t heard much about an Inuit dairy industry, and cows are notoriously unhappy on ice).

Now here’s the thing: It works. It works extremely well. Yes, it means higher prices for consumers, but since Canadians enjoy a higher level of disposable income, nobody minds much. They look at the madness of the American industry and realize that the extra fifty cents a liter is a wise investment.

American wants a dumping ground for the surpluses created by its overheated cutthroat industry, and Canada isn’t interested in destroying its own efficient and effective industry in order to oblige suicidally competitive American dairy farmers. Nor do they want a system that encourages such patently destructive competition. They are also suspicious of lax American regulations regarding the use of hormones and antibiotics in cattle, and GMOs. The wild-west approach to basic health and safety measures in America has led to a deepening mistrust of American food products.

Pissmop has to know he’s spewing nonsense when he attacks Canada over dairy trade imbalances, since it’s obvious the existing imbalance actually works in America’s favor. (Part of the reason for that is that Canada doesn’t limit imports on cheese, and the American standards for cheese, which include permitting a certain amount of animal parts in the cheese, is much lower—as are the prices.)

Trump is taking a similar approach to trade with the rest of the world: American can’t compete because standards are low for their products, so Trump is demanding the rest of the world lower their health and safety regulations to let America compete “on a level playing field.”

The problem is the rest of the world, including Canada, perhaps America’s best friend, are looking at the US the way is is right now and muttering to themselves, “Don’t be that guy.”

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