It's A Wonderful Life in Reverse

Our "representatives" have decided to focus on the deficit rather than skyrocketing unemployment and dumpster diving. Cut spending and raise taxes, especially regressive taxation like jacking up the cost of cigarettes.

Don't change the fact that private equity and hedge fund managers are taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%, keeping up the pretense that they're investing their own money in ridiculous schemes like buying swamp land in California for CALPERS, instead of taxing their wages at 35%, the ordinary tax rate on earned income.

If there ain't no regular unemployment, up grows an underground employment. Not just talkin' 'bout prostitution, drugs and shoplifting. Also about desperate behavior, like this woman who called me presumably responding to my flyer for academic services rendered.

I should have known something was up when she mysteriously refused to tell me what she wanted to meet about. She only said it was something she had to show me in person. I thought she might be embarrassed to ask me to help her with term papering and I, too, could use the work.

I met her in a neutral place (Starbux, of course). It turned out she wanted to sell me on "Wellness Products" from Melaleuca, some scam pyramid scheme run out of Mormon country in Salt Lake City. She hinted that if I was a good girl, I might even become a salesman myself. She did have some nice shiny marketing materials in a big loose-leaf shaped book featuring lots of product pictures. One "disinfecting" liquid claimed to scrub areas clean of E Coli and the H1N1 virus. I told her to lead with that. At least she bought me a skim latte.

Coming home, I G--gled the company and found out it managed to siphon people's bank account or credit card numbers right off the bat (desperation again) with its promises of riches and a new car. Mary Kay, here I come. Lots of complaints that people checked their accounts and found mysterious withdrawals from the company. When questioned, company responded, "It's in the contract you signed." Whaaa? What contract? No one could remember there being a contract, let alone signing one. Caveat emptor. Don't drink the water.

Let's fight for the crumbs on the bottom, shall we?

Uncle Sam Wants Your Ass!

The math is clear: 2/3ths of US GDP depend on consumer spending and 15 million people are out of work. Can't just depend on the luxury (otherwise known as the "bailed-out") trade to lift all boats. Employment numbers for May 2010 were miserable: 431K new hiring, mostly government census workers, 41,000 private sector workers of which about 31,000 were temporary workers. The private sector hired 10,000 new full-time workers last month! Wooowooo!

Not surprisingly, retail sales fell in May, except in one area: premium toilet paper. According to the New York Times , consumers are chancing two-ply over one ply. Not only that, they're actually splurging on a new product, premium toilet tissue, which consists of 3-ply! Can you spare a square? Or does it show that our economy is actually in the toilet, and that we're right to think that economists are pulling "recovery" numbers out of their asses?

Greater New York Hates Children

The new Greater New York section of the Wall Street Journal, which is part of Rupert Murdoch's master plan to conquer the New York Times, is trying to destroy the education system. So far I have counted 3 articles either decrying extraordinary teacher absenteeism or claiming that school districts are stockpiling cash instead of returning it to property owners.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Murdoch trying to influence policy through the "news" section was the article on M.I.A. Newark teachers coming right before NJ Governor Christie's contract negotiations with the teacher's union.

The teachers' contract, which will expire this month and is currently under negotiation, is one of Gov. Chris Christie's few chances to influence the work rules of a New Jersey school district. Newark's absentee numbers are "completely unacceptable," said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Mr. Christie, who would ultimately approve or reject the teachers' contract. "That kind of history certainly doesn't work in favor of the union and its negotiating position unless that problem can be fixed."

I know the phrase "teacher's union" is shorthand for everything that is wrong with education or indeed almost any societal ill: unwed motherhood, baby daddies, high crime, low self-esteem; but making teaching an occupation with absolutely no job security and turning it into a hapless political football won't fill classrooms with highly qualified individuals. Anyone with half a brain will look elsewhere.

PRIVACY IS LIKE NEVER DYING: YOU PRETEND IT EXISTS

Geez, it's creepy to see some of the microniche ads placed next to my Gmail account. I don't go on FB much so I haven't focused heartily on those. Obviously some entity, whether it's supposed to be an inhuman algorithm or a handrubbing Peter Lorre type, is reading my gmail and selecting ads for me personally (O Joy!) based on what I sent to another individual. Is it supposed to make it less of an invasion by having the data collection and analysis done by something impersonal? (Of course, you don't know if it's impersonal. If the coin of the realm is information, then Google and FB have the Midas touch.)

So much of monetizing the Internet (in other words, selling ads) is based on the pretense that what citizens write is private. But of course it isn't. So the companies profiting pretend and give lip service to the notion of privacy and encourage their supplicants to believe in it when they know full well that all their thoughts and dreams are accessible, marketable and blackmailable. Knowledge that nothing is private is like knowledge that we're going to die. You push it into the back of your mind and try to forget the inevitable but sooner or later it's going to bite you on the ass.

SEXXXXXX!!!!! SCANDAL!!!!! SARAH!!!!!

In Putting A Price On Words , Andrew Rice gives some good inside dope on what's considered valuable content on the web:

Henry Blodget, former felon and Editor-In-Chief of Business Insider.com, “Perhaps it’s time to float a new theory: we’re already in the gutter. What we click on accurately reflects what we’re interested in, no matter how much we think and protest and hope to the contrary.”

A few days afterward, Blodget engaged in an entertaining multiplatform spat over the issue with the Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, producing the calculation that, in order to earn back a $60,000 annual salary, an online journalist needs to generate a whoppig 1.8 million page views a month.

There is, of course nothing wrong with giving readers what they secretly want every once in a while. The problem arises when you start producing articles solely for the id of the search engines, because some clicks are more valuable than others.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.--Oscar Wilde

Jesus. If Oscar were alive today, he'd be digitalizing and uploading his Lord Alfred money shots instead of coming up with eternal witticisms. However did we arise from the primeval ooze, anyway?

Embrace Your Extremism!

Sean Fenley has an article on Dandelion Salad, a wonderful compilation of progressive views. He wrote about how values consistent with a civilization with a social contract would be considered extreme now. How even Jesus Christ preaching to help the sick, poor and vulnerable would be called "radical" and "Marxist".

We have to embrace (or stand up to the extremist label) and push the discourse further to the left. Or even the center, circa 1970. Nixon would be a radical in these times. My reply to his piece:

Sean, you are so right. Civilized values and the societal good are held to be extreme left-wing views in the MSM. During the health care reform debate, Bill Moyers of PBS’ Journal program (sadly canceled) had knowledgeable professionals speak about Medicare-for-all and single payer plans. Maureen Dowd called such discussion that of “the left wing fringe.”

Armed militia men marching on DC on the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing are not referred to as extremists but merely as “exercising their first and second amendment rights.”

In certain states which allow the carrying of unconcealed weapons, armed people are testing their rights by entering such common areas as Starbucks stores. I should say, “armed white people” because I could not imagine any other race getting away with such privilege.

Propaganda by the corporate state is funding information now.

Today the NYT is running an op-ed piece written by Kris Kobach, one of the constructors of the Arizona “guilty until proven innocent” bill, who was an adviser to AG Ashcroft. There is no opposing view to pick apart the constitutional holes in his logic, unless you count Linda Greenhouse's article a few days before, "Breathing While Illegal"

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Greenhouse is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and has covered SCOTUS for years. She is afraid that the current court will not strike down such law as unconstitutional. With good reason. In 1982, a similar law in Texas was struck down. At that time, a young John Roberts was an assistant to Texas Attorney General William French Smith. He wrote that such an action was "judicial activism." He is now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Repugs Say to Dems-Hands Off!-Save Wall Street So It Can Kill Again

If you ever wondered whether the Wall Street Journal's news coverage had been slanted by Rupert Murdoch's grip on the paper (of course, the editorial pages were always virulently conservative but the news used to be untainted), all you have to do is look at the front page story , "Banks Falter In Rules Fight".

The story presents the banksters as poor elderly widows deprived of food and shelter by the evil Obama empire rather than as greedy pirates who almost brought the world economy down (and still might) then begged to be bailed out by the taxpayers. The story decries the Democrats' efforts to regulate the financial sector as a means of:

[S]queezing the banks' lucrative derivatives-trading business.

Derivatives (like mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps--CDS) are ways for traders to sell worthless paper then insure themselves against losses by having the taxpayer take the fall. That's what happened to your housing equity and 401K. Often the traders don't own the very bond or obligation that they're betting will fail. It's like betting that your neighbor's house will burn down and collecting if it does. There are legitimate uses for derivatives, to hedge against price and interest rate fluctuations, but those have paled next to the skyrocketing CDS casino.

AIG was the entity that took all these bets against the subprime mortgage market but had no money to pay out if the market tanked, which of course it did. The only rationale for CDS is to make gobs of money while producing nothing of value and maybe helping burn down your neighbor's house. But the story doesn't present regulation against these opaque contracts made in the dark as at all beneficial. Now that Obama appears to be succeeding in fighting against weakening regulation against CDS abuse:

That's drawing Republican complaints that the pending rewrite of the rules of finance will put the economy at risk.

If that isn't Orwellian, dunno what is. The derivatives put the economy at risk.

The funniest part of the story is the description of derivatives.

Derivatives are financial instruments that derive their value from the movement of something else--for instance, the price of wheat or other commodities, or the level of interest rates. In recent years, a strain of derivatives known as credit default swaps (in effect, a bet on a borrower's ability to repay a debt) has exploded. Derivatives figured in the global financial crisis, though their precise role is a subject of debate

.

There ain't no debate. Goldman Sachs et al sold toxic instruments to pension funds then bet against them because they knew they would fail. Put someone in jail, folks. And if there's any socialism going on, it's socialism for the rich.