Proving only that putting Republicans in power is dangerous because they do paranoid as well as predatory things antithetical to what the country once stood for, Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed into law the state GOP’s anti-shariah bill.
Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.
The law has been dubbed the “Shariah bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code …
About 20 states [all under GOP governance] have considered similar legislation but the Kansas law is the only one signed in recent weeks, Council on American Islamic spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said.
“It’s unfortunate the governor chose to pander to the growing Islam-phobia in our society that has led to introduction of similar unconstitutional and un-American legislation in dozens of state legislatures,” Hooper said.
Hooper said legislators have often referred to Shariah law in supporting such legislation, but he said they take the word out of the bill to stave off legal challenges. The Kansas bill does not mention Shariah.
The Islam-o-Phobe most responsible for the national campaign to get anti-Shariah legislation passed into law in red states is birther Frank Gaffney, the man lampooned in the excerpt from the Tom Tomorrow cartoon, above.
Gaffney is also a prime mover in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and a vocal part of the Bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. Over the past few years he’s been in the blog on a frequent basis, every time for activities connected with electromagnetic pulse doom and whipping up fear, confusion and hysteria over the imagined creeping threat of shariah law in this country.
While we won’t be around to read future histories of the country, those who write them won’t be kind because of the likes of Frank Gaffney and the extremists of the Republican Party. They are a symptom the country is ungovernable and immune to reason, now in a demonstrable decline.
Who in Congress is feeling twinges from their conscience? Which men or women among them feel they should be doing something in this time of great need? Some members keep making requests for data crunches on various facets of our economic and national failure — like the youth labor market and corporate outsourcing — from the Congressional Research Service. And since the CRS is unfailingly honest in such matters, it has produced useful information, over which absolutely no action will be taken. Because the Republican Party, as everyone knows, abhors facts and information.
There is now widespread implicit knowledge that oursourcing has been very bad for Americans. But absolutely rock hard data, illustrated nicely, is always very good to have. If only because it is inarguable.
Two figures give one the gist of the CRS report on outsourcing. They are damning.
Outsourcing has not been offset by a 1-to-1 level in foreign return investment into hiring in the US. Also, US corporate multinational outsourcing has remained inexorable and constant over the last ten years, dipping or leveling only when a recession has occurred, or a global economic collapse. That is, it is no different now than at the beginning of the last decade when it really took off.
Readers will notice how the practice of shipping jobs overseas accelerated at the beginning of the last decade. The slope of the line has remained fairly constant with leveling occurring in the middle of the decade when the Bush administration put the country into a recession. It also plunged upon the global economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
However, readers will also see how it had picked back up again slightly by 2009, while commensurate employment in the US itself was still plunging.
The second figure shows US corporate multinational foreign investment against outside investment into this country.
There is nothing particularly close to 1-to-1 balance after 2000. Jobs went overseas. The balance has always been negative for American labor with foreign return investment not making up the losses.
The report also notes that when the jobs and production lines go overseas, the value chains which include other related support industries also go with them. And are not replaced.
So who is requesting such reports and why? What is the point? Our leaders, and everyone else knows that at this juncture, no action will be taken, regardless of any findings or indications of ongoing calamity.
In e-mail, Steve Aftergood informs DD: “It’s entirely possible, even likely, that no one in Congress requested these reports and that they were self-initiated by the CRS analysts.”
So I could have been overly generous in my assessments. However, it is heartening that people of integrity and conscience work at CRS and are trying to contribute to the national debate.
Music to read a CRS report to. “You buy that toilet, it was made in China …”
Sometimes if Paul Krugman harps on unemployment and publishes data extracted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics enough, minor things get done. Someone unspecified in Congress either gets anxious about the state of affairs or wishes they had statistics to refute arguments that employment opportunities in this country are dreadful. So the Congressional Research Service is commissioned to write a report.
And the CRS is, generally speaking, unfailingly honest.
This has resulted in two papers, published by Steve Aftergood at the Secrecy blog, on youth employment in this country, and its trend over the last twelve years.
From the age of 16-19 I either worked at the Pine Grove Municipal Swimming Pool or managed it. It wasn’t hard to get that job.
However, in the last twelve years, the trend for youth employment has always been downward, except for a slight leveling in the middle of the decade. Since 2009, conditions have become markedly worse.
“Over the past decade, teens and young adults have experienced a precipitous decline in employment …” it reads.
A figure in the report maps youth labor market trends from 1948 to the present.
From 1948 to 2002, the youth labor market was fairly stable, showing slight cyclical ups and downs, perhaps tied to bad economic conditions much less severe than presently, and which eventually passed. In fact, for the age group 20-24, people fresh out of training or college and entering the workforce, there was even a slight upward trend overall.
After 2002, and especially after 2008, things became bad for everyone young, differing in matters of degree — sometimes large, depending on whether you were white, Hispanic or African American. (In that order.)
And the group which has taken the worst shot has been the very young, aged 16-19.
In view of the trends mapped in “Youth Labor Force Trends” one might expect the investments in youth job training in “Vulnerable Youth” to be unremarkable over the same period.
And such is the case.
Tucked away in the back of “Vulnerable Youth” is a table of investments in youth jobs. Except for a slight bump in 2008, national expenditure on such programs has been stagnant, even decreasing slightly, in opposition to labor statistics which show irrefutable and pressing need.
It is another study of one symptom of national decline.
Why someone in Congress requested such reports is a mystery because, of course, nothing will be done.
Also among the latest posts on Secrecy blog is a longish piece on the National Security Agency’s effort to avoid minor embarrassment over an old report on US reconnaissance aircraft flights over the old Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“[The] article does present what appears to be some valuable ‘new’ information including some fine details about [signals intelligence] coverage of the U-2 incident in May 1960,” writes Steve Aftergood of Secrecy blog.
“But the author himself acknowledged that all of this is ancient history.”
In 1960, labor trends were far better than now. People had reason to have hope. However, generally speaking, the data trends now show they can stop wasting time on such pipe-dreaming.
Remember, too, that in 1960 the country’s population was 179 million. Today it is 312 million. So the labor force employment, shown as percentages in the CRS report figures, indirectly indicates much higher raw numbers of people unemployed or underemployed now than in the period marked. Use of percentages, while still a good metric, applies a relative smoothing to the graphical presentation of the material.
A key House committee has voted to cut food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a crippling wave of budget cuts come January. — AP
If there are any men or women of stature [at the Pentagon] aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it … We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Jesus of America sez ‘Guns, not butter. The rest just goes all for naught.’ And I’m going to push this until I see numbers.
While fresh out of any semblance of outrage from leadership, we have replaced it with quite the talent for knee-jerk indecency.
Still collapsing job markets include lousy minimum pay work at big box retail stores because nobody’s buying except the halves. Also, lousy minimum and sub-minimum pay work in childcare has been hurt. Economic collapse has forced families to rely on grandparents who do it for free. Or they can do it themselves because someone in the family has been de-jobbed again.
Also, gambling is off. Because the gambler cohort, those that go to Atlantic City on the party bus for the weekend, have been hit hard by firings. Plus, having seen their wages compressed and the cost of living escalate by a few inches, they’ve lost even the little gold they formerly threw away at casinos.
Hospitality work is also not happening. Because that Discover America dog I mentioned last weekend just won’t hunt.
“The gambling industry is not showing much growth,??? says Gregg Mulholland, analyst with Sageworks, a financial information company. A spokeswoman for the American Gaming Association — which represents casinos and, therefore, only one-third of the amusement and gaming sector — says employment was largely flat …
With childcare costs increasing and income growth stagnant, more grandparents have stepped in to look after young children – roughly 40% to 60% of those living within 30 minutes of their grandchildren now provide some care …
Worth special mention is Apple. No one ever mentions how much job loss Apple is responsible for in this country — and I’m not speaking of the iStuff manufacturing sent to China — but the employment destroyed because of the ubiquity of GarageBand and similar things.
Now you may think the wide distribution of cheap digital recording software has been a boon. Think a little more deeply about it and consider how well served society is when everyone who can make music, but maybe shouldn’t, does it anyway.
The software contributed to a radical devaluation, not only of the making of music, but also in any employment associated with it, transferring what was left of the spoil, to Apple.
So while there has been much demonstrable creative destruction, the creative replacement of that which was ruined with compensating value has been much harder to categorize.
The salient graph:
Jobs in motion picture and recording have remained stagnant over the last three months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The slowdown in hiring is partly seasonal, as some of TV shows end their productions this time of year, says producer Jonathan Taplin, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences. Digital music recording equipment like Pro Tools and Apple’s software package GarageBand, which was launched by Apple in 2004, have also replaced some studio jobs in the music industry, he says. “Digital technology is pretty much killing the standalone recording studio business,??? says Taplin, who is also director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, an arts and media research group. “Every band has much higher quality tools on a Mac than we had with 24-track tape in the 1970s or even five years ago …”
Fuck the guy from USC, I’m using recording software I bought well over five years ago. On a PC, not a Mac.
What might have been more perceptive an observation is that each copy of Apple’s Final Cut Pro video-making software transfers a substantial amount of money to Apple without enabling many sucked into buying it to recoup their investment. Because the economy now dictates that all video and music be free.
Unless you siphon it though Apple iTunes and pay an enabler site to put it there. Then somebody gets theirs, it’s just not you. The enabler and Apple divide your tithe right before they plant you way out back and six feet under in the vast on-line digital market.
If Apple and the technologies of creative destruction give the working majority any more help like this — well, most just won’t need it ever again.
Done without Apple’s “help.”
“We are facing a very difficult transition from manufacturing to a service economy. We have failed to manage that transition smoothly. If we don’t correct that mistake, we will pay a very high price. Already, the average American is suffering from the failed transition.” — Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel laureate.
On Loyalty National Lickspittle Day, we rededicate ourselves to the common good, to the cornerstones of liberty, equality, and justice more vigorous bootlicking and to the unending pursuit in the unbending pursuit of a more perfect Union of leaving things just the way they are, never getting anything done, except for odious and empty stuff like this.
In order to recognize the American spirit of loyalty and the sacrifices that so many have made for our Nation ass-kissing, apple-polishing and brown-nosing, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Lickspittle Day.” On this day, let us reaffirm our allegiance to the United States of America, our Constitution, and our we display our founding true values.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2012, as Lickspittle Day. This Lickspittle Day, I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance …
“Lay the scourge upon those in want for if not, they will only desire more.” — from the Complete Sayings of American Jesus, in the year of our Lord, MMXII, at age 31.
1. Alabama is one of the country’s poorest states, and it taxes its poor residents’ incomes the most. The state has a poverty rate of 17.4 percent, which is among the nation’s highest. It also has the fifth-lowest median household income. A family of four at the poverty line must pay $548 in income taxes. This amount has consistently increased since 1994. Additionally, Alabama has the second-lowest tax threshold in the country. A single-parent family of three making $9,800 — or 55 percent of the group’s poverty level of $17,922 — remains subject to income tax.
2. Illinois taxes families of four making 57 percent of the poverty level. This means that a family earning $13,100 a year must pay income tax. Due to state fiscal issues, Illinois raised its flat income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent in 2011. This caused income taxes for a family of four at the poverty line to increase by $322. However, the state plans to fully implement tax credits for low-income families by 2013, which “will almost completely offset the impact of the income tax increase for poor families,??? according to CBPP.
What swell people! They’ll implement a tax credit by next year, maybe!
Rounding out the ‘top 5’, Hawaii, Oregon and Georgia.
Last week Paul Krugman published a few charts showing the fundamental and long-standing problem with the US economy — while productivity soared the benefit went to the very top, the holders of capital. Nothing was shared with the working class. Pay stagnated for almost everyone except the titans of business.
Austerity economics forced big cuts and lay-offs and at the state and local levels across the country.
The next graph shows the national increase in “income security” spending since 2007 — money for unemployment compensation and food stamps, surging for the people put out of work.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran another damning piece on Apple.
Unsurprisingly, Apple — the wealthiest company in the country — is big corporate tax evader. The company’s defense, for most of the piece, seems to be that they’re not alone in this — which is true. Everyone Apple’s size is a tax cheat.
Apple’s hub is in Cupertino, CA. It has a subsidiary in Reno, NV, for the express purpose of legally cheating the state of California out of tax on its business.
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
Of particular interest is Apple’s use of Luxembourg, an insignificant small country in Europe in the Ardennes Forest whose primary industry is financial services enabling legalized tax cheating and money laundering.
To avoid paying tax on the sale of popular music through it’s iTunes store, Apple funnels much of the digital purchasing through Luxembourg.
For instance, one of Apple’s subsidiaries in Luxembourg, named iTunes S.à r.l., has just a few dozen employees, according to corporate documents filed in that nation and a current executive. The only indication of the subsidiary’s presence outside is a letterbox with a lopsided slip of paper reading “ITUNES SARL.???
Luxembourg has just half a million residents. But when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East — and potentially elsewhere — download a song, television show or app, the sale is recorded in this small country, according to current and former executives. In 2011, iTunes S.à r.l.’s revenue exceeded $1 billion, according to an Apple executive, representing roughly 20 percent of iTunes’s worldwide sales…
The country has promised to tax the payments collected by Apple and numerous other tech corporations at low rates if they route transactions through Luxembourg. Taxes that would have otherwise gone to the governments of Britain, France, the United States and dozens of other nations go to Luxembourg instead, at discounted rates.
It’s no secret I despise everything Apple. But the New York Times points out, repeatedly, how the company actively works to deprive the state, local and national governments of potential tax revenue.
California, Apple’s home state, has a severe budget crisis. It has led to firings and shortfalls across the entire state’s education system, from primary education to college.
The Times describes how tiny De Anza community college, the school which counted Apple founder Steve Wozniak as a student, is struggling:
A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a “death spiral” …
But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
“I just don’t understand it,??? he said in an interview. “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.
“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.???
The Times’ continuing series of investigative pieces on Apple have landed heavy blows. It is now fair to view Apple often as a gigantic, selfish and predatory business, doing everything it can to maximize earning and profit despite the toll it takes on everyone else.
From the exploitation of abhorrent labor practices and lack of environmental and labor law in China, to outsourcing and offshoring, to legalized tax-cheating, Apple — the company that produces the beautiful consumer electronic computing baubles everyone covets like life itself — does it all.
The primary excuse from the company, to repeat — everyone else is into gathering the most spoil immorally but legally, too.
In a response to the Times, one can read it at the newspaper’s piece, Apple points to the jobs it has created in the United States and the taxes its individual employees pay.
Part of this seems to rest on the idea that Apple’s app-based hardware has generated as many as half a million jobs in the US.
This meretricious meme, like everything from Apple, is a bit hard to take. It is akin to believing Jeff Bezos is a job creator because he came up with Mechanical Turk, the service that allows Americans, and everyone else, to bid on human intelligence jobs that pay pennies. Everyone, therefore, who uses Mechanical Turk, can be said to have some type of job, if they want it.
Or to believe that everyone with a channel on YouTube with AdWords/AdSense monetization, has a job created by Google.
In this way the information tech industry which has creatively destroyed jobs claims to be creating new opportunities, pathways to profound systemic un-success, fruitless work for the majority disenfranchised in the great contraction.
Half a million jobs created by Apps. Really? And what, pray tell, is the average salary and benefits package?
Finally, the serial aggravation of columns which interview small business owners, trying to always float the idea that American workers are truly worthless.
I present a series of them, the interviewees nasty and complaining pieces of work, for a variety of reasons shifting all blame to the downright laziness and unsuitability of average Americans.
And we offer a competitive wage: $8.50 to $9.50 an hour. The $8.50 is just the starting wage. After 90 days we increase it to $9.50 to $10 an hour.
But many people add up their constantly renewed unemployment, food stamps and housing assistance and realize that they can make as much not working, as working.
We could raise wages to $100 an hour, fill the positions and then go out of business, taking all our jobs with us.
The man’s all heart, telling CNN that now he only hires people who have worked for a temporary staffing agency for three months, first.
We hosted a job fair where we hired 40 people. Twenty-five showed up for training. Only two lasted more than a couple of weeks. People work for three months and get themselves fired so they can collect unemployment for another year.
We have learned to document everything we do with an employee. We’ve become sticklers for regulation. Finally, we hired an inside recruiter and created surveys designed to discover who is truly serious about working.
We’ve raised wages from $12 per hour to between $15 and $18 per hour plus commission, meaning a salesperson starts between $24,000 and $38,000.
Again, in SoCal, the starting pay puts you right on or below the poverty line.
And the guy who’s business only exists because of the war on terror.
His firm, AEGIS Finserve Corp., provides payroll services to government agencies.
The lament? Americans fail background checks and — more importantly — they don’t have security clearances.
It’s a pain getting someone a security clearance. Aegis wants them pre-installed, at government expense so to speak, by people already vetted by employment in endless war.
Since the Patriot Act was passed, the time frame to get a clearance went from 90 days to nine months. While we conduct in-house due diligence, the 32-page trust application is forwarded to government agencies, such as the FBI, NSA, etc., and costs the firm upwards of $25,000 per candidate.
If a criminal record, psychological issue, poor credit or other problem, comes up, a candidate could be disqualified. Aegis then eats the due diligence costs …
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conclude, we are more optimistic about getting qualified people. Former military applicants have held or can get security clearances. We find they make excellent representatives for our company.
From the Center of Economic and Policy Research on such arguments, the assertion that it has always been this way.
“[Unemployment] may run into the millions, but as the iron, steel, and metal-working industries improve, a scarcity of skilled workmen is developing, states the magazine Steel this week.”
This shows that technology might change rapidly, but economic reporting at the Washington Post doesn’t. Many of the stories it has written in the last two years about shortages of skilled workers in the midst of mass unemployment could have been plagiarized from this 1935 piece.
It is also striking that this piece, like much current economic reporting, relies exclusively on business sources. The article does not make any reference to any independent experts and of course, no one from a union or any workers’ organization.
