The authors of the study, which examined the regulatory filings of the 100 companies with the best-paid chief executives, said that their findings suggested that current United States policy was rewarding tax avoidance rather than innovation.
“We have no evidence that C.E.O.’s are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises,??? the study concluded. “On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that C.E.O.’s and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people.???
The study comes at a time when business leaders have been lobbying for a cut in corporate taxes …
“We pay our taxes and we have added 5,000 more U.S. manufacturing jobs that were incentivized by tax benefits,??? he said.
How the President can lose to someone who’s nuts in 2012.
The ignoramus/rage vote over conditions goes all for the other side.
Can the Democratic Party sell the fact that the opposition is aimed at destroying Social Security and Medicare? It doesn’t have the best track record selling anything.
In T-shirt pictures:
The party of Ted Nugent vows to stop the war on lemonade stands
Only a soulless bureaucratic punk would authorize or advocate shutting down a kid’s sidewalk lemonade stand. And a normal, thinking, reasoning human being would be incapable of such a callous, power-abusing act of indecency. But in America today, the abject, heartbreaking reality is that such subhumans not only exist – they now infest our government like an evil pod of nonthinking death-row criminals …
Maybe the first thing Mr. Obama should do as proof that he is serious about reducing goony government regulations on business owners is to get his teleprompter gang to set up a statement for him to read that indicates he supports kids who sell lemonade.
Then he should visit Texas, witness how Gov. Rick Perry does it, stop at the first neighborhood lemonade stand he sees and give the young entrepreneur a buck or two to stimulate the economy. Just sayin’.
“Subhumans infest the government like … non-thinking death row criminals” and we know this because they’re attacking children’s lemonade stands.
In this context, “I’m voting for the psychopath” T-shirts aren’t the least exaggerated.
Late last year and again last week DD called the Republican Party a serious threat to national security. All because of its transformation into a cult of psychopaths who deny science.
Anyone who deviates from the orthodoxy of these psychopaths gets thrown down.
Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman, because he refuses to be be or act like a psychopath, is the best living example. He’s been punished for being a rational person and, subsequently, is virtually non-existent as a contender.
Today, Krugman uses the word “terrify” twice in reference to the GOP and its denial of science.
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.??? This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.
Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,??? one that has “got some gaps in it??? — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.???
That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.???
In his book “Fed Up,??? he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.???
I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence.
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
Because of a combination of things — a weak President who either does not understand the nature of his foes or is constitutionally unable to aggressively confront them in a time of great national peril — a psychopath could get elected in 2012.
Many Americans find strongmen appealing. In a time of peril they yearn for someone who looks good, talks big and who will say whatever lies are necessary to encourage their fantasies. And they will want to lash out. The biggest target will be the man in office.
Today we have GOP Presidential hopefuls — [the psychopaths] — who proudly squawk their disbelief, even antipathy, towards science.
They don’t believe in global warming. They don’t believe in evolution. They don’t believe in science that studies pollution or the trouble with having dirty air and water because they believe regulating water and air so they’re safe are impediments to amassing great wealth.
So they call for the EPA’s destruction.
They don’t even believe in the technology of modern lightbulbs!
You cannot shame or ridicule them on the subject. They’re impervious to facts and reasoned argument …
The serious security threats from this country are not exterior. They’re all internal. The GOP has made itself over into one of them.
You can’t have a modern nation run by such people.
At the end of 2010 I made my list of the greatest threats to US national security for the coming year. They were all internal and the list is here.
The GOP was last but not least on it:
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism or its desire to torpedo a nuclear arms reduction treaty because it despises the president.
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are … opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
Today we have GOP Presidential hopefuls who proudly squawk their disbelief, even antipathy, towards science.
They don’t believe in global warming. They don’t believe in evolution. They don’t believe in science that studies pollution or the trouble with having dirty air and water because they believe regulating water and air so they’re safe are impediments to amassing great wealth.
You cannot shame or ridicule them on the subject. They’re impervious to facts and reasoned argument.
And Rick Perry, like Michele Bachmann, and the rest in a group that gets higher numbers than the non-existent John Huntsman, are psychopaths. Huntsman apparently refuses to act like a psychopath and is punished for it in the popularity contest.
Psychopaths are defined by their lack of empathy, continual lying, irresponsibility, poor behavior, gigantic egos and mercilessness.
And to win support from the Tea Party wing for the nomination, the GOP representatives must exhibit all these traits.
Even if, deep down inside, one of them actually believes throwing off all scientific thought because it’s all either hoaxes or socialist elite plotting is a bad idea, the front-runners would never admit it.
Many consider this a joke, a source for laughs. And I suppose it is if your belief is such people could never be elected president.
But they could. And here’s how it could happen.
It’s not unreasonable to think that Barack Obama will either choose to do nothing that matters on unemployment and the economy or will be stymied by the GOP.
And enraged by bad conditions, just enough of the voting public will act out of either stupidity or spite in a desire to strike back in the voting booth, that a GOP psychopath who doesn’t believe in science will get elected to the most powerful country in the world.
How could that be so bad? We elected George W. Bush and the country survived.
Well, it really didn’t if you look close. The place is wrecked. The government is paralytic, purposely so.
It is the desire of half of the Congress to smash any government action.
In the last couple months this blog has dealt, off and on, with the “cyberwar” word.
And one of the bits the fearmongers of “cyberwar” have glommed onto to is the meme that the financial system could be destroyed through cyberattack.
Well, the GOP threatened to make the nation default, the President gave them what they wanted, and a credit rating agency issued an opinion squarely blaming the Republican Party.
The stock market went volatile and in this financial system thousands have lost money, all as a result of a combination of obeisance to GOP psychopaths and a disintegrating world economy that needs to look to the US for some measure of stability.
The serious security threats from this country are not exterior. They’re all internal. The GOP has made itself over into one of them.
Paradoxically, Wall Street and the wealthy — always marked as the theoretical targets in discussions of cyberwar — went out of their way to guarantee the Tea Party would take control in 2008, so displeased were they with the alleged socialist in the White House.
And they’ve been damaged by their real world choices.
You put psychopaths in power, people who don’t believe in anything outside what is passed around their own warped cult, and you have the very strong although minority party in the US.
One wonders what the long view thinkers in the Pentagon make of it? Do they have any real long view thinkers?
Certainly no one in the parked in the public defense think tanks ever discusses the issue of a major political party morphing into a security threat.
What is the point of a mighty war machine when everything has been destroyed at home, when their is no belief in science or even logic, because it clashes with internal beliefs?
What do the Pentagon men do?
Just keep polishing and admiring their squadrons of flying robot drones?
The President, in his Saturday speech, incapable or unwilling to simply utter truth — that it is the GOP/Tea Party that drove the country to the brink of default, the party that has refused to let anything be done in its aim to destroy him and the middle class:
On Thursday, I visited a new, high-tech factory in Michigan where workers are helping America lead the way in a growing clean energy industry.
They were proud of their work, and they should be. They’re not just showing us a path out of the worst recession in generations–they’re proving that this is still a country where we make things; where new ideas take root and grow; where the best universities, most creative entrepreneurs, and most dynamic businesses in the world call home. They’re proving that even in difficult times, there’s not a country on Earth that wouldn’t trade places with us.
That doesn’t mean we don’t face some very tough economic challenges. Many Americans are hurting badly right now. Many have been unemployed for too long. Putting these men and women back to work, and growing wages for everyone, has got to be our top priority.
But lately, the response from Washington has been partisanship and gridlock that’s only undermined public confidence and hindered our efforts to grow the economy.
So while there’s nothing wrong with our country, there is something wrong with our politics, and that’s what we’ve got to fix. Because we know there are things Congress can do, right now, to get more money back in your pockets, get this economy growing faster, and get our friends and neighbors back to work.
The payroll tax cut that put $1,000 back in the average family’s pocket this year? Let’s extend it. Construction workers who’ve been jobless since the housing boom went bust? Let’s put them back to work rebuilding America. Let’s cut red tape in the patent process so entrepreneurs can get good ideas to market more quickly. Let’s finish trade deals so we can sell more American-made goods around the world. Let’s connect the hundreds of thousands of brave Americans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to businesses that need their incredible skills and talents.
These are all things we can do right now. So let’s do them. And over the coming weeks, I’ll put forward more proposals to help our businesses hire and create jobs, and won’t stop until every American who wants a job can find one.
But we can no longer let partisan brinksmanship get in our way–the idea that making it through the next election is more important than making things right. That’s what’s holding us back–the fact that some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.
So you’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. And I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.
Members of Congress are at home in their districts right now. And if you agree with me–whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or not much of a fan of either–let them know.
If you’ve had it with gridlock, and you want them to pass stalled bills that will help our economy right now–let them know.
If you refuse to settle for a politics where scoring points is more important than solving problems; if you believe it’s time to put country before party and the interests of our children before our own–let them know.
And maybe they’ll get back to Washington ready to compromise, ready to create jobs, ready to get our fiscal house in order–ready to do what you sent them to do.
Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it. That’s a hard truth–but it’s no excuse for inaction. After all, America voted for divided government, not dysfunctional government, and we’ve got work to do. And when we come together and find common ground, there’s no stopping this country. There’s no stopping our people. There’s no holding us back. And there is every reason to believe we’ll get through this storm to a brighter day.
I thought MSNBC’s work in Wisconsin on Tuesday night wildly inappropriate. They front loaded the news and were burned to a crisp.
Between Ed Schulz and Rachel Maddow, the network had built up the Wisconsin recalls as a huge victory, a raising the flag on Iwo Jima moment, a big strike back against the other side.
What they got was the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge.
Specifically, the big movie starring Richard Shaw, Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and a bunch of other name stars.
Shot in Spain, it was one of those big production movies so badly done it’s silly. Which, coincidentally, is unfortunately typical of premature Dem proclamations of victory.
By the end of the Bulge the climactic panzer battle looks like it’s taking place on a hot desert plain, not the forests of the Ardennes in the dead of winter.
“How did we get to el Alamein?” someone should have asked in post production.
Still, the Battle of the Bulge is something of a tragi-comedic show of fanaticism and delusion.
Richard Shaw plays Hessler, the ramrod steely German miraculous panzer leader, brought back for a last campaign, one to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He gets carried away by the new Tiger tanks he’s been given (in the movie they’re old crap Pattons we sold to Spain in the 50’s and 60’s) and a group of young soldiers singing “Das Panzerlied.”
Pick the one — uploaded by “arddel.” The sound is exquisite. Can you recognize the actor who would get a bigger role in “Where Eagles Dare”?
(It comes at 1:49.)
Behind those singing soldiers is a big banner: “Der Sieg wird unser sein.”
“The victory will be ours.”
Another banner reads: “Glauben. Kampfen. Siegen.”
“Believe! Fight! Win!”
Win the fucking future.
Hessler orders his skeptical orderly, a much older soldier who has been through all the campaigns, to sing. The man does so but you can see in his eyes he know it’s rot. What was once great now just isn’t good enough.
And to my mind it’s a good metaphor for our leaders. It was Ed Schulz in Wisconsin.
It’s Barack Obama when he went onstage yesterday at some measly battery plant in Michigan, choosing not to seriously discuss any of the problems that need fixing.
Everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault he can’t do anything. But he just can’t bring himself to speak it. Instead, another exhortation — onward to victory, the equivalent of singing a song — from the local bunker.
(Between two states, the place employed 150 people! Bethlehem Steel, even in major decline in the mid-Eighties when I lived near it, dwarfed the place.)
And, of course, the delusion applies in extremity to all the wild-eyed crazies in the GOP, virtually the entire party.
None of our leaders can bring themselves to admit what the old geezers standing behind them know, those who can be ordered to sing and go along but who do so only reluctantly.
Like in the movie, the country’s best now is not going to be good enough. Not by a long shot.
“Pivoting to jobs” and making speeches at piss ant firms found by the advance team using Google for a few minutes won’t fix it. Budget cutting and deficit chopping and clapping your hands in glee when the government is downsized and more people are put out of work certainly won’t.
There are answers but fanaticism and delusion make them unreachable and unspeakable to the people in power.
At the end of Bulge everything has gone to hell for Hessler. The battle is lost but he’s trying to force the last panzer up the hill as barrels of fuel incinerate him. The Panzerlied can be heard in the background. (Here.)
His aide, the old man, walks back to what’s left of Germany.
That’s us. No Marshall Plan or anything else, awaits, though. Just more of the same.
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says contact with its experimental hypersonic glider was lost after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast.
The glider was launched from this Minotaur IV rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The agency says in Twitter postings that its unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 was launched Thursday atop a rocket, successfully separated from the booster and entered the mission’s glide phase.
The agency says telemetry was subsequently lost, but released no details.
A similar vehicle was launched last year and returned nine minutes of data before contact was prematurely lost …
The U.S. military is trying to develop technology to respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.
“Respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.”
Bomb the paupers in Somalia, Yemen or AfPak at Mach 20. That’s just what Americans clamor for.
This particular example of the empire’s dog crap was started in 2003, born of the pressing notion that the US needs to be able to bomb anyplace on the planet within a few minutes to an hour or two, max.
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
Think of it as a Keynesian jobs program for our men in the arms manufacturing industry who get erections over building things that are painted black and don’t work. Thank heaven for these chaps.
Number of Americans currently on food stamps: about 46 million. Or about 1 in every 6 or 7 Americans require food assistance.
If you need a daily example from the empire on where the real parasitism is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than the “Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2.”
In any case, the link is to a piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, syndicated from TD to the Guardian, and from a new piece added to her ten-year-old book, Nickel & Dimed, on not making it in America.
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalised in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
True.
It no longer makes you blink to read stories about the homeless being chased around in SoCal for being unsightly or people in Vegas being punished for giving out food. (The covering rationalization is that such a thing is unregulated and could lead to food poisoning cases. Which, as a practice, is even more evil than just admitting you don’t wish to let any beggars have food.)
Afflicting the afflicted is part of the national genetic character. In the last decades we’ve selectively bred for it.
It’s reinforced by economic collapse, the fear that if you don’t kick down on the person below you, you’re next, and the natural tendency of frightened people to scapegoat.
The Tea Party is the apotheosis of this. The party is made up of classic kick-downers and I’ve expressed admiration for their capability at unified rage. Rage motivates. It’s something Dems can’t do. Ever.
If you watched MSNBC for the last couple months, between Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, you’d have thought the GOP was on the run, headed for a good head-cutting session for attacking labor in Wisconsin.
And so when MSNBC put all their effort into covering the Wisconsin state legislator recall like it was raising the flag on top of Suribachi and got the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge instead, it was a big reverse. Very Republican districts stayed very Republican, the guy from the Nation magazine explained today.
The Dem labor protests really didn’t move the border that much.
And there’s no way to tell if they won’t be in for another 2010 nasty shock in 2012.
When rage is afoot over the economy and jobs, you’re for the fool’s hall of fame to think it can be used just because all GOP presidential hopefuls are defined in the narrow dark spaces between the categories of “odious reptile,”“white power Christian mullah” and “weird numskull.”
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions”, which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled”. In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space – by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers …
Whether households wanted to acknowledge overcrowding or not in 2010 census was immaterial The census-takers worked it out.
(At least here we did.)
From my standpoint as an enumerator in downtown Pasadena, overcrowding was obvious. And very frequently it took the form of big old houses, abodes which looked fine on the tree-lined streets off Colorado Street, but which hid a practice of cutting the interior rooms into stealth apartments.
You walked into these once fine homes and you were in the equivalent of a flop house with single bedrooms and large closets employed as rentals. Conditions ranged from poor to plain abominable.
In these, the kitchen and bathrooms were all common use. And these modern flophouses — while not in the mansion district near the Rose Bowl — were right beside the upscale condos inhabited by the lowers in the upper class. Grinding poverty was in spitting distance of wealth, made easy to overlook by silence, neatly cut lawns and painted exteriors.
Ehrenreich discusses one family on food assistance, even that made inhospitable by requirements, put in place to drive people away under the assumption that those who need the assistance are probably parasites.
“[They] discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting,” writes Ehrenreich. “In addition, [one family member] had to drive 35 miles a day to attend ‘job readiness; classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were ‘frankly a joke'”.
A few months after I moved to California I met Barbara Ehrenreich at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Nice lady. I was so in awe she probably thought I was a stalker.
Krugman, in one of today’s later blog posts at the NY Times:
And now it turns out that what really terrifies the markets, let alone the suffering unemployed, is the prospect of a second Great Depression — a prospect that has become much more likely thanks to the utter wrongness of elite policy priorities.
Great work, guys.
As an aside, with regards to eating squirrel or raccoon meat, there are good reasons why we got away from it.
Many decades ago, trichinosis was a problem in Pennsylvania because of the local predilection for eating their own pork sausage. Modern hog farming, while causing other problems, put an end to it.
On the other hand, raccoons can carry the enzootic disease, rabies. And the incidence of rabies appears thankfully rare in Michigan.
Rabies in wildlife (raccoons) has been successfully controlled in some parts of the United States through the use of oral rabies vaccination programs. In these programs packets of vaccine are distributed for consumption by these terrestrial rabies vector species.
So eat raccoon if you must. But be careful out there and encourage and reward diligence in your local bushmeat butcher.
Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal.
The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was.
Then there is the problem of Tea Partiers’ own class position. While they are funded by the wealthy, many do not identify themselves as wealthy (though there is dispute on the real demographics). Still, a strong allegiance to the American Dream can lead even regular folks to overestimate their own self-reliance in the same way as rich people.
I’ve never had any use for “allegiance to the American Dream.” I would imagine there are a lot like me. All considered blasphemers.
Idolatry of Ayn Rand apparently a data point.
And these things now essentially define political positions and are a big part of the near violent polarization in American life.
Interesting side note: From experience I know there’s an intense aversion to any music — even some made by celebrities — in the US when it gets “political.”
The problem is that most music (other than pure love songs and oldies interpretations), or written or painted work drawn from current American life, if it’s reality-based even a bit, can’t help but be perceived as taking a political position.
You’re not writing or creating from the standpoint of an honest individual voice if it doesn’t.
Therefore, I get the trivial objection that “The National Anthem” is political because it has one image in the video — a “Conservative Talking Points” blog on an iPhone — that’s objectionable because it’s seen as slanted. Strip away the slides for the entire thing, however, and the slant disappears.
Of course, it still has a position — the national image. Which definitely has nothing to do with any American dream. A nightmare, maybe, one that you can’t wake up from.
Good news, lads! Good news! Many people will never have a sense of humor that extends beyond watching others take pratfalls and the telling of shit jokes.
