08.20.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 2:36 pm by George Smith
It’s a commonly seen antic in our Culture of Lickspittle: Zillionaires who grab headlines or design new public images around a feigned concern for the middle class and inequality that’s the toast of Davos and Aspen.
From TIME magazine, an essay on how said zillionaires are allegedly expressing concern for the environment they’ve greased. In this case it’s Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, his quote simultaneously hilarious and intelligence-insulting:
“In defining the problem of inequality … Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein told CBS This Morning that inequality is ‘destabilizing’ and ‘responsible for the divisions in the country. The divisions could get wider. If you can’t legislate, you can’t deal with problems. If you can’t deal with problems, you can’t drive growth and you can’t drive the success of the country. It’s a very big issue and something that has to be dealt with.’ ???
From one of the architects of the crash and Great Recession.
Is Lloyd Blankfein suggesting he might open his nice pool for free community swims and stop the “burgling of pubic treasure” (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 2013) his firm is known for?
Of course, when reading the advice from swells, one always finds a suggested solution. In America, you must always have an allegedly constructive suggestion, even if it’s nothing of the sort. In this instance, it is something that could, according to a pearl-clutching expert, reverse inequality.
For TIME, the writer, a professor from Rutgers, Joseph Blasi, explains:
Moreover, in 2011 almost 90% of all capital gains and all capital income, such as dividends and interest, went to the top 20% of the population. One possible avenue is to apply to the middle class at large the approaches that the rich and powerful apply to themselves. Most of their income is from having a share of ownership and profits in businesses. In order to give middle class workers access to these types of capital income, we must dramatically expand the tax incentives for businesses of every size to offer shares of ownership to all of their employees. This ownership can come in the form of grants of restricted stock, stock options, ESOPS (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) and profit sharing …
Of course, the jargon, ESOP, means nothing to Americans. Just like the name Lloyd Blankfein.
The billionaire corporate predator toad known as Sam Zell used an ESOP to buy Tribune, the company that owned the Los Angeles Times newspaper. It was a maneuver in which Zell was able to use an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) to divert Tribune’s non-union employee 401(k) matching funds to workers into the buy, leaving him without holding much of the bag. Tribune and the Times were saddled with a substantial debt load, 13 billion.
And that’s the wisdom of our betters. More flim-flam.
You’ll want to immediately go to SoundCloud and listen to another teaser, Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein, from Loud Folk Live, the soon to be released no-hit of electrical digital socialist commie beat music, by the Dick Destiny Band. Performed in Dyna-Rock-Action ™ as you’ve never heard it before, live from the First Church of American Greed and Mammon in beautiful downtown Pasadena just off Rte. 66, where you get your kicks.
It is here. Run run run.
And while you’re there, feel free to give a listen to the other fun ditties.
Consider, you must keep your mind busy and strong with something after you’ve been tossed away. Not having had a single opportunity or offer to do anything in over a year (except work for Mechanical Turk — tried that), these are the kinds of things one gets involved in.
In such circumstances one finds you no longer care about a lot of things. Like corporate America being pillaged by Chinese hackers. As you are severed from the economy, you lose your acquaintances, any small network you may have had, and any illusion that you might have once been good for something.
So, like, rock and roll! And occasionally house-sitting for cats.
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08.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund at 3:32 pm by George Smith
Fresh from the First Church of USA!USA! and Mammon in Pasadena, off Colorado, the famous Route 66: Rich Man’s Burden! As you’ve never heard it before!
Recorded live in between times fruitlessly searching and hoping for work in the Corporate Bund.
Today’s timely message liner notes from the Federal Reserve:
New data from the Federal Reserve highlight how many Americans continue to struggle financially more than five years after the end of the Great Recession.
As of September 2013, when the central bank conducted the poll, a quarter of families said they were “just getting by,” while an additional 13 percent were struggling to make ends meet.
Asked to compare their current financial situation with how they were faring five years ago, as the housing crash was wreaking havoc on the economy, 34 percent of respondents said they were doing “somewhat or much worse” than in 2008. The same percentage reported essentially treading water, while 30 percent said they were doing better.
“Given that respondents were being asked to compare their incomes to 2008, when the United States was in the depths of the financial crisis, the fact that over two-thirds of respondents reported being the same or worse off financially highlights the uneven nature of the recovery.”
Play it loud and sing out!
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07.28.14
Posted in The Corporate Bund at 1:06 pm by George Smith
Trampled underhoof.
Krugman:
There is, however, one big difference between corporate persons and the likes of you and me: On current trends, we’re heading toward a world in which only the human people pay taxes.
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Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 11:17 am by George Smith
Jesus of America, live from deep inna heart of Pasadena south of Colorado. Especially enjoy the sermon and organ music. Share, share, share, like, like, like.
The beer tip jar’s open.
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07.23.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 1:02 pm by George Smith
Proven by science quote of day (no link):
“Austrian researchers … found people feel crummy any time they’re on Facebook for too long, no matter what kind of stuff pops up.”
I wouldn’t leave all the glory to Facebook. Much of the 2014 web makes you feel crummy.
I started publishing on the net, an e-mail newsletter in 1990 or so. A bit later I started posting to a university site, NIU’s Critical Criminology Department server, when most people were still using the first browsers, even image-less, like Lynx. So it’s a legitimate observation.
Part of the feeling crummy phenomenon is the complete corporate takeover of all aspects of the web. This has given everyone an environment in which Google search is a winner-take-all proposition with only the illusion of millions of choices. The practical reality is that only the top half of the screen in the first page of results matters.
Much of everything else has devolved into pushes to buy things and ubiquitous, inescapable advertising. Most big newspaper sites are now like bad television, news magazines and the Los Angeles Times being a very good working examples.
The actual news text furnished by journalists makes up a minor part of what is sent to visitors/readers. The rest of the bandwidth is reserved for squirting even more HD advertising and idiotic video on whatever’s trending at you.
This brings us to viral content, a feel good buzzterm which really means manipulative trolling, much of it to make you subconsciously feel bad or inferior for not doing something or appreciating the wild and amusing miracles of the day. This, obviously, so the viral sites can net millions of users, what might be thought of as internet plankton, to lure venture capitalists into giving them millions in cash money while they attempt to come up with a way to monetize it more, the latter usually be selling still more HD advertising or by the not-so-subtle pushing of corporate services and products.
From the AP:
US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has a hot stock tip for you: stop throwing so much money at anything that calls itself a social network.
Specifically, the Fed thinks the “valuation metrics” for “smaller firms in the social media” sector “appear substantially stretched.” And it’s not hard to see why.
Yo, an app that only lets you send messages that say “yo,” just received $1 million in funding. Cynk, a nonexistent social network for buying friends online, somehow – fraudulently – got a $6 billion valuation despite having no assets and no revenue.
And now NBA star Carmelo Anthony is pivoting to a second career as a venture capitalist with his own seed fund. As he told the Wall Street Journal, he has “long been interested in technology.”
You should feel crummy after being exposed to the internet every day for hours. It just shows you haven’t gone insane.
I’ve commented before on how parasitic web engineering is for the average user. In my experience, most of the code delivered to you has only one purpose. It’s to tie up your machine while it squeezes whatever it can from your web presence and private data.
A good working example is SoundCloud. And you can do a little experiment to see what I mean.
Travel out to the link I posted a day or so ago (or if you don’t want to listen to Dick Destiny’s tune, choose another to your liking).
Set the tune to play and bring up the Task Manager on your PC. When I do this, using the latest edition of Mozilla-Firefox, I immediately see that Soundcloud starts executing so much code on the client side that it hogs most of the processing power. Mind you, this is only to stream MP3 audio, the actual file of which was only between four and five megabytes.
Now minimize the window.
Voila. The processor immediately drops back to a normal rate. So most of the activity SoundCloud sends to you has nothing to do with vending audio at all, it’s all on the video and miscellaneous end, junk parasitic code that torques the engine of your machine.
Browser extensions like NoScript and NotScript, the latter which I use, also illustrate the predatory nature of the web. When you start using them and look at what they’re blocking, you’re given a nice course in what the corporate web is doing to you.
In other words, you’re being worked over by grasping corporate web design, none of it for your benefit.
And from the Department of Speaking of Which
My hosting provider runs a script that can’t be turned off, one to collect web statistics for the benefit of, ahem, my alleged small business. It polls clients every few seconds.
Perhaps you have noticed it.
I have nothing to do with it and don’t use any statistics it provides. If you use a no-script extension on your browser, you’ll see it. Block it.
It will not affect the usability of the blog.
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07.21.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund at 2:45 pm by George Smith
Johnny Pantywaist performed live in Pasadena over the weekend.
You’ll surely enjoy the loud electric folk of the Dick Destiny Band, in this case the Modern Gothic tale of an attack on Rupert Murdoch by a clumsy man with a shave cream pie.
A psychedelic three minute diversion after another day of open hostility in the Corporate Bund.
You can throw a couple dollars for strong beer or guitar strings in the tip jar here at the bottom of the page, but are not obligated. Or if you are in the area you can as to come see up perform such ditties for free every week.
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07.19.14
Posted in The Corporate Bund at 12:44 pm by George Smith
Today’s speech from the White House, an excerpt:
“This week, Vice President Biden will release a report he’s been working on to reform our job training system into a job-driven training system. And I’ll visit a community college in L.A. that’s retraining workers for careers in the fast-growing health care sector. Because every worker deserves to know that if you lose your job, your country will help you train for an even better one.”
BFD.
Since the president can’t do anything in the paralyzed system, he flogs the same half-dead horse he’s flogged for as long as he’s been elected: “We’ll community college our way back to a solid economy.”
Or, translated: “Now that corporate America has devalued labor to a critical level and you’ve lost your middle class job to automation or offshore cheapness, you can retrain for two years for a job as a nurse’s assistant, medical billing specialist, tooth scraper or limited mobility physical therapist that pays a lot less but with job security since 99.8 percent of the soon-to-be geriatric boomers aren’t going to be going anywhere except into hospitals and retirement communities near you.
The real answer is simple but undoable in our state of corporate fascism: Mandate the raising of payment so people can afford to live no matter the work they do and cut the contemptible US business propaganda that workers don’t have skills, are stupid and always need retraining because everyone overseas is better.
The Washington Post:
Ever since the job market began to recover in 2010, the decline in the unemployment rate has come with a big fat asterisk. The unemployment rate has been going down, the argument goes, but largely because people have stopped looking for work …
The report has no definitive answers for why workers appear to be disappearing, but it has two overarching theories:
The first theory is that higher levels of long-term unemployment as a result of the Great Recession are causing more workers to exit and remain outside the labor force. A well-chronicled feature of the economic recovery has been the very large numbers of Americans unemployed for more than six months — 3.1 million in June. The report highlights other economic research that has shown that jobless Americans have lower odds of finding a job the longer they’re unemployed. And a big part of the reason is that employers discriminate against those with long spells of joblessness …
The report’s second theory essentially boils down to the idea that the participation rate is lower because when the recession started, the labor market was already much weaker than was widely recognized. Nearly every demographic group saw labor force participation declines ahead of the recession. It was especially problematic for men, who have been beaten down by declines in manufacturing, advances in workplace automation and expanding trade.
Personal note: All week I’ve been getting e-mail for a raffle to see the President in LA at his community college stop, just contribute to enter.
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07.18.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 4:08 pm by George Smith
We live in corporate Taxavoidination.
For the past two weeks, mainstream journalism has glommed onto covering US businesses moving swiftly to merge with foreign equivalents, specifically in countries where the economy is rigged to encourage legal corporate tax cheating by American businessmen. They’ve published so much the White House has been moved to ask for legislation, a request that hasn’t a chance of going anywhere, to stop it.
Two phrases keep cropping up, economic patriotism, and corporate patriotism, as in “why ain’t there any?”
Who would think there is such a thing living in this country for the last two or three decades? Who is surprised at its non-existence? Corporate patriotism? It’s to laugh, something to say with a sneer.
The article I’m about to excerpt and link to is entitled “America’s unrequited corporate love affair,” by Timothy Noah. It’s the latest in the official college of explainers’ discovery of the renouncement of status as American for tax purposes as the to do thing in the corporate fascist state.
But what’s this about unrequited love? Who loves big American corporations? How do they inspire love in us? Disgust, fear, contempt and anger seem far more common.
Are America’s corporations loved because they haven’t fired you yet, only increasing your workload by a third or even 100 percent without paying any more over the last ten years? Are they loved because they only filched twenty dollars from your bank account this week in administrative and courtesy fees rather than forty? Are they loved because they bankroll politicians who are climate change deniers which is better than bankrolling one who would try to cancel the food stamp program and make new law so that people who default on debt because they have been put out of work can be quickly put in jail?
Have you ever heard anyone say “I love [Big Pharmaceutical Company] or [Boeing] or [Verizon]”?
We do know the groupies of the world of Silicon Valley tech uber alles love Apple. But Apple doesn’t love them back. Apple hates everybody, except the financial instruments of Luxembourg and Ireland where it launders its money. It hates the people that assemble its phones so thoroughly they started committing suicide, then rioted. That’s a case of global corporate Stockholming, where the tormented are conditioned into a sick love for their tormentors.
The news piece is decent but not anything you haven’t seen commented on previously. In the last four years corporate tax avoidance through off-shoring maneuvers has so distorted the economic landscape of the country even the business news media can’t whitewash it.
From MSNBC:
Consider Heather Bresch, the daughter of Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and the chairman of generic drug maker Mylan, who announced plans this week to reincorporate in the Netherlands. “Until now, Ms. Bresch ran an unabashedly proud American company based in a Pittsburgh-area suburb,??? a July 14 New York Times story notes. In 2011, the Times points out, Esquire magazine named Bresch “Patriot of the Year??? for her prominent role in promoting the Food and Drug Administration Safety in Innovation Act, passed in 2012, which tightened regulations on imported drugs.
Why would a U.S. industry executive be deemed patriotic for advocating a law that, however worthy, improved her company’s competitive position against foreign imports? Try not to be distracted by that excellent question. The salient point is that Bresch had a family connection in Congress and made effective use of it. Now she’s thanking the U.S. government by repatriating her company to the Netherlands to dodge taxes.
Bresch told the Times that she doesn’t want to play the inversion game, but has to because Congress won’t lower corporate tax rates. In fact, Obama’s proposed tax reform plan, currently stalled in Congress, would lower the corporate rate from 35% to 28%, and 25% for manufacturers. But as Bresch told the Times, Mylan already pays an effective tax rate of 25%. Reincorporating in the Netherlands will lower that to 21%, and eventually to the high teens.
Speaking in defense of corporate fascism and predation over the land, a writer of entrepreneurial self-help books delivers this at Yahoo Finance:
So this might be a reasonable way to way to define economic patriotism: Pay what you owe and nothing more, while finding other ways to show support for your nation and your countryfolk. If you’re a businessperson who profits by operating in America, set up mentoring programs to help young people get ahead, or go out of your way to hire the underprivileged, or find some other way to give back.
This is bad writing on many levels. At the core, it’s intelligence-insulting and bald-faced deception.
Who expects American corporations to set up mentoring programs that aren’t excuses to wring free labor internships out of young people? And what, pray tell, does corporate America do to hire the underprivileged when the message for the last decade is that the labor pool is unskilled and too stupid to fulfill its needs?
The answer to that is simple and obvious. Corporate America hires the underpriviliged and everyone else at rates of pay that don’t add up to a living wage.
Anyway, only some weird and warped corporate boot-lick uses the word countryfolk in a piece aimed at arguing maintaining the corporate status quo is the patriotic thing.
“[If] you’re an ordinary voter, you can show your economic patriotism by demanding the government adopt policies that make America indisputably the best place to start and run a business, instead of a winded giant that seems unable to keep up with the rest of the world,” recommends Yahoo’s Rich Newman, author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.
And the best way to make America a place to start and run a business is to always lower the corporate tax rate. It’s the best argument: If American corporations are engaged in massive tax avoidance and financial legal frauds which fail to serve even the slightest social good, change the rules so they pay even less.
Now do your patriotic duty and click up the number on Taxavoidination, either version. Don’t thumb your nose, now. I can tell.
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