This urge to punish business with hysterical campaigns is not always driven by pure intentions. The main facilitators are lawyers, often joined by anti-capitalists of one type or another – unions, Occupy activists, leftwing agitators. All tend to have dubious motives, cloaked in weasel words such as “holding the powerful to account???, “fairness??? and “preventing exploitation???.
The BP Gulf oil spill of two years ago cost the business perhaps $40bn in fines, clean-up expenses and payments to various sufferers. No doubt a high proportion of that cash will end up in the hands of law firms that specialise in getting money out of big companies in class action lawsuits. It was certainly a tragedy, with 11 deaths on the rig. Management clearly made serious mistakes. But the west needs oil and drilling for it is inherently dangerous. Are we not all at least partly complicit, by virtue of our addiction to cheap petrol to fuel our consumer lifestyles? (Yes, it’s a shame about all the deformed crabs and things.)
Diverting money from industry that would otherwise be invested to create jobs can only make nations such as the US and Britain less competitive
Companies are sometimes guilty of boasting too much in their advertising, and promising goods they cannot deliver. And occasionally rogues work within organisations, behaving badly in various ways. But if we persist in bashing and suing business like a competitive sport, then how can it grow, generate jobs and help maintain our standard of living? And who would want to be a business leader?
“The writer runs Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm …” reads the tagline at the FT.
“Anti-capitalists” and “left wing agitators.” I like that. Could be a title for
a song if there weren’t too many syllables. I can make it more groovy: “Hippies and Commies are Harshing My Day.”
Companies like Starbucks could help stimulate the economy, too–by giving their low-wage employees a raise …
Our corporations are as profitable now as they have ever been. So I’d like to see a lot of them voluntarily decide to invest more and pay their low-wage employees more and hire more employees. They can afford it, and “cash flow” isn’t the sole objective or reward of running a business.
A flurry of mildly amusing stories shows how teenagers have found the new Listerine and Nyquil — Purell. Purell lacks the absolute convenience of old Listerine but separation of the glycerin and ethanol, just add salt and filter, yields a much bigger kick. Kids, kids, just bribe some local adult into buying you a couple bottles of Thunderbird or Night Train. The latter don’t have that bit of rubbing alchohol in them.
When I lived in Allentown on Cumberland Street the local newspaper would occasionally run stories on Allen High teenagers, not a lot, just enough I imagine, charging into the local pharmacy for OTC drinks containing smallish fractions of ethyl alcohol. With Listerine, they had to develop a taste, or stomach, for phenol.
Now it’s Purell, the desperate but enterprising kid’s social lubricant of choice.
From eHow — another of the new compendia of all wisdoms , before it gets yanked:
1. Combine 4 oz. of hand sanitizer gel with 1 tsp. of table salt.
2. Cover a cup or bowl with several layers of cheesecloth or a similar porous material.
3. Strain the mixture through the cheesecloth. The liquid ethyl alcohol will pass through, leaving the congealed salt and glycerin behind. In one experiment, the filtered liquid that resulted from this process was 70 percent ethyl alcohol and 2 percent isopropyl alcohol by volume.
I was going to hold “Jesus of America,” a satirical tune for tomorrow when I had a video ready. But vignettes from the wire today so captured an insane meanness of American spirit there seemed no point in waiting.
Reducing government deficits Mitt Romney’s way would mean less money for health care for the poor and disabled and big cuts to nuts-and-bolts functions such as food inspection, border security and education.
Romney also promises budget increases for the Pentagon, above those sought by some GOP defense hawks, meaning that the rest of the government would have to shrink even more
[Other cuts] include food stamps, school lunches, crop subsidies, Supplemental Security Income for very poor seniors and disabled people, unemployment insurance, veterans’ pensions and refundable tax credits to the working poor.
Based on the Romney materials, it’s impossible to project the size of the cuts to such programs. Suffice it to say, they would be controversial.
“There’s good reason why Ryan’s budget and the Romney budget don’t have details,” said Jim Horney, a budget analyst with the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy priorities think tank. “If people knew what it would actually have to be done to accomplish what they’re saying should be done, it’s hard to imagine there would be widespread support for it.”
Ted Nugent has been a more interesting study. The Secret Service has not shut him up but he’s fairly obviously been crippled by it. In compensation he’s pumped out two columns, one on demonizing the poor at the Washington Times, the other attacking the Lacey Act at Human Events.
Last week, Nugent accepted a plea deal in Alaska on a Lacey Act violation, transporting an illegally taken black bear over state borders.
Here’s another blazing statement of the obvious: Poor people will quit being poor when our government quits enabling, bribing, training and rewarding them to be poor. Write that down.
People can and will do amazing things when Fedzilla removes its heavy bureaucratic boot off of their throats …
The very first thing that needs to be done to eliminate poverty is to stop punishing the producers and expand economic freedom …
While we desperately need to eliminate the vast controls over economic freedom on the wealthy, we also need to eliminate the government poverty programs that enable and encourage people to be poor instead of encouraging them to be free, independent, self-reliant people.
Government causes poverty because it enables poor people to continue to make poor decisions. If we want to win the war on poverty, we’ve first got to win the war against Fedzilla, which intentionally causes poverty …
Since President Obama took office, Gibson has been raided twice by federal US Fish and Wildlife agents with guns drawn over suspicious wood. That’s right, guns drawn over wood …
Federal agents seized $500,000 worth of precious musical wood from India that is used to make Gibson guitars. The feds claim the wood was imported illegally from India, a violation of a heavy-handed law known as the Lacey Act.
Gibson has not been charged with a crime in either the 2009 or the 2012 raid, yet the special wood remains in Fedzillas clutches.
Good friend and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz fears Gibson may lose market share due to the loss of this very specialized wood.
This is the result of President Obama’s Department of Injustice run amok …
Had Gibson Guitars donated money to the Democratic Party or were members of the New Black Panther Party we can be sure that there would have been no raids with guns drawn and no wood confiscated …
The column, old news on Gibson, is meaningless unless you know that last week Nugent’s lawyers accepted a plea deal on a conviction under the Lacey Act. Nugent must be apoplectic over being tagged as serial hunting scofflaw — two convictions in two years, both stemming from hunts staged for his tv show. One might imagine his reputation to be trash among reasonable hunters, people who manage to stay out of trouble — a ten k fine’s worth — and the news.
The plea agreement says Nugent illegally shot and killed the bear in May 2009 on Sukkwan Island in southeast Alaska days after he wounded a bear in a bow hunt, which counted toward a state seasonal limit of one bear for that location. The agreement says Nugent knowingly possessed and transported the bear in misdemeanor violation of the Lacey Act …
“It’s kind of embarrassing for him because he practices ethical hunting and advocated ethical hunting and gets caught up in a crazy law that none of us have heard about,??? [Nugent’s attorney] said.
Nugent’s loss of that deer hunting license through June 2012 allows 34 other states to revoke the same privilege under the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact. Each state, however, can interpret and enforce the agreement differently.
“Now if we can just blow the head clean off the Fedzilla beast in November, this sort of government abuse will come to an end, of that I am certain,” he concludes.
Paradoxically, the investigation of Gibson was started under the Bush administration.
Jesus fed the poor with loaves and fishes
He really liked the lepers, too
Then he found the land of liberty
And America taught him what to do
Jesus of America said don’t feed the poor…
If you do they’ll come right to your door
They’ll end up like stray cats, shedding on the floor.
That’s what Jesus said.
Wealthiness, just like Godliness
That’s what Jesus taught
Jesus of America sez guns, not butter
The rest just goes all for naught
Jesus of America said don’t feed the poor
They are just too lazy, they’ll never work at all
Jesus of America sez tax the weak and sick
They’re always gonna be that way, never worth a lick
Sing for Jesus Lord
Jesus of America, sing praise for the best
You know our faith informs us, nothing for the rest
Wealthiness leads to Godliness
That’s what Jesus taught
Republican Jesus, he’s our favorite guy
He believes in markets, sing praises to the sky
If Jesus said it, you know it must be true
So now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
A few taps on his tablet computer and Justin Roberts sends a pair of trains loaded with hazardous materials on a collision course.
Or forces a nuclear plant into meltdown. Or shuts down the power grid for the entire Eastern Seaboard.
OK, the University of Nebraska at Omaha senior is really just sending malicious signals to a series of computerized controllers along the wall of a university lab, turning their winking lights from green to red.
But it’s through such exercises that students at the Nebraska University Center for Information Assurance examine how terrorists, hostile countries or simply bored hackers could inflict massive damage by infiltrating the nation’s critical infrastructure systems.
“In here, it’s just lights, but when you think about how many things that could be connected to … rail systems, water treatment centers, traffic control stations …,” said grad student Casey Glatter. “(It’s) the idea of him sending a single message to a single one of these devices, but causing a catastrophic failure.”
The school is creating defenders to join the cyberwar’s front lines …
Such iconoclasts, they wear team green shirts. (Follow the link.)
And where will one of the cyberwarriors be on the front lines?
[Student] Tory Cullen … is joining Facebook.
Lots of critical national infrastructure to secure there.
One of them used to steal cable tv, the Omaha newspaper reports. It is held up as a measure of cleverness. Not to worry, now he pays for it, readers are assured.
A professor of the University of Nebraska in Omaha tells us the digital
apocalypse can be visited upon us from “a cave.” So it would seem good they don’t read the Omaha newspaper in the dirt piles of northern Pakistan or the sandy waste of Yemen, or we’d be fucked:
You might imagine a terrorist with a bomb that is set to take out the power grid, but Mahoney said all someone has to do is figure out the correct substations to hack into, and they could cause the system to go down like a line of dominoes.
“You hack into New York, and it trickles all the way west from there,” he said. “You don’t even have to leave your cave. … It’s cost-effective terrorism.”
Cost-effective salesmanship, more likely.
We passed the French as world champion braggarts a couple decades ago and never looked back, I hear.
You’d guess I’m not a good match with Facebook. I have an account and while I post pointers to blog posts on it daily, it’s not good for much. Facebook does not tell you how many people visit your profile daily. There’s a simple reason for it. If people actually knew how many times their hundreds of friends browser their posts — statistically speaking, not at all — users would desert en masse.
Facebook is a place for lickspittles — people who actually go to the pages of American businesses and hit the “like” button. It’s hard to imagine how lame that is but hundreds of thousands of my countrymen do it.
Another manifestation of the lickspittle is the Facebook meme. That is, the posting of the same deadening pictures and drawings, many with supposed-to-be funny (and sometimes actually amusing) captions over and over and over.
They count as spam.
And anyone who has been on Facebook long enough will regret having picked up “friends” who upload lots of these things, confronting you with a long stream of repetitive dogshit every time you log on and see your customized Facebook feed. Slowly you come to the realization you have to go back through your list of “friends” and surreptitiously “unfriend” a big bunch to divest yourself of it.
It’s a special brand of brainlessness, always replenished by an army of gullibles relentlessly posting pictures of the dog in Jugoslavia who had his jaw blown off by mean kids, or the poor cat in Manitoba, served anti-freeze by a cruel and heartless owner. To your wall.
James Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to “share this picture??? and contact authorities if they recognize the perpetrators.
The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of absolutely no use to the world …
Facebook may now be America’s greatest entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American Novel.
Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub for maintaining real-life friendships. As some have suggested, it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune their network into a group of true friends …
Mark Zuckerberg’s great innovation was to monetize and rebrand college dormitory and high school sucking up as “social networking,” quickly adopted by Americans from their thirties to sixties.
We’ve bought into the morality of the market completely. Economic success is a matter of morality, of working hard and doing all the right things. If you fail, you deserve all the hardships, degradation and shame you’ll get. If you don’t have any money, you are a loser. Watch CNBC personality Rick Santelli’s infamous rant about losers.
Whatever the rich have, they deserve to keep because they worked for it. Poor people don’t deserve help because it only makes them weaker. If we lend a hand to those who stumble during the race, it belittles the efforts of those who kept running …
This is the guiding governing philosophy in the House of Representatives. Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, has argued that his budget plan is guided by his Catholic faith …
In other words, budget cuts in programs such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, housing assistance and health care aren’t just a fiscal necessity; they are a moral mandate, Ryan says.
While US Catholic bishops are hardly ever good for anything, at least they couldn’t stomach Ryan’s rationalizations. Jesus didn’t suddenly transmute into Republican Jesus, scourge of the lepers and poor.
Blessed are the job creators/They can always hire way more waiters.
Click on the top video clip. It’s stunning in its inadequacy.
Wherever did they get the idea to hire some fat agricultural scientist, someone who looks like he could cut down on the beef a bit, as an explainer? Worse, he speaks in a monotone.
Whatever money spent, down the drain, into the centrifuge, or the grinder …
Finally, at the end — another intrinsically unlikeable person, this time a woman, trying to sell the idea that the junking of pink slime hurts the environment.
You probably won’t get all the way there. Virtually unwatchable at any speed. I jumped on the whole thing so you don’t have to. Two minutes is more than enough.
Reader Chuck points to an article on the Apple needing three things China offers that the US does not — much cheaper labor, escape from environmental regulations and … rare earths as necessary materials in iPad manufacturing.
Even the latter is no particular surprise. Months ago DD blog went into a bit of detail over the abandonment of rare earth mining in the US.
Rare earth elements aren’t particularly rare. And they are strategic minerals. However, mining is labor intensive and messy, and it doesn’t fit short term American corporate business interests.
Not enough profit could be made instantly. So it was abandoned.
But there’s another important reason why Apple and other manufacturers have their heels stuck in Chinese mud. iPad manufacturing, like the manufacturing of other electronics, requires a significant amount of rare earth elements, the 17 difficult-to-mine elements used in all kinds of green technology …
Why is all this rare earth consumption a problem? China currently controls 95-97% of the world’s supply of rare earths and has repeatedly cut export quotas, sending already-high prices skyrocketing. Fearing dependence on China for rare earths, two companies—Molycorp in California and Lynas Corp in Australia—plan to begin mining rare earths this year …
None of this is new. Although iKit was mentioned specifically, the present and future uses of rare earth elements were discussed in the original series of posts. And the government report on rare earths as strategic materials specifically addressed the fact that abandonment of mining has contributed to the creation of a significant national handicap.
Once the US actually led the world in rare earth mining. But that was like, so boring.
This graph, from a National Science Foundation report, shows how the US totally abandoned rare earth mining just as its value and digging skyrocketed everywhere else it was done.
It was, what they call in the economic parlance, an abandonment of a value chain.
For what?
U S A! U S A! We’re number 15. We’re number 15. Or maybe lower.
[Mr. Emmanuel Saez], a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has won the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship grant. [Mr. Thomas Piketty], 40, of the Paris School of Economics, has won Le Monde’s prize for best young economist, among other awards …
“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,??? Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.???
Data that the two economists released in March showed that the top 1 percent of earners got nearly every dollar of the income gains eked out in the first full year of the recovery. In 2010, the top 10 percent of earners took about half of overall income.
Consequently, they argue for a much higher level of absolute taxation on the wealthy — 45 to 70 percent.
“Conservatives respond that high tax rates would stifle economic growth, at a minimum, and cause some businesses and high-income workers to flee to other countries,” it sez at another point.
Yes, of course. By all means go to Leichtenstein, Macau, Cayman, the wart on the tip of Malaya aka Singapore, or some small/US toady dictatorship on the southern side of the Persian Gulf.
With a total of 3.2 million staff members, the DOD tops the list of the world’s largest employers in a list put together by the BBC and compiled from global company and government information.
As the BBC points out, the information used to make the largest-employer list was far from standard, based on statistics provided by each entity. And in the case of the U.S. Department of Defense, the total number of employees includes civilian workers, as well as those in uniform.
All defense sector employment is protected labor, unlike its non-military domestic counterpart. Which can all go to China, or Bangalore, or wherever in Indonesia or Vietnam is the pseudo-slave labor hot spot currently.
Naturally, the soldiers employed by the Department of Defense don’t get paid nearly much as the private sector logistical and staffing labor furnished by various wings of the big arms manufacturers.
Now that’s truly protected labor — sacrosanct from any cutting. Food stamps, any social welfare programs, all the rest — all part of the rich man’s burden, the handouts that allegedly discourage and deter the blessed job creators.
“And DOD is also primed for some cuts,” continues the AOL bit. “With the goal of reducing America’s defense budget by $487 billion over 10 years …”
That’s about 49 billion a year, an almost trivial number, all things considered, probably one that won’t even move DoD back to pre-9/11 Bush war boom levels of spending achieved during the last decade.
You want entrenched immorality and root causes of national fail. It’s all wrapped up in this.
Here’s a question for readers. Do any think the US military structure is providing any significant material benefit at all — outside of the employment numbers, the salaries and wages they represent when filtered out locally — after more than ten years of war on terror and national decline?
I’m interested in sincere answers.
Is the 99 percent served by an alleged preservation of freedom, impossible to measure in dollar values because it’s an intangible, through the continued bombing of people in desperate places globally and the infrastructure required to make it happen everyday?
The GOP has repeatedly made the claim that the poorest Americans need more “skin in the game.??? Today, response to a question by ABC’s Jon Karl, Eric Cantor made it clear that Republicans are interested in raising taxes on the poor while lowering tax rates for everyone else as part of any comprehensive tax reform plan:
CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair.
“If we stopped it all right now we’d get rich a whole lot quicker.”
To preserve the gigantic Pentagon budget, House Republicans want to cut, cut, cut — anything that has to do with keeping the working poor afloat. This as part of the fight for the most important cause — easing the rich man’s burden.
From food stamps to child tax credits and Social Service block grants, House Republicans began rolling out a new wave of domestic budget cuts Monday but less for debt reduction — and more to sustain future Pentagon spending without relying on new taxes …
Nothing better illustrates this perhaps than the renewed focus on food stamps — now titled SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). And the estimated $33.2 billion in 10-year savings there could have an immediate impact on the farm bill debate and come November, the 2012 elections.
An average family of four would face an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1 and, even more important, tighter enforcement of rules would require that households exhaust most of their liquid assets before qualifying for help. This hits hardest among the long-term unemployed, who would be forced off the rolls until they have spent down their savings to less than $2,000 in many cases.
Indeed, food stamp enrollment and costs have exploded since the financial collapse four years ago, making SNAP a target for the right — but also a far bigger political issue in swing states like Florida, Nevada and Ohio.
National enrollment reached 46.4 million people in January 2012, a nearly two-thirds increase from the average monthly participation in fiscal 2008. The annual costs — now running in excess of $80 billion — have more than doubled in the same period. And even the most ardent food stamp proponents will sometimes say SNAP is a program “asked to do too much.???
The White House deliberately increased monthly benefits in 2009 by about $20 per person as a way to pump stimulus dollars into the economy. And in this post welfare-reform crisis, strapped governors have sought to maximize food stamp dollars as a cheap way to help families without tapping state funds.
No surprise. Republicans have always hated food stamps and fighting hunger.
A week ago or so ago, the New York Times ran a front page story on how food stamp usage had surged in the response to the poor being tossed out of social welfare programs during the economic collapse.
Sadly, yes, poor people must eat. It’s a damn nuisance. We need to pay for more Predator drones and things.
The US national security machine and its army of private sector warning robots disguised as human beings whirs and buzzes, scanning the world for menaces as the country rots from the inside out. Triumphant that it’s greased some fleabags in Yemen or added another one hundred unmanned flying or crawling machines to its mighty arsenal, it’s missed all the serious indicators of danger, those nasty internal signs, like the 44-45 million people on food stamps …
Food stamp usage in the US is a symbol of national economic failure so systemic it takes your breath away. It is rock solid proof the US economy does not provide jobs which earn a fair living for a polyglot cohort that dwarfs entire western nations.
And the great and powerful Oz’s of our national defense structure are really on the stick, aren’t they? While they were getting the lion’s share of national swag during the last decade, a Biblical mass of their countrymen were applying for food assistance.
If you add up the populations of the 50 states, starting with the least, the number of people on food stamps in the US is a number that roughly includes the summed populations of:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky.
This shows a country where the economy and business have so depressed wages the US government must take up the slack so hunger doesn’t stalk the land.
The proposed House Republican budget cuts, which probably have no hope of passing (although one cannot always be certain) seek to preserve defense spending.
But that means mostly money for arms manufacturing.
Lately a lot of complaints have been made about the food stamp program. Let’s take a look a one group that gets food stamps — 14,000 military families were on food stamps in 2000.
The Pentagon does not keep track of any military families that are on food stamps. President Bush in 2001 decided to authorize a $500 subsistence pay increase that was taxable in order to help military families get off food stamps. It did not work. Military families increased on food stamps because food stamps are non-taxable.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
There’s a deep national immorality entrenched here. And you’re not a decent human being if you can’t see it. What does that make those who would slash money for food so the Pentagon gets to keep everything it’s grown comfortable with in the last decade?
