In the empire the only businesses in growth are the peddlers of dog shit.
Arms manufacturing, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman’s pirate-shooting laser arm, etc.
On the day the Pakistanis give a purely for show ceremonial boot to US drones flying out of Shamsi in order to appease the angry locals, the American drone business gets a boost everywhere else.
Most famously, to Libya, drones now being the symbol of what American corporate military minds come up with when they’re engrossed in another war they hope to never end. Because people in the Middle East do so love the things.
They’re one of the many small poxy faces of alleged American progress, or as I wrote:
One salient feature of the US press is the continued fascination with robots that aren’t quite as wonderful as described. The stories and people in them try to convey the impression that innovation and revolution in American technology are everywhere.
The world is always radically changed by the allegedly eye-popping robots and drones produced for the military.
For everyone else, though, it still pretty much sucks.
The economy may be stagnant, the AfPak war conducted forever with the enemy unimpressed and unmoved by US technological might, record numbers of people on food stamps. It’s a sci-fi dystopia from the world of paperback novels. But there are always some sucking off taxpayer dough …
From Reuters we learn that just as the Pakistanis profess undying hatred of US drones, we’ve sold them a bunch of toys, courtesy of AeroVironment. The better to spy on their own people, presumably, who do so love (shown by their many placard-carrying assemblages) made-in-America flying things over their heads.
The United States will provide Pakistan with 85 small “Raven” drone aircraft, a U.S. military official told Reuters, a key step to addressing Islamabad’s calls for access to U.S. drone technology.
The official, speaking on Thursday on condition of anonymity, declined to disclose the cost of the non-lethal, short-range surveillance aircraft, which are manufactured by the U.S.-based AeroVironment Inc (AVAV.O) …
The Raven, according to the company website, has a wingspan of just 1.4 metres (4.5 feet) and a weight of 1.9 kilos (4.2 pounds). It can deliver real-time colour or infrared imagery, giving troops on the ground an edge on the battlefield. (Yes, it always sounds good. Repeat as necessary.)
A senior U.S. defence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Raven drone order is separate from U.S. plans to offer Pakistan much larger, longer-range surveillance drones, a proposition put forward by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates during a visit to Pakistan in January 2010.
That offer delighted Islamabad at the time but Pakistani officials say those talks have been held up over complaints about the cost proposed by Washington and a slow timeline for delivery.
The U.S. defence official suggested those talks were nearing conclusion.
“We’re in final discussions about which one they really want. They think they want the Shadow,” the senior U.S. defence official said.
Gates had originally offered Pakistan 12 Shadow drones, manufactured by AAI Corporation, a unit of Textron Systems (TXT.N).
Textron stock has been flat, about the same virtually worthless place as AeroVironment.
From which we might deduce the Pakistani deal is the equivalent of giving them a load of flying metal gadget crap no one really cares about.
What, oh what, will the white flesh androids masquerading as people in America’s weapons shops come up with next to offset our very negative balance of trade in manufacturing!?
When the plutocracy and US big business come in for months of bad publicity, they just lobby for more bribes from the US government. And the US government caves in.
In the Middle East, they riot. What’s missing here? What’s been put in the water? It’s not the fluoride. For years after fluoridation the nation did all right with it’s middle class.
U.S. corporations have enjoyed a two-year bull run on Wall Street. They are sitting on a record amount of cash and are back to paying bonuses that are the envy of executives around the world.
And the icing on the cake for many of them might be just around the corner: a tax cut that has bipartisan support in Congress.
As part of their budget plan passed last week, House Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%. The Obama administration and many Democrats also are looking to slice the current rate, but not as much.
Supporters of the corporate tax cuts say they’re needed to make U.S. companies more competitive with their foreign counterparts, and the administration and House Republicans say they want to offset rate cuts by eliminating unspecified loopholes and tax breaks.
Yet despite complaints that they fork over too much money to Washington, U.S. corporations have been paying an increasingly smaller share of federal taxes over the last half-century.
Nearly a third of all federal taxes came from corporations in 1952. Last year, they paid just 8.9%, according to government figures. Loopholes, credits and the ability to shelter earnings abroad have helped many of the country’s biggest companies pay far less than the corporate tax rate set into U.S. law.
Take Hewlett-Packard Co., which reported $11 billion in pre-tax earnings in 2010. Its chief executive for most of the year, Mark Hurd, earned $24 million in salary and other compensation, and three other executives earned more than $9 million apiece.
The company said it paid $2.2 billion in income taxes — a rate of 20.2%, well below the 35% U.S. rate.
(Note distinction as frontpage news in the delivery edition. On-line, the LA Times cyber-dummkopfs buried it.)
Big business ratchets up the class war against the middle of the nation. And then, except in Wisconsin and Michigan, the sound of crickets or huzzahs.
This is a stark turnaround from the 1990s, when 2.7 million jobs were created in multinational units abroad while 4.4 million were added at home. All told, these major companies employ one-fifth of all working Americans, 21.1 million in 2009. The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The data provide fresh context to the tepid job growth experienced during the past decade even at the height of the boom. And while small businesses create most jobs, the larger corporations tend to provide higher salaries and better benefits for American workers. The strength of their domestic operations is also critical to small-business vendors.
No easy fix for this trend is to be found. The world is awash in cheap, high-skilled labor. The fastest-growing markets are in Asia. In China, especially, American corporations are pressured to set up factories and even research facilities there — not that they probably need much nudging. According to the Journal, 30 percent of GE’s business was overseas in 2000, while today 60 percent is. As a result, 54 percent of GE employees are located abroad vs. 46 percent in 2000.
The statistics are irrefutable. You give corporate America tax breaks, or allow it to abuse the tax code, it ships jobs overseas anyway. Lower taxes create no new jobs domestically. There is no trickle down.
The only thing that does happen is the the big business lobby runs another stick-up on the US government, threatening to shoot the dog it’s already shot a few times if it isn’t sufficiently bribed right away.
Could the news out of General Electric be any worse? Jeff Immelt could get caught tormenting the neighbor’s cat in video and the president wouldn’t get rid of him. However, the guy who speaks the truth about the treatment of Bradley Manning looking bad had to go.
As part of this blog’s economic treason discussions it is again emphasized that not only is General Electric a giant tax avoider … but that it also is not at all averse to taking lots of middle class tax dollars for GE Aviation
in its arms manufacturing business.
GE, along with Wall Street, corporate sociopath poster boys.
Continuing on yesterday’s riff on the ease with which corporate American mobilizes group lickspittling to astro-turf images at variance with reality, the blog points to an article by Don Barlett and Jim Steele writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“The United States has two tax systems: A flexible, preferential one for multinational corporations and the rich; a rigid, nonnegotiable one for working people. In other words, if you’re not lucky enough to be a global business or a wealthy individual, you must pay pretty much what Congress dictates. If, however, you are among the privileged, well, your company makes billions for you and essentially operates tax-free.”
Nonetheless, corporate America collectively has long whined about paying excessive taxes.
What kind of corporation escapes responsibility for any of these bills? Carnival Cruise Lines for one …
Like others in Congress and the media, Cantor, Bachmann, and Pawlenty insist that American businesses are paying too much in corporate income tax. They claim the onerous tax burden is killing jobs and forcing companies to move abroad. To reverse the nation’s fortunes, they say, all Washington need do is slash the corporate tax rate, thereby reducing the amount of taxes these businesses are forced to pay. What’s scary is a growing number of citizens believe them.
That means a forecast made years ago by William J. Casey, a wily Republican from another era who liked to dabble in the intelligence world’s black arts inside and outside the country, and who helped craft the election of Ronald Reagan, is coming true. After taking office, President Reagan installed Casey as head of the CIA in 1981. After his first staff meeting at the agency, Casey was quoted as saying:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
One of the more egregious falsehoods being peddled by the corporate tax cutters is that companies doing business in the United States are taxed at an exorbitant rate. Not so.
Perhaps a more telling yardstick, corporate tax revenue in 2009 came to just 1 percent of gross domestic product – the lowest collection level since 1936, or three-quarters of a century ago. In 2010, it edged up to a puny 1.3 percent – the second-lowest since 1940. Even worse, the shriveled tax collections came at a time when corporations were registering an all-time high in profits. At the end of 2010, corporations posted an annualized profit of $1.65 trillion in the fourth quarter. In other words, the more they made, the less they paid.
In its most recent filing, Exxon Mobil Corp., the global energy giant, reported income of $34.8 billion before taxes on total revenue of $310.6 billion for 2009. Its U.S. income tax bill: Zero.
One things associated with GE’s tax cheat news is the corporate giants’ p.r. spamming of YouTube, via its various loyal employees.
Obviously, General Electric isn’t the only big US business to ever try this.
UPS, for example, spammed YouTube with videos of randomly chosen people doing karaoke versions of its “That’s Logistics” tune. Advertised as a fun contest, these started showing up right after al Qaeda sent printer bombs through UPS and FedEx offices in Yemen.
The attempt seemed designed to distract people from much more frequently seen news on the UPS-flown bomb packages.
Whatever their inspiration, they were unsuccessful, for easily explained reasons. They were horrible. Most of the people in them could neither sing nor hold the rhythm of the tune.
In a similar vein is GE’s current line dance contest.
It’s possible GE instigated this as a bit of innocent fun built off Alan Jackson’s “Good Time” tune.
The more cynical reading is the company knew the New York Times was readying a piece on its tax avoidance.
And knowing well what the impact of it would be on user-created media content, it mobilized one preemptive counter p.r. effort encouraging employees to make their own line dance commercials and upload them as (1), examples of all the corporate happiness associated with GE, and (2), as video spam that might soak up poorly crafted search terms on the company.
The only problem with the plan is that all of the employee line dance commercials really suck. And that wouldn’t matter if people didn’t have the tax avoidance news always in memory when viewing such things.
However, they do. And so everyone comes off as astro-turfing lickspittles — whether they are or not — dancing out their joy for a giant firm that, at least in the short term, is thought of as a primary example of corporate evil.
Meanwhile, the US Census last year said the rich-poor income gap reached record levels, nearly doubling gaps of the late 1960s. The United States is the richest nation on earth, yet we rank 97th in family-income equality, according to the CIA Factbook. Our inequality is so profound that we rank behind nations we associate with corruption, poverty, oppression, or collapsed governments — Nigeria, China, India, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Burundi, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Greece. The most economically equal country in the world is Sweden.
Even the CIA says the United States is now a nation where “those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and, more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance coverage, and other benefits. Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households.’’
For all of those “gains,’’ we are sliding backward with each announcement of CEO pay. The gain for a few has become the great American loss.
It was just about exactly one year ago that your host went to work for the US Census. Pasadena is thought of as a well-to-do place. The census disabused everyone working it of that. Its working poor live right next to the wealthy and their upper middle class shoe-shiners in often terrible conditions. And those working the census were either those unemployed from the great recession or struggling to keep their heads above water by working two or three underpaying jobs at a time.
Meanwhile, today from the alleged “weapons of doom” beat aka corporate welfare/jobs programs for arms manufacturing, the underwhelming Maritime Laser Demonstrator!
[An alleged expert named] Gibbon-Brooks said the new laser “absolutely” could be deployed against pirates, but says a sniper rifle could work just as well. He suspects the Navy has bigger hopes for its sea-based laser. The Navy released a video of the test on YouTube. It’s been viewed more than 600,000 times.
“It’s a very, very interesting moment for naval warfare in that we have a whole new genre of weapons,” he said.
“It’s certainly a remarkable step forward. The ability to apply more power in a burst or the ability to manipulate that power is really where I see this going,” he said. “I think if you watch the video and think that’s what they intend to do to Somali pirates in a year, you don’t understand what’s being set out in front of them. It could be used in any type of naval warfare.”
The laser test was carried out by the Navy and Northrop Grumman as part of a $98 million contract.
Six hundred thousand views on YouTube! It’s a viral hit! Whoopie!
Ninety-eight million bucks of swag for Northrop Grumman for, maybe, use against a handful of pirates.
In the most damning official U.S. report yet produced on Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis, a Senate panel accused powerhouse Goldman Sachs of misleading clients and manipulating markets, while also condemning greed, weak regulation and conflicts of interest throughout the financial system.
Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one of Capitol Hill’s most feared panels, has a history with Goldman Sachs.
He clashed publicly with its Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein a year ago at a hearing on the crisis.
The Democratic lawmaker again tore into Goldman at a press briefing on his panel’s 639-page report, which is based on a review of tens of millions of documents over two year
In the most damning official U.S. report yet produced on Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis, a Senate panel accused powerhouse Goldman Sachs of misleading clients and manipulating markets, while also condemning greed, weak regulation and conflicts of interest throughout the financial system.
After a two-year bipartisan probe, a Senate panel has concluded that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. profited from the financial crisis by betting billions against the subprime mortgage market, then deceived investors and Congress about the firm’s conduct.
Some of the findings in the report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible criminal or civil action, said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman.
“In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled the Congress,” Levin told reporters before the report was made public late Wednesday.
[Levin]He clashed publicly with [Goldman] Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein a year ago at a hearing on the crisis.
The Democratic lawmaker again tore into Goldman at a press briefing on his panel’s 639-page report, which is based on a review of tens of millions of documents over two year
Tune in tomorrow, same time, for the sound of — crickets.
The masters of the universe know they can ignore reports and days like this one.
From another finance story:
“This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,??? said William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis. “But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.???
Criminogenic environment. Two words where one will do: kleptocracy.
Protest music from the left, even satirical material, however, is totally dead in the US. You can comb the annals of music journalism for the last three years and you’ll find nothing on the subject. Zero.
Anyway, Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein, which also needs a video, is here.
If you don’t want to listen to the tune, listen to the intro which is taken from a Charlie Rose interview of Blankfein. The discussion is about the very thing again in the news today, that Goldman benefited from the financial crisis by pushing and selling financial products it was simultaneously betting against.
“I have to explain …” the man said. He was doing God’s work.
Today’s gold-plated dog excrement from the weapon shops of the plutocracy:
Another robot fighter bomber, the X-47b, for diddling future potential Moes, takes flight. Young US white males get erections on military tech sites nationwide.
Meanwhile, news from around the country:
6th biggest “ghost town” country created by the Great Recession — Dare County, N.C.
Number of homes: 33,492
Vacancy rate: 57%
Population: 95,828
Dare County includes the northern-most parts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The situation in the vacation area is so severe that the “Outer Banks Voice” recently wrote, “If Dare County Manager Bobby Outten was intending to sound an alarm by suggesting that the EMS helicopter and school nurses were expendable in the next budget, he probably succeeded.” His comments are unlikely to be terribly different from those of other executives of counties on the list. Vacant homes and homes which lose double-digit amounts of their value each year irreparably undermine the tax base. And, as services fall, fewer potential homeowners will consider investing in the area.
“The initial swooning has died down to some extent — but I’m struck by the extent to which news stories are still covering for Paul Ryan. I’ve already noted how “news analyses??? write as if the objections of the critics were simply that his plan is too radical, as opposed to what people like me are actually saying, which is that it’s a fraud.
“So today I read in the Washington Post that:
“The Republican plan would cut spending on domestic programs while protecting the military and preserving George W. Bush-era tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high earners.
“Um, no. It proposes huge additional tax cuts for high earners, over and above the Bush tax cuts; $2.9 trillion dollars’ worth just over the next decade.
“My best guess here is that the press corps shies away, consciously or unconsciously, from giving the stark truth about this joke of a plan; after all the praise from VSPs, it’s hard either to report that knowledgeable people consider the plan a total fraud, or even to be frank about the plan’s extreme features. But saving pundits from embarrassment is not part of a reporter’s job.” — Krugman
“In 2010, Peer’s department allocated $2.43 million in food stamps. That number is up from $1.81 million in 2009 and $862,706 in 2008.
“Through February, Peer said $419,964.44 has been allocated in food stamps in Moffat County.
“Peer contends those numbers provide a peek into the area’s economic situation.
“I think that it indicates that our recovery isn’t quite here yet and it certainly is disturbing just to know that this number of people need to have food stamps,??? she said. “On the other hand, I am really grateful to know that food stamps exist and that they are helpful to people who have reduced income.???
“The dust-up has garnered little attention in the U.S [until now]. But it’s front-page news in Sweden, where much of the labor force is unionized and Ikea is a cherished institution. Per-Olaf Sjoo, the head of the Swedish union in Swedwood factories, said he was baffled by the friction in Danville, Virginia. Ikea’s code of conduct, known as IWAY, guarantees workers the right to organize and stipulates that all overtime be voluntary…
“Laborers in Swedwood plants in Sweden produce bookcases and tables similar to those manufactured in Danville. The big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. Full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company.
“What’s more, as many as one-third of the workers at the Danville plant have been drawn from local temporary-staffing agencies. These workers receive even lower wages and no benefits, employees said.
“Swedwood’s Steen said the company is reducing the number of temps, but she acknowledged the pay gap between factories in Europe and the U.S. “That is related to the standard of living and general conditions in the different countries,” Steen said. — LA Times
“[Red state] Texas tied with Mississippi for states having the highest percentage of hourly paid workers earning the minimum wage or less.
“Some 550,000 Texans, or 9.5 percent of hourly paid workers, made the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less last year. That’s up 76,000 workers, or 16 percent, from 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
“Leslie Helmcamp, a policy analyst with the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which focuses on low- and moderate-income Texans, called the numbers “alarming.”
“The higher proportion of hourly paid workers who are earning at or below the minimum wage is reflective of our low high school and college completion rates,” Helmcamp said. “We can only attract higher-paying jobs if we are able to move more Texans into higher education.”
“The federal poverty level for a family of three was $18,310 last year, Helmcamp noted. That means a single parent with two children and working for minimum wage would earn about $3,200 less than the poverty level, she said.” — Houston Chronicle
“INDIANAPOLIS | Local governments would be barred from setting a minimum wage higher than the federal rate under legislation approved Wednesday by the Indiana House.
“The Republican-controlled House voted 57-42 to strip localities of the power to set a higher minimum wage in their jurisdiction. The measure now advances to the Senate.” — Munster, Indiana
Over the lunch hour Cornel West was briefly on MSNBC, calling the GOP mean-spirited and the Democratic Party “spineless.” He politely brushed off the host’s wish to discuss TIME magazine’s cover story on a ‘new civil war’ calling what we have now ‘a class war’ between the oligarchs, the government taken over by their henchmen and everyone else.
In the hands of merciless people with rapier wits, it would be devastating. In the hands of the Dems, forget it.
Now, all I need is someone to come up with a picture of Paul Ryan or Eric Cantor with the word balloon, “I CAN HAZ SOYLENT?” Maybe with a little green wafer in there somewhere, too.
Alternative word balloon:
“I NOT HAZ SOYLENT, YOU NOT HAZ CUNTREE!”
Go! A free No-Prize and my undying gratitude if I see one.
MSNBC masquerades as the anti-Fox but it’s often just the pits. Two minutes ago the news host introduced a teaser for the next segment on — bacon-scented men’s cologne.
Wait, it gets worse. The intro music was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell,” which was on “Street Survivors,” the album they were touring when the plane crash occurred. “That Smell” was a song about death and drug addiction.
Lyric:
Angel of darkness is upon you
Stuck a needle in your arm
So take another toke, have a blow for your nose
One more drink fool, will drown you
Ooooh that smell
Can’t you smell that smell
Ooooh that smell
The smell of death surrounds you
If you could push a button to have the host and his producer thrown off the top of a three-story building, you’d push that button.
This is not her obituary. But it might be one for describing the nature of the wreckage that is the US.
My mother was born in Philadelphia to two Hungarian immigrants. They came from Budapest and neither had high school educations. However, her father was able to grab a middle class job in Pennsylvania, one in which his wife did not have to work and which would enable him to send my mother on to a college education.
They were solidly middle class almost their entire lives and owned their home. They enjoyed lifetime good medical care as well as a long and easy retirement. And their daughter rose into the upper middle class in Pennsylvania.
My mother and father did not have their lives blighted by a constant scramble for paying jobs, long stretches of unemployment and ever diminished hopes.
So in somewhat less than the span of my mother’s lifetime the country went from what my grandparents saw as inspiration and opportunity to a stupid and mean-spirited nightmare whose gifts to the world are smart weapons, war, predatory financial services and history-making bad and/or cowardly leadership. And it has not been a random accident.
Those like my grandparents who enter the country under similar circumstances now look forward to living ten to a rented room. When not attacked outright by one entire political party, they pass on a life of zero opportunity to their children while living as serfs. And they find the locale of the working and unemployed poor getting more crowded every day, sharing the territory with an always increasing number arriving from the downwardly mobile middle class.
Now it’s better to ignore the fraudulent advertising and stay in Budapest. And it took less than one full lifetime.
The President Needs A Challenger (a continuing series)
More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice!
But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing.
