I'll See Your Loony Toons and raise you ours
Continued: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/09/when-religion-matters-why-inflame-people.html
Thoughts on politics, economics, life and creative works from the author including poetry
Continued: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/09/when-religion-matters-why-inflame-people.html
"ROMNEY: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it. And I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice.”"Of course he doesn't support that position now. He was lying back then. You can't find his position on his website (though they will ask for money) but he was lying when he said the above, because while he was governor in 2005 he vetoed a birth control law that would have allowed the "morning after pill" to be legal.
"To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives:
"... To those who believe that life begins at conception, the morning-after pill can destroy the human life that was created at the moment of fertilization.http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/ghost-of-ted-kennedy-haunts-mitt-romney-at-dnc-video.php?ref=fpa
Review of "Revolt of the Rich" Article By Mike Lofgren • August 27, 2012 in, of all places, The American Conservative : http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ writes:
"It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”"
He notes that at the time he heard this it seemed novel, but now it is not so surprising. I spent time hanging around academics as the "husband of" and if academic types find more in common with each other than those outside their fields, it shouldn't be surprising that the wealthy; who spend time at the same resorts, and places as each other, should be like this. But as he notes:
"That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness."[Article]
Mike Lofgren then says something interesting:
"There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state."[Article]
This may be something different from what the prophets wanted. The prophets were thinking that the rich and globalization would bring the world together. But our wealthy get their power from factions, from controlling resources, and they are never going to consent to run those resources in the common interest. No, Lundren puts his finger on it. The wealthy have decided to create an identity and power outside the nation state. They've become nullifiers, bushwackers and filibusterers. Lundgren writes:
"I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot."[Article]
Essentially they've made the whole world a colonial Empire. Never mind the wars and insurrections -- those are business opportunities. They can rule from behind the scenes. Both revolutionaries and dictators need their money, and will do their bidding. And they can make money as long as they can make deals. The world has become their Colony, and governments their subjects:
"Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?"[Article]
This explains the reckless stone faced impunity with which they are trying to take over our country from top to bottom. The gloves are off. Why fear Marxists when the Marxist wealthy are in their country clubs? The modern wealthy are "in the country but not of it;" Zen and the art of multi-billion deals. The result is the rise of an aristocracy that just plain doesn't give a snit about you or me:
"In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse."
But of course it is "we rabble" who are to blame:
"Stephen Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”"
But of course the wealthy have it setup so they are exempt from that requirement.
"millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes do pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. So who has skin in the game?"
The result is Islands of privilege with no willingness to share powers or shoulder any share of the common burden. Nothing common about these folks!
"Yet for the president’s heresy of advocating that billionaires who receive the bulk of their income from capital gains should pay taxes at the same rate as the rest of us, Schwarzman said this about Obama: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” For a hedge-fund billionaire to defend his extraordinary tax privileges vis-Ã -vis the rest of the citizenry in such a manner shows an extraordinary capacity to be out-of-touch. He lives in a world apart, psychologically as well as in the flesh."
And that is what we are up against:
"The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened. But how did this evolve historically, what does it mean for the rest of us, and where is it likely to be going?"
For those of you like me, who love the history of these things:
In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, on September 2, writes:
"On Labor Day 2012, U.S. workers are in dire straits, and an increasing share of elite opinion says it’s their own damned fault."
Anybody without a net worth of 250,000$ and a legacy ought to be offended by this. Yet at the same moment you hear these folks beating the war drum against the rest of us (and getting some of us to march with them) with the comment "We Built this" -- as if. These same pundits, even some of them so-called liberals and progressives, make commentary about how it's our workers own fault. Nevermind outsourcing. Never mind abusive use of the B-1B program, never mind offshoring -- it's "our own fault!" You heard it all through the Republican Nomination Convention.
Meyerson: "Not quite so bluntly, of course. But it’s impossible to read the business press and the editorial pages without encountering the argument that the economy hasn’t perked up because of the “skills gap.” U.S. workers, this thinking goes, just don’t have the skills required by our advanced economy. If only our workers and schools were better, if only teachers unions ceased to exist, all would be well." [Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
I've seen it put pretty bluntly. I've watched companies advertize for jobs I can do, I go to interview and the wish list of skills, credits and abilities is so great that they seem to want a giant performer whose spent hundreds of thousands on training. But then I did a llittle digging and I found out they were just looking for an excuse to bring in a worker who'd work for half the usual salary, or for an excuse to contract that job to another country. Suddenly the requirement is a warm body who will work for less. Harold gives them more credit than they should get on this:
Harold Meyerson: "There are indeed some skills-gap problems plaguing the economy, but the downward mobility of U.S. workers results far more from their lack of power than their lack of skills."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
To me this is an abusive narrative that justifies the exercise of power. This is the elites blaming the victims and justifying their outsourcing and offshoring on that basis. In the Republican Convention; workers, engineers, teachers and other non-entrepreneurs got no credit for the mutual enterprise that is the USA economy. And we've gotten no credit materially:
Meyerson wrote: "Since the recession bottomed out in June 2009, median household income has fallen by $2,544, to $50,964 — a 5 percent drop — according to a new report by Sentier Research. It’s no mystery why wages are falling even during the recovery. In a study released last week, the National Employment Law Project found that 58 percent of the jobs created since 2010 pay between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour. New jobs in the mid-range of the wage distribution, paying $13.84 to $21.13, account for just 22 percent of the positions created since the recovery began, though they constituted 60 percent of the jobs lost in the downturn. Higher-wage jobs are just 20 percent of the newly created positions. The biggest increase in jobs has come in food preparation and retail sales."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
What these facts say is that the benefits of all these increases in productivity, some of them from the hard work of workers using new automation tools, and some of them coming from their own hard work went ot the already wealthy. This lack of gratitude is getting obvious.
Meyerson: "These numbers underscore the question of whether our primary problem is the lack of skills or, rather, the lack of good jobs. And the problem isn’t just that mid-range jobs were offshored or fell prey to the construction bust. It’s also the declining or stagnating wages and benefits in a far wider range of sectors — even where U.S. workers have the skills they need and then some."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
And this is not the stupidity of our workers, maybe our naivity in trusting business leaders whose only concern is the size of their next bonus, and the amount of gold in their golden parachute. So, as Meyerson writes:
"Is it really insufficient education that’s dragging down Americans? Since 1979, the share of U.S. workers with college degrees has increased from 19.7 percent to 34.3 percent, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found this summer. Yet the percentage of college graduates with good jobs — which the center defines as jobs paying at least $37,000 and providing health insurance and some kind of retirement plan — had declined from 43 percent in 1979 to 40 percent in 2010."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
So it's not that we are unproductive, lazy, ignorant, poorly educated, or even poorly trained:
Meyerson: "Are American workers becoming less productive? On the contrary, a Wall Street Journal survey of the Standard & Poor’s 500, the nation’s largest publicly traded companies, found that their revenue per worker increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2010. The problem is that workers get none of that increase. As economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon have shown, all productivity gains in recent decades have gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, in sharp contrast to the three decades following World War II, when Americans at all income levels shared in the productivity increases."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
Thus:
Meyerson: "The primary plight of U.S. workers isn’t their lack of skills. It’s their lack of power. With the collapse of unions, which represented a third of the private-sector workforce in the mid-20th century but just 7 percent today, workers simply have no capacity to bargain for their share of the revenue they produce."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
Meyerson attributes this weakness to the destruction of our Union movement:
"This is not to say that there is no skills gap or that U.S. schools don’t need improvement. But the decline of unions has both weakened workers’ bargaining power and diminished the kind of apprenticeship programs that the building trades unions have long (and ably) provided. Under increasing right-wing pressure to justify their very existence, however, some unions in other sectors are embarking on skills training or professional development programs."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
This is a good trend. I think that Unions should channel the old concept of apprenticeship from their heritage in the middle age guilds. They should allow non-Union members to get a provisional or apprenticeship membership and train them and help them get a job once they are trained. Combine that with creating an independendent institutionalization from the closed shop and with open membership -- they might be able to defeat "Right to [not] Work, laws".
Meyerson writes: "The most notable is that of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which has created an interactive professional development Web site for teachers called Share My Lesson in response to school districts cutting back on their ongoing teacher education. “Teachers want and need to share best practices with each other,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told me, so her union is rolling out this site as the school year begins."
But in the long run:
Meyerson: "Unions can address the skills gap just as, in the days when they were larger, they could address the economic power gap. But if the war that business and Republicans are waging on labor isn’t defeated, good jobs will continue to dwindle and work in America will grow steadily less rewarding."
We need an alternative to the New Jersey Corporation.
And like Meyerson: "And a happy Labor Day to you."
[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]
You might enjoy this from last year:
“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.” Marbury vs Madison 5 U.S. 137, 174, 176.
“The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose; since its unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment… In legal contemplation, it is as inoperative as if it had never been passed… Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection and justifies no acts performed under it… A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the land, it is superceded thereby. No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.” 16 Am Jur 2d S177, late Am Jur 2d S256”
“the constitution had deprived the people control “Over the judiciary department.” And that therefore he wrote that even after years of Republican government the Federalists “ therefore, has continued the reprobated system, and although new matter has been occasionally incorporated into the old, yet the leaven of the old mass seems to assimilate to itself the new, and after twenty years' confirmation of the federal system by the voice of the nation, declared through the medium of elections, we find the judiciary on every occasion, still driving us into consolidation.” [1]
“The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please”
“It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.”
“each department [should be] truly independent of the others, and ha[ve] an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal.”
“The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislative, submitted to their election. Over the judiciary department, the constitution had deprived them of their control.”