brainiac conspiracy

His Work is Done

And now he needs to spend more time with his family. Just like the 428,000 other people who learned last week that they'll get to spend time with their families too.

---Vitelius

Now That He's No Longer Fair & Balanced

I am guessing the Aryan Brotherhood dog whistles are coming out for good.

---Vitelius

Lessons in Media Ethics

Uttering naughty words about our President on TV can get you suspended if you're a respected Beltway journalist. Being consistently wrong about every fucking thing in the course of your career, however, is not a disqualifying trait.

---Vitelius

Tokenism

After two-plus years now, we can begin to discern a pattern of behavior emanating from our wise leaders in the Oval Office. It starts by announcing a bold and ambitious policy initiative, following it up with a grandiloquent speech, then devoting only a fraction of the energy and/or resources needed to actually realizing their stated goal. By the time the policy gets enacted, it ends up as a half-baked loaf of quasi-reform that satisfies neither their supporters nor their detractors, a sort of policy-in-forming that never seems to get much beyond the realm of theory, or as an abject failure that they simply ignore. We've seen this again and again with the stimulus bill, the ACA, HAMP, the reticence in making recess appointments, the infrastructure bank, etc. The latest example will allow them to boast to their supporters that, yes, they prosecuted 200 percent more war crimes than the previous administration did, and while it may technically be true, it won't get to the policy root that made war crimes possible in the first place---and worse yet, they'll probably hang the rap on the wrong two people and leave the real culprits unmolested.

---Vitelius

We're All Sausage-Makers Now

It's pretty well established at this point that we Americans are more productive in our workplaces than we have ever been, and reflecting that increase in productivity, our bosses have banked record profits for our companies. As reward for our efforts, we've been treated over the last generation to lower wages, longer working hours, reduced benefits and fewer workplace protection rules. We spend more days per year at our jobs, and fewer days at leisure, than any other workers in the Western world, and before our own eyes, we're seeing our high-wage, highly educated workforce being slowly phased out in favor of a low-wage market of itinerant labor that's trained to produce low-cost, low-quality goods. This naturally helps to maximize corporate profits, and in the process, it is making some of us very sick.

They tell us that things like Medicare and Social Security are no longer "sustainable" in their present forms. You know what's really not sustainable in its present form? Our form of corporate capitalism.

---Vitelius

How We Win the Future

Let's start another war.

---Vitelius

Kill the Hippies

Jerry Brown, what the friggin' hell?!?!?!?!???

Gov. Jerry Brown, whose signature more than three decades ago gave agricultural workers the right to unionize by secret ballot, vetoed a bill Tuesday that would have made it easier for farm laborers to organize.

The proposal has been the top legislative goal for years for the United Farm Workers, whose founder, Cesar Chavez, had strong ties to Brown. It would have allowed the union to bargain for employees without holding an election---by simply collecting signatures from a majority of workers on cards saying they wanted representation.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed similar measures four times during his seven years in office. Supporters of the latest bill had been hopeful that Brown, a Democrat who often spoke of his relationship with Chavez during his gubernatorial campaign last year, would approve it.

In his veto message Tuesday, Brown cited his work with the union 36 years ago.

"I am not yet convinced that the far-reaching provisions of this bill . . . are justified," Brown wrote."

It's certainly high time we stopped these thugs in their tracks. We all know how all-powerful they've become in imposing their iron will on California's beleaguered growers:

The veto highlights the diminishing clout of the UFW, which once commanded the attention of national leaders, including Robert F. Kennedy. The group's influence has been eroding steadily. Membership has dwindled from about 26,000 a decade ago to just over 5,200 last year, according to statistics that the union provided to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Oh. But surely the governor is standing up for small businesses and family farms:

Opponents of the bill included a large coalition of business and agricultural interests, including the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Grocers Assn., the California Restaurant Assn. and the Western Growers Assn.

They argued that the bill would have created excessive new fines against growers found to be committing unfair labor practices, and the "card check" provision would allow for mischief by union organizers.

"It sets the stage for intimidation by the union," said Tom Nassif, president and chief executive officer of Western Growers. "It doesn't allow a true free choice."

Uh huh. There's your Concern Troll of the Day, right there.

I guess this should remind us once again that in 21st-Century America, hippie-punching is always a risk-free option for Democratic political figures---even ex-hippies themselves---who are on the hook for dicey policy decisions they've made and who are in need of some handy straw men to pummel to prove their centrist bonafides: Thus does yesterday's Cesar Chavez become today's Sista Souljah. Be that as it may, a guy with the background and professed public morals of Jerry Brown should be truly ashamed of himself. There is simply no rationalization for this whatsoever.

---Vitelius

Oppressive Taxation & Burdensome Regulations

Are still stifling the small business owners and entrepreneurs who drive investment in our economy and who create the most jobs:

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) has cut its income taxes by $7 billion since 2005 by booking roughly half its worldwide profits at a subsidiary at the foot of the Swiss Alps that employs about 100 people.

Now Cisco, the largest maker of networking equipment, wants to save even more---by asking Congress to waive most federal taxes due when multinationals bring such offshore earnings home. Chief Executive Officer John T. Chambers has led the charge for the tax holiday, which would be the second since 2004. He says it would encourage companies to “repatriate” as much as $1 trillion held abroad, spur domestic investment and create jobs.

Cisco’s techniques cut the effective tax rate on its reported international income to about 5 percent since 2008 by moving profits from roughly $20 billion in annual global sales through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda, according to its records in four countries. The maneuvers, permitted by tax law, show how companies that use such strategies most aggressively would get the biggest benefit from the holiday, said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“Why should we reward firms for successfully gaming the tax system when we in turn are called on to make up the missing tax revenues?” said Kleinbard, a former corporate tax attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. “Much of these earnings overseas are reaped from an enormous shell game: Firms move their taxable income from the U.S. and other major economies---where their customers and key employees are in reality located---to tax havens.”

These assholes really do want all the money. And given the collective spine of our political class in Washington, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually got it.

---Vitelius

Rich People Throwing Money at Each Other

Might repair a few balance sheets, salve some wounded egos, etc., but it doesn't accomplish anything in terms of clearing away the smoldering wreckage that's placing such a drag on economic recovery, specifically this: Over the last decade, our leading financial institutions committed securities and mortgage fraud on a mass scale. Millions of Americans got burned by the scam, and will continue to be for many years to come unless our wise leaders insist on a different course of action. An $8.5 billion buyout to cover $400 billion of Countrywide crap should be considered a down payment, not the final installment.

---Vitelius

Call Their Bluff

If I were a member of the Greek Parliament, I'd be telling these privileged assholes to go fuck themselves when the next austerity vote comes up this week:

Nikos Stathopoulous, managing partner of BC Partners, which has invested more than €3.5bn in Greece, said investors are put off by bureaucracy, strong unions, corruption and a lack of transparency. "Even in the good times Greece is not a country that attracts investment. Foreign investors don't want to invest in a country where there is no flexibility in hiring and firing people," he said. "You don't want to invest in a country in which you wake up and a new law has been passed which totally undermines and destroys the value of the investment you've just made."

Stathopoulous said investors were finding it very hard to assess the risk of investing into Greece, which means assets "will be priced at lower than they are worth, lower than the Greek government, and even the European Union, expects".

Aref Lahham, managing director and founding partner of Orion Capital Managers, said most private equity firms would not buy Greek assets because the "risks are too high". He added: "I think people will not buy those assets, that is the sad truth."

Lahham said more than half of the assets up for sale comprises land for commercial or residential development, which is unattractive because of the difficulty of securing financing to build in Greece. His firm was attracted by the potential of Greek tourism but legislation made it difficult for foreign companies to develop the country's islands and beaches. "Greece is a fantastic tourism destination with very undeveloped infrastructure. There isn't a Four Seasons or a Shangri-La or a Peninsula or any of the major hotel chains in Greece," he said. "It's strange, they would love to be there and we would love to build it for them, but somehow regulations don't allow you to do so."

Translation: The natives refuse to bend over and give us the kind of sweetheart deals we get all the time in places like the U.S., so we will make them squirm without capital infusions for a little while longer until they come to their senses, decertify their unions, deregulate their economy, accustom themselves to living in a Chilean economy, and hand over their state properties for the prices we want.

This is why the Greeks need to tell the Euro-banksters to sod off, then float a new drachma on the international exchange. It won't be pretty, but at least they'll have control of their economy again. And a few years from now, things probably won't look so bad for them in retrospect.

---Vitelius

Burdensome Regulations

Are stifling small businesses and working families and the true job creators who drive America's economy:

The pervasiveness of corporate secrecy on America's shores stands in stark contrast to Washington's message to the rest of the world. Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. has been calling forcefully for greater transparency in global transactions, to lift the veil on shadowy money flows. During a debate in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama singled out Ugland House in the Cayman Islands, reportedly home to some 12,000 offshore corporations, as "either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record."

Yet on U.S. soil, similar activity is perfectly legal. The incorporation industry, overseen by officials in the 50 states, has few rules. Convicted felons can operate firms which create companies, and buy them with no background checks.

No states license mass incorporators, and only a few require them to formally register with state authorities. None collect the names and addresses of "beneficial owners," the individuals with a controlling interest in corporations, according to a 2009 report by the National Association of Secretaries of State, a group for state officials overseeing incorporation. Wyoming and Nevada allow the real owners of corporations to hide behind "nominee" officers and directors with no direct role in the business, often executives of the mass incorporator.

"In the U.S., (business incorporation) is completely unregulated," says Jason Sharman, a professor at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who is preparing a study for the World Bank on corporate formation worldwide. "Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada."

An estimated 2 million corporations and limited liability companies are created each year in the U.S., according to Senate investigators. The Treasury Department has singled out LLCs as particularly vulnerable to being used as shell companies, as they can be owned by anyone and managed anonymously. Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming had 688,000 LLCs on file in 2009, up from 624,000 in 2007.

Treasury and state banking regulators say banks have flagged billions of dollars in suspicious transactions involving U.S. shell companies in recent years. On June 10, a federal judge in Oregon ordered a company registered there to pay $60 million for defrauding a Ukrainian government agency through sham transactions involving shell companies. The civil lawsuit described a network of U.S.-registered shells connected to fraud in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan.

When I was a kid in high school Geography class, my classmates and I used to study the political-economic systems of places like Mexico---an unequal society riddled with systemic graft and corruption, where the bulk of the country's riches were controlled by a few thousand families and where the average citizen's only chances of advancement lay in servicing the oligarchs in banking or government, peddling cheap knock-offs on the black market, joining the army or the state police, or leaving the country to find some kind of honest work that didn't require shakedowns and bribes. As students, we took comfort in the firm knowledge that such a diseased and dystopic political-economic system could never take root on our egalitarian shores.

---Vitelius

I'll Take "The Tet Offensive" for $800, Alex

It was obviously smaller, but now as then, it's a reminder that the the "enemy" (whoever the hell that is) can strike us anytime and anywhere it wants, that we're stuck in a protracted war we can never honestly win, and it's time to get our Yankee asses out of there now. Thirty thousand troops is only a withdrawal on the installment plan.

---Vitelius

Confidence Games

I'm always puzzled by all this talk about "uncertainty" in the markets and the need for government to promote investor "confidence", presumably by abolishing the minimum wage, eliminating the corporate income tax, and other enlightened policies. Uncertainty, after all, is our inner psychological hedge against reckless decision-making, and consumer "confidence" that residential real estate would never, ever, ain't-gonna-happen decline in value until the End of Days is one of the factors that kept the housing bubble so inflated for so long. Also too, threatening to grenade the full faith and credit of the United States government every six or seven weeks if you don't get a bunch of tax cuts for extremely rich people is likely to cause some uncertainty in the bond markets, among other places, so eventually you have to conclude that the people who are bemoaning financial uncertainty while simultaneously promoting it are either a bunch of confidence men who are patently full of shit, or Deeply Serious People who happen to be wrong about everything. You'd think that would be the end of the discussion, but since Opinions Differ™ over the destructiveness of job-killing taxes, we end up having to rehash the same tired arguments every 20 to 30 years, even though we already know how they end.

---Vitelius

Is She a Flake?

Nah. Just incredibly, painfully stupid.

Update: On the subject, I want to chime in and concur wholeheartedly with this post by Markos today, though more on generalities than on the particulars. Like him, I simply cannot see how next year's pack of likely Republican primary voters are going to nominate any once-moderate candidate who possesses obvious ideological baggage (Romney), a lack of sincerity or discernible identity (Pawlenty), or the proper political etiquette (Huntsman), which defaults the party Presidential nomination to a Tea Party zany like Bachmann. On the other hand, I am suspecting that some of the savvier folks in the GOP operative brain trust (Rove? Dick Morris?) have come to the conclusion that nominating an imbecilic backbencher to the highest office in the land is not the awesomest electoral idea the party has ever hatched up, and that's why you're seeing oppo-research intel like this slowly leaking into newsrooms across the country. This development, in turn, would seem to open another slot in the field to this fine Christian man. He believes in all the same crazy conspiracist shit that Bachmann does, and as a big-state governor, he brings a deep fundraising and organizing base, as well as executive credentials (however wretchedly applied) and the likelihood of delivering a Texas-sized chunk of electoral votes next year. The way I see it, frankly, the nomination's his for the asking if he wants it.

---Vitelius

Lazy Overpaid Government Employees

Are bankrupting our states with extortion-level pension and health-care benefits that they haven't really earned and don't deserve:

Students across the U.S. are enjoying or getting ready for summer vacation, but teachers may be looking forward to the break even more. American teachers are the most productive among major developed countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data from 2008---the most recent available.

Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD, U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom---among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. The OECD average is 786 hours.

And that’s just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays).

Another round of furloughs and vouchers should solve this nagging inconvenience. Also too, abolish the Labor Department. Where is it in the Constitution that they have the right to monitor the number of hours we work each year? They're probably monitoring how many hours we spend at work on Twitter and watching porn when we're not trolling for dates online. And since their statistics are being compiled by more overpaid union members, can't we assume they have an obvious liberal bias?

---Vitelius

Bank Errors

Is a kinder, gentler way to describe a regime of systemic fraud.

From our wise leaders, this also too:

Federal regulators have the power to require all banks to make a decision on a modification application before moving to foreclose, but they've simply chosen not to.

---Vitelius

All the Comforts of Home

It's heartening to know that every one of the 429,000 persons who applied for first-time unemployment benefits last week could have been put back to work for the same cost as

The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

More awesome yet, the money stays overseas even after we leave!

The 30,000 troops who will return home by the end of next year were sent to Afghanistan in 2009, at a cost of about $30 billion. That comes out to about $1 million a soldier.

But the savings of withdrawing those troops won't equal out, experts say.

"What history has told us is that you don't see a proportional decrease in spending based on the number of troops when you draw them down," Chris Hellman, a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, tells Martin.

"In Afghanistan that's going to be particularly true because it's a very difficult and austere environment in which to operate," he says.

That means most war expenditures lie not in the troops themselves but in the infrastructure that supports them---infrastructure that in some cases will remain in place long after troops are gone.

"We're building big bases," American University professor Gordon Adams tells Martin. The costs of those bases are, in economic terms, "sunk" costs, he says.

"We're seeing this in Iraq. We're turning over to the Iraqis — mostly either for a small penny or for free---the infrastructure that we built in Iraq. But we won't see back any money from that infrastructure."

---Vitelius

The Democratic Power Brokers

In the old days, they were guys like Bob Straus and George Meany and Frank Mankiewicz and Richard Daley and Jesse Unruh and Walter Reuther and Richard Russell: Quite a few of them were not terribly progressive in their political views, and some, like Daley and Russell, could be downright reactionary on issues such as civil rights. But they all represented large and diverse regional and/or demographic constituencies to whom they could be held directly accountable, and they manage to install some Democrats in the White House---Truman, Kennedy, Johnson; and while each of these leaders strongly favored interventionism (i.e., war) in their conduct of foreign policy, they were all, to a man, far more liberal on domestic and economic matters than any of our wise Democratic leaders today (Pelosi being the exception to the rule).

Today's Democratic power brokers, by contrast . . . well, they represent the same tiny and overlapping constituency, and they're really not accountable to anyone, unless you're among the top 1% of wage-earners in America that actually consumes their products. This is what a billion-dollar Presidential campaign looks like. Is it awesome, or what?

---Vitelius

Mightier Than the Sword? Questions Linger!

It never ceases to amaze how the peddlers of right-wing "dispute-Obama's-legitimacy" memes can somehow manage to wrangle consistent media coverage out of every hemorrhoidal outburst, but somehow, year after year, they do. I guess this is an example of what passes for journalistic impartiality these days.

---Vitelius

Sick Degrees of Separation

It really is amazing the amounts of abuse our wise leaders are capable of doling out once they feel they've been embarrassed. Some examples of this behavior are transparent and transitory, but others are far less clear in intent, and hence likelier to cause lasting damage to the commonweal.

Either way, I think we can agree that our current administration really has elevated itself above the previous one by expending its energies on launching punitive raids against war-crime whistleblowers than devoting its time to stuff that doesn't matter. The Bush people would never have governed so wisely and well.

---Vitelius