brainiac conspiracy

Hump Night Music Blogging

Because our leaders just can't mind their own monkeys, now, can they.

---Baron V

Raw Deals

There's something that's unintentionally revealing about the administration's latest alleged job creation gambit, beginning with its name. I mean, a "better bargain" isn't exactly inspiring, now, is it? At least a "New Deal" could be interpreted metaphorically as to mean that the government was breaking up the Big Casino, where all the games were rigged, and rebuilding the financial system and revising the tax code so that everyone could play with a fresh set of cards. A "better bargain," though, doesn't leave room for any creative interpretation as it can only imply yet more futile horse-trading and negotiation with the crazy people in the hopes that a few of them can be sufficiently bribed to desist their craziness just long enough to get a bill---any bill---passed.

Just look at yesterday's "bargain"---a massive multibillion-dollar giveaway to corporate tax cheats in exchange for a private-public infrastructure bank (read: gravy train for contractors), some community-college funding (fine with this), and some entities called "manufacturing institute hubs," which sounds like a fancier title for DeVry University or L.A. Trade Tech, but what the hell do I know.

Besides being a shit bargain, of course, what's ultimately self-defeating about the administration's approach to policy is that it undercuts whatever is left of its own mandate and renders null and void any reason for having elections anymore. Put it this way: they're not proposing legislation because it's in the best interest of the commonweal, they're proposing it so John McCain will approve of it. And if John McCain is going be allowed to essentially exercise veto power over any piece of liberal social legislation, we might as well drop the two-party pretense and admit that we live in a country where Republicans either get all of their way or most of their way, depending on who's running the executive branch, and that Team Democrat is just a place-holder until the crazies can get their act together and install President Ryan or President Nugent or whoever else in the White House. A thriving liberal democracy is really not supposed to behave this way!

---Baron V

Quote of The Day

When man hears words,
he's liable to think they convey thoughts and have meaning.

---Mephistopheles, Faust

This is a big reason why I only Tweet infrequently, and have pretty much abandoned Facebook altogether. It's just too easy to run off your mouth on the Webs before you've had a chance to weigh your words---which should be very, very carefully, because once you post something to social media, it's there forever. You don't get to take it back.

That said, I really don't think this as much of an example of Liberal Dude Privilege Syndrome as much as I think it's a symptom of Raging Internet Ego Syndrome, i.e., the desire---bordering on the compulsive---to have the last word on any subject and to have the smartest take on everything. I've seen some utterly ridiculous flame wars break out on sites like Twitter between smart, well-educated people who are normally intelligent enough to know better but who just can't seem to let a subject---any subject---pass without some hasty, ill-advised comment that ends up triggering a battery of incensed, and equally ill-advised, replies. Personally, life's too short for that shit, so as a rule, I only engage people on Twitter whose work I admire, to whose musings I'm generally sympathetic, and to exchange ideas and opinions in a tone of mutual respect. I'd rather reserve the distemper for this humble blog, and while it doesn't enable many droll and pithy Tweets, it helps me avoid a lot of unnecessary grief.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Midday Music Blogging

Because the blah people are all racists and they want to steal our elections.

---Baron V

No Money to Rebuild Detroit

But money without end for freedom:

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

Yes, it's an outrageous overreach of government police power, and its potential for abuse should be alarming to everyone, but what pisses me off as much as anything else is the fact that we are spending God-knows-how-much money on this intrusive shit when you know that a great deal of the intelligence we're scooping up with it is utterly worthless gibberish that either doesn't reveal any signs of terrorist activity, or that goes unexamined altogether. I mean, they're logging every freaking phone call in the country at this point, and for what? Just to personalize this, why are we wasting time and taxpayer dollars to monitor the phone calls I make to my mother, my doctor, my business clients, etc.? In one way, I couldn't care less since there's nothing in the way of actionable intelligence to be gleaned from them, but all that information is clogging up space on some server---alongside billions of other equally useless terabytes of data---that costs us millions of dollars a year to build, maintain and expand. It's not like we couldn't be using the money for more constructive purposes, y'know.

---Baron V

We Need To Have a Conversation About Race Relations in America

Your humble blogger went to see Fruitvale Station last week, and while I haven't written about it here, suffice to say that it's a moving and unsettling film that deserves to be widely seen. Now, a lot of folks have pointed to it (in light of the Zimmerman trial) as a possible touchstone that we should employ to initiate a dialogue on the subject of race relations in America: Specifically, to address the misconceptions that many white folks have about African-Americans, and while that's certainly a valid topic of discussion, it's only half of the problem at most. The bigger problem, to my mind, lies in the misconceptions that a lot of white people have about themselves, i.e., that they're the high moral compass of the Republic when a lot of them are just a bunch of self-indulgent assholes.

Now, I'm not sure how we exactly frame the debate to engage more white folks in it, but one possible approach lies in emphasizing Fruitvale's overarching message: Namely, that it's impossible to reach a greater understanding of other people, and to clear up misconceptions we may have about them, if we're not willing to talk to them honestly---and most importantly, to be willing to listen to them, even if what they're saying discomfits us. Because if we don't engage in this kind of two-way discussion, and we reach a point where people on both sides of aisle are just shouting over everyone else's heads and nobody is listening at all, well, that's incubating a social climate where simple misunderstandings can become tragic misunderstandings.

---Baron V

We're All Bangladeshi Garment Workers Now

Memory frequently fails your humble blogger in his declining years, but he still recalls some aspects of his decidedly middle-class upbringing back in the 1960s. My family of four lived in a four-bedroom house in the West Valley suburbs; my parents (both of whom were college-educated) bought the house in 1959 for the princely sum of $15,000, and by the mid-'60s, with both of them working, they were pulling in $10 grand a year between them. This was enough money to keep my sister and I in new school clothes each year, a new car for my father (who drove a lot for his job) every three to four years, regular trips to the doctor and dentist, and enough money left over for annual summer cross-country vacation trips and occasional entertainments such as plays, concerts and ballgames. We certainly weren't wealthy, but we lived quite comfortably, were deprived of very little, and our lifestyle was typical of your average bedroom-suburb family in those days.

As there were hundreds of thousands of other families across California earning similar incomes and living similar lifestyles, the state enjoyed a broad tax base, which allowed it to generously fund, among other things, an excellent public education system that was thought to be among the finest in the nation; college was tuition-free for state residents up until the late 1960s.

Of course, we don't live in those times anymore, and there's a reason why we don't. Adjusted for inflation, that $15,000 house my parents bought would be worth about $120,000 today, and their $10,000 annual income would now equal $75 grand. Now, it's true you could raise a family pretty comfortably in most parts of the country these days on that kind of money, given a modest monthly mortgage payment. But the average home price is much higher than that now, and the median household income is substantially lower, which means that your typical "middle class" family these days is quite a bit poorer than it was, say, 50 years ago. That's not a promising trend if you want to spread prosperity more widely and/or expand your local government's tax base to provide vital public services, and while there are many policy fixes that could reverse this trend, one thing that definitely won't help is for our political leaders to hail the growth of sweatshop labor as a sign of a healthy middle class.

---Baron V

Tuesday Night Music Blogging

Because Real Americans know that the ladyparts are always and forever a thing.

---Baron V

Still The Greatest. Nation. Ever

Because only an unregenerate Chomskyite who's caught in the throes of America derangement syndrome would believe that our job creators could be so amoral and sociopathic as to capitalize on the suffering of the terminally ill to generate bonuses for executives and dividends for shareholders. But yes, oh yes, they do!

For assisted living chains such as Emeritus, there is a powerful business incentive to boost occupancy rates and to take in sicker residents, who can be charged more . . . Former Emeritus executives described a corporate culture that often emphasized cash flow above all else. The accounts of the executives, who spoke independently but anonymously, were strikingly consistent.

“It was completely focused on numbers and not human lives,” said one executive, who worked for Emeritus for more than three years and oversaw dozens of facilities in Eastern states.

The company’s emphasis on sales and occupancy rates, the executive said, transformed the workforce into “a group of people who were grasping at every single lever they could pull to drive profitability.”

---Baron V

Also Too, Still Too Damn Expensive

The meter's always running on the Goldberg Act:

President Barack Obama's decision to delay implementation of part of his healthcare reform law will cost $12 billion and leave a million fewer Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance in 2014, congressional researchers said Tuesday.

Maybe in the big scheme of things, these are not game-changing numbers---though those million people who will be thrown into the insurance exchanges might disagree!---but you would think, three and half years since it was signed into law, they still wouldn't have to be ironing so many major wrinkles out of it. That is, if it was smart law.

Granted, somewhere down the line the Goldberg Act will (probably?) make our horrible, bad, too-expensive health-care system a bit less horrible and perhaps less expensive than the current regime, at least in some parts of the country. But one of the most intimidating elements of our current health-care/insurance system is how needlessly byzantine and complicated it is for most people, and it just seems to me that the new law doesn't really address this problem---it simply spreads the complexity around. You want to simplify coverage, then simplify coverage. Simplify pricing? Then simplify pricing. The point is, there are plenty of policy tools at our leaders' disposal that can drive down health-care costs and simplify coverage. Maybe they should consider using them sometime.

---Baron V

Econ For Morons

People can't buy stuff if they don't have any money. If they don't buy stuff, job creators can't make stuff to sell them. If they can't make stuff to sell, they can't keep their employees working, and if they can't keep the employees working, they have to send them home. How to fix? Give people more money so they can spend it on stuff. Raise the minimum wage, print more money and mail it out as stimulus checks, borrow it from your central bank, or raise taxes on rich people and redistribute the loot. There are all sorts of ways to create wealth beyond what the private sector can generate on its own. But whichever policy lever you choose to grasp, you need to get more money to people so they can spend it on stuff---because if you don't, they won't.

---Baron V

The Legacy of 9/11

Spreading the blessings of freedom.

I hate to be judgmental here, but everyone---and I mean everyone---who ever bought into the bullshit case for invading that downtrodden country, even for a minute, owns a little piece of this atrocity, and always will. The evidence was bogus, as anyone with a smidgen of curiosity and a few minutes to search the Google could have told you, and in fact did. Then again, perhaps that's why there's been no great public outcry for a Truth & Reconciliation Commission---because we'd have to acknowledge that the single overarching lesson our leaders took away from 9/11 was how fear and distrust could be packaged and marketed to play a nation of millions for suckers. The thought that all of those people who died in the towers could be dishonored in such a sick and cynical way is discomfiting to us, and so we choose to ignore it. But that's what happened, and it's still happening now.

---Baron V

Grand Bargains

I think what irks me---and a lot of other left grumblers---so much about the administration's policy proposals is that they all seem to be founded on the same false premise: Namely, that we can't think about spending more money for infrastructure, education, jobs training, etc., unless it's offset by some tax cut, or if the increased spending grows the deficit. They may think that framing the argument this way allows them to co-opt or "get out in front of" conservatives' messaging on spending and the deficit in order to attract conservative votes and to look like responsible grown-ups to the Washington policy establishment. But this isn't the reason why we have elections in this country---or at least, it used to be the reason we had elections in this country: To decide whether liberals get to write policy or conservatives get to write policy, not whether Paul Ryan gets to write policy or John McCain gets to write it. We've seen this political dynamic at play in a previous administration, and the policy outcome, having been predicated on conservative ideology, was predictably disastrous.

So, if you want to avoid bad policy outcomes, stop courting the people who advocate bad policy. And one good way to do that is to stop basing your policy argument on conservative talking points. Because we can afford to raise all sorts of taxes, and grow the deficit by a great deal more, without unleashing fiscal Armageddon upon the commonweal. How do we know this to be true? Because we've done it before, and it worked out just fine.

---Baron V

Midday Music Blogging

Because justice is blind. The people who administer it, however, are decidedly less so.

---Baron V

Priorities

If only we had a government that devoted as much time and manpower to prosecuting criminals who amassed their fortunes by stealing people's homes and looting their pensions than it has to prosecuting an Army private for disclosing that war crimes occurred in Iraq and that our nation's foreign-policy establishment is little more than the lobbying arm of the Chamber of Commerce, we might---repeat, might---be able to say that we are governed by people who genuinely look out for our best interests, and who understand that a liberal democracy such as ours can only continue to exist if its leadership class observes the rule of law. But we don't, so unfortunately, we can't.

---Baron V

No Money For Dams and Waterways

But money galore for America fuck yeah!

Since its inception, the U.S. government has spent well over half a billion dollars to fund Marti programming, which first aired on radio in 1985 and on TV in 1990. The programming includes everything from baseball games to local news to weather reports to interviews with anti-Castro dissidents.

Maybe it's not a huge sum of money on a yearly basis, but if we've got a spare $24 million laying around, we can choose to either spend it beaming reruns of Honey Boo-Boo to culturally challenged Cubans, or we can choose to, oh I dunno, hire 600 people and pay each of them $40,000 a year to build stuff that needs building, and to fix stuff that needs fixing. Not to be snarky about it, but our nation could return to full employment any time our political leaders wanted it to happen. The only thing that's ever held them back is either a lack of will, rank ignorance, or the sociopathic belief that millions of us deserve to live in grinding poverty. But our current economic malaise is not the result of some immutable law of nature, it's a predictable policy outcome.

---Baron V

No Money For Expanding Social Security

But plenty of money---isn't there always?---for freedom:

The U.S. military is preparing to deploy state-of-the-art blimps over Washington, DC, to provide early warning detection of missile attacks. The floating eyes-in-the-sky will also provide surveillance capabilities covering much of the eastern seaboard, all the way to Canada [...]

JLENS, manufactured by defense contractor Raytheon, is essentially a blimp 75 yards in length that carries sophisticated radar and lenses that can see 320 miles in any direction, while hovering about 10,000 feet above the earth.

LENS was created to enable the military “to defend against threats including hostile cruise missiles, low-flying manned and unmanned aircraft, tactical ballistic missiles, large caliber rockets and moving surface vehicles such as boats, SCUD-launchers, automobiles and tanks,” according to Raytheon.

Actually, if you dig into the policy weeds, it seems that this program has been scheduled, essentially, to be sequestered out of existence in the next few years, and I am guessing that's why this particular job creator is pushing the Pentagon to deploy these things where lawmakers can see how mission-critical and cost-effective they are---and most crucially, how well they work:

In 2007 the plan was to develop the surveillance technology and produce 32 of the blimps for about $6 billion. Five years and $1.9 billion later, the U.S. Army had four it could test. A January report by the Pentagon’s director of equipment testing cited early problems with the blimps’ “friendly aircraft identification capabilities” and “noncooperative target recognition.” Translation: They had trouble reliably spotting certain friends and foes.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Barack Obama:

President Barack Obama is extending a new proposal to Republicans that he hopes will break the political gridlock on budget negotiations, offering to cut corporate tax rates in exchange for job investments.

White House officials say just because they're at an impasse with congressional Republicans over a grand bargain on reducing the deficit doesn't mean they shouldn't look for other areas of agreement. So Obama plans to use a trip to an Amazon.com distribution center in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Tuesday to propose a "grand bargain for middle-class jobs."

Because bargaining with the crazy people has worked so well up now. And because America's job creators are overburdened by taxation. And because working at an Amazon distribution center is the ticket to entering our prosperous middle class. The jokes really do write themselves here, but none of them are even remotely funny.

---Baron V

Monday Night Music Blogging

Because job creators. It really is their world, after all.

---Baron V

Nothing Has Changed

Absolutely nothing, nada, zero. And why should we expect anything to have changed when our political leadership class has done nothing whatsoever to effect meaningful change?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) manipulated power markets in California and the Midwest from September 2010 and June 2011, according to allegations unveiled today by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The bank has agreed to sanctions that include a fine of about $400 million, to settle the investigation in a deal that may be announced as early tomorrow, according to a person familiar with the case who asked not to be identified because the terms aren’t yet public. Other claims may include forfeiting or forgoing excess profits, this person said.

In other words, anything but prison or liquidation. Too bad, because those are just about the only legal remedies we haven't tried yet. Who knows, they might even work!

---Baron V