brainiac conspiracy

Tell Us Something We Didn't Already Know

I'm old enough to remember when people could leverage mass movements to directly affect public policy. They could take to the streets en masse to earn the franchise for women and minorities, gain bargaining rights for workers, and even stop wars! And eventually, the people who governed us were forced to accede to their demands, as is the normal state of affairs in a thriving liberal democracy.

But that's all a distant memory now. In postmillennial America, we no longer matter.

---Baron V

The People Who Really Govern Us

Their names never appear on a single ballot, and nobody ever casts a votes for them. The people we do vote for---or against---are merely their paid celebrity spokesmodels. Wish it weren't so, but that's the political reality in the greatest nation ever. Perhaps it's time we started to change this.

---Baron V

General Strikes

I've been lobbying for them for years. Guess the idea's catching on!

To the point, if we can't repatriate all of the wealth the kleptocrats have stolen from us, we can at least refuse to participate in their economy and to withhold what's left of our money from them for as long as humanly possible. This won't be easy but it can be done. Need groceries? Find a local co-op or farmer's market, and fuck Wal-Mart. Need clothes? Hit the thrift store, not the department store. Need to travel? Take the bus or carpool, and leave your car in the garage. Like I said, it can be done, but several millions of wage-earners will need to agree as one that they're going to take, oh I dunno, let's say a month off of work. Again, not easy---and even a bit scary, given high unemployment---but it can be accomplished via strike funds, food banks, etc. This will need to be accompanied by nonviolent mass demonstrations that disrupt the plutocrats' ability to conduct commerce by blocking access to ports and railways, to name only two examples. The oligarchs need us a lot more than they or their benefactors in our government realize, and I suspect we won't see any significant movement toward greater economic equality in this country until we see some socially convulsive mass mobilization that hits them squarely in their most sensitive spot---their wallets. They've taken the power of the ballot from us---what other choice do we have absent violence?

---Baron V

It's Only a Matter of Time

Before the people who blew up our world, well, blow it up again.

Crazy thing is, the next implosion won't happen due to traditional market forces but as a failure of public policy. No "market forces" mandated our central bank to give trillions of dollars in free money to banks and private equity, nor were they a factor in the wholesale theft of millions of homes. "Market forces" also don't countenance "front-running" in the form of high-frequency trading---but they do suggest that failed institutions should be allowed to, you know, fail. Maybe next time?

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

Time-Warner Cable. Are they the most hated company in America, or what?

---Baron V

Plessy v. Hobby Lobby

We've been there before, it could happen again. It all comes down to how much damage the Chief Justice wants to wreak on the commonweal. In this case, I am guessing plenty. Would love to be proved wrong!

---Baron V

Clean-Up Woman

Guess we now know why GM picked a female CEO: Because none of the usual members of the Old Boys' Club wanted to be caught in the line of fire when the P.R. shit hit the fan.

More to the point, you'd think after the Ford Pinto fiasco, no automaker would act so stupidly and shortsightedly again. For an inexpensive part, it's going to cost them billions.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Sam Nunn.

These incompetent grifters centrist technocrats, they're like herpes. Once they've wormed their way into the body politic, they never really go away. They only go into remission, to strike again when the host's immune system is weakest.

---Baron V

When You Get the Money, They Call it Welfare

When they get the money, they call it a subsidy. Funny how that works out.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Reed Hastings.

Remind me never to watch anything on Netflix until they fire this awful person.

(Via.)

---Baron V

There Used to be Labor Laws in This Country

I wonder whatever became of them:

Nissan, the first of many foreign automakers to set up shop in Tennessee, is leading a trend. Companies from Amazon to Asurion to Dell have outsourced their warehouses and call centers to the hundreds of staffing agencies that have cropped up in the region. Tennessee went from having 51,867 temporary workers in 2009 to 80,990 in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics---while median wages have stayed flat. That accounts for nearly all of Tennessee's job growth since the recession, and makes up 3.61 percent of all jobs in the state, second only to South Carolina. In Tennessee's burgeoning manufacturing industry, it's even higher, going from 15 percent of all jobs in 2002 to 26 percent in 2012.

In a way, it's the workers' own damn fault since they've had the opportunity to unionize, and foolishly turned it down. But it reminds us, too, why our current system of capitalism is ultimately doomed to collapse: you keep impoverishing people, sooner or later you're going to run out of customers who can afford to buy your products. Henry Ford understood this. Why doesn't Nissan?

---Baron V

Lies We Tell Ourselves

There are many, of course, but one of the most enduring is of the superiority of the private sector, which is more nimble/flexible/adaptable than bloated government bureaucracy and hence can deliver superior services for a fraction of the money. To be fair, this hoary fraud has been trotted out by both Democrats and Republicans over the past 20 years, to the point where refuting it borders on heresy. Of course, anyone who has actually worked in the private sector for more than ten minutes knows that the notion is utter bullshit---the mission of the private sector isn't to provide equivalent services for less money, it's to provide services for more money because that's how you maximize shareholder value:

Average teacher pay last school year was under $57,000, but the highest-paid educator the taxpayers support earned $9.5 million last year. Those big bucks went to Nathaniel A. Davis, the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of K12 Inc., which runs virtual privatized schools for taxpayers.

What of garbage removal, the stinky work of burly men whose wages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get modestly increased back in 1968 when he was murdered in Memphis? These days, you can haul in $7.7 million a year in garbage. That big payday went to David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management, who also owns about $59 million worth of stock in the company that contracts to pick up garbage for cities, towns and counties, but also has private-pay customers.

And how about prison guards? Newspapers often run stories on how some guards rack up overtime to make more than $100,000 a year. But pay in this field can range as high as $6 million. That is what GEO Corporation paid CEO George Zoley in 2012. GEO operates jails and prisons with about 77,000 beds that, it boasts to shareholders, are occupied 96 percent of the time with inmates---adult and juvenile.

---Baron V

Food For Thought

In a perfect world, we humans would have all made a successful transition from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one. It's more sustainable for the planet, for healthier for us! But we don't live in a perfect world, and some people will always want to eat animals---heck, eating animals played a big part in how we evolved! So the least we can do, if we're going to eat animals, is to ensure that the animals are safe for us to eat. In the past, government undertook this task, but this was before the neoliberals and the privatizers and the deregulators took over, so now eating animals is like playing Russian roulette.

If you'd asked me five years if there was any chance that Barack Obama would finish the work that Ronald Reagan started, I'd have said you were nuts. Silly me.

---Baron V

Extortion Racket

Give the job creators what they want, or the economy gets it:

The 288 companies paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 19.4 percent between 2008 and 2012, far lower than the standard 35 percent rate. However, the rates ranged widely by industry, from 2.9 percent (for gas and electric utilities, which benefit greatly from accelerated depreciation) to 29.6 percent (for the retail/wholesale trade and health care).

McIntyre says retailers and hospitals pay the highest rates because "they can't threaten to leave" the country.

---Baron V

Greatest. Nation. Ever

It's another one of the myriad lies we tell ourselves because in many regards, we are one of the most wretched places to live in the civilized world. Maybe the next time we have a Democrat in the White House, and big Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, someone would deliver a rousing speech about this, and maybe even propose some legislation to address this! Just a thought.

---Baron V

Obvious Question

If our Washington spymasters really have acquired the superhuman power to Collect Everything®, how come it is that they can never seem to track down all the money that was stolen from us during the financial crisis? I think we can be fairly certain the money wasn't raptured up to heaven:

A Senate subcommittee investigation accused Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse of using elaborate “cloak-and-dagger” methods to hide the accounts of 22,000 wealthy American citizens with a total of up to $12 billion in assets from U.S. authorities so they could avoid paying taxes.

The bipartisan probe also sharply criticized the Justice Department for being lax in using subpoenas and other legal tools to pressure the bank to reveal most of the names of account holders, which have been withheld as part of a long Swiss tradition of bank secrecy.

All that money didn't just materialize in Switzerland out of thin air. Someone had to transfer it into existing accounts, and that means there are electronic records for everything! So the only reasons I can think of why our intrepid intelligence-gatherers haven't found the goodies is because (a) they're only interested in people who terrorize airplanes and subway stations, and not in people who terrorize pension funds, or (b) they're incompetent. If only we could hazard a guess which it could be.

---Baron V

Our Interwebs Are Terrible

But I guess this wouldn't be America is we didn't pay more money for shittier coverage than just about everyone else on the planet because free markets. That's how our job creators make their money, and it's why we should privatize and deregulate everything. Glad that's settled!

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Ron Brownstein:

[I]n a relentlessly globalizing world, most jobs that moved to Mexico since NAFTA would likely have shifted to some lower-wage country. "We are a global economy whether we like it or not," says Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Kantor, who served Clinton as U.S. trade representative when Congress approved NAFTA. "Businesses, capital, and jobs are going to move back and forth."

Bullshit. Career grifters like Mickey Kantor aside, it's like this: Jobs and capital don't move around from country to country because they have some mystic powers of their own, they move around because policymakers incentivize capital flight and outsourcing. Globalization wasn't/isn't some inevitable act of God, it's an outgrowth of policy that rewards busting unions, driving wages downward, evading taxes and offshoring assets. If we agree that these are undesirable things, we can rewrite policy to put a stop to the worst abuses of the market, but either way, economies don't change and evolve like living organisms because they're manmade constructs. This isn't at all difficult to figure out.

---Baron V

One-World Government

I know the concept frightens a lot of people, but for some issues such as climate change, for instance, it's hard to see how we'll ever get a handle on the problem without some kind of international governing body with genuine jurisdictional authority (unlike this UN, which needs an invitation from a particular state, or the approval of the Security Council to act unilaterally). So I'm not opposed to the idea of a global government---I just think it should be run for the benefit of people and not for multinationals. The people who who govern us now, regrettably, differ, so we must wage a constant struggle to defeat them utterly, no matter which team they happen to play for. Barring that, impeachment from office. Barring that, brickbats and barricades.

---Baron V

Once a Scam, Always a Scam

Defined contribution, i.e., 401(k) plans were never designed, contra their promoters' claims, to help anyone prepare for retirement---except for the extremely wealthy, who could afford to bank enough of their paychecks into them. For the rest of us, they were designed to liberate us from our money in the form of fees for the funds managers, commissions for brokers, and bonuses for the bank executives, and if you lost all your money because the equity markets tanked, oh well! That's why the Matt Millers of our world deserve to be shunned and scorned, and Social Security greatly expanded. We can do this any time we want---we simply have to summon the political will.

---Baron V