They can protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes

I am always trying to think of ways to make the idea of Vermont independence palatable to the uninitiated person. By uninitiated I mean someone who hasn't spent a few years in the uncomfortable headspace that rejects the assumption that Vermont, or any state, is required to remain in a posture of political and financial subservience to the presumptive higher wisdom of a federal government; an entity that is chronically and systemically unresponsive to the needs of the people, having chosen to assign the well-being of the rich and their corporations as flimsy proxy for the well being of the citizenry. In Vermont we rally against our geriatric nuclear plant's hopes of perpetual NRC coronation in hopes of avoiding any more irradiation and we show the fuck up to protest the NDAA and PIPA, Bradley Manning and Tim DeChristopher's incarceration and the plunder of our collective wealth represented by the waste and fraud of programs like the F-35. We call for our National Guard troops to come me from Iraq and Afghanistan and we vote to impeach sitting presidents. We lobby for our small farmers like it was going out of style and we hold our town meetings like they matter. We are filled with the spirit, there is no doubt.

I come to believe more and more, however, that the only protest that will matter is the one where people stop paying their federal taxes. Indulge me for a moment and imagine if a large group of individuals were to set up a joint holding account for these retained funds. Initially one could reasonably frame this as a simple tax protest and quite a legitimate one at that given that most Americans (not just Vermonters) want to curtail our militarism, decrease the influence of corporations and require the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. The federal government has not only been unresponsive to these sentiments, it has moved in exactly the opposite direction with the invasion of Libya, Citizens United and it's failure to impose any additional burden on the rich during this terrible recession despite the fact that their tax rates are historically low. Imagine how thought provoking and potentially paradigm expanding it would be for state legislators and other citizens to see all that money in one place and ponder the possibilities.

How would Vermonters feel about the social security and healthcare debates going on at the federal level if we could suddenly fund all our entitlement liabilities ourselves and structure them how we pleased i.e. without having to find a happy medium with South Carolina? How would the balance of power change if the federal government had to ask us for contributions to the wars for global hegemony each year? If instead of having to simply re-up with the thoroughly corrupted federal legislature by expending minimal effort throwing around phrases like "unpatriotic apologist" and "our boys deserve the best", they had to sell the idea to 50 individual states ever single year? What if the federal government had to explicitly ask for money to support corporations that are outsourcing jobs while giving huge salaries and bonus' to CEOs who hoard profits overseas to avoid taxes while smugly awaiting the next profit repatriation holiday? How many Vermonters would agree to funding oil and ethanol subsidies if they could say no? Could Vermont do a better job repairing its crumbling infrastructure if it didn't have to go begging and submit a forest worth of paperwork to the government to get a bit of its own money back? If it didn't have to keep a Leahy on staff to pander and pimp and drag some money back out of the Sarlac Pit of the Military Industrial Complex to bring jobs to the people? (We could make it fun, have an annual ceremony where we'd give his (former) salary to a small business person and blow out a riff on a trumpet or some such.) Imagine if the cynicism and fatalism of paying your taxes were replaced with purposefulness and empowerment?

I can hear you out there worrying about what Mississippi will do to itself if what some perceive to be the federal choke chain of simple decency and "reasonableness" is removed. Let me carefully suggest that said federal choke chain allowed the despoiling of the Gulf of Mexico by an oil industry responsible for creating, on our own soil, one of the greatest examples of The Resource Curse. Allow me to curb your enthusiasm by mentioning that the drug war, so unequally waged against black people, also occurs under its beneficent auspices. And let's not forget that the attempts by those in the lower latitudes to assert themselves against the power of corporations intent on either fracking or mountaintop removing large sections of this country into inhabitability are just as readily squelched by the power of these United States.

In short, you don't have to reject the entire notion of a United States in order to embrace the notion of federal accountability through greater state level financial leverage. Anyone can see that it is hopeless to try and affect change while sustaining the status quo with every paycheck.

Good Times

From December 17, 2011
Josh and Jesse are both sick and we had just about 1 tsp of Nyquil in the house which clearly isn't going to cut it. Now, its Saturday and it's almost 6pm so I've had a few at this point and Josh can't go because he's prostrate on the couch having attended a 6 year old's water slide birthday party this afternoon with Elias who can't swim for shit and that kind of extreme parental vigilance is exhausting. And he's a man with a cold. Enough said. So, toasted lightly brown, I'm looking at this pittance of nighttime relief clinging to the bottom of the bottle and I'm looking at my huge truck which I am just learning to control and I'm like: can't do it, I'm walking to the drugstore. So I announce to everyone that I am, in fact, "WALKING TO THE DRUGSTORE" because I've had a few beers and it isn't OK for me to drive (Teaching. Fucking. Moment. Y'all.) I grab my purse and my flashlight and head out into the 15 degree night. I get to the store and what's the first thing I see (after cracking myself up reading aisle signs. Why?) but this amazing beast cast in the finest Chinese resin. I instantly realize that my intoxication has led me to a date with $5 yellow demon-eyed destiny: "Whooooa! My NAME is Buck!" So, 1 package of spiderman bandaids, a Whitmans' sampler and one off-gassing 8 point buck later (oh and the Nyquil, I got that too.), I am walking home having had the most fun for $20 that I can remember. If you haven't gone shopping at a drugstore after a few beverages in a while (and who has, we all drive everywhere right?) I highly recommend it. I put the buck on Josh's nightstand. I hope he likes it.

Live simply so that these kids can die anyway because your Christmas shopping isn't what's killing them

A wonderful sentiment that rings hollow after only cursory consideration. Let's take this from the top.

What message is this visual device trying to send?

1. Those kids do not have enough food. Those chubby women have too much food.

2. Those women should give $ to those children instead of buying so many toys for their kids.

3. We should all be grateful we aren't starving African children and bitch a little less about stuff.

Seems to make sense, right? But African children with painfully swollen bellies and brain damage are not caused by overweight, slightly crazed looking mothers buying toys.

What would be more appropriate here is a strong condemnation of deforestation, slash and burn cattle farming and poor agricultural practices like improper grazing and mono-culture that deplete fertility and/or cause desertification. We could see a picture of Wall Street commodity traders inflating the prices of grain in order to make very rich people richer. Or we could see western governments supporting brutal and corrupt African regimes in order to curtail China's resource ambitions. Unlike the poorly coiffed, LL bean big shirt consumer brigade pictured above, these factors all tip quite precipitously towards direct causation.

These women could send their annual toy budget to an aid organization but these children aren't starving for lack of $, they are starving because of bad weather, bad soil, commodity price inflation and war, factors pretty much beyond the reach of the average female Toys R Us shopper. Juxtaposing a picture of some spiritually challenged wonk from the IMF or World Bank or some ConAgra douchebag whose policies actually cause this kind of shit might be harder to understand but it would be far more accurate.

I can't help but get a slight wagging finger feeling from this too, like I'm being directed to not feel bad about the American middle/working class' plight. Though the average American has access to plenty of calories they are only one paycheck, one job loss, or one illness away from being homeless. And that cart has maybe $150 worth of stuff in it (it's all box) which is no great shakes when you're spending $2K a month just between your mortgage and your health insurance. So, in addition to being a bad example of cause and effect, this visual unfairly gives the impression of vast squandered resources, engenders a self-hate that is unearned and makes snooty face at anyone fussing about wage stagnation and unemployment.

Arguing for systemic fairness goes much further towards helping these children than sending money to Unicef and certainly effects positive change more than feeling bad about Christmas shopping*. You don't have to be starving and walking around in dirty underwear to be morally entitled to advocate loudly for systemic fairness. Honestly, once you're at that point you wouldn't be very good at it, anyway. 

*the waffle riot people are excluded from this implicit pardon.    

Massey Murder

Roy Blankenship is back in the coal business. He is free as a bird and back in the coal business after his company paid a measly $200 million fine (the fact that this is a record breaking fine just makes this more depressing) for knowingly endangering the lives of his workers in order to make more money. The government's investigation found that:

"managers at…Massey put profits ahead of workers' safety, and that an ingrained corporate culture of greed and recklessness ultimately led to a catastrophe that should have been prevented…federal investigators found that a preventable methane ignition triggered the explosion, which was then fueled by an accumulation of coal dust…"The results of the investigation lead to the conclusion that PCC/Massey promoted and enforced a workplace culture that valued production over safety, and broke the law as they endangered the lives of their miners." Management showed a "systematic" and "intentional" pattern of covering up safety hazards at the mine, such as the inadequate ventilation and poor roof supports that contributed to the disaster, according to investigators. The mine also had an "established" practice of tipping off managers when federal and state safety inspectors were on the way…The company went so far as to maintain two sets of safety books -- one that included known dangers, and another watered-down version that miners and inspectors could see…Workers who tried to bring forth safety concerns were routinely bullied by their superiors and feared losing their jobs making them unlikely to seek out inspectors. "

Now if Massey were a real person rather than a corporate "person" this would be 29 counts of manslaughter at the very least, more likely reckless homicide. The fact that no one is going to go to jail for killing 29 people, even when it has been demonstrated that systematic and deliberate behaviors mandated by Massey Energy caused this explosion, is as clear an example of our inculcated and compromised justice system as you'll find.

Our justice system has been contorted and leveraged to serve the interests of capital to such as extent that it is impossible within the law to hold the responsible parties to account when their misbehavior causes calamity and death. Our elites; be they energy executives, barons of finance or members of the legislature; have completely insulated themselves from just retribution for their crimes by contorting the law to either make their criminal activity legal or by making their crimes not subject to incarceration. Sure they pay fines, fines that seem like a lot of money to regular people, but these aren't regular people. Blankenship got a $12 million severance when he left Massey AFTER The Big Branch explosion! Massey was sold for $7 Billion AFTER the accident happened!

If justice were to be served, every person who ever ordered a subordinate to implement one of these profit generating, life endangering policies would be going to jail and every lackey who intimidated a whistleblower would be going to jail. But as right now, just one guy might be going to jail for obstruction of justice for actions related to the investigation, not the accident.

When people kill other people out of passion; be it hatred, love or anger; our justice system holds them to account. But when incorporated people kill other people out of greed, it goes unpunished. Personal responsibility dissolves into the soft focus capital C corporate, designed to absolve these entities of the responsibilities of personhood while preserving the rights of personhood.

I think people might believe that there is some higher logic than greed at work here. There isn't. I think people might believe that our laws are held to some ultimate standard of fairness. They aren't.

In a society where justice had any value, our awareness of the pretty well established effect of bureaucracy on perception of personal responsibility ("I was just doing my job loading those cattle cars! It wasn't my decision!") and the difficulty of assigning guilt to groups of people who come together for the sole purpose of making money, should have lead us by now to a simplified and effective method for punishing these transgressions. That the reality is just the opposite speaks to the utter corruption, dysfunction and illegitimacy of the system.

Image by Cat and Girl "The Incredible Lightness of Being Dead" 

http://catandgirl.com/ dorothy(at)catandgirl.com

Waffle Riots

A guy in the comments of an article I just read took the author to task for applauding the "successful" uprisings in Egypt saying "has the author read the news lately, that place is a mess!" 

Part of me says "right on Credulous Man, Arab Spring was a US plot all along and the new boss is probably going to be worse, high fuckin' five!". But another part of me says "Oh Soft American, so drunk on consumerism that you are thoroughly convinced all transitions should be painless upgrades that require no sacrifice or downtime, this must be stressful for you."

I think a big part of why Americans can't seem to pull their asses out of the couch crevasse to demand a better system of governance (hell, to demand a system that won’t eat it self alive in the next 45 minutes) is because they have the expectation that beneficial change can occur in the same sanitized way that old boring white appliances get replaced with shiny new front loading red ones.

Since half the point of consumerism is to turn people into infantile hedonists too preoccupied with developing their "style" with the cheap shiny fruits of globalization to spend more than 5 minutes a day worrying about what their government might be up to, I think my theory is awesome. (this only holds up as long as the cash and credit flows, of course, interrupt this atmosphere too egregiously and well, watch this crowd go after the $2 #blackfriday waffle makers at Walmart. Fucking terrifying, no? Imagine if these people were actually hungry or cold or something.)

This thought flows through the same vein I posted in the other day about how people are resistant to leaving their big evil bank for a small, ethical credit union because the process is sort of a pain in the ass, takes a bit of time and doesn't make them have more money or stuff when it's over. We are very much accustomed to having our cake and eating it too i.e. getting something for nothing. Joining a credit union is damn near the easiest and most direct way to subvert the criminal banking cabal yet this somehow gets lost in all the flustered, confused,  vaguely sweaty 'having to do actually something' shtick.

Fundamental social/political change has always been a convulsive, destructive, highly inconvenient process. Elites very much enjoy being Elites and with institutional inertia working in their favor, depriving them of the favorable climate through which they extract their glorious tribute like a hyena pulling the guts out of a still hot wildebeest will definitely precipitate one of those 'out of my cold dead hand' type situations.  

So maybe Mr. Commenter is keen to Paul Wolfowitz's plan to suck up all those former Soviet Client States before China gets too big to make a fuss. Maybe he's tuned in to The Rand Corporation's devious covert regime change machinations. Or maybe he's just wondering when a better political system will be ready for pre-order on Amazon.

Tar Sands = Energy Independence = Bullshit

So this tar sands ad comes on while I was waiting to watch a CNN video. Nice looking black man starts telling me how US energy independence is one of America's biggest challenges right now and that tar sands oil is the answer. Now I know that because they are "people" corporations are pretty much allowed to lie under the guise of exercising free speech but this claim really pushes even that permissive standard.

Boys and girls, today we are going to learn a new word: EXPORT. EXPORT is what happens when American energy companies can get a higher price for their products by selling them to other countries! Was I in the bathroom when Obama made his "all domestically produced energy must be sold domestically" speech? Did I pick the wrong moment to go get another beer and miss the announcement of the nationalization of all domestic energy resources? WTF is "innocuous but capable looking black man" talking about?

I understand by and large people are really, really clueless and on the whole disinterested in the issues surrounding fossil fuel dependence and the imminent rack and ruin of Petroleum Man (Hat tip, Gaelan Brown) but they aren't the people watching the CNN video that featured this advertisement, hence my perplexity.

First and foremost, it is hard imagine how anyone can watch an ad from a fossil fuel company and not disbelieve anything and everything they say simply because they are a fossil fuel company. Everything about this industry is malevolent and dysfunctional; from the government subsides that obliterate the proper functioning of energy markets by squelching competition to the externalization of the costs of the pollution it produces, to the highly inequitable pay structures to the unavoidable realization that it is dead end industry; even a credulous but somewhat well informed person (the typical CNN viewer, no?) has to balk at the get go, right?

Having their "innocuous but capable looking black man" spokeswhore talk absolute nonsense about energy security is just the icing on the cake. For fuck's sake, not only are we not entitled to the use of the energy that is produced domestically, we don’t even get a cut of $$$ these companies make unless we live in Alaska! We just get to pay to clean up after them, buy our kids a lifetime of asthma medication before shipping them off the fight in the latest resource war and wait for the PR campaign featuring an innocuous by capable looking Hispanic woman telling us "drinking water security is one of America's biggest challenges right now and privatizing weather is the answer"

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Keystone XL Oil Pipeline - Bill McKibben
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Middle Class or First World Subsistence?

I must take issue with the assertion made in this article that a couple with 3 children making 50K combined is "solidly" anything, never mind middle class.

Let's run down the list of assumptions required to argue that 50K leaves a family of 5 with enough disposable income to be considered middle class vs. living a first world subsistence existence. This couple owns their home (or lives rent free), they have no debt in the form of student loans, car payments, credit cards etc., they have good employer subsidized health insurance and are all healthy and since both parents are working we have to assume that grandma is the work-day caregiver and she gets paid in love.

Even with these fairly outrageous assumptions, that 50K is more like 41K once you take out taxes. That's less than 185% of poverty level income for this family. They would easily qualify for reduced school lunches, subsidized housing and food stamps. That's middle class???

Let's look at this a different way, where we assume they have most of the liabilities most families have. They pay $1,200 a month for Housing (if they are lucky, in Chittenden County this would be very hard to do for a family of 5.), they pay $500 a month for 2 student loans, they pay $300 for health insurance, they have a car payment of $250, they pay car insurance of $100, and they pay $500 a month to have one kid in full time daycare. From the post taxes residual of 41,000 we get around $3400 a month. After just the above expenses (by no means a comprehensive list), this family has around $550 left to pay for everything else; food, utilities, car repairs, all the crap costs like parking tickets and broken teeth that come up and all the discretionary consumption that supposedly defines what middle class is.

Drop one of the student loans or the car loan and it's still insane to call their income situation anything but precarious and stressful. Even though they are both educated white collar professionals, it is Orwellian nonsense to call these people middle class.

YES WE CAN! (give our kids milk in a cup!)

In this fine article, Tom Philpott regales us with the sordid tale of wanton whore bags from the industrial food lobby successfully preserving regulations that allow the lilliputian smear of tomato paste on a frozen pizza to count as a vegetable when calculating the nutritional merits of school lunches. This inspired me to spend part of the morning peppering Governor Shumlin's twitter feed with perky pellets of 140 character cleverness asking why the fuck Vermont feeds our wee ones the bleached, irradiated, emulsified, amalgamated and most likely contaminated swill from outfits like Cargill, Tyson and Hood when we have such stark raving mad unrealized but nonetheless chomping at the bit capacity to meet the needs of our school lunch program with food made here.

Oh Governor, I said, what better way to strengthen our economy and the well being of our children than to commit to sourcing our public school lunch programs locally? Would it not be easier to shrug off the entire federally subsidized school lunch program, a program that offers a mere $1 per meal subsidy to our schools, than to hope (in the Derrick Jensen sense of hope: a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency) that the USDA will one day free itself from the clutches of the agribusiness interests which currently bend policy in the direction of their hungry gaping maw somehow not sated by the steady stream of agriculture subsidies already flowing thereto.

The thing about the corporate capture of regulatory agencies is that, well, they are somewhat restrained by the fact that they are captured. It is hard to imagine arguing that our energy would be better spent reforming the entire regulatory and electoral system of the United States than it would be developing a way for Vermont to feed this one small part of our population that already shows up in semi orderly fashion at the same place everyday. How difficult, within the wider scheme of difficult things, would it be to put ovens and stoves back in our school kitchens and to have people there that can use them to prepare 2 simple meals for children?

Can we really, in good conscience and without hanging our heads in shame say "the federal system only allows us to buy commodity beef and the local milk doesn't come in a box" and leave it at that? We are admitting defeat in a much more expansive way than we intend if we throw up our hands and resign ourselves to supporting industrial milk because industrial milk comes in a box and local milk doesn’t come in a box so we can't serve public school kids local milk.

That is "take us out behind the shed and make it as quick and painless as possible" type talk, folks.

Those boxes suck anyway, they are god damn near impossible to open.

sorry for your service? Ugh.

Veteran's Day is a tough day for me to navigate.

How do you thank someone for risking or giving their lives for a lie, for a mistake, for an oil company, for an empire that has long since abandoned the work of serving its people? How do you say that you would never be willing to unquestioningly put yourself in harm's way for such corrupt, poorly planned and deceptively articulated causes? How do you say 'thank you' when you’d give up your citizenship and leave the country before you'd give your life or offer your child's life to sustain U.S. global hegemony?

Can gratitude cohabitate with the knowledge that regardless of the "threats" at hand, you know that in a less demagogic, less corrupt, less greedy and more incredulous world, we'd have far fewer people to thank for their sacrifices on Veteran's day. It is common sense that military men and women would be far better served by not being sent into harm's way than by any amount of cheap grace we can heap upon them having sent them to war needlessly, out of intellectual lethargy more than conviction, having had no tangible costs imposed on us, taking the knee-jerk patriotic easy way out. When we are asked to honor the service of our military men and women are we not also being asked to honor militarism? How can we hate war and love war at the same time?

Isn't it inherently condescending and disingenuous to say thank you to someone for doing something you are unwilling to do, something you know is folly, something you know is perpetuated by the skillful parlaying of the manipulative power of anachronistic mythology?

In the end I feel like I should just be saying 'Sorry'. I'm sorry our nation can't think of anything better to do with your lives than send you to far away lands to kill and subdue people who will hate you for it. I'm sorry we'll pay you so poorly to do it. I'm sorry we'll often fail to care for you when you come back broken. I'm sorry we'll misplace your body or lose it entirely. I'm sorry we'll lie about how you died to cover up our mistakes. I'm sorry because I believe in my heart of hearts that your act of service, an act that will no doubt color the rest of your life, was a terrible waste of life, of money and of opportunity.

So, like I said, it's a tough day for me to navigate.

*although arguments could be made about WWI and WWII having been wholly being avoidable massive wastes of human life, I can't make them so I limit my comments to the militarism of my lifetime. 

Baklava!

So I'm on Twitter, watching the twitards tweeting this Greek debt crisis up, down and sideways. Some wondering how a "disorganized" Greek default and exit from the Euro will affect US unemployment (the going bet is +1.5%, btw) and with some sagely saying "if someone offered to cut my debt load in half I'd take it, haw haw haw" and still others just saying "duhhhhhhh" or "Baclava!".

I'll leave it to the really fine article What passes for smart on the Greek Debt Crisis to 'splain how and where even what is considered progressive media has fallen quite short in evaluating the Greek situation but, let me say this: we the people aren't getting the full story on the implications of Greek default because the full story would undermine the underpinnings of the whole fetid ball of wax under whose stingy patronage we labor. We cannot confront the paucities of the oligarchic capitalist system using its language and its assumptions for both have been purged of any notion which doesn't serve the host.

"This is the Facebook rule: if you don’t pay the freight, you aren’t the customer, you are the product.  Politicians compete for the money and favors of the rich, and what they sell is the ability to wrangle you: to pass the austerity bills, to cut the benefits, to privatize the jewels of the public system, to force through the multi-trillion dollar bailouts…They control the media, right down to the bottom, to make sure that what is discussed is what they want discussed, in the terms they want it discussed. That default isn’t that bad: forbidden.That currency controls mitigate damage in these circumstances: forbidden. That lenders will lend to defaulting countries almost immediately: forbidden."

Please forgive me for lapsing into clichés but it's hard to improve upon "you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it".

And as for the Greek people themselves, though perhaps less so the most urban among them: a culture that is almost as deeply suspicious of government as they are deeply attached to afternoon naps, that happily relinquishes 3 hours each evening to eat dinner and talk, in this humble writers opinion, will be just fine no matter the outcome of this particular pixel based debacle.

Having said that and though having just recently eaten a truly revelatory bagel and liverwurst delight, thinking about greece makes me hungry so I am off to prowl the pantry.

Starving the Beast

There is a bit of legislation in the rusty crusty works of congress that would require banks to make it easier for people to close accounts, one would assume in order to move their money to smaller institutions that don’t regularly abuse them and/or hold the national economy hostage when their bets go bad.

How ever well intentioned this legislation may be, and I have my doubts about this, it is also a prime example of the kind of top down fuckitude that has paralyzed individual action in our fine nation. Just as the credit union bug starts catching, here comes big daddy fed with a can of Lysol, putting the kibbutz on individual initiative to make the change by stating outright that making the switch is toooooo haaaaaard and implying that people should wait for the government to make it easier/safer/more convenient before they do it.

Now there's a banner idea. Let's wait for Congress to write a new law that makes it easier to walk into a bank and close an account: this should only take 3-5 years and cost about 3 million dollars to accomplish and in the end the banks will have inserted enough caustic bullshit into the legislation to make the move harder and probably have a significant fee attached to it.

I closed an account with Bank of America and opened an account with Vermont Federal Credit Union without any help and with no difficulty. If you hate what the Too Big To Fail banks are doing to this country and you want to help starve them out of existence in the most direct and effective way available to you, do not wait for the government to make it "easier".

Don't make me start waxing poetic about "at what cost liberty" because that would embarrass us both.

Here is a video with Jimmy Stewart in it to get you all hopped up on righteous indignation before you head out to do the deed:

Dear Taxpayer

This video is painful to watch but, 3 brutal years in to this crisis, I think it is worth revisiting what a bunch of slimy, self-important, conniving, lying douche bags all these CEO's are. I'll probably spend the rest of my life wondering how they escaped with their lives.

Repigs be Good: Rick Perry Edition

Rick Perry on why he might skip some debates:

“These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates. It pretty hard to be able to sit and lay out your ideas and your concepts with a one minute response. So, you know, if there was a mistake made, it was probably ever doing one of the campaigns [debates] when all they’re interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.”

First off, I am sorry I made you read that quote. Sentence structure like that is never easy to experience. But more to the point, it appears Rick Perry is trying to make the case for not having candidate debates. (I stifle a "Yay!" I live tweet these things. All of them.) This makes sense since he sucks so bad a thinking/talking and, honestly what candidate wouldn't rather just share their carefully crafted, buffed and polished image of themselves with the public? What candidate wouldn't want to be able to present their hyperbolic dysentery without fear of factual repudiation or troublesome discussion? David Frum made a very good point the other day about Perry: Perry isn't speaking to the pundit/policy wonk class when he throws down garbage like The Sort of 20% Flat Tax Plan *Now With The Magiks™*, a the plan that will:

-Eliminate SS taxes without eliminating SS payments by protecting the SS Trust Fund that is already empty!
-Simply the tax code by preserving the entire existing tax code and adding a rasher of optional flat tax gobbled-d-gook to it!
-Promise to keep energy prices low and energy plentiful in the US of A while assuming in all predictive economic models that energy prices will double by 2018 and allowing all our domestically produced energy to be exported!
-Reduce Government spending and government revenue without cuts to entitlement or military spending or addressing healthcare costs at all! Not even a little bit! Not one word!

Perry is actually talking to the Cognitive Dissonance Class of repigs; people who want to think they are good people who don’t want poor children and old people to starve, who don’t relish having the blood of a million innocents on their hands and who want winners not cheaters to get the spoils of the great American white uny-corn 24 hour buffet. They want to be good whilst still being repigs and voting for assholes like Perry. If you spend several hours a day worrying about the devil bungholing your soul for all eternity, you want to be good bad enough to believe almost anything. As much of a stretch as it it, they might even believe that debates leave a brain trust like Perry in the grips of The Frustrations: the limited time allotted for answering queries is just too dang short for him to fully convey his deep knowledge of the issues of the day. Also, he can fly and poops blueberry muffins.

Imbecile Institutions Case Study: Law Enforcement

Our law enforcement institutions have been showing a keen determination to keep shitty people on the job lately. I'll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to brilliantly opine about how the 2 tiered justice system makes it easy for member of elites classes such as law enforcement to evade judicial justice. I just want to discuss a few recent examples of people who screwed the pooch at work and kept their jobs. Tosten Veblen had a snappy way of describing institutions that drift into the realm of dysfunction by relying on outmoded ways of thinking; in this case some combination of the embrace of the sunk costs fallacy and the supremely loathsome "we take care of own" mentality seems to characterize these FAILS: Veblen called them "Imbecile Institutions". Here are a few examples:

The Sean Bell incident: You can read here, here and here for the background on this case but for my purposes we need only discuss that after having proven to be either too jumpy, too disorganized, too eager or all 3, the cops who killed this unarmed man in a arain of 50 bullets on the eve of his marriage to the mother of his 2 children, still get to be cops. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it so well this morning "an officer who's made this sort of catastrophicmistake should not continue in his chosen line of work… Being a cop is a reallyhard job. Not everyone is up to it."

Fast and Furious: You can read here, here and here for the details of this massive fuck up but for my purposes we need only discuss how the supervisors of this operation: "Fast and Furious…was ascheme that allowed the sale of weapons to known gunrunners…it all went wrongand ATF lost track of 80 percent of the guns, which have been used in numerous crimesin Mexico and have been involved in the deaths of US border agent Brian Terryand immigration officer Jaime Zapata" not only didn't get fired but got promoted.

Detroit crime lab abandoned whilst still full of unprocessed evidence and police gear: Again, you can go here, here and here for details but here's the basics:

"The Detroit Free Press found last week that the lab, housed in a former elementary school, still contained criminal evidence and files. Televisions, cameras,microscopes, files, old blood samples, and even live ammunition...the building had been open, with a fence down and windows busted open, for at least a week." 

Whoa, the person in charge of this will surely lose his job!  Ralph Godbee Jr., who was Assistant Police Chief at the time, was told to clean out the lab before it was left to wilds. Not only didn't he do that, he didn't even make sure it locked when the staff and security left. Godbee wasn't fired or even demoted. He is now Chief of Police in Detroit.

Shouldn't we be trying to get smart, capable people in these jobs? Aren't there lots of smart capable people looking for work? Man o Manischewitz, we totally suck at meritocracy.

On NPR on Occupy Oakland

NPR's reporting of the protester smack-down in Oakland has been infuriating. NPR chose to describe the brutally disproportionate reaction of the OPD to peaceful protesters as a "clash between protesters and police". The use of this phrase is a blatant attempt to repackage reality as to absolve the OPD of their unwarranted aggression by creating a sense of equanimity of violent intent between both parties. And it gets worse from there.

Here we have a situation where a group of people LEGALLY exercising their constitutional right to free speech and assembly, responds to police attempts to unjustly and forcibly remove them by (stupidly, admittedly) throwing water bottles, paint and a few rocks and being met by hundreds of police dispensing teargas, beanbag projectiles, flash grenades and rubber bullets from within the protection of riot gear. This wasn't a "clash" this was an attack by a state ARMY against a group of unarmed civilians. To try to frame it as anything short of that is dishonest at best and dishonest for the purpose of misinformation and manipulation of public sentiment to advance the ends of NPR's corporate sponsors at worst, to say nothing of the irony of assaulting the public to maintain pubic safety. Or are protesters no longer considered 'the public' due police protection in the same way that US citizens deemed 'terrorists' are no longer due their rights as citizens?

"There is no threat to the public when the public uses a public space. To suggest otherwise is authoritarian absurdity. Rather, the purpose of the police attack was to break the will of the protesters by causing them physical harm…Tear gas and nightstick blows disperse a crowd, but they also leave a memory of violence that deters future assembly"

It is worth mentioning that the pretext for this attack was trumped up sanitation and public safety concerns that could have easily been addressed by communication with the group's leadership. Although the professed lack of leadership within Occupy Oakland competent enough to resolve the alleged issues was used as a justification for the attack, these leaders magically materialized the moment Mayor P.O.S. decided she wanted to keep the peace/her job.

A later NPR segment featured this gem: "If Occupy Wall Street had an agenda, it might be able to bring grass-roots energy to the Democrats the way the Tea Party did for the GOP." To the first point: has NPR had its head up its ass for the past 6 weeks? How else could the #OWS agenda have evaded their notice? To the second: I just answered my own question, yes it does, because anyone who looks at #OWS and says "oh my, the democraptastic sell-out "thanks for inviting us, we just so happy to still be here" half of our oligarchic political duopoly will surely be able to benefit from this movement that TOTALLY rejects everything said craptastic party truly stands for." Later in the same segment, from Matt Bennett of the group Third Way: "Bennett wants to avoid having Democrats tied to the excesses of the fringe of the Occupy Wall Street protests the way the party was tied for decades to the excesses of the anti-war movement." We were all told just last week, when Obama pretended to end the war in Iraq, that the Iraq war has cost us all $3-5 trillion dollars, all of it debt. In this time of austerity hysteria where everyone and their grandma is pledging to root out waste, fraud, inefficiency, gremlins and couch change to stave off the default of the entire US economy, where we are spending $300 million A DAY in Afghanistan and just blew a another billion (and counting) to liberate Libya from The Man Who Knew Too Much, here is a self labeled liberal saying that candidates should shy away from the anti-war movement with NPR dutifully reporting this utter nonsense.

NPR: This is propaganda not journalism. Drop your sugar daddies Walmart and ADM, raid that sweet endowment of yours and do your freakin' job.