Corporate Tax Avoidance

Enough U.S. corporations have essentially switched their citizenship to avoid paying taxes that the process even has its own name now, inversion. Essentially it means that U.S. corporations invert reality and declare that they are owned by one of their foreign subsidiaries. If Walmart, for instance, continues along the path it has declared itself committed to, it will soon become a Swiss company. Nothing in Walgreen's operations will change, except for the amount of taxes it pays in the U.S.

Since the Supremes have been going out of their way lately to stress that corporations are persons, I like the proposal I read recently that corporations who engage in this slight of hand be prohibited from spending money in U.S. political campaigns. A Swiss citizen may not contribute to, or attempt to influence, the U.S. electoral process. If Walmart wishes to become a Swiss citizen, it should be subject to the same restrictions. No more donations to PACs or to political campaigns.

Apologists for this practice on the right like to point to imperfections and loopholes in the U.S. tax structure and say what is needed is all-encompassing tax reform. As if that is going to happen in the current political climate. And in the meantime, these corporate tax dodges would continue indefinitely in their world.

I love the way conservatives throw up smoke screens to divert attention from real problems. I'm reminded of a panel discussion I watched recently in which the subject of the immigrant children on the border came up. One of the conservatives bemoaned the fact that this situation was draining money that we could be spending on solving the problems faced by poor American children. And he did it with a straight face. They're good, you've got to admit.

Republicans and Irony (and Chutzpah)

I read two news stories this morning back to back. With regard to immigration, Boehner bemoans the fact that Obama has been president for five and a half years and hasn't done anything. Let's set to one side the fact that Boehner is factually wrong and just remember the fact that Republican obstructionism is the main reason nothing gets done anymore.

Ironically, the next news story of the morning had to do with Boehner's justification for the lawsuit against Obama, namely that he is abusing his executive powers by doing too much to circumvent the above-cited obstructionism.

The Republicans have long had this problem of not being able to make up their mnds about Obama. The very same same people at times castigate Obama as a revolutionary socialist with a master plan for destroying the country and at other times as a pathetic weakling who couldn't lead John Boehner to a tanning salon with free booze.

It can't be said often enough. Oh, for the days of a sensible Republican party.

Breaking News: Right Wingers Caught Lying

People on the right have been spreading the story that liberals have been over-reacting, nay lying even, about the significance of the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby ruling. Their story is that the ruling only applies to a select few birth control methods, the abortion-y ones. They say all the other government-approved contraceptive measures are still covered for Hobby Lobby employees and everyone else. The implication, if not outright allegation, is that liberals are playing politics with the issue, and of course there is no right-wing war on women.

The truth is that some lower courts have ruled in favor of similar closely-held corporations that object to coverage for all contraception methods. The Supremes not only left all of those lower court rulings in place, but they also ordered those lower courts which had ruled the opposite way, in favor of the Obama administration, to reconsider their decisions in light of Monday´s 5-4 Hobby Lobby ruling. There are supposedly something like fifty lawsuits in the pipelines challanging all contraception coverage, and the Supremes have just settled all of them.

So no, it´s not about abortion. It´s about contraception. And yes, this is the 21st century.

Ahh, the Good 'Ol Days

There is an obituary in the NY Times today for the Russian (Soviet) Air Force General who, in 1983, relayed the order to shoot down the Korean Air Lines plane which had strayed into Soviet territory, killing all 269 people on board.

It would be good if today's neo-con blatherers and right wing sabre rattlers would keep in mind, as they go on and on about how Obama is making America weak, what their boyfriend, Ronald Reagan, did at the time, i.e. nothing. Which, face it, was about all he could do.

When the Law Becomes Personal

There was a story in the NY Times 10 days ago that looked at a study showing that Supreme Court justices with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of women's rights than are those without daughters. Even William Rehnquist, in 2003 after his daughter divorced and became a single mother with a demanding job, became enough of a feminist to write in one of his rulings against “stereotypes about women's domestic roles.”

Now the Supremes have ruled 9-0 in favor of cell phone privacy, despite the eagerness that the conservative core have shown in other cases to expand the rights of police and limit the definition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In her column today, Linda Greenhouse looks at this ruling and wonders why the change in this particular case. Her suggested answer: because all of the justices are cell phone users themselves, the issue became personal.

This correlates with a similar 9-0 ruling a couple of years ago that the police could not place a GPS device on a suspected drug dealer's car. During oral arguments in that case, in response to a question from the bench, the government conceded that the justices themselves could be subjected to such an invasion of privacy. It became personal.

Fourteen years ago, Greenhouse says, Rehnquist was part of a 7-2 majority ruling that limited the ability of the police to inspect checked luggage. Again, because the justices were all travelers themselves, the issue was personal.

The best justices have always kept in mind that their rulings have concrete effects in the lives of real people, and are more than just interpretations of the law or applications of abstract ideology. Apparently even the most ideological of justices recognize this when they see themselves as part of that mass of real people.

In a Just World

Open Carry Texas and Their Apparent Heroes, Open Carry Somalia

Six undesirables, no matter how you slice it.

It Would Be Funnier If It Were Not So Sad

Pursuit of Happiness

In Sandy Springs Georgia, you can carry a gun almost everywhere, but need a prescription for a vibrator.

My favorite part of the story is this paragraph:

Of course there are plenty of other reasons besides medical afflictions – real or imagined – that a woman might need a sex toy. Maybe she's bored. Maybe her partner likes them. (Maybe they're more fun than her partner.) Maybe it's Tuesday.

The gun nuts rely on the currently-popular misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Well, what about that "pursuit of happiness" thing?

The Alfred E. Neuman Party

Still aren't convinced that the once-respectable Republican Party is dominated by lunatics? Check out this story.

With a mostly party-line vote on Thursday, the House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) that seeks to prevent the Department of Defense from using funding to address the national security impacts of climate change.

Posted Just Because His Name/Image Drive Right Wingers Apoplectic

Bill De Blasio has supplanted Nancy Pelosi as the chief bugaboo for the right wing boobs. Just say his name and quiver.

 

William Black: How to rob a bank (from the inside, that is)

I think this is poorly titled, but that's a minor point. This is just one more refutation of those few diehards who still would have it that the banks were the victims in the housing debacle that took down the U.S. economy.   Yes, there are still people who believe the crisis was driven primarily by Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, and by poor people deliberately lying to the banks in order to obtain fraudulent loans. 18:48 minutes · Filmed Sep 2013 · Posted May 2014 · TEDxUMKC William Black is a former bank regulator who’s seen firsthand how banking systems can be used to commit fraud — and how “liar's loans” and other tricky tactics led to the 2008 US banking crisis that threatened the international economy. In this engaging talk, Black, now an academic, reveals the best way to rob a bank — from the inside. William Black is a professor of economics and law at University of Missouri, Kansas City. WATCH NOW http://www.ted.com/talks/william_black_how_to_rob_a_bank_from_the_inside_that_is?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2014-05-12#t-3097

Teensy Weensy Glimmers of Republican Sanity

Republican Senator Rand Paul is right about two things in today's news. Like a stopped clock?

His op-ed piece in the NY Times demanding release of the "Drone Memos" is exactly right. Obama has nominated the author of at least two memos which authorize the killing of US citizens abroad to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supremes, and everyone deserves to see how he has justified target killings of citizens who have never been tried or convicted.

And Paul gets it right again when he calls for the Republicans to stop all of their craziness around the country on the voter id non-issue. Crazy is his word...and mine.

And Mitt Romney thinks the minimum wage should be raised. OMG

Sports Racism

It is remotely possible that I could somehow be talked into having the teeniest bit of sympathy for Donald Sterling, the racist owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. His troubles have, after all, been caused by the release of taped private conversations. (I don't know that this matters, but I seem to recall hearing at some point that the conversations were taped at his request.) For that to happen, however, someone will have to make a far stronger 4th-amendment argument than anything I have yet heard. As far as I'm concerned, he deserves all of the penalties that have been handed down by the NBA as well as all of the social opprobrium generally.

There has been much written about the fact that Sterling's history of racism was never a secret. His fellow owners, who now feel forced to take action against him, have been quite comfortable with him for the last 35 years. I think that is probably true and speaks to the matter of institutional racism in the United States.

But rather than try to generalize about past actions, or the lack of actions, and speculate about what that all means, it is far more interesting to me to look at the world of professional sports right now, already thinking of Donald Sterling as a relic of the past. The same sports commentators who are congratulating the new NBA commissioner for his prompt action against Sterling's overt racism, apparently see no racism in the names and logos of the Washington Redskins or the Cleveland Indians.

People need to stay away from Cleveland baseball games and Washington football games, wherever they are played. At home in recent years, Cleveland has always ranked at or near the bottom of Major League Baseball attendance. At this early point in the current season, they are at the bottom. If baseball fans around the country would simply refuse to show up to Cleveland's road games, so that they drew as poorly on the road as they do at home, I have no doubt the other owners would unite to take action.

I don't know anything about the NFL, but I think I know enough about capitalist owners to think a similar boycott of Washington football games around the country would produce results.

Yeah, I'm Still Here

Because I feel better writing what is on my mind, than not doing so, I've decided to start this nonsense again after a break of several weeks. But, let me repeat, I'm doing it for myself, not for you.

The obesity / diabetes epidemic documented in this film can hardly be considered an example of progress, in the event there is still anyone left who thinks the march of time is synonymous with social/political/economic advance.



The irritating aspect of this story is that there are people who genuinely prefer to believe this problem just, somehow, happened, and that for the government to try to do anything about it is overreach or another obnoxious example of the nanny state at work. These are the people who label as "bad science" all studies that don't support their economic interests. And they are people who clamor for individual responsibility but have no sense of, or understanding even, of the need for corporate responsibility.

Here is a shameful, but typical, story from 2003 about the pressure the sugar industry brought to bear on the US State Department to extort the World Health Organization into changing the conclusions about sugar in one of its reports. At the time this story ran, the issue was still up in the air. I believe the ultimate result was that the WHO bowed to US threats to pull its funding support and changed its report.

No doubt there are some examples of corporations who have made socially-responsible decisions that went against their bottom line. And it might even be true that those stories are under-reported, although that would seem to indicate a very atypically non-media-savvy corporation. But, if those examples exist, gawd gave us the internet to find them. Personally, I'm not going to waste my time, but I'll gladly give equal time to anyone who can find a story about corporate good citizenship that can offset the corporate role in obesity, or the recent story about General Motors and the faulty ignition switch.

The Earth As Seen From the Surface of Mars

CPAC 2014 Panel on Minority Outreach

This picture was posted a few days ago by John Hudak of the Brookings Institute, who covered the CPAC convention. Hudak claims to have taken this photo about 10 minutes into the Panel on Minority Outreach.

Of course Republicans / Conservatives think they have an imaging problem and/or a message problem when it comes to minorities. What they really have is a core belief problem.

 

It's Time for New Rules

There is definitely a humor gap. The right is too far behind to ever catch up.

Would You Like a Side of Irony with Your Hypocrisy?

Has everyone already seen this story? The CEO of ExxonMobile, Rex Tillerson, has joined with his neighbors to file a lawsuit in Texas to stop a fracking project near his horse ranch, arguing that a planned water tower, and the large number of heavy trucks hauling on the nearby roads would "devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy."

And the lawsuit is right. But ExxonMobile is the largest natural gas producer in the U.S. and the company has never shown any concern about the rights and interests of other property owners around the country.


Watch the documentaries Gasland I and Gasland II to see how much respect fracking companies have for property owners around the country.

A New One Percent Doctrine

To those people who continue to deny the evidence for climate change, or who admit climate change but deny there is enough proof that it is caused by man, I have always thought the best argument is that the world simply doesn´t have time to wait for perfect, 100% conclusive evidence. The risk is that, by he time we have such evidence, we will all be toast, water-logged toast if we live by a coast. I marvel at the risk these people are willing to take with other people's lives.

Ted Kaufman, in a recent blog post, makes the point much more deftly. He reminds us of the so-called Cheney doctrine shortly after 9-11 which declared the U.S. had to act in situations where there was even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack. Kaufman asks:

Can a rational human being who doesn’t believe in climate change at least agree there is a remote possibility that 95 percent of climate scientists are right? Maybe a 1 percent chance?

The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same

Today I finally finished the Kearns-Goodwin book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. I enjoyed it as much as anything I've read in a long while, mostly for all the parallels between the issues then and now, e.g. the influence of big business and big money in politics, questions about regulating and/or breaking up the big trusts. And the biggest parallel of all, the breakup of the Republican party. 

Back then it was the progressives vs. the establishment party bosses as opposed to the tea baggers, but the similarities are marked. Committed progressives were willing to let Democrats win before they would compromise on their principle, just as tea baggers are today.

Some of the issues that the progressives fought for, and which made a lot of sense at the time, look somewhat different at this historical distance. I'm thinking specifically of the primaries as a means of choosing candidates as opposed to having those decisions made by party leaders. At least on the Republican side, we can see what that has led to: Michelle Backmann, Rick Perry and several other doofusses debating the theory of evolution. Well, actually they aren't having a debate because they all "think" alike, but this hardly seems like progress.

I don't know if Kearns-Goodwin had these parallels in mind when she wrote the book, but I can't help but believe she did. They are just too omni-present. I promise you can't read the book without thinking of the situation today at almost every turn. Even TR's justifications for going to war over Cuba sound eerily like GW's rationalizations for going into Iraq. (Fifty years after we saved the Cubans from Spanish oppression, they had to have a revolution to save themselves from us, or at least from our corrupt Cuban dictator friends. Whatever Iraq looks like in forty years, I'll wager it will be like nothing George and Dick promised us.)

One thing that delighted me throughout the book was the discovery of Taft. The book really fleshes him out (no, really, that is not a weight joke), and he seems like a remarkably erudite and also exceptionally likable fellow. It is dangerous to form an opinion of an historical figure from only one source, still I can't help but like the guy that Goodwin portrays. And, according to her, all of his contemporaries felt the same. For anyone as ignorant of Taft as I was, the book is worthwhile just to learn more about him. 

We currently are at the beginning of what I hope will become a real debate about allowing the Post Office to perform some limited banking functions again. That was one of the things that TR, Taft and the Progressives fought for and achieved in 1911 and which existed until it was repealed in 1967. Elizabeth Warren and others are working to bring it back. It is too bad that progressives have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again.

Another battle that TR and the Progressives fought and won was to keep corporate money out of elections. I'm not clear what Taft's position was, but I think he agreed. Now, as everyone knows, we have once again regressed and need to fight that same fight all over again, only now the abuses of big money in our elections are beyond anything the people of that earlier era could have imagined.

One difference between the two eras is that the voices of today's progressive journalists are being drowned out by the overabundance of nonsense and the fact that journalism as an institution is in a state of flux. Plenty of good investigative journalists are still around, but their work isn't having much of an impact.

When I see that we are not only fighting the same battles that progressives were fighting a century ago, because much of the progress that was made then has been rolled back and the abuses now are greater than ever, it seems to me that public funding of elections is one sensible solution to the abuses of money in politics.

I don't think any of us should hold our breath.

Stand Your Stupid Ground

I think people who believe it is cool/necessary/smart to carry guns in public, concealed or otherwise, are idiots, living in some kind of imaginative, wild-west, individualistic free-for-all world. Perhaps they even have small cocks, as has been suggested. But that is all a matter for debate; perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the sun will come up in the west tomorrow too.

What should no longer be a matter of debate and what has nothing at all to do with the 2nd amendment is the fact that the so-called Stand Your Ground Laws are a disaster, based on the evidence of how they are working. 

The latest ridiculous example is a mistrial in the case of a white Jacksonville, Florida man who shot and killed an unarmed black teen in a parking lot in a dispute over loud music. He claimed in court that he saw the teenager point a shotgun at him, but police confirm there was no shotgun, or any other weapon. With SYG laws, all the man had to do is convince one member of the jury that he thought he saw a shotgun and felt threatened. It's hard to explain why he still felt threatened and had to keep shooting even as the car was pulling away, but I suppose that is quibbling. At least the killer faces 20-60 years of prison time for a series of lesser charges of which he was convicted, and we can hope he gets something close to the high end. And we can also hope that the prosecutor will retry the murder charge.

With SYG laws, all the killer has to do is convince a jury that he/she reasonably felt threatened, even if the threat was an imaginary shotgun. Sometimes all the killer has to do is convince the police and the DA, and the case never even makes it to a jury. The homeowner in Georgia who killed a 72 year-old alzheimer's victim who rang his doorbell at 4am might not face any charges at all because of SYG.

Then there was the homeowner in Florida who killed a black teenage who rang his doorbell at 2am seeking help when her car, or the car in which she was riding, broke down. Never mind that she was already moving away from the door and had her back to the killer when he felt so threatened he had to start shooting.

One wonders when the sound of ringing doorbells in the night became life threatening.

Or take the case of the Florida (I think) homeowner who shot and killed a young person who had been in his back yard. Again, never mind that the young man had already jumped the fence and left the yard before the homeowner felt his life was threatened and started blasting.

These are just the cases that come to mind on short notice. I know that the killers, in all of these cases, claimed SYG as a defense. How the cases are progressing through the justice system I do not know. I also have no evidence that SYG laws influenced any of these killers prior to their pulling the trigger. There have always been trigger-happy gun nuts after all. But there is no doubt that SYG laws have provided, at the very least, a convenient after-the-fact justification for the killer's bad judgment. And I think it is reasonable to believe that SYG laws have had an effect on the prevailing culture so that people with guns feel freer to use them. That, after all, was the stated intent of the legislators who passed the SYG laws in the first place.

One caveat that these self-styled vigilante saviors of the world should keep in mind before pulling the trigger: it is best to feel threatened by a young black man. The retired Florida cop who carried a gun into a movie theater presumably felt safer because of that gun. John Dillinger, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Aurora, Colorado mass killer all frequented movie theaters, and maybe this guy just believed in being prepared for the worst. Still I suspect he is going to have a difficult time convincing a jury that he felt reasonably threatened by popcorn thrown in his face (or not). But only because the alleged popcorn thrower was a nice respectable middle-class white family man. If it had been a black teen in a hoodie, the killer would have nothing to worry about.

Again, this is not a 2nd amendment issue, no matter how much the NRA might want its members to believe it is. This is not about the the right to own guns or the right to carry guns in public. It is a public safety issue about how you use those guns and the responsibility that comes with gun ownership.

Inequality For All

The Robert Reich documentary, Inequality for All, is well worth a Netflix rental. The movie is not just about what I hope is going to become a serious topic of national debate, i.e. the inequality that threatens our very existence as a democracy. It is also about Reich's fight over the course of three decades to make it part of the national discussion. Reich narrates the film and is on camera a lot, but that's no problem, as he is a witty, articulate and engaging personality.

  People who talk about the magic of the market will concede, although I think always with a mild reluctance, that there is no such thing as a truly free market economy, and never has been, for all practical purposes. Reich's film provides a subtle reminder that any number of laws effect the way the market works, e.g. the abolition of slavery and public safety laws have regulatory effects on the market. No person would argue seriously that the government has no business interfering in the market in such ways. So, yes, people, through their governments, have the right to regulate the way the marketplace works. They always have and always will. And we'd better get serious about it.


Because I am so sick of hearing Republicans talk about their concern for the so-called job creators, I was thrilled to see a couple of billionaires in the film calling bullshit on that whole idea. And we should too whenever we hear it. People with capital do not create jobs; consumers create jobs. And we do not have enough people with sufficient disposable income to consume things. I assume everyone has seen the stories about how the market for mid-level durable goods is stagnant while the high-end market is booming, or how middle class restaurants like Red Lobster and Olive Garden are seriously struggling.

Because I am so sick of hearing Republicans talk about their concern for the so-called job creators, I was thrilled to see a couple of billionaires in the film calling bullshit on that whole idea. And we should too whenever we hear it. People with capital do not create jobs; consumers create jobs. And we do not have enough people with sufficient disposable income to consume things at a rate to keep the economy flowing. I assume everyone has seen the stories about how the market for mid-level durable goods is stagnant while the high-end market is booming, or how middle class restaurants like Red Lobster and Olive Garden are seriously struggling.

I did not consciously plan it, but Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism is a great companion piece to the Reich documentary. As the subtitle suggests, this isn't just another book about Teddy Roosevelt. I presume the parallels between that age of corporate excess and our own were in Goodwin's mind as she researched and wrote this book. Unfortunately I don't think the parallels are strong enough to make me optimistic for the onset of a new progressive era.

 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Goodwin's book for me was the discovery of Taft as an engaging personality. Other than his immense weight, his eventual falling out with TR, and the fact that he went from the Presidency to the Supreme Court I didn't know much about him. I didn't even know exactly where he fit into the Taft family dynasty that still plays a role today (I believe) in Ohio Republican politics. Goodwin depicts him as a principled and admirable man, whose abilities and political destiny were widely recognized early in his career.

Another pleasurable aspect is the amount of time Goodwin devotes to the important muckraking and progressive journalists of that time, especially S.S. McClure, Ida Turnbull, Lincoln Steffans, Ray Stannard Baker, and William Allen White. These journalists had important relationships with Theodore Roosevelt and played important roles in highlighting the corporate excesses of the era and bringing about a public demand for change.

Finally, despite the fact that I probably wouldn't have bothered reading Goodwin's book if it were just another book about Teddy Roosevelt, I have enjoyed the reminder of just what a complex, puzzling and ultimately fascinating person he was. There was so much about him that was admirable mixed in with the blustery jingoism and outsized personality. We can all be glad, probably, that he lived and died before the age of television or we'd be sick of him.

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Because It's Never Too Early

The best thing about this picture is that any adults in the area are, apparently, in front of the guns.

See No Evil

There are some things we all would rather not know about, for example how that meat on our table got there.

Most of us at least know that animals die so that we can feel satiated, but we would like to believe that they were treated humanely up until the moment they were...hmmm, put to sleep?  We've all seen how chickens and pigs are caged in factory farms, without even enough room to turn around or roll over. We know how cattle in feedlots frequently live in shit and mud up to their calves (pun intended). But we would rather that information would just go away.

In another post I wrote about the U.S. clothing manufacturers who profit from slave labor in Haiti and how our very own State Department went to bat for them. Now there is a story in The Nation about one woman's protest against how U.S. firms profit from the violence against garment workers in Cambodia, workers who earn about $2.75 per day, which isn't even remotely a living wage there.

None of us, understandably, want to have to do the research to ensure that the clothes we buy are not made with what is essentially slave labor. Just as we don't want to have to do research about the conditions at the slaughter house(s) where our hamburger originated. This is one of the reasons we have governments for crissakes.

I don't know what laws might already be on the books that prohibit profiting from slave labor. You would think such laws exist. But, if they do, they are clearly ineffective.

The answer is activism, but instead I prefer to live in Brasil. In the meanwhile, I have nothing but praise and admiration for women like the one in this video.

A Review of a Book Review

Thomas Edsall has written a really intriguing op-ed article in the NY Times based on a new book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, the basic premise of which is that a growing inequality is the natural outgrowth of free market capitalism working exactly as it is designed.

There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book. One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

Of course this is the exact period that capitalism's strongest defenders love to point to, and to claim as prove of its virtue. But what if that one period when the rising tide did lift a lot of boats (no, not all), was merely an anomaly, an exception? Certainly there wasn't much in capitalism's prior history to recommend it to anyone but the holders of the capital. Karl Marx's work didn't grow in a vacuum, and there was/is a reason for its enduring popularity.

 This next point is so obvious that one feels in need of a dope slap for not having thought of it: 

 Piketty proposes instead that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.

The period when capitalism actually worked to reduce inequality in the U.S. was a period of confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes. As I understand Piketty's argument from this article by Thomas Edsall, in order for economic  inequality to be addressed in today's global economy it would require a global tax structure to ensure that the rate of after-tax growth on capital was minimized so that more money would flow into actual economic growth. Such a structure would have to be global for the obvious reason that capital would always move to the friendliest politcal-economic environment.

Although the Piketty book is apparently getting rave reviews from economists around the world, including a 20-page review in one economic journal, it does have some critics, and the Edsall column gives them their due. Generally, it seemed to me from Edall's description that many of the criticisms fall into the category of sniping around the edges, although it is unfair to say that without having actually read them.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no e-version of Piketty's book.

This Should Not Be Allowed To Blow Over...But It Probably Will

Since I continue to believe this is the biggest news story this side of Chris Christie and might still lead to some meaningful discussions about the need for greater regulation (and maybe reform of the absurd bankruptcy laws that the scumbags who make up Freedom Industires [yecch] are playing games with) :

The Constitution as Metaphor

I was thinking the other day about how christians make excuses for the ridiculous parts of the bible because, after all, they realize the world and the way people think about it has changed in the last 2000 years. But many of those same people think our 200-year-old constitution is sancrosanct and meant to be taken literally, as if nothing has changed in the interim.

On the other hand, I think a flow chart like this would work for the way most of us think of the constituion too, even for the so-called originalists. As someone pointed out recently, people like Scalia and Thomas are originalists up to the point at which they are not.

Pandering

If we needed evidence of the devolution of the Republican party over the past few years, since the rise of the Tea Baggers, you need look no further than Mike Huckabee.

As Gail Collins reminds us in her column today, Huckabee was the likable candidate in the 2008 Republican primaries, the one who smiled a lot and wanted people to get along. As governor he signed a law requiring employers to cover contraception in their insurance plans. He supported a plan to allow children of illegal immigrants access to college scholarships. He was in favor of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

 But that Mike Huckabee lost and he learned his lesson: angry and mean is the way to get ahead. Now he is against “amnesty,” against subsidized school breakfast programs, and against requiring health insurers to provide birth control coverage in their prescription drug coverage for women who “can't control their libido or their reproductive systems.” And he said this at a meeting of Republican National Committee that was ostensibly meeting to come up with a strategy to close the gender gap. He thinks he has a winning message for Republicans to take to the country.

It reminds me that the lesson a lot of Republican strategists and analysts took away from the last election was not that there was anything wrong with their message, but only with the way they had tried to sell it to the country.
 

This Republican progression from anti-abortion to anti-contraception seems to encapsulate the way in which the party has doubled down on stupid. If politicians must pander (and they probably must), why not to reason and sensibility?

Trust Us, The Water Is Fine

Although I haven't watched any U.S. news channels in ages, I suspect the chemical spill in West Virginia is not getting as much time in the national spotlight as it deserves. It certainly isn't in the print media.

This situation is giving the local citizens a real-life opportunity to decide how much they trust their governments...local, state and federal. The water in most effected areas was declared safe to drink last week when the concentration of the MCHM chemical tested below the level of one part per million, the level declared to be safe by the CDC. But other public health officials say, in effect, that the CDC pulled that number out of its ass, that there simply isn't enough data on this chemical to determine a safe level.

After citizens were told their water was safe to drink, they found that their tap water still had a strong licorice smell, which is a characteristic of MCHM. So public health officials then told people to run their water inside and out and repeatedly flush their toilets for fifteen minutes, and their water would be good to drink. Other public health experts pointed out that this was an even more egregious instance of officials pulling numbers out of their individual and/or collective asses. Where did they come up with fifteen minutes? it was asked. But not answered.

Now the apparently-worthless Governor, Earl Ray Tomblin (Dem), has told people the use of water is "your decision." If people aren't comfortable drinking the water, he said, they should drink bottled water. The profundity of the man!! Anybody offering to help defer the cost of bottled water? Probably not.

By the way, even as officials were telling people the water was safe to drink, they were (and still are) telling pregnant women not to drink the water. It seems like that should raise some eyebrows. It seems typically american to protect the fetus while it is in the womb, and start slowly poisoning it once it is born.

Of course Freedom Industries (I still say yecch to that) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will be "reorganizing."

If this spill had been the result of an individual opening a valve on a storage tank, that individual would be headed for prison. If it is the result of negligence by the individuals at Freedom Industries (yecch), as it seems to have been, why aren't those individuals charged with a crime? Intent or the lact thereof is not relevant except, perhaps, at the time of sentencing. That used to happen. Now we just charge corporations and they consider fines as just another cost of doing business.

As someone said, I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. Or in this case, when the state of West Virginia just puts one in jail.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

Roger Cohen has written a good reminder about the unpleasantness of technological curmudgeons, as well as the futility. It's called Twitter-Bashing Bores. The cardinal rule:

Thou shalt not complain about social media or judge the habits of a generation you do not understand.

I don't know that Cohen says anything you haven't already thought of on our own, or certainly heard before, but it is probably good to remind ourselves on a regular basis of these things.

Of course I still believe that the U.S. is going to hell in a handbasket, but it's probably not becaue of twitter. It's actually because of the least technological citizens, not the most technological. And, taking Cohen's commandment literally, I presume I have enough knowledge of Facebook to criticize it.

Actually, from what I've read lately, Facebook will probably become the social media for people of  "a certain age," as younger users abandon it.

Slave Labor in the Global Economy

Thanks to Wikileaks we now know that the U.S. State Department intervened on behalf of the Hanes and Levi Strauss companies to keep the Haitian minimum wage at $0.31 per hour. One wonders why it takes Wikileaks for this "highly sensitive" information to be made public.

Sarcasm
After the next hurricane or earthquake in Haiti, we can all wring our hands and lament the dreadful living conditions there. Talking heads can analyse the reasons and lay most of the blame on a corrupt Haitian political system. We can even pack up some Levi jeans and Hanes underwear to send as relief to the beleaquered people, and feel better about ourselves as we head for the mall where there is a clothing sale.

Reality
Of course most of our clothes are made is sweat shops somewhere in the world. If not Haiti, then Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Honduras....or wherever. Possibly conditions in some countries are relatively better than in others, but U.S. consumers who might like to have this information do not, or at least not conveniently. There is always Google.

There Oughta Be a Law
I presume, but don't know, that there are laws preventing U.S. companies from directly operating slave-labor sweat shops abroad. There ought to be laws preventing companies doing business in the U.S. from profiting even indirectly from slave labor.

Racial Democracy

 Is the United States a 'Racial Democracy'? is the title of an excellent essay from the online forum The Stone in today's NY Times. Please read it and get pissed, if you aren't already.

These are brief excerpts.

There is a vast chasm between democratic political ideals and a state that is a racial democracy. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that when political ideals diverge so widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. Officially, the laws in the United States that govern when citizens can be sent to prison or questioned by the police are colorblind. But when the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it. And it seems clear that the practical reality of the criminal justice system in the United States is far from colorblind. The evidence suggests that the criminal justice system applies in a radically unbalanced way, placing disproportionate attention on our fellow black citizens. The United States has a legacy of enslavement followed by forced servitude of its black population. The threat that the political ideals of our country veil an underlying reality of racial democracy is therefore particularly disturbing.

 About 9 percent of the world’s prison population is black American.... If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people. There would then be well over 600 million black Americans in the world. If you think that black Americans are like anybody else, then the nation of black America should be the third largest nation on earth, twice as large as the United States. You can of course still think, in the face of these facts, that the United States prison laws are fairly applied and colorblind. But if you do, you almost certainly must accept that black Americans are among the most dangerous groups in the multithousand year history of human civilization. (my emphasis)

Ishmael Beah. What's Not to Like?

I won't subject y'all (y'few) ou to another book review so soon after the last ones, but merely point you toward a couple of books which you may already be aware of.

The first, A Long Way Gone, was published in 2007, which is more or less when I read it. It is a powerful and moving story about the author's life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone beginning when he was 13 years old, and his good fortune to escape after a couple of years, thanks to Unicef, and end up in the U.S.

The second book, Radiance of Tomorrow, was just published a few days ago. It is a novel that deals with Sierra Leone after the war and with the question of what makes people return and reconstruct their lives and culture. I've bought it but not yet read it.

As soon as I saw that Beah was scheduled to be on the Colbert Report, I googled him to find out what was up, and saw that his novel had just been released. I bought it immediately. Beah appears to be one of those truly remarkable and beautiful persons who we can only look at with wonder and shake our heads at his joy and hopefulness. I will buy anything he cares to write.

I wanted to attach a clip of Colbert's interview with Beah, but I'm having problems. Here at least is a link that will allow you to watch it. 

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/431966/january-08-2014/ishmael-beah

Finally, there are some people who one would just like to....oh, I don't know, use your imagination. What should be done with the anal-retentive person who wrote the following on Wikipedia?

Controversy

 The accuracy of the events and chronology presented in "A Long Way Gone" have been called into question, particularly the claim that Beah became a child soldier in 1993, rather than in 1995 as the timeline of events in Sierra Leone's civil war suggests.

Supposedly Beah's rescue by Unicef can be dated and one can work backward from then. But I would imagine that birth (and death) records would be poorly maintained in the midst of a violent civil war, and I would also think it reasonable that a teenager, whose parents had been killed years before, may have some dates confused in his memory. Who cares? As if the heart of Beah's war memoir is the chronology. Is this really a controversy?