I've been thinking about the video I posted last. I decided that for my own sake I needed to type out what I think is happening in the world economy, so as to organize my own mind a bit.
I post it here hoping for your criticism and thoughts, my public. Any constructive feedback will be gratefully received.
This is the product of only a couple hours thought. It meanders and rambles and is anything but authoritative. Take it as merely the half baked thought of an ill educated layman, no more..
Ici-bas, mes pauvres pensées:
First truism: government debt is a necessary shelter for major capital. The debt exists solely for the purpose of sheltering massive (and usually essentially fraudulent, in that profits are nearly always privatized and losses socialized) investment returns with a guaranteed continuing return from the taxpayer.
The public debt is therefore the creature of capital.
Government investment in infrastructure (which includes investment in human infrastructure by way of things like education and health care) and subsidies of private business that is not financed directly by taxation must be financed by the creation of privately held debt.
We can either make rich people pay for the public expenditure directly by way of taxation, or else borrow the money from them.
The rich of course much prefer the second option, since the creation of public debt becomes a cash stream allowing them ever greater - by the mystical power of compound interest - control over the economy.
For capital is not "normal money." It cannot just sit there as cash on the counter. This is the first meta principle that "normal people" who think of their money as paper that they can carry around in their pocket must realize:
Money is not *real*. It is not even symbolic, not even a platonic actuality, not even meaningful in the sense that words are significantly real. Money is rather merely a number, an utterly arbitrary unit of measurement that we assign to wealth. When we say that Carlos Slim or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg has 63 (or whathaveyou) billion dollars, we mean that that person has **contractual control** over certain aspects of our economy that we "value" at that amount.
It is interesting that the very most essential things in our economy often cannot be so easily controlled, and hence "valued" by monetary contracts. Sunlight, the air we breathe, our thoughts and feelings, the energy and blood coursing our synapses and sinews; very often the water (rainfall) we drink, our "casual" and familial (which is to say the most essential aspects of our) social interaction, our leisure time when we refuse to sell it; all of these things are generally free from contract.
Ownership is the most atavistic of contracts. It is a social construct, a metaphysical system, by which things (largely the fruit of other people's labor) are associated with a person. Money is thus a type of implicit non-specific contract. When we exchange our time, effort and expertise for money we are accepting the reality of that money as a contract.
When Facebook is said to be worth a trillion dollars, we mean that the information and participation of people in that system is held by advertisers and people who value access to that information and such influence upon people that Facebook has, to be worth that much. Facebook is in investment terms merely a metaphysical construct, a contractual system. A source of information and influence over people.
Money is an utter abstraction, in other words. Apart from its very real blunt contractual power, it is unreal and so substantially meaningless. As a unit of measurement it is insubstantial, unlike most units of measure in that it is utterly arbitrary. This is especially true on the level of capital, where the contract has been substantially abstracted from the physical and human reality that the number represents.
This is even more true of contemporary speculators, who trade on stock, insurance and futures markets in an utterly abstract manner. There is no sense of proprietorship in a modern hedge fund.
So, in order to have money in the sense that a capitalist has money (which is as different from the way "normal people" have money as prosaic Newtonian physics is from Einstein's quantum physics) you **must be investing it** .. Because that money represents contractual power over men and property, and nothing else. It cannot be completely abstracted and unused. It must be somehow allocated, its power exercised.
Investment is merely the substantially abstract allocation of wealth and property, then.
And again, you can see how the public debt insulates the major capitalist from risk. The debt is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. taxpayer, which means that any economic activity financed by way of that debt is insulated from utter failure by the taxpayer. Barring the collapse of the government, the bond holder will get his return. The public exchequer is also simultaneously the perfect customer: it always pays its debts, and is a perpetual source of new business.
Second truism: the recent housing bubble and resulting banking crisis were (on the highest levels of banking and government) deliberately created.
Fraudulent profits created during the bubble have been guaranteed by the taxpayer.
TARP therefore essentially represents a massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to the banking sector.
Moral hazard has been substantially removed from the system for the major capitalist insider. Institutions may be destroyed, and minor investors and pension systems ruined, while the individuals responsible for these disasters are richly rewarded.
Legal consequence, risk exposure - moral hazard - exists in the middle and the bottom, but not the very top.
This radical imbalance exists, in that the laws criminalizing such behavior (eg, Glass Steagall) and separating prosaic banking from risky investment were overturned under Clinton, allowing the banker bastards to speculate with mortgage income (the money you pay every month for the privilege of occupying your home) - which income is the backbone of the banking system, accounting for most of the money in it - allowing them to use this money (which use was strictly regulated in the past, after the last crash that caused the Great Depression) in further very risky speculative loans to people very likely unable to repay, rather than merely as a source for further securitized mortgages.
People with poor credit histories were allowed to borrow without the 20% down payments historically required under Glass Steagall. People with no collateral, and insufficient income to repay loans, were nevertheless given mortgages. Usually under usurious variable rate mortgages that had seductively low initial rates, but then inevitably increasingly higher interest rates over time, guaranteeing quickly increasing profits until the inevitable moment they failed to repay. These loans were deliberately designed to fail. The bankers providing them knew the people receiving them would eventually be unable to repay, and deliberately issued mortgages that would concurrently fail sooner than later. The bubble was meant to blow up quickly and catastrophically, causing a "shock and awe" crisis where the "fire just simply had to be put out" or else the entire economy would go off the rails, causing another Great Depression.
The American taxpayer is left holding the flaming turd filled bag, guaranteeing the profits "earned" in the bubble, not on the level of the homeowner (or, more accurately, the dumb chump paying and so owned by his mortgage), and not even usually on the level of the mortgage seller (the bank receiving the interest), but on the level of the mortgage insurer. The major insurer in this past crisis, which is to say the primary tool used by major capital to defraud the taxpayer, was AIG.
This innovation, of insuring risky mortgage loans in large groups called "tranches," was again an "accidental" "innovation" made in the 90's at the time they overturned the banking laws protecting the public. Major insurance companies were allowed to guarantee very risky mortgage debt, allowing banks buying insurance for that debt to free up more capital under the banking laws that remained. Usually banks are made to hold ten percent of their capital in reserve (read low interest but very secure government securities and such) as a sort of anchor against a massive failure of mortgage buyers to repay their debts. In such an instance, the bank needs this secure reserve to garantee it's ability to continue loaning money, and hence the integrity of the banking process, and preventing a "run on the bank" (where investors and account holders pull their funds out of the bank simultaneously at the moment of crisis) and the resulting collapse of the lending process.
Banks were allowed both to make more risky loans without backing collateral, while simultaneously being allowed to reduce their reserve capital requirements. In lieu of significant low interest reserves, they were allowed to instead insure their high risk mortgage lending, and then release the money that would otherwise have been held in secure investments to use in further high risk (and very lucrative on the sort term) lending that was feeding the housing boom.
The insurers, most infamously AIG, were not then required to have the sorts of very conservative reserves on hand to guarantee the policies they were writing. Traditional insurers of property are bound by strict laws requiring they keep sufficient conservatively invested reserves on hand to guarantee their policies in the event of a massive disaster. These common sense requirements were not made of this new market. These insurers were allowed to guarantee massive speculation without being required to hold any reserves to back their massive exposure to risk. Again, this was deliberate on the part of the architects of the new system.
So, when the fraudulent loans (made without collateral, given to people who the bankers knew were very poor risks, to people who could and would simply walk away from the loans when they could not pay them, and who would suffer relatively minor consequence of bankruptcy) went bad on a massive scale, the banks turned to AIG to pay the policies. AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to back its exposure, and so immediately failed. As did Bear Sterns and Lehman.
The federal government was then mugged to back the bad insurance policies, thereby saving the remaining banks' bacon. AIG is now currently more or less owned (via "bankster socialism") by the Federal Reserve (which is a consortium or cabal of private banking interests allowed to print - create - and then loan money for their own profit, emphatically not a governmental agency acting in the public good) and so now simply a tool used to dispense public monies to the banksters.
The pattern is the same as that of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001 that claimed WorldCom, Tyco and Enron. The watchdogs were again bought out by their masters: accounting firms and ratings agencies cooked the books and gave their approval (AAA ratings to bad investments, etc.), thereby participating directly in the massive fraud being committed. Then, in the aftermath, the regulators - the SEC and Justice Department and state prosecutors - did nearly nothing, when even under the existing gutted regulatory law they could have brought thousands of Wall Street cretins to prosecution.
The public is thus left paying for the bubble. Not by guaranteeing that normal people seduced into buying homes at absurd prices can keep the houses they were seduced into "buying" at hugely inflated prices, but by guaranteeing the insurance policies written on failed loans. The intact banks keep the title on the property (causing stagnation and massive destruction in many communities) and their speculative profits, too.
Normal people (non-capitalists, those subsisting on exchange of their own labor, 99% of the US populace) can rarely afford to actually buy homes - most Americans buy mortgages, which is to say the right to pay interest to a bank for thirty years, for the privilege of living in a house whose title is held by a bank- our new lords material are bankers.
Nota Bene: while certain institutions (AIG, Lehman, Sterns: that is to say the immediate competition of Goldman Sachs, whose alumni control the Fed and so Washington) were allowed to fail, the individuals running them were made rich. Or, rather, vastly richer. They destroyed their institutions, but kept their millions in bonuses.
They failed us deliberately. They cheated us massively. And they have been greatly awarded for their fraud and thievery.
The rich own the major media. This is why this story is suppressed. The American people should be able to figure this out anyway, and react; but we are far too selfish, stupid and bovine. It is in our self interest to accept the soporific line that the bankers are rich because they deserve to be rich. We gladly believe it because we know that we in relative (global) terms are also rich, and in the very same fashion.
Which is to say that wer are rich by way of massive violence, fraud and deception. Through exploitation by way of contract. The lawyer's and banker's game is our game. We are merely their house servants, their praetorians. A privileged subordinate caste of workers and soldiers.
Third truism: The Iraq and Afghan wars are in the tradition of the "Great Game" played between the European powers, especially Great Britain and Russia, for control of Asia and her resources. Now the stakes (rapidly declining irreplaceable essential oil wealth in Asia and the Middle East) are higher, and the players more numerous (add a previously dormant but now very serious China and India to the calculus, as well as major wild cards like Iran and Pakistan that can at any moment throw the entire game into deadly nuclear armed chaos) than before. We are being fed a propaganda line about terrorism, WMD and self defense that is essentially false. We are there for oil and other essential mineral resources, period, point final. Without them we would be a third world economy. With them, we are a continuing super power.
There are millions of Chinese, Indonesians and Latin Americans (etc.) working for us for a dollar or less an hour. We benefit from this exploitation just as the bankers do, if on a reduced scale. The irreplaceable fossil fuels and cheap human labor we consume every time we go to Walmart or order something online makes us complicit, too.
We tell ourselves that we deserve wealth because we are a great and virtuous country, blah blah blah. But that is simply bullshit.
This here is the bottom line: we can either stand for justice, which is to say for the rights of workers to be properly paid and treated, and for **moral hazard**, which is to say **enforced responsibility and consequences for the powerful**, or we will deserve to fail as a society and civilization.
Final (I pray provocative) truism: American culture, our capitalist economy, has given us every crude carnal pleasure to live for, yet nothing transcendent to die for. We now have nothing beyond radical sustenance of utilitarian desire; the spurious, libertarian "freedom" to sate our every whim.
This is anti-christ.
So I say. What then say you? Any and all comments are hereby gratefully solicited. Any and all critique is welcome.
---
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
You Are As Sheep Amongst Wolves, Go Therefore Be Wise As Serpents & Innocent As Doves
For out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings thou hast perfected praise, because of thy enemies, that thou mayst destroy the enemy and the avenger.
---
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Thoughts on Luke 6:24
[concerning this blog's heading]
So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .
Two notes on this: first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters. They served them then, and they serve them now.
Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt. This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest. The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)
Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.
I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..
Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places. I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties. They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country. They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..
The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..
I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..
My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore. Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.
That extremity scarred me. I came home radicalized.
It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition. A very highly tuned one.
We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system. Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.
They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.
Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.
That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.
To include myself.
Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.
Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block. Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular. There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line. It's been subverted. They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.
They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies. The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy. Courts, perhaps prisons. Police, armies, maybe. They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law. And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.
Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up. I'm not babbling crazy. They've come out and said it very clearly. Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics. These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone. What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them. And that "them" is a very small number of people.
They do not care about anyone except themselves. They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe. They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.
I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.
Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:
One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.
Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.
To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..
Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man. Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.
Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.
---
So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .
Two notes on this: first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters. They served them then, and they serve them now.
Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt. This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest. The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)
Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.
I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..
Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places. I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties. They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country. They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..
The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..
I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..
My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore. Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.
That extremity scarred me. I came home radicalized.
It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition. A very highly tuned one.
We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system. Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.
They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.
Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.
That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.
To include myself.
Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.
Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block. Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular. There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line. It's been subverted. They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.
They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies. The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy. Courts, perhaps prisons. Police, armies, maybe. They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law. And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.
Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up. I'm not babbling crazy. They've come out and said it very clearly. Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics. These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone. What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them. And that "them" is a very small number of people.
They do not care about anyone except themselves. They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe. They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.
I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.
Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:
One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.
Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.
To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..
Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man. Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.
Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.
---
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Gnostic Propaganda & The Hive Mind: You Are a Zombie, But No Worries: Everything Tastes Like Chicken When Raw.
I've refrained from commenting on the charade taking place in Washington these last few weeks..
Or rather decades..
Because it's all too depressing, and I almost don't care about what I think about it, so why should I share it with you?
Expect you to care, when I barely do?
All pruny bathing in cynicism, here. You are stupid. You are stupid. You are stupid.
Well, you know, whatever, right?
All the discourse coming out of D.C. about default and all that is pure bullshit, cynical even for Washington and our "opinion making" elite. Ever since the Iraq invasion I've been marking their lies and propaganda. At first I was shocked and incredulous, then for a while I was paranoid.
Now, I'm bemused verging into indifferent. Still, I'll shake myself free of torpor to see if anyone cares to have a conversation. I'll just make a few quick salient points to the void. If anyone cares, you have my email address, or can leave a comment or whatever else may please you.
Study these two images:
This debt that the government creates is mostly held by Americans. Some 70% - that's seventy percent - of the debt is held by federal social security, military or civil pension funds, and our own investor class. That's to say that the interest on the public debt for the most part enriches American citizens and corporations.
This means that the tax revenues being used to service the debt goes to major capitalists, to private investors. A default preventing the service of this debt would mean Daddy War Bucks might lose his free money stream. Not gonna happen, as in not ever. The warmachine and the banksters will get their lucre. There will be no default that keeps their bloody paws from grubbing in the public till, believe me you.
There may come a point where there is a default that reorganizes the debt that could screw foreign interests, but barring war or some other major catastrophe I doubt even that.
That's right. Think about the scam, now. Seriously. You're stupid, but still. Think about it: TARP "bails out" the banks and major investment funds and insurance companies who deliberately created a bubble to run our economy into the ground.
Then, they demand that the government create public debt to "save the economy." That public debt is then bought by the same private investor class who created the crisis.
They simultaneously demand that taxes on their investment and corporate income be abolished, thereby guaranteeing a sophisticated genus of debt bondage for the idiotic American public.
The wars feed the corporate contractors and the public debt simultaneously, as well. Money goes from the public to the rich.
The debt - no matter whether accrued by war or bailout - always constitutes a massive transfer of wealth toward our investor class, the wealthy, and the currently retired.
The very people who own and watch FOX News and read The National Review and profess to hate that house servant Obama.
The very people who say they hate the government are using it to rape the middle class. Especially the future middle class, which will eventually be subsumed into the global working class (aka "proletariat") when it becomes feasible to pay the average American what they pay the sweat shop workers in Asia or immigrant labor here. That day is coming, and even though most Americans are stupid they still feel it looming, which is why they are so mindlessly restive.
The middle class being for the most part catatonic, in a trance state where they blame the government for the mess, not seeing that the government is the only agency that they have any real direct influence over, and is the only means of breaking the critical mass that monopolistic capital left alone always ultimately achieves, in which it draws all wealth to itself through interest on debt, and then enslaves all labor at a subsistence wage.
The zombies do not see that we have allowed our government and public discourse to be co- opted and utterly corrupted by the adepts of the rich.
That's right. I said it.
Enjoy your chicken.
---
Or rather decades..
Because it's all too depressing, and I almost don't care about what I think about it, so why should I share it with you?
Expect you to care, when I barely do?
All pruny bathing in cynicism, here. You are stupid. You are stupid. You are stupid.
Well, you know, whatever, right?
All the discourse coming out of D.C. about default and all that is pure bullshit, cynical even for Washington and our "opinion making" elite. Ever since the Iraq invasion I've been marking their lies and propaganda. At first I was shocked and incredulous, then for a while I was paranoid.
Now, I'm bemused verging into indifferent. Still, I'll shake myself free of torpor to see if anyone cares to have a conversation. I'll just make a few quick salient points to the void. If anyone cares, you have my email address, or can leave a comment or whatever else may please you.
Study these two images:
This debt that the government creates is mostly held by Americans. Some 70% - that's seventy percent - of the debt is held by federal social security, military or civil pension funds, and our own investor class. That's to say that the interest on the public debt for the most part enriches American citizens and corporations.
This means that the tax revenues being used to service the debt goes to major capitalists, to private investors. A default preventing the service of this debt would mean Daddy War Bucks might lose his free money stream. Not gonna happen, as in not ever. The warmachine and the banksters will get their lucre. There will be no default that keeps their bloody paws from grubbing in the public till, believe me you.
There may come a point where there is a default that reorganizes the debt that could screw foreign interests, but barring war or some other major catastrophe I doubt even that.
That's right. Think about the scam, now. Seriously. You're stupid, but still. Think about it: TARP "bails out" the banks and major investment funds and insurance companies who deliberately created a bubble to run our economy into the ground.
Then, they demand that the government create public debt to "save the economy." That public debt is then bought by the same private investor class who created the crisis.
They simultaneously demand that taxes on their investment and corporate income be abolished, thereby guaranteeing a sophisticated genus of debt bondage for the idiotic American public.
The wars feed the corporate contractors and the public debt simultaneously, as well. Money goes from the public to the rich.
The debt - no matter whether accrued by war or bailout - always constitutes a massive transfer of wealth toward our investor class, the wealthy, and the currently retired.
The very people who own and watch FOX News and read The National Review and profess to hate that house servant Obama.
The very people who say they hate the government are using it to rape the middle class. Especially the future middle class, which will eventually be subsumed into the global working class (aka "proletariat") when it becomes feasible to pay the average American what they pay the sweat shop workers in Asia or immigrant labor here. That day is coming, and even though most Americans are stupid they still feel it looming, which is why they are so mindlessly restive.
The middle class being for the most part catatonic, in a trance state where they blame the government for the mess, not seeing that the government is the only agency that they have any real direct influence over, and is the only means of breaking the critical mass that monopolistic capital left alone always ultimately achieves, in which it draws all wealth to itself through interest on debt, and then enslaves all labor at a subsistence wage.
The zombies do not see that we have allowed our government and public discourse to be co- opted and utterly corrupted by the adepts of the rich.
That's right. I said it.
Enjoy your chicken.
---
Monday, July 11, 2011
The Discontents of Civilzation: The Contradictions of Village Politics [Revised]
Back Briefly in the Villages, I am once again subjected to the discontents of the bourgeois, of how the government is ruining everything, told of how everything is going to hell.
But now, I am somehow (miraculously, even) beyond annoyance, and am just bemused.
Really! Really? No, Really.
One of the sublime ironies of this discussion for me is how the Villages are probably one of the best governed places in the country, not to say planet.. Everything works and is in order here. There are lots of rules, and people respect them.
Grant you, this is an oligarchic association inhabited almost exclusively by upper middle class white people from New England, the Mid- Atlantic and Mid- West. These are disciplined people, who know how to balance a checkbook and respect a red light.
They've got government in their DNA, coursing their veins and invigorating their very sinews. They are mostly mid to upper level bureaucrats who managed this country through the greatest economic boom in human history, a boom we are still enjoying.
Tonight I sat around a table and listened to people who all - everyone, without exception - had worked for the public sector their entire careers, as public servants in the military, the Portsmouth Naval Yard, as public school teachers and administrators, who are all retired in their 50's and early 60's on public (federal and state) pensions, Social Security and Medicare, universally abuse the government and decry its incompetence.
All without any apparent sense of irony or self criticism.
I posed questions that bounced back at me like duds off a cushion: is there any substantial difference between a publicly controlled bureaucracy and a corporate one? Isn't the substantial difference whether it exists to create value for shareholders (as per U.S. corporate law) or to advance the common good?
Isn't it in our interest to ensure that all bureaucracies and decision makers are held accountable to the public (general) good? Isn't democratic governance one of the few ways to pursue this end in our fallen world? Would it really be better to live in a world where everything was owned by a rich man, and we all were forced to bow and scape for some sort of contractual relationship with someone of wealth, where we had no recourse but to sell our labor to an overseer for the right to sustenance and shelter?
Isn't what the wealthy usually call socialism almost always a merely matter of regulating markets and guaranteeing that the economically disenfranchised maintain access to wealth necessary to their well being?
Regulation of markets, especially labor markets. The 40 hour week, workers comp, minimum wage, care for children, the sick, the elderly. Guaranteed access to food, shelter, education and healthcare. Guaranteed access to information, to markets.
It seems to me that we all benefit from the maintenance and advancement of the public good, of the public space.
I don't know. It seems to me that we can take care of one another, or else be left each of us uncared for. It seems we either fight for the common good, for mutual responsibility and benefit; or else descend into anti-social selfishness, disregard and irresponsibility.
We must either hang together, or be left to hang alone.
Just so. That all seems clear enough. Just as it seems we have yet another, similar, related choice: you can either be proud, angry and cynical or humble, bemused and amused.
I have had done with curses and cynicism. It's all worthless, it brings nothing.
Nothing but more bitterness and wrath.
Me, from now on I bless and laugh.
---
But now, I am somehow (miraculously, even) beyond annoyance, and am just bemused.
Really! Really? No, Really.
One of the sublime ironies of this discussion for me is how the Villages are probably one of the best governed places in the country, not to say planet.. Everything works and is in order here. There are lots of rules, and people respect them.
Grant you, this is an oligarchic association inhabited almost exclusively by upper middle class white people from New England, the Mid- Atlantic and Mid- West. These are disciplined people, who know how to balance a checkbook and respect a red light.
They've got government in their DNA, coursing their veins and invigorating their very sinews. They are mostly mid to upper level bureaucrats who managed this country through the greatest economic boom in human history, a boom we are still enjoying.
Tonight I sat around a table and listened to people who all - everyone, without exception - had worked for the public sector their entire careers, as public servants in the military, the Portsmouth Naval Yard, as public school teachers and administrators, who are all retired in their 50's and early 60's on public (federal and state) pensions, Social Security and Medicare, universally abuse the government and decry its incompetence.
All without any apparent sense of irony or self criticism.
I posed questions that bounced back at me like duds off a cushion: is there any substantial difference between a publicly controlled bureaucracy and a corporate one? Isn't the substantial difference whether it exists to create value for shareholders (as per U.S. corporate law) or to advance the common good?
Isn't it in our interest to ensure that all bureaucracies and decision makers are held accountable to the public (general) good? Isn't democratic governance one of the few ways to pursue this end in our fallen world? Would it really be better to live in a world where everything was owned by a rich man, and we all were forced to bow and scape for some sort of contractual relationship with someone of wealth, where we had no recourse but to sell our labor to an overseer for the right to sustenance and shelter?
Isn't what the wealthy usually call socialism almost always a merely matter of regulating markets and guaranteeing that the economically disenfranchised maintain access to wealth necessary to their well being?
Regulation of markets, especially labor markets. The 40 hour week, workers comp, minimum wage, care for children, the sick, the elderly. Guaranteed access to food, shelter, education and healthcare. Guaranteed access to information, to markets.
It seems to me that we all benefit from the maintenance and advancement of the public good, of the public space.
I don't know. It seems to me that we can take care of one another, or else be left each of us uncared for. It seems we either fight for the common good, for mutual responsibility and benefit; or else descend into anti-social selfishness, disregard and irresponsibility.
We must either hang together, or be left to hang alone.
Just so. That all seems clear enough. Just as it seems we have yet another, similar, related choice: you can either be proud, angry and cynical or humble, bemused and amused.
I have had done with curses and cynicism. It's all worthless, it brings nothing.
Nothing but more bitterness and wrath.
Me, from now on I bless and laugh.
---
Monday, July 4, 2011
Further Thoughts Forth
Since I just let tear that last post, and the void remains impassive, let me kick it up another notch:
Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.
Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.
Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.
In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..
In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.
Because for as much as I like them..
Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.
Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.
In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.
What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.
Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.
If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.
How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.
Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.
The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.
As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.
In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.
For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.
And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.
Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.
Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.
You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.
Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.
That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?
Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.
---
Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.
Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.
Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.
In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..
In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.
Because for as much as I like them..
Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.
Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.
In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.
What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.
Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.
If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.
How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.
Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.
The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.
As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.
In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.
For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.
And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.
Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.
Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.
You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.
Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.
That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?
Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.
---
Thoughts on the Forth
"Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land."
Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
- Interview of Herman Göring by Gustave Gilbert in his cell at Nuremburg, April 18, 1946: Nürnberger Tagebuch S.270
I'm sitting here at Borders somewhere in the urban sprawl of Miami drinking coffee and translating.
Un peu de Français parmi los Cubanos Locos.. A fit exercise for our national fest, I think. We Americans owe the French nearly everything, seeing as how they bankrupted themselves (thereby bringing on their own revolution) fighting in our war for Independence.
So, here's a goutte de café for the Marquis de Layfayette and his boys. Another for the Comte de Rochambeau whose men formed half the forces at Yorktown and a third for the Comte de Grasse whose fleet beat the Royal Navy there.
Our true founding fathers, all of them French.
And now one more for France Gall, France on Gaul singing this charming paean to my home, the only patriotically themed song I will listen to today:
Quand on a rêvé depuis 17 ans d'Amérique..
When you've dreamt for 17 years of America..
J'irai voir le Texas et le Colorado, sans parler du Kansas et de San Francisco.
I will go and see Texas and Colorado, not to mention Kansas and San Francisco.
Au centième étage du plus haut des grattes-ciel pousser les nuages pour toucher le soleil..
To the the hundredth floor of the highest sky scraper pushing aside clouds to touch the sun..
On dit qu'à Broadway brillent les lumières d'Amérique, ah si je pouvais voir le nez en l'air, l'Amérique..
They say that the American lights are bright on Broadway, ah, if I could only see all the rich and famous people there..
Lécher les vitrines des grands magasins d'Amérique, acheter des jeans et des mocassins d'Amérique..
Drooling at the great shop windows, buying American jeans and moccasins..
J'ai vu tous les films et j'ai tous les disques d'Amérique, mais ça ne suffit pas il faut que je voie, l'Amérique.
I've seen all the movies and I have all the records, but that's not enough- I have to see America for myself.
Et comme ce sera trop grand pour mes yeux l'Amérique, j'irai avec toi découvrir à deux, l'Amérique..
And it will all be too great for my eyes alone to bear, I'll go with you to discover America the two of us, together..
--
That's right. I'll take my patriotic mythology, nationalistic aggrandizement and gross materialism in French, thank you. Plus raffinée comme ça. Screw Toby Keith.
I'm done with American civil religion. Go wrap yourselves in the flag and make a fetish of it. Conflate love of country with love of state sanctioned violence, and pretend that you really care about "the troops." Yelp that patriotism demands celebration of whatever latest homicide our political leadership orders they commit. Do it all while stuffing your fat gob with barbecue and beer.
I say that when that violence redounds upon us - and it will, sooner than later - that we will richly deserve it.
Not that that event will be understood in those terms. No, the average American has the historical memory and moral imagination of a fruitfly. It will be cynically manipulated and used as another opportunity to incite us to more violence.
So, I have a minor quibble with that Göring quote at the head of the post:
If there's one thing people love it's war that they inflict on others but (and this is the key quibble and point) without any negative consequence to themselves. After sex and money, we're all about war. Sex without negative consequences (disease or pregnancy), money without negative consequences (drudgery), and war without negative consequences (anyone we love being hurt or killed, especially ourselves).
Anything that expresses power and sates us is what human beings want. And war is the consummate act of crushing those whom we despise. When we can't work them to death for pennies, debase them sexually them for pennies, we will blow them to viscera for pennies.
The true genius of the Anglo-Saxon power elite is that they cloak their obvious violence in a moral language that glorifies it, and them. They usually manage to extend that "them" to include "us." But not always - see Vietnam, for example.
Whenever violence can't be ignored, it becomes about virtue and freedom. The Nazis were just too obvious. Their great downfall is that they lacked imagination and were terrible propagandists. Which is merely to say that they actually told the truth about their actual motives too often. See the quote by Göring for proof of that. Neither George Bush would be caught saying that, even though that's exactly what they believe.
You can bank on that. Happy Forth of July.
---
Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
- Interview of Herman Göring by Gustave Gilbert in his cell at Nuremburg, April 18, 1946: Nürnberger Tagebuch S.270
I'm sitting here at Borders somewhere in the urban sprawl of Miami drinking coffee and translating.
Un peu de Français parmi los Cubanos Locos.. A fit exercise for our national fest, I think. We Americans owe the French nearly everything, seeing as how they bankrupted themselves (thereby bringing on their own revolution) fighting in our war for Independence.
So, here's a goutte de café for the Marquis de Layfayette and his boys. Another for the Comte de Rochambeau whose men formed half the forces at Yorktown and a third for the Comte de Grasse whose fleet beat the Royal Navy there.
Our true founding fathers, all of them French.
And now one more for France Gall, France on Gaul singing this charming paean to my home, the only patriotically themed song I will listen to today:
Quand on a rêvé depuis 17 ans d'Amérique..
When you've dreamt for 17 years of America..
J'irai voir le Texas et le Colorado, sans parler du Kansas et de San Francisco.
I will go and see Texas and Colorado, not to mention Kansas and San Francisco.
Au centième étage du plus haut des grattes-ciel pousser les nuages pour toucher le soleil..
To the the hundredth floor of the highest sky scraper pushing aside clouds to touch the sun..
On dit qu'à Broadway brillent les lumières d'Amérique, ah si je pouvais voir le nez en l'air, l'Amérique..
They say that the American lights are bright on Broadway, ah, if I could only see all the rich and famous people there..
Lécher les vitrines des grands magasins d'Amérique, acheter des jeans et des mocassins d'Amérique..
Drooling at the great shop windows, buying American jeans and moccasins..
J'ai vu tous les films et j'ai tous les disques d'Amérique, mais ça ne suffit pas il faut que je voie, l'Amérique.
I've seen all the movies and I have all the records, but that's not enough- I have to see America for myself.
Et comme ce sera trop grand pour mes yeux l'Amérique, j'irai avec toi découvrir à deux, l'Amérique..
And it will all be too great for my eyes alone to bear, I'll go with you to discover America the two of us, together..
--
That's right. I'll take my patriotic mythology, nationalistic aggrandizement and gross materialism in French, thank you. Plus raffinée comme ça. Screw Toby Keith.
I'm done with American civil religion. Go wrap yourselves in the flag and make a fetish of it. Conflate love of country with love of state sanctioned violence, and pretend that you really care about "the troops." Yelp that patriotism demands celebration of whatever latest homicide our political leadership orders they commit. Do it all while stuffing your fat gob with barbecue and beer.
I say that when that violence redounds upon us - and it will, sooner than later - that we will richly deserve it.
Not that that event will be understood in those terms. No, the average American has the historical memory and moral imagination of a fruitfly. It will be cynically manipulated and used as another opportunity to incite us to more violence.
So, I have a minor quibble with that Göring quote at the head of the post:
If there's one thing people love it's war that they inflict on others but (and this is the key quibble and point) without any negative consequence to themselves. After sex and money, we're all about war. Sex without negative consequences (disease or pregnancy), money without negative consequences (drudgery), and war without negative consequences (anyone we love being hurt or killed, especially ourselves).
Anything that expresses power and sates us is what human beings want. And war is the consummate act of crushing those whom we despise. When we can't work them to death for pennies, debase them sexually them for pennies, we will blow them to viscera for pennies.
The true genius of the Anglo-Saxon power elite is that they cloak their obvious violence in a moral language that glorifies it, and them. They usually manage to extend that "them" to include "us." But not always - see Vietnam, for example.
Whenever violence can't be ignored, it becomes about virtue and freedom. The Nazis were just too obvious. Their great downfall is that they lacked imagination and were terrible propagandists. Which is merely to say that they actually told the truth about their actual motives too often. See the quote by Göring for proof of that. Neither George Bush would be caught saying that, even though that's exactly what they believe.
You can bank on that. Happy Forth of July.
---
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Everyone has the Right to be Taken Care of.
This just in, from ZENIT, the Vatican news feed:
Vatican Calls for Rich to Make Universal Health Care Possible
Laments That "Poor People Miss Out"
GENEVA, Switzerland, MAY 24, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry says rich nations will have to show solidarity with poor countries if the right to health care is to become a reality.
Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski said this in his address to the World Health Organization's 64th World Health Assembly, which concluded today in Geneva.
The prelate noted the 2010 World Health Report, showing "on the whole, we are still a long way from universal coverage."
"We are stalled in the status quo, where the rich people have higher levels of coverage, while most of the poor people miss out, and those who do have access often incur high, sometimes catastrophic costs in paying for services and medicine," he said.
The prelate stated that to make universal coverage a possibility, nations need to raise funds, "reduce reliance on direct payments for services and improve efficiency and equity, thus removing the financial barriers to access, especially for poor and less advantaged people."
But he said that low-income countries have little chance of making this happen.
"This sad fact highlights the need for a true global solidarity, in which high income countries do not only promise, but effectively meet their commitments on development assistance," he said.
We are all our brother's keeper.
h/t: Caelum & Terra
(I should also note that Caelum & Terra has been knocking ball after ball out of the park lately. I admire Daniel Nichols immensely, and he's been posting many interesting and great things lately - like these words from St. Seraphim of Sarov yesterday for example:
God is fire which warms and inflames the heart and womb. And so, if we feel in our hearts coldness, which is from the devil, for he is cold, then let us pray to the Lord for he came to warm our hearts with perfect love, not only of him but of our neighbor too. And in the face of his warmth the cold of the hater-of-good will flee away.
How's that for some excellent advice? Pray for perfect love. What ever else were we made for but that? )
---
Vatican Calls for Rich to Make Universal Health Care Possible
Laments That "Poor People Miss Out"
GENEVA, Switzerland, MAY 24, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry says rich nations will have to show solidarity with poor countries if the right to health care is to become a reality.
Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski said this in his address to the World Health Organization's 64th World Health Assembly, which concluded today in Geneva.
The prelate noted the 2010 World Health Report, showing "on the whole, we are still a long way from universal coverage."
"We are stalled in the status quo, where the rich people have higher levels of coverage, while most of the poor people miss out, and those who do have access often incur high, sometimes catastrophic costs in paying for services and medicine," he said.
The prelate stated that to make universal coverage a possibility, nations need to raise funds, "reduce reliance on direct payments for services and improve efficiency and equity, thus removing the financial barriers to access, especially for poor and less advantaged people."
But he said that low-income countries have little chance of making this happen.
"This sad fact highlights the need for a true global solidarity, in which high income countries do not only promise, but effectively meet their commitments on development assistance," he said.
We are all our brother's keeper.
h/t: Caelum & Terra
(I should also note that Caelum & Terra has been knocking ball after ball out of the park lately. I admire Daniel Nichols immensely, and he's been posting many interesting and great things lately - like these words from St. Seraphim of Sarov yesterday for example:
God is fire which warms and inflames the heart and womb. And so, if we feel in our hearts coldness, which is from the devil, for he is cold, then let us pray to the Lord for he came to warm our hearts with perfect love, not only of him but of our neighbor too. And in the face of his warmth the cold of the hater-of-good will flee away.
How's that for some excellent advice? Pray for perfect love. What ever else were we made for but that? )
---
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
On the Utility of Occam's Razor
So, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one, aye?
I was just watching the Zaphruder film of JFK's assassination:
(this is graphic, and is appropriately enough preceded by a *Target* commercial)
JFK Kennedy Assassination - Zapruder film - high... by virveli
It's really amusing stuff, actually, because it's very clear that the bullet that kills him by blowing his skull open is definitely coming from his front. The vicinity of the "grassy knoll" and the overpass in front of the car, in other words. The Texas Schoolbook "Suppository" where Oswald supposedly is shooting from is behind the vehicle.
It's simple physics. A body hit by a bullet doesn't blow toward the bullet, but away from it. Kennedy was blown toward Oswald's putative location, and away from the knoll and the overpass. The exit wound on Kennedy's head is in the back, not the front of his head.
The fact that the Keystone cops of the Dallas PD and FBI (who along with the Secret Service so scandalously failed to protect the President that day) immediately get Oswald's description, then arrest him, is also amusing. That Oswald - whose curriculum vitae screams CIA plant - claims to be a patsy to his dying breath, and is immediately off'ed by a mob hitman claiming to be acting from motives of vigilante patriotism, just seals the case.
Who benefits from Kennedy's death? LBJ and his Texas cronies, the mob, the cold warriors who want to escalate the war in Vietnam and action against Cuba.
Kennedy apparently was undergoing a change of heart on all of that stuff, and wanted to undo the CIA, and ratchet down the Cold War, or so rumor has it. Bobby Kennedy was also an activist against the mob, and was becoming a heretic on the Cold War, too. The Boston Irish Brahmin, not a great friend to the Southern establishment Texas oilmen..
That this is some sort of scandalous "conspiracy theory" frowned upon by the powers that be (the lone nut gunman did it! it's always the lone nut who's to blame..) is simply hilarious. Sure, dudes. It was Oswald acting alone. Sure.
I'll note that George H. W. Bush is an Eastern Banking Brahmin, but of old English and Dutch Yalie stock, who gets in bed deep with the Tejas oilmen.
He is serendipitously appointed head of the CIA "out of nowhere" in 1976. Just a Texas congressman who lucked out, see.
I say that the simpler explanation is that he had been involved in the intelligence community since his days in navy intelligence photography as a pilot during WW II. Yale, George's alma mater, has been at the forefront of providing leadership in the intelligence community since before WW I.
I'll also note that George was apparently in Fort Worth the day of the JFK assassination.
Odd fact, that. Well, everyone who was anyone in Texas politics was in the vicinity that day, right?
Anyway, I say that the assassination fits easily into the larger Machiavellian drama, in which Texas is at the epicenter of power in which oil, weapons and cheap labor as well as drugs like cocaine and heroine are the essential commodities.
Illegal immigration of cheap labor, sex trafficking, drugs and weapons. And oil.
Texas. Mexico. Columbia and Venezuela. Oil, drugs, weapons. Money laundering.
The mob and cartels meld into our intelligence community and "legitimate" business in banking, oil and weapons.
Our foreign policy can only be understood in terms of all that money.
Confused as to why we are going to remain in Afghanistan even now that Osama and "al-Qaeda" are gone? That we are going to stay in Iraq, even now that the place is stable and we've "restored democracy" there?
One thing explains our presence in Iraq: one forth of the world's remaining proven petroleum reserves are there.
Two things explain our presence in Central Asia: Afghan heroin and oil in the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.
Heroin, you say? But we're squeaky clean, we don't have anything to do with that.
Yeah. Okeedokee. In 2000 the Taliban put a ban on production of opium poppies, causing world production of heroin to drop 95%.
The very next year, we've taken them out, and have planted an army there. Opium production soars back up to pre- Taliban ban levels.
This, like every nefarious thing we do, is just an "accident." We can't stop it, see?
I'll spell it out, and paint a quick picture for you:
The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).
Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. It is well and amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
The Great Game is always on, and having that chit on the central Asian land mass, against the Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians is the key.
As for the death of Osama, I say that the evidence says he never ceased being an ISI asset.
I also say that the CIA is allied with the ISI, and that our intelligence community and political elite are engaged in a huge Machiavellian game involving money, drugs, oil, weapons and cheap labor.
Guns and money, drugs and oil. (I'm repeating myself for effect. Chant it like a mantra, throw sex in there once in a while for added zest and frisson..)
They hop gladly into bed with anyone who will give them power over these things.
The Saudis, the Paki ruling class.
The average American, who gets all riled up over religion and patriotism and stuff like gender issues (them dang femanazis!) is a chump.
They keep their Praetorians obsessed with Kim Kardashian's boob job, flush with just enough porn, corn syrup and cash to keep us dumb and happy.
God bless America!
And with that, I need to go make more tea.
---
I was just watching the Zaphruder film of JFK's assassination:
(this is graphic, and is appropriately enough preceded by a *Target* commercial)
JFK Kennedy Assassination - Zapruder film - high... by virveli
It's really amusing stuff, actually, because it's very clear that the bullet that kills him by blowing his skull open is definitely coming from his front. The vicinity of the "grassy knoll" and the overpass in front of the car, in other words. The Texas Schoolbook "Suppository" where Oswald supposedly is shooting from is behind the vehicle.
It's simple physics. A body hit by a bullet doesn't blow toward the bullet, but away from it. Kennedy was blown toward Oswald's putative location, and away from the knoll and the overpass. The exit wound on Kennedy's head is in the back, not the front of his head.
The fact that the Keystone cops of the Dallas PD and FBI (who along with the Secret Service so scandalously failed to protect the President that day) immediately get Oswald's description, then arrest him, is also amusing. That Oswald - whose curriculum vitae screams CIA plant - claims to be a patsy to his dying breath, and is immediately off'ed by a mob hitman claiming to be acting from motives of vigilante patriotism, just seals the case.
Who benefits from Kennedy's death? LBJ and his Texas cronies, the mob, the cold warriors who want to escalate the war in Vietnam and action against Cuba.
Kennedy apparently was undergoing a change of heart on all of that stuff, and wanted to undo the CIA, and ratchet down the Cold War, or so rumor has it. Bobby Kennedy was also an activist against the mob, and was becoming a heretic on the Cold War, too. The Boston Irish Brahmin, not a great friend to the Southern establishment Texas oilmen..
That this is some sort of scandalous "conspiracy theory" frowned upon by the powers that be (the lone nut gunman did it! it's always the lone nut who's to blame..) is simply hilarious. Sure, dudes. It was Oswald acting alone. Sure.
I'll note that George H. W. Bush is an Eastern Banking Brahmin, but of old English and Dutch Yalie stock, who gets in bed deep with the Tejas oilmen.
He is serendipitously appointed head of the CIA "out of nowhere" in 1976. Just a Texas congressman who lucked out, see.
I say that the simpler explanation is that he had been involved in the intelligence community since his days in navy intelligence photography as a pilot during WW II. Yale, George's alma mater, has been at the forefront of providing leadership in the intelligence community since before WW I.
I'll also note that George was apparently in Fort Worth the day of the JFK assassination.
Odd fact, that. Well, everyone who was anyone in Texas politics was in the vicinity that day, right?
Anyway, I say that the assassination fits easily into the larger Machiavellian drama, in which Texas is at the epicenter of power in which oil, weapons and cheap labor as well as drugs like cocaine and heroine are the essential commodities.
Illegal immigration of cheap labor, sex trafficking, drugs and weapons. And oil.
Texas. Mexico. Columbia and Venezuela. Oil, drugs, weapons. Money laundering.
The mob and cartels meld into our intelligence community and "legitimate" business in banking, oil and weapons.
Our foreign policy can only be understood in terms of all that money.
Confused as to why we are going to remain in Afghanistan even now that Osama and "al-Qaeda" are gone? That we are going to stay in Iraq, even now that the place is stable and we've "restored democracy" there?
One thing explains our presence in Iraq: one forth of the world's remaining proven petroleum reserves are there.
Two things explain our presence in Central Asia: Afghan heroin and oil in the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.
Heroin, you say? But we're squeaky clean, we don't have anything to do with that.
Yeah. Okeedokee. In 2000 the Taliban put a ban on production of opium poppies, causing world production of heroin to drop 95%.
The very next year, we've taken them out, and have planted an army there. Opium production soars back up to pre- Taliban ban levels.
This, like every nefarious thing we do, is just an "accident." We can't stop it, see?
I'll spell it out, and paint a quick picture for you:
The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).
Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. It is well and amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
The Great Game is always on, and having that chit on the central Asian land mass, against the Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians is the key.
As for the death of Osama, I say that the evidence says he never ceased being an ISI asset.
I also say that the CIA is allied with the ISI, and that our intelligence community and political elite are engaged in a huge Machiavellian game involving money, drugs, oil, weapons and cheap labor.
Guns and money, drugs and oil. (I'm repeating myself for effect. Chant it like a mantra, throw sex in there once in a while for added zest and frisson..)
They hop gladly into bed with anyone who will give them power over these things.
The Saudis, the Paki ruling class.
The average American, who gets all riled up over religion and patriotism and stuff like gender issues (them dang femanazis!) is a chump.
They keep their Praetorians obsessed with Kim Kardashian's boob job, flush with just enough porn, corn syrup and cash to keep us dumb and happy.
God bless America!
And with that, I need to go make more tea.
---
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Freedom, Vermont & Unity: Bernie Rulz!!
Another economics/political post, it's a Lenten Tuesday:
I love my new home and senator. Stick it to them nasty Anti-Federalist corporatist libertarian trogs, Bernie!! I love you, man.
[That graphic came from here, where you can read it in a larger version.]
---
I love my new home and senator. Stick it to them nasty Anti-Federalist corporatist libertarian trogs, Bernie!! I love you, man.
[That graphic came from here, where you can read it in a larger version.]
---
Matt Taibbi & Eliot Spitzer: Put the Bastards in Jail, Now.
This is straight up:
I say this in all seriousness: if and when things get worse, the archons in charge of our kleptocracy will pay for having broken the social contract so viciously and shamelessly. Six months in a maximum security prison (Taibbi's prescription here) will be in that context a light sentence.
---
I say this in all seriousness: if and when things get worse, the archons in charge of our kleptocracy will pay for having broken the social contract so viciously and shamelessly. Six months in a maximum security prison (Taibbi's prescription here) will be in that context a light sentence.
---
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Fun with Charts & Graphs: Contextualization of U.S. National Taxation & Debt, c. 1920 thru Present [revised]
(Note: I've revised this post and added material about 4 hours after my initial posting - I want to be sure that the post is long enough to keep your attention..)
Happy Tax Day! Remember: The IRS Loves You, Baby.
Belated wishes, anyway. I meant to post this yesterday.
Still, in the spirit of the celebration (which properly speaking ought to be marked with an octave..) I present you all some pertinent charts, mostly from this excellent site: Visualizing Economics.
As always, you may click on the images to expand them.
First item, a chart of the top marginal rates of the three major sorts of U.S. Federal income taxes - personal income, corporate income and capital gains (tax on investment gains) taxes - since 1910:
This all is still only a snapshot, there's of course much more to the overall story, such as questions concerning the percentages of the lower brackets, the adjusted dollar benchmarks for all brackets, as well as issues such as tax shelters and deductions and other complications in the code cannot that be crammed into one or any graph.. So it's all more complex than this graph can represent.
The graph "Lower Taxes for the Highest Earners" below and this explanation of the chart from the Visualizing Economics website explicate those complications a bit:
Green line is the top marginal rate for married couples filing jointly (most years dividends were tax like ordinary income until 2003), orange is the top rate for income from capital gains. The top corporate tax rate is included for comparison. Your marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the “last dollar” you earn; but when you view the taxes you paid as a percentage of your income, your effective tax rate is less than your marginal rate, especially after you take into account the deductions and exemptions, i.e. income that is not subject to any tax.
Over the years, changing the amount of taxes people pay was accomplished not just by changing rates but by changing the income limits of the tax brackets. Just looking at the top rates does not give the whole picture about who is paying taxes. Before the 1986 tax reform, the income tax had 15 brackets. In the 1930s, there were more than 50. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. As the number of tax brackets decrease, the the top rate was applied to more people over the decades. Since 1987 the income tax brackets were combined so now more than a million people “qualify” for the top marginal rate. If you are interested here is the first 1040 form for 1913.
The main thing to note is how the top marginal personal and corporate income taxes were *much* higher in the booming 40's & 50's through to the Reagan "Supply Side" Tax Break Revolution 1981.
The top marginal bracket peaked in the mid 90's and then settled at 90% from the early 50's until 1964. Those were the tax rates during the most expansive economic boom in human history, in the richest country in the world.
Here are two charts that put us into an international context:
First, an international comparison of both corporate and personal income tax rates:
Notice that the United States has relatively high corporate taxes, and low personal income taxes in international terms.
Next, I give you a narrower international comparison of the percentage of the GDP (tax-to-GDP ratio) taken by governments in tax revenue:
Today, Denmark is the most taxed country in the world with a tax-to-GDP ratio of only 48.9%. While as you see here, the U.S. tax-to-GDP ratio hovers in the low to mid 20 percentiles.
Comparatively, amongst first world nations, the United States takes a very low percentage of GDP as taxes..
Interestingly, I found this graph which says that Danes report being the happiest people on earth, somewhat happier than Americans, despite making less and being taxed more:
They also report being equally happy, rich or poor, which is atypical.
Now, take that very first chart of American income tax history above, and compare it with these next two showing the national debt explosion over the same time period:
Some observations:
We now are at a similar level of debt in comparison to our GDP as we held during WW II.
Also, there seems to be some odd correlation between cutting taxes and our exploding debt.
Note 1981, which is the year of Reagan's tax reform. The debt explosion began there, briefly improves under Clinton and the economic boom of the late 90's, and then explodes again under Bush and then Obama.
Can anyone say "voodoo economics" or supply side catastrophe? Can you say trillions of dollars blown into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan?
I knew you could.
Here's another interesting chart, showing a graph of the percentage of capital gains as a percentage of all national income against a chart of federal budget surpluses and deficits by year:
Note here how the late 90's surge in investment income (the tech bubble) corresponded with a series of Federal Budget surpluses under Clinton, but that the housing bubble surge under Bush did not.
This next chart gives a bit of perspective on the issue of tax brackets, lacking in the very first chart:
Notice how the income tax is still hugely regressive, in that the people making tens of millions (the upper 1%) pay less than 40% (and still can shelter much of that), while the lowest earners making tens of thousands still pay over ten percent..
Wikipedia has some interesting data on poverty in the United States, saying that it's cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Approximately 43.6 (14.3%) million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Also note, and to put all of this into further context, that the poverty threshold in the United Sates in 2009 for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,756.
This last graph shows how that compares to poverty internationally:
Blue is good, yellow and orange not so much, red is very bad.
National estimates are based on population-weighted subgroup estimates from household surveys. Definitions of the poverty line may vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations. Thus, the numbers are not comparable among countries.
The common international poverty line has in the past been roughly US$1 a day. In 2008, the World Bank came out with a revised figure of US$1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity..
Try driving your SUV to the McDonald's drive trough on $1.25 a day. You could fill the tank maybe half full once a month in the few before the repo men come, and starve.. Or else walk, and then when you got there you'd be able to buy one item off the dollar menu.
Accentuate the positive, you'd burn off flab.
But that's just a fantasy. You make US$8.50 an hour at Walmart. And you can still get a plum job at the U.S. Post Office, so no worries! They start you at $19 an hour and the median pay is well above that! You'll get benefits and a Federal pension too!
So cheer up my fellow Americans! Don't be glum! Life isn't so bad! Not when you can afford to send a check for thousands of dollars to the IRS to do your part in helping bail out Wall Street and pay bankers their well deserved bonuses! And still own a car and shop at an American supermarket and eat out once in a while..
I close with a really funny set of maps. These demonstrate in yet another way how weird our politics are. I'm going to use the first graphic again later, because I have another post in mind that will discuss how warped people's voting is, in terms of how their ideological discourse and voting habits often diverge from their economic interests.
Click to enlarge and read it:
The two maps are a bit confusing. Look at the chart at the bottom of the graphic that gives the proportion of taxes paid to benefits received. Then compare it with this map, the electoral results for the last (2008) presidential election, red states McCain, Blue Obama:
See the joke? States that voted for McCain and the Republican line (lie) of smaller government and forever lower taxes almost all get a much greater return on their tax input than do most states state that voted for Obama and "socialism."
New Mexico, which gets the highest return per dollar sent (2 to 1) hung in the balance and I think had a recount, so it's a near exception. My home state Maine, is a clear exception - voted Obama, and get the cash for our vote. We also have two of the most powerful - moderate female Republican - senators in the country, Collins and Snowe, whom I bet account for much of that money in pork.. Most of the other exceptions who voted for Obama and get slightly over parity on their return for the tax dollar (e.g. Iowa, Pennsylvania, Missouri) are close calls electorally and have recently been skewing Republican.
I think the overall pattern can be explained by senators from small states getting the goods for their constituents, ideological blather aside. They have much more influence per taxpayer head than senators from large, and they use it. Texas you'll notice is also an outlier, but has 24 million people for its 2 senators. Maine has 1.25 million for its 2. This disparity in the senate favors states with small (and incidentally mostly rural - look at the federal farm bill for a graphic demonstration of this effecting federal cash flow) constituencies.. That's the raw brutal math.
This disparity amuses me immensely. The banker and bubba both howl against "socialism" and then take the taxpayer to the cleaners with a crowbar up side the head.
God bless America. Land that I love.
The American dream's still alive. Yippee kay yay, eh?
---
Happy Tax Day! Remember: The IRS Loves You, Baby.
Belated wishes, anyway. I meant to post this yesterday.
Still, in the spirit of the celebration (which properly speaking ought to be marked with an octave..) I present you all some pertinent charts, mostly from this excellent site: Visualizing Economics.
As always, you may click on the images to expand them.
First item, a chart of the top marginal rates of the three major sorts of U.S. Federal income taxes - personal income, corporate income and capital gains (tax on investment gains) taxes - since 1910:
This all is still only a snapshot, there's of course much more to the overall story, such as questions concerning the percentages of the lower brackets, the adjusted dollar benchmarks for all brackets, as well as issues such as tax shelters and deductions and other complications in the code cannot that be crammed into one or any graph.. So it's all more complex than this graph can represent.
The graph "Lower Taxes for the Highest Earners" below and this explanation of the chart from the Visualizing Economics website explicate those complications a bit:
Green line is the top marginal rate for married couples filing jointly (most years dividends were tax like ordinary income until 2003), orange is the top rate for income from capital gains. The top corporate tax rate is included for comparison. Your marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the “last dollar” you earn; but when you view the taxes you paid as a percentage of your income, your effective tax rate is less than your marginal rate, especially after you take into account the deductions and exemptions, i.e. income that is not subject to any tax.
Over the years, changing the amount of taxes people pay was accomplished not just by changing rates but by changing the income limits of the tax brackets. Just looking at the top rates does not give the whole picture about who is paying taxes. Before the 1986 tax reform, the income tax had 15 brackets. In the 1930s, there were more than 50. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. As the number of tax brackets decrease, the the top rate was applied to more people over the decades. Since 1987 the income tax brackets were combined so now more than a million people “qualify” for the top marginal rate. If you are interested here is the first 1040 form for 1913.
The main thing to note is how the top marginal personal and corporate income taxes were *much* higher in the booming 40's & 50's through to the Reagan "Supply Side" Tax Break Revolution 1981.
The top marginal bracket peaked in the mid 90's and then settled at 90% from the early 50's until 1964. Those were the tax rates during the most expansive economic boom in human history, in the richest country in the world.
Here are two charts that put us into an international context:
First, an international comparison of both corporate and personal income tax rates:
Notice that the United States has relatively high corporate taxes, and low personal income taxes in international terms.
Next, I give you a narrower international comparison of the percentage of the GDP (tax-to-GDP ratio) taken by governments in tax revenue:
Today, Denmark is the most taxed country in the world with a tax-to-GDP ratio of only 48.9%. While as you see here, the U.S. tax-to-GDP ratio hovers in the low to mid 20 percentiles.
Comparatively, amongst first world nations, the United States takes a very low percentage of GDP as taxes..
Interestingly, I found this graph which says that Danes report being the happiest people on earth, somewhat happier than Americans, despite making less and being taxed more:
They also report being equally happy, rich or poor, which is atypical.
Now, take that very first chart of American income tax history above, and compare it with these next two showing the national debt explosion over the same time period:
Some observations:
We now are at a similar level of debt in comparison to our GDP as we held during WW II.
Also, there seems to be some odd correlation between cutting taxes and our exploding debt.
Note 1981, which is the year of Reagan's tax reform. The debt explosion began there, briefly improves under Clinton and the economic boom of the late 90's, and then explodes again under Bush and then Obama.
Can anyone say "voodoo economics" or supply side catastrophe? Can you say trillions of dollars blown into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan?
I knew you could.
Here's another interesting chart, showing a graph of the percentage of capital gains as a percentage of all national income against a chart of federal budget surpluses and deficits by year:
Note here how the late 90's surge in investment income (the tech bubble) corresponded with a series of Federal Budget surpluses under Clinton, but that the housing bubble surge under Bush did not.
This next chart gives a bit of perspective on the issue of tax brackets, lacking in the very first chart:
Notice how the income tax is still hugely regressive, in that the people making tens of millions (the upper 1%) pay less than 40% (and still can shelter much of that), while the lowest earners making tens of thousands still pay over ten percent..
Wikipedia has some interesting data on poverty in the United States, saying that it's cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Approximately 43.6 (14.3%) million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Also note, and to put all of this into further context, that the poverty threshold in the United Sates in 2009 for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,756.
This last graph shows how that compares to poverty internationally:
Blue is good, yellow and orange not so much, red is very bad.
National estimates are based on population-weighted subgroup estimates from household surveys. Definitions of the poverty line may vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations. Thus, the numbers are not comparable among countries.
The common international poverty line has in the past been roughly US$1 a day. In 2008, the World Bank came out with a revised figure of US$1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity..
Try driving your SUV to the McDonald's drive trough on $1.25 a day. You could fill the tank maybe half full once a month in the few before the repo men come, and starve.. Or else walk, and then when you got there you'd be able to buy one item off the dollar menu.
Accentuate the positive, you'd burn off flab.
But that's just a fantasy. You make US$8.50 an hour at Walmart. And you can still get a plum job at the U.S. Post Office, so no worries! They start you at $19 an hour and the median pay is well above that! You'll get benefits and a Federal pension too!
So cheer up my fellow Americans! Don't be glum! Life isn't so bad! Not when you can afford to send a check for thousands of dollars to the IRS to do your part in helping bail out Wall Street and pay bankers their well deserved bonuses! And still own a car and shop at an American supermarket and eat out once in a while..
I close with a really funny set of maps. These demonstrate in yet another way how weird our politics are. I'm going to use the first graphic again later, because I have another post in mind that will discuss how warped people's voting is, in terms of how their ideological discourse and voting habits often diverge from their economic interests.
Click to enlarge and read it:
The two maps are a bit confusing. Look at the chart at the bottom of the graphic that gives the proportion of taxes paid to benefits received. Then compare it with this map, the electoral results for the last (2008) presidential election, red states McCain, Blue Obama:
See the joke? States that voted for McCain and the Republican line (lie) of smaller government and forever lower taxes almost all get a much greater return on their tax input than do most states state that voted for Obama and "socialism."
New Mexico, which gets the highest return per dollar sent (2 to 1) hung in the balance and I think had a recount, so it's a near exception. My home state Maine, is a clear exception - voted Obama, and get the cash for our vote. We also have two of the most powerful - moderate female Republican - senators in the country, Collins and Snowe, whom I bet account for much of that money in pork.. Most of the other exceptions who voted for Obama and get slightly over parity on their return for the tax dollar (e.g. Iowa, Pennsylvania, Missouri) are close calls electorally and have recently been skewing Republican.
I think the overall pattern can be explained by senators from small states getting the goods for their constituents, ideological blather aside. They have much more influence per taxpayer head than senators from large, and they use it. Texas you'll notice is also an outlier, but has 24 million people for its 2 senators. Maine has 1.25 million for its 2. This disparity in the senate favors states with small (and incidentally mostly rural - look at the federal farm bill for a graphic demonstration of this effecting federal cash flow) constituencies.. That's the raw brutal math.
This disparity amuses me immensely. The banker and bubba both howl against "socialism" and then take the taxpayer to the cleaners with a crowbar up side the head.
God bless America. Land that I love.
The American dream's still alive. Yippee kay yay, eh?
---
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