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Harris v Quinn Is Going To Be A Shitty SCOTUS Decision I Welcome

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So unions and many democrats are freaking out about today’s impending Harris v Quinn decision from the Supreme Court. Let me give you a little bit of detail about the case before I get to my point. This case is about public sector unions, which ultimately means it will be about all unions. The plaintiff, Pamela Harris has a son who needs ongoing medical care, which she provides for him. In order for her to be able to do this, she receives Medicaid funds and is therefore considered a home health care worker, employed by the state of Illinois. At some point, home health care workers voted to unionize so they’re represented by SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana. Since the majority of them voted to unionize, they are all members of the union and must therefore pay union dues. Back in 1977, the Supreme Court issued a decision on union dues (I’m not going to do a deep dive into this case, but it’s Abood v Detroit Board of Education is you want to look it up). The court basically said that all public workers who are represented by the union must pay the fees associated with bargaining for them minus the cost of political activity.

So this twit shill Harris sued because she doesn’t want to pay her fair share. Why do I call her a twit? Before the union, wages in IL for a state employed home health care worker was $7.00 per hour. The union negotiated that salary up to $11.65 per hour now, with a scheduled increase to $13.00 per hour in December. Calling her a twit is clearly more flattering than she deserves, but I digress.

So now the court is basically going to redecide union dues. Remember, this was already decided so we’re looking at a major act of judicial activism here. Anyway the unions are freaking out because if the court decides that the twit doesn’t have to pay her fair share, they’re basically only get dues from their members on a voluntary basis. Unions represent both members and nonmembers so if people are allowed to opt out of paying their dues, they basically get all of the work that a union does to negotiate their wages for free. This is referred to as freeloading. I refer to it as twittery because if the union falls apart, the twit’s wages start to go back down immediately. Nonetheless, people are stupid and short sided and significant percentage of them will choose to get something for nothing, until it all falls apart and they’re left with nothing.

Unions are freaking out because this could effectively end unions. Democrats are freaking out because unions are the still biggest known (remember, our elections are mostly funded in the dark now) contributors to the democratic party.

I’m not freaking out. Not because I think the decision will be the right one, and not because I don’t think this will end unions. It will likely be the wrong decision and if it is, it will end unions. I’m not freaking out because when history repeats, the results always come out the way they did the first time around. Since a large percentage of humans are dullards who aren’t interested in history, (cause what could history possibly have to do with them?) we repeat history over and over again. Most people don’t realize that they have weekends off because of unions. They don’t realize that without unions, they would be working fourteen hour days side by side with their kids. Some dipshits believe they’re above exploitation because they’re "educated". Never mind the fact that the libertarian Paypal founder (Peter Thiel) and douchebag is trying to build a slave labor barge full of dirt cheap foreign software developers far enough off the coast of San Francisco, that he’s not subject to compliance with US labor laws. But that’s not going to affect "educated" people cause, free market!

Things are definitely going to go to shit for workers if unions disappear. But they’re slowly going to shit now as unions are shrinking. Disappearing them is just going to bring us to the end game of worker misery a little faster. So here’s how it’s going to go; unions disappear, workers’ already flat wages start to drop precipitously, democrats turn to corporations for money.

Democrats will definitely get that money. They’re getting it now. They’ve been getting it in ever increasing amounts since Bill Clinton put up the "for rent" sign at democratic national headquarters. That’s why it’s been harder and harder to tell democrats apart from republicans over the past couple of decades. Once the democratic party becomes 100% reliant on corporations to fund them (as republicans have been for four decades), their constituency will shrink dramatically to include only; GE, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, and Pfizer. Notice how you’re conspicuously missing from that list? That’s because your only lobbyist, unions will be gone. Unions are your lobbyist whether you belong to one or not. Study after study shows that wages go up across the board in places where unions are strong.

Once they’re dismantled, you go back to being completely powerless. There will be no need for libertarian douchebag billionaires to invest in building slave barges because software developers in San Francisco city limits can look forward to being treated to the same conditions that a Bangladeshi garment workers enjoy now, but with a view of the Golden Gate bridge.

So why am I not worried about this decision going wrong? Because history repeats in the same way over and over again. We the people have been slowly losing our power and our voices since about 1980. It’s clear which way the pendulum of history is headed. We have about the same level of income inequality that we had in the 1920s. Thanks to the Supreme Court and decisions like McCutcheon v FEC and Citizen’s United, the government serves corporations almost exclusively (as they did in the 1920s). We are slowly digressing back to a time when conditions for the average American were miserable. I say we should speed that process up.

Americans are increasingly becoming aware that something is horribly wrong in America. This is why we’re seeing both parties fracture into different factions. Republicans have their teabaggers and their libertarians pushing up against the corporatists. Democrats have their Clinton, Booker corporatists vs the Warren, Grayson, Sanders populists. Right now, we’re at the stage of "horribly wrong" where people can be manipulated to act against their own self interest. Libertarians are clinging on to their unicorns harder than ever, and teabaggers have been duped into becoming foot soldiers for the Koch brothers. Democrats are actually excited about the possibility of Hillary Clinton saving the day, despite the quarter million dollar speaking fees she’s getting from Goldman Sachs.

This shitty decision from the Supreme Court is going to wake up the liberals. More and more of us have moved away from the democratic party and vehemently supported "socialist" candidates like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren. More and more of us are organizing to amend the constitution, whether it’s with Move To Amend, Wolf PAC, or Rootstrikers.

If you’ve been following me, you know that my opinion is that a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics is the only remedy we have left for our ailing government. I don’t know how many Elizabeth Warrens we can afford to support when our wages are going down. Remember that 94% of the time, the congressional candidate with the most money wins. Warren and de Blasio (I know he’s a mayor, but it’s not different) were the candidates with the most money. They weren’t the exceptions to the money statistic, they were the rule. The only amazing thing is that Warren managed to raise enough money from us, to defeat her bank backed opponent (de Blasio was a slightly different scenario that I won’t go into).

More liberals need to wake up and get to the conclusion I came to. The support I’m seeing for Hillary tells me that we still have a way to go on the path to "the awakening". Why do I focus on liberals? Because liberals always have been, and always will be the only ones who affect change. It doesn’t matter where in the world, or what period of history you look at, change is always brought about by liberals. Conservatives, by definition conserve. They don’t like change and they don’t rock the boat. The devil they know is just fine because "that’s just how it is". If conservatives had their way, the United States would be part of the UK. That’s just a fact. Liberals always have been, and always will be the activists. 

The evisceration of unions is going to remove the thin veil that the democratic party still wears. Remember Obama bailed out Wall Street, appointed a Monsanto executive to a high level position at the FDA, and failed to put on his picketing shoes to help labor in Wisconsin. But that’s all okay for some democrats, cause he gave us the Affordable Care Act. Don’t get me wrong, I’m marginally satisfied with the ACA as a stop gap, but I want more. I want food that isn’t going to poison me, water that isn’t flammable, and a bank that doesn’t have its hand in my pocket at all times. As long as money determines our elections, we’re not going to get any better than Obama, and as long as democrats throw us some crumbs every decade or so, liberals aren’t going to wake up to that fact. I’m very clear on the reality that I’m never going to get these things as long as money is the primary driver and motivator for our political system.

I need more liberals to wake the fuck up and join me, because we are our only hope. Because I know that things need to get shitty enough to activate the activists, I’m okay with this incredibly shitty decision from the Supreme Court. We’re already on the road to shitty so let’s get there already so that we can turn this sinking ship around.                     

 


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Again With The Training Of The Iraqi Military?

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Yep. We’re going to try this again. President Obama just announced that he’s going to deploy 300 special forces to Iraq. Not to fight, but to train Iraqi troops again.

Here’s the deal; I’m relieved that he’s not talking air strikes or boots on the ground and I sincerely hope he sticks to this position but I don’t see what the point of training the Iraqi military is. The problem isn’t that Iraqi troops are untrainably stupid or cowardly. There’s a reason why they’re not "trained" and more training isn’t the answer. The problem is that a Sunni troop isn’t going to take up arms against a Sunni group. The same is true of the Shia and the Kurdish Muslims. They’re not going to take up arms against their own, no matter how batshit extremist a package "their own" comes in.

The "Iraqi military" is a fiction because Iraq is a fiction. This is a country that literally isn’t a country. These are not a united people with a common vision of governance. Britain arbitrarily drew a border around three vastly different groups of people and said, "Poof! You’re a country". The only way "poof" works, is with a brutal dictator who can effectively keep their boot on the whole country’s throat which is what Saddam did.

Without Saddam, there’s nothing cobbling this not-a-country together. There’s no country for a military to fight for. Iraq needs to have a civil war now, and all we can do is sit back and hope that the group that takes power doesn’t destabilize all of Iraq’s neighbors. The best outcome that we can hope for, is that the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds draw borders they can all live with and split up into three different countries. And they need to get there on their own because anything we do to help will delegitimize the outcome. We’ve seen how this movie turned out when we installed the Shah in Iran.

There’s nothing remotely resembling a guarantee that they will split up the country. In my opinion, it’s actually more likely that batshit radical groups stake out their territories and create mini dictatorships (warlords)  a la Afghanistan. But we can’t do anything. There’s no victory here for the western world (notice that I didn’t limit the situation to the US).

The west was fucked the minute we killed Saddam, and lots of people told you this was going to happen in 2002. Every single expert on the middle east opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The reasons they gave weren’t, "War is bad….oh look, there’s some yummy granola". That wasn’t what they said. They plainly stated that eliminating Saddam would destabilize the region and lead to a civil war between the three flavors of Muslims that make up a made up country. Don’t believe me? Go look for yourself. Limit your searching to a period from September 12, 2001 to March of 2003 (when we went in) so that you don’t get the taint of revisionist history. Do your own research. I’m not going to provide you with links, lest I be accused of selectively dishing up materials that prove my point. But I will give you this little nugget from a peacenick who was right about what would happen until he was wrong;

 

 

The ones that warned us not to do what Bush did were right. And none of them had or have a quick fix now that the damage has been done. I don’t know what the answer is because people who are smarter than me haven’t told me, and I’m not going to come up with a rectally generated solution, just so that I can stake out an opinion. To state it plainly; we’re fucked and there’s nothing we can do that isn’t going to fuck ourselves worse unless we plan on having troops in Iraq until the end of time. And if you think you have a solution, I first want to hear you explain the current situation accurately. Because if you don’t have a grasp on what’s happening right now and how we got here, I’m not going to put much faith in your ill informed hypothesis. I’m pretty well informed, and I don’t have a hypothesis.           

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SOFA: No, Not The Kind You Sit On, But The Kind You Leave Iraq With

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So it’s Sunday morning and all hell has broken loose in Iraq so I’m positive that everyone who got everything wrong in regard to the invasion of Iraq will be on television to share more of their pearls of wisdom with the American people. I’m also positive that the chaos will be President Obama’s fault and that somehow the Sunday morning talk shows will be full of republicans discussing Iraq while managing to never utter the word "Bush". Yes, it will be an amazing thing to behold. So amazing that I don’t plan on watching. It’s going to be too predictable and infuriating.

I just wanted to write a quick post to clear up a couple of things that I’m positive will be fabricated for you by Fox, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Wolfowitz, and everyone else who is directly responsible for this shit storm. Everyone but Bush. He’s going to remain in his undisclosed location, quietly fucking up his brother’s aspirations to run for president.

I imagine that an accusation about Obama "getting out too soon" will be made. Because we all know that a decade and two trillion dollars just isn’t enough to get the job done. If we stayed in Iraq for 1,000 more years, what is happening now would be happening 1,002 years from now. The smart people who were right about what would happen if we invaded Iraq are telling me so, and I believe them because that’s how credibility works. When you’re been correct in the past, you’ve earned some. When you’ve been tragically misguided and never acknowledge that you’re wrong, you get none. 

Let’s be very clear about the circumstances of our departure. The timing had exactly nothing to do with President Obama. Bush had signed a "Status of forces agreement" (SOFA) in December of 2008, right before he slinked out of the white house in shame, and with record low approval ratings. That agreement mandated that US troops leave Iraq by January 1, 2012 unless the Iraqi government negotiated a new agreement to extend that deadline. Obama did his damndest to prolong that ill-conceived nightmare of a war but mercifully, he didn’t succeed.

So on October, 2011 when Obama announced that the US would be leaving Iraq by January 1, 2012, he wasn’t actually announcing an accomplishment he had made. He was simply letting us know that the US was going to abide by the agreement that Bush had made.

Why do I tell you this? Because the drumbeat of revisionism is about to start again, and it’s going to come from the same people that created this nightmare in the first place. People who genuinely need to revise history because they simply can’t see how very wrong they were. The invasion of Iraq should never have happened, and the minute we killed Saddam, the civil war that is now starting became an inevitability. We literally could not have stayed long enough to ever prevent what is happening now from happening. It was always going to happen sometime after we left. Say what you will about Saddam, but he managed the unmanageable task of ruling three different groups of people that should never have been forced into one country. Joe Biden was right about splitting Iraq into three different countries, and that’s going to become obvious to the world in a few years. But he’s never going to get credit for getting it right because that’s not how the right wing rolls. When they fuck things up and make the world a harder place for people to live in, they just revise history a la the mythology of Saint Ronnie.

Fortunately, we have the internet now to record the actual events of the time. And since we know the internet is forever, I just want to make sure that my little corner was preserved for posterity with the facts.        

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Hey SCOTUS, We Have The Appearance Of Corruption

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Something very interesting, but not at all surprising happened last week that I can’t allow to go unnoticed. It has to do with the sweet, doe eyed belief by the far right wing of the Supreme Court, that money can’t possibly corrupt our political system.

Vance McAllister, the republican who won a congressional seat in special election in Louisiana last November made news last week, for the second time in his short and legislatively empty tenure. You may remember him from a few months ago, when he was caught on tape making out with a married staffer (naturally, he is also married). Being the class act that he is, he decided to finish out his term while at the same time firing the staffer for doing exactly what he did. Remember?

Anyway, he’s back in the news and it’s worse than the last time he was in the news. He made some fascinating admissions during a speech to the Northeast Chapter of Louisiana CPAs when he told a story about a vote he cast. From the article;

McAllister said he voted on legislation related to the Bureau of Land Management though he did not identify the bill. McAllister said a colleague on the House floor told him that he would receive a $1,200 contribution from Heritage Foundation if he voted against the bill.

“I played dumb and asked him, ‘How would you vote?’” McAllister said. “He told me, ‘Vote no and you will get a $1,200 check from the Heritage Foundation. If you vote yes, you will get a $1,000 check from some environmental impact group.’”

McAllister said he voted against the bill but did not receive a $1,200 contribution from Heritage Foundation. Federal law prohibits public officials, including members of Congress, from directly or indirectly seeking, accepting or agreeing to receive anything of value in return for the performance of any official act such as voting.

McAllister said he was not surprised he did not receive a contribution from Heritage Foundation since the group and Gov. Bobby Jindal were “upset with me,” referring to Jindal’s call for McAllister’s resignation. Jindal asked McAllister to resign after The Ouachita Citizen and its sister newspapers exposed McAllister’s extramarital affair with a member of his congressional staff.

Isn’t the lack of corruption and the lack of the appearance of corruption comforting? But don’t get the wrong idea that you may be seeing some corruption here because a spokesman for Heritage stepped up to clear this right up for us (from the article);    

Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. It conducts research of issues and legislation before the Congress. Heritage Foundation does not make political contributions in any manner, according to James Weidman, spokesman for Heritage Foundation.

Weidman said McAllister did not receive a $1,200 contribution from Heritage “because we would never do anything like that.” “If he (McAllister) is wondering why he didn’t receive a check from the Heritage Foundation, which does not make political expenditures of any kind, it is because we do not do it,” Weidman said.

“The Heritage Foundation is a think tank and does research and education, but does not get involved with political bills at all.” “He was just badly misinformed,” Weidman added.

Me thinks the lady doth protest too much. But don’t you worry because I’m positive that this is all a misunderstanding, and that SCOTUS’s sunny optimism was well founded and not all a product of the perks they themselves get from the very same benefactors who are so generous with congress.

Nope, nothing to see here. Move along.

Or, you can help by joining Wolf PAC and changing the system.    

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Never Served In A War Zone? Then STFU

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So the republican ‘shit on anyone you need to in order to fuck Obama’ train just keeps on-a-rollin. It’s not the lunatic fringe that the mainstream republicans can claim isn’t their problem (or creation). No, this time it’s the mainstream republicans. This time, it’s Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl who served in Afghanistan, where he has been held captive in an Afghani prison for the past 5 years. They’re going after him with a vengeance because they’re positive that he’s a deserter whose desertion caused the death of anywhere between six and eight thousand fellow soldiers, depending who you’re talking to, and how high their propensity for hyperbole and straight up bullshit is. I’m not going to get into whether he’s a deserter or not. Why? Because I don’t know, and I’m not a jackass. As a nonjackass, I recognize that we don’t have all of the information we need to make that determination and that there has been no investigation into the matter. 

If he’s guilty of anything, we have military courts for that. And for everyone who is concerned that he may get away with something, let me assure you that we have plenty of prisons here in the US. No need to leave him with the Afghanis. We are the United States of America. We don’t just abandon our own because we think they might be deserters. We have a court system to determine if someone is guilty of anything. That court system is one of the things that separates us from barbaric societies made up of angry lynch mobs. We don’t do honor killings and we don’t stone people to death. We are a civilized society and since I want to keep it that way, I felt compelled to remind some of you of that.

At this point, we don’t know if he deserted or his mental health status at the time. What if he cracked under pressure like the 167 vets that committed suicide last year (by the way, that number is going up by about 15% each year)? Or like the fifty thousand that were homeless for some or all of last year (that number has tripled since 2011)? Does that matter to you at all? Because let me tell you that if it doesn’t, I find you despicable and I don’t ever want to hear you utter anything resembling "support the troops" ever again. If you don’t care that Bergdahl might have cracked under pressure, then you don’t care about any of the soldiers that are suffering as a result of what they did for us. If you have no use or empathy for soldiers that came back broken after volunteering to fight for you, then I have no use for you. I feel dirty just knowing that you people exist.

I have no fucking idea what being in the middle of a combat situation does to a person, and unless you’ve been there, neither do you.

And by the way, for the purposes of this post, I’m giving you your assumption that he did in fact desert even though we simply don’t have enough information to make that determination yet. And I’m giving you that, despite knowing better. Four words; Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch.  

Smart people wait for information. Reasoned people know they can’t possibly judge a person in a traumatic situation they’ve never, ever been in. Only the dim witted and the despicable forge ahead with their judgments because that’s the only time of the day they will ever feel good about themselves.

I just want to throw a little cold water in your face by reminding you that you have nothing to feel good about. You’re disgusting.    

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Which Party Actually Gets More Special Interest Cash?

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There are memes circulating around that assert both sides; that democrats are taking in more money, or that republicans are. They’re both not wrong, except that the ones that point the finger at democrats leaves out entirely all of that dark 501(c)(4) money at the heart of the IRS nontroversy.

Let me digress to the IRS "scandal" for a moment. The scandal was that everyone who applied for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions, with the exception of one organization, got their exemptions. The one organization that was denied status is called "Emerge America". They were denied status for three different branches; Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine, and Emerge Massachusetts. They were denied because they were clearly set up to help get female democratic candidates elected. Everyone else who applied got their tax exemptions. So Karl Rove’s GPS (all of the different flavors) is tax exempt. They spent $70.5 million tax exempt dollars in 2012. They were the top dark money spenders. Here’s the list of the top 10 biggest 501(c)(4)s:

  • Crossroads GPS – $70.5 million
  • American Future Fund – $23.6 million
  • Americans for Tax reform – $15.6 million
  • American Action Network – $10.6 million
  • League Of Conservation Voters – $9.6 million
  • The NRA – $7.4 million
  • Patriot Majority USA – $6.3 million
  • Americans For Responsible Leadership – $5.5 million
  • Planned Parenthood – $4.1 million
  • Republican Jewish Coalition – $4.6 million

Notice that all but two are right wing organizations, and one of them has the word REPUBLICAN right there in the name. They all received 501(c)(4) status. That was the real scandal with the IRS. Now I can see letting Planned Parenthood and the NRA keep their exemptions. They really are issue oriented organizations, and will support whoever supports their cause in any given race. But the rest are a joke, and they’re robbing us all blind.

Okay, enough of that. Back to the topic of this post. I understand that most people posting political memes don’t take the time to fact check, and that virtually no one who posted the "who raises more money" memes bothered to get the numbers I just got for you together. So how is a person, too intellectually lazy to get the facts, to know what the truth is?

We have an answer now, and we’re about to get some confirmation of that answer. Yesterday, Harry Reid (D) announced his support for a constitutional amendment proposed by Tom Udall (D) and Michael Bennett (D) to get money out of politics and overturn Citizen’s United and McCutcheon. Reid said he would "force multiple votes" on the proposed amendment if he needs to. Did you notice all the Ds involved in this effort? How about the Rs? Did you spot any of those? Yeah, me neither.

Don’t get excited, this isn’t going to go anywhere. There will most definitely be a filibuster to avoid a vote. We can’t have an actual vote because that would give us a record of which members of the senate are pro big, dark, corporate money and we can’t have that. We know that Mitch McConnell loves this system because he’s on record saying he’s for it. The best we can hope for with this effort on Reid’s part, is to get a record of which senators are on which side. We will never get the house on record because Boehner won’t ever bring this to the floor.

But you should believe Reid when he says he’s against the big money, and you will have to believe that Boehner is for it when he never puts it up for a vote. You should believe that Udall and Bennett are earnest in their efforts to get the money out, and you should believe every vote that every politician casts. Those votes paint a much more accurate picture than the unsourced memes do.

Believe how the politicians vote because those votes never lie. You should believe Harry Reid on Citizen’s United, just like you should believe him on this:

 

 

 

Yup, that’s Harry Reid being a giant hypocrite. But in his defense, I believe he’s being a giant hypocrite because he has to be. Under our current system, he doesn’t have a choice, but to kiss Sheldon’s ………..ring.

Do I think that democrats would want to take the money out of politics if they were winning the "giant pile of cash" race? No, I’m not an idiot. But I don’t care about motivations. My only concern is with results. If I get the good result I’m after, I don’t need you to have been altruistic while doing it. This isn’t a "democrats are the good guys" post. This is a "believe your own lying eyes instead of that stupid meme" post.

So next time a republican refers to the "IRS scandal" or tells you that unions are spending way more money on elections, tell them to shut the fuck up and believe their own lying eyes. They won’t, but telling them to shut the fuck up with impunity will give you a little satisfaction.  

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How A Lie Becomes A Sycophant’s Truth

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Another GOP lie about Obamacare is about to be debunked on the record. Last week, house republicans released a "report" claiming that the percentage of people enrolled in an insurance plan through the ACA who actually paid was only 67%. This was 100% bullshit when at the time it was released. From the report;

Data provided to the committee by every insurance provider in the health care law’s Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) shows that, as of April 15, 2014, only 67 percent of individuals and families that had selected a health plan in the federally facilitated marketplace had paid their first month’s premium and therefore completed the enrollment process. 

This would be total bullshit. They received no such data from any of the private insurance companies. Wanna know how I know? Because three giant insurance companies are going to testify at a congressional hearing today. Wellpoint says that 90% of their enrollees have paid their first months premium on time. Aetna reports that their payment rate is "low to mid-80 percent range". Health Care Service Corp., who runs Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in five states said that number is at least 83 percent.   

We’ve known that the percentage of people who paid their premiums was around 85% for about a month and a half now. We know this because the federal government and all of the states who run their own exchanges have reported roughly the same percentage. But republicans still claimed that no one had paid for their insurance, knowing that is was a lie, and that the lie would be exposed in one short week. But that’s okay, cause all they need to do now, is to stop talking about it, and let the lie just hang there for the midterms just like they’re doing with Benghazi.

This is how a lie becomes every sycophant’s truth;

  • repeat it in perpetuity
  • repeat the lie with impunity
  • ignore the truth completely

The republican lie machine will just keep repeating that there was a cover up in Benghazi, all the while ignoring the bipartisan senate intelligence committee’s report. They don’t care about the truth, and won’t ever acknowledge it when it comes out. Saxby freaking Chambliss, Tom Coburn, and Marco Rubio who are on that senate intelligence committee couldn’t even suggest that there was a fucking cover up. Yes, they blamed the State Department; "the Americans serving in Libya were vulnerable; the State Department knew they were vulnerable; and no one in the Administration really did anything about it". But they couldn’t come up with a cover up.

That’s not going to stop congressional republicans. There’s a midterm coming up, after all. So they’re going to keep telling you that Obamacare was a failure and caused four Americans to die in Libya, or some other total bullshit for the next six months because they know that the truth is irrelevant as long as they have a battalion of dedicated sycophants to parrot their crap. Truth be damned.     

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We’re SO Not #1

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Good news Americans! Trickle down economics is finally moving toward it’s intended goal. No no, not the bullshit fantastical republican goal of making everyone prosper, but the real goal of redistributing all of the country’s earnings up to the top 1% and creating bonafide Russian style American oligarchs. If you’re paying any attention at all, you’re aware that wages have remained flat for the past thirty years, while productivity has exploded. From 1989 – 2009, the hourly wage of the median worker grew by 10.1%, while productivity grew by 80%. The lion’s share of that wage growth happened in the mid to late 90s.

Still, we’re the "wealthiest nation in the world" because of all that productivity, but you’re not getting wealthier. Your kids probably won’t get wealthier, but the the wealthy are getting wealthier at an accelerated pace. What does that mean in relative terms? It means that as a nation, we’re getting wealthier but our median per capita income is no longer the highest in the world. Wanna take a guess who’s #1 now? If you’re a republican, still clinging on to the massive amount of bullshit that you’ve been fed for the past thirty years, I guarantee that you’ll never guess. Why? Because the answer demolishes everything you’ve been told about both trickle down economics, and "socialism".

Canada now has a higher average per capita median income than the United States does. Seems like that socialist health care hasn’t turned Canada into an impoverished post apocalyptic hellscape after all. The per capita median income in the US hasn’t changed at all since 2000 (when adjusted for inflation). The per capita median income in Canada has gone up twenty percent over that same period.

income

What happened? I thought the Bush/ Obama tax cuts on the top earners was supposed to create a utopia of economic prosperity, what with the trickling down and all? How long am I supposed to wait for my prosperity? It’s been thirteen fucking years? Where’s mine?

Why is this happening? From an article in the New York Times yesterday;

Americans between the ages of 55 and 65 have literacy, numeracy and technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group. Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia and close to those in Italy and Spain.

But that’s not all;

A second factor is that companies in the United States economy distribute a smaller share of their bounty to the middle class and poor than similar companies elsewhere. Top executives make substantially more money in the United States than in other wealthy countries. The minimum wage is lower. Labor unions are weaker.

And because the total bounty produced by the American economy has not been growing substantially faster here in recent decades than in Canada or Western Europe, most American workers are left receiving meager raises.

And;

Governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.

Janet Gornick, the director of LIS, noted that inequality in so-called market incomes — which does not count taxes or government benefits — “is high but not off the charts in the United States.” Yet the American rich pay lower taxes than the rich in many other places, and the United States does not redistribute as much income to the poor as other countries do. As a result, inequality in disposable income is sharply higher in the United States than elsewhere.

But we’re doing the opposite in the US. We’ve made an education harder to obtain by allowing colleges to jack up tuition exponentially faster than the rate of inflation. We’ve kept the minimum wage so low that it’s worth (in terms of buying power) about 60% of what is was worth in 1968 when it was at its peak. We keep cutting social safety nets because we’re told that we need to in order to save our economy, while countries that spend more money on helping the poorest citizens are passing us by in median income.

One big country in Europe is also experiencing stagnating wages; Germany. Why? Because Germany exports a lot of crap and in order to keep the cost of their crap low, they’ve taken a number of measures to keep wages down. They’re trying to compete with the sweat shops in China. Why? Because as long as you can buy cheap crap, it’s easier to maintain the illusion of wealth. When you can buy a blu ray player for $50 bucks, you’re not really poor because you don’t feel the poorness. 

The stagnating wages in the US and in Germany aren’t an accident or an unintended consequence. This is happening by design. And while republicans are telling you that "government can’t do anything", they’ve created a government that is robbing you blind.

I created this meme last year;

Tax Distribution copy

I spent days getting the corporate subsidy numbers together. I left out a metric ton of corporate subsidies because I wasn’t confident I was able to find all of them. They’re insidiously buried in thousands of bills that ostensibly have nothing to do with the industry that the bill is about. I know I didn’t get all of the big agra subsidies, or the big pharma subsidies so I left them out. I didn’t include these subsidies either since they come out of your state taxes, rather than your federal taxes;

Walmart

I used the smallest number I could fine in every category I listed. I explained how I came up with these numbers ad nauseam and yet, I got more push back for this meme than anything else I’ve ever said or posted. I wrote about a report that Oxfam published a few months ago, where they found that the 85 richest people in the world possess the same wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. I write about income inequality and how the game is rigged a lot. And every time I do, I get push back from a small minority of people that just don’t want to believe what their own lying eyes are telling them. Fortunately, these people are "special" (by special, I mean touched). They’re a small minority. Only 30% of Americans think that we’re on the right path. This number isn’t low because of Obama, it’s been low for fifteen years now. The most disengaged and uninformed American knows that something is horribly wrong here, even if they don’t specifically know that the Dow has doubled since the economic collapse, while we still have a much higher than ideal unemployment rate.

Our poor are more poor than the poor in other countries. From the Times article;

More broadly, the poor in the United States have trailed their counterparts in at least a few other countries since the early 1980s. With slow income growth since then, the American poor now clearly trail the poor in several other rich countries. At the 20th percentile — where someone is making less than four-fifths of the population — income in both the Netherlands and Canada was 15 percent higher than income in the United States in 2010.

Our rich are much richer than the rich in most other countries;

By contrast, Americans at the 95th percentile of the distribution — with $58,600 in after-tax per capita income, not including capital gains — still make 20 percent more than their counterparts in Canada, 26 percent more than those in Britain and 50 percent more than those in the Netherlands. For these well-off families, the United States still has easily the world’s most prosperous major economy.

Fortunately, more and more Americans are realizing this because they see it every day. I’m going to keep writing about this because I believe that the income inequality in America is going to be our downfall. I’m going to keep pointing out the thousands of ways the game is rigged against you, and I’m going to look forward to the day when I don’t get any stupid comments from the touched ones that can’t accept the reality in which they live because the Ayn Rand fantasy in their heads is much more appealing than actually doing something to improve their lot in life.

The game is rigged. It’s rigged, it’s rigged, it’s rigged and you’re on the wrong side of the rigging.       

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The End Of Affirmative Action?

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The Supreme Court did what I expected they would do today; killed affirmative action in college admissions. I’m going to say something controversial now; I’m not actually for affirmative action, especially in college admissions. Let me explain. Affirmative action is a bad solution to a really bad problem. It’s a terrible solution because it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, it merely attempts to course correct after the problem occurs.

We have some data now that shows that affirmative action, particularly at the ivy league level is actually not a great solution. It puts students into a situation that they are in no way prepared for, and the dropout rate is pretty high. This problem is referred to as a "mismatch". There is a lot of debate over whether a mismatch actually exists. I tend to believe that it’s a thing, but here are a couple of the most compelling papers I’ve found on the subject. Here’s the yes, a mismatch exists argument, and here’s the mismatch debunking argument.

In my experience as a corporate recruiter, I’ve seen both. I’ve interviewed diversity candidates that were clearly admitted to ivy league universities as part of a quota, who did very well at those universities. I’ve also seen my fair share of diversity candidates that didn’t graduate from the ivy league university they attended.

In my opinion, the problem that needs to be addressed starts years before it’s time to apply for college. We have an institutional racism problem that starts at pre-k. Let me be clear on this; the problem I’m referring to is quickly shifting from a racism problem to a poverty problem. As with everything else, it’s about the advantages that the rich have over the poor. People who live in poor neighborhoods get shitty schools. If you’re a poor person living in a poor neighborhood, the property taxes collected to pay for education in your community does not afford your child the same resources that someone from a rich neighborhood gets. People often make the point that America’s spending on education is among the highest in the world, and we still get inferior outcomes so more spending isn’t the answer. These people ignore the distribution of that money, and the disparity that exists. Outcomes are not as poor in schools with more resources, and I don’t believe that kids from rich neighborhoods have more active parents. Didn’t we just see some really fucking rich people proclaim that their crappy parenting caused their child to develop affluenza? Which is it? Are wealthy people better parents, or are they worse parents? I tend to think that there are good parents and bad parents in all income levels. But the rich parents have the resources to outsource the raising of their children. They can afford tutors and SAT test preppers to augment their already well resourced schools. So there’s an institutional disparity in the level of education for poor kids and rich kids. And since we created entire low income neighborhoods, we have minorities concentrated in specific parts of town. This is changing, as more white people are entering the poverty class. But for right now, it’s a race thing more than it is a class thing. 

A component of the institutional racism that most people aren’t aware of, exists in how college admissions are handled. A kid graduating from Compton High School with a 4.2 GPA is weighed against a Beverly Hills High graduate with a 3.7 GPA. Why? Because the level of education at Compton High is lower. Again, we have an institutional problem that further stacks the deck.

On top of all that, the ivy league has an affirmative action program that will never be challenged; legacy admissions. If your Harvard educated parents affluenzaed you into a complete miscreant, no problem. Their donations to Harvard will guarantee your admission and further enable you to affluenza your way through the rest of your life with an ivy league diploma. None of the ivy league universities disclose the percentage of legacy students they admit every year. When I interview ivy league graduates, it becomes apparent who the legacies are. Trust me, affluenza is a thing and I’ve interviewed more than my fair share of self entitled dim wits. Fortunately for them, my recognition of their dim wittery won’t stop them from getting the job, as they frequently come to me as "must hires" since either mommy or daddy knows an executive at the company. More institutional racism.

On the bright side, aside from the must hire legacies, corporate America is not racist. Corporate America is greedy, and since racism might eventually cost them a dollar, it doesn’t really exist. Don’t get me wrong, hiring managers tend to have teams that look like them. This is true of both white and minority managers. It’s a relatability issue. It’s human nature to relate to people with backgrounds similar to your own. Since corporate America has always been majority white, the relatability issue does tend to further the racial disparity among the employee population but I also see minority managers hiring more minority employees to work under them. I have often been given the directive make minority hires for positions, so companies (at least really big ones) are aiming for diversity.

The issue I run into with these searches for diversity candidates is the lack of qualified candidates to fill them. The proportion of diversity college graduates with experience is not equal to the proportion of minorities in America. That’s just a fact. It’s getting a little bit better every year, but it’s still a problem. Two or three generations ago, black people simply didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. College is a generational thing. If your parents went to college, you’re almost certain to get a college degree so that first generation is the key to every generation that follows it. And that first generation approach college much differently than the third or fourth generation. That first generation isn’t aware of all of the different career possibilities. They’re not going for careers in publishing, architecture, or mechanical engineering because those careers don’t exist in their universe. They’re choosing from a limited field of careers and getting general degrees like “business”. Third and fourth generation college graduates have more exposure, and are getting more specialized degrees. They have their eye on a specific career as opposed to a first generation college graduates who tend to have an eye on a degree. This is just the natural evolution of educating a population, and it’s not unique to minorities.

That’s why I don’t believe that affirmative action in college admissions is the way to go. It was a nice try, but I don’t think that it produces the results we really want. We need to tear down every level of institutional racism that takes place before college application time. We need to stop tying school funds to property taxes. Each state needs to spend the same amount of money on each student in their state. We can’t have pre-k available in only certain communities. All of the students in each state must be treated equally from pre-k all the way up to their senior year of high school. If that happens, the diversity ratios will take care of themselves at the college level and we would have students that are prepared for the college in which they were admitted.

As I said, there’s no racism problem in corporate America so there’s nothing to be done at that level. Fortune 500 companies are always looking to expand their diversity numbers, and I do a great deal of diversity outreach in order to accomplish that goal. But I can tell you that I’ve literally never hired a less qualified minority candidate over a white candidate. That simply doesn’t happen, regardless of the perception. The diversity initiative begins and ends in generating the candidate pool. There are no federal quotas for companies, and EEOC doesn’t look at the ratio of white to minority candidates a company hires. When they do anything at all, they look for discrimination. This usually happens when a complaint of discrimination is reported. They look at the candidate pool to assess if a less qualified candidate was hired over a female, minority, or a more "seasoned" candidate. I have very little experience in blue collar industries, and no experience in union environments so I can’t speak to those industries.

At any rate, I think it’s time to let affirmative action in college admissions go but not without addressing the institutional problems prior to college. You can’t just get of a less than ideal remedy to a problem without doing a damned thing to address the problem. It won’t go away if you pretend it doesn’t exist. We need better, more effective solutions than what we’ve been trying for 50 years.            

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Registering Jews Again?

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There was a lot of reporting yesterday on a story that claims that Jews in Ukraine are being ordered to "register" themselves and all of their property.

Those of you who know I’m Jewish probably wondered why I didn’t post it. I didn’t post it because I don’t entirely believe it. Yes, the flyers ordering the Jews to register are real but I question who the source is. It sounds just a little too crazy, and a lot too reckless because doing something like this opens up a whole new can of global involvement that wouldn’t otherwise be at play.

I thought back to Occupy Wall Street and how in some cities, they were infiltrated by some people who were looking to cause problems and therefore label the whole movement "thuggish".

A writer at The New Republic Wrote a piece echoing my doubts. She seems much more certain than I am that this isn’t really happening. From the article:
 

The Donetsk Jewish community dismissed this as "a provocation," which it clearly is. "It’s an obvious provocation designed to get this exact response, going all the way up to Kerry," says Fyodr Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs. "I have no doubt that there is a sizeable community of anti-Semites on both sides of the barricades, but for one of them to do something this stupid—this is done to compromise the pro-Russian groups in the east."

I’m not convinced one way or another, but I am watching it. As I said this sounds like a preposterously stupid move to make before reaching the endgame of taking Ukraine back for Russia. I’m positive that Putin has his eye on Ukraine. I’m positive that both the EU and the US are discussing how to respond when Putin goes into Ukraine with Russian forces. Right now, Angela Merkel is running the show, as she should be. This is much more of an EU problem, than it is a US problem. I know that some people think that the US decides what happens around the world, but I really get the sense that Obama is letting Merkel take point on this one.

I’ve read a lot about the dynamics between Russia and the EU (specifically Germany) that talk about the EU’s dependency on the Russian energy supply. Not that it matters, but I don’t think that energy is the main consideration. I think that Merkel is more concerned about the economic impacts of cutting off the sizeable EU (again, specifically Germany’s) exports to Russia. They would be cutting off a whole lot of Russian consumers from buying their goods at a time when those customers are badly needed. Remember, Spain and Greece are still in big trouble, and they’re not in any position to buy nearly as much stuff as they need to in order to strengthen the EU economy. Cutting off Russia right now would be very bad for Germany.

But whether the issue is energy or other goods, the call on how far to go to stop Putin is largely Merkel’s to make. But if Jews are actually being forced to register themselves and their property, everything changes and Obama will take the lead. The US will take much stronger measures than what are being taken now, and there’s no telling how far this situation will escalate.

That’s why these reports don’t make sense to me. It seems to me that Putin wouldn’t allow something like this to happen because this would seriously jeopardize his already slim chances of taking Ukraine. It makes more sense for Putin to roll out the Doctor Evil routine after he’s secured the country. We’ll see what happens but for the reasons I’ve just shared, I’m really skeptical that this is happening. I’m not prepared to sound the alarms just yet.   


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