The Bitchy Pundit

I posted a story yesterday about how the freshly minted CEO of Mozilla was forced to step down because of the backlash to his support of Prop 8 in California. Brendan Eich donated $1,000 to support inequality and second class citizenship of the gay community. I’m obviously vehemently opposed to what he and his like minded peers were trying to do.

I’m also vehemently opposed to punishing someone for having an opinion, even if it’s a bad opinion. Bad opinions are valuable because they move national discussions forward, which is exactly what this one did. If Prop 8 had never passed, DOMA would still be the law of the land and we would still only have about six states with marriage equality. This bad opinion put us on a fast track to the inevitable because it was a bad opinion. Treating people as second class citizens is a bad idea and over time, the good idea was going to become the majority idea. Prop 8 led to the striking down of DOMA, which led to the striking down of bad anti-equality laws all across the country. Does anyone think that the anti-equality law in Utah would have gotten a second look without DOMA having been struck down? In the long arc of history, good ideas always prevail. It doesn’t happen quickly, but it happens.

The only reasons I can come up with for shutting down the ability of someone to express an idea, is because you’re threatened or you’re blinded by emotion. Both the right and the left have adopted and embraced this dangerous and short sided tactic of shutting down opinions they don’t like.

To my fellow liberals who are rejoicing over Eich’s resignation, I have a question; have you forgotten the "you’re either with us, or you’re unpatriotic" Bush years? Seriously. What are you rejoicing over? Do you really think that next time, it won’t be your idea that is deemed shun worthy again? I know what you’re saying; "but I was right". Yes, and your opinion was a threat to the thin ice that the pro Iraq invasion and occupation side were trumpeting so they shut you down. And you’re emotionally invested in marriage equality, so you shut down the other side. But the end result is the same; Americans advocating for shutting up other Americans.

I don’t know what Eich’s motivations were for opposing equality, and I don’t care. He gets to have an opinion without having his livelihood threatened for the rest of his life. Why are we happy with this outcome? Shutting people up is just unAmerican. I’m sorry, but it is and I don’t care what your motivations are. There are plenty of places in the world we abhor for shutting people up. Do we really want to turn into that?

This is a stupid and dangerous path to take and anyone who thinks that Eich’s termination is a victory better think again.

As you probably know, the Supreme Court handed down their deplorable decision in McCutcheon v FEC today. I’m not going to get into an analysis of the decision since you’ve probably read lots of analysis already and my Facebook page makes my opinion on the matter very clear. But to summarize, the Supreme Court eviscerated democracy today. Our only hope now to truly restore democracy is to go for an Article V convention to amend the constitution.

If you read this blog or follow me on social media, you know that I really believe that what Wolf Pac is doing is our last and only resort to fix this. Let me explain what we’re doing and why it’s our only option for fixing this. We’re calling for an amendment to the constitution to get money out of politics. We’re not going through congress or the supreme court. We’re working on the state level to introduce a resolution calling for a constitutional convention. We need 34 states to pass our resolution. We have 10 states on the board right now. By "on the board", I mean that they have either already introduced, or are about to introduce our resolution. How did we do this? By working with legislators in our state. Why? For a couple of reasons. First off, we’re finding that democracy actually exists on a state level. When you call your state senator, on average, you can get a meeting with them in 3 calls. Since no one ever calls their local representatives, they seem to mostly be willing to meet with their constituents because they assume that if one constituent took the time to call, hundreds more are concerned with that issue. I personally met with both the assemblyman (woman) and the state senator who introduced our legislation here in New York. In one state (I can’t remember which), a Wolf PAC volunteer called their legislator, who actually personally answered the phone. He met that legislator for coffee later that afternoon, and had the resolution introduced the next day. In 3 states, the legislators introducing our resolution are far right wing republicans. This is a bipartisan issue, and we have a bipartisan group of volunteers.The second reason for doing it this way, is because we don’t trust congress to get it done. There’s way too much money being spent on a federal level, and our odds of crossing the finish line are exponentially higher if we work on a state level.

Today’s McCutcheon decision will undoubtedly make this harder. Citizen’s United eviscerated democracy on the federal level, McCutcheon has gutted democracy on a local level, since a single donor can now buy all the local politicians in a whole state simultaneously. The Koch brothers are busy working on buying local elections. McCutcheon makes it possible for them to buy lots and lots of local elections.

We all need to pray that they successfully buy one in particular; Mitch McConnell’s senate seat in Kentucky. McConnell’s opponent, Matt Bevin is already getting a ton of money that we know about (this doesn’t include "dark money"). The tea party, whoever the fuck they are anymore, don’t think that McConnell is right wingy enough so they’re pouring money into Bevin’s campaign. Actually, we do know who has put a million dollars (so far) into Bevin’s bank account; Freedomworks. Why are we praying that batshit crazy Bevin beats McConnell? Because this might be the wakeup call republicans need to see how devastating granting money the right to free speech is. If Mitch McConnell is taken down by the tea party, republicans will realize once and for all, that the corporations are the actual puppetmasters, and that they’re just puppets. Corporations are not people. They have no conscience, and they have no loyalties. Corporations have only one mission; to make as much money as possible. No amount of money is ever enough, so if there’s more money to be made, a corporation will go in that direction. Given McConnell’s history of obnixious generosity toward corporations, I can only assume that Bevin plans on direct depositing a percentage of Kentuckian’s paychecks directly into corporate coffers. It’s the only reason why the money wants Bevin to beat McConnell.

If McConnell loses this primary, there’s a slight chance that his buddies who thought they had the money all locked up will realize that their own power doesn’t belong to them. That it’s just been bestowed upon them by their corporate masters who can (and will) reallocate it anytime they want. Maybe a few of our "powerful" politicians will realize that their power is just an illusion created by the corporations that own them.

McConnell should already realize this because of all the money his opponent is getting, but he inexplicably threw in with McCutcheon as a plaintiff in this case. The level of arrogance and self delusion on McConnell’s part is stunning. He’s so confident that the money will never leave him to move on to greener pastures, he’s willing to give the money more power than it already has. Guess what Mitch?

The money has no loyalty. President Obama was confident that the money was going to be loyal to him too. But predictably, the Wall Street money wasn’t satisfied with everything Obama let it get away with and decided that Romney was going to be even more generous. So Obama had to find different money to buy the White House with.

One of the mighty (in their own minds) politicians needs to fall hard because of this decision. I’m rooting for McConnell.

If that happens maybe, maybe some of these guys might realize that the power they gave to the billionaires, is power that will inevitably be used against them. This decision makes the politicians themselves irrelevant because it gives the money even more power to easily replace one patsy politician who isn’t going far enough to increase profits at the expense of the people.

Our politicians have been whores for a long time. This decision has downgraded them from high priced call girls, to $5 hand job, street corner whores. 

It’s pretty clear to me at this point, that Chris Christie won’t be the Governor of New Jersey by the time summer comes along. At this point, my only question is; will he be frog marched out of office, or will he resign?

I was never convinced that bridgegate was going to be his downfall. As soon as the mayor of Hoboken came out and told us that she was basically being blackmailed over a land deal in order to get her city some relief funds, I knew it was over. I didn’t know if Christie was sloppy enough to leave a trail leading back to him in regard to the bridge closure, but I found it inconceivable that he would be making crony land development deals with those federal relief funds, without leaving a large trail of digital evidence.

The more outrageous of the two situations is clearly the shutting down of the George Washington Bridge. It was spiteful, petty, and reckless, but most importantly, it wasn’t profitable for anybody. There’s actually nothing unusual about the corrupt appropriation of those relief funds. This is how things are done, not only in America, but all around the world. Naomi Klein wrote a book called The Shock Doctrine (a must read for everyone) that goes into great detail about this. There is nothing new under the sun about leveraging (and creating) disasters to make wealthy land developers wealthier. This happens all the time, and seldom gets any scrutiny. But Chris Christie has shown us the one and only way that a legislator doesn’t get away with the shock doctrine; by having a shitty personality. You can be corrupt, you just can’t do it while being a complete dick.

I went to New Orleans every year for the four years after Katrina. Here’s what I saw;

Year 1 – rich neighborhoods were pristine. Poor neighborhoods consisted of block after block of giant piles of rubble that looked like match sticks, with FEMA trailers parked out front. No construction on the levies.

 

Year 2 – rich neighborhoods were pristine. Poor neighborhoods consisted of block after block of giant piles of rubble that looked like match sticks, with FEMA trailers parked out front. Some construction on just over half of the levies I checked out.

 

Year 3 – rich neighborhoods were pristine. Poor neighborhoods consisted of some giant piles of rubble that looked like match sticks, with FEMA trailers parked out front. Some of the piles of rubble had been cleared away for new developments. Most of the levies I drove past had completed their construction.

 

Year 4 – rich neighborhoods were pristine. Poor neighborhoods consisted of some giant piles of rubble that looked like match sticks, with FEMA trailers parked out front. New developments in the poor neighborhoods appeared to be "luxury" housing. Levies I drove past had completed their construction.

New Jersey is exactly on the same track with what I saw in New Orleans. Nothing different or unusual to see there. This is going to undo a governor, not because of the unfair treatment of the poor, or the crony capitalism, but because that governor is an ass.

If Chris Christie had a better personality, this would all be par for the course. The poor get fucked: ✓. The rich get richer: ✓. Christie gets enough money from the cronies he made richer to run for president: ✓. But unfortunately for him, bridgegate is the thing that’s going to highlight the shitty personality, that will ultimately make the crony capitalism unacceptable. It’s not okay to be a dick in this world, unless someone is making a profit from your dickishness. Christie fucked up with the pro bono dickishness on the bridge. And no capitalist in the world likes pro bono work.

Mark my words, Christie is going down because of his gratuitous dickishness that failed to make anyone any money. I’m just hoping that his crappy personality ultimately sheds light on the shock doctrine. 

 

So I got nothing but grief over this meme that I created several months ago;

It caused a lot of consternation from people who just didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that I cited every source I used and explained that when I found differing numbers, I always used the lowest number I could find. I enumerated a list of corporate subsidies I left out because they were either too hard to calculate (since they were buried in hundreds of bills), or because they were subsidies that come out of your state taxes.

I’ve posted hundreds of articles discussing the income inequality in America, complete with data and sources. Some people just don’t want to believe in that data. I’ve posted data (and as always, sources) showing that the six heirs to the Walton (or Walmart) fortune, who have done nothing in their lives, other than to win the birth lottery possess the same wealth as the bottom 40% of Americans. Still, there are some that don’t want to believe.

I have to say that unless your last name is Walton, I find this desire not to believe completely perplexing.

Well, here’s some more data for some to reject out of whole cloth. Oxfam just released a report on global income inequality. That report finds that the richest 85 people in the world, possess half of the world’s wealth. That wasn’t a typo. I didn’t forget to include any zeros or Ks after 85. It’s not 85,000 own half of the wealth. It’s eighty-five people that own half of all of the wealth in the world.

Why did I start the post by referring to my meme? Because that kind of inequality doesn’t happen organically. That kind of inequality happens because the game is rigged. Nobody is blessed with the kind of talent, brains, and good looks that earns them the wealth of the next 8.2 million people. That is not fucking possible, and the burning desire to believe that, is inexplicable. This kind of income inequality is only made possible by what I showed in my meme. You’re not voluntary giving your money to people whose products you want to buy. It’s being taken from you by people you’ve never done business with.

This happens when Bush and Pelosi decide that the best way to mend a failing economy is to give a barrelful of money to the banks, instead of to the homeowners whose property value was intentionally and systematically fictionalized by those banks. And it’s compounded by the "oopsie" that didn’t require those banks to lend that money back to you at a low interest rate. It’s rigged when your city pays to build a new Walmart store, and then lets that story keep the sales tax they collect for several years. You think that the 6 people that possess 40% of the country’s wealth can’t afford to build their own damned stores?  It’s rigged.

Income inequality is not necessarily a bad thing. Some people are more talented than others, and should earn more than others. Nobody is advocating for equality of outcome. Frankly, if you believe that, you’re the kind of willfully ignorant asshole who can’t be reasoned with. But equality of opportunity is essential to the growth of a healthy society. Everybody should have the opportunity to prosper from their intelligence, innovation, and yes good looks. That isn’t what’s happening here. A vast majority of the population will never have that opportunity. Not because they’re not talented, brilliant, or innovative, but because they’re being shut out of the system.

That’s what I’m against. I’m against shutting 40% of Americans out of the prosperity ladder, and you should be too. This kind of income inequality is toxic for a society. I always say that millionaires are great for America, but billionaires aren’t. Millionaires put a healthier percentage of their incomes back into the economy. Billionaires can’t possibly do that. When 40% of Americans can’t buy anything other than food and gas, that hurts all of us. We need a population with more disposable income than we have. Jobs aren’t created in a country where nearly half of the citizens have no purchasing power. It just doesn’t work.

What we’re seeing today is very close to pre-Great Depression era income inequality. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t going to work now. We can, and have to change this trend. From the report;

This dangerous trend can be reversed. The good news is that there are clear examples of success, both historical and current. The US and Europe in the three decades after World War II reduced inequality while growing prosperous. Latin America has

significantly reduced inequality in the last decade through more progressive taxation, public services, social protection and decent work. Central to this progress has been popular politics that represent the majority, instead of being captured by a tiny minority. This has benefited all, both rich and poor.

This is exactly right. Comically, the report gives some recommendations on a pledge they would like the billionaires to take when meeting at Davos for the World Economic Forum. The recommendations are as follows;

• Not dodge taxes in their own countries or in countries where they invest and operate, by using tax havens;
  
• Not use their economic wealth to seek political favors that undermine the democratic will of their fellow citizens;
  
• Make public all the investments in companies and trusts for which they are the ultimate beneficial owners;
• Support progressive taxation on wealth and income;
  
• Challenge governments to use their tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection for citizens;
• Demand a living wage in all the companies they own or control;
  
• Challenge other economic elites to join them in these pledges

 The idea that the people who have been mercilessly fucking you out of your wealth or any opportunity to get some wealth, will miraculously decide to stop is comical. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for them to grow a conscience. We can do something about it.

If you’re reading this, you’ve seen my relentless pleas to get you to join me at Wolf Pac. I really believe that what Wolf Pac is doing is our last and only resort to fix this. Let me explain what we’re doing and why it’s our only option for fixing this.

Followers of my FB, G+, or Twitter pages understand that I call all politicians out on bullshit when I see it. I’m not a blind partisan or a "team player". I’m a liberal, which is why I find the democratic party increasingly unacceptable. Not totally unacceptable, but increasingly unacceptable. Republicans are totally unacceptable. Not because I don’t agree with them ideologically, but because they no longer have an ideology. There’s no "conserve" left in conservatism. This is no longer a party of small government. Republicans have become a wholly owned subsidiary of the word’s corporations. They don’t believe in anything other than serving their corporate masters anymore. They believe in giant corporate subsidies and giant government in your bedroom and in your home. The last place left where they believe in low taxes, is with corporations and their billionaire executives. For everyone else, it’s layer upon layer of middle class decimating fees (because a fee is somehow better than a tax?) and really damned big government. Democrats are moving in that direction in increasing numbers. That said, democrats still have a handful of legislators that actually advocate for your best interest. I’m not interested in playing a false equivalency game. Both sides aren’t the same, yet.

As I’ve watched democrats fall down the same rabbit hole or corporatism that republicans fell down decades ago, I’ve come to realize that the root of the problem isn’t in the individual people. It’s in the system, which has all the wrong incentive structures built into it. We have a system that incentivizes our politicians to serve the wrong people. They’re forced to serve the people and corporations that can afford to get them elected, and that can keep them in office. In America, the candidate with the most money wins an election 94% of the time. Their ideas don’t matter. Who they are doesn’t matter. Their platforms don’t matter. 94% of the time, the only thing that matters, is how much more money than their opponent they have. This doesn’t exactly inspire or promote creative or progressive governing.

It almost doesn’t matter who you vote for anymore. I say almost, because there are still a handful of issues where who you vote for makes a difference (marriage equality, marijuana legalization, etc) . But on issues that involve large corporations, your vote is meaningless. No president in America will ever deal with the Wall Street situation. No president in America will ever deal with the perpetually increasing waste in our defense spending. No president in America will ever deal with Monsanto’s takeover of our food supply. These are issues where the vast majority of Americans will always lose because the system is designed to put us on the losing end, regardless of who we vote for. Third parties are not the answer as long as the system remains as it is.

So what is Wolf PAC doing? We’re calling for an amendment to the constitution to get money out of politics. We’re not going through congress or the supreme court. We’re working on the state level to introduce a resolution calling for a constitutional convention. We need 34 states to pass our resolution. We have 10 states on the board right now. By "on the board", I mean that they have either already introduced, or are about to introduce our resolution. How did we do this? By working with legislators in our state. Why? For a couple of reasons. First off, we’re finding that democracy actually exists on a state level. When you call your state senator, on average, you can get a meeting with them in 3 calls. Since no one ever calls their local representatives, they seem to mostly be willing to meet with their constituents because they assume that if one constituent took the time to call, hundreds more are concerned with that issue. I personally met with both the assemblyman (woman) and the state senator who introduced our legislation here in New York. In one state (I can’t remember which), a Wolf PAC volunteer called their legislator, who actually personally answered the phone. He met that legislator for coffee later that afternoon, and had the resolution introduced the next day. In 3 states, the legislators introducing our resolution are far right wing republicans. This is a bipartisan issue, and we have a bipartisan group of volunteers.The second reason for doing it this way, is because we don’t trust congress to get it done. There’s way too much money being spent on a federal level, and our odds of crossing the finish line are exponentially higher if we work on a state level. 

When I first heard Cenk (Uygur, from The Young Turks) announce the formation of Wolf PAC, I thought the idea was preposterous. The obstacles to getting an amendment to the constitution seemed insurmountable to me. But after a year of mulling it over, I realized that we don’t have a choice. There’s literally nothing else we can do to fix our problems. I concluded that spinning my wheels in trying to get someone elected, or in getting out the vote was pointless, since that person would have to work within the fucked up system before them. Amending the constitution started to sound far less preposterous a proposition than continuing to do what I’ve been doing.

If you’ve come to the same conclusion I have, you should help us to fix it. Sign up to either volunteer, or donate to Wolf Pac. Whether you want to get money out because your party isn’t conservative anymore, or liberal anymore doesn’t matter. We’re both facing the same issue. Fortunately, it’s an issue that we still have the power to fix. We can make this happen with a few thousand people contributing, and a few thousand people volunteering. This is my primary issue because dealing with this one issue fixes the vast majority of the problems we’re facing. Personally, I’m done with "us versus them" being framed in a way to distract from the real problem. The "us" and the "them" are not republicans and democrats. They’re the 85 people who hold half of the world’s wealth, versus everyone else.         

So Boeing is dropping their pension plans and cutting salaries.

This would be a “just another day in corporate America” story, except that they’re not even pretending they’re doing it to “save the company”. They didn’t bother to shift all the pensions to a subsidiary company that they could then load up with the first company’s debt to “put it in the brink of bankruptcy” in order to dump the pensions.

As a society, we’ve gotten used to that practice. Remember when the appallingly named Patriot Coal did it last year? It really wasn’t even news because robbing workers by playing accounting tricks is just how we do business in America now.

Boeing is taking a new approach to robbing their employees. They’re just doing it without the pretense and the hassles that come with the shell game we’ve gotten used to. From the LA Times article;

For just as the company was wringing concessions from its workers, its board of directors approved a 50% increase in the company’s stock dividend and a $10-billion stock buyback that will richly reward investors and executives who get paid in Boeing shares.

Boeing’s excuse? They’re not the first company to dump pensions, so they’re just “following the market”. Well that’s true. Again from the LA Times story; 

In 1980, 84% of American workers at companies with 100 or more employees received lifetime pensions from their companies, and 70% got health insurance fully paid for by their employers. Today, fewer than 30% have lifetime pensions and only 18% have fully employer-paid health insurance.

Now remember, a pension is not a benefit on top of an employees salary. It’s deferred compensation. In other words, an employee agrees to a lower take home wage, in order to defer some of their total compensation into a retirement plan. I don’t have any experience in negotiating union contracts, but I do have a few colleagues that come from that world. When I negotiate salary with a candidate, I’m negotiating their annual salary and their annual bonus. When negotiations happen in a union environment, the whole package is negotiated. In other words, a negotiated salary of 80k for an employee encompasses everything; take home pay, pension contributions and health insurance costs. The union determines how that 80k is allocated. So that employee (for example) will take home a salary of 50k per year. 20k will go into health insurance (present and future), and 10k is diverted into their pension. So when a company (or the government) takes away someone’s negotiated pension, they’re retroactively cutting their salary for every year that employee has already worked.

Think about that next time you hear about a state, county, or corporation dumping their employee pensions. Would that work for you? Would it be okay for you, if your employer could retroactively take money out of your bank account to cut your pay for work you’ve already done? In my opinion, it’s never acceptable to go after pensions as long as there’s a single nickle left anywhere else. Assets should be liquidated, executives should retroactively pay back their salaries (since the fate of the company lies squarely in their hands), and a dozen other steps should be taken before fucking with an employees pension. But that’s just me, blindly protecting those fat cat airplane mechanics (and their kids) again!

Boeing has been fucking with its union workers for years despite the fact that in the past 10 years, they’ve reaped $35 billion dollars in profits and not paid a single dime in taxes. In 2011, 38% of Boeing’s revenue came from government contracts. In 2011, Boeing opened a plant in South Carolina, a “right to work” state. In case you’re not aware, “right to work” means “no rights to organize and negotiate”. Boeing pays its South Carolina plant workers 50% of what those same plant workers get paid in Washington state.

Before you go all “free market” libertarian lunatic on me, let’s unpack what this means for you. Does earning 50% less make it more likely, or less likely that that line worker can send his kids to college? Does earning 50% less make it more likely, or less likely that that line worker can absorb a sharp decline in the housing market? Does earning 50% less make it more likely, or less likely that that line worker can survive a layoff and avoid having to turn to public assistance?

Let’s unpack how well this has turned out for Boeing. The South Carolina plant is where the 787s are being built. That plant is running far behind its production goals, and is less productive than the Washington plant. The stunning part is that Boeing knew this would happen, but they calculated that long term gain of busting the unions in Washington was worth the short term (wrong again, Bob) losses of moving to a less skilled state. Part of what unions do, is constantly train people. The costs of that training are baked into those union contracts. Employees without training are less productive cause they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. On top of the dramatically lower productivity rates, the South Carolina 787 has a tendency to go up in fucking flames.

So well played Boeing, well played.

I’m sure this bold new move of simply telling us they’re greedy by not even trying to make a case for fucking over their employees will turn out equally well for them. Cause it’s not like there’s anger brewing in America over increasingly obvious income inequality. Keep doing what you’re doing, corporate America. I’m sure there won’t even be any consequences for turning this country into a giant pyramid scheme, where only a few people at the top walk away with all of the wealth. Cause we’ve never seen civilizations and countries fall under these circumstances.