The SoapBoxers

The Worst Form of National Economics, Except All the Others That Have Been Tried

Like Winston Churchill Said …

Let me get this out of the way, I’m not against capitalism. Winston Churchill once said of Democracy that it’s the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried. Capitalism is the financial equivalent to that form of governance – it’s the worst form of national finance, except all the others that have been tried. I have no problems with capitalism. People should be free to make the money they want, as long as that money making doesn’t harm others. Well, that harming others is where I have a problem with the twisted brand of capitalism that so many modern corporations practice – Vulture Capitalism.

Back in the late 1800’s there was a term used for the leaders of companies so powerful that they were indeed “too big to fail” – Robber Barons. These men were known for using unethical practices to obtain their obscene wealth. They acquired personal wealth at the cost of anything, including in many cases people’s lives. The recession of 2008 also had its roots in corporate entities that were “too big to fail” and the results where a handful of individuals gaining wealth and the vast majority of the country either being stagnant or losing ground. Again, I have zero problem with people becoming rich. I have many problems with people becoming rich because the money elects the politicians and then the politicians make the rules and then the rules favor those with money.

Trickle Down is Now Upside Down

An article just out last week showed that not only is the idea of “Trickle Down” wealth false, things have been the opposite in recent times. Even before taxes of any kind are taken into effect, the rich are still getting richer and everyone else – 99.9% of the country – are either stagnant or losing wealth.

Think of it this way; you’re in a group of 100 people, and you and 98 others all drive mid 1990’s SUVs and make $10 an hour. The last guy drives a Prius and makes $100 an hour. The price of gas for you and the 98 is $3.50 a gallon, but because of the fact he drives a non-guzzler, the guy who drives the Prius only has to pay $2.00 for a gallon of government-subsidized gas. Not only does he have a lot more money to cover his basic expenses, you and the other 98 are at a disadvantage because of government loopholes – loopholes put there by a combination of his money, and money from Toyota and the gas companies. Back before the Prius was invented, and before he was making so much more things were even, but as time goes on the playing field becomes less and less level.

It’s like a very small deviation in a course, over a mile being 1 degree off course will only put you off your final destination by a few dozen feet, but if you extend that trip to a few hundred miles you will be dozens of miles off by the time you get to where you’re going – magnitudes of order. Think that’s bad? What exists between the .4% and the rest of the 99.6% now is many magnitudes of order.

Cheer Up, It Can Only Get Worse!

It will only get worse, too. Every senator and representative makes over twice as much as the average person, easily putting them in the top 2% Unless they specifically vote to freeze their own pay on an annual basis, they get about a 3% “cost of living” raise.  I’m a state government employee and because of “budgetary” reasons I haven’t gotten a cost of living raise in more than a few years. Combine that with the fact that my medical benefits have decreased and gotten more expensive (higher out-of-pocket, higher salary deduction), I’ve actually lost money, comparatively.

For the vast majority of congresspeople, the bulk of donations to their political campaigns come from the ultra-rich or corporations. Why wouldn’t a senator not vote for changes that help the rich? Not only are they helping themselves, they’re most likely helping their kin since inherited wealth is taxed at a much lower rate, sometimes not at all with loopholes and trust funds. Finally, once voted into office a congressperson gets lifetime health care and a retirement check. It’s a revolving door – rich corporations and the top .4% help get people into office, those people in turn pass laws and write loopholes that help the rich corporations get richer and top .4% keep more of their money, who in turn help who they want to be in office get there.

One of the biggest pieces of evidence of this is the Wall Street bailouts. Wall Street started voting in people who would deregulate finance laws, in turn Wall Street was allowed to take bigger gambles with collections of money – money at least in part made up of millions of retirement and savings accounts. Those risks failed, and in failing the richest of the super-rich made money because they hedged their bets. The companies they left sinking were then bailed out by the government, while the vast majority of people got nothing. The rich gambled with our money, lost it, made money themselves on that gamble, and then got the government to bail out the companies they shattered with that gamble.

It’s not just Republicans, on this one, either. After promising to change Washington in his election campaign, Barrack Obama turned around and filled his most important cabinet positions with ex-bankers, and ex-Wall Street types. I’m not sure which is worse, Obama failing like that and still decrying the evils of “Trickle-Down” or the Republicans still trying to get you to believe it works.

Plugging the River-sized Leak with Chewing Gum

Remember Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission? I’ve written about it before – it essentially removes limits to anonymous corporate spending in political campaigns. It’s just the latest in a long-line of laws that essentially give a corporation similar rights to that as a person. Even with the millions of people making political donations, corporations can still outspend us, even more so with the whole rich-getting-richer, poor-getting-poorer trend of the last few decades. We need to even the odds, we need to call in a few bulldozers to plug the leak that’s been growing larger since the 1980’s. If corporations have all the benefits of being a person, they need some of the drawbacks. When I see a corporation getting executed in Texas I’ll consider it a decent first step toward the playing field being level.

This is not about class warfare, this is about correcting a wrong that has been snowballing since the early part of last century and snowballing out of control since the 1980’s. That few degrees off course that accumulated under Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes has us hundreds of miles from where we should be. Democrats are at least arguing that the problem exists, even if they are taking corporate money in one hand while placating you with the other. Republicans are arguing for less regulation, less restrictions on campaign finance, and calling the Democrats placation “class warfare.” It’s hard to have a class war when some 400 people have more resources than 40 million.

Capitalism is wonderful, but thanks to greed it needs oversight, especially when the people making the rules are put in place by the people with the money.

Like Stan and Kyle from South Park I’ve learned a lot this year. Politically this is arguably the most partisan and divided the US has ever been, and ultimately that’s not good for anyone … except maybe the 24 hour news organizations.

• In January Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary stepped down. I actually liked Dana Perino more, simply because she could go more than 4 words without uttering “ummmm … ” followed by a long pause. It boggles the mind that a smart dude like Obama could pick a guy who has a problem speaking in public as his main public speaker.
• In January Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a mentally ill gunman. Rather than ponder where we went wrong in not only allowing the ill shooter to get a gun but slip through the cracks, treatment-wise, we immediately sought to assign blame. Mental health parity is still an unsung issue in this country, but I guess we’d rather spend billions on erection drugs rather than help the millions who are clinically depressed.
• In March Japan was struck by an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. In what might still turn out to be the world’s worst nuclear disaster, a nuclear power plant suffered at least a partial meltdown. It’s amusing that the people most for nuclear power (Republicans) are also the people who claim that government is mistake-prone and inefficient. Because nothing spells “safe” like mistake-prone and nuclear power.
• At some point in the first half of 2011 at least a few Republicans argue about the Bush Tax cuts, saying they should be kept because “tax cuts pay for themselves.” They need to clarify this statement because apparently tax cuts pay for themselves only if they’re not presented by a Democratic president and only if they’re not mainly for the middle class.
• In June yet another politician ignores the rule that if you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, admit it up front and things won’t be as bad. Who doesn’t still giggle that a politician named Wiener had to resign for showing his wiener. The really amusing part to me is all the outrage over his online exhibitionism. It’s horrible for a guy to show his privates yet a guy who divorced his wife because she had cancer and he wanted to upgrade is the leading Republican presidential candidate right now. I don’t get it.
• In yet another curious bit of hypocrisy the Republicans show it’s ok to vote for a debt ceiling increase unless it’s a president you really don’t like. Yes, the debt is a problem, but we spent a month and 1/2 arguing over something that’s been done dozens of times before with hardly an eyelash batted while the unemployment rate continued to be unacceptably high. I know now why congress has to take so many recesses – they must strain their arms patting themselves on the back for doing mundane things.
• In another interesting bit of hypocrisy, I learned that if a right-wing movement against government (the Tea Party) protests it’s considered patriotic, but if a left-wing movement against government (Occupy movement) protests they’re considered lazy and rabble-rousing.
• Finally I learned that Republicans really are conflicted over who they want to run for president. The guy that makes most sense to the general public (Jon Huntsman) is polling at around 1% and isn’t even invited to some debates. The guy that most people think has the best chance to defeat President Obama (Mitt Romney) is apparently horribly distasteful to Republicans. Is it the Mormon thing? Is it the flip-flopper from Massachusetts thing? The guy that has the most effed-up financial plan that would actually raise taxes on the middle class and lower them drastically on the rich was only brought down because he apparently wants to get in the pants of every woman out there. After that little revelation hs 9-9-9 plan might as well have been “nein, nein, nein!”

This holiday season I’m praying for something new. I’m going to pray that we somehow learn to overcome the widening divide in our country. I still firmly believe that most political problems could be solved by getting money out of politics. Pouring money into the political process benefits only the richest of the rich, and America was not created to benefit .09% of the country while the other 99.9% struggle on with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Happy holidays, everyone.
 

It’s election day today. I voted, as I almost always do. [Editor’s note: Zarberg wrote this article on Tuesday.]  This year my home town actually had mayor, 4 school board, and 5 town council slots up for grabs, as well as a referendum on a .25% sales tax – that’s 1/4 of a penny on every dollar. I voted for the tax increase. Groceries, gas, and a few other “necessary” items are exempt, so it shouldn’t really effect lower class people. In addition, the extra money will go to preventing layoffs in the public school system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for raising taxes, but I do see them as something that’s necessary in a country where a lot of necessities are missing. In addition, it’s a county tax so it’s not like most of you will ever have to pay it (and if you do, stop by and say hi – I live on the northwest corner of Chapel Hill.) Regardless, I’ve heard statistics from the area that about 20% of registered voters actually voted today. Kind of depressing considering the polarization in politics – makes me think a lot of that polarization is media driven simply for the purpose of boosting revenue.

Anyway, being that it’s November and Thanksgiving is coming up, I started thinking about the holiday season and the infamous Black Friday. Your average shopper that day will go to a mall, spend hundreds – perhaps thousands – of dollars at a store that will give almost nothing back to the local economy and send its profits overseas. Those shoppers will head home after shopping and burning gas and essentially they’ll just have given a lot of money to a large, monolithic, corporatocracy. I got thinking about what people could do that day to not be part of the cattle drive but still be in the holiday spirit and/or get shopping done.

First and foremost, if at all possible, shop local. Take a few hours on the web and find out what non-chain stores are near you. Do NOT use shoplocal.com – that’s simply a listing of what massive corporate stores are near you. http://sustainableconnections.org/thinklocal/why is a good starting point. Gift certificates to local restaurants and venues make a great gift and give a lot more back to your community than something from Walmart or Target – same with gift certificates for local entertainment like mini-golf, ski centers, bowling alleys, and the like. Want to really stick it to big oil? Stay home that day. Have leftovers, watch football, and shop online. Sweatfree.org  is a great site for fair trade shopping. Remember, Walmart reduces employee healthcare simply to satisfy stockholders (generally the 1%) and their officers – we’re talking about a company that reported a 3.5 BILLION dollar profit in 2010, and they claim health care costs are squeezing them.

The whole point of “boycotting” is to show the companies that ship their profits and jobs offshore that we’re not going to spend our money on them any more. These are the same companies that are spending billions a year in lobbying to get government to give them more tax breaks and look the other way when they announce layoffs. These companies were built on the backs of Americans, using our roads, sewers, electricity, and now they’re putting their profit above all else. While you pure capitalist folks might be ok with that, I’m not, I call it greed by any other name.

Me? I plan to buy some bottled water, some hand warmers and drive them down to my local “Occupy” to give to the folks there. I work 40+ hours a week to support both myself and my spouse who has health issues, otherwise I’d be right there protesting with them. After that I’m coming home to eat some leftover turkey and watch some football.

I think we all remember the time from our childhood playing games with that one kid who changes the rules in games. You’d be playing 4 man baseball and while your ghost runners could only take one base at a time, all of the sudden -when it suited him the most- he’d say his ghost runner was able to score from 2nd on a single. Or that game of tag would suddenly become freeze tag because he didn’t want to be “it” when you tagged him. That’s not unlike what’s going on right now with voting rules across multiple states.

A little pertinent history lesson: Right now with the US Electoral College system, the individual citizen doesn’t truly, technically, vote for the president. When you vote, you are, more or less, telling your state’s electors who you want to vote for president, and they in turn cast the actual votes that are given.  Since 1964 the United States has had 538 electors, with 270 of them being required to win the presidency (giving a winner with exactly 270 votes a 50.2% share of the vote). The theory is that in a Republic where states’ power is important, even a small population state can have an important outcome.

Currently, in 48 states, any presidential candidate winning the largest share of the votes simply gets all of that states electoral votes – a “winner take all” system. The 2 remaining states – Nebraska and Maine – essentially go by congressional district to determine who gets the individual elector’s votes with the remaining 2 elector votes in each state being decided by the overall popular vote of the state. It’s actually a fairly convoluted system that needs multiple constitutional amendments and stacks of state laws to function “correctly.” It’s not exactly a popular system, either, in both 2001 and 2004 the majority of Americans in a Gallup poll supported eliminating the electoral college system and going with a pure popular vote system.

Ok, got all that? If you find it interesting at all, there are many, many books and articles on it. As I said, only 2 states don’t use the winner-take-all system where the winner of that state’s popular vote gets all the electoral votes. In fact, not using that system is actually a fairly recent change. Maine moved away from it in 1972, and Nebraska in 1992 (gee, both election years. How strange). I’m not here to argue about which method is better, merely to point out that continuity in rules is fair. I personally think either all states should use the same method.

After the last presidential election, surely our most partisan and bitter election, Republicans in Pennsylvania decided that they didn’t really like ALL of their state’s 21 electors voting for who won the popular vote. Barack Obama won 54% of the popular vote yet he got every last one of those 21 electoral votes. The GOP there realized that by moving away from an all-or-nothing system when most states were not moving away from that system they are essentially giving votes to any Republican candidate. Pennsylvania would join Nebraska and Maine, making it 47 states that used one system and 3 states that used another.

But wait! Nebraska actually saw a vote for Obama in 2008. That’s rather astonishing for such a right-leaning state; Nebraska has only voted Democrat in 7 of the last 36 elections. But Republicans there are very aware that in such a partisan atmosphere every last vote counts, especially when there are only 538 votes. They’re actually looking to reverse their 1992 decision to leave the winner-take-all system. They want back in to get their one vote back.  Hmmm, put in the simplest of terms this really seems like the people in power are changing the rules to make it easier for their side to win. Imagine if where you worked suddenly everyone had to start paying for their own electricity used, but your boss turned around and said that since he’s in charge, he only has to pay 50%. You’d be pretty ticked off, huh?

The election tinkering actually doesn’t stop there. 14 states are looking at changing voting rules, ranging from cutting the time allowed for early voting, to requiring state-issued ID cards, to enacting laws that forbid anyone with a criminal history to vote – people who have justly served their time and are once again tax paying citizens. As a general rule, early voting has favored democrats. In fact, on election day in 2008, my current home state of North Carolina actually voted in majority for John McCain, but so many people used early voting to vote for Barack Obama that he won the election here – the first time in decades that North Carolina went blue. This isn’t a trend isolated to this state either. Demographic data shows that in almost every single state early voting came out for Obama, often with a wide margin.

In addition, early voting featured a much larger percentage of minorities than the overall voting population as a whole, and it is widely known that on average minorities vote Democrat. While I’m in favor of eliminating voting fraud – the usual excuse of those looking to implement state-issued voter IDs – fraudulent voting by individuals is less than .0001% of all voters.

To put that in practical terms, voting fraud is quite literally a one-in-a-million thing. Any given district is more likely to experience a mass shooting spree than have people try to cheat the voting system. It has been reported by multiple news organizations (almost any of the links above) that these new voting changes will disenfranchise 5 million voters. But hey, it’s worth it if we screw the 4,999,995 people voting to get those 5 cheaters, right? Well, that’s what the Republicans will probably try to sell you to your face, while in reality it’s done in the name of reducing the chances of Democrats winning. 

It’s ironic that a nation so bent on shedding light in other countries’ fair elections is so shady under its own surface. Remember that kid who would use the Monopoly board game house rule of getting money for landing on free parking when he landed on it, but then point out that’s just a house rule and say you got nothing when you landed on it? Yeah. That’s your modern Republicans.

My timing might be off on the article subject this month, as people might think I’m talking about the often controversial, usually brilliant former Apple Computer CEO.  I’m not.  Everywhere I tune in people are talking about how this economy boils down to jobs.  Too many people are unemployed, which leads to too few people paying taxes and spending money, which leads to layoffs in the public sector, which leads to more people being unemployed, which leads to more people not paying taxes and spending money, which leads to … well, you get the idea.

Back in the 1980’s “Trickle Down” was the term for how Republicans wanted to run the economy.  Their theory is that if you give tax breaks to the richest people those people will turn around and hire some non-rich folk.  Think of it like watering your plant, you pour the water on the plant and the water dribbles all down, into the soil, and makes everything in the area go to varying degrees of wetness – it “trickles down” over the whole area.  Trouble is, the economic theory doesn’t work like that.  It doesn’t really work at all, actually, so much so that Republicans have taken to calling it “Supply-Side Economics.”  Trickle down has that whole male urination connotation, “Supply-Side” sounds so much more business-like, so much more professional.  Too bad over 70% of the money that factors into GDP is because of consumers. The economy is consumer driven, so the real-world theory should be “Consumer-Side Economics.”

What does consumer driven mean?  Well, it means that the people who buy the bulk of stuff – everything from houses and cars to televisions and appliances to diapers and toys – are running 70% of the economy.  70% of the money that factors into GDP is because consumers – the bulk of which are everyday Americans – bought stuff after getting paid by their job.

One of the favorite current conservative talking points is that businesses aren’t hiring because they’re stifled by regulation and taxes.  As far as taxes are concerned, theoretically, that’s true.  Reality has a different view, however.  Using loopholes and tax breaks the richest of corporations can often avoid paying no taxes at all – GM didn’t pay a dime in taxes in 2010 despite having over 14.2 billion in profits.  The truth of the matter is businesses aren’t hiring because people aren’t buying.  People aren’t buying because so many are unemployed or underemployed, and the media has scared many into saving rather than spending.  While that’s not a bad thing, everything needs to be in moderation.  Saving for the future is fine, but not at the cost of the now.

So is government regulation the problem?  The 2008 Wall Street crash was because of a lack of regulation.  The 2011 Fukushima Nuclear disaster was because of a lack of regulation enforcement.  Bankers taking home billions in profits after getting billions in bailouts while the middle class saw nothing was because of a lack of regulation.  Say what you want about the government, but at least in theory I trust profit-driven corporations a lot less than I trust government.  I say “in theory” only because the current campaign finance laws and political atmosphere allow corporations to essentially buy politicians.  In addition, if government regulation is the problem, why are big oil, the finance sector and many other important economic players reporting record profits the past few years?  I don’t think Reagan making deregulation one of his biggest issues and the start of economic disparity in the US is a coincidence.  Corporations have proven time and time again that they will put profit ahead of anything, including the well-being of people.  You can argue that corporate charity does exist, it often does so only because tax breaks and good publicity make it economically practical to do so.

So jobs are the problem, what’s the solution?  I’m going to put one forward that all you right-wingers out there will completely balk at:  Government spending.  This flies in the face of the debt reduction debate this past Summer, but our country has faced bigger debt before and we spent our way out of it.  The power grid and transportation networks in the US are laughable, at best, compared to many other nations.  A government-wide sponsored program to rebuild/replace either of those two would employ millions for years – millions of people who would start spending again.  I’m sure conservatives will ask how can we possibly pay this off?  Well, eliminating the outsourcing of our wars would help.  It was recently reported that as much as 60 billion dollars was wasted or defrauded thanks to so-called “private military contractors.”  As far as the big-picture is concerned, take a look at any finance news the past few months – US debt is selling faster than ever.  The yield on treasury bills is at an all-time low, which means anyone with money is still scrambling to buy US debt.  If we had a debt problem, doesn’t free-market economics dictate that T-bills would be a bad buy?

Tonight President Obama is going to present a jobs bill, and no matter what he says Republicans will oppose it out of partisanship.  The number one way Republicans will take control of the White House in 2012 is for the economy to suck, so why is it in their interest to help the economy get better?  Like drooling, greedy shareholders they are slaves to short-term profit, and creating jobs just doesn’t mesh with their current goals.

For as long as I’ve been born the United States of America has had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, even in a hostage situation. The thinking is that rewarding people who take hostages will just entice them to take more hostages. It’s a pretty common and widely accepted theory in psychology – we see it’s applications on things a lot more prevalent than hostage-taking; reward the dog for sitting down and the dog is more likely to sit when you want it to. Go pick up the baby when it cries and the baby will learn that crying leads to parental attention. In the same way, our current broken political system THRIVES on 11th-hour “crisis” situations.

The recent debt crisis is a glaring example of the extremism in politics, and in my opinion it is closer to a hostage crisis than we’ve ever been. Hostage situations almost always arise from the routine; it’s easier to both take hostages and shock and terrorize people when you disrupt their daily lives in everyday situations. In that same way, this debt crisis arose from something that’s so routine it’s been done 102 times before and never with stipulations attached. In the same way our financial system was shocked when it was held hostage despite the wishes of the majority of US citizens. After George Bush cut taxes in the biggest revenue loss in US history, despite having some of the lowest tax rates in the industrialized world, congress was so concerned that they … that’s right, raised the debt limit with nary a debate.

Had we handled raising the current debt ceiling the same way that was done George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and every other president this would have been done weeks ago with almost no attention from the public. What was different this time? Well, just factually speaking, this was the first time the “Tea Party” had any kind of say in congress. This was the first time that Obama didn’t have a majority in both houses. Those are the only significantly relevant issues that apply to this specific debt increase. As a percentage of GDP, we’ve had more debt – this was back in World War 2, and we’re fighting 2 wars right now, both started by George W. Bush.

The combination of the Tea Party influence and Obama not having a free pass in both houses gave Republicans a prime opportunity to hold the possibility of a default over Democrats’ heads. As usual, the Democrats had no spine and caved in and as usual the Republicans went against the wishes of a majority of Americans to push a horribly misguided philosophy of “trickle-down” economics that has been proven to not work.

All through this situation I heard Republicans pandering to the camera and saying how they wouldn’t let Obama and the Democrats raise taxes on America. Yet from the moment this situation was labeled a crisis the Democrats did not want to raise taxes on 98% of Americans, only on the richest 2%. Your average Republican will immediately knee-jerk and come back with “but … but … but … if taxes are raised business won’t hire people.” I will point out that corporate tax revenues are at an all-time low (mostly thanks to loopholes).  I will also point out that despite corporate profits being up 22%, the unemployment rate has only slightly improved and that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands who have simply stopped looking. All that is in addition to payrates for the average American decreasing, in relation to inflation. The bottom line: The Democrats wanted to raise taxes more or less on just those very people benefiting from the 22% increased profits, and the Republicans held our economy hostage because they opposed that. Once again, I will point out that the Republicans are getting lots of campaign finance from the very companies that have flourished the past decades, and it has been Republicans in the past to oppose campaign finance.

Back on the 2010 campaign trail all we heard from Republicans was how we needed to turn around the economy by creating jobs, specifically by making it easier for business to hire people by lowering taxes and creating more loopholes. Yet, they were so concerned about the jobless rate that as soon as the debt ceiling deal was done, Eric Cantor called for the Summer recess for congress despite the fact that the FAA was shut down due to disagreement over the ability to make it easier for FAA employees to unionize.  Think about it this way: After crying for weeks during the debt limit crisis that they weren’t getting their way, Republicans were so concerned about the average American that they were letting millions in non-controversial tax revenue go each day and putting 90,000+ people out of work while they went on a SIX WEEK vacation. Aren’t you glad they represent you so well?

So, over the past 1+ decades my long-view take on US economics is this: Republican politicians relax Wall St. oversight rules and regulations. Wall St. takes too many risks and ends up crashing, dragging the economy down with it. Government knee-jerks and saves Wall St. Too many corporations lay off people as part of the crash. People stop spending in fear. Government revenues go down. Government lays off people. More people stop spending in fear. Private agency that’s funded mostly by Wall St. banks decides that the US might be a risky investment despite the fact that statistically it’s better than many others that were labeled as safe by that same private agency – despite the fact that as of this writing the stock market is tanking and US Treasury bills can’t sell fast enough.

The basic problem is not that the US Government spends too much. The problem is the US Government spends more than it earns. There are three ways to correct that problem: decrease spending, increase earning, or both. To determine which method is best requires one to prioritize spending needs. THAT is where the real issue is. Our representatives and, indeed, our people cannot come to an agreement on what the purpose of government is.

Heck, if we can’t even agree on that, how do we expect to move forward? Well we’re certainly not going to now that the hostage-takers have gotten their way – they’ll simply think that they can just take hostages to get what they want. Keep your eyes open, because they have their eyes on Medicare and Social Security.

A lot about politics these days has devolved into partisan discussions that at best are bending the truth and at worst are hyperbolic to an extreme that would make a bell curve blush. We all know it doesn’t accomplish much, except maybe to boost the ratings of the associated extreme news services – Fox and MSNBC being the most obvious. Perhaps instead of asking “what does it accomplish?” we might be better off asking “why does it happen?”

Money.

That’s the most obvious reason. We all feel it. Statistics are showing it. More than ever the US is about the have’s and the have-not’s. I vaguely remember back in the 80’s in grade school learning that the three basic socio-economic divisions in the US were the lower class, the middle class, and the upper class. I learned that the upper class comprised about 5% of the population and consisted of the filthy rich all the way down to folks making maybe $150K or more (it was the ’80’s, after all). The middle class was the biggest chunk of the population, people making anywhere from the high 20Ks to the 150K barrier of the upper class. Probably 60-70% of the country could be described as the middle class. I would guess that the majority of people that will read this article will identify as both growing up and currently being middle class. Everyone else was lower class, yet there was hope – with hard work anyone could achieve the American Dream. Remember that? Everyone’s parent’s told them that, right? “Work hard and you can be anything you want.” Does it feel like it works that way now, in 2011? It doesn’t to me. You have to work hard, plan really well, and be very lucky, it seems like. A “good” college education can easily cost $40,000 a year, and an education with an Ivy League diploma attached is well over $100,000 a year. I’ve blabbed about money all this time, but what’s my point? Not a single one of the US senators or representatives in office today is in the middle class.

That’s right, none of our elected representatives can say they actually represent us in economic terms. Where as they’ve gotten 2.6% cost-of-living pay raises every year, some reports say the average salary has actually gone down in the last 10 years. It’s not like we have financially average people getting elected into office and suddenly becoming rich thanks to the $160K+ a year salary with full medical benefits- and add to that the fact that your average politician can easily make a few hundred thousand a year with speaking fees after they retire. Want to know what profession more congresspeople had than any other, before entering office?

Lawyer.

Yup, that universally reviled job that your average person looks down on more than prostitutes. Ever heard this one? Why does the law society prohibit sex between lawyers and their clients? To prevent clients from being billed twice for essentially the same service. Think about it, there’s a reason jokes like that exist … then realize that over 1/3 of the people running the Federal Government are lawyers. That’s not the most mind-bending issue to me, either. These are people that spend millions of dollars for a job that pays slightly upwards of $160K. Not only that, but a large portion of their job is to sit and listen to people paid 100K a year tell them why their corporation or organization should get a law written that benefits them. Yup, lobbyists average salary is over $100K a year.  It doesn’t help any that lobbyists are very often “retired” politicians or former political workers.

So who speaks for us? The Tea Party? They should really be called the “Me” Party. Google “who leads the Tea Party?” and the names that pop up the most are Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Ron Paul. Of those three, only Paul isn’t using every other second in front of the microphone to push social issues from one side of their mouth while saying the government should get out of our lives from the other side. Heck, it’s been reported that one of the major reasons the Tea Party has actually survived this long is because the Billionaire Koch brothers have poured funds into it. The next time you see a Tea Partier claiming they want government out of their lives you might just ponder on the fact that a couple of billionaires who have a lot to gain with less government are funding that movement.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a socialist. I’m also not a pure capitalist. Corporations have proven time and time again that they will put human well being – including human lives – behind making a profit. The idea of capitalism – essentially greed – is good if and only if there is oversight and laws to keep those who don’t have money from getting squashed by the few who do have it.

Think about this final point – oil companies are making record profits the past decade. Billions of dollars, most of it going to a handful of men. Yet they are still getting millions in subsidies and tax breaks from the Federal Government. This past May, along almost strictly party lines, Republicans voted against ending those subsidies. Republican apologists will say that they’re needed to keep the price of gas low, if the subsidies are ended gas would go up. Doesn’t capitalist theory state that the market should be setting the price? Rather than give the money to the oil companies, why not help the poor out with tax breaks on gas paid? The reason is obvious to me: money. Big Oil has hundreds of lobbyists – making more money than most of us will ever make- telling politicians – also making more money than most of us will ever make – to keep those subsidies.

Trickle down? More like trickled on.

Your smartphone breaks.  You take it to the shop.  Do you care if the guy who fixes it has an addiction to lesbian porn as long as he fixes your phone?  You have the flu and go to the doctor.  Do you care if your doctor is having an affair on their spouse as long as they get you the appropriate treatment within the proper safety protocols?  I’m sure some of you will say you care, but I’d bet most of the people you say they would get upset about that actually would.  Think about it, if someone came up to you and said, “The guy who fixed your iPhone has gigabytes of woman-on-woman action on his home computer.”  The vast majority of people are going to say, “ummm … so?”

In that same way, I really don’t care that Anthony Weiner had inappropriate contact with women online.  I do care that he lied about it, though.  Had he come clean from the start, said that he used the internet for strange sexual purposes, he probably would have been ok.  I’m sure there would have been some outcry from Republicans.  We all know how they’re the moral bastions of politics – heck, they like marriage so much that the most prominent righties often do it two or three times. I think he’s a good politician, he seems to genuinely have the interests of his constituents in mind (being from NYC, he represents a large number of lower and lower-middle class folks), but at this point I just can’t get past that lying part.

When did America become the uptight prude of Western nations, anyway?  Was it the founding by the puritans?  Europeans laugh at us every time we make a huge deal over some political sex scandal, they practically EXPECT their leaders to have an affair or two while in office.  Heck, the leaders of France and Russia are married to supermodel class women, as far as looks go, and as far as I can tell are more popular for it.  Holding our leaders to some sort of moral standard that hasn’t evolved since slavery, smoking, bloodletting, and World Wars was in vogue just seems dumb.  We all have our unique perversions, even if we don’t admit it to ourselves or talk about it with others.  I honestly don’t care that Bill Clinton likes creative cigar use, he gave us some amazing years of prosperity and knocked a huge chunk off the country’s debt.

So … back to the lying thing.  Why is it ok for politicians to outright lie, but they have to be the modern equivalent of Beaver Cleaver’s parents when it comes to “adult” issues?  Ronald Reagan was involved with and lied about a secret deal that sent weapons to Iran (yes, THAT Iran) in return for money that was used to fund drug-selling rebels in South America.  We have politicians giving no-bid contracts to questionable companies and we care more about Anthony Weiner doing what at least 50% of all men have done.

Maybe a lot of people out there want to care about sex and personal lives, but that seems to be a lot more like the way they live in Afghanistan and Iran than here.  Well, we sold weapons to Iran to fund people that sell drugs to our youth, so maybe we do want a harder line on morals.

I had a roadtrip for work today, nothing major – a co-worker and I drove in our official state motorpool SUV with a new UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply – I.E. a battery backup) for a server in a local office about 2 hours away. About the biggest pain was the fact that this particular local office feels the need to make their server room double as a storage room, so maneuvering a 70 lb UPS through crates of sodas, stacks of folding chairs, and janitorial buckets was more of a challenge than actually installing it. I shouldn’t complain – it was a nice day for a drive. We weren’t in any particular hurry, and everything seemed just fine when the server came back up and we left, so I was rather surprise when 3 or so hours later we arrived back in the central office to find a trouble ticket for a printer outage there. I promptly remote controlled into the server to see that the particular printer listed on the trouble ticket had already printed 24 jobs just since the server came back up, about 3 and 1/2 hours prior. I went into a detailed inspection of said printer and immediately saw the problem:

toner low

I get this image of your average worker clicking print, pausing for a moment to listen for the sound of a laser printer spitting out a page, not hearing that sound … and clicking print again. Said worker might actually pause whatever else they’re doing the 2nd time they click print to listen for the printer noise, and not hearing it will click print a 3rd time, and then actually do the bare minimum to lean out of their cubical and look in the direction of the printer. Upon staring at the printer output tray for 10 seconds they’ll click print a 4th time, then get up to go look at the empty output tray, completely missing the flashing status light, and then go right for the phone to call the helpdesk to report a printer outage; nevermind that the level 1 helpdesk rep failed to do their job by simply creating a ticket and passing it on to level 2 support rather than going over the troubleshooting basics of “did you power cycle it? did you check the toner? is it plugged in?”

I won’t be mean to the helpdesk people, though, I managed a helpdesk for a while and they can get insanely busy at times. Heck, even I’m guilty of not following procedure and just taking someone at their word when they call in with a problem.

While I’m on the subject of printers, I’ll take a moment to ponder why with a 100 megabit network and a gigabit fiber backbone the half dozen or so network, high-speed, expensive printers in each local office are not enough for the 2 or 3 dozen people they serve. That’s right, probably 75% of the people in my organization have local, directly-attached printers. I suppose this might have changed at some point in the past decade, but when I was originally in the thick of things in IT the whole point of a networked printer was so people could share it and reduce costs; I.E. one big networked printer was less expensive to both purchase and maintain than 5 or more smaller direct-attached printers.

Of course the proliferation of printers leads to another interesting scenario that’s happened at least 7 or 8 times that I’m aware of …

Being a government agency, there’s an annual budget. If you don’t use up your budget one year the people that decide your budget will notice and think “oh, they didn’t use up their budget this year so I won’t give them as much for next year.” (try not to laugh, that’s really how it works) When the fiscal year is coming to an end around the middle of June a lot of local office managers will get new printers to “use up” their budget. We’ll get a lot of job requests to ensure the new printer will work on the existing print queue, tie into the mainframe, be automatically pushed out to the end user’s desk, etc, etc. Well, those old printers don’t magically just sprout wings and fly away to printer Valhalla (I know, I was surprised to find out they didn’t either). They’re usually put in storage, or under a desk somewhere, or even just left turned off in their original spots. Invariably someone – usually someone low on the totem pole – decides they want a printer at their desk that they can share with their immediate cubical mates, and they pick up the old, turned-off printer and plop it on their desk. They then plug it in, click print a few dozen times, and proceed to wonder why it’s not working and call the helpdesk as if it’s worked all along.

For once I’m not even exaggerating, that really happens. I suppose it’s a side-effect of how well computer hardware is engineered these days – it’s nice that people can think the mere act of plugging something in will magically make it work.

Before I jump into this month’s article, I just want to talk about an interesting comment I heard on the radio the other day regarding President Obama ordering the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden.  In certain right-wing circles people are criticizing both the media and president himself;  the media for giving Obama too much credit and Obama himself for taking too much credit.  We all know about this, there are plenty of conservatives out there that will never, ever give a Democrat credit for anything.  Well, the radio commentator threw a little devil’s advocate out there – what if the raid was a failure, both helicopters crashed, a few dozen Americans got killed and Bin Laden got away, who would get the blame?  No doubt in my mind that every last Republican out there would be calling for impeachment for such a bad decision by Obama if that had happened.

One way or the other, people.  You can’t have it both ways.  “The buck stops here” also means that the person at the top gets some credit when things go right, not just gets the blame when things go wrong.

Ok, on to your regularly scheduled dose of liberal-leaning anti-corporatist hate…

I want to set up a little imaginary scenario for you.  Picture your child, in 4th grade.  I know not all of you have kids, but try to play along.  Well your child’s school is having elections for class representative to the student committee.  It’s a pretty big deal to the kids and each class ends up with two children who run off against each other election style for who gets voted representative.  Your child is one of the two, and part of their “campaign” is making some election posters to put up around the school.  You spend a lot of time helping your kid on the computer making up a few really nice posters and researching an issue or two that they can run on.  You go in to school to help your child put up the posters and watch the debate against the other candidate and the first thing you notice … the other candidate has some amazingly high-quality posters!  They’re glossy, full of color.  Clearly professionally done, and probably very expensive.  There’s a tiny disclaimer in one bottom corner of each poster:  “This poster was paid for by the 5th grade volleyball team.”

You’re stunned.  These posters are up all over the place, dozens of them.  You wonder just how something like this can happen, and make your way to your child’s classroom to watch the debate.  The debate is more or less a tie, but your school lets other kids speak on behalf of whoever they want.  Dozens of other children get up and spread blatant lies about your kid;  “I saw Chris kick a dog.”   “I saw Chris cheat on a test!”  Your child tries denounce these lies, but is told by the teacher that they had their time to speak.  Of course, after all that, your kid loses the election and doesn’t get to be class representative.

That sounds … wrong.  Far-fetched.  Un-American.  You try to argue, but you’re told that everything went according to the rules.

It’s also pretty close to what can happen here in the USA, thanks to the way elections work and 2 key rulings, one of them by the Supreme Court.

Back in January of 2010 the Supreme Court decided in “Citizens United v Federal Election Commission” that there can be no caps on the amount of corporate money spent on political advertising.  That means if Rupert Murdoch or Michael Moore wanted to go and spent millions against their obvious targets, they could.  Heck, if they had the money to blow they could spend billions, and none of it would be subject to campaign finance rules.  The only provision?  There has to be a disclaimer.  Of course, you could get the fast-talk guy from the Micro Machines commercials to read a paragraph of disclaimer in 2 seconds at the end of the commercial so the average Joe doesn’t even process it.

There was another, lesser-known court case in the Florida Court of Appeals back in 2003 that can directly affect the political atmosphere in this country.  News organizations don’t have to tell the truth.  In fact, in that case the Florida Court of Appeals said that, specifically, Fox News (and by extension all news organizations) has a first amendment right to lie.  Yup, that bastion of “fair and balanced” actually fought a case to appeals court saying they can lie if they want.  As the article says, I don’t know of any other news organization that has done this so matter-of-factly.

No combine those two things … you have a first amendment right to lie, even if you’re a news organization, and corporations can spend as much money as they want as long as there is a tiny disclaimer.  We’ve already seen something similar – remember the 2004 presidential campaign “swiftboating“?  Essentially a group of Viet Nam war vets, some who never even served with John Kerry, said he was a horrible commander, his military honors were vastly overstate, and a few even went as far as saying the Navy’s records didn’t tell the truth.  There was a lot of media attention on that, but the ads still ran.  Remember how close that election was?  The Supreme Court decided it, and literally a few thousand votes could have made John Kerry president.  What if it was a few thousand people who voted for Dubya who saw those ads but didn’t see any media coverage of how they were practically lies?  That’s right, a group of corporate funded people -most of whom barely knew John Kerry and some of whom lied- decided a US election.

It’s time we take our politics back.  Every citizen has a vote already, why do giant corporations making billions in profit and sometimes not paying back any in taxes get such a strong voice?  According to US law now the Russian megacorp Gazprom or some Dubai casino could spend a billion dollars on a series of political television commercials and not even tell the truth.  Do we really want the USA standing for corporate control over the individual voice?