US Corporations – Page 8 – The Wrongologist

Corporations Are Using Free Speech To Undermine Regulations

There is a Corporatist supremacy movement operating below the radar in America. US Corporations are using the First Amendment to undermine the corporate regulatory fabric that has been built up since the founding of the Republic. You know about the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which said that corporations were legal persons entitled to free speech rights. You remember last year’s decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, where the Supreme Court decided that the mandate in Obamacare requiring corporations to pay for some of their employees’ contraception is a violation of the company’s First Amendment right of religious expression.

Here are a few examples you may not know about:

On April 14, 2014, a federal court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment free-speech right not to tell anyone if they’re financing “war and humanitarian catastrophe” in Congo. The court decided that although corporations can usually be required to disclose “purely factual and uncontroversial information,” but, in this case, that this principle is limited to government efforts to protect consumers from deception.

The regulation was an obscure provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) that requires companies to inform the public if their products use conflict minerals. In the case of conflict minerals, the Act’s goal is to let consumers know if the products they are buying are helping to finance war.

To the court, that provision of Dodd-Frank is unconstitutional, because “it requires an issuer to tell consumers that its products are ethically tainted, even if they only indirectly finance armed groups.”

This is part of a growing Corporate movement to use their rights of Free Speech under the First Amendment to escape regulation, and it has been steadily winning victories in the federal courts.

Another case: In 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), released a rule requiring businesses to put up an 11”x17” black-and-white poster notifying employees of their rights under federal law. Beneath the official NLRB seal and above the phrase “This is an official government poster,” it informed employees that they have the right to join, or not to join, a union, and that they cannot be coerced into doing either.

The National Association of Manufacturers sued the NLRB and In May, 2013, the US Court of Appeals in the DC Circuit struck down the NLRB’s rule on First Amendment and statutory free speech grounds. The Court said it did not matter that the “speech” in question was a non-ideological poster that stated US law. And it did not matter that the rule placed no constraints on companies’ speech or on the free flow of information. The Court held that the act of compelling a company to “host or accommodate another speaker’s message” was enough to violate its free speech.

Over the past few years, corporations like Nike, Verizon, Google, and the credit ratings agencies like S&P and Moody’s have been crafting (and winning in court) with innovative new First Amendment defenses to blunt all sorts of “government intrusions”.

What’s going on? The right of free speech was closely connected with the defining idea of government by “We the People“. James Madison explained that in his view, “free communication among the people” is “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

From the Country’s founding until late in the 20th century, the courts didn’t rule that the First Amendment protected very much of corporate speech. But now, Corporations are busy collecting a portfolio of First Amendment case law that establishes that corporations have a First Amendment-protected right to avoid much of government regulation. If this continues, it will change our society:

• There will be no corporate transparency
• No way to enforce workers’ rights
• No way to compel companies to protect investors or shareholders

Most financial regulations will cease to provide meaningful value to consumers.

Perhaps we have to ask our Courts to remember Justice John Marshall, who wrote in 1819, “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.”

All of the regulations that helped foster a strong economy and a strong middle class during the 1940’s through the 1970’s are now being weakened through a Corporatist revolution, enabled by our courts.

America is looking at the start of another period of unfettered capitalism. The rise of the Corporatists is at hand. We have reached the point now where we have government of the Corporation, for the Corporation.

What are you (we) gonna do about it?

The Pentagon’s Huge Problems with the F-35

The F-35 combat aircraft is the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. It will cost $1.5 trillion to build and operate over its lifetime. Most pilots think that the F-35 is being tasked with too many things, from use as a fighter and a bomber, to landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, to performing vertical takeoffs and landings. These are conflicting demands, requiring the plane to be over-configured to accomplish all of them. So, the F-35 is unlikely to handle all of these requirements at a high level.

Despite all of the above, in the Pentagon spending bill that passed last month, Congress approved nearly a half a billion dollars more for the F-35 than the Pentagon even asked for.

Conventional wisdom touts the F-35 as an aerial Swiss army knife, but the F-35 is proving to be more like a butter knife — one that only slices taxpayer dollars. A recent report by the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), highlights the conclusions in the latest F-35 report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E). Among the problems highlighted in the DOT&E report:

• Software glitches disrupting enemy identification and weapons employment
• A redesigned fuel tank that continues to demonstrate unacceptable vulnerability to explosion from lightning or enemy fire
• Wing issues that cause loss of controlled flight during high-speed maneuvering, a six-year-old problem that apparently will not be solved without sacrificing stealth or combat capability
• Helmet issues that prevent pilots from seeing things approaching from the side
• Engine problems so severe they’re impeding the test schedule, and generating risky operational decisions
• Maintenance issues leading to over-reliance on contractor support

The Marines’ version of the plane won’t be operational until this summer, while the Navy’s version won’t be operational until at least 2018.

There are accusations that Lockheed Martin has papered over these problems, failing to include certain failures or re-categorizing them to improve program statistics. Taken together, the GAO and DOD reports make for an unambiguous headline:

The F-35 is years away from being the next-gen fighter jet promised by Lockheed to the Pentagon.

More time, more money and unresolved problems. What is going on here?

That’s not all. Head-to-head competition with the Russian SU-30 fighter/bomber was conducted in the US in 2008, and the results favored the Russian aircraft. Now, aircraft have two primary missions, air-to-air combat (ATA), and air-to-ground attack (ATG). The F-35 failed the ATA exercises SIX YEARS AGO.

If you find this summary alarming, consider taking a tranquilizer or two before digesting the full POGO article (“Not Ready for Prime Time”) or the detailed DOT&E report, both of which focus on a subject that are the eventual cost equivalent to the combined GDP’s of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

We are at the point where we will be fielding yesterday’s aircraft solution tomorrow. To a great degree, this is a failure of the Defense Department’s Acquisition Process. POGO believes that the problem is not nearly as much with the detailed laws and regulations that govern the acquisition of military goods, as it is in the management by the people who have been operating the system. In the case of the F-35, while several nations are providing elements of the plane, Lockheed is the sole source contractor for the DOD.

This creates a case of moral hazard. Moral hazard is the idea that misplaced incentives can create unintended and adverse behaviors. For example, an insurance policy with no deductible could embolden some drivers to discount the consequences of reckless driving, raising the likelihood of accidents. Applied to a defense contractor, this policy can cause a heavy economic toll.

The F-35 program is an example of moral hazard. By continuing to lavish cash upon a failing program, Congress risks making failure a financially viable strategy. The predictable result would be more failure. This debacle is, in many ways, a sign of what happens when Congress is no longer the domain of the kind of statesmanlike adult behavior that puts the country first.

Congress itself has incentives to set perverse incentives for others. Unfortunately for the country, the first sign that moral hazard has truly captured our national defense maybe relying on a program that is supposed to be the single answer, one that does not perform, continues to be postponed, and costs far too much.

The second sign will be the inability of our airpower to effectively support our ground and sea military efforts, as and when called upon.

This will happen if bad decisions continue to bleed our resources, and Congress continues to try to make room for the F-35, a weapon that has not proven itself.

The Republican Revolution is De-evolution

De-evolution, or backward evolution, is a term in biology that describes the fact that a species can change from a more complex form into a more primitive form over time. So noted. Now on to the commentary below:

America used to have smart, effective Republicans, but alas, not recently, and not in the lifetimes of younger voters. In line with this de-evolution of Republicans, consider Paul Krugman’s take down of what he labels the Charlatan Caucus, a group of supply-side voodoo economists that Scott Walker had to court this week: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

On Wednesday…[Walker] did what, these days, any ambitious Republican must, and pledged allegiance to charlatans and cranks.

Krugman reminded us that the phrase, “charlatans and cranks” was originally coined by Republican economist Gregory Mankiew, who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. Krugman is speaking about Gov. Scott Walker’s appearance at a New York dinner featuring supply-siders’ Arthur Laffer (of the Laffer curve), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. More from Krugman: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Bowing obeisance before the high priests of bunk – like questioning climate change, evolution, and the current president’s American bona fides – has become a “right” of passage for Republican presidential contenders. Clearly, to be a Republican contender, you have to court the powerful charlatan caucus.

In Krugman’s view, with these economists, reality always takes a holiday. Ideology takes precedence. He cites:

• Mr. Moore published a 2004 book titled “Bullish on Bush,” asserting that the Bush agenda was creating a permanently stronger economy.
• Mr. Kudlow sneered at the “bubbleheads” who asserted that inflated home prices were due for a crash.
• Mr. Laffer wrote in the WSJ in 2009, “Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates”. What followed were the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history.
• Mr. Moore publishes articles with lots of bad numbers. According to Krugman, Moore’s numbers are consistently wrong; they’re for the wrong years, or just plain not what the original sources say. And not surprisingly, his errors always make the case he wants.

But the supply-side ~~economists~~ charlatans continue to have a big influence on Republican politicians. The NYT also reports that the University of North Carolina’s Republican-appointed Board of Governors is closing several academic centers on its campuses dedicated to studying poverty, climate, and social change. That couldn’t also be about ideology, could it? More from The Times:

It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government…said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group…And this is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their control over.

OK, 29 of the 32 university board members were appointed by the Republican Legislature since 2010, but that doesn’t make the decision about politics?

It’s similar to Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, where our friend of education is cutting the University of Wisconsin’s budget by $300 million. Mr. Walker saw Mr. Laffer’s curve, and bought it. It hasn’t worked out so well for him, since he now has to refinance a $108 million debt payment, increasing the state’s borrowing costs by $19 million over the next two years. The re-fi is a result of Walker’s $600 million tax cut in 2014, which will ultimately lead to a $648 million deficit over the next two years. But, in the big Republican wet dream, he will be president by then, and blame his successor for Wisconsin’s fiscal debacle.

And there is Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), whose aggressive tax cuts were heartily cheered on by Republican economists, but which have driven his state into a deep fiscal crisis. North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory has also tasted the charlatan Kool-Aid, but isn’t quite there yet, although he’s working on it.

Back to Krugman. He concludes:

So what does it say about the current state of the GOP that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

Current-day Republicans seem to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality. What are you going to believe, Right-Wing doctrine, or your lying eyes? These days, Right Wing doctrine wins.

In America, there has been a steady drumbeat by conservatives against education. Conservatives really believe in education…but only if it’s the privatized, de-evolved kind.

You can’t have a bunch of people looking too closely at facts, because as is well-known, reality has a liberal bias.

Road Trip Vol. II

Finally, trees with green leaves, green grass and temps in the 50’s. There was snow cover along I-95 for 630 miles south from the mansion of Wrong in Connecticut. After that, we passed through 50+ miles of ice-covered trees. In that part of America, there seemed to be few snow plows, so gas station and supermarket parking lots were ice-covered. Many schools and stores were closed.

I-95 was dry from Baltimore to Savannah, due to Socialist snow plows clearing and salting the roads. Apparently, the Obama tyranny will never end.

Have you noticed that Congress looks more and more like their owners?

Boehner is convinced that America will blame the Democrats when funding for the Department of Homeland Security expires. The reality may be the opposite:

Today’s Links:

What ISIS wants. A must read from The Atlantic.

Netanyahu wrecked a two-state solution with Palestinians in 2011. Found this at Sic Semper Tyrannis, a go-to blog on military strategy in the Middle East

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have “cordial” meeting. Does cordial mean, “civil, but can’t stand each other?” Were they smiling, or grinding their teeth?

Monday Wake-Up Call – February 16, 2015

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” − Alvin Toffler

Today’s wake-up call is for Americans who can’t unlearn that trickle-down doesn’t work, and that voting in politicians who espouse it will prolong the nation’s agony. Do people know that the new GOP House began passing a series of deficit-hiking tax cuts that will primarily help the rich at the expense of everybody else?

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax legislation), wants to make some previous tax breaks permanent. From HuffPo:

The House voted 272 to 142 to make permanent a number of temporary provisions that are aimed at helping businesses earning up to $2 million. The main cut, which would add $77 billion to deficits over 10 years, allows businesses to immediately write off new equipment purchases up to $500,000. Temporary versions of the measure have been passed about a dozen times before, generally as economic stimulus measures.

The GOP then passed a second tax cut, aimed at giving bigger tax breaks for charitable giving. Ryan wants even more tax cuts that would add another $300 billion to the deficit. Those may reach the House floor later this month.

Here’s the Republican strategy: Slice the elephant and eat it a bite at a time. Pass small pieces of tax legislation while ignoring the deficit impact, then when their corporate and wealthy individual patrons are taken care of, remind everyone that the deficit is the biggest, baddest enemy the economy has. Then propose budget cuts that hit the working poor and the middle class. Ryan’s current strategy can be seen here: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

If you dare try to make these things that we all agree on that need to stay in the tax code permanent, it’s ‘You’re not paying for it; it’s a budget buster; you’re being irresponsible; you’re jeopardizing tax reform.’ Process, process, process…Here’s the problem. What we’re trying to do here, we’re trying to grow the economy. We’re trying to get people back to work.

That meme will end soon. It will be replaced with: “growth is being stifled by the deficit”.

The NYT’s Upshot notes that a number of Republican governors are proposing tax increases — and in every case, the tax hike would fall most heavily on those with lower incomes, while they propose simultaneous tax cuts for business and/or the wealthy. Krugman analyzes it thusly:

If you look for an overarching theme for overall conservative policy these past four decades…It has been about making the tax-and-transfer system harsher on the poor and easier on the rich. In short, class warfare.

Class warfare. These folks keep bottling snake oil and voters keep buying it. Lowering income taxes on the wealthy doesn’t create jobs. Why would it? The focus of the GOP on cutting income taxes is solely intended to protect the rich.

Wrongo has run businesses for 35+ years and never saw taxes as an impediment. Taxes are paid out of profits, not revenue, and paying taxes means you are running a profitable business. Cutting taxes for small business can be a disincentive: Why should the owners expand the business when their net is greater, and they didn’t have to increase sales? For large corporations, tax cuts mean that people in the C-suite get richer. Nothing. Filters. Down.

Here is your Monday tune to fight the Plutocracy. “Rich Man’s War” by Steve Earle, from his 2004 album, “The Revolution Starts Now”:

And some Monday hot links:

The Westminster Dog Show starts today. Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right are attending.

Researchers are using drones and satellites to spot lost civilizations. Remote sensing technology is revealing traces of past civilizations that have been hiding in plain sight.

Lobbyists move though the revolving door back to House and Senate committees. There is a profound change taking place among Capitol Hill staff, as many GOP lawmakers are handing the keys to K Street corporate lobbyists. Public Citizen’s Paul Holman notes that Speaker John Boehner, has “encouraged new members to employ lobbyists on their personal and committee staff.”

More than 4,000 Fort Carson soldiers are heading to Kuwait, where they will become one of America’s largest ground forces in the troubled region. Did you know that the Army has kept a brigade in Kuwait since the end of the Iraq war in 2011?

Majority of public school students are now considered low-income. Another success brought to you by trickle-down economics.

Unaffordable rents here to stay say experts. They aren’t likely to ease up for at least two years, according to the latest Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey

Money Changes Everything

The WaPo reported that the world’s 400 richest people added $92 billion to their collective wealth in 2014. Drilling down on the US political implications of that headline, Bloomberg reports: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Here’s a bit of perspective on the ever-rising cost of elections and the big-money donors who finance them: Three of the country’s wealthiest political contributors each saw their net worth grow in 2014 by more than $3.7 billion, the entire cost of the midterm elections.

(OpenSecrets.org reported that the tab for the 2014 House and Senate elections came to $3.7 billion.)

Bloomberg’s records show that Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs) each earned enough in 2014 to have covered all of that campaign expense with the just the growth in their individual wealth.

So, the 2014 return on investment for political donations seems to be very, very good. And with investment returns like that, Citizens United will remain in place forever.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that 11 of the political donors that Bloomberg tracks added a combined $33 billion to their wealth in 2014. The implication is that, as the 2016 presidential election season approaches, almost all of those donors will have even more cash to ~~burn~~ contribute.

Their wealth, combined with loosening campaign-finance restrictions and the growing comfort of the wealthy flexing their financial muscles in politics will jump-start 2016 primary campaigns in the next few months. And Congress gave an additional gift to wealthy donors by voting in the CRomnibus to raise the limits on how much individuals can give to political parties: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Previously individual donors could give the national party committees up to $32,400 per year. The new law allows donors to add gifts of up to $97,200 to each of three causes: presidential nominating conventions, building funds, and legal proceedings, such as recounts.

That’s a grand total of $324,000 per year, ten times the prior level.

This points to a reality: A wealthy donor can now almost singlehandedly bankroll a candidate, as Sheldon Adelson did for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2012. These buckets of ducats raise questions about whether their political contributions create policy. Bloomberg quotes Craig Holman of Public Citizen:

Our democracy just isn’t going to survive in this type of atmosphere…The US, throughout history, has worked on a very delicate balance between capitalism in the economic sphere and democracy in the political sphere. We no longer have that balance. The economic sphere is going to smother and overwhelm the political sphere.

The sheer amount of money some donors made on paper in 2014 rewrites the context of “big” money in politics. For a state-wide political race, a $1 million cash infusion could change the outcome. For America’s big-money clique, it’s a fraction of what some billionaires can make or lose in a single day.

The NYT’s Binyamin Appelbaum contends in “Who Wants to Buy a Politician?” that there is an upper limit to the political expenditures by the wealthy. He makes the point that during the 2014 midterms, television stations in several contested markets reported that they had sold all of their available slots and that one station in New Hampshire actually issued refunds after selling more ads than it could air.

He says that the real return on political investment is in lobbying, which seems to be more valuable than campaign contributions. Appelbaum quotes Michael Munger, of Duke University:

Incumbents and large corporations can basically spend as much as it would take to defeat some change that would harm them…They spend around 10 times as much on lobbying, suggesting that it’s less effective to influence the selection of policy makers than to influence the policy-making process itself.

Also, the lobbyists threaten legislators that there will be fewer campaign donations next time unless the legislator votes correctly.

Either way, the wealthy have the money to buy the change they need, or you do not.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 4, 2015

RIP Mario Cuomo:

(Columbus Day Parade, October 11, 1982. Mayor Edward Koch, Gov. Mario Cuomo and Westchester County Executive Alfred DelBello march down New York’s Fifth Avenue) Credit: Associated Press

You have to wonder how different the country would be if Mario Cuomo had agreed to become a Supreme Court Justice in 1993 when Bill Clinton offered to nominate him to replace Byron R. White. George Stephanopoulos has written that Clinton came within 15 minutes of nominating Cuomo, until the latter rejected the job in a phone call with Stephanopoulos.

The Wrongologist never drops bold-face names in the blog, but today is an exception. In 1988, he (and Ms. Oh So Right) were backstage speaking with Frank Zappa, who was playing in Boston. Wrongo asked who Zappa would support for president the next time around, since the Dukakis debacle had just happened. He said: “only Mario”. At the time, the Wrongologist agreed. But Mario would never run, and Zappa died in 1993.

On Christmas, Neil deGrasse Tyson sent this Tweet:

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 25, 2014

It caused the usual spewing by the “war on Christmas” crowd, who claimed that Tyson was deliberately provoking them. Tyson replied:

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

Speaking of truth, here is the whole objective truth:

2015 will be totally different, except:

We just ceased combat operations in Afghanistan. What did we learn?

Republican leader Scalise attends Klan meeting. What did the GOP learn?

Transforming America, Part I

For the past few months, this blog has featured this quote:

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time, comprehend –Hubert Selby Jr.

Let’s start this year with a meditation about one transformative idea. Not something that is peddled by the DC think tanks, but an idea that lurks just below the surface.

All of us have wondered, like the characters in Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” (and maybe, with increasing frequency) “hey, something is wrong here”. Maybe you accept mainstream logic, but now you’ve come to realize that things are getting out of control, despite the constant messaging from your ideological god of choice that tries to pull you back to conventional thinking.

Here is the transformative idea for today: The free market isn’t a beautiful self-correcting machine. Instead, it is consuming our society and our environment for the benefit of a very few.

And it isn’t an orderly process; the trajectory is more like a slow free-fall in which the market system moves downward devouring everything, unless it is met by real opposition. In fact, the globalized version of the free market makes life horrible for lots of people, creating a constant need for intervention.

For a couple of examples, you don’t get the Russian Revolution(s) without the Czar trying to play ‘catch up’ with the West. You don’t get the Cuban Revolution without the crimes of the Batista regime.

When there is a backlash against corporatism, especially on the periphery, capitalists come up with a solution. Anyone is better than a bunch of reformers who want society to pay attention to people’s well-being rather than to profits.

With globalization, local thugs became very useful. Folks like Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, Mubarak in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, and Hussein in Iraq. Most of the time, these folks did the job big business wanted done (even if it was messy). And the American government protected US corporate assets in-country, and propped up the compliant local politicians. The profits got privatized, and the losses socialized, since our taxes paid for the military aid to the dictators, while the corporates skimmed the profits. And much of those profits remained offshore, out of reach of our taxing authorities.

Today, the useful thugs working on behalf of the American Empire are in Washington DC. They have made our political system a self-replicating support system for free market capitalism. We have retained only a veneer of our democracy, while moving rapidly in the direction of an authoritarian business-state combine, an improved version of Mussolini-style corporatism.

Oswald Spengler, who’s “Decline of the West” argued in the 1920’s that the urban culture of Northern Europe was a “Faustian” world, (his term for one of 8 global cultures) characterized by bigness and rationality, eventually to be dominated by the soldier, the engineer, and the businessman.

Doesn’t that seem particularly relevant to today’s America? Spengler thought that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and that the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. Importantly, he said:

The ‘tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers’ is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

So here we are. One day, it was 2014, the next day, 2015. What has changed? Nothing. What will change? Nothing, unless you begin a process of thinking about one transformative idea:

The free market doesn’t self-correct. Therefore, it is an ideology that must be changed.

The struggle between market forces and societal needs has always existed. In the 20th Century, we evolved a series of social democracies that kept the rights of the people balanced against the rights of the corporations, with some of the pushback actually coming from businesses themselves.

But today, well-funded efforts to roll back New Deal and New Society social welfare programs are well advanced. And there are only so many times that this blog and others can point out that many Americans have been unemployed since 2008.

The political question is what happens to this great new underclass in America? An underclass that has grown large because of the past 7+ years of economic disparity. Since the free market system that is grinding up our society is a utopian fantasy, we should be able to turn to our democratic system to help solve the real failures of our economic system.

But, our democratic system has been co-opted by the free marketers. So, who can ordinary people turn to for help AGAINST the market?

The corporatists and their captured politicians have a term, “there is no alternative” or TINA. It has come to mean that “there is no alternative” to free markets, free trade, and globalization, if our society is to prosper. They stress TINA to keep ordinary people from seeing that we need to constrain the worst of free market excesses.

The unbridled free market has to die.

Monday Wake Up Call – December 15, 2014

Today’s Wake-Up Call is for Congress and the president. Mr. Obama’s support of the “CRomnibus” year-end spending package showed how the next two years in Washington will play out, and it doesn’t bode well for anyone (you) who doesn’t employ a registered lobbyist.

You already know that the budget bill included a rollback of derivatives reform, and a nearly ten-fold increase in the donation limits for party committees. What may have been less obvious is that the bill cuts $60 million from the EPA and $346 million, about 3%, from the IRS. The IRS cuts tell wealthy earners that tax avoidance is safe, with little expectation of an audit.

The White House basically turned on its own party, accepting roll-backs of liberal priorities. It’s clear that this kind of legislative sausage-making will be the rule in 2015.

Other benefits for specific lobbies:

• Private Pension Plan trustees could cut pension benefits to current retirees, reversing 40 years of promises to workers who earned their retirement packages.
• Voters in DC who approved legalized marijuana will see their initiative die, since Congress prevented the DC government from taxing or regulating the drug’s sale.
• Trucking companies can make their employees put in an 82-hour work week without mandatory time off.
• Pell grants for college students will be cut, with the money diverted to private student loan contractors.
• Blue Cross and Blue Shield will be allowed to count “quality improvement” measures toward their mandatory health spending under Obamacare’s “medical loss ratio” provision, a windfall that saves millions of dollars.
• The EPA is blocked from regulating certain water sources for farmers.
• Reduced nutrition standards in school lunches and the Women, Infant and Children food aid program was a gift for potato growers.
• The bill halts the listing of new endangered species.
• It stops the regulation of lead in hunting ammunition.

The White House never threatened a veto of the CRomnibus over these riders, and actually supported the bill. House Democrats complained of being “lobbied by the White House” on the legislation. This is sure to be a recurring policymaking feature of the next two years.

So this is the new normal on Capitol Hill. The precedent for making changes on headline issues by tucking rollbacks into must-protect or must-pass legislation has been set with the White House’s active cooperation.

In other words, there’s your proof that elections have consequences.

Here are a couple of wake-up tunes for Monday. First, in keeping with the prime directive (well, maybe it’s the sub-prime directive), that the banks can never fail again, here is the late Pete Seeger doing “The Banks are made of Marble”:

The song was written by Les Rice in 1948 or 1949. Rice was a farmer in Ulster County, NY. Seeger lived across the Hudson from him, and apparently they met on several occasions.

Our second tune is in keeping with the other prime directive of a holly, jolly season. Captain Picard does “Let it Snow”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-zdMkOZTKs&app=desktop

Monday’s Hot Links:

The US attempted to co-opt Cuba’s hip-hop scene to foment revolution: USAID tried to recruit underground rappers in Cuba to sow unrest against Raul Castro’s government. They failed. Compared to the CIA torture story, this is small potatoes, but still another example of how we can’t stay out of any country’s internal affairs. Because, freedom!

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that insider trading is ok as long as the person accused of insider trading didn’t know that the original tipper disclosed the information in return for personal gain. Guessing that you’ll never know.

Thirty years after the Bhopal chemical accident, the worst in history, the spill’s effects are hitting a new generation. Professional clean-up hasn’t happened and there are no signs that the environmental catastrophe will end.

Congress and the President are going in the opposite direction from the Federal Reserve. The Fed is making the banks pony up more reserves to protect their balance sheets, while Congress and Obama are saying “go big on derivatives baby, we’ve got your back”.

Study supports the theory that all ‘men are idiots’. Well, it wasn’t a scientific study, but it looked at 318 Darwin Awards cases, of which 282 Darwin Awards went to males, and just 36 awards were given to females. Males made up 88.7% of Darwin Award winners.

Old news department: The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll says that 56% of Americans say the country’s economic and political systems stacked against them. Different result from the NYT survey last week.

Your thought for the week:

I had two options, to remain silent and then be killed. Or I could speak up, and then be killed. I chose to speak up. – Malala Yousafzai, from her Nobel Peace Prize speech

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 14, 2014

Tough week trying to pick the worst from among the many, many wrongs this week:

• Congress passes a budget that defangs Dodd-Frank: Citibank got Congress to let the big banks place their risky derivatives business back under the protection of taxpayer-paid insurance. So we get to shoulder the losses when the next big bank failure comes. The Congress attached it to the CRomnibus spending bill that the president won’t veto. We can dig through the couch cushions for spare change to bail out the banks next time. Simon Johnson said it best:

Give enough clever people the wrong incentives and they will destroy anything.

• Congress also lowered funding for the EPA, and stuck in a provision that allows private funding of national conventions. They were previously publicly funded.
• Some detail on “we tortured some folks” became public with the publishing of the CIA Lite torture report. If that wasn’t wrong enough, many pols and pundits just gave up, and said torture was useful and necessary. One right thing was John McCain’s speech on the floor of the Senate debunking torture as a means of getting information.
• There was more wrong-headed messaging about the Ferguson/Garner cases. But there was also many “die-in” demonstrations around the country along with the usual finger-pointing about the demonstrators’ reactions, both peaceful and not-so-peaceful.

Dick Cheney continued his spirited defense of the indefensible: