The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: January 2010 Page 1 of 5

A Small Victory

Panicked by losing Kennedy’s seat to the Repubicans, the Senate told Obama that if he wants to gut Social Security and Medicare, they won’t be joining in:

The Senate has rejected a plan backed by President Barack Obama to create a bipartisan task force to tackle the deficit this year.

The special deficit panel would have attempted to produce a plan combining tax cuts and spending curbs that would have been voted on after the midterm elections. But the plan garnered just 53 votes in the 100-member Senate, not enough because 60 votes were required. Anti-tax Republicans joined with Democrats wary of being railroaded into cutting Social Security and Medicare to reject the idea.

Sometimes elections do have good results.  Obama has lost a ton of influence with both the House and Senate, and that’s a good thing, but objectively, his policies stink.

Of course, Barack Obama certainly intends to keep trying:

Advocates of more aggressive steps to address the national debt failed Tuesday in their effort to create a bipartisan commission to press for tax increases and spending cuts, but President Obama now plans to establish a similar panel by executive order in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

Pathetic.  The only President of my adult lifetime I’ve had more contempt for than Obama was Bush Jr.

What Roberts Said

Government exists as a profit center for private enterprise, as I have said many, many times.

In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests.  Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.

Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized.  These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.

The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.

Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.

And this is only going to get worse, by the way.

In Light of the Decision To Allow Unlimited Corporate Money Into the System

I offer a blast from the past, the post I wrote on Roberts nomination, when it became clear the Democrats weren’t going to fight it…  (Oh, and also, for those who think I use impolite language now, read this.)

People are very strange in very many different ways. To me what is strangest about people is how many of them cannot see what is completely obvious. Let’s take the Afghani elections. Some parties weren’t allowed to run. More votes were cast than the entire population of the country, US money was funneled to certain parties, we had reliable reports that registration cards were for sale, we know that bribed power brokers controlled voter registration. So, when the election monitors came back and reported that the election had been free, everyone smiled and patted themselves on their idiot backs. But, of course, even assuming they were right that no ballot boxes had been stuffed in the few ridings they were in, the election was as free as any other election where a foreign power determines what parties are allowed to run, where more people vote than are alive and where regional bosses determine who votes.

The whole Roberts thing is looking very similiar.

Bush has said that he loves Scalia and Thomas and that he would appoint a justice like them.

Roberts has spent a good part of his life working for Republicans in general and for the Bush family in particular. He gave Jeb Bush advice in the 2000 Florida recount (and we can guess, from what happened at the time, that that advice was how to recall the legislature and award the victory to Bush if the Supremes fell down on the job.)

His wife is in charge of a pro-life organization so extreme that they wanted Schiavo kept half-alive in a vegetative state.

He has given George Bush the right to ignore the Geneva conventions, in direct contradiction to the part of the constitution that makes any treaty part of the law of the land.

The rightest of right wing flakes, guys like Dobson and the Family Research Council, have endorsed him.

But because he doesn’t have a lot of judicial opinions he ordered written for him by his clerks we’re supposed to think we don’t know where he stands? We know who loves him. We know who he’s chosen to work with all his life. We know who he sleeps with. We have seen not a single decision from the bench that indicates that any of the other things we know is wrong.

We know he’s a telegenic, smarter, version of Thomas or Scalia – at best, Rhenquist.

Bush and his allies aren’t subtle people. They tell you what they’re going to do, often years in advance, and then they do it. They do this time in, time out. And yet, for some reason, people still don’t believe them.

So let’s bring it back. Any failure to recognize that Roberts is Scalia prettied up is just gutless timidity and an unwillingness to look the facts full in the face. It isn’t some intellectually principled ‘we must wait till all the evidence is in’, it’s the exact opposite – an unwillingness to operate on the strong evidence which already exists.

And compromising on Roberts, being unwilling to filibuster him, is just another way of saying “I don’t really give enough of a fuck about civil liberties, about a woman’s right to control her own body, about the imperial presidency, about habeas corpus, or about torture to put up more than a token fight.”

The filibuster deal was the pre-surrender of 14 “moderates” to the Bush administration. Fighting is too much bother, upholding the constitution and the rules of the Senate is too much trouble, so we’ll just compromise ourselves right now and save everyone from having a real fight on the real issues.

Democrats in Congress are only willing to take on fights they’ve already won. What’s their big victory these days? Oh yeah, saving Social Security. They managed to defend the third rail of American politics. That’s the level they’re reduced to – that their only significant victory of the last five years is keeping the most popular government program in existence going.

But if something requires a bit more of a fight than that, if it requires going out and saying “Roberts sleeps with a woman who thinks that Congress was right to try and keep Terry Schiavo alive against her own wishes and those of her husband”, well they can’t do it.

I mean, it’s not a hard fucking fight. Everyone is acting as if because he has a nice plastic smile and has some actual friends who say actual nice things about him, that he can’t be stopped.

Tie him to the loons who everyone despises – the ones who wanted to keep Terry a zombie, and then burn them together.

And while you’re at it, take out the Fedealist Society. The White House is now saying that Roberts doesn’t “recollect” if he was ever a member – does no one have any fucking killer instinct left? Mock him mercilessly on this. No one forgets such a thing. Use his unwillingness to admit it to destroy both him and the Federalist Society, so that no judge will ever dare join them ever again.

This fight is not only winnable, it is eminently winnable. If someone has the balls to fight, fight hard and fight dirty.

As always there are real consequences to this – real people are going to die and suffer because Roberts makes it to the court. Real women, real girls, may well bleed out in alleyways because of this. Innocent people may go to jail without ever having a chance to face their accusers and the US may go to more wars because Roberts believes that Senate oversight is lese majeste.

But apparently this is just another fight the Dems are going to roll over on. One look at Roberts’ pretty face and their knees went all weak and they decided that the trust they owe those whom they’ve spent the last thirty years promising, “if nothing else, we’ll protect Roe”, means nothing.

Cause hey, their wives, their daughters, will be flown out of the country.

It’s only the little people who’ll pay the price.

And who gives a fuck about them?

Ok, I keep underestimating Obama’s

stupidity.  Seriously. (h/t Agonist.)

President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up to Wednesday’s State of the Union address, Hill Democratic sources familiar with the plan tell POLITICO.

This is in reaction to polling which shows that Americans are worried about the deficit.  Of course, if Obama does this, the economy will not recovery properly, and people will vote against him and Democrats anyway.  The correct response, politically and policy-wise, is to fix the economy, in which case people won’t give a damn about the deficit.

I should add, also, that security spending is very ineffective stimulus and even worse development or industrial policy. It’s better than tax cuts, admittedly, but it’s not better than most non-security spending.

I really don’t know what to say about Obama any more, other that the law of Bush is still in effect: no matter how bad you think things are they are always worse than you think, even if you take this law into account.  Except it’s now the rule of Obama.

Please re-read my post on getting out.

More Obama Stupidity

Seriously, what part of tax cuts are lousy stimulus and bad policy is bad politics doesn’t this incompetent screwup understand?

President Barack Obama is proposing a tax package aimed at appealing to middle-income Americans, including an increased tax credit for child care and an expansion of tax credits to match retirement savings.

The proposals are intended to fit within the main themes — the economy, jobs and tackling the deficit — the president plans to sound in his State of the Union address on Jan. 27, according to an administration statement.

If at first tax cuts don’t succeed, or the second time, or the tent time, why then, suggest more tax cuts!

One more time, repeat after me. If you pursue bad policy, then you will reap bad results.  The job market will not be improved significantly (if at all) by tax cuts, since every dollar a middle class schmuck gets, someone with pricing power (aka, the banks, healthcare industry, etc…) will take away.

Anything that by some miracle isn’t taken away, will be used to pay down debts or saved, and if a few cents are spent, they’ll be spent on crap from China and will generate no appreciable demand for US goods.

Tax cuts do not make the economy better, they certainly do not create jobs worth mentioning, and no, Virginia, they don’t improve the deficit either.

Schmuck.  He still thinks he’s Reagan for the 21st century.

China Second to US in research, set to pass in 2020

Not, actually, a surprise, to anyone who isn’t an idiot:

China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

Why is this?

According to James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government’s enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research.

Second is the organised flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. Third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in north America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the west and part in China.

Oh.  Because you get what you pay for and what you plan for.  The US has been starving its scientists and forcing them to rely on private funding, and China has been investing in them, bigtime.

Because China understands leading in science helps you lead in technology and that helps your country be strong and prosperous.

Oh, and that real strength means not prioritizing military research.

The US understood all those things, once upon a time.

A while back I stumbled upon an ex-reader commenting that he quit reading FDL when I was talking about how China was going to eat the US’s lunch in the next couple generations.

He epitomized why the US is going down, because no one can tell Americans they aren’t the center of the universe and the best at everything.  And since Americans think they are the best, it never occurs to them that they need to actually, really, fix anything.

Looks like a test case to end abortion rights to me

Is this illegal?

A Burlington woman is accused of trying to end her pregnancy by allegedly falling down stairs because police say she was mad at her husband.

Christine Taylor is charged with attempted feticide. She was arrested on Wednesday after receiving treatment at a hospital.

Police were called to a hospital late Tuesday after Taylor reportedly told a nurse she intentionally fell down the stairs of her home because she wanted to end her pregnancy.

If so, I can’t see how abortion is legal.

What Dave Said

Actually, this is already the primary strategy of a huge part of US industry (telecom, IP, insurance, pharma, among others), but it’s about to get worse:

The Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to use their vast resources to directly influence the political process shifts the business playing field away from competing in the marketplace with products and services, to purchasing government/legal/reguatory advantages, subsidies and monopolies.

The marketplace is now irrelevant – only company size matters. It is just more efficient to beat your competitors by buying legislation than it is by competing in the marketplace. When you can purchase $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies, mandates, contracts, whatever by spending a few million on candidates/influence, etc. it just makes more sense to do so. The return on investment is just so much higher than building factories, spending on research, paying employees, and other tedious, time-consuming, capital-intensive work.

For some time companies have recognized that the rewards from lobbying outperform the rewards from competing in the marketplace, and this ruling just amplifies that. This 2006 New York Times article, Google Joins the Lobbying Herd, discussed how Google felt it had “no choice but to get into the arena” to start “spreading its lobbying dollars” around to politicians and quotes Lauren Maddox, a lobbyist for Google, saying the “policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.” This supreme court ruling just clinches this shift away from markets.

This has been part of my fundamental critique of the US economy for years. This is why the US is losing its technological lead in area after area, because innovating is less certain than buying government.

Thing is, foreign companies don’t have this “advantage” so have to compete the old fashioned way.  And they will continue to eat American companies lunch.  As the US gets weaker, and becomes less able to force foreign companies to obey American laws, this strategy will become less and less viable, especially as American citizens will also be losing buying power.

This sort of thing is why I now see the odds of the US turning itself around in the next generation as being miniscule.

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