Cocktailhag, the blog

The other day Mortimer Zuckerman went on The Ed Show on MSNBC, and blathered on and on about how all his fancy-pants “business” friends hated Obama because they were, unaccountably, “afraid” of him.  This tacit admission that the criminals and incompetents he runs around with know they couldn’t last five minutes without the constant indulgences of right-wing government failed to offer any actual reasons for that fear, of course.  Fear is the only product the GOP sells, so Zuckerman has to sell it, even if it’s such transparently gauzy claptrap about “rhetoric” and “attitude,” rather than any actual policy position.  He attempts to do this same schtick each day with his laughably pathetic “journalistic” enterprises, the irrelevant New York Daily News and the invisible US News and World Report, a strategy which might be more likely to work if anyone still read them.  As far as the hierarchy of vanity right-wing publishers goes, Rupert Murdoch, say,  doesn’t exactly “fear” this guy, if you know what I mean and I think you do.  In other words, the opinions of his imaginary friends have absolutely no value; he’s obviously a liar and undoubtedly a failure at journalism (the Market decided, long ago…), so why anyone on TV gives him the time of day remains a mystery, but the message of that Darkie Obama goin’ after business was once again delivered.  Mission Accomplished.

You have to sympathize with Mortimer, and not just because that’s his name.  Not being able to offer the voters anything good each election cycle, Republicans continually have to remind us that all these sacrifices we have to make for their profligacy are the tithe we must pay to avoid something really, really, bad.  The bad things are as interchangeable as they are numerous, and all ludicrously unlikely.  Mushroom Clouds, Communism, Fascism, Death Panels, FEMA Camps, Reparations, One-World Government, European-Style Socialism, Collectivism, and my personal favorite, Sharia Law.  People not confined to mental institutions actually say, on a daily basis, the the Islamofascists are going to come over and forcibly put burquas on our women.  Seriously.  Here’s Rush Limbaugh, whom the Free Market has chosen to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for his yammerings, waxing all feminazi on 600 radio stations across America:

Let’s take, at face value, the template that the partisan political hacks spew at me. I am, according to them, anti-women’s rights. Equal rights for women is no concern of mine, right? I’m the guy that came up with the name “feminazi.” I’m not a friend of women’s rights, they say. If that were true, I would be pushing for the mosque at Ground Zero. If I were anti-women’s rights, I would be all for Sharia law. Sharia law is a not-so-stealth way to undermine women’s rights in this country. It would be a perfect cause if I was who they say I am.

Yes, Rush, some Muslims have some weird ideas about women, but your oft-spoken views are as bad or worse, and your relationships with women haven’t exactly turned out stellar, either, so it’s pretty audacious for you to take this line of argument, but do go on:

Anti-women’s rights is a cause of the left. That’s who’s pushing Sharia in this country: The left. It’s the left that wants a mosque at Ground Zero. It’s left who thinks “America’s chickens came home to roost” on 9/11. It’s the American left that thinks we got what we deserved on 9/11. It’s the American left that wants the mosque at Ground Zero. No one can be pro-women’s rights and remain silent about the metastasizing cancer that Sharia law is on women’s rights.

Ah, allowing a church and community center to be built on its own property, regardless of religious affiliation, which is to say, following the Constitution, is somehow related to wanting to impose Sharia Law, when any idiot would recognize it as the opposite.  Better yet, “the left,” which is deliberately presented as some monolithic force, is on the side of the terrorists, because some of the braver among us admitted that our foreign policies in the Middle East probably led to 9/11.  Who knew Ron Paul was a lefty?  But the newly-minted Betty Friedan of the AM dial has more:

The left is closer to the politics of Nazis than I will ever be. The person who was a National Socialist and anti-Israel would be anti-capitalist; pro-nationalization of health care, banks, education, car companies; pro-Central Planning; and try to force Israel (against its will and history) to divide its capital, Jerusalem, and to cave in to all of its enemies. None of that describes me. It describes them. It describes the left. Meaning if I were all that they say I am, I’d be one of them. Here is a leftist statist liberal, a person who believes that people should be treated differently according to their gender, the color of their skin, and their religion. Such as: Let’s use NASA to help Muslims feel better about themselves in math and science, and let Muslims build Sharia law shrines anywhere they want and pretend that we don’t know what that means.

Honestly.  The crazy here is so deep and thick, and so clearly from the fever swamps of the Rapture Right, it’s enough to make your head spin.  While he’s clearly at pains here to point out that although he famously favors ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, and torture, he’s no NAZI, Rush is a fat and happy capitalist who just bought himself a fifth wife (after a little rough patch with the drugs and the hookers); do you think he gives a flying fuck about Jerusalem and all that bible crap?  Of course not .  He’s paid, ridiculously lavishly, to foist this horseshit on Idiot America, and so he does.

Zuckerman must be so envious.

Admittedly, the dog/human relationship has evolved over many centuries; dogs were domesticated to ward off varmints, assist in hunting, act as guardians of the home, and were bred for these purposes, but long after most of them stopped doing any of these undeniably useful things, preferring instead to spend their limitless free time chewing on the furniture, digging up the yard, and eating cat poop, they’re still here, and in greater numbers than ever.  I find this unfathomable.  Why would otherwise sane people pay good money to have a filthy, loud, destructive, hair-shedding critter trash their home and belongings, suck up money and poop out, well, poop, for nothing more than some sort of weird, inter-species “companionship?”

I suppose I’m biased, having had, growing up, one of the most miserable curs (as yet)  known to man, a purebred miniature Schnauzer named Max, but compared to the dogs I encounter these days, Max was practically Lassie.  Due in part to a rather brutal version of toilet training by our housekeeper that involved hurling him down the basement stairs for every “accident,” Max could be left for a day or two without leaving any stinky surprises, at least in our house.  Neighbors weren’t so blessed, as we discovered later….  This being the early seventies, nobody walked dogs in those days, so all we had to do was let Max out, where he would poop in neighbors’ yards (never ours), chase cats, father lots of little Schnauzer-mix puppies, and beg for food, coming home only for meals.  Aside from a few doors ruined by scratching and the inevitable vet bills from fights, Max was a low-impact dog, and he knew his place.

Not so dogs today, who are raised by some sort of Benjamin Spock system wherein no behavior is too horrifying to be tolerated, and no expense too crippling to keep them around long past their usefulness by the veterinary “industry,” which no longer  allows a fed-up owner to put them to sleep, even if they have a terminal disease and/or the owner hates them.  Thus, self-destructive stupidity has been transformed into saintly “compassion.”  Rather than the other way around, today’s dog “owner” is now the dog’s servant, blaming themselves for the dog’s incorrigible behavior, and altering their lives for the worse to make the dog happy.  ”He chewed up my expensive new shoes because he was mad at me for being gone too long.”  ”She shit on my couch because she didn’t like the new food I gave her.”  ”He pulled the wallpaper off the wall because he was frustrated.”  No, those dogs did those things because they spotted you, as a dog owner in the 21st century, as a useful and credulous idiot, who will feed and support them whether they deserve it or not, and blame themselves, deservedly, for the fact that their spoiled and offensive dog ought to be dropped off at the nearest Korean restaurant, posthaste, for the good of all concerned.

Our capitalist system has obviously spotted this trend: once the Big Sleep, and even the rolled-up newspaper, became verboten in polite society, airlines could charge astronomical fees for transporting useless vermin hither and yon, every sort of dog pampering-enterprise could make bank, and the pet “industry” became as fat and happy as military contractors, not to mention those, like myself, who could make a nice living repeatedly repairing the damage dogs cause.  Dog ownership, like fundamentalist religiosity, is pretty much like walking around with a tattoo on your forehead that says, “Sucker,” and all manner of grifters have acted accordingly, as you’d expect.

That’s the worse aspect of this dog-worship, I think.  Dog owners have become just like the overly religious, in that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they still look with suspicion and even disgust on those who are too “selfish” and “cruel” to have a dog, or even resentfully respect those who choose not to have these flea-bitten freeloaders trash their homes and crimp their lives.  Thus, people who have made a completely irrational, costly, and often obnoxious lifestyle choice actually feel superior to those  smart enough not to.   That’s a problem.

Dog owners, like religious zealots, are entitled to whatever thin gruel of happiness they garner from their weird obsessions, I’ll be the first to admit, but both groups must accept the fact that no observable reality supports that decision, and behave accordingly.  If all dogs, and Christians, for that matter, go to Heaven, I’ll take Hell, if only because it will certainly smell better.

PS…  Happy Birthday to my brother, Turd, who was very excited when Joan and I finally took Max for the long night-night.

Well, today I read an interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in Der Spiegel, and I think I’m in love.  I know, Glenn Greenwald saw him first, but too bad; he’s mine.  Remember that before reading this, by the way.

In a SPIEGEL interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, discusses his decision to publish the Afghanistan war logs, the difficult balance between the public interest and the need for state secrets and why he believes people who wage war are more dangerous than him.

It is evident that the German press is now nearly as dumb as ours, “dangerous than him?), and just as automatically pro-secrecy, as you’ll see.  How convenient.

SPIEGEL: You are about to publish a vast amount of classified data on the war in Afghanistan. What is your motivation?

Assange: These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war — in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.

SPIEGEL: Do you think that the publication of this data will influence political decision-makers?

Assange: Yes. This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence.

Time to take the curlers out and head for Assange’s undisclosed location.

SPIEGEL: Aren’t you expecting a little too much?

Wars, you know, aren’t supposed to ever either end or even be talked about unduly by the small people; they just are.  Get with the program, you commie.

Assange: There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won’t do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner.

SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?

The treason card, just like ol’ Nixon, and from a supposed “journalist?”  Did Murdoch buy Der Spiegel while I was passed out or something?

Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources.

SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?

Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.

SPIEGEL: Is there anything that you consider to be a legitimate state secret?

You know, we journalists stopped doing, well, journalism a long time ago.  Why don’t you?

Assange: There is a legitimate role for secrecy, and there is a legitimate role for openness. Unfortunately, those who commit abuses against humanity or against the law find abusing legitimate secrecy to conceal their abuse all too easy. People of good conscience have always revealed abuses by ignoring abusive strictures. It is not WikiLeaks that decides to reveal something. It is a whistleblower or a dissident who decides to reveal it. Our job is to make sure that these individuals are protected, the public is informed and the historical record is not denied.

Hands off, he’s mine.

SPIEGEL: But in the end somebody has to decide whether you publish or not. Who determines the criteria? WikiLeaks considers itself to be a trailblazer when it comes to freedom of information, but it lacks transparency in its own publishing decisions.

You know, not like the WaPoo.

Assange: This is ridiculous. We are clear about what we will publish and what we will not. We do not have adhoc editorial decisions. We always release the full primary sources to our articles. What other press organization has such exacting standards? Everyone should try to follow our lead.

What he said.

SPIEGEL: The problem is that it is difficult to hold WikiLeaks accountable. You operate your servers in countries that offer you broad protection. Does WikiLeaks consider itself to be above the law?

You know, those laws about consent of the governed and a free press are so “quaint” these days.

Assange: WikiLeaks does not exist in outer space. We are people who exist on Earth, in particular nations, each of which have a particular set of laws. We have been legally challenged in various countries. We have won every challenge. It is courts that decide the law, not corporations or generals. The law, as expressed by constitutions and courts, has been on our side.

That he didn’t just say, “no wonder you have such a crappy job,”  but got the idea across anyway means I could start drinking earlier once we’re married.

SPIEGEL: You have said that there is a correlation between the transparency for which you are fighting and a just society. What do you mean by that?

Hitler showed us fascism “doesn’t matter.”

Assange: Reform can only come about when injustice is exposed. To oppose an unjust plan before it reaches implementation is to stop injustice.

I’ve got a ring all picked out.  I’ll buy it myself.

SPIEGEL: During the Vietnam War, US President Richard Nixon once called Daniel Elsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the most dangerous man in America. Are you today’s most dangerous man or the most endangered?

That would be the latter.  This Foxy Der Spiegelite clearly thinks somebody ought to, and probably will, snuff Assange, but soon.  That’ll come in handy if I get tired of him later, so the nuptials are still on.

Assange: The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped. If that makes me dangerous in their eyes, so be it.

Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah.  You tell them, Honey.

SPIEGEL: You could have started a company in Silicon Valley and lived in a home in Palo Alto with a swimming pool. Why did you decide to do the WikiLeaks project instead?

Gee, Mother Theresa, you could have joined a nice teaching order and avoided all that icky death and despair, and lounged poolside like Paris Hilton as a Good American should.  What’s wrong with you?

Assange: We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.

Imagine that.  And he’s picked the right bastards, too, in this case in the Obama Administration and the Neocon and Christianist-tainted military-industrial complex, who are reacting no better than Nixon did in a similar situation, revealingly.  Sadly, interviews like this show that Assange has a tough row to hoe in our world of Permanent War, but he’s on the right track.

A reporter once asked Zsa Zsa Gabor how many husbands she’d had.

“You mean besides my own?”

I know just how she feels.

Newt Gingrich took to the airwaves today to announce what all of the beltway elite have been talking about with dreary repetitiveness for months….  2010 is going to be a “wave” election that sweeps Republicans back into power, whereupon the regrettable accident of Democratic government will be well and truly set aside for good. Michele Bachmann, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Kristol,  Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sharron Angle, J.D.Hayworth and Sean Hannity all agree.  Isn’t that reason enough to think the wave-o-meter might be a bit off?  After all, these worthies had basically achieved everything they ever wanted: militarization, rollbacks of civil liberties and due process, massive deregulation, the tax burden shifted downward…  You name it, they got it, and look how that turned out.  You’d think this bunch would be embarrassed to go on TV offering more of the same, much less run for office on a BUSH4EVAR platform , given the entirely predictable disasters the Worst President in American History created for us over eight years, but you’d be wrong.

Just as Reagan taught the Republicans that (their) deficits “don’t matter,” Bush taught us, repeatedly, that failure also doesn’t matter.  Granted, you might need to start a well-timed war, capitalize on a terrorist attack you failed to prevent, get a leg up from the Supreme Court, work the US Attorneys into doing some voter supression and whatnot, but getting 50% + 1, as Tom Delay liked to call it, simply does not constitute a wave.  (Why Republican would even use the word “wave” is yet another mystery:  all the waves I see these days have oil in them…)  It’s official: Republicans have finally untethered performance from electoral success, but have American voters, really?

No one ever went down to defeat betting against the amnesia of the media, but a large number of Americans do remember what happened last week, last month, or even ten years ago, and to them Michele Bachmann’s vengeful rantings about taking down a Democratic President by taking back the House sound both deranged and drearily familiar.  The Temper Tantrum Party of the Gingrich years is clawing to get back to do the same old thing, and “Independents” are supposed to find such a prospect appealing and vote for them in record numbers.  There are reasons to doubt this.

Remember, Bush’s squeaker elections were not only shakily achieved, they were also deliberately deceptive: he didn’t come out and say he was going to bankrupt the country, start and lose a war or two, get rid of Social Security, and all that.  He was a “Compassionate Conservative” who would follow a “humble” foreign policy, and “give back the surplus” to taxpaying Americans.  In short, he had the good sense to lie.  Not so the Teabag-Americans of 2010.  Even as Michele Bachmann promises her investigations, Sen John Kyl announces that thirty billion for the unemployed would have to be scrapped to pay for $700 billion for the rich, and George Steinbrenner dies and leaves his multibillion dollar estate untaxed.  In other words, several more lies of the Bush Administration are exploding before our eyes, mainly the budget trickery that led to the sudden “expiration” of his ruinous tax cuts on the wealthy, and Republicans think they can make lemonade out of these lemons.  Good luck with that.

At least Sharron Angle has gotten with the program, and now denies that she ever said people needed to be “weaned” off Social Security, which of course is a lie, but at least a smart one.  Rand Paul just stopped talking altogether, and here in Oregon, free-throw champ Chris Dudley even ducked out of the traditional meeting with state newspaper publishers for a well-timed “family vacation” that happened to include a speech at the Republican Governor’s Association, in which he aspires to be a member.  Sarah Palin, whose half term compares favorably with Dudley’s none has gone ahead and, you know, while Marco Rubio has started a war with Rachel Maddow.  Is any of this wave-riding behavior?  Deliberate vagueness about governing priorities as an announced and obviously observed campaign strategy, of course, is the same tacit admission of unpopularity Republicans adopted long ago, since kleptocratic oligarchy has never polled too well, but this time it seems that the cat has even gotten Frank Luntz’s tongue.  When they aren’t lying, Republicans are simply clamming up, hoping to just ride the “wave” of their own fantasies back to the glory days of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay.  ”Cowabunga,” says the media.  I’m not so sure.

Well surprise, surprise.  It turns out that yet another Fox/Breitbart story about pigs flying, or rather, white victims of black racism, has been thoroughly exploded, as usual only after the damage has been done.   As usual, the excuse for the shamefully handled Shirley Sherrod story was that “everyone else” saw the porcine flyover, or at least knew someone who did, so they did the only natural thing and assumed that the improbable but nonetheless narrative-building story from the right’s new “media” must be correct, and another public servant was thrown to the wolves for the crime of serving in government while black.  As Rachel Maddow pointed out, the fact that this is about the eighth time this has happened reflects, if nothing else, that the media and administration are either adorably trusting or contemptibly stupid.

Admittedly, the race-based stuff is new, and is a stark enough reminder that the Republicans, having failed so dismally in their attempts to govern, are reduced to yelling “nigger” in trailer parks to avoid discussing what alternative they might provide to Democratic government.  But seriously, for many years nothing the Republicans have said, no matter how loudly, has been true, and if Democrats and the mainstream media were able to put two and two together, they’d have long ago moved from Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify” to Harry Reid’s “whatever they say, you can believe the opposite.”

From Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war, Reagan’s “Welfare queens,” Bush Sr.’s “out of the loop,” to George W. Bush’s “mushroom clouds,” the lies this bunch has told, and the undue credulity they’ve received, is the story of America’s descent into the fascistic oligarchy in which we find ourselves today.  No lie is too big or small to be used for rank, usually unrelated, political gain, and lies are routinely told even if the truth would sound better.  Before the Right had Fox News, virtually the entire AM dial, and a swarm of fake “think tanks” to push its propaganda, lies had to be used sparingly, and couldn’t be too easily or quickly proven incorrect to work.  Now, lies can work their magic in days, allowing politicians to be besmirched, careers to be ruined, and most importantly, false but nonetheless enduring and damaging narratives can be nurtured and built upon before anybody figures out that the whole thing was horseshit.  Worse, when the story inevitably explodes, the liars’ reputation is often advanced, in the fact-averse world created by the lies that conveniently preceded it.  In this absurd environment the truth can’t get its boots on because it’s already wearing cement shoes, and the lies now have an army of intrepid film editors and “reporters” which can cook up a fake story and disseminate it on any topic, any day.

Think of the people who, against all evidence, thought that the big banks ought to be deregulated–  have their careers, or even reputations, suffered?  What about those who touted the Iraq war as necessary, urgent, and the best thing for all concerned?  Or those who though Sarah Palin was brilliant?  Drill, Baby Drill?   In a just world, they’d all be getting rejection letters from WalMart and selling plasma, but instead they have television shows and multiple houses.  Then there are those who disagreed…  Joe Wilson, Paul O’Neill, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Dan Rather; the list is long of those who had the audacity to be correct, prematurely, and suffer greatly for it.

Correctness, it seems, is a dish best served cold as far as the beltway establishment is concerned, a phenomenon that is neither new nor uniquely American: author and admitted Communist Jessica Mitford was tagged for harassment by the Mc Carthyites here and in her native Britain for  her obviously sordid “premature antifascism.”  Somehow, what the Obama Administration has evidently “learned” from this boringly repetitive history is that, maybe this time, the right wing noise machine is onto something, so we had better capitulate pronto.  (Harvard must take anybody these days….)

What this story shows is that the right wing isn’t nearly as racist, deep down, as it pretends to be for its “base.”  They know where to find the people who are most likely to be progressive, smart, and potentially damaging to their worldview in any Democratic administration: amongst its women and minorities, and they thus seek to eliminate and/or marginalize them any way they can.  If the Obama administration had any brains, they would know that Republican smears are the sincerest form of flattery, and act accordingly.  The Republicans would be a little more apoplectic than usual, perhaps, but the Administration would make asses of themselves less frequently.

I almost laughed out loud when I saw that Forbes Magazine had published an article about the absurdly tiny but nonetheless (to them) significant, headlong rush of the rich to leave Socialist America, which to the folk at Forbes was a bad thing, rather than a cause for exultation.  Would that it were so:  think of the money taxpayers and ordinary people would save if they didn’t have to support the excessive lifestyles of the banksters, war profiteers, polluters, “developers,” and on and on who have captured the funding and regulatory arms of the government for their own vulgar aggrandizement; Dubai’s loss would, in this case, be America’s gain.  Cheaper housing, cheaper restaurants, and cheaper, well, everything would be great, but the best part would be the mass outmigration of arrogant, sociopathic assholes who really think they are worth 500 times what everyone else is, and act accordingly, making the rest of us miserable on a daily basis.  Given that no other country on earth idolizes its rich so fawningly, with all the privileges such fawning entails, the chances of this happening make zero look like a big number, but never mind all that.  Here’s Dan Mitchell, a “Senior Fellow” at the Washington-based Cato Institute, a “free-market” think tank, which means he relies on wingnut welfare to spout propaganda instead of contributing to society through useful work.

The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that Obama is creating in the United States. I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government. Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

As usual, imaginary friends and tinny cold war epithets form the duct tape that purportedly hold this flimsy argument together, but could it possibly have been made slightly less offensive and a bit more plausible by leaving out calling tax evasion “patriotic” and misspelling its manufactured villain’s name?  (It’s Ayers, you righty halfwit…)  The best part is that he treats “revenue maximization” as something good and holy, while “spite and envy” are sordid and evil, as a supposed justification for such greed-driven voluntary statelessness.  Anyone who has watched how the Republicans talk about the unemployed and all manner of their other chosen “lesser people”  (thanks, Alan Simpson for putting it so refreshingly bluntly…), and it’s pretty obvious where the spite, if not the envy, lies in this debate.

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

Since, as we all know, but only Leona Helmsley came out and said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”  Tony Hayward calls them, perhaps in a nod to the Queen’s English, “small people,” but you get the idea.

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans.

See, even the “liberal media” is deeply worried about the rich…  you should be, too.  The point of the whole thing is that Time reported that wealthy people (500 or so of them), have such snazzy tax lawyers that, like Dick Cheney, they came up with a way to not pay taxes pretty much at all by buying a fake address someplace awful, then profiting off of American taxpayer money, bailouts, legal immunity, and (!) citizenship, while living wherever they damn well please.  The main complaint is that they have to report every little cash transaction over $10,000, which we all know can be so onerous.  I bet tipping will suffer from that.  Then they find the following hogwash in the New York Times, but leave out whether the author is Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, or Ross Douthat:

…. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

Oh, I see; they found a tax that wasn’t devised to tilt to the rich.  It’s like a bunch of Che Guevaras in mink.

One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, (That’s one way to put it…)  said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Ah, what suffering, to have one’s multiple six-figure income, floating through the ether in banks all over the world, bothered with by one’s freeloading fellow citizens trying to get their dirty paws on it.  (Under a law dreamed up by the socialist (?) Bush Administration,  but niggling details like that don’t faze Cato…)  At least these beleaguered expats have a better chance of seeing their tax dollars at work than those of us at home do; if they’re lucky a bomb or drone might kill somebody or flatten a town in their area.  More likely, a hefty dividend check from the latest no-bid contract, a court decision relieving you of all liability for your latest crime, or a no-strings government bailout will land in your Swiss or Cayman Islands mail box with nary a thud, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  That’s what I call patriotic.

When I wrote Thursday’s post I could see this coming a mile away, but I hadn’t spotted this little treasure from The Daily Beast, which definitively proves that the right is looking, pretty much everywhere, for some new ACORNs, and as usual is relying on the stupidity and amnesia of the media to put them over, at least temporarily.  For a party utterly reliant on fraud and flim-flam to seize power, this is hardly an unexpected development.  Unfortunately for them, this is their their second racist faux-scandal in as many weeks, and the pathetically transparent diatribes in “defense” of the colorblind patriots at Teabag Central are the sorts of things that are not ready for the non-Murdoch media.  To wit:

At this week’s NAACP annual meeting, members voted to censure the Tea Party as “racist.” But it’s the NAACP that’s the throwback, argues Tunku Varadarajan.

Clearly, this bozo was reading from the memo from Mark Williams, but do the teabaggers trust a guy with such a terroristy-sounding name?  Seems so.

NAACP: Can we all agree that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cynical Politics?

Well, no.  It’s job, historically, has been to fight racism, which it quite evidently still needs to do.

The proper expansion of “NAACP” has a profoundly archaic ring to it. I know, I know: The retention of that primordial name—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—has to do with safeguarding history; and an irrefutably impressive history it is, too. But can anyone deny that the “colored” part of the organization’s name is no longer preservative of anything that is at all meaningful?

Oh, I don’t know.  The Republican Right has increasingly taken after brown people the world over, be they Hispanic, Muslim, or Black…  somebody still sees in color, it seems.  Why not the NAACP?  Further, these old-fashioned Constitutionalist guardians of (white) tradition can only declare themselves on the cutting edge of modernity to loud guffaws of incredulity whenever they try it, and this tendentious screed is certainly no exception.

Colored: Who the heck says that in the America of today, unless you’re a very, very old friend of the late highwayman (as in dedicated asphalt, not armed robbery) Robert C. Byrd? Which is why no member of this once-courageous black organization will spell out its full name. Everyone says, instead, “N-double A-CP”: To elongate the abbreviation is to expose oneself to derisive—or, worse, baffled—inquisition. (“Dad, Mom, what’s with the ‘colored’ thing?”)

Ah, toss in Robert Byrd, who long since repudiated the racist ideas modern Republicans increasingly embrace, and you can say the stupidest things and (almost) get away with it.  Well, on Fox News you can.

The NAACP, this vestigial bone on the American body politic, has thrust itself into the headlines by voting, at its annual meeting Tuesday, to censure as “racist” the Tea Party movement. (No, they didn’t.  They called upon the Tea Party movement to repudiate its racist elements, which have been both visible and numerous, so basically the whole argument is based on a lie….)  This controversial (with whom isn’t mentioned) public rebuke—delivered a day after the first lady, Michelle Obama, addressed the NAACP’s conference—has opened up a raw, new racial front in the run-up to the November elections. In effect, the self-congratulatory, post-racial Obama camp is reaching for the crudest weapon in the Democratic arsenal: the racial blunderbuss.

Well, given that all the black Republicans in America could meet in a phone booth, Republicans have nothing to say but, “It’s not me, it’s you,” which also a lie.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the NAACP is going back to an old playbook. The NAACP is resorting to the Jacksonian (Jesse, not Andrew) ploy to use the race card (a) to rally blacks to the mid-terms; and (b) to intimidate the mainstream media, so that it doesn’t report critically on a liberal administration, urging it instead to focus on the perceived sins of the Tea Party movement.

The Obama Administration, liberal?  Compared to what?  And the media is intimidated by it?  Obviously, the Daily Beast has no editors.

If black Americans are suffering due to our current economic woes, Obama’s own policies are hardly helping them. The NAACP can’t bitch about “the Man” anymore because the Man is Obama. And so instead it turns its racially monolithic vituperation on the Tea Party, which has never been in power, and has had no impact on the economic condition of black Americans—except to advocate policies (smaller government, lower taxes, radically reduced deficits, etc.) that would likely improve the standard of living of all Americans (blacks included).

This likelihood is based on what evidence?  How well blacks did under George W. Bush?  Or other non-rich Americans, for that matter?  The Tea Party ideology is, basically, to bring back slavery, but in a colorblind way, and they got a long way toward that goal over the last ten years.

In fact, the Tea Party is a greater friend of black Americans, one might say, than the administration, and is much more representative of America than the NAACP. (There are many more black members of the Tea Party—however you define that movement—than there are, by definition, non-black members of the NAACP.)

One might say, indeed, but only if one wanted to reveal himself as a lying nincompoop.

The NAACP senses—knows—that the electoral momentum is building inexorably against President Obama. And they hope to slow it by playing the race card. Let there be no doubt that nothing would have been tabled at this NAACP meeting without President Obama’s imprimatur—especially with the first lady as the keynote speaker. Our first black president—with his lowest approval ratings ever—is using his race politically, through a surrogate.

Everybody knows all darkies are connected, they said so on Fox News.

But shameless as all this is, it may have some effect. As Shelby Steele, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution, told me, “racist stigma in America is so powerful that truth and reason look meager next to it. Any populist movement—such as the Tea Party—that is predominantly white, has this vulnerability of seeming to be a throwback to the nation’s racist past.”

Ah, it seems that this diligent muckraker strolled all the way down the hall at Hoover’s Last Erection and “interviewed”  a fellow wingnut welfare recipient, which is way easier than using The Google or something to “research” the story you’d planned to write anyway.  Too bad he got some unintentional honesty mixed in with the desired propaganda.

Michelle Obama’s participation as keynote speaker could prove toxic to the Democrats in the run-up to the November elections—even though she confined her remarks to obesity and the like, and steered clear of references to the Tea Party.

In other words, nothing actually happened to support the story’s whole premise, but never mind.   The good stuff comes next:

Many in America already believe that she is a black militant in mufti, and her headlining of a gathering which cast the Tea Party as racist will have been noted by a good many ordinary, non-radical, middle-of-the-road Americans—not to mention Tea Party activists, who will be sure (and who can blame them?) to put together little YouTube packages from the NAACP shindig, cutting from Michelle O to Ben Jealous, the NAACP president who was the resolution’s prime mover.

Let’s get Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe on the case, and maybe then, with a heavy assist from Fox, such delusional claptrap can be edited to seem credible for a few hours.  Honestly, how many Americans outside of the righty fever swamps really think Michelle Obama is “a black militant in mufti?”  That would be none.  How many Americans think that suggesting such a thing is both stupid and racist?  That would be most.  But do go on; this just gets better and better.

So here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings. When race is in play, there is vulnerability all around. The NAACP, and President Obama, will learn that in the months ahead.

The surest sign of righty craziness is when they are waxing so rhapsodic about their wonderfulness that they actually call a ginned-up, Fox-sponsored astroturf organization “Athenian.”  Dick Armey probably wet himself when he read that, although Sarah Palin will undoubtedly be so impressed that she’ll announce that she can see the Acropolis from her porch.  And, like all righty diatribes, it ends with a dark threat based entirely on delusions of grandeur, with Tunku Varadarajan playing Marvin Martian, poorly, and with the same results.

As longtime Hag readers know, I had a crazy grandmother who, though quite embarrassing  and seemingly anachronistic at the time (she died in 1980…), turned out to be an exact prototype of the American right wing circa 2010.  She berated complete strangers in public for speaking a foreign language, she applauded black people who worked as shoe-shiners or janitors, (Etta voice:) “they know their place,” she loathed the war-related influx of the “Vietnese,” and referred to service personnel, to their faces, as “the help.”  Back in the 70′s, such behavior was, to say the least, frowned upon.  My mother received more than one earnest offer of assistance over the years from doctors who had met Etta and thought, for the good of all of us, that she should be committed, and they didn’t even know about her politics….   As I’ve said before, Etta just died too soon.  Heck, today she could go on MSNBC, when in the old days to was too dicey take her to the A&W drive-in, and we rarely did.

Listening to Thom Hartmann’s radio show the other day, I had the glorious opportunity to hear the latest, and most repellent yet, excuse from the teabaggers days before it hit the media.  A disgusting fatass named Mark Williams, who loudly and tendentiously “represents” the fake Tea Party, completely dismissed the NAACP’s quite appropriate condemnation of the rather visible racism in the Tea Party movement, because the the very presence of the word “colored” in the NAACP’s name meant that it was racist, despite the fact that the 100-year old organization picked the name because it sounded nicer at the time than the word then most commonly in use, and “colored” people were, indeed,  sorely in need of a bit of “advancement.”  As though this belligerently delivered nonsense weren’t enough to convince anyone listening that this ape wasn’t just Etta minus the white hair and mink, he decided to further till this fertile ground and write the following on his personal blog, in the form of a mock letter to Abraham Lincoln from the current head of the NAACP.  Like Peggy Noonan, Williams seems to have a lot of best friends from beyond the grave, who agree with him, and like Etta, he always sees himself in history’s heroes:

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Admittedly, the shoddy writing veils the meaning a bit, but when you’re as dumb as Williams, posing as an imaginary darky makes you look slightly less idiotic, so why not?  The more disturbing part is that Williams believes, or is willing to pretend to believe, that “taxes” have something to do with African Americans having flat screen televisions when anyone with a grasp of the most basic arithmetic, much less economics, knows that absurd claim to be laughably false.  Like nearly all other righties, he is deluded into thinking that all problems in the world are caused by people who don’t work, usually of a duskier hue, and this creates a new, more palatable reason to hate black people than the ones advanced by his Confederate soulmates and other white supremacists throughout history.

I’ve got news for you, Mr. Williams:  Etta is dead, and America has moved on.  Whatever credence such comments receive in our Republican-coddling media, the much sought-after “Independents” will recoil in horror at such ignorant, hateful hogwash just as I did when it came out of Etta, more than 30 years ago.  The NAACP, pardon the expression, hit the nail on the head.  Yours.

“Whut gempmums* say an’ whut gempmums mean is two diff’ent things.”

-Mammy, to Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind.”

*”gentlemen” in Mammy-ese…  (as a slave, she knew what she was talking about.)

Where’s Mammy when you need her?  The formation of the Cat Food Commission is merely the latest example of the media and political class serially advancing the dunderheaded notion that the imaginary “Free Market” is not only the supposed prerequisite to less monetized forms of “freedom,” but if the “Free Market” so much as gets a cold, Democracy might have to just be put to sleep to make it feel better, and save on vet bills.  Thus, we are treated to spectacles like the IMF coldly informing us that our elderly simply have to die sooner to maintain our credit rating, and Arizona Senator John Kyl saying, without a trace of embarrassment, that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were much more important than the relative pittance it would take to keep sending $1200 per month to people tossed out of the work force by deliberate Republican policies.  Never mind that for thirty years we’ve given the “free market” everything it supposedly wanted, and got another depression to show for it, along with the sort of vaulting inequality one associates with third-world dictatorships…  You see, the only reason the market failed was because it wasn’t free enough.  (!)

The boom and bust cycles of Randian Economics are well-known and depressingly familiar.  Corporations, usually those favored by government largesse (railroads, steel, real estate, autos, oil;  the list is long of industries that owe their very existence to the taxpayer dollar….), become so large and powerful that they have enough money left over to buy the government, even as they shower so much wealth to a chosen few executives that they can buy their wives opera houses for Christmas instead of another mink.   The purpose of free market fundamentalism is laughably obvious, and not exactly new…  selling despotism and mass poverty amid astonishingly concentrated wealth as something akin to God’s Will.  Remember that ol’ Divine Right thing?  What about “Let them eat cake?”  Down the memory hole for the Chicago School boys, who of course never expect to swallow the harsh medicine they endlessly prescribe for others.

Unfortunately for Louis XVI, there was no Fox News around in 1789, and thus no one was there to patiently explain to the uppity rabble that Marie Antoinette was not just expressing All-French Values, but was also an instrument of Our Lord.  If God had meant the peasants to have cake, He’d have given them all Easy-Bake ovens, as I’m sure Tom Friedman would be happy to tell you.  The measure of national greatness has become little more than the relative comfort of the superrich, a far cry from that dreary old “General Welfare ” crap those hippie Founders sneaked into Glenn Beck’s Constitution.  Freedom died a little, you see, when Dick Cheney moved his assets to Dubai.

It’s become increasingly clear over the last few decades that the Frankensteins created by the “Free Market:” a bloated and unproductive overclass dedicated only to Midas-like self-aggrandizement, a stodgy and backward industrial sector stuck in the 1950′s, a larcenous banking elite, and a policy-driving military sector aren’t just destroying the actual free market, but in the process are stomping all over the very concept of democratic government.

Protests, so revered by the corporate-sponsored Tea Party movement, fall like trees in an empty forest when they run counter to elite goals, and even two elections wherein the public overwhelmingly voted for change have been pushed under the rug in favor of the status quo…  The wars, the insider dealing, and the transparently false memes that sold it all still persist despite their failure and ruinous consequences.  Somehow, the Market didn’t fail us; we failed it, and must pay a heavy price:  public employees, those few who still have jobs anyway, must give up their hard-won pensions, Grandma must toil into her 70′s, and health care for the poor and elderly must be put before their own Death Panels.

Of course, the wealthy overclass isn’t being asked to give up anything; quite the opposite.  For them, even the recession ended a while back and they’ve already recovered so thoroughly that now their only worry is “the debt,” meaning the rather strong possibility that someday they might be asked to cough up something for the general good, which can never be tolerated.  Poll after poll shows that, propagandized and overworked though Americans are, few see “the debt” as a problem in the face of 10% unemployment.  Hedge fund managers are taxed at half the rate of waitresses, and Republicans say that it’s the waitress who ought to chip in by accepting sub-minimum wages….

Class warfare has reached its endgame; our idle and incompetent wealthy have decided of late that the biggest threat to America’s future is having a middle class at all, and are setting about doing away with it.  In a real democracy, such a thing would be impossible, because the wealthiest tenth of society is, in the end, arrayed against the other 90%.  Enter Citizens (!) United, FreedomWorks, electronic voting, and the Chamber of Commerce, with a healthy dose of craven propaganda about the hallowed “Free Market,” and its ironclad “laws,”  one of which seems to be that Democracy only exists these days for those who can afford to buy one.

After reading so many accounts over the past two years of how we are in ” uncharted waters ” on the economic front, I decided to search the intertubes and other media for eras in our history that bear any resemblance to our current condition, and perhaps some lessons we may derive.
The 1890′s was a tumultuous decade for many urban areas in America, and in particular, the city of Detroit. Party machine patronage systems dominated the body politic with the attendant graft and corruption. Inadequate city lighting at exorbitant prices, a street car system in need of expansion to meet the needs of a growing population, and city coffers being depleted at a rate of $ 1.50 per thousand cubic feet for gas when other cities were paying 80 cents for the same.
Into this challenging scenario the citizens of Detroit entrusted their future to one Hazen S. Pingree – Union Army veteran, cobbler by trade, who would prove to be an exemplar of progressive mayors to come. And Republican to boot. Into this already teetering affair came his biggest challenge – the Panic of 1893.
The landed gentry of Argentina were determined that Buenos Aires would not play second fiddle to the likes of New York, London, or Paris. Making national assessed valuation the basis for money issues, they found the AIG of their day, Baring Brothers of London, to underwrite their bond issues. Argentina quickly starts defaulting, and the European investment bankers started dumping American securities for some relief. The U.S. government had to buy gold at premium to support its credit, and then the fun began. By the winter of 1893, 25,000 workers in Detroit were ” made redundant “.
Pingree, exhibiting Keynesian instincts before such were known, began public works of many sorts to preserve the self-respect of the newly poor. Belle Isle was extensively improved, and the fervent hope was that the panic would abate by the following spring. Alas, 1894 brought no recovery, so it was innovation time.
Detroit had numerous vacant plots of land, many quite large, which were held by individuals and syndicates waiting for land values to rise. Pingree appealed to the landowners for the vacant property to be temporarily used by the poor for gardens and potato patches. The mayors’ office was swamped with applications for potato patches, but the poor fund had been wiped out and another appeal went out to churches to take up a special collection one Sunday for the purchase of seeds and and gardening tools. The delivery on Monday of $13.80 was surely appreciated. Undaunted, Pingree sold his own saddle horse, a high-bred Kentuckian, at auction and turned the proceeds over to the potato patch fund.
The initiative was a great success. Pingree’s Potato Patches were imitated throughout the country, and the current buzz about urban gardening proves the staying power of bringing the produce to the people. While earning the admiration of the masses, he served four terms from 1889 to 1896, the upper crust of Detroit society villified Pingree – maintaining the poor were congenitally lazy and so averse to work the program would fail – and even result in  a plague of potato bugs. The citizens of Michigan disagreed, and elected Hazen Governor in 1896.
As states and municipalities begin to experience the ” your on your own ship ” response to their fiscal crisis that individuals are all too familiar with, innovation and creativity will be the passkey to any viable future.
Sure hope there’s more Hazen Pingrees out there.

http://www.cityfarmer.info/2009/11/28/mayor-hazen-pingree-and-the-potato-patch-plan-of-the-1890s/#more-2869