Does "States' Rights" Mean Mississippi Loses the Federal Gravy?
The large blue states, on the other hand, are actually supporting the red states: California gets back 78 cents for every dollar it pays to Washington, New York 79 cents, and Massachusetts 82 cents.
My own state, Mississippi, the biggest freeloader of all, seems to be one of the most eager to balance the budget with painful benefit cuts to the less-fortunate, and at the rate we are going down that path, we may just get what we think we want.
Go on and bite the hand!
But read this first:
Robert Reich: Rick Perry's Secret Plan to Save Blue States from the Red States
What's Happing to Medical Insurance and Why We are Being Scammed
These are lies, pure and simple. The conservative plutocracy has bitterly resisted any benefit that went to the bottom 90% of the people of this nation and done everything in its power to make the vast majority of U. S. citizens insecure, deeply in debt, and beholden to the whims of employers for their very survival. They want the elderly to move in with their children when they no longer can work and then die early for lack of decent medical care - to “reduce the surplus population,” as Ebeneezer Scrooge would say.
Let me put it plainly: modern American conservatism is dishonest and corrupt to the core. There is no truth in it. Conservative leaders are worse that con-men; their thievery is on a far more colossal scale, because they aim to impoverish just about everyone except the extremely wealthy and powerful. Once they have accomplished that, they will blame the losers in this class war for not working hard enough.
On such a pessimistic note, a recent article by Shamus Cooke on the website of the Centre for Global Research is worth reading for the insight into what the power elite is planning for the future delivery of medical care in the United States:
America's Great Health Care Takeaway
The article concludes:
Read and ponder. Then act.The above health care policies are the natural result of a health care system based on the principles of private profit. Corporate profits demand that companies provide the least amount of health care services at a minimal cost. From this vantage point, health care is a commodity that is bought by those who can afford it, instead of it being the human right of every person, as the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts. Europe has already proved that a nationwide, single payer system is vastly superior when it comes to quality, cost, availability, and results.
The single payer system did not come into existence from the benevolence of kind governments, but from the demands of people in the street. Organized workers must fight to maintain their benefits; unorganized workers must organize to fight for better insurance; and older workers/retirees must fight to maintain and expand Medicare. The logical end to such struggles would be to demand a Medicare For All system, financed by taxing the wealthy and corporations.
They Thought They Were Free
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
But Then It Was Too Late, pages 166-173 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
Fukushima Meltdown Gets Worse and Worse
Dr. Tatsuhikn Kodama of the Radioisotope Center, University of Tokyo, recently stated to the Japanese Parliament that the total amount of leakage from the site is already about 29.6 times the amount of contamination caused by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Tokyo Electric Power Company remains mostly silent in the face of a disaster that it is helpless to remedy. The mass media have all but ignored the news coming out of Japan.
See also:
Dahr Jamail: Fukushima Radiation Alarms Doctors
TEPCO Releases Rare Video From Inside Fukushima Daiichi (This one seems to me to be a Japanese version of “Industry on Parade”)
Former U.S. envoy critical of Japan's nuclear crisis response
TVA Commits to Nuclear Energy
Issa Subpoenas Internal NLRB Documents in the Middle of Litigation
Could it be that Issa wants to make sure that Boeing has access to materials that the judge denied it? Imagine the howl that would have arisen if the committee had subpoenaed documents revealing Boeing’s legal strategy. Apparently these modern Republicans will stop at nothing to get their way, which in this case means crushing a labor union. Boeing recently moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, a great way to get some distance from the workers that actually make the planes.
Ironically, Issa will be forced to duel with the NLRB over a subpoena after the Bush administration’s precedent of refusing to obey inconvenient subpoenas from committees of the previous Democratically-controlled Congress. Is there a distinction between Democratic and Republican-controlled committees such that only subpoenas from the latter need be obeyed?
Issa Subpoenas NLRB, Solomon Could Face Contempt of Congress Charges
Why Manufacturing is Important
Those jobs disappeared as a result of a high dollar and international trade agreements, like NAFTA. We are poorer because of it in more ways than one.
Economist Dani Rodrick, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, explains why manufacturing is important:
Dani Rodrik: The Manufacturing ImperativeIndeed, the manufacturing sector is also where the world’s middle classes take shape and grow. Without a vibrant manufacturing base, societies tend to divide between rich and poor – those who have access to steady, well-paying jobs, and those whose jobs are less secure and lives more precarious. Manufacturing may ultimately be central to the vigor of a nation’s democracy.
As I have mentioned before, we cannot indefinitely buy manufactured goods from China in exchange for government bonds. We need to be manufacturing goods and selling them at a profit, not pushing money and property around, grabbing a piece each time it passes by, which is basically how the financial system makes money.
Renewing our manufacturing sector will require tax, monetary and fiscal policies that reward manufacturing and discourage the financier and rentier. Today, the incentives run the opposite way and thus encourage highly destructive behavior.
Riots in Britain - Could it Happen Here?
When enough people have nothing whatever to lose by barbaric behavior and the prospect of temporary gain, we should expect barbaric behavior.
Is this complicated?
Here's what British blogger Peggy Red writes (via alternet.org):
Panic on the streets of LondonNo one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
It's not a coincidence that the vast shift in wealth and income from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy in the United States, beginning with Reagan, was accompanied by the militarization of the police, the dismantling of the Bill of Rights (justified by the war on drugs and then the war on terror), the gutting of the social safety net, the destruction of our unionized industrial base by a deliberate policy of overvaluing the dollar on the international exchanges, and the relentless underfunding of public education from infancy through graduate school. This was all intentional. Margaret Thatcher’s neo-conservative austerity (for the middle and lower classes) happened more quickly, hence more obviously.
The insane but absolute logic of movement conservatism, given its reptilian premises, virtually mandates a political and economic downward spiral for everyone but a tiny and fabulously wealthy minority, along with their political enablers, apologists and enforcers.
And it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how this can be averted. The momentum is powerful and the will to fight back is weak to nonexistent. The middle class of this nation is voting itself into extinction.
More insight:
Nina Power: As London Explodes in Riots, There Is a Context That Can't Be Ignored: Brutal Cuts and Enforced Austerity Measures
William Bowles: Riots in Britain: Back to the Future
Ilona Catherine Burton: Manchester Riots
Michael McCarthy: No shame, no limits: Has the behaviour of the mob destroyed the idea of British civility for ever?
Update 8/11/2011:
Michelle Chen: Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots (via alternet.org)
Emily Manuel: Why Riot and Not Revolt in London?
Riots are what happens when people—almost always young men—stop believing in their communities, in their country, in their rights as a citizen. Riots are what happens when whole groups are treated as potential or actual criminals by the police. Riots happen when anger, resentment, testosterone and yes, consumerist desire are greater than civic pride or fear of the police, when the facade of power finally cracks and people realise they outnumber the forces of order. And mostly particularly, riots are what happens when people despair, when there appears to be few options in the present and none in the future, and no way to fix the situation.
A Sobering Summary of the American Condition
On the blog Balkinization, Frank Pasquale paints a bleak picture of our prospects:
When TV talking heads prate about "shared sacrifice," they might want to pause to consider stories like Soto's [a quadriplegic whose story appears earlier in the blog post]. They should also reveal where a particular multimillionaire will invest gains from, say, the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, or the zeroed out estate tax of 2010. How much gold does the rotting teeth of the poor buy? Are volunteer dentists effectively subsidizing summer houses? Executive protection dogs? Private jets to summer camp?
These trade-offs become more compelling as data renders the narrative of "trickle down job creation" implausible. The most recent "recovery" saw 88% of gains go to corporate profits, and about 1% go to wages. Workers are caught in a downward spiral: unemployment reduces their bargaining power, which in turn lets bosses pile more duties onto fewer people, who effectively increase unemployment more by doing the work or 1.5 or 2 or 3 workers for the price of 1. Many women face the brunt of the transition: "When companies decide to lay off secretaries and assistants while making employees pick up the slack, women take the hit." Every margin has to be worked to keep CEOs' pay averaging hundreds of times that of their typical workers.
It’s an ugly picture.
And we (particularly those of us here in Mississippi) are in denial—deep, deep denial—and our elected officials are doing the very things guaranteed to make it worse.
Read the blog post, Shared Sacrifice of Whom?
The Significance of the S&P Downgrade on the Ability of the U. S. Government to Borrow Money
(You guessed it.)
For an intelligent perspective on the “downgrade” take a look at a recent article in the Naked Capitalism Blog.
Krugman on the "Deficit Agreement"
Read the entire article.For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Krugman concludes, as I do, that the nation is currently ungovernable:
What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
Thanks to our Republican legislators from Mississippi. They just consigned their constituents to a meaner, poorer and less educated existence for the foreseeable future. And thanks to all you fellow Mississippians who voted to turn the entire nation into a banana republic, because that’s what you have been doing.
Pah!