I am speechless and typeless. Read;

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-shaming-of-america-2115111.html

Tags: Wilileaks

One of the biggest budget-busters in the U.S. national accounting system is the clever use of overseas tax havens for large corporations. Those are the same corporations that lobby Congress for the tax breaks that raise your taxes. Here’s a good example of such a practice by a company whose motto is “Do No Evil”:

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Tags: Google

Facts are sometimes hard to admit, especially when they refute some of our most dearly-held beliefs about how the country should be run.

Fact: German workers work less that Americans—by an enormous margin—but are more productive, and their economy is in great shape, with a favorable balance of payments and a banking system that is in excellent condition.

Fact: They are doing it with a real social safety net, including a form of national health insurance, generous pensions, livable wages, and a standard of living that uses half the energy that Americans use.

Fact: Americans have been consistently lied to by the media (and not just Fox, although they are by far the worst) about how productive and how well-treated German and other European workers are. By enacting policies and programs we have been told are “socialistic” they are more democratic, more secure, and their economy is in far better condition that ours.

Here’s a worthwhile interview with Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain.

Geoghegan points out that Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, and free nursing care. They really take care of their people and at the same time have built an economic powerhouse that is the envy of the rest of the world, excepting perhaps the U.S., where we are told that, being “socialism,” it is crumbling at this very moment. I heard the same prevarications 30 years ago in the respectable media. It was untrue then and it is untrue now.

The secret, dear reader, is that Germany actually manufactures things, like autos, chemicals, electronics and other products that they can sell to other nations, like the U.S. and China. We, on the other hand, manufacture pieces of paper that are quickly becoming radioactive among investors and central bankers the world over. This obviously cannot continue. Our legal and tax structure, Geoghegan points out, is biased towards finance, not manufacturing. For the past 30 years, our brightest graduates have gone into the paper business, because the system made financial manipulation far more profitable than manufacturing. Without something tangible to sell, however, those pieces of paper (bonds, other debit instruments and exotic derivatives) will eventually decline to junk status and we will be unable to swap them for the tangible things that China and Germany have to offer. At that point, we will be forced to rely on our own hideously shrunken manufacturing sector to supply us with our needs, and the moment of truth will be upon us.

To illustrate the dilemma we are in: The Mississippi Manufacturers Association, the political lobbying organization for business owners, makes it a custom to present a small gift to each legislator at the beginning of the new legislature. The gift is traditionally a product manufactured in Mississippi that reminds the legislators of the importance of manufacturing to the state. This year, the association had a hard time finding such a gift, due to the departure of so many manufacturers from Mississippi to Mexico and the far East. Clearly, a Nissan was out of the question. A frozen chicken lacks class. The association eventually found a product from a factory that had gone out of business and was purchased by a buyer who moved into the state from elsewhere.

Why has all this happened? The answer will not suit most Mississippians. Too many people in high places (and their followers in low places) accepted and acted upon the conservative claptrap that the Republican Party and others have been excreting since the middle 1970s. Even some Democrats drank the Kool-Aid. We have consequently created a system in which inequality has grown to levels last seen in the ‘20s and the golden age that preceded WWI, and which can accurately be described as a series of increasingly dangerous asset bubbles whose main purpose is to transfer money and property from the middle class to large banks and corporations and the outrageously wealthy persons who own and run them.

We let ourselves be fooled into thinking that the elites were on our side. At one time, I thought Mississippians would see through it all. I was mistaken.

That’s why we are where we are. It’s not a pretty picture. And we brought much of this upon ourselves.

Tags: Thomas Geoghegan

Check out this BradBlog article on an open test of the Washington, DC, internet voting system.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8118

Scary.