Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for Oct 21, 2011
The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.
Italian journalist, Corrado Alvaro
Had enough? Seriously, have you finally had enough? Clearly, the people occupying Wall Street have had it. They’ve figured out that 30 years of lies were, well, 30 years of lies. Tax cuts for the rich will trickle down and raise all boats; An unfettered, unregulated marketplace will solve all problems; Give rich folks tax breaks and suddenly they’ll be transformed into “job creators;” Dismantle government and America will surely become the shining city on a hill once more.
Crap. All crap. What we’ve seen instead is the consolidation of corporate power melding with (and buying) state power. In short, We the People allowed our By The People government to be hijacked, our stock markets turned into a rigged crap game, and guess who were the first ones to be tossed overboard in the new reality of Corporate Casino America? Right, We The People. Yes, very funny. Hoist by petards all around. Ha-ha.
But now people are beginning to understand the price they’re going to pay to keep the Greed is Good ethos. They’re beginning to see what it means in real time, in real towns, for real people when the top Republican leader declares publicly that his number one priority for the next four years is to see President Obama defeated. Not jobs. Not fixing a dysfunctional, broken system. Not even fixing a bridge, a road, a school. Nope. Top priority: Obama gone by any means necessary.
As a result, Main Street’s finally beginning to feel in their pocketbooks what it means to have a majority of people in Congress committed to that priority and, in addition, sworn to fealty, not to the Constitution, not to their constituents, not to what’s best for the country, but to some corporate lobbyist named Grover Norquist.
True, Main Street voted those guys into office. And sent along even more rabid True Believers, people who ran for a government office with the express purpose of dismantling the government that created the office they ran for. Yes. More Ha-ha.
So, have they now had enough? Sure, there’s a few demonstrations in a few cities, but will any of it translate into votes come November? Without the votes there will be no change in Congress and hence no change on Main Street.
Except the distinct possibility that a Corporate Republican majority in House and Senate, with a Republican President at the helm will mean another conservative Supreme Court appointee will be added to the bench. And when that happens, the Citizens United Decision – Corporations are People, my friends. Corporations are People – will never be overturned, will be strengthened and added to by other similar rulings, and at that point the corporate takeover of our democracy will be complete.
While despair is certainly one option, Mat Taibbi, whose brilliant new book “Griftopia” hilariously illuminated just how the thieves on Wall Street helped bring this country down, has a terrific list of Things to Do in the October 27 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. Here’s a few of his suggestions:
1. Break up the monopolies. “The so-called ‘Too Big to Fail’ financial companies . . . are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous an unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.”
2. Pay for your own bailouts. “A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts . . . It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes . . . and force Wall Street to go back to the job it’s supposed to be doing, i.e. making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow”.
3. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Repeal the “preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans . . . to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.”
4. Change the way bankers get paid. No more “bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up . . . later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company’s long-term health – no more Joe Casanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.”
That’s a short list, but it’s a start on the long, long list of what needs to be set right. But it all depends on Main Street taking back their government from Corporate ownership. And for that to happen, voters not only have to be finally wised up to the con that’s being run on them, they have to finally have had enough. Then vote like their life depends on it.
Because it does.
Showing posts with label Mat Taibbi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mat Taibbi. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Nile Fever?
Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for Februrary 21, 2011
Holy Cheese Whiz! Is the Miracle of Tahrir Square catching? Like their Egyptian counterparts, are the good burghers of Madison, Wisconsin in revolt Chedder Rules!
No doubt about it, it was an astonishing sight. Thousands of protesting cheese heads filling the streets of downtown Madison while government thugs pursued fleeing Democratic state senators. The senators had galloped out of town in order to stop the Republican legislature from voting on a union-busting measure. It was Cairo in the heartland, but without camels.
And, like the government-toppling Egyptian miracle, this protest by government (union) employees in Madison soon started to spread to other states as other government employees got the notion that this was really all about the Republican end game: Bust the Unions to break the last impediment to our decades-long race to the bottom for a living wage (“We’re all Wal-Mart greeters, now!”) and Bust the Unions since they are the last political arm of the Democratic party. And do it under color of balancing a city or state’s busted budget.
In the larger picture, it’s actually all about chickens coming home to roost. For thirty years Americans have quietly been sipping a toxic brew: They voted for politicians to give them all manner of nice pudding: Better Schools! Better Roads! More Parks! Strong Defense! Build Star Wars! At the same time, they also voted for all kinds of tax breaks for the rich (that old “trickle-down theory”), voted for laws that would benefit corporations that off-shored their firms, (which they did in a heartbeat, taking their nice jobs with them). Then they voted for all kinds of tax loopholes allowing those same corporations to escape taxes altogether, voted to remove many of the regulations that oversaw Wall Street’s shenanigans, all the while heeding the Conservative Siren Song: Taxes are Bad! No New Taxes!
The result was predictable. It’s what happens when termites are given free rein in the home: You hear the sudden Craaackkk! and then, Splat! as your legs fall through the honeycombed floor.
And in Madison, as elsewhere, it finally became clear what 30 years of termite damage can do: Suddenly, there was no longer any floor there.
The jobs were gone, the tax base was gone, the money was gone. It was time to pay the piper. Time for slash and burn. Time to haul out the politics of grievance to blame all those wicked Union “government workers,” you know, those awful teachers, firemen, policemen and other state workers who were now being painted as greedy cheats responsible for creating these pension imbalances and liabilities, when, in fact, they were the victims. It was they who paid out of their own pockets for their share of their retirement funds only to see it go to imprudent state pension fund managers who failed in their due diligence and gave that money to the Wall Street Fraudsters who rigged the game and gambled it all away.
But you don’t see Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker standing up there before the streets full of angry cheese heads saying he’s going to string up the state’s pension managers, do you? Nor do you see him demanding that Wall Street be put on trial and the stolen, defrauded money be returned to the workers.
No. Not a bit of it. Instead, it’s kick the (unionized) teacher time. Blame the (wicked) government employee time. They’re to blame for Wisconsin’s woes. And California’s. And Tennessee’s.
Which is a typical blame-the-victim response in our clueless Battered Wife Nation. What’s not so typical is that apparently – finally? -- the victims here have connected some dots and caught on to the game and are actually standing up and joining their Cairo counterparts in saying, “Enough!”
Well, I’ve had enough as well. Enough with being piously told that “We all have to make sacrifices here.” Fine. Reduce corporate CEOs’ pension/perk funds to zero, cut their salary 10%, then ask their employees to “make sacrifices.” When millionaires and gazillionaires have to choose between taking medicine or buying food, then we’ll talk about “shared sacrifices.” Hold Wall Street to account, restore the money stolen, then talk to the victims of that fraud about tightening their belts. When it comes to cutting a teacher’s salary or slapping a small tax on a millionaire, my choice is a clear one.
Until then, I hope that somehow Nile Fever continues to spread across America. If the uprising in Cairo was all about Egyptians recovering their voice and taking back their power, then surely that’s what’s needed here as well.
In his new book, Matt Taibbi spells out just how this country was taken down and will continue to be looted, because, “We have voters who don’t pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts. And we’ve got a superpower’s worth of accumulated wealth that is still there for the taking. . . .”
The title of his book says it all: Griftopia – Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America.
Is it possible that the Wisconsin cheese heads have finally figured out that long con and decided that the race to the bottom stops with them? If so, then that would be the Miracle in Madison. From Cairo and back again.
Inshallah.
Holy Cheese Whiz! Is the Miracle of Tahrir Square catching? Like their Egyptian counterparts, are the good burghers of Madison, Wisconsin in revolt Chedder Rules!
No doubt about it, it was an astonishing sight. Thousands of protesting cheese heads filling the streets of downtown Madison while government thugs pursued fleeing Democratic state senators. The senators had galloped out of town in order to stop the Republican legislature from voting on a union-busting measure. It was Cairo in the heartland, but without camels.
And, like the government-toppling Egyptian miracle, this protest by government (union) employees in Madison soon started to spread to other states as other government employees got the notion that this was really all about the Republican end game: Bust the Unions to break the last impediment to our decades-long race to the bottom for a living wage (“We’re all Wal-Mart greeters, now!”) and Bust the Unions since they are the last political arm of the Democratic party. And do it under color of balancing a city or state’s busted budget.
In the larger picture, it’s actually all about chickens coming home to roost. For thirty years Americans have quietly been sipping a toxic brew: They voted for politicians to give them all manner of nice pudding: Better Schools! Better Roads! More Parks! Strong Defense! Build Star Wars! At the same time, they also voted for all kinds of tax breaks for the rich (that old “trickle-down theory”), voted for laws that would benefit corporations that off-shored their firms, (which they did in a heartbeat, taking their nice jobs with them). Then they voted for all kinds of tax loopholes allowing those same corporations to escape taxes altogether, voted to remove many of the regulations that oversaw Wall Street’s shenanigans, all the while heeding the Conservative Siren Song: Taxes are Bad! No New Taxes!
The result was predictable. It’s what happens when termites are given free rein in the home: You hear the sudden Craaackkk! and then, Splat! as your legs fall through the honeycombed floor.
And in Madison, as elsewhere, it finally became clear what 30 years of termite damage can do: Suddenly, there was no longer any floor there.
The jobs were gone, the tax base was gone, the money was gone. It was time to pay the piper. Time for slash and burn. Time to haul out the politics of grievance to blame all those wicked Union “government workers,” you know, those awful teachers, firemen, policemen and other state workers who were now being painted as greedy cheats responsible for creating these pension imbalances and liabilities, when, in fact, they were the victims. It was they who paid out of their own pockets for their share of their retirement funds only to see it go to imprudent state pension fund managers who failed in their due diligence and gave that money to the Wall Street Fraudsters who rigged the game and gambled it all away.
But you don’t see Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker standing up there before the streets full of angry cheese heads saying he’s going to string up the state’s pension managers, do you? Nor do you see him demanding that Wall Street be put on trial and the stolen, defrauded money be returned to the workers.
No. Not a bit of it. Instead, it’s kick the (unionized) teacher time. Blame the (wicked) government employee time. They’re to blame for Wisconsin’s woes. And California’s. And Tennessee’s.
Which is a typical blame-the-victim response in our clueless Battered Wife Nation. What’s not so typical is that apparently – finally? -- the victims here have connected some dots and caught on to the game and are actually standing up and joining their Cairo counterparts in saying, “Enough!”
Well, I’ve had enough as well. Enough with being piously told that “We all have to make sacrifices here.” Fine. Reduce corporate CEOs’ pension/perk funds to zero, cut their salary 10%, then ask their employees to “make sacrifices.” When millionaires and gazillionaires have to choose between taking medicine or buying food, then we’ll talk about “shared sacrifices.” Hold Wall Street to account, restore the money stolen, then talk to the victims of that fraud about tightening their belts. When it comes to cutting a teacher’s salary or slapping a small tax on a millionaire, my choice is a clear one.
Until then, I hope that somehow Nile Fever continues to spread across America. If the uprising in Cairo was all about Egyptians recovering their voice and taking back their power, then surely that’s what’s needed here as well.
In his new book, Matt Taibbi spells out just how this country was taken down and will continue to be looted, because, “We have voters who don’t pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts. And we’ve got a superpower’s worth of accumulated wealth that is still there for the taking. . . .”
The title of his book says it all: Griftopia – Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America.
Is it possible that the Wisconsin cheese heads have finally figured out that long con and decided that the race to the bottom stops with them? If so, then that would be the Miracle in Madison. From Cairo and back again.
Inshallah.
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