Persons Declare Corporatehood

Posted on | September 15, 2011 | 2 Comments

The GOP now has a proposal floating around the Congressional toilet…and this stroke of genius will eliminate corporate taxes. Gone. Why not? The way lawyers, lobbyists and lawmakers have rigged the tax code, and the way corporations are allowed to hide their profits overseas, the effective corporate tax rate is falling faster than Sarah Palin’s pants at an NBA shoot-around.

But…if corporations are “people,” and I, too, fall into the general category of “people,” does that mean I will not have to pay taxes?

Does that mean my precious, God-given tax dollars will finally stop being redistributed to the wealthiest Americans?

I won’t have to pay for the roads and bridges they use to truck their plastic consumer crap to their giant, caustic big-box stores? Or for the Navy and Coast Guard and Customs Service teats they’ve been sucking at for the better part of a century?

I won’t have to pay to deploy weapons and soldiers around the world to protect their investments in repressive regimes, access to oil and cheap labor and copper and just about anything that can be dug out of the ground?

I won’t have to subsidize arms deals to nefarious characters who we will eventually end up paying billions of dollars to kill off, anyway?

I won’t have to pay for the Department of Commerce or the State Department and their welfare programs that help corporations sell hamburgers to Asia and secure job-killing trade deals that ship entire factories overseas?

And I won’t have to pay for all the agribusiness subsidies and various other corporate kick-backs doled out during the frenzy of legalized bribery we call budget bill negotiations?

I’m in!

Heck, we are about to cut almost anything that will assist the swelling ranks of the poor, the working poor, the sick and chronically infirm…along with cutting off all those socialist children who must not associate freedom with a full belly and an education.

They need to learn, and learn quickly, that poverty is no excuse to be sick, hungry or uneducated.

So, let’s cut the rest of it. Let the corporations pay for all those government services they now feel so entitled to…as they lounge around the Cayman Islands like bloated welfare queens, expecting taxpayers to do it all for them.

And if corporations are persons, then persons are corporations. Right?

It’s time “we the people” began demanding the same rights as those corporate people. And it’s time those corporate people started paying their own way and stopped depending on government handouts.

Fair’s fair, after all.

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Tea Wasn’t Served at the Last Supper

Posted on | September 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

American Christianity is in crisis.

What struck me about the “Great Tea Bag Debate” was how vociferously the candidates proclaim their Christianity and, at the same time, how far their ideas are from the teachings of Jesus.

Have any of them read The Book of Matthew? The Beatitudes? The Sermon on the Mount or on the Plain? Or, for that matter, any of The Gospels?

And where are protests from the Christians who have read the red words in the New Testament?

For some of us who have, it is troubling to see this dichotomy. How would the audience, which cheered loudly for ideas much closer to Social Darwinism than to New Testament Christianity, receive Jesus’ parables or admonitions if he himself were on the stage?

Alas, I doubt that he would be a candidate for anything other than the fate he received once before.

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First Impressions, Ten Years Later

Posted on | September 11, 2011 | 2 Comments

Sept. 11…watched the smoke rise off the Pentagon as I drove to work.

Sept. 12…my dear friend, Ray Farkas (the man who taught me producing), and I arrived in Manhattan. 10pm in Times Square, not a single car on the street. And the smell. I’ll never forget the smell.

Sept. 13…twelve hours of shooting around NY. This piece was the result.

Missing you today, Ray.

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Obama’s Afghanistan Policy? It’s a Crock(er).

Posted on | September 6, 2011 | 3 Comments

Ryan Crocker has spoken.

The “career diplomat” and fmr. Ambassador to Iraq and current Ambassador to Afghanistan, meaning de facto “provincial governor,” told Reuters that the U.S. will need to stay in Afghanistan to prevent another 9/11.

Bin Laden is dead? So what?

Al-Qaeda is basically dead? So what?

Afghanistan is a centuries-old graveyard for imperial lust? So what?

We’ve got the mother of all rationales, and a nice, neat numerical demarcation point to hang it on.

Yes, the 9/11-10th Anniversary Media Feeding Frenzy is upon us, and Fear, Inc. is about to reacquaint us with those tried and true justifications for a vast and costly empire.

Oddly, Obama came in on the vague promise of turning away from Iraq and finishing the job in Afghanistan. But we all know, or we should know, that we are never really leaving. Ever.

We could drone bomb every single “suspected, linked, associated or distantly related” terrorist du jour, and still we will not leave.

We could depopulate the entire region. And still…we will not leave.

Why?

The oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and the close proximity of Russia and China to those long-fabled reserves. Simply put, Obama’s policy reflects the long-standing imperative to control Eurasia and secure unfettered access to those reserves.

In fact, President “Hope-Change” relied on Zbig Brzezinski as his primary foreign policy guru prior to his election. It stands to reason that Zbig’s influence would stretch well into his presidency.

You probably know that, though. Right?

Zbig was the guy who started President Carter on Afghanistan and the U.S. on the hard-line approach to Eurasia.

He’s long wanted to check Russia and China in the region and use U.S. hegemonic power to dominate the Caspian’s oil and gas reserves. Control over Afghanistan has long been seen as the key to that domination.

And he wrote the book on it.

Literally.

It’s titled “The Grand Chessboard.” As it turns out, our hope for change was merely a pawn in that great game.

Take a look at the highlights. It is very much like a blueprint for the Neo-Con agenda of the Bush Administration.

So, when you listen to Obama stumping this issue over the next year and touting his better, saner war policies…just keep this connection in mind. And think about Ryan Crocker’s dire, suitable for mass-consumption warning.

Whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan…it is all about holding on to a permanent military presence in the region. Period.

Why? Oil, gas and the brimming trough of taxpayer dollars filled annually by the Defense Department. There is a lot of money in protecting corporate access to resources.

Why are we still there?

It’s the money, honey.

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BeLabored Day

Posted on | September 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

Look, I’m just saying…if you are pro-corporation, pro-Tea Bag, pro-Wall Street, pro-investor class, pro-globalization, pro-rich people and, therefore, anti-unions, anti-child labor laws, anti-OSHA and workplace safety, anti-unemployment insurance, anti-overtime, anti-minimum wage, anti-vacations/holidays and, most likely, anti-any regulations on the workplace…then, be consistent. Boycott Labor Day. Instead, go cut lawns in a gated community. For $3 an hour. And take your kids with you.

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The New American Way

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare – Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
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Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare – The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

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Right-Wing Christian Gobbledygook

Posted on | August 9, 2011 | 3 Comments

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the enemy of the facts makes strange bedfellows.

Or something like that…because a mashed-up, mixed-up cliché seems all-too appropriate in this age of viral internet gobbledygook.

You know, the sort of gobbledygook that gets sent to you by a distant, super-patriotic cousin. It piles up in your spam folder or, if you don’t have friends and family dangling somewhere along the lunatic fringe, you see this type of info-blight discoloring social media sites disguised as the latest and greatest shocking “news” item.

And the angry Christian gobbledygook is the worst.

The visceral nature of their attacks and their preternatural ability to suspend disbelief can make you feel like you are trapped on an evil Disneyland ride…a bizarre version of “It’s a Small World” where the sound is cranked up to ear-piercing, AC/DC concert levels, the claustrophobia-inducing boat is forever rocking like a fishing trawler in a tsunami and the animatronic puppets all look like disgraced televangelists.

The song?

It’s a rapidly-looped recitation of all of the vitriolic slander, all of the uninformed judgmentalism and all of the jingoistic slogans that cause your spine to stiffen and your blood to boil.

But you can tune it out. Right?

And if you can’t, what’s left?

Right. Left. Who knows what’s what, anymore? Because that’s the real problem with these bogus little email equivalents of Typhoid Mary…they infect you and force you to generate facts like white blood cells in a futile attempt to fight off the disease of ignorance.

In the case of President Obama, a man who…in the eyes of many Holier-than-Thou-vangelicals…seems to be suffering from a terminal case of Unforgivable Blackness, it is so hard to ignore the incessant attacks on his dark and shady origins, to elude the allusions to his secret religious agenda and to disregard the insanely ill-informed claim that he adheres to some radical political ideology.

Socialist. Communist. Anti-colonialist. Foreigner. Kenyan. You name it, he’s been called it. But they always come back to…Muslim. It encapsulates it all into one dark, evil ball of self-righteous indignation. Anything that shows he is the enemy of Jesus and his merry band of Capitalistic Christians…that’s the post-9/11 ticket they like to punch the most.

This one is circulating now, a re-hash of a months-old “FOX Nation” article about his failure to release an Easter message. It also points to a suspicious “Hey, can’t we all get along” message Obama taped for the beginning of Ramadan. Obviously, Obama hates Easter. And he loves Islam. Right?

It wouldn’t have anything to do with trying to calm the hornet’s nest we’ve been kicking for the last decade.

Well, ten seconds of research uncovered the shocking truth…that, in fact, Obama held an Easter Prayer Breakfast in the White House for the second consecutive year and that…gasp!…he wants to make it an annual event. Of course, that little factino will never make it into the in-boxes of those who, according to a radical religious teaching, should “judge not, lest ye be judged.”

So, once again…the argument is not about policies. Not about the real problems facing real people in real time. Nope. Instead we find ourselves battling over the very nature of the facts and the basic premises of reality.

It is hard because many of us don’t actually support the President. But our argument is about his willingness to sustain the policies of the Bush Administration. It’s about the his adherence to a barely-softened form of Milton Friedman-style Uber-Capitalism. It’s about his unwillingness to challenge the sort of defense industry profiteering that keeps wars going, despite the mounting cost in blood and treasure. It’s about his failure to demand that the super-rich pay into the public kitty, one that they’ve been benefiting from for the last 30 years. And it’s about his unwillingness to be something more than Republican Lite.

But the gobbledygook gums up the argument. It gets us caught up in these hyper-angry street fights over facile rumors, and the facts get drowned out in a cacophonous roar of schoolyard name-calling that forces us all to take one side or the other. All heat. No light.

Obviously, that’s the point.

Who benefits from all of this? Alas, it’s not the angry Christians. They proudly send their kids to fight in wars that do little more than protect corporate investments and sustain the rushing revenue streams that flow out of the Pentagon. And, in the twistiest twist of irony, the angry Christians end up abetting the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the super-rich fixers who sit comfortably atop the pyramid scheme called American politics.

Those folks cannot lose.

Sure, they might not get everything their Tea Partying proxies are clamoring for…and they know that. But the Right-Wing gobbledygook that holds the angry mob together is so infuriating, so irrational and, at times, so scary…that many of their Lefty adversaries find themselves willing to accept slightly softer versions of the very policies that make the rich richer and, ultimately, the rest of us squirm.

At least Obama has that going for him. He may have run out of hope and spent all of his change, but he can count on all that gobbledygook to keep half of America clinging to the facts, while the rest of ‘em cling to their guns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday Morning Moron Watch: 8.07.11

Posted on | August 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

It’s a “haunting legacy,” alright.

That’s the name of the book Marvin Kalb wrote with his daughter about the Vietnam War and how it has affected Presidents before, during and since. He was plugging it on that oasis of calm civility known as “Washington Journal,” which airs daily on C-SPAN.

It’s also what we can call the amazing persistence of journalism’s shibboleths regarding American wars.

Responding to a caller’s question about the economic motivations for US involvement in Vietnam, Kalb flogged the old tripe about people seeking “conspiracies” and causes that don’t exist. That the truth is, quite simply, that a series of “strategic errors” just happened…one after the other…until Presidents just found themselves in an unintended mess.

This is the haunting legacy of American journalism’s blindness to their own complicity in this economic power system, of their unwillingness to see beyond their Beltway bubble or to investigate root causes…and of their failure to ever ask the simple, ancient question: Cui bono?

Who benefits?

For instance, LBJ’s political connections to Bell Helicopter had nothing to do with Vietnam becoming the “Helicopter War.” In fact, the hundreds of millions made by Brown and Root, General Dynamics, Boeing, Dow Chemical or any number of military contractors had nothing to do with the reversal of JFK’s evolving policy of disengagement, right?

Kalb and his daughter ignore the groundbreaking work of historian Alfred McCoy…it was groundbreaking in 1972, by the way…that exposed the CIA’s efforts to pry into the lucrative heroin trade of the infamous Golden Triangle and how the escalating war was tied to that effort.

Kalb and his daughter must not know that Vietnam actually has some oil. And American companies knew it. In fact, some are there right now. Heck, why would Texas-based oil barons have any interest in prodding a known Texan named LBJ to stop Communism in favor of American capitalism? It surely wasn’t the millions of airline tickets taxpayers purchased to fly soldiers into Asia on Dallas-based companies like…American Airlines. That might cause a huge spike in demand for airline fuel, by the way.

Nope. None of the millions and millions and millions made had anything to do with the war. It was just a series of “strategic errors.” Just like the Iraq War, in fact. Same story.

Blunders, not plunder.

That’s the story, and they are sticking to it.

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What’s the Deal?

Posted on | August 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Great Debt Ceiling Crisis turns out to be little more than a game show.

It’s the DC version of Let’s Make a Deal.

Curtain No. 3 lifts and the rich get…a new car!

The remainder of the Middle Class gets what is behind Curtain No. 1…a year supply of Turtle Wax, which they will use in their newly created jobs waxing the cars of the rich. No benefits.

And everyone else gets the box on the stand. Wait for the reveal…cue “wuah, wuah, wuah” music…it’s a wicker basket filled with plastic flowers (Made in China).

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Sunday Morning Moron Watch: 7.24.11

Posted on | July 24, 2011 | 1 Comment

Am I the only person who doesn’t want to hear anything Andrea Mitchell has to say about the economic crisis? Or the debt ceiling?

Or, for that matter, any of her bloviations about the ways Washington is “broken” and, therefore, cannot seem to rectify the financial disaster created by…her husband?

Yeah, that’s right. In case you didn’t know, this “journalist” has been married to the Lord of the Fed since 1997. Contrary to popular misconception, politics doesn’t really make strange bedfellows. Not in the power orgy we call Washington, D.C. Rather, it is a cozy place with cozy relationships between convenient partners.

And when power-players decide to “meet the press,” they sometimes end up pressing the meat.

Her bedfellow just so happens to be the one man most responsible for jury-rigging the money supply and jimmying lending policies to favor the wild speculation of financial predators, to unlock the insane greed of Wall Street and is the man who personally blew up the internet and housing bubbles like a kid with twenty pieces of Middle Class gum in his drool-drench, power-puckered mouth.

And we get to watch his wife sit there and smile through her artfully-tightened face while she “reports” misdirected, mostly meaningless “news” on the story her husband helped to create in the first place.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more emblematic of the failure of our republic than is the way D.C.’s journalists are, literally and figuratively, in bed with the power elite who run this money laundering scheme we call America.

Frankly, every time she comes on camera she should be identified as Greenspan’s wife.

Although, she never really says anything, anyway. Maybe that’s the point. She creates dead air that cannot be used to expose the failures and transgressions of her husband and his team of greedy devotees who’ve sold our present to cushion their future.

 

 

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