Saturday, May 2, 2015

SAR #15122




Noted: The ticking bomb that is race relations in the US did not start with the rioting and did not start in Baltimore. And the problems will not be solved there either.

Follow The Money: A dozen current and former law enforcment officers from NC and VA have been indicted on 54 counts of bribery, drug smuggling, and money laundering. Wall Street banks that launder drug profits for the cartels are shaking in their boots... with laughter.

Bottom Line: Need a reason to oppose the Great Atlantic & Pacific “T” parties? They subvert the Constitution and are a blatant surrender of our sovereignty to faceless unelected representatives of international corporations. How much worse could it get?
 
Democracy Now! Baltimore suspended legal procedures and imposed bail bonds of up to half a million dollars on the city’s most impoverished residents.

No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers either. Thank you, Governor Brownback, for proving that Art Laffer has been misleading Republicans for thirty years. Cutting taxes on the rich does not increase tax revenues and does not act as a magic elixir to the economy. At least 8 Kansas school districts are ending classes and terminating the school year early because state leaders cut school funding dramatically in order to patch massive holes in the state's budget. When that wasn't enough, the Republicans cut everything from welfare to road repairs. In Republican Kansas, not even the roads are built with good intentions.

Soundless Fury, Signifying Little: The Axial Seamount, an active undersea volcano 300 miles off the Oregon coast appears to be erupting. While interesting, the event will have no noticeable effect on coastal areas. 
 
One Size Fits All: Brother Jeb says that the solution to all our problems will start with for profit charter schools “higher accountability and dramatically different kinds of schools”.

Prevention: 225 Republicans and 3 Democrats have voted to grant employers within the District of Columbia the right to fire women for using birth control pills or for seeking in-vitro fertilization services. Because religious belief... 
 
Serendipity, Not: Economists and politicians note the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs in the US and the downward pressure on the wages and blame the “natural process of globalization.” Untrue. Globalization is not some unavoidable natural process” like gravity, it is the direct and predictable outcome of deliberate government actions designed to put Americans in direct competition with low-paid workers in Third World countries, all for the betterment of corporate profits. And it could be reversed. And should be. Period. End of discussion.

Early Warning System: HSBC, the world's third largest bank, is advising its clients to avoid investing in fossil fuel enterprises because they are becoming “economically non-viable.”

Finely Printed: The major rating agencies have ruled that when Greece defaults on its payments to the ECB and IMF, it will not actually be in default, although it will have technically defaulted, technically. It's an accounting thing. 
 
Porn O'Graph: Flatlined.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your money isn't in Kansas anymore, Toto.

This isn't a defect, it's part of the olde Ronald McDonald Reagan / Hamburgler scheme of bankrupt the government while the gullible voters are busy wanking off, so that anything other that defense and police spending must be cut, and while everyone's busy blaming the blacks dog whistle Democrats, give cart blanc to monopoly market gang to commercialize government services.

Anonymous said...

Serendipity, Not: As a humanist, I've always been troubled by the idea that a right to decent pay for honest work is, like all rights, really a privilege. A privilege usually not earned, but an accident of birth. Why should a child born in Mexico be any more unworthy than a child born in the USA? What I do object to is the scoundrels who bag the difference in pay. That's not just the capitalist and the politicians, but often the consumers.

Blissex said...

«Globalization is not some unavoidable “natural process” [ ... ] put Americans in direct competition with low-paid workers in Third World countries, all for the betterment of corporate profits. And it could be reversed. And should be. Period. End of discussion.

It cannot be simply "end of discussion" because there are many many voters who believe that lower wages and higher profits benefit them *personally* because they regard themselves as rentiers.

A lot of delusional lefties still seem to believe that 90% of people think they are laborers exploited by the property owners; instead a large percentage of voters think they are mostly property owners like the CEOs, only in a different degree, and vote for lower wages for laborers (for everybody else) and higher profits on property (for themselves).

The American Dream is "F*ck YOU! I got mine!" and a lot of people, especially women, who started accruing (or inherited) old-style pensions in the 70s and 80s and bought (or more often inherited or got from divorce settlements) their houses in the 70s and 80s think of themselves as property owners living the American Dream, and of laborers as exploitative and lazy losers.

Many voters think of the top 50% of property owners as being oppressed and exploited by the bottom 50% of losers, Romney-style.

«the scoundrels who bag the difference in pay. That's not just the capitalist and the politicians, but often the consumers.»

The consumers who have a net benefit from the "race to the bottom" for workers are only those who are property owning rentiers. Those whose jobs or salaries get cut because of competing with people living in countries with much lower property prices and costs of living are not getting any net benefit.

«bankrupt the government while the gullible voters are busy wanking off,»

The voters are probably deluded (in part) that they belong with the property-owning elite, that they have got their place in the sun in the plantation economy. They are slowly realizing that at least some of them have got it coming, as here one of the would-be eager lackeys in the journalism trade:

www.eschatonblog.com/2015/04/why-didnt-i-get-rich.html
«journalists/columnists of a certain age (meaning ones not much older than me and younger) are coming around to the realization that the economy is screwing them, too. There was a moment when a lot of them (we're talking ones at elite outlets, not your random small town paper) thought they'd done everything right, would become celebrities, and get Tom Friedman's speaking fees. The economy sure was working for them, and screw everybody else.»

Anonymous said...

"A full-formed Horse will, in any market, bring from twenty to as high as two hundred Friedrichs d'or: such is his worth to the world. A full-formed Man is not only worth nothing to the world, but the world could afford him a round sum would he simply engage to go and hang himself.


"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." but what Jay Gould left unsaid is he would work it so that those doing the killing were paying him for the privilege, and then setting a razor to their own throat
http://www.pictorem.com/2181/PawelKuczynski55.html