SAR #15267

How much you pay in taxes is irrelevant, how much you have left is what matters.

Capitalism's Triumphs: In at least 5 states persons on bail must wear electronic monitoring bracelets – and pay for them. About $3100 a month. On any given day there are at least 100,000 people wearing ankle bracelets. That's over $1 billion a year in mostly pure profit. We're all aghast that a little snot has legally hiked the price of staying alive from $13 a pill to $750 – but it is the essence of capitalism to charge as much as possible for one's product or service. And we are shocked to our very core to discover that the capitalists at Volkswagen have been gaming regulations (for years and with the apparent knowledge and consent of the German government) for fun and profit while killing tens of thousands indirectly – the equivalent of collateral damage. Note that VW was first caught doing this back in 1974, the same year that GM was forced to recall more than 800,000 cars because it was doing the same thing.

Unfortunately: “Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession.”

People/Profits: Tennessee is arguing that the FCC cannot violate “states rights” by letting cities provide fast, inexpensive broadband services as long as corporations providing slow and expensive service continue to pay politicians for the privilege of overcharging the citizens for indifferent service.

Quoted: “When you see ever-changing rationales for never-changing policy demands, it’s a good bet that there’s an ulterior motive.” Paul Krugman

Explicate: David Cameron says Europe must get better at “sending migrants home”.

A Regular Guy: Jeb ¡Caramba! Bush now pledges to gut the FCC's net neutrality rules and return unconscionable profits to ATT, Comcast, Charter and friends. He also says he will roll back environmental protections, limits on Wall Street fraud, limits on oil drilling and saftey regulations that hurt profits of oil companies, as well as killing food-safety rules that are harming profits while preventing the food industry from killing us. Because regulations that hamper profits while protecting our health are unconstitutional. Or some such bullshit.

Shadow Boxing: A mathematician who is trying to account for anomalies in Kansas voting patterns is being denied access to the records which might reveal the causes of these anomalies. “Anomaly” here is taken to mean “how the Republicans got a lot more votes than seems possible.”

Quoted: “There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.” The Newsroom.