I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

For 30 years now, taxes for the much wealthier among us have been dropping like the proverbial stone, while "the rest of us" get little, in comparison, in terms of tax decreases. Roughly, "we" "let them" cut taxes, mostly "their" taxes.

But at the same time, we collectively haven’t forced the feds to shrink government spending. When you throw in huge increases for military spending, including several wars that "we" haven't paid for with taxes, we get huge deficits. Throw in a huge recession (OK, depression) largely created by incredible failures-to-control-corporate-and- Wall Street-greed, which horribly depresses national income and thus cuts tax revenues and...and you get. . .

Enormous federal--and state--deficits, deficits that have only a little to do with the Bush's (yes, he started them) and Obama's attempts to stimulate the economy. So, what's the effect of all this for "us ordinary tax payers"?

Well, huge deficits. That means "we" borrow from...from people and corporations and other countries that, compared to most of "us," have money to lend. For simplicity, call "them" "The Company Store." And these require interest payments that. . .

Interest payments that take up larger and larger shares of the taxes we pay.

So, we, meaning, again, ordinary folks such as you and me, see more and more and more of our tax dollars going to finance, not governmental programs or even wars, DEBT SERVICE.

Yesterday, some big-shot journalist guesting on local NPR tells me that THE INTEREST REQUIRED TO PAY ON THE DEBT CREATED JUST BY BUSH THE YOUNGER'S TAX CUTS will consume SEVERAL MONTHS OF EVERYBODY'S FEDERAL TAXES.

Not only don't "the rich" pay anything like what they did in taxes, but "we" now have to pay them for the money that we borrow to make up for the new anti-Robin Hood tax code.

Larger shares of our yearly tax payments for debt service is just one expression of this. Of course another is the incredible credit card debt--when I was a boy these rates were illegal, considered to be "Unchristian usury". And so on. And the little bird in Kurt Vonnegut's tree goes "poo-tee-weet."

This all is just another way of pointing out the obvious: We owe our souls, increasingly, to the company store.

So. Keep voting for them tax cutting Republicans and Faux Dems. And keep buying their totally discredited-by-the-facts stories about "tax cuts paying for themselves" and "the economy will grow so fast that by piddle...oops, I mean trickle--down will take care of us all...

So, St. Peter, don't you call us, 'cause we can't go. We'll all owe our souls to the company store.

Morning in America for Some, Mourning for Others

Reagan said it was "Morning in America" and it has been-- especially for the elites favored by the GOP. Let's take a look at CEO pay since "The Reagan Revolution" and the idiotic "trickle-down" that was justified by the evidence-free "Laffer Curve":

"[A]fter adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately 8 times the CEO average for all of the decades of the mid- 20th century. . .

"American workers, on the other hand, were taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s."

Of course it's not like that everywhere, it's not just having an advanced market economy. So I guess we can take comfort in the knowledge that, compared to their CEOs in Japan, "we" are winning hands-down. While our CEOs now 263 times the average worker's compensation, in Japan the ratio is only 16 to 1.

So, lucky us. We're still number 1 in some things.

For more see: thinkprogress.org/2010/09/01/ceo-compensation-workers

GOP Voters Think Obama Favors Islamic Law

Seriously, the GOP has lost its mind: A majority of self-identifying Republicans apparently agrees that "Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."

[I digress: Yet Obama "lets his wife" show bare, muscular arms in public? Let's his daughters be photographed in swim suits? Oh well.]

Seriously. I'm not joking, that's what a Newsweek poll tells me. These people are delusional. And the GOP leadership, with only a few admirable exceptions, does what it can to keep them that way. Anybody remember Dean Wormer's advice to Flounder?

www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/30/obama-islamic-fundamentalist-gop-polled-majority-says_n_699883.html
For the full Newsweek poll: http://nw-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/1004-ftop.pdf"

Spinal Tap vs. Katrina-- well, vs Katrina Myths

Harry Shearer has continued, over the years, doing whatever he can to explain the real causes of the Drowning of New Orleans. Hint-- it wasn't the storm so much as incompetence and corruption.

It was clear for years what was needed to protect New Orleans. Somehow, nobody could be bothered to do what was needed. Here's the short version:

"Two independent teams of scientists and engineers investigated the cause of the flooding, and they reached remarkably similar conclusions. The event, they agreed, was a man-made disaster—the result of more than fourdecades’ worth of mistakes, misjudgments, and misfeasance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency tasked by Congress to build a hurricane protection system for the city. Had the system worked correctly, one of the investigators said, the worst effect of Katrina on New Orleans would have been “wet ankles.”"

Here's the long version:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/08/hurricane-katrina-anniversay-201008

John Cole over at Balloon Juice asks the right question: "Is BP an Oil Company or a Criminal Enterprise?" His link to NYT tells another stunning tale of corporate greed & risk-taking, combined with a cover-up:

"While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems. . .

"For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.

"Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials

"Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company, seeking fines of about $600,000."

Our pals the Governor of Texas and BP looking out for us.

Links:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/08/30/is-bp-an-oil-company-or-a-criminal-enterprise/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/30bprefinery.html?_r=1&hp