The Daily Outrage:That's Rich

Outrage is the Internet's middle name.  Nevertheless:

Who cut back on their charitable giving after the Great Recession?  The 1% of course.  The uberrich are also getting worse at "job creation" via this article in the Guardian.

Champions of the evil rich, the fabulous Koch Brothers are finally getting exposed, if nothing else.  A Bridge Project report details their awful and negatively aggressive and ugly mistreatment of everybody who isn't rich, as parsed by Alternet.  This follows an absorbing narrative of Inside the Koch's Toxic Empire in Rolling Stone last month.

Also in the Guardian, Karuna Jaggar persuasively exposes NFL hypocrisy (again), this time in its Buy Pink breast cancer extravaganzas.  It's getting harder to argue that the NFL is about anything but mucho money mostly for those who already have it.  

Climate Vs. Distraction

The politics of distraction has been markedly successful for reactionary forces.  Distort, distract and refocus the debate on outrageous distortions that make something as conservative as Obamacare seem radical, and debate on the deeper and more meaningful changes in the dysfunctional US healthcare system ends--with the insurance companies still in charge.

The politics of distraction has been particularly successful on the climate crisis.  While it was something that was happening but would manifest its damaging effects on humanity in the future, the necessary debate on what to do about it was sidelined by the raging and outrageous phony debate on whether it was real.

But now the effects are showing up in the present, and denialists are beginning to sound like those tobacco companies hacks and stooges who were still claiming in the 1990s that the science was uncertain about the harmful effects of tobacco smoking.

It may be that the virilence of their denials is in inverse proportion to the weaknesses of their arguments.  In any case, the political efforts to deny the climate crisis--and especially deny responsibility for changes necessary to forestall it getting worse in the future that the present can still affect--is massive.

These efforts seem to be centered on creating a political atmosphere that enables corporations to protect their current activities and profits.  The political windbags and the relentless denialists on the Internet are the stormtroopers.  Their job is to distract and keep the debate as crazy as possible, and stuck on the fundamental denialist issues.  The actual battles are being waged in legislatures.  The Republicans in the US Congress effectively hold Congress hostage.  But there are pitched battles in state legislatures.

Take a very recent effect of the climate crisis out of the many in the news this month: the half a million people in Ohio who couldn't drink their water because of algae building up in Lake Erie.  The causes form a perfect storm we're going to see again and again--environmental malfeasance by big corporations (principally agribusinesses using high phosphate fertilizers) with consequences also caused by the climate crisis (principally more rain and heat in the affected area.)  It was, salon said, a manmade disaster.

Moreover, Scientific American said in its headlines:Lake Erie Algae Bloom Matches Climate Change Projections/ The bloom that poisoned Toledo's waters may become more common as the waters of the Great Lakes warm.

Connections to big corporate efforts to bully state legislatures are made in this brilliant Guardian column by Ana Marie Cox.  Although the Republican governor of Ohio signed fairly weak legislation that at least recognized the problem of phosphates in fertilizer runoff,  Cox notes:

In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker “eased” the deadlines for polluters in the state to meet the previous administration’s numerical standards for the amount of phosphorous allowed in public waters (he tried to replace the numeric standards with a “narrative description” of reduction efforts, but wasn’t successful). In Tea Partying Florida, the Republican state legislature sought to overturn locally-enacted bans on phosphorus fertilizer – an effort pushed by a Scotts Miracle-Gro lobbyist who texted a representative, “I am begging for your help here.”

Cox also found counterexamples: "purple" and "red" states that are addressing the phosphate issue, because their citizens don't take kindly to the prospect of not having water to drink.  She suggests that Republicans have the opportunity now to change their current extreme opposition to anything that smacks of doing the environment any good.

But this change into extreme anti-environmentalism (the EPA after all was established in the Nixon administration) took some years and will resist, at least until very powerful corporations start turning themselves around.  Agribusiness may be the last except for the fossil fuel behemoths, that are busy buying up state governments all over the country to enable fracking and other extreme measures that keep them rolling in the megabucks in the fossil fuel business.

For the American citizenry as a whole, which polls show is already alarmed by the climate crisis, the political effects will likely come in the form of demanding that government deals with the effects of the climate crisis on their lives.  So far there hasn't been the division between dealing with causes and dealing with effects that I've feared, but it's always possible.  For now, it seems that support for dealing with effects (including banning phosphate fertilizers) may well translate into support for dealing with causes (reducing greenhouse gases.)

So we're doing it the hard way, by suffering the effects that cannot be forestalled because we didn't deal with causes earlier.  But it's getting harder to be distracted. The climate crisis is all around us.

Stress, Smoke and Mirrors

All stressed out, especially about the effects of being all stressed out?  Or are you worried that you aren't a Type A personality, the go-getter hero of capitalism with the relentless predatory drive to achieve, cheat and win, and then die of an heroic heart attack?

Hey.  Light up a cigarette and relax.

NPR is doing a series on stress.  They commissioned a poll which is mostly non-scientific nonsense, yielding such stunning results as people in poor health feel a lot of stress. Wow!

 But in Monday's story on the subject they did come up with some important news.  (News only because it hasn't been widely reported, to my knowledge.  The actual information has been available on the Internet for decades.)

It turns out that in reviewing these documents posted by court order since the 90s,  public health researcher Mark Petticrew found that much of the research that made "stress" famous, that "discovered" the Type A personality, was funded and controlled by Big Tobacco:

"What they've discovered is that both Selye's work [which established that any kind of stress caused bad health outcomes] and much of the work around Type A personality were profoundly influenced by cigarette manufacturers. They were interested in promoting the concept of stress because it allowed them to argue that it was stress — not cigarettes — that was to blame for heart disease and cancer.

"In the case of Selye they vetted the content of his papers and agreed the wording of papers," says Petticrew. "Tobacco industry lawyers actually influenced the content of his writings, suggesting to him things that he should comment on."

They also, Petticrew says, spent a huge amount of money funding his research. All of this is significant, Petticrew says, because Selye's influence over our ideas about stress are hard to overstate. It wasn't just that Selye came up with the concept, but in his time he was a tremendously respected figure."

Why does this not surprise me?  I've already told the story here of my encounter Big Tobacco paying off a newspaper to censor anything negative about Big Tobacco.  This story is entirely credible on the face of it.  It's especially credible because it fits into Big Tobacco's obsessive attention to marketing.  Sure, a lot of scientific research has been funded by the Defense Department and other organizations with a purpose, but Big Tobacco wasn't interested in discovering or creating anything--they only wanted to manipulate "research" to help them sell cigarettes, and to prevent for as long as possible any attempt to regulate tobacco as a serious health threat.

As for stress, the NPR story also mentions that later research casts a lot of doubt on the whole Type A idea, though that mythology is firmly entrenched in popular culture.  Most of the research that links high stress to heart disease was funded by Big Tobacco, while all but one of the studies that weren't find a much weaker link.  The NPR story concludes:

But some scientists now argue that our usual narrative of stress — that stress is universally bad for health — is too one-sided and doesn't reflect the reality that some degree of stress can actually benefit people. Stress isn't always a bad thing.

Still, the narrative of stress promoted by the tobacco industry through research and marketing is alive a well. A ghost from a long time ago continues to shape how we see, and experience, stress.

Mr. Butts is still in our heads.  Want to ask him what he thinks of the climate crisis?

Tweeter Says: Bribes are just somebody's way of saying I love you

What's the fuss about Congress killing disclosure of who finances their free trips?  If money is speech and corporations are people, what's the problem?  Bribes are just somebody's way of saying I love you.

Dogma Versus the Future

It's become the holy word of Republican orthodoxy, as well as a well-worn mantra of the business class: government doesn't innovate, create jobs or do anything well except spend the money they steal from citizens through taxes.  The way to promote innovation and economic growth is shrink the government, cut taxes on businesses and rich people, then sit back and watch the economy take off.

Despite certain cautionary tales like the Great Depression, this has become a dogma, even though some thinking Republicans recognize it lacks so much nuance as to be self-destructive.  Still it remains the only theology the short shelf of Republican factions can all embrace, and still hope to draw in non-believers.

That it's not true is more than a minor inconvenience.  It's a prescription for failure, and specifically for American failure in the near future.  That's one major conclusion of a couple of new books that Jeffrey Madrick reviews in the April 24 New York Review of Books.

These books in different ways affirm that major innovations--including  recent ones in the tech sector that the Enteprenerurial Liberation Front likes to cite, such as the iphone--were made possible by government funded research.

The two books are The Entrepreneurial State by economist Mariana Mazzucato and Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William H. Janeway.  Reviewer Madrick quotes:

"For example, she [Mazzucato] shows in detail that, while Steve Jobs brilliantly imagined and designed attractive new commercial products, almost all the scientific research on which the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were based was done by government-backed scientists and engineers in Europe and America. The touch-screen technology, specifically, now so common to Apple products, was based on research done at government-funded labs in Europe and the US in the 1960s and 1970s.

Further: Two researchers cited by Mazzucato found that in 2006, the last year sampled, only twenty-seven of the hundred top inventions annually listed by R&D Magazine in the 2000s were created by a single firm as opposed to government alone or a collaboration with government-funded entities."

Much was made in the 2012 election campaign of the bankruptcy of the solar energy company Solyndra, which received $500 million in government loans.  Apart from the fact that most of the investment money came from private hedge funds, there's this: "But including Solyndra, only roughly 2 percent of the projects partly financed by the federal government have gone bankrupt."

Still, the media loudspeaker made Solyndra a brand name, while nobody much has heard of First Solar--a solar energy company that is both a success and would not exist without government funding.

Mazzucato moves on to show in detail how the technologies for those visionary tech products the Ipad and Iphone "were almost completely dependent on government-sponsored research." One of the crucial ingredients in almost all new tech devices was the government created Global Positioning Satellites, or GPS.  Earlier it was the government-formed and supported research partnership of semiconductor firms (Sematec) that both insured US supremacy in microprocessors when Japan threatened to take over, and continued to innovate to make them smaller and better, making all mobile devices possible.

And of course even earlier, it was government research that created the Internet, and (beginning in the 1940s) to computers.  "Federal funding accounted for more than 50 percent of all US R&D from the early 1950s through 1978"--which includes the last decades when big corporations like Bell, GE, Dupont and Alcoa were spending a lot on research.  They haven't done so since.

But even though President Obama talks about supporting research, Republicans often vote against it.  Meanwhile, the review notes, China is investing heavily, with the threat of dominating future innovations.

It's true that a lot of funding for tech innovation came from or through Defense.  Not so much however in health.  Though the ELF makes Big Pharma into the innovative heroes, sources quoted in these books show that government research was responsible for 75% of the "major original breakthroughs known as new molecular entities between 1993 and 2004" and that of seven high priority drugs created in 2002, only three were from Big Pharma, four from government labs--and arguably they were the more significant.

The review also cites some interesting history, some economics concerning investment in innovation and some ideas on how to better finance innovation through public and private means.  But politically the nub of it all is this:“Many of the problems being faced today by the Obama administration,” she writes, “are due to the fact that US taxpayers…do not realize that corporations are making money from innovation that has been supported by their taxes.” That they are not aware of the benefits to competition seems to be a triumph of free-market ideology over good sense. How many Americans are aware that Google’s basic algorithm was developed with a National Science Foundation grant?"

The review concludes:

"But Mazzucato’s criticism of US innovation strategies goes deeper than the lack of adequate funding. She makes one of the most convincing cases I have seen for the value and competence of government itself, and for its ability to do what the private sector simply cannot. It is not only, as economists argue, a matter of reducing the risk of research and innovation for private enterprise. She argues that government efforts are the source of new technological visions for the future, and—very persuasively—she cites the innovations of the past sixty years to make her case."

E-Moloch

In the burgeoning controversy over e-cigarettes, this and similar stories caught my eye: a congressional hearing exposing how e-cigarette sellers were marketing specifically to young people, by using social media but also by handing out free samples at music and other events that attract the young.

It reminds me all too well of similar efforts in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was a columnist for a weekly alternative newspaper in Pittsburgh.   It was in fact called In Pittsburgh, and it was mostly of interest to a young adult readership.  At one of my frequent lunches with the editor-publisher, he informed me that the paper had been offered two very large new ad accounts, both from cigarette companies.  One of these companies was buying multi-page inserts three weeks out of four.  But they had a condition: no anti-smoking stories or words could appear in that issue.  The editor was telling me because I'd already written such columns, and he was accepting the ads and their conditions.

As shocking as this was, I was even more surprised that I was virtually alone in seeing it as betraying basic journalistic principles.  If anyone else connected with the paper thought so, they didn't say so or do anything about it. For some at least it was a small inconvenience for a greater good.  "All I know is that I'm getting health insurance," was one comment I recall.

At about the same time I went to a local club to hear a band--some place I went to fairly often, and where I usually saw a lot of people I knew.  There were Salem cigarette banners everywhere.  At the door to the dance floor and performance area, young ladies in fetching green and white outfits stood with trays of cigarette samples.  And what was the reaction?  I heard somebody say how flattering it was that a national brand was paying attention to a club in Pittsburgh.

I soon wrote about this event and the compact that my newspaper had made, knowing that the column would not be published and that I would resign in protest, which is how it played out.  I got no support from "friends" on the paper.  There suddenly appeared letters in the daily papers ostensibly from other writers for the weekly (though I'd never seen the names before) criticizing my action.  I got no support from anyone in the Pittsburgh press or media. Along with my gig and my readership, I lost pretty much all of my friends.

There were a number of lessons I learned from this, about habitual ways of thinking (no one connected this with censorship, although the usual suspects were up in arms when someone was prevented from describing a sexual act on the radio), about the power of money to corrupt and compromise at any level, and about costs that never quite end.  Some of this informs my understanding of reactions to the climate crisis.

 But some of it of course bears directly on this current e-cigarette situation.  This time however reaction time has been at least a little quicker.  It didn't take as long for a congressional hearing and substantive political opposition.  And today the Food and Drug Administration is exploring rules governing e-cigarettes as well as other new tobacco products.  It's been a 5 year struggle to get that far, and the proposed rules don't do much to restrict marketing to youth.  But that's par for the course.  It wasn't until several years after my confrontation that the FDA finally declared that nicotine is a drug that it could regulate.

Update: However, the FDA action may not be all that it seems, judging from this Wall Street Journal article: "Makers of electronic cigarettes breathed a big sigh of relief Thursday as the Food and Drug Administration avoided a heavy-handed approach to regulating the fast-growing alternative to traditional smokes, likely paving the way for stepped-up investment and even more varieties."

Several years ago I wrote an anti-smoking musical for school children (never produced) that included the figure of Moloch representing the cigarette companies.  Moloch mythologically is a demon who devours children.  He's apparently still working for tobacco interests, although he's branched out since then, considerably.

Califractia No!

Think Progress reports:

"Thousands of environmentalists took to California’s state capitol on Saturday to demand Governor Jerry Brown ban hydraulic fracturing, in what is being called the largest anti-fracking mobilization the state has ever seen."

"The process relies heavily on groundwater by injecting a mixture of chemicals and water into rock formations to release oil and gas deposits. California’s recent drought emergency has prompted some lawmakers to push for a statewide moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, as a recent Ceres report found that 96 percent of California fracking wells are located in the areas experiencing drought and high water stress."

"The protest, called Don’t Frack California, also attempts to point out that the oil and gas produced from fracking ultimately contributes to climate change, which leading climate scientists have said is the reason why California’s drought has been so bad in the first place."

Also last week a study commissioned by several environmental advocacy groups quantified the risks of earthquakes induced by fracking practices.

These Kochs Aren't For You

An interesting piece in the NY Times on the mysterious disease called Valley Fever the other day.  The news had to do with a court ordering thousands of inmates to be transferred from a couple of California prisons with epidemics of the disease.  The nasty, debilitating and sometimes fatal fungus disease, so far without a cure, is related to hot weather.

The Times story discusses the peculiar genetic factors, the medical mysteries, etc.  But two parts of the story stood out for me.  The first was this:  "Many scientists believe that the uptick in infections is related to changing climate patterns."  Other contributing causes being present, global heating is a factor.

The second has to do with impact. “It destroys lives,” said Dr. Johnson, whose daughter contracted a mild form. “Divorces, lost jobs and bankruptcy are incredibly common, not to mention psychological dislocation.”  Lost jobs and divorces might well result from a debilitating disease that requires a lot of attention.  But bankruptcy--that alone also leads to divorces and psychological problems, and destroys lives.  In combination with debilitating illness, it's a frightening, ugly death spiral.

What do these two observations suggest?  The United States is still one of the few countries in the world that  refuses to face up to the realities of the climate crisis, especially in the political system, and most especially in the federal legislature.  And the United States is possibly the only modern industrial supposedly civilized country where people are forced into poverty and despair because of the cost of medical care.

Which brings us to the Brothers Koch, who more than symbolize the reasons.  In large part, they are the reasons.  The Koch brothers and how they spend their money.

The New Yorker reports that a  two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University concludes the Kochs have spent some $75 million "tied to climate inaction:"

In its multi-part report, “The Koch Club,” written by Lewis, Eric Holmberg, Alexia Campbell, and Lydia Beyoud, the Workshop found that between 2007 and 2011 the Kochs donated $41.2 million to ninety tax-exempt organizations promoting the ultra-libertarian policies that the brothers favor—policies that are often highly advantageous to their corporate interests. In addition, during this same period they gave $30.5 million to two hundred and twenty-one colleges and universities, often to fund academic programs advocating their worldview. Among the positions embraced by the Kochs are fewer government regulations on business, lower taxes, and skepticism about the causes and impact of climate change.

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming."

In the 2010 non-presidential elections alone:

 Koch Industries’s political action committee spent $1.3 million on congressional campaigns that year. When Republicans did take control of the House, a huge block of climate-change opponents was empowered. Fully one hundred and fifty-six members of the House of Representatives that year had signed the “No Climate Tax Pledge.” Of the eighty-five freshmen Republican congressmen elected to the House of Representatives in 2010, seventy-six had signed the No Climate Tax pledge. Fifty-seven of those received campaign contributions from Koch Industries’s political action committee. The study notes that more than half of the House members who signed the pledge in the 112th Congress made statements doubting climate-change science, despite the fact that there is overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject.

This is a heavily financed attempt to influence the political process for generations on the single most important issue to the future of human civilization.

But the Kochs don't stop there.  The United States has been debating ways to provide medical care coverage to its citizens for much of a century, and very specifically in the past decade.  But duly elected members of Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, and a duly elected President signed it, and a duly constituted Supreme Court said it is constitutional.

The Affordable Care Act, which goes some way towards the kind of medical care coverage that the governments of  most other industrial countries provide, so that fewer people will be ruined, impoverished and terrorized on top of serious illness or injury, is the law of the land.

Yet instead of allowing the implementation to proceed so the country can judge whether this is a better system or not, it seems to be the official position of one political party to subvert it.  This effort, which led to the unprecedented, mean-spirited and virtually treasonous threats by Republicans against major league sports who would dare to produce public service announcements explaining the new system, is being led by the Koch brothers, at least financially.

They are currently "pouring millions" into a disinformation campaign to subvert the ACA implementation.  Critics of the health law spent a whopping $400 million on television spots criticizing the law since 2010, over five times the $75 million that the law’s supporters have spent on ads promoting it. Analysts expect $1 billion in expenditures by 2015.

The Business Climate

Articles and opeds that tell us how bad things are vis a vis the climate crisis are depressingly frequent.  But this one in the NY Times quotes several facts and studies I missed.  Mostly about the ongoing role of those behemoths of the age, the fossil fuel megacorporations.

Mark Bittman first of all cites this Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report showing that the world is not going to run out of fossil fuels for a very long time, once new technologies to wring the stuff out of sands and rocks etc. are considered.  There's potentially five times as much oil to be tortured out of the Earth than we've soaked up and burned up already.  A lot of the extracting action is likely to be within the U.S. So even if societies balk at the damage and expense of getting all of it, for a century or so there's not much threat of Peak Oil.  There are others that dispute this, however.

Bittman then puts this together with a Rolling Stone report that asserts that the Big Oil companies are no longer even faking a commitment to clean energy.   BP put its $3.1 billion United States wind farm operation up for sale. Last year, ConocoPhillips divested itself of its alternative-energy activities. Shell, with its “Let’s Go” campaign to “broaden the world’s energy mix,” spends less than 2 percent of its expenditures on “alternatives.”

The implication is that Big Oil has figured out that it doesn't have to hedge its bets by getting into clean energy businesses--it's got such a sweet thing going as the world's richest corporations ever, that nevertheless demand and get government subsidies, and that never has to pay any of the estimated $2 trillion in damages to the global environment.  Why bother?  It's like that t-shirt I used to have, with the Exxon logo and the words: We Don't Care.  We Don't Have to Care.  We're Exxon.  It's an all-purpose slogan.

So with almost literally all the money in the world, these corporations can buy all the state legislators they need to keep on pumping and fracking until the ground collapses beneath befuddled non-voters and I Told You So Jesus Apocalyptics.  And they tie up the federal legislature with paid deniers, otherwise known as Republicans, though some Dems are on the payrolls too. Bittman cites an American Progress study  that counts 125 congressional deniers who soak up some $30 million from fossil fuel corps just in "campaign donations."  Which doesn't include speaking and consultant fees, etc.

So the U.S. and the world keep burning the fuels that fuel the climate crisis, and while everybody else struggles to survive the consequences of past pollution, the future is fried for thousands of years after these folks die in their greed-fevered beds.

Tobacco companies were once all-powerful, but regulations limiting smoking eventually became common and pretty pervasive.  The task is even greater this time, because there's no place for fossil fuel corps to shift their business, unless they can market to extraterrestrials.  We have to hope some of them are run by people with a rudimentary conscience, at least about the world their own future generations will inherit. Not to mention the victims of the climate crisis and their children--look no further than the children of the 19 firefighters killed in Colorado.  It will take that, and immense political will and cultural change to make the necessary difference.

Big Commerce Is Watching You

The revelations about national security telephone and internet data mining bring up a lot of issues, as well as a lot of misinformation, opportunism and hysterical bloviating.  Here's an explanation and defense of the program, here's what such a program could lead to, and here's Josh Marshall's careful parsing of the whistleblowing part of it.

While all of this bears monitoring, I have perhaps different points of view.  Apart from its secondary importance when ranked with global heating as something to concentrate on and get all upset about in the media, it further illustrates to me how effectively we've been propagandized into getting hysterical about abuses real and imagined in government that we let slide or ignore in the corporate complexes.

While agencies of the federal government may be gathering vast amounts of data on who is calling who,  I don't see the same outrage about tech corporations with playful names following my every keystroke on the internet or reading my address book and sending me emails about what they find.  There is no privacy on the internet, and very little over any phone system that gets outside of a wire connection.  The feds monitor emails for key words--haven't we known that for awhile now?--to lead them to terrorists and child pornographers.  The private sector basically is using every available means, skirting the law or simply staying ahead of it, to learn as much as possible about each one of us, down to the most private details.  Technological means are constantly developed and refined to interpret information in order to predict behavior and profile every one of us.

So while the private sector can gather all the information it wants in order to sell us stuff, and set prices individually according to what they think they can get us to pay, anything the government does is an abuse of privacy.

I'm not necessarily defending these NSA programs, and certainly not the Patriot Act, nor do I believe it's wrong to question possible overreach by the national security state.  Abuses that are more than theoretical, like censorship or monitoring what information I access (something that those internet companies do routinely), or torture or even the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo (which got very little media coverage and no big outrage), merit coverage and outrage.  But it's curious to me that people go nuts over government getting involved in health care but don't seem to mind when corporations engage in price fixing and multiple abuses that have driven the cost of US healthcare through the roof and cost people their lives.  They rail about Medicare abuse, when its private individuals and businesses who are cheating Medicare.  So the government is always big and bad, while it it doesn't seem to be big and bad enough to control the banks, the oil companies or corporations in general.

Moreover, corporations are unaccountable to anybody except their bottom lines, and if they are too big and powerful to fail, not even to the courts.  But government is still at least theoretically accountable to the courts and more to the point, run by elected officials, who can be replaced by voters.

Which of course is part of the answer: because government is accountable, these controversies are political--people get voted out or in because of them.  Whereas we all feel powerless to change the behavior of the most powerful corporations, and elected officials are wary of touching them, since their wealth finances their campaigns.

Read It and Weep

It seems the Board of Directors of J.C. Penney are really upset with how the company is going, and they've decided to punish their CEO.

In a bold if not unprecedented move, they've slashed the CEO's pay--by 97%!

Quoted the New York Times: “The C.E.O. is certainly being given a message,” said Kent Hughes, managing director at the proxy advisory firm Egan-Jones Ratings Company. 

And what a message!  Somehow this guy has to make do on only 3% of his regular pay.  Hard to imagine how he can do it and still concentrate on turning the company around to please the board.

Yes, unless he dips into his savings or his stock portfolio or even his retirement, he and his family are going to have to make do for the entire year on only $1.9 million.

2014

What political speculation there is--and there's as usual too much--is about 2016.  Will Hillary run?  Should she? Can anyone defeat her? 

But by that time it may not matter in substantive ways.  What has become increasingly clear in the first weeks after the 2012 election is that we are still in the dark power of 2010.  The dreaded off-year election (as it's called, because it isn't a presidential year) when a comparative handful of voters even show up, and yet those who did in 2010 empowered those who are still busy destroying the future.

Yes, part of the devastating effect was due to it being a census and therefore reapportionment year, and so GOPer state houses could rig congressional elections according to party, which is why the GOP retained control of the House even though Democratic candidates got more votes, and under the redistricting of 2008, would have won it back.  So we may be living with those effects for a long time.

But it was the dramatic takeovers in governorships and state legislatures, largely fueled by big money unleashed for the first time by the Citizens United decision of the GOPer Court.  The mildest thing about the resulting stranglehold on state governments in many states was that it quickly became very extreme, and its extremism was coordinated from state to state.

The worst of it we see most dramatically right now in Michigan, where Governor Snyder and the lame duck legislature has suddenly rammed through a union-busting law (with a provision apparently preventing it from being overturned by voters) with blinding speed, without advance notice or the usual hearings or debate, really in a matter of hours on an otherwise ordinary Thursday.  Taking away union rights in Michigan is a breathtaking step, and this is being done without public support--the latest poll shows all of 6% of Michigan citizens support it.

Snyder could sign this into law on Tuesday, ignoring the warnings of political chaos that could result.  Demonstrations are ongoing and are likely to be massive Tuesday. These people are being silenced as a result of elections.  (Hitler too, it must not be forgotten, was elected, at first.)  There could be no more graphic lesson of the need to organize and vote in 2014. 

For this totalitarian blitzkrieg is only the latest iron fist of autocracy to take off the glove in Michigan.  There are entire cities now ruled by a state-appointed dictator, superseding all elected officials.  Funny how those folks afraid of nonexistent interference by the UN are silent on the very real dictatorships in Michigan.

The voter suppression laws, the anti-choice and anti-health laws, all of that, all coming from the states. They all are intrusive, autocratic (even if Theocratic) attempts that take away rights and freedoms.  In states like PA and Ohio, the fracking-happy state governments are helping to destroy communities and the environment.  Many of those governors and many of the legislatures must face the voters in 2014.  All it will take to ruin the last years of the Obama presidency plus the next one will be voters not paying attention again in 2014.

It's going to be hard enough even if they are.  Michigan couldn't pass a strong pro-union initiative, and Wisconsin returned their legislature to GOPer rule in the big Dem year of 2012.  But if voters don't return sanity to their state capitals in 2014, 2016 may be nothing much but show biz.

Perils of the Free Enterprise Campaign

Mitt Romney is the candidate of predatory capitalism so it is fitting that the way his campaign is organized reflects that approach.  It may be the only non-hypocritical aspect of it.  But it also may be the source of its doom.

We've learned that true to the higher management practice in predatory capitalist firms, Romney awarded generous bonuses to fellow executives of his campaign, even though they are failing.  We've also learned that he fields half the number of campaign workers than the Obama campaign does for the same amount of money, because he pays them twice as much.  It's about profit for everybody, it seems.

But the privatized and outsourced campaigning made possible by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, and embraced by the Romney campaign, apparently has the same fundamental flaws as military contractors and other privatized public functions.

It's been kind of a mystery why all the millions that his billionaire backers have chipped in haven't worked to either demonize President Obama or make the voters like Romney.  We got one answer this week when it was revealed that superpacs pay several times more than campaigns do for the same airtime for their ads.  It's a quirk (or I guess they and the Supremes would say a flaw) of the law that actual candidates get preferred rates.

But here's another factor that really rings true to me: when you privatize the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars for campaigns, the folks doing the spending may not have the candidate uppermost in their consideration.  No, like good predatory capitalists, they're fixated on Number One.

Writes Bruce Bartlett in the Fiscal Times: "Another dirty secret about independent PAC spending is that it is often guided more by what makes money for the managers than what’s best for parties and candidates. They typically direct TV advertising toward agencies they themselves own and where they get a 15 percent commission; direct mail campaigns are conducted by companies they own as well on which similar commissions are paid; polls are conducted by polling firms they own or are affiliated with; and of course the managers of PACs are paid well in the form of salaries and bonuses. Those who fund super PACs are often political neophytes who have no idea that they are being ripped off and taken advantage of."  (Hat Tip to The Dish.)

Mittpocracy

The Rabid Right and its GOP are so regularly hypocritical that they are daily setting new standards for hypocrisy, as well as merely outrageous lying.  In response to the Colorado shooting they warn gun control advocates not to politicize a tragedy, when they are the ones that have turned societal problems into partisan political issues, with the question of what to do about gun violence high on the list. 

And so the argument goes on with lots of heat and little light.  Besides which, it's not the only societal question that has become politically partisan--there's the one I emphasized here, the support of public agencies that deal with these crises.  To stop all such tragedies in this society is just about impossible, though they can be reduced.  But responding to them is a need for every single one, and despite their hollow words of support, GOPers want to cut funding for police, fire, first responders as well as counseling and other support services.  That's the clear implication of their budgets.

It's implied as well in their latest lies: distorting President Obama's words to make their severely hypocritical battle cry of individuals building businesses on their own without help or support.  It supports their ideology, which justifies lower taxes for the wealthiest as somehow generating jobs for the middle class.  But the reality is very different.  Not only in the simple but profound notion that taxpayers support the infrastructure that supports businesses--a point it is necessary to make because GOPers want to cut funds for that infrastructure, as they are doing now.  But behind the valiant individualist businessman that Romney is supposed to symbolize is truly shameless hypocrisy about how Romney and his ilk actually succeed and make tons of money.  They do it largely and sometimes principally by taking government money.

More news emerged about the guy featured in Romney's latest anti-Obama ad who wants everybody to know that he and his family built their business, nobody else helped.  He'd already admitted that indeed government supported a teacher who was important to him, and built the infrastructure that allowed his business to thrive.  On Monday it was further revealed that his business had received direct government assistance and tax breaks--several times, with some pretty big bucks involved. 

But even this is small potatoes for the Romney class.  Romney's Bain made much of its money exploiting tax breaks, tax havens and taking government money.  Other corporations, eager to get on the Romney bandwagon, conveniently forget about the special deals with state and local governments that pave special roads for them, give them a free ride on taxes, turn over millions in taxpayer money to them.  They thrive because of government money they get that small businesses let alone middle class families never get, and probably don't even know about.  They are the richest hypocrites on the planet. 

Procrasti-nation Continued

I like this photo as a symbol of where we are on the Climate Crisis because it is at once a reality--those encroaching fires were real--and a metaphor for the national attitude towards the oncoming storm: the traffic of the usual while the fires burn the horizon. 

In those cars, people may well be listening to news of other crises.  They may be horrified by the killing of 12 in a movie theatre in Colorado, as are we all.  There are always other crises and shocking events, other problems looming, competing for our attention.  There are also the stories we mostly don't hear, like 37 people killed in a huge rainstorm in the capital city of China, or the scores that die in U.S. heat waves.  Update 7/23: Death toll across China is currently 100 from these rains.

To be fair, a lot of people in those cars are frightened by the climate crisis and worried about the future, and they want it to be addressed, and may well be frustrated by the paralysis and inaction, especially in our political system, and most especially in Washington.  They may even be the majority.  But the power of the fossil fuel industry, so deeply dependent not only on the flow of oil but the future of oil for the money that floats them now, grips our system tight.  And it's looking to grip it even more firmly in this year's elections.

But the climate crisis isn't waiting.   Much of the U.S. is in serious and protracted drought (as much as 80%), and by fall the Midwestern drought in particular will result in rising food prices.  This summer's record-breaking heat is likely to continue into fall. And so the drought is expected to worsen.  The effects continue to spread, already with economic costs.  This alone will become impossible to ignore very soon.

But drought is not the only cost now spreading nationally.  Fires, damage from rain, hail and floods in the U.S. There's simple misery and the effects of heat on the human brain and body.  Strains consequently on the electric power grid for air conditioned protection--a grid, by the way that is decaying rapidly.

In other parts of the world, hotter temperatures have brought mosquito-borne diseases to places where they haven't been before, and where public health is not equipped and people have no immunity.   Before this, the ignorable Native communities in the north have been the principal victims in North America.  But they are no longer alone.  Once again, scientists are looking at possible tipping points for abrupt climate change.

But what we know already is bad enough.  Bill McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on the climate crisis in 1989, said in an email to those on his 350.org mailing list that he regards his new article in Rolling Stone as the most important thing he's written since then.  In that article, he reviews this year's stark numbers and some of the more remote, less reported weather events, such as "Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history."  (I am reminded all too often of the 'sensationalistic' early scenes in the 2004 climate crisis disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, many of which have since happened.)

In the fight to slow down global heating, McKibben writes, "I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in."
McKibben reviews the attempts by environmentalists to slow down the death march on both the individual and political levels, and judges them obviously ineffective.  Change through the political system hasn't work so far and is unlikely to in time. He thinks action requires a global movement, centered on the real enemy: the fossil fuel industry.

"But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

For a long time McKibben has been advocating that the climate crisis be approached as a moral issue, akin to the Civil Rights movement.  Now he believes that like Bull Connor and southern segregationists, this movement needs an immoral enemy--but this time it is an enemy that itself must be controlled in order for change to happen. 

What would success look like?  Maybe like a hefty carbon tax, with the proceeds devoted not only to addressing the causes of future global heating (financing green energy and a host of carbon-reducing strategies) but also to dealing with the effects of the climate crisis, now and likely in the future, everything from mobilizing for emergencies to a real public health system, and eventually much more.  There will be likely be huge engineering projects necessary.  In not so many decades, that really will be the choice: deal with the effects as a society while dealing with the causes, or fall into violent anarchy and international war over resources, or simply as the only way we know how to mobilize anymore.

Update 7/23: Add to the warning voices today economist Paul Krugman: "For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now."

The Big Shoe

Of all the millions of dollars given to SuperPacs so far for this year's presidential candidates--the overwhelming majority going to support Romney--80% of it was provided by a total of 196 people.  Since much of this is given in secret, it is only an educated guess, but it is likely that the single person who has provided more millions than any other for Romney and other GOPer candidates--with an on the record boast that his giving could be "limitless"-- is multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Known during the primary circus season as Newt's Vegas sugardaddy, Adelson's global casino business enables him to provide millions to the Romney campaign and to its SuperPacs.  He hasn't been shy about his intent to in effect buy the presidency.  But his motives seemed to be ideology and vanity.  Now another motive may have emerged.  A big shoe has dropped.  He may be buying the presidency to keep himself out of jail.

A PBS Frontline and ProPublica investigation suggests that Adelson and his gambling empire may have criminally violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by in effect bribing an official to pave the way for an extremely lucrative mega-casino in Macau, the only place in the whole wide country of China where gambling is legal.  Adelson's company is being investigated for just such possible crimes by federal officials. This may also have involved money going to the Chinese mob.

Violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a federal crime, so it really really helps if you own the U.S. Justice Department.  Which might well be among Adelson's acquisitions should Romney be elected.

Romney may need to own the Justice Department for his own defense as well--against perjury, for instance.  But his needs would likely be secondary to Adelson's. 

Rachel has her usual sterling storytelling and analysis of the Adelson affair (though she takes awhile getting there in this clip) and here's more on the story from ProPublica.

This attempt at a get out of jail free card is precisely the kind of corruption that laws limiting campaign contributions and providing full disclosure and oversight were meant to limit if not stop.  It's why these laws were created and passed, even with opposition from those who benefit from these opportunities for corruption.  At least until the current Supreme Court decided that money is speech and corporations are people, and that there is no evidence that unlimited and unaccountable campaign money leads to corruption.  

Can Money Buy You Your Own Reality?

The Romney campaign is shaping up to be the weirdest presidential campaign ever.  Like so much about this election, it is the ultimate of something.  That something in this case would be the GOPer campaigns since 1988, the Atwater/Rove era.  They are all about creating and selling an alternate reality, very much what advertising tries to do much of the time, but on a much larger, more complete scale.  Not just part of reality, but all of reality that might determine a presidential election.

They do it by lying.  By creating lies, putting a lot of energy and power and money behind them until a lot of people are convinced they are not lies but the hidden truth.  They start with the power of right wing talk radio and their very own television network, Fox.  These outlets spend much of their time convincing their listeners and viewers that only they are telling the truth, and the rest of the media lies.

They use their power with the rest of the media, too, to always get time to tell their lies.  They are GOPers and their supporters are the owners of the corporations that own the media, and the corporations that support the media through advertising. 

By buying a controlling interest in the Supreme Court, they got the go-ahead to use virtually unlimited amounts of money to finance their lies.  This past week, a group of their billionaires committed to spend a total of a billion dollars on crafting and telling their lies.

A billion dollars.  What I wonder is the combined budget of the news divisions of the television networks, plus the news coverage of the major newspapers and magazines?  Over the six months until the election?  I'm pretty sure it's considerably less.

The superpacs will carve out their own target electorates.  The gutter sleazoids, the overt racists, will concentrate on nailing down the racist base.  The others will support the alternate reality that candidate Romney is going out and saying: that President Obama's stimulus and other policies created no jobs at all, that he's vastly increased federal spending and federal regulation and the size of government, that he is vastly contributing to the deficit with no plan to control it,  that he has no foreign policy successes, that he goes around apologizing for America, etc. etc.  Not one of which is factually true.

But if these are generalizations that are untrue, Romney is adding specific lies of a kind that are truly scary.  He did so on Thursday when he stated as a fact that "an independent Inspector General" has investigated the Obama administration investment in the Solyndra firm and "concluded" that money had gone to "friends and family, and campaign contributors."  This is an absolute and complete lie on a verifiable matter of fact, as Rachel Maddow pointed out.

So a presidential candidate is saying that the President of the United States was found to have used public money in an act of corruption to defraud the government and commit other crimes by distributing government funds to "friends and family" (which it seems would be nepotism) and to campaign contributors, which is a more nebulous charge, but nevertheless, an important one if a federal investigation had so concluded.  And none of this is true.  No investigation, no conclusion. But it is repeated in campaign ads which lots of dollars will make sure that lots of people see and hear. It is a short step to saying that the President was found guilty of murder, and then spending millions of dollars to make that the accepted truth.

The charge in itself is somewhat laughable coming from Romney, whose friends and family are in the kind of businesses he would be able to funnel millions of dollars to. (As Governor of Mass., he also spent millions on public money on tech startups that failed. Update: including a solar power company that just went bankrupt.)  Who is President Obama going to funnel money to?  His brother-in-law the basketball coach?  Malia?

But it is not laughable coming from the nominee of the other party in a presidential election, the one with a billion dollars to throw around just on media.  It is not a laughable charge as it plays into unspoken prejudices, that President Obama favors blacks, his "friends and family." 

But something else happened Thursday, something as weird but as potentially dark and unsettling as a bland candidate blandly lying.   The Romney campaign did two weird but connected things.  They rounded up reporters and put them on a bus to go to the Solyndra event, because they didn't want to give the Obama campaign the opportunity to disrupt the event.  And the Romney campaign deliberately disrupted an Obama campaign event in Chicago, preventing David Axlerod from holding a press conference by shouting him down, playing loud instruments and so on.

And the Romney campaign--and Romney himself--said both of these were deliberate, and related.  The Maddow blog reported:

  Romney apparently kept the Solyndra press conference a secret because of paranoid fears about White House sabotage.

"We knew, if word got out, that Solyndra would do everything in their power, and the Obama administration would do everything in their power, to stop us from having this news conference, "an unnamed adviser told reporters, per CNN.
Reporters raised the question of how this devious plot to derail the event would work given that the freedom to hold a press conference in public is a fairly basic right.
"Well, he's only the president of the United States," the adviser replied.... Romney alluded to similar concerns personally in his press conference.
"I think there are people who don't want to see this event occur, don't want to have questions asked about this particular investment," Romney told reporters when asked about the secrecy behind the event, according to the New York Times.

And Romney admitted his campaign organized and sent the people who prevented David Axlerod from speaking: "If the president is going to have his people come in to my rallies and heckle, why, we'll show them we conservatives have the same kind of capacity he does."

Unless the Romney campaign has actual evidence that the Obama campaign has officially sent hecklers to his events, and that they planned to disrupt his Solyndra event, he's lying.  But as laughable as these antics seemed to political reporters, they are way too reminicient of 20th century fascist tactics, striking at the heart of the public democratic process.  This is close to being right out of the Hitler electoral playbook.

Why isn't all this laughable?  Because people aren't laughing.  They are taking Romney seriously--if the polls are to be believed, a lot of women are forgetting why they would be voting against themselves if they support Romney, a lot of veterans are really deluded about who is looking out for them, etc.  And the GOPer stranglehold on the federal government makes it impossible for President Obama to do what he knows needs to be done to create jobs and improve the economy.  Unemployment is still high, and if this month's report out this morning isn't significantly better--and it isn't expected to be, though the economy (particularly housing) has shown signs of growth-- then people are going to be in the mood to listen to an alternate reality where everything is Obama's fault and there is an easy and simple solution that will make it all better.  And they are going to get a lot of opportunity to be bathed in that phony reality, especially in the swing states.

They'd Like to Give Iran a Koch

Iran features prominently in two news stories today.  The first--the one that is getting the headlines and big play--is the plot that the U.S. foiled to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, which was financed and apparently directed from inside the government (or at least the military) of Iran.

The second is the Bloomberg report that says that among the foreign countries that the Koch Brothers bribed to get business was Iran.  This is yet another hair-raising profile of the Kochheads and their international as well as national criminal conspiracy, out to not only buy the U.S. but to buy the world, a Koch at a time.
   

Economy

from the photonovel, Ruins of Detroit

Later today President Obama gives his speech before Congress outlining his proposals to spur job growth.  The Democrats at least are likely to keep pushing the jobs issue to the forefront, though how successfully remains to be seen.  Despite persistent high unemployment and underemployment, there wasn't a lot of prominent and consistent attention towards the jobs issue until now, as several commentators have noted.

In a way this inattention was surreal, but telling.  Apart from the attention focused on health care costs--a huge drag on the economy and the finances of small businesses and families--and apart from the distractions fomented by GOPer politicians, the seeming invisibility of unemployment pain was a reflection of the current corporate economy.

With financial corporations bailed out by huge government loans, the world economy avoided a catastrophic implosion in 2008 and 2009.  Banks and then major corporations based in the U.S. recovered quickly.  They have been rolling in cash for well over a year.  Apart from a very slowly recovering housing market (due to part to banks thwarting efforts to settle foreclosures),  the economy has been slowed by a lack of corporate investment in the U.S.



India

 That investment has gone overseas, where production is, and increasingly, where consumers are.  American corporations are prospering because they have new markets in the rest of the world, as something like a middle class grows in places like India and China.  U.S. corporations don't have to hire Americans because they can hire workers elsewhere who work cheaper, and they are closer to growing markets.  U.S. corporations don't have to worry about impoverishing a U.S. middle class, because they no longer depend on Americans to buy their products and services.  For these corporations, the U.S. supplies infrastructure, some skilled and professional labor not so readily available elsewhere (at least temporarily), and increasingly, the U.S. serves as a tax haven.  If corporations could just get rid of regulations and environmental restraints, they could complete the process of turning the U.S. into their ideal, a Third World country on a hill.

That's the U.S. economy in the fall of 2011.  It is unsustainable and it's temporary--perhaps very temporary.  Everyone knows this, or at least suspects it is.  Fear of the future may not be a conscious component of the denial that has become the increasingly aggressive posture of U.S. corporations, especially in fossil fuels.  But it is itself the fuel.


China


The resources of planet Earth cannot support a world of 7 billion people with the lifestyles of middle class Americans or Europeans.  We would need several more planets for that.  That's just the math.  If peak oil hasn't been reached already, it will be soon enough.  The global Climate Crisis is already wreaking havoc on food costs and supply, and in drought areas, even on human water supply.  Huge populations remain available for the kind of low-wage labor and virtual (if not actual) slavery that capitalism apparently demands. But wages for skilled labor will go up, and quickly approach U.S. standards.  So costs will go up for the currently deliriously wealthy global corporations.

In the short term, the U.S. economy still has a lot of residual strength.  Some of it may even spark an upturn next year.  Buried in the dismal employment numbers last month were continuing growth in health care jobs--a sign that the affordable care act is not depressing employment, and may be spurring it, as its major provisions unfold.  There are other positives that may pay off.

But that residual strength can also mask a situation that may well be worse than it might appear.  America is still awash in cheap stuff.  People don't look like people looked in the Great Depression.  They are better clothed, they have TVs etc.  Food is still plentiful, even if what's cheaply available is bloating people to a grotesque degree and creating long-term health problems.  The first visible sign of trouble now is housing, and that's likely the first to become very obvious.  We've somehow learned to live with a degree of homelessness that was unthinkable between the Depression and the 1980s.  But it could get more obviously worse.

All that Americans have to hang their hopes on at the moment is their vote, and GOPers are aggressively trying to take their right to vote away from them.  It's hard to see how an election can be really decisive, since 2008 turned out not to be.  But it was always going to take more than one election.  Then there's some hope in the demographics, which is what's driving a lot of current politics: it's the last of the white supremacists, now driving the GOP.  The economy itself may spring a few surprises, but when corporations seem so blindered that they don't care about the catastrophic future they are creating--along with the equally cynical fostering of present pain--they can't be counted on to do anything but evil.             

California Greeding

The piggishness of the GOPer rich that's holding the world economy hostage in Washington, and quietly turning the states into corporate empires as well as the nation (thanks to the Supreme Corporate Court) has just had another victory in California.

A Democratic governor and Democratic majority legislature apparently could not overcome GOPer resistance to even holding a referendum in which the state's voters could decide on new taxes to balance the state budget.  No--they couldn't face the danger that they couldn't buy results to their liking, and the wealthy might have to pay a fairer share for the government that provides them infrastructure and support.

Instead, the Democrats passed a budget that places all the burden on the poor and the middle class, through cuts in programs for the poor, severe cuts to the state's once proud university systems, cuts in law enforcement that will make the inner cities more dangerous, the closing of 70 more state parks, and on and on.  The only new revenue will come from regressive fee increases (car registration) and applying state taxes to online purchases.

In other words, it's people like me who will pay.  It will not be the wealthy of this state who have seen their wealth nearly double in the past decade while the incomes of everyone else have gone down.  But now the wealthy are safe from paying anything more, while all of the cuts and all of the revenue increases will affect everybody else.