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The Palin Collective

I like Sarah Palin’s idea to collectively share the wealth of the oil companies, effectively establishing collective ownership of resources. She’s a popular governor in Alaska, where her administration presides over the most socialist (oops, don’t tell her that!) policies in the country.

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” (source)

I hope that whomever wins the election, Obama or McCain, that the United States will adopt the Alaska Collective model, abolish the federal income tax, and replace those revenues with taxes on the wealthiest oil, coal, and other energy corporations, just like in Palin’s State.

I vote for the Palin Collective! So should you, my fellow comrades! Er- citizens!

VP Debate Spoofed

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Final Debate in a Minute

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The Second Presidential Debate In a Minute

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http://www.236.com/video/2008/watch_second_presidential_deba_9434.php

The Vice-Presidential Debate In a Minute

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http://www.236.com/video/2008/watch_vp_debate_in_a_minute_9334.php

The First Presidential Debate, in a Minute

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http://www.236.com/video/2008/watch_first_presidential_debat_1_9186.php

Picasa 3 ROCKS!

Graphics handling programs aren’t typically much fun to use, as in slick, cool, stylish… Picasa has pioneered in that arena since version 1.

They’ve really outdone themselves with the latest version (3). Go grab this right now! Make sure you let Picasa handle the JPG files on your computer, giving it permission to be the default display program for those files (and it is programmed with the common courtesy to ASK you if you want this, as it is installing).

VERY powerful browsing capabilities, with a free space to upload them and share them with the world to boot.

Get it from my favorite download site, filehippo.com: http://www.filehippo.com/download_picasa/

Ideas Have Consequences

Naomi Klein speaks at the University of Chicago, the birthplace of the ideas that are now crashing down all around Wall Street, Main Street, and Washington, D.C. (transcript from DemocracyNow.org):

When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld. I have it on my website. My favorite quote in that speech from Rumsfeld is this: he said, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”

So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.
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Bailout Bill = Manufactured Crisis

This morning, Amy Goodman interviewed one of the Congressional Representatives voting on the $700 Billion corporate welfare bailout, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). Amid the wails and cries of crisis, hear a voice of reason. Here are selections from the rush transcript:

This is a copy of the bill which will provide for a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. It has provisions in it where it talks about helping homeowners, but when you read the fine print, you see it has language like “may” instead of “shall” and “encouraging” instead of “mandating” help for the millions of homeowners who are worried right now about whether they’re going to lose their home. There’s no help for them in this.

So what we have here is a rescue plan that essentially gives all the speculators a bailout and puts the bad debts in the custody of the government. The president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank has said that this plan could create a fiscal chasm, says that the problem isn’t tight monetary policy, it’s the reckless behavior of some of these investors who have now found themselves in a position where a government bailout is going to help reward their bad behavior.

I reject the underlying premise that we needed this bill. And as a matter of fact, that we’re putting this up before an adjournment in an election season shows that Congress is being put under extraordinary pressure to bail out Wall Street. We haven’t looked at any alternatives, Amy. This is—you know, it isn’t as though, if you had a liquidity crisis, that—you know, a real one—that you’d start to look at all the alternatives. We haven’t done that. We have a bill here, a bill of more than a hundred pages, that we haven’t had a single hearing on the bill, you know—on the concept, yes, on what Paulson and Bernanke asked for initially. But, you know, we need to have hearings on this. There’s 400 economists and three Nobel Prize-winning economists who have said, “Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing? Why are you rushing this?” You know, this thing doesn’t smell right, frankly.

Congress better get ready with a plan B. If this thing goes down, we need to find a way to help Wall Street pay for its own problems. You can do that with a 20—.25 percent stock transfer tax, cancellation of dividends. You know, make the shareholders and the investors have to pay for the funny business that was going on on Wall Street. Why make the taxpayers pay? You know, the very underlying idea of this needs to be challenged, and frankly, there hasn’t been enough of that going on.

Well, what we have is a transfer of wealth, actually. It’s a continuation of a transfer of wealth. This whole government has become nothing more than a big machine that transfers the wealth upwards with our tax policies, our energy policies, with this fiscal policies, with the war. All the wealth of the country goes from the pockets of the people into the hands of a few. This is a very dangerous moment. You know, it’s the biggest amount of injection of capital by the government in a single time since the New Deal. And frankly, there is no trickle down here. There’s just rewarding bad behavior.

I don’t see this as a partisan issue, by the way. I mean, in a way, the debate that tries to make it a partisan issue is a diversion. This is really whether or not people will side with Main Street in a struggle with Wall Street, because, you know, this is not about left or right. This is about up or down, and it’s about the color green.

And frankly, Wall Street is—has put itself on a trajectory with now we have almost a quadrillion—half a quadrillion dollars of derivatives that are out there, floating out there. People have said that if this is intended to be a fix, it’s a joke, on one hand. On the other hand, who’s paying for it? Why are we rushing this?

I mean, we need to be ready with plan B, which helps Wall Street restrain some of this bad conduct, which immediately, you know, puts—looks at some of the issues of liquidity that have to do with the policies of the Fed. We had a former head of the FDIC tell a group of congressmen yesterday that the Bush administration has been going around the last few weeks, actually, so tightening up on the practices of banks that they’re forcing them to have bigger reserves, which in a way would, you know, kind of create—help to create the kind of tight money policies that we’re saying we’re trying to alleviate with this bill. So, you know, there needs to be a deeper look at this.

It seems to me there’s a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it. And that really concerns me, because we haven’t had enough time to look at this in an in-depth way, to analyze the impact of it on the economy, to see if it’s going to do anything about a recession that we’re obviously headed into, to see if it’s going to handle the underlying concerns on Wall Street about the speculation and a lack of regulation. The bill doesn’t, by the way, address anything about the speculation, anything about the lack of regulation. The SEC has failed. The Fed has failed. And we’re essentially telling all the same actors, “Go for it. You know, here’s another opportunity,” except this time it’s with taxpayers’ money.

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