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!

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.

SOURCE

Prepare For The Shock

The ever-prescient Naomi Klein prognosticates again:

I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place…).

The best summary of how the right plans to use the economic crisis to push through their policy wish list comes from Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. On Sunday, Gingrich laid out 18 policy prescriptions for Congress to take in order to “return to a Reagan-Thatcher policy of economic growth through fundamental reforms.” In the midst of this economic crisis, he is actually demanding the repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which would lead to further deregulation of the financial industry. Gingrich is also calling for reforming the education system to allow “competition” (a.k.a. vouchers), strengthening border enforcement, cutting corporate taxes and his signature move: allowing offshore drilling.

It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the right’s ability to use this crisis — created by deregulation and privatization — to demand more of the same. Don’t forget that Newt Gingrich’s 527 organization, American Solutions for Winning the Future, is still riding the wave of success from its offshore drilling campaign, “Drill Here, Drill Now!” Just four months ago, offshore drilling was not even on the political radar and now the U.S. House of Representatives has passed supportive legislation. Gingrich is holding an event this Saturday, September 27 that will be broadcast on satellite television to shore up public support for these controversial policies.

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No Taxation Unless For Bailouts?

UPDATE (9-21-2008):

NEW YORK TIMES financial columnists Floyd Norris and Gretchen Morgenson discussed what bailouts entail. Morgenson said:

“The ugly thing about this is privatizing gains and socializing losses. So when things are going well, the managements make out, the shareholders make out, the counterparties are fine. All the private sector people do well. But when something goes wrong, when decisions are made that turn out to be bad decisions, the U.S. taxpayer has to take on the problem. And there’s something very wrong about that.”

(SOURCE)

Amy Goodman’s latest column, “Wall Street Socialists,” exposes the hypocrisy of the wealthy elite classes of this land of so-called equality.

The financial crisis gripping the U.S. has the largest banks and insurance companies begging for massive government bailouts. The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive. Taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat now. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.

If I wanted a bailout from my present formidable credit debt crisis, I cannot ask for taxpayer funds because I am not as important or valuable as AIG, Lehman Brothers, or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Even though the risky practices those financial giants were practicing was of the same character as that of my own, in the over-reliance upon credit which the future cannot guarantee my own ability to pay back.

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Greenspan Gloom and Doom

This can’t be good. If Alan Greenspan can’t find anything good to say about the economy, it must be pretty bad. Not a pleasant thought, but deep recession and/or depression may be just around the corner.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan offered a woeful outlook of America’s economic situation on Sunday, saying the crisis with the country’s financial institutions was as dire as he had ever seen in his long career, and predicting that one or more of those institutions would likely collapse in the near future.

“Oh, by far,” Greenspan said, when asked if the situation was the worst he had seen in his career. “There’s no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen and it still is not resolved and still has a way to go and, indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes. That will induce a series of events around the globe which will stabilize the system.”

Smile – Big Brother Is Watching

Thanks to tomdispatch.com for this:

On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’” This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress’s action did not end the “total information awareness” program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public — for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness Program” is still going strong today.

(source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959)

Governments Can Prevent Climate Catastophe

Corporations have brought great amounts of inventiveness and positive change to Planet Earth. But at what cost? And if it will soon be too late to fix the global damage due to CO2 and other pollutants, why is Exxon attempting to delay the inevitable changes that must happen in order for the human race to survive the next few generations?
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Sleight of Invisible Hand

Having 66,000 pages of tax code is a powerful smoke-screen for the Federal Reserve/IRS’s sleight-of-Invisible-Hand, enabling the power-knowledge of “what does the law mean?” to be reserved to a shadowy priesthood of tax lawyers and high-level economics gurus. Who knows these people? When do they get questioned by journalists on our national news media? When does their work ever get scrutinized? Why doesn’t their all-important job description ever become common knowledge? When does their job performance ever make it into the popular news media, academic curricula, or congressional oversight?

If and when a President or U.S. Senator ever gets to hold them accountable or evaluate their performance, how does he or she know the right questions to ask, without one of these same economic gurus or priests advising them?

How might an interested tax-payer ever gain access to the knowledge base needed to formulate a critical line of inquiry, nevermind legally gain physical access to them in order to even ask the questions?
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Infragard

There are prophecies in the Bible which indicate that a time is coming in which powerful religio-political forces will persecute a non-conformist minority, attempting to intimidate them into submission, and eventually using deadly force against them. I agree with my Seventh-day Adventist Church in its application of one such prophecy to the United States government. The prophecy has been studied in this respect for over 100 years, comparing the machinations of the Federal Government with the words of the Bible. The Book of Revelation contains one such prophecy:

Revelation 13:15-17, “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.

This prophecy connects the power of commerce “buy or sell” with the power to exert deadly force. The introduction of digital banking, check-cards, and identification numbers was a first step toward the ability to bar access to commerce to hand-picked members of the population. To my mind, however, the deadly force aspect was vague; I couldn’t see yet how a large number of American citizens could be militarized and authorized to use lethal force against their fellow Americans. Then the following story was told on my local Pacifica radio station, and I sat there stunned as I listened to it, the implications of it creating a sick feeling in my stomach.

The FBI is partnering with businesses ostensibly to help guard our nation’s economic infrastructure from terrorist threats, but in so doing is granting business leaders the right to the prosecution-free use of deadly force when martial law is declared.
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