Keep Smoking that Crack, Gary

Gary "What's Aleppo" Johnson has written an op-ed arguing that people should vote for him.

Good luck with that, Bucko. When Nanny Bloomberg was mulling over a third-party run, I wrote a post to explain why if he made a real try at it, he'd toss the election to The Donald. That still holds. If Johnson garnered enough electoral votes so that neither Clinton nor Trump racked up 270 electoral votes, then Trump wins, even if he only won Mississippi.

Johnson's smoking political crack. The sad thing probably is that deep down, he likely knows it. Which makes him just another huckster.

Almost a Good Idea from Gary Johnson. Almost.

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson on Monday said he would shutter the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as president. ... Johnson, the former GOP governor of New Mexico, said he would have the FBI assume the DHS’s responsibilities.

Disestablishing DHS is a decent enough idea. They are a clusterfuck agency, with La Migra chasing down lawful private pilots, when not acting like tenth-rate music critics.[1]. DHS, an agency founded to fight terrorism, is combating art theft, copyright violations, illegal parking, and child pornography.

But putting the FBI in charge is a terrible idea. The FBI was fascist back when fascism was cool. And they are fucking pretty good at it, for they've had over a century's worth of practice.

Johnson calls himself a "libertarian", which is hooey. Anyone who advocates giving more power to the FBI is a statist. You'd expect such an inane proposal from DiFi or Peter King (R-IRA), not a "libertarian.
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[1] Kind of like making the meter maids do building inspections.

Spawn of Wingnut for President

U.S. Senator Rand Paul promised to be a different kind of Republican on Tuesday, launching a 2016 White House bid by saying he would stand up for individual freedoms that are being trampled by "the Washington machine."

The usual pseudo-racist crap of "taking our country back" was spewed.

Ron Paul has a long history of blowing a racist dogwhistle, including defending the cause of the Confederate traitors.

Rand isn't much different.

If Baby Paul wants to change the country, it's hard to see how he will do that by tossing away a lot of the power of the presidency. So he'd probably want to reduce his power afterwards, at which time, you can bet your farm that he'll find it really hard to give it up. One of the fundamental principles of holding power is that you never let somebody else take it from you. He'll find a reason to keep it, if the voters are drain-bamaged enough to choose him.

"Paulsamic Vinegar"-- How Did I Ever Miss This One?

There is this video on YouTube (and it's not the only one) of a crazy person spraying vinegar with a hand-spray bottle to wipe out "chemtrails". Freep has a long story, full of snark, about the Ron Paulistas and "chemtrails".

In a rational world, one would point out that condensation trails form when water vapor in engine exhaust condenses at high altitudes, where it is bloody cold. Contrails have been around since the Second World War, when bombers began flying up high.

In a rational world, one would explain that contrails form about 25,000' and that the airliners which create them are usually flying at altitudes between 33,000 and 39,000 feet.

Trying to eliminate a "chemtrail" by spraying or boiling vinegar at ground level is like trying to put out a match by spraying a hose at it from five or six miles away. At least, that's the point that I'd make to a rational person. One could point out that the duration of any one set of contrails depends on the temperature and dewpoint of the altitude where it was formed, which is why some vanish in a minute and some persist for hours.

But the "chemtrail" people are nowhere near close to being rational. In point of fact, they're close to being certifiable.

And so, in an age-old tradition, we make fun of them.

The Running of the Morans; Firearms Edition

From an email sent by an Internet seller of ammunition (and stuff like that):

Due to the results of the recent election, orders for ammunition and related products have increased exponentially. This has resulted in majority of our products advertised on our previous sales flyer email to be sold out. Unfortunately due to supply and demand has our suppliers and importers have increased their price to us and this is completely out of our control. Due to this and our increasing backlog, sale prices will revert back to normal price as inventory begins to return to stock.

So here we go, just like four years ago. There will be panic-buying of all things bangity by all of the Cletii* who are convinced that the Evil Kenyan Usurper is about to outlaw ammunition sales and unleash hordes of UN troops to confiscate their gunsz!!!1!

Those clowns will drive the price of a box of 9mm ball up to $40 (or higher), just as they did last time. And of course, you know that ol' Cletus isn't going to bust a single cap of his precious horde of ammunition.

Ah, well. Same Shit, Different Year. Because you can't fix stupid and, most of the time, it's illegal to kill it.
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* Plural of "Cletus", a generic gun owner who thinks that women should only carry J-frame revolvers and that the Four Rules are for sissies.

Libertarian Fantasy versus Reality

In the Libertarian mind, there is no need for regulation of companies-- Companies can be trusted to do the right thing because they want to protect their good reputation. Or so that's what they seem to believe.

In the real world, things are quite different. If a safe working environment costs money, companies will not provide one. If they are required to provide one, they will circumvent the rules. Which sort of works, until enough people die.

Exhibit A: Massey Coal.

Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.

Kevin Stricklin, administrator for coal at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, described a dual accounting system practiced by Massey before the deadly explosion, in which safety problems and efforts to fix them were recorded in an internal set of books, out of sight of state inspectors, and off the official books that the law required them to keep.

That was among the conclusions of a large team of federal investigators, who spent a year sifting through more than 84,000 pages of documents, interviewing 266 people and examining evidence at the Upper Big Branch mine, where the explosion occurred.

Twenty nine men died because Massey Coal had a deliberate policy of refusing to fix dangerous conditions and covering up the existence of those conditions. Massey Coal didn't give a damn about its reputation or its workers. I would have to suspend disbelief in order to accept the concept that the executives of Massey Coal had no idea that this was going on. Their executives pled the Fifth for a reason, I sincerely hope that their reason for doing so lands them down the cellblock from the Two Bernies (Kerik and Madoff).

Republican ideology is more brutal. Republican orthodoxy now is "all regulations bad." In the Republican mind, there would not have been a problem with Massey Coal fibbing on its records because there wouldn't have been any regulation of mine safety to begin with.

If Ron Paul Is Your Typical Libertarian, Then Libertarians Are Batshit Insane

Ron Paul thinks it is perfectly peachy if business owners engage in racial discrimination. He thinks it's perfectly fine to put "no Negroes or Jews" covenants into deeds.

Paul lives in Cloud-Coo-Coo Land, for he seems to think that businesses wouldn't have survived if they discriminated. Paul ignores the historical truth that Jim Crow was alive and well throughout the South in the early 1960s. There was no way in hell that every diner, every store, every movie theater could have been desegregated without the force of law.

Paul exposes the ground-level logic fault of Libertarian/Randist ideology, which is that businesses will do the right thing because doing the wrong thing will cost them business and their reputation. Right. From the Radium Girls of the 1920s to the coal miners in Massey Coal's mines and the natural gas frackers who are poisoning the water table, there is no shortage of examples that show that business will almost always do whatever is expedient and will maximize profit, regardless of the risk it poses to the workers and the general public.

Does the above mean that Ron Paul a racist? Arguably not, but for that evidence, you have to look elsewhere, and it is not hard to find.

Imagine Food Safety Under Tea Party Regulators, or "Hooray for Capitalism"

If you want to see what food safety would be like if Federal regulations were enforced the way that the Tea Party would like (ie, "not at all") and that the acolytes of Ayn Rand would have ("not at all"), then you need look only at China, where contaminated and even falsified foods are sold for human consumption:

Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin. Instructions can be purchased online, the Chinese media reported.

In case you are astonished, you should go look at the way things were done in this country up until the late 1930s. One company, Massengill,* sold an "elixer" that killed over 100 people and its only punishment was to pay a fine because the labels were not accurate.

There is this fantasy in some circles that holds that companies and businessmen will do the right thing because they do not want to besmirch their good name and reputation. Even if that were once true, it was true then because the businessmen lived in the same places where they made and sold their wares. If they sold defective shit, they heard about it, their relatives heard about it.

Those days ended with the development of steam-powered transport. When sausages were packed in Kansas City and sold in butcher shops in New York City, the sausage makers couldn't care less if someone in Brooklyn thought they tasted a little funny. The only thing that mattered was profit.

As a man in Shanghai, put it: “They really have no morals. They will do anything for money.”

That is exactly right. Capitalism is an amoral system. Without regulators watching for product safety, food safety and everything else along those lines (including financial regulation), then capitalism degenerates in a race to the bottom, where everything is sacrificed in the name of profit.
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* Yes, the douche people. They're now part of GlaxoSmithKline.

Going Galt?

Ayn Rand applied for both Social Security and Medicare benefits.

So the Goddess of the Tea Party was as much a hypocrite as the rest of the so-called conservatives.

The Same Holds True For the Banksters

From a NY Times op-ed on the latest series of mob arrests:

There have always been, and always will be, ambitious, greedy wise guys who are willing to risk long prison sentences for the power and riches glittering before them.

We must, as a society, always keep a gimlet eye on the banksters, for the same reason, except that the banksters who engendered the financial meltdown (and lined their pockets doing so) aren't going to prison.

The acolytes of Ayn Rand, who believe that there is no need to watch the banks and corporations, because they can be trusted to do the right thing, are fools suffering from a mass delusion. Their beliefs fly in the face of thousands of years of human history. One of those acolytes, Alan Greenspan, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, was the one man who single-handedly had the ability to stop the housing bubble from forming.

But I've blogged on this before.

So let me close with this quote (yes, I've used it before):

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I Accuse.....

(This post, originally posed on the morning of October 30th, will stay on top until Wednesday morning.)

I accuse the Republican party of actively working to sabotage the Federal government, including the destruction of Social Security and Medicare.

I accuse the Democratic party of craven collaboration with the saboteurs of the GOP. I accuse the Democratic party of lacking the spine and courage to stand up to the saboteurs.

This is my brief.

It is a simple fact of economics, from the smallest lemonade stand to the largest corporation, that if expenses are larger than income and remain that way, then the entity will eventually go broke and fail. For individuals and families, if expenditures are larger than income, then they will eventually go bankrupt.

Let us step back in time nine years.

In 2001, in part thanks to tax increases signed into law by President George H.W. Bush nearly ten years before, the Federal yearly budget was in the black. The long-term forecast was for Federal budgets to be in the black. For possibly the first time in decades, the Federal government was projected to not only be running a surplus for the foreseeable future, but that it would make large-scale reductions in the Federal debt, then a skosh over 5 trillion dollars.

That was intolerable to the Republicans and to the devotees of Ayn Rand, chiefly Alan Greenspan. It had been a plan of the Republicans for decades to overspend the Federal government until the deficit was so high that the New Deal and Great Society social programs could be dismantled. A Federal government that was running a surplus was not part of their plan.

And so they sent about wrecking it.

The way they set upon was massive tax cuts. Those tax cuts, while offering a little bit of a break to the middle class, were huge for the wealthy. They were especially significant for those who made their money not by going out and working, but by letting their money do the work for them (through investments). Those who lived off returns on investments, whether it was money they had made through their own businesses or those who had inherited wealth (the winners of Lucky Sperm Lotto), made out like bandits.

The result was the Federal government's budget shifted immediately from the black to the red. Deficits returned. The long-term outlook from the effect of those tax cuts was so bleak, with deficits, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office, to eventually skyrocket over the trillion dollar amount per year, that the only way that the administration of George W. Bush could get his little giveaway enacted was to have the tax cuts expire in 2011.

And so here we are, pretty much in the situation that the CBO said would exist, and that was before we got into two wars.

Remember what I said at the beginning: Income has to equal or exceed expenses eventually. Companies, businesses and households sometimes have to run at deficits to weather bad times. But sooner or later, the budgets must balance and the debts have to be paid down.

Any discussion of bringing the Federal government's budget back into balance that does not discuss the revenue, ie, income, side is not a serious one. It is not an ideological talking point that the Bush tax cuts are largely responsible for where we find ourselves today, it is a statement of fact.

The Republicans are doing what they have always done; Smashing down the poor, working and middle classes so that the rich benefit. If you even can get a Republican politician to talk about the revenue side of the Federal government (which they hate doing), what they talk about is crap like the "Fair Tax" and the "Value Added Tax". There is another term for both proposals: Federal sales taxes.

Sales taxes are regressive taxes. The burden of sales taxes falls disproportionately on the lower rungs of the economic pyramid. I maintain that this point is so self-evident that if I were to expound on it further, I would be insulting your intelligence.

If the tax structure is going to be a burden borne by other than those who work for a living, then it has to be on income. I believe that if the taxes are to be fair, they must not land most heavily on those who can least afford them. Those who reap most of the benefit of the freedom of this country in the creation and multiplication of their wealth should be expected to share the burden of paying for it (for the Lord knows that it is not their sons and daughters who have been playing games of IED Roulette for the last several years).

The first step is to let the Bush tax cuts die their planned death. If that is not permitted to happen, then the politicians are not serious about fixing the Federal budget.

In point of fact, there is not a single member of the Republican party, whether those in Congress, those running for Congress, or those running for the presidency in 2012, who is serious about fixing the Federal deficit. (Remember that the 2009 Federal budget, which was more than a trillion in the red, was proposed and written by the Bush Administration.)

I accuse the Republicans of economic sabotage of the Federal government. It has been their plan for decades to run the Federal government off a cliff, to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and to bring this country back to where it was in the 1890s, if not the 1840s. (Some of the far right Republicans are seriously talking about scaling back or even eliminating compulsory education.) What they seek is to reduce this nation to a near Third World status, a nation with a number of glittering rich, and mostly poor people, but a nation with nuclear weapon. What they seek is to have a system where only their viewpoints are permitted and those who dissent are marginalized, if not imprisoned.

There is a nation, of course, that is almost fully in line with the Republican ideal: A nation where dissent is not tolerated, the rich run rampant, the workers and poor are crushed down and the industrial base has been largely dismantled or allowed to rust into permanent obsolescence.

That nation is Russia.

The turning of the United States into another Russia is what the Republicans have in mind. That is why I accuse the Republicans, every last one of them, of sabotage, if not outright treason.

The Democratic party has been absolutely spineless and craven in this. Despite the self-evident results of the Bush tax cuts, the Democrats have been unable to stand up, to do a "Ross Perot" and show any graphs or charts to the American people to explain the perfidy of the Republicans. Some of the Democrats have not just been cowards unable to stand up to the Republicans, they have, in fact, actively collaborated with the Republicans on their plan to destroy the Federal government and to bring this nation back to the 19th Century.

It has been said by many people that nations get the governments that they deserve. This is particularly true in a democracy. Whatever the outcome of the election on Tuesday or the one on November 6th, 2012, we will get the government that we deserve.

Whether it is a government that looks to the 21st Century or to the 19th Century is up to you.

Vote.

A Very Good Reason to Vote for Democrats

I think that this is a good argument, but I would be a lot happier if I thought that the Democrats were a bit stiffer in the spine. They have been played time and time again by the Republicans. It should be clear by now that Republicans define "bipartisanship" as "two parties doing it our way."

The Republicans had zero intent of doing anything positive on health care reform, but the Democrats let them string them along.

Hell, the Republicans have no intention of doing anything to help anyone who is not filthy rich already. Susan Collins of Maine was happy to continue to let the execrable "don't ask, don't tell" policy continue because she was oh, so offended at the process for enacting the repeal. In fact, they are openly talking about shutting down the Federal government, which will make all of those elderly Teabaggers really happy when their Social Security checks are not mailed out and when Medicare fails to pay their doctors. That'll really make the troops happy when they are not paid. It'll do wonders for the national economy when the air traffic control system shuts down.

The Democrats ought to be talking about how the stimulus, weak though it was (due to Republican and DINO intransigence), stopped the Bush Recession from becoming a depression. They ought to talk about how the bailout of GM and Chrysler saved the entire American auto industry, including Ford as well as the German and Japanese plants in this country, from shutting down.

They ought to confront the bank bailout head-on and ask people if a global collapse of the financial system would have been in their best interest. Yes, it sucks that the banksters, the most egregious of which has been Goldman Sachs, were able to escape the consequences of their actions. But anyone who thinks that the alternative of letting the largest banks in this country fail was a better one either has mush from brains or has been fully programed by too much Ayn Rand fiction.

But the Democratic party is unwilling, unable or too spineless to try and make the argument that they have been working in the national interest. Instead, they have been alternating between hectoring the base to get out and vote and saying that the Republicans will be worse. The latter is true enough. The former is idiotic, as bitching people out is about the worst motivational tactic one can use.

The Democrats arguably deserve to lose. This nation, however, will pay the price of letting the party of the Confederacy back into power.

The Global Vampire Squid and the Other Banksters

At the same time that the global economy was teetering on the edge of collapse, the banksters had the guts to give themselves two billion dollars in bonuses for, well, I have no idea. It certainly can't be for doing a good job. The only people who might have thought that they were doing a good job would be those emotionally invested in the idea that the economic system should collapse: Marxists, acolytes of Ayn Rand and goldbugs.

Meanwhile, it has come to light that Goldman Sachs (a/k/a the Global Vampire Squid was lying when it said that if AIG had defaulted, that Goldman Sachs would have had few losses. The AIG rescue, which has cost well over a hundred billion dollars, looks more and more like it was engineered to be a hidden bailout of Goldman Sachs and the other banksters.

I suspect that the NY Fed (then headed by Timothy Geithner, now our Treasury Secretary) had its fingerprints all over that deal.

BP Also Stands For "Beguiling Prevaricators"

BP ran a full-page color ad in today's NY Times which promises that "we will fix this, we will make it right".

Except that they are not.

Except that it is highly likely that they never will.

It is also established that BP's officials knowingly took chances with the Deepwater Horizon drilling project because they were behind schedule,[1] over budget, and with the blessings of the Minerals Management Service.

If there has ever been a case of corporate folly that exposes the fallacy of the libertarian premise that "business can be trusted to do what is right", it is this catastrofuck. The blowout and subsequent gusher was not an accident, nor was it an act of G-d. It was a fuckup, just like accidentally shooting someone with an "unloaded" firearm. Only in this case, there was far more fucking up done and far, far more damage done than any single inadvertently-fired bullet could do.

[1]Unlike Casey Jones, nobody will ever write a ballad about the heroic efforts of BP.

Property Rights Are Sacred to Libertarians, But Only When It Is Their Property Rights

Which is why Rand Paul's campaign is willfully violating the copyrights of the band Rush.

Ah, the utter selfishness of libertarians: "Nobody else's rights matter, only mine, mine, mine!"

(H/T)

Grinding Down the Working Stiffs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its yearly report on what jobs people hold. The data is a year old, it takes them that long to compile it. This is the report summary.

Of the top ten jobs held by the most people, only one, nursing, pays well. For the other nine, if you were to try to support a family on the wags you earned, you'd be collecting food stamps.

These are the top ten jobs and the average wage:

Retail salespersons                                $9.74
Cashiers                                                 $8.57
General office clerks                             $12.57
Combined food preparation and
serving workers, including fast food    $8.28
Registered nurses                                   $30.65
Waiters and waitresses                          $8.50
Customer service representatives       $14.56
Laborers, material movers                  $11.11
Janitors and cleaners, except
maids and housekeeping cleaners       $10.56
Stock clerks and order fillers              $10.08

Some of the scarcer occupations make decent money. Mathematicians (2,770 jobs) average $44.99 an hour. Industrial psychologists (1,710) $40.03/hr. Prosthodontists make $53.42/hr, but there are only 660 of them. There are more locomotive firemen than that, 960, but they make a lot less: $22.63/hr.

The top ten jobs are all service-related and nine out of ten pay dogshit wages. Even in most of the factory jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to provide for a family on one paycheck.[1] It didn't used to be that way, but you'd probably have to be well into middle aged to remember when it wasn't that way.

[1]I'm sure that Rand Paul and the other dispensers of Libertarian Magic Dust think that's just peachy.

Same Criminal Corporation, Different Oil Spill

Remember the Exxon Valdez spill? BP was the company that was responsible for being prepared for oil spills in Alaska. BP cheaped out and they had neither the equipment nor the crews that they told everyone that they had. Because being ready for emergencies is expensive.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

BP is still cheaping out and cutting corners in Alaska:

In congressional hearings after the 2006 Prudhoe Bay spill, BP management was accused of making "draconian" budget cuts that affected safety and health, including limiting the use of a corrosion inhibitor inside the pipeline, a step that could have prevented the deterioration that led to the 2006 spill.

Note that BP has amassed a track record of ignoring safety rules and having to pay large fines after being found out.

The company is a corporate felon, following an explosion that killed 15 workers at a BP refinery in Texas City because of flagrant disregard of safety protocols. But unlike people, where a felony conviction inflicts lasting legal limitations, BP just carried on, doing whatever the hell they thought was the cheapest. "Safety be damned" seemed to be their motto.

It is also expensive to tell the truth and do what is right, things that BP also has a track record of not doing.

The BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Everyone who has been an believer in the philosophies of Ayn Rand that businesses will do the right thing because their good names are on the line should head down to the Gulf Coast and start cleaning up oil. Every teabagger who has been spouting the "we don't want government to do anything" line should join them.

And the Bureau of Prisons should be repainting a cellblock for the BP retirement plan.

One to Two Million Gallons of Oil a Day

The lower figure is apparently what the BP well is leaking, now. The higher figure is what it may well leak if the riser pipe snaps in two.

That $500,000 blowout prevention valve system, which BP successfully fought installing, is going to look like chump change. Note that the Bush Administration adopted the Libertarian/Randian point of view that "corporations will adopt safety measures on their own because their reputation is on the line", or some such bullshit.

Of course, BP is crying the same sort of crocodile tears that Massey Coal gushed forth:

"Losing 11 of our industry colleagues is a tragedy for the offshore community," said BP Group Chief Executive Tony Hayward in the statement.

What a load of self-serving horseshit.

(H/T)

Free Advice to Every Teabagger Along the Gulf Coast Who is Ranting About What the Federal Government Should Be Doing to Mitigate the Massive Environmental Damage From the BP Oil Spill:

Let state and local governments fix it. Hell, let BP fix it, for isn't that what you Ayn Randian cranks all believe, that the corporations would never ever do anything like this or, if they did, they'd fix it because "their good name is on the line"?

Every asshole now yelling about what the Feds should be doing who, not long ago, was waving a sign around at a tea-party and screaming about how "we don't want anything from the Federal government" should just shut the fuck up and go swimming off the Gulf Coast.

You're welcome.

p.s.; hey, Sarah, how's that "drill, baby, drill" working out for you?

So Where is Their Fealty to the Free Market?

You would think that if a product is a best-seller, that the glibertarians would be in favor of it, for after all, "the free market spoke."

That doesn't seem to be the case for the movie "Avatar", which has been slammed by conservatives for having a "far-left" viewpoint. Too bad, though, that the movie has taken in over half a billion in US ticket sales and $1.8 billion worldwide. You'd think that with numbers such as those, the glibertarians would be raving about the movie.

But, no.