A Gilded Planet

10. This week, the National Front Party, led by reliable fascist Marine Le Pen, won the first round of regional elections in France. 9. Another thing happened this week that you may have heard about. Donald Trump, the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the United States.  But he hasn't called for the deportation of all Muslims residing in the United States. At least, not yet. 8. Senator Marco Rubio believes a woman's right to choose to end a pregnancy via abortion should be banned totally even in rape cases. But that stance is within the Overton Window , so he's not a fascist as such. 7.  “It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired.”  - Senator Marco Rubio of Florida (source) , who is definitely not a fascist and we shouldn't call ...

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story offers a vision of the future that follows present day social, political and economic trends to their sardonically satirical dystopian conclusion. It is a novel that sets a star crossed romance against the backdrop of the decadent west in decline. The author, Gary Shteyngart, imagines his future dystopia literally rather than allegorically. This allows him to create characters that are more real than symbolic. But it also leads to some odd examples of a kind of warped literary prescience. The emergence of an Occupy Wall Street type movement in the imagined future of the novel is probably the most prominent example of this prescience. The book was published over a year before the tents started to go up at Zucotti Park, but the parallels between the rolling campsite protests that occur in the novel due to the U.S.'s continued economic problems bear an eerie resemblence to what transpired in reality not so ...

Republicans in the state legislature of Michigan have come together this week to institute new prohibitions on the freedom of contract in their state. These new state-mandated prohibitions would put certain restrictions on people's right to bargain and sign contracts reflecting the outcomes of such bargaining. Republicans often portray themselves in opposition to big government regulations of the economy. However, when it comes to putting new restrictions on the type of contracts that can be arranged between free and consenting adults, they always seem to forget they are against big government. See also "tort reform." Prominent Example of Big Government Interfering with Freedom of Contract For some reason, many prominent reporters and news commentators have decided to refer to the legislation in Michigan as a "right-to-work" law. I guess newspaper editors decided it would be a good idea to try to confuse their readers as much as possible. Instead of calli...

Over at Digby's place, David Atkins has argued against any cuts to Medicare or Medicaid as part of a laughably unnecessary "grand bargain" meant to avoid the largely mythological "fiscal cliff," by referring to increasingly depressed wages of working people in the U.S. But in a recent post , he repeated a myth about how globalization has factored into the downward pressure on the livelihood of the vast majority of Americans: Now, it's certainly true that we live in a brave new world that structurally advantages the wealthy: labor is global and expendable, jobs are increasingly mechanized, the world is flattened, vertical integration and economies of scale are commonplace. But as Hacker and Pierson persuasively argue , this is also a product of intentional public policy, including (as I have frequently argued) an obsession with  inflating assets over wages . Atkins correctly points out that a major part of the story that explains the stagnation of m...

Many political junkies are fond of a modest proposal for electoral reform known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , often referred to as NPV for short. NPV evolved out of consternation at the result of the 2000 Presidential Election, in which George W. Bush famously won the presidency even though he didn't receive the most votes due to an archaic feature of our democracy known as the Electoral College along with a friendly ruling from the Supreme Court. It would be admirable to institute the NPV and move to a system in which getting the most votes guarantees a victory in the presidential election. But why stop with the presidency? Last week, Democrats won more votes than Republicans in the elections for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans will maintain a solid majority in the "people's house." And this is not an uncommon result: in 1996, the same thing happened. Democrats won the House elections in terms of votes but were still in the minor...

"Comic opera." - Lancaster Dodd From left to right: Whining White Pieces of Shit Behold the outrage generated by that most outlandish breed of reactionary, the Whining White Piece of Shit: When I'm at the Wal-mart or grocery story I typically pay with my debit card. On the pad it comes up, "EBT, Debit, Credit, Cash." I make it a point to say loudly to the check-out clerk, "EBT, what is that for?" She inevitably says, "it's government assistance." I respond, "Oh, you mean welfare? Great. I work for a living. I'm paying for my food with my own hard-earned dollars. And other people get their food for free." And I look around with disgust, making sure others in line have heard me. In response to President Obama's reelection yesterday, the Whining White Piece of Shit quoted above plans to boycott any business that accepts food stamps among other measures intending to show his absolute contempt for all Obama support...

California Forward, a non-partisan front group for sanctimonious centrists who think problems can be solved by anodyne nonsense and half-measures, has polluted the ballot in our state with a truly moronic proposition that would give large businesses the ability to elude environmental regulations by playing county governments against each other. While it purports to move power and authority down to the local level, it would have the effect of giving private business entities the power to rewrite California's laws as long as they can convince already beleaguered local governments to go along with them. I am a strong supporter of the principle of local control of decision-making. Every day, city governments all over the country enact great policies that federal and state governments are too sluggish and cowardly to touch. But often "bringing power back to local government" is code for "corporate privatization of laws and regulations", in the same sense that ...

...is not the United States presidential election. There, I said it. It's not that I don't think it's very important who wins the presidential election. It's very important who wins. For example, if Mitt Romney wins, it's likely his administration will eviscerate both Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, depriving tens of millions of the Americans of health care. That would be tragic. But the most important political story of 2012 is the growing wave of strike actions at Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the entire world. Wal-Mart is virulently anti-union and entirely non-unionized, meaning these actions are taking place largely outside the federal government's legal framework of labor conflict resolution governed by Wagner Act. This is huge. Wildcat strikes at the world's largest employers mean that labor organizing in the United States is far from dead, despite the many obituaries written for it by both conservatives and liberals. And if yo...

"I know picking words that don't sound terrible isn't Mitt Romney's strong suit, but..." - Erin Gloria Ryan During yesterday's presidential debate, Mitt Romney responded to a question about pay equity for women with an answer so tin-earred, it took my breath away: Thank you. And — important topic and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the — the chance to pull together a Cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men. And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, how come all the people for these jobs are — are all men? They said, well, these are the people that have the qualifications. And I said, well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?  And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can ...

If I held public office right now, this is the speech I would make over and over again. I would stand on every soapbox that would have me delivering this message. And I would probably be ignored or marginalized. "The official unemployment rate is nearly double what used to be considered normal just a few short years ago. And that official rate does not even include millions of underemployed and long term unemployed Americans. Years after the financial crisis, employment in this country is still deeply depressed. Not only does this mean untold hardship for millions of unemployed Americans and their families, but it is also causing permanent damage to our economy since long term unemployment damages the skills and earning power of workers forever. Given this stark reality, it is unconscionable that the leadership of this country is not doing everything in its power to end this jobs crisis now. "The saying goes that those who don't know their history are doomed to r...

The truth is not just inconvenient anymore. It's obvious. Whether it's extended droughts, historic heat waves, wildfires that burn hotter and longer than ever, or more frequent and intense hurricanes and tornadoes, you don't have to go to the Arctic in the summer (where a third of the sea ice is gone) to get that global warming is already having a dramatic affect on climatological conditions all over the world. As these photos from NASA's Extreme Weather Event Photo Contest demonstrate, global warming is going to be awesome. Photo Credit: Grant Petty Photo Credit: Jason Weingart Not in the "The Black Keys played an awesome show at the Warfield last night" way, but rather the "The shockwave sent out by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and altered Earth forever must have been an awesome sight" way. Photo Credit: Meggan Wood Photo Credit: Brian Allen Keep in mind, the federal government currently has the ability to borrow ...

If I read any more stories about bankster malfeasance I'm going to have an aneurysm.  The Guardian reports that American and European authorities are close to arresting some of the bankers involved in the egregious Libor Rate Rigging Scandal : American prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders over the Libor scandal and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to sources familiar with the investigation. If we don't start arresting banksters, they are just going to keep stealing from us in every way that can be imagined. Colluding to manipulate global interest rates amounts to stealing from nearly everyone at once in a stunningly diabolical worldwide skimming conspiracy. But if they can't steal from us that way, JPMorgan has most recently shown they have plenty of other ways to steal from us. JPMorgan is clearly taking its competition with Goldman Sachs for the title of most vile vampire...

Well, no, of course not. Rape is terrible. But George Carlin, one of the most revered American comedians of the 20th century, says that rape can be funny. So it's cool when Daniel Tosh makes fun of a heckler by saying how funny it would be if like five guys raped her, right? Well, no. The difference is that George Carlin, along with Louis CK and other people who have wrought comedy from the sensitive subject of rape, are extremely sophisticated comedians to the point where you could call them social satirists, social commentators, or (almost) stand-up philosophers (to paraphrase Mel Brooks). Daniel Tosh was, is and always will be extremely unfunny, lazy, obnoxious, tasteless, artless, pandering, juvenile, anti-intellectual, and idiotic to the point of being submental. What happened in the recent incident at the Laugh Factory just highlighted these qualities in the starkest terms. Like Michael Richards, and many others before him, Daniel Tosh has a right to say whatever he wa...

Mitt Romney has announced a plan to hand out billions of dollars of taxpayer money for free to banks indefinitely. As president, he would reinstate an egregious student loan policy that subsidizes banks at the expense of taxpayers. The Obama Administration and Congress agreed to eliminate this policy just over two years ago. Tracy Jan at the Boston Globe has the story: Mitt Romney promises to usher private lenders back into the federal student loan market...The prime beneficiaries, critics say, would be banks and loan companies that stand to reap a financial boon through subsidies to make nearly risk-free, government-backed loans. They are the same firms that benefited from the system that existed for decades before 2010, when President Obama required that the government issue all federal student loans. Unfortunately, Ms. Jan tries to play objective by writing "critics say" in the middle of her explanation. But this policy solely benefits banks at the expense of taxpaye...

The Curious Fundamentalist The Reasonable Anarchist The Principled Democrat The Lucid Republican The Empathetic Libertarian The Pragmatic Socialist The Thoughtful Militarist The Adamant Liberal The Relevant Nationalist The Tolerant Conservative The Agreeable Progressive The Triumphant Trade Unionist The Useful Independent The Casual Authoritarian The Reluctant Interventionist The Traveling Isolationist

If Facebook is any indication, my generation associates the fourth of July primarily with heroic efforts of Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman to save the world from the alien menace. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I woke up this morning to fratboys blaring country music as if that's an appropriate way to celebrate the most American of holidays. To be fair, they also played a couple of Creedence songs and a Bob Dylan tune.  In any case, contemporary country music is in no way an appropriate way to celebrate Independence Day, aliens or otherwise. Country music is about waving the Confederate flag, a piece of fabric representing the heritage of a failed white supremacist slave state that was founded with the intention of destroying the unity of the North American republic founded on July 4, 1776. Country music is antithetical to the fourth of July, as it is the music of the stars and bars, not the stars and stripes. The appropriate music for Indepe...

Continued from  Part III . The Mechanics of a Carbon Tax Carbon taxes have been successfully implemented in many European countries. However, most of these countries do not rely on their carbon taxes as a primary source of revenue for the government as I am proposing. If the payroll tax were repealed, it would leave a hole in the budget of approximately $1 trillion. In order to raise this amount of revenue from a carbon tax, the U.S. would have to tax carbon at a rate of roughly $175 per metric ton emitted. Most European countries do not have a such a steep tax on carbon. However, Sweden started putting a tax on carbon comparable to what we would need almost two decades ago and has continued to experience stronger than average economic growth ever since. They also have a rate of carbon emissions per capita that is about one fourth of the U.S. average. If the U.S. achieved Swedish rates of carbon emissions, worldwide carbon emissions would drop by 15 percent. Sweden levies ...

Continued from Part II . The Mechanics of a Progressive Consumption Tax Let’s look at how a progressive consumption tax would actually differ from the federal income tax by looking at the prospective tax bills of two fictional American families of very different means. The Smiths, a middle class family of four, earn $50,233 annually. That puts them very near the median income of the U.S. Under the status quo federal income tax, their first $16,700 of earnings is taxed at a 10 percent rate and the rest is taxed at a 15 percent rate. This adds up to a total liability of about $6,700. Without going into too much detail, we can assume that a family at this income level probably does not itemize deductions but is very likely to be eligible for benefits such as the child tax credit so their actual tax bill will be lower. Let’s assume a final liability of around $4,500. Now, let’s recalculate the Smiths’ tax liability under the progressive consumption tax. The Smiths would report $50,2...

Iran is rotting from the inside. A profound destructive urge shrouds it in darkness. The deep rot in Iranian society can best be attributed to the fact that it is massively overpopulated. Massive overpopulation and highly congested living environments does very, very bad things to humans – and modern Iranians suffer horribly from these overly cramped conditions. No one should be forced to live like this. Maybe they would be better off dead. But this seems awfully extreme. We would sincerely prefer to find an alternative solution to the problem in consideration of the fact that Iranians, on the whole, are an intelligent and enterprising people, and thus would be an asset to many nations if a large emigration policy could be devised.  Perhaps we could reconsider bombing them if some of their excess populace would immigrate to Argentina or Canada, where there is plenty of room. Just a thought.