Category: Class War

Greed isn’t good, it’s downright virtuous

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Via Natasha, this very perceptive piece on how profit became the new piety. It’s written for the UK, but it certainly applies here as well:

At what point did the denial of compassion become a morally righteous act? When homeless people are criminalised and single parents left destitute “for their own good”, it’s a question we need to start asking.

In a speech to the Tory party’s spring conference, David Cameron laid out the “moral” case for an ideology which prioritises the wishes of business over the needs of ordinary people. Eulogising “small business owners” as modern-day Samaritans, the Prime Minister extolled the virtues of enterprise with as much pious self-satistfaction as any po-faced priest ever preached chastity.

A generation after Thatcher, with Chicago-school economics laying waste to civil society across the globe, it is apparently no longer enough to believe that greed is good. We must be persuaded that greed is virtuous.

Max Weber’s protestant ethic has always provided a moral framework for capitalism, but since the meltdown of 2008, business devotees sound less like men of quiet faith and more like spittle-flecked fanatics ordering their followers not to flee the burning church. The maniacal Calvinist aunt in Blackadder insisted that cold is God’s way of telling us to burn more Catholics, but Cameron may as well have declared that recession is God’s way of telling us to cut more benefits.

The flipside of this fervour is the belief that anyone who does not contribute to the profit machine is somehow morally incontinent. Some on the left would like to believe that conservatives simply hate the poor. The more terrifying truth is that many of them actually believe imposing austerity measures is the moral duty of the righteous rich.

Throughout history, our worst torturers and tyrants have always been zealots, men who believe that their faith justifies any brutality.
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As I say

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Republicans only win when they lie and cheat. They don’t actually approve of democracy!

Unbelievable. Turning the state in to a dictatorship wasn’t enough, he had to pull this out of his CorporateBastard bag of tricks. Detroit Free Press:

LANSING — One $100 bill could block voters from a chance to stop more than a billion dollars in higher taxes.

Whether you think it’s a dirty trick or a smart move, a House bill to implement Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposal to eliminate tax credits and exemptions contains a $100 appropriation — enough to make the plan immune from a voter referendum.

The plan has incensed some Michiganders. On Tuesday, AARP is holding a rally at the Capitol for senior citizens angry about Snyder’s plan to tax pensions and other retirement income while cutting business taxes.

In 2001, the state Supreme Court ruled that legislation with a state expenditure — even just $1 — can’t be repealed by voters.

On Thursday, minority House Democrats assailed the move to block a potential repeal vote. “I think there’s a natural, built-in constituency that would sign that petition” to repeal tax changes, said Rep. Vicki Barnett, D-Farmington Hills.

Lt. Gov. Brian Calley said the $100 appropriation in the 180-page bill is legitimate, and would be increased to cover the

‘A corporate coup d’etat’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Naomi Klein warns us that Wisconsin is only the beginning of the attack on democracy:

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.

NAOMI KLEIN: A municipal government. And it says specifically, “or dissolve the municipal government.” So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, “OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts.” You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned us. They said, “What’s happening to us is going to happen to you.” And I included in the book a quote saying, “Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward.” And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

NAOMI KLEIN: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

Stupidity

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Let me ask you something: when you have a mortgage, student loans, car loan and credit cards, but you’re making more than enough to make those payments, do you declare bankruptcy? Of course you don’t.

And that’s why Paul Ryan IS A FUCKING NUMBNUTS. Oh, did I say that out loud? The only reason this man is a “rising figure” is because the rest of Congress is too stupid and/or morally bereft to know/admit how full of shit he is, and our president is too ineffectual to rebut him:

WASHINGTON — House Republicans will “lead with our chin” and offer politically explosive cost curbs this spring on programs like Medicare, Medicaid and perhaps Social Security, the party’s point man for curbing crippling budget deficits said Thursday.

Even then, Rep. Paul Ryan acknowledged, the government’s budget still won’t balance for quite some time.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, the Wisconsin lawmaker and chairman of the House Budget Committee said the House Republicans’ budget proposal for the 2012 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 will propose fundamental changes to Medicare and Medicaid, the giant health care programs that cover 100 million Americans and whose combined costs rival the defense budget.

Ryan offered no specifics, saying details are still being hashed out.

Ryan, 41, a rising figure in the GOP, has been tasked with both schooling the 87 new Republican freshmen on the brain-numbing intricacies of the budget and devising a plan to wrestle the deficit under control. Both are big challenges.

“I see a willingness to embrace big things, I see a willingness to tackle the problem,” Ryan said, describing the sentiment among Republican freshmen elected on a wave of concern about the growing scope and reach of government.

“When you walk people through just how deep this hole is … it really does leave a lot of jaws dropping,” he said.

Our new role model is Texas

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Safe drinking water — or recall?

Pennsylvania has come under fire lately as pollution from drilling in the Marcellus Shale threatens water resources across the state. But instead of ratcheting up oversight, Gov. Tom Corbett wants to hand authority over some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions to C. Alan Walker, a Pennsylvania energy executive with his own track record of running up against the state’s environmental regulations.

Walker, who has contributed $184,000 to Corbett’s campaign efforts since 2004, is CEO and owner of Bradford Energy Company and Bradford Coal, which was once among Pennsylvania’s largest coal mining companies. He also owns or has an interest in 12 other companies, including a trucking business and a central Pennsylvania oil and gas company.

Walker was Corbett’s first appointee—he chose him to lead the Department of Community and Economic Development in December, before taking office. Now, as Corbett stakes much of the state’s economy on Marcellus Shale gas drilling, a paragraph tucked into the 1,184-page budget gives Walker unprecedented authority to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” That includes, presumably, coal, oil, gas and trucking.
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See no evil

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Pretty amazing, don’t you think?

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A months-long investigation into abusive mortgage practices by the Federal Reserve found no wrongful foreclosures, members of the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council said Thursday.

During a public meeting attended by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other regulators, consumer advocates on the panel criticized federal bank regulators for narrowly defining what constitutes a “wrongful foreclosure.” At least one member of the panel voiced concerns that the public would not take the Fed’s findings of improper practices seriously, since the wide-ranging review did not find a single homeowner who was wrongfully foreclosed upon.

The Fed’s findings seem to support claims from the banking industry, which has admitted to sloppy practices but has maintained that the homeowners whose homes have been repossessed were substantially behind on their payments. The Fed’s report has not been released to the public.

All 50 state attorneys general joined together last fall to probe banks’ foreclosure practices after several companies halted home repossessions when improper paperwork practices — like the so-called “robo-signing” scandal — came to light. The law enforcement officers have said they’ve found banks violated numerous state laws. State and federal officials are considering a large-scale settlement with banks and mortgage servicers that could include penalties totaling up to $30 billion and requirements to modify more distressed mortgages

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Smell the freedom

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Republicans believe in only two rights: the right to be humble, and the right to be grateful!

On Wednesday night, Republicans in Wisconsin’s state senate rammed through a retooled version of Governor Scott Walker’s controversial “budget repair bill” with the 14 senate Democrats still in hiding in Illinois. The senate bill eliminates collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions, a provision that has labor leaders and protesters up in arms. But there’s another explosive provision in the bill that’s received little attention: The bill authorizes state officials to fire any state employee who joins a strike, walk-out, sit-in, or coordinated effort to call in sick.

According to an analysis (PDF) of the Senate bill by Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB), the legislation gives state officials the power to fire workers during a “state of emergency” declared by the governor under several conditions. If a state employee misses three working days without an approved leave of absence, that’s grounds for being fired. State workers can also be dumped if, according to the LFB’s analysis, they participate in a “strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including mass resignations or sick calls.”

Rerun

~ susie

We can’t have job-killing regulation! Instead, we get people-killing pollution:

HINKLEY, Calif. – At the end of “Erin Brockovich,” a housewife sick from toxic chromium weeps with joy as she’s handed her portion of a historic $333 million settlement between residents of this small desert town and the utility that poisoned their drinking water.

In real life, that woman is Roberta Walker. She still lives in Hinkley, using her share to buy a new home in what she thought would be a safe four-mile distance from the toxic plume of chromium.

Earlier this year, she and other residents learned that the pollution, which Pacific Gas & Electric was required to clean up, was once again moving and had seeped into their groundwater.

Now, Brockovich has returned to the town that made her famous and is once again rallying residents, sampling the water, and at a water board meeting on Wednesday, her associate is expected to announce that the contamination may be worse than the utility says.

For Walker and others involved in the original case, these developments are like stepping back in time and are a haunting reminder that a landmark lawsuit and a blockbuster movie are no guarantee of safety.
“We didn’t bring a giant to its knees, all we did was wake it up,” Walker said. “This is not happening again — I can’t believe it.”