Forget the blog tax, fine Carl Greene!

Posted on August 24, 2010 by oddmanout215

City should sniff out corrupt bureaucrats, not freelancers

The City Paper recently reported that Philadelphia is taxing residents who blog. An online CP follow-up clarified that the tax is on blogs that “make some money or, at least, have the potential to make some money.”

Actually, it's a lifetime tax of $300 or $50 a year

In other words, bloggers who run an advertisement or two and have a Philly address are being taxed. Which sounds more like extortion than taxation. Many of us already pay a business privilege tax for freelance writing and, in good years, a net profits tax, not to mention wage taxes on regular income as well as property taxes and other steep fees. All of this for the privilege of living in a cash-strapped city that puts itself even deeper in debt by paying huge sums to officials like Carl Greene, who can’t even pay his own bills. More on that scumbag in a second.

The blog tax is the sort of squeeze play executed by a city where idiots call the shots. A city that gouges taxpayers because it has a large percentage of residents who don’t pay any taxes. That uses its tax revenues wastefully, often on salaries for drones and cronies and petty dictators like Greene, the Housing Authority chief, who makes $306,370 a year plus bonuses to oversee spending of federal money for public housing in Philly.

Next thing you know the snoops at City Hall will be taxing residents who sell their possessions at sidewalk sales, probably to keep up with city taxes.

City officials diligently pursue residents who are paid, say, $200 for writing a freelance article. I propose that they out the same amount of energy into pursuing and prosecuting well-paid public officials who turn out to be crooks or incompetents. It’s not a crazy idea, not if it’s written into the contracts. Think of how much more efficient and just it would be if Greene had to surrender a year’s salary in return for settlement of sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him. That amount would add more to the tax revenue stream than 6,000 bloggers paying annual $50 usage feees.

It’s annoying that right-wingers all over the country have picked up the blog tax story and are using it as an argument against all taxes, instead of just bad taxes. Or as an argument against regulation of businesses. (If regulations had been in place, the Wall Street banks wouldn’t have been able to wreck the economy.) Way to go, Philly!

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Hellhound on his trail (prosecutors, too)

Posted on August 22, 2010 by oddmanout215

Roger Clemens’s deal with the devil blows up in his face

Question, sports fans: What does big clunky bully-boy Roger Clemens, the former New York Yankees pitching ace, have in common with blues artist Robert Johnson?

Answer: Both men, after realizing the limits of mortal achievement, sold their souls to the devil in return for magical powers. Legend has it that Johnson went to hell, but not before writing and recording a bunch of immortal songs, including “Hellhound On My Trail.” Clemens might go to jail, a better deal than going to hell if you land in the right jail, but he has lost his bid for immortality.

Testifying before Congress in 2008, Clemens said, “I have never taken steroids or [human growth hormone].” Last week an unconvinced federal grand jury indicted the seven-time Cy Young Award winner for perjury. This is how the situation was summed up on Friday by ESPN.com:

Robert Johnson, circa 1937

“What once seemed to be a he-said vs. he-said dispute between Clemens and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, once the New York Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, escalated into a federal case. The grand jury heard testimony from McNamee, who gave federal authorities syringes he said were used to inject Clemens with drugs.”

I’d feel sorry for Clemens if he wasn’t such a nasty piece of work. He did what many other athletes do — cheated, that is — because the potential rewards seemed to outweigh the risks. Because he knew he could make many more millions of dollars if he kept winning ballgames in apparent defiance of the aging process. Because he knew the Yankees and Major League Baseball and the TV networks and sportswriters and most fans didn’t care what he and other “superstars” were swallowing or shooting up, so long as they continued to win.

This was obvious in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in their fraudulent duel to break Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. Both were grotesquely beefed up and hitting moonshots on a regular basis. They looked like pro wrestlers masquerading as baseball players, but everyone kept cheering them on.

In the end, both broke Maris’s record and neither did. In 2009, it was revealed that Sosa had tested positive for steroids in 2003. Early this year, McGwire confessed to using steroids at various times in his career, including the ’98 season. Record keepers don’t really know how to categorize their bogus achievements and they won’t know what to do with Clemens’s stats either.

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Newsflash: Iraq not ready for U.S. pullout

Posted on August 20, 2010 by oddmanout215

The war has cost close to $1 trillion so far. Guess who’s paying for it?

Earlier this week more than 60 people were killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as they stood in a long line waiting to apply for jobs in the Iraqi military.

The vast sums wasted in Iraq could have been used to boost the economy

There was sick logic to the attack. The jobs queue was long because unemployment in Iraq is anywhere from 30 to 68 percent, depending on whose figures you believe. Unemployment is sky-high because Iraq remains a battleground more than seven years after the U.S. invaded and occupied it, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and creating hundreds of billions of dollars of debt that has been passed on to U.S. taxpayers.

The suicide bombing was like an exclamation point on remarks made last week by Iraqi Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, who thinks it would take another decade before Iraqi forces could operate without help from U.S. forces.

Except that the U.S. literally can’t afford more war in Iraq, where ethnic and religious divisions run even deeper now than when the war began, and where the only real winners have been the corporations that made billions contracting with the U.S. government to supply goods and services and mercenaries for the war effort.

The rationale for the war was based on lies invented by the Bush administration, as was the rationale for maintaining a military presence after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. We had to end the factional unrest and stabilize the government, Bush said.

Iraq is still unstable, so it’s no surprise that the Obama administration, which was stuck with Bush’s mess, is ducking the question of future U.S. military involvement. Much has been made of the departure of the last American combat brigade, but who knows what next year will bring?

The fact is that taxpayer money will continue to prop up Iraq’s dysfunctional government and fund the 50,000 troops who will remain in Iraq in 2011 as “advise and assist brigades,” which means they will become fighting units if and when the situation calls for it. We’ll also be funding thousands of U.S. contractors — that means mercenaries — who will be hired to protect American diplomats from insurgent attacks, which are likely to begin to increase again now that most of our uniformed forces have been redeployed.

The money problems don’t end there. Barack Obama is as gung-ho about the pointless Afghanistan war as George W. Bush was, so billions in tax dollars are being spent there even as our military involvement in Iraq is winding down. And billions more are being spent to prop up the corrupt regime in Pakistan, and to keep Israel from attacking Iran.

Meanwhile the situation in America grows dimmer, with the federal deficit worsening, stimulus money drying up and applications for unemployment benefits on the rise again.

The folly of wasting huge sums on unnecessary wars becomes clearer by the day. The costs of Iraq alone will top out at more than $3 trillion. And yet few people in government are talking about bringing military spending in line with the realities of our rapidly weakening economy.

Bottom line: The war that matters is the war to cut American trade and budget deficits, and we are losing it, partly because of insupportable military spending. China and other East Asian countries are clobbering us without firing a shot.

Quotable: From British historian Tony Judt, who died Aug. 6 — “… the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Iraq war, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dowd for White House press secretary? A good fit

Posted on August 16, 2010 by oddmanout215

D.C. gossip queen has low tolerance for Democratic ‘lefties’

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a caricaturist who also specializes in insider gossip, semi-clever puns and simplistic assessments of the national mood.

She would make an ideal replacement for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, whom she recently deemed unfit for the job.

Maureen Dowd would know how to work the White House press corps

Dowd was in her glory in the late 1990s, dishing the dirt about Bill and Monica. Then she spent eight years trying to make light of George W. Bush and his posse. No sex scandals in that dull bunch, so she joked about Bush being a spoiled rich kid who felt inferior to his dad.

Her tone is catty and ultra-casual, even when she’s writing about things like the Bush administration’s dishonest but successful effort to start a disastrous war in Iraq. It isn’t until she gets riled up and tries to make a substantive argument that you notice how welded her opinions are to the status quo.

On Sunday Dowd seemed upset because millions of Democrats are disappointed and/or angry about President Obama’s failure to deliver on meaningful health care reform, Wall Street regulation and other big campaign promises. She agreed that Gibbs should be “yanked” for ranting against Obama’s Democratic critics, but she also wrote that Gibbs was correct, such critics are “lefties” who “won’t recognize the necessity of compromise.”

In a dishonest flourish, Dowd tried to pretend there’s no widespread Democratic criticism of Obama, but rather only a few disgruntled ideologues who — and here she quoted Gibbs — “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” She compared progressives who’ve lost faith in Obama to right-wing extremists who’ve “co-opted” the message of the Republican Party. The difference is that Republican “radicals” often end up helping their elected representatives — she named the far-right Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl — whereas “Democratic extremes typically do damage to a Democratic president.”

Dowd concluded that Gibbs should be removed not because of his wildly off-base attack on fellow Democrats but rather because he’s doing a poor job of communicating Obama’s message to the press. As if the flaw wasn’t in the message itself — i.e., in Obama’s watered-down legislative initiatives and his lame insistence on working with an opposition party that from the outset dismissed the possibility of compromise.

Obama’s policy failures shine a light on the general failure of Democratic politicians in Washington to adequately represent the interests of their constituents. Dowd’s defense of Obama shows she’s out of her depth when not writing about Bill Clinton’s cigar tricks or George W. Bush’s frat boy mentality.

If only Dowd could persuade Gibbs to quit and worm her way into his job. She could spew the same “centrist” nonsense that she pushes in print but this time verbally, to fellow insiders in the Washington press corps, and then engage them in gossipy off-the-record chats about matters that have nothing to do with the dreary faraway problems that most Americans wake up to every day.

Posted in Congress, finance reform bill, health care, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Canadian health care?’ We should be so lucky

Posted on August 13, 2010 by oddmanout215

Robert Gibbs is the new poster boy for Dem cowardice

Like many other Democrats, I puzzled for a few days over Robert Gibbs’s scornful remarks about the “professional left.”

Is President Obama’s press secretary just another beefy bureaucrat who lost his temper after catching flak too often, or was his outburst part of a strategy to reassure “moderates” that Obama leans only slightly more to the left than George W. Bush?

This man wouldn't want to hear about real health care reform

If Gibbs’s weirdly right-wing rant was OK’ed by his boss — apparently it was, because Obama had no public comment about it — then we’re looking at a president who’s way out of touch with the core values of the Democratic Party and at an administration that will remain content to offer the poor and middle classes almost nothing in the way of real change.

Some analysts think Gibbs was only jabbing at cable news outlets — specifically, at talking heads on MSNBC. It hardly matters. If his remarks were sincere, he’s barely in the same party with most Democrats. He represents a faction that is Democratic only insofar as it helps prevent reactionaries like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner from running Congress.

Gibbs got my attention when he said the professional left, whatever that is, seeks “Canadian health care.” My guess is that most Democrats think Canadian-style health care — publicly funded, efficiently administered — would be vastly preferable to our country’s current system, which leaves us all at the mercy of health insurance companies that charge exorbitant fees and routinely cheat customers who think their medical costs are covered.

Most of us who aren’t DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) would have liked to see Obama make a real fight for health care reform instead of settling for a bill that was watered down to a thin gruel. We also hoped he’d fight to put the jobless back to work, crack down on Wall Street thieves, pursue progressive conservation policies, scale back America’s futile war in Afghanistan and, in general, make us notice that Dubya was no longer in office.

Democrats want and need representatives who act out of conviction rather than fear. The last thing we need is a spin doctor who goes out of his way to pander to right-wingers and woo an imaginary legion of moderates.

Quotable: A tweet from  David Frum, former speechwriter for Dubya, regarding Gibbs’s outburst — “More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base.”

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Brother, can you spare… a twenty?

Posted on August 11, 2010 by oddmanout215

Joblessness will be ‘the new normal’ if Americans tune out

It’s hard to tell what’s coming, anarchy or more apathy, but there’s no doubt that things haven’t looked this bleak for the poor and near-poor since the 1930s. (Think Al Jolson, singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” adjusted for inflation.)

Al Jolson would feel your pain, brothers and sisters

About 20 percent of American homeowners are underwater, and more and more of the jobless are lining up for free food on Front Street in South Philly and all over the country.

Some economists are calling this situation “the new normal,” but that’s not an expression the out-of-work are likely to use. A rally by the long-term unemployed, to demand help from their vacationing congressional reps, will take place tomorrow on Wall Street, home of the banks that caused the economy to tank.

Anyone who’s paying attention has noticed that a weirdly diverse group of activists, economists and politicos are speaking the same language regarding the Great Recession, or whatever you want to call it. Bill Gross, a free market cheerleader who co-runs the world’s largest bond fund, hopes the government “spends tens of billions on new infrastructure projects to put people to work and stimulate demand.” Glenn Hubbard, an economic advisor to George W. Bush, thinks recovery entails investing large sums in retraining workers whose jobs are gone forever. These guys are not exactly wild-eyed radicals, but they’re on the same page, sometimes, with people like Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren and Debbie Stabenow.

Meanwhile, whose page is President Obama on? We are hearing calls for works projects from conservatives but not from the guy who was elected by millions of Democrats and independents to set the economy right. We are hearing his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, railing against Democrats who are pressing Obama to do his job.

I don’t pretend to know Obama’s true feelings about the importance of putting the jobless back to work, or his definition of economic recovery, but his conduct up to now indicates a belief that recovery means providing fiscal stimulus for banks and corporations. His actions are based on the notion that recessions are best gauged by estimating the gross domestic product, not the number of people employed. In other words, a recession is over if the GDP rises to a certain level.

Incredibly, Obama and his math wizards, Timothy Geithner and Laurence Summers, have stuck to this notion, even as millions more people lost their jobs, then their hopes that they can find new ones, and then their belief that Obama knows what he’s doing.

It makes we wonder if the president understands what the New Deal was about. If he did, he would answer the question posed by Robert J. Shiller: “Why not use government policy to directly create jobs — labor-intensive service jobs in education, public health and safety, urban infrastructure maintenance, youth programs, elder care, conservation, arts and letters, and scientific research?”

One might add, why not fight to persuade Congress to reinstate taxes on the rich — taxes scuttled in the obscenely cynical Bush era — and use the resulting revenue to fund the jobs programs?

It might all work out in the end, years from now, with or without a real jobs program. Or we’ll be rocked by social breakdown that’s less dramatic but far more harmful than what happened in the ’30s.

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No more ear meat for Iron Mike

Posted on August 8, 2010 by oddmanout215

Ex-champ’s vegan conversion still hard to digest

Mike Tyson bites for his life.

I’m way behind on celebrity gossip. It turns out Mike Tyson says he appeared in the movie The Hangover because he needed drug money, but the big story – the one that apparently broke way back in May – was that Iron Mike, the former baddest man on the planet, the boxer who bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, had lost a lot of excess weight after becoming a vegan. How did I miss this? Who’s next for vegan-ism, Michael Vick?

Footnote: Holyfield was/is a notoriously dirty fighter. Tyson resorted to biting only after Holyfield repeatedly head-butted him.

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Summers, Geithner give elitism a bad name

Posted on August 8, 2010 by oddmanout215

Obama’s go-to guys botched economic recovery. Why do they still have jobs?

Barack Obama thinks Ivy League grads who’ve worked on Wall Street have all the answers, which is why he ended up depending on Laurence Summers and Timothy Geithner to pull the country out of its economic tailspin and, arguably, why so many Americans still can’t find work.

According to Timothy Geithner, America is on a path back to growth.

Geithner, who was joined at the hip with the Wall Street crooks who started the tailspin, is still in denial about how screwed up things are. Summers, who also was thisclose to the crooks, is the bright boy who insisted back in the early days of the Obama administration that unemployment wouldn’t exceed eight percent after the stimulus package passed. The official jobless rate is now at 9.5 percent.

According to The New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Summers disagreed with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, over the size of the stimulus bill before it was proposed in 2009. Romer, like Paul Krugman and many other economists, thought the package would have to be worth more than $1 trillion in order to fuel a long-term recovery. But Summers and Geithner, along with Rahm Emanuel, feared congressional opposition and advised the boss to go with what became a $787 billion bill. So here we are with a recovery that has sputtered to a halt and a jobless rate that’s holding steady.

Romer reportedly will resign next month. As TalkLeft put it, “If Obama fails politically, the cause will be his policy failure regarding the size of the stimulus — when he listened to Geithner and Summers instead of Christina Romer.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

NYT to 99ers: Chances for new benefits ‘slim to none’

Posted on August 6, 2010 by oddmanout215

Senate Democrats, on six-week vacation, seem to agree

Reporter Michael Luo came through this week with a story on the long-term unemployed, which was more or less a case study of how dangerous it is to lose your job in an America that’s drifting into stagnation, maybe stagflation. Luo wrote that “the political appetite to help [the jobless] seems limited.”

What would FDR think of today's Dems?

The Times should spend less time forecasting doom and more on covering efforts to help the jobless. For example, activists this week persuaded Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) to introduce a bill that would 1) secure up to 20 more weeks of benefits to those who’ve exhausted their unemployment claims and 2) provide tax credits and other incentives to businesses that hire the long-term unemployed.

But the Senate went on its annual six-week summer vacation almost as soon as the bill was introduced, which means those who’ve exhausted their benefits are left high and dry until some time in the fall when the legislation may or may not come to a vote.

So why are Dem politicians so timid in efforts to help their core constituents? The Times editorial writers haven’t ventured a guess this week, and its reporters don’t seem all that interested.

Michael Thornton, who blogs for the Rochester Unemployment Examiner, got it right today: “…the unemployed/underemployed, which currently number about 30 million, could be the electoral force that brings down the Democrats; not because the Republicans are preferred, but because the unemployed, and especially the 99ers, could simply stay home and not vote.”

Who could blame them? I wonder what Franklin D. Roosevelt would think of the current crop of Democrats in the federal legislature, and of the Democrat in the White House. FDR pushed through legislation that put millions of Americans back to work during the Depression, and he raised the country’s morale by openly challenging Republicans and other cynics who were trying to shrug off sky-high unemployment and poverty rates.

My guess is that FDR would publicly challenge today’s cowardly Dem incumbents. Then he’d charm them into doing the right thing. Barack Obama doesn’t seem capable of either challenging or charming anyone, not when it counts.

Quotable: Paul Krugman, from his column that bashes Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), new hero of believers in voodoo economics: “One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans.”

The Weasel Watch: David Brooks wrote last week that “We could look back on the period between 1980 and 2006 as the long boom and the period between 2007 and 2014 or so as the nasty crawl…” But there was no boom, except for the wealthy. All other income groups experienced a period of long, slow decline. As usual, Brooks is pushing an agenda based on faulty premises and outright lies. He pretends to yearn for a “moderate” approach to economic growth while praising extreme right-wingers like Paul Ryan, who “wants to cleanse and rejuvenate the nation.”

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A moment of clarity at the coffee shop

Posted on August 5, 2010 by oddmanout215

Consumer protection starts with saying no to ATM fees

A small example of how banks take advantage of customers and why Elizabeth Warren should be appointed to lead the soon-to-be-established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

On most days I stop for a double espresso at one of those South Philly hipster hangouts where tattoos and laptops are de rigueur. Yesterday I realized I’d brought no cash. The barista directed me to the ATM in the back of the shop, which tried to charge me $2.50 for the lousy $20 I was about to withdraw. You’ve got to be kidding, I said to the machine, as if I was talking to one of the cold-blooded creeps who run the handful of giant banks and financial services firms that routinely shake down bank customers everywhere.

I was talking to one of the creeps. Not to a flesh-and-blood banking executive, of course, but to one of his mechanized stand-ins. Think about it — banks and financial firms screw us on the macro level, by making reckless bets with our money and ending up billions of dollars in debt, and on the micro level, through usurious lending and service fees imposed on individual customers for the sole purpose of enriching the creeps.

Which is why I extracted my ATM card and said to hell with it, you’re not getting my $2.50 and the extra $1.50 my bank would charge me for having used a rival bank’s ATM, I’ll wait until I can use the ATM at the bank where I have a checking account. But this was small consolation, because the reality is we’re all caught in the same trap. My bank’s ATMs gouge users who have accounts elsewhere. Some banks’ ATMs charge as much as $5 per usage fee. They all take advantage of customers because that’s what the law allows.

In May, Sen. Tom Harkin (D, IA) tried to introduce an amendment that would cap ATM user fees at 50 cents, but he was blocked by Republicans and bank-friendly Dems. The so-called finance reform bill, passed later that month and signed into law in July, contained no ATM fee cap provision and is, in general, a watered-down version of the the bill that was meant to “give states more power in going after big banks that violate consumers.”

The banks and ATM servicing companies, along with Republicans and DINOs (Dems In Name Only) in Congress, defend high ATM fees as essential to their effort to provide full service for customers. Without the fees, they say, banks wouldn’t be able to pay companies that install, maintain and service ATMs, and there would be a resulting cutback in the number of available ATMs.

To which I’d reply: Banks started providing ATMs — for free, at first — because the machines would boost their profits, by allowing them to process more transactions per day using fewer employees. (Think of all the tellers and other workers who lost their jobs because of ATMS.) If ATM companies threatened to eliminate some machines because of fee caps, then banks would make new contractual arrangements with these companies, if only to prevent narrower profit margins for the creeps at the executive level.

Elizabeth Warren knows that ATM fee caps, as well as caps on sky-high credit card interest rates and other usurious practices, and she seems ready to take action on these reforms and many others. That’s why Timothy Geithner and other bank-friendly Obama administration officials don’t like her, and why we all should petition President Obama to choose her to lead the consumer protection bureau.

Meanwhile, protect yourself. Don’t use ATMs that charge a fee. The more you acquiesce in the shady practices of bank owners, the more they will gouge you. Ask the barista to front you a coffee, then pay up next time and leave her a good tip.

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