Plumbing the depths of idiocy

Blogger is the biggest blog host in the world. I've been on it for ten years plus.

I posted a little something a couple of hours ago. It has yet to attract a view.

Meanwhile, the same post already found it's way to Before It's News, where it's had over a dozen.

Ya, I know that's bupkiss in the overall scheme of things, but how does it leak to Before It's News while still showing zero traffic at Blogger?

And seriously, why does anything I'll ever have to say need to be censored?

It's not as if I'm some sort of fired-up revolutionary.

The folks who study these matters seem to largely agree that the happiness factor is highest in Nordic nations with high taxes and a social-democratic tradition in politics. No need to guillotine the billionaires if you tax them enough on the way up to ensure they don't get there.

The difference between Chinese billionaires and American billionaires

In China, the billionaires function at the pleasure of the state. If and when their interests are deemed incompatible with the interests of the state, bad shit happens. Check out this story from the Wall Street Journal; China hands death sentence to hedge-fund manager. 

In America, on the other hand, government functions at the pleasure of the billionaires. When is the last time you heard about a corrupt "asset manager" getting a death sentence in the USA?

The next time will be the first time. 

Who do you trust more, communists or billionaires?

Paranoid fantasies of the ruling class

For over a hundred years after the publication of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, America's oligarchs viewed communism as their greatest existential threat. 

That was mostly bullshit from the get-go. From the very beginnings of the Bolshevik revolution, Yankee carpet-baggers like Armand Hammer were doing brisk capitalisky business with the Bolshies. In fact, it was the commies more than the oil fields that eventually catapulted Hammer into the ranks of the billionaires.

Be that as it may, the threat of communism was a useful construct, at least until the collapse of the USSR in '91. Since then, the billionaire class, (which, oddly enough, has a very robust membership in formerly "communist" countries) has been a little hard up for a convenient catch-all excuse for their abuse and exploitation of the rest of us. 

We used to go along with the bullshit, because after all, the only option was totalitarian communism. Now that's been debunked, you'd think the abuse and exploitation might be called out.

No such luck. Although communism is no longer a threat, there is a new, even more odious threat; right-wing extremism. 

You know. White supremacists who swear allegiance to Enrique Tarrio, the Afro-Cuban "chairman of the board" of the (mostly fictional) Proud Boys. And of course, don't forget the Grand Wizard of the KKK (digital edition), Donny J. 

Yup, the new nazis are targeting America's democracy. And its capitalism too, because you can't have the one without the other. And it's just a matter of time till it is revealed that the GameStop bros and the Bernie bros were secret Trumpkins all along, and we certainly need to keep them away from the internet, where they spread dangerous conspiracy theories, like America is rigged in favor of the rich, because that's how the rich rigged it, and other such subversive terrorist right-wing crackpot lunatic theories.

And now, the GameStop bros have upped the ante in the domestic terror sweep-stakes. They have launched an unprovoked terror attack on the very beating heart of everything America stands for.

Billionaires.

America was almost great, but then the billionaires came along...

It was the seventies, a much maligned decade. Popular resistance to the Viet Nam War ended that war.

That was the last time popular resistance ended an American war. And as you should know, there's been plenty of those in the last fifty years.

While "democracy" in America has always had its challenges, it sort of used to work. By and large, people believed it to work. Confidence is everything. The American people believed democracy was a real thing that worked for them.

Once Ronnie and Maggie ushered in the union-bashing and smashing era, things began to change. As taxation protocols were adapted to neocon standards, a billionaire class began to emerge. Suddenly you saw people with incomprehensible sums of money taking an interest in politics.

The "Stonewall Moment" for the billionaires was the SCOTUS Citizens United decision of 2010. That was the result of years of billionaire funding of lobby groups, as documented in the book Dark Money. Not surprisingly, democracy has been paying the price ever since.

As have the American people. Billionaires run the show now. Billionaires own the global information infrastructure. You're only going to see what the billionaires want you to see, and good luck finding anything else.

And once firmly having the levers of power in their hands, the billionaires have been delighted to take charge of foreign policy. It can't possibly be coincidence that billionaire owned energy conglomerates are invested in all those countries targeted by US sanctions, can it? 

But here we are. America is facing some tough decisions. The billionaires are all in to make sure you make the right ones.

Let's face it; billionaires just have too much money

Where I come from, a millionaire is somebody who is rich. I know that verity has been degraded by the fact that anybody who owns a house they bought in Vancouver or Toronto thirty years ago is now a millionaire.

Nevertheless, there's a case to be made against billionaires.

A billionaire is a millionaire who made a million a thousand times over.

The SCOTUS sanctified the political power of billionaires a few years back with the infamous "Citizens United" decision.

Yup, corporations are people too. You'll recall that created a bit of a flap when Mittens made that claim in the 2012 election campaign.

In reality, corporations are not in fact "people."

In reality, having billionaires and their shadow corporations fund super-PACs is not an exercise in democracy.

No, it's quite the opposite of that... it's the super-rich buying democracy.

That's a state of affairs that's working out quite well for the billionaires.

Just look around you.


But how is this state of affairs working out for you?

Billionaires have too much money

Money is power, they say.

Well, money isn't power when somebody with a gun takes the money away from you.

This may explain why the USA leads the world in both the number of billionaires and the number of guns.

America's guns do not threaten those billionaires, though.

America's guns, at every level, defend those billionaires.

I'm not sure why it's considered desirable to have such a thing as billionaires in society, but for whatever reason, that's where we're at. Look at the Trump cabinet.

If you're an American working at the minimum wage, you can work from age fourteen until you die and all your piddly paychecks added together won't amount to a million dollars.

A billion means a thousand times a million. Your top hedge fund guys are embarrassed if they don't up their net worth by at least a billion a year.

Being a billionaire means never having to say you're sorry. And why would you? You're obviously worth at least a thousand times more than whatever your most well-heeled critics are worth.

Being a billionaire means you can do whatever the fuck you want with no consequences. Read up on Jeff Epstein if you don't believe me.

But...

But the times may be a-changing.

Sir Richard Branson's name is seeping into the scandal unleashed by the Weinstein affair.

What?

Rich men take advantage of vulnerable women?

Who knew?

Wasn't that Obama cavorting on Branson's yacht after his exit from the White House?

He obviously had no idea either...

Poverty, taxes, billionaires, and America's collapsing infrastructure

The way I see it, the fact that there are any billionaires at all among us is living proof that the tax code is seriously flawed. To be a "billionaire" means you've become a millionaire a thousand times over. Where I come from, being a millionaire means you're rich.

Now, I know times have changed. You might have been a working class stiff who bought a 900 square foot bungalow in San Francisco or Vancouver for $8,000 in 1960, and today it's worth two million. If that describes you, high five! I'm happy for ya!

But in most of America, a million bucks still counts as a lot of money.

And a billion is an obscene amount of money.

In 1960, the marginal tax rate for the highest income brackets was 90%. America had two billionaires; J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes.

Today, the marginal income tax rate for the highest incomes is 39.5%. But that's a bit of a beard. Mitt Romney fessed up during his 2012 White House run that he pays 14% on his "US income." That was a sly way of avoiding the question of how much tax he avoids with his use of off-shore tax havens. Most of your big dogs and your big corporations (always remember that corporations are people too!) stash their income offshore to avoid paying even 14%.

That's why there are trillion dollar capital pools sitting in tax havens doing nothing.

And that's why in the "Western" world we're flirting with negative interest rates.

That's also why America today has well over 500 billionaires and climbing fast.

Is that why the middle class is shrinking?

Is that why the working class has been all but eviscerated?

Is that why America's infrastructure is on the verge of collapse?