Counterword

Most firms pay no income taxes -...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:07:10 -0700

Most firms pay no income taxes - Congress:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/12/news/economy/corporate_taxes/

Forbe’s Magazine; In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes_slide_8.html

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Bank of America, Wells Fargo might not pay federal taxes for 2009:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/26/91119/bank-of-america-wells-fargo-might.html

Boeing’s Reward for Paying No Federal Taxes Over Last
Three Years? A $35 Billion Federal Contract:
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/boeing0211.pdf

I am re-reading Naomi Klein’s excellent book, The Shock...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:04:33 -0700

I am re-reading Naomi Klein’s excellent book, The Shock Doctrine & I wanted to re-post the link to the documentary based it. Given the recent debt ceiling ‘deal’, it might be helpful for people to understand the strategy & policies that will affect them. I recommend reading the book & not just watch the cliff-note version of the movie.

A Note On The For Profit Prison Industry

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:02:00 -0700

I was surprised to learn there were so many ways to make money from locking people up and letting them out; here are four that I’ve come across:

1. Creation of for profit prisons: Private companies, such as CCA and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut), contract with states and with ICE, the Bureau Of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service, to operate immigrant detention centers known as contract detention facilities (CDF’s) on a per inmate, per diem basis under contracts known as Inter-governmental Service Agreements (IGSA’s). For example, using 2009 #’s, ICE detained 383,524 people, the average daily prisoner population was 32,098 dispersed over the 270 immigrant detention centers in the U.S. There were at that time, 7 facilities owned and operated by CCA or GEO Group. These companies refer to the number of empty beds at their facilities as “inventory surpluses” and to the illegal immigrants they might ‘host’ as “organic growth opportunities”.

2. Increase of prison populations: The introduction of ALEC model legislation, such as the “three-strikes” laws, popular in the 1990’s contributed to the explosion in the prison population nationwide. More prisoners = more $.

3. Use of prison labor to manufacture goods: Private, for profit companies, with the introduction and adoption of ALEC model legislation, use prison labor, a captive work force, to make goods at a cheaper cost than companies that use non-prison labor. Cheaper costs = higher profits & an unfair advantage over companies that do not use prison labor. So much for the ‘free market’.

4. Privatization of the parole process: Private, for profit, bail bond industry, led by the American Bail Coalition & ALEC, proposed via model legislation, a program entitled, Conditional Post-Conviction Release Bonding. This program would allow for early release of juveniles and misdemeanor non-violent offenders, who would be required to pay to post a bond with a private, for profit, bond company, to secure their early release on the condition they would return to jail for violating the terms of their parole.

I never agreed with the idea that a profit should be made from someone’s misery, especially when I think the opportunities for misery are by increasing and increasingly, by design, with the decline in affordable education, good paying jobs, increased militarism and an abundance of legislation that eventually, just may create criminals out of all of us.

See:

Corporate Con Game: How the private prison industry helped shape Arizona’s anti-immigrant law.

by Beau Hodai

http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/6084/

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

by Mike Elk and Bob Sloan

http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor

Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

by LAURA SULLIVAN

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130833741

American Bail Coalition sports ALEC model bill legislation:

A Plan To Reduce Prison Overcrowding And Violent Crime:

http://www.americanbailcoalition.com/documents/ALEC_State_Factor_Prison_Overcrowding.pdf

Three Felonies A Day: http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/

This pretty accurately sums it up:

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:58:00 -0700

Fear on the Street: Inside the Stock Sell-Off

“There’s a growing realization among even the most optimistic investors that the United States is entering a new recession — a dreaded “double-dip.” Adding to the pain is the sense that the government and Federal Reserve are out of both ideas and ways to stimulate the economy. Corporate America is sitting on record amounts of cash but is refusing to make new investments with so little end demand for its products. Consumers and corporations are hoarding cash, and the economy appears to be seizing. The debt ceiling debate was a fiasco, snuffing any remaining confidence traders had for help from Washington, D.C.”

Too bad we focused on the manufactured crisis of the debt ceiling—a political stunt, non-deal, designed to institute questionable cuts that could’ve waited—instead of focusing on getting the American worker-consumer-homeowner back on their financial feet. A basic component of economics is the consumer; without the consumer, you don’t have an economy. I see these events as repercussions of a system that has marginalized the consumers and ignored the voters.

From the article:

Fear on the Street: Inside the Stock Sell-Off”

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/fear-street-inside-stock-sell-off-204130841.html

“How can we justify massive tax giveaways to the richest two percent and continue tax...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:57:00 -0700

“How can we justify massive tax giveaways to the richest two percent and continue tax loopholes for wealthy corporations at a time when 15.5 million children are languishing in poverty?” - Marian Wright Edelman

Truth is, we can’t.

From:
The State Of America’s Children 2011, Children’s Defense Fund

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-2011.pdf

I don't doubt critics will say Bruce Bartlett isn't a 'real Republican'.

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:54:00 -0700

Are Taxes in the U.S. High or Low?

By BRUCE BARTLETT

“The G.O.P. says global competitiveness requires the United States to reduce its corporate tax rate. But the United States actually has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/are-taxes-in-the-u-s-high-or-low/

Important Stories Obscured By The Debt Default Distraction

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:18:00 -0700

I can’t find much, if any national, top-level media coverage on the July GAO Federal Reserve Audit that revealed, between December 2007 and June 2010, $16 trillion was doled out by the Fed in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses without Congressional knowledge or approval. It seems that Senator Sanders (VT) is the only site, other than random low-level websites—forums & blogs—in over 8 pages of Google searches results for the terms; Fed Audit, 16 Trillion. Even after including the search terms, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, there were no returns to indicate any of these outlets reported on this. Why hasn’t this received more attention, or am I missing something?

GAO Audit: (PDF)

http://sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/GAO%20Fed%20Investigation.pdf

There is another story that I think was conveniently side-lined by the default distraction and that is about H.R. 1981, colloquially known at the ISP spying bill. I found this at the New York Daily News:

“A late rewrite of the bill reportedly requires ISPs to store customers’ names, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and temporarily assigned IP addresses for 1 year. The panel rejected an amendment clarifying that only IP addresses be retained by a 7 to 16 vote.”

House panel approves ISP snooping bill HR 1981:

http://www.nydailynews.com/tech_guide/2011/07/29/2011-07-29_house_panel_approves_isp_snooping_bill_hr_1981.html#ixzz1Tzd2jifA

So, WTH is going on?

False Memes:

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:18:00 -0700

I wish we could lay to rest the false meme that we would have defaulted if there was no ‘deal’. We were ‘Shock Doctrined’ (read Naomi Klein’s Book or http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine). If there had never been a manufactured crisis it wouldn’t have been as easy to ram through these policies that screw people relying on the social safety net. We didn’t have a DEBT crisis, but we do have a JOBS crisis, and too many people allowed themselves to buy into the lies. Good luck to all of us on the consequences.

2 news items that bear this out:

“The bond market saw through the debate and saw that it would have to be resolved,”

(A BLIND man could see through the debate)

From:

Investors Made a Fortune Betting on Treasuries (bonds):

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-02/obama-bonds-proved-world-beaters-as-congress-played-chicken-with-u-s-debt.html

And:

“Debt deal won’t fix job market”

From:

Stocks plunge, S&P goes negative for year:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/02/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

Republicans, during the 2010 mid-term elections, ran & won on the jobs issue, promising to bring jobs. That, obviously, hasn’t panned out. Instead we have a Friedmanite, neo-liberal policy agenda, (privatization, deregulation & free trade policies and cuts to government spending) unabashedly endorsed by Republicans and virtually unopposed by Democrats, that includes, among other things, tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and corporations, being implemented and that I think will negatively affect jobs in a downward push that may become evident by the 2nd to 3rd quarter 2012, if not sooner. It really depends on how long it takes for policy to get through the pipeline to affect consumers & workers. It’s time, actually, past time, for Americans to wake up and realize what is going on. It has happened in other countries, in fact too many countries and now, the Shock Doctrine comes home. I still must ask, Mr. Speaker, WHERE ARE THE JOBS!!!!

ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors:

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:17:01 -0700

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Think of ALEC as Milton Friedman’s little shop of horrors where legislators across the country can easily access the “ideas lying around.”

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10903/alec-exposed-milton-friedmans-little-shop-horrors

My take on Bruce Levine's 8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:16:00 -0700

After reading Levine’s article, I remembered having several conversations, in the early 90’s, with a friend, about the conditions required to subdue populations to enable corporate-elite control and abuse of the population. We agreed that for the most effective and lasting control there must be present the tools used to implement those conditions combined with the willing partnership of the people in their own submission, especially in advanced democracies like America, where the appearance of choice must remain unburdened, to the extent possible, by state sanctioned overt violence, if the democracy is to preserve a claim of legitimacy. We were young and kind of dumb, but interestingly, we touched on several of those that Bruce Levine includes in his article found at Alternet:

http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don’t_fight_back:_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/

1. Student-Loan Debt.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously

6. The Normalization of Surveillance.

7. Television.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.

In our convos, we focused on ideas similar to Levine’s; #1, 3, 5, 7 & 8 — #4 didn’t exist yet and we discussed the possibility of #6, but primarily in minority and poor communities. My thoughts about items on Levine’s list:

#1, 3 & 4 (actually most of these) are clearer to understand when viewed through the lens of corporatization and privatization of the commons and easier to see in some states rather than others in the form of school-laboratories re-engineerd toward the creation of private profit. Yet, the responsibility for the conditions that lead to #3 & #4 never seem to be laid at the proper door and teachers remain the convenient pinata to beat on when our childrens isn’t learnin’.

From # 5:

“The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class.”

This is one red warning light signaling that the goal of education has changed, and very quickly, within one generation. If the goal was to educate civically minded critical thinkers, one would naturally assume we would have a certain number of successful critical thinkers. But, if the goal is to educate consumers with nationalistic tendencies agreeable to ‘disguised’ authorianism then you just might get the result the author is explaining.

#6:

“The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control.”

Levine touches surveilance, without getting into the deeper issues; uses and history of surveillance and the efficacy of the constant fear of attack, used to great effect by the previous Administration and now more acceptable by attrition than previously thought possible. It has become the new normal. For a recent example, check out H.R. 1981, the ISP spying bill, that should’ve been named H.R. 1984. See: http://www.nydailynews.com/tech_guide/2011/07/29/2011-07-29_house_panel_approves_isp_snooping_bill_hr_1981.html?r=news/politics

#7: Ahhh, the ‘boob tube’, the devil’s box, satan’s microphone, the brain drain of modern America.

“Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically.”

I would add to T.V., the internet, excellent for self-segregation in the stove-piping of information. As far as the effect of T.V. viewing on the brain, there is recent evidence that internet usage ‘rewires’ the brain as well. See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-addictive-internet-use-restructure-brain

#8: I would have preferred Levine to explore this a bit more, as there is a fundamentalist strain in contemporary politics that feeds from and contributes to to the fundamentalist strains of religion and consumerism. I think he missed a chance to tie up # 8 with several of the other points he made, by neglecting to touch upon the change in the meaning and exercise of civic responsibility and participation. An example of this change was Presiden’t Bush’s post 9-11 exhortation to

“Get down to Disney World in Florida,” he said. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

Source: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229_1872230_1872236,00.html #ixzz1TnSSeDme

and with a recession on the horizon in 2007, he said:

This work begins with keeping our economy growing…And I encourage you all to go shopping more.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfs6wpjlu28

To me, these examples are indicative of a change in paradigm, in what it means to be American and a civicaly minded American. A common assurance given in exchange for our non-participation, along the lines of “Trust us, I’ve got this”, contributes to the authoritarianism, that I think increasingly marks modern day American life and which has been pretty successful in convincing the average person to just drop out of the public sphere. I think a book can be written on the various aspects, mental and practical, that have contributed to our collective disengagement with and from our civic duty.

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Source:

http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back_—_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire

The Myth Of Charter Schools: Diane Ravitch

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:05:00 -0800

I am not a believer in the push for privatizing various public services in American life for a variety of reason, mainly due to the idea that a democracy should be focused on the people in more than name only and the people’s money shouldn’t be used to primarily for private profit.

I found The Myth Of Charter Schools, (New York Review Of Books) by Diane Ravitch, a clear summarization of the problems associated with the privatization of the American public school system. I also included the 2009 Credo Study: Multiple Choice; Charter School Performance in 16 States (PDF) Ravitch referenced in the article.

A quote from the article hits the nail on the head:

“It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts. “

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?page=1

Deterioration of Paper: Causes and Prevention

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:15:00 -0800

Deterioration of Paper: Causes and Prevention:

How to care for your fine prints and framed works. Good info.

PRINTMAKING: Techniques, Lessons, Tutorials, and Resources

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:14:00 -0800

PRINTMAKING: Techniques, Lessons, Tutorials, and Resources :

Various resources on different styles of printmaking, including videos and outside links for painting, drawing, sculpture, pastel & ceramics.

Americans Who Tell The Truth

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:43:12 -0800

Americans Who Tell The Truth:

I really like this site; it’s a body of work consisting of portrait paintings by Robert Shetterly of Americans who have contributed to society in various ways. Each portrait has a quote by the subject and Shetterly has written interesting short essays about each person. One of my favorite people, Mother Jones (seen below) is included. Yay.