Decoding Wade In The Water Poster

View this document on Scribd

Barack Obama Wins A Second Term!

Truth won. Trust won. A good man who drew a bad hand and did “the best he can,” won. Preserving peace, a non-nuclear world, expanding the rights of women to access education, security against violence, health care, family planning, and economic equity, at home and around the world won.

What lost were big battle ships and defense money for hardware and not human services. What lost was a massive raid on the public treasury; public capital to be extracted for private wealth. What lost was the absence of transparency, the offshoring of jobs and personal money; the funding raising overseas; saber rattling without a plan for soft power. What lost was America going it alone as the rest of the world finds way to cooperate and grow together.

Barack Hussein Obama won. Already, after 4 years of doing no harm, a citizen in the NewYork Times called him an arrogant communist. So, in some circles, fear and anger still wins, but not for the 62 million of us whose votes carried the day. Most importantly, the people won. They offered strong voices on behalf of a moderate idealist who gets the big picture beyond the details with a singular vision, who knows when nothing would further and carefully held an ailing country together without making its divisions more damaging. The people won. They repelled a billion dollar attack. They repelled the largest and most expensive political attack ever sustained in history to get one man out of office. Those with big money, who spent $2 billion and made the President the object of lies and scorn, of hate and fear, of weakness instead of strength, they lost.

On CSPAN the night after the election was decided, I listened to Obama’s first acceptance speech from 2008. It was eerily accurate about his first term and his vision. On the other hand, throwing workers and their families under the bus, damaging the market perception of a corporations, placing an international partner at the center of a lie, all for votes of fear and rage created a fire storm that consumed its source.

It was harder this time. More overt racism. More encoded attacks. More people who denied that it was anything other than policy criticism, but didn’t explain the lynching of empty chairs. 

It’s over. I’m glad sanity was preserved. So was respect.

And the nation’s best hope for going forward. 

~ Beautifully said.

~ Superb summation deserving of an editorial column itself.

Sage

Separating Obligations

I am stunned when people think the rack rate for corporate taxes is the going rate. 

First, Apple has neatly severed its intellectual property and administration, and labor from sells and profit. That separation allows Apple to create an supply chain using the Chinese company Foxconn that pays near poverty wages while making extraordinary demands on its workers in inhumane conditions without safeguards, benefits, job security, or due process, or safety standards, to produce devices at bare minimum costs. That separation allows for a huge mark-up based on marketing, perceived value, and the wealth of consumers in developed economies.

Apple’s separation has one other firewall: Its capital returns are extracted and separated from the taxes of any country, the countries where those funds would improve the quality and opportunities for those whose labor created the value, those who purchased the product, and the national legal systems that define and protect the intellectual property that makes the profit possible and prevents its taking.

The idea that business is an amoral enterprise, only responsible to shareholders, only ideal if it focuses on profit, on honest if it “avoids” taxes, only smart if it extracts huge sums of capital while paying the global poverty benchmarks is a very recent concept.

It is being overtaken in Brasil and elsewhere.

But more importantly, it is being challenged as immoral and dumb. Its structural separations can not be sustained. Despite the belief that profits are more important than labor and entitled to remain untaxed, it is not an inherent right. 

Legal Cover

Does the frontal attack on the hedge fund, SAC send a message to other hedge funds and financial firms engaging in the same practices?

Of course, other firms will say they are not so engaged. But the Question remains is SAC somehow, by default, running legal cover for these firms, who, aware of the finite resources of the government and its inability to build cases on multiple fronts, will expand such practices by creating new forms of information exchange, outside of the methods of contact focused on in SAC’s case.

The Default Position: Blame The President

Because the President is black (and Democratic/centrist/thoughtful/warm/reasonable) “we” don’t want the IRS to do its job of catching tax cheats or political groups gaming the nonprofit (c)3 / (c)4 system. If “we” can’t get the NAACP, we can throw dirt by proxy on him. So “we” compress the ill-prepared work orders, inefficient supervision, and snafus of low-level bureaucrats inside an agency, knowledge of which worked its way up to the top, with no evidence of wrong doing but certainly an ill-thought out plan, and no statistics to support wrong doing, but lots of complaints, and find myriad ways to imply it should land squarely on the President’s desk.

The GOP default position is blame the President, by initiation or ignorance, no matter the labyrinth of command. Either he did it or should have known about it.

Heritage Action, in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the Leader, makes this position plain. It gleefully spells out the next tactic in “vetting” the administration; the original found at this link: Don’t Legislate, “It Would Be Imprudent” [http://wp.me/p1mBVu-24q].

The Request To Subvert Democracy

To deadly political sins: Add Advocacy, By outside groups. Who feel no hesitation in directing the Speaker of the House and its Leader to set an agenda purely for the purpose of political ends, with the intent of damaging the country for political gains. The link below contains a copy of the original letter send to Boehner and Cantor by Heritage Action. Its focus, blindness, and real words are chimeras of meaning, whose only conclusion and purpose is to request the commitment to subverting democracy and its process by stretching its tactics to an illegitimate use of national power to install a view defeated in the elections. 

This is partisanship that disregards the will of the people and seeks to win by the back door.
The Republican Scandal Letter: Don’t Legislate, “It Would Be Imprudent” [http://wp.me/p1mBVu-24q].

President Obama Delivers The Address For The Morehouse College Commencement

The President delivers the graduation address at Morehouse College, the only college in the US for black men; the alma mater of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Spike Lee; the institution where SC-born educator, Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays was the legendary President. 

Not Further Dividing A Divided Country Is Noble And Wise.

I rise (literally!) to suggest the President’s goal of not further dividing a divided country is noble and wise. Troubles and lies will pass, obstruction will pass, hate and vitriol will find new targets and take new forms, but often the wisest course is to do nothing and therefore avoid becoming further mired. The I Ching talks of the difficulty of responding properly to difficulties.

That said, I do wish the White House responded with the speed, fervor, and passion of the campaign: with timely answers, well thought out, detailed responses, broadly distributed without labels and meanness.

That said, Democrats in the House and Senate do a lousy job of putting forth responses, coordinating messaging, and have a plan to advance that reaches the grassroots! It is telling when the Times commentariat puts forth cogent defenses and perspectives that exceed by every measure those who are elected to represent these positions. Where is Gov. Granholm, San Antonio’s mayor, the former Speaker in answering the exaggerated distortions pounded in the media. It is disheartening when the positions we think are important receive little support across the board. This is a systems issue and should be fixed! Do elected officials and staff read us? We should not be held in contempt. Steal our best ideas! Then organize!

“I Stepped In The Water One Day”

Pet Coke And The Profits Of Decay

Detroit has become a town unfit for ghosts. It has become a beachhead for the Koch Brothers’ purchased supply oil waste. An open pile of black sludge from Canadian tar sands that grows like a festering sore stands to remind us of the underbelly of the city’s once prominent industry, the world’s leading site for auto-making, that spurred the consumption of oil. The sludge has become the foul by-production of its success. The coke is the symbol of its decay, and how wealth can be extracted from decline and waste.

Did the state permit this use of space? What are the potential hazards for storage and shipping? What are the dangers to residents and workers? 

The coke, which is a refining waste product, is sold and often shipped to China and other countries to  be burned as fuel. It emits extremely high levels of hydrocarbons damaging to the atmosphere and leading to increases in global warming.

This will be duplicated in Texas if the XL pipeline is approved.

The by-product puts on display the greed and indifference to how consumption affects the society and environment. It is a big ticket, high cost global strategy that places profit first, and ignores any harm outside of its own expense.

The Republican Scandal Letter: Bigger Than Watergate! Don’t Legislate, “It Would Be Imprudent”

Corporate lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Lewis G. Powell’s 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce that became the manifesto of the Republican Party and conservatives:

Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

See the new letter, in line with the Powell memo, from Heritage Action that continues its tradition, by demanding the breach of the oath of office so politics can be put above governing the country.

Talking Points

To clarify, several debt/deficit measures exist: total public/private debt, federal debt, budget deficits are often cited. I referred to the budget deficit, (I did not it clear earlier!). The graph of the budget deficit since 2008 shows it is lower than 2009 when Obama took office and any years he has served.

Have you heard one House or Senate Republican say they are “very happy about the falling deficits”? This points to the intense politics of the GOP’s positions. Not governing but assigning blame while ignoring the true course of the nation or Obama’s policies.

Deficits/debt are a false flag! In fact, an important measure shows “cutting spending” is not good for a national economy recovering from a severe recession and a liquidity trap: the numbers of unemployed; by absolute count, workforce participation or percentage–too many workers are unable to find work and youth and older workers are having extreme difficulty.

Sustained high unemployment is an alarm the GOP ignores–false promise after false promise. Again, the point is GOP politics. Blame is more important for the GOP than putting people to work. The House repeals Obamacare for the 37th time, but passes no jobs bill. Why? It would require spending; also jobs cut profits and the rapid accumulation of capital by the one percent.