Outrageous Numbers

Here are the kind of numbers that simply drive me crazy. (You will find the source here.) What you're looking at here is stark evidence of why the middle class is getting absolutely reamed by the corporate interests in this country. These figures are in the millions of dollars. Just forget about the third column for the moment and consider that the thirty U.S. corporations listed here made a total of almost $164 billion worth of profit from 2008-2010, and during that same period received $10.6 billion in tax rebates from the American people. 

Just what is wrong with this picture? At least part of the explanation for these outrageous numbers lies in the last column which shows the millions of dollars these corporations paid for lobbyists in their behalf over the same time span. It's hardly coincidental that the top three companies receiving the largest tax rebates also spent the most on lobbyists. But you have to admit, the returns on this particular investment are spectacular.This, brothers and sisters, is why the tax laws in this country fill hundreds of volumes. They require that many volumes to contain all the goodies for numberless corporations and special interests crammed in there. Tell me all those fancy meals, fabulous trips, Super Bowl tickets, etc., etc., etc. don't buy members of Congress.


Related articles

• Steven Strauss: Actually, Corporations That Lobby and Make Campaign Contributions Get Special Benefits (huffingtonpost.com)
• Congress Seen as Less Honest Than Lobbyists (fdlaction.firedoglake.com)

Some Thoughts on Majorities

"The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that  a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over." 

Henrik Ibsen

"What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike."

Alfred North Whitehead

"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men."

Henry David Thoreau

"Haint't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

Huck Finn

"People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts."

Robert Keith Leavitt

" . . . the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. that is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians': the wise man stands out because he knows he is hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice, and warfare."

T. H. White (The Book of Merlyn)

Musings

I recently ran across a Roman proverb that goes thus: "The world wants to be deceived." It got me to thinking just how true it is. Just think about the masses of people in this country who believe that a "recovery" of the economy will restore things to the way they used to be. Or the similar masses who equate repression with security and believe that nations fight wars for peace.

Voices of the 99 Percent

But one of the poignant testimonies out there, one of millions

Another testimony:

I am 66 years old, and don’t plan to retire, ever. I am fortunate that I look young, feel young, am healthy, and still have a job. Friends / contemporaries are not so lucky. One needs a liver transplant. One is in a wheelchair. They are both still working. Two others have not worked for 2 - 3 years. They are smart, talented, experienced, and desperately want to work. Instead, they have the terrifying prospect of years - 25 yrs? 30 yrs? the rest of their lives - spent in unexpected poverty. Through pure luck, I am me and not them. I could wake up tomorrow and be any one of them. We are the 99%!

Our creativity and labor is the foundation of wealth. Legalized greed and exploitation concentrates it in the hands of the 1%. We are Atlas. We carry the world on our shoulders! We are the 99% . . .

Hits me in the heart. I am 68 years old, Susan is 64. I cannot imagine us being in such a condition. 

Go spend some time at the "We Are the 99 Percent" blog. This is just one person. Just one. Holding up a a sign at the "Occupy Wall Street" site in New York. There are pages and pages of such stories from people there. A real person behind every sign, every scribbled page of grief and suffering. And this is but one city in America. What are these people going to do?

I sit here typing this in my nice warm house. Tomorrow we will attend a Christmas party given by our neighborhood association. Everybody will have nice clothes, and we will dispose of who knows how much uneaten food afterwards. There is a serious disconnect going on here. There's a serious disconnect going on all across the country.

The Platinum Kiss

Pretty good line in a recent USA Today story: "The golden parachute is evolving into the platinum kiss." About the recent exit packages that CEOs are garnering from companies across the spectrum in the US. It's this sort of thing, among other outrages, of course, that have spawned the nationwide "Occupy" movement. Is there a better example of pay inequity out there than this? To wit: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano will get $170 million when he steps aside; Gene Isenberg, $126 million from Nabors Industries. Google's Eric Smith got $100 million in stock when he departed as CEO. Smith is a real interesting case. The man had an equity stake in Google of over $5.5 billion. He remains chairman of the board, which could get him $7.25 million a year.

Are you kidding me? Surely in the face of the widespread suffering across this country, this is damn near criminal. But we have lost our capacity for outrage in this country. People ought to be out on the streets in thousands. But we are as supine as sheep in the face of the grossest kind of injustice. Whereas once some sort of solidarity among sufferers apparently existed, it is impossible to discern today, aside from the often inchoate occupiers scattered across the nation. It's almost as if people have decided to cower in their misery. It's a pretty good indication that people have essentially given up. Which makes the charade of selecting a president next year as if the choice will actually make a difference in the lives of ordinary people such a joke. I told Susan tonight that I'm actually sick to death already at the media feeding frenzy over the campaign for president. It's eleven months away, and it's overwhelming in its irrelevancy already. But that's another rant altogether.

Related articles

• Retiring CEO Walks Away with $100 Million (alternet.org)
• Large Executive Payday At Nabors Industries Is Another Reason The 99% Are Ticked Off (dekerivers.wordpress.com)

Kicking Christmas Off in the Good Ole American Way

 Weihnachtmarkt (Christmas Market) in Frankfurt

I have no idea why anyone in the right mind would go out to stores on so-called "Black Friday"* under any circumstances. It is a mystery to me. Even given the fact that I don't particularly like shopping anyway. I avoid stores if at all possible and shop online. I cannot avoid the necessity to shop sometimes, but at no time, save perhaps in book stores, do I ever like it. And the Christmas madness on the streets and stores makes the experience all the more taxing. I did like shopping overseas, but not necessarily because I was buying anything. I found almost any kind of store in Germany and Europe when we lived there interesting, but that was just from the standpoint of the novelty of the goods on the shelves. Christmas time there was wonderful. The very first trip we took in Germany was to the Christmas market in Worms, which was held right next to the cathedral. I can still remember the wonder I had at this event. So utterly strange and new at the time for a person who had been living in the country only about a month at the time. I still remember the fetching and beautiful Christmas displays in the German shops. Christmas markets were everywhere with hot Gluwein, pretzels, gingerbread, and Wurst; crowds enjoying it all in the frosty air. This time of year was magical over there.

Don't know why I went on about all this. Maybe I was unconsciously setting up the stark contrast with the observation I meant to make at the beginning of this post. I.e., a story in USA Today a few days ago informs that among the biggest sellers on Black Friday were . . . guns. How utterly American! Nationwide there were over 129,000 background check requests filed with the FBI that day, far more--32% more, in fact--than the previous high. Nobody seems to have a good explanation for this surge. I could speculate, but it's simply easier to observe that a large portion of the American people are insane and be done with it.

*Where in the hell did this nickname come from? And when in hell did it become part of the American lexicon? Of course, "Black" as in "in the black" for the merchants is a perfectly good metaphor for our money-obsessed culture.

Related articles

• World's best Christmas markets (blahblahbragship.wordpress.com)

W. S. Merwin

Merwin: a poet I found challenging when I first began reading his stuff. He still makes me work a little bit, but I'm none the worse for that. This is a wonderful little poem he wrote in 1997, packed so that unpacking it would take a bit of time, a bit of imagination. I had this posted in my cubicle for years . . . I'm sure it confirmed people's view of me as an eccentric at best, a radical weirdo at worst. I'm guilty on all counts.

Remembering

There are threads of old sound heard over and over

phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender

wands of the auroras playing out from them

into dark time the passing of a few

migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks

far from the rest of the words far from the instruments 

Etchings

There once was a guy named Fred that I knew. He has been dead now for over ten years. I have forgotten his last name, but I remember he worked in the library at Special Operations Command HQ. I was friends with the librarian, which is how I got to know Fred, and we used to exchange emails on this and that to break up the boredom of being fellow drones in a military bureaucracy. I remember him being an upbeat guy, and we would get in these discussions about "deep" things. Apparently, for I don't have his original, he observed in an email that I did not come across as "content"--fancy that. Here's what I wrote to him in response: 

Dear Contented Fred,

No, I don't wish I were content.

I will be content when I am dead.

To be content is to see no room for improvement.

This bespeaks either a dull mind, an overblown opinion of oneself, or a childish Pollyana approach to life.

I have neither-nor, but rather a healthy self-knowledge, a sense of humor and a sense of the tragic, and a consequent empathy with people.

And what your prescription for this poor, sad world? More power-mongers? More gold-diggers? Liars, cheats, and thieves? Dullards and sheep? More lawyers? Manipulators, clowns, and self-delusives? More politicians? More game-players?

Nay, give me more artists, more music, more poetry, more wine. More thinking, fewer rules. More color, less carping. More love, less lechery. More God, fewer godless.

Clones of me wouldn't take themselves very seriously at least. And they would have peace at the core. The poor, sad world could do a lot worse.

I wrote this in the spring of 1997. Some of phraseology strikes me now as a bit much, and the tone is bit too judgmental and dogmatic. Nonetheless, I don't disagree with the general thrust of it here these fourteen years later.

Obvious

A day or so ago, I was telling a friend about part of quote that I remembered, but I had no idea where I remembered it from. I thought I "had read it somewhere." Well, I have this big ole commonplace book--does anybody not familiar with the pre-computer age have any idea what this is? Anyway, I did indeed find the source of the quote, which in full ran this way:

It's nonsense that Americans are individualists. Deep down, we are a nation of herd animals: mouselike conformists who will lay at the doorstep all our rights--if you tell us that we won't have to worry about crime and that our property values will be protected.

This is from a guy named Dennis Judd who was quoted in Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness (1998). But of course. This is one of those observations that is so blatantly obvious that anyone making it will be immediately condemned as anti-American. But one of the many anti-American things you can say in this land of the free that are blatantly obvious.

Housekeeping

Some of you might have noticed that the blog has a kinda new look. No drastic changes. But the rearrangement of elements at the top and their placement over a new thematic photograph . . . well, I'm happy with it. Somehow, it seems to better represent what this blog is all about. At the same time as I did these changes, I removed all the names of individuals from the labels of my posts. Impossible, really, to decide who was mentioned enough to deserve a label beyond the obvious ones. But people will still be eminently findable. The Google search of the blog is instantaneous and accurate. You can still find "Rush Limbaugh" or "Barry Bonds" or "Tom Coburn" or "Benedict XVI" (or "pope," for that matter) just by siking Google on 'em. Plus there are lots of people, such as Michelle Bachman, who are now just as findable as Barrack Obama or George Bush (also found under "vile little pretender").

And the change certainly makes the label list more useful and attractive. At least I think so.