African elephant is two species, researchers say BBC (hat tip reader John M)
Ding-Ding-Ding! Electric Cars Likely To Be Made Noisier By Law GreenCarReports
Hellfire at Christmas? Lesley Hazleton
The $20,000 Pet SmartMoney
Down and Out on $250,000 a Year Fiscal Times (hat tip reader Mary S)
Blogger gets 33 months for threatening Chicago judges on Internet Christian Science Monitor. Readers will clearly need to moderate talk of tar, feathering, and pitchforks.
Scaling laws for cities Steve Hsu (hat tip Richard Smith, via Alea)
A mineral fund for Afghanistan Foreign Policy (hat tip reader May S)
Walker Awards al-Haramain for Executive Branch Surveillance Abuse bmaz FireDogLake
How to Be President in a Fact-Free America The Nation (hat tip reader May S)
Losing Hope About a Recovery Economix Blog (hat tip reader Scott)
Basel liquidity rules, going neo-medieval FTAlphaville
Embedded financial journalism at its worst Ian Fraser (hat tip Richard Smith)
On Obama’s Failure To Carry Out His Elected Mandate To Reform Jesse. Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour. What I should be doing:
56 comments
Comments are closed.
Regarding the $250,000 article: I was ready to be convinced until I got to the sentence “family of four…” Wait, what? Why in the sam hell would that be the default assumption? Is that really what we should base our views of poverty on? That is completely skewed, IMO. It should be based on a single person with NO CHILDREN, living in an apartment in a city, with access to public transportation (perhaps tossing in median student loan debt with a Bachelor’s.) Just look at the assumptions his number tacks on (and then some): childhood education, saving for college, children’s clothing, house payments/maintenance, etc. For 250k, a single person can live fabulously well even in places like NYC. The “standard” choice of couple and two children comes off as very anachronistic and unfair IMO.
Agreed. Every time I see these “woe to the couples making $250k” articles I sneer in disgust. Wow, what a problem. Every article makes a lot of assumptions, too…like they live in areas of high taxes, or “have” to send their children to private schools, or “have” to save for college, or “have to eat out x number of weeks.
If I made even HALF of what one of these families made, I’d be sitting VERY pretty. Pay off my modest house in a year, and still be left with enough to live comfortably on. Next year, pay off my student debt, and have enough to start hunting for a second home or a new Corvette.
I can get a surprising amount of stuff done with my barely above-poverty level of income…why? Because I’m not a DUMBASS.
I think that the terrible part of that article is what it says for Americans and what we characterize as necessary lifestyle choices. It immediately assumes that they would be in the red, like people that make 250,000 a year can’t budget. Cleaning lady 5K a year, housekeeper is assumed. Their leisure budget is 16K per a year. A couple needs to have 500 $10 lunches over the course of the year.
I think what has to be questioned first is not why Americans are in debt, but how luxuries have been manufactured into ‘needs’ through popular culture and media. Putting away 13% a year towards retirement and $8000 towards their childrens education is a good thing, however, we have found ourselves within a system where someone needs to do that because of a declining safety net system and skyrocketing higher education costs.
I wonder what their European counterparts would look like.
“Putting away 13% a year towards retirement and $8000 towards their childrens education is a good thing, however, we have found ourselves within a system where someone needs to do that because of a declining safety net system and skyrocketing higher education costs.”
Better that then leaving someone else to decide what my retirement should look like and what the quality of my kids’ education should be.
As fas as skyrocketing higher education costs, how about stopping subsidizing student loans, at least to private schools (both directly, and indirectly thru the bankruptcy code)
Subsidizing student loans?? The current loan rate for a subsidized Stafford is 6.8%. Doesn’t sound subsidized to me. And how, pray tell, is the bankruptcy system helping students with debt? Student debt is not dischargeable under the current laws.
What’s especially troubling about that article (and most analysis of everything, it seems) is the false dichotomy problem.
You are either rich or not rich, and this is based on your income. Sounds dumb when one puts it that way, no?
Well, rich is obviously and clearly a relative comparison.
The one fact, however, that is really pretty indisputable (putting aside all subjective determinations) is that one who earns $250,000 per year has *MORE INCOME* than one who earns $50,000. What’s not clear about that? Seriously, let me know…
I’m not interested in expenses, wealth accumulation, etc. Tell me who has more income…
“Blogger gets 33 months for threatening Chicago judges on Internet Christian Science Monitor. Readers will clearly need to moderate talk of tar, feathering, and pitchforks.”
————
Methinks that this blogger went FAR BEYOND calling for tar, feathering and pitchforks!
He deserves his sentence which will give him some thinking time. And also some first-person association time with people who have a real strong love of guns and other weaponry.
A big part of our problem is people’s propensity to side with the elites the second they don’t like the cut of someone’s jib. “I’m against the banksters where it’s a direct bankster issue. But I side with the banksters everywhere else!”
Anyone who still goes around saying anyone “should go to prison” for attacking the elites is just siding with the enemy.
What complicates the Turner case is that he was being paid by the FBI as an informant and agent provocateur for years before he was arrested. His role was to get other people to make threatening or inflammatory statements so that they could be prosecuted, surveilled, etc. http://www.northjersey.com/news/Records_show_feds_used_ultra-right_radio_host_for_years.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Turner#FBI_Informant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Turner#Arrest.2C_trials_and_conviction
The FBI decided to prosecute him instead. After his lawyer argued that he told by the FBI to make the threatening statements to see who agreed with them, the jury deadlocked. A second trial also ended in mistrial. He was convicted in his third trial.
Yves is correct, however, about the need to moderate and self-censor one’s speech. The government routinely uses computers to search websites looking for conduct or statements that indicate illegality, disaffection, disloyalty, etc. The Turner case suggests that it also employees bloggers and others to “push” Internet commenters into making statements that can be used against them.
“The government routinely uses computers to search websites looking for conduct or statements that indicate illegality, disaffection, disloyalty, etc.”
Illegality, OK I guess. Disaffection, disloyalty — now that’s definitely Big Brother territory.
If they are going to go that far, the govt should do some good for the internet and issue warnings, then prosecute, for things like bad spelling, improper use of apostrophes, and especially mixing up then and than, or there, their and they’re.
And let’s not forget the meteoric rise in usage of the word “tons” when “many” is appropriate.
Externality says: “The government routinely uses computers to search websites looking for conduct or statements that indicate illegality, disaffection, disloyalty, etc.”
There was a time when it would have been easy to dismiss such assertions. But with the recent news about the FBI, dummy bombs, and terrorism charges it is much more difficult. There can be no doubt that big brother is amonst us.
With the economy in it’s current state, the number of investigations of disaffection must be quite large.
During the Revolutionary, War the colonies demanded citizens swear to loyalty oaths but I thought we were past that. Maybe that’s next, just before stepping into the scanners at the airport.
Another approach to controlling online speech comes from a senior Obama administration official named Cass Sunstein. Sunstein suggested “cognitively infiltrating” online discussions by, among other things, quietly recruiting and paying people, including apparently neutral experts, to support the administration’s position in discussion groups. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein
(While nominally directed against “conspiracy theories,” his definition of them expands throughout his paper to encompass any facts or explanation of events that is at odds with the government’s official version of events.)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
The blockquote is from Sunstein’s paper, available, for free at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
Sorry about the formatting. I really wish there was some way to preview posts before posting them.
(2) Government might impose some kind
of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories….
Read my lips: No New Taxes!
A ‘Liar’s Tax’? Possibilities ricochet in my skull.
Talk of pitchforks and even guillotines are figures of speech when used rhetorically, a visual expression that connotes old fashioned one-on-one instruments and mobs -lynching is another one of those figures of speech. Remember Supreme Court Justice Thomas?
Talk of pitchforks and guillotines on this blog and the story to which this caution is attached are not equivalent. Its a stretch to present it that manner, and dishonest.
I would if I were you, Yves, state your intentions for censorship as clearly as you would any issue you have tackled heretofore on your own blog.
Funny how in 6 short months the $1T in mineral reserves in Afghanistan as stated in the Risen June article becomes $3T in December.
How much of it is depleted uranium?
The dollar values that have been tossed around re: Af’s mineral wealth are literally meaningless. They’re essentially extremely crude estimates of the mass of particular minerals thought to be present anywhere in Af multiplied by the market price for the refined mineral. No consideration is given to the cost of extracting or refining the minerals. Extraction costs (particularly those associated with protecting extraction operations) make Afghanistan’s mineral wealth almost entirely inaccessible and the idea that Afghanistan is some kind of lithium shangri-la is little more than yet another imperialist pipedream.
Re blogger threatening judges:
This guy did go far beyond just expressing opinions or political goals, but committed overt acts like researching and publicizing addresses and such. So it would still be a big, overtly anti-constitutional leap for them to try to sanction pitchfork talk. (Which is common enough among Republican lawmakers as well, as we’ll no doubt soon be seeing again.)
“We live in a system where judges should be able to do their jobs and not have to look over their shoulders,” he added.
Yes. It would be very nice if judges did their jobs, which include imposing justice on criminals and restitution for the victims of crime. It would be nice if even conscientious judges didn’t have to look over their shoulders at the banks.
Re being president in a fact-free America:
Obama ought to know, since no president has ever been more of a systematic liar. (Some others may have equalled him.)
That author seems to be an example of the idiocy he’s writing about, if he really thinks Obama has ever had any intention at all other than to impose hard anti-progressive policy.
I use to think the nonsense of the Nation was just typical progressive stupidity, but by now I’m satisfied they’re a conscious astroturf.
Re Jesse:
Was I misunderstanding this, or is it the same nonsense? Unfortunately, Obama has experienced all too little futility in pursuing his criminal agenda, which he’s done with extreme aggression. But the reproduction of that speech didn’t seem to be calling him a traitor. It seems to be calling him a coward, which is just the same disproven fraud.
“I use to think the nonsense of the Nation was just typical progressive stupidity, but by now I’m satisfied they’re a conscious astroturf.”
Driven by whom and to what purpose?
By the Democratic Party for the benefit of the Democratic Party. Who else?
Unfortunately, or maybe it’s fortuntately, they make cute antidotes when they are young.
And to them, a Republican or a Democratic Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens is equally terrifying.
In “How to be President in a Fact-Free America”, Gary Younge could be a ringer for Gary Coleman: “Wa’choo talkin’ bout Willis?” Fringe racism as an excuse for Obama’s Neocon agenda was briefly plausible in early ’09, but is now tiresome and insulting. Younge himself seems stuck on grinding old axes here, blinded by race in failing to see how Obama cynically used liberal color-blindness to sell his snake oil and then sell-out progressives.
Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report has a firmer grip on reality:
“Now that self-proclaimed progressives have passed the point of disenchantment with Barack Obama and entered the stage of active anger at their once-imagined ally, they should … acknowledge that he is what we at Black Agenda Report have been saying for six years: a right-wing Democrat who has long been aligned with the corporate Democratic Leadership Conference, and whose mission is to expand U.S. empire and put the American state at the service of Wall Street. He has been remarkably successful in both endeavors.”
“… His reverence for Ronald Reagan is genuine. Indeed, if Obama were not Black, and if his supporters had not been busy getting drunk in a wishing-well, he would have been widely recognized as a stylistically updated Reagan Democrat.”
[…]
“But some things are certain. The ever-quickening pace of finance capital’s unraveling is creating multiple, overlapping crises that will be insoluble precisely because Wall Street wields decisive power over the political process. The very fact of bankster hegemony prevents other forces from saving Wall Street from itself. ..”
“…They reached too far, and accelerated the process of their own decline. Ultimately, the rulers called forth and financed a Black president to refurbish the imperial brand. Obama has since expanded Bush’s theaters of war, in preparation for another push.”
“…It is good that much of the U.S. Left – including some Black folks – have become disenchanted with, and even angry at, Barack Obama. But a great deal has happened in the world since progressive Americans of all races got their heads stuck up Obama’s behind. It remains to be seen if the latest Obama-trauma is enough to dislodge them from that dark and nasty place.”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/left-and-obama-trauma
People do the craziest things to get one more year of life out of a retriever – and not even a good year for the dog. Frankly, I don’t understand it. I have a 15 year old cat who tolerates me, mostly, and whom I love. He started downhill, and the vet (after I had run the tests for hyperthyroid, diabetes, and most of the other stuff it was more likely to be) suggested testing for something that cost $600 just for the test. When I asked what would be the treatment, should that be the problem, he replied that the cat would need daily injections. Mind you, this is an animal who took out two vet assistants before they could sufficiently drug him into submission! What four people are they going to send over to help me administer these shots?
More to the point, snuggles obviously doesn’t like to be touched. When he can’t any longer live his furball life the way he likes it, we’re done. I won’t extend his life with daily invasions of his dignity, as he apparently sees it.
I will admit that with a dog it has to be harder: their best time is always basking in the attention of alpha. But part of the deal with loving a large dog is that their life span is roughly 9 years. It’s a painfully short time if you are a person.
I would think that the greatest gift a pet can give an owner is a lesson in the impermanence of everything. Yes, let it go. And make sure for the next one you take it for more walks if a dog, and for a neighborhood to wander around in if a cat.
Steve Hsu left out a couple of the more interesting bits in ‘Scaling laws for cities’:
Doh! So what do West’s scaling laws tell us about the U.S., where increasing federal centralization and control are apparent?
To answer my own rhetorical question, the fedgov is following the sublinear scaling of the ephemeral corporation, not the superlinear scaling of the free-for-all open city (which would translate into devolution of power in political terms).
As Small Is Beautiful theorist Kirkpatrick Sale probably would conclude, Obama’s notable fecklessness is largely a product of fighting the iron laws of mathematics, which say that centrally managing a nation of 308 million is a hopeless, counterproductive, and ultimately ruinous task.
And this conclusion applies to you too, Bensane Bernanke. Your hundreds of PhD Econs ought to give Geoffrey West a call — and then resign to do something useful with their lives.
The article on how hard it is to live on $250k/yr does a lot of math to get to the $78,276 tax bill by painstakingly adding up federal income tax, FICA, state income tax, sales tax, property tax, gas tax, etc.
But let’s stop right now and put that into perspective. Subtract the tax bill from income to get an after tax income of $171,724 and then divide by 12 to get an after tax monthly income of $14,310.
Let’s put that after tax monthly income into perspective.
Assume a $1 Million house, with a 5% 30 year fixed mortgage with 20% down. Monthly payment is $4295.
Assume they each drive $50k cars. That’s a $944 monthly payment X 2 = $1888 in total.
After what is likely their two largest monthly expenses, they still have not yet even spent HALF of their after tax monthly income. They still have $8127 left.
The article is complete nonsense – their analysis includes student loan payments (which won’t exist forever), $33k in 401k contributions (which is not an expense, lol), and $19k in day care and after school activities (you can do a lot better for cheaper) plus a whole host of other idiocy.
Indeed. Basically, the article is trying to justify the fact that even people with good incomes will try to live beyond their means. It’s “impossible” for two working people to maintain their household without maids, dry cleaners, etc.? They have to live in high-cost suburbs with good schools? Or, more to the point, we should relieve their tax burden so they can more easily afford what most people cannot? It reminds me of when I would hear people in the finance industry in NYC say they were just barely “getting by” on $300K per year, when I was living in Brooklyn on a tiny fraction of that, and saving money. Sorry dude, but if you have $10-15K per month of after tax income, and you are spending it all, it is because you _choose_ to do so. Being in the red on that much money is noone’s fault but your own.
Thanks for your comment.
I was afraid it was just my mid western attitude about frugality causing me to question their numbers!
Yeah, thanks for putting that little bit of math into print.
The whole expenses chart (the embedded multicolored chart you have to scroll up and down in to see) has so many amazing expenses it’s hard to know where to start picking it apart.
I know which one would most offend my mom. She raised two kids on a secretary’s salary and did all her own cooking and cleaning even with her 50-minute commute. Yet this couple’s reasonable expenses include $5k/year ($96/week) for someone to clean their house?
As a physician, I see this all too often, with colleagues and specialists in other fields saying they hardly can get by with salaries in the 600,000+ range. Sometimes their spouse also works.
The real issue is chasing the people above your income level. In the finance field this includes people paying 15% tax on their carried interest. Robert Frank illustrates this very well in his “Richistan” book.
I know many people who moved to a community with high property taxes and great schools, AND still decided to send their kids to private elite schools. The issue for them is that they want their kids to have the MOST advantage in getting into an elite crowd early, and then an elite college, and an easy life.
They use the excuse that “my child needs special attention” that private school affords, and they would just get lost in the public school system…but really it is about class mobility…attempting to gain entry into a higher class.
Many of the comments look at the $250,000 and say, look at all of their expenses that aren’t needed. Meals out, day care because two parents work or one volunteers or plays tennis, house cleaning service. I agree on the face of things, but when you approach it in terms of class struggle, if they didn’t pay for these they would automatically drop in terms of class and essentially defeat the purpose of making $250,000 ( in their minds). They would be shunned by the people and the lifestyles they admire and would be psychologically scarred.
The alternative is to fight for progressive taxation on the Richistans to bring them down to earth, support communities, live more sustainably with excellent and efficient public transportation, end foreign wars and trillion dollar military campaigns, invest in universal healthcare, reduce dependence of fossil fuels, promote a basic income guarantee or reverse tax credit to provide remuneration for the numerous jobs that go unpaid and for basic human dignity.
Unfortunately, the $250,000 10% is too busy trying to crawl up the ladder and in so doing suck up to the top 5, top 1, top .001% that they fail to see alternatives that could give them a better quality of life. These 10%-20% are the voting professional class, the Democrats AND Republicans, that enable the current system and work to undermine their own happiness.
Beautifully said and on-point for the most part.
Yep, nothing that a 50% marginal tax rate at $500k and a 90% marginal rate at $1 million wouldn’t fix.
It is absurdly fitting that Jesse in “On Obama’s Failure To Carry Out His Elected Mandate To Reform” uses a speech by Robert F Kennedy to illustrate Obama’s supposed pusillanimity. No one, than RFK, did more to transform the Democratic Party into an amalgam of irrational self-infatuated sentimentalists and power grasping non-entities. In 68, Gene McCarthy was in Grant Park while George McGovern was on the podium with Hubert Humphrey. The Democratic Party has been worthless ever since; surviving only by the strength of Phil Burton’s gerrymander of California in the 80’s. That Dems are now disappointed with Obama’s failure to carry out “reform” after Obama’s vacuous campaign is testimony only to the depth of illusion these people have of themselves – the ones history has been waiting for. Bathetic.
…once a government has gone rogue, discussing it in the glorified terms usually reserved for childrens’ school books is a little much.
The call to patriotism by quoting quotes without reference to the true character and real lives of their purported authors is in the same category. Its not even good for the children.
Jesse’s a sweet guy; outstanding aesthetics on his blog. But he was ready to hang Hitchens for strongly criticizing the Catholic church for their part in harboring the sexual predators among their member priests.
John F. Kennedy was consorting with the Mafia; sending bags of money via his gun moll mafia whore. The guy lived dangerously and irresponsibly. If he hadn’t been offed by the mafia he would have left a lot of women and possibly children with some pretty horrendous STDs.
Those of us who mourned his death didn’t think of those things; we were heartbroken. And he’s responsible for that too.
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
The regulators don’t ask.
The banksters don’t tell.
Will we reform that? Will we repeal that?
Despite being a firm believer in equal rights for all citizens, gays and straights alike, I don’t think that repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is such a great win for the gay and lesbian community. I will continue to feel this way until I hear that a sizable number of gays and lesbians have moved up the military ranks where they are out of harm’s way, thus reducing their chances of being severely maimed or killed at war. And because hate against non-straights is so prevalent in the military, I’m afraid that many of them will be used as cannon folder. Or worse, they’ll be killed by friendly fire or become victims of joy killings. So I think that it best for gays and lesbians to seek jobs in the peace corps, not the armed forces!
And it takes away the best and easiest way to get out of a draft :(
Noiseless electric cars?
Why not make them neigh like horses?
[lol]! I am going to use that line somewhere…
I don’t think you’re really down and out on $250K a year.
It’s just that, to those making $100 million/yr, you are really just part of the ‘low income’ rabble and will never be invited to their soirees, but the-really-rich will gladly include you as a member of ‘the rich’ just to soften the blow of any potential tax-the-rich legislation by having you, one of those not-really-rich, share their burden.
Honestly, I think every once of love AND hate expended on Obama is completely wasted.
The office of the president isn’t good for much of anything except going to war. We already have enough fronts in an unending war on nouns. The best he can do is retreat from one, maybe start another one. All the moneyed interests in the world peddle their influence in Washington, so the best we can do is change the names.
No money is going to “trickle down” from Wall Street, EVER. It’s a rigged game. Don’t give anyone on Wall Street your money. Demand your pension remove money from Wall Street firms. Only deal locally.
No, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. No adults are coming to the rescue. If you want to see businesses in your area succeed, start a local bank or help the one in your area. Volunteer at the shelters. If you can work construction, help your neighbors fix their homes. If banks are forcing people out of their homes, start a group to come sort things out on short notice. Your neighbors will remember the favor, and return it.
Those of us without money have to barter our goods and services. It beats sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.
As for the $250k “poor” family — I agree that they aren’t wealthy. They’re simply earning the income that anyone working an honest job SHOULD earn. True wealth doesn’t earn income, they collect tithes in the form of rent, which is inherited.
That’s why I think the furor over the 2% tax “increase” for the top was a waste of effort. It’d be better to increase the estate tax. And the capital gains tax. And the carry interest BS that lets hedge fund managers get away with murder.
Obama is a conservative pursuing a conservative agenda. We should expect nothing else. He’s not going to change. Rather he epitomizes David Addington’s statement, “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” He not only is not going to change course. He’s going to continue to double down.
Back in the days when we still had a Constitution and a rule of law, advocating the overthrow of the government, even its violent overthrow, was protected speech. wiki Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). The line drawn in that case was between speech which was protected, and action which was not.
@Jim the Skeptic:
The Washington Post has done several series on the massive array of domestic surveillance agencies created over the past ten years. Per WaPo:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Even senior government officials are not allowed to know their full extent or take notes about the ones they are allowed to see. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
On Monday, the Post wrote the following in its most recent article:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/ (emphasis added)
Even this was not enough. The federal government, along with several states, _outsourced_ to an Israeli company called the Institute for Terrorism Research and Response the task of surveilling and creating a “Stasi-style informant network” to monitor protesters and contact their parents and friends for information about them. After a now-former Pennsylvania official accidentally sent a message to a gas drilling protestor he mistook for an industry lobbyist, some of ITRR’s actions in Pennsylvania became public knowledge. ITRR is still employed by the feds, other states, foreign governments, and private companies to monitor Americans.
Targeted groups in Pennsylvania included:
Gay pride marchers
Tea Party groups
People wanting lower taxes
People wanting more education spending
Environmentalists
Pennsylvanians who attended a movie about the danger of natural gas drilling.
Anti-war protestors
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0910/Rendell_Deeply_embarrassed_over_spying_on_peaceful_groups.html
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/11/10/the-privatization-of-citizen-informant-networks/
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/09/15/when-political-activism-gets-treated-as-potential-terrorism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/15/pennsylvania-protest-repo_n_717393.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-zeese/politically-active-americ_b_744154.html
@Jim the Skeptic:
The Washington Post has done several series on the massive array of domestic surveillance agencies created over the past ten years. Per WaPo:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Even senior government officials are not allowed to know their full extent or take notes about the ones they are allowed to see. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
On Monday, the Post wrote the following in its most recent article:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/ (emphasis added)
Even this was not enough. The federal government, along with various states, _outsourced_ to an Israeli company called the Institute for Terrorism Research and Response the task of surveilling and creating a “Stasi-style informant network” to monitor protest groups, protesters, and to contact protesters parents and friends for information about them.
After a now-former Pennsylvania official accidentally sent a message to a gas drilling protestor he mistook for an industry lobbyist, some of ITRR’s actions in Pennsylvania became public knowledge. ITRR is still employed by the feds, other states, foreign governments, and private companies to monitor Americans.
Targeted groups in Pennsylvania included:
Gay pride marchers
Tea Party groups
People wanting lower taxes
People wanting more education spending
Environmentalists
Pennsylvanians who attended a movie about the danger of natural gas drilling.
Anti-war protesters
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0910/Rendell_Deeply_embarrassed_over_spying_on_peaceful_groups.html
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/11/10/the-privatization-of-citizen-informant-networks/
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/09/15/when-political-activism-gets-treated-as-potential-terrorism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/15/pennsylvania-protest-repo_n_717393.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-zeese/politically-active-americ_b_744154.html
One can never have enough ‘security’
or
our government will protect us from our own misconduct
or
Homeland should not be confused with Fatherland
or
You have nothing to fear if you are not guilty, comrade.
While I agree with the criticisms of the 250K article above, there is a good point buried in these sorts of articles.
Middle class and above middle class families in the United States face a huge amount of fixed costs compared to their counterparts in other countries. Taxes in the US are actually quite high when you combine federal, state, and local taxes (the US media dishonestly likes to compare federal taxe rates in the US with taxes for ALL levels of government in other countries). Add in health care costs and education costs, all much higher in absolute terms and as a percentage of income than anywhere else. Plus in most of the US to get anywhere you have to buy a car, maintain it, and fuel it, and more than one if you have a family. And add the inflated cost of housing.
So a large proportion of Americans are constantly forking over large amounts of money for, really, not much. When I visit other countries with lower incomes on paper, I’ve increasingly tended to be impressed by how much higher the standard of living is for at least the middle class in those countries compared to the US.
And I live in Manhattan on a 60K income, basically thanks to rent stabilization and not having kids. So I can even afford a 16K “entertainment budget” like the family in the article. But even with me a majority of what I’m paid gets handed to the various governments and the landlord before I get my hands on it. Discretionary income in the US comparatively low compared to nominal income, and I don’t think enough attention has been paid to this.
You’re alluding to purchasing power parity — and its effect is quite large.
So-called developing countries recognize that their large cohorts of disadvantaged citizens need access to cheap food, utilities, education and transport, and tend to price them accordingly.
In the US, the assumption has been that 80 to 90 percent of residents are middle class or above, and can tote the full load of market-priced services (and even more extravagantly priced non-market services, such as government).
Increasingly, this principle is no longer valid. People who fall off the high-income, high-overhead treadmill without independent resources (or enter indentured servitude in young adulthood thanks to a heavy millstone of student loans round their necks) suffer a punishing drop in lifestyle.
Although it’s difficult to draw an explicit connection, America’s monstrous waste of resources on its military empire has much to do with its anomalous status of being a high-income country statistically, yet one in which the median standard of living is becoming increasingly deprived and threadbare.
To be impolitically blunt, endlessly invading and occupying countries on the other side of the world makes you poor and hungry. But the Depublicrat duopoly unanimously endorses continuing on this proven path to poverty.
That’s a baby Bob-cat, ain’t it? Cute.
Yves,
I’m not sure if it was you (in Econned, perhaps?) who brought my attention to banks using Trust Preferred Securities that essentially converted debt into equity for banks, thereby satisfying their Tier 1 Capital requirements.
Do you know if this is still ongoing? If so, what magnitude of Tier 1 capital would these roughly represent?
More karma!
“MBIA’s suit against Bank of America and its Countrywide unit is one of at least 12 claims brought by insurers in state and federal courts targeting issuers of mortgage-backed securities, including Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse and GMAC Mortgage LLC. Government-owned mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and bond investors such as MetLife Inc., are also pursuing repurchase demands from originators of the securities.”
Bank of America Loses Bid to Stop MBIA Using Statistics in Fraud Lawsuit
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/bofa-loses-evidence-ruling-in-mbia-fraud-suit-over-21-billion-in-coverage.html
Bruce Stirling checks in on the recent Wikileaks drama.
At last — at long last — the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those “cypherpunks,” of all people.
….
Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.
Bruce Stirling, “The Blast Shack”
http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/
Just to note that Sterling would’ve been better off citing Nick Leeson, rather than Jerome Kerveil who was prolly backed by managers supervised by board members appointed by shareholders.
The savannah/forest elephant thing has been known for a long time. Forest elephants behave completely differently: they are invisible. A forest elephant could be 500 yards away and you would not hear it go past.