I could talk football all day. Unfortunately, I can’t make a living from it, so I have to pay attention to the “real” world, because I am in one way or another affected by what goes on it. So here goes my end-of-year clean-up of unfinished business.
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Bloomberg News recently reported on how some billionaires have risen in opposition to the call of other self-styled “patriotic” millionaires and billionaires—including the now party-unaffiliated Donald Trump—to raise their tax rates to help maintain a civil society, instead of one where the Prince Prosperos of the country try in vain to hide from the consequences of their avarice. One millionaire hedge fund manager admitted on NPR that businesspeople were not in the “business” of job creation, but in sales and profits; if they could safely cut more jobs, they would do it without the slightest pangs of conscience. They had to be “forced” to create jobs in the face of increased consumer demand that on hand labor cannot meet. Unfortunately, in this country the people who currently have all the extra cash (the rich)--due to massive income disparity in this country and the disappearing middle class--prefer to hide their income in tax shelters and capital gains havens. That cash would be better used in the hands of ordinary consumers, but greed and avarice rule the minds of the newly-surfaced, super-rich "put-upons."
According to Bloomberg, “Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among those of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors conference this month into an occasion to defend wealth. ‘Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it,' the JPMorgan Chase CEO responded to a question about hostility toward bankers. "Sometimes there's a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.’" The super rich “deserve what they are getting” from Wall Street protestors, says the Home Depot’s Bernard Marcus, if they don’t “talk about their troubles.” What “troubles” would that be? Apparently the “crap” he gets from “imbeciles.” Other “troubles” include the Dodd-Frank Act’s requirement that the ratio of CEO compensation compared to employee median wages be disclosed, the discovery of which would be "incredibly wasteful" and "insane.” Only those trying to disguise their greed would use such transparently self-serving, deceitful terms.
Many of the super-rich of the Koch brothers stripe complain incessantly about “an attack on the very productive." But "productive" is a matter of opinion, since hedge fund managers and dealers in derivatives do not create wealth or jobs for anyone but themselves—and when they screw-up thousands of middle-to-lower income people pay. Of course, income disparity is a major cause of this country’s lack of job growth, because middle-to-lower income people spend the most of their disposable income on consumer items, while the rich squirrel their money away, as a hedge against bad economic times like this. As Warren Buffett noted in an op-ed in the New York Times, only relatively small amount of the money “earned” by the super-rich is actually income, and “While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.”
And the more they make, the less they pay in taxes, contrary to popular belief, according to Buffett (confirmed by Politifact) : “Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.” Forty million jobs were created between 1980 and 2000, before the Bush tax cuts. Why haven’t tax cuts for the rich created jobs? Because lower taxes remove the incentive to invest. Investing doesn’t just mean more workers and equipment, but higher pay that will also increase consumerism, and hence sales—and job creation. Instead, the extra money might be used for a European vacation, put into financial gambling casinos, or put it an off-shore tax haven. Buffett remarked that the 39.9 percent capital gains taxes in the 1970s did not persuade people not to invest, in fact quite the opposite—they had to invest more to make more money.
Some of the super rich are telling us “Don’t raise our taxes” until the poor pay their “fair share.” Their propaganda has the gullibles' minds twisted in knots, especially those who belong to the Tea Party. They say “We’re taxed enough, don’t raise our taxes” as if they are in a trance, repeating what they have been told without understanding what they are saying. Now, I would consider myself in that “poor” category. Federal payroll and income taxes reduce my income by 17 percent; after the personal exemption, I get 5 percent of that back in the form of a refund. But that’s not all the taxes I pay; another 10 percent of take-home income goes to state sales taxes. Overall, on income in the bottom quarter, I pay 20 percent in taxes—the same as the top 1 percent, according to IRS figures—and they have rather considerably more money left over than I do; for every one dollar I have left before pay day, someone in the top 1 percent has anywhere from $100 for the low-end to $10,000 for CEOs like Jamie Dimon.
One of the ultra-rich quoted in the Bloomberg story said that if he might consider being more “patriotic” if he was shown more “respect.” After what he and his chums did to the economy this past decade, and the many millions of people still out of work—and he demands respect? Like the transcontinental railroad tycoons of the 19th Century who knew nothing of basic economics, but expected the federal government to continually bail them out of bankruptcy, these people always seem to come out ahead whenever their imprudence outstrips their avarice. We don’t need a few people hording cashes; we need millions spending it to force the businesses to create jobs. If they don’t want to do the job, give it the federal and state government, so they can do it for them.
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There was a fascinating story from the Reuters news service recently concerning Medicare fraud. Most people think of Medicare fraud as ordinary people faking injury; in reality, the worst abuses are perpetrated by slick operators who create “shell” companies that appear legitimate but are just fronts for the illegal activities of another operation. In the case of Medicare fraud, a shell company might claim to be a billing company that purports to handle the claims of a clinic that in fact exist only as post box, if it exists at all. Medicare functionaries rarely have the time to check-out every clinic to determine that legitimate medical procedures are taking place, compounded by the fact that some crooked doctors accept kickbacks for putting their signatures on phony claims.
Making it harder to catch the fraudsters is a so-called “bust-out” operation, when a shell company or company bombards Medicare personnel with claims, hoping that as many a possible are approved before someone wises-up the scheme: “In one of the largest cases of Medicare fraud ever charged, the operation was enabled by shell companies. In October 2010, federal prosecutors indicted 44 members of an Armenian organized crime ring. Their network, which stretched from Los Angeles to Savannah, Ga., used 118 shell companies in 25 states to pose as Medicare providers, billing more than $100 million, according to federal indictments in three states.” In another case, a Florida fraudster “formed or acquired control of six medical clinics in Florida, each with its own office. Patients were then recruited and paid kickbacks to periodically appear at the clinics or allow use of their Medicare numbers.” According to report by the GAO this year, nearly 10 percent of Medicare payouts last year were classified as “improper,” the bulk of them organized fraud of this sort.
Of course, some of this fraud could controlled if there was proper enforcement, and as usual the culprit is lack of resources, like money. A few million dollars to put teeth into even modest regulations could save billions of dollars stolen every year. And naturally it is the Republicans who see no need for regulation, let alone its funding fraud investigations—thus exposing their deficit cutting rhetoric as empty sloganeering.
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It was a bad month for police agencies that one would believe are at polar opposites in their approach to law enforcement: The Seattle Police Department and Sheriff Joe’s infamous regime in Maricopa County, Arizona. If there is a difference, it that Arpaio’s gang actually revels in its reputation as racist, paid thugs who also act as enforcers against his enemies in the political, judicial and media sphere. Arpaio always comes off as “rational” whenever he appears on CNN, but he is still just the head thug, as revealed in the letter detailing the Justice Department’s findings in its investigation of racial profiling and abusive tactics openly condoned in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department.
But first the DOJ’ s report on abuses in the SPD, brought on several shocking episodes including the John T. Williams killing: “We find that SPD engages in a pattern or practice of using unnecessary or excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Section 14141. Deficiencies in SPD’s training, policies, and oversight with regard to the use of force contribute to the constitutional violations. Officers lack adequate training or policies on when and how to report force and when and how to use many impact weapons (such as batons and flashlights). We also find that, starting from the top, SPD supervisors often fail to meet their responsibility to provide oversight of the use of force by individual officers. Command staff does not always provide supervisors with clear direction or expectations of how to supervise the use of force…We do not make a finding that SPD engages in a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing, but our investigation raises serious concerns on this issue. Some SPD policies and practices, particularly those related to pedestrian encounters, could result in unlawful policing. Moreover, many community members believe that SPD engages in discriminatory policing. This perception is rooted in a number of factors, including negative street encounters, recent well-publicized videos of force being used against people of color, incidents of overt discrimination, and concerns that the pattern of excessive force disproportionately affects minorities.”
The report found that SPD officers use force “in an unconstitutional manner” 20 percent of the time. Investigators reached this conclusion by examining the SPD’s own reports. It is also revealed that Seattle police seemed disturbingly eager to use “impact” weapons; almost 60 percent of the time it was either “unnecessary or excessive.” Even more disturbing—but hardly surprising—was officers tendency to “escalate situations and use unnecessary or excessive force when arresting individuals for minor offenses. This trend is pronounced in encounters with persons with mental illnesses or those under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This is problematic because SPD estimates that 70% of use of force encounters involve these populations.” Incidents such as that involving a mentally ill man who was beaten senseless by a half-dozen officers in precinct lobby was indicative of “Multiple SPD officers at a time use unnecessary or excessive force together against a single subject. Of the excessive use of force incidents we identified, 61% of the cases involved more than one officer.”
Another disturbing trend was the failure to discipline and the retention of officers who were involved in dozens of incidents of excessive force: “SPD has no effective supervisory techniques to better analyze why these officers use force more than other officers, whether their uses of force are necessary, or whether any of these officers would benefit from additional use of force training.”
But Seattle’s problems were small potatoes compared to Maricopa County’s Brown Shirts. DOJ investigators found that Arpaio and his deputies—playing-up the illegal immigration “menace” as a cover—ignored with impunity the constitutional and civil rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants of Latino extraction alike; if anyone complains of his policies and practices, Arpaio and his deputies “unlawfully retaliates” against. The CBS news affiliate in Phoenix recently conducted its own investigation of Arpaio’s revenge tactics, which a former federal attorney deemed criminal and prosecutable. The report also noted that Arpaio seemed particularly “juiced” whenever he received letters from racist white constituents—many of which “contain no meaningful descriptions of criminal activity — just crude, ethnically derogatory language about Latinos,” which he apparently used to justify his actions. One such letter that asked Arpaio to “round-up” of people with “dark skin” was marked by Arpaio as “intelligence” and ordered a subordinate to “handle this.”
Latinos were routinely referred to as “wetbacks,” “Mexican bitches,” “fucking Mexicans” and “stupid Mexicans” by Arpaio’s officers. A study commissioned by DOJ found that Latino drivers were 4 to 9 times more likely to be stopped than non-Latino drivers. In fact, the DOJ report concluded that Arpaio’s office “oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history”—creating a “culture” which routinely ignored the civil rights of Latinos—any Latinos. An example of this was the following incident: “A legal U.S. resident and his U.S. citizen son invited deputies into their home during a raid on a suspect drop-house next door. The deputies proceeded to search the home without consent or a warrant, handcuffed the man and his son, then had them sit on the sidewalk next to the people being busted from the neighboring house. They were detained for an hour before being released without any citation (This reminds me of the actions I had to endure at the hands of Renton police, even though I didn’t fit the description of a six-foot white bank robber).” Another disturbing activity was the pressuring by jail guards to sign “voluntary” deportation forms, regardless of their legal status.
Racism was so rife in the Sheriff’s Department that even blatantly racist complaints from people who thought all “dark-skinned people” were illegal immigrants were treated with all due diligence. For example, Arpaio sent deputies to investigate a complaint that the employees at a McDonald’s were conversing in Spanish. Arpaio was accused of personally directing the worst abuses in his office—and then when called to account, he routinely claimed he knew nothing.
And CNN continues to coddle bigots like Arpaio and nativist hate groups like FAIR.
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Meanwhile, in South Carolina—together with Mississippi the most socially backward state in the Union--U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked the most abusive parts of its anti-immigrant law. Like the Arizona law before some parts were blocked, the South Carolina would have allowed police to check the immigration status of anyone they had “reasonable” suspicion might be illegal. This requirement “unquestionably vastly expands the persons targeted for immigration enforcement action," said Gergel, obviously in reference anyone who was suspected of being Latino. In another “unrelated” ruling, the Justice Department struck down South Carolina’s requirement that voters present photo identification at the polls as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. It has been noted before that the Bush administration’s DOJ never found evidence of widespread voter fraud; this may be due to the fact that most of the “fraud” had more to do with Republican voter suppression tactics. South Carolina’s Indian-American governor, Nikki Haley (who frankly looks like a white woman with a tan, making her more “palatable”), raged ."It is outrageous (the DOJ’s action), and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th Amendment rights." But Democrats rightly accuse Haley and her Republicans here and throughout the country for engaging in bald-faced voter disenfranchisement and suppression for their own cynical political aims.
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Meanwhile, Cox News service is reporting that the Social Security Administration has a $90 billion “suspense” fund, payroll deductions from workers whose Social Security eligibility cannot be verified. It is assumed that many, perhaps most, of these workers are illegal immigrants who have no legal right to the money. About $7 billion a year is added into it.
The story quotes Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which is largely responsible for the details in Arizona immigration law, and really has nothing to do with “reform” or “fairness.” It’s real aim is halting all immigration by non-Anglo/Arians; the Southern Poverty Law Center has FAIR on its list of nativist hate groups. Mehlman admits that he has “heard” of the $7 billion per year figure in FICA payroll taxes (Social Security plus Medicare). But he refuses to believe that in general undocumented workers pay taxes, and insists that they are drain on social programs, for which he has no evidence, but assumes that Latinos—even those of impoverished means—use resources at the same rate as comfortably middle class whites.
What FAIR is fighting for in reality is exactly what founder John Tanton says it is: "As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" and "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, went even further in racist fantasy: "I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country's immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it's a form of revengism, or revenge, that these forces continue to push the immigration policy that they know full well are [sic] creating chaos and will continue to create chaos down the line."
The racial agenda of FAIR couldn’t be more obvious, yet mainstream media outlets continue to treat this organization as if it has mainstream “respectability.”
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Earlier this month I encountered an interview of feminist attorney Gloria Allred in the New York Times Magazine. Interviewer Andrew Goldman managed—despite Allred’s attempts to obfuscate matters—to make her squirm trying to explain her various mendacities while devolving into what the UK Guardian called a “fame whore,” using some rather pathetic women as a vehicle to extort money from well-known men. Her latest victim is former Hewlet-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, her tool Jodie Fisher. Fisher was apparently employed by HP as a “company hostess” for some years; Allred refers to her as an “actress” and “contractor.” Fisher did appear in some films, although her “starring” roles were in several “erotic thrillers” and soft core porn in the 1990s, like “Body of Influence 2” and “Intimate Obsession.” Somehow the general plot line of these films—a woman seducing a man in order to frame him for a crime she has committed, like murder—seems appropriate to describing Allred’s methods. A letter composed by Allred with a story-line obviously embellished by its author, accused Hurd of sexual harassment of Fisher and was a transparent attempt to extort money from him.
While most people in the media still regard her activities with reverence, Goldman had the audacity to point out her own sexism. He asked her to explain why it wasn’t the kind of commentary that feminists frequently rail against as sexist when she walked into steam room at the Friars Club with a tape measure singing “Is That All There Is?” She claimed that she wasn’t against “sex,” but “sexism.” She claimed there was a “big difference” between them. The problem was that she meant to demean—which, according to her definition, is sexism. She also repeated a story that while on vacation in Mexico during the 1960s, she was raped by a Mexican doctor at gunpoint, claimed that she never made mention of it until decades later because “nobody would believe an American girl,” became pregnant, had an illegal abortion that almost killed her. The problem is that we only have her word that any of this is actually true, but the story is useful when she tries to explain her desire to wreak vengeance on men.
When asked why in recent years her cases lack “heft”—she claimed her firm won over $250 million for “victims of discrimination.” But almost all of her most recent “high profile” cases have one thing or another to so with women of questionable repute who have an angle on a man of means. Besides softcore actress Fisher, Allred’s clients included porn actresses like Ginger Lynn and Joslyn James; a “massage therapist” who was arrested for prostitution, and a nanny who demanded $1.5 million from actor Rob Lowe and his wife “or she will accuse us both of a vicious laundry list of false terribles." When asked why she demanded that Tiger Woods should issue a public apology to James, she claimed that “Tiger Woods led her to believe that she was the only one that he was having an intimate relationship with and that he wasn’t having that kind of relationship with his wife. He asked Joslyn to give up her career in adult films, which was her only source of income, because he was jealous. And she did. When the scandal broke, he dropped her like a hot potato. You may think a broken heart and hurting a woman is O.K. I don’t.”
When Goldman asked if she could possibly be serious making such inferences, Allred retorted “I wouldn’t characterize it the way you have.” When he pointed out he was just quoting her own words, she hemmed and hawed and then inferred that Woods was responsible for a businessman selling golf balls with James face on them: “We don’t think it’s funny that a man takes a golf club and strikes a woman’s face. We don’t think domestic violence is a laughing matter.” When Goldman asked her what golf balls have to do with domestic violence, Allred accused him of not considering domestic violence “the important issue I do.” Given the recent CDC report that validated the suspicion that women are just as culpable in domestic violence (just the other day there was a local report of a woman who shot her husband head during an argument; a “precautionary” hospital visit found no indication that she had been physically abused herself), neither does Allred. When Goldman asked Allred to explain her claim that James and Lee were forced to go into hiding following the “exposure” of Rep. Anthony Weiner, when in fact the two could be found dancing nude at an Atlanta strip joint taking advantage of new-found “fame,” Allred retorted that “Although I didn’t arrange the appearances, women need to earn a living. I’m proud that my clients are working to support themselves and those who depend on them.” One wonders, deep down, if Allred’s fascination with porn stars, strippers and prostitutes conceals a secret desire within that diminutive frame.
There are other things that thinking people might find questionable in regard to Allred’s character. In her book “Fight Back and Win,” she says very little that is informative about her youth, but what she does say only makes one suspicious of what she doesn’t say. What, for example, does she have say about her first husband, who she married while still in college, and the father of her only child? She mentions in passing someone named Peyton, who happened to be her husband. She complained that he “went out for a beer” when she was in labor. She complained about cooking and cleaning. She said her relationship with him deteriorated. He became “emotionally abusive and threw things.” She claimed that she “loved” him, but no counseling, treatment or medication could help him. Why did he need any of that? She had to leave for her daughter’s sake. He shot himself with a gun “years later.” Oh, wait. She forgot to mention that her first husband was battling bipolar disease, and she abandoned him because she didn’t want to deal with it.
I came across a story in the Los Angeles Times dated 1992. “For many years, William C. Allred had seemed the most docile of husbands, a quiet, patient man who lived in the shadow of his famous wife. To hear him tell it, he proudly helped make Gloria Allred the woman she is today, loyally supporting her climb to fame, fortune and influence as a firebrand feminist attorney.” In 1987, Mr. Allred was convicted and for allegedly selling counterfeit parts to the military through a company he owned, which he claimed he was innocent of. Out of prison and in bankruptcy court, Mr. Allred was fighting a divorce “settlement” made while he was in prison that awarded $4 million to Allred. "It's the height of hypocrisy for her to do this,’ Bill Allred said in an interview. “I put her (her daughter, Lisa Bloom) through law school and now she's going to take everything I ever earned.” Allred, who has made a career representing gold diggers, responded with "How is a person a gold digger for trying to collect their share of community property? I'm entitled to collect my fair share of community property without being called names…I consider his statements about me defamatory and I am saddened that he has chosen to publicly attack me instead of paying the judgment." For his part, Allred allowed that "I don't begrudge her her share at all. I believe in community property. I don't care if I earned 95% of it. I should get half and she should get half." That’s what he thinks; with Allred it has always been about the money—the rest of it is just how she justifies her desire to make men pay for being men.
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Russia has always been the rather enigmatic “partner” of Europe. Technically, it is a “European” country; in fact national mindset wanders elsewhere. Even the land itself has an almost bland character, the bulk of the European portion west the Urals and the Volga comprising of the vast Russian Plain, 1.5 million square miles of never-ending expanse of lowland that varies no more than 500 feet between its lowest and highest point; it would be this—rather than Russian armies—that would defeat the spirit of invading armies. During the largest land invasion in world history, the Nazis only managed to occupy 600,000 square miles of it before exhausting its military capacity. Because of the northerly latitude and lack of influence of the oceans on the weather, there are only two seasons in most of the country—mild summers and bitterly cold winters. The kind of place that should be left to its own devises, and for most of history, was isolated from Western influence.
Back in the day (like 500 years ago), its large land mass and sparse population did not spawn a great deal of economic and political sophistication. Peter the Great attempted to “westernize” Russia, but with limited success because of entrenched provincial customs, and the lack of sufficiently educated population that made the ideal of an independent, efficient civil service hampered the governance even now. While serfdom disappeared in the rest of Europe during the Renaissance, it survived in Russia until the 1860s (not that the southern parts of the U.S. had much to brag about). Even in the revolutionary fervor of 1917, ideology took a backseat to governing practicality; “governance” by the workers was a sham, and one form of dictatorship was replaced by another. Vladimir Putin certainly comes off as if he doesn’t respect democracy in principle. His political organ, United Russia, used its two-thirds majority in the Duma to change the constitution in order to move the country toward despotism; the constitution already permitted a president to return to office after a single term, but United Russia voted to extend presidential terms from four to six years, meaning that one man could rule 24 of 30 years—although this seems to be primarily in favor Putin, who had only four years to wait while effectively ruling the country in absentia during that time.
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The result is that Russia—along with even more reactionary Belarussia—continues to be the odd-man out in Europe. The most recent local elections seem to suggest, however, that not all Russians are enamored with the idea of Putin remaining in power; United Russia has a bare majority after taking heavy losses, while protests against alleged fraud at the polls have were forced treated with scorn (current president and Putin stooge Dmitry Medvedev attacked protestors as “stupid sheep” on his twitter account), but now more heavy-handed police tactics are being employed to silence critics; one report claimed that two “feminists” who protested topless were allegedly detained and forced to dance nude for police. Russia also happens to have a habit of finding its “free” journalists lying dead on the street for speaking out.
Russia is still a country with an East-leaning mindset, preferring to make deals with its Middle East and Asian neighbors in opposition to Western interests. Its apparent move toward de facto despotism only consolidates its isolation from the rest of Europe; it is still in many ways an “enemy” as it ever was.
As an aside (keeping with the Russian theme), one of the World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries is whether-or-not that massive johnson inside a jar of preservative located in a museum in Saint Petersburg actually once belonged to the infamous Mad Monk, Rasputin. This character, whose questionable influence on the Empress Alexandra helped seal the doom of the Romanov dynasty, was said to be quite the lady’s man, first mesmerizing them with his eyes and then subsequently delighting them with his (supposedly) gigantic member. The object inside this glass jar is indeed impressive, if in fact it is of human origin. Some people, however, question its authenticity. Some believe it is a Sea Cucumber; others suspect that its original owner was a horse. I have no opinion on the matter myself; suffice it to say that other nations have much different attitudes concerning sex than our puritanical (and hypocritical) country. When I was in Crete, I was amazed by all the statuettes of naked women, and men with huge erect johnsons, in the tourist gift shops. The ancient Greek pottery that you will not see in museums are those that have depictions of human activity of a rather pornographic nature; apparently there were no no-fun feminists around back then.
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