Wealth redistribution is evil and is happening today. My proof:
If you look at the graph, you'll notice that the top 5% of the population holds 72% of the financial wealth of the nation. This despite the fact that even if they were twice as productive as the rest of the population (a laughable assumption -- Paris Hilton, anybody? -- but one that I'm sure they'll pretend is true), they only produce 10% of the nation's real wealth -- the goods and services that make up the nation's economy. So where did the other 62% of their financial wealth come from? Redistribution, my friends. They redistributed it using the "invisible hand" that extracts wealth from your pocket and mine and puts it into *their* pockets, which they pretend is all fine and dandy because this "invisible hand" (called market power) is private force, not government force, and thus isn't evil.
But of course force is force. If some goon shoves a gun in my face in the park and demands all my money, I don't care whether he's got a badge showing he's a government employee or not, either way it's still force being used to extract money from me at gunpoint. If some goon tells me to grovel and lick his feet and give all my productive output to him or he will make sure that I get black marks on my official record that will guarantee that I live the rest of my scant days as a starving homeless hobo, that is just as much force as if the government seized the contents of my bank account and told me that every dime I made above simple subsistence was going to them from now on, but for some reason the former (what the Fortune 500 tells every single one of their employees and every single one of the small businessmen who are dependent on Fortune 500 suppliers) is considered "ok" by the top 5%, while the latter sends shivers of horror up their spine -- yet from the perspective of the bottom 95%, they are one and the same -- application of force to redistribute their wealth for the benefit of a few! Sprinkling magic free market fairy dust over it doesn't make it anything other than what it is: redistribution of wealth. All that sprinkling free market fairy dust over this extraction of wealth does is change who gets the wealth -- a small percent (the top 5%), vs. the 95%. Hmm, now I wonder why so many of the top 5% embrace free market ideology? Gosh darn gee willickers, Batman!
Today is a national holiday where everybody pees their pants on command while chanting "Save me, oh kindly Big Brother!". We are supposed to either cower in terror that Zombie Dead Osama is coming to get us, or we're supposed to go grab our guns and go kill a darkie for Jeeeezus! The television airwaves today will be filled with death porn commemorating the murder of a couple thousand people in New York City and a few hundred elsewhere with Important People solemnly intoning "we shall never forget". The question of *what* we shall "never forget" is never asked. We've certainly forgotten the names and faces of those who died on September 11, 2001, after all. Well, unless you're one of those who lost a friend or relative in the attack, but folks who lost a friend or relative in the attack aren't one of the Important People who will be intoning "we shall never forget", they'll be someplace private where they can avoid all the death porn.
And let's not even think about all the hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent civilians and not-so-innocent soldiers (both American and otherwise) that were "justified" by the fact that "them darkies attacked us!" (for any random darkies that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, such as Iraqis, the Taliban, and so forth), or the loss of civil liberties where you now must accede to an anal probe and carry an internal passport oops "government-issued ID" if you want to travel more than a few hundred miles from your home or even vote in many states (gosh , just like the Soviet Union!), or any of that. No no, this is a solemn day, where we worship death while whipping out our big swinging dicks and, like, jizzin' *all over*, not just on our own country, but in random other places overseas where we swing our dicks and jizz all over'em just because, well, because we can.
So it goes. It's enough to drive a penguin to the sauce. Herring sauce, that is.
people are starving. Because, see, in Somalia -- Libertopia, which hasn't had a functioning government in twenty years -- there is no government to protect farmers from having their crops confiscated by local thugs with guns ("warlords"). There is no government to buy food from overseas or accept food aid from overseas then oversee its distribution to people who need it. So while food does make it into the country or gets grown by the local people, it gets confiscated by whoever the local warlord is and distributed only to his supporters. Combine that with drought, and you have disaster.
Libertarian theory holds that government is not necessary, that all functions of government could be privatized with no loss of services that people like, paid for voluntarily by people rather than via extracting money at gunpoint in taxes. "Taxation is slavery!" is the Libertopian chant. But without taxation, you don't have a government. And if you don't have a government, what you have is... Somalia, where the only people who are truly free are the thug warlords who terrorize the populace and steal what little wealth they have at gunpoint. Because, see, thugs have a big advantage over people like you and me. They *like* violence, while violence makes normal people queasy. So thugs will *always* have the advantage over ordinary people in Libertopia. *Always*. That's just reality, and you can no more change that than you can change the fact that you get wet if you stand out in the rain with no umbrella or clothes on.
Power grows from the barrel of a gun. And the wealthy can purchase a whole lot of guns. There is only one power that has ever managed to even halfway prevent the wealthy from simply taking everything at gunpoint, and that is the power of the People as a whole getting together and using the wealth they produce to buy their own guns to offset the wealthy. We call the organization thus produced "democratic government", and the guns are "police", directed by "laws" produced by "legislators" that are interpreted by "courts" that decide the punishment for those brought at gunpoint before them (said punishment, of course, being enforced at gunpoint too). At least, that was the notion during the 20th century. Today, of course, that all seems rather quaint.
But Tom Engelhardt is only half-right when he says we're living in a post-legal society. We're living in a post-legal society for the rich. If you are an ordinary worker, one of the people who produces the wealth that the rich then steal at gunpoint on their own while returning a tiny portion to you (called "wages" -- note that the rich do not themselves make anything or do anything other than "manage" their "worker" serfs, i.e., they're overglorified slave masters enforcing the wage whip upon their workers), you will find that there is indeed "rule of law" -- that is, you will face "laws" produced by the slave masters, you will face "police" owned by the slave masters, you will face "courts" owned by the slave masters, and you will find yourself in "prison" owned by the slave masters if you in any way attempt to take back some of the goods and services you produce for your slave master. Your slave master will call it "theft" and "trespassing" if you and your fellow serfs decide you're tired of giving the output of your factory to your slave master and decide to instead keep that output and sell it yourselves, cutting the slave master out of the loop. Paramilitary police officers will break in and beat you and haul you out bodily, and then if you attempt to return, they will cage you like an animal for the crime of refusing to be a slave.
Of course, none of this would work if the slaves would refuse to work for their slave masters and instead chose to join together and work for themselves, but the slaves are cowed because the slave masters have vowed to deprive them of all sustenance and housing if the slaves refuse to labor for their slave masters, indeed claim that over 50% of all assets of the nation are "theirs" despite the fact that they built none of it, created none of it, but they wrote up pieces of paper (via their "laws") saying it's theirs so it's theirs. So the slaves go to work every day and accept the pitiful table scraps that the slave masters offer, and they call it freedom.
-- Badtux the Free(*) Penguin
(*) Offer void where prohibited. Attempts to exercise rights implied by the word 'Free' may lead to unemployment, starvation, beatings by armed thugs wearing badges, and lead poisoning. But you are free, citizen!
And today, six years later, here I am again, writing about a publisher -- Julian Assange of Wikileaks -- that once again made the mistake of telling the truth, and once again the government is trying to destroy him -- this time with rape charges that don't hold water -- and once again pointing out that we have free speech only when we speak in government-approved ways here in America. I can write this blog because my speech is approved speech -- it is speech that allows me to vent, but which does not allow me to change anything about how America is run or inconvenience those in power in any way. Julian Assagne's crime is that of inconveniencing those in power by showing the world diplomatic cables proving that they are moral-less, venal, and vicious.
Of course, there is one big difference between 1996 and 2010: the Internet has grown up. Today when newspapers of record attempt to destroy someone, the cyber-libertarian left, cool geek toys/geek culture bloggers, and people like Michael Moore can react in real-time rather than having to wait weeks or months for conventional publication. If this was still 1996, Assange would have been deported to Sweden by now, then would have been deported on an unmarked aircraft to a black prison run by the CIA somewhere in Eastern Europe, and that would be the end of it all. Instead, he's out on bail, and stands a good chance of at worst serving a few weeks in jail if he does end up deported to Sweden, rather than disappeared, because there's too many people watching.
Will that be enough? We'll see. I'll just point out that the oligarchy has a pretty good record when it comes to destroying journalists that they don't want publishing the truth. And lest you say "Watergate!" and "Pentagon papers!", those were factions within the oligarchy, i.e., a significant percentage of the oligarchy wanted those published. But Assange's reveal of the sheer droll venality of our ruling class is something that none of them want published -- thus why they're trying their best to play whack-a-mole with Wikileaks (which, BTW, is back up at its original wikileaks.org site after Michael Moore paid for new DNS hosting, though it immediately redirects to a Russian Wikileaks mirror at the moment).
And as it was six years ago, so it is today. The only thing to remember about history is that it repeats itself... but only as long as we let it. I just find it... interesting... that I posted about a journalist driven to suicide six years ago, and now the U.S. is trying to do the exact same thing to another journalist. Freedom! U S A! U S A! Fuck yeah!
Today I made the trek to the Federal Building to apply for a replacement Social Security card. I made this trek because they need to see my government ID before they condescend to send me a card that isn't a government ID with a Social Security number that I provided them (i.e., I already know my SSN, all I need is the card to show my employer instead of my passport). I arrived at 1:30PM and promptly was directed to stand in a line outside the federal building. We were then called one at a time and subjected to the same screening that you get at airports to verify that we didn't have any stray nail files that might be used to gut a Social Security worker and that we had the proper papers to prove our identity to the satisfaction of the security screener. Then, and only then, were we allowed to enter the building and go to the almost-empty Social Security office (almost-empty because nobody was allowed to enter until somebody left the building). That was at 2:15PM for me.
I remember when you could just walk into a Social Security office, do your business, and walk out. But that was back when the Soviet Union was around, when the United States prided itself on being different from the Soviet Union. "In the Soviet Union", Reader's Digest proudly proclaimed, "you can't walk down the street without an armed police officer stopping you and asking you for your papers. We don't do that in free countries." For once, that right-wing loon DeWitt Wallace was right...
-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin (*)For some definition of "free" that isn't in the dictionary.
If these children had really wanted to live, they would have saved themselves. We must not protect children from the consequences of their actions, otherwise children will not learn to avoid drowning. Ronald Reagan would weep in Heaven if this lifeguard interfered with these swimmer’s God-given right to drown themselves.
In the comments below on my story about how the U.S. was a prison state with almost 1/4th of the world's prisoners despite having less than 5% of the world's population, Jazzbumpa linked to a guy in Chile who pointed out that the U.S. today looks an awful lot like Chile under Pinochet's police state. There is the same deal where if the President declares you to be an Enemy of the State (or a "terrorist organization"), then anybody who talks to you can similarly be jailed as an Enemy of the State. There is the rubber stamp judiciary which rubber stamps all actions of the Supreme Leaders when it comes to declaring Enemies of the State, and the same gulags into which people are disappeared if they are declared Enemies of the State. The forms differ (some of the gulags are outsourced overseas via "extraordinary rendition", for example), the Presidents change out from time to time, but the substance remains the same -- the United States is a police state.
So... why don't we hear more about this? Well, as I pointed out to JzB, it's because the majority of Americans want to live in a police state. It makes them feel safe, knowing that Big Brother Police State is busy beating down on "those" people -- you know, those people that make them feel uncomfortable, people who are dusky, people who advocate too stridently, people from other countries, people who are, well, NOT LIKE THEM. It's the same reason Saddam stayed in charge in Iraq. Yeah, he was a brutal dictator... but he kept the streets safe. As it turns out, the people of Iraq had plenty of guns and ammunition to overthrow Saddam if they'd so desired... but the majority of Iraqis wanted Saddam. And if Saddam had been an American President rather than Iraqi... the majority of Americans would have wanted him too.
WASF, yeah... but WASF because the majority of Americans are, to put it bluntly, fucking idiots who don't give a shit about democracy and freedom other than to give them occasional lip service. After all, who can worry about those sorts of things when there's a new episode of Survivor:Afghanistan on the air? Sheesh, priorities, folks, priorities, we'll worry about that whole "freedom" thing after we find out who gets voted off the helicopter!
America is a prison state, with 23% of the world's prisoners despite less than 5% of the world's population. Some "Land of the Free", snort! Yeah, Freedom(tm), for some definition of the word that looks suspiciously like the old Soviet Union...
Don't feed me that line of bullshit about the "Land of the Free" as long as it's illegal in at least three states to record evidence of police misconduct... free nations don't need such restrictions on recording the police. Only police states need such restrictions. Just sayin'.
Juan Cole says that the Deepwater Horizon is not your fault because it's a case of regulatory capture, deep-pocket corporations buying legislation in their favor with campaign contributions. Thing is, as I've pointed out repeatedly, every one of those corrupt bastards in Congress or in your local legislature is there because the majority of Americans in their district or state voted for them. We don't live in a tyranny imposed by some evil dicator, we live in a democracy -- and keep voting for the most corrupt person, the person who accepts the most bribes err campaign contributions, despite the fact that it's destroying us as a nation.
Don't blame me, I voted for the hobbit in the California Democratic Presidential primary. He was the only one who refused to accept bribes err campaign contributions from corporate interests. Yet everybody else seems to have voted for the most corrupt candidates in the race, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Huh. Why is that?
I suppose it's because our campaigns have turned into mudfests where each side uses millions of dollars to smear the other side as un-American baby-molesters who probably bathe in the blood of 9 year old virgins every morning, but that only works because Americans let it work. If Americans simply ignored the mud-slinging, did their own research, and voted for the most honest candidate, we wouldn't have this regulatory capture problem. Yet they don't. They allow themselves to be swayed by the most laughable things, like the majority of Americans who voted for George W. Bush (or had no problem with him and thus stayed home) because "he's the kinda guy I'd like to go to a bar and lift a brew with." Nevermind that GWB didn't even drink. That's the mentality of the average American... they vote for an image, not for honesty, integrity, or substance. And there's nobody forcing Americans to do this. They do it because, well, just because they're Americans, fuck yeah, and nobody's gonna tell them they can't vote for Georgey Dry Drunk or Barry Hopey Changey just because Georgey is a draft-dodging moron and Barry is an empty speech-making suit, yo.
Compound this with the destruction Reagan did to our civil service, a destruction that the majority of Americans approved of because "federal employees shouldn't have better retirement options than the rest of us"... before Reagan destroyed the Federal Retirement System, federal employees were fairly honest because they intended to put in their 30 years and then take their FRS retirement, which would suffice to keep them in herring for the rest of their lives, and crooked companies couldn't influence them with bribery offers of cushy jobs if they ruled the company's way because, well, 30 years, dude, no job offer today outweighs the thought of putting in your 30 years and retiring and spending the rest of your life enjoying yourself. But when Reagan destroyed the FRS and instead put federal employees into Social Security and 401(k) plans, suddenly federal employees were bribable -- and they are.
Yet the majority of Americans still support cutting the pay of federal employees and still support cutting the retirement benefits of state and local employees, retirement benefits that are there to keep employees from being bribable. It seems Americans want something for nothing. They want honest bureaucrats, but they aren't willing to tax themselves for the pay and benefits that it takes to keep them honest. This was Reagan's great observation, that Americans want something for nothing and will vote for anybody who tells them they can have something for nothing, and as long as the majority of Americans are that way... yes, it *IS* your fault, America. You fucking morons.
-- Badtux the Moron-observin' Penguin
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers, these are people of the land, the common clay of the new west. You know... morons. -- The Waco Kid, in Blazing Saddles
You know that Border Patrol agent who supposedly was surrounded by rock-throwing Mexicans and had to regrettably shoot a 14 year old boy by the name of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca in order to save his own life? Uhm, turns out that there was someone making a video of the incident and, err... the agent lied. The video shows nobody was within at least 30 yards of the agent. Here, see for yourself:
But of course the fact that the agent lied won't change anything, because as I noted earlier, there's two laws in Soviet America -- one for the Stasi 2.0 (our very efficient and deadly police forces that enforce a "soft" police state upon us), and one for ordinary civilians. And murdering 14 year old kids isn't a crime if you're a member of the Stasi 2.0. Alrighty, then!
Welcome, fellow inmates of Soviet America. In today's news, here's something you did not hear about, except maybe gloatingly on some white-wing web site or buried deep inside a tiny 2-inch side column in the middle of the A-section of your newspaper.
Like our forefathers in East Germany, we are regularly spied upon by our very efficient police agencies, with our every phone call monitored for disturbing content (do not mention the words "terrorist" or "bomb" in your phone calls unless you desire a visit from men wearing black suits). Like in East Germany, soon one shall need to register with The State if you want a phone. And we, too, have a wall at our border, albeit a very porous one intended to keep people out, rather than in.
And, like the former East Germany, we shoot people who cross the wall. If one shot doesn't kill the crosser, why, we shoot him twice. And if he's a kid, why, no big deal. Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was 14 years old, but he's just as dead as if he'd been 34.
According to the witnesses, some Mexican boys were under the bridge in Ciudad Juarez, without wearing backpacks or anything (i.e., they were *not* part of a group crossing the border to stay in America), they were running over onto the American side of the border and back again, taunting the border patrol agents on the other side of the border. The kids started throwing rocks, and one of the border patrol agents opened fire, killing young Sergio on the other side of the border. And on right-wing hate sites everywhere, white-wingers gloat.
At which point I say... wow. Just wow. Look. When I was a kid, we were sort of like the "Little Rascals" gang in our neighborhood, and would have rock fights with the rival gang across the bayou. But none of us ever thought of actually *shooting* at the folks throwing rocks at us. No, we simply threw rocks *back* at them! Wow, what a concept... proportionate force! Wow, I should have been thinking like a Border Patrol agent, and actually shot one of those kids throwing rocks at us. Oh wait, if I'd done that, I would have been sent to jail for life. Oops, my bad, I forgot, there's two laws in Soviet America -- one for the Stasi 2.0, and one for the rest of us. But that's okay, because here in Soviet America we have Freedom(tm), and beside, it was an unseemly darky that died, not a good upstanding tighty whitey, and darkies don't count as real people so it wasn't *really* murder. Alrighty, then!
Click on that image to the left and take a good long look at it. That's Paul Revere's woodcutting of the "Boston Massacre". Note the deliberation on the part of the British troops. Note the foppish way they hold their feet and the cruel smirk on their faces and how they are all lined up and deliberately firing upon an unarmed crowd.
This woodcut is, of course, long on propaganda and short on fact. The first person to die, Crispus Attucks, was *black*, not white as depicted here. The mob was engaged in attacking the Customs House at the time in protest of taxes and had assaulted the troops, the crowd wasn't standing peaceably around across the street and troops just decided to open fire on them. And there was no organized volley fired by British troops, but, rather, a ragged fire from those behind the troops being assaulted through the gaps to try to drive off the mob that threatened to overrun them. The mob itself was well armed with clubs and stones, if not firearms, and was decidedly a physical threat to the British troops -- yet in the woodcutting you see not a single stone nor club held by the crowd. The end result was that a jury of Bostonians found the soldiers "Not Guilty" of murder when they were brought to trial, defended by lawyer John Adams who later became famous as our second President.
This is what our founding fathers meant by "freedom of the press" -- the freedom to lie. Fox News is not an aberration. Fox News is exactly what our founding fathers intended -- a propaganda mouthpiece in the hands of the wealthy elite used to control and mold the public discourse. The only thing aberrant about Fox News is that they make it obvious, whereas most of our news media in recent times has tried at least to appear "fair and balanced" (Fox's self-mocking slogan for themselves).
One of the continual items of discussion on the left (the real left, i.e., the European left, not the moderate centrists labeled "the left" here in the USA) is the question of why socialism took hold in Europe, but there was never a viable socialist party with a chance of winning the Presidency here in America and instead, liberalism became the predominant philosophy of the political "left" in America. This peculiar definition of "freedom of the press" in America -- the freedom to lie for propaganda purposes -- is, I suggest, a large part of it. In Europe, the press can be sued successfully for libel or even shut down if they tell lies about events or public figures. Yes, there is a long tradition of "tabloid press" in Britain (for example), but there must be at least a certain amount of respect for the truth, and as Stephen Colbert is fond of satirically saying, "the truth has a liberal bias" (thus why righties use "truthiness" as their way of judging what to believe or not, "truthiness" being what their own personal prejudices *wish* was the truth). Here in the USA, our press has by and large been a propaganda arm of our wealthy elites since day one -- indeed, since *before* day one -- and our peculiar definition of "freedom of the press", which is defined as "freedom to lie blatantly", protects that. The result is that we've never had the free and open political discourse here in the USA that they have had in Europe because anything not in the best interests of our wealthy elites simply never gets published, or gets lied about in the press to such extent as to repulse people. So it goes, in the United States of Illusion, where we think we're free -- because that's what our wealthy elites tell us.
I've been pestering the conservative Twitterati ranting about Socialism and how it means the end of Freedom(tm) for exactly what freedoms we have that the socialist Swedes don't have. First, they say "well, socialism is the first step to Communism!" and I say "but Sweden has been socialist for over sixty years now. When do they go Communist?" Then they sort of stammer and stutter and go away. Except finally, finally one of the teabaggers came up with a freedom American parents have that Swedish parents don't have: The freedom to place their hand firmly on their child's firm, nubile young buttocks, in a most loving manner of course, to provide parently discipline to the disobedient little shit. Sort of like with the bondage lesbian night club that the GOP took their Young Republican donors to, except kinkier because the little darlings are actually related to you, but hey, Freedom(tm)!
Of course, Swedes might retort that Swedish children have a freedom that American children don't have -- the freedom to grow up without having the shit beat out of them by repressed pedophiles pretending that their "discipline" has nothing to do with sexual urgings on their part. Oh those firm, nubile young buttocks, so enticing... the child made him do it by being a naughty little boy, don't you see? Nothing to do with sexual urgings! Yay, Freedom(tm)!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Bringing Freedom!(tm) to the Internets for over six straight years and 4,000+ posts now!
Update: So now we know what the Pope and teabaggers have in common... a liking for touching the buttocks of children. Whoa!
Update#2: This post did not, did not I repeat, have anything to do with the Lucinda Williams video below it, which was queued up over two weeks ago. Still, the subject matter of both is eerily similar...
