The problem with police states

Yesterday I mentioned that the 1% have squeezed the turnip that is the 99% so thoroughly to extract wealth that it is taking exponentially greater amounts of state-supported violence to extract each additional increment. Think about it. When you're wringing water out of a wet rag, it's easy to get plenty of water out with the first few twists. But to get additional water out, you have to wring it tighter and tighter. And with 6 million people -- 2% of the population of the USA -- currently in prison, and another 3% out on parole or probation, the amount of wringing that is being done to squeeze those last bits of juice out of the turnips, err, the 99%, is getting pretty dire indeed.

So what's the end game? The first possibility, and the one that I give an 80% chance of happening, is a police state. It's simple: Once you require so much violence on your behalf against such a large percentage of the population, once keeping down the inevitable riots and demonstrations and disorder takes so much power that the police are basically omnipresent, the police end up with so much power that eventually they look at each other and ask, "Why are we doing this on behalf of *those* schlubs?!" and simply take power themselves. They might do so openly, or they might do so quietly by suggesting to the departing power brokers that it'd be a good idea to anoint the secret policeman as their successor, but take power they do, and then work the levers to make sure they *stay* in power. Just ask yourself who the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe is right now. Hint: he's a secret policeman.

The second possibility, and the one to work toward, is peaceful revolution. Luckily our founding fathers wrote a peaceful revolution into our Constitution. It happens every two to four years, and it's called the vote. Every single one of the bastards in Congress or any other elected office got there because the majority of voters in his or her district or state voted for him. If the majority of people vote for the candidate with the best attack ads rather than the best candidate, if the majority of people vote for the candidate they'd like to have a beer with rather than the smartest candidate, they get what they want -- and deserve. But if things got dire enough that people were willing to engage in the political process rather than dismiss it as something irrelevant to their lives, the mechanisms are there for a peaceful revolution *without* the sort of risks that people in Egypt and Tunisia had to take to bring a peaceful revolution to their nations.

One thing I will warn you about, however, is violent revolution. Violent revolution almost 100% leads to a police state. The reason is that violence scares the majority of people. Sociopaths love violence, but it makes ordinary people queasy to their stomachs. And police states are very good at promising safety from violence -- and delivering. All it costs you is your freedom.

One outcome that is *not* going to happen, however, is that the current oligarchy manages to persist for another generation. The amount of government force needed to even maintain their current positions on top of the heap are of a nature that one of the prior two events -- a police state or a peaceful revolution -- are going to happen because the current level of violence simply isn't sustainable in the long term. Our oligarchs are generally pretty dim, the majority having "earned" their wealth by being members of the lucky sperm club rather than via any effort or intelligence on their own behalf (the Walton family members, for example, "earn" more income from their inheritance than the bottom 25% of American *combined*), but the fact that they've overreached is starting to slowly sink in, and they're panicking. To calm down the tornado and extend their rule another generation would require letting loose the screws a bit, letting some of that wealth they've forcibly extracted from the 99% trickle back down into the hands of the 99%. Yet this goes against everything they believe in, which is a toddler's version of the universe, "mine, mine, mine!". My prediction is that they will *not* be able to overcome this conditioning and loosen up the reins. I don't see any FDR's among the current crop of oligarchs, I don't see any of them under the age of 50 (FDR was elected at age 50) with enough sense to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But could it happen? Well, cows could fly, I suppose. Don't count on it. Just plan for one thing: That at some point in time, the discussion will likely change from how to bring about peaceful change in America, to how to maintain an underground pro-freedom resistance movement in the face of a police state that is awe-inspiring in its ability to monitor our every movement. I hope that it never comes to that. But looking at the possibilities, that seems all too probable.

-- Badtux the Gloomy Penguin

Wal-Mart slaves pay more taxes than Romney

Left unmentioned during all the fuss and furor about Mitt Romney's 13.9% tax rate in 2010 is the fact that Wal-Mart slaves laboring for minimum wage pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes than Romney does. Yes, they don't pay *income* taxes, but they most definitely pay *payroll* taxes, which currently stand at 15.3% if you combine the employer portion and paycheck portion together, which you want to do if you're talking about taxes, as well as pay an average 9.7% sales tax on the percentage of their income that goes to non-shelter items, for an effective tax rate of around 20%.

So is it fair that Mitt gets to pay lower taxes for sitting around and letting his investment advisers move his money around than is paid by someone who works for a living? Uhm... do you need *me* to answer that question for you?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Numbers Penguin

Protest chic vs. getting things done

Let's face facts: #OccupyWallStreet isn't going to accomplish anything unless somehow the movement starts costing our lizard people overlords money. LOTS of money. Because money is all that our lizard people overlords from planet Sociopath care about. Not ethics. Not morality. Not fairness. Not human decency (remember, they're LIZARD people, they view humanity as PREY, not as fellow travelers through the brief flash of time we call "life"). Money. That's it.

This is what has bothered me about protest chic for quite some time. Protests are flashy and reporters love them. But let’s not forget that what took down segregation was not morality, was not protests, but, rather, that it was bad for business (same reason the Vietnam War ended). Mega-corporations only care about one color — green — that’s it, and being told they had to leave 20%+ of their profit on the floor in the South because of legally or socially enforced segregation forcing them to turn away black patrons had always chapped their ass in the post-WW2 period. The purpose of the Civil Rights marches and such was primarily to give them cover to do the right thing (for their profits).

And yes, MLK Jr. understood this. Economics was something he used both as a carrot and a stick when he was talking with elites. Remember that the whole point of getting Rosa Parks thrown in jail was to give the black community a rallying point for a strike against the bus companies that enforced segregation, it was never about being arrested as an end in and of itself, the way it is with today’s protest chic street theater.

Similarly, Mubarak got kicked out by the military not because the military agreed with the protesters, but because of a general strike — the entire economy was basically shut down for weeks, costing the military (which owns a lot of the Egyptian economy) a lot of money. The protests were important in rallying support for the general strike, but in and of themselves were just theater.

So anyhow, do Americans have the balls to shut down their economy to get rid of these cold-blooded lizard people from planet Sociopath who are in charge right now? I’m not seeing it. Things just aren’t bad enough for that yet. You’d have to see 1933 levels of misery that forced FDR to do his “New Deal” or be overthrown in a Communist revolution.Though if the Austerians continue their nonsense, that might well happen, and quick, either peacefully or by violent revolution… unfortunately, revolutions are won by the organized. And what’s organized in America is the religious right. You’d think that the lizard people would realize that the religious right with all their “thou shalt not”‘s is bad for profits too, but our modern-day lizard people seem to be a bit stupider than their 1950′s/1960′s counterparts. Too much inbreeding, I guess, since over 50% of them inherited their wealth and are thus the offspring of other lizard people…

- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Tolerance of evil

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." -- George Orwell, 1984

We're told that we shouldn't use certain words to describe people who do bad things. We're told that using these words is "intolerant". So if I wish to describe the KKK members who killed four little girls for the crime of being black... if I want to describe the bland bureaucrat who devised the "Final Solution" for the "problem" of European Jews... if I want to describe the people who call for or cheer the prospect of the death of fellow Americans... if I want to describe people who want to impose a religious theocracy where only their religion is allowed and non-believers must be registered as a "thought offender" in order to be ostracized and starved to death... if I use the proper word to describe these people -- EVIL -- I'm "intolerant"?

I have one thing to say about that: Damn straight I'm intolerant of evil. Tolerance of evil is the same thing as condoning evil. If someone wants to harm me or mine (and I count my fellow Americans as "mine" for this purpose), you're damn straight I'm going to be "intolerant", because any other choice is the same as condoning evil. And I want no part of that.

-- Badtux the Do-no-evil Penguin

Viciousness vs. practicality

Two problems regarding the homeless have recently gotten attention here in the Silicon Valley:

1) The problem of homeless people living in run-down motor homes parked by the streets and dumping their raw sewage into the street drains that run to the Bay.

2) The problem of homeless people living on the shores of local streams and crapping in places where rains will wash their crap directly to the Bay.

Needless to say, both of these present water quality issues for San Francisco Bay. So what should we do about them? Here's two possibilities:

1) We can create public dump stations for the motor home people to dump their sewage into and refill their water tanks from, and we can set up porta-potties near homeless encampments so they have a place to shit into rather than directly into the streams, or

2) We can go out and arrest people and throw them into jail for dumping their crap into street drains or shitting into streams.

Which of the above two alternatives do you think would be cheaper? Well, porta-potty rental and weekly cleaning service is around $250/month (deliberately overstating), so figure $3,000/year. A public dump station could be installed near a sewage lift station for fairly cheaply, figure around $5k total, and would basically require no maintenance after that because the incremental costs of processing that sewage are lost in the noise. So figure that for around $50K/year total, you could completely do away with the issue of raw sewage flowing into the bay due to homeless people crapping in the water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

*OR*... you could put ONE SINGLE HOMELESS PERSON into jail for a year for that $50K/year total. And the reality is that you'd need to put HUNDREDS of homeless people into jail to deal with the problem of homeless people crapping into water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

So which alternative do you think the local governments have chosen? Any takers on that one?

Hint: It's the vicious solution, not the practical solution. As usual.

-- Badtux the "Americans are such a vicious bunch of motherfuckers" Penguin