Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

According to a May 17,2008 AP article, Alabama’s county sheriffs are are given $1.75 per day to feed a prisoner - and are allowed to pocket the difference, if they can do it cheaper.

The report says “critics charge that Alabama, in effect, is paying law enforcement to skimp on food and might be rewarding sheriffs for mistreating prisoners. “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way,” said Buddy Sharpless, executive director of the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

I don’t understand the negative reaction to the fact that Alabama’s county sheriffs are allowed to profit by, in my opinion participating in what amounts to legal graft, by scrimping on food for prisoners. (Alabama jails bank on cheap meals - Law allows sheriffs to pocket leftover food allowance, AP May 17, 2008)

What’s the big deal? Isn’t this exactly what private prisons do? While condemning the practice by county sheriffs, I’m sure Mr. Sharpless would listen attentively to executives from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) making their pitch to privatize public jails and prisons.

CCA claims to save states and counties money by negotiating a per-head fee for housing and feeding prisoners. They profit by pocketing the difference between what they spend and what they charge the taxpayers. Contracting-out public services had been a gold mine for ARAMARK, too. In addition to prisons, ARAMARK also turns a tidy profit feeding children attending public schools.

I agree with Mr. Sharpless opinion, “It’s a bad system, and it ought not be that way.” As a taxpayer I want to know my dollars are going to provide public services, not lining the pockets of CCA and ARAMARK.

Two sets of financial numbers in the news are the focus of my attention tonight:

First, the price of regular unleaded gasoline where I live is not four dollars per gallon yet. It’s three dollars, ninety nine cents and nine tenths of a cent - a whole whopping tenth of a penny less than four dollars per gallon.

Second, Open Secrets reports a huge difference in the character of the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Barack Obama: $250
The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Hillary Clinton: $1,216,842

This week, CafePress sent us a cap as a free sample, to get us excited about selling clothes using a technology they call InfiniStitch. It’s a way to get an image made on a computer automatically stitched as a badge on a piece of clothing.

That sounds really great, but there’s a problem, as seen on the sample cap filmed in the movie below: The stitching doesn’t actually look very good, and the words in the stitching are almost impossible to read.

That’s small stuff compared to the problem I found on the tag: The cap is made in China by a company called Alternative Apparel. The name Alternative Apparel sounds great, but there’s more to a business than just a name.

Alternative Apparel makes a lot of promises when it comes to the ethical treatment of workers in its Chinese factories, and it says that it inspects factories a few times a year in order to see if things are on the up-and-up. However, Alternative Apparel doesn’t really know what’s going on in those factories in China except on those special inspection days.

What’s going on in Chinese factories has been exposed: Forced prisoner labor, worker abuse, and even child slave labor. The New York Times recently reported that “Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws.” They report the use of Chinese child slave labor as “quite typical”.

Alternative Apparel surely knows about these problems, and the insufficiency of inspections in revealing the problem. Yet, they choose to do business in China anyway.

Why? That’s easy. They do it for the money.

Alternative Apparel chose to have the clothes it sells made in China in order to save money, so that they could make big profits. They knew that China has low labor costs because it has low standards of worker protection.

Alternative Apparel chose to outsource its manufacturing to China in order to avoid American laws that guarantee fair treatment of workers and environmental protections.

Do you want to support that choice? It’s your freedom to do so, but if you buy from companies like Alternative Apparel, please don’t act shocked when you hear about children being forced to work as slaves in China. You helped make it happen, after all, with every cheap thing you bought that was made in China.

There is a true alternative in apparel. You can buy a shirt from Skreened, which prints here in the USA, only on shirts that are made in America, by American Apparel.

American Apparel is the real thing. They follow American labor and environmental laws. Alternative Apparel doesn’t. They went for the ethical loophole. They’re just posers.

Do you want to wear clothes made by posers?

The real moral values of the Republican Party are demonstrated in brutal, sadistic form in the last federal budget proposed by George W. Bush.

The federal budget President Bush proposes for 2009 begins a program of cutting 196 billion dollars from Medicare health care benefits for the elderly and extremely impoverished Americans.

Why would the Republicans do such a cruel thing? Well, part of that money taken away from Medicare will go to pay for policies that make rich Americans even richer.

But, some of the money the Republicans will save by cutting Medicare benefits for senior citizens will go to pay for something even more inhumane. The Republicans propose using some of the money taken away from Medicare to pay for a new generation of nuclear bombs.

What do we need new nuclear weapons for? Terrorists cannot be defeated with nuclear missiles. Nuclear weapons are designed to kill civilians by destroying entire cities, vaporizing them, melting them, burning them into nothing more than radioactive cinder and ash.

These are the moral values of the Republican party: Less medicine for the sick, and more nuclear weapons to kill people by the millions.

This isn’t about getting tough, or being fiscally conservative. It’s inhumane. It’s just plain insane.

The Republican Party agenda, led now by George W. Bush, and to be continued by John McCain, leads on a path of fear and destruction.

America can do better. We must do better.

The three trillion dollar budget viciously cuts programs that benefit the American people, so how come it’s still the biggest federal budget in history? Part of the answer is that the budget proposed by George W. Bush contains the biggest military budget since World War II.

Are we really supposed to believe that the “War On Terror”, a fight against Islamic terrorist riff raff, our generation’s equivalent of a war against pirates, costs more than the global struggle against the forces of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations? No, don’t believe that for a second - you’re being asked to believe something even worse.

You see, when they say that the military budget requested for 2009 is the biggest since World War II, they aren’t even including the nearly trillion dollars extra that the Bush White House is expected to request for the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Where is the money going this time? It’s going to fund corruption, fraud and waste. It’s going into the pockets of some very well-connected individuals - people in what the charitable refer to as the “defense” industry who have close working relationships with the Bush White House and members of Congress.

The military-linked corruption isn’t only going to the Republican side of the aisle, either. Think about the whopper unloaded upon the good people of Missouri by Democratic Congressman Ike Skelton: The Chicago Tribune cites Representative Skelton as saying that the military budget is necessary to ensure the health of the military.

The health of the military? My foot. The budget increase for the Pentagon ensures the financial health of military contractor corporations, and their investors and executives who are linked to politicians in Washington D.C. It’s a financial scheme for which members of Congress will be rewarded generously in the form of campaign donations. It’s dirty, rotten, stinking corporate pork barrel in the form of bullets and bombs.

Republican politics in Washington D.C. brings us this polluted equation:

40 billion dollars of profits for ExxonMobil in 2008 plus record oil prices plus ever escalating economic damage due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change equals continued tax breaks for ExxonMobil

This is no joke. It’s what’s really going on. We’re getting another record-breaking federal budget next year, but ExxonMobil won’t be paying its share.

The Republicans in DC are nothing but an oil slick across America’s pocketbook.

This far out blast from the past come from the Democratic Caucus:

How much did a gallon of gasoline cost when George W. Bush took office (and I put the emphasis on took)?

$1.39

Can you imagine how much your monthly budget would change if the price of gasoline were back down to that level?

It can be done - if America invests heavily in solar, wind, and geothermal power. When I say “America invests”, I mean the American government.

Let’s end the economy-destroying military occupation of Iraq, and redirect that budget to implementing green power, back here in the USA where the investment will be returned to the government in the form of taxes resulting from a stronger, more efficient economy. Those bullets in Iraq don’t bring anyone any economic benefit. Windmills keep on giving, long after their initial deployment.

Drop energy prices, not bombs.

The Bush Administration is threatening to veto legislation that would improve health care at Native American reservations and would require that federal contracts active on those reservations pay people fairly.

Why? Who would the Bush White House do such a cruel thing, especially just as the American economy is heading into the gutter again?

“The Bush administration said in a statement that the labor provision would violate long-standing administration policy,” says an official Bush Administration statement.

Long-standing administration policy? What long-standing administration policy? Oh, yeah, the long-standing policy of the Bush Administration to screw over American workers whenever possible - whether they’re Native Americans or not!

Equal opportunity cruelty. How reassuring.

The Dow Jones Industrials Average has just plummeted more than 450 points in just three minutes.

So much for putting trust in the fossil fuel economy. So much for the idea that corporations are going to provide a secure foundation for the American economy. So much for steady employment in exchange for the cubicle conformity of corporate life.

What America is learning now is that everything that they have given away to corporations - all their independence, all their privacy, all their local identity, and even their own influence over the democratic process - has been for nothing. The corporations, and the Wall Street financial institutions that back them up, are not competent to run the economy.

We’ll all pay the price for this Wall Street and corporate ineptitude. Don’t think recession. Think depression.

The corporations have taken away America’s economic safety nets, and our national treasure is being blown to bits in Iraq.

Hunker down, people, and prepare for some tough times.

A new report out by the Democratic congressional joint economic committee says that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up costing America 3.5 trillion dollars, not 2.4 trillion dollars as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says.

You know what my reaction to that is? So what?

It has to do with the psychology of numbers. People regard their burdens in terms of relative, not absolute, scales. When the country is in debt 2.4 trillion dollars, what’s another 1.1 trillion dollars to add on?

Peregrin Wood tries to put these trillions of dollars into perspective by breaking them down into gumballs. That helps, but there’s only so far that the mind can stretch. What’s the difference in a line of gumballs stretching to the sun and back eight times and a line of gumballs stretching to the sun and back twelve times?

Who in their right mind would not be bothered by the loss of 2.4 trillion dollars, but then when 3.5 trillion dollars is lost, freak out? No one. If 3.5 trillion dollars is bad, then 2.4 trillion dollars is bad too. If 2.4 trillion dollars of burden won’t bother you, 20 trillion won’t either.

This game the congressional Democrats are playing, of saying, “No no, it’s 3.5 not 2.4″ shows a profound deficit of understanding of effective communication.

George W. Bush and his Republican followers love to talk about the value of good hard work. They hate people just sitting around unemployed, they say. Their message to Americans having hard times is: Get a job!

It’s an odd thing, then, that Republicans actually oppose programs that help people get work. In the federal budget the Republicans have proposed for 2008, the funding for vocational and technical education programs is cut in half.

Those programs help give students the skills that will make them valuable to employers, keeping the economy strong. The programs encourage and enable people to get a job, just like Republicans say everybody ought to.

Republicans may talk about the value of hard work, but they don’t back up their talk with action. They show the low regard they have for working people in the funding cuts they hurl at the pro-work programs in the federal budget.

Tonight I was researching various topics on paganism and ancient revivalism when I came across a Wikipedia article about a group of pagans in Greece who were trying to gain equal rights in the eyes of the Greek government. It seems that prior to 2006, all religions except Christianity, Judaism and Islam had been banned. An Athenian court seems to have overruled that.

The story regarding this can be found here (I may post a separate diary entry about this later).

When I read about their desire to be allowed to worship in the Parthenon, I looked it up on Wikipedia for clarification. The article listed pollution hazards and I found myself curious enough to read on. It seems that acid rain from the growth of Athens and the exhaust from cars has caused irreparable damage to the sculptures in the Parthenon.

Pollution is a bad thing, not only for the harm it does to ourselves and our environment but for the harm it does to our history. When historical landmarks and wonders of the ancient world are threatened by our pollution, isn’t it time to do something?

I see this and then I see conservatives calling for less restraints put on pollution control and I find it hard to believe that they could be so caviler and arrogant not to see the harm that is already happening. Is there nothing at all more important than grabbing for that extra dollar?

‘lo and behold, what do I find when I wake up and log into Yahoo this morning?

(link)

Bush vetoes water projects bill
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer 22 minutes ago

An increasingly confrontational President Bush on Friday vetoed a bill authorizing hundreds of popular water projects even though lawmakers can count enough votes to override him.

Bush brushed aside significant objections from Capitol Hill, even from Republicans, in thwarting legislation that provides money for projects like repairing hurricane damage, restoring wetlands and preventing flooding in communities across the nation.

This level of opposition virtually assured that Bush would have a veto overridden for the first time in his presidency. He has used the veto very sparingly for most of the time he has been in office, but has made more use of it recently.

“When we override this irresponsible veto, perhaps the president will finally recognize that Congress is an equal branch of government and reconsider his many other reckless veto threats,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“More than two years after failing to respond to the devastation and destruction of Hurricane Katrina, he is refusing to fund important projects guided by the Army Corps of Engineers that are essential to protecting the people of the Gulf Coast region.”

The $23 billion water bill passed in both chambers of Congress by well more than the two-thirds majority needed to vacate a veto and make the bill law.

Bush objected to the $9 billion in projects added during negotiations between the House and Senate. He hoped that his action, even though it is sure not to hold, would cast him as a friend to conservatives who demand a tighter rein on federal spending.

But Bush never vetoed spending bills under the Republican Congress, despite budgetary increases then, too. Attempting to demonstrate fiscal toughness now, in the seventh year of his presidency, carried the risk being criticized for doing too little, too late or as waging a transparently partisan attack against the Democrats who now run Capitol Hill.

The president took the gamble, making it part of a broader effort to more pointedly and frequently take on Democratic leaders.

The legislation originally approved by the Senate would have cost $14 billion and the House version would have totaled $15 billion. Bush and a few Republicans complained that the final version was larded with unneeded pet projects pushed by individual lawmakers — sending the overall cost of the bill much higher.

“Only in Washington could the House take a $14 billion bill into a conference with the Senate’s $15 billion bill and emerge with a compromise that costs taxpayers over $23 billion,” said White House press secretary Dana Perino.

She also said Bush vetoed the bill because it is “fiscally irresponsible” and falls outside the scope of the Army Corps’ mission.

Critics noted that the bill piles more work on the Army Corps of Engineers, which already has a backlog of $58 billion worth of projects and an annual budget of only about $2 billion to address them.

If Bush is overridden, the measure would give a green light to projects in virtually every state. It only authorizes the projects; the actual funding must be approved separately.

The authorizations include:

_$3.6 billion for major wetlands and other coastal restoration, flood control and dredging projects for Louisiana, a state where coastal erosion and storms have resulted in the disappearance of huge areas of land;

_nearly $2 billion for the restoration of the Florida Everglades;

_nearly $2 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to build seven new locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers;

_$7 billion for various projects related to hurricane mitigation in Mississippi and Louisiana, including assuring 100-year levee protection in New Orleans;

_hundreds of smaller dredging, wetlands restoration and flood control projects across the country.

The Congressional Budget office says the bill includes projects that, if fully funded, would cost $11.2 billion over the next four years and $12 billion in the decade after that. The bill also calls for increased oversight of the Corps, requiring an outside review of water construction projects.

The veto was Bush’s fifth. Four of those have come since Democrats took over Congress in January, but this one was unusual because it also pits the president against a sizable number of lawmakers from his own party. Previous Bush vetoes include two of bills allowing expanded federal research using embryonic stem cells, and a spending bill that would have required troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Last month, Bush vetoed a major expansion of a children’s health insurance program, also over objections from some Republicans. But he has far more partisan unity on that issue than on the water projects bill. It was the first time Bush went into a veto knowing it was a futile effort. This turns the tables somewhat on him, as he has been criticizing Democrats almost daily for wasting time by passing legislation they knew he would not accept.

Isn’t it funny that now that there’s a Democratic majority in Congress Bush is finally taking the packaging off his veto pen? Ain’t it also funny that Bush considers things that will cost around 14 billion over the next 14 years to help fix some badly needed things is “fiscally irresponsible” and yet I just found an article that report economists are speculating that the war in Iraq could balloon to over $1 TRILLION dollars. Whether that is true or not that same article is reporting that the daily cost is over $200 million a day.

Which is fiscally irresponsible? Adding in things to help protect American citizens from natural disasters and restore the environment for $14 billion, or continue an occupation of a foreign nation that serves as nothing but a black hole for the economy and is turning this into the most expensive military campaign in American history?

You want to be fiscally responsible? Pull troops out of Iraq and STOP GIVING TAX BREAKS TO COMPANIES FOR OUTSOURCING AMERICAN JOBS!

October , 2007 - Monday

1654 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3815
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28093

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 74691
(MAXIMUM): 81405
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $458,261,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

Yesterday I talked to an old friend back east who was about to lose a home through foreclosure. Today the foreclosure has been forestalled, and my friend is relieved.

Today my neighbor was talking about the number of SNL’s (?) (small mortgage companies) that have gone bankrupt. The neighbor’s usual topic of conversation is boobs.

Sometime during the afternoon a big “for sale” sign appeared nailed to the tree in my front yard.

I give up. What’s going on with the real estate market?

Terrible, terrible news from Xinhua today: Starbucks is planning to raise the price of its drinks by nine cents.

This is unjust! I can’t afford to pay nine cents more for a four dollar cup of coffee! Eight cents, maybe, but not nine cents. I’m on a fixed income, after all.

If Starbucks won’t restrict the increase in the price of its drinks to eight cents per cup of premium venti, then I’ll have to take drastic measures… and make my coffee at home, for between 20 and 50 cents per cup. Don’t make me do it!

When it comes to freedom, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul seems to think that it all comes down to one thing: Money. He believes that property rights are the foundation of all rights. In other words, Ron Paul believes that, if a person doesn’t own anything, they don’t have any rights.

For this reason, Ron Paul proposes giving special tax breaks to wealthy estates. Paul writes,

“If you truly own your property, you have the right to dispose of it any way you wish. You can sell it, give it away, or direct who will receive it when you die. This control is the essence of property rights. If you can’t control what happens to your property, you don’t really own it. That’s why the estate tax is so destructive”

The problem with Ron Paul’s defense of tax breaks for wealthy estates is that there is no such thing as a legal right for people to spend money however they wish. The Constitution does not contain the phrase “property rights”, and does not establish the concept of general property rights in any language at all. People do not have the right to dispose of their money in any way that they wish. They cannot buy nuclear weapons, for example. They also do not have the right to dispose of hazardous materials they own by just dumping them in the nearest river. In the United States, people may have property, but they also have a responsibility to other people.

That’s why we have government, and it’s why the government has the constitutionally-established right to gather taxes in order to sustain itself. Government is the collective creation of all citizens, through democratic participation and through the contribution of money. Government mitigates between individual desires and the needs of society as a whole, protecting individuals from each other.

Ron Paul’s proposal to abolish estate taxes encourages selfish irresponsibility. Money is not, after all, just property. Money is an embodiment of what people can expect from their government, and from each other. People may own what they buy with money, but society as a whole is what makes money valuable.

What Ron Paul forgets when he defends abolishing estate taxes is that the taxes are not paid by the people who die and leave their estates to their inheritors. Estate taxes are paid by the inheritors. Wealthy people have the right to accumulate massive estates, and to direct certain people to inherit those estates, but once the inheritance takes place, they’re dead, and they don’t get to direct their money as if they’re alive. The dead do lose control of their property. That’s a natural part of death, and there’s nothing Ron Paul and his libertarian supporters can do to stop that.

Inheritance is a form of income, just like wages in compensation for work, and it ought to be treated in the same way. It is unjust to make people who work for their money pay income taxes on that money, while giving people who inherit their money a special loophole that allows them to keep all of their income.

Estate taxes are necessary because the accumulation of the power of property is destructive to society as a whole. If people like Paris Hilton, who gain substantial property just through their luck of being the children of extremely wealthy families, do not have to pay their share to support the government, then non-wealthy citizens have to give a larger share of their own property to keep the government functioning.

(Source: Sierra Times, June 14, 2006)

The whole world is the kingdom of Visa

You must realize that the whole world is the kingdom of Visa as stated by Mastercard. Because I said so, that’s why. Any injustice will be punished by Customer Service and you need not worry about it. Your view of the debt limit is revenge but our CEO’s view of interest rates are to transform the blah blah blah blah blah…

Sorry, I lost steam. Here, let me start again:

The more definitively someone tells you they know what God is, the more desperate they are to nab your cash.

Fair? Unfair? True? Untrue?

The next time you hear some supposed “expert” from The Heritage Foundation given the chance to speak on an NPR program like the Diane Rehm show, remember this graphic here, taken straight from The Heritage Foundation’s web site. It’s from a page of political propaganda promoting the evisceration of Social Security.

You see, The Heritage Foundation isn’t really a think tank so much as it is a propaganda factory dedicated to pumping out justifications for the right wing agenda. That’s why The Heritage Foundation’s page on Social Security includes this graphic (I added the critical words below). Even now in 2007, two years after the American people overwhelmingly rejected the right wing plan to kill Social Security, The Heritage Foundation is still trying to push it. They’re still working the tired old line that, because the Social Security system might be short of some money a couple of generations in the future, we ought to just go ahead and kill it now.

This claim has been made by the right wing since the 1970s. It’s a matter of political faith, not careful research and consideration. The right wingers just hate the idea of the government helping working people to come together to ensure some security for the families in the face of old age, infirmity, and tragic accidents. They’d prefer that we rely on shaky private schemes that involve investing in corporations like Halliburton and Enron.

Social Security doesn’t have insufficient funds - not anything close to it. The Heritage Foundation does, however, have insufficient credibility.