Being 1 of the 1%: Nice Work if You Can Get It

I use 'work' in the loosest possible sense here.

Fun article in the Times today ('A Family's Billions, Artfully Sheltered') about the Lauder family and their hijinks.  Apparently the Lauders are not really into the whole taxpaying thing.  And who can blame them?  Asking people who are worth $3.1 billion to pay more than 17% in taxes is just so unjust.  If Ronald Lauder hadn't dodged $135 million in taxes, he just might not have been able to afford that Klimt painting--which he so generously donated to his own private art foundation.  And then deducted the 'gift' from his taxes, as one simply must, n'est ce pas?

Apparently the Lauders have so aggressively pursued every possible tax shelter, loophole, and ambiguously worded tax code that several loopholes have been closed just because of them.  Does that make for some awkward moments in St. Bart's, I wonder?*

A few minutes later I came across this little blurb from Progress Illinois.  Apparently a bill has been introduced in the Illinois state senate that would give tax breaks (amounting to $250 million a year) to a couple of companies, including one CME Industries.  That name rang a tinny little proletarian bell of rage in the back of my mind, so I went back to the Times article.  Sure enough, CME Industries is one of Lauder's 'companies,' which is organized as a Dutch holding company, conveniently headquartered in the Bahamas, and 'operated' in Central Europe.  Yet they forced the Illinois senate to give them tax breaks by threatening to leave the state.  Fascinating.

*'Don't be silly, darling, only the plebes go to St. Bart's now.  We all have our own islands. Ronald had his constructed out of a mixture of diamond dust and rabbit tears.  Isn't that fun?'

Mind the Gap

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that the income gap between the the richest one percent and everyone else tripled between 1979 and 2007. Average after-tax incomes in the top 1% bracket, adjusted for inflation, increased 281%. That is not a typo: THE INCOMES OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA INCREASED BY TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT IN LESS THAN THREE DECADES. (Sorry for the pajamas-media-style all caps, but there are times when only all caps will do--not when responding to news stories with insightful comments like: TEH IMMGRANTS TAKE R JOBS SEND THEM BACK TO WHERE THEY COME FROM WE DON'T SPEAK MEXICAN HERE LOLOL!!!!--but when communicating something truly astounding.)

Go forth, read the report, be astounded (or have your suspicions grimly justified, whatever suits your temperament). One of the arguments my Republican friends make against European-style 'socialism' is that it hinders social mobility. I'm not entirely clear on why this would be so, but the gist seems to be that people coming from Europe to America found more opportunities here to Horatio Alger it up, without being sneered at for not going to Eton. Seems like it has been a while since Europe got on the "I don't really care where your money is from, as long as it is enough to pay for the upkeep of my 150-room ancestral mansion" bandwagon, but I was willing to grant that there was some truth to the idea that there was greater equality of opportunities and relative lack of class-based snobbery in the United States. Seems like a lot more people are making their money the old-fashioned way, though--that is, putting in a lot of time and hard work waiting for their trust fund to mature (check out this article about the creative ways in which the rich in America are enabling their great-grandchildren to be lazy shitheels).

Also, let's not forget that universal health care systems might contribute to greater social mobility. Lack of teeth is more of a barrier to the upper class than lack of, well, class.

Abandon Hope, Mortal Weaklings...Dick Cheney Will Not Die

I've been skipping most non-World-Cup-related news of late (shockingly, everything has continued to go as shittily as it does when I am paying close attention, bringing my delusions of grandeur into check once again) so missed the news item about Dick Cheney going into the hospital for some reason. Of course everyone sat up and hoped a little more than they have since 2008: was that a rainbow? A shooting star? Could the Doomsday Face Shooter actually expire?

Alas, and of course, no. As I once explained to someone, Dick Cheney's heart is powered by the tears of kittens, which have a radioactive half-life of millions of years. He'll be scuttling around with the cockroaches, eating Twinkies, when the rest of us have either a) been swept up into the arms of Baby Jesus by the Rapture, or, if we did not Recognize The Truth in time, burned and flayed alive by the devil (something like that, I really can't keep my Jesus-freak eschatology straight) or b) died in worldwide floods and famines brought on by global warming, over-population, and BP (something like that, I can't keep my eco-freak eschatology straight either).

When You Are Engulfed In Oil

As the Great Unmitigated Horror in the Gulf began, I was reading An Unreasonable Woman. This book--highly recommended, by the way--is the story of Diane Wilson's fight against Formosa Plastics, a privately owned chemical manufacturer whose environmental violations were so egregious that they could no longer build plants in their home country, Korea. So instead, they came over to the U.S., where people aren't so picky. And they located in Texas, where they don't believe in the federal government no how, anyway, and the only people concerned about environmental degradation are those damn liberal elitists in Austin, gettin' in the way of The Free Market and Profit, in total defiance of Our Lord's clearly stated preference for capitalism.

There are so many things to say about this book, which opens with a truly horrifying map of Calhoun County, showing the number of chemical plants that line the waterways into the Gulf of Mexico. Along with Formosa, there are: BP Chemicals, ISP, Union Carbide, Alcoa, and Dupont. These plants are tightly clustered together, packed into little Calhoun County, which has the dubious honor of being the most toxic county in America. Now here's a fun fact I didn't know: the EPA doesn't test chemicals for toxicity before approving their manufacture. Instead, they tell the chemical plants to go right ahead, and it's up to...whoever has the time, I guess, to prove that any given chemical is toxic. Which makes sense, since it would be so onerous for the Environmental Protection Agency to do something like Protect the Environment. It's clearly not in the job description, because the words are in a different order.

When they discover exactly how toxic these plants are making their county, do the citizens rise up en masse and slay them? Or at least insist that the new Formosa plant will be built so as to minimize toxic discharge into the air, rivers, and ocean? Actually, no. They throw them a couple of parties and spend a lot of time bootlicking, because the plants create jerbs, and the plant owners make sure there's a little something for all those nice councilmen-and-women who help get their permits through. (Oh, and here's another fun side note: the EPA can waive the requirement for an environmental impact report, even in the case of a company manufacturing literally millions of tons of chemicals which are known to be toxic. Being the helpful folks that they are, they waived this requirement for Formosa--a company which had been booted out of another country because of their total disregard for environmental regulations. Formosa just had to fill out a one page form that said there would definitely be no harm to the environment, and they, like, totally swore on the Bible, for real.)

And why do so many citizens of Calhoun County need jobs, might we ask? Well, because most of them were fishermen or shrimpers, and there aren't enough of either in the Gulf to support them anymore. The collapse of the fisheries being a totally independent incident which has no provable connection to the chemical plants along the waterways.

Let's cut to the chase here, since I have a dissertation to finish sometime this year. Government at all levels--local, state, and federal--has apparently abandoned the job of acting in the public interest. Instead, their primary role seems to be to protect corporations from the public. Where Formosa can demand--and get--EPA approval in one day, it takes nearly 3 years for Wilson to get her case against the plant heard, and she had to go on a 30 day hunger strike in order to make it happen. Citizens who voice concerns are told that there is a process for grievances which must be followed in every detail, and then maybe some desk jockey at the EPA will give it a looksee in a few years.

And it is all too clear, from this soul-crushing article by Tim Dickinson, in Rolling Stone, that this contempt for the public good does not vary with administrations. Dickinson details the ways in which the Obama administration simply continued to follow the Bush playbook, and this led directly to the BP oil spill, which will be destructive beyond our worst nightmares, I think. The Obama administration colluded with BP to downplay the magnitude of the spill, giving lowball estimates which they knew were false. They have left the cleanup in the hands of BP, despite the fact that BP is clearly more concerned with it's stock price than with the Gulf Coast. Despite the fact that BP had the worst safety record of any oil company by far, the Obama administration approved their plan for the Deepwater rig without anyone reading it--as Dickinson points out, the application refers to wildlife that does not inhabit the Gulf (walruses, for example). BP just cut-and-pasted from another application for a different rig. The article goes on, and it is just infuriating at every level. There's no way to make it funny, so I'm not even going to try.

What Fresh Hell is This?

I have previously insulted the Catholic Church in this blog. I will now resume.

What is the deal with these guys? What is up with the fornicatin' and prostitutin' and gay fornicatin' and, oh yeah, molestin'? Is the Catholic Church just one particularly well-organized, well-funded, and fabulously dressed secret sex society? To be honest, most religion seems to me kind of suspect from the get-go. But okay, some churches provide the kind of communities that most people no longer have, and many of them do indeed go forth and do good works.

However. The Church as headed by Der Popenfuhrer (thanks, Jesus' General, for that one) has arguably done more harm than good. First they went after American nuns, which is a good idea, since so many women want to be the unpaid, unappreciated workhorses of a byzantine patriarchal organization. They went ahead and said they didn't think condoms were much help after all, because Every Sperm is Sacred, Even Sperms with HIV. Then they went back and clarified their stance on women as priests, from [quietly] "No, we don't think we'll be doing that anytime soon" to "Women are all sinful whores vaginas are scary never mention this again."

So I guess what I'm saying is that the Catholic Church is the originator, the Ur-Dudes, if you will, of the "Bros Before Hos" ethos.

And now all this bullshit. Some dude in a dress molests 200 deaf children, but while suggesting
that birth control is not actually counter to "God's will" is grounds for instant excommunication, molesting disabled boys is just fucking fine. Then there's this other guy in a gown in Germany, who had his little peccadillos reported to Ratzenwhatsit when he was head of what used to be the office of "The Inquisition" but is now called something much more bureaucratic, like "the Office of Making Reports Of Child Abuse Go Away." The Church got some guy to throw himself on the sceptre for that one, but oho, look what the Times is reporting today:

But the memo cited by the Times says that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest's reassignment, the newspaper reported.

The Vatican's response to this bit of news is:

The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.

I know, right? Seems like every goddamn day I hear about the Unitarians covering up for criminal pedophiles in their organization.

In the case of this shitheel who abused children who literally could not speak of what was happening to them, there was apparently an "internal" investigation, which showed that the abuse was not as widespread as had been claimed. They determined this without interviewing any of the victims. I guess they wouldn't have to, since God would just transmit the truth to them through their fillings or however he communicates these days. This is a good one:

Fasani said the diocese maintained that it did not interview the alleged victims because they never made a formal complaint to the bishop. The diocese also said it didn't know how to contact them, even though they are all members of a Verona deaf association with ties to the church-run school.

Somewhere, someone from the Bush Administration is saying, "Hey, they copied our notes!"