Month: May 2012

Facts are stupid things

by digby

Following up on my post yesterday about Paul Ryan’s “genuineness” despite his ability to lie with virtually every other breath, Krugman discusses another “Austerian”, the European editor of The Economist, who said this in an interview:

And of the countries that were in trouble, I would say Ireland looks as if it’s the best at the moment because Ireland has implemented very heavy austerity programs, but is now beginning to grow again.

Krugman posts this and quips, “see the return to growth, there at the end? Me neither.”

He writes:

To be fair, Peet isn’t alone. The legend of Irish recovery has somehow set in, and nobody on the pro-austerity side seems to feel any need to look at the data, even for a minute, to check whether the legend is true.

Since virtually every VSP is on the pro-austerity side, why bother? As St Ronnie said, “facts are stupid things.” They can say anything they want.

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It’s Codpiece day!

by digby

As I do every year on this day, here’s a reminder of one of our nation’s most memorable moments, and how the Villagers celebrated it:

It seems like only yesterday that the country was enthralled with the president in his sexy flightsuit. Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. But there were none so awestruck by the sheer, testosterone glory of Bush’s codpiece as Tweety:

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

A Cod-piece can fool them all
Make them think you’re large
Even if you’re small
Just be sure you don’t fool yourself
For it’s still just imagination
And to be sure it works like a lure
And will raise a wench’s expectations
But have a care you have something there
Or the night will end in frustration

Preventing a one-world corporatocracy

by David Atkins

One of the many zombie lies told by conservatives is that if a municipality, state or government tries to raise taxes (or close loopholes) on corporations residing within their borders, then those corporations will take their offices, factories and the jobs that come with them to lower-tax havens. Similarly, we are told that low-tax incentives must be offered to companies to recruit them to locate in our neighborhoods.

Greg LeRoy’s under-celebrated book The Great American Jobs Scam does a good job of disproving these lies. Companies tend to locate their factories and offices based on considerations far more important to their bottom lines and quality of living than minor differences between tax rates. Wage costs, education, cost of living, customer base (for retail) and myriad other factors tend (especially for non-finance businesses) the real drivers of where a company chooses to set down roots.

Still, it’s true that taxes do have some influence on where many companies do some things. Things like put up inconsequential “offices” to avoid paying the taxes they should really owe. For instance, Apple corporation knows that California offers better talent, education and quality of life than Reno, Nevada. So most of their offices are stationed there. But Apple doesn’t pay California taxes. Apple cheats. Here’s what Apple corporation actually does:

Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Conservatives would argue that California should bring its corporate tax rate to zero in order to keep the jobs of the handful of employees in Reno–even if it means losing the education, infrastructure and quality of life that makes California the place where Apple actually wants to locate its real corporate operations. Conservatives voters are too beset with loathing and ignorance to see how this stuff works in practice. But the big money boys know the game very well.

At some point, the states in the U.S. and nations around the world are going to have to decide whether it’s better to play brinksmanship on taxes and wages with one another, driving to the bottom of the barrel at the behest of corporate overlords playing them all for fools, or if it’s better to cooperate with one another to create a unified, cohesive tax and regulatory code so that corporations have to play by the same rules everywhere.

If nation-states don’t band together to defend themselves from these corporate predators, then multinational corporations will dominate nation-states lock, stock and barrel. In which case the nation-state as an institution deserves its demise as the major organizing principle for the world’s people. The corporation cannot be allowed to take its place as the mightiest organization on this planet. Many young people like me who would not lightly give our lives for the cause of a nation-state, would be more than willing to do so to prevent a world corporatocracy. The fact that the world has sustained a dominant organizational paradigm for 500 years or so, does not mean it must continue indefinitely.

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20 years ago today LA went crazy

by digby

I took my husband to the airport in the morning and we were told that airplanes were having trouble with visibility because of the smoke from the fires all over the city. It was my first clue that things were much worse than I’d thought. I went to work and my office had a bird’s eye view of South LA and I watched the number of smoke plumes double, then triple that morning.

I went ahead with a scheduled lunch with our legal team for a planned celebration of the end of a big deal we’d all been working on because it was in West Hollywood and we all figured that the riots were far away. In the middle of our meal the manager came over and told us that they were shutting the restaurant since there were reports of looting in the nearby mall. This turned out to be a rumor but rumors like that were flying fast and furious that afternoon. The city had somehow turned crazy just during the time we were inside the restaurant.

People were driving on the medians and generally acting like fools on the road. I saw someone with a shotgun just casually walking down the street. In Beverly Hills. The mayor came on the radio as I was heading back to the office and told people to go home and stay home, so that’s what I did. My normal 30 minute commute was two and half hours that afternoon.

Here’s what we saw on the news:

There’s a lot to be said about the underlying causes for this conflagration. LA policing has always been problematic, going all the way back to the beginning. I have to say, however, that this article by Dave Zirin in The Nation puts the whole thing in a completely different perspective. He says this particular bomb was armed during the 1984 Olympics. It’s a very interesting thesis and one I hadn’t heard before.

That night it was helicopters overhead all night long. The National Guard had arrived and was camping out at the Federal Building which wasn’t far from where I lived. We could see that there was still major burning and looting all over south LA on television. But the army was there to guard the north and the west — where all the important (white) people lived.

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