How it would play out here: Part two

When I was growing up, the army was where you went if you had no idea what you wanted to do with your life.  If you were not smart enough for college, you just wanted to get away from home while you figured out what you wanted to do with your life, or you wanted to get away from the high school girlfriend who expected you to marry her, the army was sort of a catch-all.  Then came the Vietnam War.

That war had been around for a while, but it was under the radar of most Americans.  Our military commitment there had been relatively small.  As it grew and grew, and started chewing up and spitting out in pieces more and more of our young men, attitudes toward the army changed.  Eventually the draft was eliminated, and the all volunteer, the 'professional' army emerged.

In Egypt, the military decided that it was not there job to attack civilians to prop up a corrupt regime. In Libya, many in the military defected to the opposition, and actively supported the overthrow of that regime.  What would happen here?

One need only look at the behavior of the police to get a picture of how the military would respond in this country.  They show up at the Occupy Wall street demonstrations in riot gear, even though the demonstrations have been almost universally peaceful.  Of course there have been isolated incidents of trouble, but nothing more than any police officer on a regular patrol might encounter.  And they do not wear riot gear on patrol.

The police are essentially a closed culture.  Protecting each other is the highest law, far more important than protecting you and I or the law.  Why do you think police Internal Affairs units are looked down on by other officers?  It is because they are perceived (an not always correctly) as placing the law above that 'highest law'.

With the advent of the 'professional' army, the same exists there.  Yes, unemployment has helped the military swell it's ranks, but for the most part you have a military that is completely separated from society as a whole.  They will follow orders, even if it means killing unarmed civilians.

In the military, unit cohesion is a matter of life and death.  A military unit that does not work together is ineffective.  Each individual needs to be able to trust that the person beside him will do his job.  But that is not what I am talking about here.  Especially in the wars that we have fought most recently, it has never been about protecting America, defending freedom, or any of that nonsense.  It has been about getting a job done and getting out alive.

Because if soldiers were encouraged to think too much about what the job actually is, then they might find themselves hesitating at just the wrong time.  They might even refuse to follow some orders, or report to someone on some of the things they have seen.

Just following orders, as the Germans said at Nuremberg, is alive and well in the US military.  This is by design, as more and more they are being asked to do things that have nothing to do with safeguarding our country.  So if a movement like Occupy Wall Street starts to really threaten the 1%, and the military gets involved, do not expect any sympathy from them.  It has been drilled out of them.

An observation

I was reading a article on the Daily Kos today, and while the entire article was worthwhile, there was one point it make that stuck in my mind more than the others.  The author said that the markets of today, rather than being vehicles for the creation of wealth, are now vehicles for the concentration of wealth.

That sounds very much like the feudalism of the middle ages.  A small oligarchy which produced nothing controlled most of the wealth.  Food and clothing was produced and consumed, but the society as a whole was stagnant.  Innovation of any sort was suspect as it had the potential of challenging either the interests of the ruling class or those of the church.  Literacy was the exception, rather than the norm, even among the ruling classes.

Which is exactly where we seem to be going.  The public school system is being systematically dismantled, science is being subjugated to ideology, the middle class is being driven to extinction, and ownership of essentially everything is slowly being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.  Our own home grown version of the Taliban seeks to exercise their control over more and more aspect of our lives.

The Roman empire is crumbling, and the new nobility stands ready to resume their rightful station.

How would it play out here

I was watching the live video feed from Al Jezeera English on the web a while ago, watching the events in Libya unfold as the rebels took Tripoli.  I thought about Egypt, I thought about the other places where events like this have occurred, even going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So a couple of thoughts crossed my mind.  Like how bad would if have to get, before something like that happened here?  And if it did, would enough of our military decide to side with the people to actually put some muscle behind a popular uprising?

It is important to note that in each of the Arab countries with a successful uprising, the government unintentionally turned what were essentially demonstrations of discontent into a revolution by the virulence of their response.  If Gaddafi had, for example, recognized that the demonstrators had legitimate grievances, even if very little changed, he probably would still be in power.

The appearance of sympathy and some token concessions would likely have blunted the anger of the populace.  Instead he proved to them that they were right by his violent response.  It is possible to make the population cower in submission, but it has become harder to do in the age of the internet and social networking.

Demonstrations of any size against the status quo in this country are usually downplayed, while tiny demonstrations in favor or right wing causes are treated as major events.  You need look no further than Minnesota where massive demonstrations in support of organized labor and a dozen tea party members with signs across the street were given equal weight by the mainstream media.   

So the tactic in this country would be very different, it would be to marginalize the demonstrators, try and convince each group that they represented a tiny segment of the population.  I attended a large demonstration in San Francisco before the invasion of Iraq, and one person had a since that was prophetic.  It read "Remember what you see here, because they will lie about it on the news".  And it was very true. Despite massive demonstrations all across the country, the anti-war sentiment was marginalized in the media.

So what would it take?  How many people out of work, how many families tossed onto the streets before there would be enough opposition that the oligarchy feels threatened? 

You only need look to the early union movements to see what has happened in the past.  As recently as 1920, there was the Anaconda Road Massacre where company guards fired on unarmed miners, shooting 17 in the back.  Or look at the Colorado Labor wars of 1902-1903, where the military was used to violently suppress striking miners.  Look to Herbert Hoover's reaction to the Bonus March of World War I Veterans, which eventually led to his downfall and the election of FDR.

In many homes around the country, there is an air of quiet desperation.  How long does this continue, when does the pot boil over?  And on who's side would the military end up?

When they talk about high US Taxes

The right is always talking about high US corporate tax rates.  You could compare us to places that have legalized slavery and always make us look uncompetitive.  Instead lets compare us to a successful industrialized country, one that is essentially eating our lunch in the marketplace.  Let's look at Germany.

First let's start with the VAT (Value Added Tax).  That is essentially a sales tax, that is tacked on to each transactions at each level.  The rate is generally 19% but for certain foods, books, magazines, flowers, some transportation, it is 7%.  And some things are exempt.  Doctors do not charge VAT tax, nor do public theaters, museums.  This is not a complete list of things that have a reduced or waived VAT tax, but you get the idea.

The tax is charged by the seller. The manufacturer pays it on the raw materials they buy.  The distributor pays it on the finished goods they buy, the consumer pays it.

Let's take the case of the manufacturer.  On a quarterly basis they will pay the tax that they charged to their distributors, minus the tax they paid buying raw materials.

Then there is the corporate tax rate.  According to taxrates.cc the combined (federal and local) tax rate for corporations is 33.3%.  This is actually a rough summary of three different taxes applied to corporate income.  And unlike US corporations, German corporations are taxed on their world wide income, minus of course any taxes paid on income in other countries.  So they cannot hide their income in low tax countries.

Now let's talk about the other two facets of this.  How are German companies doing under this burden, and what do the German people get for their money?

Well, you know that in manufacturing and exports, they are beating us in the marketplace and have been for years.  So paying employees a decent wage, a mandatory 25 vacation days, and taxes on their world wide income does not seem to have stoped them from doing well.  And look at CEO salaries, well in 2009 Deutches Bank CEO Josef Ackermann had a total compensation 9.55 million euros.  He was the higest paid CEO in Germany that year.  It does not compare to some of the packages US CEOs were getting in that same year, but he is still getting rich.

And what do the people of Germany get for these taxes?  How about universal health care, pensions, and tax-funded child, housing, and educational allowances?

So our taxe rates are not, and never have been what is killing our manufacturing, destroying our middle class.  Rather it is the blind faith that if you only appease the oligarchy that owns this country enough, that they will eventually share a few crums with the rest of us. 

You want to see jobs moving back to this country?  Stop giving businesses a free ride to hide their profits overseas forever. When you give them economic incentives to send your job overseas, what do you expect?

Pension Reform - the San Francisco Treat

There is a new catch phrase, and it is pension reform.  Pension reform is like tort reform, who's primary purpose it to make it harder for people injured by neglect or even deliberately faulty designs to hold businesses accountable.  Pension reform is another example of kick em when they are down.

The City and County of San Francisco will have two competing pension reform measures on the ballot, each of them trying to outdo the other on screwing city employees.  Before I describe them, let's talk a little about the bargain that city and county workers everywhere accept when they go to work.

• You will accept less pay than your counterparts in private industry.
• You will work in a bureaucracy that whose rules and working conditions will always lag those of private industry.  Change takes so long that you will always be using obsolete practices.
• You will be led by managers who's sole qualification is that they are a friend of the mayor a supervisor or the son or daughter of a somebody's big campaign contributor.  And they will never have to deal with the consequences of their decisions because:
• Every few years someone new is elected and all those managers will change, and you start all over again trying to explain to them what it is the department is supposed to do.

In exchange, you will get decent benefits and a decent pension.  The pension is a defined benefit plan, meaning that how much you will receive is based upon a formula that factors is the age at which you retire, the number of years you worked, and what you were paid while you worked.  It allows you to plan your retirement, because you can know what your income will be. 

So now that you know the terms of the bargain, let's see what our politicians have come up with.

First, they will increase how much of your salary they will take for to help cover the cost of your pension.  The more you make, the higher percentage they will take.  This could actually result in a raise reducing your take home pay.

Second, they will no longer count all of your salary when figuring your pension.  For a long time overtime has been excluded from most plans, and with good reason.  You don't want to encourage people to game the system and tack on a bunch of overtime in their last year or two of employment to goose up their pension.  But under these plans, you stop accruing benefits after a specified number of hours each year.

Third, they will modify the benefit calculations, so that the amount of your income that the pension will replace when you retire will be less.

Fourth,  there will be some cost of living adjustments for retirees, widows, and orphans that can just disappear.  If the Retirement Board and the actuaries decide there is not enough money in the trust fund to increase your pension a specified percentage, not only will they not pay it, but they will take away the cost of living adjustments they have been giving you over the years.  The adjustment is specified at 3-1/2 percent.  If there is enough money in the trust fund to pay only a 3 percent increase, they not only will not pay any increase, but they will take away all the increases from previous years.  This could be an unexpected pay cut of 10, 20 percent or more, depending upon how long you have been receiving it.

Finally, when times are hard, and the city is asking you to take unpaid time off, and pay cuts (while of course the politicians are not cutting their own pay), then they will raise the amount you must contribute to your pension.  So first they cut your pay, and then they take more of what's left.

There you have it, pension reform in a nutshell.

If the mantra were true

Over and over you here the right saying you don't raise taxes during a recession.  And on the surface, it even sounds like it might make sense.  After all, the last thing you want to do in the middle of a recession is to take money out of circulation, have people spending less.

Most of your basic necessities, you know, food, clothing, utilities, gas, those are all spent locally.  Even if most of the manufactured items were made elsewhere by slave labor, at least someone in the country is making a buck on it.

The people who's taxes they don't want to raise are the one's who are not going to spend it anyway. All of their basic needs are already covered, and most of their luxury desires are too.  They already have the boat.  And if they do spend it will not be on stuff that is going to have any impact on the US economy.

Because when you get beyond that stuff, well hiring another illegal alien to clean your toilets does not do all that much for our economy.  Nor does investing in more slave labor factories in countries with no worker protections, no safety standards, no child labor laws do much to pull us out of this.

Now contrast with their other big passion, cutting government spending.  What do you think happens when you cut government spending?  You take money away from people who are going to spend essentially all of it here in this country.  Every dollar you cut ripples through the economy many times.  So that completely belies the argument that they are doing this for the economy.

Of course there are exceptions, we could stop paying mercenaries in Afghanistan, the gold-plated benefits our elected representatives grant themselves could be cut back to something comparable to what the rest of us have to live with.  But that is not what they want to cut. They would cut meat inspectors and the FDA and other agencies whose responsibility is protecting you and your interests.

It really does come down to this.  The Republican party, and many Blue Dog Democrats, work for their corporate masters and only their corporate masters.  And they do not need the US economy to make money.  They don't need you.

What they mean by entitlements

Whenever you hear the deficit being discussed, you hear the party on the right discussing entitlement reform, or reducing entitlements.  Sadly, you also hear some of this crap coming from the lips of those who have promised to protect us.  So let's talk a little bit about what they are really talking about.

First of all, who do you think is in that room while they are negotiating what should be cut and what should not be cut.  Let me give you a hint.  There is nobody in that room that will ever need medicare or social security.  They are vested in the federal health and retirement plans in just 5 years.  These are the same plans that they would like to strip from people who do actual work. And of course there is nobody in that room with a net worth of less than a million dollars. 

So, in their viewpoint, what are entitlements?  That's easy, that is anything the government does that benefits you, that does not also benefit them.  They don't need social security or medicare.  They must be entitlements.  Unemployment benefits?   Same thing.  How about Aid to Families with Dependent Children, WIC, food stamps, college grants (or public education in any form), veterans benefits?  None that applies to them.

What you will not hear them talking about is them raising their own taxes, cutting their own salaries and benefits.  Nor will you see them cutting out the loopholes and tax giveaways that their corporate masters receive.

You don't matter.  Your role in this picture is to provide cheap labor then hurry up and die.  And they will raise the specter of welfare mothers cranking out children to increase their income or overpaid government employees (only the ones not in the room) to convince you that they are only taking food out of the mouths of the undeserving.  But of course to them, the undeserving is you.

And if you buy into that, then you deserve what you get.