A dilemma

Jack Abramoff has wrote a book. He apparently names names about Congressmen he bought and what he bought from them, as well as names names about other lobbyists who are doing exactly the same thing today. I am lusting to read that part of his book (not so lusting to read the other part of the book, which is standard boiler-plate small government GOP stuff).

Problem: political pressure meant that no conventional publisher would touch Jackoff's book. Meaning that it's being published by... World Nut Daily Press ("We're batshit crazy and so are you if you read us!"). The notion of sending my money to Birther Central makes me vomit in my mouth a little.

What to do, what to do...

-- Badtux the Overly-curious Penguin

Waiting for the explosion

I've previously talked about the concentration of wealth -- about how 60% of Americans are dirt-poor, lack access to the fundamental capital to make anything of themselves due to everything being hogged by the top 5% and especially the top 1%, and how this is not a tenable situation in a democracy. I view OWS (and to a lesser extent the teabaggers) as a symptom. People are seeing that things are getting worse for most people while certain people (the 1% in particular) thrive, and they don’t know what to do about it, so first thing they start doing is complain about it — the OWS protests. The oligarchs are betting that putting down the OWS protests with force will make everything okay for them, but the problem with that notion is that OWS is a symptom, not a cause. Suppressing OWS won't relieve that pressure building up underneath, it will simply deny it an outlet -- and it will keep building until either there is an explosion and Very Bad Things happen, or the oligarchs are forced to impose a police state so blatant and obtrusive that the notion of America as a free country would be ludicrous to even the ill-informed.

OR the oligarchs could come to their senses and realize that their current route is to either the guillotine or irrelevance. The guillotine if the explosion happens, and irrelevance if they impose a police state. Because the end game of police states is always the secret policemen taking over — see, e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, and the imprisonment or exile of many of the Russian oligarchs who crossed swords with him. The only solution that would allow our oligarchs to preserve their own importance is to return back to the New Deal regime of regulation and taxation that served the nation so well in the period 1945-1981, but that would require our oligarchs to be smart, and due to inbreeding (less than 10% of our oligarchs got there because of merit, the rest got there because of winning the lucky sperm contest and being born rich or going to the right school with the right people and getting a "Gentleman's C" like Dubya), they’re not all that smart anymore…

Americans have figured out the game is rigged, and they want it fixed. They want the America of their parents and grandparents, when hard work and education provided you with a living. If something isn’t done to take us back to when that was so, all hell will break loose, with uncertain results. Well, let me rephrase that. The results will be *disaster*. Because I can't think of any violent revolution, anywhere, that has ever ended up well. They always ended up with thugs of the worst kind in charge. Maybe mailing Marie Antoinette Action Figures to the CEO's of the Fortune 500 and to every Senator and Representative would make that clearer (note that the outcome of the French Revolution was *disaster* for France -- virtually every French male between ages 18 and 35 ended up *DEAD*), but frankly I doubt that our feudal overlords are smart enough to "get it". More likely they'd just arrest you for terrorist threats or some shit like that...

- Badtux the Waiting-for-the-explosion Penguin

Look, honey, I found 7,000 votes!

Wisconsin discovers 7,000 votes for GOP candidate. Said votes had apparently been "accidentally" left on a county recorder's personal computer, and "accidentally" discovered during the canvassing process.

Hmm... I seem to recall another election where something of the sort happened... Box 13, anybody?. I guess the question is whether the registration book was signed in alphabetical order in the same handwriting, or they got several different people to sign it when they schlupped Box 13 up to Wisconsin ;).

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The revolution starts... err... not.

So in the aftermath of the Egyptian public driving out their President-for-life with protests and strikes in the aftermath of Mr. President-for-life Mubarak failing to take care of the fundamental business of the people -- that is, making sure that his people had jobs, food, housing, that kinda shit -- some of the folks of the lefty sort say, "uhm, say, we got those problems too, when are the Americans going to follow the Egyptian example and have a revolution of their own?"

What a *great* idea! And hey, we have one of these revolution thingies every two years, you betcha. Why, back in 2010 we actually had one of them there "revolution" thingies, called, "a vote". And, uhm... excuse me. You see the bozos that got elected? Republicans who hate government welfare except when they collect it themselves, teabaggers waving their sacks around while proclaiming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", the works.

So, as usual, the stupidest, most corrupt, most inept people got elected, while people with smarts were called "elitists" and had no more chance of being elected than The Mighty Fang has of flapping his ears and flying to the moon. At which point I gotta say... revolution? Dude. If Americans aren't going to even take the time out of their days to research the candidates and elect the best ones rather than the most corrupt ones (the ones who've taken the most bribes... err... "campaign contributions"... and thus have the slickest ads), what makes you think that they'd take even more time out of their day to, like, hold massive demonstrations and shut down cities and shit day after day? It is to laugh. If Americans are too lazy, stupid, and apathetic to even take the easy route to revolution, i.e., simply researching who's the best candidate and voting for him, they certainly aren't going to inconvenience themselves by marching in the streets.

So congratulations, America. You have your chance for revolution every 2 to 6 years (depending on the politician in question)... and you instead vote for Hosni Mubarak's clone brothers each and every time. It is to laugh. Or cry, depending upon whether you're one of those who've been thrown out of work by the oligarchs and corrupt puppet politicians or not.

-- Badtux the Cynical Penguin

Oh yeah, that investigation of BP

A right wingnut asked why I didn't have a post about the "independent" inquiry that "cleared" BP of misconduct in the Gulf Coast oil spill. Was I embarrassed, he asked?

Err, no. More like just smiling and nodding knowingly, because it was clear from the beginning that the government was going to do their best to cover up BP’s liability, starting from the fact that they actively hindered researchers from gathering information that could have independently established the extent of the oil flow, to their statements in the media that basically gave BP atta-boys for their response to the oil spill. So this “independent enquiry” (which had no subpoena power and no ability to, like, actually question the crewmembers on the drillrig or examine the real physical evidence) is just more of the same, just another sop to throw the rubes so that the American public won’t try to make mean old BP pay for destroying the ecology of the U.S. Gulf Coast for the next 20 years. You’ll note that I don’t post every morning about the Sun rising above the horizon either… I mean, why post about the obvious and predictable, duh?

So anyhow, there ya have it. Sun rose in the East this morning. Government released another whitewash report trying to hide corporate misconduct today. Yawwnnnnn... bore-ing!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Ideological fail crashes State of Virginia computer networks

The State of Virginia experienced a massive multi-day outage of almost all state computer systems due to contractor incompetence. Northrop-Grumman, the contractor, not only overcharged the State by approximately $2 billion for the IT infrastructure that failed, but did not even include system backups in the system design.

The reality is that the State of Virginia could have saved approximately $2 billion by simply hiring their own IT workers to design and implement the new network. Despite the ideological nonsense about how the free market can always do everything better than government, government employees are cheaper than contractors approximately 99.999999999% of the time -- they're willing to work for less than people with their experience and education would get in private business due to the better job security and benefits of government employment, and because they're eating their own dog food (i.e., their own paycheck is paid by the same IT system that they're designing), they have every incentive to get it right. It's the same reason why, when I was a government employee for a school district, my own curriculum materials that I designed myself for my own classroom were better than the materials developed by government contractors -- I had every incentive to get it right, because I was going to actually be using these materials. I wasn't doing it for a paycheck, I was doing it because I needed these materials and I needed them to be right.

So why didn't the State of Virginia simply hire the employees needed to implement and maintain the new network? Ideology. Simply ideology. Ideology says government is always more expensive than the free market -- despite the fact that in 99%+ of cases, contracting out a government-run function results in spending MORE money. Ideology, rather than pragmatic reality, drove this decision. That, and copious bribes from Northrop-Grumman to various Virginia politicians, of course. Oops, I forgot, they're not called "bribes", they're called "campaign contributions". My bad!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Corruption in the federal bureaucracy

One of the things that has become clear recently, whether we're talking about regulation of Wall Street, regulation of deep sea oil drilling, regulation of coal mining, or whatever, is that federal regulators are now working for the companies they're regulating, not for We The People.

So why is that? Well, you can blame this on ole' Saint Ronnie Ray-gun again. In 1983, Reagan eliminated the Federal Retirement System for all new federal employees. New employees would pay into Social Security like everybody else, and then pay into a 401(k)-like plan, with the Federal Government providing some matching money.

There were two things that occurred because of this. The first is that the Federal Government had to start paying people more in order to come to work for the government. Much more. Federal employees today are paid salaries typical of private enterprise, whereas before Reagan did this, federal employees accepted less money up front in order to get more money on the back end when they retired with a federal pension.

The second thing is that the new system encourages corruption. Back in the days when you put in your 30 years and then retired with a federal pension for life, there was no percentage for corruption. If you accepted prostitutes and bribes from one of the companies you regulated, you would at the very least be fired, and then you'd be forfeiting your 30 year retirement benefits. But now if you're fired, you still have your Social Security benefits paid in, and you still have your 401(k) contents, and you can go to work for the company that gave you the bribe because you still know other people within the federal bureaucracy who might be bribable.

In short, eliminating the FRS a) made federal employees more expensive, and b) increased the incentive to accept bribes from the industries you regulate, or accept job offers from them in exchange for giving them what they want regulation-wise. Federal employees no longer have a reason to stay with the Federal government for the next 30 years, since there is no longer a pension waiting for them at the end of the line, so if someone offers a Federal employee a cushy job for the next few years if the Federal employee rules in favor of the company... well, there's no monetary reason to *not* do it. You're not giving up your federal pension, after all, because there *isn't* a federal pension...

So anyhow, that is why as the people covered under FRS have retired, and new employees have come in, that corruption in federal regulatory bodies has become rampant. Let that be a lesson to state and local governments planning on slashing their public employees retirement plans: That way leads to runaway corruption and higher personnel expenses overall. 'Nuff said.

-- Badtux the Pensionless Penguin

Cindy Sheehan doesn't get it

Cindy says, in an interview by PlanetGreen:

PG: In the time since your son’s death, you have been on a journey that I’d guess you could’ve never seen coming. What has been the biggest surprise over the past six years?

CS: Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt and are both working against our interests.

Oh poor naive woman. Look. Every single one of those bastards in Congress got elected by the majority of voters in their respective district or state. They're not there because they were installed by some evil dictator. They're there because the American people want them there.

But why, you ask? Why does the American public keep electing corrupt tools to Congress? Well... the problem is that most Americans *like* it that way. Because they feel that if they ever “make it”, they deserve to be coddled by a corrupt crony political class too. Of course, they never will “make it” — if you’re born rich in the US you tend to die rich in the US, if you’re born poor in the US you tend to die poor in the US, with very few exceptions to the contrary, we have a very stratified society with almost non-existent social mobility compared to civilized nations — but every American loves to dream that he’s going to figure out some way to make a million bajillion bucks and then be in the same place as the rest of the oligarchs, with corrupt politicians at his beck and call.

So Cindy Sheehan’s observation gets a big shrug from most Americans. And they continue voting for the same corrupt politicians they’ve voted for over and over again, rather than for someone who isn’t in the pocket of the oligarchs. Indeed, the more corrupt you are, the more bribe money err “campaign contributions” you’ve accepted from the oligarchs, the more likely you are to be elected here in the USA. Baffling, astounding even, but true.

- Badtux the Cynical Penguin