The Bulletpoint Blog: February 2005

Sunday, February 27, 2005

$646 Billion Dollars.

$646 Billion is $2100 per US citizen. For a war... for the wrong war.

Gaa!

From the Asia Times

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Scott Ritter, In my own backyard

Wow. According to Mark Jensen, Scott Ritter told the audience at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, WA that Bush steals foreign elections too, and In June, the Iran bombings start.

... but that wasn't the main point of his talk. His main point is that we need to be more vigilant in protecting our constitution.

Newsworthy? I'd think so, but I doubt that the corporate media will utter a peep.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Confessions of "an editor who ran Bush propaganda"

Newsjocks' post at DemocraticUnderground very clearly illustrates the reasons that the news media panders so excessively to the right wing. Confessions of "an editor who ran Bush propaganda"
As with all things, it boils down to money. The right wing can afford to hire phone banks to pressure senior editors to print what they consider acceptable.

Until last year, I was the news editor at a midsized daily newspaper, a paper owned by one of the larger newspaper chains. I was the news editor at this paper when Bush* took office, and I stayed there through 9/11, the runup to war, and the war. I, too, would like to see heads roll over what the media did in that time, but it's not that easy.Day after day, I'd see the crap coming across the wires, and I'd have to decide whether to put it in the paper, and if so, where to play it and what headline to put on it. Every time, without fail, if there was anything on the wire that supported the Bush* administration and we did not run it prominently and "favorably," the very next day, we would get a stream of phone calls from angered conservatives who railed on and on about the "liberal media." These calls, not surprisingly, registered in the offices of our senior editors ("news editor" is not a "senior editor," by the way), and those editors -- who feared for their own jobs if they pissed off readers and lost circulaton -- insisted that we present the news in a way that was favorable to the administration's position.Indeed, after the first few days of the Iraq invasion, our corporate offices put out an advisory that their "research" was showing that readers were "tired" of news from Iraq, and that we needed to switch back to local news, quickly, relegating nearly all Iraq news to tiny spaces inside the paper.Nonetheless, I was able to get stories into the paper that were appropriately skeptical. Those stories appeared periodically, and the Washington Post has already atoned for their repeated sin of burying such stories on Page A17 and beyond when they came up. That caused no end of pain at my paper, when senior editors would see the next day that stories I had placed on the front page were buried inside the Post. We were showing inappropriate bias against the administration, they argued -- after all, if it's not important to the Post, why should it be important to us?A year after the invasion (oh yes, we steadfastly refused to call it "war" for as long as we could; it was an "attack," not a "war"), the nonstop drumbeat of pressure from senior editors -- caused mostly by the nonstop drumbeat of pressure from readers -- I finally decided that my stress level was getting way too high, and I had to bail. I'm still in newspapers, but I'm not on the hard-news side, at least for now. But I have three years of front pages on PDFs sitting here on CDs. When the day comes -- and I know it will -- I will be able to show that I did not fall for this administration's bullshit. And with that, I hope to someday work in real news again, when journalism in the United States is once again allowed to be journalism.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Support the troops part 2

The Abu Ghraib facility has a long history of torture. In 1991, a group of US pilots were tortured there by officials of Saddam Hussein.

Those US airmen have sued and won a judgement against the government of Iraq for compensation. They have now hit a big legal obstacle; George Bush. Bush's justice department intervened on behalf of the Iraqi government to overturn the judgement.

The 17 airmen's original judgement was for $959 million. Although the Bush administration has many flaws, for the most part they can count. If US courts believe that the appropriate punishment for torture should be $56 million per victim, the hundreds of "detainees" they have tortured provide a strong financial incentive to object to the judgement.

From Reuters.

US financing the insurgents? "Support the troops" indeed.

Let's review;

We attacked Saddam because he was an ally of Osama. Uh, wait...
We attacked Saddam because he had yellowcake uranium from Nigeria. Oops, no...
We attacked Saddam because he had chemical weapons? Sorry.
How about we attacked Saddam because we believe that Iraq would be better off as a democracy?

Right... no objections? That's it then, "we did it to create a free and democratic Iraq".

So to help incubate this hypothetical democratic society in Iraq, our troops are now fighting insurgents. The Iraqis took our rhetoric at face value - so they demanded an election. That election has now taken place and the fundamental(ist) result is essentially that Iran won the Iraq election.

Oops, that's not what we had in mind at all. What are we going to do?

Here's an idea; since we don't like the government that they elected, we'll start supporting the insurgents.

According to the Asia Times, the US is now buying guns, rpg's, ammunition and other light weaponry from Pakistan and providing it to the Ba'ath militia to fight against the Shi'ite elected government.

Let that sink in for a moment.

What part of "supporting the troops" is served by providing guns to their enemies? Didn't these guys learn anything from their experience in Iran Contra?

Can someone please give me a definition of "providing aid and comfort to the enemy" that the above story would not exemplify? This isn't the kind of rhetorical "providing aid and comfort" that right wingers claim war critics do, but the kind of literal aid inherent in providing actual bullets to actual enemies.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Economy had a great year, but why no new jobs?

The growth in the economy was accompanied by fewer jobs and a drop in household earnings. Why? Because healthcare cost increases took one-quarter of the increase in GDP.

This is absolutely not scalable. We already spend twice what citizens pay in other countries, yet we don't live as long as Cubans.

Bush's solution? Essentially, his solution is to do away with employer-provided health insurance. Apparently, the fact that 50% of bankruptcies are already caused by health care costs are not sufficient evidence that uninsured individuals can't afford it.

The authors of the Boston University study repeat our perennial mistake: "Yes, universal, single-payer health care is the solution that has worked in every other country, but it won't work here because we're incrementalists."

Monday, February 07, 2005

You've been Lay'd

If you live in the west, the Bush budget will raise $2 Billion by raising your electric rates. Call it The Blue-State tax.

Public power: Build it and Bush will steal it.

Thanks Stash.

$1.7 Trillion in unclaimed property

My home state, Washington, has a website dedicated to returning unclaimed property. People who have bank refunds or other small checks awaiting them for a variety of sources can go to the Department of Revenue to collect.
The federal government wants to assure that you never collect on your biggest receivable of all - $1.7 trillion worth.
If you're a worker, the Social Security Administration has $1.7 trillion in the bank awaiting your retirement. That figure that has grown about $155 billion in the last year alone.
Bush intends for the government to never have to repay their debt to you AND they want taxpayers to divert 30% of the Social Security income stream into the stock market. The way that they intend to coax people to divert these funds is based on a big lie; "You'll get more money from the stock market".
No, you won't. Here's why. There are big costs that have not been accounted for in reform discussions.
If SS were only a retirement fund, it would stand to reason that the 30% you diverted from Social Security would result in a slightly more than 30% cut in your SS benefits. However, there is one very big caveat;

SS is not just retirement insurance. Almost 30% of the after-reform expenditures are unrelated to old-age benefits. Workers who diverted their taxes from SS still share the burden of funding disability and survivors insurance as well as bearing the entire burden of borrowing to pay current retirees. 22% of current SS expenditures are for non-retirement programs.
In other words, for the system to remain solvent, retirees who (when they were young and easily misled) elected to divert their taxes would have their SS benefits cut almost 40% - perhaps more. The difference represents the extra cost of borrowing as well as the increased proportion of "overhead" - the fixed cost of the survivors and disability programs. The below charts illustrate the point.

Current Social Security

The above chart illustrates the relationship of the various forms of Social Security expenditures today. $0.78 of each dollar expended goes toward retirement benefits. $0.15 goes to disability insurance payments, $0.07 goes toward survivors payments and fractional penny goes toward other stuff, like administration.

Social security after reform

After reform in which 30% of the income stream is diverted, the total pie is still the same size ($531 b in todays dollars), but non-retirement expenditures make up a larger proportion of the remainder. In a post-reform SS system, non-retirement expenses are equivalent to over 50% of the amount provided to retirees.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

A frozen egg = a person

Yesterday, a Cook County judge ruled that the "parents" of a fertilized egg accidentally thrown out by a fertility clinic can file a wrongful death lawsuit.
In other news, the editor of this blog filed his tax return, listing as dependents; the contents of his freezer.

Lumberjack's Dependents

Name that scandal

John Perr recently conducted a Name That Bush Scandal Contest Some of the submissions are hilarious.

Iraq WMD:

Iraq-style Dysfunction
Weapons of Mental Deficiency
Wild Nukes Chase

Armstrong Williams:

Funditry
Hackdraft
Propagate
No Bribe Left Behind

Abu Ghraib:

Chains of command

Medicare reform:

Medicon
Elderscrew
Medicarelessness
MediScam

Mission Accomplished Speech:

Premature Emancipation
Misaccomplishmentality
George of the Bungle

Valerie Plame:

Whack-a-Mole
Intimigate
Treasonable Doubt

Bogus Iraq-Niger Yellowcake Uranium claims:

Cake Walk
Rice Cake
Bay of Fibs

Bush National guard non-service:

MIA (missing in Alabama)
Air Fortunate One
If the Superscript doesn't fit, you must Acquit.

I've heard some good ones for Social Security:

Social (or private) Insecurity
Antisocial Security
Piratization
Alpo Accounts
Credit Card Retirement Accounts
The Cannibal Plan
Soylent Security
So-So Security
(what a) Sucker Security
Social Duplicity
Pirate Accounts
Brokerage Security

Friday, February 04, 2005

Moderation? Leverage = force times distance.

I just found this post on DemocraticUnderground. It is excellent.

Republicans have been telling me for a couple of months now that Democrats need to move to the right on issues or risk becoming irrelevant.

Hogwash.

Our DLC-type leadership are sellouts. I am disgusted with them. They not only helped the person most responsible with protecting us from 9-11 obtain her new job speaking for us on the international stage, they also supported Alberto Gonzales, the man who wrote an official policy of torture and gave incomplete legal advice to then-governor Bush in life-or-death decisions. It is not at all unlikely that he is singly responsible for the execution of innocents and torture on a systematic scale.

What does it take?

I can excuse elected officials for acting in an unprincipled, pragmatic fashion, when it serves a bigger purpose. I can't excuse them for acting in an unprincipled fashion when it undermines the bigger purpose. If Democrats retake power, our swirling circuits around the porcelain bowl can be arrested. However, our Democratic leaders are acting as if they are enjoying the ride.

To retake power, our elected officials need to speak with conviction about principles that are supposed to guide america, and particularly the Democratic party.

I am very hopeful that Dean can help to drive the national dialogue in such a way that the power of truth, applied at enough ideological distance from the current meme that the public begins to question the issues that the press hasn't the courage to tackle.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue
The ends may justify the means, but the absence of a virtuous end does not.
Moving the dialog back from the right wing fringe will require a bold approach, not a marginal one, and applied at an ideological distance.

Who pays for government?

The image below shows the relationship over time of the various forms of taxes to the government. As you can see, although individual income taxes have remained relatively stable at around 45% of total income to the government, social insurance taxes (medicare and SS) have increased dramatically. So what kind of taxation has decreased to allow for such a shift to workers? Corporate income taxes, of course.

Types of tax as a share of total revenue

It should also be noted that this chart does not include the effects of elimination of Capital Gains and estate taxation. Both of which will shift the burden off of individual income tax and further onto workers.

There's only one kind of entity taxed in our society - workers.
Corporate taxes have dropped while Social Security and Medicare taxes have increased.
A drop in social welfare taxes would ordinarily result from the baby boomers reaching retirement.
An increase in general fund expenditures would occur, a result from the redemption of the boomers savings bonds to pay for their retirement.
The real impetus for SS reform is a desire to keep the burden of society on the backs of workers and relieve capital of the need to repay its debt.

Three imperatives for saving the country

you don't govern if you don't win.
your best chance of winning is to study the habits of those who have won.
"values" and "principles" have no business in a discussion about winning.

The Republican party now runs all the machinery of society, so they get to apply their principles. They got there by winning. We, the people, may gripe that they didn't follow the rules, but the reality is that they did follow the rules or the referee would have thrown them out.

There's no referee? Then there are no rules, silly. And we Democrats fancy ourselves as smart. Bah!

Karl Rove once "found" a bug in his office and called the cops to investigate about an hour before a major press conference by his candidate's opponent. Why is this interesting? The bug had a battery that would last 1 hour, of which about 15 minutes had been used by the time the cops arrived.

No tactic is off limits unless it is ineffective. Were the swift boat lies ineffective? Was the Rove-forged CBS memo ineffective? Was leaking Valerie Plame's identity to Novak ineffective? Was the Bush/Cheney "be scared" mantra ineffective? Were Bush's lies to us about Iraq ineffective?

The worst president in history just won by using cheaper, more brutal, more devious, nastier and all around better tactics.

Unfortunately, this is not what Democrats are good at. We need to learn. The next DNC chair should be someone who can light the fires of righteous passion in the true believers. He, in turn, should hire the creepiest, most amoral psychopath he can find to run the campaigns.

Case in point, the hypothetical boycott of products advertised on local right wing radio. The reason we should not boycott is because at this time it's counterproductive, not because of any other consideration, and we shouldn't be all squirmy about that calculation.

I admit - I have a fantasy about what the ideal US Government would look like, the values it would promote and the policies it would defend, but until Democrats win it's just a form of self-abuse.

Social Security reform

Bush's current Social Security reform proposal is the most brilliantly malevolent scam in history.

To make the case that a crisis exists within the next twenty years, it is necessary to assume that the government is not good on its debts... however,
To assume that privatized accounts will yield anything at all, it is necessary to assume that the government is good for its debts. (If the US won't honor its debts, then the worlds currency has no value. Therefore, the worldwide economy has no foundation. It is hard to visualize a thriving stock market within this context.)
To make the case that a crisis exists, if the government allows retirees to withdraw their savings from the trust fund, it is necessary to assume that our economy will grow pitifully - about 1/3 as fast in the next 75 years as it has in the last 75 years.
To treat privatized accounts as the cure for the "crisis" it is necessary to assume that the economy will grow at least as fast in the next 75 years as it has in the past.

Matt Yglesias has an excellent deobfuscation of this topic on his blog.

Suffice to say, there is no underlying logic behind the proposal - save the logic that every burglar uses: "I can make your stuff become my stuff and not get caught! Cool!"

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