Author Archives: deanwebb

Political Percentages

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47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes, although they still pay sales taxes. In that 47% are the very poor, military overseas, and the retired elderly. Also the disabled. Yet, there is one group in that 47% of Americans that don’t pay income taxes that isn’t angry about Mitt Romney’s gaffe: they’re the richest of the rich, whose incomes have gone up 385% in the last 20 years, while the bottom 90% of American incomes have declined by 1% in the same time frame. Those guys don’t pay taxes, or pay very little, and they all know how to take huge streams of taxpayer money and direct them towards their businesses and bank accounts.

It’s disgusting how the rich of this nation have forgotten that we are all debtors to the earth and our national ancestors. This is not a land to be consumed in an instant: it is to be husbanded carefully so that it will be in proper shape for our descendants. We are currently being ruled by plunderers, and the plunderers to watch are not the supposed ones that are barely able to keep from starving. No, the real plunderers, the real criminals, the real destroyers of democracy are people that live in houses with more bathrooms than bedrooms. They are the people that live in one of many houses like that, and they care nothing at all for the poor, the infirm, or the widows.

Well, let them cut aid for the poor. What they get will serve them right. I will pass over what may await them in an afterlife scenario. I will instead look to the rioting that happens around the world when people are starving and food prices go up. If our nation fails to care for its poor and they go hungry, we will see the destruction of the nation.

Even if we cling to fascism as a means of combatting nascent communism, it will be a fool’s bargain with the devil: does anyone remember that fascism demands militarism, and that when all the small targets are consumed, fascism commits a nation to a path that leads to world war. Do not point to Spain or Portugal as a model: the USA is a great power, and it must be compared to the fascism that ruled in Italy, Japan, and Germany as a possible glimpse into a future in which we forget our poor.

China Draws the Foul

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For those of you watching corporate media or living inside salt shakers – because the view of the world is roughly the same – China and Japan are close to blows over a set of rocks in the East China Sea. These rocks have lots of petrochemicals underneath them, but that’s not the big contention.

It’s the 81st anniversary of Japan’s unapologized-for invasion of Manchuria, and Japan’s assertion of sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands right up on that anniversary makes their move infinitely more insulting to China. Think of how we’d feel if Japan took control of a few outlying Hawaiian Islands on or about December 7. Well, it’s worse than that in China on account of their millions more of casualties from their war with Japan.

Anti-Japanese riots are all over China. The Chinese are sending 1000 fishing boats into the waters around the disputed islands. Each of these boats are updated with the latest in technology and have a multi tool to them that does everything. If the Japanese don’t stop them, then the Chinese will declare that they have a stronger claim on the islands. If the Japanese try to stop them, then China will claim a causus belli. China either gets the two points or the penalty shots, to use a basketball metaphor.

I’m flipping my lid over this because the US has a treaty with Japan and this will directly affect us even more than the anti-American rampages going through the Muslim world. That stuff, we pretty much expect. This business between China and Japan is something we need to be focused on, and our focus needs to be in finding a way to keep this conflict from escalating. Even if it only leads to a trade war, its effects will be devastating.

China makes nearly all the rare earths used in wireless technology – imagine a world in which there are no new cell phones or other like telecom devices. That’s just the start. Never mind preventing a shooting war, we need to halt the trade war.

Bollywood Lord of the Rings

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For all the people that complain about how the existing LOTR movies left things out or got things wrong, you should be clamoring for a Bollywood version of the epic series. First off, they’d make twelve films, three hours apiece, and keep everything in there. Second, the music wouldn’t put everyone to sleep. Sorry, Enya, but your tunes were the Snoozerville Trolley. A.R. Rahman would blow everyone away with his Bollywood LOTR score. Plus, dance numbers. Finally, audiences would really, really cry their eyes out at the sad parts. In the current films, Boromir dying is noble, but we move on. When Denethor goes up in smoke, it’s kind of a relief. Bollywood, though, would make us cry and we’d love it.

So… how about the casting?

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“Helicopter Ben” Lives Up to His Name – But What Will Be His Legacy?

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Ben Bernanke said the Fed will buy $85 billion in US debt every month through to the end of 2013. That means, by that time, the Fed balance sheet will have 25% of US GDP on its hands. It will eventually have to unwind all that. That will be hard to do.

But for the short term, look for higher prices at the pump, higher food prices, more desperate people about to retire that can’t get good yields on their investments, more insolvent state pension plans, aaaaaand… more riots, revolutions, and civil wars around the world.

Food prices spike up when the Fed does a round of QE*. When the Fed did its first move in 2008, we saw massive riots in the poor nations of the world. When QE2 hit in 2010, the riots were severe enough in North Africa to deliver the Arab Spring. Prices were already high enough this year to intensify the Syrian civil war and provide the foundation for the latest round of anti-US violence in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco (so far). This new QE looks set to send food prices even higher – and they were already higher in 2012 than they were in 2010.

Jeremy Grantham has said that we are five years into a severe global food shortage. This “QE to Infinity and Beyond” business from Bernanke is going to exacerbate that situation. We may soon see nuclear armed Pakistan and China descend into civil war because of food prices. China might be able to avoid war through draconian internal measures, but Pakistan is not capable of such action in my assessment.

The law of diminishing returns says that this QE will have less effect on the US economy than previous ones. It might even have no effect on the US economy outside of fueling a stock market bubble that will have tremendous fallout when it pops. But that law of diminishing returns is the least of our worries when we look at the law of inflation and how those food prices are going to affect Central America, South America, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Think about each in turn, because we do ourselves a disservice if we lump them all together. Can governments in those regions withstand an even more severe food shortage than the one they’re facing now?

*QE= Quantitative Easing, or the Federal Reserve’s purchase of bank loans that may or may not be dodgy… Japan tried it in 2001 and found it to be highly ineffective in the long run.

An Angry Redaction

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OK, so I endorsed Obama because I can’t stand the foreign policy people connected to Romney. Now I have to un-endorse Obama because I can’t stand the foreign policy people connected to his organization. Not only is a third carrier group underway to the Persian Gulf, which can only serve to further provoke and inflame Iran, Russia, and China, but this happened: Video of undemocratic stunt at Democratic convention…

That is unreal! The party wanted to add a platform plank that required a two-thirds majority. I don’t care if it was right or wrong to add the plank. It could have been about endorsing the official dog food of the Democratic party, for all I care. They ran the vote three times, and it was clear to me that there wasn’t a two-thirds majority for the plank… and the chairman rammed it through, anyway, claiming he heard a two-thirds majority in favor of it.

Democracy, that ain’t. Sorry, Democrats, but stuff like this should be unacceptable. At least half the people there didn’t want to have that on the party platform. In a two-thirds majority situation, the measure should have been defeated, not added to the platform.

This is all about power. Naked, aggressive power. I’ve seen this in the GOP, and I’m looking at it right now in the Democrat party. It’s like breaking a hole in the drywall and seeing the wood frame shot through with termite tunnels. How far does this go? How long has this been going on? If it’s been going on too long, is the structure able to be saved, or is it beyond repair?

I know that sounds terribly negative, and it’ll sound even more so when I say I don’t think it is savable, not with this system in place around it. I have hope for the future, but it lies more in myself and my community than in the people that hold power in the USA. There are ways to fix this mess, but they have to come from within individuals and not from within party platforms, as we can see here…

Dystopian Nonfiction

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Unless you live off the interest of your interest, you’re poor. Got that? If you think you’re middle class, then you just think you have a shot at getting rich. In the USA, that’s in the past unless you’re ready to participate in some truly massive crimes. Born poor, you stay poor, because that’s the way it is and you can check the statistics on that for yourself. I’m here today to talk about how to calculate the rate of decrease of wealth among the poor in the USA.

It’s simple. Look at the interest rates they’re paying on credit cards, houses, cars, and other loans. The interest rate is money they are boxing up and shipping to the richest of the rich, because that’s who’s lending the money at interest. I’ll start with the credit cards. The average interest rate on credit cards in the USA is just short of 17% and the average credit card debt in the USA is $16,000 per household. Now, yes, I know those are averages: the poorest folks don’t have credit card debt and the folks that call themselves middle class have many times more than that in credit card debt, but they’ll serve for my illustration just fine. 17% of $16,000 is $2720 in interest paid by every household in the USA on credit cards. There are 114 million (and change) households, so that’s roughly 113 million households that aren’t in the top 1%, so they’ll be paying that interest… so that’s about $308 billion dollars a year that go from the bottom to the top in credit card interest. Money flows uphill, people.

Put another way, credit card debt provides over $300,000 in income every year for the top 1%. They don’t have to work for it: you do. That 6% of average household income going to pay only the interest on the credit cars is paying for a year-round vacation for those beautiful people at the top. But wait – there’s more!

College loans in the USA are at $1 trillion now. That’s more debt than what’s in the credit cards. The average interest rate on student loans is 7.9%. That’s an additional $79 billion flowing uphill. If we have the households average all this out again, that’s $700 per household per year. That average household income of $44,389 just got squeezed by another 1.5% What could we do with a 7.5% pay increase? Well, the richest folks certainly don’t want to end their gravy train, so you’re not having that.

Don’t believe me? Look at how real wages have been flat or declining for a very, very long time. At the same time, our banks made it possible to borrow money in ways that it’s never been borrowed before. That’s two sources of increased profits: making you borrow more and paying you less than what you’re worth.

Then there’s mortgages: if credit cards are #3 and student loans are #2, then mortgages are #1. While it was relatively easy to get numbers on the first two things, mortgages seem to be a good deal more obfuscated in terms of aggregate data. No surprise to me: This is an industry in which 20% of the professionals have a felony conviction and the main real estate lobbying group has made sure that property purchases are exempt from money laundering restrictions – which means that high-end property in the USA is the perfect sink for the profits of crime.

This helped, though: http://www.cnt.org/repository/heavy_load_10_06.pdf. Fun fact: people that spend less money on houses away from city centers, on average, pay considerably more for transportation. 48% of household income goes in that direction – money for the real estate people, mortgage banks, car finance companies, and big oil.

Working families – under $50,000 in annual household income – pay another 9% of income in transportation costs. They also pay 15% of their income for food and 7.7% for medical care. 57 + 15 + 7.7 + the 7.5 from above = 87.2% of income… that leaves $5800 per year for everything else in our average family of $44K income. Could be worse – and it is for those closer to the poverty line – but it could also be better, without those interest payments going up to the people that really don’t need more of our money.

It could be much, much better as well if we didn’t have banks being run as casinos for the benefit of those rich people that aren’t content to simply hit us up for our spare cash every year. No, they need to make massive gambles in which they gain all the profits but – thanks to their lobbyists and de facto ownership of Congress – have zero risk of paying out to cover any losses. Trillions of dollars of losses.

Each trillion a megabank loses means $8849 per non-rich household in America. The nine biggest banks in the USA are on the hook for over $228 trillion in derivatives that are on the razor’s edge of going bust – that would be over $2 million per household in the USA when the bill comes due.

Don’t worry: we won’t have to pay it all at once. I’m sure we can arrange a payment plan.

Homemade Fudge

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OnePotChef’s fudge recipe is easy, quick, and delicious. Since I’m in the US, our goods aren’t necessarily the same size as his Aussie kit, but it’s simple to keep the ratio of chocolate to condensed milk at 1:1 and to use about half a stick of butter to get the necessary 50g he specifies. It all melts nicely in the microwave, a good stir gets the liquids to mix, and just be sure you have a spot cleared in the fridge to let the stuff cool down.

A Sneak Peek at “Women Look Better with Lasers”

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I’ve just started on my second book of short sci-fi stories. Here’s a little bit of it… I hope to have it ready to go by the end of next month.

Laurent Recherche shouted, “Charge them! Nobody wants to see a fashion show without live weapons!” At that command, two dozen assistants scrambled to make sure each laser gun had a fresh battery pack. The House of Recherche had its reputation on the line with this show, and every detail had to be perfect.

As the electronic music thumped through the PA system, models moved out on the catwalk, took a potshot at some target across the auditorium, and then sashayed back to change outfits and weapons systems. The audience roared with glee as each new outfit brought with it a display of marksmanship that resulted in a satisfying explosion or fire. Camera flashes mingled with zapgun lightning in a retina-deadening tour de force.

Of course there were critics. Always, there were critics! Only a handful had a true sense of fashion. The rest dressed like idiots and had their coterie of sycophants shout down anyone that dared to doubt their vision. They had connections in the industry and their critical eye had to be appeased, no matter if one wanted to design haute couture for the beautiful people or flog pret-a-porter to the proles. While Recherche longed to hear praise from the critics that knew their jobs, his line lived and died by the comments of the fashion-blind.

Flash and sizzle, therefore, were the order of the day. In some ways, Recherche had to be as false and shallow as the critics he loathed. Hence the lasers. Mere projectile guns, even with tracer rounds, were not as dramatic as the exquisite linear flashes of the laser gun. Those colored lines became extensions of the clothing, the danger in the weapon an expression of feminine power. Even the targets the models fired at had to be matched to their outfits for optimal results. Heaven forfend that Recherche should be panned by a critic for having a red laser disintegrate a magenta teddy bear! That was so three seasons ago!

The Chocolate Bomber

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Yes, such a person exists. During the Berlin Airlift, Gail Halvorsen took it upon himself to drop chocolate bars and gum on kids that watched the planes land at Tempelhof. I think that’s totally cool. His action inspired others to think of the kids and to donate their rations of chocolate and gum for the kids of West Berlin.

More than that, Halvorsen’s actions showed what can be done if we think of things greater than profits: freedom and compassion. We all are capable of volunteering and donating and visiting and encouraging. When I see what is wrong in the world, it is in people that have forgotten the most important things we can do. To remind them, it is not enough to say what needs to be done. Actions will show the way to what is better.

Gail Halvorsen did a great thing. Never mind the names of dictators or other monsters in our history books: in a better world, it is the names of people like Halvorsen that we will remember – not because we have to learn them, but because we want to learn them.

So here’s a link to a wonderful documentary of Col. Halvorsen and his inspiring actions. It’s an hour well worth spending, and it sure as heck beats listening to the recent waves of hot air blasting from the left and the right. This one arrives cool and refreshing, straight down the middle. Inspiring Lives: Gail Halvorsen

That Progressive Insurance Thing…

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For those that missed it, the basic story goes thusly: reckless driver kills a woman in her car. She has a $100,000 policy with Progressive for death or disability due to a vehicular accident. Progressive not only questions negligence without a court ruling against the other driver, it represents that other driver in court in that very negligence case.

To be sure, Progressive claims it was only looking out for its interests in the case and not really representing the other driver, but to represent its interests it worked to find that driver not negligent. This is not what corporations should do. Yes, they can do it, but that doesn’t mean they should. I always deal with call 1800 Truck Wreck if something happens on the road, they are rigorous at taking done in notes all the details, which can prove valuable against these corportations.

This corporation, like so many others (HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Countrywide, Enron, etc, etc…) is not acting in the best interests of the people of this nation. It should not operate in such a fashion. Yes, there’s shareholders to consider as part of a fiduciary responsibility, but that’s only due to laws that were written precisely to require that corporations behave like antisocial jerks at best and sociopathic mass murderers on other occasions – so as to increase profitability.

A corporation that puts all its emphasis on profitability is of no use to a people. We have massive problems in America and around the world because of corporations exploiting loopholes in laws that they’ve written in order to garner massive profits that would not have been otherwise possible. We will continue to have these problems if we do not change the fundamental nature of corporations.

Once upon a time, it was a felony for a person from a corporation to lobby a member of Congress. Once upon a time, owners of a corporation could be sued personally for the gross negligence of their company or its employees. With all the crap about teachers being responsible for things that are totally out of their control, how about we instead train those same cannons of responsibility on corporations and hold them responsible for the things that they actually can control, like pollution, high-frequency trading, collaboration with terrorists, funding nuclear weapons projects, and – yes – taking the side of the man that killed your sister for the sake of a few dollars’ profit.