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The Expansionist
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
 
David Rockefeller (1915-2017)
I once rode up in an elevator with David Rockefeller in 30 Rock[efeller Center]. He was already a man in late middle age, but entered a public elevator in a major Manhattan skyscraper open to the general public without a bodyguard, and with only one other middle-aged man in a quality suit, who seemed to me to be a business colleague — who also did not feel the need for a bodyguard. "So what?", you may wonder. I'll tell you what that meant, and still means, to me.
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The United States used to be a country in which the rich were not hugely separated from the rest of us, not hated, and did not feel the need to surround themselves with "security". How many people, as rich in 2017 terms as David Rockefeller was in 1980's terms, would dare risk being assaulted, or even killed, if ordinary people could get within three or four feet of them, as I did?
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Malicious, rapacious greed has rendered the rich into targets of hatred and the will to kill, among a large proportion of American society. Only rich people well known to be philanthropists can dare to go without protection from the outraged great majority of society. How wonderful the life that the rich have made for themselves, to be imprisoned by justified fear of being murdered anytime they are anywhere, even in their well-defended estates or gated communities. Who truly believes that their "security" is impenetrable? Bank vaults are not impervious to invasion by determined, knowledgeable criminals. Wouldn't it be better to be less rich but more secure everywhere they go?
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You and I might think that living large in the greatness of society, with all the freedoms that being an ordinary person affords, would be worth a fortune, and thus it would be better to be starkly less rich, relative to the bulk of society, than to live in obscene luxury but be prisoners of fear. Which would you rather have, gold faucets in a marble bathroom or the ability to buy an ice-cream cone and walk freely thru the park without fear of being killed because people HATE you? If you experience even momentary hestitation in choosing between those options, you need to rethink your values.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:15 AM
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
 
Trump's 2005 Tax Returns? Who Cares?
Media and the White House are making much ado about financial nothing, in discussing Donald Trump's tax returns from 2005, 10 years before the year we were concerned with during the Presidential campaign. The bulk figures show that Trump, who made $150 million that year, like all of the obscenely rich, cheated Americans of modest means. Even if the effective tax rate is a bit higher than that on a person who made $50,000 a year, the impact upon the lifestyle of the person of typical income is vastly greater. What matters is this differential impact.
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The purpose of a progressive taxation policy is to REDUCE unfair differential impacts between the rich and the rest of us. Ideally, the obscenely rich should be progressively, and starkly, reduced in wealth, to bring the Nation closer to equal effective treatment of all citizens. In what other area of life is there the kind of differential between individuals? Do the rich live 60 times as long as the typical citizen? No. Are they 60 times as tall, heavy, muscular, smart as people of modest means? No. Only in monetary terms is there the kind of preposterous differential between the rich and the rest. The typical income in the United States is $52,250. Let's do a little calculation, which you can do on Google if you don't have a dedicated calculator or a calculator program at hand. $150 million divided by $52,250 is 2,870.8. So a person like Trump made about 2,871 TIMES as much as the typical citizen. How can anyone regard that as reasonable or fair?
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After he paid his taxes, he still had $112 million. After the ordinary human being in the United States pays their taxes, they have $44,412, from which they must pay all expenses, usually for a family of 3 or 4, including mortgage/rent, food, insurance, one or more cars and their expenses, including liability insurance, college for the kids, retirement, and everything else in life. After basic expenses are deducted, the ordinary citizen is left with somewhere between a PITTANCE and — NOTHING. Nobody needs $112 million A YEAR! Everybody needs more than a pittance, esp. if some unforeseen expense comes up, such as medical costs for injuries from a traffic accident that are not covered by the insurance that people felt they could afford to pay, either because of a deductible or copays or both. And now the Republicans want to make sure that people must pay thru the nose for health insurance. If that ruins their lives, that's TUF. Don't go crying to the Republican leadership, because they have NO sympathy for you or anyone else who is not rich. Your problems are YOUR problems, and they won't let you 'push off onto others' YOUR problems. To their mind, "society" and "social responsibility" are ridiculous delusions.
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This is what passes for fairness in the United States in 2017, and it will be far worse if the Republican let-them-die-if-they-cannot-pay, healthcare bill is enacted. Republicans don't want their proposal called "Trumpcare"? OK. How about the DIYCPA — Die If You Can't Pay Act?
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Implicit in the stance of the Republican Party is that the rich EARN what they get, and the poor get what little they deserve, because they are not worthy of wealth. I wish they would tell that to the yahoos who are their core constituency. "You are poor because you deserve to be poor. And we are going to do everything in our power, which was really YOUR power until you gave it to us, to see that you get exactly what you deserve: nothing." Yes, by all means tell them that.
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The rich do NOT necessarily — indeed, do not generally — EARN the difference in income they enjoy over other citizens. In fact, it is rare that the obscenely rich earned their wealth. In a very few cases, such as Internet megamillionaires, they might have reaped a fortune because they produced a superior product or service. But it's all luck as to whether a product or service catches on and continues to amass or even maintain the fortune that Internet tycoons make. Just think of all the tech companies that have disappeared, and all the devices that failed to catch on. Wikipedia has a list of some of the more spectacular casualties of the dot-com crash. Why did pets.com fail but other major pet-supply companies survive? Why did Myspace fall out of vogue, in favor of Facebook? Myspace went from 1,600 employees in 2009 to 200 in 2011. Wise people know the difference between money really earned and simple good "fortune".
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The public is fickle, and today's biggest tech companies could disappear. Exxon offered a dedicated word-processing machine, Vydec, which dominated the field, and was only partially displaced by Wang Laboratories' word-processor. But when personal computers started to be used in word-processing centers, Exxon shut down Vydec. Wang went bankrupt and was sold on the cheap to a Dutch company. Facebook could prove a flash in the pan. And Google is doing some things very badly (such as Google Photos, a massively inferior replacement for Picasa Online Albums), that may foreshadow serious difficulties in the future.
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It's all a matter of luck.
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The same holds for many of the richest individuals today, who did not earn their money from the outset but inherited their wealth, as Donald Trump inherited his base wealth. Remember his appallingly preposterous statement that he took a small loan of A MILLION DOLLARS from his father? Why didn't the impoverished redneck yahoos who comprise The Donald's base of support catch wise to his scams from that? Oh, that's right: they're poor because they're STUPID, and so, according to the thinking of Trump's ilk, they deserve to be bilked.
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The rich also make contacts with other rich people in positions to steer business their way, contacts that ordinary people do not have. The rich get jobs in which they are given enormous salaries that bear no relation to the difficulty of the work they do, or what the typical worker makes. The rich in the corporate suite pay themselves very well, and provide themselves bonuses, stock options, and other forms of remuneration that ordinary workers do not receive. The system is, as Trump might say, if he were being honest — which, of course, he cannot bring himself ever to be — "rigged" to provide huge advantages to the rich and keep those benefits away from the poor and middle class. What our tax system should be is FAIR, but no one on Earth could say that taxation in this country is fair.
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Worse, in the case of Trump's taxes, the information given is aggregated, with no specifics as to source of income, by which we would be able to determine possible influences upon his behavior by business contacts, including foreign, esp. including Russian, individuals and corporations.
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So, of what value is the info about Trump's 2005 taxes? None. It is a distraction from the fact that Trump has STILL not released comprehensive information about his 2015 taxes, with all that might appear in them about possible sources of corruption of his Administration by his far-flung business empire and esp. operations in, you guessed it, Russia.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:57 AM
Wednesday, March 08, 2017
 
Hunt Down and Kill Everyone in WikiLeaks — and All Its Defenders
WikiLeaks is guilty of mass espionage, and ALL its members need to be hunted down and at least arrested and tried for espionage, with an automatic and unappealable death penalty upon conviction, or summarily executed, without trial, wheresoever its members may be found,. Why hasn't the CIA done that? This is war, not civil litigation or even economically motivated criminal activity. War. We don't trouble even to try to arrest enemy soldiers in individual trials. We kill as many as we need to win the war. And so we should kill everyone in WikiLeaks and everyone who defends its war against the United States.
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So, Mr. Trump, Do You Still Love WikiLeaks? During his campaign for the Presidency, Donald Trump famously proclaimed "I love WikiLeaks!" Yes, he really did say that! It was plainly disloyalty at the time, and if he repeats it now, it will be the exact equivalent of treason. So say it, Mr. Trump, so we can impeach you for treason.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM
Monday, March 06, 2017
 
More Tempests in a Teapot
I am hostile to Donald Trump and all his co-conspirators against this Republic and the planet Earth, but I'm not so carried away by hatred that I have lost all perspective and tossed aside all honesty. The extreme enemies of the Trump Administration, are manufacturing mountains from molehills again. The first is Jeff Sessions' having met with the Russian ambassador twice during the MANY months of the Presidential campaign. Big f* deal. That's what ambassadors do: they meet people, esp. influential people, in the country they are posted to, and try to make friends for their own country.
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The United States' embassy in Moscow has various organizational departments, such as an intelligence-gathering unit, in which Americans fluent in the spoken and printed Russian language read thru ALL major publications, scan ALL major news and public-affairs broadcasts, read as many regional publications as they can get, and speak with dissidents and prominent mainstream figures in Russian society. The Russian embassy here does the same thing in reverse.
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The issue is not whether Sessions met the ambassador but whether he lied about it. It is possible that he didn't remember an incidental contact of, say, three to seven minutes, in passing, and so he didn't lie about not remembering if he discussed the campaign. Plainly, during such a contentious time, any reasonable person would expect some aspect of the campaign to come up when people in public affairs met. It really is not a big deal, and we have much more important matters with which to concern ourselves. People hostile to Trump don't need to grasp at straws. I even agree with a few of Trump's stated policies, such as deporting ALL illegal aliens (tho he has, as usual, backtracked on that, as he backtracks on ALL his pledges from the campaign) — and no, I do not accept the recent renaming of illegals as "undocumented immigrants", because "immigrant" implies legitimacy. I would term them "barbarian invaders", and they are ALL lawbreakers, because they broke our immigration LAWS — not "recommendations" nor "informal policies", but LAWS. And they compete unfairly with the lowest echelons of American labor, partcularly native-born blacks and Latinos, drastically undercutting their wages and benefits, for NO benefit to society at large.
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Slaves WERE Immigrants. The second trivial matter of recent days concerns the statement by Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, (the moron) Ben Carson, referring to slaves as "immigrants". Let's not just wander around the intellectual firmament but consult the dictionary as to the exact meaning of "immigrant".
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Microsoft Encarta dictionary: "a newcomer to a country who has settled there". That is a perfect match. The definition does not address whether they immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily. That is not the issue. Yes, slaves from Africa were from another country; yes, they did settle here (altho almost all settled in this geograffic area before it became the United States; so the "country" they immigrated involuntarily to was Virginia or South Carolina, not the United States); ergo, they were indeed immigrants. That they didn't choose to come to what became the United States is irrelevant. The children of immigrants do not choose to come here either. They are taken, without their consent, by their parents, even if they didn't want to leave their friends, grandparents, cousins, schools, soccer teams, etc., behind.
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The American Heritage Dictionary defines "immigrant" thus: "A person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another." That is, again, a point-for-point match.
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Dictionary.com says an immigrant is "a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence", with no mention of voluntary or involuntary migration. That is, again, a perfect match. Carson did NOT misspeak.
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Yes, slaves WERE immigrants, and what Carson said further about them is absolutely true: "There were ... immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day, their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters ... might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land." Before anyone claims that slaves worked for "free", not "less", they got paid in housing and food — what is now known as "room and board". Indeed, it is one of the ironies of history that poor whites fought for the perpetuation of an economic structure in which monetarily-unpaid slave labor unfairly competed with free white labor, undercutting their wages and reducing them almost to slavery themselves.
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How can anybody argue with what Ben Carson said? Yes, slaves indeed "worked even longer, even harder for less". And many, if not every last one, did "ha[ve] a dream that one day, their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters ... might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."
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Fallon's Nonsense. NBC's latenite talkshow host Jimmy Fallon complained about a fotograf of Kellyanne Conway kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office, on the basis that she had her shoes on. But the foto does not show her feet!, and no one has produced a foto that does show her feet, with or without shoes on the fabric. So why did Fallon make so silly an accusation? Come on, people, let's stick to legitimate matters of public poicy. There is a lot to criticize Kellyanne Conway for. Kneeling on a couch is not one of them.
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Colbert Disgraces Himself. Stephen Colbert has lost his mind. He is constantly making 'jokes' about the outrageous accusations that Donald Trump watched Russian prostitutes urinating on each other for his amusement. NO ONE has presented ANY CREDIBLE EVIDENCE that such a thing ever happened, but Colbert keeps running with it, in hideous, crude, unfit-for-television "comedy" skits. That is irresponsible and contemptible in the extreme, AS contemptible and irresponsible as Trump's assertion that President Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped. Why the double standard, Mr. Colbert?
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Cease and desist, or a great many people will stop watching your show — I for one turned it off mid-skit — and indeed pressure CBS to REMOVE IT FROM THE AIR. Even if the assertions were true, and there is NO good reason to believe one way or the other, this is NOT a matter for public discourse (given Colbert's disgraceful behavior, perhaps we should spell that "discoarse"). Nor is the assertion that Donald Trump has unusually small hands fit for public discourse. All that that assertion is supposed to imply is disparagement about genital size — as tho genital size matters, one way or another! That is NOT an issue for public discourse in civilized society. And Donald Trump's hands look to me to be perfectly appropriate in size, if you compare them to the heads of normal people shown in fotos alongside him. What confuses some (feebleminded) people visually is that Trump's HEAD is ENORMOUS. Am I the only person in the Nation who has observed that? In any case, when did major U.S. media lose all standards of decency, to talk about sexual oddities and genital size? (I pass over the observation that it's not the size but the motion that matters in ordinary heterosexual intercourse. So is Stephen Colbert a pervert? You have to wonder.)
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Give It a Rest. Why is anyone complaining about these trivia? Everything Ben Carson said in his criticized remarks is absolutely true. Hold your fire for something UNtrue and viciously so, such as Trump's insane assertion that President Obama had his office/home(?) in Trump Tower wiretapped. We already know that Trump is a pathological liar, but perhaps he is more generally pathological, seriously ill mentally, as disqualifies him to remain in office.
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There is a constitutional amendment, the 25th, that provides for the temporary replacement of a President who cannot fulfil the obligations of the office. So to remove this madman from the Presidency, at least temporarily, and even if temporarily, again and again until his term expires, we do NOT need to impeach him, but merely to employ the mechanism set out in the 25th Amendment to find Trump unable to function by reason of (mental) disability. What if Donald Trump comes to have the delusion that Communist China or North Korea is about to launch a ballistic-missile assault upon us, so uses the nuclear codes to launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on one or BOTH of those countries? That is worth very serious consideration. None of the other matters I raised today is worth two seconds' attention.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

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