During the Reagan years, when American institutions were being purged of religious bric-a-brac, right-wingers warned that Americans would substitute money for God as that which must be worshipped.
“Ummm, well, they’re probably right about that,” I thought to myself, somewhat uneasily because I hate to give Bible-bangers any credit for being right.
.
Little did I know how quickly the Elmer Gantry crowd would adapt to the new formula of worship:
Money = God’s love!
Pathetic.
Thank God for my liberal, Massachusetts Catholic upbringing. It keeps me from murdering people.

According to the Heritage Foundation, lots of poor people have unnecessary, luxurious gadgets like stoves and refrigerators. Surely they can sell these possessions they are undeserving of so that the “job creators” can keep a few bucks.

The right assumes its minions/vot4rs are too stupid to see the idiocy of what they’re touting – and that it’s been disproven thoroughly when it was embraced by them previously. Problem; this is true.

And the Left ignores the obvious — that patriotism is the Right’s Achilles Heel.

Good morning all,

If Troy Davis gets the bible justice these clowns promote it’s time to boycott all things Texas and Georgia.

My understanding of God comes from Lenny Bruce ,like Jesus and Moses in the back of the cathedral al natural, with their junk hanging out,on Sunday morning.

The God these people trust is Mannon, period.

Good morning, pups. It’s Dowd and Friedman today. In “The Re-Election Tango” MoDo tells us that Bill shows Barry how to dance with adoring women. The Moustache of Wisdom has a question: “Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?” He says our country faces a big choice right now. We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.

Here they are.

The coffee and tea are ready, and I’ve got a variety of bagels with cream cheese. I’m cranky this morning, so I’m going to go off by myself and snarl. Or maybe I’ll go out into the garden and eat worms… Have a great day.

Thanks, Marion. Roll up our sleeves…easy to do if you can get a job, which the MOTU refuse to admit is happening.

I don’t know where the disconnect lies but almost everybody at work thinks the rich should pay more in taxes but almost all of them plan to support Republicans in the next cycle. Although these days voting for Democrats is like electing Reaganesque Republicans, the modern conservatives have moved a corresponding distance rightward. But I’m not here to evaluate the “lesser of two evils” “choices” we are given, just pointing out the disconnect. Sometimes I think these people vote Republican so they’ll have something to whine about.

Why would you want to “love” america anyway? Nationalism is overrated and leads to wars.

Choosing austerity, okay. Imposing it on all of the rest of us is immoral.

I don’t know that it’s much of a disconnect. Obama is the face of the democrat party and the idea that he’d raise taxes on his contributors is silly. Yeah, he JUST proposed something like that. But he’s not going to invest enough political capital into it, it’ll never see a vote.

So they’re ALL republicans, even the democrats. That said, lets go for the incumbents and hope fresh faces help. Because that’s all we’ve got.

Boxturtle (Heck, I’m probably going to have to vote for Obama. The alternatives ARE worse)

Good morning all.

My mother used to tell me it’s just as easy to love (and marry) a rich person as it is a poor person.

No, not okay. I can’t find a single real world example where austerity has produced an economic recovery. It has resulted in the richest 10% of so doing well in many cases.

I don’t mind eating my peas, if eating them makes a difference. As currently implemented, it doesn’t. Ask Greece.

Boxturtle (or England, for that matter)

Phone hacking: Ted Turner says Rupert Murdoch will have to step down
CNN founder and rival media mogul says News Corp head should take responsibility for crisis

Sorry, Ted, Rupert doesn’t do `responsibility’ any more than he does `patriotism’

Making the choice of austerity is Buddhism in a way, when done for oneself. Doing it to others, I repeat, is immoral.

Doing it to others, I repeat, is immoral.

Oh, agreed. But doing it to yourself, while not immoral, is foolish.

Pinching pennies is one thing, deciding you’re not going to spend anything more on food and starving to death is another.

Boxturtle (Which is why austerity is for US, not THEM)

I can hardly wait for a Tea Partier to argue that America started down the road to perdition when states abolished property requirements for voting.

Believe me,Greece needs a dose of austerity. This is a country where people love two things,evading hard work and evading paying taxes.Is it any wonder that they went broke?

Link?

I tho’t it was when workers would allowed to join together to bargain with the corporate welfare crowd.

Ron Paul seems like the only answer to me.

Sometimes the truth hurts.

Austerity is the result of the bankers making the people pay for their crimes. I don’t understand how people just glaze over this truth? Seems like mother media has been feeding you well…..

Troll central this morning.

And austerity (as advocated by the EU and implemented earlier in Greece) solves those problems how?

The way to stop tax evasion is to enforce tax laws. Which requires MORE government employees, not less.

The way to fix a people evading hard work is to not pay them if they’re not working. As opposed to the austerity fix of paying them less when they do work.

Boxturtle (Thinks the people REALLY avoiding hard work are the Greek politicians)

Austerity is the result of the bankers making the people pay for their the bankers crimes.

Fixed it for you.

Boxturtle (Dude, ease off the koolaid)

What a great plan….

The elephant in the parlor that no one wants to mention because we don’t know what to do is the simple fact that momma eaarth will soon force austerity everywhere. If we are in the first stage of that process…well…somebody think of something quick.

Population control via fumes from Big Oil, did I guess right?

That came a couple of generations after lawmakers dropped property qualifications. Believe it or not, RINOs like Abraham Lincoln and even William McKinley supported the rights of communists and anarchists.

And a bit of bonus trivia: as a New York legislator, Millard Fillmore sponsored a bill that would outlaw debtors’ prison because people found themselves there because they were truly broke and not hiding assets from their creditors.

Ask yourselves-why class structure or rich and poor with gradations in between? Class structure establishes a ranking of superior and inferior. It is psychotic in that any ranking we create is divorced from reality. We die and difference ends.

It should be clear the wealthy are motivated by hatred of humanity. Their collective hatred, like individual self hatred, turns suicidal. They build nuclear plants on fault lines, they pollute, and they enjoy the pain they inflict on others as in let them eat cake.

The relationship is reciprocal. People who see themselves as inferior, desire to be led by those they see as superior. And so it goes.

The conventional wisdom appears to be the only way out of this employment depression is to produce/spend/consume more. Get the government to borrow and spend yes but we must do it only in the service of the environment not against the environment making, buying and tossing more landfill.

Indeed, but property qualifications hasn’t been brought up yet. Unions have, it’s the great unifier of the extreme right at the moment.

But that is rational, so it will not happen.

Absolutely. In Michigan, where I live, the Republicans are hell-bent on legislating the Michigan Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, out of existence. Why? Because (a) the MEA was highly successful in negotiating good pay and benefits for its members and (b) the MEA is a key source of boots on the ground for the Democrats.

You wouldn’t believe the extent to which the right wing has portrayed Michigan teachers as overpaid, incompetent, and protected by union work rules. At the same time, education “reformers” created a new district consisting of the state’s worst-performing schools and hired an administrator from Kansas City at a salary of $220,000 a year plus a $170,000 signing bonus. Yesterday we learned that the district in KC which he headed lost its accreditation.

I think many of the ultra-rich sense an ecological disaster coming and plan to ride it out in gated communities guarded by private armies made up of the less-than-ultra-rich. A number of fiction writers have described what a post-collapse world would look like. It isn’t pretty.

Maybe a LOT of Democrats will vote Republican in 2012 BECAUSE we’ve learned there’s NO difference reelecting him or the worst Republican running? Obama is demonstrating he will do anything to turn the 2012 election away from his record into a tribal conflict – except govern like an ideological Democrat. Why? The answer should be obvious to even the most tribal Democrat.

But I do believe it. Big Oil here has a stranglehold, and workers have no rights. While it means fewer consumers for these ‘job producers’, they can’t see that as any problem.

December 7, 1941 we woke up to notice something happened, something big enough so that nothing else mattered. We have been getting more and more dramatic notifications that something is happening in recent years. It’s almost a ho hum now, arctic ice disappearing, interesting, wonder what’s next. Lets get more oil from Canada.

Agreed, but why blame Republicans? Obama controlled the House & Senate for TWO YEARS, OBAMA could easily have turned this mess around! Is is that hard to grasp, that Obama IS a Republican?

I’m blaming the corporatists. They’re in both parties, typically disguised as moderates.

I don’t know that obama could have easily turned this around, too many conflicting goals and he’s not capable of standing up to big money.

Boxturtle (And I agree that Obama is more republican than some republicans. Like Reagan, for instance)

Yes, indeed.

I’ve often wondered where they think they are all going to flee when America becomes (is?) a soiled nest. Europe? the Moon? Mars?

Sure the wealthy have tried to get citizens to conflate: America = The Rich, but most poor and that can only work for so long. What might happen then? Seems like they would be more familiar with the history of 18th Century France. The problem with the “fortress” mindset is it makes one believe that the Other can locked out forever on the other side of the razor barbed-wire.

Well, I have a friend who tells me there’s a proverb in Chinese that translates, “A man who has no shoes isn’t afraid of a man with shoes.”

The classic magazine piece on Greeks evading taxes is from Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair a year ago.

As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”

“What?”

He smiles.

“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”

“You’re kidding.”

Now he’s laughing at me. I’m clearly naïve.

The important detail we need to pin down is whether rich Greeks evade taxes more successfully than other Greeks, i.e., does “everybody do it” — do the folks with the most money hide more of it from the collectors than regular working stiffs?

Lewis interviewed actual tax collectors, he didn’t just make shit up. Here’s what one told him:

The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.

In Spain, the solution seems to be tax the assets, which are harder to hide than the income:

Last Friday, the Spanish government reintroduced a wealth tax that it had abolished three years earlier, hoping to collect an estimated 1.08 billion euros from taxpayers with more than 700,000 euros in declared assets. Spain’s wealthiest have so far not publicly endorsed calls for higher taxes, and Mr. Botín on Friday told reporters that “it seems to me very bad to reintroduce” the wealth tax.

(I cherry-picked that one fact from a new story about yet another billionaire with a secret Swiss bank account. That particular billionaire may not have known that he inherited the secret account.)

Well,it is either a case of cognitive dissonance or they all think they are just a little away from becoming millionaires and want to be in the in crowd.

I take you’ve spent a lot of time in Greece. Thanks for your insight.

Awhile ago there was a story about there being over 16000 swimming pools but only a thousand or so on the tax rolls.

Things happen really fast. I’ve been doing some work (for a book) on prehistory, and discovered the Younger Dryas, which was a huge blip in temperature (downward) between 10800 and 9600 BC, when a big piece of the North American ice pack melted and drained down the Mississippi. Exceptionally fast cooling followed by heating up. Water levels rising several hundred feet, drowning out huge areas where people lived, hunted and gathered. When the Antarctic pack goes, watch out!

In Italy the government is tracking restaurants. The police have the right to ask you for a receipt within 100 feet of any restaurant you visit. We were warned about this last spring in Sicily by a waiter. Keep your receipts, she said.

The movie Contagion might be wishful thinking on the part of some on the right. Now if they can only come up with a Flu that just kills slackers ( AKA the unemployed & poor people.) I’m sure their Drug companies are up to the task.

interesting. Those are not ordinary cops but the Guardia Finanziere (sp?), the “Treasury Police.” They don’t track tourists’ spending, they track restos trying to dodge tax by failing to record sales.

check out the Vanity Fair article, I think the swimming pools anecdote is in there. Editors let Michael Lewis tell essentially two different stories in the same piece, so there is a long, long detour into the history of a cult of Greek monks that turned into flim-flam artists, but it’s worth wading through that to absorb the scope of total corruption in Greek society.

There have been some editorials in my “nooz” paper recently written by conservative shills whiiiiiing about the poor benighted richie-rich people, who have to “shoulder” a completely “unfair” tax burden, whilst all those lucky-ducky slacker poor peons are lazy effen jerks who are a blight on the system.

My take: just part ‘n parcel of Ye Olde Kabuki Show. Duly noted that a number of these “editorials” showed up right on target after Warren Buffett hacked out his trope about the rich not paying enough in taxes. Then these editorials whining about it; then Barry Zer0 *proposes* (but clearly has no intention to follow-through) to raise taxes on those *earning* $1mill or more per year (oh boo hooo hooo). And so on.

Kabuki Show. Nothing more; nothing less. And nothing will happen.

I read that article, and I agree that it’s quite interesting and provides a lot of info, facts, etc.

I do think that there is a lot of corruption in Greece, and that there *appears* to be institutionalized tax evasion across all levels of society. Duly noted, though, that most conservatives in the USA wish to blame solely the middle/working class Greeks for being lazy slackers (what else?). It appears that the lion’s share of tax evasion goes on more at the top of the pyramid (what a shock, I know, who’da thunk it??). And of course, there are shenanigans by the banks to be considered (albeit rarely, if ever, mentioned by conservatives).

And so on… article is recommended.

Banksters

The details of the Younger Dryas event (an absolutely astonishing bit of recent geologic history that not many know about) are, I think, a bit different. The waters of a huge former inland lake drained suddenly to the Atlantic by way of the St Lawrence about 13,000 years ago. The influx of cold fresh water quenched the warm northbound Atlantic current for scores of years, maybe longer, with the result that the northern parts of Europe and America were plunged into an ice age.

Same thing is theorized to happen if the glaciers of Greenland were to quickly slide off the land into the Atlantic. This consequence of global warming could paradoxically plunge the north Atlantic into a 100-year ice age, even while the rest of the planet continued warming.