OPINOINS BASED
ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU MAY
HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
YEAR FIVE
OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM
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Jan. 07, 2015
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03
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Jan. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-04
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Jan. 24, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-05
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JAN 30, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06
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Feb. 06, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06 EXTRA
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Feb. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-07
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Feb. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-08
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Feb. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-09
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Feb. 27, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-10
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Mar. 08, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11
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Mar. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11 EXTRA
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Mar. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-12
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Mar. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-13
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Mar. 29, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-14
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Apr. 03, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-15
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Apr. 12, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-16
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Apr. 19, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-17
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Apr. 26, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-18
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May 03,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-19
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May 10,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-20
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May 20,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 21
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May 28, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - Ho 22
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June 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 23
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June 20, 2014
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noteOBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 24
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July 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 25
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Aug. 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 26
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Aug. 25, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 27
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Sept. 03, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 28
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Sept. 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 29
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Sept. 14, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 30
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Sept. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 31
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Sept. 29, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 32
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Oct. 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 33
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Oct. 31, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 34
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Nov. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 35
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Nov. 16, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 36
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Nov. 25, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 37
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Nov. 30, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 38
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Dec. 14, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 39
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Dec. 20, 2014
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Agenda
1.
STARTING YEAR FIVE.
2.
The Story Behind the Story of
Those Huge Corporate Tax Cut.
3.
Obama: Keystone 'Not Even
Nominal Benefit' to U.S.
4. A Society of Captives.
STARTING
YEAR FIVE
By Floyd Bowman
Publisher "Opinions Based On
Facts."
1-03-2015
I started this four
days ago, but just haven't been able to get this in finish form. So help me, I am going to get this done
today. I am not getting off to a very
good start for 2015. All I can tell you
is that I will do what I can.
I don't want to fill
this with pitty talk, but I fell on Thanksgiving Day and wasn't able to get up
for four hours. It has been a bit of a
challenge to get going again. I don't
know for sure how 2015 is going to shape up.
We'll just have to put one foot in front of the other until one foot
doesn't want to move.
My readers have fallen
off from around 300 to about 160. Of
course the Holidays could account for some of that, but I think more, it is
because I am not just regular enough in my postings.
To that point let me
say that I am going to do the best I can and I hope you will all tune in, if
not all the time, at least once in a while.
Instead of counting years anymore I count months. I have now hit 90 plus 6. I still want to make 100, but I just don't
know. I'll try to hang in and keep
going.
~~~
The Story
Behind the Story of Those Huge Corporate Tax Cuts
Authors: Joshua Holland | Moyers
and Company | Op-Ed
Published: December 4, 2014
Last
week, Igor Volsky reported for Think Progress that Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid (D-Nevada) had struck a deal with House Republicans to give corporate America
He wasn’t
alone in panning the deal. Treasury
Secretary Jack Lew told Volsky that the cuts would be “fiscally irresponsible.”
The 10-year, $444 billion package includes a few provisions that were popular
with Democrats, but would phase out existing tax credits for clean energy
development. Mostly, it’s a boon for
some of the top corporate tax-avoiders in America
And while
Republicans insist that things like disaster relief and unemployment benefits
be “offset” with cuts to other programs, these breaks would not be. The resulting deficits would then be used to
justify deeper cuts to programs that have already been starved by
“sequestration” — health care, education and assistance for the poor. Jared Bernstein called that “a particularly
nefarious twist.” And, as if to add
insult to injury, The New York Times reported that Republican negotiators
announced that they were stripping away an expanded earned-income credit and a
child tax credit, two measures that help keep poor working families above the
poverty line. The proposed cuts were in retaliation for Obama’s executive
action on immigration.
Once the
story broke, Harry Reid’s office denied that a deal had been struck. The White House quickly issued a veto threat.
And one Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified told
BillMoyers.com that shortly after Volsky’s story was published, administration
staffers were sending out emails to allies excoriating the deal. He noted that it was an unusual response for
an administration that values message discipline and is typically deliberative
in crafting responses to these kinds of legislative proposals.
It’s
quite possible that the Democrats floated the story of this corporate giveaway
in order to knock it down. Perhaps they were trying to draw heat away from
Obama’s controversial immigration order, or establishing a narrative for the
next two years — that the new Congress would exhibit the same “culture of
corruption” that Democrats used to their advantage during the 2006 elections That’s
speculative, but there’s another angle to this story which isn’t: a major
reason this package of “tax extenders” has political salience is that earlier
this year, several progressive groups that advocate for a fairer tax system
decided to make them an issue.
They’re
called “tax extenders” because these corporate handouts require congressional
renewal every year or two. In the past, they’ve been quietly approved again and
again with large bipartisan majorities and virtually no public attention. One of them, the research and experimentation
tax credit, has been extended by Congress 15 times since it was first enacted
in 1981. As the Congressional Research Service noted last year, the purpose of
making tax provisions temporary is to evaluate their effectiveness, but that
goal “is undermined if expiring provisions are regularly extended without
systematic review, as is the case in practice.”
It’s an
example of the kind of quiet corruption that frequently passes without notice
in Washington, DC — largely because it lacks the drama of a partisan fight. Last year, Harry Reid and Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell both came out in favor of extending the cuts without
paying for them.
The late
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote of government transparency
that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” and in March, as the
Senate Finance Committee prepared to vote on extending the tax cuts, Public
Campaign and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) launched an effort to bring some
much-needed exposure to this legislation. “This year, we made a concerted
effort to raise awareness, to raise discomfort and to carry on a good fight
against these tax breaks that were usually rubber-stamped every year,” says
Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. Clemente
added that in the past, he’d ”been shocked by how comfortable and desirable
these tax break were for both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.”
The two
groups issued a blistering report detailing not only what the tax extenders would
do, but also exposing the massive lobbying campaign that was pushing them
through Congress. Using data from OpenSecrets, the report’s authors noted that
“1,359 individual lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill to press members of Congress
on the issue between January 2011 and September 2013.” That means that about 10 percent of all
registered federal lobbyists worked on advancing this one piece of legislation.
The report also pointed out that “58 percent of the lobbyists who worked on tax
extenders have passed through the revolving door – they have worked for
Congress or the executive branch.” These included some heavy hitters on Capitol
Hill — people like former Sen. John Breaux (D-LA), who sat on the Senate
Finance Committee for over a decade, and former Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott (R-MS).
Public
Campaign and Americans for Tax Fairness worked hard to get the public’s
attention. “We did as much retail work as possible,” Frank Clemente told
BillMoyers.com. “We held press briefings
and did one-on-ones with reporters to make sure that they understood the story.
It’s like grassroots organizing — you
have to do a lot of organizing to get the media engaged on issues like this.”
(We first wrote about the extenders after one of their media calls in early
April.) The progressive Center for
Budget and Policy Priorities followed up with a damning analysis a few weeks
later. And while these efforts didn’t
make the extension of a bunch of corporate tax cuts a big issue for average
Americans, it certainly put them on the radars of many political reporters, who
were well equipped to write about them when Volsky’s story broke last week.
It’s
possible — or even likely — that, absent this effort, Congress would have
extended these cuts yet again, perhaps permanently, with little notice and no
public outrage. And these cuts may pass
yet — attached to some veto-proof legislation, or as part of a broader “tax
reform” between the White House and the new Republican congressional majority. But we saw last week that a group of organized
advocates can turn a non-issue into a matter of public controversy, and, at a
minimum, make things a bit more difficult for what journalist David Sirota
called “the money party” that dominates Washington ,
DC
~~~
Obama: Keystone 'Not Even Nominal Benefit' to U.S.
By Laura
Barron-Lopez, The Hill
21 December
14
resident
Obama on Friday said building the Keystone oil pipeline would “not even have a
nominal benefit” to consumers, pushing back at claims it would lower gas prices
further.
Obama
stressed that the issue at hand for Keystone is “not American oil, it is
Canadian oil.”
“That
oil currently is being shipped out through rail or trucks and it would save
Canadian oil companies, and the Canadian oil industry enormous amounts of money
if they could simply pipe it all the way down to the Gulf,” Obama said during
his final press conference of 2014.
“It’s
very good for Canadian oil companies, and it’s good for the Canadian oil
industry but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to U.S. consumers, it’s not
even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers,” Obama said.
Obama
has repeatedly criticized Republicans for demanding approval of the $8 billion
oil sands project. A Senate vote in November fell one vote short of sending
legislation to Obama's desk. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) has vowed to make it the first piece of business for a Republican
Senate next year.
Obama
reiterated that he wants to make sure if the project does go forward it is not
add to the “problem of climate change ... which does impose serious costs on
American people.”
Asked
about McConnell's plans, he said:“I’ll see what they do. We will take that up
in the new year.”
With
the new GOP majority in the Senate, Republicans are positive they will have
more than the 61 votes needed for a filibuster-proof majority to send the
pipeline to Obama’s desk.
Whether
they have the 67 votes needed to override a veto, however, is in question.
Obama
noted litigation in Nebraska Nebraska
“Once
that is resolved then the State Department will have all the information it
needs,” Obama said.
“I
think there has been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic
formula to what ails the U.S.
~~~
A Society of
Captives
Authors: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed
Published:
December 9, 2014 |
Bio: Chris Hedges has written twelve
books, including the New York Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of
Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Some of his other books include “Death of the
Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph
of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best selling
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
His book “War Is a Force That Gives
Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Hedges previously spent nearly two
decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries
and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas
~
When laws do not apply equally to all, they are
treated as “rights and privileges.” We are
currently living through the rise of the corporate state and the death of our
democracy where we have become a society of captives.
Mayor
Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program in New
York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training
seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language,
along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely
cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric
Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of
Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty,
state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise
of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil
disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only
mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We
must defy the corporate state, not work with it.
The legal
system no longer functions to protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites.
These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud.
They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break unions,
pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy public
institutions including public schools and social assistance programs, wage
endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms merchants,
and—yes—authorize police to murder unarmed black men.
Police
and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale
surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal
enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even
terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative
bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention of doing—things
will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a
post-constitutional era.
Corporations
have captured every major institution, including the judicial, legislative and
executive branches of government, and deformed them to exclusively serve the
demands of the market. They have, in the process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” warned that without
heavy government regulation and oversight, unfettered and unregulated
capitalism degenerates into a Mafia capitalism and a Mafia political system.
A self-regulating
market, Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into
commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural
environment. The ecosystem and human
beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or
collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and
life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits
collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.
As in
every totalitarian state, the first victims are the vulnerable, and in the United States
They
confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of
illegal drug activity and use the proceeds to swell police budgets. They impose fines in poor neighborhoods for
absurd offenses—riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or not having an ID—to fleece
the poor or, if they cannot pay, toss them into jail. And before deporting undocumented workers the
state levels fines, often in the thousands of dollars, on those being held by
the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in order to empty their
pockets before they are shipped out.
Prisoners
locked in cages often spend decades attempting to pay off thousands of dollars,
sometimes tens of thousands, in court fines from the paltry $28 a month they
earn in prison jobs; the government, to make sure it gets its money,
automatically deducts a percentage each month from their prison paychecks. It is a vast extortion racket run against the poor by the
corporate state, which also makes sure that the interest rates of mortgages,
car loans, student loans and credit card loans are set at predatory levels.
Since
1980 the United States
The
police, who are often little more than predatory, armed gangs in inner-city
neighborhoods, arbitrarily decide who lives, who dies and who spends years in
prison. They rarely fight crime or
protect the citizen. They round up human
beings like cattle to meet arrest quotas, the prerequisite for receiving
federal cash in the “drug war.” Because
many crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants
into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The arrested are acutely aware they
have no chance—97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state
cases are resolved by guilty pleas
rather than trials.
An
editorial in The New York Times said that the pressure employed by state and
federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas—an action that often
includes waiving the right to appeal to a higher court—is “closer to coercion”
than to bargaining. There are always police informants who, to reduce their own
sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police. And, as we saw after the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and after the killing of Garner, the word of
police officers and prosecutors, whose loyalty is to the police, is law.
A
Department of Defense program known as 1033, which was begun in the 1990s and
which the National Defense Authorization Act allowed along with federal
homeland security grants to the states, has provided $4.3 billion in military equipment
to local police forces, either free or on permanent loan, the website
ProPublica reported. The militarization
of the police, which includes outfitting departments with heavy machine guns,
ammunition magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft and armored vehicles,
has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well,
into quasi-military forces of occupation.
“Police
conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US Union , in Chen’s words, found that
“almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to
investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade,
or active shooter scenarios.’ He went on
to say, “The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately
against people of color.”
The
bodies of the incarcerated poor fuel our system of neo-slavery. In prisons across the country, including the
one in which I teach, private corporations profit from captive prison labor. The incarcerated work eight-hour days for as
little as a dollar a day. Phone
companies, food companies, private prisons and a host of other corporations
feed like jackals off those we hold behind bars. And the lack of employment and the collapse of
education and vocational training in communities across the United States
Lawyer
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness,” identifies what she calls a criminal “caste
system.” This caste system controls the
lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated but also the 4.8
million people on probation or parole. Millions more people are forced into
“permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make
employment, higher education and public assistance difficult or impossible,
Alexander says.
Totalitarian
systems accrue to themselves omnipotent power by first targeting and demonizing
a defenseless minority. Poor African-Americans, like Muslims, have been
stigmatized by elites and the mass media. The state, promising to combat the
“lawlessness” of the demonized minority, demands that authorities be
emancipated from the constraints of the law. Arguments like this one were used
to justify the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror.” But once any segment of the population is
stripped of equality before the law, as poor people of color and Muslims have
been, once police are permitted under the law to become omnipotent, brutal and
systematically oppressive tactics are invariably employed against the wider
society. The corporate state has no
intention of carrying out legal reforms to curb the omnipotence of its organs
of internal security. They were made omnipotent on purpose.
Matt
Taibbi in his book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth
Gap,” brilliantly illustrates how poverty, in essence, has become a
crime. He spent time in courts where
wealthy people who had committed documented fraud amounting to hundreds of
millions of dollars never had to stand trial and in city courts where the poor
were called to answer for crimes that, until I read his book, I did not know
existed. Standing in front of your home, he shows in one case, can be an
arrestable offense.
“That’s
what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a
kind of sense, but side by side they’re a dystopia, where common city courts
become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal
prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who
behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee,” Taibbi
writes. “And it’s evolved this way over
time and for a thousand reasons, so that almost nobody is aware of the whole
picture, the two worlds so separate that they’re barely visible to each other. The usual political descriptors like
‘unfairness’ and ‘injustice’ don’t really apply. It’s more like a breakdown into madness.”
Hannah Arendt warned that once any segment of
the population is denied rights, the rule of law is destroyed. When laws do not apply equally to all they are
treated as “rights and privileges.” When the state is faced with growing
instability or unrest, these “privileges” are revoked. Elites who feel increasingly threatened by the
wider population do not “resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal
status and rule them with an omnipotent police,” Arendt writes.
This is what is taking place now. The corporate state and its organs of internal
security are illegitimate. We are a
society of captives.
~~~
If the good Lord is
willing and the creek don't rise I talk
with you again next week.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
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