Category Archives: current events

Corporate profits are at a 70 year high

As Robert Reich explains in testimony to the Senate’s budget committee the other day, corporations, enjoying the highest profits in seventy years, are raising prices and making windfall profits as the economy recovers from the pandemic. These giant legally created persons are using using those fortuitous profits to buy back shares and drive up their stock prices at the expense of consumers, who groan under inflation.

Of course, blaming Biden and the “tax-and-spend Democrats” for Biden Inflation (worldwide, what a dick he is!) increases their chances for a president Pompeo or Mnuchin or Kushner or Carlson, and even higher profits when all government regulation is finally abolished, along with all income tax (for the wealthiest). It all goes to prove, if proof is kept strictly independent from the facts, that fairly taxing the rich means the destruction of all of us.

Incoherence can prevail, for a time

An incoherent insistence on the righteousness of your beliefs isn’t the same as a persuasive argument that can convince somebody else to change their point of view. Incoherence is only only persuasive to people who are already angry and who share your belief and your outrage. Their anger will make them agree without question.

So, cunningly, wealthy reactionaries have, over decades, spent billions to create an industry to stoke and focus the rage of millions of powerless Americans who need to feel righteous and powerful, somehow.

Cue the AR-15 sales reps, these vultures ain’t merchants of death they’re purveyors of security and freedom from Socialist tyranny and oppression by an illegitimate government! If the occasional mass killing of tiny children is an unfortunate side effect, we have ways of protecting these kids, by “hardening” the schools in which they are slaughtered against would be slaughterers , and other common sense things of this nature. Besides, to be brutally candid, only the children of losers ever get slaughtered in their classrooms anyway.

And, like gambling addicts who can’t walk away from the table until they’re bankrupt, these incoherent motherfuckers only know how to “double down” like their leader, the most insecure and perpetually angry victim we have seen in public life in living memory of the oldest among us.

Incoherence can prevail for a time, sometimes for years, but reasonable people eventually figure out how to get together and put a stop to it. Time to get busy.

Stating the obvious

If the law allows the creation of limitless nonprofit organizations that are actually partisan lobbying groups, and allows these groups to be funded by anonymous donors giving unlimited amounts of “dark money” (tax deductibly, don’tcha know), then, obviously the NRA, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and the rest, are all funded by the same handful of supremely generous reactionary hereditary billionaires.

When we talk about the NRA, or Judicial Watch, or the Institute for Humane Studies, we’re talking about the selected mouthpieces of autocrats like fucking Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Jared Kushner and their insatiable ilk, make no mistake who these devils are or what their insane goal is.

Herschel Walker on preventing school shootings

My apologies for this non-embedded YouTube video, apparently can’t do it from my phone these days, at least not with the short clip I made. At any rate, check out Jimmy Kimmel’s introduction and reaction to a stunningly incoherent expression of something by leading Georgia candidate for US Senate, and apparent TBI victim, Herschel Walker.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxtVNIR7ZPoG5ujuvUtAv67iZpHYevlsiN

Texas gun law

Why should a Texas teenager not be able to buy a military assault rifle and a case of high capacity clips on his eighteenth birthday? It’s not like he needs to get a permit, pass a road test and buy insurance before he can legally drive a high end Masterati as fast as he wants.

Freedom in the Hang ’em High State demands no less!

Mass media and the soul of America

From progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the opening of their most recent podcast, Counterspin:

Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

https://fair.org/home/matt-gertz-eric-k-ward-on-the-buffalo-massacre-replacement-theory/

Leave it to The Washington Post to put everything into perspective in a tweet. Of course, in our profit-driven, corporate advertising-driven mass media, the 18 year-old avowed racist’s racially motivated mass murder spree in Buffalo a few days ago is old news, wiped off the front page as pundits and politicians argue about whether it was right or wrong for Texas law enforcement not to intervene for an hour while another enraged 18 year-old mass shooter used his brand new legally acquired military assault weapon to shoot his grandmother in the face and massacre children and teachers in a Texas elementary school.

And the GOP’s united, incoherent talking point is always the same, cannibal socialist pedophiles are trying to politicize this terrible, horribly regular (27th school mass murder in 2022 so far) tragedy that can’t be avoided in the greatest country in the world has ever known. And that Biden, like slippery, illegitimate Obama before him, is too weak to make good on his promise to fix hundreds of years of racist custom and practice in this country and bring everybody together as he lyingly promised.

But tip of the yarmulke to Jeff Bezos and the influential liberal media outlet he owns, for the helpful framing of the ineptly managed ‘fight for America’s soul’. Good job, Jeff!