the treatment of Jeffrey Sterling

Jeffrey Sterling has been in the news recently due to the completion of the trial phase of his prosecution by the Obama Administration under the Espionage Act. That in itself is noteworthy since so few Americans have ever been tried under that particular piece of legislation born out of the war preparations for what was supposed to have been the great war. But like the Selective Service System and the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act and all the rest of the national security state, these things have a tendency of becoming permanent.

A typical headline and lede goes something like this:

C.I.A. Officer Is Found Guilty in Leak Tied to Times Reporter

WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

Now, that's from the paper whose reporter himself published the information in question. Sterling wasn't found guilty of espionage. He was found guilty of whistleblowing. And of course, even that is circumstantial. Remember how hard it is to prosecute the financial fraudsters and war criminals because we don't have airtight cases against them? Well, when the government actually wants to, it prosecutes people on rather flimsy evidence. If you're interested in the details of the proceedings, Marcy Wheeler has been following this in depth.

What I want to do is tell a little more about him and government employment. Something I haven't seen in the corporate media at all is anything that would humanize him or tell an actual story about him other than ooh, spy convicted. (In fact, if an American really was spying on America for America's Enemies, why hasn't he been tried and hanged for treason?).

You see, Sterling is a graduate of Washington University in Saint Louis, my alma mater. He grew up in Missouri, Cape Girardeau, not Virginia, where he's being tried. He received a law degree in 1992. He worked for the public defenders office. And he had a respected career in government service until something happened. Was it incompetence? Nope. Did he steal something? Nope. Did he sexually harass a colleague? Nope.

Sterling is a black man. Now that shouldn't matter. But it does still matter in our society. When he filed a discrimination suit against the CIA, all of a sudden, the government started not liking him. That's the real story here. An employee tried to exercise their right to anti-discrimination, and the government responded by pursuing that employee aggressively for alleged leaking of classified information - a pursuit not sought with the same vigor against others who might also have been the source of the leak.

And, oh, what was this leak? Yeah, well, the government doesn't want you to ask. See, they classified materials in the discrimination proceedings and the leak proceedings. Because, you know, public information doesn't belong to the public. It belongs to the Fearless Leaders of our great country.

This is where we are at. The US commits acts of war against Iran. Dedicated public servants are denied their right to pursue nondiscrimination in employment. When someone leaks information that was improperly classified in the first place, the obvious solution is to go after the guy making waves.

That's called retaliation when a private sector employee does it. But when the government does it, it's called national security. Literally, it is a secret of the state. Just another tidbit for MMTers to consider. How, exactly, will employee rights be guaranteed by a government that is so secretive, vindictive, and authoritarian that it prosecutes someone like Jeffrey Sterling?

small potatoes

This post attempts to organize some thoughts regarding where we are headed. It's fun when there is a clear vision, but perhaps the most important times for reflection are when things are muddier. Basically, if we can identify unsustainable trends, we can identify sources of change. While the catch is anticipating what exactly that change will be, having some semblance of the terrain is useful.

One of the analytical approaches that interests me is where the tendency toward optimism/pessimism intersects awareness of reality vs. fiction. There is a lot of emphasis in our culture on the first dimension, almost as if being optimistic is more important than being right. Visually, it puts the emphasis like this, on the vertical columns.


However, an attempt to rationally understand the world around us needs to compensate for that natural cognitive fallibility by emphasizing the horizontal.


Truth requires an ability to interpret events both optimistically and pessimistically, to have a vision of what could be yet also a sense of what might go wrong.

With a couple decades of general wage stagnation providing the context for several years of very specific economic hardship and dislocation, the strategy of the governing coalition of interests in the US appears both clear and consistent. Outside of the national security nexus (GWOT, drug war, deportation, etc.) neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations are particularly hostile toward or directly targeting 'average' Americans. The 'not Hitler' meme was one of the better ones that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert encouraged at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Metal Chris captured this one:



In other words, it is not so much that individual political leaders act maliciously toward the citizenry so much as they don't care about us. Apathy is the key descriptor; we are simply irrelevant. All of the energy in government is devoted to marshaling whatever resources are necessary to save the Big Fish. What we are left with is the crumbs; small potatoes, so to speak. You can almost see the political class psyching themselves up to sell the latest batch of small potatoes for the masses as something of remotely similar importance to the efforts to save the Masters of the Universe. The transparency that Vice President Biden accidentally showed at the health care press conference, for example, revealed so much.


It's not that Bush's Medicare 'Modernization' or Obama's HCR 'most important reform since FDR nevermind that Medicare thingy in the 60s' are Terrible Legislation that will Destroy America. It's not that Bush was an Idiot or Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Fascist. It's not that abortion and gay rights renders America ungovernable and/or on a path of moral decay and damnation.

Rather, that's not where the action is. Two successive presidents, from two different parties, pushed massively complicated bills that purported to make the healthcare system significantly better. Yet they didn't actually solve the problem of expensive healthcare that causes preventable deaths.

I learned to hone in on that tactic of over-selling and under-delivering as a teenager, and it has proven to be one of the most insightful observations in comparing words and deeds. It's the 'let your yes be yes and no be no' philosophy: either government should do something (such as guarantee quality healthcare for all citizens) or it shouldn't. Both are legitimate beliefs. So is I don't know/let me think about it/it's not important to me. But to pick bits and pieces from both is to give away that neither belief is sincerely held; rather, they are merely justifications for acting upon an unrelated set of beliefs (like the belief that government should protect the economic interests of the wealthy).

Clarity has been particularly revealed with the financial crisis because we now have so much data upon which to draw. It's a simple statement of fact to observe that the Obama Administration supports the use of law enforcement resources to arrest hundreds of thousands of people every year, from illegal drug users to illegal residents to illegal assemblers. Yet one specific group of criminals stand in stark contrast to this massive deployment of police and prisons: politically connected financial crooks. There are literally more baseball players in legal trouble for testimony given before Congress related to steroid usage than there are top corporate executives and board members in legal trouble for all financial crimes combined. The current Secretary of the Treasury was literally head of the New York Federal Reserve when the proverbial bile was impacting the proverbial turbine. The ongoing effort to enter into a mortgage settlement is designed to give the Too Big To Fail financial firms immunity from liability in court - that's the point, that's what a settlement is - a settling of claims of unlawful behavior outside of court.

The preceding paragraph is neither pessimistic nor partisan. It's simply recognizing where we are at. The past and current Presidents of the United States think cocaine users, whistleblowers, protesters, and immigrants should be treated like murderers while financial fraudsters should be treated like people who don't pay a parking meter.

This is beyond specific policy debates or even broad ideological contests. We are now in the realm of questioning, of bringing to light, the core foundations of the American experiment, in all of its grandiose, exciting, and dangerous forms.

Is the Constitution the foundational pillar of secular governance, or do we now look to something else? Is there a rule of law, or a rule by men? Do we want to participate in a peaceful world order, or do we want to instill an American world order? Our basic systems of property and finance and law are quite literally crumbling around us. It's not pessimistic to point this out, to consider the implications. It's responsible.

We know housing prices got out of control. We know higher education costs got out of control. We know healthcare costs got out of control. If actual solutions to these kinds of problems are not going to be forthcoming, that is important to know, to understand what it really means. If you're a Big Fish, you play things very differently, but for areas of American life that depend upon the broad 'middle class', there are only two outcomes. Either public policy ultimately changes and we start encouraging wage growth again (either directly through employment policies or indirectly through additional transfer payments like universal unemployment insurance), or the asset classes dependent upon wages will simply wither away.

This has to happen*.

Either $20,000 - $30,000 a year has to become what it is elsewhere in the world - a comfortable living - or millennials in aggregate looking for jobs have to have a way to earn much more than that in entry level positions. Xers have to have broadly accessible means of earning promotions and switching careers. Baby boomers need to be able to easily replace lost jobs and find part-time income in retirement.

We have utilized credit to bring forward as much consumption as possible. The distant future is finite, too. And the near-future was spent in the past.

Household formation has slowed. New home sales are at record low levels. Record numbers of Americans do not participate in the healthcare system. The percentage of Americans employed has dropped precipitously. Millennials are even ditching things like cable and phones. Student loans - financial commitments undertaken by minors deemed incompetent to buy a Bud Light - can't be discharged in bankruptcy, ever.

Any asset that depends upon middle class wages, any industry that sells to those last marginal dollars of disposable income, will simply shrivel up to a much smaller core.

That's what I don't follow about some of the more intense hyperinflation perspectives. Massive increases in broad pricing measures ultimately requires the government to get money into the pockets of 'normal' people somehow. But that's not the bailout mechanism this time around. The most well connected players are seeing such socialism, but the general citizenry confronts a dearth of capital. I wonder if our 'capitalist' system can handle such misallocation of resources on such a grand scale.

But what I don't wonder is that it is a misallocation. Undermining the rule of law causes many more problems than it solves.

*It is becoming increasingly difficult to get simple, accurate information. The Consumer Price Index, for example, is so watered down and altered that it's not even clear why it's a good measure. A KC strip steak from grass fed open range cattle simply is not substitutable with a breast from a tightly caged, anti-biotically stuffed, corn-fed melange of chickens. Our political process helpfully focuses attention on the relatively small amount of trinkets from places like China and India when the bulk of American household expenses go to much more mundane domestic sources like housing, healthcare, higher education, food, transportation, and so forth. I keep anal financial records, so I thought it interesting to look at a few specific items of my own. By my various calculations, I had a stretch of rental increases that amount to an annualized rate of 4.8%, tuition and fees at Wash U increased by 5%, the cost of an entry level car increased 6%, health insurance increased 12.6%, and food increased 14.7%. The drawback of course is that by being specific, it's unique to me and just anecdotal. But comparing that against the average annual increase in household income over the past decade - 1.6% - it's obvious to see something has to give.

only banksters get tarps

Wow, I wish I had thought of that. Classic.

The absurdities of our system are absolutely gut-bustingly hilarious. The world is changing, or perhaps more accurately, has already changed. It really is as simple as David Graeber lays out.

“We are watching,” I wrote, “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans...

Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état?

baseball and wall street

I think the Occupy Wall Street crowd picked impeccable timing. The Yankees and Red Sox are both out of the playoffs. Detroit's the only team left even in the Eastern time zone.

With flyover country carrying the baseball battalion this year, might as well do something else. I'm sure this was an integral part of the planning.

Maybe a Cardinal will do some PR for Veterans for Peace. We could call it learning geography by protest. The corporate media in places like NY and LA might be shocked to learn we Midwesterners despise fraud and inequality and warmongering, too. Red and blue are for sports teams, not the Constitution.



Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

the idiocy of copy protection

When people wonder why there is such hostility to the intellectual property framework in the United States and how companies are allowed to inflict intentional damage into their products in the name of 'copyright protection', Blizzard is a poster child for some of the worst behavior. When you buy a software package from them, you don't actually buy the right to use that software on your computer. You buy the right to maybe sometimes use that software under certain circumstances solely under Blizzard's discretion.

Oh, but I forgot, hampered functionality is what customers are demanding. After all, as senior producer Alex Mayberry helpfully explained to MTV, "with our games as a whole we're tying everything into Battle.net these days...We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line."

Ah, maybe it's just a rogue software developer. Oh, nope, senior executive Robert Bridenbecker shows it's a management decision, stating, "When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that." Let's assume the guy hasn't made it to senior management by being a total idiot himself. Which leaves the only conclusion that DRM crap is, well, crap. Or in Blizzard's words:



How do you like them stable and connected and persistent apples? Apparently Blizzard customer service likes 'em so much they don't even respond to support requests. But the exclamation points make it all okay!

Update: Contrasting the corporate spin with the actual legal agreement is downright hilarious.

13. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES.
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS FOR YOUR USE, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND THOSE ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. BLIZZARD DOES NOT WARRANT THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS OR USE THE SERVICE AT THE TIMES OR LOCATIONS OF YOUR CHOOSING; THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE; THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED; OR THAT THE GAME CLIENT OR THE SERVICE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.

welcome to the other america

(PR) Uh oh, I'm ranting about politics...

I obviously haven't been paying much attention because I didn't realize the Clinton blowjob of the early 21st century was an ongoing matter. But apparently, former Senator, Vice Presidential nominee, and Presidential candidate John Edwards has been under an actual, real-life, full blown Department of Justice criminal investigation because he did something absolutely no politician ever does, try to portray a false public narrative about himself that doesn't match his actual nature.

I mean, thank goodness our political leaders (and heck, our business leaders, too, for that matter) are such paragons of virtue and family values.

But what intrigues me most is that the Obama Administration isn't happy with the Usual Punishment* for Being Caught: expulsion from the club (publicly). They actually want a felony conviction.

Quick, name the 10 most important people the Obama Administration has prosecuted.

Okay, I'll give you multiple choice:

a. George Bush
b. Dick Cheney
c. Condoleeza Rice
d. Donald Rumsfeld
e. Alberto Gonzalez
f. ...uh, this might take awhile...

It's almost comical. I only met John Edwards once (I was a pretty big fan back in 2007 of his candidacy). He struck me in person to actually be a lot like his reputation: he felt like a rich, sleezy used car salesman. I don't invite used car salesmen to my birthday parties. I don't go to movies with them. But you know what, I bought my car from one. They serve a purpose. Where the purpose overlaps with your purpose, they are valuable partners.

I ain't lookin' for a saint; and heck, even saints are sinners.

John Edwards made his cheesy sloganeering about poverty. Even today, you can say the phrase two Americas and largely evoke a pretty coherent narrative that Edwards was telling. Now, he's living the two Americas. The problem with our two-tiered justice system isn't that people down on their luck don't break the law. The problem is when the full weight of the law is selectively administered.

If I knew him well enough to call him John, I'd be in position to talk about how his life has completely fallen apart. I'd wonder what Cate, his eldest daughter the same age as me, is going through. But I don't know the family, and like any other family with moral, and now legal, complications, their challenges are for them to face, to decide how they want to come out the other end. His sin is against his wife, his kids, his family, his faith.

What I do know is that this has a chance to remind us what the rule of law means. It means no one is above it. All are equal under it. Technicalities are all the law is. Create exceptions, and what you've got is two Americas.

* of course, even being caught doesn't necessarily do it. Heck, people as varied as Rush Limbaugh and Tim Geithner have broken the law. And no one in the world avails themselves of more drugs and prostitutes than Manhattan and DC.

further down the rabbit hole

I've had a wide range of reactions to a Supreme Court ruling this week. The Court overturned a decision by Kentucky's Supreme Court that had determined that police busting down a door without a warrant violated the 4th amendment.

I mean, obviously, that's unconstitutional. You have to create an entire theory of Constitutional Law out of thin air to justify something as ridiculous as that. The text is clear. The intent is clear. The application to modern times is clear.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Because the issue is so straightforward, there's really nothing of substance to add to the background at places like NORML's blog.

But two thoughts I will share for intertube posterity.

First, an issue like this is a good reminder to make sure you know what you believe. Times change, social acceptabilities change, do you know what you believe is right and wrong, or do you float with the wind? If you're an American citizen, is the Constitution your basis of political economy, or do you hold some other idea as being more important?

Second, I think this fits into a broader theme of the shifting sands of power as more and more Americans alive today have grown up without a connection to, or even understanding of, the politics of fear and hate and divisiveness that have characterized so much of our myopic focus on wedge issues at the expense of things that really matter. Like many systems of power that are crumbling, it is doubling down on what worked in the past instead of seeking to maintain leadership in the transition to the future.

It's not just the Fed that has some problems, shall we say, with the concept of exigent circumstances.

beat the streak

Barry Ritholtz has made me think of baseball. He highlighted information from Zillow about housing prices, specifically, an interesting tidbit that prices have fallen for 57 consecutive months.

60 years ago, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio embarked on two of the greatest feats in modern sports history. Williams finished an entire season with a batting average above .400, while DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games.

No hitter has been able to approach 56 since then.

pundit4sale

(P) Something that has fascinated me for several years now is how easily some Democratic pundits seem to shift their principles based upon how the wind blows from party leaders. In the short term, it does provide them significant cover in that it is difficult to discern whether they're bought off or honestly believe what they're blathering. But over time, the only value added Dems bring to the equation is inhabiting the reality-based world, in being interested in doing what works.

It's utter nonsense like this spewed by Matthew Yglesias last week - on a Think Progress blog, no less - that starts warranting comparisons to folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin. Yglesias is actively proposing that powerful people should be above the law. That's a direct assault on the Constitution, not to mention a market-based economy.

So here's the question. Is Yglesias bought and paid for, knowing that the rule of law is a good thing but being willing to shill for criminals nonetheless? Or does he honestly believe that poor people should go to prison for petty crimes while the rich and powerful should maintain their liberty no matter how heinous the consequences of their actions?

I'm obviously a little partial to the Heartland, but the one-two transpartisan punch of Bill Black at UMKC and Tom Hoenig at the KCFRB over the past couple years has been much more interesting than most of the 'liberal' commentary from Inside the Beltway about how we need to Protect the Financial Fraudsters for the Good of us All.

I eagerly anticipate wittiness from Yglesias in favor of the rule of law. Oh wait, just look to the Bush years.

Like this commentary on Attorney General Mukasey.
Or this one on Bush lawbreaking more generally.

Black's response is worth reading in full. And here is the underlying New York Times article from Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story that set off Yglesias' defense of our rotten system. By the way, how's that for turnabout? The corporate media runs a big story highlighting a major problem, and the 'liberal' blogger Yglesias defends the status quo!

This is also a good place to tie in some commentary from Barry Ritholtz about another NYT article - yes, that's two positive references from me regarding the Times in the same post! Even as the overall US prison population has exploded, the Bush and Obama Justice Departments radically reduced annual referrals of white collar crimes for prosecution. You know, despite the mid-90s having no systemic domestic financial collapse, while a decade plus later, we confront Armageddon that Requires us to Give Rich People Money.

a little time to think

I have felt particularly out of touch with what's going on in the world the last couple weeks. With a little bit of time and energy to catch up, I think I find I'm most surprised that people are surprised about what's going on.

The world is changing, or perhaps more accurately, has already changed. It just takes some time for the 'old regime' to get that; things don't crumble overnight. In the US, despite everything you hear about the aging of the population, the actual median age of the population is under 40. Not only do we not remember the '60s, we weren't even born then. It's even more stark in most of the industrializing world, with many nations' median age under 30.

We just don't possess the same cultural training and socialization for the old explanations to make sense, to mean anything. You either support democracy or you support authoritarianism. Claiming to support democratic processes and acting to support autocratic ones sends a clear message: you don't believe in the benefits of democracy.

Maybe there was some time in the past when 'Democrat' and 'Republican' meant something substantive. But today, the challenges we face are almost entirely nonpartisan. The framework isn't left and right, it's We the People vs. The Special Interests. The key leadership and power centers of both parties advocate policies that consolidate wealth and power and disparage ideas that would create broad prosperity and innovation. Sure, in election season, there are always some interesting differences at the margin, and that was enough for quite some time in the US.

But entering the second generation now of Americans growing up with prospects worse than our parents, we just don't fall for the 'ole divide and conquer wedge issues. We actually believe what our elders taught us, that America should be a beacon of freedom, not a harbinger of oppression. We actually believe that representative democracy is better than autocratic strongmen. We actually believe that the leaders of our government work for the citizenry, not the other way around. We actually believe that we are on an unsustainable path and that in the end, unsustainable things end. We actually believe that a man should be measured by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. We actually believe that women can do whatever men can do.

Maybe there was a time when the traditional media or corporate media or mainstream media or whatever you prefer offered value. Maybe there was a time when they investigated stories and reported news. Many Americans alive today simply can't remember such an occurrence; it hasn't happened in our lifetime.

One of the most important observations from science, I believe, is the one about the process of scientific development itself. New ideas don't convert adherents of old ideas; it's not a frontal confrontation. Rather, a new generation grows up comfortable with a new paradigm and the old adherents simply die off. Look at viewership ratings of the CBS Nightly News and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Five years ago, most people over 40 had never heard of Jon Stewart. Today, most people under 40 couldn't name the lead anchors on the nightly news. Sure, a few cable commentators have made names for themselves. But as infotainment celebrities, not the people you go to for answers on why we can't provide healthcare and jobs and housing to our fellow Americans.

Change is happening. Not one interested in petty recriminations, but in a substantive reordering of the world and our place as humanity in it. We can be afraid of it, or we can embrace it. We can dig in to fortify the old ways, or we can help bring about change a little faster and better.

When you encounter somebody trying to stop it, you can be forgiven for taking a moment to laugh.

Remember when we were afraid of the Soviets, or the Japanese (the industrial economic competitor, not the bombing Pearl Harbor competitor)?

I don't.

P.S. Thought I'd add five links with a broad overview on these issues.

First, on US foreign policy, especially the Middle East and supporting dictators.

Second, on the abuses of the surveillance state, especially the USA PATRIOT Act.

Third, on the lawlessness with which we treat prisoners, especially torture.

Fourth, on the lawlessness with which we don't protect property rights when it's rich and powerful people committing the fraud and other illegal acts.

Fifth, on the scale of wealth inequality in the US. Mind you, this is before the people whining about deficits gave trillions of dollars of loan guarantees, backstops, free money, sweetheart deals, and other bailouts, handouts, and payouts to the very failed and fraudulent management teams that wrecked the economy in the first place:



Note that none of these issues can be delineated as 'left' or 'right'.

i'm not afraid

Julie goes out of town for 24 hours and I'm ready to blow something up*.

*warning, don't joke about blowing things up in England.

Two bits of information came out on the same day that highlight everything that's wrong with our two-tiered justice system - the one for the rich and powerful, the other for the rest of us. And when I say rest of us, I mean all of us. White, black, young, old, christian, atheist, north, south; if you're not rich, the government can steamroll you.

What am I talking about?

On the same day, we learn that:

1. The government kidnapped and tortured (err, 'allowed' to be kidnapped and tortured) an American teenager in Kuwait.
2. The government has arrested a former intelligence officer for saying embarrassing (err, 'state secret') things, a local man from O'Fallon, MO.

That both men happen to be black is perhaps the icing on the cake.

Essentially, we can't prosecute - or even stop - the most vicious assaults on American citizens. We can't prosecute - or even stop - the most blatant looting of our financial system.

But boy, share CIA secrets about CIA incompetence in the run-up to Bush's oh-so-legal invasion of Iraq, watch out! Wammmo, Obama/Bush/whoever you picture as 'the enemy' will be after you!

I have a special place in my heart for people who go nuts, because I think insanity is the only rational reaction to what's going on in this world of ours. I have some stupid unevolved hangeron in my brain that refuses to give up. I believe this country of ours can still be saved.

But it's worth it yet again to ponder the difference between a US President and a third world dictator. If government agents can arrest patriots and kidnap citizens, what can't be done to any one of us?

I'm not afraid of black people. I'm not afraid of Muslims. Secrecy itself is the cancer eating away at our security. I refuse to be afraid, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat telling me scary bedtime stories. I refuse to accept that this is the way things are.

go irish

I mean, with a name like Dempsey, how can I not support Mark Ireland for judge?

P.S. Sarah, or whoever is doing the website, primary day is over...you can put up info about the general :)

i want my money back

(P, R) Well, my checks to the Department of the Treasury and the Missouri Department of Revenue cleared the bank yesterday. I'm passionate year round about responsible uses of public dollars, but tax time does serve as a nice reminder as it puts the specific numbers in front of you in a way that can't be ignored.

For fun, I thought I'd break out rough estimates of spending categories exceeding $1,000 in 2008. I realize not everybody gets worked up by numbers, but these kinds of things really make me mad.

What's my top expense? Rent? Car insurance? Utilities? My Roth IRA? Nope. Federal income taxes.

1. Federal income taxes: $5,600
2. Roth IRA: $5,000
3. Rent: $4,900
4. Europe/Other travel: $4,000
5. Payroll taxes: $3,500
6. Groceries/Eating out: $2,500
7. Missouri income taxes: $1,800
8. Other taxes: $1,600
9. Car insurance: $1,300
10. Utilities: $1,300

In case you're keeping score, my rough estimate of my total tax burden last year (income, property, sales, OASDI, and medicare) is approximately $12,500.

Now, what separates me from the conservatives like Grover Norquist is that I'm not opposed to taxation per se. I recognize that programs require resources, and the purpose of taxation is to raise revenue to pay for those programs. I happen to like courts and armies and fire departments and schools and roads and subways and sewers and parks and so forth. Indeed, most people understand that in order to have these popular services, we have to be taxed.

What's aggravating, what gets me ranting around tax time, is the unnecessary expenses, the waste, the programs that do nothing to invest in the safety and prosperity of our country. The Republican Party has taken an interesting strategic course, which is to talk about fiscal responsibility while doing the opposite. The enormous disconnect between rhetoric and reality from the GOP leadership has done much to put them in an amazingly restrictive demographic situation looking forward. And the Democratic Party has certainly shown progress. But what stands out is how little has changed since the Democrats took control of Congress over two years ago now. It's like celebrating cutting an alcoholic back from 10 drinks a day to 9. Well, that's great and all, but it's only progress if much more noticeable changes are around the corner.

From corporate subsidies to war profiteering to the costs of inaction on things like mass transit, energy, and healthcare, there is enormous waste and outright theft going on in our system. We devote massive resources to law enforcement efforts against petty criminals, and yet these master thieves walk around freely enjoying the spoils of their endeavors. Maybe it's one of those cases where being mugged personally makes it easier for you to get angry about the more impersonal kinds of muggings going on.

AIG has been mugging me every month since last September. The broader financial bailouts, from Goldman to Citi and on, will be mugging me for years to come. The Iraq war has been mugging me every month since 2003. The drug war mugs me a couple times a year. Farm subsidies, wealthy tax cheats, on and on, these are greater thefts than any petty criminal who steals a hundred bucks from your wallet. Over six million Americans are incarcerated or on probation or parole. We've done God knows awful things to 'high value' detainees all over the world. And yet the very people who have caused massive suffering and looting still walk around in charge of our government and the financial industry they wrecked.

And then that doesn't even cover the opportunity costs, the extra expenses we pay because we don't have good mass transit systems, passenger rail lines, freight rail lines, wind and solar energy, single payer health insurance, universal unemployment insurance, and all the other investments that actually make us better off.

It's probably unrealistic to ask the rich to play by the same rules as the rest of us. The Bernie Madoffs of the financial world will be the Lynndie Englands of the war crimes world, people who did bad stuff, but who can serve to be scapegoats for the larger perpetrators rather than compasses pointing to the larger perpetrators. But at least, stop taking my tax dollars. If you want me to bail out Goldman Sachs, sell me as an investor, not a taxpayer. If you want me to fund a trillion dollar defense industry, fund everything else that lavishly, too, from education to healthcare to employment services to affordable housing to energy to transportation to the environment to every other sector that produces a bigger return than another Reaper flying over Pakistan.

about time

I would highly encourage reading of the letter the Obama campaign sent to Attorney General Mukasey regarding the Republicans' fussing about 'voter fraud', as if the Democrats are the ones trying to disenfranchise people.

It's pretty fundamental stuff. If people are kept from voting, and if the legal system is politicized, then we lose confidence in the outcome of elections, destroying the very democracy that supposedly governs our society.

It's very exciting to see Obama wading into the discussion.