The "Improved" TPP Only Increases Corporate Power to Enslave All of Us

Think it's bad now? If Congress OK's this fascist power grab, corporations will be able to veto minimum wage, Social Security, affordable health care, clean water regulations and anything else - like the right to vote - that they can imagine hurts their profits by a single fucking penny.

Wave bye-bye to democracy, y'all; Exxon-Mobil will own your ass.

Apologies to Charlie Pierce for lifting his entire column, but This. Is. It. The hill we die on.  Compared to TPP, the Keystone XL pipeline is an overturned trash can.

​There probably is no more (occasionally overly) judicious voice on the world economy than Jeffrey Sachs. He has taken a look at the soft spots in the monstrous Trans-Pacific Partnership and he has found them to be bad enough to vote down the bill as a whole.​

The third is a set of regulations governing investor rights, intellectual property, and regulations in key service sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, and pharmaceuticals. These chapters are a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their common denominator is that they enshrine the power of corporate capital above all other parts of society, including labor and even governments. The fourth is a set of standards on labor and the environment that purport to advance the cause of social fairness and environmental sustainability. But the agreements are thin, unenforceable, and generally unimaginative. For example, climate change is not even mentioned, much less addressed boldly and creatively.

That sounds really bad. But, according to Sachs, there is worse to come.​​

The most egregious parts of the agreement are the exorbitant investor powers implicit in the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system as well as the unjustified expansion of copyright and patent coverage. We've seen this show before. Corporations are already using ISDS provisions in existing trade and investment agreements to harass governments in order to frustrate regulations and judicial decisions that negatively impact the companies' interests. The system proposed in the TPP is a dangerous and unnecessary grant of power to investors and a blow to the judicial systems of all the signatory countries. And, as in earlier trade agreements, the United States has pushed through overly strong intellectual property rights that strengthen the aggressive pricing practices of big pharma and unnecessarily extend the copyright protections far beyond their social usefulness.

​From the start, this thing has reeked of being an investment protection act. This thought has occurred to Senator Professor Warren as well.​

Because of how costly these awards can be, ISDS creates enormous pressure on governments to avoid actions that might offend corporate interests. Corporations have brought ISDS cases against countries that have raised their minimum wage, attempted to cut smoking rates, or prohibited dumping toxic chemicals. Just last month, a foreign corporation successfully challenged Canada's decision to deny a blasting permit because of concerns about the environmental impact on nearby fishing grounds, and now the company could get up to $300 million from Canadian taxpayers. Will Canada's environmental regulators hesitate before they say no to the next foreign corporation that wants to dump, blast, or drill?

​ The president's devotion to this deal is surpassed in its everlasting mystery to his implacable demand that Congress fast-track a measure that contains uncounted numbers of land mines for ordinary people and the countries in which they live. Sachs seems curious about this as well.

Perhaps most disappointing is the lack of creativity in the development, labor, and environmental chapters. Yes, they rhetorically defend global economic development, labor standards, and environmental sustainability, but they do so without specific enforcement powers. Why is it that companies can force arbitration tribunals to defend their investor rights, but workers have no such power? Why is climate change not even considered in the draft, despite the fact that it represents the most important environmental threat of the 21st century, and may have strong implications for future trade rules?

​ Outside of his education policies, the headlong rush into the TPP is going to be one of the only acts of his presidency with which the president justifies the criticisms levelled at him from the left. That's not a bad batting average, but this is an awful exception to the rule.​

Where are the Social Worker Cards? The Safety Inspector Cards? The Mental Health Counselor Cards? The Firefighter Cards?

What they're really teaching children with these cards is to view cops as super-authorities to be obeyed instantaneously and never questioned.

Just exactly what the billionaires and corporations want in their serfs.

Kat Russell at the Paducah Sun:

Get ready to start collecting and trading because the Paducah Police Department has teamed up with Head Start to bring back its once-loved officer baseball cards.

Discontinued about 12 years ago due to budget constraints, the new cards, paid for by Head Start as part its community partnership efforts, will be hitting the streets in the next few weeks.

Each officer will have a card with his or her picture and name on the front. On the back it will give their rank and division, how long they've been on the force and some personal information about the officer, such as where the officer is from, hobbies they enjoy or sports teams they like.

In the past, the baseball cards were used as a way to encourage the community to get to know PPD's officers, said Gretchen Morgan, the department's community resource officer. The cards gave people a reason to approach officers, chat with them and ask them for their cards.

That, said Kristy Lewis, director of Head Start for Paducah Public Schools, is what she hopes to encourage children to do when the new cards come out.

"We want our kids to know that it's OK to go up to an officer and say hello and ask them for their cards," Lewis said. "I think in doing that, kids will see that the officers are here to support them and help them."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/10/10/4080871/police-in-paducah-ready-to-unveil.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

Where At Least We Know We're Free to Suffer Horrific Injuries Without Compensation

It's easy to forget that it's been less than a century since employers were forced to treat workers as human beings.  Slavery and serfdom were the rule for 10,000 years of human civilization. 

And the corporate whores and billionaires who benefit from that system are fighting like rabid ferrets to get it back.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Above: The libertarian vision of America’s future

Brian Beutler’s piece on libertarians’ goal to return the U.S. to the Lochner Era through the courts should scare you. It’s hardly news to political junkies that libertarians seek to destroy a century of regulations that created what was great about the United States in the twentieth century. But because a lot of seemingly smart people take libertarianism seriously as an intellectual idea, their actual nefarious goals are often muted. Libertarians want to return this nation to an era of workplace deaths, of unlimited working hours, of low wages, of industry polluting wherever they want with whatever substances they choose, etc. They openly say that the nation went off the rails with the Progressive Era (Karl Rove and Glenn Beck have said this on top of the libertarian crew) and hope to return us to the Gilded Age. They’ve gone a long ways toward succeeding, as I have documented on this blog for the past four years.

They are also really close to the big coup. That would be a Republican victory in 2016 and the replacement of a couple of elderly Supreme Court justices with Thomas and Alito-types who are happy to do the bidding of corporations.

All libertarians want to fight federal regulations in Congress and the executive branch. But Barnett and his allies think courts should be empowered to throw regulations out even if political majorities support them. These Lochner revivalist professors have established beachheads at law schools across the country. In 2002, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh founded a blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, as a hub for libertarian ideas, including Lochner revisionism. Today, it has become the most prominent academic legal blog in the country and now publishes under the auspices of The Washington Post. It boasts nearly two dozen contributing professors and mainlines detailed and informed libertarian legal arguments to thousands of the nation’s top lawyers, law students, clerks, judges, and opinion-makers every day.

The contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy teach at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern, Emory, Duke, and elsewhere. Several hold positions at George Mason University’s law school, which is famous for its conservative faculty and, in 36 short years, has rocketed to prominence as one of the 50 best law schools in the country. In 2011, GMU law professor and Volokh Conspiracy contributor David Bernstein published a book titled Rehabilitating Lochner, and that’s exactly what he, Barnett, and their contemporaries have been attempting to do.

Again, it drives me crazy that people respect what happens at Volokh Conspiracy because these are horrible people. They aren’t hiding it either:

To dismiss the debate between libertarians and traditional conservatives over Lochner as an academic sideshow is to misunderstand the stakes. “A full-fledged return to Lochner would put a constitutional cloud over a whole host of laws that we all take for granted today,” said Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan who has argued cases before the Supreme Court. “Laws guaranteeing workers the right to join a union without being fired, and the right to earn a minimum wage and receive overtime if working more than 40 hours a week, laws protecting worker safety, and laws protecting workers and customers against discrimination based on race or other protected statuses, just for starters.”

I asked Barnett whether the social welfare laws on the books today would be permitted under his reading of the Constitution. “Probably not at the federal level,” he said.

That’s why Barnett and his contemporaries prefer to root their arguments in specific injustices rather than categorical abstractions. Why shouldn’t bakers be allowed to work more than 60 hours a week, or individuals be allowed to remain uninsured? Why should the government be allowed to regulate out of existence my right to hail a driver or your right to rent a stranger’s house for a weekend?

These are people who actually want to return us to the the Gilded Age. Let’s look at the past to get a glimpse of the libertarian paradise. Allow me to quote from Empire of Timber.

Both camp and mill workers felt the pain and shock of severe injury in a dangerous and highly mechanized working environment and saw workers die horrible deaths. These technologies made logging a more dangerous and deadly job. Cables and machines broke, becoming deadly whipsaws. The flying logs of high-lead logging crushed workers’ heads. The state of Washington began collecting data on workplace injuries in 1912. Between that date and 1929, between 124 and 261 loggers died every year in the timber industry. In 1914, 63,350 people worked in the timber industry, thirty-five per cent of the state’s workforce. In the first five months of that year, there were 4,928 reported accidents that injured or killed timber workers.

Working in the region’s watery environment contributed to this death toll. The Northwest’s cold rain and snow made workers sick while the workers toiling on floating logs in log ponds or river drives risked their lives. At least nine loggers drowned on the job in 1906, including J.W. Roth of Springfield, Oregon and Ralph Leedy of Hoquiam, Washington who died in separate incidents on log ponds and J.K. Lynn who fell into a river near Hoquiam while rafting logs. Alfred Aasen fell into a cold river while working in the spring of 1916. He did not drown, but he caught pneumonia while riding on a rail car the ten miles back to camp in soaking clothes and soon died.

Machines killed far more workers than water and cold. On August 28, 1905, Clise Houston reached to clear an obstruction from his saw. He fell into it and died. Finnish immigrant John Koski found a job with the Simpson Logging Company in a camp near Matlock, Washington. On June 18, 1904 nearby tree fallers shouted “Timber!” He did not move and the tree landed directly on top of him, crushing him beyond recognition. Koski had no family in America and his co-workers had no way to inform his relations in Finland of his demise. The company paid for the burial. Karl Carlson worked in the Middleton mill in Aberdeen, Washington. In 1905, a belt fell off its course and Carlson tried to guide it back on to the pulley with a shovel. The shovel became entangled with the belt and he lost control of it. The machine tore the shovel from his hands and plunged it, handle first, through his body. Carlson lingered for a day before dying, leaving behind a wife and child.

The lucky workers were merely maimed. Morris Campbell worked in J.E. Nichols’ sawmill in La Conner, Washington. In the last days of 1899, he caught his arm in a mill saw. It was amputated at the shoulder. In 1900, Frank Lang lost most of his left hand running a band saw in the Centralia Shingle Mill in Centralia, Washington. In 1901, Martin Boyer’s foot got caught in machinery in a Centralia mill. Doctors amputated. In a nation without a social safety net, injured workers often fell through the cracks into a lifetime of poverty. Workers like Campbell, Lang, and Boyer faced grim futures as disabled persons, as did many people disabled on the job before the passage of the Civilian Vocational Rehabilitation Act in 1920, which provided occupational training and job placement for those injured on at the workplace. Many workers chose self-medication. Joseph Gillis of Seattle lost a leg while working at the McDougal and Jackson logging camp near Buckley, Washington. He sued for $10,000 but overdosed on the laudanum he used for pain the day before he lost his suit.

This was the reality of Lochner-era America. Workers could do little to nothing about these working conditions because the courts said they had agreed to work under those conditions and thus protecting them would be violating their freedom of contract. Things got so bad that during the years after Lochner, judges, juries, and politicians began pushing back against it. That’s why workers’ compensation was enacted in the 1910s, because juries began awarding benefits to workers and ignoring the freedom of contract ideas and this scared corporations into protecting themselves while still paying as little as possible to injured workers. 

This is the America where Volokh writers hope to take us Even if they say that’s not what they foresee, that’s the reality. In calling for a return to Lochner-era policies, there is no guarantee the Supreme Court won’t rule, say, OSHA unconstitutional. 

This future, which sounds hopelessly dystopian, is entirely possible if Republicans win the 2016 presidential election. And we need to be calling out libertarians for what they are–people who think dead workers is a form of freedom. People who think working 84-hour weeks in a steel mill is totally acceptable. People who want you to experience another Donora Smog in the name of liberty. People who want to eliminate OSHA and the EPA. People who want to tear apart everything that makes this nation livable. And they are this close to succeeding.

New Published Confession: The Rich WILL Seize Power to Restore Feudalism

They don't even care about hiding it any more; lords-n-serfs is what they want, and lords-n-serfs is what they're going to get. 

So when Bernie Sanders talks about taxing the billionaires out of existence, maybe now you'll hear it as middle-class self-preservation.

 

Think Progress:

Charles Murray, an author who GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush recently named first when he was asked which books have had a big impact upon him, is not an elected official, so he is free to rail against democracy to his heart’s content. And that is exactly what he does in his new book, By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

Pay no attention to the title. Government “by the people” is the last thing Murray cares to see. Murray admits that the kind of government he seeks, a libertarian fantasy where much of our nation’s regulatory and welfare state has been dismantled, is “beyond the reach of the electoral process and the legislative process.” He also thinks it beyond the branch of government that is appointed by elected officials. The Supreme Court, Murray claims, “destroyed” constitutional “limits on the federal government’s spending authority” when it upheld Social Security in 1937. Since then, the federal government has violated a “tacit compact” establishing that it would not “unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided America” (Murray traces the voiding of this compact to 1964, the year that Congress banned whites-only lunch counters).

SNIP

So when Murray speaks, powerful and influential men (and his acolytes are, almost invariably, men) listen, including men who shape our nation’s fiscal policy and men who could be president someday.

By The People, however, rejects outright the idea that Murray’s vision for a less generous and well-regulated society can be achieved through appeals to elected officials — or even through appeals to unelected judges. The government Murray seeks is “not going to happen by winning presidential elections and getting the right people appointed to the Supreme Court.” Rather, By The People, is a call for people sympathetic to Murray’s goals — and most importantly, for fantastically rich people sympathetic to those goals — to subvert the legitimate constitutional process entirely.

“The emergence of many billion-dollar-plus private fortunes over the last three decades,” Murray writes, “has enabled the private sector to take on ambitious national or even international tasks that formerly could be done only by nation-states.” Murray’s most ambitious proposal is a legal defense fund, which “could get started if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars,” that would essentially give that wealthy American veto power over much of U.S. law.

Murray, in other words, would rather transfer much of our sovereign nation’s power to govern itself to a single privileged individual than continue to live under the government America’s voters have chosen. It’s possible that no American has done more to advance the cause of monarchy since Benedict Arnold.

Of Course E. Ky is the Most Criminally Poor; What Are We Going to Do About it?

Signs of spring in eastern Kentucky: blooming dogwood and redbuds, ferns covering the trash dumped in the woods and the latest study repeating the obvious: that people exploited by Big Coal are irretrievably enslaved by poverty.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

Kentucky did poorly in the latest national survey of well-being, but the state's 5th Congressional District fared even worse.

The district covering Eastern and Southern Kentucky ranked the lowest among 434 nationwide included in a survey of people's perception of well-being.

The survey assessed people's emotional and physical health; behavior that affects health, such as smoking or exercising; job satisfaction and access to basic needs, including food and housing; and their outlook on life.

SNIP

Donna Pace sees the reality of the survey every day. She heads the Harlan County Community Action Agency, which has assistance programs to help people with heating, food and other needs. Requests for services have increased as jobs in the regional coal industry plummeted the last two years.

"We're seeing people we've never seen before, who never had to ask for help," Pace said.

Cynical and pessimistic as I am, I have genuine hope that the Affordable Care Act - which after just six months has allowed 370,000 low-income Kentuckians to obtain the health insurance that is a huge step away from generational poverty - will be the game-changer that nothing else has ever been.

Which is why powerful entities like Big Coal and the Koch Brothers and Wall Street are bound and determined to destroy the ACA.

People who can take pride in their work because they are well-paid and humanely benefited are proud, responsible citizens are not the beaten-down drones the plutocrats need to create a maintain a serfs-and-lords economy,

Billionaires feed on poverty. Obscene wealth needs hundreds of millions of poor people getting poorer every day. It's been true since the first neolithic asshole stole more than his share of the aurochs somebody else risked his life to kill.

Appeals to religion don't work; religion justifies their theft. Appeals to social responsibility don't work; rich sociopaths don't give a fuck about society. Appeals to human morality don't work; the rich don't think the non-rich are human.

The only thing that has ever worked - for 40 years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s - is to tax the criminally rich out of existence.

Don't Laugh: This Is Where We're Headed

Words cannot express what Tom Tomorrow captures here.

Federal Court: Workers Are Serfs With No Rights

It's not just the Supremes: thanks to Senate dems rolling over for Smirky/Darth on judicial nominees for eight straight years, then Obama letting court vacancies languish, there are thousands of corporatist repugs with lifetime appointments to the federal bench and decades ahead of them to make rulings that strip every last shred of self-determination from everyone in this country who is not obscenely wealthy.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Former NLRB member Craig Becker on an extremely disturbing decision by the 5th Circuit that effectively creates what he terms a “rightless workplace.”

Unnoticed except by employment lawyers, the United States Court of Appeals in New Orleans last month issued what might be the most important workers’ rights opinions in decades. The decision permits employers to require workers, as a condition of keeping their jobs, to agree to arbitrate all workplace disputes and to do so as individuals, standing alone against their employer. The ruling could spell the end of employment class actions that were instrumental to breaching the barriers of both race and sex discrimination after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and remain critical to enforcement of minimum wage and other labor standards laws.

SNIP

Effectively, Republican judges are continually pushing the United States toward the New Gilded Age, where employees no longer have rights but employers have expansively defined rights that happen to coincide with Republican policy beliefs about the workplace. Think of Gilded Age courts not enforcing Sherman Antitrust Act against the corporations the legislation originally intended to regulate but instead being used to bust unions, as was the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for a comparison. Courts are effectively ending a long tradition of workers using the institutions for their rights through defining laws to end class action suits.

The Republican Party and its court appointees have basically deified corporations. Whether we believe corporations should be our masters are not is irrelevant, since the courts will decide the question for us.

A Strong Social Welfare State Makes Religion Obsolete

Which is, of course, why repugs and freakazoids prefer a feudal state full of desperately poor people with nowhere to turn but to an invisible sky wizard.

An invisible sky wizard who, conveniently, tells them to endure their suffering and obey their masters to earn paradise in the afterlife.

Confronting Babble-on, via Divine Irony:

"Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe. In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism? In a new study to be published in August, I provided compelling evidence that atheism increases along with the quality of life (1).

First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (2). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and atheism is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

The question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence.

Atheists are more likely to be college-educated people who live in cities and they are highly concentrated in the social democracies of Europe. Atheism thus blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure. But why?

It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion. Hence my finding of belief in God being higher in countries with a heavy load of infectious diseases.

In my new study of 137 countries (1), I also found that atheism increases for countries with a well-developed welfare state (as indexed by high taxation rates). Moreover, countries with a more equal distribution of income had more atheists. My study improved on earlier research by taking account of whether a country is mostly Moslem (where atheism is criminalized) or formerly Communist (where religion was suppressed) and accounted for three-quarters of country differences in atheism.

In addition to being the opium of the people (as Karl Marx contemptuously phrased it), religion may also promote fertility, particularly by promoting marriage (3). Large families are preferred in agricultural countries as a source of free labor. In developed countries, by contrast, women have exceptionally small families. I found that atheism was lower in countries where a lot of people worked on the land.

Even the psychological functions of religion face stiff competition today. In modern societies, when people experience psychological difficulties they turn to their doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. They want a scientific fix and prefer the real psychotropic medicines dished out by physicians to the metaphorical opiates offered by religion. No wonder that atheism increases along with third-level educational enrollment (1).

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

What Happens When the Lords Don't Need Their Serfs Anymore?

Since the Black Death of the 14th century caused the labor shortage that dealt the death blow to original feudalism, the only thing standing between workers and the parasitic rich who despise us is that the parasitic rich could not survive without workers.

Until now.

Thom Hartman at Alternet:

America is falling apart — and this nation's super-rich are to blame.

There was once a time in America when the super-rich needed you, and me, and working-class Americans to be successful.

They needed us for their roads, for their businesses, for their communications, for their transportation, as their customers, and for their overall success.

The super-rich rode on the same trains as us, and flew in the same planes as us. They went to our hospitals and learned at our schools.

Their success directly depended on us, and on the well-being of the nation, and they knew it.

But times have changed, and the super-rich of the 21st century no longer think that you and I are needed for their continued success.

And in some ways, they have given up on America, period.

So why haven't we deported them all to Guantanamo, as the existential threat to the nation they so obviously are?

Ramona's Voices:

We're an odd bunch, we Americans.  We've had a hate-hate relationship with the very rich for as long as we've existed as a country, but, damn their black hides, we can't stop taking care of them.

After all these years we've become used to sparring with the super-rich over how much they get to keep and how much they should share.  They want to keep it all, and we know that.  We want them to behave like responsible citizens, and they don't think they should have to.

It's a long-standing battle, but it was infinitely fairer when they needed us as much as we needed them.  Most of them built their fortunes while still being Americans in America, by being major forces in the building of the strongest, richest country in the world. Now there is almost nothing American about the major corporatists, but we still insist on treating them as if they were a part of us.  We can't help ourselves.  We cling to our nationalism, to our sense of superiority, and even after decades of sliding downhill, of watching our resources leave our shores for parts unknown, we can't believe our industry, our infrastructure, our wealth, is gone.  We refuse, in fact, to believe it, even though our roads, our bridges, our buildings, our very way of life, is crumbling around us. 

SNIP 

They don't need us.  They don't want us.  And as long as we keep insisting that everything's gonna be all right, the super-rich will be alive and doing exceedingly well in America.

As for the rest of us--we'll be exactly where they want us.

 If not Guantanamo, then 99 percent confiscatory taxes on their traitorous asses ought to set things right.

Where the Wealth Is

From Divine Irony:

"There is $118 trillion of wealth in the United States alone, or about $375,000 per American. For every homeless person in the country, there are 28 empty homes waiting for them right now. Laws and culture deny them a roof over their head, not a dearth of roofs. It is our legal system that funnels a disproportionate amount of wealth to a small handful of people, not the benevolent hand of a just and caring god."

- Steal This Article (via theamericanbear)

In other words, religion is what keeps the poor from killing the rich.

The Future Wall Street Wants is Happening Now in Qatar

Where there is great wealth, there is exploitation of labor.  Where there is extreme, obscene wealth for a tiny minority, there is slavery for everyone else.

Real, vicious, lethal, literal slavery.

Charles Pierce:

The Trade Union Confederation has had to count the corpses the hard way. It found that 83 Indians have died so far this year. The Gulf statelet was also the graveyard for 119 Nepalese construction workers. With 202 migrants from other countries dying over the same nine months, Ms Burrow is able to say with confidence there is at least one death for every day of the year. The body count can only rise now that Qatar has announced that it will take on 500,000 more migrants, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, to build the stadiums, hotels and roads for 2022.

Not all the fatalities are on construction sites. The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises. To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6am to 7pm. He would return to a hot, unventilated room he shared with 12 others. Because he died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked him to death. There are millions of workers like him around the Gulf. When we gawp at the wealth that allows the Qatari royals to buy the Olympic Village and Chelsea Barracks, we miss their plight, and the strangeness of the oil rich states, too.

Strangeness is one way to put it.

"Absolute monarchy" does not begin to capture a society such as Qatar, where migrants make up 99% of the private sector workforce. Apartheid South Africa is a useful point of reference. The 225,000 Qatari citizens can form trade unions and strike. The roughly 1.8 million migrants cannot. Sparta also comes to mind. But instead of a warrior elite living off the labour of helots, we have plutocrats and sybarites sustained by faceless armies of disposable migrants.

Obscene is another way.

SNIP

I don't want to hear anything about cultural imperialism. This is inexcusable in the 21st century. And, in the years since, we've pretty much turned Qatar into an aircraft carrier with luxury hotels. They're our plucky little ally. Sooner or later, the shit will hit the fan and we'll be startled by the ingratitude displayed. We do nothing but wrong over there. It's startling.

No taxes on the rich, of course - no need, what with all the no-cost "jobs" they create. It's the Galtian paradise the teabaggers are working so hard to make happen here, never realizing they'll be the first ones in chains.

Let Them Eat Shame

Repugs know damn well their proposed $40 billion in cuts to food stamps will never fly. They don't care.  Because the immediate cuts are not their goal.  Their goal is demonizing people so poor they can't afford to eat. Their goal is shaming people whose two minimum wage jobs do not provide enough income to feed their children.  Their goal is to ensure that the unemployed victims of Wall Street greed get all the blame for the economic devastation caused by rich people.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The next time someone talks about how food stamps create a "culture of dependency", remind them almost half of the people on SNAP, otherwise known as the food stamp program, are children. And nearly half of those kids belong to parents who have jobs, but are in poverty anyway.

SNAP provides families with an estimated 22 million children with resources to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. This represents close to 1 in 3 children (29 percent) in the United States. Almost half of all SNAP recipients are children (47 percent), and an additional 26 percent are adults living with children. (See Figure 1.) Forty percent of all SNAP recipients live in households with preschool-age children (ages 4 and below). 

Over 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. In 2011, SNAP provided an estimated $51 billion in benefits to families with children, over half of which went to families with preschool-age children.

SNAP families are low-income. A typical family with children that is enrolled in SNAP has income (not including SNAP) at 57 percent of the poverty line. For a family of three, 57 percent of the poverty line corresponds with an annual income of $10,785 in 2012. A typical family with children on SNAP spends close to three-quarters of its income on housing and/or child care costs. Families with children currently receive an average of $420 a month in SNAP benefits, or about $5,000 a year. 

SNAP benefits help working families support their children. Nearly half (48 percent) of children who receive SNAP live in low-wage working families. A typical working household with children receives an average of $400 a month in SNAP benefits, representing about 30 percent of the family’s average income.

This is not a rational disagreement about public policy. This is a gulf of basic decency, a demand by fearful people for the sacrifice of innocents to sate a perversely sadistic form of cosmic justice.

Interestingly, most people demanding the starvation of children so that billionaires can buy more yachts call themselves Christian. Perhaps they're reading a Biblical translation that calls for blood sacrifice of innocents so that the rich may enjoy more fruits of Mammon. I missed that part in my copy.

 Sorry, David, but the problem is not their failure to read their Bronze Age mythology correctly. The problem is the ubiquity of religions that prevent the poor from killing the rich.

Ellison: "Food assistance for working families fulfills a promise we make to each other: if you fall on hard times, your neighbors, friends and fellow Americans will help you get a meal. Eighteen companies dodged $92 billion in taxes last year, which is more than double the cut passed by Republicans today. Let’s cut corporate waste, not meals for our nation’s children."
- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/#sthash.IHdWWTJW.dpuf

Repug Privatizer Cuts Electricity to Sabotage Detroit

This is the behavior of comic-book villains. And the city-killing un-elected czars repug governors appoint to destroy democracy.

Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

There was a blackout in Detroit, Michigan on September 11th this year, but the reason for it seems to depend on who you ask.

Via Addicting Info:

"If you ever had any doubt that Michigan has been taken over by a group of dangerous, radical extremists, what happened in Detroit on September 11th, 2013 should be enough to wake you up. There were several things significant about September 11th, 2013. Not only was it the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, but the state of Michigan was also experiencing an unseasonal heat wave. In the city of Detroit, power outages left people stranded in elevators, trapped four hours in the blistering heat. Hundreds were evacuated from buildings in the downtown area, traffic lights did not function, public transportation was disabled and 1,400 sites across the city were without power. Wayne State University and other key buildings still remained closed, the following day. All of this after the city’s power supply supposedly failed.

The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, a twelve story building that conducts the city’s criminal proceedings was shut down and the building was evacuated. Earlier in the week, a prisoner had stabbed a Wayne County Deputy, before fleeing from the building. A manhunt followed, with authorities searching for the escaped prisoner for several long hours, before finally apprehending him as he was trying to flee the city. In light of this, the power outage on September 11th created a tense and dangerous situation for officers, justice workers and visitors to the building. The problem is that the city’s power supply never failed.

On September 12th, 2013, Bill Nowling casually stated that the city’s power outages were intentional. Officials and citizens working in the city were given no warning before the electricity was cut off. Law enforcement officials working in the Hall of Justice had no time to prepare.

Senior citizens and disabled citizens using elevators in the city’s downtown district had no way to know what was coming. The entire criminal justice system was shut down without notice. Wayne State University Campus was just one of many sites evacuated under emergency conditions. Traffic lights across the city stopped working. 1,400 public and private locations were left without power. And the entire thing was intentional, to “send a message” to the people of Detroit. Bill Nowling works in the office of Kevin Orr, Detroit’s Emergency Manager.

Many people believe that the deliberate power outage was carried out because Orr’s office has been pushing for the privatization of the city’s power supply. The video shows Gary Brown laughing about the power outage. After saying that he deliberately took power away from the city, causing chaos in the process, of course, the need for privatization of electricity in the city is stressed. "

The following day, Erika Erickson with Detroit's WJBK followed up with Gary Brown amid outrage over not only his statements, but also his laughter during the interview about the power outage. Brown attempted to defend his actions by saying that if he hadn't made the call to shut down power, that DTE would have.

However when called to verify, DTE offcials say that simply isn't true; they supply the power, they don't choose where the power goes.

As for injuries caused by the power outage, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Sharon Grier said that "Someone was injured. I know of her personally. She was injured, in extreme pain because of this."

Kevin Orr, Detroit’s Emergency Manager, was appointed by GOP Governor Rick Snyder to replace all of the city’s elected officials under the state’s “Emergency Manager Law,” and is the sole authority over the city of Detroit. He answers to no-one except the Governor. He is not elected and cannot be fired, as is also noted by Addicting Info.

SNIP

I don't know if what the emergency manager's office did when they shut down the power was a crime. In a perfect world, it would be a crime, and someone would actually go to jail. Preferably a jail without air conditioning, or cable tv and situated on the banks of the Detroit River, next to the Koch Brother's piles of petcoke.

We need to keep working towards 2014 so that we can send a strong message of our own by taking out the trash on election day, and taking back our state from the dark overlords who seek to destroy it.

Organize.

This is exactly what the Koch Brothers and their Wall Street buddies have planned for the rest of us: total domination by unelected corporate stooges who get to decide when or if we get electricity. Or water. Or food.

And if it hasn't gotten through your thick head yet, it's repugs who are doing this. Repugs and only repugs. Remember that come next election.

It might be your last.

You know why the repugs and corporatists and Koch-sucking freakazoids so desperate to keep the minimum wage below the minimum necessary to live on?  Because a living wage - and the economic power it gives to everyone who works - is the greatest obstacle to the lords-and-serfs economy the obscenely wealth are so very close to creating in this country.

But they haven't won yet.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

Let the sunshine in:

A bill that would boost California's minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016 won approval by the state Legislature on Thursday and was sent to Gov. Jerry Brown, who said he would sign it.

The measure would raise the current $8 minimum wage to $9 an hour next July 1 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.

The 25% increase would be the first minimum-wage hike in California in five years and would put extra money in the pockets of an estimated 2.4 million Californians.

"This is the time to raise the minimum wage to provide relief for hard-working families," said the bill's author, Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville). About 3 of 5 minimum-wage earners are 26 or older, he stressed

Labor unions lobbied heavily for the bill, both in the Legislature and at the governor's office. Business groups opposed it.

The bill won final passage in the Assembly on Thursday evening by a 51-25 vote. Earlier in the day it received a 26-11 vote of approval by the state Senate.

We live in an era when asset holders take all the gains while wage earners get the shaft. We won't fix our problems until that trend is reversed.

Raising the minimum wage slightly isn't a huge fix, but it's a major step in the right direction. All too often liberals focus on government services and the safety net. Those things are crucially important, to be sure, but they're no substitute for changing the skewed rules that allow the asset class to walk away with all the loot.

National Democrats may still be mired in centrist DLC economic politics. But in places like New York, California and Massachusetts, the progressive economic revival is already well underway not just at a grassroots level, but at an institutional one as well.

Everyone who is not a millionaire benefits from a living wage - which today means at least $15 per hour, and $20 per hour if productivity is taken into account. Even small business owners benefit from paying their employees more, if everyone else does so also, because more money in everyone's pocket means more money gets spent which puts more money in everyone's pocket.

It's a virtuous circle that benefits even the disgustingly rich. But because it narrows the gap between the richest and the poorest, the richest would rather a bigger gap between them and us than an equitable economy that benefits all.

In that, they are no different from the racists who reject social programs like food stamps and unemployment compensation and Obamacare that help millions of white people because they also help thousands of black people.

Rich people are absolute poison to the economy, to society and to democracy. Unless we eliminate them through confiscatory taxation, they will kill us all.

Rand Paul's Bill to Make You An Indentured Servant

They aren't even pretending any more. It's them and their friends as lords and the rest of us as serfs.

McConnell's a co-sponsor

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:

More than three-quarters of the Senate Republican caucus signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rand Paul (R-KY) that could render it virtually impossible for Congress to enact any legislation intended to improve working conditions or otherwise regulate the workplace. Had their bill been in effect during the Twentieth Century, for example, there would likely be no nationwide minimum wage, no national ban on workplace discrimination, no national labor law and no overtime in most industries.

SNIP

Coburn and Paul’s bill appears to be an attempt to restore the constitutional regime that prohibited child labor regulation and other such nationwide regulation of the American workplace. While the bill does not apply retroactively — so existing labor laws would continue to function — the bill does allow a procedural objection to be raised against any new legislation that does not comply with the limits imposed by the bill.

Such an objection could be used to block any most attempts to enact new workplace laws — such as a bill increasing the national minimum wage or a bill prohibiting all employers from firing workers because they are gay. Similarly, Coburn and Paul’s bill could permanently entrench decisions by the conservative Roberts Court rolling back existing protections for workers — such as a recent decision shielding many employers whose senior employees engage in sexual harassment.

Such an effort to shrink the constitutional role of government until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub is consistent with Paul and Coburn’s records. Last March, Paul praised a particularly infamous Supreme Court decision empowering employers to ruthlessly exploit their workers. Coburn told a town hall meeting in 2011 that Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional because “that’s a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”

 Just like the good old days of the 13th century. Unless you're writing million-dollar checks to their campaigns, to them you're a serf, and have to be treated like one.

Massie: Gutting Public Education Not Enough; Kill It Dead

Northern Kentucky's own teabagging Thomas Massie is veering perilously close to performance art territory. No matter what society-demolishing idea congressional repugs come up with, Massie can find a reason to vote against it because it's not destructive enough.

Down with Tyranny:

Not a single Democrat voted for John Kline's anti-education bill, H.R. 5. It passed Friday, 221-207, a dozen Republicans crossing the aisle and voting with Team Pelosi. The bill, which Kline and the rest of the GOP zombies call the Student Success Act, was supposed to rewrite No Child Left Behind. If anything, they've managed to make a terrible law even worse.

Even Obama's way too corporate Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, couldn't stomach it. He said that beside locking in crippling cuts to education funding. it “marks a retreat from high standards for all students and would virtually eliminate accountability for the learning of historically underserved students-- a huge step backward for efforts to improve academic achievement.” The Senate will never pass this garbage and Obama said he would veto it if it ever reached his desk.

The 12 Republicans who voted NO, are mostly in purple districts where it's hard to get away with voting for this kind of crazy-ass legislation. (It is worth noting, however, that Congress' most anti-education Member, Louie Gohmert, also voted NO, but he voted NO because he opposes public education completely. 4 Libertarian-types who also oppose public education-- Justin Amash (R-MI), Tom Massie (R-KY), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Sam Graves (R-MO)-- voted against the bill as well.

Meanwhile, Hal Rogers, the pride of Southeastern Kentucky, has come up with a budget to eliminate all spending on anything and everything that doesn't kill or imprison black, brown and non-subservient female people.

TPM:

House Republicans unveiled legislation Monday that dramatically cuts funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and various arts and wildlife programs.

The draft legislation (PDF), which will face committee hearings starting Tuesday, slashes the fiscal 2014 budget for the Interior Department and for the EPA by $5.5 billion from existing levels enacted for 2013 — a 19 percent cut that brings base funding down to $24.3 billion. It’s $4 billion below levels already required by sequestration — automatic spending cuts that both parties say are senseless and onerous.
House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said the bill “reflects the extraordinarily hard choices needed to maintain critical investments and services for local communities,” while “dramatically scaling back lower-priority, or ‘nice-to-have’ programs.”

The proposal reflects the GOP’s opening salvo in what is shaping up to be an ugly battle to keep the government open when funding expires on September 30. Republicans are demanding a swath of new cuts to domestic programs, in part to protect the military budget from long-term spending reductions that the two sides agreed to in 2011.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

So, here are the options so far:

1. Slashing government programs like the EPA which the Republicans characterize as "nice to have" but nonessential.
2. Slashing the social insurance programs instead (preferably with some phony "tax reform" so Democrats can pretend that they soaked the rich even though they didn't.)
3. Already scheduled military cuts which President Obama, most Democrats and all Republicans have said they cannot tolerate.

Gosh, I wonder how this is going to go?

 We're not moving toward a feudal lords-n-serfs society any more.  We're already there.

"Republicans have declared war on the nation"

Don't think you're safe from repug predations because you're not a woman of childbearing age or a young black man in a hoodie.

If you're not rich, white, straight, Xian and male, you're a target.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

In fact, I think these types of restrictions, and worse as we go forward, can be expected any time Republicans control all three branches of a state (or god forbid, national) legislature. And I’m also not convinced at all that the story of Texas was showing the power of the pro-choice movement. The law passed anyway. Texas Republicans simply don’t care. The reality is that all of us, no matter what progressive movements we believe in, need to understand that Republicans have declared war on the nation we believe should be created and are determined to roll back all of it to a Gilded Age, patriarchal, and racist structure that grants rich white men full rights to control the nation and makes poor white men at least feel superior to women and people of color. That’s the Republican Party platform of 2013 and they’ve already done a heck of a job moving closer to their goals.

I think it's feudalism they're after, not the Gilded Age, but otherwise dead on.

Creating Serfs

Because the one thing authoritarians of the corporate, religious and warmongering variety all hate and fear it's an educated, organized and democratically powerful population that can't be intimidated.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

For a very long time, I've said that whenever the Republicans do something even crazier than usual, it usually makes sense if you look at it through the lens of their ultimate agenda: Cheap, disposable labor. Why do you suppose ALEC is pushing these "pro-life" laws in all these states when they're funded by soulless, self-interested corporations? Because they love babies? Hell, no. It's to keep workers poor, too poor to make waves. Too afraid to speak up. Nice, docile, humble workers with so many kids, they're terrified to lose whatever job they're lucky enough to get.

It's gotten so bad, the Koch brothers feel free to run an ad claiming that eliminating the minimum wage - allowing the bosses to pay as little as the most desperate are willing to accept - will create jobs for all.

Yep, at 10 cents an hour.

Digby:

I don't know if you know this, but before we had subsidies like the minimum wage or health and safety regulations there were no poor people. You remember those good old days, right?

Seven Dials, in central London, was synonymous with poverty and crime, a black hole to most Londoners.

And hey, we'd still be better off than the poorest countries in Africa, amirite?

*This seems relevant: "Although he deems low-wage workers part of a “culture of dependency” on the government, Koch Industries is on the receiving end of oil subsidies, government contracts, and bailouts."

Jaaahb createrz.

They are systematically destroying the very concept of a full-time job.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

While there may be cases where temporary workers make sense, this industry not only needs to be heavily regulated (which it is not), but most of these situations should be illegal and employers should have to hire full-time workers. BMW does not need temporary workers to staff the majority of its position in a car manufacturing plant. Those should be full-time workers. The majority of workers in a processing plant that a constant business with Wal-Mart should be full-time workers. There is simply no good reason the exploitation of poor people through temporary labor should exist. That most of this exploitative labor system targets at African-Americans and Latinos reinforces the structural racism flowing through American society.

As Grabell shows, while unions haven’t done much for temp workers, the law basically prevents them from doing so anyway. Temp agencies openly operate as union-busting institutions while untrained temp workers with no real rights on the job die at the workplace in easily preventable accidents. As we recreate the Gilded Age, it’s again going to take workers standing up for themselves in the face of great danger to their livelihoods (and possibly their lives) to eventually force corporate America to stop exploiting them. I’m not looking forward to another half-century of horrid labor struggles like the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but that’s realistically what we are facing. The American dream is dead for many Americans. The middle class is dead as well, although we are loathe to admit it. With each passing day, we move back to the Gilded Age, a terrible time in American history and in the American future.

 I think we're to the point that as a society and a planet we would be better off if corporations were outlawed. 

Keeping the Poor Poor

The dirty little secret of capitalism is that the richer the rich get, the poorer everybody else has to get.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

The state of Louisiana (and the voters themselves) have cut off funding for the last operating ferry in New Orleans. Big deal, right? Who takes the ferry anymore? The answer here is a lot of poor African-Americans coming to work in New Orleans from their homes on the west bank of the river. The ferry has about 1 million pedestrians and 175,000 cars on average. The drivers will be fine, but what about the walkers? How are they supposed to get to work? Part of this is a general American indifference or hostility to public transportation, but of course that feeling has its racial competent, whether it is Atlanta suburbs turning down MARTA service because it was afraid of black people coming into town or the reduction of public transportation services anywhere, since they disproportionately affect the poor and in the United States the poor are usually people of color.

As Charlie Pierce reminds us:

... income inequality is the only story worth following in the American economy. To hell with the Dow. To hell with the NASDAQ. To hell with the S&P index. And, as the blog's First Law Of Economics tells us -- Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. If, in our haste to declare ourselves recovered from the Great Swindle Of 2008, we accept the current level of unemployment, and a permanent level of income inequality that touches every aspect of our society, and not in a good way, then what we are doing is curing our head cold through decapitation. Civil government cannot endure with the level of income inequality that we seem willing to tolerate, or at least, that we seem willing to see as being inevitable. Civil government becomes a farce and, eventually, an unendurable one. And it starts, as everything usually does, in the schools.

Only well-regulated capitalism - the market economy we had from World War II until 1970 - expands the middle class while shrinking both the super-rich and the super-poor. Cancel the rules, and you get lords and serfs, with nothing in between.

The New Serfs: Student Loan Slaves

I went to college when you could afford public-school tuition, room, board and books on a full-time minimum wage job. Student loans were for people who went to private school.
I simply cannot comprehend the financial burden graduates face today. But I know what it means.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The student loan crisis isn't just an abomination from a progressive standpoint for all the obvious reasons. It's also horrible from a conservative standpoint. If the objective is to make of every American a self-sustaining, freedom-loving capitalist entrepreneur, saddling them with loans they cannot repay at the beginning of working age is the very worst thing one can do.
If Republicans really believe their rhetoric, they'll do something about it. On the other hand, if their intent is to create a desperate, indentured labor pool struggling just to maintain the facade of a middle class existence while begging for scraps from the corporate table, then doing nothing is a perfect choice.
But I think we already know what they're going to do, don't we? So let's just remember that when conservatives do nothing on this issue, it will be proof that they're not interested in removing barriers to entrepreneurship and capitalist risk taking. They're interested in creating a vulnerable, dependent class of desperate grist for the corporate mill.

It's all coming together for the plutocrats:  a forty-year transfer of wealth and political power from workers to rich parasites; a deliberately-created crisis that sweeps away the remnants of the middle class; unaccountable corporations with unimaginable wealth able to openly buy elections, and lifelong debt burdens to prevent any of the proletariate from accumulating enough power to fight back.

It's the Lords-and-Serfs economy, and it's already here.

It's not about preventing plutocracy any more; it's about overturning and destroying it.