Y
Yo' Momma
Guest
"Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates a
months-long saga of controversial behavior, it's the question being asked by
her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?"-- Bald
and Broken: Inside Britney's Shaved Head, Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19
What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a ****? How's
that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?
I'm not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina
moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to
usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile
demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a
demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless
celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and
Human Services budget.
But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find
Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily
newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend. To me,
this crosses a line. My definition of a news story involves something
happening. If nothing happens, then you can't have "news," because nothing
has changed since the day before. Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday,
an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was,
shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an
idiot, and we'll know when that happens, because she'll have shot herself
for the good of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the
least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.
Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own
eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the
battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.
On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in
the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very
hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had
done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks
ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy
over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing
document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly
articulates the priorities of our current political elite.
Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a
complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are
in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this
country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about
$442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense
budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts
are how Bush plans to pay for them.
Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate
Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one
family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be
about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy
corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely
ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work
cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those
assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than
three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion)
over the same time period.
Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:
a.. Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while
education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
b.. Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax
break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630
million cut
c.. Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while
LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut
And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of
former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement
package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.
Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes
be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The
program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and
newborn children.
Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the former
CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged consumers,
with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January of 2001. There is
a direct correlation between the avarice of oil company executives and the
increased demand for federal aid for heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and
yet the federal government wants to reward these same executives for raising
prices on the backs of consumers.
Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of
budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole
century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while
cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant
subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical
companies and defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on
those who most directly benefit from those subsidies. Thus you're not
cutting spending -- you're just cutting spending on people who actually need
the money. (According to the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic
twist of fate did one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be
1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while
revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is something different from
traditional conservatism and something different from big-government
liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the state into a
huge, ever-expanding instrument for converting private savings into
corporate profit.
That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized
bribery and political connections more important factors than performance
and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain
****ing offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about
paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for
some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are
buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick
cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an
excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.
I also don't remember reading much about this year's budget. It was a story
for about half a minute when it came out two weeks ago. It barely made TV
newscasts, and even when it did, only the broad strokes made it on air.
There was some fuss about the Alternative Minimum Tax and a mild uproar over
the fact that the 2008 budget failed to account for estimates of the costs
for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But overall, the budget was a non-starter
as a news story. As it does every year, it takes a back seat to hot-button
issues like gay marriage, the latest election scandal, etc. Already, the
2008 election presidential campaign has gotten far more ink than the 2008
budget. As entertainment, bullshit politics always triumphs over real
politics.
Here's the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If the
Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune actually
needed the news media to work better than it does now, believe me, it would
work better. But they have no such need, because the system is working just
fine for them as is. The people it's failing are the rest of us, and most of
the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse or
watch Britney Spears hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars
are actually paying for.
****, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us? People that
dumb don't deserve to have money.
http://www.alternet.org/story/48278/
months-long saga of controversial behavior, it's the question being asked by
her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?"-- Bald
and Broken: Inside Britney's Shaved Head, Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19
What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a ****? How's
that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?
I'm not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina
moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to
usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile
demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a
demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless
celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and
Human Services budget.
But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find
Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily
newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend. To me,
this crosses a line. My definition of a news story involves something
happening. If nothing happens, then you can't have "news," because nothing
has changed since the day before. Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday,
an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was,
shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an
idiot, and we'll know when that happens, because she'll have shot herself
for the good of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the
least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.
Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own
eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the
battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.
On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in
the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very
hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had
done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks
ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy
over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing
document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly
articulates the priorities of our current political elite.
Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a
complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are
in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this
country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about
$442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense
budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts
are how Bush plans to pay for them.
Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate
Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one
family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be
about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy
corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely
ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work
cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those
assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than
three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion)
over the same time period.
Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:
a.. Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while
education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
b.. Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax
break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630
million cut
c.. Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while
LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut
And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of
former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement
package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.
Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes
be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The
program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and
newborn children.
Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the former
CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged consumers,
with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January of 2001. There is
a direct correlation between the avarice of oil company executives and the
increased demand for federal aid for heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and
yet the federal government wants to reward these same executives for raising
prices on the backs of consumers.
Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of
budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole
century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while
cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant
subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical
companies and defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on
those who most directly benefit from those subsidies. Thus you're not
cutting spending -- you're just cutting spending on people who actually need
the money. (According to the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic
twist of fate did one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be
1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while
revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is something different from
traditional conservatism and something different from big-government
liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the state into a
huge, ever-expanding instrument for converting private savings into
corporate profit.
That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized
bribery and political connections more important factors than performance
and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain
****ing offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about
paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for
some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are
buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick
cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an
excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.
I also don't remember reading much about this year's budget. It was a story
for about half a minute when it came out two weeks ago. It barely made TV
newscasts, and even when it did, only the broad strokes made it on air.
There was some fuss about the Alternative Minimum Tax and a mild uproar over
the fact that the 2008 budget failed to account for estimates of the costs
for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But overall, the budget was a non-starter
as a news story. As it does every year, it takes a back seat to hot-button
issues like gay marriage, the latest election scandal, etc. Already, the
2008 election presidential campaign has gotten far more ink than the 2008
budget. As entertainment, bullshit politics always triumphs over real
politics.
Here's the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If the
Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune actually
needed the news media to work better than it does now, believe me, it would
work better. But they have no such need, because the system is working just
fine for them as is. The people it's failing are the rest of us, and most of
the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse or
watch Britney Spears hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars
are actually paying for.
****, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us? People that
dumb don't deserve to have money.
http://www.alternet.org/story/48278/
