Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

New York City union workers claim they were ordered to intentionally go slow at clearing snow to protest budget cuts.

TAX AND SPEND:

Robert Murphy takes apart Paul Krugman's funny contortions to claim that government isn't growing under Obama.

Here's a good reminder we have the stupidest government in the world: Canada cuts corporate tax rates to less than half of US corporate rates. But there's more...

"Canada is poised to cut its corporate-tax rate to 16.5% on Jan. 1, part of a decade-long campaign that some experts say is making the country one of the most cost-effective places to do business in the developed world."

"The latest tax cut is Canada's fourth in as many years and will lower its federal corporate income-tax rate from the current 18% to less than half of the U.S.'s 35%, at a time when economists and government officials fret that high U.S. taxes could be discouraging investment south of the border.

In 2012, Canada plans to cut its corporate taxes further, to 15%, bringing combined provincial and federal taxes to about 25%, from a combined average of 42.6% in 2000.

The Canadian government says those cuts will give Canada the lowest overall tax rate on business investment in the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations when deductions and credits are factored in.

The cuts have been accompanied by other business-friendly policies in the past few years, from removing corporate surtaxes and levies on capital to a promotional blitz by Canadian politicians and business leaders bent on taking advantage of the country's relatively strong standing after the recession.

"We have our deficit and debt situations under control,'' said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, in an interview earlier this month. "Our financial sector is solid so people don't need to be concerned about dealing with Canadian banks.''"

And we wonder why jobs are fleeing America. This begs the question: why do we have the stupidest government in the world? Because we have the biggest government in the world and because we elect people to dominate the world through violence. The most evil people in America go into government, and the most evil of those rise to the top. The people who want to dominate the world through violence are necessarily psychopaths and sociopaths. Those same psychopaths and sociopaths don't differentiate between foreigners and Americans. They violently dominate everybody.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Big banks are starting to lend. Inflation is sure to follow.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

This was the coldest winter on record in south Florida.

WAR ON DRUGS:

This article shows that not only is government an upperworld group of gangsters, a super-mafia that claims the power to legalize its crimes, it's also intimately connected to underworld gangsters through the drug trade by intelligence agencies.

"Las Vegas is the Rosetta Stone to understanding America's confluence between the State and organized crime. In their monumental book, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, the brilliant husband and wife research team of Roger Morris and Sally Denton have authored a comprehensive synthesis detailing the historic nexus of organized crime syndicates, Wall Street, and the intelligence community. Business World described this volume as "a unified field theory of corruption — political, economic, and criminal — in which all dark roads lead to the oasis in the Nevada wasteland," while The Wall Street Journal stated the book portrays "a saga of underworld subculture that intersects with that of government agents, senators, and presidents and ranges from Cuba to Dallas to Watergate.""

I guess I have to buy that book.

"Michael Woodiwiss, Organized Crime and American Power: A History. This amazing book outlines how it all interconnects. This is not the American History your coach taught you in high school. Government = Organized Crime."

And that one. This article lists many more books that document the links between government and organized crime. This shouldn't be surprising to anybody given the nature of government.

CIA involvement in the Afghan opium trade.

POLICE STATE:

Here's a great reminder that judges are not fair arbiters but merely agents of the government along with police and prosecutors. Tampa police setting up DUI checkpoints with judges on site so if a driver refuses a breathalyser, the judge can immediately sign a warrant requiring a blood test. This gives new meaning to the term "vampire state".

WAR:

Examining the war in Afghanistan as a struggle to control the opium trade. CIA involvement in the Afghan opium trade.

"the Afghan economy is a narco-economy: in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply."

Wow.

"Since Alfred McCoy has done more than anyone else to heighten public awareness of CIA responsibility for drug trafficking in American war zones, I feel awkward about suggesting that he downplays it in his recent essay. True, he acknowledges that “Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets,” and he adds that “the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region.”

But in a very strange sentence, McCoy suggests that the CIA was passively drawn into drug alliances in the course of combating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the years 1979–88, whereas in fact the CIA clearly helped create them precisely to fight the Soviets:

In one of history's ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia's opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region's highland warlords.

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources. Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda."

More blowback.

"Thus I take issue with McCoy when he, echoing the mainstream U.S. media, depicts the Afghan drug economy as one dominated by the Taliban. (In McCoy’s words, “If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.”) The Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy is variously estimated from $90 to $400 million. But the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the total Afghan annual earnings from opium and heroin are in the order of from $2.8 to $3.4 billion.

Clearly the Taliban have not “captured” this economy, of which the largest share by far is controlled by supporters of the Karzai government. In 2006 a report to the World Bank argued “that at the top level, around 25-30 key traffickers, the majority of them in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions.” In 2007 the London Daily Mail reported that "the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government.""

So despite control ten times the amount of drug money, Karzai's government still can't compete with the Taliban. Our government chose the losing side in this civil war.

"Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country. For example both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.” When Associate Attorney General Lowell Jensen refused to proceed with Nazar’s indictment, the San Diego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publicly exposed his intervention. For this he was promptly fired."

I always knew government created crime, but I never really made the leap to persistent, pervasive organized crime before. After reading several of the articles linked in this post, it just became clear to me that persistent, pervasive organized crime can only survive because of government. It needs access to government institutions and it feeds on the criminality and corruption of government. Free people would never tolerate it, and it would be much easier to stamp out without government protection and support.

"General Ramon Guillén Davila, chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, "The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." Time magazine reported that a single shipment amounted to 998 pounds, following earlier ones “totaling nearly 2,000 pounds.” Mike Wallace confirmed that “the CIA-national guard undercover operation quickly accumulated this cocaine, over a ton and a half that was smuggled from Colombia into Venezuela.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen. Guillén may have been more than 22 tons."

"But the United States never asked for Guillén’s extradition from Venezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela for plotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez, his indictment was still sealed in Miami. Meanwhile, CIA officer Mark McFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had also wished to indict, was never indicted at all; he merely resigned."

That's some pretty heavy duty support and protection.

"Other institutions with a direct stake in the international drug traffic include major banks, which make loans to countries like Colombia and Mexico knowing full well that drug flows will help underwrite those loans’ repayment. A number of our biggest banks, including Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of Boston, have been identified as money laundering conduits, yet never have faced penalties serious enough to change their behavior. In short, United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad."

So not only do alcohol, tobacco and cotton corporations profit from the war on drugs, but Wall Street does as well. No wonder we can't end it.

Wonderful, personal illustration of the drug problem in the Afghan war:

"In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja's outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. Marines dashed through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town's mud-walled compounds.

After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander General Stanley A. McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice-president and Helmand's provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing government to remote villages just like Marja.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted anger.  "If they come with tractors," one Afghani widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy."

For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous threat: opium eradication.

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely unaware that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin capital -- with hundreds of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin."

It boggles my mind that handful of central planners in Washington think they can go to Afghanistan and centrally plan a foreign society half a world away into an American ally with bombs and bullets. They can't grasp the complexities of what's going on in their own neighborhoods, each individual simply has too much information for others to comprehend, let alone a nation of 25 million still living in a tribal society half a world away. This is a spectacular example of the fatal conceit of central planning.

"With its forces now planted in the dragon's teeth soil of Afghanistan, Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending cycle of drugs and death. Every spring in those rugged mountains, the snows melt, the opium seeds sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters takes to the field, many to die by lethal American fire.  And the next year, the snows melt again, fresh poppy shoots break through the soil, and a new crop of teen-aged Taliban fighters pick up arms against America, spilling more blood. This cycle has been repeated for the past ten years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely."

As heartbreaking as it is, there's no end in sight.

"So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome -- for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or we can begin to withdraw American forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined in decades of war."

But that's just a different central plan that suffers from the same fatal conceit. I think the best plan is no plan at all: withdraw our troops as quickly and safely as possible and free the American people to engage the Afghan people in a system of voluntary exchange. Private citizens will organize to inform others and guide resources to their best advantage.

POLITICS:

Establishment Republican runs for RNC head to put a stop to the tea party rebellion. This is another piece of evidence showing Republicans are no different than Democrats. I think establishment Republicans might just make themselves extinct in a few years. The no labels party is a similar reaction from the ruling class. They're scrambling to come up with an idea that will convince the tax slaves to come back to the plantation.

Bloomberg succintly sums up the problem with the no-labels movement:

""Last month, voters turned against Democrats in Washington for the same reason they turned against Republicans in 2006," Bloomberg said. "Democrats now, and Republicans then, spent more time and energy conducting partisan warfare than forging centrist solutions to our toughest economic problems.""

It begins with the false believe that Republicans and Democrats don't work together. This is blatantly false. According to THOMAS the 111th Congress passed 342 public laws. The two parties only disagreed on three or four laws, and on those laws, all they disagreed about was how much each faction of the ruling class got to share in the looting. So this idea is based on a false premise.

It continues with the assumption that government should solve our problems, and it propagates the myth that government exists to solve our problems. Both are blatantly false. Government exists as a tool for the ruling class to loot the people. That's it's sole purpose. Because of the laws of nature - human nature - it can't be any other way. It doesn't protect us. It makes us less safe. It doesn't improve the quality of our lives. It makes us poorer, less healthy and more stressed. There's no such thing as good government. There's only small, bad, corrupt government and bigger, worse, more corrupt government.

The ruling class divided itself into two factions, identical for all practical purposes except for the rhetoric they use to engage their bases, so they could use divide and conquer techniques on the people, and they have been phenomenally successful at doing so. There's really not a dime's worth of difference between them. If you didn't believe that before, the lame duck session should have made it perfectly clear as Republicans worked overtime with Democrats to advance their common agenda of looting the American people. If you didn't believe that before, seeing that the so-called party of no actually worked with Democrats to pass 342 laws, 330+ of which we never heard a peep about, should prove it.

This is smoke and mirrors undoubtedly being pushed by ruling class members who think it will enable them to loot us more effectively in the future.

It's just a bunch of aristocrats who are upset they lost their jobs and scared more of their ruling class buddies are going to lose their jobs in the near future. They'll do anything they can to keep the people from exercising their power.

In Notes on Democracy, Mencken explains how American politicians, who I call aristocrats, aren't aristocrats at all.

"What [the political class] lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another - which is to say, men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in the metaphysics, and that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the cots of heresy become prohibitive."

Those are important distinctions between the aristocrats of today versus old, but I think the similarities outweigh the differences. I doubt aristocrats of old felt as secure from the mob as Mencken claims. And if you think about how many aristocrats went broke in England, I'm sure they were very concerned about their government paychecks as well. But of course the mob couldn't vote them out of office.

As for similarities, both put self-interest above anything else. Both loot and inflict violence on the people - as much as the people will tolerate without taking revenge. And while there's no old social entity to compare to today's plutocrats, the aristocrats still hold all the power. Plutocrats are not as powerful as many think. Certainly the heads of Lehman Brothers were part of plutocracy, yet the aristocrats orchestrated the collapse of their company. Obama fired the plutocrat who headed GM. Obama limited salaries and bonuses of plutocrats. Aristocrats can crush corporations like bugs knowing full well a host of other plutocrats will race on hands and knees to the aristocrat with plates full of gold coin to fill the monetary void.

Democrats orchestrating a campaign to vote for Sarah Palin in the primaries because they think Obama will defeat her. I wonder how they feel about copying Rush Limbaugh.

LOCAL:

Apparently Ohio was a hotbed of seismic activity this year, including this morning.

MISC:

Nock links Prohibition and the Neal Deal through American character.

"[N]o one has adequately remarked the ease and naturalness of the transition from Prohibition to the New Deal. Someone may have done it, but if so it has escaped me. There is a complete parallel between them. They are alike in their inception. They are alike in their professed intention. As for their fundamental principle, they are so far alike that the one is a mere expansion of the other. They are alike in respect of the quality of the people who support them, alike in respect of the kind of apologists they attract to their service, and, finally, they are alike in their effect upon the spirit and character of the nation."

When I started this essay, I thought it was current.