Independence Day 2023

 I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.

For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.

I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".

I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).

But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today. 

And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.

And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.

I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.

It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.

Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.

So. Happy Birthday, US. 

May you always be right. 

And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.

(And Charlie Pierce says all the same things, and better, than I just did. Worth a read.)

As for me?

Well. Couple of things.

Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.

I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing. 

Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.

Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...

So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.

We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.

I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.

Well.

Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.

We filed.

Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.

Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.

Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.

So. Good.

Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.

Oh! Almost forgot this.

So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.

But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.

Last night?

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.

So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?

Given my general opinion of We the People?

My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?

So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.

Stupid laws for clueless people

 Once again the Worst Law In Oregon returns to fuck up my state's fiscal planning:

"The surge in anticipated tax receipts will also likely trigger a big increase in the state’s unique “kicker” tax rebate that taxpayers would receive when they file their taxes next year: $5.5 billion, up from a predicted kicker of $3.9 billion at the last forecast just three months ago, according to economists’ presentation to state lawmakers Wednesday."

"Unique" is a nice way of saying "this stupidest of all stupid fucking ideas".

Imagine if you had to predict how much you'd earn in overtime for the next two years.

Then if you worked more overtime, you had to hand that money back to your employer.

You'd go fucking nuts, right? And nobody would blame you!

Of course, the anti-tax "conservatives" love this thing, but the other obstacle to flushing it is that Joe and Molly love their "kicker", without ever thinking that the eighty bucks they get is a fraction of the $80 million that Flav-r-pac and Stoel Rives and Nike are getting, all money that could be put to roads and schools and building places for all those smelly homeless people they hate seeing in their parks to live in.

Plus it prevents Oregon from setting aside a rainy day fund when times and revenues are good to help pay when times are not.

Sometimes I swear I'm living in the stupidest timeline.

Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

We have not.

A tax measure that provides a road map to increased inequality in one of the already-most-unequal industrial democracies and shreds the social safety net woven in the depth of the Depression to prevent a hard turn to fascist or communist revolution, and that is "supported" by, at most, a quarter of the citizens of the affected polity (and that in the midst of a relentless, unashamedly vicious barrage of lies from the ruling party that suggests that at least a portion of that 25% would fall away if they understood how nakedly plutocratic this legislation is) is as close to the definition of "taxation without representation" as I can think of short of a genuine occupation government.

If our political system has devolved to the point where a coterie of neo-Gilded Age fantasists can impose their Sharia Law on three-quarters of the populace, then we have put a wrap on the American Experiment.

In a truly republican nation this would decorate Pennsylvania Avenue with a festive holiday display of heads on pikes.

It has not and will not.

And, as such, we have no one to blame for our failure to keep our own republic but ourselves.

Down and Out in Schofield Barracks

A friend of mine put this up on her Facebook feed with the observation "This is a good point":

I see some variation of this stuff from time to time and usually just snort and move on. I have no idea why it pissed me off so much this time. Maybe it's that the Portland coppers are in the process of chasing our local homeless people out from under the Steel Bridge, one more round in the endless "We aren't willing to spend money to try and figure out a solution but we're fine with spending money to kick the problem-can down the road again" game we play here in the Land of the Free to Steal Bread and Sleep Under Bridges.

Maybe it was reading Jim Wright's terrific column discussing the whole nonsensical yet fucking insanely irritating obsession of the roughly-one-third-of-my-fellow-citizens who think of all taxes as theft...unless they're going to pay for killing people and breaking shit in which case, hooah!, America, fuck yeah!

But whatever the reason, it really, really pissed me off.

First, because it's a straight-out, brass-faced, fell-off-the-back-of-the-crapwagon bullshit lie.

Because the poor sad little broke GI or Marine (I add "Marine" because that the person that originally posted this thing has some sort of "jarhead 4 jarhead" header) doesn't "just" get paid $8.85 an hour.

Snuffy and Chesty also get free medical and dental care, free housing, and free meals. That's huge. Like, tens of thousands of dollars a year huge. and that's not all.

The poor little fellow's work clothes are paid for. He walks to work, so he doesn't have to have pay for a car, or gas, or insurance unless he wants to. He gets two weeks paid vacation a year and can spend it paying Motel 6 rates at Fort DeRussey at Waikiki Beach of he wants to fly there. And she doesn't even have to pay more then ten bucks for her vacation travel, either, if she flies space-A, a privilege kinda out of reach of Burger McFlipperson.

Poor little underpaid Joe and Molly are also working towards a guaranteed 50% base pay retirement after only 20 years service (meaning an 18-year-old private is only 38 at retirement) when he or she gets a huge veterans preferment for almost every civil service job.

If he makes 30 years he gets 75% of what is a pretty sweet top-three-grade pay and allowances.

Not to mention the fact that most American troops aren't ragged dog faces out in the tules, but truck drivers, IT techs, wing wipers and sailors who sleep in a bed and go to work in an office.

Plus everybody thanks his GI and Marine ass for their "freedoms" even though the last time an American soldier killed anyone for "freedom" was in 1945.

And second and last, this little screed pisses me off as a sad attempt to belittle the working poor, who have it way worse than 99% of the folks who wear a uniform, and that's coming from someone who wore one for 22 years.

This goes back to Jim's point about the nonsensical notion that paying taxes for tanks and aircraft carriers is a "public good" but paying taxes to help prevent a critical mass of your fellow citizens living in poverty and sickness and ignorance isn't. That somehow nations with lots of weapons are "healthy" and "strong"" even though they may be riven with social dysfunction from fostering a permanent underclass and a poorly educated, unhealthy, credulous citizenry.

That's nonsense, of course. Not that I'd expect a "conservative" to see that. But nonsense all the same.

Hey, I love GIs, too. But a lot of those GIs are gonna get out and find that they're going to have to try and make ends meet flipping burgers or making beds or stocking shelves and trying to do that while paying for their food and clothing and rent and aspirins, so being a dick about how poor people should be poor? That's...well, that's just being a dick.

So. As far as I can see the only "good point" this damn screed makes is the one that every GI figured out long ago;

If you crossbreed a "conservative" with a gorilla what you get you get is a retarded gorilla.

Ha! And you thought I was going to make that joke about Marines, didn't you.

April Fool.

Mortem et censito

Bob Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a link to a Stanford paper titled State revenue and expenditure in the Han and Roman empires (Scheidel 2012).

The entire paper is pretty wonkish but worth reading for a glimpse into half of the supposedly inescapable pairing of this stuff with death back in the day. I'll cook it down here for you into the Clif's Notes version:

The bureaucratic tax-and-spend set-up of Han Dynasty China (a period that extended about 400 years, roughly spanning the 2nd Centuries BCE to CE) included a lot of individual ("poll" or flat taxes per person regardless of income) taxes collected and disbursed by a small army of relatively low-payed local officials. A lot of the money stayed in the place it was collected, a relatively smaller portion went to pay the senior officials both civilian and military, and significantly less went to direct military costs.

The early Roman imperium (from roughly the end of the civil wars period in the 1st Century CE to before the crises of the 3rd), on the other hand, tended to try and capture more easily-extracted revenues; things like tariffs and fees on goods and transfers, the profits from imperial enterprises such as mines, and "luxury taxes" on great legacies and the enterprises of the wealthy such as slaves on the huge latifunda.

However, a very much larger proportion of these revenues was spent on "big projects" - public buildings and the like - as well as directed to Rome (the infamous grain dole, "bread and circuses"), and military expenses, as well as a proportionally much higher amount on the pay of the highest levels of officialdom.

Roman senatorial appointments such as the Praetorian prefect and consul-level provincial governors made something like 8 to 18 times what their Han equivalents made. This discrepancy gets smaller but persists at lower levels. A 1st Century BCE Han company commander (who ran an outfit similar to a modern infantry company, about 100-120 troops) was paid between half and two-fifths as much as his 2nd Century CE Roman counterpart (a centurio who ran a smaller outfit, typically about 80 guys at full strength).

The really pointed observation comes in the final section. Here's what Scheidel (2012) has to say about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems:

"By funneling resources towards high-level agents, a privileged capital city, and a military that were all far removed from local society, the Roman state weakened the nexus between taxation and spending. In the Han system...geography impeded massive transfer of staples, senior officials were paid less, the military less lavishly endowed and at least in times of stability more constrained by civilian leadership, and the local affairs above the village level were dealt with by formal state agents rather than self-governing urban elites.

This superficially paradoxical combination of greater cellularity and deeper state penetration may have strengthened the institution of the state at the local level. In the long term it may ultimately...explain the permanent dissolution of the Roman empire and the comparatively greater resilience or perhaps rather regenerative capacity of early Chinese state institutions."

You know I've remarked on what I see as some of the similarities of the late-republican United States and late Republican Rome. Well, here's what looks to me like some similarities between early imperial Rome and the early-oligarchic United States; a greatly increased social stratification and disconnection between the proles from whom the taxes are collected from (or who are simply too impoverished to pay more than local and state taxes - let's not forget that the really bullshit part of R-money's "47 Percent" bullshit was that federal income taxes are typically a small portion of what poor and lower-middle-class Americans pay; things like sales taxes, payroll taxes (the Social Security collection that is capped for the truly wealthy), gas taxes, state and local taxes, and property taxes (including the cost included in their rent).

In the place of the narrow Roman political elite we have an increasingly narrow American economic elite that has effectively captured the political process. Outside the truly brain-dead Teatards most Americans not in the two-yacht economy are well aware that the economic and political Game is rigged against them. It doesn't mean that they can or will stop playing. But it does mean that the tie between the citizen and the state is strained and frayed.

Add in the truly toxic Republican rhetoric about "government is the problem", the demonization of any taxation (and a deliberate drive to deflect inquiry into the actual structure and impact of taxation), and exaltation of the march towards open oligarchy as "Freedom!" and you have a system almost crafted to fail under pressure, either into a fractious anarchy or to a Man on Horseback.

I've said this before; my disgust lies not so much in the lies of the Right - after all, they're nothing but whores and whores lie to get paid - but that the rest of us, We the People, are happy to let those lies pass and let them become the language we use to "debate" our lives. At least the Romans had the excuse that they'd never seen this shit happen before.

Busy week

Things are surprisingly lively around here for the week before the Cunning Christian Prelates' Winter Solstice and Mithrasmas Takeover Bid. I'll try and post something here before the weekend is out.

One local political note: I'm seeing signs

against two state-wide tax measures that I thought would be no-brainers; Measures 66, which raises taxes on the rich (anyone making more the $250K/year) and 67 (which raises the minimum corporate tax to $150/year from the current ten bucks)

You heard right. Nike? Ten bucks. Intel? Ten bucks. Adidas?

Ten bucks.

And the frustrating thing is...I've seen NO yard signs arguing FOR these measures.

"STOP TAX GIVEAWAYS TO RICH FATCATS! YES ON 66/67"!
See?

How hard is that?

Honestly, there are times it's frustrating to be a liberal.

Canary, meet Coal Mine

Somewhat lost in the federal health care/war funding/global warming/wise Latina raree show was the sad little, noxious little budget deal worked out in California this Monday.It has to say something about who we Americans are and what we're becoming that the best idea that the Golden State's best and brightest (okay, we'll exempt Da Governator from that, but, still, We the People of California elected his Austrian ass) could come up with to "balance" the state budget was to rob their own counties and municipalites blind, to kick the poor and sick in the crotch, and to cut nonessentials like teachers, garbagemen, cops, paramedics and highway maintenence workers (in the state that practically invented Car Culture, no less...).

You can read all about it in the linked LA Times editorial, but even that supposedly liberal news organ seems to have developed collective amnesia about a couple of salient points.

1. The "we're broke, we just don't have any money, we HAVE to cut your food stamps (AFDC, Head Start, fill-in-the-blank...) or die, you silly Negroes..." meme goes all the way back to the toxic little property tax time-bomb the California GOP wired up in 1978, Proposition 13. We here in Oregon then devised our own little suicide pact, Measure 5, clearly on the conviction that if California was going to be Tom Fool and lead the best plan for us was to be Jack Fool and follow.

The direct result of this was to save Ma and Pa Goober a couple of hundred dollars a year on their rancho deluxe out there near McMinnville while giving Pacific Gas and Electric, Flav-R-Pac, and Megacorp Development an immense windfall of untaxable largesse, which, of course, they immediately rushed out to donate to the widows, orphans, disabled, and mentally ill that the now-tax-strapped state government had to chuck off the welfare rolls and out of the state institutions, colleges and job training programs they could no longer fund, so that the poor devils didn't have to beg for change at the top of the on-ramps of the roads the state could no longer maintain.

Not.

2. California compounded their own stupidity by then crafting a 2/3rds supermajority rule for passing legislative revenue measures, which has effectively prevented the state from passing any NEW revenue measures since 1996.

I love this little cartoon because of what it says about the mindset of the people who are fond of this situation. The cartoonist wants us to see that the Republican elephant is a simple but wise old soul, doing his math like a good householder and making his expenditures meet his income, and the Democratic donkey is a maddened policy wonk, all goofy for taxing everything moving to fund kooky-spooky crunchy granola frills.

But the cute little exercise fails when you realize that Jumbo's "a = b" is a logical fallacy. "a" isn't "a", it's "x", and "b" is "y". The animals in the legislature can - unlike the prudent household - change their income and outlays to meet their needs. So, in a sense, it's the donkey's frantic figuring that represents what a real government has to do: try and figure out what it needs versus what it wants, and then what it can take in versus what it would like to take in. The elephant isn't being simply honest; he's being simpleminded, he's using an axe to craft a budget rather than a woodcarving tool. Which explains a LOT about how Republican "governance" has gotten us here.

And so, here we are.

Imagine a nation in which a small handful of wealthy people live a First World lifestyle.

Their homes are nicely maintained, their roads well paved, their neighborhoods patrolled by polite, competent, professional police officers. They and their neighbors get First World medical care in daintily appointed medical clinics, shop at the best locations, dine, party, work and generally live as well as any human society in the 21st Century can arrange.

Then imagine that the bulk of the nation lives in precarious, decaying cities, towns and countrysides, prey to the collapsing, badly maintained public roads, buildings and utilities around them. Their lives are made more random by the capricious nature of their public "servants": seldom present and, when appearing, typically bribeable or even worse, merely indifferent. A fraying middle class lives squeezed between the wealthy, who despise them and the poor, who envy and hate them. Their political power is notional, their involvement in their own government negligible, they are useful only as fodder for the wealthy.

But you don't have to imagine this. All you have to do is travel south, east or west, to find dozens of impoverished Third World nations where this condition is the standard. Every craptacular little dictatorship or oligarchy the U.S. Army helped me vacation in, from Panama to Egypt and points between, featured this vast disparity between the rulers and the ruled. This wasn't a bug; it was a feature.Democracy cannot exist in a feudal society. It dies, or is killed, by the desperation, foolishness and ignorance of the peasants and the greed, venality and indifference of the nobles.

California has now chosen, rather than to even mildly discommode the wealthy, to disadvantage the disadvantaged. Rather than even attempt to close the gap between the rulers and the ruled, it chooses to allow the public weal to fall victim to private wealth.

There is a name for this sort of system.

But "republican", it's not.

Ever since the Elevation of Saint Ronnie, our public discourse has been dominated by the idea that "taxes are bad". In this sense, the conservatives that lost the Battle of Watergate won the larger war. They wanted to concentrate power in the nation's elite, and, largely, they have. They wanted to move the nation's laws - if they could not move the nation's people - to the right and, largely, they have.Well, California has reached the conservative state of grace; the state, and those in the care of the state, now exist to serve the needs of the wealthy. We shall see if the result is beneficial for the state and her people as a whole. We shall see.

(crossposted at MilPub)