Misleading Us All

No, I haven't posted in a good long while, almost 10 months. I just haven't found much of anything worth posting about in that time. Sure, I could do the usual thing and talk about elections. I could talk about whatever random nonsense occurs to me. I could even talk about the strange and silly things that happen in my everyday life. But none of those are the purpose of this blog and none of those are cathartic enough for me. No, instead the topic I find myself drawn to most recently is the downfall of the US as a nation.

Now, you may think that I'm going off on a conspiratorial rant here, that I'm jumping at shadows and, who knows. Perhaps I might be. Goodness knows I've always had a semi-flirtatious relationship with optimism, instead defaulting to pessimism and cynicism especially when it relates to anything that smells faintly of the US Government. What's stuck in my craw at the moment are, well, a number of things. I could break these down to individual posts and get more mileage out of it, but instead I decided I would make a single, comprehensive post. This will likely be a fairly long post, so go get yourself a cup of coffee or whatever. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission
(Corporate Personhood)


This is the first stone. I say first because it came first. In case you haven't heard of it (which honestly wouldn't surprise me), this was a decision by the US Supreme Court made on Jan 21, 2010. This decision held that the First Amendment prohibits government from limiting political spending by corporations and unions. Stop here and let that sink in for a moment. Corporations and unions can spend as much as they like on political campaigns. Let's take a simple example. The Fortune 500 list has come out now so, I'll take the top 3 and do a little rough and dirty math. Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, when added together have $971 billion. Do me a favor, if you're fortunate enough to currently be employed, go get your most recent pay stub. Looks good, right? I mean, it's money in hand at the very least. Compare it though to, oh let's say, Exxon Mobil's revenues. I'll be a mean son of a bitch here and type it out in full so that you can make a visual comparison. According to the Fortune 500, Exxon Mobil's revenue was $354,674,000,000.00 rounded, of course. How's that paycheck look in comparison now?

"Oh look, he's pulling out the class warfare rhetoric!" No, no I'm not. I'm making a point, just bare with me and excuse the snark as we writers have to take our victories where we can get them. For your typical 12-week advertising campaign the average cost for prime time air time is around $200,000 for a 30 second spot. How many spots could you afford as an individual citizen right now? How many could Exxon Mobil afford? I'm not picking on Exxon Mobil, I'm only using them as an example. Take your pick of the Fortune 500 companies. You have to drop to number 18 before you're under $100 billion, and even down at number 100, you're still listing revenues in the billions.

Okay, so TV spots are likely out for you. You're just going to have to give up on that route but maybe you can do something, right? I got it, let's go with something else. How about Direct Mail. Junk mail. You know, snail mail spam. That should at least get word out there, right? Average cost there is around $1,500 for 1,000 postcards. That's more in the ballpark, right? Until you consider that to reach the same audience as prime-time TV (I'll take the audience of Person of Interest, because I like that show, so 14 million people) you will have to shell out around $21,000,000 dollars. Ouch.

So, you'll never really reach the spending capability of a large corporation, so whatever message you have, will likely just get lost in the shuffle the equivalent of shouting into a hurricane. It's a sensation I'm familiar with so let me express my sympathies now. I'm not saying that groups of people shouldn't be able to collectively voice their opinion. The First Amendment does say that we've got the right to do that. Hell, look at any of the recent Occupy movements for an excellent example of that. What I'm saying is that the system is broken when it's money, not ideology, that gets people elected.

We are in the year of a major election, electing our President. This is admittedly a very prestigious position. The elected leader of an entire nation. Already I'm hearing on radio and seeing on TV advertisements that support or completely trash current politicians that are trying to vie for various offices. These spots are not endorsed or funded by any of the candidates. We're not even getting the typical "I'm Pompous Dickweed, and I approve this message" at the end any more. It's not necessary.

This particular rabbit hole goes a bit deeper though. Corporations can out-spend citizens, this much is a given, on top of being able to 'donate' money to political parties (I would love to see the Cost/Benefit analysis of that particular decision). They hold these abilities behind the guise of Free Speech. But I challenge you to go look at the numbers. They spend on both sides, most often down to the individual level. They give money simultaneously to Republicans and Democrats. They give money to the campaigns of both Pompous Dickweed and his opponent Clueless Fuckwit.

Let me break this down Barney for you. I tell you "I support Pompous Dickweed" then I tell you "I support Clueless Fuckwit", who the fuck am I supporting? I stuff envelopes and answer phones and post signs in my yard for both of them, what exactly am I doing? I am diversifying my options so that no matter which way the election goes, I was right. I 'win'. I'll expand on this a little more here with a little bit more pretend.

Imagine for a moment that I'm not a writer. Imagine I'm the head of "Ben Dover and Takeit" a large corporation that just keeps falling shy of the number one spot on the Fortune 500. In fact, I'm having trouble clinging to spot number 499 because my company has a bad public image, but I just happen to make all kinds of useful sprockets that lots of people want. My company continues along on it's meager $4 billion but guess what? There's an election coming up (There always is, I just needed to 'cling on' for 2 years) so, here comes my two happy politicians Pompous Dickweed and Clueless Fuckwit. The election could go either way, it's really really hard to make a choice between them and even the radio talk show hosts, blogs and news organizations seem to be going either way. I go, as the head of my corporation, and talk to Pompous Dickweed and say "Hey, I've got a spare $50 mil, I'll throw it at your campaign because I can now, and when you get elected, I'll even give you stock options so you can make a huge profit while in office as long as you help to craft the laws in the way I want so I can finally make it into the top 100 in that damn Fortune list." But I'm not done, I go to Clueless Fuckwit and make the exact same pitch. For $100 million, I've secured a bump in revenue that may potentially push me up from $4 billion to, oh say, $25 billion. That's only the 99 spot but hey, I've gained $21 billion for a $100 million dollar investment. That's damn good caviar for a tiny price of entry.

How about we make this example even worse. I'm the head of "Ben Dover and Takeit" a company incorporated in Delaware (as a 'random' example..I'll get to that), but I'm actually a German national (again, semi-random, I am German by heritage). I'm not even a US citizen. But because my company is a US company, a 'person' in the US, I can spend as much as I like to influence elections without having to worry about what these decisions might mean for citizens across the ocean because they don't really affect me. I will say that again. A non-US citizen can decide who will lead US citizens. And this is a good thing?

This in isolation is pretty fucking bad, to be blunt, but guess what? It gets worse.

The Delaware Loophole
(Or, How to Legally Dodge Taxes)

This one came to light to me most recently with the aforementioned Occupy movement, so I list it as later than the Citizens United decision though it has arguably been around longer. Here's how this works:

I am once again the head of "Ben Dover and Takeit". The state my business operates from is slowly going broke and so they figure "Hey, we've got a lot of corporations here, maybe they can stand to take a half-percent bump in taxes to keep us afloat collectively, yeah?" But I can't allow that, it would cause a drop in on-paper profits and thereby cause investors to lose confidence and pull their money out of my company's stocks, leading to an eventual crash and burn of the company, right? Well, that's how I see it. But wait! I have a savior! The Delaware Loophole.

I create a subsidiary in Delaware. To this subsidiary I grant all IP rights, all my patents, all of the business side of my business. Now, mind, I'm not laying out costs for an office building, I'm not going to pay a single employee a damn thing. What I'm going to do is rent a PO Box. There is my address for the subsidiary. Now my 'subsidiary' is going to rent back my stuff to me at such a rate as to make my in-state business profits effectively zero dollars. Nothing, zilch, nada. Oh! I'm so sorry mister State tax collector! I have no monies in profits, so I don't have anything you can tax.

What if my state goes bankrupt though? Wouldn't that be horrible? Oh well, I suppose I could generously donate to a mayor, governor, state congress and be seen as a savior for far less than they would have collected in taxes. And would this generosity possibly lead to advantages like tiny little local laws that might stifle potential competition? Maybe! Wouldn't that just be a happy day for my company? Of course "our politics don't work like that!" No dear, no they don't. And Santa Claus really is Big Brother.

This goes beyond the local or even business level though. Congressional reps are allowed to use this loophole for their own ends to likewise avoid being taxed. Is there any wonder why there hasn't been any talk about this, let alone an utter lack of movement to close it? If I were to be disappeared, this would probably be the reason here, because I dared to go after the money.

Oh, I'm just being a real conspiratorial whack job now. People in the US don't get disappeared! Really?

National Defense Authorization Act of 2012
(How to Rendition Americans)

This is the biggest monkey on my back, somewhere around the size of an 800 pound gorilla. What is it? Oh, not much. Just the routine typical military spending budget. It comes along every year and never really makes much of a splash and this one is more of the same. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Oh wait.

I wouldn't be talking about it if that was the case, would I? Buried deep in the (as usual, wordy cumbersome and dense) language of the bill (H.R. 1540 Title X, Subtitle D, Sec 1021 and 1022) is a section that deals with the detention of terrorists. Nothing to worry about there, right? I mean, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) already allows us to hold those dirty dirty evildoers (I love that word) in Gitmo until 'hostilities' are ended. You know, the whole War on Terror thing that's scheduled to end sometime around the second coming?

This section apparently had to be included because we're too stupid to recognize things that were done a decade ago so we just had to reiterate that we really really want to get those raghe-ah I mean terrorist bastards. Right? Well, probably partially true, given how inept the average politician is but, there's more in the bill.

In combination with the Patriot Act and the AUMF, this bill authorizes the indefinite detention of US citizens without trial.

Yes, this is important enough that it gets it's own line. I cannot say this enough. All those awful things that we do across the sea over in the Middle East can now be done right here at home. Any wonder why the President decided to bring the military forces (mostly) home now, instead of the promised 16 months into his term? Okay okay, maybe that's getting a touch conspiratorial.

There's a lot of talk on the tubes back and forth about this bill and whether that line is true or not. There's the whole 'belligerent act' wording, there's the waivers for individuals (waivers to be detained, mind, not to avoid detention), there's the section that says this doesn't affect existing laws, there's the part that says military detention isn't a 'requirement' for US citizens. But what's really important to note is that none of the talk itself matters. This bill is law. It's done.

Someone might say "Well, we needed this because (McVeigh, Kaczynski, Galleani, Ivins, etc..Fuck it, name a 'terrorist') needs to pay for their actions" or "We need to be able to stop (pick an X from the list) from (blowing up/poisoning/shooting..again, pick one) people!" We already accept ubiquitous spying on us, so sure, why not? Go ahead and lock anyone you want up. That can never go wrong. Just ask the Japanese during WWII. They liked their concentration camps because they totally didn't have anything better to do with their time. It was like a vacation. And the same with those ugly brown people locked up in Cuba. They're evil anyways so what does it matter? We need to be able to stop US citizens from following that evil path.

One small thing though... We already have a law on the books for this.


Read that again. And again. Fucking memorize that. It's the only actual law listed in the Constitution and repeated in the US Code:

 "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States." - 18 U.S.C Sec 2381


Deep breath. I'm going to take a step back here. Maybe you've read the bill and thought to yourself "I don't see at all where this applies to us. It totally keeps us safe with those sections about application to US citizens and the other part about not changing existing laws." What you have there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the legal system.


Put simply, intent matters. There was an amendment offered while this was still in debate that would have, in plain language and categorically, put in writing that this law does NOT affect US citizens. It was rejected wholly. Why? Why would Congress say "We don't want that in our bill". Why would the President sign a law that failed to have such a provision? Because the intent is that this law is intended to apply to all people equally, foreign and domestic. This law passed and, among politicians, not a single fuck was given that day.


They passed this law because there's that whole sticky issue of courts going off on their own and, you know, finding people NOT GUILTY. That just puts a real twist in the nipples of the 'counter terrorist' folks. Because obviously suspicion should be more than enough evidence. Never mind the fact that the Occupy movement, a mostly peaceful world wide happening that espouses direct democracy, has been called a terrorist organization. Suspicion alone is more than enough to lock the lot of them up, right? Because due process is too slow and just a big dick in the ass that no one really needs, I suppose.


Still feeling happy and sunshiney about the direction of our country? It gets better. Now for the most prolific thing that has happened in recent memory (the last 24-48 hours as of the time of this writing in fact).


Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act
(Shut the Fuck Up Acts, collectively)


SOPA and it's ugly sister PIPA. If you haven't heard about these, you're a damn fool. Sorry, just the way of it. Everybody has been talking about them recently. You couldn't get on Wikipedia yesterday because of it. A large number of websites blacked themselves out willingly in protest over these bills.


On this front there is some good news. The pressure has been big and public enough that lawmakers are considering backing off on these. Good for you, online protesters. Kudos and good job. Where the fuck were you for the previously mentioned bill-now-law? Don't worry, I'm not about to go on a tear about that, it's already done with.


These acts would allow websites to be shut down. Plain and simple. No due process (just like the last law, are we seeing a trend?), no warrants, no investigation. Just shut it down (Dark City style, in my head). Who's in favor of this? Money, of course. Those giant conglomerations and corporations I mentioned before. Who's against it? Other corporations, mostly tech-based. Who will suffer in the end? All of us.


In it's current incarnation, this law is done, until people forget about it and it gets passed silently, likely shoved into the middle of another appropriations bill that is crammed full of shit that no one is going to read. And when it does, it will happen without fanfare, without a whimper once people have collectively moved their attention on to the next shiny thing, the next disaster, the next blockbuster movie. People will let this pass, forget about it and be silenced.


When this happens, this blog will likely cease to exist and we will all become felons and terrorists and we will welcome this change with no fight, no backlash.


"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -- Thomas Paine, 1777


"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.  It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837