Working Life

The government’s deficit and debt are not a big crisis. It’s not even a little crisis. It’s not a crisis at all.

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Unfortunately, this all seems so familiar: lies that lead to death and misery for millions of people. We’ve seen it with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—and no one reading this needs a recounting of that travesty. To me, the domestic economic equivalent of a purely absurd, immoral policy is the obsession over the debt and deficit “crisis.” Which is to say: welcome to the first of a series of posts to coincide with the release of the Second Edition of “It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis”

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It’s hard to pick out, in the world we live in, the greatest of all farces. But, certainly, a top-tier candidate would be the repeated, mind-numbing instances when a Wall Street financier or a big bank pays a massive fine to avoid litigation but is allowed to present the fiction that it did nothing wrong. Everyone knows the law was violated. But, only the big fish get to pretend like it never happened. Well, maybe there is a very tiny crack in the facade of these farces, which could bring, some day, the practice to an end.

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For your digestion, or indigestion, another chapter in the astonishing chutzpah and greed. When the rich don’t have enough room or covet something else, they just buy another property for a nice cool $60 million — and, then, they whine about taxes being too high.

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One of the people I have zero sympathy for — and the general public should have outright antipathy towards — is Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. If the guy isn’t in jail, he should at least be unemployed — like the millions of people he helped put out of work courtesy of his financial shenanigans. Maybe he will actually end up on the short end, though I’m still skeptical even with the raft of investigations aimed at JP Morgan Chase.

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Ideology is a powerful factor in the way people see things — or don’t see things, either intentionally or because they just can’t. So, when Bruce Bartlett recently wrote about the risks of retiring without a decent pension, it was both comical and bizarre that he chose to ignore the main reason for the destruction of a comfortable retirement.

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So, Wall Street got to really fuck workers once — when the greedy bastards who cratered the economy with their foolish games, they put millions of people into the streets, people who lost their jobs because of the greed. While not a single high-ranking financial leader is in jail, the greedy bastards are coming back for a second time to fuck workers — this time trying to screw them out of pensions.

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On the list today of no-brainer questions and answers: If you are an undocumented immigrant working for a low wage, would you trust the Chamber of Commerce or the AFL-CIO to look after your interests. Ok, on to a tougher question…

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The whole nonsense about taxes being a big burden on the rich has been one of great societal burdens. At least one rich guy has found that out, giving up the search for the Holy Grail of low tax countries. And wouldn’t you know it, it was John Cleese himself.

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With the budget debate in full swing and tax deadline just a whisper away, I thought it would be useful to post this, even if it’s a year old — something to keep around every time you hear corporations whine about high taxes. Because those taxes aren’t high at all (yes, I know you know that basic fact).

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