Supply Side Wreckonomics

When the suppliers are the favored party in the economic transaction, even to the point of benefiting from individual taxpayer largess (by not having to pay their fair share of the cost for the infrastructure within which they do business), they end up controlling the economic playing field. When they do, the power in the system flow to the heirarchial heads of those fictitious persons called corporations. Sole proprietorships are unable to compete in such a scenario, because the barriers to entry are actually *raised* by the existing corporations - minimum orders, availability and prohibitive cost of insurance, and other market pressures.

Soon this ends up with a few giant, vertically integrated conglomerates deciding what and how much to produce where, and how much they will sell it for. The fact that these corporations now also decide the prevailing wages for everyone (hint: as low as possible) they will soon produce things that can only be afforded by a few, unless bought on credit from the central company bank. The amount of choice and customization will go down (you can have any color of computer you like, as long as it's white) and this will be touted by the corporate propaganda mills as a fashion statement.

Sounds like communism with a veneer of market doublespeak to me. Manufacturing already takes place in low wage gulags, and if the wages rise it gets moved to somewhere that the wages are lower and the conditions are harsher. Supply side cheerleaders within our government want to do away with the minimum wage and make child labor legal again (to "stop discrimination against the young", but they want to pay them lower "trainee" wages.) Sounds like 1920s sweatshops bullshit to me. The pee party want to bring it all back in the name of libertarianism.

So we are in the middle of stupid tax-cutting on the rich, government job cutting on the middle class, and creating lots and lots more poor with cutting off unemployment benefits, reducing food aid, and cutting medical assistance. The last, I guess, they hope will solve the problem of the poor once and for all - they'll just die and not mess up their spreadsheet world any more.

They want a total buyer's market on labor, a seller's market on goods, and the profits all flowing to the vaunted, elite few who "worked hard for it" - read that as being born rich into the right family with the right schools and the right connections. The "self made man" is a myth

What's worse, is they want all this on the backs of the taxpayers of America - the people who built the schools that trained their idea people, the people who paid for the roads that they haul their supplies and finished goods along, the people who paid for the water system, the power grid, the police, the fire department that keeps their buildings safe, etc. They don't want to pay their share, as stockholders sucking profits out of the system, or as corporations that use the roads, the water, the air, the land, and the educated workforce without paying it forward.

You know what they call such things? Parasites.

I heard Michelle "Batshit" Bachmann bleating the other day about "Job Creators, blah, blah". Problem is, after a decade of tax cuts and more tax cuts, they have only *shed* jobs, not created them. Every time we cut taxes, employment seems to drop more. Jobs creators my ass - they are sending it all into the corporate officers' and major shareholders' pockets. The ratio of CEO to bottom employee pay has gone up, not down. That's what tax cuts give you: greed for MORE.

Tinkle down economics is a failed theory. We have 30 years of proof that human nature is for the rich to always want to be richer, and thus keep more and more of the money, not spend it on creating jobs or making purchases. When they say "A rising tide lifts all boats", you have to realize that you don't make the tide rise by giving the rich guy a bigger boat with more water storage. You have to taken the stored water off of the rich guys barge and put it back in the sea.

So, 'supply side economics' seems like 'centrally planned production', with the suppliers (corporate oligarchs) deciding what to make, where make it, how little to pay the workers, where to sell it, and who to sell it to. The consumers just become a passive proletariat, manipulated by advertising pitches targeted on their income+borrowing ability and psychological weaknesses, kept in hock and enslaved to the corporation by debts that not even death allows him to shed. Should the consumer fall from grace, and lose his job because someone else will do it cheaper, he will still be marketed, but also stigmatized, called "not ambitious enough", "lazy", druggie", "stupid", "too picky" until he takes his life and his children inherit his debts.

These are the glories of "pure" capitalism according to the GOP.

Fuck that shit.

Google+ Update

I went ahead and got a Google+ account - under my pseudonym! I won't use my legal name there, period.

I have used this pseudonym for 30 years, and there are people IRL who do not know my real "legal" name. If Google+ wants to ban me, fine. I've been around since before they were, and I'll be around when they are gone.

I have more links on pseudonyms for your perusal, of course:
A Case for Pseudonyms
Preliminary results of my survey of suspended Google+ accounts
Posted at the request of someone even more tired than I am... :-)
Real-name social networking
Name Dropping

Google+ gets a minus

They have fallen into the "Real Name" trap. So I won't be there (under my wallet name). I won't go and "be social" where my social identity (my nom de net, or pseudonym) is unwanted.

It's bad enough that I have a FarceBook account under my real name. I post nothing of importance there, I don't talk about work, home, or even any deep politics there. I don't post pictures, and although I link to various progressive political stuff, I don't tend to comment much.

Geek Feminism Blog has an excellent post entitled Anti-pseudonym bingo, complete with a graphical bingo card, that covers many of the arguments against pseudonymity that I have heard online and IRL since UseNet.

My LiveJournal has various rants that I've done over the years about SF&F cons demanding my Real Name™ and city of residence for display on my badge, plus other stuff on pseudonyms (tag: pseudonym). Stalker enabling, that's all it is. It's not just on the net.

The Real Name™ thing is all bound up in privilege - especially those who trot out the "what do you have to hide" trope, or "I want to know who I'm really talking to" baloney - they want to be able to discount you if you have a funny name, or a female name, or might be a POC, or whatever. Or they want to be able to "look you up" (read: "hunt you down and intimidate you") if they disagree with what you have to say. Thank, but no thanks, you can stuff your privilege where the sun doesn't shine.

So, Google+ is actually Google-, until they fix the pseudonym problem. We don't need another FarceBook for stalker convenience.

Other Links:
Living in the Metaverse: Pseudonymity (part one)
Living in the Metaverse: Pseudonymity (part two)
Female-Name Chat Users Get 25 Times More Malicious Messages
Forward: On refusing to tell you my name
An object lesson in pseudonymity and internet privacy

Dear Stupid Republican Teabaggers

When will you get the point that Social Security and Medicare are not "entitlements"?? "Entitlements" implies that somehow they weren't paid for, that people just feel "entitled" to them, something for nothing.

You assholes. I've worked since I was 18, paying taxes into Medicare and the Social Security Trust Fund. The government, with the strength of it's buying and investing power, is supposed to invest and keep those monies for when I retire. Just because every time the GOP get their hands on the purse strings it wants to raid that piggy bank to buy another bunch of bombers and tanks doesn't mean I haven't paid in my share.

Now you chiseling asswipes want to wipe out all of that. You want me to have to go to the fucking market with a puny voucher after I'm 70 (you already have fucked over my retirement at 65) to "buy" health insurance. You fuckheads - I'm uninsurable in the private market at 49, what makes you think I could hope to buy insurance at 70? What sort of fantasy land do you live in? Medicare isn't insurance - it doesn't have to make a profit or deal with actuarial tables. The private market does. Most people over 60 can't buy private insurance for the combined amount of your penny-ante "voucher" plus their meager Social Security stipend (that they earned and paid for, damnit!)

Over-Privatization

What the hell is with this selling of America to the highest bidder? Have you no goddamn shame? Private industry is seldom the most efficient provider of social services - there is not enough profit in it without screwing the recipients over. Fire departments are a classic example, but you want to turn that over. The only way to do it is have the government pay, or require the taxpayer to pay, a monopoly provider. Yet you've seen what cable monopolies do in the various markets - drive up prices. You think the government privatization would be different? Oh, yeah, they'd cut costs all right - by cutting service, outsourcing our jobs overseas, and then coming back for more money.

You bastards would sell your own mothers, wives and children to a private company as debts slaves if it meant that they'd give you a campaign contribution. You are idiots, willing to barter away to corporate greed everything that this country has worked for over the last 100 years.