12/13/10

Obama Tax Cuts; Followed by Outsourcing Jobs tete-a-tete With Chinese President Hu Jintao

President Obama seems the role model for young republicans for homosexuality and corporatism today:if the Obama tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires go through in the final collapse of the democratic majority in congress they are unlikely to be repealed before 2021. The national public debt by then might be 30-40 trillion dollars. President Obama has scheduled the Chinese president to visit Washington D.C. in January to consult on outsourcing more U.S. jobs to China.

Ambassador John Negroponte comments on the Hu Jintao visit...

http://www.amchamchina.org/event/740

The Obama administration turns out to be the Harvard global corporate marketing strategy p.r. team. President Hu Jintao will find a friendly face in Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the first generation born in America former Governor of Washington of Chinese ancestry. With the Harvard global marketing team wrapping up the supremacy of billionaire and millionaire networks driving the final nail in the ongoing crucifixion of democracy in the U.S.A., the prospect of a Republican Grisvald –Palin administration in 2012 seems likely, if not that of Mitt ‘Knute’ Romney asking Americans to ‘go out and win one for the billionaire’.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/sc-dc-senate-tax-vote-20101213,0,251901.story

A Sino-American Corporatist-Socialist elite management axis of power has developed so far as to undermine democracy in the United States. Democracy must reign in corporate and individual concentration of wealth in order that all citizens may have an equal opportunity for freedom and quality of life. It may be an onerous taxation task, yet someone has to do it. Failing to tax the wealthy at a 70% rate allows the beneath the surface concentration of power and influence to grow quite counterproductively to the interests of a democracy. If citizens of a democracy do not have the intestinal; fortitude to control the concentration of wealth and power they will give up their right to be free as well. It is notable that the Spartans-an historically free and self-reliant although morally extreme people, disdained individual wealth.

12/10/10

Tax Cuts for the New World Order

Economist Larry Summers-President Obama's double dip adviser (he advised the other lawyer-President Bill Clinton too), has enfiladed himself as a puppeteer of the President by suggesting that a double dip recession will follow failure to give tax cut extensions to the rich. President Obama may be more concerned about getting tax cuts for Oprah,or he could be like the corrupt steward that gave price breaks on everything debtors owed to his master (the people in our case) because he knew he was being fired (not re-elected) and wanted friends with money for when he would be out of office.

chart credit-U.S. Treasury

Malenkovitch cycles or Kondratieff waves make little difference to those of us that are not economists; we must follow common historical precedence to discern that the rich already paying historically low taxes are building up capital and network infrastructure for their enfeofment as royals in a new world order. We look at the history of the United States and believe that a failure to raise taxes during a recession and protracted war will create an economic crash ahead rather than economic growth.

The United States is a kind of wild child that is a little bit nationally obsessive-compulsive in its political attention. Without some foe to be 'them' the nation and market investors tend to spin off into the wild and crazy schemes leading to crashes such as in 1929-30.

Following the first world war the nations grew and entered the roaring 20's-akin to the 90's following the end of the cold war. Flimsy investment schemes and swingy raving arrogant ignorance abounded, then came 9-11 and a protracted 'new cold war' to replace the other one than ended in 1989.

Except for the 1930s the United States was in a protracted war until 1990. With peace the unyoked nation immediately dove into the construction of a new world order and existential financial growth globally that under the Clinton construction advice of Larry Summers outsourced industry and investments abroad, flooded the U.S.A. with illegal alien construction workers and doomed the U.S.A. to a future economic crash. Larry Summers is back double dipping with President Obama pulling his chain to enrich the Harvard crowd that created the President in an affirmative action yes-man cloning tank.

Until 1981 the lowest tax rate the rich had was 70% during the 20th century. The nation never had much public debt and the standard of living continuously improved. Though the Regan tax cuts as a one-time phenomena were able to help lift the U.S.A. past Soviet economic competition with good timing as the Soviet Army was mired with Afghanistan issues, it was a non-sustainable economic policy except as it would concentrate wealth and create vast U.S. public debt reversing the rational long term national economic progress.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/

There comes a time when brainwashing and inertia make political changes seem unthinkable or even treason. Such thought has grown around low taxes for the rich. Even the middle class in former generations has shouldered the nation's economic burden with tax increases to keep the ship of state afloat. Aristotle wrote that democracy collapses into tyranny because the people do not care enough to keep it alive, and such a circumstance seems to have befallen the Congress. Just letting the tax cuts expire would be the right thing to do though the economic leverage of the rich might raise unemployment and require a showdown between them and us. A quick draw is better than a late, half-hearted minimal compliance on self-defense issues.

The interest on the national public debt is nearly as large a portion of the federal budget as the inflated military budget. For Congress to extend unusually low tax cuts not only allows the top 1% to control most of the nation's economy and directly own about 15 or 20%, it also immediately deepens the U.S. debt that was already scheduled to be 19.6 trillion dollars in four more years.

The effects of the crisis level public debt will be to cut social service spending. Welfare spending is presently just 15% of the federal budget. The Democratic Party by keeping the tax on the rich low will sign away the nation's future to rule by the rich with fewer democratic investments in the majority.

In an ideal corporatist state democracy is effectively dead. Tax rates for the rich are low and the rich control virtually all business through networks and inter-corporation shareholding; no independent business efforts are allowed and society stagnates.

The working class will effectively become disempowered and the broadcast media will be owned by the rich to propagandize and intimidate dissident opinion. Politicians will have little option to raise taxes on the rich as they will be entirely controlled by the corporatist state. Individual opinion will be stifled when the corporatist state control the opportunity to work. Illegal alien workers will be imported to keep down the value of all non-corporate controlled improvisational independent work opportunities

12/7/10

The Psychology of Immediate Political Gratification (extended tax cuts)

Immediate versus deferred gratification is a well known characteristic of human and political psychology. Getting tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits now and letting the future worry about paying off public debt is a contrapositive example of that trait.

The present Congressional descent in public debt about 14 trilllion dollars and increasing is perhaps the best historical example of the unwillingness to pay up front what will cost a lot more if deferred. People prefer immediate rather than deferred gratification even when the immediate reward is of significantly less value.

Letting the Bush II era tax cuts would cost more now, yet historically such tax increases are used to recover from recession, depression or finance war. Presently the United States has war and a recession like economy and should raise taxes. The deferred gratification is a healthy economy later on rather than one possibly moving toward the brink of cascading insolvency, social service cuts and depression.

Paul Glimcher and Joseph Cable published an article on the phenomena of human psychological preference for immediate gratification rather than a better financial gratification in the future when given a choice. (ref. December 2007 Nature Neuroscience).

In reading this 2010 book 'Wisdom' by Stephen Hall one may encounter several concepts that can be applied to the current bad federal national economic legislation.

Historically Tax Rates Have Been Raised in the U.S.A. to Escape Recession, Depression and Finance War

In U.S. history income taxes have been raised to finance war or escape depression. Taxes were raised to 63% on the rich in 1932 to get out of the depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States

Income taxes began during the civil war with the prosperous paying 3 to 5 percent. During world war two the tax rate for the rich was raised to 92%.

The 16th amendment ratified in 1913 allowed a return of substantial federal income taxes. In 1918 the tax on the rich was raised to 77%.

All the way to 1981 the tax rate for the rich was still 70% and the nation never had substantial public debt.

The Obama-GOP plan to extend tax cuts during a war and recession go against all historical precedent. High taxation has worked before during U.S. history. The Eisenhower years were good years and taxes on the rich were high.

Perhaps an ecological economic national full employment and border security policy should be made to counter the offshore drift, and higher taxes on those earning more than $100,000 restored.

Invasive Airport Security Screening Offers Medical Screening Business Opportunity

In former eras the U.S. Government may have sought efficiency in taxpayer dollars getting what President Harry S. Truman called "more bang for the buck". Today the U.S. Government searches for extreme negative return expenditures, and the T.S.A. security screening becoming ridiculously invasive are a case in point.

The negative social psychology impacts upon many by the Federal search procedures could be readily converted into a positive reinforcement strategy with some creative thinking. Elizabeth Edwards died today of advanced breast cancer; how many people pass through T.S.A. portals at airports to worldly destinations with undiagnosed cancers and other illnesses that might have been captured during high-tech imaging procedures?

With some technical determination comercial ariport screening venuess might be made with advanced computer intelligence screened health imaging that exist alongside the invasiive T.S.A. procedures. If the high tech screening could be made a useful medical diagnostic tool many passengers passing through would be grateful rather than unhappy that their body was given a thorough once over by a computer. Those passengers found to have anamolous health problems would be given a print-out of their examination, while those passengers found to have nitro-glycerin breast implants (if that is possible) might be referred to an ordinance disposal room.

With very low cost airport medical diagnostic security screening competition, perhaps the three best diagnostic security-medical screening imaging technology bidders would win coveted space at all of the nation's airports alongside the T.S.A. The U.S. Government should determine to advance quality of U.S. airport screening to a really high tech level that does the public some good rather than making them feel violated by the heavy hand of oppressive government.

Neuro-Scientific Moral Psychology; The Emotive Moral Judgment Boundaries to Evaluations of Collective Behavior

Hanover wrote-"Epistimological questions dealing with what do we "know," preceded our dependence upon the scientific method as a means to obtain knowledge. That is, we claimed to "know" things for 1000s of years before we employed "science" as it's known today. Even today, when we say we know something, we don't always mean that our knowledge is based upon scientific reasoning.

Whether various langauges once used the word "science" and "know" interchangeably, is an interesting artifact, but I don't think it's relevant to the OP's use of the term "science," as I suspect he was using a contemporary meaning."

If knowledge and science are synonyms one might take a more contemporary meaning of science as a specialized method of attaining knowledge of the universe and its composition. Theories of knowledge or episteme regarding knowledge about knowledge are subsequent to sentience and direct awareness-knowledge obviously.

I suppose one might regard direct individual sentience as a Sartrist kind of existentialist paradigm and large organizational science such as occurs in making a phoenix lander on the Martian northern polar ice cap margin to discover that the ice is mostly water-ice rather than co2 as is on the southern pole, or M-Theory researches or particle accelerators as collective social phenomena as Sartre described in the critique of dialectical reason-I believe these activities generally are good although they may produce obstructions to science too-an inherent danger of social bureaucratic ossification developing use truths for purposes of social rewards.

Reading in Stephen Hall's 2010 book 'Wisdom', there is a chapter on morality that regards the present elite University philosophical researches into morality as a neuro-cognitive phenomenon. Kantian individualism is classed with the emotional, deep proprietary side of moral judgment and utilitarianism with a more advanced abstract neurological processing capability occurring in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Moral judgments are based in organic responses to external stimuli such as food tastes/disgust and threats to personal survival.

I would stipulate that organic stimulus response judgments to the external world and food intake quality and survival may be deeply associated with moral judgments as good or bad, yet primary emotional judgments occurring quickly when not enough time exists for advanced creative reasoning about the values of worldly circumstances and suggested best responses are not necessarily wrong when applied to more abstract circumstances.

Innate moral judgments applied to generally have the potential for being wrong responses as well as fallibility in doing math problems can occur. It Is interesting that innate responses may develop with food readily, though one may also dissociate good taste from high food quality such as in junk food in which PFC thought is required to select the bad tasting Brussel Sprouts (to some) instead of the chocolate pudding. The Congress is presently selecting the chocolate pudding of tax cut extensions.

With a neuro-cognitive moral criterion for deciding the OP it is perhaps somewhat more complicated to find a true rather than a politically correct answer. The epistemological foundation of morality based in brain processing organic history, in which moral decisions of good and bad have a certain grounding in automatic associations to food intake or perhaps survival, present different criteria for deciding the effectiveness of science in advancing planetary interests. If science enables the destruction of life on Earth through innumerable means and even destines the destruction of life on Earth through global warming or biological war it is challenging to claim that knowledge/science is improving the planet.

This irony of eating of the Tree of knowledge is that intelligence arises following willful disobedience to the will of God. With all the knowledge gained in the history of mankind, sin and greed may doom mankind to destroy itself through the wrong use of that knowledge/science rather than ‘improve it.

Hall quotes Marc Hauser in his book ‘Moral Minds’ saying, “moral judgments are mediated by an unconscious process, a hidden moral grammar that evaluates the causes and consequences of our own and others’ actions”. Hall also mentions Leon Kass and his books ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ and “The Hungry Soul”.

While there may be simple historical existence challenges that become deeply grounded as recurrent experience of good or bad events, the early childhood learning of things such as fire burns, or the examples that Schopenhaur presented in ‘The Fourfold Roots of Reason’ that depth perception is learned offer some room to differ from complete acceptance of an organic foundation for morality that cannot be easily changed.

That modern neuro-philosophy finds evidence for the existence of a natural law of moral judgments that Cicero would have been happy with, when the external referents change character from bad to good as can happen in a new environment, conditioned quick or emotive responses may also change. In contemporary politics the immediate day to day political satisfaction of income takes prescience over longer range reasoning-in the PFC is set aside for the ‘up close and personal’ processing in emotional areas of the brain.

Neuroscientific moral psychology may be able to map out various brain functions-one would expect such, yet like mapping out a computer is does not map the operating system or conscious development of moral structures for evaluating the manifest world and the manifold of complexity presented in the modern world. There seems to be an implicit bias toward proprietary emotive evaluations of external circumstances including large science and other bureaucratic endeavors, yet one should blame that drift toward inefficient political and social management of scientific activities rather than upon innate emotive psychological determination of allocation of financial resources for funding science.

Mandarin Duck Congress Readies to Kiss Butt and Expire (Sine Die) with Corporate Globalist Tax Cuts

Extended tax cuts and another year and a month for unemployment insurance (not much confidence in job creation there) and put it on the Chinese charge card of public debt. Besides being controled by foreign governbments increasingly the congress also has set the economy to be controlled by the Saudis (the major funding of terrorism according to State Department cables); anytime the Saudis like they can let terrorists destroy an oil infrastructure, cut off oil suppling and triple the price of oil allowing the U.S. economy to collapse while Saudis earn more for less production.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/07/tax.deal/?hpt=C1 The President defends the tax cut extensions. He seems not to realize that tax rebates for the middle class are possible next session nor that Republicans could not oppose middle class tax rebates.

Illegal aliens are another national job feedback control mechanism. As soon as the unemployment rate drop millions of illegal aliens surge in decreasing wages and driving up the unemployment rate. President Obama and other government lawyers with economic sludge for brains throw the nation's sovereignty under the bus as Republican adults become stern with them. Democrats apparently have no confidence in their own economic ideas for reform.

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are lobbying Congress to lay down and give tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires. These people earn more in a day than the poor earn in a lifetime. Their effect on destroying democracy and replacing it with global corporatism is nearly complete. Poor Americans have a future as lint since millionaires replacing economic activism with homosexual agitation ruled the Democrat party.

A democratic party President is urging the Democratic Majority in the House and Senate to sign off on a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts as its final substantive legislative act before scurrying back to their holes as a defeated lame duck gaggle of underachievers. Democratic Party repudiation of their major two planks-ending the war in Afghanistan and the Bush era tax cuts is a legacy likely to doom their credibility for some time; even with a complete majority government Democratic party political ineptitude would reduce their effectiveness to bent efforts to gay the military and graft a corporatist health care monstrosity unto the global corporate beast.

One may better ponder the evolving role of morality and philosophical-neurological researches at Harvard and Stanford with PFC-pre frontal cortex abstract reasoning of moral dilemmas than the national political false consciousness of economic policy that has become the perennial Lucy-Charlie Brown conundrum of failing to kick the football of balanced budget through the uprights.

Emotion occupies a priority spot in select contemporary research into morality. As the brain recognizes immediate threats, or good or bad things to eat, emotions such as fear or disgust appear before abstract cogitation and neural processing.

Emotion may recognize immediate threats before reasoning. Yet emotion like reasoning can be mistaken about the nature of phenomenal appearances; reasoning may make more complex moral evaluations than emotions. In political economic processing concerns of immediate continuity of wealth and power may override rational engineering allocations of national resources.

Emotion at a political-social level may make it all right for a political party to veto good sense. The consequence of failing to think with the PFC rather than emotion can be hazardous to long-range national prosperity.

The Democratic majority is set to sign off on pervasive low taxes for two years although U.S. history shows that such low taxes last led to the 1929-30 stock market crash. When tax rates were higher than today the nation generally was more prosperous and the standard o living of the poor and middle lass increased while the rich-the rich are always with us, had less distance between themselves and the majority. The Eisenhower years were good years.

The political false consciousness of procrastination on budget balancing and ecological economic reform will probably lead to the end of the government of the U.S.A. eventually. As in the end of the Roman republic and empire the rich became to global, greedy and universal providing unemployment (bread and circuses) to the masses while investing in foreign lands. They also flooded their military with foreign ‘guest soldiers’.

On Golden Pond or Lake of Fire?

 I was wondering if a second Biden term would bring a Lake of Fire to the world with nuclear holocaust, or a golden pond for a reelected oc...