OK – I’ll own up to this … we were in Barnes and Noble, and there for $7.98 was a book of self-scoring tests called “What’s Your IQ.” I took all of those tests in school, and got the results at that time only in percentile numbers. I’ve never been told my “IQ.” I’ll leave it to my readers to guess the number – the guesses might be from 56 (Swede) to 73 (Fred), to 211 (me).

I haven’t taken anything more than the social skills tests – basically, it says I have none. I’m “argumentative”, it tells me. I gotta give them that.

Here’s a couple of questions they ask:

You have been working at your company for ten years and have not had a history of leaving work early. You have a doctor’s appointment that requires you to leave work a half-hour earlier than scheduled. Instead of letting your boss know you have to leave early, you decide to leave unnoticed and hope nobody sees you. Your boss finds out that you left early and the next day he comes into your office and asks what happened.

Below are five potential responses to your boss. Rate each one according to how effective you think it would be.

1: I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
2. Look, I never leave early. Will you stop bothering me.
3. I had an appointment that couldn’t be missed. I’m sorry for not telling you.
4. It couldn’t be helped.
5. I understand you’re upset, but I had a personal issue to attend to.

You are taking clients out to a business lunch to discuss a proposal. The clients have a very small budget and you don’t feel that they are worth spending much time on. Your food hasn’t arrived in quite some time and you cannot find your server. A different server walks by your table and you ask them where your food is. The server says “I’m not your server. It’s not my problem.”

You say:
1. I want to talk to your boss right now.
2. I know, but we’re in a hurry. Please find him and send him over.
3. You must be having a rough day today.
4. I know you’re busy too. If you happen to see him, could you ask him to come over?
5. That’s not how you speak to customers.

I don’t know why I don’t do well on these tests, but at least part of it is because they don’t even bother to list the answers I would give. In the first case, I would tell the annoying little creep to go f*** himself. “Jesus Christ! Ten years sucking your d*** and you still think that I have to punch your little ego clock every time I move from point A to point B.”

In the second case, I’d just order a second beer and relax. It’s low pressure, and heck – these might even be nice people to lunch with. We could talk some football or baseball on the company tab. Slow down a little. My experience is that wait staff are generally overworked and underpaid. If they go Galt on us, as with garbage collectors, western civilization collapses.

The correct answers, according to the book are “5” and “5.” I suppose that’s right, but at this point I began to understand that these are tests that are really used in real life, and potential employers use them to judge how submissive people are. As a long-time self-employed person, I recovered my personal dignity and am therefore considered poisoned fruit. I’m unemployable.

Man, what a day yesterday – for me personally. The phone was ringing off the hook, my desk overflows, and at the same time I tried to deal with that creature of the Internet – that Norwegian guy who spices up blogs with links but otherwise offers no substance.

By pure happenstance, as my muddled head tried to deal with both him and work at once, I inadvertently coined a new word. I take full credit as I have “researched it”, also “read about it.” Yeah, OK, I Googled it. The word is free for anyone to use, please do give credit now and then … it can sit astride the one we’ve been using for centuries to describe the attitude people feign when they want to give the impression they know far more about a topic that they do. These are the ones who are certain of their facts even as they don’t have a full grasp of the wide range of “facts” that can be marshaled to support any subject. After all, any assertion can be supported by disparate facts out of context.

Of course, the word I’m referring to, so useful because of it’s deep and rich meaning, is “bullshit.” The word I’ve coined to sit beside the original, but beneath it of course as the original cannot be topped, is “Foxshit.”

So expect me to use it with regularity now .. as in “Swede, that’s just plain Foxshit!”

One thing that is clear out of all of the fun we had yesterday with the punking of Governor Scott Walker is that Scott Walker does not know and has never spoken before to David Koch. We lefties like to throw around the Koch brothers as the force behind everything that is happening in rightwingville these days, and it's not that simple. The Koch's are radical revolutionaries in a sense I'll get to below, but by no means are they isolated or unique. They are just rich and powerful enough to make things happen. The thrust of right-wing talk radio, the think tanks, the Tea Parties (stooges below, but money above), the Republican and Democratic parties, is a large and interconnected network of money. It encompasses vast swaths of our landscape and tens of thousands of people. It is immensely powerful.

I know that sounds like a conspiracy, but that’s just the point – it is not that at all. It’s too big to be managed unless there are common ideals and purposes. The Koch brothers may have been a large factor in Scott Walker’s campaign, and more importantly were behind many of the anonymous Astroturf ads that overwhelmed Wisconsin in the last election. Scott Walker may be the first governor who owes his election in total to Citizens United. But our minds are small, and so we need to put a face on the enemy, as it is hard to hate an amorphous blob of like-minded people.

The Koch brothers serve as that face. We need to get over them.

It’s a large and incredibly wealthy country we live in, and there has always been a power structure hidden in plain sight. It is corporate wealth with the interlocking directorships, wealthy families, the big charities and private universities and the non-profits. (Outfits like Manhattan Institute and Heritage and Cato are the intellectual hirelings of these same people – they are the foot soldiers, sophists and sycophants. Intellectuals throughout history have glommed on to power. They are, after all, smart.) They support most of our office holders via our intentionally loose campaign finance system. They don’t have total power, they do not meet (other than Bohemian Grove). It’s more like an ant hill – people unknowingly cooperating in a very large enterprise. There are tens of thousands of individuals going on about their business, but they have common purpose.

That common purpose gives focus and thrust to that blob of wealth, and the only way to counterbalance that power is to organize. And so it naturally follows that the blob despises any form of organization among ordinary people, be it ACORN or environmental groups. But mostly they hate trade unions. Historically, trade unions have been our most effective organizing tool. They have been a force for political expression. They have offered education to counterbalance standard indoctrination. They have given ordinary people a means of achieving a moderate slice of the pie.

The thrust of this army of ants since World War II has been to eliminate taxes on wealth, the social welfare programs that came out of the Great Depression and New Deal, and to eliminate trade unions. My god do they hate unions!

Most of our aristocracy is simply preoccupied. It takes time an effort to run a corporation or the local opera house or the United Way. And anyway, having a lot of money creates the need for expensive leisure pursuits. There are only a minority of firebrands – people so ideologically hidebound that they have no concept of greater good and at the same time are willing to work tirelessly for their cause. The Koch Brothers are exemplary of this, but not alone by any means. They’ve merely been exposed.

The Koch Brothers and their fellow travelers usually cannot hold public office, as like Steve Forbes, they are not terribly charming or smart or convincing. So they must work through others, sometimes charlatans, but usually true believers. There are on the right an army of people who have imbibed deeply of the Kool Aid of Ayn Rand, and suffer from immense certainty coupled with dense stupidity. It’s a dangerous brew.

I believed Scott Walker yesterday when he said to fake-Dave that he was trying to do the right thing. He really believes that busting unions will make our lives better. He’s not a thinking man, he’s not a visionary. He’s a revolutionary.

Here is the foundation of conservatism as I have understood it all of these years – it is straight out of Burke:

“Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore, it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time.”

OK, I’m not quoting him – he would not have said “mess around.” I’m quoting someone who is summarizing. But that is his thrust. So what would Burke say to these radicals who want to do away with trade unionism, Social Security and Medicare, unemployment compensation, minimum wage and child labor laws … people who have no concept of the immense and unpredictable fallout from such changes? He would say that they are dangerous.

These are not conservatives that we are dealing with. These are dangerous radicals. They are not “evil.” They don’t take orders from the Koch Brothers (though I would like to know who penned the legislation that they are trying to pass in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio). Scott Walker, if anything, showed me yesterday that he is a man of honorable intentions who wants to bring about positive change. He also showed me that he is a radical who does not listen to opponents, and is so sure that he is right that in his mind he can justify any action he takes to advance his cause.

He is not knowingly bought. He is not intentionally dishonest. He is that combination of certainty and stupidity we see all day long on that news channel. Scott Walker is full of foxshit.

This sounds too good to be true. A Buffalo, NY independent prank-called Governor Scott Walker, pretending to be David Koch.
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Gov. Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, admits the call was real, according to the same source I linked.

There’s quite a bit of debate about the Wisconsin and Indiana legislative flights to prevent votes on eerily similar right-wing bills. The debate centers around democratic processes.

One argument is that when this is done once, it can be done again – that is, what the Wisconsin Democrats are doing, the Wisconsin Republicans will do next time around. The other assumes that voters know what they are voting on – that there are no surprises in all of this, and that Wisconsin Democrats who have left the state should accept the will of the people.

These assume we are in a functioning democracy. Not hardly. I mentioned two defects in our system at 4&20 yesterday, and Polish Wolf added a third.

1: I said that because of winner-take-all voting, third parties are frozen out. Since reform is usually initiated outside the two parties, winner-take-all voting prevents reform. That’s why historically most of our “reforms”, good (civil rights, for instance) and bad (prohibition?) came from outside the two parties.

2. Our system of private campaign finance is an invitation to corruption. There’s no debate about that – we revel in our corruption. Citizens United is perhaps the most ludicrous and boldfaced insult to thinking people since Dredd Scott. Because of private finance, now even worse due to C/U, the political system is naturally ceded to moneyed interests. There’s a simple reason for this: They have more money. Campaigns, far from being referendums, are diversions. Real issues are rarely discussed.

3. Unrelated to Wisconsin/Indiana, Polish Wolf noted that the U.S. Senate is not a representative body. It was never intended to be – Senators were appointed under the constitution, and two were given each state no matter population. This, coupled with filibuster rule of questionable constitutionality, theoretically allows for 11.3% of the population to thwart majority rule. The Constitution is a flawed document in many ways. This is but one.

Since this is not functioning representative government, methods available for fighting wealth are limited, and usually must be exerted outside on the steps of court houses and lobbies of state capitol buildings. Those who have reveled in the filibuster rule of the last four years are now upset that the legislators in those two states fled, but what is that if not a form of filibuster? The game is rigged anyway, so play dirty.

Scott Walker is a mere front for big money, a Park Avenue-quality whore. The Koch brothers spent over $100,000 on his behalf, secretly at the time but now public knowledge. He and the Republican majority have thrown out the rules of civil debate with their anti-union bill, demanding an up or down vote without debate – without even enough time for Democrats to read the bill.

There’s a reason for that. There’s some bad stuff in that bill even aside from the union-busting. It cannot stand much disinfecting light, and needs to be passed quickly. Walker is trying to bludgeon it through because he knows that if there is debate, he loses.

There is a provision (16.896) to allow Walker to sell of public assets to his cronies. He wants to sell public power plants to private interests without competitive bidding or consultation. Once that is done, how do we get those assets back? Once the gouging starts, like California in the Enron days, how do we get our money back? Do we wait two years for another Koch-money election?

I believe in representative government. I wish we some of it. But this is a fake republic/democracy/whatever, and so the cries that we now hear from the moneyed interests about the need for legal procedures are an insult. How dare they pretend that they too believe in representative government!

Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana have grown a set, developed some spine. Democrats always let us down, but the thing that sustains them right now are the throngs of people occupying the buildings in those state capitals. They need us now, or they will fold.

That is democracy at work. As in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Bahrain, it ain’t pretty. Whatever it is that we have here (plutocracy), it pretends to be democracy only when democracy serves money.

Muammar Gaddafi appears to be next in line in the cavalcade of sleaze balls facing public protests, and that’s a good thing. We can always use one less tyrant.

But my thoughts took me back to 1986 – I was still a good American at that time, and hated all the right people, Gaddafi among them. (He was “Quadaffi” back then.) There was a bombing in a disco in Germany where some Americans were killed, and the U.S. claimed that Libya was behind it. Reagan launched a huge bombing raid on that country. It felt good … sort of, you know, living vicariously through F-16’s raining bombs on unseen victims.

But it felt creepy too. Maybe I just didn’t blend. I was getting my news from all of the right places, and yet somehow found out that in that raid, along with the hundreds of other civilians, Gaddafi’s young daughter was killed. Memories fade, but as I recall, he witnessed her death. [They are saying on the news now that people around him say that he never recovered from watching that murder.)

They never did solve the disco bombing, never pinned it on Libya, by the way. Not that it matters. The Empire writes its own history.

My own children were very young at that time, and the thought of seeing one of them murdered was extremely unsettling. Maybe I just never was a good right winger. Within a few years I would be free of all of the ugliness, and no longer had to smooth things over in my mind. I could call murder … murder.

Then there was the whole Lockerbie thing. I have never been satisfied with the official explanation of that event. The man who was imprisoned for the crime, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, never confessed, and is widely thought to be a patsy. When Libya formally admitted to the deed, there was quid pro quo – the U.S. took Libya off the list of nations that “sponsor terrorism.” (As if we have a right to such a list! How many lists is the Empire on?)

More logical to me, and I think there were hints of this at the time, Lockerbie was done by the Iranians in retaliation for the U.S.S. Vincennes shooting down an Iranian passenger jetliner. But that explanation was unacceptable in ‘official truth’ terms, as that would have made it “blowback,” like 9/11, and the empire never confesses to crimes and there is never a reason for blowback. Ever.

It’s a horrible deed no matter who did it, of course. Just as shooting down that Iranian airliner was. But somehow we escape ever having to look in the mirror. We are always able to project our evil on others.

Anyway, as with Tunesia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, I hope for a peaceful outcome and to see some tyrants actually pay a price. Not death, not bombs, but a good long prison term, and time to reflect. Reagan belonged there, as have all his successors.

But it is too much to ask justice in life, and I know that. Just sayin’.

If there was any doubt that Scott Walker is but a tool of money, cast it aside and read what follows. This is from the bill he is pushing, the one that also outlaws collective bargaining for public employees:

16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).

In other words, crony capitalism.

If Walker succeeds here, expect to see him on a national ticket. Palin/Walker? Bush/Walker? Romney/Walker? Whoring for money is usually rewarded here in the land of the free.

The above photo appeared in my inbox this morning, courtesy of family members, a brother in Montana and a cousin in Wisconsin. The caption was “How the Senators escaped Wisconsin.” You probably don’t want to hit me with something like that after I’ve had nightmares about hail storms and my son being arrested (in my dream, OK?). I responded

Wow, this is impressive. A new low for you guys! You are at once insulting mentally challenged people and the brave men and women in Wisconsin who are fighting a fight for you. You don’t even know that it’s for your rights that they are fighting. If I were so low as to use your crude form of humor, I might suggest that there are seats reserved on that bus … for you.

As usual, you guys remind me of prisoners in an unlocked cell. The jailer is not worried about you. You’re not going anywhere.

Yeah, we’re one big happy family, and I wish I could take that response back. The part about seats on the bus, anyway. That was bad. That bus represents a crude slur of mentally challenged kids, and is part of this culture in which we live. Have you seen that show Tosh.O on Comedy Central? We are backsliding. It’s OK now to ridicule people in public based on race, personal appearance and handicaps. That show is extremely offensive, but common fare. We’re decadent and in precipitous decline.

The battle in Wisconsin is not Armageddon. Not by a long shot. Governor Walker says he’s in it for the long haul. He’s intent on busting that union. Club for Growth was running ads in Wisconsin urging people to contact their representatives to support the bill even before Democratic representatives in Madison were given a copy. Walker is connected to the national money, and his efforts are part of a larger thrust. This is the new right wing. The true fanatics, the wild men – the Koch Brothers and John Birchers – are out of their cages. They were freed by 9/11, and after Citizens United, smell blood. They are going for the jugular.

Crazy times! But they won’t win. It’s been decades now since Americans understood class warfare. My cousin and brother who sent that awful email are unaware of it still, or are so deluded as to think that they are on the side that is fighting for the rights of ordinary people.

The folks in Madison might lose. As surely as we sit here, the moles of the back rooms of the national security apparatus are looking into the lives of those fourteen senators, searching for dirt, for ways to extort them back into Wisconsin. One or two will fold, seeing his or her life and reputation threatened. And that particular battle will be lost.

But out of it will come a newly energized set of “Fighting Bob’s”, and a smart and tough minority of people will realize that the stakes are real, and high. There will be more protests, and the more violent the right wing becomes, the more likely will be victory for regular people. Scott Walker might have thought that his Koch-Brothers support made him invincible, but all he has done is awaken the slumbering beast.

So as bad as it looks, as bad as it is going to get, it is going to get better.

And most importantly, all of those people in Madison who are sleeping outdoors and eating pizza (paid for by supporters all over the world)* know that it all happened because of Scott Walker. Two lessons will not be lost on them: one, that the national and state Democratic Party apparatchiks are not there for them, and two, solidarity. Those pizzas are not being supplied by Obama and Company. They are coming from their real friends.
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*To make a donation to feed the hungry strikers, visit the “Welcome” page on Ian’s Pizza’s Facebook account.

I’m not going to look this up. I laughed when I heard it, as it is apparently straight news, which makes it even funnier. What I heard was this: “Democratic party organizers have arrived in Madison this weekend.”

I swear – it is not from the Onion.
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Do you suppose they are there to talk them down, urge the protesters to give it up and go home? Are they carrying a message from Obama that says “I said hope for change. I did not say to actually do anything. Now go home!”

I’ve been reading a paper presented in 1999 by Peter Orszag and Joseph Stiglitz called “Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths About Social Security Systems.” It’s over my head, of course. It deals with five “macroeconomic” and five “microeconomic” myths, and treats the matter of pensions from very high above in addition to ground level.

If I may, I’ll assemble my strawmen right off: The thrust of the far right is the idea that without the link between contributions and individual pension payments, retirement benefits amount to nothing more than welfare. And anytime we give money to non-bankers and non-corporatists (who are immune to corruption), we destroy individual character.

Orszag and Stiglitz deal with the matter with much more subtlety, comparing and contrasting defined benefit versus defined contribution, and equating savings rates under both – that is, defined contribution plans displace savings in one area and replace them in another, but so do defined contribution plans.

The other strawman is the idea that government is too inefficient and corrupt to run a pension plan. Set aside the fact that the American Social Security system negates that contention, and remember the lesson of the recent crash: Government failed to regulate Wall Street, and Wall Street went crazy. If we turn our pension system over the Wall Street, someone is going to have to regulate them. If government is corrupt and inefficient, then we need another mechanism.

Good luck on that.

Here’s a passage from the paper that struck me as holding out raw meat bait for Wall Street fund managers:

… even in industrialized economies with relatively efficient governments and well-developed financial markets, the scale of the regulatory challenge should not be underestimated. For example, according to Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, more than half of all Americans do not know the difference between a stock and a bond; only 12 percent know the difference between a load and no-load mutual fund; only 16 percent say they have a clear understanding of what the Individual Retirement Account is; and only 8 percent say they completely understand the expenses that their mutual funds charge. The investor education and investor protection measures required to ensure that an individual account system operates well despite these knowledge gaps seem substantial.

Take a sophisticated fund salesperson, give him an easy mark, and expect that he will behave. What could possibly go wrong?

Take two examples of countries that experimented with privatizing their public pensions: Chile and the United Kingdom.

An alternative approach would be a decentralized system of individual accounts, in which workers held their accounts with various financial firms and were allowed a broad array of investment options. Under such an approach, costs tend to be significantly higher because of advertising expenses, the loss of economies-of-scale, competitive returns on financial company capital, and various other additional costs. The Advisory Council estimated that administrative costs under such a system would amount to roughly 100 basis points per year. Such costs would, over a 40-year work career, consume about 20 percent of the value of the account accumulated over the career.

Experience from both Chile and the United Kingdom is consistent with these predictions and indicates that a decentralized system of individual accounts involves significant administrative expenses. Both Chile and the United Kingdom have decentralized, privately managed accounts, and administrative costs in both countries have also proven to be surprisingly high. … Taking into account interaction effects, Murthi, Orszag, and Orszag estimate that, on average, between 40 and 45 percent of the value of individual accounts in the U.K. is consumed by various fees and costs. Given the fixed costs associated with individual accounts, furthermore, costs for smaller accounts (e.g., in developing economies with lower levels of GDP per capita) would be even higher relative to the account size if the U.K. experience were replicated in such countries.

In a public retirement system in a well-developed country like ours, the incentives to advertise and bilk clients is virtually nonexistent. The cost of running such systems is more like 20 basis points, which over the life of an annuitant, consumes maybe 2% of his pension. So in real practice, government-run pensions systems are neither inefficient nor dishonest. The private sector? About 20X more expensive? The honesty factor? Given recent events, it appears undefined, but enormous.

There is a drive to privatize Social Security in this country that goes back to 1980, when Reagan took office. When Republicans have tried (Reagan in 1983, Bush in 2005), they have failed miserably. (Reagan parlayed the failure into an opportunity to raise middle and working class taxes, giving us the largest tax increase in history in exchange for that failure. Which of his faces does the right wing want to put on Mount Rushmore?)

Because we live in what is essentially a one-party state, with private corporate wealth financing the “two” parties, the thrust for privatization is two-pronged. On one side, the Republicans brazenly confront the system, and unify support for that system. As seen, that approach is not effective.

On the other side, the “enemy in our camp” approach, Democrats appear to support the current system but are its deadly enemies. By luring supporters to comfort, they can launch a surprise attack from within, and gut the system before opposition crystalizes.

This indeed was the approach that was taken by Bill Clinton, who before leaving in office in 2001 had in place an elaborate plan to privatize Social Security. He was only derailed by the Monica scandal, after which he became the program’s biggest supporter in order to rally support and save his sorry-ass presidency.

Such plans must surely be in the works now with DLC Democrat Obama as under Clinton. Without eternal vigilance (and Democrats are not vigilant when Democrats are in office), the program will not survive, and we will join the Chileans and Brits in seeing our pockets picked while Wall Street lines its own off of our private retirements.