Tag: Politics

Who Says Crime Doesn’t Pay

Those who say crime doesn’t pay obviously never took up crime as a profession:

State lawmakers got their first pay hike in years, courtesy of Minnesota voters. The salary for the state’s part-time lawmakers rose sharply — from $31,141 a year, to $45,000. But that does not include money they also receive for their daily expenses.

House members receive $66 dollars a day for expenses, on top of their salaries. That’s seven days a week during the legislative session, no receipts required. In 2017, Representatives got an average of $8,812 in per diem, bringing total pay to almost $53,812.

$45,000 a year might not seem like a lot but as the story noted legislators in Minnesota only work part time. In addition to the rather sizable salary for doing absolutely nothing productive the legislators also get a pretty decent per diem.

Imagine getting paid $53,812 per year to rob everybody in a state for a short stint every year. In addition to the salary you receive from that you are also in a position to make political deals. You can promise companies legislation that will hinder their competitors for a fee (not directly payable in cash to your bank account but you end up receiving it in a roundabout manner in order to avoid accusations of corruption). On top of that you can also hold another job.

Crime pays quite well in Minnesota.

Out of Touch Plebs

I’ve seen a lot of people, primarily conservatives, flipping their shit because Nancy Pelosi referred to the up to $1,000 employee bonuses several companies announced after the latest tax legislation was passed as “crumbs“:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the bonuses being handed out to workers by businesses across the country following the passing of the Republican tax act are mere “crumbs.”

[…]

“In terms of the bonus that corporate America receives versus the crumbs they are giving to workers to put the schmooze on is so pathetic. It’s so pathetic,” Pelosi said during a press briefing on Thursday.

Instead of criticizing her maybe people should take some time to empathize with her situation. Pelosi is a multimillionaire. $1,000 is literally crumbs to her.

I can’t help but be disgusted by how out of touch the plebs are with the ruling elite!

Formalizing a Tradition

For too long the specter of responsibility has hung over the heads of our brave boys in blue. Although the tradition is not to hold law enforcers responsible for their actions, it’s still just a tradition. But the governor of New Mexico wants to formalize that tradition:

Updated | The Republican Governor of New Mexico could soon propose legislation that would protect police officers from lawsuits—essentially granting them immunity from cases of excessive force.

Governor Susana Martinez’s bill would shield officers who fail to comply with police orders but would not protect officers who do not obey orders or break from training, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

This is the kind of strong backing of the thin blue line that this country needs. For too long just following orders or training has been an informal get out of jail free card. Now it can be a formal one, which means all of that pesky showmanship to make it appear as though rouge officers are held accountable can be discarded. This should save taxpayers some money since internal investigations, prosecutors, and other people involved in the showmanship don’t have to waste their time with it.

When You Just Want to Mess with Your Subjects

If you watch a politician being grilled by the press, you can often see the disgust in their face as clear as day. Politicians don’t like being questioned by lowly plebs but they usually put up with it because it helps them uphold the appearance that they care. The Prime Minister of Thailand isn’t one of those politicians:

Thailand’s prime minister has evaded journalists’ questions by bringing out a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself and telling the reporters to quiz it instead of him.

Prayuth Chan-ocha then turned on his heel and walked off, leaving the mock-up behind, to bemused looks and awkward laughter from the Government House press pack.

I appreciate how upfront he is about not giving a damn about what the plebs think. It’s too bad this kind of honestly wasn’t more prevalent amongst politicians. Perhaps if it was, the masses would see the government for what it is instead of what they want it to be.

War is Good for Business

Working in the military-industrial complex must be nice. While companies in other industries are forced to market their own goods and services, companies in the military-industrial complex enjoy subsidized marketing from the United States government:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration is nearing completion of a new “Buy American” plan that calls for U.S. military attaches and diplomats to help drum up billions of dollars more in business overseas for the U.S. weapons industry, going beyond the limited assistance they currently provide, officials said.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce a “whole of government” approach that will also ease export rules on U.S. military exports and give greater weight to the economic benefits for American manufacturers in a decision-making process that has long focused heavily on human rights considerations, according to people familiar with the plan.

Not only will military attaches and diplomats provide free marketing but since the weapons sold by the United States have a tendency to fall into the hands of its and its allies’ enemies this proposal could create a continuous cycle of sales. First the United States sell weapons to one of its allies then those weapons fall into the hands of its allies’ enemies then the allies need to buy more weapons to fight off their enemies.

Representative Advocating for a Return to Slavery

A lot of people in the United States are delusional about slavery. They believe that it ended after the Civil War. In reality the rules were merely modified. Before the Civil War slavery was defined by skin color. Slaves were black. After the Civil War slavery slowly began to be redefined by criminality. If you were found guilty of a crime, you could be enslaved by the government. That definition remains today but now there is a representative with senatorial aspirations who wants to remove all criteria and make everybody a slave:

Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke hopes to introduce a bill to Congress this year that would require all young people to spend at least a year “in service to this country.”

O’Rourke, who currently represents the 16th District of Texas, which includes El Paso, held a town hall in Corsicana on Thursday and shared his idea with those in attendance.

Why should the government pay market rates for labor when it can simply force people to work for it whatever compensation it deems appropriate (maybe you’ll get paid a pittance like soldiers do or maybe you’ll be paid nothing at all)?

I’m probably too old to qualify as a “young person” but if I did qualify, I’d refuse to partake just as I would refuse to go to war if drafted. While each and every one of us who lives in this country has relegated ourselves to an amount of abuse by the government there is always a line. My line is overt slavery and I’m guessing that I’m not the only one.

Being a Sore Loser Is Lucrative

Roy Moore is such a piece of shit that he couldn’t even managed to pull off a win in the red state of Alabama. Not only is he a loser but he’s a sore loser. Instead of fading into the shadows after his opponent was declared the winner of the race he has filed a lawsuit to block his opponent from taking office:

Attorneys for defeated Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block the state from certifying Democrat Doug Jones as the winner of the special election held earlier this month, The Associated Press reported.

Jones defeated Moore in the Dec. 12 election by slightly less than 21,000 votes, a margin of 1.5 percent, but Moore has yet to concede the race. He has continued to ask donors to contribute to his “election integrity fund,” pledging to pursue “voter fraud and other irregularities at polling locations throughout the state.”

Emphasis mine.

This charade is pretty obvious. Moore is likely under no delusion that this lawsuit will result in him being give the seat. But the longer he’s able to drag this lawsuit on the longer he’s able to continue begging his supporters for money. He is probably hoping that this lawsuit will result in a sizable war chest for the next election.

With Great Power Comes… Great Power

Sometimes I wish that I was a politician because then I could vote myself a raise whenever I wanted one:

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – The Minneapolis City Council last Friday approved a pay raise for all its members and the incoming mayor starting in 2018, according to public documents.

Though the resolution was not previously on the agenda or passed through any standing committees, outgoing Council President Barb Johnson proposed the measure at this year’s final meeting to give each member of the Council and the mayor a $10,000 salary increase, with annual raises matching those given to other city employees through collective bargaining agreements. The proposal passed unanimously, though no period of public comment was noted in the meeting’s minutes.

Politicians who vote themselves raises like to make any number of excuses. The most common excuse is that any vote for a raise doesn’t take effect until after the newly elected politicians take office so they’re not actually voting themselves a raise. However, with such a high incumbency rate in this country voting for a raise for the next set of politicians is usually the same as voting themselves a raise so that excuse is incredibly feeble. Other politicians try to justify giving themselves raises by claiming that they do a hard job. But robbing people and forcing them to do their bidding isn’t terribly hard since they have an army of uniformed thugs willing to do their dirty work.

Of course the denizens of Minneapolis could always opt to replace the entire city council but the next set of politicians will do the exact same thing because almost nobody is going to turn down the opportunity to give themselves a raise. This is what democracy looks like.

The Taxpocalypse

I doubt there is anybody in this country who isn’t aware of the tax bill that was recently passed. I’m not writing a post arguing whether it will or won’t actually lead to lower taxes because I’m not actually qualified to digest the current tax code, let alone the new tax code. Instead I’m just going to wait and see if I actually get to keep more of my paycheck.

What I do want to write about is peoples’ reactions, specially those who opposed this bill from the beginning. If most of these people were opposing the bill because it would actually lead to higher taxes, I could understand their reaction. However, most of them aren’t complaining about that. Instead they’re almost hysterical because various government programs are getting cut and that will somehow lead to people spontaneously combusting or some such nonsense.

With almost instantaneous access to information across the world I cannot fathom how anybody still believes that government programs actually do what their proponents claim they do. Everyday we read stories about government programs either not delivering the services they promise to deliver, money being diverted from government services into the pockets of the people put in charge of them, or new private startups coming into existence in order to provide the very service the government service provider promises to deliver. What I’m saying is that the government doesn’t actually do what it claims it does and therefore nobody would care if a department charged with providing a specific service gets its funding cut.

No matter how much funding government service providers receive they always provide, at best, a subpar service and their slack must sooner or later be picked up by nongovernmental individuals and organizations. That being the case, letting individuals and organizations who actually help people keep a bit of their money will do more good than any funding to a government program.

An Impressive Level of Corruption

People often talk about the amount of corruption present in so-called third world nations. They mention how police officers in Latin American will pull you over but not issue a ticket if you slip them $20 or how getting a building permit in a timely manner in Africa requires a bit of grease to get the gears moving. However, this kind of corruption is amateur hour compared to the corrupt here in the United States of America, especially around Washington DC.

Consider this story. It involves a state government giving permission to a foreign company to operate a tollway at an area that suffers from significant traffic congestion. As part of this deal the state government gets a kickback and in exchange it prevents improvements from being made to either the nearby roadways or mass transit systems. On top of that a local level of government pretended to fight the deal until it was given a kickback of its own:

The current I-66 project, as well as the express lane schemes on Interstates 95, 395 and 495, all contain contract provisions negotiated behind closed doors that ensure improvements are never made to streets bordering the tolled routes. The theory is that the free roads are the “competition” for the toll road, so the deals say that the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) must pay the foreign firms “compensation” in the event improvements are made. This is a powerful financial incentive for VDOT never to improve Northern Virgnia’s notorious congestion.

Leaders in Arlington, the city surrounding the tolled stretch of I-66, originally feigned opposition to tolling, but subsequent events show that they were just holding out to win lavish concessions from the state in the form of transit funding. With more buses tying up the streets already narrowed to accommodate bicycle lanes that are never used, the area’s congestion will necessarily increase.

Defenders of the I-66 deal often say people can just use transit or carpool, but they fail to mention that the I-66 deal extended existing high-occupancy restrictions by three hours. They likely are not aware that the I-66 contract limits improvements to the Orange Line Metro, and that the road will soon require three occupants instead of just two to qualify as a carpool. The I-95 and I-495 Express Lane deals force state taxpayers to pay penalties to Transurban, an Australian company, if carpooling actually becomes popular.

The governments of Virginia and Arlington as we as Transurban must be felling good right now. All three of them have already made money on this deal and their profits are only going to increase! And the best part is that none of them have to worry about a pesky competitor throwing a wrench into their scheme because the governments have a monopoly on the transportation infrastructure and can therefore prevent additional parties from building more roadways, light rail, or other forms of transportation! Everybody is a winner except the plebs who have to drive between Virginia and Washington DC.

While people living in the United States think so-called third world nations are corrupt, they often fail to see that the country they live in has more money exchanging hands in corrupt deals that the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many of those supposedly corrupt nations. The only difference is that the supposedly corrupt nations are far more transparent about their corruption whereas here in the United States corruption is mostly kept behind closed doors and wrapped in a veil of political ceremony.