The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Hillary raises money from people with

    By Flavius on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 12:20am |

    money because people with money have money that she can raise from them.

    If you take my meaning. 

    Perhaps there are business firms that never behave dishonestly. Just my bad luck that I never met one.

    Goldman Sachs is not the most immoral  Investment Bank. Arguably it's somewhat better than average. 

    Investment Banks are not the most immoral  instruments of capitalism. Arguably they're  better than many of the other ways people make money. 

    Business is not the most immoral occupation. Arguably the military , for example, is worse. Or the Catholic Church. Or almost any other occupation except living with lepers.

    The complaints about Hillary here, and where ever else they appear, are based on a profound misunderstanding of the automatic dishonesty and uncharitable behavior  that permeates every level of the society in which we live. And all others.

    The only way  Hillary or Bernie or any other politician can raise money to run for office is to raise it from people who obtained it in tainted ways.  Because they're the only ones who have it.

    When Bernie implies that he only accepts money from people who he knows obtained it purely, he's lying. He should stop.

    And if H&B agreed tomorrow that they would stop raising money that way (Please Don't guys) then the election will be won instead by someone who would fail to do any of the good things they would like to do.

    Grow up!

    Comments


    "Goldman Sachs is not the most immoral  Investment Bank. Arguably it's somewhat better than average. "

    Alright, how much is Goldman Sachs paying you for this favorable opinion of them?  

     

    (Just kidding.)


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 1:39am

    My first lie is free.


    by Flavius on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 7:43am

    There's big money and little money as well, for-profit and non-profit, and a variety of other ways to go.

    They all have their advantages, disadvantages, moral ups-and-downs depending on your viewpoint.

    There are socially conscious investment plans - typically they earn quite a bit less than socially agnostic investment plans, which is why even few socially conscious people use them.

    There are non-profits to get money from - planned parenthood, nursing & health orgs, ecological orgs - but then you're getting money from groups with little money. Good luck. And of course you still might not agree with all their goals and methods.

    Then there are the big money orgs. Google sounds fine as a clean IT company - except they're probably as complicit as anyone on snooping on every facet of our lives, from government-supported to crass commercial use. But if Hillary spoke to Google, we'd probably be "wow, cool - Google glass!". eBay - it's an auction house, though with PayPal, it's a usurious micropayments company. Telcos are similarly suspect.

    Bernie's all in for redoing healthcare - and from comments I hear, Hillary speaking to or taking money from healthcare companies is unethical. (insurance, HMOs, pharmaceutical, etc.). So who will have the connections and industry knowledge to actually change things? 

    Forget speaking to chemical companies and big agriculture (Monsanto & genetically modified foods? No way). Many of the auto & big equipment companies (John Deere, Caterpillar) and Boeing have anti-union raps. 

    Similar and worse with Wall Street. I'm not thrilled with Goldman Sachs - I know of one case where they gave specifically unprofessional wrong advice, and lost a promising startup *ALL* of its assets and stonewalled them in court for years. Ditto the malfeasance on Greece's second set of books. But these banks are either "too big to fail" or "so big we need to understand them and whack them down to proper size" - not "ignore them, strangle them, defeat them" - or they'd need to be replaced by something probably as bad that we don't understand yet. Much of the money Bernie's talking about using for reforms comes from Wall Street - and of course much of the money that props up the US budget already comes from Wall Street. Not a great strategy to demonize them while doing so, and it's important to balance Wall Street growth with whatever benefits we siphon off or game over. (Russia thought its gravy train oil windfall would last forever - surprise).

    I haven't heard anyone mention the 3.8% investment tax that kicked in for 2013 to help pay for ACA. There's certainly room to go back to that well, but we do have to ask "how many more times, and to what effect?" It's not an endless moneypit.

    There are quite a few electric fences set up in our political dos-and-donts - not all of them helpful. As you say, "grow up" - plus get real.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 2:54am

    The "abuse" scandal taught us that in some Catholic dioceses priests who had abused children were protected by the hierarchy.

    "Some" ?


    by Flavius on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 7:38am

    Flav, you're giving us a straw man argument. The real concern about corporate money is not that it's "impure" or that bankers are less honest than barbers. The real concern is that it concentrates power at the top of the economic ladder. The point of democracy--as opposed to oligarchy--is that the banker and the barber have equal say in how they are governed. In a society where the rich have more power than the poor, the rules tend to benefit the rich.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 9:08am

    Of course the rich have more power than the poor. The question is "How much?" and ties into how much of the bills they'll pay. Equality is largely a fantasy, aside from the 1 vote thing, and even there, the "who gets out to vote" and "where are the contested states/districts" drive the attention. That New York will vote Dem anyway makes it an easy punching bag. Iowa corn subsidies and agro/livestock policies are almost as disgusting as Wall Street, but no one will say boo about them.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 9:34am

    I will amend. The more power the rich have, the more the rules tend to benefit them. Regardless, the point about corporate money concentrating power stands.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 9:34am

    Yes, the "recovery for corporates, not for individuals" simply sucks. The banks getting bailouts that supposedly had strings that then turned into free money/no obligations also sucked. The energy with which they turned that into illegal robosigned repossessed mortgages added insult to injury.

    With a million blacks sitting in jail largely for dope charges, I'm all for putting bankers in jail who violate the law (not just CEOs, which is likely a never-will-happen thing). Happy to put cops who abuse their jobs in jail (short of a witch hunt - there are tough decisions on the street, but getting blowjobs from fifteen-year-olds or breaking blacks' spines in police vans aren't the ones).

    A sane balance to US companies paying US taxes is needed to support US-based services and benefits they receive. Similar to Wall Street, which in some ways is more like like a grand concession than a free market. And when they can then turn those gamed profits back into the elections where the most money usually, the resulting influence is pretty obvious. Carly Fiorina for example has barely raised a dime from people - something like 90%+ PAC money last I checked, and just enough to be the kind of anti-Hillary element. Jeb Bush has something like $100 million in PAC money, while individuals react to him like warm spit. Nonetheless, the issues debated on the Democratic side are far different from the "Money Party", even with that corporate influence. Both candidates are pro-union, pro-women, pro-crack-down-on-WallStreet, pro-universal-healthcare, pro-pay-fair-share-of-taxes, anti-discrimination, etc. Sadly, the real influence felt is the money spent on the thousands of other races besides president, and that's where typically the average person gets shut out and the special interests rule the day.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 9:57am

    I agree that people overestimate the effect of money on elections, especially presidential elections, and that the impact is much bigger in state races for lesser offices. If we only restricted campaign contributions in presidential races, it wouldn't have much effect.

    Still, presidential elections are the most visible and the sums are the much larger, so they offer the best opportunities to push for campaign finance reform. Regardless of your views on whether Hillary or Bernie would be a better president, none of us should be complacent about the impact of money on politics. Bernie's efforts to draw attention to the problem--through his rhetoric and by his example--are good for the country.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 10:32am

    If you look at how this campaign money is used , mostly Bernays' styled PR advertising, and the fact that many of the big contributors fund both Parties you would see that the money is used  not just to elect a particular candidate but to condition the public.

    This advertising is used to sell the myth of informed consent while it is actually a tool of manufactured consent where the public is led to believe they are making real choices and that they should believe they are living in a democracy which is a proven fallacy. .


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 10:55am

    Well, that kinda sums up the arrogance of it - nobody I know is "complacent" about the impact of money on politics - they think there's relatively fuck-all we can do about it, especially when the Supreme Court says, "hey, open the spigot full-cock". I've heard the "won't take money from PACs" line ever since the first time I heard the acronym "PAC" (3 decades ago?)  - hasn't changed a thing, PACs have multiplied, the Koch Brothers are supplementing to the tune of $3/4 billion while other sugar daddies keep the Republicans afloat, and Obama gave his main Chicago backer and bundler a cabinet position.

    Maybe, just maybe the largesse is slightly less outrageous than when Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff were running sweatshops out of Saipan and holding junkets to Israel, or maybe these things just don't get reported anymore. I don't recall the last time anyone discussed our foreign wars in terms of how much profit they make for defense contractors/weapons manufacturers - maybe since Halliburton rebranded Blackwater to X-something - but I think I saw we're still building some ridiculous F-35 that can't quite fly but sucks up the equivalent of GDP for 30 smaller nations. I don't see Congress rushing to fix the tax avoidance schemes of Apple and Amazon and Google the way they went after a single Facebook founder for moving to Singapore.

    I must admit I'm not really expecting anyone to do anything that improves the system that drastically - perhaps a 5% correction on "fucking ridiculous" is the height of my optimism - so I haven't followed politician statements that much (they're all "outsider" non-Washington types, you know) - so if there's actually some inkling of a real actionable plan to say take the money out of Washington (aside from "get real mad and rally the people together and start a revolution..." ) please let me know. I occasionally am open to some kind of hope and change thing if it actually seems doable rather than empty marketing & sloganeering.

    (and curiously I agree with Peter - though I don't know which one - that much of the money is just to soften us up. It's kinda like the helper in the audience for the sucker watching 3-card monte the first time. That scam, by the way, has been used since at least the 15th Century, and I imagine people in De Medici's Venice were complaining then about all the money involved in politics)

    Update: would note that I'm optimistic that a few tweaks can be made to improve on income inequality. I think the big dragout between $12 & $15 minimum wage misses simply that we've largely accepted that the Econ 101 "minimum wages loses jobs" is now corrected to add "but employers will game the system anyway, so we need to make sure they get paid something survivable". This lesson about gamed outcomes and reverting the excessive influence of the entitled is by far what I'm content about with the debates on the left this election. The jobless recovery has turned into jobs, but the wage gains have long lagged, and the culture of cheapskates and exploitive work conditions needs to "evolve" ever so slightly (snark).


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 11:13am

    Well, I regard this post as complacent insofar as it distorts and belittles the argument for shunning corporate money. But apathy, the cousin of complacency, is really the biggest problem--that nothing-we-can-do-about-it-shrug you present here. What we can do about it is elect politicians who offer more than lip service about campaign finance reform.

    Until we do that, then of course nothing will change.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 11:20am

    What specifically is he likely to do about it, aside from another round of "highlighting the problem".

    I just had a discussion re: someone's suggestion that Apple divert its banked-up $150 billion into reforesting the Sahara, and I felt like an old grouch for pointing out what a stupid brain-fart of an idea it is on so many levels (to Apple stockholders, that Apple knows nothing about soil renewal and water issues, that $150 billion doesn't come close to handling that - let's say $100 trillion).

    Too much pie-in-the-sky non-critical thinking. Fuck, it's hard enough to get consensus on "police beating, tasering and killing blacks without stopping to think is bad". Hell, we can't even get the police to think of other options. Where are we going to find all this extra Buddha consciousness lying around to achieve these other goals?


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 12:15pm

    How do we elect politicians who offer more than lip service about campaign finance reform.? That's the whole point. Republicans are rolling in money like it's a bed of roses and they are winning most of the time. It doesn't appear to me that democrats will win more seats in congress, state houses, or governors without sufficient money to match their republican opposition. I'm so pure doesn't seem to be a winning argument. No democrat is happy about the amount of money the Supreme Court released into the political process. No democrat was happy about the money in politics before the Supreme Court opened the flood gates. No democrat is complacent. But some of us don't see unilateral disarmament as the solution. Nor do we see attacks against democrats for a lack of purity as the best way to get the change we all want.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 2:43pm

    Michael,

    I agree with 'your  narrowing my diatribe about human nature to focus on what you see as the prime concern, power goes to people at the top.

    Then broaden again The power that is flowing to the people at the top will -not may- be misused .

    If the people at the top were Albert Schweizer or even dare I say BarakObama there'd be some chance that it wouldn't be misused.But in fact the top people will misuse power as Lord Acton said they would for why he said they would. And I go a step further Those with absolute power aren't corrupted by it.Because they were already corrupted. That's what got them there.

    As to your implicit position that things would be better if the rules didn't benefit the rich. Paraphrasing -backwards- Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway

    SF: The very poor are different from you and me

    Hem: Yes,they have less money.

      


    by Flavius on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 10:34pm

    Hmmm. That's really interesting, Flavius.

    Is it a given that poor, middle-class or disenfranchised people would be better leaders because of circumstance or morality? What determines whether a leader, and/or their supporters would be "better" overall?


    by barefooted on Tue, 02/09/2016 - 10:51pm

     

    Every business behaves immorally.Not all the time. But for sure, when the chips are down. Capitalism results in many good things for a society but is  too great a temptation for individuals  and corrupts those involved. Chances are they remain corrupted if they enter politics. You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

    Absolute power of course corrupts absolutely. If the  poor ,middle-class or disenfranchised are given absolute power they'll be corrupted.Absolutely,

    Limited power would also corrupt the p,m-c or d as all power  does. I'm  sufficiently optimistic that I think they'd be slower to become seriously corrupt than a  business  executive trained by a life time of corporate corruption .

    Don't get me started about religious leaders.


    by Flavius on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 12:00am

    But if the bottom line is that whoever holds the popular opinion at any time holds the power, where is the alignment to be found? Especially when we must remember that the majority of the public at the time they're asked rarely lean toward revolutionary change.


    by barefooted on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 1:50am

    When someone asks, "But if...." and then says, "especially when"...and yet they don't have an answer, but only more questions...someone needs to ask themselves first, "Why am I asking these questions out loud when I really should be learning more first?".

     


    by LisB on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 4:41am

    Especially when we must remember that the majority of the public at the time they're asked rarely lean toward revolutionary change.

    That was my point, and it's been proven throughout history when any civil rights or equality issue has been put to a public referendum.

    "Why am I asking these questions out loud when I really should be learning more first?"

    That was your point, though perhaps I misunderstand. Honestly? Both questions and learning are necessary, and both should be challenged. Learning is never stagnant because asking questions leads to more of it.


    by barefooted on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 10:56pm

    More to the point...we're all leaning toward very revolutionary change.

    Hop aboard!

     


    by LisB on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 4:43am

    I was trying to fix a communication system at a remote location. .It had been struck by lightening.

    I hired a retired specialist in systems like that. .He started by painting the exterior of the equipment shed,,putting in better lights,and  other things that didn't seem to me to be on the "critical path",.When I asked why he said: "First I fix anything that's wrong,"

    Or as Goethe said "Only begin".

     


    by Flavius on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 8:28am

    Sounds like a very expensive fix.


    by barefooted on Wed, 02/10/2016 - 3:04pm