"Citigroup College" has a vulgar ring to it

It doesn't sound any better to name the college after Mr. and Mrs. Sandy Weill, the Citigroup billionaires. NPR reported this story. Sandy and Joan Weill wanted to give $20 million to a struggling small college in upstate New York. The one condition was that the college be renamed after them. How modest the rich are!

How did we get here? Colleges are starved for a reason: the college age population is poorer than ever after three decades of declining middle class incomes. Colleges rely more and more on part time professors who are very poorly paid. Many need public assistance to make ends meet. That is poor advertising for the idea of college, and putting a billionaire's name on the college's football jerseys won't erase it.

The tax deduction given for a donation should be less if your “gift” demands naming rights, or if something is named after you. Maybe the naming should cancel the deduction altogether. There are ways of placing a dollar value on the publicity value of naming an institution after oneself. How much do corporate brands pay to put their name on major league venues? They don’t do it out of public spiritedness. They do it for crass reasons of value. If thousands of college football fans wear your name on their chest and more thousands of graduates put your name in the back window of their car, each iteration of this publicity should subtract from your tax deduction. At some point the institution should be able to demand you pony up more money or be free to remove your name. Maybe cash-starved public institutions should publish the petty-minded negotiations the “donors” engaged in over the size of their name and it’s prominence. It would be good to know exactly how starved for attention rich people can be.

The rich people who give generously because they believe in it far outnumber the ones who are greedy for praise. Most who give to their alma mater do so with a sense of humility, recognizing that the names of the people they learned from are far more important than the names of the rich people who paid their salaries. Better still, name the college after a philosopher who influenced centuries of humanity. He or she never got rich from the search for knowledge. Naming a college after a billionaire suggests that wealth accumulation is the best measure of a civilization. That is a bad message to send young people who are going to school. Why worship the few who become rich by keeping the rest of us poor

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Civilization, meaning everything in history that comes after we learned to farm, in fact all of history, is founded upon reliable climate, reliable rain and growing seasons. Climate change caused by the greed of fossil fuel billionaires fucks all of that.

Some places will be warmer, some colder, some will have longer growing seasons, some shorter, most will fluctuate meaning farmers will have to guess and hope even more than they do now (imagine the crop insurability problem then).

The changes will be dramatic. Some places will be too dry to support life. Some will be washed away in huge floods or flattened by huge storms. Things like this that happened in the Bible were interpreted as God’s punishment for wrongdoing––our wrongdoing this time is stupidly placing ourselves in the political grip of fossil fuel billionaires.

Think we can solve these problems by shipping grain from one lucky continent to another? Picture all of our functioning and extremely expensive port facilities under water and no longer functional.

Weird how the big insurers haven’t cottoned to this huge risk overhang. I think it’s because most big insurers think of themselves as investment companies investing the premiums they collect rather than insurers of risk, and right now at peak oil their biggest investments are with the oil companies. Colossally stupid. Stupid on top of stupid, which should help disprove the free market capitalist’s religion that says money is smarter than any of us. Money is mostly just greedy.

The greed of the top 1% may doom all of civilization, murdering millions. We should mind.

There is a local weatherman where I live who hosts “documentaries” that explain why Climate Change and Global Warming are stupid hoaxes. He says it’s hard enough to predict weather two weeks out, so it has to be impossible to predict what will happen in two decades. This sounds persuasive if you don’t think about it. Children are unpredictable too. We can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow, but we have a pretty good idea what they’ll be up to over time, and we can be pretty sure in twenty years they’ll be twenty years older, with average luck. With average luck they'll live lives like ours, with better than average luck, better lives. Throw that average luck out and what happens?

Climate stability gives us average luck that we can build on. Climate instability takes that away: no predictability, no reliable averages to plan our complex civilization around. Climate scientists are warning us about the risks of enormous changes in our children's lifetimes. What changes exactly? It's hard to say, and that is the danger. Unreliable climate destroys civilizations and has ground many into dust over the centuries. Usually it happens slowly. Previously the climate changed slowly. Not this time.

The well paid attractive telegenic criminals who are distracting us from this enormous danger are being paid to distract us and dissuade us. 97% of all climate scientists agree, but we are being persuaded by smiling weathermen and ignorant politicians to ignore science.

These shills are being paid to help shore up a dirty 19th century industry that threatens us all. They are being paid to help us confuse Weather and Climate. Weather is if it’s raining outside. Weather is a discussion about whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. It’s not deep stuff. Climate change is as deep as life and death for our nation, the happiness or misery of our descendants' lives, the arc of history itself.

Climate is the reason we have a prosperous nation. We are lucky to have a good, reliable, moderate and predictable climate. Climate Change is why there are dead civilizations buried under the sands of North Africa. Usually climate changes slowly. We are changing it radically and quickly and lethally unless we decide to stop changing it by changing the way we fuel our lives.

Lincoln Would Be Expelled From Today's GOP

Lapham's Quarterly posted an interesting bit of historical rhetoric. Words from Stephen Douglas when he was debating Abraham Lincoln. Reading them today they seem very much like the modern Republican mindset.

I’ve been saying for a while that the modern Republican Party thinks, acts and moves like the old Confederacy. The resemblance is so remarkable it’s surprising that newspapers and commentators haven’t picked up on it. It’s probably just too insulting and awful to say out loud. It’s considered impolite. Liberals are certainly too tolerant to say such things.

Lincoln was a great president, but by modern standards he’d be called a failure. He was so unpopular when elected that half the country seceded. How would CNN play that? For most of his four and a half years in the White House he was in charge of a war that was costing hundreds of thousands of lives and going very badly. The enemy was running rings around his generals. Lincoln’s emergency security measures were draconian and widely hated. And in the middle of this horrible crisis he decided to champion the rights of millions of another race who were not even voters, not even citizens of the nation he was president of at the time. He was laughed at for his powerlessness, his coolness, his laconic nature, his unfashionable intelligence and his patience. Lincoln was widely joked about until the day he was shot. It’s only in retrospect that we realized what a hero he was.

Lincoln had one significant advantage. Most of his enemies had seceded. Obama’s equally determined and intractable enemies are in control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. Today’s virtual Confederacy also has the full and energetic backing of Wall Street’s trillions. Today’s Republican Party is the old Confederacy in a more muscular and aggressive form, minus the gentility and honor, minus the honesty about its deeply racist motives and objectives.

When Lincoln’s armies defeated the Confederacy the nation bound up its wounds and forgave the treason. The South never forgave the North for recognizing the full humanity of the former slaves and the new Confederacy is itching for revenge on this old score. The current president embodies all that they once felt superior to.

What can we call this old order of things? Was it a feudal system of serfs and masters? Somewhat, but worse. The collaboration with Wall Street gives the new Republicans a more fascist character. Mussolini defined fascism as an alliance between corporations and government that is so close you cannot slip a cigarette paper between them. That is the system the modern Republican Party would like to impose.

They’ve already done so in many ways. Will a war be profitable for their client companies? Then we shall have a war. Do their client companies want a large undocumented workforce who can be forced to work at below legal wages for longer than legal hours in illegal conditions and be immune from Social Security obligations? Then they shall have that work force. Do their client companies want to launder their profits overseas to avoid taxes? They shall be allowed to do so. Would their client corporations like to engage in massive market manipulation and fraud and not be imprisoned for it? Not a problem. Would their client billionaires like to be free to manipulate the public and rig elections and control our political system without any restraint? Fine. The Republican Party and its Supreme Jurists will declare that corporations are people and their billions are protected speech and their income is immune from taxation. It is hard to tell whether the race baiting side of the Republican personality is the dominant half or if it’s just the ugly side that comes out when it’s convenient, like the brownshirts who beat up the Jews on the street but didn’t attend the official parties when polite society was invited. The climate today has more than a passing resemblance to the 1930s in Germany. Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South had more than a family resemblance; they were twins.

But, of course, it is impolite to say this. If it offends anyone to make this comparison, then the comparison had better not be made. It would be like repeating and giving credence to the lies said about President Obama. Saying that he is a Kenyan socialist Muslim is simply code for what the Republican half of the country would like to call him, a term which broadcast codes prohibit. Race hatred is a convenient excuse for enabling fascism. It gets the mob to march for you. Ugly emotions and ancient racial loyalties become handy tools during anxious times. But to point out the way they are being deployed would be hurtful to the ones deploying them. We mustn’t be impolite to brutal people because they might decide to be brutal to us, and they are very powerful. What they say and do is law.

The Rich Are the Real Parasites

ThinkByNumbers does the numbers on Romney's complaint that half of Americans are freeloaders. Doing the math, they discovered that the richest Americans are the biggest freeloaders.

"The government gives tons of favors to the largest corporations, increasing the significant advantage they already have over smaller competing businesses. If, in the court of public opinion, Wal-Mart has been tried and convicted for the murder of main street, mom-and-pop America, then the government could easily be found guilty as a willing accomplice. Wal-Mart receives hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidization by local governments throughout the country. These subsidies take the form of bribes by local politicians trying to convince Wal-Mart to come to their town with the dream of significant job creation. Of course, from that follows a larger tax base. For example, a distribution center in Macclenny, Florida received $9 million in government subsidies in the form of free land, government-funded recruitment and training of employees, targeted tax breaks, and housing subsidies for employees allowing them to be paid significantly lower wages. A study by Good Jobs First found that 244 Wal-Marts around the country had received over $1 billion in government favors."

So when Republicans talk about "helping small business" they don't really mean it, unless you're including the "small family business" of the Walton family. That would be WalMart.

The Walton family members who own WalMart hold more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans. That's six families. Politifact backs up this assertion.The tax code and commercial laws written by a generation of Reagan Republicans in Congress helps protect and subsidize their wealth.

And what is their wealth earned from? Lowballed products imported from Chinese factories that run American manufacturers and Main Street stores out of business.