Month: December 2016

by William Skink

Claiming private-sector charity can make up for a ravaged social safety net is usually a Republican claim, one based on a myth this Atlantic article does a good job deconstructing.

Tell that to Missoula’s City Council.

Before getting to what the Council is proposing, let’s start with the manipulation coming from the Missoulian, which starts with the title of this article: Property taxes got you down? Missoula City Council’s Got Your Back.

A reader might think that the City Council is prepared to address the ever-increasing property taxes that make it more and more difficult for people to stay in their homes, especially if they are subsisting on a fixed income. Think again. Here is what the Council is proposing:

The Missoula City Council is investigating the creation of a donation-based tax relief fund for residents disproportionately affected by rising property taxes.

Even if the fund never gets off the ground, just talking about tax-relief options will help educate Missoulians about programs they may not realize they are eligible for, council members said.

Ward 5 representative Julie Armstrong introduced the idea in August and worked with city staff the last few months to come up with a plan, which will be up for approval from the Administration and Finance Committee in the next couple of weeks.

Her ward in particular has a high number of seniors, Armstrong said, who rely on Social Security payments that don’t keep pace with increases in city and county taxes.

“When our increases hit them, it’s straight cash-out-of-pocket and it’s very difficult for them to manage,” she said. “I’d like to offer them a buffer.”

Let me translate: a “donation-based tax relief fund” is nothing more than charity, and charity is not a limitless resource. I would also like to know why Armstrong thinks the increasing cost of property taxes is only “cash-out-of-pocket” for her senior constituents living off of Social Security. Money is money, and when property owners have to pay perpetually increasing property taxes to fund Missoula’s every municipal whim and desire, it’s cash-out-of-pocket for every taxpayer.

Relying on charity isn’t something that can be budgeted for, and it’s not sustainable, but that isn’t the point, apparently. The scheme here is to raise awareness of existing tax-relief programs already in place:

The city would only dole out as much money as they have in the fund, Armstrong said, on a first-come, first-served basis.

But she estimated that most people would only qualify for $100 to $200, and ideally the fund would hold much more. She initially wanted the city to put in $25,000 to kick-start the program.

But Armstrong said the main goal of the fund is educating people about the four programs listed above, which many people qualify for, but know nothing about.

I don’t have a problem with raising awareness of existing programs, but this charity scheme isn’t a good way to do it. Why? Because anything the City touches costs money, which is openly admitted will happen if this charity scheme takes off:

People would be able to donate and apply for tax relief on the city’s website, where they’d fill out an application and submit proof they are eligible and use one of the four aid programs.

The city would then confirm their eligibility, do the math on how much they would save on their city bill and credit their tax account with Missoula County.

City Finance Director Leigh Griffing said administrative costs should be low initially, though if a large amount of donations come in, it would cost the city more to process them and dole out more money to people in need.

So City Council wants to create a charity fund to alleviate property taxes, but doing so has administrative costs, which makes city services more expensive, which creates more incentive to…wait for it…INCREASE TAXES!

I have a crazy idea for Missoula’s City Council: instead of scheming to direct charity away from non-profits that have no choice but to rely on charity, how about you just stop pushing every bell and whistle inching up our property taxes every year?

Just a thought.

by William Skink

Lest my conservative readers think I’m not paying attention to what’s brewing with Trump, this poem is for you.

P.S. I figured out Obama was a scam when his cabinet was assembled (by Citibank).

When will you figure it out? Here’s the poem (and soon to be song):

Trujunta in the tower
Generals come and go
reporters bow for golden pens
a fast food CEO
will take the reigns of Labor
Dr. C will get HUD
and Mad Dog don’t like pizza
but Goldman still gets love

what say you angry voters?
let’s all now call Taiwan
that infrastructure tune is
a defense contractor song
will you pick tomatoes
when immigrants get kicked out?
and when the economy collapses
who will you shoot down?

There’s more of this that I’m working on, like a reference to the Pope’s poop comment. Yes, you read that right, and instead of boring you with with more lyrical political analysis on this snowy Friday in Montana, here is the Pope warning his followers not to be aroused by shit:

Writing fake news and stories about scandals is like being sexually aroused by excrement, Pope Francis has said.

And since people tend towards coprophagia, or eating faeces, then the media should avoid spreading it, he said in an attack on the spread of disinformation.

Francis apologised for his use of precise psychological terms that describe when people are aroused by excrement.

Don’t apologize for the words, Pope. The actions of some your priests on the other hand…

by William Skink

Today is Jim Morrison’s birthday. My impression of this man has changed dramatically since my first exposure to his music through the movie Lost Boys.

Knowing what I know now about the exploitation that occurs where power and influence resides–like Hollywood and Washington DC–the movie was the perfect vehicle of introduction to the music of The Doors.

The Lost Boys is not a horror movie about vampires. It is a metaphor for what powerful men in Hollywood do, sucking the life force from their victims. Corey Haim was one of those victims, according to the other Corey, Corey Feldman, who also acted in the movie.

And once you’re turned, you must continue to exist in the darkness.

It’s bizarre to see pedophilia being churned about now in the spin cycle of mainstream media after 4Channers and Reddit sleuths pieced together bits of data that by themselves don’t mean much–but as the data accumulates, and is added to past scandals, like the Franklin network in Nebraska, outright dismissal of something significant lurking within the spectrum of accusations is harder to maintain.

Over the summer I read everything I could on Jim Morrison, including all the biographies of the band members (except Robbie, who hasn’t written on). Jim Morrison is a character of sorts in the story I’m writing, so it was mostly research.

But it’s not all research.

Though I don’t have much to back this up, I have a hunch that Jim Morrison was abused as a child, either by his military father, or possibly someone in his family. Because I’m writing a work of fiction, I get to use my creative license to explore this hunch as it relates to the larger narrative.

That’s of course assuming a creative license is still allowed in America. In the coming witchhunts, I suspect artists are going to have to be very careful and clever to avoid the detection of the new censors.

Part of what’s happening with the debate over Pizzagate, at least in this 50+ page thread at Rigorous Intuition, is a debate over the validity of using works of art as part of the data set justifying calls for a formal investigation.

One of the artists being referenced in this debate is Kim Noble, who is allegedly a survivor and has dissociative disorder (once called multiple personality disorder) as a result of the abuse she experienced. In that context, her art is part of a therepeutic process of healing from severe trauma.

But her website is a dot com, so works can be purchased for money. The question then becomes who would want this kind of art hanging on their walls? A patron who wants to support a struggling artist, or a pedophile who is aroused by depictions of past trauma by a victim of abuse?

With some of this in mind, I offer my latest piece, Canyons of LA. I hope what I lack in vocal talent I make up with lyrical content and image arrangement. Enjoy!

by William Skink

First, let’s get something straight: fake news can kill. That’s what happened when the New York Times and other corporate media platforms promoted the fake news story about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of that fake news story, but the New York Times isn’t on a blacklist or subject to suppression by social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s another reality: unbalanced people can interpret information then believe criminal action is warranted. While you may think I’m referring to the dude who showed up at Comet Ping Pong with a gun and allegedly fired a shot inside the pizzeria, I was actually thinking of the incalculable incidents of violence inspired by passages from the Bible and Koran.

Because of that violence, should we ban the Bible and the Koran? Should anyone quoting passages from these books have their social media accounts deleted?

At the end of last month, the House passed H.R. 6393 ostensibly to counter those pesky Russians who have extended the dark tentacles of propaganda to infect alternative news sites like Counterpunch and Truthdig. Here is how the useful idiots at Zerohedge reported on this:

A quick skim of the bill reveals “Title V—Matters relating to foreign countries”, whose Section 501 calls for the government to “counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”

The section lists the following definitions of media manipulation:

Establishment or funding of a front group.
Covert broadcasting.
Media manipulation.
Disinformation and forgeries.
Funding agents of influence.
Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.
Assassinations.
Terrorist acts.

So, corporate media can lie about WMDs, spurring our nation to launch a disastrous war, and religious nuts can use their holy books to justify murdering abortion providers and infidels, but when it comes to the NeoMcCarthyite witchhunt for witting or unwitting purveyors of “Russian propaganda”, we are seeing the power of the state joining forces with social media giants to suppress “fake news” and “extremist” content. From Yahoo News:

Web giants YouTube , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share ‘hashes’ – unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos – of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

“We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online,” the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.

Tech companies have long resisted outside intervention in how their sites should be policed, but have come under increasing pressure from Western governments to do more to remove extremist content following a wave of militant attacks.

YouTube and Facebook have begun to use hashes to automatically remove extremist content.

I wonder how long it will take the Youtube channel I created to promote my artistic efforts to get shut down because I made a song about Pizzagate. I wonder if I’ll get a call from the FBI for something I tweeted, since the FBI is now using their limited resources to investigate a journalist’s joke tweet about fake news.

We live in interesting times.

by William Skink

I got an email from a RD reader bringing my attention to this Guardian piece by Naomi Klein, squarely placing the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism as the defining factor in Trump’s shocking (for many, but not all) electoral victory. I’ll highlight this part for the purpose of this post:

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

I honestly don’t know if it’s worth trying to continue the ideological fight to define what a “real left” even looks like anymore as this truly bizarro world of Trump Tower politics emerges. When decades of policy can be obliterated by one phone call, while Mad Dog’s son gets into a tweet-battle with Jake Tapper over Pizzagate, the disorientation of this new normal is so potent I don’t think what remains of the left has the capacity to trump the fear of Trump and wrestle control of the Democratic Party from neoliberalcon consensus.

Maybe there’s a chance at building a broader coalition if Democrats can move beyond the denial stage of grief over the loss of legitimacy their deal with the neoliberal devil produced. I’m not waiting around to find out, though. My path is taking me elsewhere.

Part of that is trying to actually understand the Christo-Fascist element people like Steve Bannon represent. BuzzFeed recently dusted off a 2014 talk Bannon gave the Vatican. Here is an interesting part:

It’s ironic, I think, that we’re talking today at exactly, tomorrow, 100 years ago, at the exact moment we’re talking, the assassination took place in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the bloodiest century in mankind’s history. Just to put it in perspective, with the assassination that took place 100 years ago tomorrow in Sarajevo, the world was at total peace. There was trade, there was globalization, there was technological transfer, the High Church of England and the Catholic Church and the Christian faith was predominant throughout Europe of practicing Christians. Seven weeks later, I think there were 5 million men in uniform and within 30 days there were over a million casualties.

That war triggered a century of barbaric — unparalleled in mankind’s history — virtually 180 to 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and I believe that, you know, hundreds of years from now when they look back, we’re children of that: We’re children of that barbarity. This will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age.

But the thing that got us out of it, the organizing principle that met this, was not just the heroism of our people — whether it was French resistance fighters, whether it was the Polish resistance fighters, or it’s the young men from Kansas City or the Midwest who stormed the beaches of Normandy, commandos in England that fought with the Royal Air Force, that fought this great war, really the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists, right? The underlying principle is an enlightened form of capitalism, that capitalism really gave us the wherewithal. It kind of organized and built the materials needed to support, whether it’s the Soviet Union, England, the United States, and eventually to take back continental Europe and to beat back a barbaric empire in the Far East.

That capitalism really generated tremendous wealth. And that wealth was really distributed among a middle class, a rising middle class, people who come from really working-class environments and created what we really call a Pax Americana. It was many, many years and decades of peace. And I believe we’ve come partly offtrack in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we’re starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.

In the absence of a legitimate leftist opposition to what’s emerging, people like Bannon get to replace a leftist critique of Capitalism with his own skewed narrative that features a Nationalist nostalgia that will resonate with the rust belt for many elections to come.