HAPPY HOLIDAZE FROM PNG!

---30---

'Toontime: Christmas with Donald

credit: Jim Morin

BC Idonwanna sez: Give him snake in bag!

It is too bad that 'Mericans had to find out about the man they installed in the White House to be their king at Christmas. The facts put a real damper on the holidaze. The 1% are doing just fine, however, in their greater America retreats away from the 99% rabble; their dollar votes are the ones that count in 21st century 'Merica.  PNG wishes you a merry little Christmas in the age of Trump!

credit: Jim Morin
Wackydoodle sez: Oowe, he just trickled on you, boy!

Jackals Cross Alps

Another sign of the feverish planet: golden jackals, Canis aureus [photo credit: Getty Images] from Central Asia have crossed the Alps and migrated into western Europe. Biologists believe their migration is due to global warming and the decline of rival species. Hunters in the Haute-Savoie region of France reported seeing the canines, and experts confirmed the sighting after examining photos from camera traps located on the Swiss border.  The animals have been migrating westward since the 1980's from Asia. They flourished in eastern and southern European countries since their competitor, the wolf, has declined in numbers due to persecution. Despite culling of 40 wolves this autumn, about 10,000 sheep were reported killed by predation in France. Wolves re-inhabited France about twenty-five years ago. French wildlife officials said the eventual appearance of jackals was expected. Jackals, about a third of a wolf in size, compete with foxes for small prey and will take lambs, but adult sheep are generally too big for the slim canine.

COTW: Return to Aristocracy

Father Christmas

More: The UK's Guardian reports that six members of Trump's gang in the White House will save millions in federal taxes as a result of his Christmas gift to the wealthy. Trump will personally save $11-15 million a year according to the Center for American Progress' research. His heirs will save $4.5 million due to favorable changes in the estate tax. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary; Linda McMahon, administrator of the Small Business Administration; Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary; Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary; and Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, will benefit to the tune of $4.5m from changes to the estate tax. The overwhelming majority of businesses use "pass through taxation" in which the business entity is not taxed directly as corporations, but its owners are taxed at ordinary income rates. The rates for pass through businesses such as S corporations, and limited liability partnerships were reduced by ten percentage points. At the last minute a special exception was pushed through Congress to benefit real estate companies with too few employees to qualify for ordinary pass-through treatment. Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and real estate mogul, will rake in $5 to $12 due to the changes. Think of it as icing on the cake. The rest of US will get coal in our stockings for Christmas!

Update: The compromise bill passed in the dead of night further exacerbates the income inequality in the US by reducing the top marginal rate from 39.6% to 37%, lower than both the House and Senate versions. Through lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, it is possible the reform will increase corporate investment, though most economists believe it will do little good because corporate profits are already historically high. That possibility was further belied by Wells Fargo's CEO who told an interviewer that his company's extra cash will be used to bolster the stock market through stock buy backs and higher dividends to stockholders. The US already has a relatively low top rate compared to other developed countries. It boggles the mind to think that in the late 1960s, when 'Merica was presumably still great, the top rate was near 70%!

{20.12.17} French economist Thomas Pickety in his classic work, Capital in the 21st Century, shows how income inequality has increased drastically in America in the last few decades. In the decades between 1950 and 1980, income maldistribution reached its ebb in which the top decile of income earners claimed 30 to 35% of US national income That figure is now 45-50% and increasing. Consequently, inheritance of accumulated wealth will play a greater role in society in the future--a return to aristocracy--not seen since the Gilded Age. This is just one fact Trump's tax gift to the wealthy is intended to protect. By increasing the estate tax exemption to an exorbitant $22 million, most estates except for the very largest will pay any estate tax. Even the very largest will employ a legion of tax avoidance techniques to pay relatively very little tax in comparison to the wealth pasted on to subsequent generations. This chart is reveals the "scam" at the heart of the Repugnant 'tax reform'. The purple line will continue to go down under Trump:

This fact makes the so-called progressive taxation of income even more regressive when the impact of all taxes--income, estate, and gift at all levels of government--are considered. Very wealthy people do no have incomes like the 99%.  Their incomes are primarily made up of returns on investments and business profits. They take a relatively modest share to meet sometimes extravagant living expenses, while the rest of their capital is left untouched--more often offshore and beyond the jurisdiction of taxing authorities--to accumulate at compound rates.  These untouched returns are not taxed as ordinary income, and therein lies the venality.

'Tooontime: Not Yet!

credit: Wolverton

The margin of victory in Alabama was unsurprisingly low*, even against an opponent tarred with being a racist pedophile and having a history of segregationism.  The truth is that the Deep South is unreconstructed, and the narcissistic demagogue in power knows how to manipulate the hatreds of white supremacists for political gain: this poor example of a latter day Gov. George Wallace was actually endorsed by the President! That sad fact shows how desperately he needs votes in the Senate for a win on the tax gift to the plutocracy.  Or could his support for Judge Roy Moore be for less cynical reasons? You decide.

credit: M. Streeter, Savannah Morning News BC Idonawana sez; No little girls sit on his lap! *He got nearly three-fourths, 72 percent, of the white male vote and nearly two-thirds, 63 percent, of the white female vote. This is what former Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges says about the nation's political predicament: "The problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to fight and slay. Until that is done, nothing of substance will change…To reduce the political debate, as [Bernie] Sanders and others are doing, to political personalities is political infantilism. We have undergone a corporate coup. [italics added] Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will not reverse this coup. They, like Barack Obama, know where the centers of power lie. They serve these centers of power."

A Long Row to Hoe

The defeat of racist pedophile Judge Moore by corporatist Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama's special US Senate election is a small step in the correct direction, thinks US Person, but there is a very long road ahead to social equity in 'Merica.  A team from the UN investigating conditions in Alabama last week exposed what is already known to its black inhabitants: poverty conditions there compare with sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.  Particularly, Lowndes County, the home of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suffers from poor sewage disposal, resulting in hookworm infections otherwise unknown in the United States.

UN rapporteur Phillip Alston encountered extreme poverty and civil rights abuses "uncommon" in the first world.  His team toured Lowndes and Butler Counties in Alabama's "Black Belt", the one-time epicenter of cotton plantation in the Antebellum South with local activists guiding the way.  They were shown open sewage ditches that dump untreated human waste into nearby creeks. In September, Baylor University's  National School of Tropical Medicine (NSTM)  published a study that revealed serious sanitation deficits in Lowndes County. Three-quarters of study participants reported that raw sewage had managed to reenter their houses, either because of heavy rainfall or clogs in improvised sewage disposal systems.  Alabama's Department of Health reported in 2011 that the number of homes with inadequate or no sewage systems ranged from 40-90%.

Alabama's hot, humid weather that made cotton grow abundantly, is also the favorable habitat for Necator americanus, a species of hookworm that lays its eggs in the intestines of its host. [photo right] Usually hookworms enter humans through bare feet and ankles walking through moist, contaminated soils.  The parasite is mainly associated with extreme poverty in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, and many infectious disease researchers had assumed that it no longer existed in the US. Hookworm infections are considered a 19th century insanitation disease in the developed world.  NOT in 'Merica!  Reporting of hookworm infections is spotty because poor residents fear they will be prosecuted by Alabama authorities who are unsympathetic to their plight.  Poor families living on $700 a month cannot afford to install their own required septic systems.  An estimated 80% of "Bloody" Lowndes County, as it was known during the Civil Rights Movement, is without municipal sewage disposal.

Voting rights are still an issue in the Black Belt.  Rapporteur Alston was informed of the difficulties black voters have getting to polls and providing the proper required ID.  More importantly, residents complain of political candidates who are not concerned with their abject poverty or do not represent their interests effectively.  Nevertheless, it was black voters in Alabama that saved 'Merica from another white supremacist in the Senate. (a whopping 98% of black women voted for white man Doug Jones).  Democrat Jones did not mount an attack upon either Judge Moore’s viciously antidemocratic positions or the history of failure of the Republican Party within the state of Alabama, which has orchestrated massive cuts to public programs.  Instead he choose to focus his campaign on allegations of sexual misconduct by his opponent, and pro-business positions.  Once again the political duopoly that eviscerates 'Merica deliberately ignores glaring social inequity to protect the plutocracy.

COTW: The Burden of Empire

While the handmaidens of war "debate" a conference bill on a massive tax gift to the wealthy, take a look a how the US spends more than a third of the funds it collects from taxpayers:

It is this incredible cost of empire that is repeatedly justified as a job producer.  Economists dispute this claim of reactionaries, pointing out that other government spending, such as infrastructure replacement and education create jobs more efficiently. Economist John Keynes advocated government deficit spending to create more aggregate demand in times of crisis, but he never advocated military spending as a means.  In a famous letter to FDR in 1933, he wrote:   

In the past orthodox finance has regarded a war as the only legitimate excuse for creating employment by governmental expenditure. You, Mr. President, having cast off such fetters, are free to engage in the interests of peace and prosperity the technique which hitherto has only been allowed to serve the purposes of war and destruction.  

Conservatives assailed FDR's deficit spending for social and economic recovery as "communistic" or "socialistic".  Today's ideological decedents use the same disparaging terminology to denounce efforts to pass progressive social programs such as expanded Medicare to replace a for-profit system that is broken.  Yet they have a curious mental lacuna concerning more deficit spending for an ever-increasing military establishment.  Their derangement is no doubt caused by greed.

What the weaponized version of deficit spending does is further enrich a cadre of profiteering weapons manufacturers that endlessly feed off the Pentagon cash cow at the expense of the rest of the nation.  The F-35 fighter jet is the avatar of Pentagon boondoggles. It will cost $400 billion to complete the acquisition program through 2038, requiring an average annual expenditure of $12.4 billion according to GAO, and the product is beset with technical failures and performance shortcomings. For this price the country could provide its citizen's with Medicare for all.  If peak demand for oil is approaching as experts claim, the end of 'Merica's petrochemical empire is at hand.  How can such flagrant expenditure for weapons of war be morally justified by a supposedly democratic, peace-loving nation?  NOT.

'Toontime: Rolling Downhill

credit: Adam Zygus, Buffalo News

Yes, friends, the Donald is on a roll--in his own mind.  The tax cut is blatantly unfair regardless of what reactionary apologists say.  The Big Ears Monument is a long, long overdue recompense for the white man's destruction of Native American culture and territorial rights.  And the poor may always be with us, but we do not have to seek our own moral justification by starting another war.  Calvin was rejected by "social gospel" Protestantism; the Catholic Church has always been the succor of the poor and disposed even when other Christian churches were not.

It was capitalist tycoons, the same people who now support the Donald, who conflated capitalistic super-patriotism with Christianity in order to combat what they saw as the "virus of collectivism" embodied by Roosevelt's New Deal programs. H.W. Prentis, head of the National Association of Manufacturers said in speech at the time, "The only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.”  This corruption of the Christian ethic was spread across the country by fundamentalist preachers like Congregationalist minister Rev. James W. Fifield Jr. who preached capitalism to one of the first mega-churches in the US.  His congregation numbered four thousand, and his "Spiritual Mobilization" program counted 17,000 participating ministers.  This organization to preach the gospel of wealth was of course funded by money from oil tycoons, General Motors, and other patrons from across the corporate world.  According to this perversion, government is the embodiment of evil, and regulation of business violates the Ten Commandments.  When the "Red Scare" created the demagogue McCarthy, it was simple for the preachers of the emerging "Gospel of Prosperity" to insert godless communism and heathen communists in the blank as the devil of the moment.  Fifield chose Norman Vincent Peale to replace him as leader of the movement in 1947.  Trump attended Peale's Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. Trump referred to Peale as one of the most inspirational speakers he has ever heard.

All of this was preface to what is now called the "religious right",  and to which the feckless robber baron occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue panders.  One of Trump's favorite stump lines is, "we worship God, not government."  As usual the line resonates with religious conservatives, but little do they know the real meaning of that line is, "we worship Capitalism, not Jesus Christ."  The itinerant preacher of Galilee would simply shake his head in total disbelief, and perhaps say as he did to Simon Peter, "Get behind me, Satan".

Yeti Is No More

Yeti, the infamous Himalayan biped of legend, has been debunked. So say geneticists who published their research in the Proceedings of Royal Society B. An international team of scientists analyzed 24 samples of hair, bone, feces and skin. The reality is that samples of DNA supposedly taken from the Yeti are from the Asian brown bear, most likely a Himalayan subspecies. The legend of Yeti, or Abominable Snowman as it became known in the west, has persisted for centuries; it was even worshiped as the god of the hunt by pre-Buddist peoples inhabiting the Tibetan Plateau. The lore captured western imagination in the 1950s when European mountaineers began their famous assents of Himalayan peaks. Suspected bits and pieces of the Yeti including alleged footprints [photo] and sightings were collected over the years, but there was never any documented proof of its existence.

The scientists led by Tianying Lan of the University at Buffalo in New York, write in their report, “we unambiguously show that this sample is from a bear that groups with extant Himalayan brown bear.”  One studied 'Yeti' hair sample held by a museum actually belongs to a dog.  The team goes on to say, “This study represents the most rigorous analysis to date of samples suspected to derive from anomalous or mythical ‘hominid’-like creatures, strongly suggesting the biological basis of the yeti legend as local brown and black bears,”  This is he second genetic study of alleged Yeti samples, the first completed in 2014.  That investigation also concluded study samples belonged to a bear.  Chalk another myth lodged in man's archaic collective unconscious exploded by science.  Next stop on the train to rubbish: 'Merica's analogue, Bigfoot.

Following the Money

It was only a matter of time before Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller got around to subpoenaing the personal financial records of THE TRUMP.  Undoubtedly he has been aided by inside information by others in the TRUMP WORLD already charged with crimes, including money laundering.  Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest bank, has turned over documents concerning certain money and credit transactions made by the rouge billionaire, and now El Presidente.  The bank has lent millions to the TRUMP ORGANIZATION, one of the few to extend credit after a string of TRUMP bankruptcies during the 1990s.

Investigators are apparently interested in confirming information that Deutsche Bank sold TRUMP'S loans to VEB or other Russian banks (Gazprom Bank, VTB Group, Sberbank) now under economic sanction by the United States.  Holding TRUMP debt coming due would give the Russian oligopolists leverage over TRUMP, especially if the banks in question are state controlled.  According to an official disclosure document issued in June, the TRUMP ORGANIZATION has debts of $130 million to Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, the US operating unit.  The debts in reality are probably much larger.

Rueters reports that Paul Manafort's client profile are among the documents handed over.  Manafort was TRUMP's campaign chairman; he nor his wife have accounts at Deutsche Bank.  In October Manafort pleaded guilty to charges that included conspiracy to launder money.   The inference that one can reasonably draw from these circumstances is that the TRUMP ORGANIZATION, a TRUMP family business represented by Manafort, engaged in transactions with prohibited Russian financial institutions in response to pressure from them on loan repayments.  (All capitals for TRUMP because he is YUGE)  At some point later in the investigation, perhaps after subpoenaing senior advisor Jared Kushner for his testimony, Mueller will have set the stage for requesting testimony under oath from THE DONALD himself. US PERSON's advice:  DUCK!

Trump to Shrink Monument

Playing off his tax gift triumph in the Senate, Trump will announce that he will shrink the newly designated Bears Ear National Monument by as much as 90%.  The Monument is the result of over ten years of efforts by a coalition of environmentalists to protect landscapes held sacred by Native Americans.  The move will certainly trigger lawsuits by tribes, such as the Navajo Nation, who were instrumental in its creation.  The suits will bring before conservative justices the entire concept of natural preservation in America, the Beautiful.  The battle may result in millions of protected land being opened up to development, a prospect that excites commercial exploiters of all sorts.  Trump ordered his sycophant at Interior, Ryan Zinke, to review 27 monuments designated since 1996, since he considered the designations to be "egregious use of government power".  Zinke recommended that the boundaries of some the monuments be changed since it is not clear that the President has the authority to withdraw designations completely. {24.08.27}

Bears Ears connects the Navajo Nation to Canyonlands National Park

The issue of designations under the Antiquities Act of 1906 touches upon a sensitive intersection of intergovernmental relations.  The Act limits designations to the "smallest area possible" to protect desired features the law is meant to protect.  Conservatives still think in terms of limited federal authority enshrined in the 10th Amendment and colloquially termed "states' rights".  They see the monument designations as a unlawful federal land grab, closing commercially valuable land to development.  The federal government, on behalf of all the people, controls two-thirds of the land in Utah.  Utah receives anlarge sum of federal subsidies as a result of this ownership.  Currently new mineral exploration is prohibited within Bears Ears, but cattle grazing is still allowed.

Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation, told reporters that the United States government had already taken “millions of acres of my people’s land.”

“We have suffered enough,” he said.  Protestors stood at the Utah state capitol with signs, saying "Keep your tiny hands off our Monument"  Too bad Trump's ego is not as small as his hands. Trump is expected to make the reduction announcement this week when he visits Utah.  He is also expected to cut the size of Staircase-Escalante NM by 50%.  Trump is not the first president to reduce the size of a monument.  President Wilson cut Olympic National Monument, and President Roosevelt reduced the size of Grand Canyon National Monument.  Both are now national parks.

"Toontime: Trickle On Trump

credit: Wolverton

Bernie Sanders got it right: the Repugnant tax plan is a moral abomination.  US Person says "Repugnant" tax plan because the only thing the Trumpster knows about it is that if passed it will give him and fellow plutocrats a huge tax break. There is no social equity in it, and creates a gaping trilion and half more of federal deficit. His smash and grab government is just about run out of time, December 8th to be exact.  Shutting the federal government has become a routine political ploy of the Grinchs on the hill.  The 'toons today are en point.