Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for emergency workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

New Yorker, November 26.

Congrats to the Toronto Star for printing this op-ed while all around us it was "union kills Hostess".

Vulture capitalism ate your Hostess Twinkies

What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a great company? The vultures blame the workers. The vultures blame the union. And vapid media outlets report the lie as "news." That's what's happening with the meltdown of Hostess Brands Inc.

Americans are being told that they won't get their Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos because the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ran the company into the ground.

But the union and the 5,600 Hostess workers represented by the union did not create the crisis that led the company's incompetent managers to announce plans to shutter it.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more pay. The BCTGM workers did not ask for more benefits. The BCTGM workers did not ask for better pensions.

The union and its members had a long history of working with the company to try to keep it viable. They had made wage and benefit concessions. They adjusted to new technologies, new demands.

They took deep layoffs -- 20 per cent of the workforce -- and kept showing up for work even as plants were closed. They kept working even as the company stopped making payment to their pension fund more than a year ago. The workers did not squeeze the filling out of Hostess.

Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists -- "a management team that," in the words of economist Dean Baker, "shows little competence and is rapidly stuffing its pockets at the company's expense."

Even as the company struggled, the 10 top Hostess executives pocketed increasingly lavish compensation packages. The Hostess CEO who demanded some of the deepest cuts from workers engineered a 300-per-cent increase in his compensation package.

"Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized," explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

"Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven't had a raise in eight years.

"In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 per cent pay and benefits cut."

When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually. They were challenging abuses by a private-equity group -- Ripplewood Holdings -- that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.

"When a highly respected financial consultant, hired by Hostess, determined earlier this year that the company's business plan to exit bankruptcy was guaranteed to fail because it left the company with unsustainable debt levels, our members knew that the massive wage and benefit concessions the company was demanding would go straight to Wall Street investors and not back into the company," recalled BCTGM president Frank Hunt, who described why the union struck Hostess rather than accept a demand from management for more pay and benefit cuts.

"Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years," Hunt explained. "They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and 'restructuring specialists' walk away with untold millions of dollars."

On Nov. 6, American voters rejected Mitt Romney and Bain Capitalism. But that didn't end the abusive business practices that made Romney rich. They're still wrecking American companies like Hostess.

Instead of blaming workers, Americans should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation.

This is from a newsletter put out by Dr. Gary Kohls. Now I know we're all supposed to be thinking about the US Presidential election right now, but when I go through the list of fascist political traits below, I just can't help thinking of Harper. There isn't much he's missing.

Kohls writes:

Here is the list of fascist political traits, which I gleaned from an article entitled "Fascism Anyone?" It was written by Lawrence W. Britt, PhD and was first published in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. It can be accessed at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm .

1. To what degree does the candidate or party express a fervent, blind nationalism? (Do they prominently display flags and wear flag lapel pins [or swastikas], display patriotic fervor or spout jingoistic slogans [ex "Deutschland Uber Alles" or "America First"], express blind pride in the nation's military [whether the missions or the actions of soldiers are right or wrong; legal or criminal], or express fear or suspicion of foreigners and people of color?

2. To what degree is the candidate or party disdainful of human rights? (Do they disregard the human rights of others, especially foreigners, racial and ethnic minorities? Do they tend to not object to human rights abuses, torture, extra-judicial assassinations and the marginalization or the demonization of targeted group?.)

3. To what degree does the candidate or party use enemies as scapegoats or as a unifying cause to gain votes? (Are they willing to use propagandistic disinformation to incite "spontaneous" acts against targeted scapegoats - such as communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, ethnic and racial minorities, members of non-orthodox religions, secular humanists, homosexuals, and "terrorists.")

4. To what degree is the candidate or party subservient to, or supported by, its nation's military/industrial complex? (Do they identify closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supports the military? Are they OK with a disproportionate share of national resources being given to the military, even when domestic needs are left unmet?)

5. To what degree is the candidate or party overtly or covertly sexist, racist, homophobic or xenophobic? Do they treat women and non-whites as second-class citizens, are they fearful of foreigners or do they support the criminalization of abortion and homosexuality?)

6. To what degree is the candidate or party beholden to the controlled mass media to dis-inform or mis-inform the public (propaganda)? (Are they suspicious of the power of the mass media and the dis-/mis-information that is often articulated there?)

7. How obsessed is the candidate or party to issues of national security? (Are they heavily supported by the police, military, FBI and CIA to maintain power and suppress dissent?)

8. To what degree does the candidate or party profess punitive, compassionless or pro-violent religious or theological beliefs? (If Christian, are their political policies incompatible with the nonviolent, compassionate, merciful and unconditionally loving teachings of Jesus?)

9. To what degree is the candidate or party supported or subsidized by corporate power and wealth? (Do they uncritically accept money, gifts or political support from ruthless corporations and the moneyed elite? Are they disdainful of the under-privileged or those made poor by the capitalist system that impoverished them?)

10. To what degree does the candidate or party's policies suppress the rights of the working class by trying to weaken the power of trade unions? (Are they subservient to the political and economic power of the ruling elite and their corporate allies, who regard labor unions as a threat to maximum corporate profitability and therefore deserving of elimination?)

11. To what degree does the candidate or party suppress free speech or disparage intellectuals, science and the arts? (Are they afraid of the freedom of ideas, freedom of expression and academic freedom, all of which are considered, by the right-wing, subversive to national security? Are they OK with McCarthyism on campus? Do they fear dissent and therefore attack free speech? Do they disregard scientific evidence, such as the facts on climate change, to promote their political aspirations?)

12. Is the candidate or party obsessed with crime and punishment? (Do they, because of the fear of being characterized as "soft on crime", support punitive judicial systems that maintain large prison populations, lobby for long prison terms for victimless "crimes" or glorify police power?)

13. To what degree has the candidate or party participated in cronyism or corruption? (Have they enriched themselves with the largesse of the power elite in exchange for government policy favoritism or the theft of national resources?)

14. To what degree has the candidate or party benefitted from fraudulent elections? (Have they or their supporters stooped so low as to resort to fraud to win elections? Have they benefitted from fraudulent computerized election machinery, intimidation at the polls, the disenfranchisement of opposition voters (Voter ID legislation?), destroyed or disallowed legal votes or benefitted from a judiciary beholden to the corporate ruling elite?)