Go Go RocketParty

The final Sports Tax hits you two ways: First when your annual taxes go to support higher education and then when you or your kids pay ever-higher tuition rates. In both situations, your cash is typically subsidizing large schools’ sprawling athletic departments. That’s right – thanks in part to multi-million-dollar coaching salaries, 93 percent of those departments bring in less money than they spend, meaning you are paying a Sports Tax to make up the difference.

—(via Salon)

Obama’s jobs program is almost entirely a corporate tax incentive scheme, to bribe corporations to send home the jobs they sent offshore, where they have also hidden tens of trillions from taxation – a subject not deemed worthy of mention in a national discussion of shared sacrifice and patriotic obligations.

—(via Black Agenda Report)

Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America.

—(via Robert Reich)

1. Be suspicious of any new idea from below — because it’s new, and because it’s from below. After all, if the idea were any good, we at the top would have thought of it already.

2. Invoke history. If a new idea comes up for discussion, find a precedent in a an earlier idea that didn’t work, remind everyone of that bad past experience. Those who have been around a long time know that we tried it before, so it won’t work this time either.

3. Keep people really busy. If people seem to have free time, load them with more work.
In the name of excellence, encourage cut-throat competition. Get groups to critique and challenge each other’s proposals, preferably in public forums, and then declare winners and losers.

4. Stress predictability above all. Count everything that can be counted, and do it as often as possible. Sweep any surplus into master accounts, and eliminate any slack. Favor exact plans and guarantees of success. Don’t credit people with exceeding their targets because that would just undermine planning. Insist that all procedures be followed.

5. Confine discussion of strategies and plans to a small circle of trusted advisors. Then announce big decisions in full-blown form. This ensures that no one will start anything new because they never know what new orders will be coming down from the top.

6. Act as though punishing failure motivates success. Practice public humiliation, making object lessons out of those who fail to meet expectations. Everyone will know that risk-taking is bad.

7. Blame problems on the incompetent people below — their weak skills and poor work ethic.

8. Complain frequently about the low quality of the talent pool today. If that doesn’t undermine self-confidence, it will undermine faith in anyone else’s ideas.

9. Above all, never forget that we got to the top because we already know everything there is to know about this business.

—

Nine Rules (via Harvard Business Review

Every single business leader should have these memorized. They should wake in a cold sweat at the idea of these

For so many in the techno-elite, even those who don’t entirely subscribe to the unlimited optimism of the Singularity, the notion of perpetual progress and economic growth is somehow taken for granted. As a former classicist turned technologist, I’ve always lived with the shadow of the fall of Rome, the failure of its intellectual culture, and the stasis that gripped the Western world for the better part of a thousand years. What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the foresight to face the world’s problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance. Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being “a Ciceronian” rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism. Now consider how conservative elements in American religion and politics refuse to accept scientific knowledge, deride their opponents for being “reality based,” and ask yourself, “could that ideology come to rule the most powerful nation on earth? and if it did, what would be the consequences for the world?

—Tim O’Reilly (via azspot)

(via azspot)

We need a new politics in America, which unites people, which sets aside partisan differences for the greater good of the country, which strives to reconnect with the greatness of the nation and the goodness of the American people. What would that politics look like? The rhetoric would change to one of mutual respect. The questioning of motives would end. The poisoned system of pay to play would be transformed by public financing. And our government would be rededicated to addressing the practical aspirations of all the American people, for jobs, for health care for all, for education for all, for retirement security for all and for environmental security. We need a new politics which creates jobs and celebrates the dignity of work. Our government must raise the status of working people and protect their rights. Our government must stress wealth creation over taxation, investment over debt, health over illness, peace over war, liberty over surveillance.

—Dennis Kucinich (via azspot)

(via azspot)