j_b

Wildfires and the consequences of anti-tax demagoguery in San Diego county, the scene of incredibly devastating fires in 2003 and 2007: "San Diego County remains the only large urban county in California without its own fire department. Many areas such as Ramona, Cuyamaca and Dulzura are woefully underserved for day-to-day incidents, let alone major wildfires. The best way to prevent fires from becoming monsters is by jumping on them when they are still small. This cannot be done with inadequate firefighting resources. The San Diego County budget is more than $4 billion. However, the county has only allocated $8.5 million to $15 million per year to support fire protection services. For comparison, Orange County, which is one-fifth the size of San Diego County, spends more than $275 million on its fire department. San Diego County also receives about $250 million from the half-cent sales tax levied by Proposition 172 approved in 1993. This money is required to be spent on public safety services, but the county continually has refused to allocate any of this tax revenue for fire protection. It is common knowledge throughout the fire service in California that San Diego is considered a “welfare county” when it comes to fire protection. This is because it depends heavily on out-of-region fire agencies to fight its own wildfires and cannot adequately reciprocate when other regions need help. Under mutual aid agreements, cities and independent fire districts are continually responding to county emergencies, especially during major events. But mutual aid is not meant to be depended upon for first response. Although no official will say so publicly, there may come a time when fire agencies will refuse to send firefighting resources to the county during major firestorm events because their first obligation is to their own citizens – the people who paid for the services in the first place." http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20081114/news_lz1e14halsey.html

I don't claim to know the specifics but taxes are necessary to build infrastructure and provide services to those who need it and make our society more efficient and productive.

so someone on this board doesn't want to pay their taxes???? Right and taxes for basic services too. Libertardians have really gone off the deep end.

because you claim that the drama queen act of libertarians about "freedom" when it's a matter of basic services doesn't sound retarded?

What pressure? either you play by the rule of modern society or go live in a cave or in Somalia where I hear government is to your liking, really small. I certainly can't be blamed because your ancestors gave up the opportunity to play with their genitals in public for the amenities of living in society several thousand years ago. I'd suggest you wake up to that reality on your own.

Are you retarded, Bill? because you certainly sound like it when you spew your libertarian nonsense. I am not for big or small government, I am for the government necessary to do the job properly. Sometimes, in some sectors, significant government intervention is absolutely necessary. Somewhere, at some other time, no so much. If you don't like the social contract as interpreted in your region, you can move to an unincorporated area far away from infrastructure and communities that expect basic services like fire protection. There are still plenty of isolated places in North America and you won't be mooching off services provided by our tax dollars.

Lame. Dude, it's your ideology that will exclude folks from having fire protection (and education and ..), which will surely kill some of them, so don't attempt to portray me as the bad guy who is going to blow you up (wtf?).

In your regressive world those who can't afford fire protection won't have any (same with education, etc ..). Taxation should always be progressive despite what you say the rest of the time.

It's clear that the "victim" in this story could have paid the $75, but didn't. He was counting on other people to foot the bill for fire services for him. Who, exactly, is the sociopath here? The one not showing compassion, or comprehension that a community is as healthy as its members, when a homeowner made a bone-headed move and paid for it.

$3 trillion in WA? Certainly not. Most WA state public pension funds are fully funded. Anyway, you weren't talking about unfunded pensions but about pay raises for cops and bus drivers when there are much bigger fish to fry, yet not a peep from you about that ...

how about those death panels for grandpa? huh? fuckin soshalists!

Perhaps, some day JayB will go after someone other than the few workers on the gravy train, but I am not holding my breath. It's not like there are not more important fish to fry but his insistence on focusing on the piddling stuff shows that libertarianism is a convenient fig leaf for corporatists.

"According to documents prepared by the county in 2008, a paltry 0.13 cent increase in property taxes on each household would be all it would take to fund fire services for the towns within the county." http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/05/after-firefighters-obion-expands/ "Let's save 0.13 cent so that joe blow who can't pay for fire protection is further in the hole once his house is burnt to the ground". Freakin sociopaths!

Local taxes are notoriously regressive so yes the duplex people do pay part of the mansion fire protection cost, but as said in my post above regressive taxes have never been an argument for no taxes and optional fire protection. That's just terrible logic to pretend the opposite.

The injustice of regressive taxation isn't an argument for no taxation. It's an argument for progressive taxes so that low income brackets don't pay fire protection for the wealthy. Letting those who can't pay without fire protection (education, access to the outdoors, ..) is the kind of world that sociopaths are engineering all around us.

... with foreign-financed attack ads" "As of Sept. 15th, the Chamber had aired more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates alone, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project. The Chamber’s spending has dwarfed every other issue group and most political party candidate committee spending. A ThinkProgress investigation has found that the Chamber funds its political attack campaign out of its general account, which solicits foreign funding. And while the Chamber will likely assert it has internal controls, foreign money is fungible, permitting the Chamber to run its unprecedented attack campaign. According to legal experts consulted by ThinkProgress, the Chamber is likely skirting longstanding campaign finance law that bans the involvement of foreign corporations in American elections." Foreign-Funded ‘U.S.’ Chamber Of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads

I am only giving an opportunity to the sociopaths to explain how their societal model isn't a "fuck you, you are on your own". Did I forget to mention that the town mayor is a republican as are all members of the county commission that should levy taxes for fire-protection? yes, i did forget to mention it. An extract from Harper's excellent piece on AIG and the LA fires of 2008: "The inventor of fire insurance was a Puritan preacher’s son born in seventeenth-century London and baptized If-Jesus-hadn’t-died-for-thee-thou-wouldst-be-Damned Barbon. He went by Nicholas. In 1666, when he was in his late twenties, the Great Fire of London was lit. It started in a baker’s oven on Pudding Lane—someone overcooked some bacon—and because the baker’s house was made of wood and his neighbors’ houses were made of wood and there was no fire service, it spread easily. People ran in every direction, carting away valuables in horse carriages. “The noise and cracking and thunder of impetuous flames,” wrote one observer, “the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm.” Two prisons, eighty-seven churches, and more than 13,000 homes, housing 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 citizens, were destroyed. Barbon’s response was to give London its first firefighters since the Roman era: one contemporary described them as “Servants in livery with badges, who are watermen and other lusty persons” who are always ready “when any sudden fire happens, which they are very laborious and dexterous at quelling, not sticking in cases of necessity to expose themselves to great hazards.” His Fire Office offered insurance policies for seven, eleven, twenty-one, or thirty-one years—two shillings, six pence per pound of rent for a brick house, twice that for a wooden one, with the services of the lusty watermen included. He signed up more than 4,000 clients. He soon attracted competition: the Friendly Society, the General Insurance Company, the Hand-in-Hand Company. Each brigade had its own uniform—blue coats with red linings, or blue shirts with silver buttons, or yellow pants and silver-buckled shoes—and its own firemarks, metal plaques posted on homes so that everyone would know exactly who should save whom. Whenever part of London burned, the brigades competed so well for water and space that authorities had to impose fines: five shillings for hitting a rival fireman; two shillings, six pence for pouring water on him. By the early 1800s, private firefighters were replaced by public firefighters, for whom the only adversary was fire. Barbon’s other response to the Great Fire has almost been forgotten: he became a developer of newly cheap land—“the leading speculative builder of his generation,” according to the historian Leo Hollis. Such a builder that in 1684 the justices of Middlesex complained about “the many great inconveniences occasioned by the late increase of buildings” at his Red Lion Square development. But growth was Barbon’s creed. He never stopped defending it. In 1685, to protest Britain’s new building tax, he distributed a pamphlet, “Apology for the Builder.” In 1690, he followed up with “A Discourse of Trade,” which has since secured his reputation as one of the fathers of free-market economics. In “Discourse,” published nearly a century before Adam Smith gave us the invisible hand, are the seeds of modern capitalism—and its original sin: The Native Staple of each Country is the Riches of the Country, and is perpetual, and never to be consumed; Beasts of the Earth, Fowls of the Air, and Fishes of the Sea, Naturally Increase: There is Every Year a New Spring and Autumn, which produceth a New Stock of Plants and Fruits. And the Minerals of the Earth are Unexhaustable; and if the Natural Stock be Infinite, the Artificial Stock that is made of the Natural, must be Infinite. “This sheweth a Mistake,” Barbon wrote, by those who would commend “Parsimony, Frugality, and Sumptuary Laws, as the means to make a Nation Rich.” He believed there were no fundamental limits to supply, no real consequences to growth; man could skim infinitely off the top of nature without being subject to its rules. What made an economy great, then, was the demand side—spend, spend, spend, grow, grow, grow—and Barbon was one of the first to recognize that man’s physical needs, the “Wants of the Body,” could play but a small part in this. It was the all-consuming Wants of the Mind that mattered. He celebrated our irrational taste for luxury, for constantly shifting styles: “Fashion or the alteration of Dress . . . is the Spirit and Life of Trade; It is an Invention to Dress a Man, as if he lived in a perpetual Spring; he never sees the Autumn of his Cloaths.” Three hundred years before the American housing boom that fueled fires both real and metaphoric, Barbon railed against government meddling and called building “the chiefest Promoter of Trade.” He celebrated what happens when we cluster in cities: “Man being Naturally Ambitious, the Living together, occasion Emulation, which is seen by Out-Vying one another in Apparel, Equipage, and Furniture of the House; whereas, if a Man lived Solitary alone, his chiefest Expence, would be Food.” Barbon would have looked at the subdivisions spreading across the Los Angeles foothills, the gated communities, the leased Land Rovers and Mercedes Benzes—so much Artificial Stock made of the Natural—and seen a free-market economy at its peak. Barbon died bankrupt in 1698, but his legacy survived, thanks in part to the work of one man: Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. In his thirty-seven years as CEO of AIG, Greenberg turned the company into an $81 billion icon of American capitalism—largely by inventing increasingly abstract ways to insure increasingly abstract investments—only to be forced out in 2005 when Eliot Spitzer, then New York’s attorney general, began investigating him and AIG over accounting irregularities. In 2006, Greenberg’s aides created a think tank for him, and, in honor of another inventor of groundbreaking insurance products, they cleverly named it the Barbon Institute. It was part of a larger rehabilitation campaign: they would pay a Massachusetts public relations firm, eSapience, to hire well-known academics—-including the dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and professors from the University of Chicago, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and University College London—to say good things about Greenberg, write papers that underscored his genius, and host conferences that let him be keynote speaker. According to an internal memo, eSapience would also “leverage” its “relationships with important and highly credible channels,” including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. “Mr. Greenberg will share his views on corporate governance,” the memo said, “as a result of his more than thirty years at the helm of one of the most successful companies in business history.” The campaign faltered. After eSapience sent Greenberg a bill for $2.3 million, he refused to pay, the company sued him, and everything became public. When AIG itself later collapsed, Greenberg, still a major stockholder, lost at least $2 billion and got kicked off Forbes’s list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The Barbon Institute, which eSapience had used to host a 2006 seminar at New York’s St. Regis Hotel at which Greenberg addressed fifty top insurance executives, would be the campaign’s only bright point. Its name seems cleverer by the day." Too big to burn

Pay to play and personal responsibility in action just like regressives want it: "A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground. The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck. This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond. Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee. "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick. Because of that, not much is left of Cranick's house. They called 911 several times, and initially the South Fulton Fire Department would not come. The Cranicks told 9-1-1 they would pay firefighters, whatever the cost, to stop the fire before it spread to their house. "When I called I told them that. My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn't," Paulette Cranick. It was only when a neighbor's field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn't." http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html

I didn't say all these needs were the same for everybody, in fact, I said the exact opposite, which is the reason we need a diverse media, but you are so eager to spew your libertarian drivel and ramble on about the big bad gov taking your privilege away (not a peep from you about the on-going loss of civil liberties however, fraud) that you had to make up stuff per usual. Some needs are the same for everybody, like the need for truthful and complete news. Doesn't everybody need worthwhile news to make informed decisions in a democracy? or do you expect your pals the Koch brothers to make decisions for the peons? I like your denial of the power of corporations, wealthy, etc ... It shows how completely clueless you are.

the major premise here is that media and especially news play a specific role in a plural democracy and to do so it has to reflect the needs of everyone, not just the needs of those concerned with making money. Therefore, government is the instrument through which the people make sure that media fulfill those needs. Is that too hard to understand?

"The Market" in this and every other case is an aggregation of individual's choices and preferences. the choices and preferences of advertisers selling you crap (100's of billions in advertising) and those of media conglomerates selling you media products/services made by a subsidiary, etc.. Anything but the public interest. as if the current media landscape wasn't anything other than the arbitrary of the moneyed class. as if Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and others didn't already decide for us. we want truly diverse media so that you can get what you want, and others can too. What A concept! Nobody said "perfect" or some other impossible goal you are setting.

The UN report was published on September 22. As of yesterday, no corporate or public media outlet had said a word about it (more than a week later) according to Google, which I personally checked, and the video above.

I am sure you would Daniel, although it isn't obvious during winter.

There is little doubt that the descent gully is loose. Chair is probably the deadliest Snoqualmie peak fwiw.

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