Last week, in response to the murders in the Florida high school and the student protests, Delta withdrew the discount. In retaliation: "Georgia lawmakers approved a bill on Thursday that stripped out a tax break proposal highly coveted by Delta Air Lines — the most stinging punishment that America’s pro-gun forces have leveled so far on one of the many corporations recalibrating their positions on firearms ...."
The tax break on sales tax for fuel is worth $50,000,000 to Delta (and would probably mean higher taxes for the citizens of Georgia). Will Delta cave to the Georgia Republicans. Or will Delta retaliate and raise the price of tickets for the residents of Georgia and NRA members to make up that 50 Mil? Or?
Stay tuned. NYTIMES.
I'm generally against corporare welfare tax breaks for big businesses like Delta. (Imagine what $50 million would do for Georgia's poorest school districts.)
ReplyDeleteBut it's interesting that the gun lobby carries more weight in the Georgia legislature than a major employer. Will other states follow suit? Will the Pennsylvania legislature, where Dick's Sporting Goods is headquartered, look for ways to retaliate against Dick's recent voluntary gun sales policies?
I wonder what would happen if Delta called up the Georgia legislative reps and offered them all campaign contributions above whatever the NRA offers.
Is it really the Second Amendment they're het up about? Or the money?
"Follow the money" is always a safe bet. It would be interesting to turn over some rocks and see what's underneath as far as how much NRA and gun industry money has gone into legislature campaign coffers.
DeleteThe guy behind the move against Delta plans to run for governor. Could this be a coincidence? Are taxes a political tool? But what might this do to Atlanta's bid to become the Amazon Headquarters 2? Glorioski! (I still think HQ 2 will end up in Toronto where employees will be able to get health benefits and some activities will be out of reach of the Twitter Tweeter.)
ReplyDeleteWhat if Charlotte or, for that matter, Little Rock were to offer Delta a $50 million fuel tax break? What is the purpose of enacting taxes that won't be collected? I know that when emu feed was exempted from the Florida sales tax two important state House members had just gone into the emu egg business. Are taxes a political tool? Oh, I asked that.
Once upon a time taxes were used to pay for vital government services and were considered the price we pay for civilization. Now that Christian conservatives run everything even the price of civilization has been weaponized.
"I know that when emu feed was exempted from the Florida sales tax two important state House members had just gone into the emu egg business. Are taxes a political tool? Oh, I asked that."
ReplyDeleteMan, oh, man, I had to read that twice to make sure it wasn't a weird typo. Sometimes I really miss working at the newspaper where this type of info would roll in in tidal waves, especially in March when people had cabin fever, the drinking had got way out of hand, and all manner of insanity crept into public discourse.
While we're on the subject: NYC regularly offers property tax abatements for developers who put up new buildings. The owners are then contracted to offer something back: lower rents, public access to lobbies or gardens, etc. The abatements can be for a very long time, decades even. My reading of these stories is that none of this helps to build affordable housing, that landlords close public access the first chance they get, and unless tenants are savvy and aggressive, the rents over-time slip up ignoring the abatements.
ReplyDeleteJean: "all manner of insantiy crept into public discourse." Fortunate that these days you can get that just from reading the paper; you don't have to be producing it. My favorite this morning NYT... John Kelly, "God is punishing me." You said it brother, and God isn't finished yet!
Raber and I both enjoyed that clip on the NewsHour last night. Yes, the drama of "What Happened to John Kelly" unfolds before our eyes.
DeleteAnd, for insanity in discourse, there is the Twitter account that provides a new jaw-dropper, often several times a day. I'm not sure that I won't feel, when all is said and done, that living through the era of the American Mussolini wasn't satisfying in some perverse way. A guy like Trump has always just been burbling under the ooze, waiting to hatch out on a rotted log. (I think I stole all that imagery from "I, Claudius." Apologies, Robert Graves, but how can one not think of the waning days of Rome when watching Washington politics.)
I am waiting for the post-modernists to take on the twitter tweeter. There's grad school gold in that there muck. If post-modernism is still around, of course.
DeleteThey'll have to include Trump's frequent recitation of "The Snake," which composer Oscar Brown's family wishes he'd stop using. There was a lively piece in the WaPo about this a few days ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/24/the-snake-how-trump-appropriated-a-radical-black-singers-lyrics-for-refugee-fearmongering/?utm_term=.fdfad5ab8405
DeleteI like the theory in the article that Trump identifies with the snake in the poem: “His over-the-top recitation will be the narrative device for the first big post-Trump documentary. And they’ll think we’re all so dumb for not recognizing it in real-time," said Democratic aide Dan LaVoie.
Postmodernism died in 1989. What comes next? "There are many terms for this new supplanting cultural logic, this shift in the ruling belief system: to name a few – altermodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digital, post-humanism, and the clunky post-postmodernism."
Most of these terms show a lack of imagination and rely on modernism as the reference point. I like "peformatism."
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/postmodernism-dead-comes-next/
'89? It died with the Soviet Union?
DeleteApparently it was torn down with the Berlin Wall. Didn't you get the memo?
DeletePostmodernism died before I found out what it was? Thanks to crossword puzzles (ARP, ERTE) I have nailed Dada and was wondering what came next.
DeleteJean, my German isn't good enough.
DeleteI admit to a very limited tolerance for metacriticism and theology. But performatism is kind of interesting. It reflects/addresses the "truthiness" we all live in now, as I read it. It seems to hearken back to the "beautiful lies" of the aesthetic movement a little bit. Raoul Eshelman has a fairly lucid recap of it here. Watch for it in your crosswords, Tom!
Deletehttp://www.performatism.de/What-is-Performatism
If the Wiener Slawistischer Almanach turns up in a crossword, I'll be ready, thanks to you. But I don't think "Mean Girls" (see K.N. below) qualifies as an example of performatism, and isn't it what's happenin'?
DeleteI have not seen "Mean Girls," but I could consult with some colleagues about this, and I'm sure I could get two or three conflicting views for you to chew on. Stuff like performatism is like catnip for them. These topics come in handy if you need to break up an unproductive faculty meeting. Just sit with the critical theorists and start a side conversation, chaos ensues, and you can get to lunch on time.
DeleteMy own critical theory is that all literature, at heart, feeds our endless simian need for gossip about the neighbors: "So there's this guy I heard about one time who divided up his property according to how much his daughters sucked up to him. One of them had a thing on the side with her father's best friend's illegitimate son who!was egging her on to get the whole shebang. Well, you can imagine how THAT went."
On a somewhat related free market and business note, did anyone see this? Trump's announcement that we were going to impose hefty tariffs on imported metals has roiled the markets and riled our trading partners. The president tweeted "...trade wars are good, and easy to win." Right. I wonder if some of his supporters from big business who considered him the most likely candidate to favor their interests are having any buyer's remorse?
ReplyDeleteHere is Brendan Greeley's take on the situation; "Trump's tariff tirade makes more sense after you watch "Mean Girls". I'll take his word for it.
If you read his Twitters, you'll see that Trump really knows nothing about tariffs, how they will affect manufacturing, or even what he is proposing.
DeleteThere is no clear idea, just a reactionary desire to punish the world for wrecking our steel and aluminum industries. Constructive ideas are not this guy's forte. Beating people up us.
My guess is that the man never approaches anything by asking, "Tell me why this isn't a good idea ..."
My guess is also that there's is some tariff geek in the government bureaucracy with PowerPoints and a white board who could give a 15-minute spiel that would clarify Trump's thinking.
But that assumes the guy even has a 15-minute attention span.
Or maybe Lindsay Logan could explain it. He might listen to her.
Delete*Lohan. You gotta watch auto correct like a hawk.
DeleteAnybody betting on how long it will take before the fix is in? I can't imagine that Big Industry is going back this idea.
DeleteI'm not a free trade fan or overarching trade agreement fan either. But you don't just start flipping switches thoughtlessly. But thoughtless is how the man works.
ReplyDeleteTrump's billionaire buddy Carl Icahn dumped $38M in stock last week. The stocks were in companies that make products from steel.
ReplyDeletehttps://thinkprogress.org/trump-ichan-steel-imports-cf7deb8beaf0/
Would it be sweet justice if Trump changed his mind and Icahn got caught out. Of course, maybe Trump can't change his mind or his old friend Icahn will upend the stock market.
DeleteWho has whom in a scissor-hold? Assumption: Trump let his old friend know about the coming decision. But that's illegal, isn't it? Insider Trading.
Illegal...does that even mean anything for this administration? I think Trump has already surpassed Warren Harding for degree of corruption.
DeleteAlso, I don't think Harding himself was personally corrupt and didn't seem a bad fellow besides his extramarital activities. But Trump was corrupt way before his presidency. He is a crook through and through.
ReplyDeleteEgomania, kleptomania, megalomania... An infantilely corrupt center surrounded by felons, four-flushers, double dealers, highbinders, flim-flammers and assorted routine thugs and idiots. Why is Jared Kushner allowed within 100 miles of the White House? Who let Wilbur "Cans" Ross out? Where does the President get off retweeting a gasbag who claims media "attacks" on Trump are "unparalleled in American history" when the media does little else but quote his own double-talk?
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of Delta Airlines, to their credit they are standing their ground. Said their CEO:
ReplyDelete"Our decision was not made for economic gain and our values are not for sale... We are in the process of a review to end group discounts for any group of a politically divisive nature."
Pretty sure their "values" are all about money. I doubt they give discounts to KKK members because it would hurt business. So it's heartening to see that their discount deal with the NRA is perceived by customers as a a bad PR move.
DeleteAh, postmodernism. Not that I know much about it, but I do know something about Jacques Derrida, one of its superstars, and it ain't pretty. He got involved - and got clobbered - in a series of exchanges at the New York Review of Books; some of his disciples chimed in, trying to defend him; they, too, got blown away by Thomas Sheehan, author of the piece that Derrida was objecting to. If, after reading the excerpt that I'll provide here, you decide you'd like to see all of the exchanges, you can find them 1) all together here
ReplyDeletehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2zuyt5_UZUqckl3bmFZU0ZqVzg/view or 2) individually (and in an easier-to-read format) here, in the listings for 1993:
https://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/people/thomas-sheehan/publications
The excerpt is from the piece by Sheehan which brought the exchanges to a close. It's his reply to two letters to the editor from Derrida's followers. Among other things, it's a fine piece of writing:
. . . Jacques Derrida, for the basest of reasons, forced Richard Wolin’s book out of print. Derrida did that not because Wolin had acted illegally (he had not), not because Wolin had been discourteous (he was not), not because the translation is “execrable” (it is not, and there are infinitely worse translations of Derrida).
Derrida suppressed the book for one reason only: he did not like the brief criticism—a mere three pages out of the book’s three hundred—that Wolin leveled at Derrida’s position on Heidegger and Nazism.
If Wolin had praised Derrida instead of criticizing him, Derrida would have let the book stand as it was, . . . There would have been no threats to have the police impound the book, no quibbling about the rights, no histrionics about the translation.
How can the distinguished scholars not see this? Derrida is not the victim but the victor. He won. He succeeded in doing what none of them would ever dare to do: he muscled a book out of print because he didn’t like what it said about him. . .
The issue in l’affaire Derrida is one thing only: . . . Derrida’s ego and the power he can muster to serve it, including the power to commandeer—by a network of faxes and phone calls (and a good deal of arm-twisting, by all reports)—the two letters printed above.
How ironic that Derrida, who provides a language for criticizing power and for deconstructing the imperialisms of authorship, now parades himself, to the cheers of his acolytes, as the very psychopomp of power, who threatens to resort to the oldest and crudest of weapons, the police. . .
Surely we all understand Derrida’s deep personal embarrassment at having the whole business exposed, both his suppression of the book (which he had hoped to keep secret) and his foolish blunder in lying about it in The New York Review of Books.
And we can understand how his disciples and friends, out of loyalty to the Master, feel the desperate need for damage control to bolster the morale of the faithful.
But for these scholars then to sign a public letter justifying Derrida’s deplorable conduct in this affair—as if to say, by their signatures, that they too would have done the same thing—this, to me, is not so much morally shocking as it is evidence of just how politically dim, in their blind loyalty to one of their own, some professors can be. It gives a whole new meaning to Socrates’ question, “Do you know any tribe stupider than the rhapsodes?”
Let me say to these distinguished colleagues and to the others who have faxed in their signatures to Mr. Weber’s sycophantic letter: I am no enemy of deconstruction, but neither do I believe, as some of you seem to, in the cult of personality or in defending Derrida at all costs. I teach and write about Derrida’s texts with considerable appreciation. But if valuing his work means one must approve his despicable conduct and support his threats to seize books, then count me out.
Ugh. Derrida's ideas always struck me as of marginal value. All texts contain an equal and opposite anti-text. We used to deconstruct "The Cat in the Hat" in lit class. It was a cute trick, but, when all is said and done, what insights are you left with? Pretty much zip. Call me a Philistine, but deconstruction is pretty much the smirk on the face of postmodernism.
DeleteMy French isn't that good either. Once was, but probably never good enuf for Derida...
DeleteNot bragging, but thank God: being a non-academic, non-teacher, it is a blessing how much I could skip and just go back to reading Dickens, et al., when I needed my brain dusted and decluttered.
DeleteOne tries to "keep up" with this stuff if only to debunk it. We all have our "brain drain" reading. "The Vicar of Wakefield"or "Persuasion" does it for me. Also partial to "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Why don't people read that anymore?
DeleteI'd think this is more about the joys of politics than the joys of the free market. I am supposing that Delta's decision was in response to pressure / threats from gun-control advocates. And certainly the Georgia Legislature's response is political.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding of airline pricing is that it's a pretty safe bet that each of the 180 passengers on any given flight paid a different price for his/her seat. I wouldn't consider that practice a subsidy. I travel from time to time on business, for which purpose I am expected/required to use the airlines that my company has designated as "preferred". A consumer who is on my flight to visit her great-aunt in the city I'm flying to, and who bought her ticket without the benefit of my corporate discount, is "subsidizing" my price, too. Although some spot-checking on Expedia suggests that individual ticket prices for individual consumers frequently isn't any higher, and on occasion is lower, than the "corporate discounts" I'm getting from the same airline. If airline seat pricing is a game, it's not easy to tell how to win.