The Prancing Elites - How About Some Holiday Tolerance? Kinky Boots Alabama Style

Sickening Moves in Santa Suits

On December 11 in the very right wing suburb of Mobile, Semmes, Alabama, folks in the community got something of a jolt at the end of their annual Christmas parade.  Clad in not quite fitting Santa suits and hats, white hot pants and go go boots, the "ladies" of the Prancing Elites came by strutting their sickening dance moves to quite a few dropped jaws.  By the way, for those not literate in tranny street talk, sickening means awesome.  I only know from watching Ru Paul's Drag Race on Logo but, being a white straight guy, I take pride in throwing around terms like that.

So yea, Semmes is a primarily white, very blue collar, very Baptist area in a very conservative state.  The Prancing Elites are all ladies of color and, to the crowd at the parade, represented about fifty things the citizens of that community rarely see.  Even on TV when all you watch is NASCAR, Duck Dynasty, Alabama football and Fox News, the only black people you see on a regular basis are on the football field.

Bringing Up the Rear and Throwing Some Junk

But remember the outrage over the Kinky Boots thing at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?  Well imagine that times about a hundred.  That particular event in Manhattan had people around the country bemoaning the fact that they had to explain to their kids what those men were doing dressed like that.  The funny thing is that children are much more ready to be tolerant than their parents.  For many, an answer like "those men like to play dress up, honey" wasn't an option.  I guess you have to explain that those men sometimes like to have sex with other men and sometimes those men actually want to become women.

Recently John Stewart's Daily Show came to Alabama and Mississippi.  They had a fantastic plan.  They had two kind of redneck looking actors pretend to be gay and in love walking around with a camera to see how people would respond.  To their field reporter's shock the couple met with almost universal approval.  They even had one propose to the other in a Waffle House and that got a standing ovation in the restaurant known pretty universally as the redneck headquarters of the South next to Cracker Barrel.  The best part of that story was that the sure that he's always right Nate Silver had to eat crow.  You can read that story and watch the hilarious video, if you missed it, here.

The point is that, despite many people down here being intolerant jackasses, there are a lot of folks who are accepting and more open minded.  If all you see is media coverage of Alabama you wouldn't know that.  That's what made the shock on Nate Silver's face so gratifying.  If all you do is sit in an office in D.C. or Manhattan or Los Angeles and rely on some well-worn talking points and assumptions, you'll certainly miss the fact that the world has some good people in it everywhere you go.  Sometimes you just have to look a little harder.

Case in point:  The Prancing Elites were supposed to appear in Mobile's MoonPie Over Mobile Parade, the city's annual New Year's Eve event.  You'd have to know the history of Mardi Gras in Mobile, yes Mobile had it before New Orleans, to understand the MoonPie thing but it's the most common throw during Mardi Gras in Mobile's parades where in New Orleans they only throw non-food items.  Due to the negative publicity over the event in Semmes, the people putting together the Mobile parade told the ladies they wouldn't be invited.  That's the bad news.

The good news is AL.com, sort of a news clearing house for the major newspaper dailies in Alabama, posted a story about the cancellation and included a poll.  The poll's question was "What do you think of the decision to pull the Prancing Elites’ invitation to perform in the New Year’s Eve MoonPie
Drop parade?"  The two options for answers:  They shouldn’t be invited and Get over it, bring them on.  As of the writing of this blog, the numbers on the poll are 2,587 for Get over it, bring them on, and 1,673 for They shouldn't be invited.  61% to 39% in favor of letting them dance in a state where George Wallace once proudly stood on the steps of a university risking his life to deny a black man an education.  Please cast your vote in the poll here.

Yes Alabama has a long, long way to go.  But it has a lot more to do with the politicians who end up representing us in Washington than actual public sentiment.  All the average American gets to see of us is the likes of our moronic Senator Jeff Sessions and other pols putting their feet in their mouths every chance they get.  Yea, rednecks are a big part of the equation, but the tide is changing here as in much of the rest of America.  And where once a black man was lynched on a street corner in the heart of town not 40 years ago, a group of young black men are now dressing in hot pants and shaking their asses like there's no tomorrow in the middle of the street.  Here's an interview with this stunning crew and them showing off their hot ass moves.  Enjoy!  and Merry Christmas!

All I've got to say is YOU GO GIRLS!!!!  And to all those wanting to throw shade on these ladies, take it back to the 1960s and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Sticking it to the Swiss Banks - One Less Hiding Place but Still Plenty Out There

Dark Skies for Tax Dodgers

December 31 is the end of an era for many Americans and the Swiss banks that have helped them dodge taxes for many years.  The Swiss bank account has always had the cachet of being the haute hiding place for money made in our country that those oh so patriotic wealthy want protected from having to pay for roads used to move their commerce or police and army used to protect them from the poor.  Nothing says screw the poor quite like a number with no name attached in a bank in Geneva or Bern or Zurich.  Well the party is quickly coming to an end.

Since the first warning shot was fired in 2009 when Washington fined UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, $780 million for helping Americans avoid paying taxes, the Swiss government has sought to comply with new rules and banks across that country are getting in step.  They will begin to make their records available to federal prosecutors and prepare to pay fines.  Billions of dollars in US currency have avoided taxation in Switzerland over the years so what does this mean now?  Are our wealthy patriots going to have to start paying their fair share?  I mean we're frequently told how much of the tax burden they already take on so how can they find fairness with the Swiss option going away?

Well, first, let's be clear, when you see statistics that say that the top whatever percent pay some whopping percentage of the total tax intake in our country it's totally misleading.  The anti-tax folks are taking what would be the corporate tax rate times whatever a company's gross is; that's before all the deductions, tax breaks, subsidies, etc. kick in.  And all you're seeing is the income tax, not fees paid by average Americans or sales taxes as part of the much larger pie.  So pity the poor right wingers, right?  You'll frequently hear how the big corporations would love to pay their share if only our corporate tax rates weren't so high.

Through clever accounting, tax dodges written into law, subsidies, writing forward losses, etc. many companies in America are able to avoid paying taxes and frequently get a government rebate to boot.  And should they find themselves in the unenviable position of actually having to pay their fair share they can always set up shell subsidiaries overseas.  According to Citizens for Tax Justice over a trillion dollars made by American companies is in foreign tax havens and hasn't been taxed by any foreign government, much less our government.  Again, these companies say they'd just love to repatriate this money if it weren't for our horribly unfair tax code.  I mean really, they would love to do the right thing but it just isn't possible.  Everyone knows shareholders are much more important than roads, schools, defense, that stuff.  And why should these companies be expected to have any patriotism anyway?  Everyone knows patriotism is for poor people.

Anti-Tax Nutjob Grover Norquist

Leading the charge in the anti-tax arena is Grover Norquist whose group, Americans for Tax Reform (reform meaning ending taxation), leads the fight for these companies.  In the world of Norquist any tax is unfair and any income the federal government gets is by theft.  Sound like an anarchy?  Feudalism?  Well, no, this is what the right calls Libertarianism.  Everything the government does, except when it's protecting the interests of corporations overseas, see the Dole Fruit Company in Nicaragua in the 1920s, or giving subsidies to large farming concerns or Park Avenue tree growers, is demonstrably evil.  What Norquist does is just more of what keeps the right in power in large parts of this country.  He claims to represent the little guy by opposing taxes across the board.  In the meantime, like while Romney was governor of Massachusetts, while taxes may not have gone up, state and local governments increase fees and local sales taxes which hit the average citizen but rarely have any effect on corporations.  The government gets its money and it's off the back of the common people; everybody is happy.  Well on Wall Street at least.  Of course good old common man warrior Norquist is a Harvard graduate and board member of the National Rifle Association but you only invoke cries of ivory tower when it's a Dem saying it.

The Big Four Swindlers

So what about all the other tax havens out there?  Where are they?  Well you can thank our good buddies the British of course.  British territories make up the majority of the tax havens of which companies the world over can take advantage.  According to reports from the Tax Justice Network some $32 trillion is stashed in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man, and Jersey (not our Jersey of course).  This while Prime Minister David Cameron, with Britain being the current leader of the G8, stated his intent to "rewrite the rules on tax and transparency for the benefit of countries right across the world".  So while tackling Switzerland is admirable, the U.S. will further have to go after the British banks who profit from the other part of the swindle:  Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, and HSBC.

Again, thank God for the Elizabeth Warrens of the world.  They continue to try to hold these financial institutions' feet to the fire.  But at some point we, as a country, are going to have to lay down the law and say if you want to sell in our markets and profit off the backs of our workforce you're going to have to play by our rules.  And our rules need to be changed so that those companies who take advantage of our protections, our markets, our workers have to pay their fair share for the benefit.  Right now that's simply not the case.