24 Friday Aug 2012
Tags
Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Peak Oil, Police State, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit
Click to Enlarge…
19 Sunday Aug 2012
Tags
Bread and Circus, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Eric Zeusse, Fareed Zakaria, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gore Vidal, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jonathan Turley, Mass Media Manipulation, Matt Taibbi, Mike Spindell, The Elite 1%, The Federal Reserve, Thomas Friedman, Transnational Capitalism, TV Punditry, War for Profit
Imagine a world where the elite’s professional frontmen, aka TV pundits and ‘talking heads’, framed the public debate and steered public opinion for a nation of 350 million people. In such a world, journalism became an infomercial formulated by such apparatuses as spin alley and fed to the masses as expert opinion and deep intellectual insight. Now imagine that virtually the entire nation voluntarily bought an electronic device for their home that would pipe all these fabricated talking points, along with the mind-numbing bread & circus entertainment, into their living space. We have, as Gore Vidal described, entered a digital fun house from which we cannot escape.
A novelty called television had begun to appear in household after household, it’s cold, grey distorting eye relentlessly projecting a fun house view of the world. Those who followed the ugly, new-minted word media began to note that often while watching television we kept fading in and out of the chamber of horrors… ~ Vidal
Occasionally an insightful article will be written which lifts, if only briefly, the veil of the American hologram and allows, for those brave enough to look, a glimpse of the conniving little man behind the curtain furiously working the levers to create the Great and Powerful Oz. Depending on how much you reveal of the dark truths lurking behind the curtain, you may eventually find yourself subject to unrelenting persecution and holed up in a dark solitary cell or some South American embassy situated in a vassal state. The long arm of Empire has a way of reaching those who cross her.
Lawyer and blogger Jonathan Turley is someone I frequently follow. Amongst his humorous work he also posts about serious subjects, one of which is the recently published The Pretense of Punditry by guest blogger Mike Spindell. In this post, Mr. Spindell sheds light on the inner workings behind the face of TV punditry that bombards you 24/7 and molds the conventional wisdom of the day.
What all of these shows have in common is that they are repeatedly populated by the same people, whether politicians, journalists, economists or political operators. This link gives the background of the truth of Sunday morning “journalism”. The casts rarely change and in all but the rarest of cases these guests make up what could be called our nation’s “Pundit Class”. They are seen as the “Serious People”, who lead America’s national debate on vital issues. I’ve been a “political junkie” since the age of ten. For many years I was misled into believing that these “Serious People” were really my intellectual betters when it came to public affairs and that political discussion must only exist within the ground rules of debate established by our “Pundit Class”. Beginning with the murder of JFK and in the ensuing disillusionment of the Sixties I’ve come to see that not only is this “Pundit Class” inherently corrupt, but only a rare few can barely be called intellectually informative. This group is in reality the paid propagandists of the elite 1% that rule this country and their main task is to limit the scope of our national debate.
On 8/12/12 Eric Zeusse, an investigative historian, posted an article titled: “Fareed Zakaria Is Bitten by His Own Tale: How He Helped Create the System That Bit Him Back”. He began the article in this manner and in doing so exposed me to an idea that frankly hadn’t occurred to me.
“When Fareed Zakaria was suspended on Friday from Time and CNN, for plagiarism, this wasn’t merely justice, it was poetic justice: it rhymed. What it rhymed with was his own lifelong devotion to the global economic star system that he, as a born aristocrat in India, who has always been loyal to the aristocracy, inherited and has always helped to advance, at the expense of the public in every nation. He was suspended because, as a born aristocrat, who is a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and many other of the global aristocracy’s primary organizations, he is so well-connected that his writing-commissions are more than any one person can possibly handle, and he consequently cannot possibly actually write all that is attributed to him. He certainly cannot research it all.”
I think back to graduate schools papers I’ve written and wonder how I would have fared if I had “made a terrible mistake” in them through plagiarism. Would an investigation of my “isolated incident” and remorse have allowed me to continue in school? However, protecting Mr. Zakaria, one of the chosen, is not only important for his sake, but for the sake of these “News Entities” that rely so heavily on the “connected” pundit class to provide their“cogent” analysis of major issues.
How many other “Pundits” acting as the “serious” people are setting the parameters of the national debate through their appearances on Sunday Morning talk shows, News Channels, the PBS News Hour and it appears as paid guest speakers at supposedly meaningful conferences and conventions? The person who first came to mind as I read this article on Zakaria was Thomas Friedman. Friedman is a son of privilege who married into a billionaire family. He has been a champion of “Globalization”, which to me has always meant unbridled support for the multinational Corporatocracy…
…what is obvious and known about Friedman is that he is a pundit star, ranking with, or possibly above Zakaria in the firmament of “Serious People” who frame our national debate and dominate our national media. This is really nothing new in our country. In the past the “serious people” were the likes of Walter Lippman, and Scotty Reston. These past pundits and “cold warriors”, share a commonality with Zakaria and Friedman, in that they all serve(d) the interests of the Corporate and Monied Elite that run this country from behind the scenes. Indeed, I’m sure that you the reader could expand this very small list of those who are deemed acceptable to lead the “serious” discussion of our national/international issues.
I assert that the entire Liberal versus Conservative debate in this country is but a smokescreen that distracts us from the one most vital issue. Our nation and indeed the world is and has been controlled by an Elite representing those with most money and power. Their first allegiance is to themselves, their class and to the belief that they alone are fit to rule us all. Call it what you will, but to me it is the continuation of feudalism in modern guise. Just as in feudalism there were “Courtiers” who gladly did the bidding of their “Royal Masters”, in order to enrich their own lives. Most of the “Courtiers” were either born to, or became part of the elite, while maintaining the pretense of speaking for the benefit of all humanity…we are surrounded by experts, who in reality are propagandists purveying non-existent mythology to keep us in the thrall of the Elite…
When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.
I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors…
Matt has also written about the master propagandist Fareed Zakaria here:
From a distance I’ve always vaguely admired the skills of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who is maybe this country’s preeminent propagandist. Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull, the outrageous commonplace, and rendering horrifying absolutes ambigious and full of gray areas.
Wheras most writers grow up dreaming of using their talents to stir up the passions, to inflame and amuse and inspire, Zakaria shoots for the opposite effect, taking controversial and explosive topics and trying to help rattled readers somehow navigate their way through them to yawns, lower heart rates, and states of benign unconcern. He’s back at it again with a new piece about the financial crisis called “The Capitalist Manifesto,” which is one of the first serious attempts at restoring the battered image of global capitalism in the mainstream press.
This writer has done work like this before, using a big canvas to rework an uncooperative chunk of history in the wake of a crisis. Zakaria is probably best known for his post 9/11 “Why Do They Hate Us?” article, a sort of masterpiece of milquetoast propaganda that laid the intellectual foundation for a wide array of important War on Terror popular misconceptions, not the least of which being the whole “They hate us for our freedom” idea. One of Zakaria’s central arguments in that piece was that poor struggling Arabs were driven to envious violence by the endless pop-culture reminders of American affluence and progress. It was just too much to take, seeing all those cool blue jeans and all that great satellite TV.
In one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that?
I thought the old Arab’s comment was funny, but Zakaria imbued it with serious significance. “This disillusionment with the West,” he wrote, “is at the heart of the Arab problem.” And while witty Arab potshots at tacky southern strip-mall meccas like Houston were significant enough to put high up in Newsweek’s seminal piece about the root causes of 9/11, things like America’s habitual toppling of sovereign Arab governments and installation of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran were left out more or less entirely (Zakaria managed to write a whole section on the Iranian revolution without even mentioning that the Shah come to power thanks to a CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, whose crime was ejecting Western oil companies from Iran)…
Just as American journalism has become a paid spokesman for the exploitive economic system controlling the world, so too has the entire economic profession been bought off: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession…
The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
18 Saturday Aug 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud
Tags
America's Plutocratic Traditions, Ayn Rand, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Neoliberal Capitalism, Paul Ryan, Poverty, Privatization, Rage Against the Machine, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Taming Democracy, Terry Bouton, The Elite 1%, War for Profit
Just discovered this blog: The Paul Ryan Watch:
Paul Ryan, cool cat wannabe, loves Rage Against the Machine’s music, he says. He must not listen to the lyrics. Here’s what the band’s guitarist/activist Tom Morello has to say:
Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
As Paul Ryan preaches to the masses about the evils of living on the dole of government largesse, it was revealed recently that his family’s fortune was made from contracts with the U.S. government.
And of course he had to recently disavow himself from his ethical and spiritual idol, Ayn Rand:
Such pompous, self-serving, and seemingly sociopathic behavior among the elite in capitalist America is nothing new. As a matter of fact, it seems to have always been the norm in American history:
America’s Plutocratic Traditions
I recently read a book by University of Maryland historian Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy, which is an account of the intense struggles over wealth and power that emerged in the earliest days of the United States. Bouton’s detailed research was focused on Pennsylvania, but he describes patterns that also appeared elsewhere in the infant republic.
The core of the story he tells is that the colonial coalition that made possible the political break with Britain fractured even while the Revolutionary War was still in progress, as wealthy interests in the colonies quickly had second thoughts about the democratic fervor that they had helped to set in motion and how it might jeopardize their ability to amass still more wealth….
…The story demonstrates that strong class consciousness and class-specific drivers of policy have been a major part of American politics since independence. A key part of that class struggle all along has been a strong sense among a wealthy elite of separateness from the non-wealthy, and of having a right to push hard for public policies that favor their own class even if they are clearly detrimental to others.
A major figure in Bouton’s account is the Philadelphia merchant and financier Robert Morris…
…An even more blatant ploy of using government to favor his own class’ interests at the expense of others concerned speculation in war debt. Amid poverty, scarcity of money, and uncertainty about government funding of debt, many holders of IOUs — who had furnished support to the war effort ranging from food to blacksmithing — sold them for cents on the dollar to speculators who hoped to redeem them eventually for much more than that.
Morris not only participated in this game but openly promoted it. He told the Continental Congress in 1782 that speculators should be encouraged to buy up the IOUs “at a considerable discount” and then have the government bring the pieces of paper “back to existence” by paying them off at top dollar.
This big transfer of wealth would provide the affluent with “those funds which are necessary to the full exercise of their skill and industry.” Bouton writes, “As Morris saw it, taking money from ordinary taxpayers to fund a huge windfall for war debt speculators was exactly the kind of thing that needed to be done to make America great.”
We have tended to whitewash such aspects of American history from our consciousness, for several reasons. One is the hagiography we customarily apply to the Founding Fathers. Another is that we lose sight of the connections between class consciousness of the past and that of today by euphemizing today’s version and espousing more subtle notions of trickle-down economics than the crude version that Morris espoused.
People of his economic stratum were known at the time as “gentlemen”; today they would more likely be called “job creators.” A further reason is Americans’ belief in the national myth that America is less stratified into classes, and exhibits more mobility between classes, than do other countries and especially the old countries of Europe. That myth has become increasingly distant from fact in recent decades…
For those who believe that class structure and the struggles therein do not exist in America, history shows that it has always been a part of our country, reasserting itself with a vengeance in recent times. With the elite having a lock on mass media and now the use of the empire’s security and surveillance state to squash dissenters, malcontents, and any challengers of the status quo, there does not seem to be any going back to a society embodied by a strong middle class, especially in an age where the economic pie is forever shrinking.
16 Thursday Aug 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud
Tags
Barack Obama, Chris Hedges, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Cult of Individualism, Economic Collapse, Empire, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeffrey Sachs, Mitt Romney, Neoliberal Capitalism, Police State, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit
Jeffrey Sachs’ op ed piece entitled “America Has Lost the battle Over Government” in the Financial Times explains how the budget plans of our two corporate candidate stooges are strikingly similar and offer no real choice for the American citizen. With the modern-day instruments of mass media manipulation being the most sophisticated tool for mind control in the history of man, you are made to think that the current election is an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil, but the American’s fate of joblessness, dwindling social assistance programs, a permanently growing underclass, and the slide into an oligarchic Third World country has already been written in stone by the transnational capitalist forces and its corporate state. Crime will surely go up, lifespan expectancy will go down for the underclass, and the infrastructure of the nation will continue its trajectory into dilapidation and decay. Sacrificing your body in the Empire’s foreign resource wars and geopolitical games will be one of the only jobs available for our debt-ridden youth:
…Mr Ryan’s plan calls for federal revenues of 18.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2016 and 18.5 per cent in 2020 (though his lower tax rates would probably put those targets out of reach). His budget outlays come in at 19.7 per cent and 19.5 per cent in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Of the total outlays in 2016, Mr Ryan targets “discretionary” programmes at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 3.7 per cent; and interest payments, 1.9 per cent.
Now consider Mr Obama’s budget unveiled in February. Federal revenues are targeted at 19.1 per cent of GDP in 2016 and 19.7 per cent of GDP in 2020, only about 1 percentage point above Mr Ryan’s revenue targets. In Mr Obama’s 2016 budget targets, discretionary spending is set at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 5.8 per cent; and interest payments, 2.5 per cent.
In fact, Mr Obama’s overall discretionary spending targets are essentially the same as Mr Ryan’s. Whether Mr Obama or Mr Romney wins, the “non-security” discretionary budget – for education, job skills, infrastructure, science and technology, space, environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change adaptation – is on the chopping block. Mr Obama’s budget would shrink non-security discretionary programmes from an already insufficient 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2011 to 1.8 per cent in 2020. That is the “liberal” alternative.
In bemoaning Mr Obama’s budget, I do not mean to equate it with Mr Ryan’s. Mr Ryan’s budget is nothing short of heartless in the face of the dire crisis facing America’s poor. It is also reckless, guaranteed to leave millions of children without the quality of education and skills they will need as adults. Yet the sad truth is that the Democrats offer no progressive alternative. Both parties are accomplices to the premeditated asphyxiation of the state. Viewed from an international perspective, the constricted range of the US fiscal debate is striking. Total US government revenues (combining federal, state and local governments) in 2011 came in at about 32 per cent of GDP. This compares with an average of 44 per cent in the EU and 50 per cent in northern Europe.
Many Americans will say that they are dodging the European curse by keeping taxation so low but they should look again. Northern Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) gets great value for its tax revenues: lower budget deficits, lower unemployment rates, lower public debt-to-GDP ratios, lower poverty rates, greater social mobility, better job training, longer life expectancy, lower greenhouse gas emissions, higher reported life satisfaction and greater macroeconomic stability.
America’s two political parties depend on wealthy contributors to finance their presidential campaigns. These donors want and expect their taxes to stay low. As a result, social divisions, broken infrastructure, laggard educational attainments, high carbon emissions and chronic budget deficits are likely to continue no matter who is elected, even though the public supports higher taxes on corporations and the rich…
Chris Hedges was back in court over the government’s appeal of Judge Forrest’s earlier injunction of the NDAA. As a matter of fact, the government has refused to comply with the injunction. Hedges states he and the other plaintiffs “will most likely have to continue this fight in an appellate court and perhaps the Supreme Court.” He also notes that no matter the results of the rigged U.S. elections, no meaningful change will come to the deteriorating lives of ordinary Americans:
…The corporate state has convinced the masses, in essence, to clamor for their own enslavement. There is, in reality, no daylight between Mitt Romney and Obama about the inner workings of the corporate state. They each support this section within the NDAA and the widespread extinguishing of civil liberties. They each will continue to funnel hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to defense contractors, intelligence agencies and the military. They each intend to let Wall Street loot the U.S. Treasury with impunity. Neither will lift a finger to help the long-term unemployed and underemployed, those losing their homes to foreclosures or bank repossessions, those filing for bankruptcy because of medical bills or college students burdened by crippling debt. Listen to the anguished cries of partisans on either side of the election divide and you would think this was a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. You would think voting in the rigged political theater of the corporate state actually makes a difference. The charade of junk politics is there not to offer a choice but to divert the crowd while our corporate masters move relentlessly forward, unimpeded by either party, to turn all dissent into a crime…
A lot of Americans buy into this “cult of individualism” and anti-government sentiment which the elites of the corporate state artfully peddle in order to dismantle any remnants of a functioning government that might serve the common good of its citizenry. In this way, the corporate state has convinced the masses to cheer the destruction of government and its beneficial roles. But of course we cannot call our lobbyist-infested, corporate-controlled government an actual representation of the people’s interests. Just as our two-partied presidential election is an orchestrated illusion of democracy, so is the false dichotomy of government and corporations which are merely separated by a revolving door. The government has become, for the most part, a tool for wealth extraction by multinational corporations. During a period of multiple civilization-ending crises when leadership is in dire need, the degeneration of government from a socially beneficial entity into a puppet of Wall Street’s rapacious greed is the greatest tragedy of our time.
13 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud
Tags
Bain Capital, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Economic Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Matt Taibbi, Obama, Off-Shore tax Havens, Post-Humn Era, Romney, Security and Surveillance State, South American Death Squad Oligarchs, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit
Here is a nice little skewering of King Romney by Cliff Schecter entitled Mitt Romney: The aristocrat. Some excerpts:
…if you knew you were running for president, wouldn’t you perhaps spend at least five years before running making your taxes look as clean as a whistle? I’m saying no Grand Caymans, no Switzerland, no stashing bullion in the cargo bay of Curiosity to reach the low-tax surface of Mars (ok, one of these might be an exaggeration).
Not Romney, though. He apparently had to use every manoeuvre known to man and man’s most deceitful accountant to ensure he paid low-to-no taxes. So how has he handled the fallout? Stonewalling, uncomfortable denials, and lashing out at those who attack him for his hidden returns, such as Senator Harry Reid – thereby keeping the whole story in the news that much longer (genius!).
He’s even got porn star Jenna Jameson saying she is going to vote for him because “when you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.” (Of course, other porn actors interviewed by The Daily Beast are pro-Obama, showing that even in the world of X-rated entertainment, Mitt can find a way to divide the top 1 per cent from everyone else)…
Amazingly, if you look at the polls, a large percentage of American’s(aka the clueless, MSM spoon-fed plebs) would still vote for someone who is part of the cosseted 0.001% responsible for hiding 20 to 30 trillion in off-shore tax havens and who boldly regurgitate the lie that corporations in America have the highest tax rate in the world (the nominal rate is meaningless; it’s the effective rate produced from all the tax loopholes that counts). But as they say, the propaganda-ridden minds of the American public are mere putty in the hands of the corporate-owned media machine. Mind you, I know there is no real measurable difference between Obama and Romney when it comes to our self-inflicted trajectory toward a post-human era, but voting for Romney, a financier of the criminal class on Wall Street, takes ‘voting against your own interests’ to a whole new level. I mean this guy financed Bain Capital with blood money from death squad oligarchs in South America. I understand the utter failure Obama has been for the masses who bought into the “Hope” slogan, but voting for King Romney is like saying, “I give up; please rape me and then throw me to the lions.”
In a comment section of Schecter’s piece, a reader sumarizes perfectly what King Romney is about:
Let us focus that the issue is not Rommey or the VP RP, the issue is what is behind Rommey. Rommey is the representative of global capitalism; he is not interested in the American people as a nation, but as consumers; for him the solvency of the middle class is of no importance. It is the maintenance of corporate America and global capital that matters for him. He advocates trickle down economics and the emancipation of corporations over people. [In] the end Rommey, like any other warmonger, will use war [as] an economic incentive.
– ’nuff said. So how are the American plebs doing? For starters, a recent study found that nearly half the population in the U.S. dies penniless and dependent on Social Security. Basically we are now a nation of the grotesquely wealthy, the ‘just-getting-by’, and the crumb scrapers. The ‘just-getting-by’ segment is always in danger of falling into the ranks of the crumb scrapers. And the elite 1%, as we have discussed in prior posts, have built up a security and surveillance state as well as the prison industrial complex in order to deal with those who have any funny ideas of changing that status quo.
…now back to our two corporate stooges who are vying for the coveted PR position of the corporatocracy. Matt Taibbi has a new article out which shows how our tax system favors the wealthy and how Big Money from Wall Street perverts our political system:
…We’ve known for seven months now, for instance, that Romney paid $3 million in federal taxes in 2010 on $21.7 million in taxable revenue, an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. Which, as most people know, is less than half the rate most people pay on their income tax.
When Romney released these numbers, he said they were “entirely legal and fair,” and added, “I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.”
The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney. …
<snip>
In Mitt’s case, the money you and I make to support ourselves is called income and is taxed up to 35 percent, but the money Mitt makes raiding companies with borrowed money and extracting draconian management fees from captive companies that have no choice but to pay them is called “Carried Interest,” and taxed at a top rate of 15%.
The ostensible excuse for this outrageous difference is based upon a built-in cultural value judgment, which says that the work Mitt Romney does raiding companies with borrowed money is more valuable than the work ordinary people do laying asphalt or teaching autistic children. Here’s what one private equity spokesperson said by way of explanation for this difference:
Steve Judge, the president of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade group for private equity funds, said carried interest is a way to reward risk takers in a way that tax havens do not. “They don’t have the purpose of incentivizing risk taking,” Judge said. “That makes it inappropriate to blend carried interest with them.”
So the carried interest tax break is a way to “incentivize” the kind of work Mitt Romney does. One wonders then if the relatively higher tax rates paid by teachers and librarians and cops is … what? A disincentive? Anyway, it’s this skewed set of obligations that Mitt Romney thinks is “fair.”
The Obama administration, if it wanted to, could make a lot of hay over this. It could say, “Mitt Romney doesn’t want to release his tax returns for years and years during the last decade. But the years for which he did release returns, he paid a rate that’s less than half of what most ordinary American professionals make – and he thinks that’s ‘fair.’”
Now, Obama has gone after Mitt’s tax returns – a little. He’s released a few ads here and there, including one called “Makes You Wonder” that called Mitt’s use of carried interest in his tax return a “trick,” a semantic move for which Obama was criticized, since it was actually nothing of the sort. Mitt Romney’s ability to pay a top rate of 15% for his work was no trick at all but a fully-legal expression of the values of our current political system, a system, again, that Mitt Romney is “proud of” and thinks is “fair.”
The reason the Obama administration hasn’t gone after this aggressively is probably the same reason it hasn’t fought harder to repeal that carried interest tax break (which Obama incidentally promised to do four years ago), and the same reason that everyone from Corey Booker to Bill Clinton has urged Obama to lay off the theme of private equity thuggery in his campaign against Romney. Big-time politicians are still afraid to explain to the American people how exactly it is that many Wall Street firms make their money, because they’re afraid to lose access to the crumbs those firms sometimes toss their way.
In the case of Romney, what we’ve mostly heard is that he’s a turnover specialist who sometimes creates jobs and sometimes eliminates them – a kind of ideologically-neutral efficiency consultant who takes a cut when poorly-run companies cut out the fat. The Obama ads about Bain have been emotionally effective, but they’re still frustratingly vague about the actual mechanics of these takeovers. We learn from these ads that a bunch of rich guys took over plants and fired workers, but what we don’t learn is how companies like Bain raise the money for those takeovers, why the plants subsequently become cash-poor, how this industry works generally, and not just at Bain.
In fact the takeover method espoused by Bain and many other private equity firms is a lot closer to the Tony Soprano-takes-over-Davey-Scatino’s-sporting-goods-store “Bust Out” model (and we’ll be getting into this more in the magazine in upcoming weeks) than it is to anything like legitimate consulting.
Barack Obama is one of the few politicians with the communication skills to explain this to middle America, but he’s refusing to go there, probably because he’s still hoping for a post-election rapprochement with Wall Street. He wants to go after Bain Capital, but not private equity in general; he wants to go after Mitt Romney’s missing tax returns, but not the tax returns of all people like Mitt Romney.
So there you have it. Both sock-puppet politicians continue to protect the monied interests, skirt the real issues, and bamboozle the sheeple. But as I said, in a post-human era of the not-too-distant future, you can’t get too riled up about such trivialities.
10 Friday Aug 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil
Tags
BRIC, Capitalism, Christopher Doran, Corporate State, Empire, Financial Elite, Iran, Neoliberal Capitalism, Petrodollar, Resource Wars, The Elite 1%, U.S. Sanctions Against Iran, War for Profit
In a recent article by Christopher Doran, author of Making the World Safe for Capitalism: How Iraq Threatened the US Economic Empire and had to be Destroyed, the underlying reasons for America’s bellicosity toward Iran are revealed. Threatening the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency seems to have resulted in a death sentence for a few countries, most recently Iraq and Libya:
…By accepting and encouraging countries to pay for its oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, Iran has deliberately taken the same action that, I argue in Making the World Safe for Capitalism, led directly to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In September 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq would no longer accept the “currency of its enemy”, the U.S. dollar, and from that time onwards any country that wanted to purchase oil from Iraq would have to do so in euros. I further argue that the motivation for the United States’ invasion of Iraq was to eliminate the threats a post-U.N. sanctions Iraq posed to the key underpinnings of American economic hegemony, and to install a pro-U.S. client state and permanent American military presence in the region. The book examines how a post-U.N. sanctions Iraq either directly threatened the ongoing success of American economic power, or provided enormous opportunities to extend it.
All the same considerations are in play with Iran, starting with Iran’s direct threat to the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency. But that is just one aspect of the much larger issue: that Iran openly defies U.S. neoliberal hegemony. Like Iraq pre-invasion, Iran is not a member of the WTO, has not had any dealings with the IMF since 1984, and does not have any debt with it or the World Bank. Like Iraq before it, and evidenced by China’s oil development contracts, the U.S. and its oil companies are cut out of any future oil development in Iran. Like a post-sanctions Iraq, Iran has the potential to be the dominant power in the region and to provide development assistance on a vastly different model to that imposed by the WTO, World Bank and IMF, against which so much of the Middle East is rebelling….
The article details how the BRIC countries and many other nations are circumventing the U.S. sanctions with Iran and using gold as well as other commodities to buy Iranian oil. The sanctions have pretty much been rendered worthless because so many countries are defying what was designed to isolate and starve Iran into submission.
He explains how the Petrodollar System works:
In a nutshell, any country that wants to purchase oil from an oil producing country has to do so in U.S. dollars. This is a long standing agreement within all oil exporting nations, aka OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The UK for example, cannot simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia by exchanging British pounds. Instead, the UK must exchange its pounds for U.S. dollars. The major exception at present is, of course, Iran.
This means that every country in the world that imports oil—which is the vast majority of the world’s nations—has to have immense quantities of dollars in reserve. These dollars of course are not hidden under the proverbial national mattress. They are invested. And because they are U.S. dollars, they are invested in U.S. Treasury bills and other interest bearing securities that can be easily converted to purchase dollar-priced commodities like oil. This is what has allowed the U.S. to run up trillions of dollars of debt: the rest of the world simply buys up that debt in the form of U.S. interest bearing securities.
The flip-side of this are the countries that produce and export oil, in particular Saudi Arabia and the other Arab producers. The only way the system can possibly work is if oil producers refuse to accept anything other than U.S. dollars as payment for their oil. This they have done since the Nixon Administration’s manipulation of the OPEC oil crisis in the mid-1970’s, which succeeded in getting Saudi Arabia, traditionally the world’s dominant producer, to agree to accept only dollars for oil. The Saudis used their influence to get the rest of OPEC to agree as well. In return, the U.S. offered to militarily defend not so much Saudi Arabia, but the horrifically repressive monarchy that ruled it.[11]
But there was a kicker: Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also got the Saudis to agree to invest their mega oil profits in the U.S. economy. In addition to buying interest bearing U.S. government securities, the Saudis also invested in New York banks. Because the OPEC oil embargo had quadrupled global oil prices, the Saudis and other Arab producers suddenly had a great deal of money to invest. The money parked in those New York banks then became available to be loaned to the rest of the world, which faced major financial crises due to—yes, you guessed it—the sudden quadrupling of oil prices. By the year 2000 and Iraq’s dramatic switch to selling Iraq’s oil in euros, Saudi Arabia had recycled as much as $1 trillion, primarily in the United States. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates recycled $200–300 billion.[12]
And because those loans were in U.S. dollars, they had to be paid back in U.S. dollars. When U.S. interest rates skyrocketed to 21 percent in the early 1980’s, interest on the loans also skyrocketed. This in turn precipitated a third world debt crisis, which was mercilessly exploited by Wall Street and the U.S. In this case, the exploitation came in the form of requiring countries to “structurally adjust” their economies along neoliberal lines in return for World Bank and IMF bailout loans. By 2009, the total debt owed on these bailouts and other loans was an astounding $3.7 trillion. In 2008, they paid over $602 billion servicing these debts to rich countries, primarily the United States.[13] From 1980 to 2004, they paid an estimated $4.6 trillion.[14]
The history of how this came about is fascinating, and I discuss it in detail in Making the World Safe for Capitalism. The short version is that from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which set up the International Monetary Fund and the precursors to the World Bank and World Trade Organisation, the dollar was accepted as the international currency for all trade. Crucially though, the dollar was backed up by gold, which was fixed at $35 an ounce. This meant the U.S. had to have enough gold on hand to back up any and all dollars it printed.
Faced with escalating costs from the Vietnam War, in the early 1970s Nixon abandoned the gold standard and replaced it with the petrodollar system described above. Almost simultaneously, he abolished the IMF’s international capital constraints on American domestic banks, which in turn allowed Saudi Arabia and other Arab producers to recycle their petrodollars in New York banks.
The petrodollar system, and U.S. ability to manipulate the dollar as the global reserve currency and hence global debt, has been the bedrock of American economic power...
…But as the article explains, since the financial crisis of 2008, the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world has been thrown into question and challenged by even formerly staunch U.S. allies. As the lifeblood of a country’s economy, i.e. oil, becomes increasingly hard to come by, the demands of an old ‘friend’, named Uncle Sam, will likely fall on deaf ears, especially when he’s now seen by the rest of the world as a drunken, pickpocketing buffoon swinging at shadows.
08 Wednesday Aug 2012
Tags
3-D Printing Technology, Empire, George Bush, Gore Vidal, Gun Culture, Inverted Totalitarianism, Iran, Iraq, John Robb, Military Industrial Complex, Neoconservatives, Neoliberal Capitalism, Resource Wars, Sam Nunn, SILEX Technology, The Elite 1%, War for Profit, War on Terror, Warren Buffett, Weapons of Mass Destruction
Sometimes, in order to move forward we must look back. I am reflecting once more on another man’s life and words, very prescient and witty words. I was reminded again of his legacy this morning after reading the Congressional Record honoring the life and accomplishments of Gore Vidal by US Congressman Steve Cohen who was brave enough to give it. Before we get to Gore, let’s talk a bit about mankind’s technological prowess in terms of lethal weaponry.
In the great expanse of Earth’s history, industrial civilization will be chronicled as a mere blip in geologic memory, but in the human scale of time perception, our self-inflicted demise by way of ecocide is slow and seemingly imperceptible. And so while we quietly commit self-extermination by breaching environmental tipping points, mankind’s annihilation may also arrive via the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, facilitated by the ongoing advancement of technology:
Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the worry with SILEX laser technology “is that it is particularly suited for nuclear proliferation, even better than centrifuges. SILEX can also enrich fuel-grade uranium to weapons-grade in fewer steps than a … centrifuge.”
Kemp was until 2011 science advisor in the Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control at the U.S. State Department.
Writing in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he says that before the plant is licensed the U.S. government or Congress should commission an independent inquiry into whether its benefits outweigh the added proliferation risk. Other U.S. nuclear scientists and arms control specialists have previously called for similar action….
A U.S. State Department assessment in 1999 of the SILEX technology and the plans to start commercial processing conceded that a laser enrichment facility “might be easier to build without detection and could be a more efficient producer of high enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons program.”…
“It seems likely,” the State Department said, “that success with SILEX would renew interest in laser enrichment by nations with benign intent as well as by proliferants with an interest in finding an easier route to acquiring fissile material for nuclear weapons.”
And recently, John Robb of Global Guerillas had some disturbing news on this new technological breakthrough:
While there are still some details to sort out, it’s pretty clear that making weapons at home using 3-D printers from commonly available materials is going to become much more commonplace in the near future. In fact, as 3-D printing technology matures, materials feedstock improves, and designs for weapons proliferate, we might soon see the day when nearly everyone will be able to print the weapons of their choice in the numbers they desire, all within the privacy of their own homes.
In an October 22, 2002 speech, Sam Nunn quoted a letter by Warren Buffett:
“Through my work at NTI, I’m often asked, “What are the odds of nuclear use by a terrorist group?” Today, I received a letter from Warren Buffett, who is an adviser to NTI, describing the statistical chance of a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon attack in the United States. His letter said:”
If the chance of a weapon of mass destruction being used in a given year is 10 percent and the same probability persists for 50 years, the probability of the event happening at least once during that 50 years is 99.5 percent. Thus, the chance of getting through the 50-year period without a disaster is .51 percent — just slightly better than one in 200.
“If the probability of similar weapons being utilized can be reduced to 3 percent per year, the world has a 21.8 percent chance of making it through 50 years without an event. And if the annual chance can be reduced to 1 percent, there is a 60.5 percent chance of making it through 50 years.
Now back to the insightful and prophetic words of Gore Vidal:
JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn’t a coup; it was a many-year process. [crosstalk] feel normal. I’m not suggesting we’re living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned about.
VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don’t be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstags Fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration’s people. “And if we don’t fight them over there, we gotta fight ’em over here.” This little fool. How are they going to get here? Greyhound bus? I mean, he is so stupid himself that he assumes everybody else is equally stupid. If he had been really elected, I would say everybody else was stupid, but he wasn’t.
…
VIDAL: After all, you are in opposition to American media, and so am I. And we know how false it is, and how corrupt it is, and how engaged they are for mischief, making money for the ownership of the country. There’s nothing to be done about them. And no wonder, even when the American people might ever again, which I doubt, have an uncorrupted presidential election. 2000 was corrupted. 2004 was corrupted. I don’t think we’ll ever get to know the people’s voice, and the people have no voice because they have no information. That is why you’re doing useful work here. That’s why I’m chatting with you here. That could be useful, to tell them actually what happens around the world. That poor guy running for Congress, everybody jumped on him, particularly [inaudible] people. He suggested that our foreign policy might have had something to do with 9/11, that we were deeply disliked in the Muslim world for other reasons. It’s the same presidential, I guess. “Do you believe in evolution?” said this idiot. I mean, to reveal the leadership of the United States hasn’t made it to the 20th century, that our leadership is as ignorant as that. Five of them said, no, no, thinking little lord Jesus was going to vote for them.
JAY: It’s in these moments of crisis, like terrorist attack, that you start to see people’s colors.
VIDAL: Yellow.
JAY: In Britain as well, and I was really taken aback. After the bus London bombings, Ken Livingstone, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, was asked, was there any connection between these bombings and UK foreign policy, and he said there’s no connection whatsoever. This is just people that hate our way of life.
VIDAL: Yeah, that’s the new lie that they like to tell. Well, that’s Bush allover. “They just hate us.” Why? Nobody has to ask them why. He doesn’t know why. “Well, they envy us, our form of government.” Who envies us that can of worms we’ve got in Washington? And it’s been many years in the United States since I have seen a Norwegian coming to get a green card.
JAY: The economic structure of television makes what I’m going to ask difficult to accomplish. But do you think television journalists have learned anything from this last four years?
VIDAL: Well, they’ve always been lazy, and they’re not used to getting to the heart of problems, of matters. They’re not used to investigating anything. Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that is an absolute truth. Those who want to examine life don’t go in for journalism, because they’re not allowed to. So they’ve got to be very careful. They have to think about tenure if they’re at a university. They’ve got to think about, you know, the publisher and advertisers. So it’s a difficult row to hoe, and we have no intellectual tradition of any kind in the United States. I even told Arthur Schlesinger, “You know, Arthur, one Schlesinger does not make a spring.” He was horrified.
…
VIDAL: …It’s when the news starts to break, how two presidential elections, 2000 and 2004, were stolen and The New York Times would not review the book written about it by Congressman Conyers, nor Washington Post, nor Wall Street Journal, the great instruments of news were silent. Well, they’re saying, “We don’t give a goddamn about the United States. Just stew in your own juice. Leave us alone. We have corporate figures to add up now, and we have certain things we want to put in place, and we may have a couple of candidates for you dumdums, but you probably won’t like them.” You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. And the Republican machine became so good at transmitting its own feelings about the world to the enemy, to the liberals, once anyone, any of the right wing hear what I just said, he’ll say, “Oh, the liberals have always hated America. We know that. They despise family values, because they’re only interested in gang bangs and drugs and so forth.” This is the way they deal. And whenever they have a real coward for president, like Bush himself, and you have a hero like Kerry, “Oh, he’s a coward. Didn’t you know that? We’ve got five guys who were in Vietnam with him.” What they do is whatever is their transgression, whatever are their faults, they lie and apply it to the other person. That confuses everything. If I were an average voter in the United States, I wouldn’t know who was telling the truth, whether Kerry really had run away and didn’t get purple hearts, or whether Junior, you know, had actually learned how to fly a plane.
JAY: And television news covers the lies like news.
VIDAL: Yes. It has a lock on it.
…
VIDAL: …There’s not anyone with an IQ above, you know, lowest room temperature who isn’t interested in something like this [truth in news]. Everybody is on to the con act of our media, that they are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public, which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing. So I think, you know, the sky’s the limit to the amount of audience you can get. And one of the secrets is, aside from telling the truth which most people in America hate because they’ve been brought up on advertising, and they think the truth is just something irrelevant, irrelevant, you know. Everybody lies. You know, I love that line. So it’s alright to steal the election. Well, that isn’t what the world’s about. And I think it’s really come down to we’re going to be blown up one of these days. We have now acquired so many enemies with so much power in the world that, well, they’re going to take a couple of cracks at us. I would rather have Real News here telling us just where it was they struck, where it is, intelligence says they may strike again, and maybe why they’re doing it – we blew up their mosque, we killed their president, or whatever it was that set them off. What our fictional news does now, and this is–all it is is fiction, whether it’s CNN or CBS or NBC, it’s all fiction. The people making this junk know that. The viewers suspect it. But where are they going to turn to? Where are they going to find out? They can’t all go out and get a, you know, subscription to The Nation, which would help straighten them out, at least in print. So you’re going to be the only alternative, and the word will start to spread. Look at the speed with which, you know, just by telling jokes, John Stewart and company, got the attention of everybody. And now they say, well, most of the real news that the people know about they get from the satirizing of it that Stewart does. And very funny he is, too. In other words you build a better mousetrap, and the mouse will come to your door.
“…You can’t just go into Iraq and smash them to pieces and pretend that they are an enemy. They will become one if you knock down their houses and kill them. They get very grumpy, you know, when you do things like that to them. So he [Bush] managed to make a lot of enemies. We’re the ones the bombs are going to fall on… He’ll [Bush] be in his bunker in that awful place in Texas where he lives. He’ll be hidden away. He’ll be safe. It will be our cities that are going to get it when some of these suicide bombers get angry at us and blame us for his misdeeds… It was a coup d’état after 9-11. A bunch of ambitious hoods, from the oil and gas business mostly, decided now is the time to take over everything. And the neoconservatives were right there with them, and they wanted big armies in the Middle East to destroy countries they didn’t like. They wanted to get rid of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran… they have a long list, they’ve still got it. I don’t think they’re going to have a chance to utilize it because we ran out of money…”
06 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud
Tags
Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Gore Vidal, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Police State, Poverty, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War on Terror
Growing up in the seat of American power gave Gore Vidal, historian and scathing critic of the Empire, a front row seat to its inner workings. He was raised in Washington, D.C. at the home of his grandfather, Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore. Being related to Jacqueline Kennedy, he held close ties to the Kennedy clan. He was also distantly related to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Gore Vidal himself ran for public office twice, once for Congress in 1960 in New York and once for the U.S. Senate in California in 1982. He knew his subject well enough to speak of the skeletons in its closet and the truth behind the glossy facade. In fact, he once said, “You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.”
My belated tribute to Gore Vidal will simply be to present twelve quotes from him and let his words speak for themselves. You could do much worse with your time than to spend it studying the writings of Gore Vidal:
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
~~~~~~~
…fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues…we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…
~~~~~~~
We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
~~~~~~~
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
~~~~~~~
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
~~~~~~~
…I think it is tragic that the poor man has almost no chance to rise unless he is willing to put himself in thrall to moneyed interests.
~~~~~~~
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
~~~~~~~
We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.
~~~~~~~
We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.
~~~~~~~
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
~~~~~~~
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
~~~~~~~
Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.
Kevin Gosztola at the FDL Dissenter Blog has a nice post remembering the perceptive brilliance of the now-deceased author entitled, Gore Vidal on the ‘National Security State’ of America. Here are a couple choice quotes from the video-taped speech by Gore Vidal:
…In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes…
…Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy–communism, the star of the chamber of horrors–then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few enemies of the national security state were known.
Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5 trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to the White House…
Mr. Vidal, you told the truth with wit and wisdom and may you now rest in peace for that valuable legacy.
29 Sunday Jul 2012
I found this very interesting : –
I took a look into Direct Democracy for Switzerland at Wikipedia [link], where I found : –
In Switzerland, single majorities are sufficient at the town, city, and canton level, but at the national level, double majorities are required on constitutional matters. The intent of the double majorities is simply to ensure any citizen-made law’s legitimacy (Kobach, 1993).
Double majorities are, first, the approval by a majority of those voting, and, second, a majority of cantons in which a majority of those voting approve the ballot measure. A citizen-proposed law (i.e. initiative) cannot be passed in Switzerland at the national level if a majority of the people approve but a majority of the cantons disapprove (Kobach, 1993). For referendums or propositions in general terms (like the principle of a general revision of the Constitution), the majority of those voting is enough (Swiss constitution, 2005).
In 1890, when the provisions for Swiss national citizen lawmaking were being debated by civil society and government, the Swiss adopted the idea of double majorities from the United States Congess, in which House votes were to represent the people and Senate votes were to represent the states (Kobach, 1993). According to its supporters, this “legitimacy-rich” approach to national citizen lawmaking has been very successful. Kobach claims that Switzerland has had tandem successes both socially and economically which are matched by only a few other nations, and that the United States is not one of them. Kobach states at the end of his book, “Too often, observers deem Switzerland an oddity among political systems. It is more appropriate to regard it as a pioneer.”
Unfortunately, I found the political spin in the states worth giving emphasis from the same wikipedia link above : –
Direct democracy was very much opposed by the framers of the United States Constitution and some signers of the Declaration of Independence. They saw a danger in majorities forcing their will on minorities. As a result, they advocated a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic over a direct democracy. For example, James Madison, in Federalist No.10 advocates a constitutional republic over direct democracy precisely to protect the individual from the will of the majority. He says,
“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence said,
“Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state — it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”
Alexander Hamilton said,
“That a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity…”
Interestingly, Edward Bernays, that wonderful spinmeister of double speak – worthy of debate, due to the outcome of much of his folly in the present world – had this to say at the opening of his (1928) book Propaganda [PDF] : –
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Which leads me to use a relevant passage from page 770 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 book On Democracy in America. : –
I therefore believe that the kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples is unlike any the world has seen before. Our contemporaries will find no image of it in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces my idea of it and captures it fully. The old words “despotism” and “tyranny” will not do. The thing is new, hence I must try to define it, since I cannot give it a name.
I am trying to imagine what new features despotism might have in today’s world: I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country.
Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living?
Every day it thus makes man’s use of his free will rarer and more futile. It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville ~ 1835
I sense that the work is almost complete, since the exportation of most every wealth – with its replacement of exhorbitant debt – complete a nation without appeal to their constitutional rights – has squandered; for want of a stance in sensibility, even what abilities are left remaining to resolve it …
29 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil
Tags
Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Gun Culture, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Holmes, John Stewart, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public
Dear potential contributors (DK, Tom Tom, Kramerfaust, Sunson),
I am going to send you an invitation tonight so that you can contribute. You’ll have to sign up with wordpress in order to submit your work to me. It looks like Kramerfaust already has a wordpress account set up. Per the WordPress staff:
Your new user will now be able to access your blog by visiting the My Blogs section of their dashboard when they log in to WordPress.com.
You won’t have to blog at the site you initially create; it’s just a required formality. Or you can simply email me at Collapsitarians@gmail.com. I’m looking forward to reading your posts. More voices means more worldly knowledge to glean from and different perspectives to appreciate.
Since I started this site, the stats tell me that the top four google searches which have brought people here are the following:
1.) collapse of industrial civilization
2.) the price of offshore revisited
3.) james holmes sociopath
4.) collapse peak oil
The first one is an obvious outcome. I was surprised this domain had not been previously claimed since it seems to be such a hackneyed phrase. As Greer has noted, in the twilight of past civilizations, the elite are increasingly seen as corrupt and stories of societal collapse become popular in the mainstream culture. The second one relates to my post about the trillions being hoarded in offshore tax havens by the 0.001%. Backed by the power of the State, the global elite live in a cocoon of cossetted comfort, indifferent to the hand-to-mouth existence of the majority. They’ve got the iron fist of the Military Industrial Complex and Police State to protect their wealth from the rest of humanity who will be falling off the net energy cliff into poverty and desperation.
The third google search phrase is apparent to all unless you have been living under a rock since July 20th. We have these mass shootings periodically here in the Land of the Second Amendment just as a reminder that guns don’t kill people. Guns are completely innocent in these mass bloodlettings and should not be denied their freedom of getting into the hands of every man, woman, and child in the country. The response by the public is simply to buy even more guns. Why refute such logic in a world that thinks more debt is the answer. More debt, more growth, more firepower, more people, more wars, more cars, more profit, more, more, and more…..
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 