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#Post#: 777--------------------------------------------------
Re: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1
By: AGelbert Date: February 18, 2014, 9:00 pm
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG17oEsQiEw&feature=player_embedded
#Post#: 807--------------------------------------------------
A Cartoon about the 1% that Is NOT funny
By: AGelbert Date: February 26, 2014, 5:41 pm
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[img width=640
height=780]
HTML http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/70689/lightbox/Kchroniclessteve.png?1393310444[/img]
#Post#: 844--------------------------------------------------
Beneath Veneer of Democracy, The Permanent Ruling Class
By: AGelbert Date: March 1, 2014, 3:12 pm
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Published on Monday, February 24, 2014 by Moyers & Company
Anatomy of the Deep State: Beneath Veneer of Democracy, The
Permanent Ruling Class
by Mike Lofgren
"Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.
Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no
industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts
and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices
of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas,
the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing
but loads of dung. That was their return cargo." – The Martyrdom
of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
[move]"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one
that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid
entity of public and private institutions ruling the country
according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected
to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state
whose leaders we choose."[/move]
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in
Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more
indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or
observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The
former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of
the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which
is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part
of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates
according to its own compass heading regardless of who is
formally in power. [1]
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with
pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The
conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and
dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the
case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this
development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits
of this critique as it applies to the American governmental
system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the
domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly
deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently
rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that
is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity
of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only
intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we
choose."
As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of
congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch
powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a
goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are
clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact
his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP
filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of
vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his
most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats
controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the
filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react
with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts
to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a
party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate
American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners
indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the
American people without judicial warrant and engage in
unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts
against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat
Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized
by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized
federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President
Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other
activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from
Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane
carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.
Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about
executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have
until recently heard very little from them about these actions —
with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand
Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron
Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the
extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony
under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of
illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have
been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background
noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the
debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of
governance in Washington, the United States government somehow
summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in
Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled
over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French
intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about
continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control
because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to
commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to
pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government
Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to
that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying
interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance
of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same
period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a
building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This
mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security
Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest
numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A
yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need
that much storage to archive every single trace of your
electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that
is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity
of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only
intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we
choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a
secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding
mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light
of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an
“establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a
social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation.
In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global
reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class
by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible.
The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly
sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far
from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the
Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel
that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why
am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for
28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top
secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the
world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of
full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But,
like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent,
assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for,
and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq,
did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that
motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the
deciders.”
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist
Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability
of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This
syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by
sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand
bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the
town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive.
As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the
mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The
universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at
the institutions they work for is always going to be a small
one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.”
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead
weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted
yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government
life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel
about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at
the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the
evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of
takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the
higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a
while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in
another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least
noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness
like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist
groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people
are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation
whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with
imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the
curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the
inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at
least until I had had a couple of years away from the government
to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is
a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the
Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department
of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Justice Department. I also include the Department of the
Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its
enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis
with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the
Executive Office of the President via the National Security
Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep
State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress.
Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such
as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of
Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security
cases are conducted. The final government component (and
possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of
government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump
Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some
(but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence
committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and
partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State
and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words
from the State’s emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable
incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized
the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional
surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and
indemnified the telecommunications companies for their
cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was
required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most
members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a
magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack
Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the
Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the
most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent,
Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and
the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not
consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically
called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its
operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called
“Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described
the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which
it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are
now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a
number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian
employees of the government. While they work throughout the
country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around
the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33
facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are
under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of
almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy
percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying
contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is
highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James
R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of
the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His
predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current
vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent
dependent on government business. These contractors now set the
political and social tone of Washington, just as they are
increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are
doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional
Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to
congressional hearings.
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has
taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible
threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes.
One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the
political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary
marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines
and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with
cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best
interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de
facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the
Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated
the following: “I am concerned that the size of some of these
institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for
us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if
you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will
have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the
world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement officer of
a justice system that has practically abolished the
constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with
certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may
be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if
for no other reason than that it has the money to reward
government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a
salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden
highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the
period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert
Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and
many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with
the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013,
General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis
Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm
with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management
buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in
these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence,
however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus,
the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the
plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a
sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League
is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of
the American oligarchy. [4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State — the White
House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits
on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts
who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus
who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation
are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run —
are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their
preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat
offering well considered advice based on profound expertise.
That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the
official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is
neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically,
whatever they might privately believe about essentially
diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage,
they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”:
financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and
the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse
21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of
the United States to meddle in every region of the world with
coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore
painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To
paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago
about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has
prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why
describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast
television is treated less as political heresy than as an
inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a
cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.”
Go to the link below for the second half of this excellent
article:
HTML http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/24-0
#Post#: 856--------------------------------------------------
“Just-World Theory,” is “a Warrant for Inflicting Pain."
By: AGelbert Date: March 3, 2014, 12:35 pm
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[move]...“just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do
good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve
to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting
pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along
with economic stagnation or decline, this neoclassical model is
ominous. It could be used to justify repression in an effort to
sustain a vision that does not correspond to the real
world.[/move]
[quote]
He argued, citing John Kenneth Galbraith, that in affluent
societies the relative contentment of the majorities has
permitted, through free market ideology, the abandonment,
impoverishment and repression of minorities, especially
African-Americans. As larger and larger segments of society are
forced because of declining economies to become outsiders, the
use of coercion, under our current model, will probably become
more widespread. [/quote]
[quote]“Economics, political science and even philosophy, ever
since rational choice swept through the American social
sciences, have embraced the idea that an individual has no
responsibility towards anyone except himself or herself,” he
said. “A responsibility to anyone else is optional. The public
discourse, for this reason, has become a hall of mirrors.
Nothing anymore is what it seems to be.”[/quote]
[quote]
I think there is a sense in government and business that there
is too much independence in academia. We need to be put in our
place. The spirit of free inquiry, free expression, and to some
extent free teaching, and communality[I] is alien to the
corporate and political culture, which are repressive
hierarchies.[/I]”[/quote]
Suffering? Well, You Deserve It
Posted on Mar 2, 2014
By Chris Hedges
OXFORD, England—The morning after my Feb. 20 debate at the
Oxford Union, I walked from my hotel along Oxford’s narrow
cobblestone streets, past its storied colleges with resplendent
lawns and Gothic stone spires, to meet Avner Offer, an economic
historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History.
Offer, the author of “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control
and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950,” for
25 years has explored the cavernous gap between our economic and
social reality and our ruling economic ideology. Neoclassical
economics, he says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits
that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who
suffer deserve to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for
inflicting pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting
scarcities, along with economic stagnation or decline, this
neoclassical model is ominous. It could be used to justify
repression in an effort to sustain a vision that does not
correspond to the real world.
Offer, who has studied the rationing systems set up in countries
that took part in World War I, suggests we examine how past
societies coped successfully with scarcity. In an age of
scarcity it would be imperative to set up new, more egalitarian
models of distribution, he says. Clinging to the old
neoclassical model could, he argues, erode and perhaps destroy
social cohesion and require the state to engage in greater forms
of coercion.
“The basic conventions of public discourse are those of the
Enlightenment, in which the use of reason [enabled] us to
achieve human objectives,” Offer said as we sat amid piles of
books in his cluttered office. “Reason should be tempered by
reality, by the facts. So underlining this is a notion of
science that confronts reality and is revised by reference to
reality. This is the model for how we talk. It is the model for
the things we assume. But the reality that has emerged around us
has not come out of this process. So our basic conventions only
serve to justify existing relationships, structures and
hierarchies. Plausible arguments are made for principles that
are incompatible with each other.”
Offer cited a concept from social psychology called the
just-world theory. “A just-world theory posits that the world is
just. People get what they deserve. If you believe that the
world is fair you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually
by blaming the victim.
“Major ways of thinking about the world constitute just-world
theories,” he said. “The Catholic Church is a just-world theory.
If the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they
deserved. Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If Kulaks were
starved and exiled, they got what they deserved. Fascism was a
just-world theory. If Jews died in the concentration camps, they
got what they deserved. The point is not that the good people
get the good things, but the bad people get the bad things.
Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy norms, is
a just-world theory.”
Offer quoted the economist Milton Friedman: “The ethical
principle that would directly justify the distribution of income
in a free market society is, ‘To each according to what he and
the instruments he owns produces.’ ”
“So,” Offer went on, “everyone gets what he or she deserves,
either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one
asks how he or she got this property. And if they don’t have it,
they probably don’t deserve it. The point about just-world
theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that it provides a
warrant for inflicting pain.”
“Just-world theories are models of reality,” he said. “A rough
and ready test is how well the model fits with experienced
reality. When used to derive policy, an economic model not only
describes the world but also aspires to change it. In policy, if
the model is bad, then reality has to be forcibly aligned with
it by means of coercion. How much coercion is actually used
provides a rough measure of a model’s validity. That the Soviet
Union had to use so much coercion undermined the credibility of
communism as a model of reality. It is perhaps symptomatic that
the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position
among its values, is also the one that has one of the very
largest penal systems in the world relative to its population.
It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a
great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes
large numbers of people.”
“There are two core doctrines in economics,” Offer said. “One is
individual self-interest. The other is the invisible hand, the
idea that the pursuit of individual self-interest aggregates or
builds up for the good of society as a whole. This is a logical
proposition that has never been proven. If we take the
centrality of self-interest in economics, then it is not clear
on what basis economics should be promoting the public good.
This is not a norm that is part of economics itself; in fact,
economics tells us the opposite. [I]Economics tells us that
everything anyone says should be motivated by strategic
self-interest. And when economists use the word ‘strategic’ they
mean cheating.”
[/i]
Last two pages at link:
HTML http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/suffering_well_you_deserve_it_20140302
#Post#: 876--------------------------------------------------
The REAL Crisis of Civilization (Dark Humor and LOTS OF TRUTH!)
By: AGelbert Date: March 30, 2014, 12:43 am
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMgOTQ7D_lk&feature=player_embedded
#Post#: 891--------------------------------------------------
World's Food Systems Needs Complete Overhaul Toward Democracy, D
iversity
By: AGelbert Date: April 5, 2014, 12:44 pm
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[move]World's Food Systems Needs Complete Overhaul Toward
Democracy, Diversity[/move]
SustainableBusiness.com News
One of the important, positive trends we're seeing is growing
food closer to home and in cities that often means rooftop
farms.
In Japan, a leading railroad, East Japan Railway, is turning the
roofs of train stations across the country - starting with five
in Tokyo - into urban farms. Commuters can weed while they wait
for the train or pick some vegies on their way home. And when
they rent a space, they are provided with everything they need -
tools, water, and even seeds. They even have professional staff
who will help you learn how to garden. Anyone can rent a space,
but depending on its size and location, it can be pricey - as
much as $960 a year.
UN Calls for Overhaul of World's Food System
This is probably one of the things the UN Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food has in mind in his provocative report that
calls for a complete overhaul of the world's food system,
starting with the move to local, sustainable farming.
After six years of visiting more than a dozen countries, Olivier
De Schutter says that democracy and diversity is the key to
eradicating hunger and malnutrition. It is achievable, but the
current system works only to maximize profits for big
agribusinesses.
Currently the "one-dimensional quest to produce more food"
crowds out systems that would support small farmers that produce
culturally diverse foods that sustain the soil and water and
provide food security, especially to people in vulnerable areas.
It might be built from the bottom-up, based on meeting the
ability of the smallholder's ability to thrive, he says. That
means working at the level of villages, regions, cities, and
municipalities.
He urges cities to take food security into their own hands
because by 2050 more than 6 billion people will live in cities.
Cities must identify and overcome logistical challenges in their
food supply chains."
These efforts, however, have to be supported by national and
international policies. The World Trade Organization, for
example, must not get in the way, for example.
"Wealthy countries must move away from export-driven
agricultural policies and leave space instead for small-scale
farmers in developing countries to supply local markets," he
says. "They must also restrain their expanding claims on global
farmland by reining in the demand for animal feed and agrofuels,
and by reducing food waste."
This is one more reason why NAFTA and the trade pacts under
negotiation are taking the world in the wrong direction.
HTML http://www.desismileys.com/smileys/desismileys_1593.gif
Read our article, How Community Fisheries Save Fish and Local
Economies.
Read the report:
Website:
www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20140310_final
report_en.pdf
HTML http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/25629
#Post#: 900--------------------------------------------------
Re: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1
By: AGelbert Date: April 7, 2014, 1:13 pm
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8 Things Mainstream Media Doesn't Have the Courage to Tell You (
BECAUSE [img width=50
height=50]
HTML http://www.imgion.com/images/01/Angry-animated-smiley.jpg[/img]<br
/>
) News sources speak for the 5%.
April 6, 2014 |
The following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard
news" stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But
the business-oriented press generally avoids them.
1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got
Almost None of It.
That's an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people
who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For
them, the average gain was well over a million dollars --
tax-free as long as they don't cash it in. Details available
here.
2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage
Workers
A recent report stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in
the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair
market rent. There are 3.6 million such workers, and their total
(combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market
gains of just eight Americans, all of whom take more than their
share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates,
and Warren Buffett.
3. News Sources Speak for the 5%
It would be refreshing to read an honest editorial: "We dearly
value the 5 to 7 percent of our readers who make a lot of money
and believe that their growing riches are helping everyone
else."
Instead, the business media seems unable to differentiate
between the top 5 percent and the rest of society. The Wall
Street Journalexclaimed, "Middle-class Americans have more
buying power than ever before," and then went on to sputter:
"What Recession?...The economy has bounced back from recession,
unemployment has declined.."
The Chicago Tribune may be even further out of touch with its
less privileged readers, asking them: "What's so terrible about
the infusion of so much money into the presidential campaign?"
4. TV News Dumbed Down for American Viewers
A 2009 survey by the European Journal of Communication compared
the U.S. to Denmark, Finland, and the UK in the awareness and
reporting of domestic vs. international news, and of 'hard' news
(politics, public administration, the economy, science,
technology) vs. 'soft' news (celebrities, human interest, sport
and entertainment). The results:
-- Americans [are] especially uninformed about international
public affairs.
-- American respondents also underperformed in relation to
domestic-related hard news stories.
-- American television reports much less international news than
Finnish, Danish and British television;
-- American television network newscasts also report much less
hard news than Finnish and Danish television.
Surprisingly, the report states that "our sample of American
newspapers was more oriented towards hard news than their
counterparts in the European countries." Too bad Americans are
reading less newspapers.
5. News Execs among White Male Boomers Who Owe Trillions to
Society
The hype about the "self-made man" is fantasy. In the early
1970s, we privileged white males were spirited out of college to
waiting jobs in management and finance, technology was inventing
new ways for us to make money, tax rates were about to tumble,
and visions of bonuses and capital gains danced in our heads.
While we were in school the Defense Department had been
preparing the Internet for Microsoft and Apple, the National
Science Foundation was funding the Digital Library Initiative
research that would be adopted as the Google model, and the
National Institute of Health was doing the early laboratory
testing for companies like Merck and Pfizer. Government research
labs and public universities trained thousands of chemists,
physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production
line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc.,
etc.
All we created on our own was a disdainful attitude, like that
of Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about stealing
great ideas."
6. Funding Plummets for Schools and Pensions as Corporations
Stop Paying Taxes
Three separate studies have shown that corporations pay less
than half of their required state taxes, which are the main
source of K-12 educational funding and a significant part of
pension funding. Most recently, the report "The Disappearing
Corporate Tax Base" found that the percentage of corporate
profits paid as state income taxes has dropped from 7 percent in
1980 to about 3 percent today.
7. Companies Based in the U.S. Paying Most of their Taxes
Overseas
Citigroup had 42% of its 2011-13 revenue in North America
(almost all U.S.) and made $32 billion in profits, but received
a U.S. current income tax benefit all three years.
Pfizer had 40% of its 2011-13 revenues and nearly half of its
physical assets in the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in
U.S. losses to go along with nearly $50 billion in foreign
profits.
In 2013 Exxon had about 43% of management, 36% of sales, 40% of
long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive oil and gas
wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its total
income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something
called a "theoretical" tax.
8. Restaurant Servers Go Without Raise for 30 Years
An evaluation by Michelle Chen showed that the minimum wage for
tipped workers has been approximately $2 an hour since the
1980s. She also notes that about 40 percent of these workers are
people of color, and about two-thirds are women.
Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a writer for progressive
publications, and the founder and developer of social justice
and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org,
RappingHistory.org)
HTML http://www.alternet.org/comments/media/10-years-after-iraq-disaster-rumsfeld-documentary-reveals-what-unaccountable-slippery-bastard
#Post#: 905--------------------------------------------------
Re: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1
By: guest16 Date: April 8, 2014, 6:05 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
What would be your main suggestions in raising awareness to the
8 points you mentioned? The big problem I see is many people
especially those in the United States believe the basic memes of
capitalism and that the US is a meritocratic society. People who
reach the top genuinely deserve to be rich while those who are
poor are on some level damaged. Any environmental factors such
as parents income, education and social networks are understated
factors while factors of personal achievement and hard work are
overstated. What is another notable variable is time as your
success or ease of opportunities is also depend on what era you
were born in. For example moving ahead as a young person is
harder today than say 50 years ago when more high paying jobs
per person was higher and in general social mobility was more
easily achieved.
While there maybe a gradual recognition that the American dream
is no longer true the connection between being poor and lazy is
stronger than ever. More significant perhaps is the fact that
the rich tend to be held in high esteem regardless of how that
money is earned. While people may scoff at oilmen just imagine
if you were the CEO of Exxon. I bet any website you wrote or
forum you started would command a lot of respect because you
were a successful outstanding citizen. If rich people are
rewarded so handsomely both financially, socially and
politically how will society reverse its behaviour?
#Post#: 910--------------------------------------------------
Re: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1
By: AGelbert Date: April 9, 2014, 12:39 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
M,
I hear ya. :( How about his idea? If only...
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rtySUhuokM&feature=player_embedded
#Post#: 911--------------------------------------------------
Re: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1
By: guest16 Date: April 9, 2014, 7:49 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=AGelbert link=topic=17.msg910#msg910
date=1397065195]
M,
I hear ya. :( How about his idea? If only...
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rtySUhuokM&feature=player_embedded
[/quote]
Great video. Now one of the things I have observed when engaging
various US media articles or Americans is there seems to be this
deep seeded belief that the government is bad corrupt,
incompetent and generally a waste of space. Now I am not saying
such views do not exist in Europe but I feel it is a much more
common thought in the US than other regions. The problem with
this line of thinking is that while governments and bureaucracy
can be corrupt and inefficient the assumption is that private
companies and corporations in-particular are not subject to the
same problems.
The area where this issue is most prominent is that of free
speech. Lots of Americans make a lot of noise about free speech
and feel the government must allow lest it leads to corruption
and worse. These feelings however are not often extended to
private companies. It is much more acceptable for the media to
practice censorship under the reasoning that the company in
question owns the medium it is publishing thus it can censor as
much as it deems necessary. Now the problem I see here is that
if the media can be censored or altered to the owners whims then
the question becomes how can the companies and government be
monitored? The whole process of free speech will be undermined
due to a lack of oversight. Now this is but one example. The
take home point in this example is the fact that our
expectations of what the government can do and what private
ownership is allowed to do is quite different. Due to a
fundamental mistrust of government we set a much higher standard
and stigma to its various functions however when it comes to
private entities our expectations diminish and accountability is
much lower due to a great deal of misplaced trust.
The elephant that is missed and it is a big elephant is that it
is a universally recognised truth that power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely. Since power is the ability
to control people then it follows that the larger any
organisation becomes the more likely it is corrupt as the
controllers has the ability to control a larger pool of people.
This phenomenon applies to private AND public institutions yet
it is largely only public institutions were this corruption is
recognised and scrutiny applied. This is one of the fundamental
problems.
The second issue I see here is that the function of a sound
government is it should represent the views of the poorer
people. I say this because in most societies the rich will
always have greater resources to represent their needs so the
countermeasure to this inequality is that the government must
represent people who lack the financial means of protecting
their rights on an individual level. If a government cannot meet
and address the needs of the common man then the government has
become dysfunctional. The problem people have is quite often
they think if there is little government then the rich and poor
can push their wants in equal measure. The fact is in those
scenarios - at least on a historic basis - is that the rich will
bulldoze over the poor and you will get great social tension. In
a way government policies is like vaccines in the sense that
over time people have forgotten the great benefits and can only
remember the side-effects. Thus people take for granted the
benefits these policies bring and focus on the bad points which
while noticeable are considerably smaller than the lack of
policy/vaccines. Benefit abuse is bad but imagine a society with
no welfare social safety net. It will be a return of seeing many
poorer families on the streets with kids and all.
Finally the final myth that is promoted is this idea of
independence or the rugged individual. What people need to
understand is true independence is next to impossible to achieve
and in nearly all occasions we are dependent on others for our
welfare either through subsidies of various kinds or other
measures (such as exploitation of others/environment). Even if
we were to ignore the various subsidies that make your life
possible the dependency still exists because you are still
dependent on an income to fund your lifestyle. If you lose your
job/business that independence will quickly disappear. When the
word independent is used what people really mean is you have an
income that is sufficient to make you financially independent.
To achieve true independence however you would need to lead a
lifestyle which you can provide for your needs without an
income. Historically this has been very difficult to achieve.
This should lead us to the idea and recognition that we are
inter-dependent on each other and there is no crime in being
dependent. In many ways the atomised way of living we have today
is largely a by-product of our high energy fossil fuel lifestyle
were machines have replaced the need for labour. In the future
we will depend more on people and community for our needs so
this attitude of rugged individualism must be displaced by more
communal living arrangements which can only come if we
acknowledge the fact people are in fact inter-dependent and
there is no crime in that. The main point people should
understand is people should pull their weight and everyone
should have the opportunity to show they can pull their weight
(many segments are denied even the opportunity to prove
themselves). Rugged individualism societies (if attempted) will
be failures and the power of team spirit and community needs to
be embraced.
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