This story is just amazing:
A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY’s reporting on the military’s “information operations” program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticized even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored.
USA Today didn’t nail down who the contractor was, but Gawker’s John Cook reports that it’s a sketchy-sounding outfit called Leonie Industries that does psychological warfare for the Pentagon in Afghanistan:
Leonie Industries, which the Vanden Brook and Locker investigation called the U.S.’s top contractor in Afghanistan, is an interesting company. It was founded in 2004 by a Lebanese-American brother and sister, Camille Chidiac and Rema Dupont, and has cobbled together $130 million in Pentagon contracts for, as Vanden Brook and Locker put it, “plant[ing] unattributed broadcasts, plaster[ing] the countryside in war zones with billboards, stag[ing] concerts and drop[ping] leaflets” in Afghanistan.
USA Today had reported on Leonie in its investigation into the Pentagon’s privatized propaganda mills.
— Forbes’s Christopher Helman writes a very good post on what the revelations from Reuters’s big Cheseapeake Energy/Aubrey McClendon investigation mean:
Here is the core of what is wrong with McClendon’s massive borrowing: Chesapeake is severely capital constrained (a result of high debt loads, reckless spending on ever more shale gas acreage and rock bottom natural gas prices) to the point that the company is trying to sell billions of dollars in assets this year to make ends meet. At the same time this is going on, McClendon has been competing directly against his own company for access to the capital markets in order to shore up his own finances — without telling shareholders the extent of his financings..
And:
The simple truth is that McClendon’s well participation perk does not align his interests with those of shareholders. As I detailed in my cover story on McClendon last fall, at the heart of Chesapeake’s operation is the land machine, which scoops up promising acreage across America, paying billions to secure the rights to drill. Much of that land turns out to have oil and gas; some doesn’t. When land turns out not to be worth drilling, the millions sunk into accumulating it is lost.Chesapeake only drills wells on land where it has a good belief that there’s oil and gas to be had. It drills more wells in the choicest parts of a field. McClendon only participates in the good acreage; he doesn’t get docked for the bad acreage Chesapeake has no use for. Thus he is absolutely guaranteed to get better opportunities and better returns than Chesapeake’s shareholders. He shares in the boons and avoids the banes.
— Read Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann New Yorker piece on the politics, and lack thereof, of inequality:
Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been. There was a period during the Republican primary campaign when Romney rivals like Newt Gingrich tried to take votes from the front-runner by bashing Wall Street and private equity, but that didn’t last long, either. Politics does feel sour and contentious in ways that seem to flow from the country’s economic distress. Yet much of the ambient discontent is directed toward government—the government that kept the recession from turning into a depression. Why isn’t politics about what you’d expect it to be about?
"Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been."
Of course there's no sign. The tea party was not a spontaneous movement that arose out of nowhere. The tea party was a rebranding of what we used to call "Republican", therefore the tea party had all the infrastructure at its disposal that formerly belonged to team republican: fox news, talk radio, billionaires hiring pr firms and old republican hacks like Dick Armey, a police force and mainstream media friendly to their perspective (CNN hiring Erick the Erickson? Really?).
The ONLY differences between team republican before Obama and team tea party after are
1) the anger of the silver haired mob that a democrat with a funny sounding name "took their country away"
2) the money funneled through the tea party made them more supportive of their billionaire sponsors' economic agenda than the social conservative and national security agenda. "Everybody must read Ayn Rand!11!"
Based on these two differences, republican moderates were run out of their party and Bircherism (or Birtherism if you prefer) were mainstreamed, but the tea party brand represents a change in hierarchy of priorities, not a change in priorities.
Therefore the tea party was a pre-assembled movement, one that had an impact because it could claim it came out of nowhere (when it didn't) and that it represented a break from conservative history (which it doesn't).
This is the same movement that got behind Rick Perry, for cryin out loud, who's difference from Bush can be measured in the microns of IQ which separate them.
Cont.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 02:25 PM
The occupy movement is different in that it is not really supported by any pre-existing infrastructure and it is antagonistic to major donors and the previous policies of Democratic politicians.
If anything, they are the remnants of the Obama movement in 2008 which demanded a radical break from the politics of Bush and pre-Bush and had HOPE and CHANGE in mind when they got Obama elected.
These people were put in the "veal pen" or locked out after the election. The Obama movement was disarmed and told to assemble under Tim Friggin Kaine's direction of all people.
The Obama election was supposed to represent the triumph of an outsider process over insider politics. The outsider campaign worked, but the moment Obama got in, he became the inside man.
And he left us on the outside while Rahm Emmanuel called us retards and Obama coddled his radical enemies (some of us warned of this back in the campaign days).
So the genesis of Occupy is a frustration with a political process in which either conservative radicals win, by making things worse for the population (and blaming it on the black guy), or democrats lose, making things worse for the population by beating themselves (and blaming it on the electorate who are just too conservative a voting block to fight for the right things).
Occupy isn't designed to affect the political process, it's outside the political process because it's designed to replace it.
Why start outside? That's where all the people are.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 02:56 PM
Nick Lemann wrote: "Yet much of the ambient discontent is directed toward government—the government that kept the recession from turning into a depression"
padikiller responds: What a load of biased crap!
Lemann is apparently gifted with the ability to discern the future not only in our universe, but also in some alternative Obama-free universe.
Without Obama at the helm of the Gubmint, we'd be worse off than we are. This silly unfounded assertion is presented as an obvious fact.
I think Lemann meant to say that the government that lost more than a million jobs since Obama took office.
Or the government that has run up $5 trillion in debt since Obama took office.
Or the government that has seen gas prices double since Obama took office.
Or the government that has seen income inequality increase since Obama took office.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
I can't believe the Head Honcho of a "journalism" school would write such a piece of sycophantic crap as this.
#3 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 03:39 PM
And, by the by, why would Nicholas Lemann even bring up Charles Murray in a serious fashion? "Pat Buchanan for smart people" has earned himself a deserved decades long trashing for shoddy work used to give race and low income baiting an intellectual veneer.
When you can't even get David Frum to eat this vomit, why are you using it in the New Yorker?
"as long as the United States is a meritocratic society, and as long as these people keep meeting at selective colleges, marrying, and improving their breeding stock, they’ll keep doing better than everybody else. Anyway, what the non-élite need isn’t money, Murray thinks; it’s better values. Very little of “Coming Apart” is devoted to government policy."
When you have conservative policy in place for 30 years and the byproduct of Lee Atwater's process ("say[ing] stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.") starts to affect poor white people AND black people, then you have to modify your eugenics argument so that your policies don't get the blame, the genetics of personal character does.
"Rothkopf writes as a grand strategist, not as a reporter, but there are a few moments in his book when he visits members of the Superclass whom he obviously knows from having worked with them."
He shouldn't be reading about superclass, he should be reading about Super capitalism.
The wealthy are pulling away from the societies which host them, making the interests of wealth and nation divergent.
You have a vampire class, not a superclass, and the reason why they are so politically successful, despite the harm they have done to the global economy, is that they have bought the political and intellectual support they need to maintain power and prevent others from challenging it. Economists, regulators, politicians, judges, and major media are bought.
The only thing they haven't bought yet is the internet, which is how the interested observer can get the information and the vocabulary to describe reality as is and not how bought elites like it presented.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 04:37 PM
The so-called "vampire class" pays nearly ALL of the income taxes paid in this country. Indeed the top 5 % of income earners pay 60% of all of the federal income tax collected, and half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all.
The "Occupy" mooches will never be satisfied, as long as somebody else has something they want. The want other people's stuff and they want the Gubmint to get it for them.
Some "revolution" this is!
They don't want jobs. They don't want an opportunity to produce or improve anything.
They just want other people's property.
Yeah they have Soros, the unions and few celebrities propping them a bit, but the average working slob sees the Occupiers for what they are - a damned joke.
One of the best questions I have seen posed to these selfish, lazy leeches is "what specific thing (or things) has anyone in the "1%" done to keep you from getting rich or earning as much money as you want to earn?".
Answer: Nothing.
Nothing is stopping any of these crybabies from busting ass and succeeding.
We need an "Occupy Workhouse" for these useless bums.
#5 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 07:48 PM
"The so-called "vampire class" pays nearly ALL of the income taxes paid in this country. Indeed the top 5 % of income earners pay 60% of all of the federal income tax collected, and half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all."
Ugh, you've been debunked a couple of times on this.
As I wrote above, "Paddy, you're dishonest, repetitive, and a waste of time."
"One of the best questions I have seen posed to these selfish, lazy leeches is "what specific thing (or things) has anyone in the "1%" done to keep you from getting rich or earning as much money as you want to earn?".
1) creating an environment where pension and investment earnings are based on the curve of pump and dump asset bubbles (which meant we lost our pensions and investments).
2) creating an environment where fraud and theft have become retroactively legal (which meant our savings and credit were used as weapons to beat us).
3) creating an environment where risk estimates were for 'pussies' so when the securities banks bought for themselves on leverage tanked, they damn near collapsed and took the global credit system down with them (when the government "kept the recession from turning into a depression", it was by stopping that) which resulted in;
4) creating an environment of volatile financial instability and job insecurity for the rest of us while you assholes pocket bonuses based on your ability to "do god's work." You see, when you tanked the major asset most everybody everybody had to their name (houses) through fraud, pump and dump, and predatory lending THEN your actions killed our pensions AND our mutual fund investments because it turns out you were selling them house securities, we began wondering. Wondering how to pay our inflated mortgage for our deflating houses, wondering how to pay for our retirements based on empty plans, wondering how to afford the new costs coming down from our downsizing state governments who loss a bunch of tax revenue when house prices collapsed.
And when we wonder about stuff like that, we stop shopping. Which means businesses don't have revenue. Which means we loose our jobs.
Which you try to blame on the black guy.
Boy, that doesn't sound a thing like "Nothing." I wonder who you've been listening to.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 21 Apr 2012 at 11:19 PM
Back on topic, and back to ignoring the padfly, you cannot understand Occupy and its opposition within powerful circles until you go back to 1999.
You see the ideologies which have driven politics and business from the Carter years on has been the idea that high wages end up creating inflation and unemployment and that the sole business of business is to generate profits for their owners/shareholders.
In order to prevent inflation and make American labor employable, labor costs had to be reduced and labor markets must become more flexible. You cannot have that when unions are assertive, so unions had to be made more passive.
This happened in the private sector as labor unions found labor laws unenforced by the government, changes in trade laws allowing low wage labor pools to compete with high wage labor were pushed by the government, and assertive union leaders might find themselves banned for life from participating in labor based on trumped up charges (for which they were acquitted) by the government.
But as wages lost value, benefits were cut, and the new jobs became more flexible, the question arose "how do we keep a rising standard of living when we're cutting what labor makes for a living?"
The idea was they would make money from investments, not wages. So government began, since Carter, giving more flexibility to markets to make money without pesky the oversight and investor protections that made life so difficult for bankers.
If the process of money making becomes easier and more efficient, and lord knows these bankers who been running it have kept it safe for 50 years, then more money can be made without significant risk. Investment is how you grow economies. Growth through investment doesn't cause the same inflation problems as growth through wages. Growth through investment dispenses benefits to citizens to the degree that they participate as investors. The thinking became that it was not through government nor union that prosperity and welfare was attained, it was through market activity. Government should use the market as the means of achieving societal goals, therefore government should create environments where investor confidence market freedom can be set high.
But you have a problem, which was a similar problem to the one you had with assertive unions. You cannot outsource government responsibilities and functions to a market in a democracy that is assertive. The possibility of democratic assertion poses a risk to investors. Policy makers therefore decided to make government and democracy, by law, limited.
Which was the motivation behind crafting the MAI. Which provoked the mass mobilization reaction in Seattle in 1999 at the WTO.
The thing to remember is that much of these investment protecting, labor attacking agreements were put forth by Democrats. These attitudes are bipartisan. This is why you have the tea party getting cable coverage and OWS getting tear gas. The OWS movement directly challenges the 30 year old operating procedures of the elites which naively believed that we saw "the end of history" when the berlin wall fell.
They gave the keys to our political systems to the masters of the market and, instead of being proper stewards of our societies, the masters looted them.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 12:55 AM
Therefore, the question we have now is, what do we do when our elites fail us and do not seem to know how to correct themselves?
We waited for three years after Obama was elected for change. We voted for the Democrats to lead us out of a broken system, not to make nice within it.
We cannot expect to change intellectually captured leaders through civil engagement when they see assertive democracy as a threat and they see our constituency as one who will vote for them for lack of a better choice.
If civil engagement doesn't work, then maybe civil disobedience will.
That is OWS - and it ain't over yet.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 01:09 AM
Time to toll the Reality Bell:
"The so-called "vampire class" pays nearly ALL of the income taxes paid in this country. Indeed the top 5 % of income earners pay 60% of all of the federal income tax collected, and half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all."
This is called a FACT.
All of the obfuscation and redirection in the world won't change this, Thimbles.
The lefties want to change the subject every single time this truism sees ink.
They redirect to avoid the truth about income taxes - they claim that the payroll taxes hit the "working poor" unfairly (but they can't make this argument without ignoring the disproportionate benefits that the "working poor" receive.
Note: Thimbilistic Chittumism requires duplicity in dealing with "inequality" in considering payroll taxes. When it comes to paying them, they are taxes according to these loonies, just like any other taxes and the fact that the "poor" pay more taxes, as a proportion of income and due to the cap on taxable income, that the "rich" do, drives them nuts. However, when it comes to a discussion of the BENEFITS that the payroll taxes fund (in theory) then the LAST thing these lefties want to do is to examine the inequality - where the FACT is that the "poor" receive many times the benefits (when compared to they payroll taxes they paid over their lives) as the "rich" do.
They talk about sales taxes and other state taxes, but these taxes are minimal and often don't apply to food, medicine or other necessities.
Finally, they ignore the cash that flows directly to the "poor" from the Gubmint in the form of tax credits, like the "head of household" filing status, the Earned Income Credit, the "Making Work Pay" credit, and the Child Credit, not to mention state credits and welfare programs like SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, SSI, S/CHIP, etc, etc, etc.
The FACT of the matter, is that people at the bottom quintile of American income earners GET MORE MONEY OUT OF THE TREASURY THAN THEY PUT INTO IT.
This is just the undeniable TRUTH.
No matter what Thimbles blithers to the contrary.
#9 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 09:54 AM
I see that the mental giants of journalism are still spreading partisan hooey and general misinformation, thick as ever. That's too bad, because the heroes of every revolution are those who expose and oppose State evil instead of concealing and promoting it. But maybe it's not too late to turn that leaf. Last I checked, folks like Ben Swann and Glenn Greenwald are still giving free lessons on how to be a free and independent press.
#10 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 10:08 AM
Thimbles can't point to any specifics of course...
The simple fact of the matter is that there is nothing stopping anyone from painting houses, washing cars, hauling trash, etc, 80 hours a week to become successful in business. Not a damned thing except laziness.
That's just the truth.
The only thing keeping the Occupiers from wealth is effort.
Moving on....
It is worth noting that a central tenet of the Occupier's Manifesto is that "Wall Street" is rampant with "fraud".
The word "fraud" is never defined in the Occupier's lexicon. It a nebulous concept - anytime "somebody else" makes a profit, then "fraud" occurs.
Anytime anyone takes a risk, then "fraud" occurs (though lenders are expected -nay, REQUIRED to make risky loans to the high risk borrowers the Occupiers deem worthy).
If a business makes money, "fraud" happens. If a business loses money (except for Solyndra and Obama's other "green" companies), "fraud" happens.
Finally, it is important to note Thimble's accusation of racism. He is really a rather nasty person when it comes to such accusations.
You know Thimbles is hitting headfirst into the Wall of Truth, when he starts in with the nasty ad hominem.
This is rather ironic since he is the one who brings up race here - and when he does, it is to advocate for some silly racist position. (For example, his contention here that journalists should be held to different standards based on race).
#11 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 11:18 AM
"Thimbles can't point to any specifics of course..."
Are you saying, all this:
"the government that lost more than a million jobs since Obama took office.
Or the government that has run up $5 trillion in debt since Obama took office.
Or the government that has seen gas prices double since Obama took office.
Or the government that has seen income inequality increase since Obama took office."
suddenly doesn't matter when the blame for it is on the .01% living in new york? Then I guess it doesn't matter no matter who you blame, you selfish, lazy crybaby.
"It is worth noting that a central tenet of the Occupier's Manifesto is that "Wall Street" is rampant with "fraud".
The word "fraud" is never defined in the Occupier's lexicon. It a nebulous concept - anytime "somebody else" makes a profit, then "fraud" occurs."
http://www.correntewire.com/code_is_law_literally
"Finally, it is important to note Thimble's accusation of racism. He is really a rather nasty person when it comes to such accusations."
When it comes to Obama, many conservatives and you in particular are racist.
There are a lot of problems in America which first became visible in 2007. You want to blame it on the "undereducated, inexperienced" man with the "black muslim" friends who assumed office in 2009.
What do you call that, padfly?
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 11:57 AM
In other news, on the topic of "wondering how to afford the new costs coming down from our downsizing state governments, who lost a bunch of tax revenue when house prices collapsed"
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3747
and on the topic of "There is nothing stopping anyone from painting houses, washing cars, hauling trash, etc, 80 hours a week to become successful in business. Not a damned thing except laziness. WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE!"
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/national_journal_reports_things_are_bad_out_in_real_america/
"The piece is bookended by the story of Johnny Whitmire, a guy who was unceremoniously dropped from the rolls of the middle class by the Very Serious People In Charge of Things. His wife lost her state job. They fell behind on their mortgage. He applied for the Obama administration’s mortgage modification program. His modification was canceled, Citi billed him for back payments, and his home was foreclosed on. Then he got a bill for not cutting the grass at the home his bank seized, because banks keep foreclosed homes in the names of their former owners to avoid liability issues.
So, Whitmire is angry. And he has every right to be...
Whitmire’s life was ruined by a few specific “institutions”: Mitch Daniels and the Indiana Republican Party, the finance industry as represented by the bank that decided to screw up his paperwork and seize his home, and the Obama administration, which failed spectacularly on mortgage modification efforts for a variety of reasons.
The piece as a whole lays blame for the sorry state of affairs in Muncie at the crumbling of institutions — church, school, government — but Whitmire is actually a victim of elites. It’s elite consensus that loan modifications have to be limited and difficult for homeowners in order to preclude “moral hazard” and save banks from having to overexert themselves. Mitch Daniels, a leading GOP presidential contender among George Will-style Republicans, slashed state payrolls, in the name of fiscal responsibility. The sorts of people who pay for National Journal subscriptions are actually responsible for this guy’s life going to hell.
Fournier and Quinton’s piece goes on to describe the decline in various Muncie institutions: the mainline Protestant church dying as a corporate-inspired Megachurch thrives outside of town, some local government scandal involving improperly cast absentee ballots and an arrogant one-term mayor. The schools are apparently awful, in part because of elite-mandated testing regimes, more Daniels budget cuts, and, of course, because many of their most motivated students have been redirected to private-run and publicly funded charter schools. (Though as usual the awfulness of the public schools is simply stated — there’s no data or anything.)
But if we want to talk about how things got so bad for formerly middle-class people like Whitmire, the culprit is basically the financialization of our entire system of capitalism and the crippling of the labor movement; the slow death of the Mainline Protestant tradition doesn’t really enter into it. Whitmire was screwed by a venal bank and betrayed by an administration that gave venal banks way too much leeway to screw people.
The National Journal advertises that their piece on “the solution” will run next, but I’m not entirely convinced they’ve nailed down “the problem.”"
It's only natural. They've likely been reading stuff like Charles Murray, so it's real easy to miss "nailing down the problem".
H/T's to dday's newsfeed at firedoglake.
#13 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 02:47 PM
Obama does have Black Muslim friends and he most definitely was propped up by (and probably got into Harvard Law School because of) a Black Muslim activist. Indeed Farrakhan claims that Obama ate dinner at his table,
Of course, we'll never know unless the "professional journalists" put the heat on Obama (like they did on Bush) to release his college transcripts. Fat chance of this ever happening.
This is just the REALITY. It isn't "racist" to acknowledge that Obama spent twenty years in a racist church and was married by by a racist lunatic minister. It isn't racist to acknowledge that Obama has eaten dogs and snakes and that he used cocaine and marijuana when he was "stressed" by the mean streets at his Hawaiian private school. It isn't racist to acknowledge the reality that Obama began his political career in the living room of an unrepentant terrorist bomber who ghost authored his books.
Racism (what you engage in) is advocating different standards for different people based on their race (as you have done). I would never do this. Never have, never will.
You, on the other hand, are on record. YOUR WORDS DUDE. Read 'em and weep!
"There's a big difference between a black columnist using the term "negro" and a couple of white guys" -- Thimbles
You own them, Pal.
#14 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 02:50 PM
"You own them, Pal."
I do.
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/politico_explores_talk_radios.php#comments
"There's a big difference between a black columnist using the term "negro" and a couple of white guys on hate radio doing it."
Not ashamed of them, fully willing to show the whole quote in full context.
And as for Obama, there's a lot of legitimate things to get upset about with his choices in policies, staff, and approaches.
You choose race and religion baiting. You choose to push the uneducated black man who used drugs and has dark muslim connections meme.
You're a racy guy, and with your "women who want birth control coverage are sluts " comments, you're proving to be a pretty sexist fella' too.
But this thread shouldn't be about our history, so I'm gonna' call it here.
Mind you, a bit of advice? Why don't you let Limbaugh defend himself for a while.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 03:43 PM
When you take the idiotic and racist position that people of different races should be restricted or permitted to express certain political opinions, Thimbles...
The question becomes... How do you enforce them?
I mean, how do you decide who is "black" enough to express a particular political opinion?
What are you going to do? Have a "Mulatto Commission" to determine the "blackness"? Use paint chips? Hair samples?
I mean seriously... How can you defend such moronic stupidity?
#16 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 22 Apr 2012 at 07:02 PM
Sigh..
Moving on, Michael Hudson has a pretty good read down at Naked Capitalism:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/michael-hudson-productivity-the-miracle-of-compound-interest-and-poverty.html
"Under Pension Fund Capitalism, employees are encouraged to think of themselves as capitalists in miniature – and provide for their retirement by employee stock ownership programs rather than saving up their wages themselves or having pensions financed on a pay-as-you-go basis out of future production. The idea is to make money from money (M→M’), not by producing commodities (M-C-M’). In America, half the employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) have gone bankrupt, mainly by being grabbed by the corporate employers. Corporate raiders borrow credit from bankers and bond investors to fund management buyouts. The plan is to buy out stockholders, pledging the earnings to pay out as interest. And not only earnings; they loot the employee pension plans. George Akerlof won the 20– Nobel Prize for describing this. But novelists have recognized it more than economists. It was Balzac who said that behind every great family fortune is a great theft, often long forgotten to be sure.
Today’s economy is based on theft under the euphemism of “free enterprise.” It’s sometimes called “socialism for the rich” because they receive most government subsidy. But it’s not the kind of socialism that people talked about a hundred years ago. It is a travesty of social democracy and socialism. In a word, it’s oligarchy. But we’re living in an Orwellian world. No party calls themselves fascist today, or even anti-labor. They call themselves social democracy. But it’s the opposite of what social democracy meant in the 19th and early 20th century.
Social Security has not yet been privatized, but education has – not only privatized, but financialized. Students no longer get free or low-priced education. In order to qualify for professional jobs in America, they have to take out loans that put them deeply in debt. Then, when it comes time to start a family, they have to take on a lifetime 30-year mortgage debt. They need to take out an auto loan to buy an automobile to drive to work, especially where public transportation has been dismantled as in Los Angeles. And when their paychecks are squeezed more, they can maintain their living standards and social status only by taking on credit card debt.
Paying the carrying charges on this debt diverts spending away from the goods and services that employees produce. The result is debt deflation. Employees have less and less ability to buy what they produce – except by taking on even more debt. That’s why banks and bondholders have ended up with the increase in productivity – almost synonymous with the 1%. They are the core of the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that now absorbs most of the economic surplus in the form of various types of economic rent: land and natural resource rent, monopoly privilege and financial overhead...
Bankers back anti-government ideology because they want to obtain all of the untaxed rental revenue as interest. So taxes that otherwise would be paid to the government will be paid to the bankers. The result – what you’re seeing today in Europe and North America – is an economic grab that is in many ways like that which gave birth to European feudalism. But this time around it is financial, not military."
And a video interview with Jamie Galbraith on inequality and instability:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/jamie-galbraith-on-inequality-and-instability.html
Worth a view.
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 23 Apr 2012 at 02:57 AM
Thimbles is definitely standing behind his claim that black journalists should be held to different standards than white journalists...
WAY behind it!...
But I really would like to know how such a racist standard who would be applied.
How will Thimbles decide which particular journalist is "black" enough to express a particular political opinion?
HUH?
#18 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 23 Apr 2012 at 02:35 PM
Thomas Frank has been on fire in recent years.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/problem-in-nutshell-by-davidoatkins.html
"The problem is larger than Obama; it is a consequence of grander changes in the party’s most-favored group of constituents. No one has described the new breed of Democrat better than … Barack Obama. “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means – law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists,” reminisced the future president in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope:
As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. … They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital.
“I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” Obama confesses a few paragraphs later. So he has. And so has his party. Today’s Democrats have their eyes on people who believe, per Obama’s description, “in the free market” almost as piously as do Tea Partiers.
Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the new Dems; off limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to think of their organization as the vanguard of enlightened professionalism and the shrine of purest globaloney...
They have permitted nothing less than the decimation of their own grassroots social movement; the silencing of their own ideology. Thanks to this strategy, large parts of America are liberal deserts, places where an economic narrative that might counterbalance the billionaire-pitying wisdom of El Rushbo is never heard and might as well not exist.
The effects of a wrenching recession, on the other hand, aren’t likely to touch the new, well-to-do Democrats directly. They know bad things are happening, yes; they express concern and promise to help the suffering, of course; but the urgency of the recession is not something they feel personally. It is not a challenge to their fundamental values. It is, rather, an occasion for charity.
Oh, but a country where everyone listens to specialists and gets along – that’s a utopia these new Dems regard with prayerful reverence. They dream of bipartisanship and states that-are-neither-red-nor-blue and some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future where the culture wars cease and everyone improves their SAT scores forevermore under the smiling, beneficent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries."
A perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
God, it makes you wonder why even have a second party sometimes. (And then you remember that the other side has morphed into a cross bearing Taliban.)
#19 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 27 Apr 2012 at 11:39 AM
Hiya Charley!
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/robert-draper-book-8385022
"[At] what point, exactly, did the Move Right To Win strategy that had always existed on the fringes of conservative political science circles become uniform orthodoxy, to the point that the 2012 GOP nomination contest because strictly a matter of identifying the maximum conservatism the political markets could bear?
I think I can — and recently have — offered at least a partial answer. It, of course, began to happen in the 1960's, when the Democrats allied themselves with the civil-rights movement and lost the South and those parts of the North where people thought the South had a point. But it really accelerated in the 1970's, when the Democratic party overreacted to what happened to George McGovern and began whoring after corporate money, an effort that required them to abandon at least partly their traditional allies in the civil-rights and labor movements, and to soften their positions on a number of important issues, and basically inculcated into the party a permanent instinct for accommodation and surrender that was only strengthened after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The rise of the Democratic Leadership Council was, in its own way, one of the largest white flags in the history of American politics. In fact, one of the most dismal weekends of my life came at the 1982 Democratic "Mid-Term" Convention, where it became plain that great progressives like the late Billie Carr of Texas were no longer welcomed by the party's serious people.
At that point, the Republican fringe was empowered by the simple fact that there now was no political entity pushing back at them with a force equal to theirs in the opposite direction. At the very least, the Democrats could be counted upon to give them some of what they wanted, at which point they would scream and holler and nobody noticed that the "Center" was drifting in their direction. And when they overreached — the Clinton Impeachment, Schiavo, the entire Bush presidency — they didn't have to regroup. I've often used Stalin's order to the Red Army to describe this — Ni shagu nazad: Not one step backwards — and it's true. They fight like they do not care what happens to the country either way. They fight as though they don't care if they burn their party down. The Democrats fight like they care about both things. The Democrats stopped taking risks 30 years ago. Faced with nihilism, they reach for the olive branch, which is generally sent back to them in ashes...
Holy Jesus H. Christ on a late-night infomercial, the Republicans on Capitol Hill... are pure products of the atmosphere created by people like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist... There isn't a repressed, reasonable Paul Ryan waiting tremulously in the shadows somewhere, hoping Rush doesn't notice him, and secretly hoping in the fondest part of his heart that, one day, it'll be safe to like Ike again. I realize that, at some level, the president has to believe this bushwah, or else his whole notion of what a great self-governing people we are goes right up in flames. But what he's asserting in this interview simply has no basis in the empirical reality of our politics.
Perhaps the Democrats couldn't have held back the onset of dementia in the Republican party all by themselves, but by accepting it, by surrendering to the essential logic of it, while trying to break off bits of sanity that would help them in various elections, the Democrats let it bleed."
#20 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 27 Apr 2012 at 12:29 PM