Class Wars of the Psychopathic Elite

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer

2010-02-26T05:50:00.000-08:00

She wasn't a sociopath. She was a psychopath! Much more evil!

Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
By Mark Ames, AlterNet
February 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked "Atlas Shrugged" as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.

I'll get to where Rand picked up her silly Superman blather from later -- but first, let's meet William Hickman, the "genuinely beautiful soul" and inspiration to Ayn Rand. What you will read below -- the real story, details included, of what made Hickman a "Superman" in Ayn Rand's eyes -- is extremely gory and upsetting, even if you're well acquainted with true crime stories -- so prepare yourself. But it's necessary to read this to understand Rand, and to repeat this over and over until all of America understands what made her mind tick, because Rand's influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means her ideas are affecting all of our lives in the worst way imaginable.

Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman's crime started to grip the nation. His crime, trial and case was a non-stop headline grabber for months; the OJ Simpson of his day:

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun -- most of the kids thought he was a budding manic, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and quickly turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it's believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee, and killed his crime partner's grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman's partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he'd like to kill and dismember a victim someday -- and that day did come for Hickman.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, and told administrators that he'd come to pick up "the Parker girl" -- her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn't know the girl's first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins -- Hickman answered, "the younger daughter." And then he corrected himself: "The smaller one." The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. No one suspected his motive; Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marian's father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising that the girl would be left unharmed. Marian was terrified into passivity -- she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman's extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a "master mind [sic]" and "not a common crook." Hickman signed his letters "The Fox" because he admired his own cunning: "Fox is my name, very sly you know." And then he threatened: "Get this straight. Your daughter's life hangs by a thread."

Hickman and the girl's father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor's demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair -- he didn't even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end.

Hickman's last ransom note to Marion's father is where this story reaches its disturbing: Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father's suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and "ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won't stoop to that depth " What Hickman didn't say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion was already several chopped-up lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer's thrill, maximizing the sadistic pleasure he got from knowing that he was deceiving the father before the father even knew what happened to his daughter. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927:

"It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me," he continued, "and I just couldn't help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marian. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. "When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. "I knew she was dead. "Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out."
Another newspaper account dryly explained what Hickman did next:

Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.
Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam's head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive--he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she'd appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam's father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam's head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam's head and torso out of the car, and that's when the father ran up and saw his daughter--and screamed.
This is the "amazing picture" Ayn Rand -- guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing -- admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should."

Other people don't exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante's bastardized Nietzsche -- but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined "Behavioralism Gets The Blame," a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

"Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman's original rebellion against society," the article begins.

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for "Supermen" like Hickman. Rand's philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even "moral cannibalism" to use her words. To her, those who aren't like-minded sociopaths are "parasites" and "lice" and "looters."

But with Rand, there's something more pathological at work. She's out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people like Ayn and her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the "weak," whom Rand despised.

That's what makes it so creepy how Rand and her followers clearly get off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak--Rand and her followers have a kind of fetish for classifying weaker, poorer people as "parasites" and "lice" who need to swept away. This is exactly the sort of sadism, bashing the helpless for kicks, that Rand's hero Hickman would have appreciated. What's really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan."

As much as Ayn Rand detested human "parasites," there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her Supermen - the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: "If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite."

And yet Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and make declare, with pride, "Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism." Indeed. Except that Ayn Rand also despised democracy, as she declared: "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom."

"Collectivism" is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here for example is another Republican member of Congress, the one with the freaky thousand-yard-stare, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, rto explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs:

"As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that's not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves."

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between "producers" and "collectivism," just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them threaten to "Go John Galt," hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers -- or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and brag about their plans to slash them for "moral" reasons, just remember Ayn's morality and who inspired her.

Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!

2010-02-26T05:46:00.000-08:00

One of My Favorite Writers!

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/02/24/of-high-treason-and-economic-incompetenc

Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!
February 24th, 2010 3:39 AM
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Ronald Reagan was already a 'grandfather' figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: 'Well....there ya' go again!' In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan's empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember --not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long 'depression' which left millions homeless, not the act of 'high treason' called Iran/Contra.

Reagan was no friend of the poor, the working class, the cities. On numerous occasions, Reagan would offer up his own version of 'let them eat cake'. Reagan implied that the poor were lazy and welfare recipients 'crazy'. He invented --full cloth --a 'welfare Grandma' who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Many reputable journalists tried to find this 'welfare cheat'! None succeeded! At last, they were forced to admit that this infamous 'welfare cheat' did not exist. She was either one Reagan's bald-faced lies or one of his many psychotic delusions. I will be charitable to Reagan's memory. She did not exist! Reagan was not nuts, he was just a common, goddamned liar! Tragically, the image stuck. Reagan might have known it would. The lasting image of the 'Cadillac driving' cheat was behind the 1996 'welfare reform law' which the GOP stuck on Clinton who, to his same, signed. It demonstrate the power of the 'big lie' technique which the GOP clearly learned from Hitler.

Of aids victims, he might as well have said what he really believed: 'let them die and decrease the surplus population!'. Reagan is evidence if not proof that evil is what Nuremberg psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert said it was: 'the utter lack of empathy!'.Later, Reagan would pay tribute to Nazi SS, saying of them that they, likewise, 'sacrificed'. Yeah --but for what? Nazism, genocide and enslavement, that's what!

Recessions, like the one following Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut of 1982, harmed workers. American recessions, like periods of prosperity, are inequitable in their effects, harming wage earners at the outset and paying off an increasingly tiny elite on tax day. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter confirmed as much when he compared recessions to a "cleansing douche", a characterization that lifelong goppers must surely apply to everyone but themselves and their country club cronies.

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," former Sen. John Edwards shot back at an event in Henderson, Nevada.

"He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country...He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."Edwards added, "I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

Washington Post, Obama's Reagan Comparison Sparks Debate

When I think about what Ronald Reagan did to this nation, I think of how he struck at and perhaps killed-off a viable labor movement. I think about how middle class families --made homeless --lived under bridges and overpasses in boomtown Houston. I think about how Reagan, like Bush, waged a phony war on terrorism during which terrorist attacks increased some three fold. I think about how Ed Meese waged a war on porn even as a gay prostitution ring operated right out of the White House. I think about how Ronald Reagan neutered affirmative action, the fairness doctrine, and the industries that had kept the middle class in the middle class. I remember how Ronald Reagan was worshipped by the gullible who remembered Reagan's reign at the Republican National convention of 1992: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves", they swooned.

Reagan was both a liar and hypocrite. He occupied the White House with a mandate to cut federal spending. It was his raison d'etre. Conservatives bought it. Reagan became the biggest spending 'President' in U.S. history, doubling the size of the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the deficit! He would escalate the military budget, enriching his crones on K-street and the Military/Industrial Complex. It was a laundered payoff for their unswerving support.

Reagan can be given no credit for restoring the nation's prosperity. It was not enough that he destroyed the labor movement by he would cut off its raison d'etre by exporting jobs and industry abroad. Whatever economic growth occurred benefited only the upper quintile, a fact easily proven by cold, hard stats available to the public at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His tax cut of 1982 benefited only the upper quintile and, inevitably, the chasm between the rich and everyone else widened. To be expected, wages declined; home ownership declined; infrastructure declined. The rich remember Reagan fondly. They alone prospered. Everyone else lost ground. In fairness, that trend was reversed briefly in Clinton's second term but --to be expected --resumed with Bush Jr. Today --just one percent of the U.S. population owns more than 95 percent of the remaining population combined. The Reagan years were heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, only poverty and crime increase.

Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies? Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit. The budget, they said, would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, he doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totalling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the US Census Bureau make stark reading:
Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

Twenty percent of the population owns 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
And more unequal than any other developed nation today.
—Inequality.org
The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of declining in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseum utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work?The answer is simple: the GOP sales pitch is what David Stockman called a 'Trojan Horse'. The purpose of the tax is not to trickle down. The tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! It's a payoff for their support. Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them.

It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief - restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists - thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things - local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama's remarks have done) or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left - and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering.

It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission. It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era.

It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

--Found on the Democratic Underground

Paul Krugman can always be depended upon to put this kind of thing in perspective.
Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

--Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

Reagan/Bush tax cuts are payoffs to the already rich for their support. The GOP prescription is simple: just take another dose of what's making you sick.

Reagan was clearly aloof, indifferent to anyone's plight but his base of ultra rich robber barons, idle rich boys and the war mongers of the Military/Industrial complex. Reagan cared nothing for 'urban voters' which for him meant: 'black people' or 'brown folk'. There was only one black face in his cabinet, that of (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce. At a reception, he asked him: "How are things in your city!" Unfortunately, I don't have the reply. I hope it was: "Fuck you, Mr. President!" Reagan got away with a housing scandal because no one knew anything about it until Reagan had left office. How convenient!

It was during the Savings and Loan Scandal, often described as an 'orgy of commercial real estate speculation', that Reagan managed to rise above it all by closing his eyes to 'widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions' across the nation. As we have seen recently, the Savings and Loan scandal preceded a huge bailout which stuck the tax payer for $billions$ The Reagan administration was a racket!

Widespread, endemic, institutionalized racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, went unrestrained and un-monitored. Big banks exploited what was called 'red lining', openly violating the Community Re-investment Act, to deprive minority and poor neighborhoods of capital. Only eight of some 40,000 applications from banks seeking to expand their operations were denied by the Reagan administration because they had violated CRA regulations.

Reagan cut federal assistance to local governments by some 60 percent. His administration eliminated general revenue sharing, slashed public service jobs and job training, and all but dismantled federally funded legal services for poor people. Other targets: the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and any program having to do with public transit. It was primarily the 'inner cities', which Reaganites considered to be 'black', which suffered. Reagan's favorite 'urban' program' provided aid to highways and that was favored only because it benefited 'white suburbs' not 'black' inner cities.
I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

--Barack Obama, Washington Post

Following is a very brief checklist of a variety of Reagan abuses that defy easy categorization.
During the Reagan years, federal aid to cities dropped from 22 percent to six. Causalities included urban clinics, hospitals, and police.
In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.' And to that, I say: bullshit! Prove it!
Various groups, community organizations et al, fought to limit the damage. Some victories were won including, during the Clinton years, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA. But funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs are still lost and may never be restored short of a revolution that will undo Reagan's very worst legacy: the fact that the rich have gotten exponentially richer as everyone else, including the middle class, have lost gains. I will repeat this until someone gets it: today, just one percent owns more than some 95 percent combine. That is Reagan's most horrible legacy and the one from which almost every other evil springs.
Reagan was called the 'great communicator' but used his talent to divide the nation, perhaps, irreparably! Obama inherited a nation in which there is extreme wealth among the very, very, very few but obscene poverty and deteriorating conditions among the many. The middle class is no longer smug but threatened and the increase in foreclosures throughout suburbia will attest.
Iran-Contra: A Case of Treason!

In 1986, the Reagan administration was implicated in two illegal and secret U.S. Government stemming from the Reagan administration's support for Nicaraguan 'contra' rebels. At the time, U.S. law prohibited aid and/or the sale of arms as had transpired in Iran/Contra. The scandal called 'Iran/Contra' came to light Reagan administration officials announced that government had sold arms to Iran. Iran was, at the time, an avowed enemy of the United States. It was not so long ago, that U.S. embassy personnel had been recently released by the 'revolutionary' government in Iran. Proceeds from the arms sales to Iran were diverted --of the books --to the 'contra' rebels in Nicaragua.

As the 'scandal' came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese sought the appointment of a 'special prosecutor', a position in which Lawrence E. Walsh would assume the role of 'independent counsel' to investigate and prosecute possible crimes arising from what was already called 'Iran/Contra'.

It was alleged that Director Casey's 'unswerving support of President Reagan's contra policies' encouraged the CIA officials to exceed legal restrictions in both operations, though it cannot be said that Iran/Contra was the origin of CIA 'off the book' operations. The Boland Amendment of October 1984 had sought to prohibit and prevent the CIA from aiding the 'contras' either directly or indirectly. As the 'scandal' came to light, it became increasingly clearly that Casey had made an end run around Boland and was, in fact, the architect of North's role in a so-called 'contra-support team'.

North's role --described as 'dove-tailing' CIA activities --violated the Boland restrictions even as Casey either ordered or supported arms sales to Iran. 'Operatives' Alan Fier and Claire E. George lied to Congress for the purpose of keeping 'the spotlight off the White House'. When the arms ales were made public in November, 1986, it was clear that Congress had been lied to, the people, the nation had been misled.

Four CIA officials were charged with crimes. George, the third highest-ranking CIA official, was convicted of two felony counts of false statements and perjury, i.e, 'lying' to Congress. Two CIA 'operatives' were awaiting trial when they were pardoned by Reagan whom Special Prosecutor Walsh clearly implicated in his 'Final Report' on Iran/Contra matters.

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.

Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

The top 400: Income way up and taxes way, way down

2010-02-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

Behind every great fortune there is a crime. ~Honore de Balzac, French realist novelist (1799 - 1850)

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason/2010/02/17/top400/index.html

FEB 17, 2010 18:18 EST
A new IRS report on the richest 400 taxpayers shows their income rose an average of $81 million -- in a single year
BY JOE CONASON

Before angry voters restore Republicans to power -- in the name of "tea party populism" -- perhaps they should consider just how well right-wing rule worked out for them during the past decade. Last fall a Census Bureau study found that real median household income had declined from $52,500 in 2000, the last year that Bill Clinton was president, to $50,303 in 2008, George W. Bush's final year -- a period during which Republicans dominated Congress as well. Millions of those median households lost their health insurance (and, since the onset of the Great Recession, many of those same families have lost jobs as well).

So most of those middle-class Americans who flock to the tea party demonstrations were big losers during the Bush era. So who were the winners? According to David Cay Johnston, America's premier tax journalist, newly released IRS data shows that the country's very wealthiest citizens -- the top 400 -- marked enormous income gains while paying less and less in taxes. For purposes of comparison, Johnston notes that the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their incomes rise by only 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with a 399 percent increase for the top 400.

In a single year, between 2006 and 2007, the income of those top 400 taxpayers rose by 31 percent -- from an average of $263.3 million to an average of $344.8 million per year. Meanwhile, Johnston writes, "Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007." He also notes that the IRS data probably understates the income of the top 400, because of deferral rules enjoyed by hedge fund managers (at least three of whom earned $3 billion or more in 2007).

Johnston's data comes from the latest edition of an annual IRS study of the top 400 taxpayers, which was first made public during the Clinton presidency. When Bush became president, unsurprisingly, he curtailed public access to the top 400 report for eight years. The Obama administration has made the report available this year, but such embarrassing statistics will no doubt be buried again as soon as the Republicans return to power.

Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?

2010-02-20T04:37:00.000-08:00

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 11, 2010, Printed on February 19, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the "money changers" who "have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision and where there is no vision, the people perish."

Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric. According to one skeptical congressional observer of FDR's first inaugural address, "The President drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th -- and they were all back on the 9th."

That was essentially true. It was what happened after that, in the midst of the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that is the mirror image of the direction in which the Obama administration seems headed.

Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama has so far revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment. On arrival, expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered extraordinary at all -- until he actually did something extraordinary.

The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to smell like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric -- including populist-style attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or cynically pandering) when uttered by Obama's brainiacs -- layered on top of the pile like deodorant. Meanwhile, the country is suffering through a recovery that isn't a recovery unless you happen to be a banker, and the administration stands by, too politically or intellectually inhibited or incapacitated to do much of anything about it. A year into "change we can believe in" and the new regime, once so flush with power and the promise of big doings, seems exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid. A year into the New Deal -- indeed a mere 100 days into Roosevelt's era -- change, whether you believed in it or not, clearly had the wind at its back.

A Tale of Two Presidencies

If, a few days after Roosevelt pronounced them ex-communicant, the "money-changers" were back inside the temple -- "temple," by the way, was how the Federal Reserve used to be known before its recent fall from grace -- no one was too surprised. He, like Obama, was initially worried about alienating big business and high finance. He arrived in the Oval Office, in fact, still a prisoner of his own past and the country's. He believed, for example, in the then-orthodox wisdom of balancing the budget and would never entirely abandon that faith.

Not long before he assumed office, his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, vetoed a bill calling for the accelerated payment of bonuses to World War I veterans. Many of them had only recently gathered in makeshift tents on Anacostia Flats in Washington D.C., an army of the destitute, to plead their case. Hoover, to his lasting dishonor, ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas McArthur to have their tents set on fire and drive them away at bayonet point. Not long after FDR took the oath of office, he vetoed the same bill. He shared, as well, in a broad cultural repugnance for what was then called "the dole," and today is known as "welfare."

The legendary first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, memorable for a raft of reform and recovery legislation, also prominently featured an Economy Act designed to reduce government expenditures. Fearing the possibility of a break with the commercial elite, the president tried forging a partnership with them, much as Hoover had. As a matter of fact, the first two pieces of recovery legislation his administration submitted to Congress -- the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act -- were formulated and implemented in a way that would seem familiar today. They gave the country's major corporations and largest agricultural interests the principal authority for re-starting the country's stalled economic engines.

However, even as the administration tried to maintain its ties to powerful business interests and a traditional fiscal conservatism, it broke them -- and it severed those connections in ways, and for reasons, that are instructive today.

*The Glass-Steagall Act: This emergency banking legislation passed during those extraordinary first 100 days separated commercial from investment banking. It was meant to prevent the misuse of commercial bank deposits (other people's money like yours and mine) in dangerous forms of speculation, which many at the time believed had helped cause the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, prelude to the Great Depression. Today, ever more people wish Glass-Steagall had never been repealed (as it was in 1999), as its absence helped open the door to the financial misadventures that brought us the Great Crash of '08.

The bill infuriated what was called, in those days, "the Money Trust," especially the once omnipotent house of Morgan, the dominant member of an elite group of Wall Street firms that had run the financial system since the turn of the century when J.P. Morgan, America's most famous banker, was revered and feared around the world. (Jack, the patriarch's son, was so incensed by New Deal financial reform that he banned all pictures of the President from the bank's premises.) Glass-Steagall, as well as the two Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 which created the Securities and Exchange Commission and left the doyens of the New York Stock Exchange apoplectic, represented real reform, and so were different in kind from TARP and all the other contraptions designed by the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments simply to bail out the financial sector.

*The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Offspring also of those first 100 days, the TVA uplifted a vast, underdeveloped, and impoverished rural region of the country by bringing it electric power, irrigation, soil conservation, and flood control. It introduced the then-alien (and once again alien) idea of government-directed economic planning and development. It left the private utility industry irate at the prospect of having to compete with effective, publicly owned electrical-power-generating facilities. Fast-forward to today when, on the contrary, the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, conniving behind closed doors with Obama's people, proved triumphant in a similar confrontation, leaving government competition in the dust.

*Jobs: And then there was, as there is again, the question of jobs and how to create them. In 1933, American politicians still took the notion of balancing the budget each year with deadly seriousness. In our present era, every president from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and now, apparently, Barack Obama talks the talk without any intention of walking the walk. What made the Roosevelt moment remarkable was this: balanced-budget orthodoxy notwithstanding, the new administration soon forged ahead with a set of jobs programs that not only implied deficit spending but an even more radical departure from business as usual.

Initially, the Public Works Administration (PWA), created as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, relied on large-scale infrastructure projects farmed out to private enterprise. Undertaking such projects inevitably entailed government borrowing and deficits. Partly for that reason, the PWA proceeded at a glacial pace, put few to work right away, and -- in the way it looked to the private sector to take the lead -- resembled the latest thinking of the Obama administration whose newest tepid suggestions for creating jobs depend almost solely on funneling tax relief to business.

Simultaneously, however, the New Deal pursued a more daring alternative. FDR diverted a third of the PWA's budget to the Civil Works Administration (CWA), out of which was born the legendary Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency that deployed hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to restore the country's forests and parklands. The CWA skipped the private sector entirely and simply put people to work: four million people in the summer and fall of 1933. (That would be the equivalent, today, of ten million Americans back on the job.)

During the first nine months of the Roosevelt administration manual laborers, clerks, architects, book-binders, teachers, actors, white and blue collar workers alike became Federal employees. They laid millions of feet of sewer pipe, improved hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and built thousands of schools, playgrounds, and airports. Harry Hopkins, who ran the CWA, was authorized to seize tools, equipment, and materials from Army warehouses to get the new system up and running. (The Works Progress Administration, a subsequent incarnation of the CWA, would later create eight million jobs on the same principle of public employment.)

This isn't even within hailing distance of where the current Administration is now as it frets about the deficit and pledges to freeze domestic spending (and implies, without having the courage to say so, that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security had better watch out). Coming from a regnant Democratic Party this is change we can't or don't want to believe in.

Heading Backwards

Like Obama, Roosevelt was denounced by his enemies in the Republican Party and the business community as a closet socialist (not to mention a cripple, a Jew, and a homosexual). While the administration would sometimes trim its sails considerably to weather the right wing storm, its general reaction to Republican opposition was the opposite of Obama's. Even during that first year, and at an accelerating pace afterwards, the momentum of the New Deal carried it irresistibly to the left.

This was true, in fact, of the whole Democratic Party. The Congress elected in the off-year of 1934 was not only more overwhelmingly Democratic, but the Democrats who won were considerably more progressive-minded. They were far readier to jettison the shibboleths of the old order and press a still cautious President in their direction. By 1936, the essentials of the social welfare and regulatory state were in place, an insurgent labor movement had won the elementary right to organize (while becoming the New Deal's most muscular constituency), and the president was denouncing "economic royalists" and "tories of industry" whose "hatred" for him he "welcomed."

Today the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are visibly moving in the opposite direction. They read the lesson of humiliating defeat in Massachusetts and the voluble hostility of the populist right as an advisory to move further to the right. Tacking rightward, tailoring policy to match the tastes of business and finance, cautioning Americans that they'll need to tighten their belts (as if they hadn't already been doing so), adopting the parsimonious sanctimony of the balanced budget, slimming down their great expectations until what little is left mocks the hopes of so many who elected them -- all of this is seen as smart politics.

Smart like a chicken. This is the same cleverness that, beginning with Ronald Reagan's triumph, turned the Democratic Party into Republican-lite. Shrewdness like this helps explain, in part, why Obama's inner circle and Democratic leaders took the early, fateful steps that were bound to land them where they find themselves today.

Would the Republican right and its tea-party populists -- marginal, mockable political freaks less than a year ago -- have enjoyed their current growth spasm if the administration hadn't been committed to bailing out the very institutions most people considered the villains responsible for running this country into a ditch? Would the Democratic Party have been in imminent danger of losing its faltering grip on Congress had it found the will to pursue serious health-care reform and environmental legislation, or wrestled the financial oligarchy to the mat as Roosevelt did? A long generation spent cowering in the shadows of the conservative ascendancy has left the newly empowered Democrats congenitally incapable of seizing their own historic moment.

After a year of feinting to the left without meaning it, how seriously is anyone going to take the administration's latest call to tax the banks or break their addiction to reckless speculation? Even if Obama now means to push ahead with some sort of health-care reform or put some teeth into new financial regulations, he has spent so much political capital moving in the opposite direction and seeking partners where there never were any that his quest, even if genuine, may now be purely quixotic. As for the surge in Afghanistan and the endless war that goes with it, by election time 2010, it's an even bet that it will have further undermined any hopes of a late-inning Democratic Party revival.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, off-year elections do not always favor the minority party. Indeed, 1934 may be the best example of the opposite effect. Exactly because the New Deal showed itself ever readier to junk the ancien régime, break with economic orthodoxy, and above all say goodbye to its erstwhile corporate friends, it was rewarded handsomely at the polls. None of that apparently will be repeated in 2010, given an administration that seems to be running a New Deal in reverse.

The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class Part One

2010-02-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
By David DeGraw, Amped Status
February 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/

"The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight." -- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.

It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99 percent of the U.S. population no longer has political representation. The U.S. economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.

Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99 percent of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep...and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the U.S. middle class.

To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.

Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.

Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let's take a look at how much damage they have already caused.

Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage

The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable." You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.

We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. "Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today." Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: "The percentage of 'underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes." Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.

One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world -- the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled "Incarceration Nation" revealed that "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America."

Mass Unemployment

The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error" in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January."

When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.

Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?

Working More for Less

The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had "better-than-expected profits" with earnings 17 percent above expectations, "the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans' job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low.

There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today's economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.

A Crime Against Humanity

The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they "normalize the unthinkable" and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.

Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery; the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn't get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child's next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how they are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or Internet bill.

There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.

These are all basic things every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.

Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Are Upending Our Democracy

2010-02-16T08:04:00.001-08:00

By Janine Wedel, AlterNet
February 4, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145533/

Editor's Note: Any time you turn on the television these days, you'll find pundits sounding off on the policy debate du jour. Labeled something along the lines of "military experts" or "Democratic consultants," you have to wonder what they're hiding behind those vague-sounding titles. In an era when mainstream media turns to punditry to shape the American public's view of the most important policy issues, it's worth looking into who these so-called experts are and what effect they're having on our society. As Janine R. Wedel writes in her new book, Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (excerpted below), the rise of a new breed of confidence men and women -- think-tank members, government advisers, business consultants and television pundits -- upend our democracy. Because they are technically individual actors, they claim to hold no allegiances; in fact, they usually hold too many.

* * *

We live in a world of flexibility. We have flex time, flex workers, flex spending, flex enrollment, flex cars, flex technology, flex perks, mind flex—even flex identities. “Flex" has become an integral part not only of how we live, but of how power and influence are wielded. While influencers flex their roles and representations, organizations, institutions, and states, too, must be flexible in ways they haven’t been before. The mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible. Even the short-term consultant doing one project at a time cannot afford to owe too much allegiance to the company or government agency. Such individuals are in these organizations (some of the time anyway), but they are seldom of them.

Being in, but not of, an organization enables these players to pursue a “coincidence of interests,” that is, to interweave and perform overlapping roles that serve their own goals or those of their associates. Because these “nonstate” actors working for companies, quasi-governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) frequently do work that officials once did, they have privileged access to official information—information that they can deploy to their own ends. And they have more opportunities to use this information for purposes that are neither in the public interest nor easily detected, all the while controlling the message to keep their game going.

Take, for instance, Barry R. McCaffrey, retired four-star army general, military analyst for the media, defense industry consultant, president of his own consulting firm, part-time professor, and expert, whose advice on the conduct of the post-9/11 U.S. wars was sought by the George W. Bush administration and Congress. Crucial to McCaffrey’s success in these roles was the special access afforded him by the Pentagon and associates still in the military. This included special trips to war zones arranged specifically for him, according to a November 2008 expose in the New York Times. McCaffrey gleaned information from these trips that proved useful in other roles—and not only his part-time professorship at the U.S. Military Academy, which the Pentagon claimed is the umbrella under which his outsider’s perspective was sought.

At a time when the administration was trying to convince the American people of the efficacy of U.S. intervention in Iraq, the general appeared frequently as a commentator on the television news—nearly a thousand times on NBC and its affiliates. He was variously introduced as a Gulf War hero, a professor, and a decorated veteran, but not as an unofficial spokesperson for the Pentagon and its positions. He also was oft-quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other leading newspapers.

Further, in June 2007, according to the Times, he signed a consulting contract with one of many defense companies he had relationships with, which sought his services to win a lucrative government contract. Four days later, McCaffrey did the firm’s bidding by personally recommending to General David Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, that the company supply Iraq with armored vehicles, never mentioning his relationship to it. Nor did he reveal these ties when he appeared on CNBC that same week, during which he praised Petraeus, nor to Congress, where he not only lobbied to have the company supply Iraq with armored vehicles but directly criticized the company’s competitor.

Using information and access to link institutions and to leverage influence is what General McCaffrey and other such players were expected to do by an administration seeking public support, media in need of high ratings, industry pursuing profits, and academia in search of superstars. But because only the individual player bridges all these institutions and venues—by, for instance, enlisting access and information available in one to open doors or enhance cachet in another—only he can connect all the dots. Such a game involves a complex, although subtle, system of incentives that must reinforce its players’ influential positions and access to knowledge and power. And the players must uphold their end of the bargain. When McCaffrey criticized the conduct of the war on the "Today Show," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly cut off his invitations to Pentagon special briefings. Tellingly, McCaffrey went back on the air, reiterated the Pentagon’s line, and regained entry into those briefings.

McCaffrey owes some of his access to a Pentagon public relations campaign that enrolled retired, high-status military personnel as “message force multipliers” in the media, according to an earlier piece in the Times. McCaffrey was among the most high-profile members of the campaign, during which, from 2002 to 2008, the Pentagon provided the seventy-five analysts access to military campaigns and initiatives through private briefings, talking points, and escorted tours. Following the expose and congressional calls for an investigation, government auditors looked into whether the Pentagon effort “constituted an illegal campaign of propaganda directed at the American public,” as the Times put it. The Pentagon’s inspector general found that Pentagon funds were not used inappropriately and that the retired military officers didn’t profit unfairly from the arrangement. President Obama’s Pentagon later rescinded the inspector general’s report, but no new one was issued.

Even when they are not whitewashed, such government audits are not designed to capture the reality of today’s influencers and the environment in which they operate—a reality that poses potentially much greater harm to a democratic society than a mere drain on taxpayer dollars. While millions of viewers, Congress, and General Petraeus were led to believe that McCaffrey was offering his expert, unbiased opinions, McCaffrey’s interlocking roles created incentives for him (and others of his profile) to be a less-than-impartial expert. The Times understatedly remarked, “It can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.”

Meanwhile, the official and private organizations in and out of which such movers and shakers glide either just go along to get along or are ill equipped to know what these actors are up to in the various venues in which they operate. In McCaffrey’s case, no institution, from the Pentagon to the defense contractor to NBC, had an incentive to be anything but complicit. Operators like the general have surpassed their hosts, speeding past the reach of effective monitoring by states, boards of directors, and shareholders, not to mention voters. And while the players sometimes cause raised eyebrows, they are highly effective in achieving their goals—and often benefit from wide acceptance. Much more than the influence peddlers of the past, these players forge a new system of power and influence—one that profoundly shapes governing and society.

This new breed of players is the product of an unprecedented confluence of four transformational developments that arose in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the redesign of governing, spawned by the rising tide of government outsourcing and deregulation under a “neoliberal” regime, and the rise of executive power; the end of the Cold War—of relations dominated by two competing alliances—which intensified the first development and created new, sparsely governed, arenas; the advent of evermore complex technologies, especially information and communication technologies; and the embrace of “truthiness,” which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record. While it may be jarring to mention such seemingly disparate developments in the same breath—and to name “truthiness” as one of them—the changes unleashed by these developments interact as never before.

The proliferation of roles, and the ability of players to construct coincidences of interest by those who perform them, are the natural outcome of these developments. So, for example, increased authority delegated to private players (facilitated by privatization, the close of the Cold War, and new, complex technologies) has enabled them to become guardians of information once resting in the hands of state and international authorities. While supposedly working on behalf of those authorities, such players (working, say, as consultants for states or as special envoys or intermediaries between them) can guard information and use it for their own purposes, all the while eluding monitoring designed for the past order of states and international bodies.

And they get away with it. Appearances of the moment have become all important in today’s truthiness society, as comic Jon Stewart expressed in his quip: “You cannot, in today’s world, judge a book by its contents." Today’s premier influencers deftly elude such judgment. Pursuing their coincidences of interest, they weave new institutional forms of power and influence, in which official and private power and influence are interdependent and even reinforce each other.

The phenomenon of these “flexians” is no less than a systemic change. A new system has been ushered in—one that undermines the principles that have long defined modern states, free markets, and democracy itself.

From Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market by Janine Wedel. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009.

Janine R. Wedel is a professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Her previous books include Collision and Collusion. She lives in Washington, DC.

Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?

2010-02-02T13:03:00.001-08:00

Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
By Harriet Fraad, Tikkun
February 2, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145481/

This is the cover article for the January/February issue of Tikkun magazine. For more on the article and the magazine go here.

An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.

This article looks at each of five collaborators in the crisis in order to answer the following questions:

How did this happen? What forces are responsible?

Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, their hopes of justice, and the American dream?

Why do Americans remain disorganized at home while their European and Asian counterparts flood into the streets and strike in militant, organized protest? Why do others believe in their potential to reclaim their lives while we do not?

What happened is a result of at least five major, interrelated forces. One is a transformation of American morality, and with it the loss of belief that the social and political realms could be shaped by morality, ethics, and secular spirituality. Another is an economic depression. A third is a transformation of the family, which has been the foundation of American emotional life. A fourth is the decimation of Americans' social participation in all areas, from bridge clubs and PTAs to political parties. A fifth is the tranquilizing and numbing of the American population with psychotropic medications.

1. The Crisis in Morality and Social Ethics

Let us begin with the first of our contributors: American ethics, morality, and spirituality. The same forces that decimated our economic, psychological, and social landscapes have transformed our sense of morality and social ethics. The shared dream of an ethical, moral society that dominated the United States until the 1970s has systematically eroded. In the 1960s it was common to believe that morality and spirituality include a concern for all human beings, rich and poor alike. The biggest push against those social ethics began with Reagan's presidency in 1981. It continued in Reagan's second term and was reinforced by each president until its (we hope) final act in the presidency of George W. Bush.

Reagan's basic ideology was that people are poor because they lack incentives. He claimed that poor people's noble drive to get rich is eroded by social programs that permit them to survive or, in his term, "freeload." In this framework, income tax cuts increase the incentive to work and get rich, so all are expected to benefit from them. In 1980 the highest incomes were taxed at 73 percent. In 2009 those same high incomes were taxed at half that rate, 35 percent. Of course the percentage of tax on the highest incomes is actually even lower, since the wealthiest Americans can hire tax accountants to help them evade taxes. Reagan used his famous veto power to cut a huge range of social programs from biomedical research, to social security for disabled Americans, to clean water, to expanded Head Start. At the same time, he increased the military budget while decrying big government.

That pattern has been repeated ever since, which is how, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States went from being the most egalitarian western industrialized society in 1970 to the least egalitarian in 2009.

In addition, the Soviet model of socialism failed. It did not provide the kind and ethical societies that are part of a socialist vision. The mass of people believed that the Soviet Union was communism. Left-wing class analyses of the failure of Soviet Communism, such as Bettelheim's in the late 1970s or Resnick and Wolff's in 2002, were not widely read or embraced. Both of those analyses demonstrate that the USSR and its satellites exemplified class societies in which a bureaucratic class appropriated wealth and made crucial decisions affecting the lives of the mass of people. They explain that the USSR failed because it was not a communist society. It was not a society in which the people in each workplace decided what to produce, and also collected their own profits and decided together how to distribute those profits. Because these left-wing class interpretations were few and largely unembraced, a socialist or communist dream seemed doomed to end in rigid, bureaucratic, and undemocratic societies that were rejected by their own people. People lost faith in a secular dream.

Slowly there has been a transformation of our morality and ethics. Where our morality once required the United States to embody our ethics in the world and empower all citizens, it has shifted so that our morality now consists of requiring conservative personal and sexual behavior. Within that morality Clinton committed an impeachable crime by lying about having sex with an intern, while Bush and Cheney did not commit impeachable crimes by lying about the threat from Iraq and thus causing the deaths of over four thousand U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, or by torturing prisoners. It is not considered immoral to spend between six billion and twelve billion dollars a week on the war in Iraq while cutting school and social programs for needy families because "there is not enough money." The secular morality that made America a proudly democratic and egalitarian nation has deteriorated. We are experiencing a national moral, ethical, and spiritual crisis.

2. The Dying of the Economic Dream

A second contributor to American passivity is the economic crisis from which we are suffering. Let us look at our history in order to understand what happened. From 1820-1970, the United States experienced a unique period of ever-increasing prosperity. For 150 years, U.S. salaries rose together with ever-increasing worker productivity. For 150 years, each generation was able to afford a better standard of living than the generation that preceded it. That was the American dream.

Unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not enjoy working-class solidarity with other workers whose families and social organizations, unions and political parties were inflected by a history of overt class struggle fought as proudly permanent members of the working class. Europeans organized their working unions along political lines. They fought for better conditions as part of the ideology of long-term communist and socialist struggles for ownership and control of their workplaces.

The U.S. labor movement is not informed by a struggle for worker ownership of the businesses that produce U.S. goods and services. Decisions about what to produce and the right to appropriate and distribute profits are left to corporate boards of directors. Americans accepted the capitalist system in which each generation had relatively prospered. American labor fought for an increasing amount of income that would permit workers to consume more goods and services, a system in which each generation could move to jobs considered more prestigious and lucrative within the capitalist hierarchy. Blue-collar workers' children could become white-collar, and white-collar children could become professionals in the next generation (particularly if they were not just white-collar but white, period). U.S. growth permitted ever-increasing real wages and possibilities for consumption. Even in the Great Depression from 1929-1939, real wages, the amount that one could buy with one's wages, were able to rise because prices fell even faster than wages.

That ever-increasing prosperity stopped in 1970. By 1970 the introduction of computers, better telecommunications, and more efficient transportation enabled jobs to be outsourced to lower-paid workers overseas. Competing factories in Europe and Japan, which had been decimated by World War II, were now vying for U.S. markets. Then China emerged as a manufacturing giant. Competition reduced the U.S. share of both domestic and global markets. The outsourcing of American jobs to cheaper labor markets was not stopped by militant unions, which were unable to achieve the powerful "runaway shop" laws that were won in other nations. Nor did militant unions force the creation of a tight safety net to catch workers in financial distress.

For a long time, there was a relative scarcity of white male workers available for the jobs reserved for white males in America's racially and sexually segregated job markets. White male workers, who were accustomed to receiving increasing real wages and living a lifestyle of ever-greater consumption, could no longer support their families on their frozen wages. Americans' sense of self worth was in large part dependent on their net worth. They became increasingly depressed. Their sense of personal value was cut with their salaries. This happened as the advertising industry burgeoned. Advertising continuously and relentlessly sells consumption as the path to happiness. Consumption was undermined and with it stability, prosperity, and a sense of personal success.

3. What Produced the Crisis in Personal and Family Life?

Economic desperation pushed many more women into the labor force to increase money for the household. Previous to the 1970s, most white, nonimmigrant American women entered the labor force only in times of particular and urgent family need: upon divorce, or if a husband died, was ill, unemployed, or deserted his family. Women's labor outside the home provided some safety in times of emergency. In 1970, 40 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly part time. By the year 2008, 75 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, mostly full time. Many women enjoyed the greater autonomy, variation, and creativity that jobs could provide. Many others were forced by economic necessity to work outside of their homes in routinized dead-end jobs with scarce assistance from governmental supports for day care, after-school programs, or elder care.

Women's work outside of the home helped to improve the standard of living for most families, but it did not compensate families for lost white male wages. Women's wage work imposes not only the obvious expenses of additional clothing and transportation, but also the costs of purchasing some of the goods and services that women previously produced at home free of charge, such as cooking, mending, cleaning, shopping, and child care. Those goods and services are crucial. Once they become commodified in the marketplace, they become expensive. The latest figures from Salary.com indicate that if a stay-at-home mother in the United States were replaced by paid domestic products and services, the cost would be $122,732 a year. The domestic products produced and services rendered by a mom who works outside of the home would cost $76,184 per year.

Even with women flooding into the labor force, families were still financially hurting. Working women had no time to perform full-time household labor and child care, and there was still not enough money for consumption. More money was accumulating at the top while the mass of Americans suffered from frozen wages. The wealthy then promoted the credit card to lend to Americans the money that they formerly would have earned in growing wages. Families became dependent on credit card debt. Since the interest rate on credit cards ranges from 15 percent to 25 percent, Americans descended into debt at record-breaking levels.

The living standard of Americans deteriorated psychologically as well. In American culture, women provide most of the emotional labor to make home a warm and comfortable place for men and children. It is women who usually arrange children's social lives and activities, from play dates to dental appointments. Women are usually the directors of adult social life as well. Indeed, women are usually in charge of emotional life for the entire family. The more women work outside of the home without social support in the form of child care programs and domestic help, the more stressed, overworked, and emotionally unavailable they become. Overwhelmed women have less energy for the roles of social director and organizer, as well as emotional and physical caregiver. Households are hurting emotionally. When Bush took office in 2000, he cut many of the already hobbled social programs that allowed families to survive. Families are in trouble.

Women are no longer willing to work outside of the home, do the lion's share of the domestic work, and simultaneously take care of their children's and husbands' physical and emotional needs largely unaided either by their husbands or by social programs. For the first time in American history, the majority of women are abandoning marriage. Women now initiate two-thirds of divorces. Half of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in legal separation or divorce. These impressive figures do not include the many people who end their marriages outside of the legal system.

When men's emotional relationships with women break down, they have little intimate emotional support. Women usually count on other women to emotionally sustain them. Women still manage to befriend and support each other on a personal level in a way that few men can. These changes in households and family life are a third tributary to America's deluge of disaster. Americans have lost both the financial dream of ever-increasing prosperity and consumption, and also the emotional family dream of a stable family connected by a present wife creating emotional connection and domestic order. In short, Americans have lost what was the comfort of home.

4. Americans' Increasing Isolation from One Another

A fourth disaster is closely related. The freeze in U.S. real wages coincided with the beginning of Americans' increasing isolation from one another. Beginning once again in the 1970s, nearly all social connections between Americans declined. The decay in U.S. social life was an almost total phenomenon. It extended from inviting friends to dinner, to joining bridge clubs or bowling leagues, to volunteering for noncontroversial activities such as the PTA or Red Cross blood drives, to participating in more controversial activities such as working for a cause or a political candidate.

There was growth in social participation in evangelical religious groups; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) groups; internet groups; and self-help groups. However, membership in self-help groups, America's greatest social participation growth area, was outnumbered two to one by drop-outs from bowling leagues alone, according to Robert Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone, which I have drawn on for statistics throughout this section.

Several inconclusive theories have emerged as to why Americans have dropped out of U.S. social life and civic life.

Women dropping out of social activities because of working full time outside of the home accounts for only 10 percent of the overall dropout rate.

One might attribute U.S. social desertion to the phenomenon of busyness, but that too is an insufficient explanation. The average American watches four hours of television a day, which would be difficult to manage with an intensely busy schedule. The Internet may seem like a replacement for social interaction, but the Internet isolates people as well as connects them.

Extensive television viewing may be a culprit since more people relate to their television sets than to each other, and the heaviest viewing correlates to the least social participation. But surely this is a symptom as much as a cause of the problems that isolate Americans. I say this because extensive television viewing is reported by the viewers themselves as so unsatisfying that it leaves them "not feeling so good." Their descriptions portray it as an addiction that compels without satisfying. An overwhelming number of viewers watch for the purpose of distraction or entertainment. Television functions as an escape from loneliness, changed gender expectations, and looming economic disaster.

Perhaps the greatest reason is that Americans are psychologically and also physically exhausted. They have fewer vacations and longer workweeks than any of their Western European counterparts. Activity in society, including activity in politics, has become a luxury good for those fortunate few who have extra time and energy. The Left's natural constituency, the mass of Americans, is exhausted, disillusioned, and in despair. To add to their despair, the tremendous wealth at the top of society has been used to fund right-wing media outlets like Fox News, to name just one example. Right-wing media promote the idea that there is no alternative to the status quo. At the same time, the skewed distribution of wealth allows vast sums to be given to politicians who advance the fortunes of those who pay their way. Immense wealth is invested in weakening the regulations against enormous giving at the top. These developments increase the conviction that ordinary people make no difference in politics. They have no voice. The force of the Left is further weakened.

5. The Drugging of America

The fifth tributary that helped to create our deluge of disaster is both a cause and an effect of America's social breakdown. This is the numbing of Americans with psychotropic drugs. In 2006, Americans, who make up approximately 6 percent of the world's population, consumed 66 percent of the world's supply of antidepressants. In 2002, more than 13 percent of Americans were taking Prozac alone. Prozac is one of thirty available antidepressants. Anti-anxiety drugs, such as Zoloft, are so widely prescribed that in the year 2005, the $3.1 billion sales of Zoloft exceeded the sales for Tide detergent.

Many of these drugs, which are also called "cosmetic drugs" or "life-enhancing drugs," are diagnosed for loneliness, sadness, life transitions, or concentration on task performance. They have been "normalized" through extensive direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing to doctors who are financially rewarded for recommending them to colleagues. Regulations that once restrained the widespread promotion and sales of these powerful drugs have been relaxed to the point of near nonexistence. The United States is the only Western nation that permits direct-to-consumer drug advertising. We are also the only nation without price controls on drugs. Psychiatric drugs are so ubiquitous that the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in America, and antidepressants are their most profitable products.

What Can We Do?

The current disaster did not just happen with the recent burst of the stock market and housing bubbles. Americans somewhere knew for a long time that we could not pay our credit card bills or our mortgages. Somewhere, unconsciously, we had to know that disaster was approaching. We responded with denial, withdrawal, depression, and dissociation accomplished with the aid of extensive television viewing and preoccupation with scandals and celebrities.

Each of the five tributaries flowed together to drown the mass of Americans in debt, family dissolution, isolation, and drug-induced apathy. In response to the original questions that inspired this article, we now need to ask another question: what can we do about it? Americans may now be looking for change. They elected a president who promised change. That change has not happened. Where else can we look?

Capitalism needs and breeds consumerism. We are surrounded by advertisements for products. Ubiquitous advertising has a blighting side effect. The presentation of all human connection now carries a price tag for a branded product. Scenes of connection with a group of friends include, for example, Budweiser beer. The devoted mother is washing your clothes with Tide. The sexy woman, whom men want and women want to be, seems to come with the sleek Toyota. Ads appear whenever we turn on our computers or read newspapers or magazines. Product placement is present in almost every film. Television, America's mass entertainment, embraces product placement and explicit advertising directed to all ages. Capitalist consumerism coveys the message that relationships happen with and through products. There are too few scenes of people trying honestly to connect and surmount their real economic, social, and emotional problems through honest discussion and negotiation. We need more images of people who enjoy their connection and work through the difficult times involved in creating close, mutual, nurturing relationships. How do we manage to effect change within this environment? Where are the contradictions that create openings?

A Time When Noncommercial Values Are Attractive

One opportunity for change has emerged due to the recent capitalist collapse, which has intensified American suffering. People can no longer afford the brand-name products seen on TV. Their economic woes reveal the relentless hustling of now unaffordable consumer products. They try generics, unknown brands, and less consumption, and often find them just as good. This presents us with an opening to question. New, noncommercial values can form.

Since Americans are hooked on the mass media, and the media loves anything new, the Left can create media-attracting new actions. The anarchist group that formed around a book called The Coming Insurrection got full media attention when a well-publicized group jumped on stage at Barnes & Noble in New York for a spontaneous reading that began, "Everyone agrees it's about to explode." The action was widely covered for its novelty.

We can look to the four areas that have grown in the current social drought. They are, in order of their growth, self-help groups, internet groups, evangelical church groups, and GLBT groups.

Self-Help Groups

The largest self-help groups are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Alcohol and drugs have proved to be a personal and social disaster for millions of Americans, who cannot function on the job and suffer havoc in their personal lives due to these substances. Huge alcohol and pharmaceutical lobbies push these substances on individuals desperate for relief from their problems. The individual solution of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol-promoted so efficiently by capitalism-failed terribly. In the face of that failure, millions join together in small groups where they share their pain and suffering within a supportive, nonjudgmental collective that operates without salaries, advertisements, or financial charges. These twelve-step groups give the Left a window of possibility. We can add a thirteenth step to their twelve-step programs. We can add a step to organize against big pharmaceutical and liquor advertising, which profits on false promises. The Left desperately needs to address people's despair and give them support. We can learn to incorporate nonjudgmental personal and political support, as well as psychological and political dimensions, to Left groups where both nonjudgmental attitudes and psychological support have been sadly lacking. The Left has tried too hard to focus on being correct and not enough effort on reaching people where they are hurting. We need to listen to people without judgment as they do in twelve-step programs.

The GLBT Movement

We can also study the contradictions that helped to produce GLBT organizations. Advertising creates omnipresent images of happiness accessed though products that relate to sexual attractiveness. The sexy woman rides in the man's sleek new car. The virile man drives a big truck and smokes Marlboros. Multibillion-dollar industries such as the diet, cosmetic, and fashion industries promote products to enhance sexual attractiveness. Popular culture celebrates heterosexual coupling and family as ultimate happiness while avoiding mention of collective joys or homosexuality.

The GLBT movement works to include those in their identity group who are excluded from the grand celebration of personal couple happiness built around sexual pairing. The very pressure to channel complex desires into heterosexual coupling helped lead GLBT people to, as a group, articulate collective visions of resistance and envision new possibilities.

Since most families and relationships are breaking down, American people desperately need connection. Organizing creates connection. Collective dreams have a chance to replace the individualistic desires cultivated in capitalist America.

What We Can Learn From Evangelicals' Failures ... and Successes

Conservative evangelical groups create a collective vision and connection while celebrating capitalist success as God's blessing. They provide some of what people desperately need and the Left ignores, such as strong verbal support for important work in the home and a focus on the hard work of child rearing. Conservative evangelicals manage to accomplish this while sex role stereotyping that labor, as well as opposing every form of non-church-based material support that actually allows families to stay afloat. They typically oppose single-payer health plans, Head Start for all, sex education (unless abstinence-based), family planning, maternity and paternity benefits, minimum wage hikes, etc. In the end they cannot deliver the support that families need. The savior they pray to has not saved them from financial and personal desperation and divorce.

Evangelicalism's reduction of morality to personal morality and particularly sexual morality has an embarrassing side effect. Googling "evangelical scandals" results in 3,729,000 hits in five seconds. Evangelical scandals have resulted in reduced credibility. There is now an opportunity for the wider ethical spiritual morality of the community associated with Tikkun and left-leaning evangelicals connected to Sojourners who develop their social, economic, personal, and political morality, and who see political activity as an expression of morality taken into the world. We on the Left have an opportunity to champion our own moral, ethical, and spiritual vision to Americans who desperately need both morality and hope for a better world. Evangelical promotion of the centrality of personal connection and family gives the Left an opening to advocate material and psychological support for all kinds of families. The Left urgently needs a family program to address the mass breakdown of U.S. homes and families.

The evangelical groups can, ironically show us what we are missing. The failure of evangelical morality, which excludes social, economic, and political morality, may create an opening for a much-needed left-wing program of social, political, economic, and personal ethics and morality for which many hunger.

Internet Organizing

There are explicitly political possibilities afforded by the net. MoveOn.org and other political groups organize and mobilize through the Web. In Iran, members of the opposition evaded censors, communicated with each other, and aroused national and international support through Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook account of Neda Soltani's murder focused Iran and the world on the violent repression of Mousavi's supporters. That possibility exists here.

The four social growth groups springing up in America's desert of political opposition point out possible avenues for a Left that desperately needs direction. Let us return to our original questions:

Why are Americans passive as millions lose their homes, their jobs, their families, and the American dream?

Why do Americans remain at home, disorganized, while their European counterparts flood into the streets in militant, organized protests? How did this happen? What forces are responsible? We can see that the cycles of capitalism with its relentless need for consumer spending and capital accumulation at the top have devastated America. We can also see that unbridled capitalism has created mass suffering and then turned the rage of those who suffer against all who need governmental assistance and against additional scapegoats such as homosexuals, feminists, liberals, socialists, and immigrants. We can create new roads to reclaim this nation by organizing and activating the mass of Americans who know that the ostensible "recovery" will never return what they have lost. We dared to elect a president who championed change verbally, who campaigned on unity and respect for all, and who preserves the structures that destroyed our lives. En masse, we have turned to self-help groups, evangelists, psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, and sexual identity politics, which do not solve the multifaceted crisis in which we are drowning. America needs another way. Perhaps we can provide it?

Harriet Fraad is a psychotherapist-hypnotherapist in practice in New York City. She is a founding member of the feminist movement and the journal Rethinking Marxism. For forty years, she has been a radical committed to transforming U.S. personal and political life.

The Real Story on Arsenic in Your Water

2010-01-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/199587-The-Real-Story-on-Arsenic-in-Your-Water

Neal Boortz
American Patriot Friends Network
Tue, 03 Apr 2001

At first it sounded pretty damming: George W. Bush had 86'ed an EPA regulation further limiting the amount of arsenic that could legally be found in America's drinking water.

For people who don't bother to look beyond the sensational headlines, this sounds mighty bad indeed! Everybody knows that arsenic is poisonous! Everybody knows that you can die from arsenic poisoning! Why, it's absolutely outrageous that President Bush would do such a thing! He's a madman!

I purposely avoided conversation on this particular subject this week until I could get a little more information.

OK, here goes. So everybody knows that arsenic is poison, right? Fine. Do you also know that arsenic is found naturally in broccoli and other vegetables? Do you know that most groundwater already contains arsenic? Did you know that at low levels arsenic is virtually harmless to the human body?

Here's what happened. The National Academy of Sciences issues a report saying that there is too much arsenic in America's water supply. The EPA follows suit with a new regulation lowering the permissible arsenic in our water supply form 50ppb (parts per billion) to 10ppb.

Fine. Now, what would this cost, and how many lives would it save?

Cost? The water industry says it would cost about $6 billion in immediate capital outlays and about $600 million a year from then on.

That cost should be no factor, though, if huge numbers of lives could be saved. So, what's the toll in saved souls? The EPA says that by reducing the arsenic level in water we're going to statistically save about 28 lives per year.

Whenever you talk about saving lives through regulation, you ought to pay a little attention to just how much each one of those saved lives would cost. We could, for instance, save the lives of a lot of airline passengers if each passenger could be encased in an escape pod with automatic fire suppression systems and a decent parachute in case of a disaster. The cost, though, would be absolutely prohibitive. The EPA realizes this and has suggested a figure of "cost per statistical life saved" for its regulations. That figure is around $4 million.

So, what would the cost-per-life-saved be of these new EPA arsenic regulations? OK, get your official Clark Howard calculator out. The new arsenic regs would save about 28 lives per year - at a cost of $65 million per life. That's over 16 times the EPA's own suggest threshold limit!

So, now that you've learned a bit more, does Bush's rejection of the new EPA standards sound so horrible?

So why does this work so well? How can Democrats, union goons and mental midgets like Barbra Streisand succeed so wildly in demonizing George W. for a decision that actually makes sense? Easy, because the decision doesn't make sense UNTIL the facts are known. Facts - poison to the left and the liberal mental process.

Rioting College Students

So Arizona lost. Big deal. But once again we were treated to video of rioting students overturning cars and setting fires.

Just once I would like to read about strong disciplinary action being taken by a college or university after an event like this. Get the video, then identify every single person you can in that video. If you had your hands on that car when it was turned over - you're out. Pack your stuff. Your education at this university is over. Period. No questions. If your face is shown around that fire - so long! Time to apply to another institute of higher education.

Yeah - like we're going to get that type of a response from today's college and university administrators.

Wouldn't it be nice if this spread!

Tax Revolt: Dozens of small-business owners have stopped withholding taxes from their employees and have challenged the IRS to prove them wrong. 60 Minutes II reports on a tax revolt that's a direct challenge to the way our tax system runs.

Well, Texas congressman Ron Paul has introduced a bill that, sadly, doesn't have a snowball's chance. He wants to end tax withholding.

Class Warfare Rages On

Let's take a quick look at the way the AFL-CIO participates in and encourages the politics of envy and class warfare in America.

Here's a link to a page on the AFL-CIO Web site:
http://cw2k.capweb.net/aflcio/letterstate.cfm?letter_id=1512

It's a letter you can automatically send to your favorite politician or journalist. Throughout this letter you can see one of the elements of this class warfare agenda. The left and the AFL-CIO are working to differentiate between "the rich" and "working people." The goal here is to promote the idea that wealthy people don't actually work for their money. And since they don't work for their money, it's no real big deal if their money is taken away from them and given to people who actually DO work!

If you want a good rundown on the entire leftist-socialist movement in the United States, there is no better place to start than http://www.aflcio.org/home.htm .

Before we move on, here's a quote from AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney about Bush's tax cut idea:
"My fear is that he is so determined to reward his corporate and ideological backers that he will ignore the needs of the vast majority of American people who make daily decisions between pork chops and peanut butter - as he pays attention only to those who must decide between a $190 and a $125 bottle of Bordeaux."
Nice, huh? We have two classes of people in this country. Those who work and have to decide between pork chops and peanut butter; and those who are rich and who's only problem is which wine to drink with their gourmet dinner.

Hey, Sweeney. The next time one of your precious union members needs a job, tell him to go apply for work to someone trying to decide between pork chops and peanut butter.

They're Not Interested in Educating Your Kid

If you needed further proof that government schools don't give a rat's derriere when it comes to educating your child, here it is.

Thomas Edison Elementary School in San Francisco used to be the kind of school that "parents fought to get out of," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. I say "used to be" because in 1998, a company called Edison Schools came in, privatized it and renamed it the Edison Charter Academy. The New York Times says that since Edison took over the school, the proportion of students scoring in the upper half on national math and reading tests has doubled. And the number of students scoring in the lowest ranks has been cut by one-third.

That's great, right? Kids at Edison Charter Academy are learning, and their test scores show it. The kids get their future handed back to them and San Francisco looks good for allowing Edison Schools to take charge. It's a win-win situation, right?

Not if you're a member of the San Francisco Board of Education. A recent investigation alleges Edison discriminates against black students, sends special education students to other campuses, and hasn't provided the school district with records that track the public money the school uses. At a school board meeting last Tuesday, the board voted 6-1 to give Edison Schools 90 days to fix these "problems." If the board still finds problems, the school will lose its charter and revert to government control.

Parents of children at the Edison Charter Academy attended last week's meeting and begged the board not to revoke Edison's contract. More than 80 percent of the academy's parents have signed a petition asking the city to keep Edison Schools.

And opponents of Edison Schools have failed to provide any concrete evidence that Edison has forced students out to increase test scores.

Oh, and let's not forget that this is the same school district whose loose finances led them to spend $30 million in voter-approved construction funding for other things, like salaries. Audits show that over the past eight years, the district has routinely spent money it didn't have. And this week, the district passed up a $50 million federal technology grant because it couldn't even pony up the 17 cents per federal dollar.

The bottom line is that a private company beat government educators at their own game, and the school board doesn't like it one bit. So they're going to do their best to sack Edison Schools and protect their monopoly on San Francisco's children.

Speaking of Privatizing Schools ...

It wasn't a very good week for Edison Schools.

The company also wanted to privatize the five worst-performing schools in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan - but was stopped cold. But it's not the school administrators who sent Edison down to defeat, it's the apathetic, government-addicted parents that nixed this proposal.

Only 2,267 of nearly 5,000 eligible parents cast votes last week. And Edison Schools required "yes" votes from a majority of all eligible parents at each school. Mayor Rudy Giuliani wants the school board to allow Edison to take over the 20 worst schools - with or without parental approval.

Kenneth Wilson is the father of a kindergartner and a first-grader at one of these dreadful government schools: Community School 66 in the Bronx. On Thursday he said, "We hate Edison because they're going to come in here as a business. Each child is a dollar sign." Wow! A true candidate for Parent of the Year.

Sorry ... how is that different from a government-run school? And is it somehow diabolical for a for-profit company to want to operate as a business? Is there something about a company that makes it less qualified than the do-nothing government educators who currently run the show?

If Kenneth Wilson and the other parents put that much stock in the ability of the government regime to teach their kids how to read and write, they're deluding themselves.

Every parent who sends their kid to a government school should sit down and try to think of a single thing the government does well - besides tyrannize freedom-loving individuals.

Our benevolent imperial federal government can't do anything right. So why should you think they're qualified to educate your child?

Be Careful How You Ridicule Dubya

ABC News needs better copy editors.

On last Thursday's World News Tonight, White House reporter (and Clinton flack) Terry Moran ridiculed George W. Bush for using the term "energy crisis." That's because, as Moran said, "there are no gas lines and the price of crude oil is actually declining."

The very next night, anchor Charles Gibson plugged an upcoming story by saying, "When we come back, America's energy crisis. Gas prices are soaring and they'll get even worse this summer."

So one night there's no energy crisis and Dubya's a dunce ... and the next night there is an energy crisis!

Which is it, ABC? You can't have it both ways. And you've just shown the world that you're more interested in slamming the Bush administration than reporting the facts.

Here In The Long Solemn Dark: An Examination Of Global Elitism

2010-01-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

http://neithercorp.us/npress/?p=214
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200545-Here-In-The-Long-Solemn-Dark-An-Examination-Of-Global-Elitism

Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press
Sat, 02 Jan 2010

Inherent in every human being lurk the qualities that make us capable of indelible and enduring good, or astounding and catastrophic evil. Many of us struggle with these natural inborn psychological dualities every day of our lives. With the help of conscience; the ever present voice of the unconscious which guides us towards balance, many of us survive the internal battle without inflicting too much damage on the innocent bystanders around us.

I used to believe that all people endured this same struggle equally, that everyone wanted to eventually achieve that ever elusive self awareness that cuts through the fog of life and makes us feel whole. I believed that all men who committed terrible crimes and injustices against others did so out of ignorance and blindness. Surely, they had lost their way, and did not fully understand the implications of their actions. This did not make them any less responsible, but could they not be redeemed? Had they not let their own shadows run wild in the daylight without knowing the consequences? Weren't all of us, even the worst of us, deep down still striving to do what was right?

In this belief I must now admit, if I am to remain true to my conscience, I was terribly mistaken...

What I did not comprehend when I was younger was that not all men struggle against the dark corners of their own hearts. Some men revel in them. Some men embrace their failings, their hatred and their envy, their vicious desire for control over their environment and those in it, and they do it deliberately, completely aware of the imbalance and pain they are inflicting on others. Where I see weakness of character, they see untapped strength; the strength of cold and unrestrained malevolence. They were not "victims" of their own ignorance. These men had traversed the River Styx and glimpsed the mythological gates of hell, the psychological barrier between saints and madmen. They stood at the edge of reason and truth, looked out into the nightmarish abyss at the back of their own psyches, and liked what they saw!

If there was ever anything closer to the definition of "evil," I have not heard of it.

This methodology, this philosophy of embracing one's darker nature, is ever present in an organized group of people we have come to label "Global Elites." They have existed in various forms for centuries but their goals have always been the same. In this article, we will examine some of the early influences that gave birth to the elitist philosophy, as well as some possible explanations as to why they do what they do.

Plato: Catalyst For Elitism

Elitism has existed perhaps as long as man has existed, but was not implemented on a broad social scale until the formation of empires such as Babylon. It later blossomed into a full fledged brand of "spiritualism" under the watchful eyes of the Greek aristocracy and the tutelage of Plato, or as elitists sometimes dub him, "The Divine Plato."

It is hard to say so many centuries later what the real intention of Plato's Dialogues were. Did he mean them to stand only as metaphorical sociological examinations, as questions designed to promote healthy debate? Or, did he write them as a blueprint for society expecting them to be translated literally and then implemented in the real world? Whatever he originally intended, his views on social structure became the underlying foundation for the monstrous organized brand of Global Elitism we now know today. These views are most prominent in Plato's "Republic," however, they are present in nearly all of his works.

Plato had a very low opinion of the majority of the human populace, often stating that the concept of Democracy; rule by the common man, was far less than ideal. In one of Plato's famous arguments, he proposes that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant, than be a part of a bad democracy, since in a bad democracy, all the people would be responsible for the terrible deeds of a nation, rather than one individual (of course, Plato fails to realize that by letting a "bad tyrant" come to power in the first place, the people are still ALL responsible for any terrible act that tyrant commits). Instead, he believed, there were several levels in which society could form itself, and he listed them in order of significance:

Aristocracy (rule by the best)
Timocracy (rule by the honorable)
Oligarchy (rule by the few)
Democracy (rule by the people)
Tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant)

Plato seems to see no threat in the idea of Aristocracy, and the possibility of a group of men labeled "best" reverting to tyranny appears to have never dawned on him. This is even more evident in his idea of the "Philosopher Kings"; a "guardian class" who are so steeped in knowledge and wisdom as to be nearly infallible and ideally suited to rule over the lives of others. The elites of today salivate over such concepts, because they provide an easy avenue for the justification of their own political ideals of feudal rulership. In fact, Plato and his Philosopher King scenario were often expounded by University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss. Strauss' teachings went on to become the political linchpin for what we now call "Neo-Conservatism:"

http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1542.jsp

http://www.jeetheer.com/politics/strauss.htm

Strauss promoted many of Plato's more questionable tenets, including the idea of the "Noble Lie." In his book "Persecution and the Art of Writing", Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals (reprisals they likely deserve). He also believed that the only true balance in human nature was the will of the strong; the idea that morality is built upon the views of those who are strongest. The weak had no choice but to adopt the implicit morality of the strong.

Strauss often talked of the need for a moral imperative and even a benevolent God, but interestingly, Strauss was not only an atheist (according to some of his own colleagues), but also a moral relativist. Young and naïve students of Neo-Conservatism often argue that Strauss was a promoter of high morals because he mentions them so often in his books, but they do not seem to understand the context in which he uses them. Strauss felt that a moral framework was a useful tool in manipulating the masses, and nothing more. He was in no way a man of conscience. Religion or any other system that focused on the development of conscience was meant for the lowly serfs, while the elite "Philosopher Kings" would rule with their own set of virtues, virtues to which the commoners were supposedly not equipped to mentally grasp.

What Plato accomplished, and Strauss later expanded on, was the mutation of elitism from a mere political movement with many undesirable consequences, into a full fledged philosophy bordering on cultism. Elitists were no longer simply an overprivileged class of tyrants and sadists making the lives of common men miserable, now, they were "necessary" to the very mechanics of society. They were "guardians" with the godlike responsibility of molding and directing the course of all humanity. Without them, we would be "lost."

The weaknesses of this methodology are numerous and obvious. It promotes the concept of "equality as illusion," which may have some legitimacy since all people are born with inherent and unique qualities. However, men like Strauss take this fact and twist it, claiming that because we are all different, this means that some of us must be naturally "better" than others, and therefore, elite. This is an extremely childish interpretation of inborn dynamics.

According to the archetypal discoveries of Carl Jung, we are all born with the same psychological constructs, however, each person has a unique relationship to these constructs, meaning, the way in which we embody the archetypes we are born with is particular to each individual. This means that while every person may develop a different brand of intelligence, unless there is a physical brain impairment, we are ALL capable of being intelligent. The elitist philosophy extolled by Plato and Strauss claims that some people are simply born far more intelligent than others, and that these people, being so naturally advanced, should be given free reign to make our decisions for us.

Who is qualified to categorize human beings into such narrow labels? Who decides what intelligence truly is? While one group may focus more on intellect and critical thought, prizing logic above all else, another may see intuition and emotional advancement as true brilliance. How can one determine if a person is hindered rationally and emotionally to the point of being incapable of progress? Does the theory of Plato not limit all men into static states of being? Have people not proven century after century, generation after generation, that we have the ability to change, adapt, and grow?

Some may argue that the lack of intelligence in the average man is blindingly apparent if one only looks around himself. But this way of thinking is based on an invalid assumption; the assumption that because a man acts unintelligent, he is therefore incapable of ever being intelligent. One contradiction I find most interesting about elitists is that they often preach about the natural stupidity of common people, yet, they place most of their massive resources into keeping the public unaware and "out of the loop." If the average man is so "naturally inept," then why have elitists put so much energy into trying to keep us stupid? Why do they keep information, data, the truth of the world, to themselves? Are we not so mentally handicapped that we would not understand the truth even if we knew it?

The fact is, they KNOW we are intelligent, why else would they feel the need for secrecy and lies?

While given the appearance or the dressings of wisdom, the elitist ideal is actually a mish-mash of highly flawed theories and biases flung together so that they may absolve themselves of their crimes against conscience and against mankind. By the standards of logic alone, they have proven themselves to be far less intelligent than they wish others to believe.

Machiavelli: The Methods Of Control

If any historical figure wholly embodies the elitist ethic, it would have to be Niccolo Machiavelli. Most famous for his political treatise entitled The Prince, Machiavelli was an aristocrat extraordinaire, counseling numerous monarchies on the best methods for controlling their respective populace. He was also a military advisor and writer of strategies on war, giving his ideas for social manipulation a cold and violent edge.

Some historians argue that Machiavelli's works on political subversion and tyranny are actually a form of satire, because no one would reveal his secrets of control in the way Machiavelli did unless he was trying to expose the horror of elitism. I find this theory highly unlikely. Machiavelli was an advisor to kings, not a revolutionary with any desire to rock the boat he had been sitting in his whole life. I think it much more likely that he was simply an egomaniac, perfectly willing to speak openly about his disdain for the masses, as many elites are.

The most important (and dangerous) philosophy Machiavelli put forward was his view on good results accomplished by evil deeds. Machiavelli lived at the edge of the Renaissance, and perhaps saw before many that the world was changing. In the past, elites could easily abuse the people through force of arms, and there was no need to paint a kinder picture on their own despotism. However, a sense of revolution, a hatred of monarchy was growing in the populace. The need to manipulate the public through rhetoric instead of only violence was becoming more evident. The people now had to be tricked into going along with their slavery, and Machiavelli was perfectly willing to devise strategies for this eventuality.

He did this by promoting the idea of "the end justifies the means." That is to say, if elites wanted to remain in control of the public, they had to convince the public that evil deeds were necessary in order to achieve a "greater good." This was the first truly cognizant formation of what would be later called "Moral Relativism," although, Machiavelli was more of the opinion that rather than being amoral, all men were inherently bad. Here are some quotes from Machiavelli on these points:
"Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant."
"As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity; and if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered."
"The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again."
Among other things, Machiavelli taught that a tyrannical ruler must offer up a proxy, a sacrificial lamb to the public in order to maintain their complicity. In his time, rulers would execute former leaders, councilmen, advisors, and others who were expendable in order to satisfy the public's need for justice, while at the same time maintaining control over them. This strategy has been honed to perfection in the U.S. political system, in which the elites control both major parties. By sacrificing the public image of George W. Bush, the elites were able to stave off the growing discontent among Americans over the government. They then replaced him with Barack Obama, a man whose policies are nearly identical to Bush's. In this way, Machiavelli has influenced the cultures of today.

The problem with the "ends justify the means" argument is that it treats the "means" as a sine qua non.

Say my goal is world peace, but I use lies, war, genocide, and oppression to achieve it. Then, I make the claim afterwards that all this death and destruction is vindicated because world peace was in fact achieved. My assumption here is that world peace could not have been achieved without the destruction. What grounds do I have for this assumption? The answer is none, because no other method was attempted to achieve peace. I have also assumed that there are no new methods for achieving peace, methods which I had not thought of. Therefore, the "ends" DO NOT justify the "means," because there are many means to an end, some far more honorable than others.

So, what point of reference do we have to determine whether means are justifiable? The answer is conscience, something we will discuss greatly in the next section.

The Marquis de Sade: Do What Thou Wilt

Many people have a tendency to become preoccupied with the elements of sexual perversion when examining the work of the Marquis de Sade, but this is really a side note to the bigger issues at hand. The real root of the Marquis' message is one of corruption, dominance, and amorality. His sexual escapades were merely a means by which he expressed these "values." He said:

"There is nothing either fundamentally good, nor anything fundamentally evil; Everything is relative, relative to our point of view."

From this single rationalization, all the horrors of Global Elitism can be attributed. Through the philosophy of Moral Relativism, any crime, any injustice, any infliction of pain or death on others, can be easily placated as "natural" to the specific viewpoint or circumstance of the man committing the terrible act. The Marquis de Sade's nihilist worldview can be summed up as follows:

(1) God's nonexistence reduces the universe to a purely materialist Nature, a self-running mechanism; "the perpetual motion of matter explains everything."

(2) People are determinist machines, which annuls moral responsibility. You cannot help it, then, if you are sexually perverse or depraved.

(3) There is no afterlife, so your conduct does not matter.

(4) Merely the child of local custom, morality is relative to culture and geography, and therefore fictive.

(5) Nature is our only ethical guide; humans are no more significant to Nature than insects. And since Nature uses matter from dead life forms to create new ones, crime, destruction, and death are necessary and pleasing to her. Therefore murder is good, and the mass murderer is the highest human type.

(6) Born isolated, the individual is solely important, with obligations to nobody and only selfish motivations. Each individual is pitted against all others. His only maxim is to "Enjoy myself, at no matter whose expense."

(7) Man tends naturally to dominate others and inflict pain, which he enjoys.

(8) Ordinary people are utilitarian objects, the playthings of the wealthy, powerful and godlike libertines, who are utterly unloving.

(9) Beauty and innocence inspire only diabolical cruelty. Since materialism makes pleasure proportional to stimulus, the greater your cruelty, the greater your pleasure.

(10) Maximum selfishness and cruelty are therefore the proper course.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/1960890/The-Marquis-de-Sade

The key to the entirety of Moral Relativism is the belief that we are born as "blank slates," and therefore our belief in right and wrong is completely dependent upon our environment, meaning, morality is an empty product of cultural taboo. This is, of course, entirely false, and has been proven incorrect by numerous scientists and psychologists. Watch the film linked below for an in-depth analysis of the failings of Blank Slate Theory:

http://neithercorp.us/sdsl

Setting the debate over the existence of God aside, the psychological reality is, all human beings have an inherent archetypal sense of what we call good and evil, and this sense is common to every culture regardless of environmental conditions, proving The Marquis de Sade's conclusions false. Conscience is the messenger, or the interpreter if you will, of the archetypal sense of balance.

Although the Marquis' philosophy is logically impractical not to mention psychotic, it does illustrate very well the elitist mindset.

A rapist, for instance, often does not derive much pleasure from the sexual act itself, but the control involved over others. Thinking of elitists in such a way helps in understanding the warped reasoning behind their actions. Like the Marquis de Sade, elites are so possessed by their unlimited desire for power and control that they themselves fall into their own pattern of self created determinism. Finding that they will never have enough control to satiate their desires, and discovering that such power over the environment is unreachable, they turn towards thoughts of complete destruction. For them, destruction is the pinnacle of control.

What we also find is that the egotism of elites causes them to strive for what they feel is "true individualism." They see conscience as psychological bondage, a will imposed on them by society, or the universe itself. By breaking free of conscience, they believe they have achieved ultimate freedom, and elevated themselves to a plane beyond the common man. This is called "transcendence through evil."

But by disowning their inborn qualities, they have actually lost everything that gives them individuality, as well as humanity. They have essentially made themselves inwardly dead, soulless dolls driven by nothing but base desire. Instead of self-destructing under the weight of such ambition, they have focused it all into a single collective goal....

The New World Order: Destined For Failure

The New World Order which the Global Elites speak of so often is not just a political shift, or a social reformation; it is an attempt to subvert the human psyche. It is an attempt to defy nature. Controlling the lives of the masses is not enough. What they want most, is to transmute the human heart and bend it in any manner they wish until all traces of conscience and individualism have vanished from the species. Such an act could take centuries, perhaps millennia, and even then it may still be impossible.

When examining the shift towards the NWO, I often take into account the elitist fascination with the game of chess. Zbigniew Brzezinski makes this fascination laughably obvious in his book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives." I am an avid chess player myself, and I understand the game well.

In order to win consistently in chess, one must above all things become exceedingly ruthless. There can be no momentary lapses of compassion. This is something the elites strive for. You must also be willing to sacrifice any piece in order to meet the greater objective; another elitist trait.

In the game of chess, the greatest players do not win so much by attacking their opponent; they win by forcing their opponent to move in the way they want, until, in effect, the opponent defeats himself. This is a fulcrum point for the strategy of Globalism. They set the noose upon our necks, but it is our aimless struggling that tightens it until we suffocate.

The problem is, life is NOT a chess game. People do not follow straightforward patterns laid out beforehand. Some of us walk off the board entirely. Some of us make our own rules. Sometimes, the pawns change the entire dynamic of the game, and this is why the elites will fail. We aren't playing anymore.

The elites often boast of possessing an unparalleled wisdom, an awareness that supercedes all others. If they had attained any wisdom, however, they would have already realized the futility in attempting to control the destinies of other men. Such power is in itself an illusion, for the only power over us is that which we give away. Therefore, the elites only have power over us in so much as we give them explicit consent. All it takes is for one man to say "no," and the entire web begins to unravel. Control of the world is a fantasy, a cartoon, a cabaret, a childish whimsy that those with legitimate wisdom grow out of. The farce can only continue so long as everyone submits to deception.

Here humanity waits, standing still in the long solemn dark, poised to step from the cold cast shadow into daylight. The great threat to elitism has been and always will be the so called "common man." We are the honest and faithful explorers of the soul, unhindered by presumptions of superiority or fixations of malice. We are the antithesis, the counterweight, the opposing force, for we seek no power, no dominance, no control over the world; only understanding. We are the future, not the elites. Their time is nearly over, and with their passing, may we see all the horrors they have wrought undone, until life can be lived the way it desperately needs to be lived; with wide eyes, with honor, with sincerity.

Strength, real strength, comes not from the exile of conscience, or surrender to the murky waters of amorality; it comes from trust in one's own heart. It comes from that intuitive knowing, knowing without calculation or observation. It comes from the utter invincibility of truth; a force against which even the most depraved of elites cannot stand.

SOTT Comment: What the author is describing is the view of the psychopath, nihilist creatures with no conscience who seek only dominance and control over normal humans. For more information on psychopaths and how they rise to power read Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski.

Who cares about the excesses of the rich? It's the fate of the poor that matters

2009-12-28T16:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=dont_blame_the_billionaires

Don't Blame the Billionaires
Who cares about the excesses of the rich? It's the fate of the poor that matters.
DALTON CONLEY | December 15, 2009

When I was growing up, my mother used to sing me the old adage, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," before hastening to add, "And it's all Ronald Reagan's fault." Because I had campaigned for Jimmy Carter as a wide-eyed 11-year-old, this was one of the few maternal claims that I did not dispute in my adolescence.
In decrying the rising inequality of the 1980s, my mother was speaking from a long tradition, extending back at least a century, of progressives shaking their fists at economic disparities. During the 1970s, just as the midcentury compression of economic difference was ending, philosophers and social scientists were becoming concerned with the issue. In 1971, philosopher John Rawls penned A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus arguing that social policy should be based on the imperative to narrow the difference between the welfare of the most and the least well-off in society. The following year, sociologist Christopher Jencks and his colleagues authored a book titled Inequality, in which they argued that attempting to promote the American dream of economic mobility was futile and that if we were truly concerned with equal opportunity, the only real solution was to lessen inequality.

Maybe it was rapidly rising living standards that stimulated such interest in the issue of inequality back then. Like environmentalism, worries about inequality are a luxury that folks seem to indulge in when they are flush. When times are hard -- like now -- families are too worried about their own finances to be concerned about how the Joneses are doing. One study shows that while for Europeans, inequality truly makes them less happy, in the United States only the moods of rich leftists are adversely affected.

My mother was, in fact, only half correct when she quoted the old saying about income polarization. In the United States, the family that is richer than 90 percent of Americans reaps incomes that are between five and six times larger than the family that is better off than only the bottom 10 percent. (In Sweden the rich are about 2.5 times wealthier than the poor; in the Netherlands they are about three times wealthier; and in Great Britain they are approximately 4.5 times wealthier.) If we stop here, we might conclude that my mother was right about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But the truth is that the rich have gotten richer, full stop. If we break down this 90-to-10 ratio into two parts -- how the top is doing relative to the middle and how the middle is doing relative to the poor -- we find that the growth in inequality has been almost all concentrated in how much better the top percentiles are doing than the middle. The poor have for the most part kept pace with the middle class (whose incomes have been fairly stagnant), but both those groups have watched their proportional share of national wealth dwindle as the upper end has broken records for income growth. However, the rising share of national wealth held by the richest 10 percent of Americans has recently hit a wall and declined from the 2007 peak (which matched the 1929 peak). But should my mother cheer this news? Are we better off? It's the fate of the middle and lower classes that should concern progressives, not how many private jets the super rich can afford.

As for blaming Reagan? As much as liberals would like to think so, rising inequality is not his fault. It's not even George W. Bush's fault. Nor is it his father's fault. The sharpest rise, in fact, occurred on Carter's watch. Much more important are factors well beyond the control of politicians: globalization, immigration, demographic shifts, and changeover to a knowledge economy.

Inequality -- and its consequences -- is the wrong target. It's time for progressives to spend less time trying to prove the effects of inequality on health, growth, and politics and instead start focusing on opportunity for those shut out entirely.

***
For liberals, it is self-evident that inequality has bad consequences for society as a whole, from health to the economy. Meanwhile, since the Scottish Enlightenment conservatives have argued that inequality is the engine of progress: Differential rewards lead to ingenuity, industriousness, and innovation. But social scientists have long struggled to determine the effects of inequality because it is impossible to study in any systematic way. We can't do experiments to assign some communities to enjoy (or endure) greater equality than others. In lieu of some grand economic experiment, many scholars have focused on comparisons over time and across places.

A few years ago, there seemed to have emerged a cottage industry on the deleterious effects of economic inequality on health. While it has long been established that there is a class gradient in health -- poorer folks are typically less healthy than the well-to-do -- it has been much more difficult to resolve why this is so and whether the degree of societal inequality itself has an effect on health. The "weak" case is that it's worse for your health and longevity to be poor in a society where the rich are really rich; the "strong" case is that even if you are rich, equality is better for your health.

Early research found that folks in more equal Sweden and the Netherlands were healthier than we here in the United States and our Anglo brethren in the United Kingdom and Australia where inequality is higher. However, the easy rejoinder is that whatever it is that produces that equality -- racial homogeneity, culture, powerful trade unions -- is also causing health. To get around this, researchers have used comparisons over time within countries, but it's not like inequality is driven up and down randomly like the weather. So whatever is affecting the level of economic differentiation could also be affecting health, whether that's government policy, immigration, or fertility.

Other studies have shown that U.S. states with more inequality are less likely to be healthy. But what really makes the difference between states are policy differences -- like minimum wages, welfare rules, ease of divorce, and speed limits -- which suggests that, like countries, whatever states do to produce equality also produces population health; equality itself does not produce better health. To tackle this possibility, other researchers have delved into ever more local levels -- metropolitan areas, counties, even Census tracts. But there is always an alternative explanation. Even unequal neighborhoods tend to differ from more equal communities in terms of their real-estate trajectories, school taxes, and so on.

The cottage industry of inequality-health studies was stopped in its tracks (or should have been) in 2002, when a couple of economists, Jennifer Mellor and Jeffrey Milyo, showed that inequality is not causally related to the health of a population, although individual incomes are related to individual health. Being poor is bad for your health for a whole host of reasons ranging from lack of adequate preventative and curative care to stress to bad behavioral choices, but being unhealthy has nothing to do with other people's incomes.

That diagnosis calls for a different policy prescription than the inequality-health link does: increasing economic growth and opportunity at the bottom.

***
This brings us back to where we started. Is there a trade-off between equity and growth as most traditional economic models suggest? Or are they complements, as economist Paul Krugman argues when he links the Great Compression (the post?World War II dip in inequality) to the robust middle-class growth of the period?

Conservatives have taken it as an article of faith that high capital-gains tax rates and a progressive income-tax erode the incentive for the rich to do good with their money (start businesses, invest, or donate), while shoring up the bottom end of the income distribution softens the need to work. What's more, taxes, even redistributive ones, cause a deadweight loss for the economy as a whole. In other words, government policies that reduce inequality slow the growth of productivity.

It is indeed feasible to claim that a generous dole blunts the need or desire to drag oneself out of bed to clock in at a low-wage job. However, the claim that higher marginal tax rates or corporate levies slow growth through decreasing incentives to innovate and invest is quite controversial, to say the least. The rich can only consume so much. They could invest elsewhere if marginal tax rates were lower, but offshore tax havens aside, ultimately they have to pay Uncle Sam. Besides, most of the developed world is less pro-business than we are. And the developing world already has enough to offer with its supply of cheap labor.

The debate about the economic incentives of progressive taxation and direct effects of inequality on growth is really beside the point, anyway. How we spend revenue is much more important than how we raise it. Investments in research and development, infrastructure, and other public goods with high returns are likely to lead to increased economic development. It's also probably fair to say that taxation that leads to consumption or waste is a huge drag.

What's up for debate is the vast middle ground: Do investments in health care or education also generate economic growth? Certainly progressives have a strong case when arguing that a healthy, well-educated population pays for itself in the long run. But that calls for an opportunity agenda -- -preventative health care, oral health, clean air, education from early childhood on through post-secondary schooling -- not a focus on ending inequality. These are just a few of the investments we can make whose efficacy and value are backed by good social-science evidence.

Even given the recent economic slump, America is quite a wealthy nation. Back in the 1930s, inequality was still just beginning to decline from its 1929 peak, but Hoovervilles were erected because people needed to eat. Today -- barring a recurrence of the Dust Bowl thanks to global climate change -- most of us will not suffer from material hardship in the way that our grandparents may have. There is enough shelter in America. Almost everyone has access to clean drinking water and electricity. There is enough (or even too much) food.

In other words, today's crisis is not a productivity problem. All the same, the demands upon the social contract in an affluent, unequal society are all the more impossible to satisfy. That's because with our basic needs satisfied, our aspirations turn to relative desires -- which by their definition cannot come true for all. The major sources of economic anxiety today relate to goods and services that often convey status distinctions. There's the $5,000 gas grill, which is an example often used by economist Robert Frank (who addressed this issue in the Prospect's April 2009 cover story, "Post-Consumer Prosperity"). More consequentially, there's housing and college tuition.

So if we are not willing or able as a society to rein in economic inequality, then one alternative model aims to make socioeconomic disparities less important by ensuring that a basic, high-quality floor of opportunity is available in areas such as housing and education.

***
We could choose to do nothing about inequality. After all, the yawning gap between rich and poor has not led to protest marches. It doesn't appear to be causing bread shortages. And it's highly debatable whether it has any effect on our physical or mental well-being. But economic inequality does not exist in isolation: The elite also wield disproportionate influence on the political process. Where money intersects politics, inequality perverts democracy -- and by extension, the public interest.

The lion's share of attention about the corrupting effects of inequality on politics has been focused on issues like campaign donations that grant plutocrats access to politicians. But big money tends to find another way to keep flowing once we put the public thumb over a given spigot, whether through campaign-finance reform or lobbying bans for ex-government workers. Sometimes combating the negative effects of inequality requires thinking politics rather than economics. One way to fix a political system that kowtows to rich donors at the expense of the public good is to amplify the power of small donors who came out in record numbers during the last election. Many localities, such as New York City, already do this through very generous matches on the order of 6-to-1.

Or we could bring back old-fashioned shoe-leather politics by making districts much more local. Today, the average congressperson speaks for about 700,000 Americans. Back in 1790, the ratio was a mere 60,000-to-1. In 1913, it was roughly 200,000-to-1. If we were to restore that proportionality of representation, campaigns would be cheaper, the political value of donations would greatly decrease, and the salience of grass-roots campaigning would rise dramatically. In proposing such a reform, political scientist Jacqueline Stevens points out that nothing in the Constitution stops us from increasing the ranks of Congress as long as each member speaks for at least 30,000 people.

Nowhere is the linkage between inequality and political power starker than in the realm of finance -- now one-fifth of the nation's gross domestic product. The so-called regulators have been totally captured by the regulated, and the notion of the free market has become risible in the very geographic center of global capitalism. Hence the unusual alliance between the far left and the far right in opposing last year's bank bailout. Even if very few voters actually comprehend the messy details of the greatest political swindle in history, at least the public smells something fishy on Wall Street.

The answer, then, is to not decry inequality in and of itself. That's a losing proposition in the United States. Anyway, it distracts from the real issue: opportunity. Whether that's the inadequate health care that the poor disproportionately receive, the dearth of human capital investment at the bottom, or the lack of political voice that most of us have, the game itself is hardly fair in America. Overhauling this rigged system -- not decrying its winners -- is a much more effective (and politically wise) strategy to ensure a prosperous and just society for all.

In essence, I am arguing for exactly the opposite of what Christopher Jencks advocated in Inequality 37 years ago. Whereas he and his co-authors ultimately resigned themselves to unequal pathways and thus focused on relative shares of the pie, instead, I maintain that inequality is epiphenomenal as long as we focus on maximizing opportunity for all. Let's worry about making sure the circuitry of the American dream isn't shorted, rather than whether some folks draw more current from the grid.

Powerful People Make War, Ordinary Folks Suffer

2009-12-28T15:41:00.001-08:00

Like Bob Dylan sings, "Come ye masters of war..."

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2009-12/25/content_9228247.htm

Powerful People Make War, Ordinary Folks Suffer
Ma Chao
China Daily
Fri, 25 Dec 2009 07:49 EST

Three decades after the erstwhile Soviet Union's tanks rolled into Afghanistan, another superpower is struggling to bring "stability and order" in the country.

The US story is not very different from the Soviet's. On Dec 27, 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan with thousands of troops, tanks and armored vehicles to fight Islamic rebels (Mujahideen). Within a week, they had reached the border with Pakistan and taken control of all the major cities and traffic arteries.

Leonid Brezhnev, then head of the Soviet Union, believed his army would take control of the whole country and stabilize security in three to four weeks. He would then hand over the country to the Kabul government and his troops would return home triumphantly. The Soviets, however, didn't leave the country till seven years after his death in 1982.

Twelve years after the Soviet withdrawal (on Oct 7, 2001, to be precise), US and allied troops invaded Afghanistan and took control of major cities and highways within a very short time. They drove the Taliban away from Kabul and formed a new government.

But the US success, like the Soviet's, has been confined to the initial phase. Though the Taliban have been driven out of Kabul, their writ still runs large across the vast land, especially in rural areas - some estimates say they control 72 percent of Afghan territory.

Military actions against the Taliban have been largely futile. The number of casualties in the US and allied forces is growing. To reverse the trend, US President Barack Obama has decided to send reinforcements. By summer, the US will have almost 100,000 troops, close to the 118,000 Soviet soldiers at their peak in 1985.

Despite the military success in the beginning, the Soviet army gradually found itself mired in a bloody endless war. Though the Soviet and Afghan government forces controlled large cities, the majority of the land, up to 80 percent, was in the hands of the Mujahideen, says Jia Lei, a researcher in military affairs. The Soviets and the Afghan military launched numerous assaults against the Mujahideen but were never able to contain the insurgency.

The Soviet troops were part of one of the most powerful land forces in the world. Despite that they could not navigate Afghanistan's mountains and valleys, because they were equipped and drilled for regular warfare and grand-scale mechanized battles, says Chen Xuehui, a researcher on military history at the PLA Academy of Military Science. The Mujahideen's guerrilla warfare spelled the doom for the Soviet and Afghan forces.

Frustrated, Soviet forces bombed villages that supported the insurgents. This only served to make the rebels more determined to fight the Soviets; something that we are seeing now against the US forces.

Like the Soviets, the US troops are equipped with much more advanced weaponry than their enemy, but they have met with little success. Drone bombings, aimed at destroying Taliban bases, have killed innumerous civilians and further incited anti-US sentiments among the Afghan people.

Futile Soviet measures

The Soviet Union tried political and economic measures, too, to establish control. It helped the Kabul government to train civil servants, soldiers, secret police and intelligence staff. It built public buildings and infrastructure in the territories under its control, and launched a massive propaganda campaign. But even those measures did not reverse its fortunes. Afghan government forces deserted or defected to the Mujahideen. Officials sold Soviet supplies to the Islamic fighters, and people in the occupied areas helped the insurgents to sneak in and out of cities. Many war-weary Soviet soldiers, especially those from Soviet Central Asia, deserted their units, and a few even joined the Mujahideen.

The US, too, has poured in huge amounts of money to rebuild Afghanistan. But Kabul government officials have pocketed a large percentage of those amounts, while most of the Afghans continue to live in destitution. Like the Soviet Union, the US has tried every possible tactic - from spying and rule to bribery and propaganda - to exercise control. And, like the Soviet Union, it has failed.

The mountainous terrain and the tribal social structure of Afghanistan are not the only factors that have kept invaders at bay. What many people don't know is that Afghanistan is one of the oldest civilizations in the world (it's part of the Indus Valley and Vedic civilizations which spread across present-day Pakistan and India.) The Afghans have been subjugated by religions - from Zoroastrianism, Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam - but not at the expense of their freedom and social practices. Even the most faithful of the Muslim is rooted in his tribal practices. From Alexander the Great to the British and Russian (and Soviet) rulers, none has been able to rule over them for long. The Soviets didn't realize this. Nor have the Americans.

Like the Soviet Union, the US has committed a blunder - that of ideological arrogance. It is confident of the supremacy of its political and economic systems, and believes they can be replicated in Afghanistan, which will help it to set up a friendly government so that terrorism can be "crushed at source".

The Soviet military failure (and the huge drain on its resources) forced former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to think of withdrawal in 1985. He increased the number of Soviet troops to contain insurgency in order to ensure an honorable withdrawal. But the strategy didn't work, and ultimately the Soviets had to pull out in disgrace. The Soviet Union lost more than 13,000 troops, and was left to tend for over 35,000 wounded and 470,000 sick.

Now it seems Obama has given up the dream of his predecessor George W. Bush, and would prefer retreating with honor. But judging from the Soviet experience, the chances of that are remote.

The Soviet invasion left a devastating legacy in Afghanistan: More than 1 million people died, a quarter of the population became refugees, and the entire country fell into a ruinous civil war, paving the way for the Taliban to seize power. No exact casualties' figure is available in the US invasion, but tens of thousands of civilians have reportedly been killed since 2001 and the country has been devastated further. So when the Americans withdraw - if they do at all - they will once more leave behind ordinary people to suffer the misery of a misplaced war.

PSYCOPATHS AND CHILD ABUSE

2009-12-24T13:43:00.000-08:00

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 01, 2009

PSYCOPATHS AND CHILD ABUSE

Can we reduce the number of psycopaths by reducing the amount of child abuse?

James commented on LORD OF THE FLIES; CHOOSE RALPH, NOT JACK

James wrote...
"It seems to have always been the psychopaths against the rest since the beginning of so called 'civilization'.

"We have economic and political cultures built by them around hierarchies and centralism.

"The hierarchical structure and centralized power greatly favour psychopaths, of course.

"Voting for a non-psychopathic candidate is a good thing, undoubtedly, but it is not the answer because, as we've seen all too often, the next psychopath that is elected promptly undoes all the good done.

"We need systems that are designed to marginalize psychopaths instead of the rest of us."

Robert Hare, a researcher in the field, describes psychopaths as "predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs.

"Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse".[8]

"What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony."[9]

It is estimated that one percent of the general population are psychopaths.[13][14]

Bad parenting appears to have something to do with the production of at least some psycopaths.

"Rat pups who receive high levels of tactile contact from their mothers - in the form of licking, grooming, and close bodily contact - later as mature rats show reduced levels of stress hormones in response to being restrained, explore novel environments with greater gusto, show fewer stress-related neurons in the brain, and have more robust immune systems." (Darwin's Touch: Survival of the Kindest Psychology Today )

The military likes kids who have been abused.

Was George W Bush deprived of sufficient loving hugs and kisses as a child?

Would Hitler have been a more peaceful citizen if he had been given lots of affection by his dad?

Lloyd deMause in The Journal of Psychohistory, Winter 1998, refers to The History of Child Abuse. (The History of Child Abuse Lloyd deMause - The Journal of Psychohistory)

Lloyd deMause

Among the points made:

1. In past history we find child abuse was common.

In most countries children were sacrificed and mutilated to relieve the guilt of adults.

Today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children.

Lehnert and Landrock

2. "The evolution of childhood from incest to love and from abuse to empathy has been a slow, uneven path, but one whose progressive direction is, I think, unmistakable."

"If the parent - the mother, for most of history - is given even the most minimal support by society, the evolution of childhood progresses...

"If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is frozen...

"It is only when changes in childhood occur that ... changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive..."

World War II

3. There are six childrearing modes that I have suggested are common to all groups...

1. The earliest childrearing mode I have called infanticidal.

"I have estimated that perhaps half of all children born in antiquity were killed by their caretakers, declining to about a third in medieval times and dropping to under one percent only by the eighteenth century."

"In most simple societies today in such areas as New Guinea, boys and girls are used sexually by both their mothers and by the men, who gang rape girls and often are also pederasts who use the boys sexually, have boy-wives, or force all the boys to fellate them daily from age seven to fourteen..."

"The Greek and Roman child lived his or her earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse...

"Boys ... were regularly handed over by their parents to neighboring men to be raped...

"Child brothels, rent-a-boy services and sex slavery flourished in every city in antiquity...

"Christianity constructed its central myth of the Father sending his son down to be penetrated by a soldier’s lance in order to restage the common experience of fathers giving their boys to a neighbor to be sexually penetrated.

"Those who accepted the myth, accepted the penetration, and were promised the Father’s love and Mary’s tears in return."

2. "I labeled the second stage the abandoning mode..."

"Through the nineteenth century over half of the children born in Florence, for instance, were dumped into foundling homes at birth, to be picked up by their families - if they lived that long (the majority died) - when they were around five years old, thus avoiding having homes where crying babies disturbed the peace.

"The same abandonment was common in France, where, in 1900, over 90 % of the babies born in Paris were carted out to the countryside to wetnurses at birth. As one author put it, 'mother love' was a late historical achievement, not an instinctual trait...

"The erotic beating of children continued in Christian times...

"Century after century of battered children grew up to batter their own children in turn.

3. By the thirteenth century in the West ... some advanced parents began to practice what I have termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where the child was not born completely evil... The mother might herself nurse her infant.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Western Europe saw vastly improved childrearing.

This "allowed at least some of the schizoid and borderline personalities of antiquity and medieval times - who regularly heard voices and hallucinated visions - to move on to the more integrated, less splitting modern neurotic personality more familiar to recent times...

"The sixteenth-century watershed in childrearing allowed people to reduce splitting and feel real depression for the first time, as can be seen in ... the ability of Protestants to end the good mother/bad mother splitting of Mary/Eve, and the ability to internalize the projective panoply of split Catholic saints/devils into Protestant depressive guilt.

"With this vast improvement in childrearing - in some families at least - the modern world could begin, with the development of science, technology and democratization now being possible in parts of the West."

4. "By the seventeenth century, the intrusive mode of childrearing began, particularly in England, America and France, whereby the child was seen as less full of dangerous projections...

"Intrusive parenting, in essence, began to substitute psychological pressure for physical abuse, so that rather than whipping the child to prevent it from sin, it was, for instance, shut up in the dark closets for hours or left without food, sometimes for days.

"One mother shut her three-year-old boy up in a drawer.

"The intrusive mode required ... a steady pressure on the child to “break its will”...

"John Wesley’s mother said of her babies, “When turned a year old (and some before), they were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly.”

"A mother wrote of her first battle with her four-month-old infant, “I whipped him til he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.”

"Religion was a further source of terrorizing. God was said to “hold you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire”..."

5. "By the nineteenth century’s ... more gentle psychological means began to be used to “socialize” the child.

"The socializing mode is still the main model of upbringing in Western nations, featuring the mother as trainer and the father as provider and protector, and the child is seen as slowly being made to conform to the parents’ model of goodness.

"By the nineteenth century parents ... still sent their children to schools where they were erotically whipped on the bare buttocks and usually buggered by the older boys and masters.

As John Addington Symonds reported his experience as a boy at public school:

"Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s ‘bitch.’ ... Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, or the sports of naked boys in bed together...

"Those who tried to pass child labor legislation to reduce horrendous working conditions and hours were labeled Communists...

"Even so, the decrease in parental seduction and beating during the intrusive mode produced an explosion of social innovation, allowing nations to produce the democratic and industrial revolutions of the modern period."

6. "What kind of society might be envisioned by children brought up under the latest childrearing mode - what I have termed the helping mode - whereby a minority of parents are now trying to help their children reach their own goals at each stage of life, rather than socializing them into adult goals - is yet to be seen...

"That helping mode children grow up to be incapable of creating wars is also becoming evident from watching the anti-war activities of my children and those of their friends who have been brought up by other helping mode parents.

"For war is only understandable as a sacrificial ritual in which young men are sent by their parents to be hurt and killed as representatives of the independence-seeking parts of themselves.

"Psychohistorians have regularly found that images on the magazine covers and in political cartoons in the months prior to wars reveal fears of the nation becoming “too soft” and vulnerable, with images of dangerous women threatening to engulf and hurt people...

4. "That all social violence - whether by war, revolution or economic exploitation - is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not surprise us.

"The propensity to reinflict childhood traumas upon others in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues.

"Clear evidence has been published in The Journal of Psychohistory that the more traumatic one’s childhood, the more one is likely to be in favor of military solutions to social problems..."

5. "We cannot be content to only continue to do endless repair work on damaged adults, with more jails and police and therapists and political movements.

"Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of “child helpers” who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence...

" The success of parenting centers such as the one pioneered in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, has been astonishing.

"Through parenting classes and home visiting by paraprofessionals, they have measurably reduced child abuse, as shown by careful followup studies and by reduced police reports and hospital entrance rates.

"All this has been accomplished with very small monetary outlays, since these parent outreach centers operate mainly with volunteer labor, while it has the potential to save trillions of dollars annually in the costs of social violence, police enforcement, jails and other consequences of the widespread child abuse of today.

"Such a parent support movement would resemble the universal education movement of over a century ago...

"Do we really want to have massive armies and jails and emotionally crippled adults forever?

"Must each generation continue to torture and neglect its children so they repeat the violence and economic exploitation of previous generations?

"Why not achieve meaningful political and social revolution by first achieving a parenting revolution?

"If war, social violence, class domination and economic destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood trauma, how else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else end child abuse and neglect? How else increase the real wealth of nations, our next generation? How else achieve a world of love and laughter of which we are truly capable?"

~~

"I don't know if they have tigers in Bhutan, but they certainly have criminals. Well, they do now anyway - ever since Rupert Murdoch's Sky began broadcasting into every home that is. Suddenly their meagre police force no longer has time to assist grannies cross the street because they're too busy chasing all those people who've taken to robbery and murder...

The Portuguese... (have) de-criminalised drugs... Both crime and drug use in Portugal is declining...

"A world without fear, a global societal model based not on proscription of innumerable sins but rather redemption and a single aim of selflessness, is possible..." - Fear and Deterrence, and the Possibility of Redemption

Division Between Developed and Developing Countries

2009-12-23T06:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/133241.html

December 22, 2009 by the Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Division Between Developed and Developing Countries
by John Buell

Why did Copenhagen yield meager results? Divisions between the so-called developed and developing worlds have been cited as one of the major causes, with the developed nations — especially the U.S. — being seen as especially reluctant to reduce their carbon footprint.

Yet in a deeper sense the divisions in Copenhagen reflect a widespread backlash against a multinational corporate “free trade” agenda. That agenda, endorsed by both parties, has not only exacerbated inequalities between developed and developing nations but has also further entrenched inequality here, with attendant bitterness and insecurity.

Developing nations insist that if they are to commit to level or reduce their greenhouse emissions, they must receive assistance to produce or purchase the clean technologies that are more costly in the short run even as they yield long-term economic and environmental benefits. It is all too easy to portray this demand as a request for charity.

Rather than seek charity, however, developing nations are demanding that the U.S. live up to the terms of the free trade principles it so often touts. Genuinely free trade demands at least two minimal principles, that the polluter pays and that trade in all goods and services be unrestricted by tariffs or by other nontariff barriers to trade.

Trade deals orchestrated by the U.S. have observed neither principle.

Tariffs on manufactured goods have been reduced and the flow of goods across borders has increased as free trade advocates expected. Yet environmental standards were treated in effect as illegitimate barriers to trade. Production migrated to nations where environmental restrictions were minimal or not enforced.

Middle class consumers in affluent nations enjoyed the economic benefits of free trade while producing regions within the Third World absorbed the immediate toxic threats. Lawrence Summers once notoriously remarked that the Third World was underpolluted. His trade agreements mitigated that problem. Over the long run, the atmosphere as a whole experienced growing greenhouse concentrations.

Corporate trade agenda’s second departure from free trade principles lies in the way professionals and intellectual property have been treated versus labor and the service sector. The autoworker in Flint, Mich., must compete on an even basis with factory workers in Mexico. Surgeons and lawyers in Flint face no such competition. “Free trade” advocates have not even contemplated proposals that would allow Medicare to be outsourced to India or Canada, even though seniors could receive equal quality care at lower prices and some economists have developed plausible proposals on these lines.

One such economist, Dean Baker, points out that U.S. free trade agreements amount to “selective protectionism, the purpose of which has been to redistribute income from the less educated sector of the workforce to the most highly educated sectors. In addition, its trade policy has helped enhance the profits of the pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries by forcing our trading partners to provide stronger protection for patents and copyrights.”

Developing nations must open their financial services to U.S. finance competition and must stop subsidizing national media or peasant farmers. But these nations must observe the U.S. monopoly patent rights over drugs and software, and industrial patents. U.S. patent protections are the most generous in the world and enable profits far in excess of that needed to stimulate development of new technologies. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz advocates a system of reward for discoverers of medical breakthroughs that would be a much more cost-effective way to induce innovation.

Environmentalists advocate developing nations bypass the carbon age and develop alternative technologies. Yet adoption of these technologies is cost-prohibitive if they are to be asked to pay a monopoly ransom to the West for their use. Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, points out, “When intellectual property rights attached to a technology becomes a barrier to its transfer, because it increases the costs and it prevents developing countries from making the same technologies, then we have to overcome this barrier in order to have the greater international global good.”

Nonetheless, since U.S. taxpayers already pay the same companies disproportionately through high drug and software prices and for much of the basic research on which discovery depends, they are in no mood to support Third World subsidies — especially to nations whose labor is often now perceived as the source of their economic insecurity.

Rascism Key to Wars for Empire

2009-12-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

Democracy - Part I - "people power" usurped by elites.

2009-12-19T17:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Democracy--Part-I--peop-by-Jim-Miles-091216-578.html

December 18, 2009
Democracy - Part I - "people power" usurped by elites.
By Jim Miles

Part I examines the business values - globalization, free trade, corporations and capitalism - that define the workings of our democracy today.

One of the many words in the mantra of the imperial apologists is that of democracy. From its Greek roots meaning "people" and "power" the word has travelled a long and convoluted journey but needs to be questioned as to whether it has achieved the real ideal. For the people, the "demos" to truly have power requires a system that acts considerably differently from actions by the global elites currently in power.

I differentiate between democracy and freedoms. Having power for the people indicates that the people have an actual say in what the government is doing, and that the government, being of the people, by the people, for the people, responds to the wishes - and hopefully educated wishes - of the populace. Freedom, as present in our current society, represents the wide range from any kind of licentious but licit behaviour through the practical freedoms of the press and media up to the philosophical freedoms of religion and thought. It seldom represents responsibility towards society and its various parameters of poverty and the environment, or towards other less fortunate members of society. It does represent choice, choice to one form of behaviour or another, for the environment or against the environment, for the people, or for the corporation. Democracy and freedom are highly compatible but not necessarily the same thing.

The vote

Democracy as envisioned by most is encapsulated into the act of voting. Our grandfathers died for it in the First World War, "sacrificing" themselves for the empire in order to achieve it (either that or be shot as a traitor or deserter or for treason). The same mantra is brought forth every Remembrance Day, of our soldiers dying so that we have the freedom to vote. Consider that Soviet Russia had votes, Mugabe had votes, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan had votes, occupied Palestine had a vote, Cairo, Islamabad, Honduras, and Russia all had votes, yet the effect of those votes ranged from no democracy to only nominal democracy, or a nominal democracy invigorated with great helpings of violence.

In modern democracies, the psychological spin doctoring is so intense that a vote becomes a popularity contest, decked out in mudslinging, fear of the other, and so many outlandish promises (some call them lies) that votes are essentially bought on the rhetoric of uneducated platitudes to try and soothe the seething angst of the voter. The billions of dollars promised during an election, the great calls for more openness, clarity, and better communication, for more citizen participation are all forgotten once the election has been confirmed one way or another. The "representatives' then head off to the seat of power to learn what they need to do in order to stay in power and to stay within the confines of the party they are nominally elected under and to not get kicked out of caucus. Foolishly the majority of citizens believe that what was talked about will be delivered (Did we want NAFTA? No, got it anyway.)

The real power, without the people, begins its work in the hallways and private rooms of the institutions that represent our democracy. The interplay between corporations, big business, government lobbyists, bureaucrats, and the military, is what truly runs our democracy. It is in these elite corridors of power that businessmen and women collude in private for a new world order, where decisions made will later be justified to the people under some manner of fear mongering or some well inculcated belief system ever present from the very first time a child watches television or runs a computer game.

Globalization and a not so flat world

The cry of globalization is frequently incorporated within the context of democracy, an almost supra-democracy wherein global communications, the internet, cell-phones and the laptop computer are making the world a level playing field. It encompasses the business world of Thomas Friedman's work of the same verbiage, to the exhortations of politicians and soft imperialists towards the coloured revolutions around the world. Certainly it has had its impact, but it is only technology, and one might as well describe the ubiquitous kalashnikov as a more effective leveller in the world of globalization.

The world remains bumpy and lumpy as the various contenders to power, or those trying to tame them, rise and fall within the technological capabilities of their most recent state of the art purchase. Whether it is big business, or big government, ranging through to subversive elements or insurrections against occupation, the technology has enabled the various players to continue making the world as uneven as possible, trying to tilt it entirely within their own favour. The ultimate bump that denies the level playing field are the computer nerds somewhere in the middle of U.S. playing their war games in real time as they control missile firing drones over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan blasting mostly civilians to shreds. No kalashnikov will ever be near them - and they call the insurgents cowards".

But globalization is much more the Friedman's technological wonders of communication. It is much more about the World Trade Organization (WTO) which is "the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups," those pressure groups being environmental, labour, health, and other social organizations. Renato Ruggerio, former director of the WTO said, "We are writing the constitution of a single global economy."[1] Ironically, the credit goes to the internet for the destruction in 1998 of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) to which this quote refers. Globalization as envisioned by the WTO and the other members of the Washington consensus - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund who have carried forward the effective work of the WTO and its MAI intentions - is completely non-democratic.

Its non-democracy comes from several factors. First and most obvious is that representatives to any of these institutions are not by election, not by representation, but through invitation. The representatives are appointed from international corporations, from banks, from lobbyists and other government institutions. Secondarily, the institutions from where these people are chosen - the business corporations and unelected members of government bureaucracies - are decidedly non-democratic as well. Thirdly, the "free trade" demanded under the WTO banner is anything but free.

The free trade espoused by these people and institutions is only free for the manipulation of wealth. Workers are not free to travel to wherever the pay and working conditions are better, but are constrained to their own geographical regions. The environment is not free although its resources are taken for free without too much concern about the long term negative results from pollution caused by extraction, transportation, consumption, and elimination through burning or waste dumping. And rather than being free trade, trade and commerce is bound up in multiple layers of rules and regulations that tend to over-ride national rules and regulations, especially pertaining to health, safety, education, and workers rights, entrapping the weaker governments into a cycle of democratic social welfare destruction. The overall result is wealth and resources rising to the dominant financial countries (ignoring momentarily the elites and their cronies within the weaker countries) while the weaker countries remain perpetually indebted to the member states of the Washington consensus.

Corporations and capitalism.

Corporations are probably the least democratic institution in the world, designed and purpose built to gather wealth, to avoid paying taxes, and more particularly to avoid the managers and shareholders from having any responsibility for institutional damages, either on the personal level or the global level. The corporation becomes a person under law, an invisible person, as the real people hide behind the legal barriers set up by corporate lawyers and accountants and MBAs and governments to protect their harnessing of wealth.

They have been around for a while, set up as a mechanism to harvest the wealth of the East Indies, of North America, and to transport that wealth back home. They have continued to receive government largesse in the form of favourable rules and regulations to the extent that they now are part and parcel of government and all too frequently are powerful enough to over-ride government constraints - until when things become really shaky because of their own manipulations, government steps in and bails them out - their own form of social welfare without the democracy aspect.

Corporations are decidedly non-democratic and their paramount place within the so called "capitalist" system (by whichever definition or permutation or purity of idealism it is defined to actually be) renders the capitalist system non-democratic as well. Economists rank about the lowest in my judgement of the range of careers available to anyone, working within a world of abstract perfection with mathematical models that are invented and created out of thin air without a connection to reality (all math should represent physical reality in some way as it does with chemistry and physics). Those economists who define themselves as supporters of capitalism are arguing for a world with its base mired in poverty and its peak in the giddy heights where the few control by far the most wealth of the world.

The underlying basis of capitalism necessitates unemployment in order to keep labour cheap and mobile (at least within a region or country). It necessitates poverty, if not for a motivator then for the same cheap labour. It requires consumption at all levels which because of the need for poverty and unemployment, also requires a complacent middle class to be the consumers of the world. Without a truly decent wage, with both parents working, with unending propaganda/advertising beating it into the consumers brain that they simply are not cool, sexy, articulate, or beautiful if a certain product is not purchased, the theoretical middle class drives itself - sometimes literally as our culture is based on the automobile - into ever increasing levels of debt. That debt is wealth to the corporations, as the consumer is trapped into an ever larger cycle of purchasing and debt creation.

The peaks of capitalism thrive on market control, elitism, cronyism and the ever revolving door between big business, government, and the military. It returns us to the world of globalization and the WTO and Washington consensus discussed above. Its reality is a world in which ten per cent of the population control over half of the global wealth, while half the global population controls only one per cent of the wealth - and really probably do not "control' even that. From these vertiginous heights of wealth the world perspective is perhaps flat, the bottom layers being so dim and distant in view that we are all of equal powerlessness to the elites.

Part II - will take a look at how other than business and political philosophies - theological considerations, meritocracy - and how they influence perceptions on democratic values and actions.

The Billionaires Behind the Hate

2009-12-19T10:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=103332

December 8, 2009
RADICAL RIGHT
THE BILLIONAIRES BEHIND THE HATE

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

STOPPING CLEAN ENERGY: David Koch presents himself as a champion of science. Next year, because of his donations, a wing of the Smithsonian will be named after him. Nevertheless, Koch has done more to undermine the public's understanding of climate change science than any other person in America. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Koch finances the "Hot Air" tour, a nationwide roadshow using a balloon to depict climate change science as "hot air." Despite the brothers' extravagant wealth, Koch's Americans for Prosperity has run populist ads mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about economic conditions. In addition to its efforts to misinform the public, Koch Industries has spent nearly $9 million dollars so far on direct lobbying, much of it on climate change legislation. With a team of Koch-funded operatives going as far as attempting to crash the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week, the brothers may succeed in scuttling any prospect for addressing climate change.

STOPPING HEALTH REFORM: Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as "Patients United," dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. Patients United has blanketed the country with ads distorting various provisions of the health reform legislation, particularly the public option. Patients United even centered a media campaign around Shona Robertson-Holmes, claiming she had a brain tumor the Canadian system refused to treat. However, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Patients United has been exaggerating Holmes' case, and that she in fact had a benign cyst. In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have fostered extremism. A speaker with the roving Patients United bus tour repeatedly compared health reform to the Holocaust while an eight-by-five foot banner at an AFP health care rally with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) read, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany" superimposed over corpses from a concentration camp. Although many were surprised at the level of anger AFP channeled into Democratic healthcare town halls in August, it wasn't the first time Koch groups have helped to hijack the health reform debate. Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS: The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear business-related reasons why Koch would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David and the company's namesake, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. By presenting progressive reform as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, Fred Koch and the other industrialists bankrolling the Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations.

Kucinich: 'Class War Is Over, Working People Lost'

2009-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

Kucinich: 'Class War Is Over, Working People Lost'
By Sahil Kapur, Raw Story
December 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144650/

WASHINGTON -- Reflecting on the growing divide between Wall Street and Main Street, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday offered a powerful critique on the state of the economy in an open committee hearing.

"The class warfare is over -- we lost," Kucinich said before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost."

The harrowing comments from Kucinich, who is Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, come amidst a national unemployment rate of 10 percent, one year and several months after the economic collapse of 2008 has marred the livelihoods of many.

"Don't tell me about class warfare," he continued. "Come to my neighborhoods in Cleveland. I will show you class warfare. I’ll show you hollowed out areas. I’ll show you businesses that went down because they don’t have access to capital. And on Wall Street it is fat city. Don’t tell me about class warfare."

Kucinich, a former presidential candidate who is viewed across the nation as a progressive champion on many issues, said that despite the recent uptick in economic figures, many regular Americans continue to struggle.

"All across this country people are starved for capital," Kucinich said. "Small businesses are failing, you have shopping centers that are becoming vacant because people can’t afford the rents anymore because the people who own the malls the developers are getting cash calls and credit is tightening."

"The separation between the finance economy and the real economy is real. This is not some fake idea. You can’t call that class warfare. That’s a fact."

Kucinich, who voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (also known as the Wall Street bailout), lamented it as a catalyzing force for the rising inequality of income in the United States.

"The wealth of this nation is being accelerated upward," Kucinich said. "That’s one of the problems that I had with the bailout."

"You could say that it helped stabilize the American economy, but what I see is the separation between the real economy and Wall Street. Wall Street is stabilizing, markets are a lot better, banks are doing well -- they parked their money at the Fed for a while so they could get higher interest rates."

As wage theft rises, states and cities crack down

2009-12-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/199106-As-wage-theft-rises-states-and-cities-crack-down

Sophia Tareen and Laura Wides-Munoz
Associated Press/Yahoo News
Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:53 EST

Chicago - Fabian Gutierrez logged more than 60 hours a week slicing meat and stocking shelves with cheeses and milk at a neighborhood grocery for less than minimum wage and no overtime.

The 32-year-old Mexican immigrant said he put up with the situation for months because he was desperate to support his wife and young daughter. And like many co-workers, he was afraid to challenge his boss.

"All of us took abuse. We were disrespected," said Gutierrez, who found help at a workers' rights center, joined with other workers to sue the owner of La Fruteria and now works at another grocery store that he says treats him better.

Across the nation, the long-simmering problem of employers who don't pay their workers appears to be getting worse, especially for immigrant laborers.

In the absence of aggressive federal action, some states and local governments have begun to tackle the issue on their own. They say employers who don't pay overtime or minimum wage are unlikely to pay into state workers' compensation or unemployment insurance funds - bilking taxpayers even as they're cheating workers.

Workers rights centers say wage theft has become the No. 1 complaint they've heard in recent months.

In Chicago, Working Hands Legal Clinic, which is helping Gutierrez, received 161 complaints of wage theft from January through June 2008. That jumped by more than 60 percent to 252 complaints during the same period this year.

The Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network says at least 50 percent of day laborers - there are 120,000 on a given day in the U.S. - experience some form of wage theft.

About 68 percent of low-wage workers reported wage theft in 2008, regardless of citizenship status, according to a study released earlier this year that surveyed 4,400 low-wage workers in major U.S. cities, the first such extensive review in years.

"It's not confined to the margins, or a few rogue employers. Employers realize that workers are desperate," said Nik Theodore, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and lead author of the study conducted with the University of California, Los Angeles and the City University of New York. "It looks like standard business practice in many industries."

Wage theft has even emerged in industries where there haven't previously been many complaints, like fairs and carnivals, according to the Workers' Rights Law Center of New York. Earlier this year, Dreamland Amusements Inc. agreed to pay $325,000 in back wages to Mexican workers in New York after the company was accused of forcing them to work 70 hours a week at less than minimum wage.

Low-wage immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable because most are paid in cash, making record-keeping difficult. Many fear a call to immigration authorities, even if they have legal status to work in the U.S.

Gutierrez, a soft-spoken, husky man who declined to discuss his immigration status, said he and other workers were scared to bring up the problems with their employer because they feared they might be deported. Eventually, Gutierrez said, he overcame his fear because he wanted to make sure others weren't wronged.

Gutierrez's former boss, Tony Macias, owns several grocery stores throughout Chicago. His attorney, William J. Raleigh, said Macias didn't know he had to pay overtime.

Until recently, such lawsuits have been the main way for workers to fight back. But lawyers often won't take the cases since they take months to resolve, the payoff is low and collection is difficult.

"Even if we win, that's usually just the beginning," said Milan Bhatt of The Workers' Rights Law Center. "By the time the litigation is resolved, they've closed shop and moved elsewhere."

Some states are looking for creative solutions. California and New York created multi-agency task forces that raid problem industries, such as car washes and grocery stores, and focus on regions where workers repeatedly report violations.

"Having everyone go out together shows a very powerful message that you can't just pay the piper and keep going," said Terri Gerstein, New York's deputy labor commissioner for wage and immigrant services.

Advocates say enforcing wage and hour laws even for laborers in the country illegally keeps wages for all workers from being driven down and ensures that employers who follow the rules can compete.

California has also required some businesses to pay a state registration fee, which pays workers if violations are later found and funds a collections department, making fines enforceable.

Some worker advocates say combining efforts for massive raids is good publicity but nets little for workers because the focus is on recovering unemployment or Social Security taxes for the state rather than overtime wages for the employee.

In response, New York Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith has worked with community-based groups and even unions, which are often the first to receive labor complaints, in a nationally recognized effort to identify employers violating labor laws.

"Unlike with a state agency, people don't feel nervous coming to us and sharing their stories, even undocumented folks," said Make the Road co-director Andrew Friedman.

Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts are beginning to adopt some similar approaches and adding their own twists, such as hefty fines and online complaint filing.

In Miami-Dade County, a nongovernmental wage theft task force is pushing to create a low-cost, streamlined complaint process. San Francisco already has a similar ordinance, and Los Angeles and New Orleans are considering such proposals.

Still, advocates say the federal government needs to step up enforcement. Despite reports from the ground that wage theft is on the rise, the U.S. Department of Labor reported a 25 percent drop in registered complaints from low-wage workers from the start of the Bush administration through 2008, the most recent data available.

A recent Congressional report slammed the Labor Department for frequently failing to investigate or even register some complaints; a bill in the House would extend the federal statute of limitations on some violations to give the department more time to investigate them.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has added about 250 wage and hour inspectors, and last week, the department signed an agreement with the New York labor department, Mexican Consulate and several other groups to create a call center that will provide Hispanic workers in the New York area information about their labor rights.

For now, Gutierrez and his former employer are trying to work things out in court, but he's unsure if he'll get all the back pay he says he's owed.

"I want my voice to be heard," he said. "We don't do the work for free."

British CEO pay 81 times that of workers

2009-12-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.wsws.org/category/world.shtml

Simon Whelan
World Socialist Website
Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:47 EST

In spite of the deepest economic recession in 70 years, the CEO's of the FTSE top 100 companies continue to fill their pockets with enormous amounts of money.

According to figures compiled by the Income Data Services (IDS), a remuneration monitoring group, the pay gap between the boardroom of Britain's top companies and the shopfloor has almost doubled in size over the last decade. The chief executives of the UK's 100 largest companies now earn 81 times the average pay of full-time workers.

When the IDS compiled its figures for pay inequality in 2000, three years after the election of the Labour government, chief executives commanded 47 times the average worker's wage.

Analysis by the IDS reveals how the yawning chasm between shopfloor and boardroom rates of pay reached its widest point in 2008 when the inequality ratio between the two stretched to a multiple of 94. The economic recession has dampened the ratio slighty, but only back to their 2006 rates. The total bonus package is still expected to be similar to levels reached in 2007, i.e., just before the onset of the economic crisis.

Executives at the top FTSE 350 companies have received rises which exceed inflation by 6.6 percent over the past 12 months. During the same period workers have had to make do with just 3 percent increases.

Reporting the IDS findings, the Financial Times mentioned the inequality factor of 81 but did not report the actual amounts that the top CEO's are earning. Outside of the pages of the FT no other major news scource reported on the IDS figures.

The average salary for a UK FTSE 100 chief executive is now £737,000, with incentives, share options and other perks pushing total remuneration packages over £3 million.

The average (mean) British full-time wage in comparison has risen over the past decade by £5,000 from £25,000 to £30,000. These figures actually distort upwards average worker pay, as high-end earners are included with shop floor workers and the poor to arrive at the mean figure.

CEOs' year-end bonuses dwarf what workers earn in a whole year. In mid-October the IDS reported that the CEOs of Britain's biggest companies were furnished with average bonuses in excess of £500,000, and the top 300 FTSE executives enjoyed bonuses of an average of £283,000 over the last financial year. Nevertheless, executives complained that these bonuses were almost a third down on the previous year and represented the first time in a decade that bonuses have fallen in value.

However, cuts to bonuses were being made up for with much higher basic salaries. Basic salaries increased by an average of 7.4 percent and meant that the average FTSE 100 director's complete remuneration package were just 1.5 percent short of previous record incomes achieved in 2006 prior to the economic collapse.

Even the IDS was taken aback by the scale of the bonuses during a period of intense economic restructuring. "What is suprising is that the credit crunch, which has led to some of the biggest rescue rights issues in living memory, has had so little impact on the rate at which chief executives' salaries are rising," wrote the editor of the report, Steve Tatton.

In mid September the Guardian newspaper did its own research into executive pay at Britain's largest companies and discovered increases in basic salary of 10 percent. Such avarice occurs despite "the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value amid a record decline in the FTSE".

The Guardian estimated that between them, full- and part-time directors of the FTSE 100 companies pocketed at least £1 billion .

In the summer IDS reported how the boardrooms of the biggest companies were enjoying almost a third of their salary from so-called performance related bonuses. This is while in the 12 months leading up to April this year the FTSE fell by 38 percent.

Such figures reveal the absurdity of the repeated media claims that the economic crisis finds everyone in the same boat. In fact, British society has arguably never been so polarised.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and New Policy Institutes' annual report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion, found that in 2007-2008, even prior to the economic crisis, 13.4 million people were officially poor. This is the highest figure since 2000. The figure will undoubtably be much higher since unemployment has doubled in the meantime.Youth unemployment is almost one in five.

Europe’s ruling elite fear the “contagion” from Greece

2009-12-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/pers-d15.shtml

Europe’s ruling elite fear the “contagion” from Greece
15 December 2008

It is necessary for working people, especially the young, to consider the broader implications of the past week’s events in Greece. It is, after all, a question that is occupying the thoughts of senior figures within the ruling elites of Europe and the United States.

The rioting that has engulfed Greece had its spark in the police killing of a 15-year-old boy, Alexis Grigoropoulos. But this ignited a seething mass of discontent, especially amongst Greece’s youth and its student population. Despite the efforts of the New Democracy government and its nominal opponents on the official left to blame anarchist agitators, only this social opposition can account for the sustained character of the protests and their spread throughout the country, even in the face of brutal repression.

Numerous reports have drawn attention to the dire situation facing the younger generation in Greece, even those who have graduated from university. Unemployment affects one in four 15-to-24-year-olds, even in advance of the full impact of the slump in the world economy. Post-graduates are routinely forced to take minimum wage jobs at just €600 a month, if they are lucky. Some work two jobs in order to survive.

Andre Gerolymatos wrote in Canada’s Globe and Mail that “the predominant factor for the actions of such young people is a sense of hopelessness,” noting that unemployment for those between 15 and 20 is “just over 22 per cent.” He continued: “It’s no coincidence that most of the rioters fall within that age group. In effect, one in four young men and women face a future of low-paying jobs and poverty.”

The situation in Greece is dire, but it is by no means the exception. Across Europe a similar picture is developing. Hence the commentaries to the effect that Greece is emblematic of what the Wall Street Journal acknowledges to be “growing discontent among youths in many European countries.”

The Journal noted that young people in Greece have been “dubbed ‘Generation 600’—referring to the country's national minimum wage of €600.” It then listed similar designations: In Germany it is “Generation Intern” because graduates “have found themselves working as interns for no or low pay for long periods.”

In Spain, young people are referred to as “mileuristas” — “loosely, those who scrape by on a thousand euros a month … entering the workplace with few benefits or protections, often moving between temporary contracts.”

In a more extensive December 9 comment on Spain, Bloomberg noted that its “Best Generation” is being hit hardest as “boom turns to bust.” Some 28 percent of Spain’s young people are out of work, twice the European Union average. Fully 63 percent of those between the ages of 15 and 24 who were working were on temporary contracts last year, “so the young people are the first ones to lose their jobs and they’re losing them massively,” explained Gayle Allard, vice-rector of the Instituto de Empresa business school in Madrid.

The average net monthly salary for people under age 29 is just €964. Only 55 percent of young workers can afford all their costs, according to a government report.

The day before Alexis Grigoropoulos was killed, Forbes ran a report by Selcuk Gokoluk warning, “Rising unemployment among young Turks threatens to fuel social unrest.” Bulent Pirler, general secretary of an employers’ group, stated, “Turkey has a young population. If they are not educated and employed, it means you have a bomb in your hands.”

Forbes continued: “Data shows that 1.09 million people are registered at the state unemployment agency, but it is advertising only 14,526 job offers. More than one third of the jobless claims registered last month were made by people aged 15-24.”
The Telegraph in Britain featured an article in its December 8 business pages by Constantine Courcoulas insisting, “Investors are wrong to ignore the Greek riots.”

After warning that the present “uproar is unprecedented” and “no longer limited to an anarchist fringe” due to “widespread anger at the government,” Courcoulas wrote that “the tensions created by unemployment, marginalised youth and incompetent governments are far from exclusively Hellenic. Similar outbreaks are possible in other countries. Recessions are always tough on the young. And while the Greek rioters’ slogan— ‘bullets for your youth, money for your banks’—may not qualify as sound socioeconomic analysis, it has a catchy ring.”

He concluded, “Social protests have sometimes changed the world. Think of the French and Russian revolutions.”

Writing for the Associated Press, a similar appraisal was made by Paul Haven, who stated that the “authorities in Europe worry conditions are ripe for the contagion to spread” as the continent “plunges into recession.”

Most tellingly, the Scotsman newspaper drew attention to the response of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to the Greek events. Rejecting budget proposals from his own party that he considered too obviously biased toward the wealthy, he remarked, “Look what is going on in Greece.”

Sarkozy expressed concern that unrest could spread to France, the Scotsman reported. “The French love it when I’m in a carriage with Carla, but at the same time they’ve guillotined a king,” he said.

The citations above are drawn from leading financial journals, newspapers with a distinctly right-wing colouration and organs generally designated as newspapers “of record.” They are serious appraisals made of a growing threat to the capitalist system posed by a generation of young people, often educated, highly intelligent and articulate, who are living on next to nothing.

Told for years that an education was all that was required to succeed, they have no prospects for the future despite their sacrifices and those of their parents.

Faced with governments of the official left and right seeking to make working people shoulder the full weight of the economic crisis, and opposition parties that offer no real opposition to this agenda, young people in Greece have taken to the streets in a mass display of anger and frustration. But make no mistake. We are witnessing the beginning of a profound social shift that must assume political forms that will not be confined to the compromised and discredited trade unions and organisations of the official left.

Triumph of the Money Party

2009-12-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Triumph-of-the-Money-Party-by-Michael-Collins-091216-299.html

December 16, 2009
Triumph of the Money Party
By Michael Collins
Health Care Reform DOA. Why the Surprise?
They Did what they Always Do

The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us September 30, 2007

Dr. Howard Dean, MD, just said pull the plug on the current health care reform effort. The cure is worse than the disease according to the good doctor.

Why the surprise?

Last week the president announced that he's sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan without a declaration of war by Congress and without Afghanistan posing a direct threat to the United States violating both the United States Constitution and international law at the same time.

The bailed out Wall Street failures are paying back just enough of their loans to the Treasury Department to allow a new round of huge bonuses. At the same time, they continue to get tons of cash through the Federal Reserve. Pay back a few billion, get seven trillion dollars in credit. Not a bad deal.

Congress failed to pass a bill to help with foreclosures. We're at eight million so far since 2008 with another four million predicted for 2010. The beat goes on.

The Justice Department and Congress failed to seriously investigate massive mortgage fraud from the very top on down to loan officers during the real estate bubble.

The White House and Congress forgot to include a cap on credit card rates in its credit card bill of rights. How unfortunate since the credit card companies jacked rates way up shortly after the bill passed.

The official unemployment rate of 10% is far below the true unemployment rate of about 17% or higher. Why? Because it might upset us to know that we're at Great Depression levels of unemployment.

Poverty is rising at a rapid rate with no end in sight but you'd never know it for all the attention it gets. Let the markets take care of it.

The people who made the financial mess on Wall Street are now running the U.S. Treasury. Key players, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner and insider extraordinaire Larry Summers, were appointed right after the inauguration.

The constitutional rights stolen by the previous administration are still missing in action with no real effort underway to restore them. The Patriot Act is alive and well. The feds can still tap your phone and email. They can get at any of your financial data they want and it's all done in secret. But we still haven't had a real investigation of 911.

Congress is about to consider an international treaty of copyright that will turn anyone with a public blog or web site into a cop required to enforce the new laws or face prosecution.

Throughout it all, not one member of Congress or the financial elite will miss a meal, worry about their health care, lose their house, or ever face prosecution for destroying the economy of the United States.

Their Ponzi scheme is literally too big to fail. If there were ever the least bit of concentrated scrutiny on the various wars and financial rip offs over just the past decade, it would be the end of all of them.

But The Money Party is a permanent fixture in our lives. It dominates politics, the media, and the economy. It's a self fulfilling prophecy that is always accurate. Rig the game so only those with money can run for office. Hold elections with invisible ballots on electronic voting machines that nobody really understands. Allow all sorts of legal bribes for legislators. And never allow the term election fraud to be mentioned anywhere but on a few internet web sites.

Marginalize the poor, ethnic groups, immigrants, and anyone who protests the system. Kill the unions. Then intimidate those who have the courage to show up and protest with SWAT Teams decked out for a serious beat down.

Take all you can from the middle class to support the big casino in banking and on Wall Street. Make husbands and wives work two jobs and be grateful for the opportunity. Provide children a lousy education that costs more every year while you talk about how much you love education.

Create false issues that pit one group against another --race against race, class against class -- so that the great horror is never realized -- a unified public movement to demand freedom, dignity, and respect in our personal and public lives and a chance to earn a decent living in return for our hard work.

The Money Party has no ideals or goals other than to take as much as they can, at every turn, all the time and never let up.

Blame citizens for the fraud committed by the financiers.

Turn a blind eye as people lose their homes, savings, health care, and jobs.

Blame humanity for pollution when it's just a few industries that create the filth that's threatening us daily.

Create side shows not worthy of a second rate carnival that you call politics and never mention that changes in administrations are really cosmetic and stylistic, not substantial. Meet the new boss, not exactly the same as the old boss, but close enough.

It's all good if you're at the top or on the take. The river keeps flowing, filthy as it is, in your direction with more and more based on the real work and the real economy of citizens who, despite all of this, strive to improve their lives and contribute to the larger good.

If things get too hot, you can just stage a big drama, get everybody upset, and make people feel grateful that they have the opportunity to be perpetual victims of the most rapacious, relentless, and callous scheme around to transfer wealth from the many to the very few.

It's only class war when we fight back and they're ready with their distracting dramas and debates on issues where the two sides are separated by just a few degrees of difference. Then demand bipartisan solutions where compromise is routinely used to break major campaign promises.

They don't care if we live or die although they do want us to be as productive as possible up to the end, as long as we don't expect to retire or enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We are nothing to them.

END

Are Americans a Broken People?

2009-12-13T17:29:00.001-08:00

Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
December 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?

No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."

Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."

An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries

2009-12-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

Most good government jobs are given to people through political and class connections, not how good and skilled you are.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20091211/1afedpay11_st.art.htm?loc=interstitialskip

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries
Average pay $30,000 over private sector
By Dennis Cauchon
USA TODAY

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

"There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House's federal workforce subcommittee.

Jessica Klement, government affairs director for the Federal Managers Association, says the federal workforce is highly paid because the government employs skilled people such as scientists, physicians and lawyers. She says federal employees make 26% less than private workers for comparable jobs.

USA TODAY analyzed the Office of Personnel Management's database that tracks salaries of more than 2 million federal workers. Excluded from OPM's data: the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, intelligence agencies and uniformed military personnel.

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

Key reasons for the boom in six-figure salaries:

•Pay hikes. Then-president Bush recommended — and Congress approved — across-the-board raises of 3% in January 2008 and 3.9% in January 2009. President Obama has recommended 2% pay raises in January 2010, the smallest since 1975. Most federal workers also get longevity pay hikes — called steps — that average 1.5% per year.

•New pay system. Congress created a new National Security Personnel System for the Defense Department to reward merit, in addition to the across-the-board increases. The merit raises, which started in January 2008, were larger than expected and rewarded high-ranking employees. In October, Congress voted to end the new pay scale by 2012.

•Pay caps eased. Many top civil servants are prohibited from making more than an agency's leader. But if Congress lifts the boss' salary, others get raises, too. When the Federal Aviation Administration chief's salary rose, nearly 1,700 employees' had their salaries lifted above $170,000, too.

Medical Marijuana Apartheid: Different Rules Apply for Rich and Poor Pot Smokers

2009-12-13T15:07:00.001-08:00

Medical Marijuana Apartheid: Different Rules Apply for Rich and Poor Pot Smokers
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
December 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144530/

About 80 percent of Americans approve of medical marijuana laws, but some conservatives are incensed that state legislatures keep passing them. In a recent column, George F. Will, the Washington Post's bow-tied curmudgeon, decried the reefer madness he sees taking over California, sweeping across Colorado and perhaps even coming to a normal state near you.

The pundit seemed especially incensed that states like Colorado and California had effectively legalized the drug through a "back-door" process, writing that medical dispensaries "serve the fiction that most transactions in the store -- which is what it really is -- involve medicine." He lamented that "fifty-six percent of Californians support legalization," and concluded: "They essentially have this."

But Will is only half right. Pot in California is only legal for those of a certain class, or those who live in certain areas. It is effectively illegal in most communities of color. It's not legal for pot smokers in many conservative counties and municipalities. And it's effectively out of reach for California's poor.

It's not hard to imagine George F. Will overlooking the poor and disenfranchised from his lofty perch at the Washington Post, but they're right there, basking in the California sunshine. And every day they get busted for marijuana, and every day they enter the criminal justice system as a result.

It must be one of the great ironies of pot-politics. By using the "back-door" of medicinal use rather than legalizing marijuana sales outright -- treating it like alcohol or tobacco -- progressives in California have helped create a system of pot apartheid in the Golden State.

That's obviously not spelled out in the law. But marijuana is only legal for those who have $100-$300 to fork over for a medical marijuana card (you don't get any pot in return), who live in an area where there are medical marijuana dispensaries (generally liberal-minded, gentrified areas), who have proof of residence, and who don't fit the stereotypical image of a drug dealer.

If all that's the case, then it's true that you can go to a doctor and tell him or her that you have insomnia, headaches or bad menstrual cramps, and you're good to go. You can walk into a store like a civilized, non-criminal person, and choose from a variety of grades of marijuana.

But if you don't have a couple of hundred bucks to invest up front for what is essentially a (partial) get-out-of-jail-free card, or you don't have access to a willing physician and a dispensary, you're out of luck. There's still a healthy black market for marijuana, however. And police still arrest people who patronize it, and the courts still mete out punishments for doing so.

Just the $100-$300 barrier alone means that pot's still illegal for anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck. Add to that the fees cash-strapped California counties can charge to issue the card (in Sonoma it'll run you another $160 on top of the doctor's visit). If you earn a living wage, yes, you can use marijuana without fear of arrest. Work a minimum wage job, and pot's as illegal as it ever was.

Access to legal pot is limited geographically, according to both class and race, and the ideological orientation of local government.

Even if, for example, you really are a terminal cancer patient who smokes weed to curb the worst side-effects of chemotherapy, you're screwed if you live in one of California's right-leaning communities. As the Wikipedia entry for California's medical marijuana law notes, "Conservative areas such as San Bernardino and Riverside counties saw little change when local officials declared the law null and void due to conflicts with federal law, and continued to arrest, prosecute, and in some cases convict legal patients."

There is also something akin to "red-lining" in poorer neighborhoods. Consider this map of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. If you're unfamiliar with the city, they're all clustered in yuppified, high-rent areas -- Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Silver Lake, etc. There are no medical marijuana clubs in Inglewood, none in Compton, none in East L.A.

In the Bay Area, where medical marijuana dispensaries flourish in some communities, "Oaksterdam" has become the best-known destination for medical cannabis. But while people from elsewhere in the country may see Oakland as a poor, minority-dominated city, a map of Oaksterdam pot clubs shows they're clustered exclusively around the tony Lake Merritt area. There are none in the poorer parts of the city.

Geography and class aren't the only barriers to legal pot-smoking. If the 56 percent of California voters who favor outright legalization of marijuana had their way, anyone who appeared to be of age could buy marijuana legally, as with alcohol today. But California's medical cannabis law requires "a valid government-issued photo ID."

A number of studies looking at similar ID requirements for voting have shown that some are more likely to have those papers than others (PDF). In Georgia, blacks were 83 percent more likely than whites to be without a state-issued ID. In Indiana, the elderly and the poor, young adults and minorities were less likely than the population as a whole to have valid state-issued documents. And ID, like the medical marijuana card itself, costs money. The New York Times, citing the $20 cost of a state-issued ID (in California, it'll run you $21), called Georgia's voter-ID law, "a new poll tax," disproportionately affecting the "poor, black and elderly."

So it is with medical pot in California. Or perhaps a better analogy would be the papal dispensations that once allowed those who could afford to grease the Catholic church to buy forgiveness for their sins.

Of course, disparate punishments for getting high is nothing new in the U.S. The history of American drug laws is fairly consistent: with the exception of a brief and disastrous flirtation with alcohol prohibition, we have always come down harder on whatever the poor, foreigners or people of color use to get stupid. Opium became illegal when Chinese railroad workers used it to stave off the pain, but white ladies of the time could get their opiates easily enough from their favorite medicine-show huckster anytime they came down with a case of "the vapors."

The ultimate irony is that because of its "back-door" legalization, progressive California is continuing that tradition today. Conservatives may decry the state's supposedly freakish leftward tilt, but it's still the case that a San Francisco yuppie can hit the vaporizer without fear of jail, while a poor black youth smoking a blunt in downtown Oakland isn't so lucky.

Using Media Against the Masses for Control

2009-12-13T11:51:00.001-08:00

http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/

THURSDAY, JULY 02, 2009
The Stupefaction of a Nation: Corporate Media Propaganda and its Weapons of Mass Distraction
Originally written in December 2003

For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility... They [American news] should be balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other…Telling people what they want to hear is not doing them any favours. It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but it is what we are here to do. -- Greg Dyke, BBC director general on American news organizations coverage of the war in Iraq

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands... [Propaganda] must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect... The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses…[Propaganda] does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way …But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over….The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince… the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

[Propaganda in this nation has never been more incessant than today. From the hundreds of lies, misrepresentations and deceits being told to us by both government and corporate media about battles, deaths, injuries, the resistance, security and the deteriorating state of the occupation of our quagmire in Iraq to the distortions and chicanery the Bush administration seemingly launches at us in wave after wave of lies to the purposeful distortion and omission by corporate media of the corrupt going-ons of the embarrassment and scandal that is the bordello called Congress, propaganda, it seems, has never been used so systematically and methodically. While the corporate Leviathan launches war against us its media merrily downplays or ignores its truth or consequences or our daily lives. With the growing power of the Leviathan becoming ever stronger, in essence becoming our government, we are witnessing propaganda, conditioning and manipulation on a scale never seen before. Our nation is being devastated by both government and business propaganda. As a result, we are being made brainless puppets attached to the willful strings of the powerful elite. What follows is an examination of this growing phenomenon and how it is affecting us all, our democracy and the direction this nation is headed in.]

He who controls the media controls the masses. Today, America’s media is controlled exclusively by fewer than a dozen multinational conglomerates and their many interests. NewsCorp, AOL, Viacom, General Electric, Disney and others have formed a media oligarch that reaches into every American home and most every citizen. These few omnipresent entities hold as paramount the belief in assuring for themselves perpetual loyalty from as many of the masses as possible. Revenue and profit, corporate growth and power, executive pay and ego, these are all determined by us, the masses, and helps explain why the oligarchy has decided to invest and take an interest in all forms of media that reaches and influences us.

We are the lifeblood of the conglomerate, of vital importance, and, as such, it is in its best interest to control as much of our lives as possible, transforming us into obedient servants of obliviousness. Is it no coincidence, then, that the United States has become a nation whose masses no longer question authority or the propaganda that passes for news? Is it any wonder why we seem so ignorant as to what is being done to us and incurious as to what is happening in the world, readily and naively accepting as true everything that is spewed out of our televisions and newspapers? We have allowed the oligarchy to hide the keys of democracy while we carelessly follow it on the road to fascism, where the elite have control of all aspects of our lives, including our mind.

We live at a time when capitalism’s inner demons are beginning to be exhumed from the catacombs of the human ego, when love for the almighty dollar and her sister greed blinds those basking in the hypnotizing light of greenbacks and materialism. This phenomenon, combined with the addictions spurred by power and pomposity, has created in the last several decades a need by the powerful elite to manipulate and condition the masses; to transform and mold us into subservient drones that neither think, question, participate or demand.

Through the use of the television – the most influential instrument of control and propaganda in present day America – conglomerates can direct and sway public opinion on virtually every subject they see fit. The television has become an opiate for the masses and a conduit from where conglomerates can dictate how society thinks, acts and evolves. Our habits and ethics are manipulated, our ideas and beliefs distorted. We are but pawns in a game of corporate capitalism played by a few elites whose economic interests lie in making us docile, conformist and oblivious creatures of mediocrity ingrained with the need to shop and consume. The system instills a sense of paralysis, isolation and uniformity among the masses. We are assimilated to conform to society, to incorporate how the oligarchy wants us to live. The derailment of democracy as we know it is the end result of the reality we are presently experiencing.

As captives to their propaganda, our ears become theirs, our mouths spout their distortions and our minds contemplate what they want us to believe. To the capitalist elites, we are but a product, hundreds of millions of worker bees addicted to televison, easily persuaded and exploited, wishing for the escapist fantasies we see, sold like shares of stock to other corporate entities interested in our existence, in our captive audience. They are the strings by which we move, the drill instructors by which we march and the brain by which we think.

Propaganda, both corporate and governmental, has seemingly exploded with the ever-increasing consolidation of the media. Today few interests own the majority of our nation’s airwaves, newspapers, Internet access, print media and television stations. One company can in essence control everything you hear, see and read on a daily basis, every year of your life. From coast to coast our sources of information are increasingly being sold to wealthy multinational corporations that more and more are mingling into our daily lives, transforming our beliefs, views and goals. American society is guided by them, evolving through the commands that help shape the direction opinion will take. Diversity of opinion and thought is disappearing faster than biodiversity on Earth.

There is nothing more ominous than peering into the not-to-distant future and seeing Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp – one of the world’s largest media companies and owner of the Fox network (We distort, We decide) – have majority ownership of DirecTV, the nation’s largest home satellite TV company that in many ways represents the future of entertainment and information delivery. If the deal is allowed to go through NewsCorp could incessantly shove down our throats its right-wing, pro-Bush, pro-Murdoch business propaganda while shutting off truthful and diverse sources of information. With Bush’s FCC enamored with consolidation it is a good bet that the deal will go through.

Guided by measly crumbs of ten-second news flashes, in paltry thirty-minute news capsules loaded with a potpourri of deceptions and distortions, the masses are subjected to a blitzkrieg-like summary of that news which the elites deem necessary to serving their own interests. These drops of news and information we are granted are designed to quench the already conditioned low level of curiosity among the masses. These morsels have no intellectual worth, no capacity to inform and act more to exacerbate ignorance than to educate. What tidbits of news are allowed to fester are an amalgam of contorted half-truths, cheerleading subjective diatribe and porous reporting that is biased in favor of those conglomerates that employ the reporter. This assures that the decisions and interests of the wealthy and powerful are maintained and accepted by the masses.

What information does not serve the oligarch interest is either suppressed by omission or attacked. Government and corporate interests, such as those prevalent in our occupation of Iraq, prevent realities and truths from surfacing. Instead, propaganda is disseminated that will distort and manipulate the masses into believing exactly what those in power want. Corporate media caters to military interests because in many instances they are part of the military industrial complex. Simply look at General Electric, one of the world’s largest military contractors and owner of NBC and its sister stations. Helping manipulate the masses in time of war allows both the corporate media and the government advance their respective interest in subverting public participation and discourse while advancing a perception of consent around the nation. Forming a symbiotic relationship, both now fused into the same two headed beast, one the master of the other, their combined actions undermine the reality of a world not seen by the American public.

Corporate media, an extension of its mother company, reports pro-business, pro-corporate and anti-labor positions on a constant basis. News bits lean towards those interests that will help the corporation achieve its goals of profit maximization, whether from pushing conservative, right-wing views onto a gullible public or from conditioning audiences towards those views it sees as paramount in securing allegiance. News reports are created not to be right but to have the highest ratings, which in turn means greater profit. The interests of the masses are ignored and exchanged for that debate which will fit the interests of the elite minority. Today, growing reports of an economic recovery linger on the evening news, but can we see it in our lives and in that of our friends and neighbors? No, but good economic news benefits the elite who depend on your wallets to fatten up theirs.

Many low and middle-class citizens, through propaganda, manipulation and constant bombardment by incessant repetition of sound-bite slogans and visual imagery end up supporting those interests that are contrary to their own socioeconomic well-being. These people have in essence been brainwashed into believing that by assenting to the will and opinion of the elite their lives will be made better. Unfortunately for them, their lives are made worse as the continued exploitation and subjugation of their class continues by the same entities they so fervently believe in. This is a system where the powerful few command the weak majority and where the most important decisions are made to the benefit of the elite at the detriment of the rest.

Manipulation of the masses has been made easy with the advent of television. Populations, many made ignorant by pervasive and purposeful determents of education (itself a different article altogether), naturally believe and blindly place their confidence in those "trusted" entities they watch on a daily basis. Television is made an all-comforting apparatus as we warmly welcome home the many celebrities we become enraptured with, each manifesting inside us our desire to partake in the small fictional fantasy world they inhabit. We become numb to reality and its consequences, failing to analyze and question the actual world we reside in due to conditioning we have undergone since early childhood.

Over time we become robots incapable of discerning or even seeking the truth in the news that is provided us. We have been stupefied into believing the garbage blasted from the monitor. We have been trained to never question, always accept and to always flip the remote when our attention runs dry. News is decided on the basis of ratings and on the advertisers paying for commercial spots. Corporate media is but a business where profit is king and where the seeking of customers – other corporations buying ad space – is of primary importance. We are but a means to an end, mere statistics in the earnings game. Shows are designed not for our enjoyment but to attract and retain as many souls as possible from which to harvest revenue from advertisements and product consumption.

The corporate media inundates us with promotion, news, gossip, tabloid, rumor and innuendo from those celebrities placed high above the pedestal of sanctimony. Our heroes’ daily lives, loves, mistakes and exploits are absorbed into our psyches through the constancy of corporate media’s assault on our brainwaves. Hollywood-hero news is designed to distract us from real world events such as war and recession, keeping our minds pre-occupied and away from information that might wake our slumbering conscious. While showcasing for our viewing pleasure the present tribulations of our halo-anointed superstars of the moment, so-called journalists dissect, analyze and comment about hairstyles, appearance and supposed crimes with award winning passion. Yet real, pertinent and important news is given minor and oftentimes erroneous insight. Throughout the channel-horizon we see the same news, headlines and marketing package. The oligarch’s WMDs have been unlocked; weapons of mass distraction fester like noxious gases in every state, city and home.

Repetitive sound-bites, facetious imagery, verbosity and one-sided and frivolous analysis and commentary by pundits, spinsters, newscasters and recycled "experts" is a daily and rampant occurrence on corporate channels, each spitting out talking points and the company lines and opinion, never forcing the viewer to actually think for herself. Relevant news is brushed aside in seconds so that the latest up-to- the-second news on "Wacko Jacko" is aired. Stories that have no relevance other than to stupefy a nation into ignorance are played and replayed, trumping that news that affects most people. We are witnesses to a form of propaganda that is transforming this nation from a once bright-shining pulsar of informed democracy into a dark nebula of nothingness where everything that matters is neglected and all that degenerates and indoctrinates prospers.

Without an informed and participatory citizenry democracy begins to stumble. Our government is being taken over by the corporate Leviathan and we are indifferent as to its consequences. Crony capitalism is affecting tens of millions through lower wages, layoffs, longer hours, lost savings, tax burdens, lack of health care, increased pollution, perpetual warfare, electoral fraud and the gradual elimination of social services. Yet we remain passive and loyal, ignorant to the Leviathan’s war against us. The oligarchy uses its powers of manipulation to divide and alienate us from each other. The divisive and passionate topics of class, race, culture, religion, party affiliation, immigration and education are constantly hammered into our collective mind, announcing as real myths and stereotypes, classifying peoples into groups and imputing on them the necessary ingredients by which society will marginalize and disdain them. We are told our way of life is in peril, that we must vote against our interests in order to preserve that which we most cherish. As usual, fear is used to attain the Leviathan’s interests. A united society is a threat to the establishment, which is why we are separated and corralled into distinct clusters, conditioned to segregate ourselves from those deemed different and to fear those labeled a threat to our existence.

In its never-ending campaign to control us, corporate media instills fear into our daily lives. It has found a gold mine with the war on terror, becoming yet another fear-mongering profiteer and looter of the American public. Abusing our still fragile memories of 9/11, the corporate media unleashes the vast array of products it manufacturers onto us, using fear as its principle marketing tool, hurling diatribes about our supposed imminent threats looming in every city. Consume, consume, consume the Leviathan commands, knowing full well that our fear will eventually succumb to their perpetual warnings of apocalyptic zeal.

America has become a nation of obedient drones, aimlessly walking empty streets devoid of an informed and participatory population. Our nation is being pillaged in front of our eyes, the government is now in the hands of our masters. Apathetic puppets we have become, free thinking minds we have none. The light that once shined so bright has disappeared in a fictional world of fright. The elite that pull our strings are becoming stronger, objective information is disappearing. The powerful few now control the nation’s media and its ideas, and soon our free will and freedom to think as well. Democracy is disappearing, the Leviathan is swallowing us whole little by little, assuring itself of allegiance from a people who once questioned, were once curious and who once had control of this great nation.

Brazil police 'kill 11,000 in six years'

2009-12-13T10:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/6765724/Brazil-police-kill-11000-in-six-years.html

Brazil police 'kill 11,000 in six years'
Police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have killed more than 11,000 people in the past six years, many in execution-style murders, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch.
09 Dec 2009

Few of the officers have been charged in the extrajudicial killings, which are often labelled in police reports as the deaths of suspects who resisted arrest, the report said.

The 122-page declaration echoes a 2008 United Nations' finding that police throughout Brazil were responsible for a "significant portion" of 48,000 slayings the year before.

"Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The residents of Rio and Sao Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

Isabel Figueiredo, Brazil's coordinator-general of human rights and public safety, acknowledged that police violence is a widespread problem and "it concerns the federal government a great deal."

Ms Figueiredo said authorities have launched a series of initiatives to confront the problem, including training police to respect human rights and the appropriate use of force, in addition to the purchase of less-lethal weapons for state police forces.

Security forces "have begun to understand that instead of solving the problem, confronting criminals with weapons leads to casualties on both sides," she said.

Officials from the Rio and Sao Paulo police departments did not comment.

IRS Audits Single Mother For Not Making Enough Money

2009-12-13T10:32:00.000-08:00

IRS Audits Single Mother For Not Making Enough Money
By Cara , Feministe
December 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.feministe.us/blog//144526/

This is absurd. Via Raven’s Eye, Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times has uncovered a case in which the IRS audited a single mother with two kids, who earns $10 an hour at Supercuts and lives with her parents. What was their reason for doing so? Random selection? An incorrectly completed return? No, they just thought that she was too poor to be telling the truth:

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ ”

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

Seriously? An estimated 60,000 people in Seattle live below the poverty line — meaning they make $11,000 or less for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four. Does the IRS red-flag them for scrutiny, simply because they’re poor?

The IRS must either think that the United States is just filled to the brim with liars, or that they receive an awful lot of tax returns for people who don’t exist. A whole lot of people in this country, not just in Seattle, live under the poverty line — even though the poverty line is actually placed ridiculously low. And more still live above the official poverty line while still being poor. It’s usually not pretty. It’s sure as hell not just. And often, those people need the help of friends and family to get by. But as they will tell you, it can be done — because, simply, it has to.

As Westneat points out, it’s not as though low-income people can’t commit tax fraud. But choosing them as audit subjects specifically because of their low income is incredibly classist, and far from cost effective. It can also be just plain cruel and vindictive, as it turned in Porcaro’s case:

She had a yearlong odyssey into the maw of the IRS. After being told she couldn’t survive in Seattle on so little, she was notified her returns for both 2006 and 2007 had been found “deficient.” She owed the government more than $16,000 — almost an entire year’s pay.

She couldn’t pay it. Her dad, Rob, has run a local painting business, Porcaro Power Painting, for 30 years. He asked his accountant, Driver, for help.

Rachel’s returns weren’t all that complicated. At issue, though, was that she and her two sons, ages 10 and 8, were all living at her parents’ house in Rainier Beach (she pays $400 a month rent). So the IRS concluded she wasn’t providing for her children and therefore couldn’t claim them as dependents.

She stood to lose what is called earned income tax credit, a refund targeted to help low-income workers. You qualify only if you’re working, as Rachel has been.

So, according to the IRS, parents living in intergenerational housing aren’t caring for their children. Further, while I don’t personally know anyone for whom $16,000 is not a huge sum, it’s an impossible and mind-boggling one for someone who earns $18,000 a year.

When Porcaro’s father’s accountant informed the IRS that they had been interpreting their own tax law wrong, they didn’t exactly back down — they instead launched an investigation against Porcaro’s parents. As one can imagine from the fact that such an investigation was conducted at all, that, too, got ugly:

They racked up $10,000 in accountant bills — $8,000 of which Driver is trying to recover from the IRS.

In the end, the parents were cleared. The IRS also backed off trying to reclaim Rachel’s earned income tax credit.

But the agency insisted Rachel couldn’t prove she was supporting her children — she didn’t have enough receipts — so she had to stop claiming them as dependents. A few weeks ago she paid back $1,438 (plus penalties and interest!) on that issue.

Way to go, IRS. You did an investigation likely costing tens of thousands of dollars (counting both sides). To squeeze a grand out of a single mom who did nothing wrong.

Now, for tax purposes, Porcaro’s children just don’t plain exist. She’s not supporting them. Her parents aren’t supporting them. Apparently these children don’t eat, wear clothes, incur medical bills, or sleep anywhere — except that they do, and the IRS just doesn’t give a shit.

There was no fraud here. Porcaro was and is supporting her children. She just so happened to be doing it under a very common living arrangement that the IRS doesn’t seem to like. No one was breaking the law by claiming her children as dependents twice. She filed her taxes honestly, and indeed probably paid extra money she didn’t have to ensure that they were done right. And after that she is still being penalized, both now and in the future.

And she’s hardly alone in her struggle:

Why did this happen? The IRS won’t say, but Congress has been fighting for years about the earned income tax credit for the working poor.

Republicans have called the credits “backdoor welfare” and tried to cancel them. When they controlled Congress, they ordered the IRS to ramp up audits of people who claim the credit.

In 2006, credit recipients such as Rachel were more than twice as likely to get audited as the rest of the 140 million individual tax filers.

So, while upper middle class and rich people are being handed actual tax breaks out the ass, poor folks are being specifically and disproportionately targeted for tax “breaks” that they need to survive.

The thing is, while I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way to her, Rachel Porcaro’s story probably has a comparably happy ending. A whole lot of single moms making $18,000 a year don’t have parents with accountants, not to mention $10,000 to pay now and try to get back later. And I dread to think of what the IRS does to those women’s lives.

Further, this absolutely is a women’s issue: women are disproportionately represented among the working poor, and single moms are even more over-represented (49% of working poor families are headed by single women). We’ve got a system that is undoubtedly classist, consequently sexist, and, since a greater percentage of people of color live in poverty as compared to whites, racist.

Porcaro’s story isn’t just scary and outrageous because of what was done to her — it’s also scary and outrageous because it reveals that there are a lot of stories like it that aren’t making the news.

America's Race To The Bottom

2009-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-s-Race-To-The-Bott-by-David-Michael-Gree-091211-304.html

December 11, 2009
America's Race To The Bottom
By David Michael Green

I sure hope that there is a full and speedy recovery to the massive recession we are all now suffering under.

But, I'll be honest. I doubt that there will be. Most of the upticks following our latest national downturns have been dismal enough that economists have had to invent a new term for them. The phrase is jobless recovery, and the implications are as ugly as they sound.

What it means is that GDP rises, but life remains crappy for real people with real jobs. If they're lucky enough to have one, that is.

Where does the money from rising GDP go, then? Funny you should ask. It goes exactly where it's been going for the last three decades. Not to the public, and not to raising the living standards of ordinary folks. But, rather, to the über-class.

My guess is that The Great Recession as some are calling the current disaster (presumably to avoid using the D word) will be followed by what history will record as the The Tepid and Rather Jobless, Thank You Very Much, Recovery. If that.

And, more importantly, my guess is that this will be the latest and greatest click yet of what is the most massive ratcheting project of the last three decades, perhaps the most wholesale redistribution of wealth in human history.

Consider the numbers...

The ratio of executive salary to the average paycheck during the mid-twentieth century was about thirty to one. In the last decade it has ranged from three hundred to over five hundred to one.

The richest four hundred Americans were worth an average of about $13 million each in the middle of the century, using today's dollars. Now they average over $260 million each.

The top taxpayers in America now pay the same proportion of their income in taxes as those earning less than $75,000 per year. Those taxes on the wealthy went from being more than half of their income fifty years ago to about a sixth today.

In the past three decades, the income of the richest Americans quadrupled, while the income of the lowest ninety percent actually fell. Today, the median wage is lower than it was in the 1970s, even though productivity has grown by nearly fifty percent.

All told, from the 1930s through the 1970s, America produced the biggest and richest middle class in human history. But then many of us made the mistake as I did of assuming that this had become, based on a solid society compact, the default status quo for the foreseeable future.

In fact, it was instead an aberration. And it was contingent.

It was an aberration because we are now speedily returning (if we haven't already arrived) to the days prior to the New Deal, when the rich had everything and the middle class was small and insecure. And it was contingent because the good old days depended on a combination of elite satiation and/or a strong progressive defense of an equitable economic order.

But both have disappeared in the Age of Reagan. Today, there are seemingly no bounds conceivable to what the already astonishingly wealthy will do in order to further magnify their holdings. No suffering of the struggling middle class let alone impoverished brown people inconveniently sitting on top of desirable resources somewhere abroad represents the slightest impediment to a greed which long ago ceased to have any passing relationship with utility. We are simply talking here about sociopaths people who cannot fathom a reason to alter their predatory behavior under any circumstances, even when the lives of millions are at stake, and even when another pile of millions of dollars in their investment portfolio does nothing to improve their condition because they are already so rich to begin with.

Okay, well, that's not exactly a new thing. Unless, say, you're a geologist and you happen to think that human beings are a new thing. But what is new is that the other possible protection against the gutting of the middle and working classes that is, the existence of a progressive bulwark against greed has all but disappeared. At the level of elites, this has transpired because the Democratic Party has simply joined the GOP in becoming a corporate tool, serving the interests of Goldman Sachs and a few others, with near complete disregard for the public interest. At the mass level, Americans have embraced their own petite bourgeois form of greed, and have become stupider and Republicaner with each passing year.

The result is that the aberration is ending, albeit slowly and somewhat fitfully, and the country is returning to its natural state, where outrageous disparities of wealth are common. So common, in fact, that no serious political movement exists to redress ths injustice. So common that the wealthy go to churches where Jesus the proto-socialist who talked about camels and needles has been morphed instead into the First Coming of Ayn Rand. So common that a guy can run for president incessantly repeating the word change, invoking the greatest moral struggles of history, and come to office during a time of multiple crises for a deeply stressed American public, only to turn out to be just another Wall Street hack, busy diverting the remaining chunks of the commonwealth to the plutocracy.

It's not exactly a mystery how we ended up here, although there's more obfuscation on this question than there are hypocritical sinners at a GOP family values convention. And that's a lot. Every American government since Reagan has essentially been consumed with the task of denuding the middle and working classes of their paltry share of the national pie, in order to deliver those dollars into the hands of wealthy political benefactors. This includes Democrats as well as Precambrians. Indeed, probably the president least tenacious in pursuing this project, of the five we've been blessed with these last three decades, was George H. W. Bush. That really tells you something, right there, doesn't it?

Yes, it's true that even a mixed economy system practicing both Keynesianist and monetarist countercyclical macro-economic strategies will experience oscillations in growth. (Although, remember when, a decade ago, people were speculating about whether the business cycle had forever been tamed? Remember when people thought Alan Greenspan walked on water? Seems like a lot longer than ten years ago now...) But at the same time, government policies on economic and political issues really do matter, especially when it comes to cutting up the pie.

If you adopt policies that decimates unions, you're gonna wind up decimating unions. Never particularly high in America, and peaking historically at about thirty-five percent, the share of workers who are organized in this country is now down to about seven percent. Guess what sort of effect that is going to have on worker negotiating power over wages, benefits, safety, general treatment and respect?

If you adopt trade policies that undermine labor at every turn, you're gonna wind up with a lot of unemployed Americans competing against low-wage Mexican, Chinese and Indian workers overseas. This wasn't exactly hard to see coming as NAFTA and the WTO were being negotiated, two of the biggest priorities of the Clinton administration. It was even less hard to see when Republicans created tax incentives for companies to ship jobs outside America, and when John Kerry was either too stupid or too fully coopted to turn that slam-dunk issue into the Willie Horton of the 2004 presidential campaign.

If you adopt policies that slash taxes on the already wealthy, guess what that's going to do to the distribution of wealth in the country? Guess what impact it will have on the federal government's revenues and debt? Guess who will be stuck, in the future, paying for the loans to finance the share of revenue that the wealthy are excused from today? Plus interest, of course.

And guess what that will mean for social needs spending as the government grows so deeply indebted that its creditors force it to make cuts in outlays, like some banana republic getting the whip hand from the IMF? Will those cuts be on the military, or on healthcare? Wars or food stamps? We know they won't be on service to the debt. That interest we now pay on the $12 trillion or so we've already borrowed is currently one of the biggest single items in the federal budget, and cannot be defaulted upon without producing disaster. We already know from the Clinton administration the answer to these questions about spending priorities. Even in the flushest of times, this supposed Democratic president slashed welfare spending.

So how shocking is it, when you add it all together, to find that anti-American labor, trade, tax and spending policies turn out to hurt the middle and working classes?!?! The only thing really shocking about the entire affair is that voters have been swallowing whole that baited hook for thirty years now. And that they will likely do so again, in 2010 and 2012, as they perceive the failure of Democratic Party liberalism', and knee-jerk their way into a reign of repeated GOP pillaging, after just rejecting it in deserved disgust only a year or two ago.

Of course, new Republican governments won't be any more successful at generating public prosperity than Democrats, not least because neither has much interest in doing so, except perhaps incidentally. What the Grand Old Pricks might be able to pull off, however, is some more raghead slaughtering, fag bashing, or terror traumatizing in order to keep the hoi polloi focused on anything and everything but the emptying of their wallets.

Ultimately, the game will end, and we'll wind up looking like the British following the Second World War a great empire bled dry, all its people running around with bad teeth. Right now, Republicans and Democrats are essentially competing, as in a game of musical chairs, to avoid being the party in charge when the fictions of our economic condition can absolutely no longer be sustained. Kinda like what you see in California, the once great state. Looks to me like the Democrats lost. Now there's a shocker, huh? the party of Obambi getting reamed by the party of Tom The Hammer DeLay.

Politicians continue to play the same old cards about resurrecting the same old prosperity. No one will say the truth about how the US standard of living will probably never be restored for the bottom ninety-eight percent, while elites now have the kind of wealth that European kings once had to conquer entire continents in order to acquire. In fact, none of our courageous politicians will even tell you that you can't afford to have tax cuts and full governmental services at the same time. They're too busy borrowing it all from their kids and ours. Well, really just ours. Anyhow, isn't responsibility kinda boring? Isn't that whole honesty thing so twentieth century?

The simple and sad fact is that greedy elites will always use their power to acquire unseemly quantities of wealth, unless one or both of two conditions obtain. The first is that they are socialized to be slightly less greedy, slightly more patriotic, and remotely compassionate about those who have nothing. They may also recognize, as Henry Ford did, that their long-term prospects are rather heavily tied to those of all the rest of us.

The other option is that we, acting through genuinely progressive politics, distribute the cash more fairly. Even if we do this, the wealthy will still have ridiculous amounts of absolute wealth, of course, and truly sickening amounts of relative wealth. It's just that the rest of us will be a bit less impoverished. Perhaps all full-time workers would be guaranteed a living wage, for example. What a concept, eh? Perhaps if we throw all-in with our subversive little Bolshevist revolution, we'll go so far as to even join the rest of the world's developed countries in supplying our people with healthcare. Radical, man.

We got part of the way to a more just society during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, though it was a minor miracle that we did. And it probably really required the Great Depression to do it, along with the twin legislative forces of nature more commonly known as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

We may actually get there again.

Though if I had to guess, I suspect instead that the next stop is Palinism.

Whether we'd have the brains subsequently to ever transcend that disaster for a moderately equitable American economic order is a real question.

Whether we even could at that point is quite another.

Obama helps continue the right-wing war against America's middle class

2009-12-10T13:26:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-helps-continue-the-r-by-Richard-Clark-091205-658.html

December 8, 2009
Obama helps continue the right-wing war against America's middle class
By Richard Clark

The US is now using the Obama administration's 'stimulus' money to hire Chinese companies to build billions of dollars worth of American infrastructure! Why? Because the Chinese can do it cheaper than American companies and workers. In other words, to hell with American workers -- until they are willing to work for Chinese-level wages!

Let's face it folks, Obama and the Democrats in Congress are part and parcel of the betrayal of the American worker.

http://www.manufacturethis.org/?p=5709

http://www.manufacturethis.org/?cat=18 (Scroll down about 20% of the way to read the relevant article.)

Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren expresses her doubts about the viability of America's middle class:

“America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-warren/america-without-a-middle_b_377829.html

(Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard and is currently the Chair of the U.S. Congressional Oversight Panel.)

Consumer credit is shrinking, bank lending is down, and one out of four homeowners is upside-down (more mortgage debt than house value). Money is not moving and the economy is on a ventilator. Conclusion: We need more stimulus – for American workers, not for Chinese workers!

But there won't be another round of stimulus because Larry Summers and his sniveling companion Tim Geithner won't allow it. They have other plans. Oh yeah, Wall Street and the banking Goliaths will still get as much monetary stimulus as they need (under the phony moniker of "quantitative easing", liquidity swaps, or excess reserves). But as for the working slob -- zilch.

It seems that Summers' assignment is to bring the broader economy to its knees; to crush big labor by keeping unemployment high, to force state and local and governments to privatize more public assets and services, and to generate as much human misery as possible. In short, Summers is laying the groundwork for structural adjustment within the US, a policy which reflects his ongoing commitment to multinational corporations and neoliberalism. It's the shock doctrine redux. These people are monsters. http://www.counterpunch.com/whitney11272009.html

America's looming banking disaster will dwarf what has transpired thus far

In America the safety net of the FDIC no longer exists. It is virtually broke and that is why a few months ago, unofficially the FDIC asked government for $500 billion. Putting this into perspective, about $700 billion would insure about 1% of all the qualifying deposits in the US.

Not only will the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (HR-1207) pass the House, but also it will pass the Senate. Why? Because a great many citizens are going to write every Senator demanding that they pass it.

And when it passes, we will find out what toxic garbage the Fed has been buying from banks and what they have paid for it. We will find out every company that received funds and how those funds were spent. We will subpoena every piece of correspondence, fax, e-mail and phone calls the Fed has ever made. We will get a real balance sheet; not some version the GAO approved. Just wait until the public sees how the Fed and its owners have looted the people for almost 100 years.

Are we headed for another great depression?

Unbeknownst to most of us, we entered a depression this past February. And if we are not in a depression, then what is the significance of an actual 20% unemployment rate, a factory utilization level of 65%, and continued foreclosures on a massive scale? Nearly a third of homeowners with a mortgage – 16 million people – now owe more on their mortgage than the price for which their home could be sold! This kind of negative equity, combined with high and rising unemployment, greatly increases the risk of future foreclosures, which continue to increase in number.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/opinion/28sat2.html?_r=1&sq=Housing%20weighs%20on%20the%20Economy&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1259431211-rX/3awXi6nr4/E3aDw1B+g

Chris Hedges aptly sums up our current situation:

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation.

Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once enough of their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/addicted_to_nonsense_20091129

Obama allowing the financial elite's economic warfare on America's middle class to continue

As a result of this cooperation from Obama, American society is unraveling at an increasing rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are flashing red across the board.

1) The inequality of wealth in the United States is soaring to an unprecedented level. The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high. http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060823/

2) As the stock market went over the 10,000 mark and just surged to a 13-month high, the three big banks that took taxpayer money and benefited the most from the government bailout have just set a new global economic record by issuing $30 billion in annual bonuses this year, up 60 percent from last year. Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses.” Goldman Sachs is on pace for the best year in the firm's history, and it is also benefiting by only paying 1 percent in taxes. http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/15/goldman_sachs_posts_record_profits

3) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/veterans-lip-service-bank_b_355068.html

As the looting is occurring at the top, the U.S. middle class is beginning to collapse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

4) Workers between the ages of 55 to 60, who have worked for 20 to 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans went up by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion. http://ampedstatus.com/during-economic-crisis-wealth-of-400-richest-americans-increased-by-30-billion

5) Home foreclosure filings "hit a record high in the third quarter (of 2009)" They were the worst three months of all time" 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter" in this three-month period; “3.4 million homes are expected to enter foreclosure by year's end, with some experts estimating that next year will be even worse.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/19/AR2009111902097.html

President Obama has enacted a $75 billion taxpayer funded program that has been a spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis and has proven to be another massive waste of billions of taxpayer dollars. http://www.last.fm/forum/23/_/582596

6) Twenty-six million Americans are now unemployed or underemployed.

This means we have 26 million people who urgently need to increase their income, and they're quickly running out of options. The unemployment rate is expected to rise further and remain high for several years. “The president's chief economic adviser warned that the nation's unemployment rate could stay ‘unacceptably high' for years to come."

The New York Times reports: "Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse. Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking".” As this ratio continues to grow, it will lead to a further reduction in wages -- average worker wages have seen a sharp decline over the past year. http://www.mybudget360.com/real-unemployment-situation-approximately-26000000-unemployed-or-underemployed-job-growth-in-10-per-hour-jobs-while-20-per-hour-jobs-disappear/

Economist Nouriel Roubini, a man who accurately predicted our current crisis, just reported on unemployment stating: “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening". So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.” http://futurepredictions.com/2009/04/29/nouriel-roubini-predicts-us-unemployment-above-11-in-2010/

7) As bankruptcies surge across the board, 46 out of 50 U.S. states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with several ready to declare a financial state of emergency. California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are all “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services." http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/trend-alert-46-of-50-usa-states-could-file-bankruptcy-in-2009-2010/

8) Although the government's official figure tries to low-ball the number, 47.4 million U.S. citizens live in poverty, and the U.S. poverty rate is the highest in the industrialized world. http://www.solvingpoverty.com/PovertyFacts.htm

Predictably, homelessness is rising at an increased rate as well. "The U.S. government does not tally the numbers but interested organizations say that more than 3 million people were homeless at some point over the past year". The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is families with children.” http://www.susanohanian.org/atrocity_fetch.php?id=6171

Washington Post report: “The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat" Several independent advocates and policy experts on hunger said that they had been bracing for the latest report to show deepening shortages, but that they were nevertheless astonished by how much the problem has worsened. 'This is unthinkable. It's like we are living in a Third World country,' said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111601598.html

9) Lack of health insurance has caused 45,000 preventable deaths in the U.S. in the past year.

A Johns Hopkins Children's Center study reported that 17,000 children have died due to lack of health care. You can also add in a recent report that revealed that 2,266 U.S. veterans have died in 2008 due to lack of insurance.

As the Senate continues to strip meaningful amendments from a health care bill that wouldn't even take effect until 2013, it has become clear that, despite the media hype, the health care bill is going to fall far short of meaningful reform and continue to rig the game in favor of large insurance company profits at the expense of the U.S. population.

Never before has the United States had so many citizens with so little means, little to no income and heavy debt. Debt and costs of living have now shackled U.S. citizens just as they have shackled people throughout the world. The economic hit men have now hit the United States as well and millions of American citizens are now effectively sentenced to a slow death. http://www.healthcare-now.org/harvard-study-finds-nearly-45000-excess-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/

10) The gun and ammunition manufacturing industry in the United States has over 200 companies producing billions of dollars in annual revenues. This huge manufacturing base cannot fulfill demand quickly enough. The demand for guns and ammunition has hit a record high and the gun industry cannot produce enough bullets to keep up with orders. Americans are arming themselves to the teeth! In the past year, 100 new armed militia groups have been formed, as militia members have doubled in numbers. Federal authorities are gravely concerned about the “uptick in militia activities." One federal authority recently said, “All it's lacking is a spark.

http://openintelligence.amplify.com/2009/11/30/15-signs-american-society-is-coming-apart-at-the-seams-2/

Bottom line

We have a population of 50 million people who are now in desperate need of money, most likely have no health insurance, and can't afford to get health care or help of any kind. Part of this population probably also has loved ones who can't get life sustaining medical treatments, or loved ones who have already died due to lack of costly medical treatment. These Americans number in the hundreds of thousands and their number is, as cited above, growing at the rate of approximately 45,000 per year. The clock is ticking loud for the people facing this fate, and they are running out of options fast, and time delayed is time closer to death.

While the richest 1 percent has never had it so good, a growing and unprecedented (since the 1930s) percentage of the American families has now had firsthand experience with poverty and economic insecurity, chronic untreated illness, and premature (and wholly unnecessary) death. Millions upon millions of Americans are now poor, broke, struggling, starving, desperate, and helplessly watching loved ones die of easily cured illnesses " and growing numbers of them are armed to the teeth. Conclusion: We are sitting on a powder keg!

We are now witnessing the critical unraveling of U.S. society and the consequences may soon become more severe than most of us ever imagined.

Thanks, President Obama.

Wealth Redistribution - It Happens and the Wealthy Have Won

2009-12-10T09:20:00.001-08:00

http://www.antemedius.com/print/content/wealth-redistribution-it-happens-and-wealthy-have-won

Wealth Redistribution - It Happens and the Wealthy Have Won
andy96
antemedius.com
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:50 EST

In America, personal wealth will be redistributed one of two ways: taxation and accountability to the tax payers, or the lack thereof. Will redistribution recreate a wealthy aristocracy this nation rebelled against long ago, or will it provide for the common good and give all citizens an equal chance at creating their own wealth?

America's wealth redistribution will either benefit all of us or a select few at the expense of all of us. America's wealth redistribution will either raise all boats or only those that can be well maintained. America's wealth redistribution will either enrich the common good or engorge the well off. America's wealth redistribution will either create and maintain a foundation for our democracy and our infrastructure, or let both crumble for the sake of self-interest. America's wealth redistribution will either protect citizens and their shared resources from abuse or empower the abusers as they ravage the shared resources and protect their 'individual' gains. America's wealth redistribution will either empower all citizens to become wealthy or empower a few to control most of the nation's wealth. America's wealth redistribution will either provide for a broad based common wealth, which gives all citizens a equal chance for success and building personal wealth, or will concentrate wealth and power in a very wealthy aristocracy.

For the last 60 years, our tax laws have favored the very wealthy at the expense of other Americans not like them. The tax cuts for the wealthy are highlighted by the chart below which shows the drop in the highest tax rate between 1945 and 2008.

As detailed in another posting, the impact of the above tax cuts has given 16 percent of American families, those who make over $105,000, a 361 percent greater tax cut than the other 84 percent of American families. America's growing, but young, aristocracy is becoming wealthier and more powerful.

To these tax cuts, add the surreptitious use of privateering. Privateering takes a portion of the remaining tax revenues and diverts it to companies like Blackwater and other sole-source defense contractors, or to 'too-big-to-fail' banks. And so the wealthy CEOs get richer still and more powerful.

This redistribution of the nation's wealth to the wealthy is also shown by the chart below. It shows how family income distribution has changed from 1945 (blue) to 1970 (green) to 2008 (yellow). (All incomes were adjusted to 2008 dollars.)

In 1945, while all citizens were helping to fund their share of the common wealth, only 6.6 percent of the nation's income wealth was distributed to those making more than $75,000. (In 1945, taxation was based on funding the common wealth to protect and empower all citizens. This progressive taxation also took into account the effects of systemic causation. This progressive taxation was exemplified by the tax rates during WWII, which included up to 32 brackets and rates that ranged from 10 percent to 94 percent.)

By 1970, after the highest tax rate was dropped by more than 30 percent, that same group tripled their share of the nation's income to 18.3 percent. By 2008, even more favorable tax cuts allowed the wealthy to keep even more of their income. Now they capture 32.4 percent of the nation's income wealth - about a five fold increase from 1945.

Of course, while this transfer of wealth to the rich was happening, the funding of our common wealth was reduced just as dramatically. Now a college education is becoming affordable for only the very rich and grades K-12 are underfunded and failing in more and more public school districts as tax cuts rule. Now citizens die from food poisoning and inadequately tested drugs due to lack of independent inspectors which are paid with falling tax revenues. Now our nation and state infrastructures are literally falling down or being overwhelmed by nature and citizens die as a direct result of tax cuts. Now we have to borrow from other nations to pay our war bills and bank CEO's bonuses. Now we have corporations that build facilities that electrocute our troops so they can maximize their profit. Now we have a health insurance system that lets Americans die to maximize CEO bonuses.

As the wealthy have become disproportionately wealthier and more powerful, what has happened to accountability for the nation's wealth between 1945 and 2008? In 1945, with highest tax rates at 94 percent, all families were proportionately funding our common wealth - our elected officials were accountable to the voters for our common wealth and used it to protect and empower all citizens. In 2008, with the highest tax rate at 39 percent, mega rich individuals, who have gained the most from the nation's common wealth, became accountable - to themselves and to shareholders.

This difference in the distribution of wealth and whose accountability for the redistribution is explained by the strict father family model of conservatives without conscience (CWC) and the nurturant family model of progressives. As stated by George Lakoff in 'Making Accountability Accountable', "To progressives, it [accountability] means social as well as personal responsibility -- responsibility for both oneself and everyone else who could be harmed by one's failure. To conservatives, it means individual responsibility only."

In other words, for CWCs, the individual is solely accountable for their wealth and they have no responsibility for other Americans not like them. Nor do they believe that other factors have an impact on their wealth. They believe they are in control. For progressives, the individual and various systemic factors like the family you were born into and the availability of a good education, contribute to an individuals wealth. Progressives also believe we are all accountable for our effects on others. They that hold our elected officials are accountable for America's common wealth and will not support those officials that show favoritism with our common wealth.

As accountability shifted from elected officials to CWCs, funding for the common wealth was reduced significantly by substantial tax cuts for the mega rich. The result is a slow drift toward a new corporate aristocracy where most citizens will suffer more abuse and find it more and more difficult to get ahead. Increasing taxes on the rich is the only way to defund the rise of this aristocracy and re-fund the common wealth This in turn will provide for the protection and empowerment of all citizens to create their own wealth based on their abilities, better K-12 basic education, equal access to higher education, protecting our common resources like land, air and water, and an infrastructure that enables equal and safe access to the nations common wealth.

In summary, America's common wealth is being depleted, the government is less able to protect and empower its citizens, and accountability for the nations common wealth has been stripped from our elected representatives and handed over to corporate CEOs who are only accountable to shareholders.

It's time we all realize that tax cuts favoring the very wealthy are not what America needs. Just look at where they have gotten us - The Great Recession, consumer debt at 100 percent of GDP, and banks too big to fail.

Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?

2009-12-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/levine12042009.html

Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?
Bruce E. Levine
Counterpunch
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:12 EST

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes? NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing -- it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington D.C. protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested any of this.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was over-ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even all this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more psychological way we become even more broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was fully realizing that Americans were so broken that they could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant in 2004 (10 percent of Americans lacked a single confidant in 1985). Sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented - or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings - or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions - or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted, "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude." Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything - this is one reason why the Soviet Empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Television, Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television: (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves - and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything - not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals - at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the Question & Answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . .

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything - they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of the few U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."

An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

We're Doing a Heckuva Job Helping Those Devastated by the Economic Meltdown By Karen Dolan and Diana Pearce, AlterNet December 7, 2009 http://www.alte

2009-12-07T06:06:00.000-08:00

Not helping the weak and vulnerable is done on purpose! The evil, serpentine elite have an agenda to get rid of as many 'useless eaters' as they can in American and on the planet and feeding/helping/housing/so forth of the poor results in many kills! Women and children are primary targets of this depopulation program of the filthy rich bitches as if you wipe out women, you wipe out their fertility. You wipe out children and you wipe out all their future generations. Evidence for depopulation program is all over the internet or right in front of your face. Look around and you will find that poverty on this planet is socio-engineered by the psychopathic elite!

We're Doing a Heckuva Job Helping Those Devastated by the Economic Meltdown
By Karen Dolan and Diana Pearce, AlterNet
December 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144392/

The levees failed residents of New Orleans when Katrina battered their city. The safety net is failing Americans battered by the most recent Category 5 storm—the "Great Recession" of 2008-2009.

Category 5 storms are catastrophic: communities are ravaged; security is stolen; lives are lost. For millions of Americans, the Great Recession is just such a storm.

Unemployment is in the double digits; poverty and hunger are at record-high levels; foreclosures and homelessness are still climbing. The middle class is shrinking and many blacks, Latinos, single mothers and children are experiencing a full-blown economic depression. With such devastating conditions, our nation once again finds itself unprepared to face the ravages of an unnatural disaster.

Katrina exposed our nation's inability to respond to the plight of many of our most vulnerable citizens in a time of great need. This recession has exposed our nation's inability to respond to the profound needs of a growing number of Americans falling precipitously through a badly tattered safety net.

The Institute for Policy Studies (where one of us works), the Center for Community Change, Jobs With Justice and Legal Momentum have co-authored a new study outlining the tragic state of our nation's safety net. In "Battered by the Storm: How the Safety Net is Failing Americans and How to Fix It," we find that while the Obama administration's 2009 Recovery Act has provided some responsiveness, particularly with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and Unemployment Insurance extensions, our safety net has far too many holes to keep millions of us out of poverty, particularly during this extended period of high unemployment.

We have a national social assistance program, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), that’s supposed to be our nation’s last line of defense against falling into the depths of poverty. Yet this program is so deeply inadequate that by 2008, the number of needy children receiving TANF fell to only 22 percent. Under the pre-“welfare reform” system of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1995, 62 percent of poor children were benefiting. Eligibility criteria are set at sub-poverty levels in some states, making poor children ineligible, and barriers such as lack of childcare and lack of access to employment have further kept poor children from receiving desperately needed economic assistance that a system such as TANF should provide.

Most Americans' sense of well-being is tied to their jobs. With unemployment and underemployment at over 17 percent, higher among black, Latino and women-maintained household populations, the fall from middle class to poverty is often quick and painful. America’s children suffer the most. Almost one in five children in the United States lives in poverty; almost one in four suffered from inadequate access to food last year. These numbers are on the rise without an end in sight.

And although two safety net programs in particular, food stamps and unemployment insurance, have proven fairly responsive during the recession, what does this mean in practical terms? About 57 percent of unemployed workers currently receive unemployment compensation thanks to the Recovery Act and congressional extensions. But the amounts are typically less than half of the wages they were receiving and many are suffering from the devastating loss of work-related health benefits.

Although the SNAP program, commonly known as food stamps, has responded fairly well to growing need by reaching more households, the average monthly benefit per person is only about $100. How can our children be happy, healthy, and adequately nourished on that?

There are solutions. We can begin to repair the safety net immediately, saving millions from lives of despair. We can simultaneously begin to implement longer-term structural changes that can eventually make obsolete the need for a safety net in this country.

The first step is an emergency relief package. We propose a roughly $400 billion relief package that will:

Create 1 million new public-sector jobs;
Cover the gaping state and local fiscal deficits;
Maintain existing jobs;
Bolster inadequate safety net programs like TANF and SNAP;
Extend and expand Unemployment Insurance and COBRA.
There are innovative ways to keep homeowners in homes threatened with foreclosure by allowing them to rent. Low-income families facing homelessness can be protected when landlords go into foreclosure by funding a national housing trust fund that can provide desperately needed affordable housing.

Such an emergency relief package is a necessity and it will have positive effects on the economy enabling a more robust recovery. We simply can’t afford not to do it.

The Institute for Policy Studies even suggests ways to pay for the package that involve progressive tax reforms. For example, we could raise up to $150 billion for new jobs simply by putting a penny tax on every $4 of stock trading transactions. We could save our economy and curb the reckless casino mentality that got us here in the first place.

Ultimately we need to reverse the trends of the past 30 years that have reduced wages, increased poverty, and grossly expanded the income gap between the rich and the rest of us in this country.

Such solutions would at least entail policies aimed at generating:

Full employment;
Affordable quality universal healthcare;
Childcare assistance for all who need it;
Increased access to affordable housing;
High-quality education from pre-school through college;
Reform of discriminatory and unjust law enforcement policies;
Paths to citizenship; and
Full enforcement of anti-discrimination laws at all levels of government.

Unless we act immediately to stop the bleeding and simultaneously begin the longer-term work of reversing the devastating trends of increasing poverty in this country, Katrina and the Great Recession will be only two of countless Category 5 storms that will leave our families, our communities and our nation tattered for generations to come.

Why welfare reform fails its recession test

2009-12-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

Back when this was passed, the politicians told me that they knew there was a big recession coming and that the people thrown off welfare rolls would suffer. One even told me that one of the reasons of getting rid of welfare was to "cull the citizen cattle" (kill some by socio-economic forces). One thing for sure, the poor of america have been thrown under the economic bus so many ways...I earned four university degrees and it never got me a decent job...Believe it or not, the puppet masters of the underworld have economics tightly controlled in american and in the whole world...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120402604.html

Why welfare reform fails its recession test
By Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich
Sunday, December 6, 2009

We all like to imagine that there'll be something to stop our fall if we hit hard times. Mulugeta Yimer, for example, is a 56-year-old Alexandria cabdriver who escaped poverty and persecution in Ethiopia 20 years ago only to be clobbered by the recession. Business is way down, and he's facing possible foreclosure on his home. He says he is averse to government handouts, but when he contemplates what might be in store for his wife, who works part-time at a convenience store, and their two young children, he muses wistfully, "There's always welfare, isn't there?"

Actually, no. When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, he didn't just end welfare as we knew it. For all practical purposes, it turned out, he brought an end to cash help of any kind for families with children in much of the country. While welfare reform was long ago declared a success in some quarters, it was deeply flawed from the beginning. The recession has shown how seriously unprepared it left us for hard times.

Conservatives had been attacking the old welfare system for decades, claiming that it fostered dependency. Many liberals found it unsatisfactory as well. Welfare checks weren't big enough to lift families out of poverty, and the system did little to help recipients get or keep jobs. When Republicans gained control of Congress and welfare rolls swelled in the early 1990s, these attacks gained momentum, and in 1996, Clinton ended the legal right to cash assistance and imposed a five-year limit on federally financed help to any given family.

Welfare reform also provided the states with nearly complete discretion over how to administer benefits. Most states responded with gusto, reducing welfare rolls nationally by two-thirds in just a few years.

So when the Great Recession came along, the government safety net for families with children was in tatters. The United States was no more prepared for massive unemployment than New Orleans had been prepared for its levees to fail. Some important government programs, including unemployment insurance and food stamps, have started to rise to the challenge and have even begun to lose their stigma among former members of the middle class. Unemployment insurance now covers 57 percent of those who have lost their jobs, as opposed to less than 40 percent before the recession -- although their benefits amount to less half their former wages. Reliance on food stamps has expanded even more dramatically. While the average benefit still isn't enough to meet people's basic nutritional needs, the program now serves 36 million people, double the number when Clinton left office and up by a quarter in the past year.

By contrast, the caseload for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the name we now give welfare) is about 5 million people. This number is up by about 1 million since the beginning of the recession, but it's still just a little over a third of what it was 15 years ago, before welfare reform.

Why the huge difference between unemployment insurance and food stamp usage and welfare caseloads? People have a legal right to food stamps if they meet the statutory requirements, but since 1996 there has been no legal right to cash assistance. And so welfare, generally speaking, has not cushioned the impact of the recession.

We can see the results: According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, the number of homeless Americans is up by 61 percent since the recession began in December 2007. That figure will only continue to rise. The number of people living in poverty increased by 2.5 million during the first year of the recession, and it has surely risen further in 2009. The government reported recently that nearly 50 million Americans are experiencing what it delicately calls "food insecurity."

We are among the co-authors of a forthcoming report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "Battered by the Storm," which documents the government's inadequate response to the human suffering caused by the recession and describes the excruciating choices people now face between feeding their families and paying the rent.

Both of us were critical of the new approach to welfare when it was enacted in 1996. One of us resigned from the government in protest of the law; the other helped organize opposition to it from within the women's movement. We argued that the low-wage jobs available to former welfare recipients would not pay the bills. We warned that the legislation didn't provide adequate child care for single mothers thrown off welfare. And we cautioned that many welfare recipients faced serious barriers to success in the job market.

But some advocates of welfare reform seemed to consider poverty a voluntary condition, one curable with a quick kick in the pants and the opportunity to work for minimum wage. There were not enough jobs even then, but, blinded by the economic boom of the 1990s, the authors of TANF seemed to think that the business cycle had been abolished and that prosperity would take us only onward and upward.

In the rapidly expanding service economy of the 1990s, many former welfare recipients did find jobs, but most did not escape poverty, and a significant number were pushed off the rolls without finding work. Research showed that one in five former recipients ultimately became disconnected from any means of support: They no longer had welfare, but they didn't have jobs. They hadn't married or moved in with a partner or family, and they weren't getting disability benefits. And so, after a decline in the late 1990s, the number of people living in extreme poverty (with an income less than half the poverty line, or below about $9,100 for a family of three) shot up by more than a third, from 12.6 million in 2000 to 17.1 million in 2008.

In some states TANF virtually disappeared -- perhaps not surprisingly, given the states' new discretion and pressure from Washington to slash the rolls. Nationally, the fraction of poor children getting help plummeted from almost two-thirds to less than a third. A number of states reduced their welfare rolls by 90 percent.

Perversely, many observers welcomed these huge declines as proof that welfare reform was working. They didn't bother to follow these families as they moved into ever more crowded living situations, pieced together patchworks of part-time jobs or left their children alone while they went to work.

With the recession that began at the end of 2001, thousands of women who'd been removed from the rolls found themselves without jobs or welfare. Beverly Ransom, for example -- a Miami welfare reform "success story" -- had found well-paying work in the catering business, until the recession took her job away and left her without employment prospects and unable to pay rent for herself and her two children on the meager assistance available to her. She eventually found help from a community organization fighting for welfare rights.

If 2001 and the months thereafter revealed holes in the safety net, the current crisis shows even more vividly that TANF is essentially irrelevant in large parts of the country. If the real purpose of welfare reform was simply to reduce the rolls, it's been a smashing success. Some states have been more responsive to economic conditions, but they are the exception. Even now, in the face of high unemployment, caseloads in many states are tiny. At the end of last year, Wyoming had 281 families on its rolls -- about 550 people. Idaho had 1,600 families, Oklahoma had 8,639, and Arkansas had 8,664. The share of poor families receiving TANF was 4 percent in Wyoming, 5 percent in Idaho, 9 percent in Illinois, 9 percent in Louisiana and 9 percent in Texas. Caseloads fell in 20 states during 2008.

Benefits are tiny, too, with 30 states paying a maximum benefit that's less than 30 percent of the federal poverty line. Mississippi skimps by offering its TANF recipients $170 a month for a family of three, about 9 percent of the poverty line and barely enough to cover the utility bills.

Nationwide, there has been no increase in federal welfare funding since the 1996 law was enacted, so thanks to inflation, the value of that funding has eroded by about a third. There is an emergency fund for TANF in the stimulus package Congress passed in February, but little of it has been spent, primarily because it requires a match that fiscally strapped states are unable to put on the table.

Most states in effect adopted a welfare policy of ignoring the recession. Fourteen of 24 states that responded to an Urban Institute survey this fall said they had not changed any of their TANF policies or practices in response to higher unemployment.

There are two techniques that allowed states to radically reduce welfare rolls over the past decade, and they are being used to keep the rolls down now, even as need escalates. The first is to shut the front door almost completely through a process called "diversion" -- essentially telling someone: "You look able-bodied. Go out and look for a job." The Urban Institute's analysis showed that 42 states have rules that discourage enrollment, such as requiring an extensive job search, even when there are obviously no jobs to be found. For a person without a car or access to public transportation, a requirement to apply for dozens of jobs before an application for welfare will even be considered, as some states and counties mandate, can be a deal-breaker.

In some states, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut law school, "applying for welfare is a lot like being booked for a crime." There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting and lengthy interrogations as to the true paternity of one's children. Word gets around, and, even in the face of destitution, many people will not undergo such indignities.

The other technique for keeping the rolls down is to staff the back door with the equivalent of a nightclub bouncer. The practice is called "sanctioning" -- kicking people off the rolls because they were late to a work assignment (no excuses accepted, whether for sick children, late buses or car trouble) or didn't show up for an appointment at the welfare office (no dispensation for failure to receive notice of an appointment or inability to understand English). In some states multiple infractions of this sort can result in lifetime disqualification.

It's time to acknowledge that America's 1996 experiment with welfare reform was based on reckless assumptions about the economy, as well as a callous disregard for the realities of sustaining a family. We need a massive emergency relief package not only to fund new jobs but to repair the grievous holes in our national safety net. Fifty million people need help now -- not in three months or six months, but today.

Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown Law Center and served as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book is "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America." They are among the co-authors of "Battered by the Storm," a report to be released Monday by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Why white skin is all the rage in Asia

2009-12-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/091123/asia-white-skin-treatments-risks

Why white skin is all the rage in Asia
From pills to lasers to cream, what's fueling the boom in skin-whitening procedures across the continent?
By Phillip Martin — Special to GlobalPost
November 25, 2009 06:25 ET

HSINCHU, Taiwan — Walking along a rushing stream in Hsinchu, Hilda Chu balanced an umbrella in one hand and textbooks in the other. Her skin was ghostly white. “I try hard to make my skin white,” said Chu, 18, a student at National Tsing Hua University. “If my skin is lighter, I will be happier because I think I look good. It makes my emotion better, yes.”

She's hardly alone. Asians spend an estimated $18 billion a year to appear pale.

“Asians like white skin," said Dr. Hsieh Ya Ju, a dermatologist at MacKay Memorial Hospital in Hsingchu, who sees about 25 patients a day. Outside Hsieh’s office, four middle-aged chalky-skinned women sat patiently awaiting treatments that cost $300 to $500 per session. They are there to take pills that Hsieh says will help their skin turn white. Doctors in Taiwan also use lasers, creams, surgeries and other means to lighten skin.

Nydia Lin, a senior executive in Taiwan for Japanese cosmetics giant Shisedo, said as many as 50 percent of Taiwanese women (and growing numbers of men) are paying big money to medically alter their golden exteriors. “We promote the idea of whitening. Especially in Taiwan we see many beautiful idols on TV and they are all focused on their whitening skin. As the Chinese say, ‘You can cover all your defective parts if you are white.'”

Variations of that slogan are heard throughout Asia, with the most common translation being, "One white can cover up three ugliness.” According to a 2004 study by global marketing firm Synovate, nearly 40 percent of women in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines used skin whitening and lightening products that year.

Asian skin whitening has a tradition that stretches back centuries. "The feminine ideal during the Han period for women of the court was almost unearthly white, white skin. Moon-like roundish faces, long black hair. You can see how a culture that maintained that as an early ideal might continue with an ideal that light skin equals beauty," said Anne Rose Kitagawa, assistant curator of Japanese art at Harvard’s Sackler Museum.

Asia’s obsession with whiteness is also a reflection of economic status. "Those who had skin burnt by the sun were working in the fields, therefore, the whitening of the skin was a reflection of labor status,” said University of Houston historian Gerald Horne.

Horne also points to a political angle, shaped by the Allies' victory in World War II. “An aspiration of many in Asia toward whiteness is a reflection of the idea that the North Atlantic Powers were the quote — winners — unquote, and therefore they need to be imitated.”

But Chao-uan Tsen, of the Taipei womens' rights organization Awakening Foundation, said the whitening trend is a form of self hatred. “The beauty industries in Taiwan emphasize different skin tones and say that if you can be as white as Japanese women you can be as beautiful as a cherry blossom. This kind of image which they create doesn’t make women any happier. It actually creates more anxiety.”

Moreover, there are medical downsides to seeking lighter skin. That's especially true for those who can't afford expensive treatments, such as poor women using illegal bleaches and creams containing mercuric chloride that have left them disfigured.

Skin whitening can be dangerous for other reasons too, including the loss of melanin. “The whiter they become the more chances they will be subjected to skin damage and skin cancer," said Dr. Ernesto Gonzalez, director of international dermatology training at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.

Medical concerns aside, Taiwanese student Hilda Chu views skin whitening as a practical response to society’s pressures: “My future employers like white skin more,” she says simply.

For Parade Magazine, the Middle Class Starts at 100K

2009-12-04T18:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/11/23/for-parade-magazine-the-middle-class-starts-at-100k/

For Parade Magazine, the Middle Class Starts at 100K
11/23/2009 by Jim Naureckas

Claiming that "something needs to be done--and fast" to save Social Security, Parade magazine's Gary Weiss (11/22/09) suggests a downside to the idea of raising the ceiling on taxed income, so that income above the current $106,800 would be subject to the Social Security tax: "Raising the cap is popular among Social Security reformers but would increase the tax burden on the middle class, since more of their income would be subject to the tax. " (By contrast, "Raising the payroll tax rate would disproportionately affect lower-income workers.")

According to the Census Bureau, less than 5 percent of individuals over the age of 15 in the U.S. have incomes exceeding $100,000 a year. That's a peculiar definition of "the middle class."

If Weiss truly believes that "experts agree that the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to solve the system’s financial ills," he ought to read Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot's Social Security: The Phony Crisis.

Is Capitalism at a Breaking Point?

2009-12-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/11/25/is-capitalism-at-a-breaking-point/

Is Capitalism at a Breaking Point?
By Stephen Dufrechou
NEWS JUNKIE POST
Nov 25, 2009

The following lines begin Ralph Ellison’s masterful novel, Invisible Man:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed everything and anything except me.”

Ellison’s narrator is speaking, of course, of the experience of being black in America, in the pre-Civil Rights era. But Ellison’s words here might also be those of any man today—a man of any color—who is a victim of global capitalism.

The theme of racial divide in Ellison’s novel was evoked, recently, by a New York Times article, on November 17. In many communities, the current depression “has begun to erase” that divide—if not psychologically, at least visibly. “Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office”, the article says, “and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time.” The article equally notes, though, that black Americans seem to be hit the hardest by the depression, a fact underscoring the long-lasting effects of racial apartheid in the US.

But encountering the object of one’s racism in a food-line certainly won’t erase that racism from a person’s psychology. Poor whites have hated poor blacks, and vice versa, for centuries. But what this current depression has introduced to the minds of the newly-impoverished, of all races, is the state of “invisibleness” that the poor experiences.

Keasha Taylor, 36, an official at the Division of Family and Child Services has said: “Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation [of welfare assistance]… We’re already used to poverty; they’re not.” Poverty, in one sense, is a tremendous equalizer.

To be “poor” in America is to be “invisible”, regardless of your skin color; everyone is equally non-existent. If you’re white and poor, you’re as non-existent—in the state’s eyes—as the “Other” demographics that are poor. It has always been that way, even in so-called times of “economic prosperity”. This factor of “invisibleness” is one that the growing number of newly-poor are struggling to accept.

Invisible under Capitalism

Now that middle-classes are being forced into the “invisibility of poverty”, they’re beginning to understand the state of racial “invisibility” explored by Ellison’s novel. For that is what Ellison’s black narrator and the American poor share in common—they are both invisible “sub-humans”, whose invisible “sub-humanness” fails to register on the radar of American social consciousness. They are “invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see” them—to quote the novel.

Indeed, for Americans, poverty is the 1,000-ton elephant in the room everyone ignores. Politicians, the mass media, the upper- and middle-class citizens—the poor remain invisible to all of them. To evoke the poor’s very existence is at best impolite conversation, at worst tantamount to “anti-Americanism”. God forbid, one goes further and suggests ending poverty; such a heresy results in certain expulsion from the discourse. Even Obama’s populist, campaign rhetoric fixated on assisting the “middle class”, at the expense of saying a word of substance about the systemically poor—the chronic victims of capitalism.

And even now, as the economy is all but imploding into the rubble, poverty is ignored—this while corporations scrape the cream off their “bailout” checks and hold executive resort parties. Journalist David DeGraw, at Amped Status, has catalogued the severity of the economic and social implosion. Here are highlights—summarized by AlterNet—of DeGraw’s “Critical Unraveling of US Society”:
1) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth.”
2) The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and the poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the US population is at a record high.
3) 25 million people are unemployed or under employed. Plus, economist Nouriel Roubini, a man who accurately predicted the current crisis, has recently stated: “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the US labor markets are awful and worsening … So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest … All economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs are not coming back.”
4) As individual bankruptcies spread like wildfire across the board, 10 US states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with several ready to declare a “financial state of emergency”.
5) Lack of health insurance has caused 45,000 preventable deaths of US citizens in the last year (the equivalent death-toll of over ten “9/11s”), according to The American Journal of Medicine. The Journal also stated that “Nearly two out of three bankruptcies stem from medical bills, and even people with health insurance face financial disaster if they experience a serious illness.”
6) 50 percent of US children, one out of every two children need food stamps to eat. In other words, one out of every two children will starve to death without government assistance.
Journalist Alan Maass has equally noted that “About one-third of the 49 million people threatened with hunger were part of households that had what researchers call “very low food security”—meaning that one or more members of the household skipped meals, ate reduced portions or otherwise didn’t get enough to eat at some point in the year.” Maass adds that this statistic is “from 2008—before the worst job losses and unemployment hit earlier this year.”

He follows this by citing a New York Times editorial, which noted that before the depression began, “more than two-thirds of families with children who were defined as ‘food insecure’ under federal guidelines contained one or more full-time workers …

This suggests that millions of Americans were trapped in low-wage jobs before the downturn that made it more difficult for them to provide children with adequate nutrition.”

Capitalism’s systemic inhumanity is not just isolated to the US, though. The same catastrophic social implosions have hit Europe and the East, as well, with the “Third World” and Latin America being slammed the hardest. The BBC’s recent worldwide poll demonstrates that “Dissatisfaction with capitalism is widespread around the globe”. The study states that “Only 11 percent of people surveyed across the 27 countries thought free market capitalism is working well, while nearly a quarter—23 percent—said the system is “fatally flawed”. A bare majority, 51 percent, believed its problems can be solved with more regulation and reform.”

The study also states that “the world’s economic system has failed to live up to its promises”. It then cites Japan’s recently-elected center-left Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who called for a global “fraternity” of livable societies.

“It is self-evident,” Hatoyama said, “that free economic activity in markets invigorates society … But it is also obvious that the idea of letting markets decide everything for the survival of the strongest, or the idea of economic rationalism at the expense of people’s lives, does not hold true anymore.”

The bottom line is that capitalism must radically change if it wishes to survive. In fact, it must change to such an extreme degree that it looks drastically different from “capitalism” of the past. If it does not do so, revolutions are going to occur globally.

The Coming Social Implosion in America

All of these facts, regarding capitalism’s innate, inhumane flaws, are lost on most Americans—even as directly they suffer from them, bizarrely enough. This is largely because information like this, when it does break in the media, is automatically dismissed by many US citizens. Thus, this crucial information also becomes “invisible”, both to the government and the citizenry. It becomes “invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see” it.

After five decades of ideological indoctrination and institutional miseducation, a sweeping majority of Americans are left psychologically unable to accept anything which does not fit with their ideological programming. Thus, they fail to understand the causes of their grim social reality, even when faced with the naked truth.

Two recent News Junkie Post articles have addressed the current dynamics of this “brain-washed” American consciousness. Looked at together, they paint a dark picture of the coming social violence and its long-standing causes. They go far, indeed, in explaining the problem of “invisibility”.

On November, 21, “The Traumatic Illusion of Free Speech” was published. The article documents the causes and dynamics of American “brain-washing”, and the resulting ideologues which have seized control of the public discourse—leading to the closure of free speech in the US.

On November, 24, Ole Ole Olson published “Conservative Counter-revolution and the Coming Violence”. Olson’s article examines the recent historical developments, which have led to the eventuality that the brain-washed ideologues will soon irrationally explode into violence on American soil.

But as the corporate media and US politicians continually offer platitudes, while sweeping the facts of reality under the rug, the “invisible” in America are growing in number—and growing enraged at this state of affairs, even if they can’t fully comprehend the nature of those affairs. The rage, one way or another, will ignite. As Joan Didion once said of the 1960’s, “The center was not holding”.

The center is not holding today, either. Governments cannot expect to maintain such inhuman conditions for long. But what will (sadly, horrifically) separate the protests of the 60’s from coming revolts today is crucial: the 60’s movements were driven by philosophically-based, humanist ethics; today—though there will be some intellectual-minded groups—the coming revolt will be largely void of such substance.

Of the 1960’s protesters, the civil rights movement was fueled by such moral thinkers as Martin Buber and St. Augustine; the second-wave feminist movement was driven by critics like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan; the anti-war movement was influenced by a wide range of philosophers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Gandhi.

But if the French suburban riots of autumn 2005 are any indication of where protest is today, then America is in grave trouble. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek notes in his book, “Violence”:

“the 2005 revolt [in France] was just an outburst with no pretense to [philosophical] vision … There were no particular demands made by the protesters in the Paris suburbs. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated resentment … In a weird self-referential short circuit, they were protesting against the very reaction to their protests. “Populist reason” here encounters its irrational limit: what we have is a zero-level protest, a violent protest act which demands nothing.”

Given the lack of education and psychological stability in the US, the coming American revolt will likely be more “irrational”, even more at the “zero-level” of violence, which “demands nothing” of substance, than the French riots were. The “populist reason”, here, is fueled by nothing but fifty years of irrational consumer psychology, by infantile fantasies of wish-fulfillments. No logic, no moral philosophy, no humanist idealism will be trumpeted—just violent demands to be “recognized“. Such events could easily turn the US into a genuine police state.

Nevertheless, soon the “invisible” will explode into “visible” revolt. Then, no one will be able to ignore the giant bulge of facts, which had been swept under the ideological rug. Americans, indeed, are in for a turbulent coming decade. Brace yourself now. The facts will explode. History, itself, is moving again. And capitalism may be its way out, in the waves of oncoming violence.

How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

2009-12-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

Read this book for free at http://www.conservativenannystate.org/cnswebbook.pdf

The Conservative Nanny State
How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
by Dean Baker, published May 2006

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It’s time for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes – decent wages, good jobs and affordable health care.

Congress Can Kill Outlandish Bonuses for Wall Streeters: Why Won't They?

2009-12-04T06:52:00.000-08:00

Congress Can Kill Outlandish Bonuses for Wall Streeters: Why Won't They?
By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
December 4, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144261/

Great minds have been searching, ever since last fall’s financial sector meltdown, for an antidote to the wildly excessive Wall Street paydays that made that meltdown inevitable. That search, after over a year, still hasn’t generated anything close to meaningful Wall Street pay reform.

And that has to be puzzling many, if not most, average Americans. The problem on Wall Street, after all, doesn’t seem to be all that complicated. Neither does the solution. Wall Streeters did terrible things -- they gutted the pensions and savings of millions -- because they were rushing to hit massive pay jackpots. To prevent that greedy rushing in the future, we ought to limit those jackpots.

And Congress could do that -- by not letting any banker getting bailout dollars make more than the President of the United States. Or by denying government subsidies or tax deductions to firms that pay their top execs over 25 or 50 or 100 times what their workers make. Or by taxing big bonuses at 90 percent.

Various bills that take these approaches have actually been sitting in Congress, all this year. Why aren't these bills going anywhere? America’s big banks, predictably enough, oppose them. But so do many of Wall Street’s mainstream critics. Both these camps have been bending over backwards to steer Congress away from the notion that rewards on Wall Street need serious downsizing.

The banks, by and large, simply deny that these rewards have had any significant impact on how the movers and shakers of high finance behave. In the end, they argue, "the market" will always punish power suits who take reckless risks -- and the power-suits know it.

And if those power-suits didn’t know it before last year’s financial meltdown, the apologists continue, they know it now, thanks to last year’s nosedives at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

These nosedives left top execs at Bear Stearns and Lehman holding millions of shares of worthless stock. The Lehman collapse wiped nearly a billion dollars -- $931 million, to be exact -- off the personal net worth of Lehman CEO Richard Fuld. Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne saw the total value of his personal stock holdings drop by $900 million.

In effect, apologists for Wall Street's compensation status quo argue, the market system worked. The truly reckless paid a price for their recklessness. So leave that system alone.

Wall Street’s mainstream critics don't want to leave that system alone. They believe "the market," left to its own devices, does not adequately discipline the reckless. We need reforms, they believe, that tie executive rewards to "performance" that boosts "long-term shareholder value."

With such reforms in place, their argument goes, Wall Streeters would have no incentive to take reckless risks -- and lawmakers would have no reason to mess with capping the rewards that go to Wall Streeters.

Last week, the most eminent among Wall Street's mainstream critics -- Harvard Law’s Lucian Bebchuk -- released a report that takes on Wall Street's hardline defenders and their claim that the reckless, thanks to the market, have truly suffered for their sins.

This new report powerfully demolishes that hardline claim. But the report, read closely, may just as powerfully undermine the mainstream case against caps.

Bebchuk's new paper revolves around what really happened, on the executive pay front, at Bear Stearns and Lehman. Top execs at these two banks, Bebchuk and his two Harvard co-authors show, did not lose their shirts when the banks crashed. In fact, the top execs at both Bear and Lehman left the crash scene in fine financial fiddle. Spectacularly fine fiddle.

Between 2000 and 2008, the top five executives at Bear Stearns and the top five execs at Lehman together pocketed just under $2.5 billion. About half a billion of that came from annual cash bonuses. They picked up the rest selling off the shares of bank stock they had received as "performance" incentives.

But what about those $900 million “losses” that the CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman suffered? Those losses existed only on paper. They represented the difference between the pre- and post-crash value of the Bear and Lehman stock the two CEOs had left in their portfolios when their banks tumbled over the cliff.

In real cash, the two CEOs -- despite their epic failures -- came out way ahead. For his labors between 2000 and 2008, CEO Cayne of Bear Stearns ended up $388 million to the richer. CEO Fuld of Lehman walked away with $541 million.

So what do mainstream reformers propose, to prevent a repeat of the Bear Stearns and Lehman fiascos? These mainstreamers want execs to get more of their "incentive" pay in stock and less in bonus cash -- and have to wait a number of years before they can cash out their stock incentive awards.

If these executives took more pay in stock, the mainstreamers hold, they and their shareholders would share the same self-interest. So "aligned" with shareholders, the executives wouldn't do anything to jeopardize "long-term shareholder value." We would all be safe from recklessness.

But these reforms, New York Times analyst Louise Strong points out, had already been put in place at Bear and Lehman -- before the two firms crashed.

“Both firms required executives to wait several years before selling their stock,” her report on Bebchuk's new paper notes. "Both firms paid heavily in stock."

These requirements, in practical terms, did nothing to discourage short-term recklessness, mainly because Bear Stearns and Lehman awarded massive stock incentives to their executives year in and year out.

Execs at Bear and Lehman did have to wait five years before they could cash out the stock incentives they received in any one year. But after their first five years on the job, they ended up with stock awards they could cash out every year. That gave them plenty of incentive to play risky games that could recklessly jack up their short-term share price.

Bebchuk, in his new paper, acknowledges as much. Having executives wait five years before they cash out, he notes, isn’t go to stop long-serving executives "from placing a significant weight on short-term prices."

A better approach, Bebchuk suggests, might be the Goldman Sachs policy that requires executives to hold 75 percent of the incentive stock they receive until they retire. But Goldman Sachs execs get the bulk of their windfalls from annual cash bonuses, not stock awards, and annual cash bonuses give execs just as much incentive to think short-term as annual stock awards.

That's why bolder mainstreamers -- like Bebchuk -- also want firms to be able to "claw back" bonus awards based on short-term gains that later evaporate.

But clawbacks have their limitations. You can easily, for instance, claw back a single year’s bonus based on a specific accounting fraud. But you can't so easily claw back the long-term damage that a greedy rush for quick profits -- and big bonuses -- can do to innocent bystanders.

And top executives can do this damage while appearing to enhance "long-term shareholder value." The execs at Bear Stearns and Lehman did just that. Year after year, for the better part of a decade, they enhanced shareholder value. Between 2000 and 2007, they quadrupled their bank share prices.

The bottom line: We need more protection from Wall Street greed than the "long-term shareholder value" reform standard can provide us. Americans on Main Street understand that. Why can't Wall Street's mainstream reformers?

White Man's Burden Redux: The Movie!

2009-12-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/White-Man-s-Burden-Redux--by-Race-Talk-org-091203-909.html

December 3, 2009
White Man's Burden Redux: The Movie!
By Mike Barber, Canadian Filmmaker, Race-Talk contributor

As I am typing this, I am five hours and 25 minutes into a 15+ hour trip on a slow train to Baltimore. I'm on en route to D.C. to interview sociologist and author Dr. James Loewen for my documentary film, A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. This interview is two years in the making. In late 2007 when I originally conceived the idea to make a feature documentary on how Canada's over 200 years of institutionalized slavery of indigenous and African people is constantly escaping mention in our history books, James Loewen was one of the very first names that entered my head for interview candidates. His book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995) was one of the biggest inspirations for me to start think about making documentaries in the first place; an inspiration possibly rivaled only by Errol Morris' (2004) documentary film,The Fog of War).

Lies My Teacher Told Me is the result of Loewen's research into the 12 most popular history textbooks used in American schools (circa 1996). He explores the common threads of what/who is given coverage, how much coverage is given, and in what lights that coverage is made. He also looks into what is conspicuously absent, what is biased, and, finally,what is flat out false. More than myth-busting, Loewen examines the far-reaching social consequences of the history of teaching practices, a history that he finds has served more as jingoistic propaganda than scholarly discourse. At its heart, this book (and the follow-up Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sights Get Wrong) is about why the way in which history is disseminated matters,and how society could benefit from a curriculum that is unafraid to look deeply into the dark side of Canada's past as opposed to the feel-good bits.

Loewen demonstrates how the bland, celebratory versions of history found throughout the pages of various Canadian textbooks serve as a form of boosterism catering specifically to a white, middle- and upper-class audience. In essence, stories about white people written by and for white people. Page after page, Europeans are exalted for their great achievements while non-Europeans, if mentioned at all, are painted as people in need of European help. This feel-good bias doesn't feel right, however, and worse, it goes beyond the classroom, visible in pop culture and everyday discussions about historical events.

The film and television equivalent of this form of boosterism comes in the Hollywood archetype of the white saviour—a white, typically middle- or upper-class, usually male and almost exclusively heterosexual character through whom the life of a person of colour (or persons of colour) is dramatically improved. The basic formula goes like this: through the white protagonist's selfless deeds the helpless, downtrodden victim of circumstance is rescued from the cycle of poverty and violence, changing both their lives forever. One gains new opportunities that would otherwise never be afforded to them, while the other gains redemption and a well-deserved personal sense of piety. Most importantly, the white audience gets to feel good about themselves.

White Man's Burden: The Movie

One problem with white saviour films is that they perpetuate the archaic paradigm of the white man's burden. They tell stories of white people going outside of their privilege to help people of colour who ultimately can't or won't help themselves. Whether it's Uncle Sam bringing “civility, education and religion” to the Philippines or Clint Eastwood teaching his young Hmong neighbour how to be a “real man,” it's the same old story being played out again and again. It's been colonialism's best justification since Manifest Destiny in real life, as well as the template plot for movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, Finding Forrester, Gran Torino, Freedom Writers, The Blind Side"

(Why we never saw a remake of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady with Michael Cain as Henry Higgins and Rosie Perez as Eliza Doolittle, I'll never know. Perhaps that would have been a little too on the nose.)2

Another problem with stories focusing on white heroes is that the reality of people of colour working hard to improve their communities goes largely ignored. Just like the selective telling of history in textbooks, the audiences of white saviour films walk away with the message that it is only white people that are doing anything to change things for the better. While there are films telling the stories of some of these individuals striving to improve the lives of the underprivileged, they are a disproportionate exception. For every Lean On Me (1989) there are at least three or four Dangerous Minds, a film which also exemplifies yet another issue.

“Destroyers and usurpers, curse them.”3

The movie Dangerous Minds (1995), which purports to be based on a true story, stars Michelle Pfieffer as a LouAnne Johnson, a white English teacher who tries to help her inner-city high school students learn an appreciation for poetry through the lyrics of Bob Dylan. The “based on a true story” isn't entirely dishonest. There really was a woman named LouAnne Johnson who used musical lyricism to connect with her underfunded inner-city high school students; in fact, it was her book, My Posse Don't Do Homework (1993) was the inspiration for the film. The betrayal in the movie adaptation is that the real LouAnne Johnson was Latina and used rap music.

The filmmakers had a profound opportunity to tell the story of a non-white person inspiring a group of inner-city Black and Latino students, who had been otherwise written off, to become engaged with their own destiny. Instead, they chose to usurp LouAnne Johnson, while the movie tirelessly extols the virtues of being white.

(And if that doesn't churn your stomach just a little bit, wait until next summer's release about the true story of the Black Panther's Free Breakfast for School Children Program, starring Tom Cruise.)4

What are students supposed to make of such history? What is an audience supposed to make of such movies? The constant message is that white people shape the world; non-white people are passive participants merelybenefitting from those efforts. White people are the only ones with the faculty to improve anyone's situation; non-whites are unorganized, hapless people, doomed until saved by the good will of their white saviours. Moreover, the white protagonist is usually the only character to have any depth or character development, while non-white supporting characters are foils to the white protagonist, and largely without history. The million-dollar film budget question is, why are white people the only ones deserving of inspiration?

The fact that none of these movies even mention, much less try to really address, the issue of systemic racism,is an appalling failure. The tragedy of over-crowded and under-funded inner city classrooms is never explained. It's never explained why these under privileged people are under-privileged to begin with. The situation is presented without any nuance, save for the givenness of white privilege.

White saviour movies, like their history text counterparts, are designed to reinforce and perpetuate white privilege. White audiences get to walk away from these films feeling good about being white, and they are never prompted to empathize with supporting non-white characters. Furthermore, white audience members are never confronted with their own privilege or internalized racism. They are let completely off the hook for their own roles and responsibilities in the perpetuation of a racist power structure.

Since more whites than non-whites are shown throughout our pop culture as the people effecting change, the lesson inferred is that these individual cases we see in movies and on TV are the rule, when they are really the exception. This leads to a false sense of racial justice in the minds of all audience members. Just as the election of Barack Obama led some white Americans to actually believe that the West was entering a “post-racial” state [*insert bellowing gut laugh here*], white saviour films give white audience members the notion that they don't have to do anything about racism themselves because look, there areplenty of examples of white people out there doing good!

Back to the history question, Loewen deftly points out that “the Eurocentric history in our textbooks amounts to psychotherapy for whites.” To run with this simile, I would liken these white saviour films to psychotherapy for whites with a bonus happy ending. But like the history behind them, there is much therapy needed to right the normalization of whiteness, which is plainly wrong.

1. Both Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America as well as Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism are required reading, especially for those in the US. Get your hands on them now or turn in your “progressive” card.

2. FYI, Columbia and CBS Films are actually in development for a remake My Fair Lady with Keira Knightly being considered for the role of Eliza.

America Without a Middle Class

2009-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-warren/america-without-a-middle_b_377829.html?view=print

DECEMBER 3, 2009
Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts
December 3, 2009
America Without a Middle Class

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

Rush Limbaugh: America's Biggest Welfare Recipient

2009-12-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rush-Limbaugh-America-s-B-by-Marc-McDonald-091202-856.html

December 2, 2009
Rush Limbaugh: America's Biggest Welfare Recipient
By Marc McDonald

The OxyMoron, Rush Limbaugh, is always bitching and moaning about welfare recipients (and, indeed, he slams any working person who gets any kind of assistance from the government).

Limbaugh's hysterical screeds about the evils of "welfare" seem to get more extreme with each passing year. Indeed, on Sept. 1, 2005, Rush even blamed "the welfare and entitlement thinking of government" for the humanitarian disaster that hit New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

But note that Rush only has a problem with poor people who get welfare. Exempt from his criticism are the rich, the politically-connected, and the corporations, who really collect most of the welfare in this country.

Indeed, the military war profiteers get vastly more welfare than all America's poor people combined. I mean, how many billions of dollars in closed, no-bid contracts did Halliburton alone receive in the Iraq War? And they're merely one of the pig-like, greedy corporations with their snouts at the trough of the bloated, wasteful Military Industrial Complex.

Of course, Rush also exempts himself from his screeds about welfare. After all, the Pig-Man gets loads of welfare himself. Indeed, Limbaugh's entire business is dependent on complete and total free usage of the public airwaves that we the people OWN.

Rush and his backers don't pay a penny for using OUR property. The airwaves we own are every bit as much a tangible asset as real estate or gold.

And Rush gets to use it to spread his disgusting hate speech for free.

And it's not like Rush's corporate backers are so broke that they couldn't afford to pay at least a small nominal fee to use our airwaves. (After all, these people just recently signed Rush up for a new contract that will pay him an eye-popping $400 million, on top of the tens of millions Limbaugh has already pocketed over the years).

If Rush's free ride on the public airwaves ain't welfare, then nothing is.

Of course, this isn't the first time in Rush's life that he's gotten a handout from the government. After all, in his 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken noted that Rush once admitted on his radio show that he'd been receiving handouts from the government dole back when he was struggling in the 1980s. And now this fat piece of sh*t has the gall to blast any and all government programs that offer a helping hand to working people.

Oh, and to all you wingnuts who constantly bitch and moan about poor people getting a "free ride" off the taxpayers: obviously, you've never been poor, yourselves. If you were, you'd know that America's skimpy, Scrooge-like social safety net hardly offers much of a helping hand to poor people. We're not living in Sweden, for Chrissakes. The vast majority of poor and working-class people in America get ZERO help from the government. Frankly, if you're poor in America, you're on your own these days.

The fact is, Rush Limbaugh is America's biggest welfare recipient (both in a literal and figurative sense).