End of This Blog

I have just discovered that Google has quietly enabled "per country" censorship of blog posts on this Blogger service. Therefore, I have stopped all blogging. I will not be part of Google's compliance with dictatorships and the suppression of human rights.

From Wired magazine:

Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

By David Kravets January 31, 2012

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

This censorship by Google puts the lie to its supposed corporate code of conduct of "Don't be evil".

In fact Google is just another greedy corporation that blows smoke about social concerns and "putting the customer first" when in reality their only bottom line is corporate greed.

I'm disillusioned. I foolishly believed that ethical corporations can be run with a mandate to service three critical stakeholders: their shareholders, their workers, and the broader community that provides the matrix (the legal infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, etc.) which makes capitalism possible.

But Google has proved that my idealism is poorly supported by facts on the ground. Instead, greed and evil is endemic in capitalism and Google has shown itself to be just another greedy corrupt and evil corporation.

Goodbye.

Looking Through Lovely Libertarian Glasses

When I was a kid the big complain was the bizarro world painted by "socialist realism". The hyped and deeply false world view sold by the commies.

Today the world is pervaded by its bizarro world version of reality, the kool-aid of Ayn Rand, that worships the individual and ignores any gummy social cohesion or social obligation. It is every man for himself in the wonder world of the political right. No mushy leftist "it takes a village to raise a child" in the libertarian worldview.

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that shows the application of this libertarian "individualist realism" to politics in the US:

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

...

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

...

Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

...

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

For some reason most people want a cartoon cut-out version of reality. They want a simplified story that consoles them with a happy ending. The real world, just like Nature, is totally indifferent to humans, their aspirations, their needs, or their ideological fantasies. The real world is "red in tooth and claw" because it is so different from the normal human social world of cooperation and empathy. Humans have the ability to create a safe harbour from the cruelties of the world. Sadly, right wing nuts want to destroy the paradise and replace it with a fantasy of "the big man" who creates and destroys for his own pleasure with indifference to others. That is a cruel reality that is offered up by the libertarians as a "better future". Nuts!

Clay Shirky on America's Proposed Insane Property Rights

Here is Clay Shirky talking about SOPA and PIPA:

How the US Plans to Nuke the Rest of the World

The SOPA/PIPA legislation is in effect a "weapon of mass destruction" that will easily destroy the world as we know it. Here is a very nice description of just how dangerous and "creepy" the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws are:



The above is just one of many, many wonderful instructional videos available from the Khan Academy.

From Wikipedia:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching Mathematics, History, Healthcare & Medicine, Finance, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Economics, Cosmology and Computer Science.

Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

Selling Black is White, Up is Down

Here is a bit from a post by Robert Reich that nails the big lie that the political right in the US is selling to gullible electors:

Mitt Romney is casting the 2012 campaign as “free enterprise on trial” – defining free enterprise as achieving success through “hard work and risking-taking.” Tea-Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says he’s supporting Romney because “we really need someone who understands how risk, taking risk … is the way we create jobs, create choices, expand freedom.” Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue, defending Romney, explains “this economy is about risk. If you don’t take risk, you can’t have success.”

Wait a minute. Who do they think are bearing the risks? Their blather about free enterprise risk-taking has it upside down. The higher you go in the economy, the easier it is to make money without taking any personal financial risk at all. The lower you go, the bigger the risks.

Wall Street has become the center of riskless free enterprise. Bankers risk other peoples’ money. If deals turn bad, they collect their fees in any event. The entire hedge-fund industry is designed to hedge bets so big investors can make money whether the price of assets they bet on rises or falls. And if the worst happens, the biggest bankers and investors now know they’ll be bailed out by taxpayers because they’re too big to fail.

But the worst examples of riskless free enteprise are the CEOs who rake in millions after they screw up royally.

Near the end of 2007, Charles Prince resigned as CEO of Citgroup after announcing the bank would need an additional $8 billion to $11 billion in write-downs related to sub-prime mortgages gone bad. Prince left with a princely $30 million in pension, stock awards, and stock options, along with an office, car, and a driver for five years.

Stanley O’Neal’s five-year tenure as CEO of Merrill Lynch ended about the same time, when it became clear Merrill would have to take tens of billions in write-downs on bad sub-prime mortgages and be bought up at a fire-sale price by Bank of America. O’Neal got a payout worth $162 million.

Philip Purcell, who left Morgan Stanley in 2005 after a shareholder revolt against him, took away $43.9 million plus $250,000 a year for life.

...

But as economic risk-taking has declined at the top, it’s been increasing at the middle and below. More than 20 percent of the American workforce is now “contingent” – temporary workers, contractors, independent consultants – with no security at all.

Even full-time workers who have put in decades with a company can now find themselves without a job overnight – with no parachute, no help finding another job, and no health insurance.

Meanwhile the proportion of large and medium-sized companies (200 or more workers) offering full health care coverage continues to drop – from 74 percent in 1980 to under 10 percent today. Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of large and medium-sized employers also provided health insurance to their retirees. Now, fewer than 15 percent do.

The risk of getting old with no pension is also rising. In 1980, more than 80 percent of large and medium-sized firms gave their workers “defined-benefit” pensions that guaranteed a fixed amount of money every month after they retired. Now it’s down to under 10 percent. Instead, they offer “defined contribution” plans where the risk is on the workers. When the stock market tanks, as it did in 2008, the 401(k) plan tanks along with it. Today, a third of all workers with defined-benefit plans contribute nothing, which means their employers don’t either.

And the risk of losing earnings continues to grow. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch about half of all families experienced some decline in income. And the downturns were becoming progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average.

What Romney and the cheerleaders of risk-taking free enterprise don’t want you to know is the risks of the economy have been shifting steadily away from CEOs and Wall Street – and on to average working people. It’s not just income and wealth that are surging to the top. Economic security is moving there as well, leaving the rest of us stranded.

Go read the whole post.

Pundits like to push the idea that "you get the government you deserve". But the reality is that the average voter doesn't have the time or resources to follow the political fluff thrown at him and sort the wheat from the chaff. When a corrupt political party like the Republicans in the US (and to a lesser degree the Democrats) deliberately sell a false message, it is very hard for the average person to uncover the truth.

An Honest Assessment of the US's Federal Reserve

From a post at the Eschaton blog:

If this really is the Fed's view, then they're saying that monetary policy is generally going to be utterly useless in fighting recessions as they won't be willing to do anything. Time to rewrite all the textbooks. As in, instead of the usual "fiscal policy is less likely to be useful during recessions due to lags in recognition, implementation, and impact" claptrap, we should have "monetary policy is unlikely to be useful during recessions due to the fact that modern central bankers are sociopaths whose only concerns are inflation and the economic wellbeing of the creditor class."

It is clear that all central banks are more concerned about the creditor class than the debtor class. The tragedy of the 2008 financial crisis is that central bankis have shown themselves more dedicated to ensuring the wealth of the rich than the economic well-being (jobs, houses, retirement, education, etc.) of the bottom 99%. Sad.

How US Companies Help Set Up Repressive Regimes

Here is a bit from a post by Cory Doctorow on the BoingBoing blog:

Two thirds of the way through the talk, they broaden the context to talk about the role of American companies in the war waged against privacy and free speech -- SmartFilter (now an Intel subsidiary, and a company that has a long history of censoring Boing Boing) is providing support for Iran's censorship efforts, for example. They talked about how Blue Coat and Cisco produce tools that aren't just used to censor, but to spy (all censorware also acts as surveillance technology) and how the spying directly leads to murder and rape and torture.

Then, they talked about the relationship between corporate networks and human rights abuses. Iran, China, and Syria, they say, lack the resources to run their own censorship and surveillance R&D projects, and on their own, they don't present enough of a market to prompt Cisco to spend millions to develop such a thing. But when a big company like Boeing decides to pay Cisco millions and millions of dollars to develop censorware to help it spy on its employees, the world's repressive governments get their R&D subsidized, and Cisco gets a product it can sell to them.

They concluded by talking about how Western governments' insistence on "lawful interception" back-doors in network equipment means that all the off-the-shelf network gear is readymade for spying, so, again, the Syrian secret police and the Iranian telcoms spies don't need to order custom technology that lets them spy on their people, because an American law, CALEA, made it mandatory that this technology be included in all the gear sold in the USA.

Here is the video of the talk which Doctorow attended given by Tor technologists:



It is depressing that US politicians pass laws that set up the basis for the spyware and then US corporations do the multi-million dollar R&D to develop the spyware that is then deployed by repressive regimes worldwide (plus the US government and big US corporations). We live in a "big brother" world. Orwell thought he was writing a cautionary tale with his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was documenting the hellish future we now all live in.

New Rules for the New Economy

Rule #1: He who writes the rules owns the gold.

Here is a bit from an article by Simon Johnson that rips into the insanity of the US government letting the big banks make big bucks on their housing bubble fraud but then demanding that the little guy, the taxpayer, first fork over billions to "make whole" the fraudulent banks, then stand by and look down at our feet while the big bank's top people get billions in bonuses, then go through a charade of "law enforcement" where the bankers get off the hook with pitifully small fines for bad behaviour and no jail time:

Santa Claus came early this year for four former executives of Washington Mutual (WaMu), a large US bank that failed in fall 2008. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had brought a lawsuit against the four, actions that included taking huge financial risks while “knowing that the real estate market was in a ‘bubble.’” The FDIC sought to recover $900 million, but the executives have just settled for $64 million, almost all of which will be paid by their insurers; their out-of-pockets costs are estimated at just $400,000.

To be sure, the executives lost their jobs and now must drop claims for additional compensation. But, according to the FDIC, the four still earned more than $95 million from January 2005 through September 2008. So they are walking away with a great deal of cash. This is what happens when financial executives are compensated for “return on equity” unadjusted for risk. The executives get the upside when things go well; when the downside risks materialize, they lose nothing (or close to it).

Here is the problem with the current "system" that is shafting the 99%:

But capitalism without the prospect of failure is not any kind of market economy. We are running a large-scale, nontransparent, and dangerous government subsidy scheme for the benefit primarily of a very few, extremely wealthy people.

Jon Huntsman, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, is addressing this directly – insisting that we should force the largest banks to break up and to become safer. No other candidate for the presidency is seriously confronting this issue head-on: just saying “we’ll let them fail” is no kind of answer when the failure of megabanks would cause so much damage.

We should learn from both the WaMu and the Occupy movement. In both cases, the lesson is the same: concentrated financial power is a gift that keeps on giving – but not to you.

The Case Against Copyright

Here is a brief summary of why SOPA and similar copyright laws are bad for people and bad for the economy. This is a bit from a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog:

Standard economic models show that tariffs cost jobs. The reason is that they make consumers pay more money for the protected product. This pulls money away that could be spent in other areas. If the spending took place elsewhere, it would create more jobs than the additional money earned by the protected industry.

The same logic applies to increasingly stringent protections for copyright, except the economic waste and resulting job loss is likely to be much larger. Tariffs rarely raise the price of products by more than 15-20 percent. Copyright can make items very costly that could otherwise be available for free or nearly free. This implies a tariff of several thousand percent or higher.

In addition, there are enormous costs associated with copyright enforcement, with both the public and private sector required to make substantial expenditures to prevent unauthorized copies of copyrighted material from being circulated. This amounts to a waste of resources that could instead go to productive activity.

Copyright and its enforcement can be thought of as being analogous to toll booths, which can be used as a way to finance road construction. If the only way we have to finance road construction is toll booths, then we absolutely need toll booths to pay the road-builders.

However, once we have roads that are financed through other mechanisms (e.g. government funding), then it becomes increasingly difficult to collect money at the tollbooths since people will opt to use the free roads. We could go the route that many in Congress want to take with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which effectively amounts to building toll booths that are harder to get around and imposing tough penalties on those who try to take free roads.

This gets more money for the people who build and operate toll booths, but may not do very much to help the people who build roads. Alternatively, we could try to find ways to get more money directly to the road-builders without spending vast sums erecting bigger more expensive toll booths and being more punitive to those who use free roads.

Occupy & Overthrow Capitalism

Here is a bit from a post by Tim Harford that takes advantage of the Occupy Wall Street protests to point out shortcomings in the current version of capitalism and identifies 5 things that need to be done:

“... It sounds like an attempt to distract from the fact that the rich aren’t paying their fair share of tax.”

“Aha, the 1 per cent, you mean?”

“Exactly, the 1 per cent.”

“How much tax do you think they should pay?”

“Um – well, more.”

“More than what?”

“More than they are doing now!”

“How much do you think they are paying now?”

“Well, not enough.”

“We’re going in circles here. We’ve established that you’d like the rich to pay more than a quantity of tax which you admit is entirely unknown to you. It’s 27.7 per cent, by the way.”

“What is?”

“The percentage of income tax paid by the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK. It’s 27.7 per cent. I looked it up. It’s on the revenue and customs website. It’s a little fact you might find useful next time you get into a discussion about whether it should be more than that.”

“Let’s go back to this something nicer business.”

“I’ve got a five point plan. Number one is more meaningful equality of opportunity. Left-wingers have been too interested in making sure people who make very different choices end up with similar amounts of money. Right-wingers have been too glib about levelling the playing field and accepting whatever outcome the market produces. We need much more attention to the quality of nurseries and schools.”

“More easily said than done.”

“Isn’t everything? Number two, raise more taxes from environmentally damaging activities. For some reason we seem to have decided that jet fuel and domestic heating deserve a tax break, yet simply being rich is regarded as the most profound of pollutants.”

“What about the banks? They’ve been doing toxic things.”

“They have, but the idea that the cause of the crisis was simply fat cat bankers is juvenile. The financial system – its regulations, risk management and ethics – is profoundly flawed. Fixing those flaws is a hugely technical problem as well as a political one. Fighting the banking lobby is going to be necessary but not sufficient. And that’s point three.”

“Point four?”

“We need to pay serious attention to our innovation system. Patents are useful in some circumstances but seem to be distorting the computing industry. There is far too little attention being paid to ideas that really matter, such as low-carbon technology or antibiotics.”

“And point five?”

“Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism can’t just be about trying to make money – that’s the ethics of a used car salesman or a drug dealer. Capitalism has to involve a sense of creativity, boldness and pride in a job well done. The most successful companies have usually had this and many still do – from Apple to Brompton to Zipcar – but many financial companies seem to have long ago abandoned them.”

“None of this quite amounts to the overthrow of capitalism, does it?”

“No. I think it’s going to be rather more difficult than that – and a lot more useful.”

The real and lasting success of the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't the tents cluttering up city centres. It is the fact that it has got jobs, inequality, poverty, and the shortcomings of capitalism onto the political agenda. It is helping to slowly turned the supertanker called "the state" to chart a new course for a better future than the complete freeze-up of society as the 0.01% end up with 90% of the income and 99.999% of the wealth of society. That kind of social pyramid with a handful owning everything ends democracy and destroys the economy. The rich can hire only so many servants to pad around after them braying out praises to keep their egos afloat. A real economy needs a real middle class to keep industry and innovation going.

Reich Sees a Global Uprising

The winds of change are blowing. Robert Reich sees today as pivotal like 1968 and 1989. Here is his latest post on his blog:

Washington Pre-Occupied

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.

Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.

I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989?

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.

The most interesting thing about the future is that nobody really knows what it holds. I certainly hope the 40 year swing of the pendulum to the right is about to be changed and society will swing back toward social justice, greater democracy, a better sharing of the fruits of economic development, and a more positive future for the bottom 99%. But this will only be clear 10 or 20 years from now.

Examining Income Inequality

Here are some bits from an excellent article by Glenn Greenwald in The Nation:

Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1 percent of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.

...

Not only have the overwhelming majority of Americans long acquiesced to vast income and wealth disparities, but some of those most oppressed by these outcomes have cheered it loudly. Americans have been inculcated not only to accept but to revere those who are the greatest beneficiaries of this inequality.

In the 1980s, this paradox—whereby even those most trampled upon come to cheer those responsible for their state—became more firmly entrenched. That’s because it found a folksy, friendly face, Ronald Reagan, adept at feeding the populace a slew of Orwellian clichés that induced them to defend the interests of the wealthiest. “A rising tide,” as President Reagan put it, “lifts all boats.” The sum of his wisdom being: it is in your interest when the rich get richer.

Implicit in this framework was the claim that inequality was justified and legitimate. The core propagandistic premise was that the rich were rich because they deserved to be. They innovated in industry, invented technologies, discovered cures, created jobs, took risks, and boldly found ways to improve our lives. In other words, they deserved to be enriched. Indeed, it was in our common interest to allow them to fly as high as possible because that would increase their motivation to produce more, bestowing on us ever greater life-improving gifts.

...

This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed. It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.

Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating. Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimizing anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law—that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all—has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.

If you watch the popular media closely you will see that they try to discredit the OWS movement by claiming it is driven by envy, that these are all "hippies and ne'er do wells who are jealous of the rich". The point Glenn Greenwald is making sets this right: the American people are not against the rich, they are against the rich buying the politicians and getting "special rules" to exempt them for punishment when they commit financial crimes that blow up the economy.

Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1 percent is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. Thanks to this control, they can write laws that have no purpose than to abolish the few limits that still constrain them, as happened during the Wall Street deregulation orgy of the 1990s. They can retroactively immunize themselves for crimes they deliberately committed for profit, as happened when the 2008 Congress shielded the nation’s telecom giants for their role in Bush’s domestic warrantless eavesdropping program.

It is equally obvious that they are using that power not to lift the boats of ordinary Americans but to sink them. In short, Americans are now well aware of what the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, blurted out in 2009 about the body in which he serves: the banks “frankly own the place.”

If you were to assess the state of the union in 2011, you might sum it up this way: rather than being subjected to the rule of law, the nation’s most powerful oligarchs control the law and are so exempt from it; and increasing numbers of Americans understand that and are outraged. At exactly the same time that the nation’s elites enjoy legal immunity even for egregious crimes, ordinary Americans are being subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest penal states, under which they are unable to secure competent legal counsel and are harshly punished with lengthy prison terms for even trivial infractions.

The OCW people are in the streets because:

In lieu of the rule of law—the equal application of rules to everyone—what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.

...

That is what has changed, and a growing recognition of what it means is fueling rising citizen anger and protest. The inequality under which so many suffer is not only vast, but illegitimate, rooted as it is in lawlessness and corruption. Obscuring that fact has long been the linchpin for inducing Americans to accept vast and growing inequalities. That fact is now too glaring to obscure any longer.

The battle lines are drawn. The struggle begins. Sadly both political parties have defected to the 1%. So this will be a long and bitter struggle.

Ignorance of the Workings of Capitalism

Here is a poor misguided woman who apparently doesn't understand the secrets of "financial engineering" and the kind of "God's work" that Lloyd Blankfein is doing at Goldman Sachs.

Click to Enlarge
The successful capitalists, like all the big shots on Wall Street running the big financial institutions in the US, know that the secret to getting billion dollar bonuses is just what this woman is complaining about.

And this woman should know that Barack Obama, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, his Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, and his Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, have all assured us that doing this kind of slice-and-dice securitized mortagages -- as well as the using bribes to get the big ratings companies to stamp them as AAA -- is all completely legal.

They keep assuring us that "nobody is hurt" by financial engineering because these instruments were bought by "sophisticated investors" who obviously understood that within weeks of buying AAA-rated bonds they would blow up and become worthless junk. That is exactly what "sophisticated investors" are known to do. And this is exactly the job of big Wall Street firms. To take billion dollar investors and sign them up for so-called AAA-rated investments which "mysteriously" blow up just weeks after you buy them.

That's not criminal that's just good salemanship. Just like a used car salesman who sells you a 1992 Buick with 300,000 miles on it with a brakes that don't work, a transmission that can't get out of first gear, and whose engine puts out clouds of noxious black smoke and gets you to pay $20,000 for the "little gem of a car" is just showing his highly skilled automotive expertise and deserves the big bonuses from the fly-by-night used car lot owner. No crime here when the salesman by tells you the car has passed all mechanical inspections and is in "top-top shape" and you just need to get the car out on the road to do a shakedown drive to get those brakes working, the engine to settle down, and the transmission to start changing gears. Nobody would think that salesman should be arrested for this. It isn't misrepresentation to claim this care is in "mint condition", right?

That's capitalism... at least according to the big bonus CEOs of Wall Street, and Obama and his administration, all all the big shots in the Republican party. All of these big important people are telling us that the $10 trillion collapse in the econonmy, the 25 million unemployed, the 10 million foreclosed homes are just "normal business" and no crimes have been committed. This is just the wonders of "the market" where the nimble and clever get handsomely rewarded while the bottom 99% get fleeced.

All the politicians are telling us there has been no crime. Taxpayers will just have to "suck it up" and bail out the big boys so they can kept their billion dollar bonuses. The only arrests needed is for that riffraff on the streets with those threatening and illegal "occupy!" signs. Those protesters are attacking the very foundations of our society and won't be happy until they have brought down the proud institutions that have delivered "the American way of life".

The Glorious Operation of Capitalism

If you go to a bank in New York City and request to close your bank account, they will arrest you...

Update 2011oct17: Here is a personal account by one of the victims of the "you try to close your account, we will arrest you" event.

Details in the Gothamist.com:

Below, you can see video of some of the protesters in the bank trying to close their accounts who are then arrested by police. That includes one woman who argues she is a customer, and allowed to be in the bank—and then she is picked up by a policeman and taken away.

Incredible!

The mouthpieces of capitalism talk about freedoms, but the freedom to close a bank account apparently isn't one of them. I'm puzzled exactly which law the banks have managed to get their bought-and-paid-for politicians to pass which makes it illegal to request that a your own bank account be closed and your money returned.

Obviously the Wall Street banks have gone one step further than simply using their politicians to siphon taxpayer dollars into the corporations. They are now simply seizing people's money directly and arresting you if you think you have some legal right to your own money!



And here they are hauling people away. I guess the banks love your money more than they love you so they will keep your money while using the police to enforce a "separation" between you and your money.



It is interesting how banks can decide some people are "legitimate" customers while others are not allowed because the bank simply refuses to let the customer into the bank building:



The banks love to set you up with mortgages with hidden charges and "gotcha" stuff. The biggest "gotcha" is they won't let you close your account!

How Big Corporate Media Utterly Fails the Public

Newspapers originated as partisan broadsheets full of pointed political views. They advocated. But by the 20th century newspapers fell into the hands of big corporations that were selling fish wrap (i.e. the paper was the medium of advertisers and they didn't want to upset readers, so toned down vague-and-fuzzy reporting replaced any serious opinion and investigative journalism). Papers stopped being intellectually challenging and because useful onto fish vendors to wrap the fish they sold or for homeowners to line the bottom of their bird cages to catch bird droppings.

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog making this point for the umpteenth time:

Post Does the Old He Said/She Said on Perry Energy Plan

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced an energy program yesterday that involved drilling everywhere in sight. According to the Post article on the plan, Perry claimed that his plan would create 1 million jobs. In classic he said/she said style the Post told readers:

"Perry predicted his energy plan would create more than 1 million new jobs. Weiss [a researcher at the Center for American Progress] sharply disagrees."

This is utterly useless information for readers. A Washington Post reporter should have the time to talk to some experts on this issue and/or read some of the key articles. Post readers do not have the time. Simply reporting opposing claims that readers have no ability to access is a pointless exercise. Trees died for nothing.

(Perry's claim is nonsense -- it is unlikely that it would in the long-run lead to even 100,000 additional jobs [0.07 percent of total employment]. The short-run effect would be considerably less.)

Is there any surprise in the fact that newspaper readership is plummeting and newspapers will go extinct? Why pay for pablum like this?

And... is there any surprise that major political parties have quietly fallen into the hands of big corporate lobbyists? With no "press" to challenge the politicians, most Americans have no idea that their government has been stolen from them. They have no idea that the traditional electoral exercise is a farce. The decisions of what laws will be passed -- indeed, even the writing of the bills -- has passed into the hands of big corporations.

The whole world of "American politics" is a kabuki dance of smoke-and-mirrors with lots of pretended outrage and threats when in fact all the deals have been quietly done behind locked doors as money passes hands to fund politicians and their "campaigns" (think John Edwards with his million dollar slush fund to hide Rielle Hunter and his illegitimate "love child", this was a "campaign donation" from billionaire heiress "Bunny" Mellon).

American Banks

Here is the intro to a provocative post on Washington's Blog:

Virtually all independent economists and financial experts agree that the economy cannot stabilize or recover unless the giant, insolvent banks are broken up (and here and here). And the very size of the big banks is also warping our entire political system.

Politicians are wholly bought and paid for. As famed trend forecaster Gerald Celente writes in the current Trend Alert newsletter:

Politics today is little more than legalized prostitution. While a streetwalker gets busted for selling her body to a john, politicians get rewarded with campaign contributions for selling their souls to a corporation or lobbyist. With all of the whoring going on – the money exchanged and the pleasures lavished – the only one actually getting screwed was John Q. Public.

But the chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University (Donald J. Boudreaux) says that calling politicians prostitutes is inaccurate – because it is being too nice. Specifically, Boudreaux says that it is more correct to call politicians “pimps”, since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants.

So the state of banking and politics in America is grim, indeed. But do we really even need banks or politicians? Or can we cut out the middle man?

This post looks at whether we can use alternative financial arrangements to cut out the big banks as financial middleman. In a separate essay, we look at whether we can use Direct Democracy to cut out the corrupt political middleman.

Go read the whole post and get the embedded links.

I don't buy into the specifics of this post because it takes a libertarian political/economic stance. I accept the broad criticisms, but the trouble with American society is not a need for radical dissolution of the few remaining human relationships to be replaced by a purely individualistic contractual relationship. The real solution is to cut economics and the right wing philosophies of economics down to size so that human relationships and human institutions again have room to thrive. Government needs to be revived to regulate capitalism and to allow human institutions to flourish. For too long everything has been razed to bare earth to make the land "prepared" for the financialization of everything.

A Right Proper Philosophy for Today

Now here's a street corner guy who is a step up from the old-fashioned guy in a sandwich board sign saying "Repent! The End is Nigh!". This guy has managed to absorb and synthesis the complete "message of today". This is what the political right and the big corporations want you to not just believe but to feel down deep in your bones. This is the new religion:



I find it really helps to have this "message" delivered in a proper English accent. It gives it so much more respectability and authority. It makes you want to drop to your knees and swear "I repent! Forgive me for I have sinned against the corporations and the political right. Forgive me. Bring me home. Let me become a blind consumer who is properly politically ignorant."

Post script: I would like to see the Occupy Wall Street protestors to use more humour like the above to disarm the vicious right that wants to bring down protest as "Un-American". The political right in the US has the "talking point" that the Occupy Wall Street has no "coherent political agenda". If you want to see very succinct statements of the OWS agenda, look at these statements.

Here is what the Republican presidential candidates call an "Un-American mob who are threatening our democracy":



What I see is a peaceful demonstration which is the very heart of a vibrant democracy. These are citizens in the street making known their opinions. There is no violence. This is an on-going peaceful assembly seeking the redress of grievances, a non-political gathering petitioning the government and the political parties to work diligently to redress the imbalance in the social fabric by giving the bottom 99% social justice in the face of corporate greed and the buying and selling of politicians by the Wall Street elite.

Corporatocracy

Jeffrey Sachs has an article in Huffington Post that lays into the right wing politician Paul Ryan and the "corptocracy" that the Republicans are building in place of democracy:

My new book, The Price of Civilization, describes why America needs a "mixed economy," one where a more effective federal government regulates business and invests alongside the business sector. In his review of my book, Congressman Paul Ryan, an avowed libertarian, describes my book as anti-American in its values. ...

Ryan ignores the extensive evidence in the book showing that Americans support the values of a mixed economy, not of Ryan's free-market libertarianism. Americans today by large majorities support public education, Medicare, Social Security, help for the indigent, stronger regulation of the banks, and higher taxation of the rich. ...

On issue after issue, Washington is presently bucking the public's values, rather than respecting them. A majority of the public wants to preserve social programs, but they are being cut anyway. A majority wants higher taxes on the rich, but they are being cut rather than raised. A majority wants to end the wars, but they continue anyway.

The reason is the following. America is losing its democracy as our politicians trade their votes for campaign contributions from the corporate lobbies. We have a corporatocracy rather than a democracy, and Ryan stands at the center of it. The Wall Street Journal, which commissioned Ryan's review of my book, is the leading print mouthpiece for the corporatocracy.

While Sachs -- who was part of the problem with his "cold turkey" capitalism for Russia and his globalization crusading -- has now turned against the corporate greed and crime, he doesn't mention the people who are putting their bodies on the line to clean up this mess and bring back democracy, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and groups like them putting in the hard work to bring back a better world. Instead, Sachs is selling his latest book. I'm glad he is on the right side of this issue, but he has a miserable track record.

But I fully agree with Jeffrey Sachs on this:

On issue after issue, Washington is presently bucking the public's values, rather than respecting them. A majority of the public wants to preserve social programs, but they are being cut anyway. A majority wants higher taxes on the rich, but they are being cut rather than raised. A majority wants to end the wars, but they continue anyway.

The reason is the following. America is losing its democracy as our politicians trade their votes for campaign contributions from the corporate lobbies. We have a corporatocracy rather than a democracy, and Ryan stands at the center of it. The Wall Street Journal, which commissioned Ryan's review of my book, is the leading print mouthpiece for the corporatocracy.

...

America's corporatocracy is governed by vested interests rather than moral or economic principles. After financial deregulation led to the 2008 collapse, Ryan's enthusiasm for free enterprise suddenly took a second place to his new enthusiasm to rescue the banks through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout. The "free-market" Wall Street Journal similarly defended the bank bailout, all of a sudden lecturing its readers about market failures and the limits of the free market.

This is why Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.".

What the Future Looks Like

Creepy greedy corporations are winning the war. They have bought all the politicians and what you get is something like the following:

Italy's insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia

By Cory Doctorow at 4:21 am Wednesday, Oct 5

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Internet law will make it impossible to have an Italian Wikipedia:

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources...

The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.

My understanding is that Bill Gates has recently bought up all the rights to oxygen and is planning to implement a per-breath access fee. If you want to breathe, you will have to pay because he owns "the rights". Oh, and Apple is tired of waiting for people's eyeballs to wander over their various iEverything devices, so they have bought the copyright to all the world's languages. If you don't want to be illiterate, you will need to license from Apple the right to read. Any peek at a letter or word will cost you!