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And, yes, I DO take it personally: 07/04/2010 - 07/11/2010
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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Friday, July 09, 2010

The State of the Union - July 2010

let's try some real news for a change...

bottom line - privatize gains, socialize losses...




thanks to brasscheck tv...
This video comes from the consistently excellent Max Keiser program.

He covers a lot of ground very fast and his economic projections have been outstanding, but he is also an outspoken advocate for freedom and human rights.

It's all tied together: tyranny, government lying, torture, media collaboration, financial fraud, rampant corporate criminality. Max Keiser is one of the very few who gets it and puts it out there.

The only difference between the US today and Germany during the Hitler era
is there's no obvious goose stepping in the streets and the swastikas are in the closet.

The country has completely lost its way.

and that last is a sad understatement...

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Wednesday, July 07, 2010

The perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless ... Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated

since "discovering" joe bageant, i've been continually amazed at how closely our views track with each other... there's been a not-so-fantastic scenario playing out in my mind lately where the board of directors and the senior management of a major corporation are discussing business strategy... the gist of the discussion is this... "we really don't want any damn employees... they're nothing but a cost drain not to mention they're a pain, always whining and causing trouble... is there any way we can just get rid of the lot of 'em...?"

joe bageant...

Paying the workers in society to produce real wealth costs money. Capitalists hate any sort of cost. It represents money that has somehow escaped their coffers. So when any behemoth corporation hands out thousands of pink slips on a Friday, Wall Street cheers and "the market" goes up. No ordinary mortal has ever seen "the market." But traders on the floor of 11 Wall Street, people who've deemed themselves more than mortal by virtue of their $110 Vanitas silk undershorts, assure us the market does exist. No tours of the New York Stock exchange are permitted, so we have to take their word for it.

In any case, in the money economy, eliminating costs, even if those costs happen to be feeding human beings, citizens of the empire, is sublime. That is why economists in the tertiary economy can declare a "jobless recovery" with a straight face. By their lights, the perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless. Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated.

it was only a little more than twenty years ago that people were considered to be an organization's most important resource... no longer... people as a "factor of production," as a cost to be minimized or eliminated, has trumped all respect for the dignity of labor, of the essential worth of using one's ability or skill to provide a livelihood for one's family...

fortunately, it's not true everywhere, at least not yet... in argentina, for instance, taxi driver is still considered a worthwhile and dignified career... i've met numerous taxi drivers, solid, middle-class family men, proud of their profession and respected by their friends and neighbors for the work they do... look at taxi drivers in the u.s... it's seen as a dead-end job, about on a par with flipping burgers at mac and don's...

our entire way of life is swirling the bowl but we can't rouse ourselves enough from our favorite tv programs to notice...

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Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Pick an Israeli soldier, any Israeli soldier, and make a scapegoat outta him

and cross your fingers and hope to heaven this takes the pressure off...
The Israeli military indicted a soldier Tuesday on a charge of manslaughter during last year's war in the Gaza Strip — the most serious criminal charge to come out of an internal investigation into the devastating offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory.

The soldier was among three troops, including a field commander, to face new disciplinary action stemming from their conduct during the offensive, which has drawn international condemnation for its civilian death toll. An Israeli human rights group praised the announcement, but said the disciplinary measures announced by the army so far were insufficient.

The steps against the soldiers were linked to four specific incidents during the offensive, which Israel launched to halt years of rocket fire from Gaza.

indicting and/or disciplining a few israeli soldiers for participating in the wholesale, slow-motion genocide of the gazans is hardly an adequate response to atrocities and war crimes... i'm sure israel will tout this as adherence to accountability and the rule of law but it ain't, not by a long shot, any more than the fact that israel is now allowing basic construction materials and foodstuffs in to gaza will erase the years of malnutrition, infant deaths, disease and abject misery the gaza siege has inflicted on many thousands of innocent people...

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