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And, yes, I DO take it personally: 04/08/2012 - 04/15/2012
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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Saturday, April 14, 2012

The view from China: the United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy"

from the nyt...
China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst, Wang Jisi, the co-author of “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a monograph published this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Institute for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

[...]

The United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be much discounted,” Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s leadership.

[...]

“It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,” he adds.

in an interview, the brookings representative was quoted as saying that there is an increasing belief on both sides that the two countries would be "antagonistic in 15 years"...

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Bill Moyers talks with Angela Blackwell about optimism

a stunning quote...

"23 million people in the u.s. do not live within a mile of a place to get fresh fruits and vegetables"...

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The rich live in a foreign country at the top of the world at heights so rarified they can't imagine life down below

bill moyers and michael winship expound on the old saw, "the rich are different from you and me"...

from truthout...

Top hedge fund managers collectively earned $14.4 billion last year." No wonder some of them are fighting to kill a provision in the recent Dodd-Frank reform law that would require disclosing the ratio of CEO pay to the median pay of their employees. One never wishes to upset the help, you know. It can lead to unrest.

That's Wall Street - the metaphorical bestiary of the financial universe. But there's nothing metaphorical about the earnings of hedge fund tigers, private equity lions and the top dogs at those big banks that were bailed out by tax dollars after they helped chase our economy off a cliff.

So, what do these big moneyed nabobs have to complain about? Why are they whining about reform? And why are they funneling cash to super PACs aimed at bringing down Barack Obama, who many of them supported four years ago?

Because, writes Alec MacGillis in The New Republic - the president wants to raise their taxes. That's right - while ordinary Americans are taxed at a top rate of 35 percent on their income, Congress allows hedge fund and private equity tycoons to pay only 15 percent of their compensation. The president wants them to pay more; still at a rate below what you might pay, and for that he's being accused of - hold onto your combat helmets - "class warfare."

[...]

To add insult to injury, average taxpayers even help subsidize the private jet travel of the rich. On the Times' DealBook blog, mergers and acquisitions expert Steven Davidoff writes, "If an outside security consultant determines that executives need a private jet and other services for their safety, the Internal Revenue Service cuts corporate chieftains a break. In such cases, the chief executive will pay a reduced tax bill or sometimes no tax at all."

Are the CEOs really in danger? No, says Davidoff, "It's a common corporate tax trick."

Talk about your friendly skies. No wonder the people with money and influence don't feel connected to the rest of the population. It's as if they live in a foreign country at the top of the world, like their own private Switzerland, at heights so rarified they can't imagine life down below.

even in my asset-free and spartan, bare-bones lifestyle, i'm well aware that i lead a relatively privileged existence compared to many in the u.s. and certainly to the vast majority of those i encounter in my travels to other countries... but, even at that, the gap between how i live and how our super-rich elites live is so vast that i can barely comprehend it... while one of these stratospheric fliers might have pieds-à-terre in the south of france, in manhattan, in pebble beach and somewhere in the caribbean, mine consist of a room in my son's house, an ever-available guest room with a friend and colleague in central america, and my "mobile apartment," a 5th wheel rv - all very low overhead... HA...!

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Friday, April 13, 2012

Corporate philanthropy as a cover for not contributing to the common good of your country

another insightful post from glenn's guest blogger, murtaza hussain...

A list of the most charitable companies in America shows some of the biggest tax evaders in the country. These include heavyweights such as Goldman, Wells Fargo, BoA and Exxon Mobil; a company which made $41.1 billion in profits last year and paid only 17 percent in effective taxes, a far lower rate than the average U.S. citizen. The savings here vastly outweigh any donation which is subsequently offered in the spirit of “social responsibility”. The result of this neglect of public duty has been spending cuts across all areas of government, resulting in layoffs to teachers, the closing of hospitals and the slashing of benefits to the most vulnerable sections of society including children and the elderly. That these same corporate citizens turn around and give back a fraction of what they owe in the form of charitable donations (for which they of course can claim further tax benefits) is a cynical attempt to manage their public image in the face of the increasingly angry public backlash against their policies.

The private social safety net, provided by corporate donors as compensation for the public one which their tax avoidance helps shred, is a poor substitute for democratically accountable public spending. Besides being poorer, free of public oversight, and geared primarily towards public relations efforts, the private safety net is a rug that can and will be pulled out from under its beneficiaries at the slightest notice. Goldman Sachs, which generously gave $320M in charitable contributions in 2010 and $500M in 2009, drastically cut its charitable budget to $78M a year in 2011 in response to reduced profits while making minimal cuts to employee bonuses and other compensation. “Doing God’s work”, as Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously described the companies activities is apparently an elective commitment based on market conditions. Whereas as a strong public safety net is managed democratically by its beneficiaries, corporate charity can and will disappear the moment it is deemed necessary which exemplifies clearly why it is no substitute for government spending.


i am fully in favor of csr (corporate social responsibility) but in no way is it a substitute for contributing a fair share of resources to the overall common good... an effort to polish a reputation to such a sheen that it blinds the public to what is in essence a repudiation of the social welfare of the country is, i'm afraid, the strategy for many corporations... particularly notable is the point hussain makes about the rug being pulled at a moment's notice...

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Henry Kissinger: soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns of foreign policy”

in a recent post, i referred to the obscenity of "sending our young adults desperate for work to fight and die in wars that only benefit the super-rich elites"...

glenn greenwald's guest blogger, murtaza hussain, expands on that topic in a post from wednesday...

The decision to send young men and women to kill and die in foreign lands is one which is often taken without much real thought for the welfare of these individuals, often barely past the age of adulthood, despite the massive amount of rhetoric and jingoism which surrounds their deployments. Soldiers are killed and maimed with depressing regularity, registering as a brief news story and then in most cases disappearing from the public consciousness forever.

[...]

Those in the United States who advocate war often cite the need to Support the Troops, ostensibly to show them legitimate support, but in practice usually as a means to stifle debate in order to further their own agendas. “Supporting the Troops” is an end-all response and bludgeon to any criticism of the massive, opaque wars being fought around the world; but how much does it really correspond to reality?

[...]

Of those whose lives are ultimately affected by war, the overwhelming majority have little or no say in the popular discourse yet are made to bear the brunt of others ill-thought out or malicious decisions. [...] Those who continue to call for more young men and women to be sent into the abyss of war but who choose never to pay the cost of these grave decisions themselves are the modern iterations of Henry Kissinger who in a moment of candor famously described soldiers as “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns of foreign policy.”

it is anathema to the ruling, super-rich elites that our country should live up to its stated goal of government of, by and for the people... it we actually functioned that way, it would put an end to this bullshit right quick...

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Thursday, April 12, 2012

More from Adbusters: Will Occupy be co-opted and neutralzed? A call to action...

spring is here...

TACTICAL BRIEFING #29 – Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,

First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?

It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.

Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?

We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.

Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26, #27 and #28 / Check out Oakland occupier Mike King’s take on MoveOn’s 99% Spring

P.S. For Adbusters #102, we’re looking for intimate portraits of life inside art/activist/visionary communes worldwide. Also, a lucid, incisive critique of the continuing anti-Palestine bias at the NY Times. Plus inspiring, strategic takes on the future of Occupy. Send to editor@adbusters.org.

SHARE URL: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/jump.html


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Robert Scheer: Love the fetus and shun the child

to me, it's the height of bald-faced hypocrisy to rail and fulminate over abortions and then to leave vulnerable children poor and hungry while sending our young adults desperate for work to fight and die in wars that only benefit the super-rich elites... and that's not even to mention the enormous death toll of citizens of other countries the is the grim legacy of our pursuit of endless war...

from truthdig via common dreams...

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the “tough love” callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

The ensuing wave of state-imposed eligibility restrictions was designed to replace the war on poverty with a war on welfare recipients, with the result that in this time of economic crisis the poor have nowhere to turn. It also allowed states to play in a meanness derby, cutting the welfare rolls and forcing many of the desperate to cross state lines to locales where they might survive. “My take on it was the states would push people off [the assistance lists] and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration over this issue and who told the Times for the recent article, “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be."

Edelman, now a law professor at Georgetown University, was a close friend of the Clintons. His principled resignation was a rare exception to the cheerleading by Democrats who celebrated President Clinton’s betrayal of the poor as shrewd triangulation.

[...]

Calling the shots on spending for the most vulnerable since the Clinton revisions went into effect, the states have diverted funds for the poor to filling other holes in state budgets. Consequently, as the New York Times piece noted last week, “Just one in five poor children now receive cash aid, the lowest level in nearly 50 years.”

The response of the right-to-life Republicans has been typical—indifference to the fate of the fetus once it’s born.

the "i've got mine so screw you" mentality has not only modeled itself on cold indifference, it's morphed into a contest to see who can be more petty and just plain mean...

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An instant classic

Photobucket

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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Linh Dinh: Obama is only here to facilitate the wishes of the Military Banking Complex

linh dinh posts at his blog, state of the union... this excerpt is via information clearing house...
If even preschoolers or wheelchaired farts on their last legs must be frisked for underwear bombs, box cutters and ninja stars, not to mention contraband copies of the Constitution, is it any wonder that our cops are becoming more trigger happy? Post 9/11, the United States has entered a permanent state of psychotic paranoia, all to justify our endless war (profiteering) for oil, and with a host of new laws enabling the state to harass, eavesdrop, strip search, arrest or even kill you without charge, that is, without presumption of innocence before proven guilty, supposedly a bedrock of our democracy and what separates us from all the other nightmare states we’ve always been warned about.

As we sleep, America has become one of those nightmares, I’m afraid, although all still seems relatively normal, for now. The home runs still fly, and the inane commercials still sing. All is normal until you find yourself on the wrong side of an increasingly brutal and arbitrary set of laws, or none at all, just whatever our President, local cop or security guard decides is right, for him, at that moment. You see, a nightmare is when you’re at the total mercy of another man, without recourse to remedy whatever wrong he may inflict on you, without the law or your fellow humans ever coming to your aid. Our tortured foreign detainees have long been acquainted with this evil, but we have looked the other way, because we are not them, you see, at least not yet.

[...]

This Obama presidency has been a brilliant move by our ruling class, for this black, personable decoy has managed to pacify vast swaths of an otherwise restless constituency, while enraging others for the wrong reason. Although Obama’s blackness is irrelevant, it has become a fixation to both his detractors and supporters, so that it has become a point of honor to defend or depose this man for his blackness alone, when in truth his race does not factor at all in any of his decisions. One should not care that he is black, because Obama does not care that he is black, and not in a good way either. Obama is not here to rectify whatever ails the black or any other community. He is only here to facilitate the wishes of the Military Banking Complex, and he’s willing to trample on you all, black, white, brown or yellow, to achieve their goals.

"all the inane commercials still sing"... i have that same thought daily as i go about my routine and wonder if i'm living in the same world as those around me... i keep waiting for the house of cards to fall and i wish it would just hurry up and do it...

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Yves Smith: The word “predatory” is not adequate to describe Wells’ conduct

yves smith, writing in naked capitalism, is commenting on a louisiana bankruptcy judge's ruling awarding $3.1M in punitive damages for one loan...
The word “predatory” is not adequate to describe Wells’ conduct. The bank is not simply willing to steal from consumers, via blatant, institutionalized violations of its own agreements on mortgages and later on bankruptcy plans. It has absolutely no respect for the law, whether it be contracts or court procedures. It’s a band of marauders that our society treats as legitimate because the perpetrators wear suits and can afford to hire lobbyists. And the Federal government and state attorneys general are certain to have emboldened Wells and its brethren by rewarding them rather than treating them like the criminals they are.

despite an occasional and well-deserved ruling like this one, the banksters are such to regard it as a mere slap on the wrist and will continue to rule our lives...

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Monday, April 09, 2012

Kunstler on the impending student loan implosion

i'm very grateful to have been in a position to finance my daughter's graduate degree... the last thing i wanted for her was to see her handed a masters degree along with a multi-year debt load... owing dad is a whole lot different than owing the banksters...

james howard kunstler...

And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.

[...]

The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students.

[...]

The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.

kunstler is making a prediction that this latest collapse will peak during the national political conventions in charlotte and tampa... i guess we'll see, won't we...?

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Sunday, April 08, 2012

Glenn: The Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices

as someone who was subjected to this constitution-shredding outrage on 1 june 2006 (a date i will never forget), i'm now ever wary whenever i return to the u.s. and have to run the immigration and customs enforcement gauntlet...

glenn...

One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why.

In an age of international travel — where large numbers of citizens, especially those involved in sensitive journalism and activism, frequently travel outside the country — this power renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment entirely illusory. By virtue of that amendment, if the government wants to search and seize the papers and effects of someone on U.S. soil, it must (with some exceptions) first convince a court that there is probable cause to believe that the objects to be searched relate to criminal activity and a search warrant must be obtained. But now, none of those obstacles — ones at the very heart of the design of the Constitution — hinders the U.S. government: now, they can just wait until you leave the country, and then, at will, search, seize and copy all of your electronic files on your return. That includes your emails, the websites you’ve visited, the online conversations you’ve had, the identities of those with whom you’ve communicated, your cell phone contacts, your credit card receipts, film you’ve taken, drafts of documents you’re writing, and anything else that you store electronically: which, these days, when it comes to privacy, means basically everything of worth.

[...]

It’s hard to overstate how oppressive it is for the U.S. Government to be able to target journalists, film-makers and activists and, without a shred of suspicion of wrongdoing, learn the most private and intimate details about them and their work: with whom they’re communicating, what is being said, what they’re reading. That’s a radical power for a government to assert in general. When it starts being applied not randomly, but to people engaged in activism and journalism adverse to the government, it becomes worse than radical: it’s the power of intimidation and deterrence against those who would challenge government conduct in any way. The ongoing, and escalating, treatment of Laura Poitras is a testament to how severe that abuse is.

If you’re not somebody who films the devastation wrought by the U.S. on the countries it attacks, or provides insight into Iraqi occupation opponents and bin Laden loyalists in Yemen, or documents expanding NSA activities on U.S. soil, then perhaps you’re unlikely to be subjected to such abuses and therefore perhaps unlikely to care much. As is true for all states that expand and abuse their own powers, that’s what the U.S. Government counts on: that it is sending the message that none of this will affect you as long as you avoid posing any meaningful challenges to what they do. In other words: you can avoid being targeted if you passively acquiesce to what they do and refrain from interfering in it. That’s precisely what makes it so pernicious, and why it’s so imperative to find a way to rein it in.


my laptop, camera, dvd's, cd's, flash drives, external drives and memory cards were seized in san francisco after i deplaned a flight from frankfurt... they were kept for three weeks and i can only assume that everything was copied... to say i was distraught is an understatement...

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