Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior

more on the social darwinian b.s. that is heaped on our heads on a daily basis...

from the nyt...

A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news.

[...]

Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.

[...]

“Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.

as one who teaches ethical, values-driven leadership in a graduate business program, i'm all too well aware of the shortcomings of business education... while the bottom line focus should be maximizing the common good, instead it's all about maximizing profits... oh, well... after all these years, i'm accustomed to being a voice crying in the wilderness...

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The #1 surveillance society in the world, the UK, focuses on "domestic extremism"

make no mistake... these same tactics are being used in the u.s., it's just that the u.s. doesn't have as deep a tradition of investigative journalism that is willing to ferret them out...

all emphases added...

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.

The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor "domestic extremists", the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

[...]

• The main unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), runs a central database which lists thousands of so-called domestic extremists. It filters intelligence supplied by police forces across England and Wales, which routinely deploy surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings. The NPOIU contains detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name.

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR "interceptor teams" are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance.

• Police surveillance units, known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners' political activities.

then there's this lovely item innocuously called a "spotter card"...

This kind of highly confidential document – pictured above – is rarely seen by the public.

These so-called "spotter cards" are issued by police to identify individuals they consider to be potential troublemakers because they have appeared at a number of demonstrations.

The photographs are drawn from police intelligence files. This card was apparently dropped at a demonstration against Britain's largest arms fair in 2005.

"H" is Mark Thomas, the comedian and political activist. Asked why it was justifiable to put Thomas, who has no criminal record, on this card, the Metropolitan police replied: "We do not discuss intelligence we may hold in relation to individuals."

Thomas had been acquitted of criminal damage after attaching himself to a bus containing arms traders at a previous fair.

The Met said: "This is an appropriate tactic used by police to help them identify people at specific events … who may instigate offences or disorder."

so, now peaceful direct action and civil disobedience, so-called "minor order public offenses," along with protest, an act of free speech, are defined as "domestic extremism"...?

there's a phenomenon called "psychological reciprocity" which, loosely defined, means that when people are treated a certain way, they tend to respond in the manner in which they're treated... in my professional life, i've seen it a million times... management characterizes front line workers as "lazy," "untrustworthy," "cry-babies," and generally no damn good and, guess what...? they tend to respond that way which, in turn, justifies management's attitude...

to quote kurt vonnegut, "and so it goes"...

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"We, as a country, are living a lie"

hard on the heels of my earlier Impeachment ... or accept that the United States is no longer a Republic governed by the rule of law post, steven d at booman tribune uses today's wapo story about yet another "reassignment" of a senior military legal officer, Air Force Col. Moe Davis, the chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions trials, as a springboard to put together a documented chronology of the numerous reassignments and outright firings that point to a profound dis-ease with the so-called legal process being imposed on detainees...

his summation...

It's a familiar pattern by now. Question the way the Bush administration wants these phony show trials for the Gitmo detainees to be stage managed and your ass is kicked to the curb. Swallow your pride, your honor and any sense of justice or morality you possess and you can continue your legal military career. But at what cost?

We are becoming the opposite of the Land of the Free. America no longer stands for truth and justice, it stands for torture and indefinite detentions. We no longer have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, we are obligated to submit to the federal government keeping its all seeing electronic eye on us night and day. We can be denied the right to travel, if we end up on the government's mysterious "no fly" list. We can no longer peaceably assemble and dissent without being subject to mass arrests so that the President and his faction can party it up in New York City.

We, as a country, are living a lie. We are not a free country, and we are not the land of the brave. And that is the joint legacy of George Bush and all those who cowered before him after 9/11. And the few individuals who have risked their lives, or their careers and their reputations, by insisting on doing what is right rather than what the Bush administration demanded, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

he concludes with the famous kurt vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death...

And so it goes.

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Yes, "so it goes," but Kurt will be missed

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.

i think i've read nearly everything he's written, and, for me, he's been one of the voices that most clearly reflects the insanity and absurdity that passes for reason and common sense in this modern world... Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death acquainted me with the horrors of dresden, a nightmare conveniently omitted from our history lessons, and his understated comment on death, dying, and all things transitory, "so it goes," has been part of my lexicon ever since... all the best to you on the other side, mr. vonnegut...

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