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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

Thursday, July 05, 2012

More Alyona talking with Chris Hedges on the global trainwreck of unfettered capitalism

maximizing profits in a marketplace that recognizes no constraints...
That's what our guest tonight argues in his latest book, by travelling to, and documenting life and the destruction of it in so called, "sacrifice zones". This includes the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the city of Camden, N.J.; the now leveled mountains of West Virginia; and the migrant-worker camps that resemble modern day slavery of southwest Florida. So why are they sacrifice zones? Because both human beings and the natural world have been used and then discarded to maximize earnings in a marketplace that rules without constraints. They're perhaps the most shocking and in your face examples, but should they be used as a warning sign as to where the rest of the country, and the world are headed? Alyona discusses his new book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" with Chris Hedges Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute.



consider this an antidote to the mindless 4th of july celebrations of an america that doesn't exist...

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Thursday, June 21, 2012

The ideology of capitalism and free markets reject the need for thought, knowledge, information, and any notion of public life

rob urie in counterpunch...

Occupy is Alive; So is History

Political leadership in the West has calcified atop a set of existing facts and trajectory that assure rebellion in one form or another until they are reconciled. In addition to the economic divides between wealth and poverty, employment and unemployment, opportunity and the lack of opportunity, there is a generational divide that has left youth around the world on the outside of economic life.

[...]

These conditions were not created by the young or by the multitudes that are likewise on the outside of economic and mainstream political life. They result from decades of ideologically driven policies that assumed that the secular deity of markets removed the need for thought, knowledge, information, and any notion of public life. This ideology supports a predatory economic order that has had disastrous consequences for vast majorities in the West. And yet it still drives economic and political decisions today.


[...]


[T]here are entirely practical reasons why rebellion is here to stay until these problems are resolved. What this rebellion will look like will be a function of material conditions as they develop and the systemic response to them. To date this response has been discouraging and events unfolding in Egypt add new degrees of pessimism. This written, rebellion is both necessary and life affirming.

we'll see, i guess...

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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Paul Craig Roberts: Financial deregulation is likely to prove to be the mistake that destroys Western civilization

whether or not roberts is right, i just wish the house of cards would go ahead and collapse...

from counterpunch...

The enormous cost of the financial crisis has one single source–financial deregulation. Financial deregulation is likely to prove to be the mistake that destroys Western civilization. While we quake in our boots from fear of “Muslim terrorists,” it is financial deregulation that is destroying us, with help from jobs offshoring.
[...]
Financial deregulation has had dangerous and adverse consequences. Deregulation permitted financial concentration that produced “banks too big to fail,” thus requiring the general public to absorb the costs of the banks’ mistakes and reckless gambling.

Deregulation permitted banks to leverage a small amount of capital with enormous debt in order to maximize return on equity, thereby maximizing the instability of the financial system and the cost to society of the banks’ bad bets.

Deregulation allowed financial institutions to sweep aside the position limits on speculators and to dominate commodity markets, turning them into a gambling casino and driving up the prices of energy and food.

Deregulation permits financial institutions to sell naked shorts, which means to sell a company’s stock or gold and silver bullion that the seller does not possess into the market in order to drive down the price.

[...]

The dollar in its role as world reserve currency is the source of Washington’s power. It allows Washington to control the international payments system and to exclude from the financial system those countries that do not do Washington’s bidding. It allows Washington to print money with which to pay its bills and to purchase the cooperation of foreign governments or to fund opposition within those countries whose governments Washington is unable to purchase, such as Iran, Russia, and China. If the dollar was not the world reserve currency and actually reflected its true depreciated value from the mounting US debt and running of the printing press, Washington’s power would be dramatically curtailed.
[...]
It is ironic that the outcome of financial deregulation in the US is the opposite of what its free market advocates promised. In place of highly competitive financial firms that live or die by their wits alone without government intervention, we have unprecedented financial concentration.  Massive banks, “too big to fail,” now send their multi-trillion dollar losses to Washington to be paid by heavily indebted US taxpayers whose real incomes have not risen in 20 years.  The banksters take home fortunes in annual bonuses for their success in socializing the “free market” banks’ losses and privatizing profits to the point of not even paying income taxes.

[...]

Will Western civilization itself survive the financial tsunami that deregulated Wall Street has produced?


i think the day when the dollar is not the world's reserve currency is rapidly approaching...

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Monday, November 28, 2011

The 1% only care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else

dean baker...
It's time to expose the lies for what they are. The One Percent have rigged the deck over the last three decades to accomplish the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. These are not people who care about budget deficits or free trade or free markets. They care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.

i know i'm being completely unrealistic, but wouldn't it be nice to see the views of someone like dean baker competing with the views of the 1% on traditional news media outlets...? i have to ask myself, why is that not happening...? the answer, obviously, is that the 1% control the traditional news media...

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Thursday, March 03, 2011

A call for a direct focus on our super-rich elites, the ones who are calling the shots

one of the real benefits of the "global awakening," particularly as it's being played out currently in the u.s. (in places like madison, wisconsin), is that it's drawing back the curtain on those behind those they have installed as their puppets... case in point: it's not scott walker, the wisconsin governor, we should be focusing on, it's charles and david koch, the super-rich elite money-men who finance and enable people like walker...

george goehl writing in the nation...

We need to get to the root of the issue of budgets—we’re facing a revenue crisis. There is simply not enough money in our cities and states to support the investments needed to rebuild the American middle class. The good news is this: we know where the money is. And though politicians might tell you differently, it’s not in Grandma’s pension. It’s not in the homes of families fighting off foreclosure. And it’s not in the pockets of American schoolchildren or schoolteachers. It’s on Wall Street.

Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the New York Times that the “easy cuts” are behind us. “Easy cuts” are those that impact the poor and less powerful. The hard cuts—the ones that are so hard that few in statehouses or Washington are talking about them—would mean ending tax breaks and free rides for Wall Street and the corporations they finance. These cuts are hard not because they hurt everyday people but because they would force elected officials to go toe-to-toe with the economic elites who finance their campaigns. And because too few politicians have the stomach for this fight, it’s clear we’ll have to lead it ourselves.

To do this, we need to hold elected officials accountable and directly challenge the moral abuses of major corporate powers. We get in trouble when we're doing only one or the other and missing half the fight. Right now the mix is uneven. That’s why we need to move from directing most of our energy toward the pawns of the corporate class to going directly to those calling the shots. Imagine if every time we organized a protest at a statehouse or on Capitol Hill we also marched on a bank or the headquarters of a corporation that is impeding an economic recovery for American families. It’s critical that we make this shift, because if this battle simply pits people against politicians, it allows those with the most power to be absent from the story and therefore absent from any real accountability. [emphases added]

david korten describes the unholy alliances that have been manipulated by those elites to bring us to the ugliness of today...
In the 1970s, an alliance of elite interests began preparing to roll back the measures that created the American middle class and launched a full-scale class war during the 1980s under the banner of the Reagan revolution.Corporate interests provided the money and controlled the real agenda. Religious fundamentalists provided votes in return for lip service to a conservative social agenda opposing abortion, family planning, and gay marriage. Libertarians provided an ideological framework removing constraints to the unlimited concentration of wealth in the name of market freedom. Neo-conservatives provided justification for wars and outsized military expenditures to swell the profits of the defense industry and secure corporate access to the world’s resources and markets.

you've gotta admit, those wealthy elites have done one hell of a job...

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Monday, November 08, 2010

All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace

chris hedges...
Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

[...]

Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.

in the documentary, the corporation, a film i use in my mba class, often to the displeasure of my students, has a segment in it where a so-called "authority" not only predicts but actively espouses the privatization of EVERYTHING, every square inch of earth, air and water, out of the belief that "ownership" equates to "stewardship," a belief that has been repeatedly shown to be profoundly misplaced...

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Friday, February 06, 2009

¡Que se vayan todos!

¡Que se vayan todos! (All of them must go!)

naomi klein opines that the disgust with capitalism that toppled four presidents in succession here in argentina may at last be spilling over to the rest of the world...
The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?) echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

[...]

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the streets and the protests never stopped.

[...]

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

unfortunately, argentina's outburst only produced a temporary stay of execution... today, you can find the same elites, dressed in their faux populist finery, still lining their pockets and feeding from every available trough... the good news is that it's happening without imf and world bank debt... the bad news is that the poor are still poor and getting massively poorer by the day...

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

John Pilger: "The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states"

needless to say, in my present situation in afghanistan, i hear a lot of people mouthing "democracy," "free market economy," "reform," and "capitalism"... not surprisingly, those from whom i hear those things the most are the few who have managed to profit the most from the mess that the country is in...
"Democracy" is now the free market – a concept itself berefet of freedom. "Reform" is now the denial of reform. "Economics" is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line. Alternative models that relate to the needs of the majority of humanity end up in the memory hole. And "governance" – so fashionable these days - means an economic system approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos. "Foreign policy" is service to the dominant power. Conquest is "humanitarian intervention". Invasion is "nation-building".

Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do. Take the "war on terror". This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror. Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation.

In fact, the opposite is true. The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states. Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years ago have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this "nation-building". Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a "good war". Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond.

We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America's perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news.

The difference between the two tragedies is that the people who died in the Twin Towers in New York were worthy victims, and the thousands of children who die every day are unworthy victims. That is how many of us are programmed to perceive the world.

over the past few days, i have had several deep and passionate conversations with locals here who question me intensely on ways to change "the system," the term we have agreed best captures the powerful stranglehold the entrenched interests have on us all... i'm unable to give them the magic solution they're looking for simply because there isn't one... all i can say is that it's up to us, that we are all we have, and that it will be through each of us doing what we can, living our lives the way we know is right, and seizing opportunities to help others see the light that things will eventually change... the little understood fact is that revolution contains within it the seeds of its own gradual demise... for true systemic change to manifest, it will only be by letting our individual lights shine forth...

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Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The myth of free trade and neoliberalism, special to "The Mustache of Understanding"

a somewhat lengthy but quite informative article in alternet via truthdig by chalmers johnson, reviewing Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, by cambridge economist ha-joon chang that, besides debunking neoliberal economic policies and the so-called "washington consensus," excoriates tom friedman...
[The] book is a discursive, well-written account of what [Chang] calls the "Bad Samaritan," "people in the rich countries who preach free markets and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and preempt the emergence of possible competitors. They are saying 'do as we say, not as we did' and act as Bad Samaritans, taking advantage of others who are in trouble."

[...]

[Neoliberal policies include] privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country's central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism.

chang's - and johnson's - bottom line...
[F]ree trade, privatization, and [neoliberal] policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense...

[...]

It is time to recognize, particularly in the English-language economic press, that a "level playing field" leads to unfair competition when the players are unequal.

i spend a great deal of time outside the united states... i have worked on economic development projects in so-called "emerging economies," principally in former socialist countries, i reside part-time in argentina, i have traveled extensively throughout latin america, eastern and southeastern europe, and i have seen first-hand the devastation wreaked by neoliberal, world bank and imf policies... following those policies, it is virtually impossible for a country's producers and manufacturers to prosper... how could they when transnational corporations flood the national markets with goods and services, establish a country-wide presence, and operate with an economy of scale that home-grown businesses find it impossible to match...

every time i go to shop, i always look at the fine-print on the labels of the items i purchase because i want to see what corporation is behind the product... 9 times out of ten it is a transnational corporation, unilever, nestle, proctor and gamble, pepsico, coca cola, danone, bayer, etc., etc... sure, if the country is a big enough market, those corporations may license local companies to produce their products in-country which is at least somewhat better than importing everything, but the money still largely flows out of the country... and, if the market is small - macedonia, for instance - most brand-name products on store shelves are 100% imported... (and, yes, there are plenty of knock-offs, but that's a whole 'nother story...)

anyone who espouses free trade and neoliberal economic policies is either grossly ignorant of the realities those policies have created in the developing world or committed to serving his or her own economic interests at the expense of others...

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation

aw, geeeez... more bullshit from foreign policy... check this out...

the title...


Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

now, for the meat...
In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s great democracies—France and Germany.

oh, my stars and garters... shocking... just SHOCKING...! "savage..." "unhealthy..." "immoral..." they certainly COULDN'T be talking about capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship...! oh, but wait...! yes, they ARE...! france and germany are DARING to challenge THE RELIGION OF CAPITALISM... how terribly cheeky of them...
The deep anti-market bias that French and Germans continue to teach challenges the conventional wisdom that it’s just a matter of time, thanks to the pressures of globalization, before much of the world agrees upon a supposedly “Western” model of free-market capitalism. Politicians in democracies cannot long fight the preferences of the majority of their constituents. So this bias will likely continue to circumscribe both European elections and policy outcomes. A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.

well, we CERTAINLY can't tolerate POPULISM, now, can we...?

i don't know about you, but i find this little screed terribly naive... by choosing to completely overlook the ravages caused by globalization, the breathtaking exploitation of people and resources wrought by capitalism, and the global financial chaos we are experiencing right at this moment from free and unregulated financial markets, the author is revealing himself as nothing more than a public relations shill for the global super-rich... like they need another apologist... i say, "bloody good for france and germany for trying to inject a little truth into their school curriculums..." it's a novel idea, but, who knows, it might catch on...

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Monday, September 10, 2007

Tom Tomorrow 'splains the market's "invisible hand"

tom tomorrow in salon ...

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