Yes, there's something terribly wrong and it's much deeper than easy access to guns

at least once a day, i read something that gets my blood boiling and i often think, gee, maybe i ought to post that on the blog... yeah, right... i don't seem to be getting very far on that one...

well, today, when i read the latest horribly superficial and denial-ridden analysis of the latest in the never-ending parade of mass-slaughter incidents in my country, i simply couldn't let it go unchallenged... and, yep, you guessed it, almost the entire focus was on easy access to guns...

summing up steven rosenfeld via alternet...

...access to guns exacerbates violence...

well, yes, i don't think there's any doubt about that but where, ferchrissake, is the discussion of where all that damn violence is coming from...? but, ya know, that's not all such hard a question to answer... all it takes is opening your eyes and looking around... 

in the u.s., violence permeates the very air we breathe... it's in the movies, in sports, on television, seeded all through popular music, is the theme for countless widely played video games, on and on... the look, the feel, the attitude of barely suppressed violence struts around our streets with shaved heads, tattoos, piercings, male and female, in the malls, in the bars, and, yes, even on the playground... and i don't need to go into all the details of where and how violence manifests itself because it's visible everywhere...

i go to the gym several times a week as i'm sure some of you do too... general gym protocol seems to require loud rock music playing in the background... i'm not anti rock music to be sure but i'm appalled at how much of it involves anger, yelling, screaming, and implied if not outright violence... in-your-face aggression is more often than not the norm...

then there's the utter militarization of our society... fighting in endless wars, local police departments equipped like special operations hit squads, "support our troops" stickers, themes, and celebrations everywhere, assassinations by drone, u.s. military support to some of the most repressive and violent regimes on the planet...

i won't even mention income inequality better suited to a failed state, mass incarceration, stratospheric student debt, structural unemployment, and starving retirees...

in short, anyone who thinks that gun controls will fix anything is sadly mistaken and is only confusing the symptom with the cause... we have a very, very sick society, my friends, and, if denial about anything needs to be faced, it is that...

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More on our elites' hidden money

the pirate banking industry... 

from rt, speaking with james henry, the author of the "tax haven" report...

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Our global, super-rich, elite "cabal" have at least $21 TRILLION tax-free stashed away

truly staggering but not at all surprising... merely a confirmation of  what we have already assumed to be true...
 
from the guardian (emphases added)...

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy". According to Henry's research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.

The detailed analysis in the report, compiled using data from a range of sources, including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, suggests that for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests. Once the returns on investing the hidden assets is included, almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s, and Nigeria £196bn.

"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people," said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become."

the bottom line is that our super-rich elites owe allegiance to no one... their citizenship is merely a formality maintained for appearances and to facilitate crossing those pesky borders... the rule of law and accountability is for the unwashed masses...

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We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities

chris hayes taken from his book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy excerpted at In These Times...

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life. The failure of the elites and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society. It structures and constrains the very process by which we gather facts, form opinions, and execute self-governance. It connects the Iraq War and the financial crisis, the Tea Party and MoveOn, the despair of laid-off autoworkers in Detroit to the foreclosed homeowners in Las Vegas and the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans: nothing seems to work. All the smart people fucked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility.

[...]

Three decades of accelerating inequality in America have produced a deformed social order and a set of elites who cannot help but be dysfunctional and corrupt. Most of us don’t see it that way, because we get elites wrong.

We don’t acknowledge that our own most fundamental, shared beliefs about how society should operate are deeply elitist. We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.

To recover from the damage inflicted by this crisis of authority, we must reconstruct and reinvent our politics, a process that has, in a sense, already begun. Andrew Smith, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street, told me one fall evening in 2011 that the movement is not “Left or Right, but up or down.” Amid drums and whoops and chants of “We! Are! The 99 percent!” he leaned in and said, “I realize that’s scary for some people.”

[...]

By waging a sustained assault on the establishment responsible for perpetuating the Vietnam War, patriarchy and racial discrimination, the social movements of that era permanently transformed American society for the better.

In place of the old WASP establishment, America embraced meritocracy, an ideal with roots that reach back to the early years of the Republic. By opening the doors to women and racial minorities, while also valuing youth over seniority and individual talent over the quiet virtues of the Organization Man, it incorporated the demands of the social movements of the 1960s. But whatever the egalitarian commitments of the social movements that brought about the upheaval of the time, what emerged when the dust had settled was a model of the social order that was more open but still deeply unequal.

[...]

At its most basic, the logic of “meritocracy” is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best-equipped people into the positions of greatest responsibility and import. You certainly wouldn’t want surgeons’ licenses to be handed out via lottery, or to have major cabinet members selected through reality TV–style voting.

But in our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model, we overestimate its advantages and underappreciate its costs, because we don’t think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces.

[...]

So the obstacle to more equality is not widespread public opposition to a more egalitarian society. The obstacle is simply that people and institutions who benefit most from extreme inequality have outsize power they can use to protect their gains from egalitarian incursions. The most pressing challenge for those who desire a better functioning, more representative nation is conceiving not of policies that will ultimately enhance equality, but of mechanisms by which the power of the current elite might be challenged and dramatically reduced.

Because the meritocratic winners are reluctant to part with their power, they must be convinced that the current status quo is unsustainable. Normalcy is what keeps the system moving and its inequities unaddressed—so normalcy must be disrupted. The social distance between the current beneficiaries of our post-meritocratic social order and its victims must be annihilated.

interesting perspective... i had never before framed our situation in terms of a "meritocracy" but it certainly makes sense...

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Sitglitz: Money trumps democracy - America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries

in my travels over the years, i've always been acutely aware of the disparity between rich and poor in many of the countries i've visited... mexico was my first eye-opening experience in the early 70s and, despite the appearance of home depots and sam's clubs that have popped up like poisonous mushrooms after a rain, as of last october, i haven't seen that much change... the poor are still very poor and the rich are still staggeringly rich... i've seen the same story repeated to greater and lesser degrees all over latin america, the balkans (with a few exceptions), africa and, saddest of all, afghanistan...


i always thought that the poor in the u.s., although i know there are some whose circumstances are almost as extreme as in the poorest of third world countries, were poor at a level a bit more comfortable than, for instance, in mexico... i don't think that any more... in the last ten years, especially, i've seen my country slide inexorably toward third world standards with no end in sight...


joseph stiglitz is an acute observer and i offer this only as a way to keep the problem visible...

[T]he American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data.

This is one of the reasons that America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with the rest has been widening. In the “recovery” of 2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth. Other inequality indicators – like wealth, health, and life expectancy – are as bad or even worse. The clear trend is one of concentration of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at the bottom.

It would be one thing if the high incomes of those at the top were the result of greater contributions to society, but the Great Recession showed otherwise: even bankers who had led the global economy, as well as their own firms, to the brink of ruin, received outsize bonuses.

A closer look at those at the top reveals a disproportionate role for rent-seeking: some have obtained their wealth by exercising monopoly power; others are CEOs who have taken advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance to extract for themselves an excessive share of corporate earnings; and still others have used political connections to benefit from government munificence – either excessively high prices for what the government buys (drugs), or excessively low prices for what the government sells (mineral rights).

Likewise, part of the wealth of those in finance comes from exploiting the poor, through predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices. Those at the top, in such cases, are enriched at the direct expense of those at the bottom.

i never cease to be amazed at the greed manifested by those at the top and completely baffled at their disregard or even outright contempt for any notion of the common good...

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What is common-good conservatism?

truthout via alternet...

What is common-good conservatism? It is a political philosophy rooted in the stewardship ethic of traditional conservatism. It begins with three simple premises: that recognition of the shared dignity of all human beings is the essential predicate of a just society, that rights always correspond to duties and that we bear a collective responsibility toward one another. Forward-looking, solutions-oriented and committed to social, economic and environmental justice, common-good conservatism champions the interests of average Americans and promotes civic virtue while laying the foundations for broadly shared prosperity and human flourishing in the 21st century. It is both transformative and restorative - a political and intellectual rebirth.

[...]

We must ensure that our economy and our government equitably distribute the benefits and burdens generated by both booms and busts. Taxation is also a mechanism for putting reasonable moral boundaries on greed. We must abandon libertarian-conservatism's reflexive opposition to any proposals to increase revenue - a millionaires' tax, ending the Bush-era tax cuts, or returning the top personal income tax rates to their levels during the Clinton administration, are all measures that we should discuss and consider. At the same time, we must identify and eliminate subsidies, loopholes and exemptions that benefit giant corporations, like the famous corporate jet tax break, in order to ensure that they also contribute their fair share.

Growing inequality, declining opportunity and a widely shared perception of systemic unfairness (that the game is rigged in favor of the super rich), ultimately undermine the stability of the social order and delegitimize our political and economic institutions. They must be addressed, so that our society can be maintained and extended forward in time.

[...]

Common-good conservatism, with its emphasis on stewardship and its recognition of the traditional conservative concern for preserving communities and institutions over time, is the solution.

Intellectually bankrupt and morally craven, libertarian-conservatism is hurtling toward its Gotterdammerung, a political version of Ragnarok where the sky falls and the world burns.

But there is still hope. From the smoldering ashes of libertarian-conservatism's funeral pyre, something fresh and wondrous might emerge, a conservative phoenix, singing a beautiful new song. That song is conservatism, for the common good. And with its first notes, we will greet the coming of the dawn.

wouldn't it be loverly...?

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When plunder becomes a way of life

moyers & co...

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaires, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes' worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” -- as in, "Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

[...]

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren't rich, not to mention what's left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

rape, pillage and plunder...

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Six people have as much wealth as 90.7 million of the 302.2 million people in the U.S.

laura at daily kos...

We're talking about the top .00000002 percent.

laura is posting on research done by Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics...

such a yawning gap of wealth inequality is unconscionable...

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Glenn on Dylan Ratigan yesterday

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Yves Smith sitting in for Glenn Greenwald at Salon - highly recommended

by all means, go read it...

Income inequality is bad for rich people too

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The US has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite and the country's social disintegration is breathtaking

it's always very instructive to see your own country through the eyes of others... while i share much of the view of the u.s. that's presented in this spiegel opinion piece, i am nonetheless gap-jawed at the picture that's painted...

This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy. In the face of America's apparent political insanity, Europe must learn to take care of itself.

The word "West" used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word -- along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence -- should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically -- in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

The country's social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest 1 percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country's total income for themselves -- 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total wealth, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America's path is leading it down the road to "banana-republic status." The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

The same applies to America's broken political culture. The name "United States" seems increasingly less appropriate. Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and '70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology. In this new American civil war, respect for the country's highest office was sacrificed long ago.

wow...! can you imagine reading an opinion piece like this in ANY traditional u.s. media outlet...? me neither...

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The richest 1% of the US population controls 40% of the wealth

from the al jazeera fault lines news magazine that aired august 2, 2011...

The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it's been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US' 14.3 trillion dollar debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above 9%, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programs that are the backbone of the US's social safety net, and whether to raise taxes — or to cut them further.

The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the United States has never seemed so divided — both politically and economically.

How did the gap grow so wide, and so quickly? And how are the convictions, campaign contributions and charitable donations of the top 1% impacting the other 99% of Americans?

pretty pathetic, eh...?

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"We are worse than old Europe"

again, none of this is news, but it certainly bears repeating...

joseph stiglitz...

The point is that there has been this growing inequality, not only in income, but actually the inequality of wealth is even much greater. There’s a shrinking of opportunity. It’s not just that the people at the top are getting richer. If they were getting richer because they were contributing more to our society and everybody else was doing well, that would be one thing. But actually, they’re gaining, and everybody else is decreasing. In fact, right now, it’s not just the bottom, but even the middle, the middle, the median income—half above, half below—are poorer today than they were more than a decade ago. So, all the growth that has occurred in our country over the last decade or more has gone to the upper one, two percent.

At the same time, there’s really shrinking opportunity. You know, we used to think of the United States as the land of opportunity—Horatio Alger, anybody could make it. And we used to think of ourselves as different from old Europe, as we used to call it. But the statistics show otherwise. Now, yes, we have some dramatic examples of people making it from the bottom to the top, middle to the top. But the statistics look at what happens on average: what is the chance of somebody at the bottom making it to the middle or the middle making it to the top? And right now, we are worse than old Europe. This is something dramatic that has happened over the last 30, 40 years.

yeah... and i'm sitting here in kabul, afghanistan, watching all this from the perspective of the incredible mess we've created for these good people...

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The wealth of [society's] most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good

you'd almost think we were talking about the u.s., now wouldn't you...?

Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.

But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.

That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.

It is also a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.

Though the authorities have tried to expand the net in recent years, taxing profits from the stock market and real estate, entire swaths of the economy, like agriculture, a major moneymaker for the elite, remain untaxed.

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.”

[emphases added]

the disingenuousness of the nyt is stunning, particularly in a time when the super-rich elites in the united states, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the obama administration, are systematically destroying what's left of the social contract in a process that's continued unabated through the bush/clinton/bush/reagan years...

but, hey... the ability of the united states to point out the sins of others is unparalleled and it seems that everybody in the world accepts that as fact - except us, of course...

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