big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Two examples.
1) …public gatherings of 10 or more persons require a government permit, and police have the authority to stop an unofficial assembly of five or more persons deemed likely to cause a disturbance of the peace.
2) …four or more people must obtain permits for all activity and displays in state buildings and apply for those permits at least 72 hours in advance.
USA broadband is sloppy. It’s better in urban centers where profits are dense, but overall, coverage and quality is generally poor.
Occupy Anchorage is told tents are OK but permits are required for an igloo.
The Nation, “Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom,” can act as a guide to why this is so important and what the roadmap toward changing it could look like. He says:
The secret of conservatism’s success — as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest — has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market…
We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job…
The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it — for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”…
That is why the politics of freedom refuses to view the state as the conservative does: as a constraint. Or as the welfare-state liberal does: as a distributive machine. Instead, it views the state the way the abolitionist, the trade unionist, the civil rights activist and the feminist do: as an instrument for disrupting the private life of power. The state, in other words, is the right hand to the left hand of social movement.
Income inequality rose as banking regulations were eased…
From about 1933, when the federal regulation of banks was put in place, to 1980 when Chicago School theories began to shape policy, bank failures were rare. During those years incomes were much more equal, with a prosperous middle class.
Interview with Australia economist Steve Keen:
The best we can hope for is a lost two decades?
If we leave it to the basic mechanism by which capitalism eliminates excessive debt which is bankruptcy and a slow grinding process of paying the debt down. Once we get back down to the level of debt that the system actually needs which is far lower than the level of private debt we have now then the process will be over. But that could take something like 20 years.
You’ve also suggested that it could take a rising level of violence.
The trouble is when you have a growing population and an economy that is used to growth and people expecting to get employed when they leave school and they find that in fact there are not enough new jobs coming on to handle the new entrants into the labor market, even if you grow slightly less than the rate of population change, that means that [you have] a population which you’re saying in the recent media is a lost generation. Well, that lost generation only has one outlet and that is frustration and violence. It is not the way to manage an effective society to be caught in a trap like this.
Your argument is that politicians won’t listen until there is something to make them listen.
Absolutely. Politicians are reactive individuals. They’re not leaders most of them. The vast majority of them. They’ve been going along with the general trend of believing that a larger financial sector, more deregulation, is a good thing.
Will Hutton warns on Britain:
What is going to make the years ahead doubly fraught is that the ideologies that used to provide the basis for our democratic discourse have been as torched as the economy. This is a first-order crisis to which socialism, certainly as conceived and practised over the past 100 years, is no plausible answer.
But equally, nobody can dare argue that the solution is to press ahead with yet more of the free-market capitalism that has laid Britain and the west so low. The simple-minded nostrums that have poured from the great American neocon thinktanks have been tried and found wanting. An ideological vacuum coincides with the most testing economic times for decades.
We need vision and visionaries – but what we have is journeymen espousing bankrupt world views.
via Harvard Business Review:
Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?
We are the creators of the future. Because we are the inheritors of a tradition not just older — but more humanistic, constructive, nuanced, dynamic, and perhaps just a little bit wiser — than we know.
A good life today? It’s been vacantly reduced to the frenzied sport of buying ‘consumer goods’ — more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now.
But the foundational idea that ignited the art of human organization in the first place just might have been eudaimonia — and today’s opulence is just its clumsy, hurried streetside caricature, empty of depth, shorn of meaning, bereft of the essence of what make us human, void of the hunger to create a better world for humanity. Somewhere along the way, sometime on the journey — perhaps for the best of reasons — we lost it. Let’s get it back. —Umair Haque
Romney says his Bain experience shows he knows how to create jobs. A closer examination paints a different picture….
Under Romney, Bain became one of the nation’s top leveraged-buyout firms…. Boston-based Bain acquired more than 115 companies.
Romney and his team maximized returns by
♦ firing workers,
♦ exploiting government subsidies, and
♦ flipping companies for large profits.
Ruthlessly, some of his deals slid into bankruptcy in order to extract profits.
==========
So Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.
Now I’ve just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular? Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That’s a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts — and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both.
So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us.
The truth is that what’s good for the 1 percent, or even better the 0.1 percent, isn’t necessarily good for the rest of America — and Mr. Romney’s career illustrates that point perfectly.
Quote # 1:
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.” —Aristotle
Quotes # 2:
“Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” —Newt Gingrich
Even without knowing German, see if you can tell what Der Spiegel thinks of the GOP field.
46 billion deaths over our history.
That staggering number is even more frightening in context.
Mosquitoes have killed half the humans that ever lived ?!
The illusion of infinite growth, like the Emperor’s New Clothes, is maintained by the Emperor. The citizenry see something naked and ridiculous which can’t be sustained.
Much like the housing crisis and the dot-com boom/bust, the Wall Street Empire is revealed as naked, even to the emperor himself. #OWS has already succeeded by one measure, they broke the shared fiction about Wall Street for all of us.
And:
What was once a useful distinction between the left and the right has become artificially crafted polarity of two sides to the same position.
The majority of the left and the right have come so close to the center to serve corporate interests and woo uncertain voters, that they collapsed into each other in a meaningless muddle.
Bill Moyers asks,
What two things don’t mix well?
Plutocracy & democracy.
Watch the ‘must-see’ video in which Bill explains why.
Barry Ritholtz breaks it down for you.
No matter the GOP spin, we cannot blame housing policies from the 1930s or mortgage tax deductibility from even before that.
It is a statistical invalid argument, as the data show.
Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up.
An examination of public documents involving Mr. Lauder’s companies, investments and charities offers a glimpse of the wide array of legal options for the world’s wealthiest citizens to avoid taxes both at home and abroad.
His vast holdings — which include hundreds of millions in stock, one of the world’s largest private collections of medieval armor, homes in Washington, D.C., and on Park Avenue as well as oceanfront mansions in Palm Beach and the Hamptons — are organized in a labyrinth of trusts, limited liability corporations and holding companies, some of which his lawyers acknowledge are intended for tax purposes.
HA!
“Perhaps the worst part of this immensely distressing story is how unexceptional it is.”
“It would be hard to imagine a greater betrayal of the ideals and origins of a nation of immigrants than systemic abuse of this kind, perpetrated as it usually is by agents of the government.”
via Salon: Australia awarded its highest distinction for ‘Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism‘ to WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined.”
“WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency that has empowered people all over the world.”
‘What has the country so angry,” says Fred Siegel, “is the sense that crony capitalism has produced a population that lives off the rest of us without contributing. They’re right. It’s not paranoid.”
Great slogan but “we are the 99%” aims too low.
Why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?
Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy.
It’s really the top 0.1%, not 1%, that have escaped with such a large slice of the pie.
And who are they? Let’s get one thing straight: They are not, on the whole, “job creators”.
..we’re on a trajectory
…we’re collapsing towards ‘neofeudalism’
…what does it look and feel like?
I’d say it has five key characteristics:
Ian Walsh:
Which leads us to the sudden surge in the price of oil to $107 a barrel. On the face of it, this is crazy.
Yes, the US has had a bit of a recovery, but Europe is going hard core austerity. But this is the game the hot money is playing: they move out of bonds and into oil, out of oil and into bonds. $107/barrel oil means the US recovery (such as it is, which isn’t much) isn’t going to last much longer.
Being rich is about being liquid when everyone else isn’t, so you can buy up assets on the cheap.
When [IF] the rich are properly under control (ie. when you keep them terrified of government and the people, as they should be) they can’t create such buying opportunities, they have to wait for them….
Right now the rich can and are crashing asset prices by forcing countries into austerity through attacks on their currencies and control of their political elites. They then buy up assets for fire-sale prices.
These attacks …are deranged.
These attacks are about power: the global rich were bailed out after the crash, now they are using their hot money in attack after attack, demanding austerity, which will cause semi-permanent depression in those countries which accept it.
All of this is crazy.
The financial elites are on a plundering spree, gleefully using their power to force entire nations into poverty, blackmailing governments into huge payouts.
Did you ever ever ever expect so many lights?
How is there ever ever ever enough fuel for this?
Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour [at Florida’s The Holy Land Experience amusement park] and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer.
He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”
“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.
He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”
“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign–not that I had anything against foreign doctors–but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”
“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”
Story at Yahoo News.
This Republican has had enough.
For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership.
They are indicators of a crisis of followership.
The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
I AM the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.
MEMO TO A NATION’S HEART
There is such a thing as healthy community. It is clear that the people’s viability requires a network of effectiveness. Informed progress is imperative. It must step from answering need –the key to both survival and prosperity.
The desire to fulfill is a strong human force. Participation in tangible efforts toward success is not a burden. It is, in a healthy culture, a remarkable opportunity of privilege, creating a vibrant common wealth, not merely in market economies, but where it matters the most, in the fabric of society.
The world is dynamic. Its legacy and primary resource: our ingenuity. There are those that pierce inhibition to challenge habit and shape wisdom. Problems can be severe; hopeless when viewed from the peaks of yesterday, and change may seem as chaotic as crisis.
But we will embrace a positive vision of our future and work toward an America that survives her dream. Vision is required. Wit is required. Action is required. The unforeseen is our beacon. Compassion is our only restraint.
We can inform the centuries there are vistas of our welfare yet discovered. We can prove diligence again, demonstrate our skills, and dispel the cathartic for the healing itself.
