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How Greed Destroys America
America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels
If the “free-market” theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman were correct, the United States of the last three decades should have experienced a golden age in which the lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry would have transformed the society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.
Direct Action for Single-PayerAfter all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.
By slashing income tax rates to historically low levels – and only slightly boosting them under President Clinton before dropping them again under George W. Bush – the U.S. government essentially incentivized greed or what Ayn Rand liked to call “the virtue of selfishness.”
Further, by encouraging global “free trade” and removing regulations like the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banks, the government also got out of the way of “progress,” even if that “progress” has had crushing results for many middle-class Americans.
True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now.
We should be able to assess whether laissez-faire capitalism is superior to the mixed public-private economy that dominated much of the 20th Century.
The old notion was that a relatively affluent middle class would contribute to the creation of profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That “middle-class system,” however, required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.
Beyond building a strong infrastructure for growth – highways, airports, schools, research programs, a safe banking system, a common defense, etc. – the government imposed a progressive tax structure that helped pay for these priorities and also discouraged the accumulation of massive wealth.
After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.
A century ago, it was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who advocated for a progressive income tax and an estate tax. In the 1930s, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who dealt with the economic and societal carnage that under-regulated financial markets inflicted on the nation during the Great Depression.
With those hard lessons learned, the federal government acted on behalf of the common citizen to limit Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and to impose high tax rates on excessive wealth.
So, during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency of the 1950s, the marginal tax rate on the top tranche of earnings for the richest Americans was about 90 percent. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top rate was still around 70 percent.
Discouraging Greed
Greed was not simply frowned upon; it was discouraged.
Put differently, government policy was to maintain some degree of egalitarianism within the U.S. political-economic system. And to a remarkable degree, the strategy worked.
The American middle class became the envy of the world, with otherwise average folk earning enough money to support their families comfortably and enjoy some pleasures of life that historically had been reserved only for the rich.
Without doubt, there were serious flaws in the U.S. system, especially due to the legacies of racism and sexism. And it was when the federal government responded to powerful social movements that demanded those injustices be addressed in the 1960s and 1970s, that an opening was created for right-wing politicians to exploit resentments among white men, particularly in the South.
By posing as populists hostile to “government social engineering,” the Right succeeded in duping large numbers of middle-class Americans into seeing their own interests – and their “freedom” – as in line with corporate titans who also decried federal regulations, including those meant to protect average citizens, like requiring seat belts in cars and discouraging cigarette smoking.
Amid the sluggish economy of the 1970s, the door swung open wider for the transformation of American society that had been favored by the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, putting the supermen of industry over the everyman of democracy.
Friedman tested out his “free-market” theories in the socio-economic laboratories of brutal military dictatorships in Latin America, most famously collaborating with Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet who crushed political opponents with torture and assassinations.
Ayn Rand became the darling of the American Right with her books, such as Atlas Shrugged, promoting the elitist notion that brilliant individuals represented the engine of society and that government efforts to lessen social inequality or help the average citizen were unjust and unwise.
The Pied Piper
Yet, while Rand and Friedman gave some intellectual heft to “free-market” theories, Ronald Reagan proved to be the perfect pied piper for guiding millions of working Americans in a happy dance toward their own serfdom.
In his first inaugural address, Reagan declared that “government is the problem” – and many middle-class whites cheered.
However, what Reagan’s policies meant in practice was a sustained assault on the middle class: the busting of unions, the export of millions of decent-paying jobs, and the transfer of enormous wealth to the already rich. The tax rates for the wealthiest were slashed about in half. Greed was incentivized.
Ironically, the Reagan era came just as technology – much of it created by government-funded research – was on the cusp of creating extraordinary wealth that could have been shared with average Americans. Those benefits instead accrued to the top one or two percent.
The rich also benefited from the off-shoring of jobs, exploiting cheap foreign labor and maximizing profits. The only viable way for the super-profits of “free trade” to be shared with the broader U.S. population was through taxes on the rich. However, Reagan and his anti-government true-believers made sure that those taxes were kept at historically low levels.
The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman theories may have purported to believe that the “free market” would somehow generate benefits for the society as a whole, but their ideas really represented a moralistic frame which held that it was somehow right that the wealth of the society should go to its “most productive” members and that the rest of us were essentially “parasites.”
Apparently, special people like Rand also didn’t need to be encumbered by philosophical consistency. Though a fierce opponent of the welfare state, Rand secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to one of her assistants.
She connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.
In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as justifying Rand’s move by saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.” Yet, it didn’t seem to matter much if “average” Americans were wiped out.
Essentially, the Right was promoting the Social Darwinism of the 19th Century, albeit in chic new clothes. The Gilded Age from a century ago was being recreated behind Reagan’s crooked smile, Clinton’s good-ole-boy charm and George W. Bush’s Texas twang.
Whenever the political descendants of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt tried to steer the nation back toward programs that would benefit the middle class and demand greater sacrifice from the super-rich, the wheel was grabbed again by politicians and pundits shouting the epithet, “tax-and-spend.”
Many average Americans were pacified by reminders of how Reagan made them feel good with his rhetoric about “the shining city on the hill.”
The Rand/Friedman elitism also remains alive with today’s arguments from Republicans who protest the idea of raising taxes on businessmen and entrepreneurs because they are the ones who “create the jobs,” even if there is little evidence that they are actually creating American jobs.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who is leading the fight to replace Medicare with a voucher system that envisions senior citizens buying health insurance from profit-making companies, cites Ayn Rand as his political inspiration.
A Land for Billionaires
The consequences of several decades of Reaganism and its related ideas are now apparent. Wealth has been concentrated at the top with billionaires living extravagant lives that not even monarchs could have envisioned, while the middle class shrinks and struggles, with one everyman after another being shoved down into the lower classes and into poverty.
Millions of Americans forego needed medical care because they can’t afford health insurance; millions of young people, burdened by college loans, crowd back in with their parents; millions of trained workers settle for low-paying jobs; millions of families skip vacations and other simple pleasures of life.
Beyond the unfairness, there is the macro-economic problem which comes from massive income disparity. A healthy economy is one where the vast majority people can buy products, which can then be manufactured more cheaply, creating a positive cycle of profits and prosperity.
With Americans unable to afford the new car or the new refrigerator, American corporations see their domestic profit margins squeezed. So they are compensating for the struggling U.S. economy by expanding their businesses abroad in developing markets, but they also keep their profits there.
There are now economic studies that confirm what Americans have been sensing in their own lives, though the mainstream U.S. news media tends to attribute these trends to cultural changes, rather than political choices.
For instance, the Washington Post published a lengthy front-page article on June 19, describing the findings of researchers who gained access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service which revealed which categories of taxpayers were making the high incomes.
To the surprise of some observers, the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators. America’s new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains.
As the Post’s Peter Whoriskey framed the story, U.S. business underwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today.
The article cites a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a year. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported.
However, just a few decades later, Gregg L. Engles, the current CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averages about 10 times what Douglas made. Engles works in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owns a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belongs to four golf clubs; and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently has little concern about what his workers think.
“The evolution of executive grandeur – from very comfortable to jet-setting – reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening,” Whoriskey reported.
“For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.
“But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall Street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled. Now a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap.”
Jet-Setting Execs
The Post article continued: “The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.
“The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms.
“An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories. Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled.”
While these new statistics are striking – suggesting a broader problem with high-level greed than might have been believed – the Post ducked any political analysis that would have laid blame on Ronald Reagan and various right-wing economic theories.
In a follow-up editorial on June 26, the Post lamented the nation’s growing income inequality but shied away from proposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich or faulting the past several decades of low tax rates. Instead, the Post suggested perhaps going after deductions on employer-provided health insurance and mortgage interest, tax breaks that also help middle-class families.
It appears that in Official Washington and inside the major U.S. news media the idea of learning from past presidents, including the Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower, is a non-starter. Instead there’s an unapologetic embrace of the theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, an affection that can pop out at unusual moments.
Addressing a CNBC “Fast Money” panel last year, movie director Oliver Stone was taken aback when one CNBC talking head gushed how Stone’s “Wall Street” character Gordon Gecko had been an inspiration, known for his famous comment, “Greed is good.” A perplexed Stone responded that Gecko, who made money by breaking up companies and eliminating jobs, was meant to be a villain.
However, the smug attitude of the CNBC stock picker represented a typical tribute to Ronald Reagan’s legacy. After all, greed did not simply evolve from some vague shift in societal attitudes, as the Post suggests. Rather, it was stimulated – and rewarded – by Reagan’s tax policies.
Reagan’s continued popularity also makes it easier for today’s “no-tax-increase” crowd to demand only spending cuts as a route to reducing the federal debt, an ocean of red ink largely created by the tax cuts of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Tea Partiers, in demanding even more cuts in government help for average citizens and even more tax cuts for the rich, represent only the most deluded part of middle-class America. A recent poll of Americans rated Reagan the greatest U.S. president ever, further enshrining his anti-government message in the minds of many Americans, even those in the battered middle class.
When a majority of Americans voted for Republicans in Election 2010 – and with early polls pointing toward a likely GOP victory in the presidential race of 2012 – it’s obvious that large swaths of the population have no sense of what’s in store for them as they position their own necks under the boots of corporate masters.
The only answer to this American crisis would seem to be a reenergized and democratized federal government fighting for average citizens and against the greedy elites. But – after several decades of Reaganism, with the “free market” religion the new gospel of the political/media classes – that seems a difficult outcome to achieve.
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158 Comments so far
Show Allslapbangwallah,
That was my first thought when I read the article. The glue that held this country together was the belief that the government worked for the people.
That glue is history. Whether it was ever true or not isn't the point. The point is that most people don't believe it anymore.
Next stop is secession by some state or group of states like Texas. They will defend their nukes and the Union won't dare attack them because the "Republic of Texas" has nukes and an army , navy and air force. Some other Southern states may quickly move to side with Texas.
Within a few months another group will secede and so on. I hope I'm wrong.
Robert Parry, like many other "Progressives" such as Ralph Nader, falsely attributes the U.S. economic crisis to the "Greed" of "America’s corporate chieftains".
Greed is defined as a characteristic of an individual, along with "avarice, avaritia, greed, rapacity, covetousness - reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth (personified as one of the deadly sins)" [The Free Dictionary by Farlex.].
While there are perhaps many individual corporate CEOs who fully deserve this characterization, it is obvious that identifying and replacing "Greedy" or even criminal CEOs with more "moral" CEOs would not solve by itself solve any apparently systemic economic crises.
Ralph Nader, and other "Progressives" think perhaps that it is the intrinsic nature of Corporations that is the problem. All is need is serious legislation to limit, control, and tax the for-profit corporations.
But the corporation is merely a legal entity, perfected after a century of law-making, designed to maximize the protection of existing wealth and further accumulation of wealth and profit.
No mention is made, no systematic thinking by "Progressives" is allowed, to consider that the economic crises impoverishing millions and destroying the ecology of the U.S. (and now globally) are rooted in the intrinsically toxic nature of "free market" capitalism.
Corporations are organized by wealthy individuals to become investors (capitalists). Their personal wealth is combined with others (owners, shareholders) for the sole purpose of preserving and maximizing their wealth. By maximizing the profit earned by the corporation, the individual investors become wealthy.
Capitalist owners of corporations maximize their profit in many ways, with the "unintended consequences" to humanity, to the ecology of the planet, to society of no concern.
WARS AND MILITARISM generate vast profits. Thus wars continue without end.
TAXES (which attack profits and wealth) are to minimized and eliminated to maximize profits.
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION is inevitable as environmental protection by destroys profits.(The energy industry (oil, coal, gas, nuclear) should be nationalized)
LABOR COSTS minimized to maximize profits.
POLITICAL CORRUPTION is legalized to prevent law making that would hurt profit maximization. Both Rep
HEALTH CARE is privatized to maximize profit to health care corporations.
GOVERNMENT PRIVATIZED to maximize profit. (The C.I.A. is 60 % outsourced.)
MASS MEDIA becomes a profit center while indoctrinating masses.
LABOR MOVEMENT becomes a "business partner" to corporate capitalism
Read daily the World Socialist Web Site: http:// www.wsws.org
This is a good critique of the monster US farts and shit that are being spread over the planet.
US'ns need to get up to speed. This comment should be taught in all US schools and academic institutions before Evolution.
These comments are as incoherent as the screams of passengers on a sinking ship.
People must ask why they are on board. Why are they US citizens? after all the ship has long been sinking. The entire history of the 20century is covered with the slime of the US; a monstrous, oily construction that has dragged itself over mankind seeking to press all people into the swamp of corporate profit while it has bellowed 'Freedom! Democracy! Me!'.
One simple feature of the stupidity of this entire set of writing before me is the use of the word American as in almost all US'n English. I mean who the fuck really believes that all Americans are US citizens? Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentineans, Venezuelans, and on and on are all Americans.
The monstrous paper-thin structure is obscenely clearly made of the simplistic, childish conceit that nobody counts but US citizens.
Now, predictably, even they don't count as the monster has begun to leak and fart.
US citizens have shown they are people who deny the nobility of mankind. They have accepted the lowest common denominator, which is I or me, as the essence of man. Monotheistic to the core even while in denial, they call this chimera God. They have long done this and it has been clear for all this time that the USA is just too big to succeed. It does not have the culture.
And so the USA is long a ghost ship but this makes it highly dangerous for it is full of the poison of envy and stupid with conceit, together a drug more destructive than all others. It kills routinely as it has from the beginning. It is a monstrosity that has achieved the status of life as in a monster.
There are fortunately some simple truths. People everywhere are good and so are US citizens. The structure, USA, is the evil turning good people into bad. Corruption is the right word here and the language of this monster, US English, is a smelly entity spreading its pall all over the world by means of names like Predator and Profit and incubating our world in the US stink.
Get out of it! It is a paper ship inflated with the ego of US citizens who call themselves THE Americans and who in truth believe that the plural is not really necessary. The pump that keeps the pressure up in this intellectually flaccid being is the White House/ Pentagon. As the expression of the unity of the USA they have clearly proven again and again that the USA is a mistake; a monstrous absurdity.
Pssst! The ship is sinking right next to the jetty. This little diatribe is a line that grows in numbers just as it is grasped, rather like the loaves and fishes. Grab on and climb off! Disunite the States. Look to your back yards while respecting others that do. Become the people of our planet that you truly are, for the planet is our back yard sisters and brothers.
Here's a helpful hint. Some people refer to citizens (or, "consumers") of The United States of America as "Americans" for basically the same reason that people refer to citizens of The Dominion of Canada as "Canadians".
That's it- it really is just that simple and not intended to slight the americanness of Mexicans, Brazilians, Guatemalans, Colombians etc etc etc.
This is NOT to detract from the rest of your comment ~ I concur with all of the points made about the USA.
What are you denying?
Please explain; cryptic comments are usually of no value, but if there is any substance, please make your point. I, for one, am interested in hearing just about ALL povs concerning the monstrosity that calls itself the USA / "America".
There's a whole lot of disinfo, fake mythology, and hidden reality that NEEDS to be brought forth, and it will probably never be enough!
I think this comment by slimshady about the use of American is very sensible.
The problem is we are not speaking about a sensible entity here. The actions of the entity commonly referred to as America are rankly insane.The words and the associated postures oozing and spewing out of this entity are not those of reasonable people. 'American' exceptionalism is clearly insane.
Insanity starts in small ways. Often with a little grin and a shrug of the shoulders a compromise is made because it seems the matter is not so important. So American, it is said, is just an abbreviation as is Canadian. But Canadians are Americans and their name distinguishes them from other Americans such as Mexicans and so on. Their name is not absurd. Californians, Alaskans, Texans, and so on same thing. But now we are dealing with an American entity that constantly presumes ownership of the word American in a way that by its actions can clearly be see to be a presumption of superiority; a claim to be the only significant Americans indeed the only Americans as if the others are mere accidents. No reasonable person can deny this is a fact and that this fact is an absurdity.
It follows in this way that the entity emanating from this use of 'American' the USA is equally absurd. Having eradicated vast numbers of people who had prior claim to the word American the murderers adopted the name for themselves as if those murdered by such as Custer had no claim to the land they were born on. Oh how very British of the 'Americans'!
In the Beginning is the Word. Language is important.
The solution lies no longer in a change of nomenclature. The entire identity is corrupt. The USA is a bad history and must go. The world cannot go forward while the USA exists. Read the news; read history for Christ's sake. To use another absurd word made in the the USA, the USA is the 'greatest' terrorist of all time.
Two steps need to be taken. The UN must receive the Pentagon and the entire structure and assets of the US armed forces. Then as clearly indicated by the spew of the political establishment in the USA, the source of the corruption of US English namely the White House and the houses of its its 'Democratic' institutions must be made into a museums to warn the world not to go the same way. There must never be another 'US President'. Then of course the US financial institutions and corporations must be brought to heel.
Hopefully we may have a President of the Americas in the future with the Americas and all its peoples as an integrated part of the world.
Right now US citizens have to stop calling themselves 'Americans'. The word used this way is the monster. The entire history of this name can be seen as a mark of shame.
I repeat. US people are good. The institution called 'America' is now proven to be a frighteningly bad one; an evil one.
Yes- very interesting. My parents arrived in this country (usa) in 1950 as teenagers. My point being that I have never subscribed to nor understood all of the schlock about "founding fathers" and deep roots (for instance- tracing ones ancestry back to the Mayflower, or Jamestown, etc) but your ship of fools theory actually makes more sense.
jpheran is entirely relevant and elegant.
Nevertheless, as a contribution may I introduce some use of English words that could be effective in giving access to useful understanding.
A fool is a social judgement. This means a fool is anything from someone who is insane to someone much wiser and more balanced than the relevant society. Jesus was a fool. Confucius, Mandela, Gandhi, Laotse, Idi Amin, Hitler and so on were all to some degree fools. The Shakespearean fool, the core of Shakespeare's greatness is a superb expression of the meaning of the word. Go look and see!
An idiot truly means a common man. This means we are all idiots. Another expression of idiocy is lowest common denominator. This means that all wise men are idiots but not all idiots are wise.
Both fool and idiot have always been idiotically misunderstood.
The present reality is that the USA is effectively an entity of nothing more than idiocy, like wine without a wine vat.
The entire structure known as the USA is an embarrassment to our planet and to humanity. This is certainly not the first time an entity has been such, but the USA is very large and this makes it the most significant and dangerous no-more-than-idiot in the history of our planet----except perhaps for the dinosaur .
Sorry! I have perhaps been unfair to the dinosaur.
Obama and Congress just agreed to a deal of Free Trade with So Korea and
Columbia..in the same deal they will pay some fees for the American workers
who have lost their jobs because of this outsourcing of jobs..This is the same
language that Slick Willie Clinton was using.."We will train you for the new
jobs, computers" said Willie...His wife Hillary was busy outsourcing computer
jobs to India..Wake up middle class. the sell-out is still in marching orders.
Time to throw out Obama and the others who voted for this deal..
As Parry points out, recent polls reveal that USians now really do consider Ronald Reagan the greatest president ever, better than Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy, all of them. That is not an opinion the public arrived at on their own.
At the end of his regime, polls indicated that Reagan was the least popular modern president, hated by large numbers because of the harmful societal changes this article describes. But in the early 90s, Republican Grover Norquist initiated the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, with the goal of naming major things after Reagan in every state of the union and of promoting his ideas everywhere. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and beyond my worst nightmares, to the point that no Democratic president will even try to reverse Reagan's policies, to bring us back to the long pre-1980s period of true prosperity via equality, and now all candidates, regardless of party, make a point of praising Reagan.
Until Reagan's policies are reversed - the top-down economics, the shoveling of money from social services and education to military, prisons, and police, all of it - the US will continue to go downhill.
Blech- absolutely disgusting that raygun bastard. I can't stand the fact that there are so many (more than zero is TOO many) "things" named after that corpse that finally died.
Dominant political rule by the wealthy --Plutocracy-- is what we now have in the US.
But even halfway psychologically balanced political theorists throughout history, like Aristotle (and, most ironically, even the so-called father of modern capitalism Adam Smith), long ago and always saw this kind of unworkable rule for what it was ---- just another form of tyranny whereby institutionalized societal power becomes locked-down and controlled by a relative few-- over the many --- w/o any meaningful accountability to the many.
It was precisely this kind of outrageous arrangement that Britain tried to exercise over its North American colonies that resulted in the US Revolution -- however only somewhat-less hypocritically vile our revolutionaries were.
Point being: Either a nationally organized people accepts willfully being politically ruled by monied power and privilege, or they do not.
Normal human beings over history, including most in the US, do not want such rule, however befuddled they may become at the hand of manipulative plutocrats.
In the current day, Randians and other assorted 'radical free-marketeers' are nothing really nothing much more than personally wanton social deconstructionists -- sociopaths, in a word, -- who use their alleged internal logic of an existentially insupportable theory to cloak their personal aversion to being more-wholly honest about themselves and the human condition.
"True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now."
...And there are plenty of countries (before this decade, most of which were in Southern America and Africa) that can give some anecdotal backdrop to this. Funnily enough, many of those countries came back a little later and asked Friedman and/or the Chicago Boys (Friedman's cronies) why the amazing prosperity promised had not occurred uniformly as expected. The response was always along the lines of, "Because you have not implemented free market theory to the extreme. You have to let everything go."
As if there is some magical turning point in the latter stages of self destruction. If I had access I would gladly piss on Friedman's grave.
"I can make one half of the working-class kill the other half."
-- Jay Gould, Gilded Age railroad and land speculation tycoon.
This Parry article is one of the best short pieces I've read in a while and he doesn't ignore the grand betrayal of the American middle- and lower-class by "free trade" as so many economics articles by Dim apologists on CD still cravenly do.
The betrayal of economic globalization is now taking more and more bites out of the upper-middle-class that I suspect many very deluded trolls inhabit. They don't understand the concept of economic attrition or military attrition [hint: Walmart's and Halliburton's business models.]
All those tens of millions of brainwashed, dumbed-down Americans falling down one or two classes will find after a couple of years of hitting branch after branch on their way to the bottom of the class food chain that neither Republicanism nor neo-liberal DLC Democrats have any real answers for their (and their families') new predicament.
Median wages for "ordinary Americans" have dropped $3,000 since 2008 while wealth and "free trade" stock gains for the richest one percent have broken new records. This is true of the global billionaire and centemillionaire class as well, who've seen their overall wealth grow over the last three years by several Trillion dollars while the middle-classes in the First World have rapidly declined, and Third World lower-classes struggle to survive soaring food and oil prices thanks to TARPed-up, QE-abetted over-speculation on these commodities.
Bear in mind that the global billionaire class (fewer than 2,500 people worldwide) has somewhere over $600 TRILLION dollars "in play" in the global derivatives black market that could implode overnight if small country defaults spread across the EU, or if Republicans play one too many stupid games delaying the raising of the debt ceiling just a hair too long.
We've had a multiplicity of Black Swans in recent years. Once investors lose market confidence in a major economy the dominoes tumble. France is a major economy in the EU system and their banks' exposure to losses in loans to Greece alone is substantial.
The Greek government wants to double down on traumatic cuts to the Greek middle- and lower-classes and raise taxes on them but they won't compel payment of existing taxes on their own upper-middle- and upper-class, let alone substantially raise taxes on their upper-class. The banking and political elite of the entire First World are behaving the same way: They have danced along with the Pied Piper of neo-liberalism (a full-blown religion of nothing but plutocratic greed) for decades and are incapable of governing with any sane degree of ethics, social conscience or social responsibility.
France just made damn sure their representative--an arch-neo-liberal pushing hard-core "austerity" for Greece--was named head of the IMF. Greece is so deep in debt to French and German banks and so unwilling to tax its rich that its masses may force default just so Greece can rid itself of the EU/IMF "structural adjustments" austerity yoke and cut its own trade deals using its old currency that would be devalued closer to the true scale of their economy.
They would still be broke but they would have more say in the shape of their own social spending and slow (but at least more direct, less externally burdened) path to recovery without EU/IMF debt payment deadlines regularly suffocating growth for decades. Argentina did it after an early failed experiment in neo-liberalism and privatization of their Social Security equivalent and recovered very well. Iceland has done it. As much as our pols and media insist otherwise, it's not impossible for Greece to default. Then France would tumble. Germany would fall after France. Britain. The U.S.
America's early 20th century populist progressives, the early socialists who prodded them and John Maynard Keynes (who was no socialist despite how he is portrayed by the Right and who actually helped save American capitalism from outright socialism or communism with ideas LIKE Social Security, the WPA and CCC) always came up with the best and brightest ideas in the past on how to avoid bank runs and how to smooth the socio-economic consequences of roller coaster business cycles. The New Deal's Glass-Steagall Act prevented a major run on the big banks for three quarters of a century until neo-liberal Republicans and neo-liberal faux Democrats bedded each other to gut it near the end of Slick Willy Clinton's second term.
Contemporary populist progressives might have helped lift falling Americans back up this time around as well--like the New Deal, post-war DOMESTIC manufacturing, labor unions and the original GI Bill did after the first Great Depression--but they've summarily cleansed from corporatist, militarist mass media and the contemporary corporatist, militarist Democratic Party.
Our entire political class needs to be listening to Ralph Nader, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Hudson, Michael Spence and Paul Craig Roberts (one of the only paleo-conservative, moderate libertarians left with two brain cells to rub together) and they are nowhere to be seen on mass media except for very rare appearances by Stiglitz on the PBS Newshour.
Once those who plummet from their well-duped arrogance on high have basted in their own juices long enough and watched their families deteriorate, then they'll finally start to figure out a few hard realities about who their real class enemies are and always were.
The Mussolini brown shirts certainly popped up to comment on this article. Any time too much of the truth gets told about the last five presidents and the slowly spreading venom of neo-liberalism that preceded and pervaded them the trolls slide out greasy, fangs bared and gill pumping like moray eels. But it's also clear many of these righty reactionaries don't know any actual history and many of them did not read Parry's entire article but skimmed it for "hot buttons" about which to steam and hiss.
Earlier tonight the neo-liberal full corporatist press was on at the BBC, German Deutsche Welle and U.S. PBS TV "news"-- all supporting "staying the course" on failed neo-liberalism, protecting the bloated super-rich classes of the U.S. & EU from tax increases at all costs, and circling the imminent bloodbath of volatile austerity like the walnut-brained sharks circling chum before a feeding frenzy. Only that chum has ticking financial bombs in it and is floating in a sea of flammable crooked derivatives that are going to cause the entire world indigestion, right, left and center.
These daze I'm thinking about how to sanely, compassionately transition from the present failed neo-liberal capitalist nightmare to an entirely new form of national and global civilization I've written about before in some posts. The best transition phase for the U.S. that I can come up with is still a Green New Deal. But neo-liberal indoctrination of America is so deeply entrenched and pervasive in every class at almost every cultural level that I do not know if America is realistically capable of adapting to survive the 21st century. It seems hell bent on descending into truly barbaric Dark Age neo-feudalism: Destroyed from within to the degree that it will ultimately be culturally overwritten by immigrants yet to come.
At this point the world would probably be far better off moving beyond anymore harebrained economic theories concocted by the U.S. Establishment. It has no concept of environmental sustainability and no longer has any ethics, morality or sense of shared sacrifice for the common good because there is no truly shared sense of identity in America anymore that isn't "reality show" vapid or brand list thin. Our rulers have divided us, pitted us against each other and conquered too well for too long. Americans don't listen to the still quiet voices of their personal or collective social conscience anymore because they cannot hear them in the cacophony of their corporatist programming as all-consuming and breeding commoditized products and markets.
After forty years of increasingly globalized neo-liberalism and what it has wrought, the survival choices humanity will face over the next forty years will be ones of such complexity that our plutocrats and their politicians and economists will be utterly at sea to cope with, let alone solve any of them. Politicians and economists make decisions that affect the lives of billions of people (and animal & plant species upon whose existence billions of human beings depend) based far more often than not on purely subjective and self-serving decision making processes.
What is called for on planet Earth these days is a global, truly democratic, scientific, empirically objective decision making process regarding economic resource distribution: One that trumps the blind corporatist drive for profits at all other social and environmental costs. It could do this via a global body of international non-corporate scientists chosen from all countries who would research, enact and enforce resource, habitat and species viability limits on corporatist GREED. They would focus on the sustainability of a healthy biosphere with sufficient bio-diversity and a global network of human civilizations that guarantee basic decent standards of living to all--but which understand that human populations, resource extraction and human quality of life do not rise together past a certain point.
What we need are regional habitat-based, environmental, economic and human population harmonization plans that make each regional habitat of the planet as self-sustaining in every sense as possible; have scientifically determined, optimal human populations (not too big, not too small) to allow for self-reliant agriculture and sustainable localized fishing economies; allow for green spaces for human recreational activities; allow for smaller scale and more widely dispersed "greened" industries, and allow for the survival of sufficiently buffered wilderness areas for somatic evolution to continue for bio-diverse legacy species.
Any kind of market investment in mass distributed products that are environmentally destructive to human, animal and plant habitability in any regional habitat should be globally outlawed. Human populations need to be slowly and humanely reduced to attain optimal harmonized regional habitat/human population goals using procreation limits set by objective scientific plans tailored to the unique biological and geological characteristics of each regional habitat, not by using race or class-based eugenics.
"Americans don't listen to the still quiet voices of their personal or collective social conscience anymore because they cannot hear them in the cacophony of their corporatist programming as all-consuming and breeding commoditized products and markets. "
No more than the ordinary farm animals on "Manor" or "Animal" farm did. The "pigs" are now walking on two legs and carrying whips.
'The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman theories may have purported to believe that the “free market” would somehow generate benefits for the society as a whole, but their ideas really represented a moralistic frame which held that it was somehow right that the wealth of the society should go to its “most productive” members and that the rest of us were essentially “parasites.”'
Rand/Friedman lied Merka into self-destruction. And they did it by a very specific method: They OBSCURED relevant fact with irrelevant fiction. The relevant facts about what the people need for their happiness have been well-documented for over two millennia (Plato) and well-understood probably for many more millennia.
But nobody told you to consider that. So you forgot about Plato. And you swallowed Rand/Friedman's koolaid, after swallowing that of the 17th/18th century philosophers, Descartes, et al, who buried Plato, et al.
You never noticed Plato was buried. But you will notice when you look into it and see how your very own personal instincts regarding human needs and happiness resonate strongly with Plato, not with Descartes. Your personal instincts about human needs and happiness do not resonate with Rand/Friedman, not with "conventional wisdom", not with follywood propaganda.
Yet we swallowed all that, hook line and sinker. How could we become detached from our own instincts? It's the petro-opiates. They stoned us on the petro-opiates, and so their koolaid tastes good. We don't know our own instincts because we as Merkans were taught from day one to look outside for stimuli, for information, for wisdom. Merkan elites taught us to be detached from our own minds, hearts and souls. There you go! Wanna get the monkey off your back now?
For America, Britain and Europe to cling to the failed Rand/Friedman mythology will only result in spreading, increasingly violent and excruciating (in every sense) resource wars (worsened by religious, tribal and ethnic divisions), extreme income and resource disparities (and therefore explosive tensions), and human, animal and plant species CRASHES commensurate with critical habitat loss and accelerating extinctions that will box homo sapiens into a hellish, perhaps un-survivable biological corner and lead to the death of billions of human beings by the end of this century.
Ocean species of fish are being wiped out from overfishing, warming seas and pollution faster than predicted even a few years ago. For two-thirds of the Third World ocean protein is their only source of protein. Coral reefs and rainforests have been the Earth's nurseries and laboratories for biodiversity for hundreds of millions of years and are now being casually obliterated by humankind before we even understand the gifts of ancient, slowly evolved, complex chemical & biological structures and functions, and evolutionary adaptations about which they can teach us.
Global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40 percent within 19 years according to Worldwatch. That's going to needlessly kill tens of millions of people in and of itself if humanity doesn't get its act together.
Simply thinking globally and acting locally isn't going to cut it. We need an evolutionary jump in how human beings regard the purpose of their existence, their relationship with, obligation to and life support dependence on the other plant and animal species on this planet and the very nature of what constitutes a true civilization itself. I do not think we have ever had a true civilization on this planet--except maybe the Minoan civilization. But it is within our reach if we will work hard to drag that dream into existence and maintain it with all the diligence we can muster and teach our kids to cherish and protect.
rtdrury should be compulsory reading in depth. On the lighter side, his 'Merkan' is genius and his 'follywood' uncannily apt.
One thing I would like to add: Laozi, author of the Daodejing, and Kongzi (Confucius as most will know him), the man of education and responsibility, still dominate in the China as Plato (Socrates) could in the West. They are woven into the structure of Chinese languages and customs as Descartes and the rest have become on the West.
Presently there is a concerted Western effort to eradicate their influence in China, not because of any insight but just because they are alien to Western understandings, which are fundamentally at odds with those of the East.
Interestingly, Mao eradicated Confucianists but in doing so acted in a thoroughly Confucian way. Those puzzled by this may consider that Kongzi and his disciple Mongzi state clearly that the educated and trained and fortunate who do not use their capabilities and position to benefit those less fortunate are corrupt (rotten) beings who will be physically eradicated as a matter of justice and directly as a consequence of their own mendacity.
It is also true that Jesus physically threw the same pretenders out of the Temple; true that these same people crucified Jesus just as the USA and most Merkans do now; true that these same pretenders still rule now in Jesus' name in the pirate ship 'West'.
"with early polls pointing toward a likely GOP victory in the presidential race of 2012 – it’s obvious that large swaths of the population have no sense of what’s in store for them as they position their own necks under the boots of corporate masters."
I am not sure re-electing the incumbent democrat would effect any type of change. 3 years of experience have not demonstrated that there would be any notable difference. The only thing this democratic administration has accomplished is in bringing the boots in ever closer proximity to our necks while absolving the booted from any liability.
"But – after several decades of Reaganism, with the “free market” religion the new gospel of the political/media classes – that seems a difficult outcome to achieve."
Especially when both established and recognized parties have adopted it. How many times have we heard Obama sing Reagan's praises?
"In an article published in USA Today, President Obama praises President Ronald Reagan as a man with a "unique ability to inspire others to greatness." Obama also says of Reagan that "there is no denying his leadership in the world, or his gift for communicating his vision for America." The late president, Obama continues, "understood that it is always 'Morning in America.' That was his gift, and we remain forever grateful.""
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/01/new-op-ed-obama-praises-reagan-inspiration-95-autobiography-obama
"Senator Barack Obama: "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.""
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/17/6445
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Thank you very much for that second quote which I had never read. Obama's entirely unsupported contention here falls flat on its face by the mere fact that there has been nothing but a rapidly degenerating level of government accountability, massive deregulation of corporations, and diminishment of government oversight on the public's behalf with the rise of neo-liberal Democratic Leadership Council pols like Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and Barrack Obama.
The ruling elite consider themselves above the law--indeed there are now obviously and consistently two systems of justice in this country--one for the super-rich and/or well connected and one for everyone else, and the entire political class protects their self-serving selective lawlessness and systemically covers up for the war crimes of members of the neo-liberal, militarist partisan Republicrat duopoly.
Obama himself has initiated more prosecutions of whistleblowers trying to expose government crimes than all other presidents combined. He has abused the State's Secrets privilege worse than George W. Bush--something even one of Bush's White House Counsels criticized. Where is the clarity or accountability in any of this?
Dynamism and entrepreneurship that only benefits a tiny few and is linked to Democrat abetted "free trade" offshoring of lower-class, middle-middle-class and now, more and more upper-middle-class jobs is neither dynamic nor economically or socially sustainable. For you righties: Google GINI coefficient,
CIA and read up.
"Rand secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to one of her assistants.
She connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.
In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as justifying Rand’s move by saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.” Yet, it didn’t seem to matter much if “average” Americans were wiped out."
Excellent argument for a nationalized health care isn't it.
"And it was when the federal government responded to powerful social movements that demanded those injustices be addressed in the 1960s and 1970s, that an opening was created for right-wing politicians to exploit resentments among white men, particularly in the South."
So a resentment to racial equality, ecologic protections, anti war sentiment and sexual equality created the right wing? That doesn't really explain why we've elected 3 democratic presidents from states that refused to ratify ERA. And numerous republicans from states that did.
One more general comment on this "competence" bullshit: it is also stupid because leadership does not really need "competence". It needs honesty and decency a lot more. Competent people, like the mathematicians and physicists selected to work for big financial institutions, designing ways to scame people and rob, are doing a lot of harm, all the while doing nothing productive, using their "competence" only to enrich themselves. Competent people designed nuclear plants and the atomic bomb; started expansive wars and killed other people and are most responsible for waste and destruction of the planet. I don't believe in this mythical "competence". I don't think smart people are the best leaders. I think honest and good people are the best leaders. And I don't believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's just bullshit. It's paved with bad intentions and drwatkins type "competence" in fact.
Now, this doesn't mean that idiots should lead, but I think average people are pretty much OK.
First : Patriots keep their interest at home!
Second : the home of the 'brave' became the home of the 'insured'.
Consider three : We are paying for this.
I will show the value when I say what its worth to me....
What is it worth to you?
Value is what you pay for... where are the values?
I have apples for $5000.99 ea. please take a number and wait in line.
Pet rocks for only $6,200.98 ea.
A new $5 for $20 and a 20 for 50....
and i promise to take the tax break; and create a job.
Where is the value. Where are the patriots?
On that note. Here is a talk by John McMurtry, moral philosopher from University of Guelph in Ontario who wrote "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism". He goes into, what he calls, the money sequence of value, which means the only thing that matters is turning money of private money owners, into more money. Nothing else. That is the value system of the global market system.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/zmglobal/2011/06/29/62911--tzm-host-peter-joseph-guest-john-mcmurtry
Thanks for the association and direction to zmglobal and John McMurtry.
I have a lot to learn; but I don't want to to over think, to the point of in-actions. I see that our liberty is the very last door to the majority of the peoples voice vs. the majority of the moneys, influence vote.
In that thought I seem to understand that money advertises the negative to swing the vote; hence WE are voting to the money because it is the winners of money that WE want to promote as they are being perceived not as losers and are leaders! this is the value of the voters.
I see and watch the left fist as the right fist moves. we are being suckered. I will can tell the value of the apple is $0.25 because that's only what i will pay; the seller can keep the lot till they rot and losses his/her wealth and greed, no one is forcing us to spend for what we do not need and do not want. (except the oil co., taxes,.... now insurance and I am sure more to come?
How do we stop drinking from the spittoon
A noted part of the talk was Peter Joseph take; re: '...service the problem do nothing to address the problem ' I see this as the model for hydrofacking in the north east. To flirt with science and the cherry picking of data to reassure the gullible voters that the water which sustains life is not at threat, but our industry and fuel is. Some how this gas will make my devaluing dollar go further!!!! The value folks is that money needs no water CAN WE SEE THIS IS THE SUCKER PUNCH. Its okay you say,,,, we can sell you water if the impossible happens......Fukushima, Tar sands, imminent domain, more to come.
Help me not to understand to accept but to know how to react to reject this tsunami
will this be mans future limited liberty's of freedom ?
thank you for reading my rant. arggggg.
Robert Parry makes good points, but leaves out the current president so much a part of the problem. We won't get any better on the income gap if he's reelected and actually it will likely get worse. Ron Paul is likely to be the next president and will restore civil liberties and stop endless war as a foreign policy. We aren't going to get much better than that this until the 2016 election. The Democrats have to get a defeat for president to learn the lesson that whizzing on the base costs jack asses as it should. CounterPunch already is talking that Paul would be better than the current president.
A drug addict will do anything for that next fix, no matter the consequences to others.
A gambling addict will do anything he can to keep betting, no matter the consequences to others.
Same with money-addicts - AKA, the greedy. It's a mental illness no different than those above. Money-addicts will do anything for more money - even after they have enough to live on a thousand times over - no matter the consequences to others.
The only solution is to diagnose Money-addiction as a mental disorder, then remove said addicts from all situations where they can cause harm to others until they are cured.
We wouldn't let a child molester operate a day-care center, right? We wouldn't allow an alcoholic to drive the school bus, right? Then we shouldn't allow money-addicts to operate financial institutions and/or corporations, either.
The correlation between greed and antisocial thinking and behavior should be obvious and verifiable. Its existence is without doubt unhealthy to a benevolent society, and its practice and rationalization the symptom of an antisocial, even criminal mindset.
My ancesters came to this country for a better life, now, I wonder if my grandchlldren will need to emigrate to another country for the same reason?
Liberals unite! Let's stop our bashing and get to work! Here's my Independence Day fire in the hole:
Fixing America Before It’s Too Late: Who Is Going To Do It?
Endless wars, growing poverty, and the decline of our very health - the United States edges toward the brink of disaster. Some rally and organize, trying to turn things around. Others stubbornly hold fast, and toil to keep the sinking ship afloat. All of us believe in justice, freedom, and the American way, yet we can’t agree on what it should look like. But, we agree that we are the greatest country in the world, and nothing can keep us down for long, right?
Let’s say that you’re a conservative, most likely a Republican. Protection of liberty, freedom, and individual rights are worth dying for. People who don’t take responsibility and provide for themselves have made a choice, and they get what they deserve. Politicians should be strict father figures, and guard the right to power and prosperity. If they don’t maintain moral order, they should be impeached. Your party understands liberal thinking, and mocks progressives on FOX news and hot talk radio.
Okay. You’re a liberal, probably a left Democrat, but you might like the Green Party. Protection of liberty and freedom means taking care of everyone. Nobody should have to die for that. A good leader should be like a nurturing parent. People can be forced into bad circumstances and aren’t to blame. Republicans are responsible for our mess. If you can organize, yell, and rally hard enough, the truth will prevail. You know your side is right, and you can’t understand why the conservatives just don’t get it.
It’s time to understand, and act on that understanding. It’s time to stop beating the ground with liberal messages that no one else cares about. It’s time to be more aware, and stop preaching to the choir. The map has been laid out, and we can do this. But, how?
• View the conservative mind empathically – it is important to understand why people repeatedly vote against their own best interests.
• Reframe the progressive message – we can succeed in taking on conservatives at their level, and reach the public by resonating with their deeply held values.
After all, conservatives have been doing this successfully for many years.
Why should we reframe? Everywhere we look, there are opportunities to deliver those messages that are dear to us. We will win eventually, because we are correct! But - correct doesn’t count in politics. Persuasion counts. Messages, based on reason, logic, and statistics, miss the mark. That is Old Enlightenment thinking. We must change our message to better deliver our point of view, or watch the opposition continue to mock the messenger.
It’s time to question our beloved charts and statistics, and our reason and logic. They give us a voice, but it’s in a foreign language. Political and healthcare reform should not be long-term projects. They need to occur now. It’s time to see that our rallies barely make the headlines because the media is controlled. While we pass hats for donations, our opposition enjoys luxury accommodations and million dollar budgets. Let’s gather to create a new voice that demands change, and let’s use the power of that new voice to make what’s right happen.
I've come to believe that Ayn Rand is some sort of economic Antichrist and her followers nothing more than deluded minions, whose fanatical and lunatic belief in "market forces" is surely going to destroy the United States of America.
Mr. Parry's summation of U.S. economic history is accurate as far as it goes, but he leaves out three important facts -- and his omissions reveal that despite his apparently progressive stance, he writes from a hopelessly (and uselessly) bourgeois Ruling Class perspective.
Indeed he even echoes the implicitly fascist elitism of Ayn Rand by denouncing us -- the Working Class (which in today's economy is anyone who is not part of the ruling 1 percent) -- as the perpetrators of our own victimhood. Whether through racism, fear, ignorance or some combination of these factors, the vast majority of us -- at least according to Mr. Parry -- "position (our) own necks under the boots of corporate masters."
The three facts he cleverly omits in his anti-Working-Class screed are these:
(1)-that the outcome of the 2010 election (and the near-certainty of a Republican landslide in 2012) are the direct result of breathtaking, historically unprecedented betrayals of the popular will by President Obama and the Democrats in general;
(2)-that the reforms enacted by the administrations of Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not prompted by sudden conversions to humanitarian beliefs but were instead compelled by the truly bottomless Ruling Class terror of Communist revolution;
(3)-that with the death of the Soviet Union, the Ruling Class no longer has any fear of Communism and is therefore free to express its infinitely greedy, infinitely malevolent selfhood.
Here too is the reason the Democrats have so brazenly (and so ruinously) betrayed their Working Class constituents. As Bill Moyers points out, U.S. democracy has long been a charade in which one party functions as a noise machine to conceal the treachery and malfeasance of the other. (See particularly http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html) But now with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics destroyed, the capitalist ruling class no longer has any need to conceal its agenda of tyrannical greed: hence capitalist governance in the U.S. is becoming indistinguishable from capitalist governance anywhere else in the world: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
While it is surely true the U.S.S.R. never lived up to its claim to be a "workers' paradise," it is equally true the U.S. has never lived up to its claims of "liberty and justice for all." But the U.S.S.R. -- with its global network of professional revolutionary agitators -- was undeniably a facilitator of progressive change: this in direct contrast to the U.S. history of supporting an endless succession of fascist dictators. Thus despite its many flaws the Soviet Union was the sole protector of Working Class interests anywhere on Earth.
But Mr. Parry omits all these vital facts, no doubt because he fears the direction it might take us were he to acknowledge them -- particularly the lesson implicit in the history of Communism: that capitalism is evil of such unprecedented magnitude, only the most disciplined organized resistance can ever prevail against it.
Meanwhile as Mr. Parry remains intellectually imprisoned by his identification with the oppressors -- the capitalists and capitalism in general -- he seeks to reinforce our own imprisonment as well. Thus he neither tells us anything we don't already know, nor does he dare suggest we the explore one proven way out from under the capitalist jackboot.
DELUSIONAL, MEGALOMANIACAL, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR, SOCIOPATH WINS...AGAIN!!! That's US Politics.
So!! These megacorporation titans want to run the entire show!! And to run it as a business and/or corporation!! Has anyone yet figured it out that these business and/or corporate models have proven to utterly fail the miserable and struggling huddled masses that now comprise the majority of US citizens; all while the top 1-2 percent of our total population can and do flourish in obscene wealth and ghastly corporate entitlements?!?
Meg Whitman, along with anyone like Meg Whitman, will further decay and further destroy the state of California, and any other state in the nation. Are their really any people with discernible I.Q.s that enjoyed the glorious eight year reign of that, well, that IDIOTIC MORON, George W. Bush?!?! Incredible!! And NOW, just to be fair, we are stuck with another one; Barack Obama, who loudly and clearly promised CONCRETE SYSTEMIC CHANGE...well, NOTHING; He is, in fact, the corporate titans' greatest friend and ally. A veritable QUISLING FOR THE BANKERS!!!!!
Doesn't anyone see that these truly monstrous [corporate] empires have been crumbling left and right, while the ever-shrinking middle class of America, or actually, the WORKING POOR, have been left footing every last dime of their huge bills?!?!? State and Federal governments can not and should never be run like some filthy corporation; that has been tried and has FAILED virtually EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this godforsaken country. Look around you and look at the FACTS.
These people, the likes of Meg Whitman, Republican and Democrat alike, are nothing but dangerously delusional power mongers and megalomaniacal dictators, the very same dictators that have worked tirelessly to keep most Americans as stupid, uneducated and as crazily misinformed as possible; and apparently these people want to put another nail in the coffin. And the unforgivably and increasingly thoroughly ignorant morons that now make up the overwhelming majority of the US population, they, whether Republican or Democrat, will, of course, just keep on voting for these vile and reprehensible pathological LIARS, all the while shooting themselves in their very own filthy feet.
So it is that these people, the likes of Meg Whitman, the crazy Mormon guy, et al, are so drunk on power and privilege and truly obscene wealth that they truly think that they and they alone know how to fix this MESS, the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Well, in fact, it is those very people that CREATED THIS MESS!! And they, these sociopathic power mongers continue reveling in their 25 mansions and 25 yachts, and repulsively rolling around in their own self-made FILTH and in whatever other inane, ultimately USELESS STUFF they've so steadfastly acquired; and all the while viscously calculating just how to run the entire world; And they do this while totally disregarding ALL FACTS, ALL history, and every last one of history's most important lessons. Furthermore, I do indeed think that playing politics is nothing but a GAME to these people. Just another challenge to conquer so they can put another notch in their gold-gilt belts. It is all utterly appalling. Go ahead: Enjoy your filthy ill-gotten and ultimately WORTHLESS spoils as you RUIN THE ENTIRE WORLD.
The argument is no longer about Republican versus Democrat; the argument NOW brings us straight back to the 1920's era of MONOPOLIES and TRUSTS, wherein it is once again the top 1-2% of the HAVES--and they HAVE EVERYTHING-- versus the 98% of the HAVE NOTS. And it's also the old sharecropping system where 98% of the miserable and huddled masses are quite literally enslaved by the elite and stuck in constant and rising debt to the quisling corporate whores. Nearly all of these wretched politicians are CORRUPT and very nearly all of them do whore themselves to the CORPORATE ELITES. All the destruction can be traced directly to CORPORATE PERSONHOOD. THAT is a FACT and an absolute TRAVESTY!!!
*Please Note: Nearly all candidates with their sights set on ruling are virtually interchangeable; Whoring, Thieving Sellouts to the Corporate Whore Masters.
Cheers!!
The age of American industrial hegemony is over. Globalization has pitted the American working class against the China, India, etc. working classes. The low exchange rate on the yuan is constructively a tariff on American goods. The corporate leaders are now grinding the American worker into the ground - forcing him/her to take lower wages, fewer benefits, to go without health care and unable to provide higher education for his/her children. It is over - the American dream is dead - murdered by the bought and paid for Republican Party and their masters.
Greed a dark cancerous spot in the underbelly of success oozing vile tendrils upon unsuspecting wretch
A miscreant beat lacking charity compassion or regret devoid of caring reason or ability to fret beyond the calculated chores of deception manipulation & personal mind set
A bloated swelling abdomen a collective ego feeding upon the life blood of societies weak vulnerable people curable only by prevention 4 cutting out the disease emancipates the social body to a point of suicidal redemption.
Deaths*Lobby
Welcome my friend to the lobby that never mends,
Credit and debt, corporate agendas always met,
Consumer, taxpayer and citizens pay our bills, while the environment suffers the road kill,
Airways, waterways, public health, trash it all to build our wealth,
Welcome my friend to the power and greed which rapes your future, to fulfill our lobbyist needs,
Country's bleed through halfway measures and legislative misdeeds.
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12*Minutes + 13*Months = Global Peace Initiative 2*Billion Jobs Global Economic Recovery State & Federal Budget Salvation Mass Poverty Reduction Global Ceasefire Environmental & Abuse Healing Security & Unity... Tis a Brave New World & so Time to globalize - NOT- Government nor Religion but Humanity... Unite the C.H.A.O.S. - 12*Minutes + 13*Months = World4Peace
It's funny how the Christian Right has accepted Ayn Rand's philosophy while ignoring the teachings of the bible.
According to Proverbs 22:7; “the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” Since the heart of God is towards the poor, Romans 13 demonstrates how government is supposed to be the tool to balance the power of the rich. Paul even states to pay taxes!
The environmental destruction around us makes the meaning of Proverbs 25:26 all too clear; “if the godly give in to the wicked, it’s like polluting a fountain or muddying a spring.”
Just like our Republican friends skip sections of the Constitution they don’t like, Right Wing Christians do the same with the Word they so cherish. What a shame.