Posts
Just to get a whiff of the corruption running amuck now gives one pause. And the desire to move away. Far away, but hopefully not into the path of a drone. (And become a "bug splat.")
Chris Floyd lifts their skirts.
Tears of a Drone
Arthur Silber writes with power and eloquence about the Aurora killings - and the monstrous hypocrisy of our national "leaders," who mouthed saccharine pieties about fragile and precious life is, and how tragic it is that innocent lives are so cruelly taken from us ... this while raining down terror and mass murder on innocent human beings all over the world. A brief excerpt:
Consider the staggering number of murders of innocent human beings committed by the United States government - and ask yourselves how many Auroras those murders represent. ... Listen for the public lamentations about even a small fraction of these deaths. Listen as carefully as you can. What do you hear? Why, nothing at all. ...
President Obama and ... the U.S. government [assert] that he and they have the "right" to murder anyone at all anywhere in the world, for any reason they choose - and that they need never disclose any details of their murders, including the fact that they have ordered them. ... This monstrous crime, what is in fact an ongoing, systematic series of monstrous crimes, is greeted by near universal silence in America. The U.S. government orders an unending series of Auroras: it ordered an Aurora last week, it will order an Aurora this week, it will order an Aurora next week. Almost no one cares. Almost no one even notices.
Silber then quotes Obama's statement after the killing, and notes:
... These are the remarks of a man who has suffered an irreparable break with reality, a man who who has rendered himself unable to connect obviously related facts. If Obama genuinely meant these comments - if he understood how these remarks apply with far greater force to him ("we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this") - his realization of the monster he has allowed himself to become would reduce him to gibbering incoherence for the remainder of his life. In varying degrees, the same is true of any individual who remains in the national government at this point.
More generally, this is American culture today. Like the killer in my story, many Americans hurl themselves with fundamentally false, deeply disturbed enthusiasm into public demonstrations of grief over the needless deaths of some human beings - those human beings they see as being much like themselves, when the deaths happen in what could be their own neighborhood. As for all the murders committed by their government with a systematic dedication as insane as that of any serial killer: silence.
But every murder committed by the United States government, every murder ordered by Obama, represents a tragedy exactly like Aurora to someone.
There is much, much more; go read the whole thing.
***
Den of Thieves
As we all know, the world is suffering through a severe economic crisis. Governments at every level are on evangelical fire with the gospel of austerity, slashing services and people and selling off essential public goods at knock-off prices to a few rapacious elites. Everywhere, at every turn, we are told that there is simply "no money" to sustain anything remotely like the quality of life known by the past few generations before us. ("No money," that is, except for the hundreds of billions in tax dollars - our money - these same austerian evangels continue to dole out to those same rapacious elites.)
OK, fine; for the sake of argument, let's take these plutocrat-serving poltroons at their word: there is no money. So where did all the money go then?
As the Observer reported this weekend, an extraordinary new study shows exactly where the money went: into the off-shore tax havens of the super-super rich. How much of the world's wealth has been squirreled away by this tiny group of gilded buccaneers? At least $21 trillion.
That's right: $21 trillion. And that's just the lowball end: the actual figure could be up to $32 trillion. The Observer reports:
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....
"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, [$9.7 trillion] 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. ...
Assuming [this] mountain of assets earned an average 3% a year for its owners, and governments were able to tax that income at 30%, it would generate a bumper [$187 billion in tax revenue] every year.
And much of that revenue would be going to world's poorest countries, whose wealth has been looted at levels outstripping the worst of colonial times.
Put simply, there is no good reason for the people in 'developing nations' to live in the crushing poverty that has long been their lot. There is no good reason for the people in the 'developed' nations to see their societies rot away before their eyes.
These things are happening because unimaginable amounts of money have been and are being looted by a powerful elite abetted at every turn by banks and politicians - by specific individuals freely deciding to do evil to their neighbors.
Or as the Observer headline puts it in an accompanying story: "Wealth doesn't trickle down - it just floods offshore."
Make you want to just give up yet? (Because I think that's their plan.)
On a slightly different chord some thoughts arise due to the Aurora murders. Every death is a tragedy, of course. Except for those of brown strangers? (I dare you to read this essay.)
By Paul Balles
America's drones are nothing more than a clever attempt to distance America's vampires from their bloody victims.
How's that for something hard to absorb in this most consumerist of cultures?
And for something for dessert?
I remember wondering when I first read William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (when I was 19), which ones of his professors had offended him (and his worldview as a callow young man) so badly.
It's still ongoing. Anti-intellectuals believing they are the real intellectuals continue to afflict us today. At all economic levels.
Dreaming of a World With No Intellectuals
Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay — conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history. The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals — socialist, liberal, secular — as the cause. They perceive political unrest as rooted in fallacious ideas advanced by misguided thinkers and indict the educational system for inculcating subversion. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke denounced lawyers and writers — whom he called "these professors of the rights of man" — for their dangerous ideas.
A new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) (Encounter), by David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, affords an occasion to revisit the issue: Do contemporary American conservatives scapegoat intellectuals and teachers? If so, they can claim an all-American pedigree.
William F. Buckley Jr. began his career in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, which lambasted his professors for their godlessness and socialism. Past and present American intellectuals on the right generally disdain economic or social analyses of political dislocations. They attribute socialism's appeal, for example, not to the condition of society but to the influence of nefarious professors and subversive writers.
. . . Tennessee just passed a law protecting teachers who want to challenge evolution—and global warming. As one of the bill's supporters stated, the teaching of evolution was "extremely unbalanced." In other words, it was taught as true. The old battles are not over; indeed, the situation seems to be getting worse. For conservatives, conventional morality and religion are waning. Sexuality no longer seems contained or constrained. Men are marrying men. What's next? Interspecies marriage?
If the ills of modernity are intensifying, conservatives know why. They rarely mention hyperconsumerism or advertising or a rigidifying class structure — the byproducts of advanced capitalism. Rather, they dwell on the presumably corrosive ideas of the educated, especially the professoriate.
Correspondingly, many conservative politicians flaunt their unworldliness as proof of their virtuousness. Often their provincialism requires no flaunting. Anti-intellectualism flourishes in contemporary America. To the applause of conservatives, George W. Bush took pride in his C average at Yale University. Mitt Romney has sought to burnish his anti-intellectual credentials by complaining that the Harvard-educated Obama "spent too much time at Harvard." Romney, who has spent more time at Harvard than Obama, and has sent three of his sons there, explained that little can be learned from "just reading" or hanging out "at the faculty lounge."
Rick Santorum has also attacked Obama, this time as a "snob" for wanting everyone to go to college.
Santorum, who has three advanced degrees and whose father was a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D., said he knows why Obama wants everyone to get higher education: so that students will be "indoctrinated" by their liberal professors.
How did liberals take command of higher education and derail America? The standard conservative interpretation is straightforward: America progressed smoothly from Presidents George Washington through Dwight D. Eisenhower, but went to hell in the 1960s and has yet to recover. Radicals have taken over the universities and spread their poison. That is the gist of David Gelernter's book.
So, it would seem that no education has actually occurred (ever) and that playing to the stark raving crowd never gets old.
No comments:
Post a Comment