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I'll say it again. We have got to take the guns away from the children.
Is there actually a serious challenge to Wall Street's resurgence? Matt Taibbi documents the possibility here.
Remember the movie Rollerball?
No?
Too bad as it's about as good a reminder as any that our current economic dilemma has been in the making since the 70's (before, really) and that the owners have always been aware of the utility of violent and/or pharmaceutical distractions. It's a fascinating film. I recommend it for a dreary afternoon. (Not a date movie, of course, although the wide-mouthed babe scenes are quite moving!)
The film's title is the name of a violent, globally popular sport around which the events of the film take place. It is similar to Roller Derby in that two teams clad in body armor skate on roller skates (some instead ride on motorcycles) around a banked, circular track. There, however, the similarity ends. The object of the game is to score points by the offensive team (the team in possession of the ball) throwing a softball-sized steel ball into the goal, which is a magnetic, cone-shaped area inset into the wall of the arena.
The team without possession of the ball is defensive and acts to prevent scoring. It is a full-contact sport in which players have considerable leeway to attack opposing players in order to take or maintain possession of the ball and to score points (in the overpopulated world of the original short story, the object of the game is to kill off the other players). In addition, each team has three players who ride motorcycles to which teammates can latch on and be towed. The player in possession of the ball must hold it in plain view at all times.
Rollerball teams, named after the cities in which they are based, are owned by the various global corporations. Energy Corporation sponsors the Houston team. The game is a substitute for all current team sports and for warfare. While its ostensible purpose is entertainment, Mr. Bartholomew, a high-level executive of the Energy Corporation, describes it as a sport designed to show the futility of individual effort.
I remember when this movie debuted in 1975 thinking that it didn't seem that far off. It's set in 2018.
For those not interested in or even worried about old movies hitting close to the mark of reality, you might want to see it just for the young James Caan's nudity in the locker room scenes (or his dismay at being laid off while still in his prime). Notice how I mentioned the nudity part first? The movie makes it clear that that's really what the audience is always interested in primarily. And the prose explaining to him that his desire for the ultimate good of the team is not what matters to those pulling the strings is without equal (at that time anyway). And the voting scene is . . . wait for it . . . priceless!
Oh, and don't miss the great scenes with John Housman revealing in his own heavily accented irony-laden prose exactly what happens to us in the future. (Also don't neglect to notice the nonexisting-then intranet TV!) Other to-die-for scenes include when the librarian, Ralph Richardson, goes apeshit when the computer spews forth his "trusted" historical data with the programming somehow changed to the easy lies suborned by his enemies. And hang on for the heart-rending genius finish.
JON A THAN! JON A THAN!
Speaking of the irony-redolent future . . . how about going to war all over the world to stop mindless terrorists (whom we taunted into attacking because we had already made intolerable war on their culture). Or something.
Try not to think of Abramoff's machinations and Tom DeLay's glee in divvying up the spoils under Bush 1 after the fall of the Soviet Union. And the populations that were left without defenses.
It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership.
War On All Fronts
Washington's three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, Russia in Europe...
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, July 18, 2012
The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression.
Just as earlier this year Egypt expelled hundreds of people associated with foreign-funded “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) for “instilling dissent and meddling in domestic policies,” the Russian Duma (parliament) has just passed a law that Putin is expected to sign that requires political organizations that receive foreign funding to register as foreign agents. The law is based on the US law requiring the registration of foreign agents.
Much of the Russian political opposition consists of foreign-paid agents, and once the law passes, leading elements of the Russian political opposition will have to sign in with the Russian Ministry of Justice as foreign agents of Washington. The Itar-Tass News Agency reported on July 3 that there are about 1,000 organizations in Russia that are funded from abroad and engaged in political activity. Try to imagine the outcry if the Russians were funding 1,000 organizations in the US engaged in an effort to turn America into a Russian puppet state. (In the US the Russians would find a lot of competition from Israel.)
The Washington-funded Russian political opposition masquerades behind “human rights” and says it works to “open Russia.” What the disloyal and treasonous Washington-funded Russian “political opposition” means by “open Russia” is to open Russia for brainwashing by Western propaganda, to open Russia to economic plunder by the West, and to open Russia to having its domestic and foreign policies determined by Washington.
“Non-governmental organizations” are very governmental. They have played pivotal roles in both financing and running the various “color revolutions” that have established American puppet states in former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. NGOs have been called “coup d’etat machines,” and they have served Washington well in this role. They are currently working in Venezuela against Chavez.
Of course, Washington is infuriated that its plans for achieving hegemony over a country too dangerous to attack militarily have been derailed by Russia’s awakening, after two decades, to the threat of being politically subverted by Washington-financed NGOs. Washington requires foreign-funded organizations to register as foreign agents (unless they are Israeli funded). However, this fact doesn’t stop Washington from denouncing the new Russian law as “anti-democratic,” “police state,” blah-blah. Caught with its hand in subversion, Washington calls Putin names. The pity is that most of the brainwashed West will fall for Washington’s lies, and we will hear more about “gangster state Russia.”
China is also in Washington’s crosshairs. China’s rapid rise as an economic power is perceived in Washington as a dire threat. China must be contained. Obama’s US Trade Representative has been secretly negotiating for the last 2 or 3 years a Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose purpose is to derail China’s natural economic leadership in its own sphere of influence and replace it with Washington’s leadership.
Washington is also pushing to form new military alliances in Asia and to establish new military bases in the Philippines, S. Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Washington quickly inserted itself into disputes between China and Vietnam and China and the Philippines. Washington aligned with its former Vietnamese enemy in Vietnam’s dispute with China over the resource rich Paracel and Spratly islands and with the Philippines in its dispute with China over the resource rich Scarborough Shoal.
Thus, like England’s interference in the dispute between Poland and National Socialist Germany over the return to Germany of German territories that were given to Poland as World War I booty, Washington sets the stage for war.
China has been cooperative with Washington, because the offshoring of the US economy to China was an important component in China’s unprecedented high rate of economic development. American capitalists got their short-run profits, and China got the capital and technology to build an economy that in another 2 or 3 years will have surpassed the sinking US economy. Jobs offshoring, mistaken for free trade by free market economists, has built China and destroyed America.
Washington’s growing interference in Chinese affairs has convinced China’s government that military countermeasures are required to neutralize Washington’s announced intentions to build its military presence in China’s sphere of influence. Washington’s view is that only Washington, no one else, has a sphere of influence, and Washington’s sphere of influence is the entire world.
On July 14 China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said that Washington was interfering in Chinese affairs and making China’s disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines impossible to resolve.
It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership.
Rmoney Vs. Obama Cage Fight?
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
From our bestest buddy The Angry Bear:
Note to Laurence Kotlikoff on Social Security
Posted by Dan Crawford (Rdan)|7/20/2012
Laurence Kotlikoff has a post in Bloomberg opinion section on the current status of the Social Security. This is lifted from Dale Coberly's note back to him:
So do I.
Your analysis that SS is desperately broke ignores the fact that the projected shortfall can be made up by raising the payroll tax one half of one tenth of one percent per year, while incomes are projected to go up over one full percent per year.
This would result ultimately in an increase in the payroll tax of about 4% of income (which you misleadingly call a 33% increase in the tax, which it is, but which is likely to mislead the average reader). A 4% increase in the tax really amounts to a 4% increase in the savings protected by Social Security, which is properly understood as insurance against the potential failure of other modes of saving for retirement. The 4% increase is a very fair price to pay for the longer life expectancy that the workers paying the tax will enjoy.
They really won't want to work any longer, and since they are paying for their own benefits, there is no reason they should have to. Further, while the tax increase does represent a higher percent of their income going to their own longer retirement, the projected increases in their wages would leave them at least twice as well off "after the tax" (that is, in terms of money left in their pockets each month after putting away the extra for their longer retirement) as they are today.
I don't know if you are able to understand all this, or if you just prefer to ignore it. But I do what I can.
But will it be enough?
ALEX COCKBURN LIVES!!!
Katrina Vanden Heuvel does the honors.
[EXTRA! EXTRA !!]
William (Bill) Black, regulator of all things financially criminal (we should wish) details the admitted collusion between the Libor thugs in London and their cohorts in the states:
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