Failing Upwards Unmasked Elites Bring Destruction To Taxpaying Non-Elites (Rich White Guys Feel Need For Richer White Guy Club) Papers of Record? Not So Much (Anymore) Rethug Forward Motion BLOCKED In NC

I'm sure none of the following can be true.

After all, us white guys stick together.

Right?

January 15, 2014

FAILING ELITES?

The elites claim to be worried about the people's rage.

In the Financial Times, on 15 January 2014, Martin Wolf writes that failing elites threaten our future.

According to Martin Wolf:

1. The elites got us into the disastrous World War I.

"This calamity launched three decades of savagery and stupidity, destroying most of what was good in the European civilisation of the beginning of the 20th century."

2. The elites in 1914 were ignorant and prejudiced because they wrongly believed that empires are good and that war is glorious.

3. As a result of World War I, we had dictatorships in Russia and Germany, the Great Depression, World War II and eventually the Cold War.


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4. The elites brought about the disastrous financial liberalisation.

The elites have "mostly misunderstood the consequences of headlong financial liberalisation."

The result has been "economies collapsed; unemployment jumped; and public debt exploded."



5. The elites have brought about the disastrous situation whereby the leaders of the large corporations now owe loyalty to no particular country's electorate.

"If the mass of the people view their economic elite as richly rewarded for mediocre performance and interested only in themselves, yet expecting rescue when things go badly, the bonds snap."



6. The elites created the disastrous Euro.

The result has been "huge recessions, extraordinarily high unemployment, mass emigration and heavy debt overhangs."

Power is now concentrated in the hands of Germany and "a trio of unelected bureaucracies - the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund."



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7. "If elites continue to fail, we will go on watching the rise of angry populists.

"The elites need to do better.

"If they do not, rage may overwhelm us all."

(Financial Times, 15 January 2014, Martin Wolf - failing elites threaten our future.)

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coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com.

The elites claim to be worried by the people's rage.

However, if any revolts do occur, you can be pretty sure that they will have been organised by the elites.

Not all the members of the elite are stupid.

Some people did very well out of World War I.

Those rich white guys.

They never get a good enough deal do they?

I mean, FREEDOM!  Or something.

Take a gander at their latest cleverness (because words don't actually mean anything in our most Orwellian of times):

The National Journal reports that a few liberty-loving Republican members of Congress, led by Rep. Justin Amash, have started a little caucus to represent the true, “hard-core” alternative to the Republican Study Committee. The idea that anyone needs a more “hardcore” Republican Study Committee seems to require some explaining.

The RSC is (and has been for decades) effectively the House of Representatives’ “conservative caucus,” the group you join to announce that you are officially not a RINO.

It is also a sort of miniature right-wing think tank with extensive ties to the business and other interests that fund the right and keep Republicans in line. For years, it has produced alternative budgets and decried compromise and criticized leadership for being insufficiently dedicated to small government.

It has, it turns out, been too successful. The RSC’s membership has increased rapidly as it became necessary for most House Republicans to signal their allegiance to ultra-conservatism; it now counts more than 170 members, including the most extreme members in the House, like Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann and Paul Broun, but also many more who rarely make headlines.

There have been attempts to replace the RSC with something even more conservative in the past, but most of them — like Michele Bachmann’s pathetic “Tea Party Caucus” — were more about an individual lawmaker’s play for press than about creating an alternative organization.

The problem is, the RSC, by any measure, won the battle for the House Republican caucus long ago. More than three-quarters of the GOP conference are now members, including everyone in leadership besides Boehner and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Its primary “rival,” the “moderate” Republican Main Street Partnership, currently has fewer than 50 members in the House.

. . . What Mulvaney doesn’t seem to understand is that the RSC is still “just the hard-core right-wingers,” it’s just that now the vast majority of the Republican conference is “the hard-core right-wingers.” When everyone is a true conservative, then, how do you distinguish yourself as a true conservative? Easy! You just stake out a new position to the right of the right-wing majority. Hence, Amash’s “House Liberty Caucus,” which has a Rand Paul-ish name and a (somewhat fluid) membership of “core” House conservatives . . .

So, while Amash and others insist that the Liberty Caucus is a complement, not a competitor to the RSC, the National Journal says that “several RSC members are considering leaving the group altogether next year and pouring their energy into growing the Liberty Caucus.”

In other words, a few years from now, don’t be hugely surprised if the far-right RSC is the “mainstream” House Republican caucus to the “conservative” Liberty Caucus, all without any Republican having moved even slightly toward “the center.” (Either that or this Liberty Caucus will flame out after failing to repeal Obamacare by 2016 or whatever.)

This is the entire story of the modern Republican Party, writ small: ratcheting ever rightward.

Those elites who run the "papers of record" on several continents have stopped being subtle about letting their most personal opinions be known (and throwing their pettiness in everyone's face).

And facts ever be checked.

About both the New York Times and the Guardian we learn:

After Emma Keller’s piece ran, a similar hot mess unfolded over at the Times, when Keller’s husband Bill rolled up his sleeves to go after Adams. That Bill Keller would choose to use his powerful platform in such a way — right after his wife was roundly chastised for a similar piece — opens a world of ethical questions.

But Keller then compounds his journalistic shadiness by introducing his own set of mistakes. He too decides that Adams has “spent the last seven years in a fierce and very public cage fight with death,” and he initially even got the number of children Adams has incorrect.

He also implies he’d tried to get her medical information from Sloan-Kettering, saying, “Her doctors, bound by privacy rules, won’t say” whether her treatment has extended her life, and that neither Adams “nor Sloan-Kettering would tell me what all this costs or whether it is covered by insurance.” He repeatedly presents her as a woman engaged in “final days” and “in battle,” two distinct concepts Adams firmly rejects.

The Kellers are far from the only so-called journalists hiding out in the opinion page, where they’re getting away with peddling straight-up wrong information as facts. As an environmental reporter friend pointed out this week, that’s practically George Will’s job description now. Richard Cohen gets away with, among other crimes, calling a rape that resulted in two convictions a “so-called rape” because hey, who cares. The Wall Street Journal gives noted intellectual Suzanne Somers space to gas on in a mistakepalooza op-ed.

We’re not talking about a tabloid like The Star announcing that Jen is pregnant and Kim is totally leaving Kanye here. These are major news publications, giving space to writers who are just saying whatever the hell they feel like. They are leaving the incredibly easy task of Googling to their critics.

Sure, in the rush to tell the news, everybody makes mistakes. The New York Times’ corrections are the stuff of legend. Retractions happen. But this is about publishing things that just aren’t right or true, again and again, under the guise of “opinion.”

It’s a sneering, insulting practice on the part of both the writers who are too lazy to check their own assumptions and the editors who can’t be bothered challenging them. It’s depressing as all hell.

When they wrote their ethically questionable, mistake-riddled pieces on Lisa Adams, the Kellers didn’t just do a disservice to Lisa Adams; they gave the finger to readers everywhere. And when their editors published them, they just added a big raspberry to go with it. “Political correctness”? It’s called fact-checking. Try it.

North Carolina is lucky there is still a working federal judiciary (district court) left in North Carolina.

How long will this last? It's anybody's guess.

A federal court on Friday permanently blocked a North Carolina law requiring women to undergo coercive counseling and a narrated ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion. The judge permanently enjoined the unconstitutional law, ruling that “the Act requires providers to deliver the state’s message to women who take steps not to hear it and to women who will be harmed by receiving it with no legitimate purpose.”

United States District Court Judge Catherine Eagles called the law “an impermissible attempt to compel these providers to deliver the state’s message in favor of childbirth and against abortion.”

The decision is a clear victory for doctors and women in the state, and a strong indictment of similar laws intended to pressure or shame women out of accessing basic medical care.

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, celebrated the ruling in a statement. “Today’s ruling marks a major victory for North Carolina women and sends a message to lawmakers across the country:  it is unconstitutional for politicians to interfere in a woman’s personal medical decisions,” she said.

“This dangerous law would have required abortion providers to perform an ultrasound and place the image in the woman’s line of sight — even if she asks not to view it. The provider would then be required to describe the image in detail — even over the woman’s objection. It made no exceptions for women under any circumstances, including cases of rape, incest, or those who receive a tragic diagnosis during pregnancy.”

The North Carolina law was a clear overstep, but as Salon has previously noted, forced ultrasound laws do virtually nothing to influence women’s choices, making them little more than intentionally punitive policies intended to shame women for making sound medical choices.

Here's some lovely Handel one of my readers sent me the other day (to help us handle our frustrations from the above). (Thanks again, Peter!)

No gods connection required.