The future of Big Chicken Creative Loafing Atlanta
Prevailing View of How the Brain Is Wired Overturned? Science Daily
Vatican cleric arrested in corruption case Al Jazeera
China Regulator Says Bank Reserves Enough to Weather Cash Crunch Reuters
Chart of the day, Fed-tightening edition Felix Salmon, Reuters
What to Do with the Hypertrophied Financial Sector? Brad DeLong
A ‘sitting man’ at Goldman Sachs Waging Nonviolence
How Many High Wealth Individuals? The Conversable Economist
Qatar National Bank to issue diamond-embedded credit card African World
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
New slides on NSA program released WaPo. “PRISM case notation format reflects the availability, confirmed by The Post’s reporting, of real-time surveillance as well as stored content.”
Speaking on NSA stories, Snowden and journalism Glenn Greenwald, Guardian. “Delivered to the Socialism 2013 Conference in Chicago.”
NSA – Recording One Billion Phonecalls Per Day Moon of Alabama (partial transcript of Greenwald talk)
Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices Der Spiegel
Ecuador in talks with Russia and US over CIA whistleblower Voice of Russia
OMIGOD James Clapper Has Our Gun Purchase Records emptywheel
Snowden fallout comes at bad time for private equity Reuters
Secret snooping keeps us vulnerable Interfluidity
I’ll Be Watching You: NSA Surveillance and the Male Gaze The New Inquiry
Big Data, n. Another Word For It
When Numbers Don’t Add Up Bloomberg
Wages falling Angry Bear
Deflation By Any Other Name Would Smell As Foul The Automatic Earth
Crisis Chronicles: 300 Years of Financial Crises (1620–1920) Boston Fed
No, manufacturing jobs won’t revive the economy Salon
Number of the Week: U.S. Oil Boom Affecting Global Prices Online WSJ
Obama State Dept. Leaving Citizens in the Dark About Exact Keystone XL Pipeline Route DeSmogBlog
More mining canaries croak Macrobusiness
The Largest Gold Miner On The Planet Is Losing Billions In The Andes Mountains AP
The water is running out in Gaza: Humanitarian catastrophe looms as territory’s only aquifer fails Independent
New Orleans’ Achilles Heel: a Storm Surge on the Mississippi River? Jeff Masters, Weather Underground
Eroding soils darkening our future Blouin Report
A Cutting-Edge Second Look at the Battle of Gettysburg Smithsonian
Immigration, class & ideology Stumbling and Mumbling
Antidote du jour (amolife):
100 comments
Comments are closed.
Can’t have any “red flags” when private equity is gorging at the Military Industrial Trough complex. The kleptocrats keep us laughing, it’s always some rogue employee deep in the ranks that serves as a sacrificial edifice to total corruption.
For your delectation, Yves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBxRRUj1bcA
Another one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E5qY-LSSI
I pity the young people at the NSA that first sold their souls to the Dark Side and now have to waste their youths sitting hidden in bunkers listening to the EU bureaucrats and politicians squabbling over Europe and continung to fail in every regard. Someone should tell the people at the NSA to get lives instead.
Not sure that more of “yes we can” charm from Obama will suffice to help him out of this hole. And the Europeans and the Americans were supposed to be close, now. This is getting funny.
The lunacy of W Bush was obvious. Obama is obviously more of a drone and let’s pretend to respecte human rights while we really do not care, kind of guy.
An empire is always an empire, I guess.
I see this as a deeper cultural problem. When we decieded to move to a me-first-get-it-all-now hedonistic culture back in the late ’60s and ’70s, we set ourselves on a path that reveres wealth and power. We’re now seeing the real price for that shift, and it’s very ugly.
Perhaps so.
But viewed from the outside, an empire is always an empire. The supreme bully that inherently has the right to bully around.
This sounds true… we need to create what we want, we need to come together, figure it out and create a new economy…
use cash, support local mom and pop businesses, avoid giving money to corps whenever possible…. eat local food, support local sustainable agri-practices, etc., etc.,
Well, the 60s hippies who moved up here and bought land 40 years ago planted the seeds for sustainable agriculture and set up many cooperative institutions to support it, like FedCo and MOFGA to name a few. So I don’t know where this “me first” narrative comes in. (Well, actually, I do. It’s a mainstream media trope, and very well worn by this time. It’s also a justification for looting the Social Security pensions of those same hippies under the banner of “shared sacrifice.”
Before coming to Maine, I spent nearly 20 years in Silicon Valley and San Francsico. Before that, I studied at Chicago and Harvard during the ’80s and was married to an ex-Streeter. These places were full of techno-utopian hippies, angry young neo-cons, and nerdy proto-Randians who were taking their cues from the counterculture and Friedman’s Free to Choose to proclaim a self-governing society based on “ability” rather than subscribe to some -ism.
This is no MSM trope; it was very real. I’m sure many thought the need for the women’s movement and racial equality had passed by the time of Reagan’s election, or they thought getting government out of all social activities would solve our problems, or they thought it was time for the powerful to take over again. But we did change during those decades, and not for the better.
Yes, Maine and a few other states were quite special; that’s why we moved here just before the 2007 crash. But you only have to look at the names that often grace the op-ed pages of the Portland Press Herald, and our Tea Party governor, to get the idea that the flood waters are rising around here, too.
I know what David Lentini is talking about — watch Adam Curtis’ documentary, “The Century of the Self.” Around the 70’s, marketers and PR corporations co-opted the hippy movement, to transform it from a movement that was no longer about confronting power, but selling the idea that you only need to care about yourself and your own “personal growth.”
Of course, some remnants of 60’s spirit remain, thank goodness. But, by and large, it’s safe to say that most boomers who participated held onto that spirit. I do see a transformation into a “me first” attitude that has overtaken American society, and
…certainly many progressive ideas are now part of marketing schemes.
Thanks, Inverness. And I just want to make it clear that I’m not happy with the change. We neeed to develop a culture that suppports democracy, which is very different from the “do what you feel like” freedom that is choking us.
Having never lived in Maine, or a place like it, I think David hit the nail on the head. It’s no MSM meme. I see it all around me. It’s funny because I was lamenting over it just this weekend.
Speaking in broad strokes, this is what I’ve noticed. I’m 56 and have always seemed to have had older friends. I live in the same city with a sister six years younger. I’ve noticed a divide just between our two peer groups. As one example, I went into nursing, then mental health, working with the most severely ill trying to help them integrate into the community (after Reagan cut them loose). I couldn’t have picked a lower paying and lower benefit area of nursing, and worked countless hours of unpaid overtime, but loved my work. I’ve also always done volunteer work helping different unrelated causes, and helped friends in need, and still do, though more so before a broken neck left me disabled and put a crimp in my activities. Among my friends and peers I’m not particularly special.
Then I observe my sister, Harvard lawyer, and her peer group. To her credit, she did leave a large Boston firm working with the likes of Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs. But I don’t believe she’s ever donated any of her time to volunteer work, other than an occasional promotional pro-bono day by all at her firm. She rakes in big bucks and subscribes to an unspoken attitude of worth being directly proportional to compensation. By extension, her time is worth far more than mine. Spare time is devoted to recreational time needed to alleviate the stress, considered well-deserved time for self, from her high-powered work. Spending the say at an OWS protest or accompanying a friend or family to a medical procedure,….. never happen. When asked for help, she’s known to respond by saying she doesn’t have the time or energy and needs to focus on herself. I long ago crossed her off my list of people I can ask. But when recently hospitalized for surgery related to an ulcer, she wanted, even expected, older sisters to come stay with her and help out. They did. While she may be more overt about it, I don’t see her as an outlier among her peers. They filled her hospital room with cards and flowers (sent by assistants and secretaries, no doubt), but nary a one visited or otherwise offered their valuable time. She sent a mass email to all her peers, included family, 65 recipients total, after arriving home thanking her friends and coworkers for their “awesome support”. She forgot to mention any help or support provided by family, who stayed with her 24/7 before, while in hospital and after coming home. The disconnect between what she’s willing to do for sisters and what she expects in return from sisters doesn’t even register.
While my other younger sister was here from out-of-town to help out, there was a conversation about my younger of two daughters being the only grandchild that had turned out okay, (My two are broadly recognized by family as having turned out the “best”, the oldest working and on her own, youngest graduates next year as pharmacist, both have feet firmly planted on ground.) I asked about the reasoning for labeling my nieces and oldest daughter as “f—ups” and was told b/c they’ll never make over $100K/year. Seriously. I was floored. (Nor will I, so guess I’m f-up too. I knew it. Now I know why. Off to go kill myself now.)
This may be an anecdotal example from the margins, and granted my family is the poster child of dysfunction. I’m speaking in broad strokes, but I think the generalization holds and I could cite many other examples. There was a switch to a me-first focus on materialism, with success defined by how much stuff one has accumulated, how many rungs up the ladder one has climbed, that occurred with those born somewhere after 1960. External causes aren’t valued.
I think that’s part of why Obama and Congress can get away with so much. They REALLY don’t care if food stamps or SS are cut. They have plenty to eat and a 401K. As long as it doesn’t affect them, DC can do what they want. Besides, it means more for them. If the needy had gone to grad school and worked long hours like them, they could be all set too (having a rich mommy and daddy to pay for the Ivy League education is irrelevant). Before anybody gets offended, it’s not ALL of you! And there are pre-1960 money-grubbing narcissists too.
P.S. Aby, I’m still dealing this morning (Monday) with the remnants of an all day migraine from yesterday. I think it was the barometer. Or all the moon and star activity, or something.
It was the opposite of what you say. It was a time of working for Universal Rights for everyone–civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental rights–all of which we need to work on again.
How could I forget, labors’ rights also. Again, we need to work for labors’ rights.
via:
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2011/02/dont-buy-these-products-from-koch-industries/#comments
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/mark-ames-the-lefts-big-sellout-how-the-aclu-and-human-rights-groups-quietly-exterminated-labor-rights.html
June 24, 2012
Mark Ames: The Left’s Big Sellout – How the ACLU and Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Daily Banter.
Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
snip
Puzzled, I called Alex Edwards, Amnesty’s Media Relations guy in Washington DC, to ask him why labor unions didn’t rate important enough as a “topic” on Amnesty’s “list of topics.” Edwards was confused, claimed that he was totally unaware that there was a “list of topics” on Amnesty’s home page, and promised to get back to me. I haven’t heard back from him.
snip
On the advice of an old friend, Jan Frel, I read an excellent book on the human rights industry, James Peck’s Ideal Illusions, which helps answer why labor rights have been airbrushed out of the language of human rights. It wasn’t always this way: Economic rights and workplace rights were for decades at the very heart of the human rights movement. This was officially enshrined in 1948, when the United Nations adopted a 30-point “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” putting labor rights and economic equality rights alongside those we’re more familiar with today, like freedom of expression, due process, religion and so on. But somehow, labor rights and economic justice have been effectively amputated from the human rights agenda and forgotten about, in tandem with the American left’s abandonment of labor.
In Peck’s history, Human Rights Watch stands out as a force for rank neoliberalism, a major player in the extermination-by-omission of labor rights and economic equality rights from the language of human rights. How this happened sheds at least a bit more light on how the left abandoned labor.
snip
Neier goes further, explicitly rejecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because nine of its 30 articles focus on economic rights as human rights. Neier objects to that, singling out for censure “such economic issues as a right to work; to social security; and to an adequate standard of living.” The human rights article on “a right to work” that Neier dismisses as “authoritarian” is Article 23, and it reads:
“Article 23 (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
It’s interesting that Neier rejects Article 23, the article on labor, which he mislabels as “a right to work”, because back in the 1970s, when Neier was executive director of the ACLU, he supported big business’s “Right To Work” anti-labor laws, against the rest of the left and the ACLU, which at the time still supported labor rights as civil rights. The so-called “Right To Work” laws are grossly misnamed—they’re really laws designed to bust unions by making it even more difficult for them to organize worker power against the overwhelming power of the corporation. It was corporate PR flaks hired to deceive and conceal the real purpose of those laws who came up with the false name “Right To Work” laws. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch and one of the founders of the John Birch Society, got his start in rightwing politics as a leader of the “Right To Work” movement in Kansas in the mid-1950s.
Less than twenty years after Fred Koch fought to destroy labor rights through “Right To Work” laws, the executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier—the same Aryeh Neier who later led Human Rights Watch— colluded with William Buckley to push the ACLU rightward against labor by getting the ACLU to represent big business and “Right To Work” laws, under the guise of “protecting free speech”—the same bullshit pretense always used by lawyers and advocates to help big business crush labor and democracy. This “free speech” pretense is the basis on which the ACLU currently supports the Citizens United decision, which effectively legalized the transformation of America into an oligarchy.
Ronald Reagan won by a landslide in 1979. The civil rights movement was largely dead by then, as was the feminist movement. In their place was a culture growing impaitent with reform and incraeasingly interested in consumption. Just look at the popular movies of the mid- to late-70s, like Network, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Three Days of the Condor; these were warnings of the changes in American culture from the social concerns that really dominated the early- to mid-60s but were under attack even during the Cater administration.
The feel-good trope is that were all still marching and demonstrating for justice until aliens took over our government. That’s what’s wrong. No, after Viet Nam, the hoard of white middle class college graduates starting voting for the “leave me alone” platform, which Reagan was happy to give them. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and Christopher Lasch’s books lay out this history nicely. The problem was that “leave me alone” also put the fox in charge of the hen house.
Mr Lentini so all our ills are the responsibility of a few groups in one generation. EXCUSE MEEEEE! to quote Steve Martin. Far to many people paint with to broad a brush, so please refrain from blaming a whole generation as a total group, there were many as Lambert pointed out who diverged from the self-centerism your speak of. But to you we were(are) everything that is vile to you. That we dropped out learned about the land, the food system, fostered cooperation between multiple age groups(generations) I guess we just didn’t do enough to please you. No Generation, no group of people will ever be monolithic in thought or action so please use another example to represent your point of view.
There are generational effects. Not monolithic, because filtered through class, race, gender and so on. But they do exist. They are conditioned by larger social and historical externalities : what was the economy doing when they were growing up, what did the last war do to their parents, what was television feeding them in their childhood … and so on. Which is why it’s not much point blaming them for what the world made of them.
As for that mixed hippie bag, for the USA I always thought that Pychon and Robert Anton Wilson got the mix somewhere near right – or at least got that there was a mix. Euro-hippies are a different bunch, because their parents experienced the war differently from Americans. Did you ever meet German hippies? A long way from California.
The quality of an administration can be measured by its attitude toward secrecy. This does not bode well for the Obama Administration, which is reaching toward Mad-Hatter levels of secrecy.
Interestingly, Bill Clinton was nowhere so secretive as our more recent Presidents. Under Clinton, the government declassified huge numbers of documents, making them available for public view.
This liberal policy was quickly reversed under Bush-Cheney, who actually began reclassifying many of the documents the Clinton people had freed up.
This Kafkaesque policy has continued under Obama, despite him being dead-set to outdo Bush-Cheney in bringing fascism to America. The government is continuing to reclassify documents, some going as far back as World War II. At some point since the tenure of Bill Clinton, the U.S. went south on matters of secrecy.
Whistleblowers naturally become villains to the members of a corrupt system. The more corrupt the system, the worse it treats people like Ed Snowden, which shows you how bad it’s gotten.
I wanted to find a nice quiet spot, go to sleep, and dream about kittens <3
j.corwin
Matt Taibbi slays Vampire Squid w/ Giant Pen at Public Banking Conf.
Also, Ellen Brown, Gar Alperovitz, Brigitta Jonsdottir, and the aforementioned Mr. Taibbi talk about “Reclaiming our Economy from Wall Street.”
Oops, screwed up the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RF9COa2zA0
Thanks for this link. interesting, and somewhat terrifying, talk.
Yet another post eaten. Can’t this be fixed?
David,
I’m suffering the same here. I’m sure it can be fixed. I’ve decided to be an optimist this morning. :)
I think so too. It just gets frustrating when you write more than a few sentences and watch a good 15 minutes of work disappear.
Yep. I just got bit too – twice.
Do your writing in a text editor and paste it into the form when done.
There’s a browser plugin called Lazarus Form Recovery which might be the fix you’re looking for. I thought it was just for Firefox, but the new version is available for Chrome and Safari as well.
“After Lazarus is installed, it starts saving everything you type into your browser.” ~from their website
For some reason I think people might not be down with this…
I can often get my text back just by using the back button a few times. Also, if the post is long I’ll use “It’s All Text”, which lets me set a text editor to enter text into a form. I then have the text separate from the Web page if anything goes wrong. I can also save the text for use later.
I always copy to somewhere on my own computer any post I have put much effort into. Even with the most reliable site, something can go wrong and on occasion my own computer has crashed with a long post half-written.
Highlight your comment, control + c (copy), say a few magic words of choosing or prayer for those inclined, then submit comment. If it doesn’t work, control + p (paste) in the comment box, and repeat.
Control + a ( all ) performs the ‘highlight your comment’ nicely. Great habit to get into — a couple of keystrokes can prevent a mini-stroke or worse should the gods of the Internet be fickle.
Yet again.
* * *
Commenters further up this thread have the right of it. The Internet is a hostile computing environment. If you compose and submit without saving your work first… Well, let me be nice and say that’s a good habit to get into for all the sites you frequent.
On the other hand, I have often found that the internet gremlins have far better judgement than I do.
Antidote title: Elbows, knees and ivory?
both Adorable.
@ “Ecuador in talks with Russia and US over CIA whistleblower”
Last year Samir Amin did an interview in Quito with Irene León.
http://www.fedaeps.org/alternativas/entrevista-a-samir-amin-el-mundo
Amin, who hails from the world systems school, first articulates his take on the reigning world system, which he calls “generalized imperialist monopoly capitalism.”
Amin theorizes that monopoly capitalism, which has been around since the final decades of the 19th century, has entered a new qualitative phase, what he calls “generalized imperialist monopoly capitalism.” There exists a concentration of capital and of control which is heretofore unknown, Amin says. Monopoly capitalism now “controls everything.” There exist no activities independent and autonomous of the generalized monopoly.
Bourgeoisie capitalism, Amin goes on to explain, has been completely derailed because bourgeoisie capitalism was based on a left-right opposition that corresponded to social alliances, more or less popular, more or less bourgeoisie. Therefore, they had different conceptions of the political economy. Today, as we already know, we have Democrats and Republicans in the United States, socialists in Hollande and the right in Sarkozy in France, but they are the same, or almost the same. What this means is that they all are allies in a consensus, and this consensus is the mandate of the generalized monopoly. “Only having comprehended this,” he says, “can we understand the challenge that confronts the people of the south, in the emerging countries as well as the other countries of the south.”
Generalized monopoly capitalism has very grave consequences, Amin continues, and has “converted the United States into a country of imbeciles.” The consequences are grave because democracy has “completely lost it significance.” Since generalized monopoly capitalism now controls every aspect of the world’s economic activity, and its political activity to boot, it has been liberated from the control of democratic institutions and is free to financialize the entire world economy and convert an ever increasing share of world production into monopoly rents. This is the basis of the growing inequality and the stagnation of the economies in the north.
Amin’s analysis of generalized imperialist monopoly captialism, in my opinion, is dead on.
But then the interview turns to the part that is germane to l’affaire Snowden. In part IV, León suggests that Ecuador, in alliance with other South American countries, had managed to “disconnect” from the world system of generalized imperialist monopoly capitalism. Amin, while trying to be polite, poo-pooed this idea. “There is much talk and little action in Latin America,” Amin says. He then goes through a litany of reasons as to why South America has not disconnected from the world capitalist system. The most glaring reason, of course, is that Ecuador uses the dollar. A country that doesn’t have monetary sovereignty, that uses the dollar, is hardly disconnected from the world capitalist system, Amin notes. Then he goes on to note that the language used by Latin American progressives is a language that doesn’t stray outside the neoliberal box.
Amin’s critique is harsh, which he fully admits to. And what’s happened recently in Brazil and with Snowden seems to lend credence to his criticism. But on the other hand, I believe important baby steps have been taken, and that these are far greater than anything that has happened anywhere else in the world, including China. After living through a long neoliberal winter, there’s finally a thawing in many parts of Latin America, and there is movement, even if slow and sporatic, in the direction away from neoliberalism. It may not be an “audacious movement,” as Amin puts it, but at least there is movement. Mexico, the US, and China, on the other hand, are still very much headed in the neoliberal direction.
I don’t agree with that analysis. It’s emphasis on capitalism being the sole driving force behind history is unwieldy at best in it’s ability to explain the downfall of other civilizations. Brooks Adams had a general theory that is more applicable to all civilizations. From Ancient Rome and Europe to the present day American empire. Adams’ theory stated that human societies begin first in a state of decentralized dispersion. They then gradually centralize until society is heavily concentrated. At this point of the process they fall under the socio-economic power of quasi-capitalistic usurers. When the usurers have consolidated their control over society it then enters a period of decay and dissolution.
Who knows whether this theory is true or not. There are other great thinkers who provide just as compelling arguments as Adams about the rise and fall of societies. Though consider the fact that Latin America has usually been America’s exclusive sphere of influence. Which is now brazenly rebelling against the Washington Consensus. This provides evidence that the American empire is in a state of dissolution. The ossification of politics in America as well as Europe seems to support this theory as well. As Europe is explicitly tied to the United States as global political power is centralized in Washington DC.
Seems to me that our entire current system is doomed by its own internal contradictions, and the Elites know it and are acting accordingly. Our system relies on unlimited markets, resources and money, not to mention unlimited and free energy. Of these, only money can be made infinite, and that only by making it completely abstract. As we hit the limits on all the actual physical stuff, the only way for those currently on top to remain so is to make money infinite for the time being; as long as it takes to buy up all the physical stuff and saddle everyone else with the other side of the abstract money coin; debt.
It’s just feudalism, except instead of Dukes and Duchesses, we get CEOs, assorted high rollers, and their high-ranking bureaucrat courtiers. Instead of The Great Chain of Being, by which the privileges of the aristocracy were justified by saying it was God’s Will, now we have debt and obligation for the lower orders, and wealth and impunity for the elites.
Same difference, really. And just as heretics threatened the justification provided by the Great Chain of Being and therefore had to be horrifically dispatched as an example to others, Liberty Reserve etc. have to be charged with facilitating Child Porn (while HSBC, which really did launder billions in drug gets a tiny peck on the cheek).
The worst offense of all is to question the legitimacy of the system. That’s why Bernie Madoff gets far more time than a serial killer.
It’s hard to make sense of what we see going on around us in real time. But this is just the First Class Cabin passengers colluding with the ship’s crew to make off with all the lifeboats as the Titanic takes on water, while the rest of us are told to snuggle up tight in our lower berths. As a member of the lower orders, it’s hard to tell what to do for safety, but going below decks (taking on more debt obligations) seems like a very bad idea.
Shorter: TINA. Until there is.
I care even less for that ‘end of history’ theory. Before the Great Depression prominent Americans were already discussing the implications that Adams’ theory had for the future of the United States. I can only imagine what the effect the debt bubble bursting in 1929 had on their subsequent actions. Regardless the possibility exists that the American republic has gone through that cycle a few times already.
They were just as delusional about the future until reality came crashing down on them too.
Thank you for another interesting post, From Mexico.
I would contend that the stagnation in the North has a deeper structural source. The economy 5 or 6 decades ago reached a point where it needed to shift to being knowledge-driven but the controllers of the social structure blocked that (to a large degree unconsciously).
The “knowledge economy” we have now is a cruel pantomime of a true knowledge economy. A true knowledge economy compensates those who do the real work and at the same time turns the knowledge loose. That is the source of its enormous productivity. What we have now is driven not by knowledge, but by the search for chances to collect rent. Rent collection does require some knowledge production but it also requires much knowledge blocking and the active creation of unknowing.
The social stratum of people who would be the highly productive core of a knowledge-driven economy instead are servants of the elite. This social stratum has been turned upside down and is paid to produce not-knowing rather than knowing. This does not affect every individual uniformly but does affect that social strata as a whole and affects people more, the higher up they are within this social strata.
This production of unknowing explains much social behavior of recent decades. PR and advertising are clearly precursor forms of the production of unknowing. Astroturfing, roach motels, veal penning, and the entire performance art piece of two-party democracy in the US are more advanced examples. This mandatory production of unknowing affects even areas that would seem apolitical, for example the form of development of Buddhism and meditation in general in the West.
I think this thesis of the blocked knowledge economy and the upside down knowledge worker strata is compatible with the theory of generalized monopoly capital. One difference is that the blocked knowledge economy theory holds that nothing holds the 1st world elite together other than the desire for power itself. The elite has no purpose or sense of purpose and no moral ground. This is why the crudest greed and sociopathology have taken hold of the elite. Our current elite has no moral* immune system and that of society as a whole is compromised too.
Post on Big Data On My Blog
http://moosesnsquirrels.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/comments-on-big-data/
Kitten adorable.
+ 1 trillion
a kerfuffle at the Observer (the sunday version of the guardian)
this was the headline of the 1st edition print and online only to be pulled for the 2nd edition and the online story is now “This article has been taken down pending an investigation.” and replaced by the Der Spiegel story
Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to America
http://tinyurl.com/q266xzm
oh and the site news sniffer is great for tracking the edits of a story over the day.
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/versions
Re: I’ll be watching You: NSA Surveillance and the Male Gaze
Paraphrasing Damien of Moloka’i, “Now we are all Women.”
Zeitgeist watch
Massive Attack meet Adam Curtis: the unlikely double act
http://tinyurl.com/obfsshl
http://tinyurl.com/bzdn9an
oooooh Massive Attack…
Now they are fine individuals (Grant Marshall / Daddy G helped me out back when I used to do that electronic music thing…)
…as for Adam Curtis, the guy is a GOD I tell you…
Thanks for the link!
agreed with you about (to a point) Curtis.
and tell me more about that electronic music thing!…been a fan since little fluffy clouds
The Orb & Kakatsitsi from yesterdays Glastonbury
http://tinyurl.com/njhkx8p
Devastating info from the article about high wealth individuals:
1) The “ultra-HNWI” individuals are less than1% of the total HNWI population, but have 35% of the total assets of this group. The “millionaires next door” with $1 million to $5 million are 90% of the high net worth individual population, and have 42.8% of the total net worth of this group.
2) Another table in the report shows that 3.4 million of the high-net worth individuals–about 28% of the total–are in the United States. The next four countries for number of people in the high net worth category are Japan (1.9 million), Germany (1.0 million), and China (643,000) and the UK, (465,000).
3) World population is about 7 billion. So the 12 million or so high net worth individuals are about one-sixth of 1% of the world population.
They call the shots and we follow, as the song goes…
I’m really struck by the German figures. More than twice as many HNWI than the UK, with a population only approximately 25% bigger. It’s even more striking when you consider how the UK has always been a magnet for rich foreigners to move to,and there’s a well entrenched aristocracy.
Germany didn’t used to be like that.
“There are not very many of the shing.”
NSA: I’ll be watching you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WEIgTD96Rc
(the laughter helps…some)
“real-time surveillance.” Anybody notice that? All the “direct access” concern trolls can slink away quietly, now.
I mean, I suppose the system architecture could be designed for instant input to and output from the dropbox, but at that point we’d be in “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” territory. As indeed we always were, in that discussion.
Adding… Can trolls slink? I’m not sure. Perhaps “stumble grotesquely,” or “crawl.” Still, you see what I mean.
I’m sure they’ll find another hair to split, some way to prove it really isn’t that big a deal.
Re: Big Brother Watch
Item. Former US Air Force General, former Director of the National Security Agency, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, has become a One-Worlder!!! — “the fourth amendment is not an international treaty.”
Item. Cages in the Euro Kennel are rattling.
“Robert Madelin, one of Britain’s most senior officials in the European commission, tweeted that EU trade negotiators always operated on the assumption that their communications were listened to.” (Guardian)
This Trusty Dog IS in the game.
your immigration article gives specious arguments.
importing immigrant labor is nearly nothing like his analogy of “helping” his neighbor when she’s ill.
a better analogy would be that the poster’s wife/husband could sleep with the all of the neighbors’ husbands because she’s suddenly developed nymphomania. the neighbors’ partners get shut out in the cold, not because they are unwilling to roll in the hay but simply because the bimbo is satiating all needs at low/zero cost.
business & bosses would, if they could, force you to work 27 hours a day and pay you less than the cost of a loaf of bread (or less than the calorie expenditure necessary to do the work) if at all possible. they have an unlimited desire to obtain “something for nothing” and will use any excuse–surplus labor, ever-increasing demands, exclusionary background checks, etc. to reach for the optimum benefit for themselves, which is a world where they get all the benefit of “raw” materials and don’t pay anything for them.
immigration also allows the home-country to export its surplus labor, or in reality never spread the wealth to its laboring classes or provide proper land access to them. so when a country imports like the U.S., it subsidizes inequity both here and at home. if we are going to function as the safety valve for all of the screwed up (probably deliberately done by our transnational corps, but which is mostly out of our personal control and definitely out of the awareness of most) then who will function as the safety valve for us? other, “more developed” countries don’t want us gringos either.
that poster that you linked to is part of the class war, but he’s on the side of the owners.
Special report: The dark side of credit – a million new payday loans every month
An increasing number of people are taking out loans which they have little chance of paying back, due to the exorbitant interest rates and high fees
One million families are being forced to take out payday loans every month as they struggle to meet the rising cost of living, new research reveals today.
A poll for Which?, the consumer organisation, shows that nearly 400,000 of them use the high-cost loans to pay for essentials such as food and fuel, while 240,000 need the money to pay off existing credit. Half of the people who take out payday loans find they can’t cover the cost of repayments – which can attract interest rates of more than 5,000 per cent – which means they are forced to take out new credit and spiral further into debt.
http://www.independent.co.uk/money/loans-credit/special-report-the-dark-side-of-credit–a-million-new-payday-loans-every-month-8680018.html
Good luck fighting this in the UK (and I mean that sincerely). I was part of the fight to drive these guys out of our state back in 2002. We were finally successful…eight years later. Now there’s an internet payday loan company running off of the Rocky Boy Reservation. It’s a never ending fight against loan sharks, but it’s one worth fighting.
Litton Loans/Ocwen horror story:
http://www.givemebackmycredit.com/blog/2013/06/daughter-fights-wrongful-foreclosure-while-mom-fights-cancer.html#more
Any attorneys willing to work on spec?
Mississippi, of course. The only thing that that god-forsaken state is good for is making a four-year-old think he/she can spell. (Or jumping rope, if anybody does that anymore.)
If you are a 40-something, speak to your aging parents IMMEDIATELY. New Rules: You DID NOT win the Nigerian lottery, no matter what the Prince’s e-mail says. Trust me on this one.
No matter how nice the young man on the other end sounds, DO NOT give your SSN or credit card number to ANYONE who CALLS YOU. You didn’t win the contest. (There was no contest.) They’re NOT going to send you a gift card. Politely take their number and tell them that you’ll have your daughter, the attorney general, call them back, at the end of the week, or when she has time.
Do NOT agree to roof repairs from ANYONE who rings your doorbell. EVER. (Consider disabling your doorbell.)
Last, but not least, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, stop making your scheduled mortgage payment, especially if you got the name of the mortgage modifier IN THE MAIL. Period. End of story. No matter how official the paperwork looks. If you need a mortgage mod, call me, we’ll work it out.
Lastly, AARP is MIA. Keep your annual dues and take yourself to Olive Garden for all-you-can-eat salad and breadsticks. Before 5.
Find someplace other than Olive Garden [or Red Lobster] to celebrate. The owner [Darden] is a right-wing Terrible. And don’t try Chick-Fil-A either.
Automaticearth. Deflation by any other name. Yes the money vanished. Right into the pockets of the internationalists. Do they actually think they can sell their products to enough bankrupt people who live on credit to keep their corporations alive? Central Banks are only borrowing from the future because there is no there there. No economy exists anywhere on the planet. Hence a delicate balance between inflation and deflation, with always just enough inflation to keep international corporations alive. Of course everyone knows post modern capitalism is toast.
I can’t remember where I heard this, but, for what it’s worth:
“In an economic downturn, money is not destroyed, it is transferred.”
NSA and the Male Gaze. Let it begin. Let it be democratic. Let us have rules of engagement so that the democracy being surveilled can also reverse the trace of the bug and surveill the NSA. What have they got to hide? Many of them have been proven to be provocateurs. If we are going to have security, we must also have laws that protect us from surveillance abuse. Prompt legal recourse for harm, etc. Where are the laws we need? Oh, I forgot. Congress doesn’t do legislation for its constituents. I can’t wait for counter surveillance devices to hit the market.
Hijabs. Except for everybody.
Also on those free range chickens in Georgia. Great article. What’s not to love about a poultry magnate who describes himself as born again with the enthusiasms of a reformed whore. White Oaks Georgia. Humane, organic methods. Huge production on an organic scale. No antibiotics. White Oaks contracts with Whole Foods. It almost sounds like a model that combines industrial production with chicken permaculture. It’ll prolly work as long as Monsanto doesn’t buy in because Monsanto will never be a reformed whore. They’d much rather poison the juicy delicious grasshoppers and modify the genetics of the entire biome than be an honest partner in an organic world.
Yes, “Whole Foods” is a tell.
“Pastured poultry” is a new term, popularized only in the past few years, that actually means what most people think “free range” means. Though ‘free range’ sounds nice, the USDA definition only calls for a vague “access to the outdoors,” which in practice can amount to as little as a small open door at the end of a warehouse. **Pastured poultry means birds raised outdoors in grass, no legal tricks**.
agree STO…thorough job CL
Freedom: The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.
Ambrose Bierce
On Thursday, the House approved an amendment that would expand an oil revenue sharing cap for Gulf Coast states from $500 million to $1 billion, something that Gulf state members supported.
On Friday morning, the House disposed of the last four amendments to the bill, from:
— DeFazio, prohibiting offshore oil-and-gas leases in Bristol Bay off the coast of Alaska. Failed, 183-235.
— Paul Broun (R-Ga.), requiring all claims against offshore lease activities be filed within 60 days and resolved within 180 days, and imposing a “loser pays” requirement on entities filing suit. Passed, 217-202.
— Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), ensuring that no portion of the bill affects the rights of any state to prohibit the management of lands beneath navigable waters within its boundaries. Failed, 209-210.
— Lois Capps (D-Calif.), blocking oil-and-gas lease sales in southern California. Failed, 176-241.
http://thehill.com
See! Gridlock is preferable to getting anything passed. The only thing that makes it out of congress’s esteemed chambers is big steaming piles.
Alternative antidote title with alliteration filter on: Camo Can’t Cover Cute.
That’s a good one. It seems like it should be on the cover of some 1940’s tabloid.
Big Brother Watch
For sheer entertainment value, how can you beat what just happened with Presidential Confidente, Ambassador to the UN (soon-to-be National Security Advisor), and White House spokesperson extraordinaire Susan Rice?
The day before the latest release describing spying on US European allies, she made a widely publicized statement in which she:
Europe appears to have a different opinion: NSA Spying Threatens EU-US Trade
Re the Greenwald partial transcript at Moon of Alabama:
1) There’s a much longer partial transcript by Kevin Gosztola at firedoglake: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/06/29/glenn-greenwalds-speech-to-the-socialism-conference-with-transcript/
2) Here’s where I burst out laughing: Moon of Alabama writes:
Having seen YouTube and C-Span speech-to-text transcripts: http://correntewire.com/comment/218843#comment-218843
And Dilbert cartoons: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-04-26/
…And you’re laughing because commercial technology is the best there is, esp. in this area?
I’m laughing because… oh…
(Did you look at the Dilbert cartoon? Call security!)
Did you look at the YouTube example? Here, I’ll transcribe it:
Here is same section of YouTube from the transcript at the link:
Or (“especially in this area” – national security/intelligence), the transcript could just as well read:
(wipes tears from eyes)
Most machine mediated analysis and production of language in any form, spoken or written remains primitive. I suppose a super computer like IBM’s Watson might do a somewhat better job, but I have to wonder how many conversations it could analyze. But even if it could, what happens when innocuous words are substituted for the keywords it is looking for? And of course, people like Osama bin Laden knew years ago not to use cell phones or any electronic communications.
The only way something like this could work even in a limited fashion is working on a greatly reduced data set, not just targetting certain locations but specific people and organizations in that location, and then backtracking through the haystack to look at their contacts. However, for each degree out from the original target the size of the data set increases by probably one to two factors of magnitude.
As an aside, I remember years ago wandering into a conference with some of the then supposedly best people in speech recognition and production. One of the funnier things was seeing how these programs tried to read language from dead air.
Remembering kids prank phone call game: “I know who you are and I saw what you did.” All you need is a phone.
Did you ever see The Bedford Incident? “Fire one.”
Automatic national security. What could possibly go wrong?
Re Big Brother is Watching You Watch Links
Since the end of WW2 there have been five countries sharing intelligence (US, UK, Australia, Canada and NZ) and the NSA is a part of this global system to track every single movement on earth. The system is deeply entrenched and makes similar efforts by other countries such as China look like chicken shit.
Despite the growing disillusionment with the US military intelligence complex, it is here to stay. It is part of a larger globally-allied beast, which after 9/11 was given fresh blood and greater magnitude to embrace the private sector, which in the wink of an eyelid, filled the gap in demand for additional life support. Even Obama has proved to be more of a loyal disciple to the system than Bush ever was.
The Snowden affair only boosts the level of hysteria hormones in this global beast and its’ sphere of influence and potential for abuse. The difference between spying to protect a nation and using cyber weapons to harm your citizens has been lost.
Defense firms are already increasing their r&d investment in surveillance products, and a new enormous data center within the US is being created to capture and store all types of online data with “total information awareness” as objective.
Trust in ones’ fellow man is melting away faster than the polar ice sheets. Nobody is going to trust anyone with anything, and the potential consequences for individual freedom and liberty are going to be graver than anyone could have ever imagined.
The Snowden affair is truly bitter-sweet.
In shift, Florida woos Amazon’s low-wage warehouse jobs
Palm Beach County vies for warehouse; state takes focus off luring high-paying positions.
In Pennsylvania, an Amazon warehouse was so oppressive during a summer heat wave two years ago that an ambulance waited outside to whisk away victims of heat stroke. In Kentucky, Amazon workers said they were urged not to report minor injuries suffered as they frantically filled orders.
In England, residents of a former coal-mining town describe the minimum-wage jobs at an Amazon warehouse as grueling. And in Germany, Amazon warehouse workers have staged strikes in recent months to demand higher pay.
http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/business/in-shift-florida-woos-amazons-low-wage-warehouse-j/nYYkH/?
amazon’s spending by cycle
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00360354
lobbying expense
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883&year=2012
hometown ain’t too happy either
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883663_amazonmain25.html
Last year, amid a troubled economy, United Way of King County said it received record donations from some of the area’s largest companies.
Microsoft made a corporate donation of $4 million. Boeing gave $3.1 million. Nordstrom, nearly $320,000.
And Amazon.com? Zero.
Ha! Snip…
Since 2009, Amazon has helped some 80 writers groups in the U.S., including 19 in the Puget Sound region, with grants of about $25,000, and it gave the University of Washington $51,000 over a three-year period.
But critics note that Amazon’s support of writers groups coincides with the growth of its publishing business.
And besides, they say, these are small sums for a company with a cash pile of $5 billion and more than $1,500 in sales every second.
&
Amazon, by contrast, makes its philanthropic mark not by giving cash, but by “letting charities use its technology to raise money,” said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
In 2001, within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, Amazon set aside space on its homepage for customers to make Red Cross Donations. In total, the company says, customers have donated more than $35 million to global relief programs since then.
Note to Lambert: The date needs to be updated at the top of the NC homepage. It says yesterday’s date.
This is just too special. Karma’s a bitch.
Article re: response to US outsourcing Chinese factory to India. Could US labor take some lessons from uppity Chinese workers?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57590654/chip-starnes-boss-of-u.s.-based-specialty-medical-supplies-held-hostage-by-workers-at-companys-china-plant/
In followup, Mr. Stames was released on Friday, after 6 days and the loss of 9 pounds, when funds arrived to pay workers’ demands. Apologies in advance if this is a repost.
The Strange Case of Barrett Brown: http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown
“The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”
Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.
The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.”
That soil erosion/desertification is caused by over grazing is a foregone conclusion. It ought to be re evaluated. http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html
I was waiting to see if anyone even commented on the soil article. It really is the foundation of civilization. We are so enamored of our achievements that we can’t tell that the foundation has got some serious issues.
Allan Savory’s work is a gift to humanity.
I realize NC is an “as-is” view of economics and that is why I visit, but the current “system” is completely whacked and it was whacked at the “concept stage.”
For your consideration.
The Israel/Palestine “situation” has been about water from the very beginning. “Toxic racism” means segregating the “wrong people” into polluted areas. Israel practices “drought racism”.
I am waiting for the leak of the Yoo torture memo equivalent for the NSA issue which effectively defines out mass interception and storage (for later mining) of communications as not being wire-tapping/surveillance but rather something mechanistic and thus not subject to invasion of privacy because it targets nothing in particular, or some such failed logic. Time shift may be a good one (hey fair use!). Many of the media commentators are missing the obvious point, rather than argue the dubious utility of meta-data in and of itself, that the meat-data functions as index for the data mining of what would be fairly poorly ordered information tapped off in mass from networks. There are probably some highly paid data analysts who are presently just in charge of finding ways of reducing the bulk of the collected information without resorting to invasions of privacy. Something akin to spam filtering to reduce the bulk of your intray. I would suspect they have not perfected the technology, which actually means more money poured into a system which will eat lots of electricity and produce no significant results against people who communicate without resorting to digital technology. But it does create huge opportunities for commercial exploitation and produce mountains of criminal evidence which, alas, will not be admissible in civilized courts.
meta not meat
I rather like it as written.
Instead of human analysts, more likely software is being used to do keyword searches, etc. Thus the NSA can still claim the data has not been collected, as the definition of “collection” of data used by the NSA requires it to be handled by humans.
And why pray tell can it not be used in criminal investigations. No warrant is required for the FBI to obtain data from the NSA using FISA. Should defense counsel object, the prosection merely argues it was obtained by secret law, authorized by secret court, with oversight and knowledge of Congress, and that proof of same will compromise national security. Just trust them, it’s all good.
My Eyes My Eyes!! i just read where Ralph Reed appeared on one of the Sunday Mornin yak ‘shows’…boasting his favorite subjects ‘women’s bodies & same sex marriage’. i had a headache most of the day, figured it was the barometer shifting…but nooooo it was that little freak of nature stepping out of his crypt.
Tweet: Ralph Reed @ralphreed 4h
@michaelbeck Thnx much. Always humbled/honored to defend marriage. Other side’s argument is ad hom & false charge of bigotry.
The most interesting thing about Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Forum being held this week is that it exists at all. Ralph Reed, for those precious few of you who do not remember recent political history, is a crook. He is a political scammer who worked with Jack Abramoff in a swindle of Native American tribes and conservative Christians alike, a scam that went to the heart of the conservative movement but in which every last person save Abramoff himself has undergone a magical conversion back into respectability based essentially on the same scam as they started out with, which is duping Good Christian People out of their money.
So to have Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Allen West, Ron Johnson, Rick Santorum, Gohmert-Perry-Bachman-Palin-Cain-and-everyone-else-who-is-anyone in far-right conservatism eagerly climb aboard the good ship Ralph Reed for his latest little shindig should tell you all you need to know about the sincerity of the whole movement. He’s a lobbyist who got caught in a money laundering scandal, and he was back lobbying and collecting checks in no time flat because, bluntly, all the conservatives currently surrounding him were just fine with that. Just don’t get caught again, Ralph, and everyone will go along with the political scam.
Also…Donald Trump is one of the speakers. No, you can’t make me care about what Donald Trump has to say to a room full of holier-than-thou types, but this is the sort of “faith-based” conference that attracts people like Donald Freaking Trump.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/14/1216291/-Top-Republicans-assemble-for-Ralph-Reed-s-Annual-Crook-O-Rama
Ralphie: “There is no telling how marriages and lives were saved and how many children were spared of the consequences of gambling because of the work I did, Now, if I had known then what I know now, I would not have done that work.”
(DRUGS! its all i can figure and possibly a bit of bestiality with a mad cow)
Lambert: “Yes, “Whole Foods” is a tell.”
Lambert, maybe I am thick today, but I am not sure I follow you. Could you explain?
As I read the article, the folks with the Whole Foods contract were operating their poultry (and other) operations in a genuinely model way, but their production costs make their prices too high for many people. The other operation was somewhat better than the industry standard but somewhat compromised. That one actually seemed more like the way Whole Foods operates.
Regarding the Big Brother is Watching Watch:
I’m not sure where the origin of this thread is but I got here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_exchange_points_in_the_United_States
This shows some of the major internet exchange points in the US-those are explained in detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Exchange_Point
Now back to the list of exchange points and click on MAE-West [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-West ]and look at the location; Its San Jose facility is housed in the Market Post Tower.
Go to the link for the Market Post Tower and look at the second paragraph-
“Market Post Tower remains mixed-use, comprising office, telecom, and retail space, but it is perhaps most well known for its use by internet network service, peering, and colocation providers. The building was purchased in 2000 by The Carlyle Group, which further enhanced the building’s network infrastructure, and now advertises it as a “multi-tenant carrier neutral telecom facility.” It may not be needed as the final dot here but Carlye Group owns Booz Allen Hamilton.
The Carlyle Group is one of the larger capitalist venture vultures in the world.