Capitalism

This is a rant on TED. It's pretty good. I thought the quote below was the best takeaway.

We need to talk about TED | Benjamin Bratton | Comment is free | theguardian.com:

"Communism in theory is an egalitarian utopia.  Actually existing communism meant ecological devastation, government spying, crappy cars and gulags.

Capitalism in theory is rocket ships, nanomedicine, and Bono saving Africa. Actually existing capitalism means Walmart jobs, McMansions, people living in the sewers under Las Vegas, Ryan Seacrest … plus – ecological devastation, government spying, crappy public transportation and for-profit prisons. 

Our options for change range from basically what we have plus a little more Hayek, to what we have plus a little more Keynes. Why?"

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Congress and AIPAC

Congress Must Not Cede Its War Power to Israel » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names:

Americans should refuse to let Congress give Israel the power to drag the United States into war. American and Israeli intelligence agencies say repeatedly that Iran has no nuclear-weapons program. Though Iran champions the Palestinians, who live under Israeli occupation, it has not threatened Israel, which, remember, is itself a nuclear power.

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Fox News

Where old people go to learn to hate liberals and fight the war on Christmas.

REPLACEMENT AGE | Gin and Tacos:

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Middle East Peace

Israel plans 1400 New Squatter Homes in Palestinian West Bank | Informed Comment:

"Israel plans 1400 New Squatter Homes in Palestinian West Bank"

This should help the peace process.

Didn't we ask the Israelis to halt the settlements? Maybe we should stop the 3 billion of US taxpayer dollars we give them every year.

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NSA intercepts computers

Report: NSA intercepts computers and other devices to hack them | Al Jazeera America:

 "The report shows that American spies intercept computer deliveries, exploit hardware vulnerabilities and even hijack Microsoft's internal error-reporting system to spy on their targets."

"Dude, You're getting a NSA-modified Dell?

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China

The year in photos | Al Jazeera America:

Picture #15 - Not your father's Chinese Communist.



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Evangelical Christianity

The American Scholar: Where Are the People? - Jim Hinch:

The Evangelicals are still out there but most have been too busy with Tea-Party organizin', Fox-News watchin', Gun-totein', and Obama-hating to spend much time being Evangelicals.

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Facebook 'dead and buried to teens'

Facebook 'dead and buried to teens', research finds | Technology | The Guardian:

"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person’s decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," wrote Miller."

That is when my kid's Facebook use started to decline.

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We’re The Good Guys

Good question,....

". ..how (can) a guy in a beard and turban hiding in a cave along the Pakistan frontier could conceivably threaten the United States (?)"

We’re The Good Guys by Philip Giraldi -- Antiwar.com:


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Muslim Brotherhood

I pretty sure George Washington would have been labeled a terrorist by the British.

Egypt: Government uses "Terrorism" charge as Pretext to Crush Muslim Brotherhood | Informed Comment:

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom Fighter.


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Drones

I understand why the US and Israel approve of drones, they make them which is good for profits and they use them to kill those, brown, non-christian, non-jewish people, but why would Kenya be the only other country on the planet with a favorable view of them?



They save elephants?

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/saving-kenyas-elephants-with-drones

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-09/google-earth-saves-kenyan-elephants-with-drones-in-maasai-mara.html

or they use and profit from them too?

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/28/21213615-us-kills-two-top-leaders-of-terror-group-that-attacked-kenya-mall?lite

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/us-drone-strike-somalia-al-shabaab-expert

http://www.kenyanaviation.com/tag/drones/

Kenya’s military is about to join the growing list of combat forces across the world currently employing drone aircraft in the battlefield. Media reports suggest that Kenyan forces fighting in Somalia will soon get at least eight RQ-11 Raven drones from the United States Defence Department. The Ravens will assist in identifying targets, according to […]

Anyway, it seems odd to me.

Found the chart here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/26/6-global-challenges-for-2014/

Justice

How much can you afford?

Hullabaloo:

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War on Christmas and Israel ?

I wonder how those Israel-lovin', War-on-Christmas hatin' folks feel about this? Palin? O'Reilly?  

Israeli parliament speaker: Christmas tree offends:

" The speaker of Israel's parliament says he refused to display a Christmas tree in the building because of the "painful memories" it evoked among Jews."

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Inequality

Cardiff de Alejo Garcia: Deaton on US inequality and the Pareto criterion:

 "The countries in the OECD that have seen the largest increases in shares of income at the very top are the countries that have seen the largest cuts in taxes on top income. Studies of congressional voting by the political scientists Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens have documented how votes in Congress from both sides of the aisle are sensitive to the wishes of rich constituents and not at all to the wishes of poor constituents. ..."

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Fuck You Sarah Palin !

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/367017/christmas-sarah-palin-interview/page/0/1

"Of course there are many decent and moral atheists, but if you take an objective look at atheism’s historical track record you’ll see that its natural progression is moral decay. Don’t take my word for it. Look at what might be called the great atheist empires of the 20th century, and you see a horrific legacy of death and despair — from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc."

Are those atheists killing each other in the middle east right now?

Creating Terrorism

This will guarantee that they become a terrorist group. They've tried acting though politics, recently winning leadership of the country only to be crushed by a military coup. Now they've basically been outlawed, what other choice do they have?

Egypt labels Brotherhood 'terrorist' as riots follow deadly bombing | Al Jazeera America:

Juan Cole on the Brotherhood vs the military regime

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Will Inflation Come Back

Will Inflation Come Back - Business Insider:

Maybe, but I think the high level of inequality will help hold it back. I don't see much inflation until we have too many dollars chasing too few goods. We may have too many dollars but if those dollars are tied up in the the off-shore accounts of hedge-fund managers, corporations, and other elite, they aren't going to be sloshing around the economy driving up the general price levels. Well, they might drive up asset prices but not those of everyday goods and services.

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About those Chemical Weapons in Syria

Case Agasint Syria's Assad Falls Apart Washington's Blog:

Still, the totality of the new UN report suggests that Syrian rebels have developed a capability to produce at least crude chemical weapons and delivery systems, further adding to the possibility that the Aug. 21 attack east of Damascus could have resulted from a botched rebel launch of a makeshift missile aimed at government targets or as an accident.

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The 40-Year Slump

A good article on the decline of labor's share of the the American Pie.

The 40-Year Slump:

American Capitalism of the last 40 years has failed the common worker. I think the corporate emphasis on the well-being of the stockholder is the key.

Boosting the company’s share price, they contended, gave corporate executives a clear purpose—even clearer if those executives were incentivized by receiving their payments in stock. After Welch’s speech, the goal of America’s corporate executives became the elevation of the company’s—and their own—stock. If revenues weren’t rising, and even if they were, that goal could be accomplished by reducing wages, curtailing pensions, making employees pay more for their health coverage, cutting research, eliminating worker training, and offshoring production.

All the other issues pointed out by the article, union busting, moving jobs off-shore, fighting minimum wage laws,  temp workers, reduced benefits, etc., all of these, result from favoring the stockholder over all the other stakeholders in the economy.

We need a change to a version of capitalism where the business exists not just for the good of the owners but for the good good of all stakeholders, the owners, the workers, the surrounding community, and the planet as a whole.

tnb

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War On Christmas

New Iran Sanctions

Obama will Veto new Iran Sanctions, Israel War Mandate pushed by AIPAC Senators | Informed Comment:

"This behavior is no surprise coming from the GOP, but the thirteen Democratic senators involved are traitors to the party. "

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/19/iran-sanctions-bill_n_4472439.html

It is further undercut by the lead supporter of the Menendez bill, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has pushed hard to derail the talks and encouraged Congress to undermine the president's effort. Schumer and Menendez are close allies of AIPAC.

I'd say, they're not traitors to their party. They are loyal members of the AIPAC party.

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The Boycott Against Israel

Former Ambassador Asks U.S. to Criminalize Support for Boycott Against Israel | MyFDL:

1.  We don’t send hundreds of billions of American tax dollars to the North Koreans so that they can drop or shoot white phosphorus onto schools and hospitals. 

2.  We don’t write tax policies that enable the Han Chinese to invest in housing projects that eject Tibetans from their homes in Lhasa. 

3.  We don’t have a State Department chief spokesperson whose husband developed an expansionist policy paper for the Iranian government. 

4.  We don’t cater to lobbyists from Sudan who constantly encourage us to go to all-out war against a neighboring country that hasn’t attacked one of their neighbors in generations. 

5.  We don’t have a Pentagon whose offices are stuffed with people with dual Somali-American citizenship, who manufacture false premises to march us into a series of wars in the heart of Africa. 

6.  We aren’t experiencing a time when a small group of ruthless Burmese generals and politicians have hijacked Buddhism, turning it into a militant version of what had once been a great religion, and branding anyone who doesn’t believe in a Myanmar expansion version of Buddhism as anti-Burmese or anti-Buddhist. 

7.  Additionally, no North Korean, Chinese, Sudanese, Burmese or Somali general, politician, general or warlord is openly bragging that the United States is fighting two wars and threatening to start a third one, on their behalf. 

8.  The Prime Ministers of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia or Libya have not appeared in American political ads in the most recently run national election, advocating openly against the incumbent president. 

9.  Also, and importantly, there is no large body of American people who openly believe that we need to foster violence in North Korea, Tibet, China, Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Iran or Burma, so that we may enable the second coming of Jesus Christ, and implement a new age. And there is no cynical tie-in between Columbian politicians who hope to bring money to their country because of some apocalyptic religious myth, and American fundamentalist sects who total in the tens of millions of misguided believers.

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The war on Christmas

Headlines from the war on Christmas

Late Night: That Baby Isn’t Jesus | Firedoglake:

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The 'Eds and Meds' Industries

Where 'Eds and Meds' Industries Could Become a Liability - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities:

In my area, Eastern Indiana Teabagistan, the health and education industries are doing quite well (We appear to be a dark green dot on the linked map) but it isn't about economic growth as much as it is about watching over the aging and economic decline of the area while mining it for dollars for the corporate owners.

Teabagistan is a dying area. The population is old and requires lots of hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes,... oh,, the nursing homes. The medical industry here seems to focus on creating an income stream for the corporate owners who are just mining the sick and dying baby-boomers for some of the government supplied medicare cash until they can finally take their homes to pay for whatever ailment eventually claims their life. It is not about growth. It's about tending death to maximize revenue.

Teabagistan is also poor and lacks jobs. The bulk of the young have limited prospects. Most of the better manufacturing moved out years ago. Employment opportunities are Medical, Government, Education, or the various global corporate fast-food/strip mall players. The higher education industry is here nominally to train people for jobs but again they seem to really be better at mining the population for their government supplied education dollars than actually building a better local workforce.

Private schools are popping-up for the local elite's kids. Initially these schools were about a quality education but many now seem to be more about business than education. The elite who send their kids to these schools then bitch about  and cut the taxes required for the public schools eventually weakening their programs. It's a vicious circle continually moving a good education further from the poor and leaving the public schools as basically a day-care for the children of the strip-mall-fast-food-workers.

The amazing thing to me is that Teabagistaners hate the government? They hate the government that pays their retiree's medical bills. The government that pays their workers medical wages. The government that educates, feeds, and baby-sits their kids and pays the wages of teachers and officials, many of whom send their kids to private schools.

I don't get it?


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Selling Privitization

Chicago’s ‘Smart Card’ Debacle and Privatisation | The Nation:

"The problem is not just the profusion of private contractors who do the public’s business so poorly; it’s the fact that the public’s business is being so relentlessly privatized by the government executives in charge. Slowly, the perceived imperative to privatize has become the political tail that wags the policy dog. The results are before us."

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War on Christmas

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Why They Hate Us

US Drones Kill 15 in Yemen Wedding Convoy, mistaking them for al-Qaeda | Informed Comment:

Making them hate us,... one drone at a time.

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Americans Abroad

Reports: American missing in Iran worked for CIA | Al Jazeera America:

I'd bet that most of the Americans the US press reports as killed, kidnapped or disappeared in foreign counties are working for the CIA.

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Affluenza Defense

Teen avoids jail with affluence defense in deadly drunk-driving case | Al Jazeera America:

Yeah, the kid fucked up. However, I hate to see any  young kid's life destroyed because of a screw-up when they're sixteen. We all screwed up when we were 16.  I don't see how sending this kid to jail for 10 years could help the situation.

The problem here is that if this kid were poor, black or hispanic his ass would have been convicted and locked in jail in no time. Justice isn't blind, it's expensive. Only the affluent can afford it.

 
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The Horror Show

A good rant here..

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' | World news | The Observer:

including

And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

and

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

and

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

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More Ho-Frickin'-Ho.

Ho-Frickin'-Ho

Middle East Peace Process

I'm sure this will help the peace process.......Such a nice government...

Israel's Prawer Plan: A New Trail of Tears | MyFDL:

"The Israeli government and Netanyahu administration are going ahead with plans to ethnically cleanse between 30,000 and 70,000 Bedouin Israeli citizens from the area of their ancient homeland into new abodes. It is the so-called Prawer Plan (or Prawer-Begin Plan) 

 The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently stated that carrying out such a relocation without Bedouin consent is a violation of international law."

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Corruption in the US

Corruption Perceptions Index 2013: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results

Well, it depends on what your definition of "Corruption" is.

Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World | Informed Comment:

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Privatize it all.

Hullabaloo:

Some things the private sector does well and some things the government does well. They each have their role to play in our economic and civic lives. About 25 years ago the Democratic Party abandoned its mission, forged during the Great Depression, to defend the things the government does well, and decided that the traditional Republican defense of the private sector was more to their liking. I'm sure money had nothing to do with it.

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Skilled workers vs Unemployment

The solution to unemployment isn’t better-trained workers: Or, Systemic problems have systemic solutions | An und für sich:

"increasing the supply of something (for instance, high-skilled workers) decreases its price, all things being equal. In the academic example, all things are indeed equal, because administrative cost-minimization priorities remain determinative of the number of job openings. There’s no reason to assume that the situation would be significantly different in other industries, because the reality of our system is that the employers’ priorities determine the number of jobs available. If the government provides job training — or worse, provides loans that allow people to take on the cost of their own job training — the result will be the same as in academia: employers will get highly-trained workers without having to invest in them (i.e., for free), with no appreciable effect on the number of job openings available."

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