December 16, 2013 archive

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Failure of the Elite

Our elites are inbred, gibbering, idiots.

Why Inequality Matters

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: December 15, 2013

The best argument for putting inequality on the back burner is the depressed state of the economy. Isn’t it more important to restore economic growth than to worry about how the gains from growth are distributed?

Well, no. First of all, even if you look only at the direct impact of rising inequality on middle-class Americans, it is indeed a very big deal. Beyond that, inequality probably played an important role in creating our economic mess, and has played a crucial role in our failure to clean it up.



It’s now widely accepted that rising household debt helped set the stage for our economic crisis; this debt surge coincided with rising inequality, and the two are probably related (although the case isn’t ironclad). After the crisis struck, the continuing shift of income away from the middle class toward a small elite was a drag on consumer demand, so that inequality is linked to both the economic crisis and the weakness of the recovery that followed.

In my view, however, the really crucial role of inequality in economic calamity has been political.

In the years before the crisis, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of financial deregulation – a consensus justified by neither theory nor history. When crisis struck, there was a rush to rescue the banks. But as soon as that was done, a new consensus emerged, one that involved turning away from job creation and focusing on the alleged threat from budget deficits.

What do the pre- and postcrisis consensuses have in common? Both were economically destructive: Deregulation helped make the crisis possible, and the premature turn to fiscal austerity has done more than anything else to hobble recovery. Both consensuses, however, corresponded to the interests and prejudices of an economic elite whose political influence had surged along with its wealth.



Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they – unlike the general public – consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse.

Which brings me to my final point. Underlying some of the backlash against inequality talk, I believe, is the desire of some pundits to depoliticize our economic discourse, to make it technocratic and nonpartisan. But that’s a pipe dream. Even on what may look like purely technocratic issues, class and inequality end up shaping – and distorting – the debate.

On This Day In History December 16

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

December 16 is the 350th day of the year (351st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 15 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships moored in Boston Harbor and dump 342 chests of tea into the water.

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea coming into the colonies. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.

The Tea Party was the culmination of a resistance movement throughout British America against the Tea Act, which had been passed by the British Parliament in 1773. Colonists objected to the Tea Act for a variety of reasons, especially because they believed that it violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. Protesters had successfully prevented the unloading of taxed tea in three other colonies, but in Boston, embattled Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the tea to be returned to Britain. He apparently did not expect that the protestors would choose to destroy the tea rather than concede the authority of a legislature in which they were not directly represented.

The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston’s commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. Colonists in turn responded to the Coercive Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.

Late Night Karaoke

Cartnoon

Funding models, Glenn Greenwald, Omidyar, and tinfoil hats

(Reposted with permission. ek)

by lambert at corrente

Sun, 12/15/2013 – 5:35pm

On The Greenwald Question:

It is true that the “left” (for some definition of left that would include Greenwald’s civil liberties work, even if under the aegis of strange bedfellows) has struggled with a funding model. If Corrente were 10 times its size (with concomitant increase in size for similar blogs) that would make, I’m convinced on no evidence at all, a big difference in the discourse.

Hitherto, a reader support model — though reasonably free from conflict of interest, i.e. buying into the bullshit — has enabled survival but not growth. I don’t know why.

Another model is to become Kos or TPM or ThinkProgress, and to be funded by the Democratic nomenklatura. So here we have conflicts of interest. (“Who kidnapped Josh Marshall”?)

Another model is advertising, selling eyeballs (which, to be fair, Naked Capitalism does, in addition to reader support). At scale, and IMNSHO NC is not at scale, we have potential for a different sort of conflict.

And another model is finding a patron, which is what Hamsher did, CJR does (Soros, IIRC), and now Greenwald has done. A different sort of conflict. (Marx, we might remember, was funded by Engels, a Manchester factory owner.)

So what model do you use if you want to get a story out?

I find it hard to fault Greenwald on ethical grounds, especially if he got some up front “Fuck you” money from Omidyar. (I haven’t been following the ins and outs, and it may be that Greenwald has disqualified himself on other grounds in his various defense of himself.) If Greenwald doesn’t ruin his personal brand, he’s free to walk away. For some definition of “free.”

However, I’m not sure the funding model is the story. Let me now put on my tinfoil hat:

Call me foily, but if I were a really astute right wing billionaire who thought long term, and who wanted a lot more leverage over the government than I already had, I’d:

  1. Get a technically astute and ideologically aligned mole into the NSA;
  2. Have them steal a lot of extremely incriminating data;
  3. Dole just enough out to the press to show what I had;
  4. Keep the great bulk of it as a “fleet in being,” as it were.

I’ve also considered the idea that Snowden was the tool of an NSA faction that didn’t like the rampant illegality; that could combine with #1.

GG comes in at #3, and as an archivist/researcher in #4. He doesn’t even have to know.

I know this reads rather like a real-life late William Gibson novel, with Omidyar in the role of Hubertus Bigend, and “the data” as the McGuffin, but real life these days resembles a Gibson novel, except more convoluted, darker, and with even nastier villains.

I had always had this way of thinking in the back of my mind, but this story really brought it to the forefront for me:

   Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks

That story reads very much like normalizing the situation to me.

So, Omidyar becomes a sort of data-driven sovereign, with informational nukes. Of course, that would imply that the tippy top global ruling class runs on blackmail, but then you knew that.

Readers?

In Memoriam: Peter O’Toole 1932 – 2013

Peter O’Toole 2 August 1932 – 14 December 2013

Peter O'Toole 1932 - 2013 photo Peter_O27Toole_--_LOA_trailer_zps80a2f910.jpg Peter Seamus Lorcan O’Toole, an Irish bookmaker’s son with a hell-raising streak whose magnetic performance in the 1962 epic film “Lawrence of Arabia” earned him overnight fame and put him on the road to becoming one of his generation’s most accomplished and charismatic actors, died on Saturday in London. He was 81.

His daughter Kate O’Toole said in a statement that he had been ill for some time.

A blond, blue-eyed six-footer, Mr. O’Toole had the dashing good looks and high spirits befitting a leading man, – and he did not disappoint in “Lawrence,” David Lean’s wide-screen, almost-four-hour homage to T. E. Lawrence, the daring British soldier and adventurer who led an Arab rebellion against the Turks in the Middle East in World War I.

The performance brought Mr. O’Toole the first of eight Academy Award nominations, a flood of film offers and a string of artistic successes in the ’60s and early ’70s. In the theater – he was a classically trained actor – he played an anguished, angular tramp in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and a memorably battered title character in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” In film, he twice played a robust King Henry II: first opposite Richard Burton in “Becket,” (1964), then with Katharine Hepburn as his queen in “The Lion in Winter” (1968). Both earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor, as did his repressed, decaying schoolmaster in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” in 1970 and the crazed 14th Earl of Gurney in “The Ruling Class” in 1973.  Mr. O’Toole threw himself wholeheartedly into what he called “bravura acting,” courting and sometimes deserving the accusation that he became over-theatrical, mannered, even hammy. His lanky, loose-jointed build; his eyes; his long, lantern-jawed face; his oddly languorous sexual charm; and the eccentric loops and whoops of his voice tended to reinforce the impression of power and extravagance.

Burton called him “the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war,” with “something odd, mystical and deeply disturbing” in his work. [..]

He is survived by daughters, Kate and Patricia, and son, Lorcan.

At the start of both videos the screen is blank during the orchestral introduction and intermission.

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Joy in the Struggle, Fast Food Workers Are Standing Up by JayRaye

Remembering a Wonderful Day on Picket Lines Across the Nation!



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DONE, & DONE RIGHT!

This is exactly the way it should be done, drumming, chanting, singing, marching, and statements of Solidarity. This diary is a celebration of the joy of the struggle with photos of unity and songs to fight by.

Workers of the world, awaken!

Rise in all your splendid might;

Take the wealth that you are making,

It belongs to you by right.


             -Joe Hill

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