Ok, my google-fu is failing me, so I’m asking for help.
What I need is a list of perceived risk vs. real risk. Well, more perceived risk, I can easily find the real risk numbers. So, how likely do Americans think they are to die of terrorism or being in a plane and so on, vs. real risk. What do Americans perceive as the risk of a child being kidnapped v. real risk. Homicide v. real risk of homicide. Risk of dying in a car accident v. real risk. Etc… Or non Americans.
Doesn’t even have to be a list, just specific numbers with sources.
People really, really, really want to be lied to. And most progressive and liberal pundits are either so brain dead stupid they don’t remember the lies of the 08 convention and how Dems and Obama actually governed or are corrupt.
Evil? Or Stupid?
A question not just for Republicans any more.
1) the majority of new jobs are bad.
2) the economy has still not recovered all lost jobs, either in absolute #s or as a percentage of the population
3) so there are fewer jobs, and what new jobs have been created are worse. They pay worse.
4) The upper middle class job market has recovered, which is why those folks are no longer panicking and are telling you that the economy isn’t so bad as all that.
5) the failure to force the rich to take their losses and to break up the banks means that the same people who caused the 2007/8 financial crisis still control the economy and the government.
6) failure to restructure the economy to get off oil and over to an electrical economy means that the US (and the world) are caught in the oil price dilemna: any real recovery increases oil price and will be derailed by those high oil prices.
7) Europe, ex. Germany, is in recession.
8 ) the developed world is in depression, it never left depression. During depressions there are recoveries (such as they are) and recessions, but the overall economy is in depression.
9) China’s economy is slowing down. Since China is the main engine of the world economy, followed by the US, this is really bad. If it goes into an actual recession, bend over and kiss your butt goodbye.
10) Austerity is a means by which the rich can buy up assets which are not normally on the market for cheap.
11) the wealth of the rich and major corporations has recovered and in many countries exceeded its prior highs. They are doing fine. Austerity is not hurting them. They control your politicians. The depression will not end until it is in their interest for it to do so, or their wealth and power is broken.
12) The US play is as follows: frack. Frack some more. Frack even more. They are trying the Reagan play, temporize while new supplies of hydrocarbons come on line. Their bet is that they’ll get another boom out of that. If they’re right, it’ll be a lousy boom. If they’re wrong (and the Saudis think they are, and the Saudis have been eating their lunch since 2001) then you won’t even get that. Either way, though, they’ll devastate the environment, by which I mean the water you drink and grow crops with.
13) For people earning less than about 80K, the economy never really recovered.
14) If you’re out of work more than 2 months your odds of getting another job drop through the floor. If you do get one, odds are it will pay much less than your previous job.
15) Canada is undergoing austerity madness at all levels of government, and the corporations, with historically low tax rates, are not going to spend either. With Chinese demand for commodities dropping, expect a nasty recession.
16) Australia, having tied itself completely to China is about to reap the downside of that decision.
17) Wages are being systematically broken in the developed world. The rich do not believe they need you, except as wage-slave labor. You will all be company store slaves, paying rental streams to everyone to be allowed to continued to eke out a miserable existence.
18) Since the US sells protected works (so called “intellectual property”) you will continue to see a massive attempt to break anyone who doesn’t pay IP rent to the US. Some countries (Sweden, Germany, among others) are going along. But there are signs of rebellion. Apple may have won against Samsung in their ridiculous attempt to enforce patents on obvious solutions, but both Japanese and Korean courts threw the cases out. Paying rent to America, the hegemon, when the world system is working is one thing, paying rent when the world isn’t working is another.
19) Stirling Newberry says, and I agree, that none of this is stable, but it will last as long as the majority of the baby boom, the silents and a good chunk of the Xers still think they can hang on to their little piece of the pie, and screw everyone else. It will most likely break down in 2020/24, which is when the demographics turn. Young people today are completely screwed, they have astronomical student loans, no or shitty jobs, can’t afford a house and can’t afford to start a family. Note that the places where revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, are happening, are places where the majority of the population is young. Latin America, the Middle East.
Addendum
20) The economic numbers you hear don’t mean squat. Headline inflation does not matter, ask yourself instead “what are my fixed expenses?” Start with food. Jobless claims #s cannot be compared to prior numbers because less people have the sorts of jobs that let you make those claims. For the #s to make sense you’d have to adjust them for the reduced # of jobs which allow claims. The unemployment rate has dropped even though there are, in absolute terms, less jobs, because people have given up looking.
21) The money the Fed floods into the financial markets (quantitative easing, among others) is mostly NOT getting to ordinary people, and whatever Bernanke and his apologists say, it was never intended to. It is intended to prop up financial actors, and keep the rich richer. It has done what it is supposed to do.
If you haven’t read Arthur, you should. He doesn’t write often, but it’s powerful stuff when he does. The right hand column has links to the articles he considers his best.
The donation link is on the top right of the blog. The beg post is worth reading, as it’s more than a beg post and includes meditations on Gore Vidal and outsider status.
Don’t give if you’re in trouble yourself and can’t afford it or if you have people you care about who need the money, whom you haven’t helped, but could.
Another episode of America’s broken health and welfare systems.
To say that people must never revolt violently is to say America’s founding was illegitimate
The question is not if it is ever justified. The question is when.
The credible threat of revolt was understood by America’s founders to be necessary for liberty to exist, just as they understood that standing armies were a great threat to liberty and that eternal war is the graveyard of freedom.
The mainstream left in the US, Britain and many other countries, exists today in large part to ensure that there is no credible threat of revolt from the left, so that the elites can steal and kill as they please. Its only other purpose is the same as that of Conservative parties: to steal from the poor and give to the rich, but while pretending they do not.
People need to be taught by cops, with tazers and billy clubs, pepper spray and tear gas, rubber bullets and lead. By bailiffs and homelessness, hunger and fear, humiliation and misery, and by the loss of their dreams.
The political system is broken, the legal system is a farce. The descent into violence is inevitable in most developed and many undeveloped nations, because the rich and powerful do what they can, steal what they will, for they know no one can, or will, stop them.
You know the JFK quote, or you should.
Sigh,
read the actual accusations. They have been translated into English. They are also, straight up, he said, she said, and rest entirely on credibility. There are no witnesses to the actual acts other than Assange and the two women (who spoke to each other before going to the police) and no physical evidence. This is not to say that if Assange did what he is accused of he did not do something wrong. If. You don’t know if he did, and neither do I. Only 3 people do.
Assange has not been charged, he is wanted for questioning. Sweden is refusing to question him in England. I note that they have questioned a man accused of murder in another country.
The way the case has been treated is vastly disproportionate to how people wanted for questioning about such a crime are usually treated.
Ecuador said they would hand over Assange under one condition: Sweden promised not to extradite him to the US. Sweden refused.
Sweden engaged in illegal extraditions on behalf of the US in the past, and handed people over to be tortured. No one has gone to jail for those crimes. Since no one was punished, I can’t see why Sweden wouldn’t do it again. Certainly Assange would be a fool to take the chance, because if he winds up in the US he will be thrown into an isolation cell and treated in a way which amounts to torture. This isn’t in question, the US has done it in other high profile cases.
Anyone who thinks this is just about sexual misconduct…
Yeah.
As for Assange, his long game is simple. He will run, in absentia, in the next Australian elections. He is more than popular enough to be elected. Once he is an MP, he can’t be touched.
What Assange did, with Wikileaks, was engage in actual journalism. He was the last attempt to play under the rules of the current, corrupt system. What Wikileaks did was straight up journalism, no different than the Pentagon papers. Immediately afterwards, VISA, Mastercard and PayPal shut down all donations to Wikileaks, despite the fact that Wikileaks had been convicted of no crime. If an individual or organization can be shut out of the modern payments without any legal procedings, then there is no rule of law that matters. It is impossible to live in the modern world beyond a subsistence level if one is shut out of the electronic payments system.
Now Britain has threatened to storm an embassy. Be assured that if they are stupid enough to do it, British diplomats WILL die as a result. Even now, with Britain, the US and Canada saying there is no right to asylum, there will be huge consequences. The entire asylum system is now threatened, because any nation unhappy with someone being offered Asylum in any of those countries will just say “but you said you don’t believe in asylum. We’re not letting this person out of the country.”
Britain itself has given asylum to people accused of far, far worse crimes than Assange, and yet they are willing to trash the Asylum system over this? This isn’t about sexual misconduct. Anyone who is stupid enough to think that anyone not named Assange would have caused Britain to threaten to violate an embassy is too stupid to be allowed out in public.
Correction: I stand corrected. The charges would amount to rape in the UK. Or, at least, so the courts have ruled. You can read the ruling here. You can read the argument otherwise here, claimed offense #4 is the key issue. I tend towards the latter argument, but the courts have determined that it was rape. Make your own decision. I have removed text indicating that the allegations would not amount to rape as of 3:25 EDT, Aug 19, 2012.
Yes, he did. (graphic)
So I don’t want to hear anything from Britain about how important extradition is to them or how important rape accusations are.
Some scattered thoughts on cops, particularly cops in the US.
Police exist primarily to protect property arrangements. The war on drugs has paramilitarized police, with a heavy emphasis on overwhelming force. While police have always considered themselves above the common herd, and have always looked after themselves first and civilians second, it’s very clear that police today are much worse in this regard than they were 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, and 10 years before that. Police are well aware that they have near full immunity: they can beat people, kill people, plant evidence on people and they will, in most cases, get away with it. Even if caught on tape, the worst punishment is likely to be paid suspension.
Security forces who are expected to be brutal, as the US’s police are (and much of the rest of the West) can be staffed by two basic personality types: ideologues or thugs. Ideologues, as with the KGB in the USSR, have the advantage of being believers. They also have the disadvantage of being believers. They generally don’t get off on violence and cruelty, though they do it when necessary.
Thugs, on the other hand, want a license to allow them to be brutal and cruel. They like power and they like to be able to tell other people what to do, to force them to obey and even to grovel. The jokes about the crime of “disrespect of cop” aren’t jokes, it is very close to the most dangerous thing you can do around a cop, as any refusal to obey an order can be cause for a beating and a free-standing resisting arrest warrant (something which used to be impossible, but is now common.)
The problem with thugs is that they really aren’t that discriminate. They like hurting people and forcing people to grovel and under the right circumstances they’d be just as happy to do it to their lords and masters as to dirty hippies. From the point of view of a real reformer, security forces, whether police or otherwise, are a huge problem. They’re trained in violence, they like it and they want to keep doing it. If you fire them or lay them off in large numbers, they will turn their skill in violence against you. Mind, they are actually lousy at fighting anyone who can fight back, paramilitarized police are generally no threat to the real military, but they are excellent at terrorizing civilians.
One of the most notable things, to me, about the police, is that as they have become more and more “militarized” they have become more and more ineffective. It now takes 10 car loads to quell disturbances that 30 years ago a single car could have handled. I was recently treated to the spectacle of less than 50 Occupy Toronto protestors marching, surrounded on all three sides by police, a squad of horse-cops following and a bunch of paddy wagons in addition. Dealing with any sort of real crowds always involves bussing in cops from hundreds of miles around, and their reactions in crisis are slow, confused and yes, brutal.
The police have also been corrupted, especially in the US, by seizure laws in general and the war on drugs in particular. The ability to seize cash and property without proving and underlying crime has turned the police into a crime syndicate themselves. I have friends who won’t travel through entire US states because police systematically target out-of-state travelers in order to seize their money and property.
All of this is before we get to the problem of prison guards. Violent, brutal and numerous, they are politically powerful, their industry is the mainstay of entire towns, and they can’t be laid off in large numbers for the same reason you can’t get rid of police who are thugs, because they are trained in violence and cruelty and it can be reasonably expected that jobless ex-prison guards in large numbers will engage in violence.
This problem is an ancient one: teach men to be violent, and to enjoy cruelty, give them license and you become as much their prisoner as their master. For now the police are willing to do their master’s bidding, and brutalize the citizenry, because they enjoy it and see citizens as lesser forms of life, who need to be taught their power. But they are a danger to everyone, their masters and anyone who would fix society alike, for there is no road to fixing many nations which does not include de-militarizing the police. And that removal of their power and license to abuse is something they are unlikely to tolerate.
The best news this year is the Court of Justice of the European Union upholding doctrine of first sale
This is a big deal. A really big deal, and really good news. It allows brokers, it allows you to sell your software once done. It allows you to treat digital property like you would a physical object. You can give it, sell it, lend it to someone else.
This is the work of austerity, the good side of austerity. This is Europe saying, “no, we aren’t going to pay intellectual rent to America.” (Yes, other countries make software, but America is still the big winner in the software stakes.) When Europe was prosperous, they were willing to pay. The international order, whatever its problems, was delivering for them. Now that it isn’t, they won’t pay.
