Seriously, listening to all the progressives either supporting the payroll tax rebate extension (an attack on Social Security) or saying that Cameron should have signed on to a forced austerity pact, I am reminded how mind numbingly stupid and partisan these people are. Scum. Evil. Stupid. I could have a small amount of respect for them if they were getting millions in order to sell out the people they say they care about, but many of them do it for free and the most of the rest do it for peanuts.
There is not an institution in existence, of any importance, which will not have to be torn down. Unions, corporations, schools, the UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, they all have to go. All of them.
The oligarchs have made peaceful change impossible and the people have refused to take the few chances they had (many European countries had far left parties. Why weren’t they voted for?)
There will be war, there will be revolution. And there will be Terror. Hundreds of millions will die.
We had our chances. I spent 15 years of my life trying to explain how to save the old system, how to make it work. Others have spent decades. We failed. The oligarchs and the people, at every step, refused to do what was necessary. At every step small minded greed and selfishness won.
So it was.
Unwilling to give up anything to make our civilization actually work, many will now lose everything.
So shall it be.
We shall reap as we have sowed, and we shall know ourselves by our fruits.
was to tell Merkel to take a long leap of a short pier, and refusing to sign on board for European control of member state’s fiscal policies. Such control in the current context (forced austerity) is a recipe for outright, extended depression. Cameron may be throwing Britain into depression all on his own, but not signing away control to Germany (and be clear, in this context, European means German) was the right thing to do, even if he did it for what appear to be all the wrong reasons.
As a friend of mine quipped, who thinks Europe should have a common currency. “By common currency, however, I don’t mean everyone using the EuroMark.”
The insistence on policies which everyone knows, and which even straightforward macro-economics shows clearly, will throw Europe into a semi-permanent depression is rather remarkable.
Oh well.
Because the Fed cut them off. That is all. Yes, they were doing shady things, but no more shady than many other companies that didn’t get cut off. If you are a financial firm, you need the essentially free money the Fed provides. With it, you can make money, without it, you can’t. Once the Fed cut them off, everything else was just the thrashing around of a dying firm.
I would assume, and lay long odds, that someone at the Fed didn’t like Corzine.
Yes, this is how your “economy” works.
So, I’m browsing the NY Times and a title leaps out at me:
Albany Tax Deal to Raise Rate for Highest Earners
The URL says Cuomo, governor of New York.
Odd, I think. I wouldn’t expect Cuomo to raise taxes on rich people. Maybe I’ve misjudged him? Maybe he isn’t just a union busting jerk squishing the small people and covering his butt with things like gay marriage which the corporate interests he serves are good with?
I read further. Paragraph 3:
The long-term impact on the wealthy was described by some as a cut and others as an increase: beginning next year, the highest-income earners will be taxed at a lower rate than at present, but at a higher rate than had been expected with the expiration of the surcharge.
Oh. So, in fact, the deal lowers the actual tax rate the rich will pay.
Good to see the NY Times is still the same gray old lady she’s been my entire life.
Back when I was a managing editor at FDL and the Agonist, I used to tell the writers the following: assume that 90% of readers will only read the title of the piece. Assume that of those who do read further, you are losing half of them with each paragraph. I doubt the Times numbers are that much different. The vast majority of readers will never get to paragraph 3. They will assume the title is accurate. If the title is a lie, which it is, that is the information they will take away.
The accurate headline, if this is the story they want to tell, by the way, would be:
Legislators lower tax rate for highest earners less than expected
What it means is German control over other countries budgets. What that means is semi-permanent austerity. What that means is semi-permanent depression.
I somehow doubt that this will be accomplished, if it is accomplished, through referenda. I doubt any major party will stand against it. So, to add to the blindingly obvious, it is blindingly obviously undemocratic.
It is true that the Euro requires fiscal union. It always did, shared currencies don’t work without union. However, if fiscal union is to occur, then it should occur with each member state’s population voting for it, especially as this fiscal union’s purpose is to impose corporate friendly austerity measure’s on the populations of countries that would almost certainly vote against them.
I will note that this is not going to redound to Germany’s favor in the not-very long run. Permanent European depression is not to Germany’s advantage. Who, exactly, they think is going to buy their high-end goods is beyond me. They shouldn’t expect India and China to play along, those countries are creating their own auto industries and do not intend to be dumping grounds for Western goods.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words are applicable:
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The states in Europe are controlled by private interests. We have seen this, clearly, in Greece and Italy in the past weeks. If this fiscal union passes, the Rubicon will have been crossed for all states remaining in the Euro. Ironically, Europeans will have given up real democracy in exchange for depression. Lose/lose.
For them.
When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it. Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy. In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.
I didn’t care either time. Repeat after me:
Public opinion does not matter.
It is irrelevant. A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill. A small majority wanted single payor. Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against. There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.
In Europe every government other than Iceland has been sure to never allow a referendum on austerity. Members of the Euro-zone like Spain and Greece and Italy have not had referendums on whether to leave the Euro. They have had elections in some cases, but both major parties are FOR austerity (it’s not clear that citizens entirely understand this, watching Spaniards talking about how they had voted against austerity in the recent election was pathetic. They elected a government which will go even more hardcore on austerity.)
Most countries in the developed world do not have functioning democracies in any meaningful sense. You can vote for party A, B, or C, but they will all do substantially the same things, differing only in how fast they do them and the degree of gratuitous cruelty they engage in.
Your opinion does not matter. Politicians are almost entirely in the thrall of a neo-liberal ideology, and are almost entirely the bought and paid servants of the very rich. If a politician does what the oligarchy wants, he or she will be taken care of, even if thrown out of office. If they don’t, money and influence will be used against them, and once out of office they will be on their own.
Politicians do not work for you. Neither, just to be clear, do the police. Nothing is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side.
Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is.
What matters is not “opinion”, but action. So with regards to Occupy, all I cared about is how many people were being radicalized—whether a cadre was being formed; and how much of the population supported them in real terms. People who would donate goods, would donate money, would spread the message actively, would go down during the day.
What I care about in general, is how many people are willing to impose costs on the oligarchy. These can be financial costs (as when French protestors occupied a refinery), or they can be personal costs, such as heckling politicians and the rich, slashing the tires of their cars (the Argentines did that, by the way) or, if rioting, rioting where they live and work.
Understand, the true rich live in the bubble. They fly on private jets, they travel by helicopter, if they stay in hotels they cost tens of thousands of dollars a night and have private entrances, check-ins, elevators and so on that you as a peon never see or use unless you are part of their direct servant class. Being in the bubble means never having to deal with a human being who isn’t directly financially dependent. These people do not care what you ‘think’, they only care if you can damage their interests.
Politicians live less in the bubble. You can reach them, and let them know what you think. Loudly and insistently. At their homes. Their restaurants. Their fund raisers. Everywhere they go. Don’t “occupy Wall Street”. Occupy Bloomberg. Go everywhere he goes, and make his life living hell. That’s a cost to him.
Until politicians fear you more than they fear the rich and covet the favors and money of the rich, they will continue to serve the rich first. Their salaries are not that important to them, they do not work for you, and they don’t fear you enough.
But that won’t change because of “opinion”. Opinions don’t matter in aristocracies or oligarchies, and that’s what we are creating, what we’re heading towards. What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters.
So I no longer care about polls in almost all cases. They don’t matter. Likewise most elections: elect whoever you want, the policies will remain the same except on the margins as long as the politicians don’t work for you, but for the rich.
Your “opinion” is irrelevant. The powerful do not care what you think.
The oligarchs have taken down two governments in the past two weeks – Italy and Greece. The idea that the Mario Monti, the new PM of Italy, is something wonderful, is deranged. Note that once again, neither an election nor a referendum was allowed.
If you want to save the Euro and some form of European prosperity, there is only one solution, the European Central Bank (ECB) must do what it keeps insisting it won’t do, it must buy Eurobonds from members. And it must buy them at fixed prices. Italian, Greek, French, German bonds will be issued at X price, and if insufficient investors want to buy at that price, tough, the ECB will buy. If this causes inflation, great, Europe needs inflation right now.
Even France and to a lesser extent, Germany, are coming under attack. However France is under significant attack, and Merkel and the ECB seem unwilling to really do anything about it. France has the option to go off the Euro in a way that most other countries don’t. The issue with going off the Euro is simple: oil prices. You now have to buy oil with your lousy currency, which is even more worthless than the Euro. But if you happen to control countries that have oil, like France does (for example, France is mostly in control of Libya right now, not the US), then hey, sign some long term contracts and voila. It is not written in stone that prices must be set on open bid markets.
Which leads us to the sudden surge in the price of oil to $107 a barrel. On the face of it, this is crazy. Yes, the US has had a bit of a recovery, but Europe is going hard core austerity. But this is the game the hot money is playing: they move out of bonds and into oil, out of oil and into bonds. $107/barrel oil means the US recovery (such as it is, which isn’t much) isn’t going to last much longer.
Being rich is about being liquid when everyone else isn’t, so you can buy up assets on the cheap. When the rich are properly under control (ie. when you keep them poor and terrified of government and the people, as they should be) they can’t create such buying opportunities, they have to wait for them, and the government makes it so that the rich can’t take too much advantage of them, because taking advantage of them means taking advantage of other people when they’re most vulnerable.
Right now the rich can and are crashing asset prices by forcing countries into austerity through attacks on their currencies and control of their elites. They then buy up assets for fire-sale prices. (The history of fire-sale is worth commenting on. Crassus, the Roman Senator of the first triumvirate, had a fire fighting team. When a fire broke out they’d go to the fire, fight off the other fire teams, then Crassus would buy the burning buildings from their owners, negotiating as they burned. If they refused to sell, well, they lost everything.)
These attacks on currencies are deranged. The countries are not in that much difficulty, certainly the idea that France is in enough difficulty to be under attack is crazy. These attacks are about power: the global rich were bailed out after the crash, now they are using their hot money in attack after attack, demanding austerity, which will cause semi-permanent depression in those countries which accept it. That allows them to buy up what they want, keeps their labor costs down, and lets them divert what money they spend on investment which creates actual real economic growth into developing countries which are cheaper for them.
But watching European leaders respond has also made clear that they are either compromised, ideologically neo-liberals or completely ineffective. Watching the ECB insist that it won’t just buy bonds has been particularly amusing, because if the ECB won’t defend even France, the Euro is in great danger of not existing in a few years, and if the Euro doesn’t exist, neither does the ECB, which means all those central bankers will be out of jobs. They won’t even act to save their own jobs.
All of this is crazy. The financial elites are on a plundering spree, gleefully using their power to force entire nations into poverty, blackmailing governments into huge payouts. Pay extra on bonds, or pay extra on oil, or hey, why not both!
The political elites are clearly either bought or completely ineffective at resisting. If the ECB won’t buy bonds, then countries just need to leave the Euro so they can print money. Yes, that might cause inflation and various other problems, but that is better than semi-permanent depression through austerity.
Now, what can the people do when the elites won’t allow direct referendums, and when there are elections you can only vote for parties which are all in favor of austerity?
Make them fear you. Start as follows, which is what was done in Argentina: find their cars, those nice expensive cars, and trash them. Every time you see someone in a suit coming from the airport, surround the car and slash the tires.
And if you’re going to riot, don’t do it in your own neighbourhoods. Go to the parliament buildings, the bank HEADQUARTERS or to the neighbourhoods in which the rich live, and riot there.
If you insist on some form of pure nonviolence (which the European left and right don’t) then you must chain and twist tie yourselves around important areas. Go to the headquarters and shut them down by tying yourself up to all the entrances. Twist ties aren’t just the cop’s friends, they are yours. Love them and learn how to use them.
The elites will only respond when they feel your pain. And they will only feel it if you make them feel it.
A huge coordinated attack in multiple cities occurred last night, in which even journalists were thrown in jail. Many protestors are being denied access to lawyers.
Bloomberg and the police are in direct violation of a court order to allow protestors back into the park.
In other words, the law has been broken, openly and nakedly. There will be no legal consequences for doing so which matter.
But the NY protestors built barricades while defending themselves, and they’re surrounding the cops now, at the park. In Oakland, the General Assembly refused to pass a resolution banning all violence and condemning all vandals.
Radicalization continues. The education continues.
The law in the US is, and has been for years, a tool which is used as a weapon. Some people are given a pass, others are hit with the full force of the law. That is to say, there is no rule of law in the US, it is a nation of people, not laws. This is well known in certain circles, but needed to be shown to others at the end of a nightstick.
I’m proud of the Occupy people, however, especially the Oakland bunch. A fool doesn’t learn even from their own experience. The occupiers are proving that many of them aren’t fools.
We’re years from the endgame, Occupy isn’t going to convince the elites to do the right thing, it is, in fact, convincing them to do more of the wrong things. OWS is necessary, but insufficient.
by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Read. I will add that this account jives with what I have heard through other sources.
(No, OWS is not leaderless, and the General Assembly is heavily managed.)
The question about OWS has always been how it will metastasize. That remains in the air. At the current time, one ideological fight is over absolute non-violence, and an attempt is being made by many in the Oakland/SF area to drive the anarchists completely out of the movement. Problem being that since non-violence is the rule, they have to rely on the police to remove the anarchists and the police aren’t cooperating any more.
