i got to say that the when i first got back from vietnam, i worked for companies that seemed to have some optimism, a concern for the well-being of their employees and the country… and i assume that that attitude filtered down from management.
by the time i was washed up, the coporate attitude hand changed, and you were expected to lie to get a job, and nothing much counted other than the bottom line… i’ve got to say that i didnt work for about fifteen years, so the change was starkly evident.
i have to assume that the corruption was evidence of disillusioned boomers getting high enough in management to affect the company attitude.
a looter attitude.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 8 2011 20:15 utc | 4

if the barbarians have the most potent military ever, do they care how much anybody respects their doofus government?
we barbarians believe that might makes right, and we’re the mightiest… anything else is irrelevant.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 8 2011 20:49 utc | 6

“…any claim that obama is being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do – e.g., charges that his family has been threatened if he doesn’t do what others demand – is nonsense.”
Agreed. All Obama wants is to be re-elected. I suspect that he is very happy that two terms is the limit, because he is already running out of things to say and ways to disguise the fact that: All Obama wants is to be re-elected.
On the other hand the political chaos in the United States, which basically arises out of the fact that there isn’t a debate, and there wouldn’t be much point in one if there were, because the course is set, the orders have been issued, the Empire is on auto-pilot and the politicians are just vulgar song and dance men (and women) drawing attention to themselves and, because they can’t do anything, promising to make vast changes, signifying very little. Like impotent old rouees telling each other dirty jokes and leering at young girls.
The political situation is very much like that which precedes a coup, when experts and military men, to public applause or at best apathy, shut down the legislature on the grounds that it is corrupt, ineffective and doing nothing to solve the real problems that people face. It is something that the US ruling class has done, albeit everywhere else in the world, with some regularity over the years, and defended without embarassment or shame.
Sooner or later the Empire always comes home and even the most decorative parodies of democracy are swept aside in favour of more serviceably authoritarian models, featuring Juntas, Fuhrers, Duces or Big Brothers.
Maybe it could be called the Red White And Blue Revolution.

Posted by: bevin | Sep 8 2011 21:43 utc | 8

Here’s Rick Perry saying that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD83XZOjPyU
But no one is making millions, much less billions, by managing the Social Security budget. That alone should tell us that Social Security is NOT a Ponzi scheme.
So it should be obvious to any of you here, as it is to me, that the moneybags on Wall Street are paying Perry to peddle this lie that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Then once Perry and other Wall Street toadies get done thoroughly duping the public into believing that Social Security is some sort of criminal Ponzi scheme that needs to be shut down, then Goldman Sachs and other moneybags on Wall Street will be free to get their grubby little thieving hands on Social Security and turn it into their own personal Ponzi scheme to loot and pillage for fun and profit.
They know, as all criminals do, that one of the surest ways to get away with being a criminal is to dupe others into believing that their victim is the criminal.

Posted by: Cynthia | Sep 9 2011 0:30 utc | 10

Increasingly, I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there could be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital….
I know that as a consequence of my fund raising I became more like the donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardships of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people I‘d entered public life to serve.
—- Barack Obama, Audacity of Hope p. 136-137

It was the Wall Street Democrats, as much as the GOP, that dismantled the rules protecting labor, and increased the rules protecting capital. As many have noted, decisions that matter have already been decided at the think tank level, long before they reach Congress. A short explanation of the process is given by Robert Rubin, interviewed by William Greider in 2006 at The Nation -Born-Again Rubinomics A More complete history is detailed by Robert Kuttner in his book “A Presidency in Peril”
As Kuttner states “Wall Street Democrats are characteristically liberal on foreign policy, race, and human rights, centrists on many issues such as alleviating poverty and school, reform, and deeply conservative on financial regulation and taxation”. The “good cop/ bad cop” scenario may make for good drama, but it is “much ado about nothing” and a mere distraction to give the illusion that what the bottom 99 percent want matters.
Obama has purged his economics team of all but Wall Street Democrats. Those excluded include:
Jerad Bernstein, Laura Tyson, Austen Goolsbee, James Galbraith, Robert Reich, Dean Baker, Christina Romer, Joe Stiglitz, Bill Black, Elizabeth Warren, Daniel Tarrulo, Paul Krugman, Mike Thoma, Brad deLong, Paul Volker, Karen Kornbluh, Elizabeth Warren.
What remains are hard core representatives of wealth.
MofA asks the key question: What then is the way out? Love, patience,courage, and understanding. Power is not given up willingly. People MUST speak up and refuse to be complicit with evil.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
“One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was to fill this want. It was a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.”
This is from Joan Robinson. It’s about using economics as an ideological defense of wealth. Keep in mind as you read this that it was written in 1936, not today.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
— Joan Robinson
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” –Nietzsche

Posted by: erichwwk | Sep 9 2011 2:43 utc | 12

any claim that obama is being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do – e.g., charges that his family has been threatened if he doesn’t do what others demand – is nonsense.
Yes, it is. Obama was groomed for this for a very long time. He’s part of the Team. He’s a Technocratic minion to the Plutocracy, doing as he was trained, and as he is told to do. There is no blackmail here, or threats. He is a trained soldier who will be paid off dearly when he is finished destroying the Middle Class in the U.S.
Those who want true, real and everlasting change should not lament the destruction of the Middle Class, for it is the Middle Class that has allowed this all to take place. They believe in the illusory carrot, and continue to do the bidding of the extremely privileged few. The Middle Class are complicit, and if you really mean what you say, and truly care about the future of our species and all life on this planet, and in the Universe, then you know deep in your conscience, that the Middle Class must go, and that means the Stock Market must crash to zero because that’s the last leg holding up the Middle Class. So long as they still have their pensions and retirement, they will feel exceptional, and either look down their noses at the dispossessed as either lazy, unfortunate, or not blessed.
Not until they walk that path will they realize it’s none of the above, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, join in solidarity with those they have effectively ignored for so many years, despite feigned concern by some well-meaning, but ineffectual few.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Sep 9 2011 11:09 utc | 14

what makes you think middle class boomers believe in the carrot?
Because I walk amongst them every day. They believe in the dangling carrot. They believe in the Rags To Riches myth. They believe that economic success is achieved through hard work. It is that belief that keeps them firmly in place doing the bidding of Plutocracy. Without the delusional Middle Class, the Plutocracy cannot survive…..not yet, but I’ll be damned if they’re not trying to change that with their technological Singularity.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Sep 9 2011 12:13 utc | 16

MB @ 14: Exactly so, and even as we write, the monied elites are planning, through their sycophants like Obama, the complete take over of the U.S. system. Ah yes, the “Global Plantation” is coming to the good ole U.S.A.

Posted by: ben | Sep 9 2011 13:12 utc | 18

@17, it goes something like this. I’m not saying I’m a Marxist, although I agree with many of his criticism of Capitalism, and some of his methods for disarming it.
http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/docs/021.html

The Marxian classification broadly and very satisfactorily divides modern industrial communities into three broad sections–the greater and dominant capitalism, which is practically in control; the smaller capitalism which has lost control but which stubbornly and incessantly maintains the fight against the greater capitalism, and the proletariat which is practically, so far, a negligible quantity.
The Marxian theory predicates the destruction of the petit bourgeois and the forcible thrusting of that somewhat unpleasant individual into the pit of proletarianism whence he is to come forth as an avenging angel and to repay his sufferings at the hands of the greater capitalism by the destruction of the latter.
But here we encounter somewhat of a check for the beaten petit bourgeois does not to any extent take sides with the proletarian and does not furnish that leadership and brains to the proletarian movement which it was confidently expected that he would. On the other hand, the later decades have been marked by the growth of what is called “the new middle class” which is not revolutionary. Indeed, the whole Bernstein controversy which has occupied so much space and generated so much heat rests precisely on this undeniable fact.
If we look at the matter from a practical and concrete standpoint it is easily understood why this is so.
When a trust takes over the field of an industry it disposes of its opponents two ways. It buys them out and takes the best brains of the smaller industry into its own service, the rest it annihilates by sheer force of economic superiority. It is obviously true that the more vigorous portion of the petite-bourgeoisie thus assimilated by the trust does not become revolutionary. On the contrary, its interests are henceforth identified with the interests of the trust of which it has become employee.
Economically, the smaller capitalist has been crushed out by this process, he has become a proletarian in receipt of a salary. Obviously he cannot be generally described as a capitalist large or small, and, according to the Marxian idea, he ought to be ranged with the proletarian class, but, as a matter of fact, he is no proletarian. He becomes a good servant of his new master, he accepts the political views of his new master as a good servant should, and he is not to be reckoned as a force with the revolution but as a distinct acquisition to the power of his destroyer.
Besides this, large numbers of the middle class are shareholders in the greater capitalist concerns. The Pennsylvania R. R. has twenty-five thousand shareholders and the steel trust an even greater number. In fact, the capital of the great trusts rests largely upon the subscribed capital of middle-class stockholders. It is clear that the economic interests of these people are not with any other than the greater capitalism into which they have become merged.
The small fish swallowed is transformed into part of the shark, and the petit-bourgeois losing his economic identity is absorbed in the Nirvana of the greater capitalism.

It should not be the goal to protect, maintain, and perpetuate the above. In fact, we should welcome the dissolution of the process described above. For sure, it will be painful and there will be gnashing of teeth, but at least that sacrifice wouldn’t be pointless and groundless, as will be the case if nothing is done at all. Because, as we all know, the Middle Class is being dismantled in this Go For Broke phase, and don’t think those who are responsible, won’t turn us against each other in order to prevent us from turning against them.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Sep 9 2011 13:23 utc | 20

“…we should welcome the dissolution of the process described above…”

america will be dissoluted, no matter what.
it’s just too goddamned bad that people who never outgrew their marxism have also acquired, somewhere along the way, a belief in their racial superiority, and that superiority enttitles them to lie, cheat, steal, terrorize, and murder.
the dissolution would have been much more civilized if these people hadnt exploited their persecution myth to gain so much power.
barbarians presiding over the dissolution… such a deal.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 13:36 utc | 22

i got to say it’s pretty hard to maintain the jewish persecution myth when jews seem to be running the Fed, the US government, and the media…
israel is a problem for everyone, seeing as how it’s damaging jewishness and the persecution myth… so maybe the rothschilds or the Fed will nuke israel, thus rehabbing the persecution myth…
the attack will be blamed on oily muslims, and judeo-christianity will finally be able to take its gloves off, abandon its pretenses of humanitarian intervention, grab the oil, and be done with it.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 13:43 utc | 24

Ben, we better learn the following, post haste. It will help get us through the day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSJZ12iMzvQ
I’m renting Roots and watching again for the tenth time this weekend. Maybe I’ll throw the HBO series Rome in there too, for good measure.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Sep 9 2011 13:45 utc | 26

“…Jews will not be the next scapegoat….”

sure they will, that’s how they make their living, it’s part of jewish philosphy… well, they might not be the next scapegoat, but sooner or later they will be the scapegoats, because that’s the way it works.
how else can you the barbaric behavior of big jews who now control america? …they know they’re going to be blamed, they know little jews will suffer, and they know little jews expect to be persecuted, and they know jews are virtuosos whiners… it’s just how it is.
so the big dogs get away with the loot, the little people have their expectations of persecution fulfilled, little jews hining gains enough sympathy to set up the next cycle, and everybody’s happy.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 13:59 utc | 28

As for me, I’ll continue to believe it’s an “avarice” thing, not a “Jewish” thing. The old saying “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, has never been so true. With the consolidation of the mega global corporations, and the financial sector, most of the west’s governments are operated at the behest of these interests.

Posted by: ben | Sep 9 2011 14:49 utc | 30

“…it’s an “avarice” thing, not a “Jewish” thing…”

jews have had 50 years of free lunch, because of their holocaust persecution myth… wouldnt you expect them, or anyone, to cash in on an advantage like that? …the worst predators, inspired by the worst of jewish philosophy, will rise to the top of the heap in a situation like that.
the problem comes when it’s time to pay the piper, because the barbarians who started tthese wars and are looting the country will be long gone, so the “justice” will be rough… the rougher, the better, from a big jew standpoint, because, after a few decades on nonstop whining, that rough justice will be the foundation for the next persecution myth, and that new persecution myth can be exploited to achieve another period of jewish dominance.
lord knows we need a new persecution myth, because there’s as many holes in the holocaust story as there are holes in the official 9/11 conspiracy theory…
…which is probably not entirely coincidental.

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 17:58 utc | 32

[deleted – b.]

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 20:55 utc | 34

[deleted – b.]

Posted by: lead.and.lag | Sep 9 2011 22:21 utc | 36

What then is the way out?
The rank & file seem to be wasting time waiting for a Gandhi to emerge and lead them, peacefully, to salvation. When they’ve had time to find a dream worth dying for, and an an Attila the Hun to lead them, salvation will quickly follow.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Sep 10 2011 1:50 utc | 38

“What then is the way out?”
That’s the real question to be answered, B.
We (pretty much global humanity… especially “advanced”, interconnected “industrialized” nations) passed the tipping point of implosion years ago. Some of ’em set those dominoes (implosion) rolling more then others (US… especially Bush era) a lot more then others. But the others participated as well.
And the larger consciousness of humanity, currently, is mostly informed by the general conditions within wherever they are, of their current “status” within all this. Some are a little more correct in identifying the forces driving all this stuff, some a little less, but they all are more or less just looking out for whatever they want/need in their given environment, not seeing the whole thing, their place in that, and speaking to it with authority, as to the huge hazards for everyone here.
And those hazards are… generally, that populations all over this rock have skyrocketed. And there is dramatically less resources that we all need… just the basics (food, water, shelter) per person, wherever they are, then just 10 years ago. Commensurate with that, happening all at the same time in this cascade of stupid, is more stupid… meaning, various “leadership” wherever they are, trying to fit 10/20/50 year old ideas into the entirely, completely transformed circumstances today, which demand “stuff” which can only come from people, in order to meet these (let’s call them challenges), knwing that we need to find ways to do more with less, provide means by which intelligent/clear minded (enlightened?) humans can both convince the others these present realities exist, much less get some critical mass momentum, built by agreement of enough of the people (critical mass) so that we can find ways to re-create (really, just identify accurately the state of things that matter on this planet) goals and things that need done, then begin to work for them.
So in answer to your question, looks to me like we’ve had some years now of plenty of (my term) “smart” people, like yourself… pointing out what was wrong. It just hasn’t worked. Meaning… the cascading ignorance (dominoes) these recent years, well… it’s continuing to cascade. And the growing populations and resource relationsips to them… things are becoming more acute. Food production is near it’s “Hubert Peak”, we’re using 75+ year old dirty, shitty energy sources, and those profiting from it are holding the world hostage to keep things that way, while humanity has vast stores of knowledge to replace it all entirely, if a focused effort is made… in a few short years.
So it seems clear as hell, that the answer to your question is obvious. That laregly, humanity is asleep. They are vastly minsinformed, and believe all that, thus… just in the process of <<<< that, actively participating in keeping things the same, while circumstances beyond their immediate awareness are conspiring to further constrict their lives… and most everyone is asleep about that.
Seems clear as hell, somehow, people need to be woken up. Telling them what is wrong, well… it hasn’t got the job done. Waking up means seeing clearly, a whole bunch (critical mass) of people, seeing this whole big picture with their own eyes, and in doing so… just in the process of that, they’ll start to “get it”, that the “it” is… we need a whole new vision of the future that fits realites as they exist now, and we don’t have all that much time to fuck around with it.
We need to make available to people everywhere all the knowledge humans collectiving have, and start making us of in order to make, and into the future… ensure, that this rock we’re travelling on remains a liveable space.
Printing a few more $$, or moving one nation’s $$ to another who (it seems) doesn’t have enough of ’em… sheesh, we all may as well just sit down and scratch our balls, ’cause either activity is equally guaranteed to keep us stuck.
You need a new paradigm B. None of any of this stuff (and you’ve kicked open a bunch of doors with open eyed, intelligent inquiry/discover over the MofA years)… but it hust hasn’t gotten the larger picture changed or clear, in a way that makes a difference. Know what’s wrong doesn’t inform of what needs to be, so that, from what needs to be, action/activing/purpose/realization can be brought forth meaningfully, so that life is good for the greater preponderance of people in all our tomorrows.
I suggest to you that, the thing that needs to be done, is be with as many people as you can, in a way, that they start opening their eyes and looking… seeing what’s there… bursting their cocoon deceiving belief bubbles, and replacing it with acknowledgement of reality. Get enough people doing that, you’ll begin to have a critical mass of people starting to “move” things, to wherever they need to be for our tomorrows.

Posted by: jdmckay | Sep 10 2011 15:07 utc | 40

one reason for a unfavourable viwe of congress is most congress persons are bought and paid for by the zionists and serve israel.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/11/the_greatest_elected_body_that_money_can_buy
this is what happens when a society values money too much, ad allows polticians to accept money gifts

Posted by: brian | Sep 14 2011 22:03 utc | 42