isn't it impossible to be violent against the most powerful military political economy on the planet?

bnarchives |  On April 16, 2014, we published a short article in the Indian fortnightly Frontline, titled 'Profit from Crisis'. Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we'll call 'Mr. X'. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was 'terribly flawed'. It 'failed miserably' in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing 'tremendous harm'. This note deconstructs Mr. X's protestations in the context of the current capitalist angst.

Over the past few years, we have written a series of articles about the global crisis. [1] These papers try to break the conventional constrains of liberalism and Marxism, examining the crisis from the new theoretical viewpoint of capital as power. Capitalists and corporations, we argue, are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’ and increase their differential power. In this approach, the redistribution of income and assets is not a ‘societal’ side effect of the economy, but the central conflict that propels modern capitalism. And the main weapon in this struggle, we claim, is not investment and growth, but what the American political economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘strategic sabotage’ – the restrictions, limitations, hazards and pains that capitalists impose on the rest of society in order to sustain and augment their differential power.

Now, until 2011, distribution was a non-issue. Save for a few ivory-tower experts and justice-seeking activists, nobody spoke about it. It received little media coverage, let alone headlines, and elicited no meaningful debate. But with the global crisis lingering and upward redistribution continuing unfazed, the Occupy slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ has finally gained traction. Suddenly, inequality and the excesses of the Top 1% are hot commodities, broadcast, discussed and written about all over the media.

The debate itself, though, remains largely conservative. The protest movements succeeded in putting distribution on the political table, but they haven’t figured how to take this achievement forward. So far, they have produced no new policy template, let alone a new theoretical framework, and this vacuum has left the political centre-stage open for policymakers, leading academics and Noble Laureates to recycle their worn-out platitudes.

In order to buck this trend, however symbolically, we wrote a short, pointy article titled ‘Why Capitalists Do Not Want Recovery, and What That Means for America’. The paper delivered a clear massage, backed by two highly contrarian graphs. The graphs showed that, contrary to the conventional creed, both mainstream and heterodox, accumulation thrives on crisis and sabotage. They demonstrated that, over the past century, the capitalist share of U.S. domestic income and the income share of the Top 1% have been tightly correlated not with growth and prosperity, but with unemployment and stagnation.

Looking for a publisher, we started with the two bastions of American liberalism: The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. We sent them the article, free of charge, but neither replied. We then moved to England, emailing the paper to The Guardian. Again, silence. Our last stop was The London Review of Books. This time we got a polite response, stating that the article ‘isn’t quite right for us’.

Clearly, the enlightened capitalist press wasn’t particularly keen on showcasing the power basis of accumulation. The article was too counterintuitive for readers to digest and too politically incorrect for advertisers to subsidize. It suggested that upward redistribution and its associated sabotage were not unfortunate manifestations of ‘social injustice’, but the twin drivers of capital accumulation. And that message, apparently, was unpublishable.

There was no point banging our heads against the wall. It was time to head elsewhere. And since salvation always comes from the East, we turned to the emerging market of India. Unlike in the United States and England, capitalism in India is still being debated, including in the mainstream press. So we submitted the article to Frontline, a fortnightly magazine published by The Hindu Group. And to our pleasant surprise, it was promptly accepted, as is, and appeared in the very next issue (Nitzan and Bichler 2014). One must admit that globalization does have its upsides.

The Letter
Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we’ll call ‘Mr. X’. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was ‘terribly flawed’. It ‘failed miserably’ in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing ‘tremendous harm’:

uncle pookie not the only one forbidden from telling the truth...,

rsn |  n a closed-room meeting of the Trilateral Commission last Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israel is on the verge of becoming an Apartheid state, according to a recording obtained by The Daily Beast.

The remark will raise a firestorm of criticism from Palestine-deniers, who are if anything more blindered and fanatical than climate-change deniers. What is sad is that Kerry phrased it in the future tense. That cow was out of the barn a long time ago.

As the Daily Beast noted, the Rome Statute defined Apartheid as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

Former South African deputy president Baleka Mbete and African National Congress leader has said that Israel-Palestine is actually “far worse than Apartheid South Africa.”

Israeli society inside 1967 borders is not broadly characterized by Apartheid conditions, though Palestinian-Israelis do labor under legal forms of discrimination. For instance, unless their villagers are “recognized,” they cannot receive water and other municipal services and are threatened with dispersal. Since no Jewish villages are unrecognized, this separate status for (indigenous!) Palestinian-Israeli villages is Apartheid-like. Still, the most thorough comparison of the Apartheid system of racial segregation with Israeli practices can only be made of the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians are ruled by Israel but kept stateless and without rights.

bomani jones spits the unvarnished in public and on the air

WaPo | At this point, it does appear likely that Sterling’s time as an owner is finally coming to a close, and not just because of the public outcry. Rather, the comments in the recording are starting to impact the one thing that we know actually gets leagues and owners to take decisive action: money. So far, Virgin America, CarMax, State Farm and Kia have all announced they are ending sponsorships of the Clippers, with others likely to follow. (State Farm runs those omnipresent Cliff Paul ads that feature Chris Paul, the star point guard for the Clippers and the president of the National Basketball Players Association; Blake Griffin, the other star Clipper, has an endorsement deal with Kia.)

These announcements seem to mark the beginning of the end for Sterling. We saw this just a few months ago in Arizona, where a controversial bill would have let businesses deny service to gay customers. The bill was roundly criticized by many businesses, and it seemed like it could have endangered the state’s chances of hosting the next Super Bowl, so the bill was vetoed.

It’s unclear right now what the league will do. The NBA says it will make an announcement on Tuesday. Players have said they want the maximum possible punishment for Sterling. NBA commissioner Adam Silver (who took that job in February) referenced “broad powers in place under the NBA’s constitutional bylaws” in discussing what sanctions could follow an investigation.

We don’t know what is actually in these bylaws because they aren’t public (something taxpayers should remember the next time an NBA team asks for millions to upgrade their arena). But Jeffrey Kessler, a sports lawyer who participated in talks during the NBA’s lockout in 2011 (amid some controversy), said he thinks the league could force the team’s sale. (Kessler also said it doesn’t matter if the recording was made illegally, because the NBA “is not a court of law.”) And Michael McCann noted that even though forcibly removing Sterling is unlikely, the NBA could just suspend him indefinitely.

The NBA will hold a news conference on Tuesday at 2 p.m. The Clippers host the Golden State Warriors for Game 5 of their playoff series a little more than eight hours later.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

from the kwaku net: pookie's very last day on the job, ever...,

Donald Sterling, thank you for your honesty (they are the enemy/ that was his words in the audio) and the players take the court 24 HOURS later in the hunt for a championship and most black men turn on the TV and watch….. That says it all. (That showed how absolute power works and the difference between an owner and an employee) and how dumbed down the consumers have become and how much control sports have over the masses.

Donald Sterling said he did not want you in his arena, what part of that did you not understand? There is no need for a  great debate or some public apologies and the last thing we needed  was to let Doc Rivers have his let’s have a team meeting moment or chicken George AKA Charles BARKLEY opinion or any other coonery there was an opportunity to take a stand and once again we chose to be the cowards that we have become, from this point on if you are a black man in America shut the hell up and get back to work……  you race of cowards you race of good for nothings.

Black men are real tough when it comes to fighting and killing each other and tearing down their community and marrying white women and buying  Jordan’s and flooding our community with bastard babies but when it comes to fighting against white supremacy you become cowards….  Most Black man have become a Joke around the world….. Useless creatures, powerless modern slaves.   

We need more Donald Sterling moments and maybe channels on the idiotic box (TV) were all they do is let billionaires speak truth without emotional intelligence and allow the truth to flow like water. 

The masses are not only sleep they have fallen into a coma and the players taking the court on sunday were more despicable then a billionaire speaking his truth, there is nothing they can do to Donald Sterling he is not Pac man Jones.  He is the OWNER worst case they vote him out the league…… so what, he is still a billionaire and will push his agenda behind closed doors……. That is the reality of a billionaire vs the reality of peasant employees, Doc Rivers and the clipper players are no more then hired help.  If you don’t know what that looks like watch the game tonight and watch the LA Mandingo Clippers play in the LA plantation coliseum. We need more Donald Sterling moments.   

LeBron had the nerve to say this is our league we are a league of 80% black men….. Shut the hell up you don’t own a damn thing get your ass back in the lay-up line before we turn this into a whites only league boy, if it was not for white men you boys would not have a league, you don’t own a damn thing.

Black AMERICA needs to stop it. You don’t own any thing.  Get back in line and wait for the next game to come on the Idiot box, idiots.  There is nothing you can do because you are a powerless people. Don’t fool yourself the only thing that can really happen is Donald Sterling agrees to move on because it is no longer worth the trouble….. That’s it. 

First you get the money and then you get the power, he has the power and the money and the idea of hundreds of millions of other white men and he said the truth in the audio (I feed and clothe all of them) the truth hurts does it black America. We hate the truth but the lies are killing us slowly thank you Mr. Donald Sterling for allowing the world to see what absolute power looks like live in HD. 

Black Folk don’t even have a platform that is black owned to talk about this subject, if you are getting your information from ESPN and Stephan A Smith and crew - you need your ASS kicked….if they speak one ounce of truth they are fired. Stay in your lane.  You are in employee not the owner of ESPN we all know who owns that.

We are a group without power and there are many sick cowards in the village and I had to avoid listening or reading the response from Black men over the weekend. It was a lot of noise and slave talk and very little empowerment talk. Until we start practicing black empowerment like every other group does, and start owning things like white America does, and collaborating together like the Asians do, shut the hell up and watch the game you group of buffoons.

Time to move past watching sports....

The best thing that happened over the weekend for me, I had no idea that any of this was going on with the Clippers until after the fact. 

I have not watched any NBA this year and will never watch another game outside of a social environment where I have no control over the content.  I have no idea what is going on in the world of sports outside of sports law, social political and sports business - and I believe I will keep it that way.

I stop watching ESPN two years ago and the NBA/NFL/MLB is about to be on the same level as BET and MTV at my house permanently blocked…..have not watched that garbage in over five years. Time for a some new outlets.  Sports is a big soap opera and there is a lot of Shuckin' and jiving' going on in the world of sports.

There is a group in America that is not playing games and you will not find any of them in the layup line or the tackling drills in the NFL because they will leave that to the Mandingos because they are too busy owning and controlling the world. They own everything we do and every move we make.  If you like it or not, that is the reality of the game, no one cares about black rage because like he said……. we still own you.

Thank you once again Donald Sterling for teaching the real game it’s not called Basketball or football or baseball it’s called unapologetic power in the land of capitalism and if you don’t like it - who gives a damn?

tokowitz(sterling) a sad old shakespearian cuckold with "a" bullying iago?

powerlineblog |  The more you learn about the story, the stranger it gets. If you listen to the tapes, which have been made public by TMZ and Deadspin, it is hard to make sense of them. Sterling doesn’t want Stiviano to put up photos of herself with African-Americans on Instagram or bring them with her to Los Angeles Clippers games. He says he doesn’t care if she associates or sleeps with black people, just don’t put them up on Instagram. An odd distinction! His request was motivated, evidently, by the fact that one or more of Sterling’s friends called him to comment on the Instagram photos. While Sterling never says this, reading between the lines it appears that someone must have teased him about his mistress consorting with blacks. 

What makes this bizarre is that Stiviano herself if black and Mexican, a fact that she reminds Sterling of during their argument. The situation is otherworldly, in that Sterling seems not to have noticed that his own girlfriend is black.

So Donald Sterling emerges as a pathetic figure: a reverse image of Othello, a doddering old man with a young black mistress who cheats on him. He understands, but asks her not to embarrass him before his friends. He may also be suffering from dementia. For a billionaire, he makes precious little sense on the tape(s). But then, most of us probably wouldn’t make much sense to outsiders if tapes of our domestic arguments were made public. Not a single person has defended Sterling, to my knowledge.

So an 80-year-old man with a much younger, mixed-race girlfriend is sexually insecure–go figure! He has a friend, a negative-image Iago, who plays on his insecurity and teases him when the mistress posts pictures with black men, however innocent they may be. So the old man asks her not to do it. She can spend all day with black men and even sleep with them, he says, just don’t post photos or attend Clippers games with them. But the young woman already has one foot out the door, and she illegally records her conversation with the old man, and then turns it over to two of the most disreputable gossip sites on the internet.

On the tape, Donald Sterling says, “I love the black people.” I can’t vouch for his sincerity, but there is nothing in the DMZ/Deadspin tapes that belies that sentiment. It is telling that this domestic upheaval between an aging billionaire and his gold-digging, disloyal mistress represents the best the Left can come up with to support its claim that racism and the “legacy of race and slavery and segregation” are alive and well. As for Sterling, he is merely collateral damage.

should I reconsider my disdain for the lowly sex-worker?

yahoo |  We already know plenty about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, by the numbers the worst owner in major professional sports and the target of a torrent of lawsuits regarding his off-court business dealings and conduct. But what about the other alleged voice on the tape? What do we know about V. Stiviano, Sterling's frequent guest at Clippers games?

Her real name is Vivian. Perhaps. Stiviano changed her name from Vanessa Maria Perez in 2010, claiming in court filings that she had not "yet been fully accepted because of my race." She claims to be of both Hispanic and African-American descent."One day I will look back at Instagram & say,'I've been there & I've done that.' I do it all," she says on her Instagram page, billing herself as "Artist,Lover,Writer,Chef,Poet, Stylist, Philanthropist." Of note: a lawsuit filed against her by Sterling's wife (more on this later) names her as "V Stiviano, aka Vanessa Maria Perez, aka Monica Gallegos, aka Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, aka Maria Valdez.”

She's a social-media maven. The popularity of her Instagram page, the source of this latest controversy, has exploded, and now stands at more than 144,000 followers. That makes this a bad time for her website to be simply a parked GoDaddy domain.

She is the target of a lawsuit from Sterling's wife. Most of the information about the 31-year-old Stiviano derives from court papers related to a lawsuit filed by the 80-year-old Sterling's estranged wife Rochelle. The lawsuit, filed in March, claims that Sterling met Stiviano at the Super Bowl in 2010, and that Stiviano “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men.” The suit charges that Rochelle Sterling believed the $1.8 million duplex in which Stiviano now resides was being purchased in the Sterlings' names, and that Stiviano has received gifts including four cars (two Bentleys, one Ferrari, and one Range Rover) and about $240,000 in "living expenses." The allegation, then, is that Donald Sterling gave Stiviano about $2 million in community property without Rochelle Sterling's knowledge.

She claims she didn't release the tape to TMZ. Stiviano's attorney, Mac Nehoray, said in a statement that Stiviano "did not release the tape to any news media. Due to the present litigation [from Rochelle Sterling] and its absurd allegations, which Ms. Stiviano vehemently denies, Ms. Stiviano and this office have no comments at this time.”

She hasn't admitted to being Sterling's girlfriend. "Neither Ms. Stiviano, nor this office has ever alleged that Ms. Stiviano is, or ever was, Mr. Sterling's girlfriend," Nehoray said in a statement. Stiviano further countered Rochelle Sterling's claims that she bewitched Sterling, saying in court papers that it was absurd to believe the "feminine wiles of Ms. Stiviano overpowered the iron will of Donald T. Sterling who is well known as one of the most shrewd businessmen in the world." However, she has been listed as a director of the Donald T. Sterling Foundation.

kareem didn't do jeet kune do very well either...,

time |  And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.

They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.

I don’t blame them. I’m doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.

the story of America's rise to power starting in 1959 using nothing but archive footage and American pop music

America, the media, the apologists, the enablers: "We don't know if the tape is legitimate": RIGHT!!!

WaPo | Salters asked Shelly if it was her husband’s voice on the tape released Saturday by TMZ. “I don’t know,” Shelly Sterling said. “I haven’t listened to the entire thing, but I do believe there are some parts that were cut out. I will let the experts handle that.”

Deadspin has an extended version of the recording that’s 15 minutes long.

Shelley Sterling is suing V. Stiviano, her estranged husband’s girlfriend and the woman whose voice is on the recordings released to TMZ, in a lawsuit that predates the tape. Shelly states that she believes Stiviano “engages in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce, and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat, and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men whom she targets for such purpose,” according to a copy of the lawsuit posted online by EveryJoe.com.

Basically, Shelly Sterling thinks her husband’s girlfriend is a gold digger, and she wants a judge to declare the same.

Stiviano is also identified by the aliases Vanessa Maria Perez, Monica Gallegos, Maria Monica Perez Gallegos, and Maria Valdez.

The lawsuit, filed in superior court for Los Angeles County on March 7, appears to be Shelley Sterling suing for the return of gifts her husband gave to Stiviano, which she’s asking be considered community property. The list includes a 2012 Ferrari, two Bentleys and a 2013 Range Rover, along with $240,000 in living expenses. Essentially, Shelly is saying Donald didn’t have the right to give the gifts, so Stiviano should return them. Stiviano has refused. Earlier reports, based on a statement by the Clippers, said that Sterling was suing Stiviano for embezzling $1.8 million from the Clippers. However, there’s no mention of this in the lawsuit, only the $1.8 million Los Angeles duplex Sterling bought for his girlfriend.

Said the Associated Press:

Clippers President Andy Roeser said in a statement that the team did not know if the tape is legitimate or has been altered. He said the woman on the tape, identified by TMZ as V. Stiviano, “is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Sterling family alleging that she embezzled more than $1.8 million, who told Mr. Sterling that she would ‘get even.’”

why did stern and silber turn a blind eye to the slumlord billionaire all this time?

Donald Sterling -- NEW AUDIO RELEASED ... I Put Food on Black People's Tables

rsn |  Sterling is narcissistic and CliffsNotes literate enough to present himself as a self-made Gatsbian figure. He even has “white parties” at his Bevery Hills home where guests all wear white “like in the book.” He’s a Gatsbian who never read The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was running from his past, hiding his rough background behind the artifice of taste and wealth. Sterling presents himself as the tony developer of high-end properties in the Hollywood Hills, and plays it much closer to the street. Sterling is also the Slumlord Billionaire, a man who made his fortune by building low-income housing, and then, according to a Justice Department lawsuit, developing his own racial quota system to decide who gets the privilege of renting his properties. In November of 2009, Sterling settled the suit with the US Department of Justice for $2.73 million, the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals. Reading the content of the suit makes you want to shower with steel wool. Sterling just said no to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and just said hell-no to African-Americans looking for property in plush Beverly Hills. Sterling, who has a Blagojevichian flair for the language, says he did not like to rent to “Hispanics” because “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” He also stated that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”

The Slumlord Billionaire has a healthy legal paper trail, which creates a collage of someone very good at extorting rents from the very poor. In 1986, the spiking of rents in his Beverly Hills properties—the so-called “slums of Beverly Hills”—led to a large march by tenants on City Hall.

Former NBA commissioner David Stern, always so PR-conscious when it comes to where players mingle, how players dress, whom players consort with after hours, has turned a blind eye to this disturbing pattern. Now these chickens have returned to Stern’s back porch to roost. There is a second racism lawsuit buzzing around Sterling’s helmet of hair.

Sterling’s other lawsuit comes from inside his own NBA offices: his long-time general manager Elgin Baylor. Baylor, an NBA legend with the Los Angeles Lakers, has spent more than two decades making a series of personnel decisions that have ranged from depressing to enraging. Baylor’s was called without irony by a television commentator as “veteran of the lottery process” watching the ping-pong balls bounce around to see who gets the number-one pick. The Clippers draft picks under Baylor’s tenure—and their entire roster—have largely been a dyspeptic horror show. According to Baylor, one reason for their continued ineptitude was Sterling in telling Baylor he wanted to fill his team with “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach.” 

10 things I learned about the world from ayn rand's insane atlas shrugged...,

rsn |  ver the past year, I've been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand's massive paean to capitalism [3], Atlas Shrugged. If you're not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.

Rand's protagonists are Dagny Taggart, heir to a transcontinental railroad empire, and Hank Rearden, the head of a steel company who's invented a revolutionary new alloy which he's modestly named Rearden Metal. Together, they battle against evil government bureaucrats and parasitic socialists to hold civilization together, while all the while powerful industrialists are mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind only the cryptic phrase "Who is John Galt?"

Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as far as many prominent conservatives are concerned, it's sacred scripture. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle, and opposed regulation of financial markets because he believed her dictum that the greed of businessmen was always the public's best protection. Paul Ryan said that he required his campaign staffers to read the book, while Glenn Beck has announced grandiose plans to build his own real-life "Galt's Gulch," the hidden refuge where the book's capitalist heroes go to watch civilization collapse without them.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like entering into a strange mirror universe where everything we thought we knew about economics and morality is turned upside down. I've already learned some valuable lessons from it.

who is calling donald sterling and breaking his balls?!?!? everything else is frivolous conversation....,

cbssports |  Deadspin.com has obtained a longer version of the tape that contains a man alleged to be Donald Sterling making, somehow, even more disturbingly racist comments than the version released by TMZ on Saturday. In the 15-minute cut of the tape that features discussions of Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp, Israel, and the Holocaust, the man alleged to be Sterling makes it clear he feels he does enough for the black players he employs:

V: I don't understand, I don't see your views. I wasn't raised the way you were raised.
DS: Well then, if you don't feel -- don't come to my games. Don't bring black people, and don't come.
V: Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?
DS: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

via Exclusive: The Extended Donald Sterling Tape.

national association for the advancement of certain people been licking and sucking them crusty toes for years...,

IBT | In a tweet Saturday evening, the California state NAACP, said: "As the investigation is in progress, we urge the LA Branch of the NAACP to withdraw Donald Sterling from the honoree list." The president of the California state NAACP, Alice Huffman, said, "Racism is not a footnote of our past but a reality of our present we must confront head on."

Despite Sterling's long history of racism, he has been honored twice previously by the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, shortly after former Clippers general manager, Elgin Baylor, filed an employment discrimination claim against him. Sterling also received the NAACP Presidents Award in 2008.

The branch's president, Leon Jenkins, attempted in 2009 to explain why the august civil rights group would honor a man many consider a racist. Jenkins began, by telling the Los Angeles Times, that the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter had planned to honor Sterling long before Baylor’s lawsuit. Seeming to sense the inadequacy of that response, Jenkins added the Clippers owner and real estate mogul's years of service to Los Angeles minority community.

“He has a unique history of giving to the children of L.A.,” Jenkins told the Los Angeles Times, then. "We can't speak to the allegations, but what we do know is that for the most part [Sterling] has been very, very kind to the minority youth community."

Sterling is no stranger to racism accusations and has settled several discrimination lawsuits. He settled a lawsuit confidentially in 2005 that accused him of discriminating against black and Hispanic tenants at properties he owned. In another housing discrimination lawsuit in 2009, he paid $2.7 million to settle the claim. Sterling denied wrongdoing and said the settlement wasn't an admission of guilt, according to the L.A. Times.

cliven bundy a saint: old lizard likes its crusty toes sucked and licked....,

nydailynews | Eighty-year-old rich man dictates life's terms to younger woman, tells her what she can and cannot do. Sex with black men? OK. Hanging out publicly with black men? Not OK.

Ick. Nobody seems to mind that part of the tape, those paternalistic, sexist ramblings. And none of it should come as a surprise, because Sterling's disrespect for women, verging on the criminal, has been on display and purposefully ignored for more than a decade. In 2003, he sued a mistress, Alexandra Castro, demanding back property she claimed he'd given her. In a deposition obtained and made public by TheSmokingGun.com back in August, 2004, Sterling's graphic, repulsive testimony was shockingly Neanderthal — and earned him no suspension from David Stern.

In excerpts from that two-day pretrial deposition, Sterling talks about how he enjoyed having his feet licked and toes sucked. And he goes a lot further:

"The girl was providing sex for money," Sterling said. "She was exciting. It was exciting. I have to tell you, and it was good. And it was delicious, and it was the best of the best. And maybe I morally did something wrong… I probably didn't tell my wife."

 There are also parts of his testimony in which his total disdain for women is horribly apparent:

"The girl always cried, never had any money, always talked about sex, 24 hours a day, when she talked to me, talked about sex and how I was so cheap. She just stripped every time you saw the woman. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

"I wouldn't have a child and certainly not with that piece of trash. Come on. This girl is the lowest form… She is a freak. A total freak… She would say anything I asked her to say, and I would say anything she asked me to say. It was purely sex for money, money for sex, sex for money, money for sex."

At one point, Sterling was asked whether he called Castro, "honey."

"I call everybody (that)," he said. "Every secretary is honey. I'm a very flowery man. If you are having sex with a woman you are paying for, you always call her honey because you can't remember her name."

babylon bubbling...,

cnn |  The racism controversy embroiling Don Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has reached half way around the world to Malaysia, where President Obama is on a diplomatic mission to Asia Pacific nations.

At a press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak Sunday, Obama was asked about racist comments Sterling allegedly made about African Americans.

"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk. That's what happened here," the President said.

Obama also said Sterling's alleged comments are an example of how "the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation."

"That's still there, the vestiges of discrimination. We've made enormous strides, but you're going to continue to see this percolate up every so often," Obama said in Malaysia.

Sterling, who has owned the basketball franchise for nearly three decades, is now under investigation by the NBA over the alleged comments.

According to the website TMZ, Sterling made the discriminatory remarks during a 10-minute argument he had with girlfriend V. Stiviano on April 9. TMZ posted a recording of the argument online Friday.

If authentic, the remarks seem to reflect Sterling's embarrassment and frustration with Stiviano over her associating with African-Americans at Clippers games and for posting such pictures on her Instagram account.

oooooo.., it's a cold day in babylon: who all donald sterling telling on?!?!?!?

Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF - Don't Bring Black People to My Games, Including Magic Johnson Fist tap Ed.

babylon-system cold busted using bacon's rebellion tricknology...,

Why did Adam Nagourney and the New York Times  and Oliver Willis at Media Matters knowingly lie on Cliven Bundy?

In Bundy's unedited remarks he said far more than what appeared in the New York Times and Media Matters - and all of the viral propaganda that has followed in the wake of these libelous original reports. 

... and so what I've testified to you -- I was in the Watts riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen that last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people are thinking they don't have their freedoms, they didn't have these things, and they didn't have them.

We've progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and we sure don't want to go back. We sure don't want the colored people to go back to that point. We sure don't want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.

Those comments appear to change the context of the next section, which was quoted in the New York Times. One clear point the rancher made: America has progressed since the 1965 race riots and "we sure don't want to go back."

Now watch the edited version of Bundy’s remarks as promoted by Media Matters and as reported in the NY Times:

gun-toting bootlicking uncle tom oreo negroe ready to take a bullet for bundy...,

dailymail |  Despite a collection of seemingly racist rants about 'negros,' slavery and 'picking cotton,' not everyone thinks Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is a racist, and one of the people defending the one-time far-right-wing folk hero is one of his bodyguards - who happens to be black.

Bullock was recently interviewed by CNN and asked, 'You're protecting this man and he's wondering whether African-Americans would be better off as slaves. How does that strike you?'

'It doesn't strike me any kind of way,' Bullock answered. 'This is still the same old Mr. Bundy I met from the first day of all this happening.'

Bullock says the things Bundy has been saying - 'wondering' if 'negros' were better off under slavery, and comparing himself to civil rights hero Rosa Parks, for example - don't offend him.

'Mr. Bundy is not a racist. Ever since I've been here he's treated me with nothing but hospitality,' Bullock told the reporter. 'He's pretty much treated me like his own family.'


He goes on to say that 'I would take a bullet for that man, if need be,' and that he 'look(s) up to him just like I do my grandfather.'

'I believe in his cause and after having met Mr. Bundy a few times, I have a really good feel about him and I'm a pretty good judge of character,' Bullock said.

why james baldwin beat william f. buckley in a debate 540-160

insidehighered | In 1965, James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union Society, Cambridge University. The topic of the debate was, “The American Dream is at the expense of the American negro.” 

At the time, James Baldwin was well-established as a prominent writer and civil rights figure, having published Notes from a Native Son ten years previously. Buckley was the still-young editor/founder of National Review, still to become the “father of modern conservatism,” thanks to his famous proclamation in his own magazine that, “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!' He’d prominently come out against desegregation in the pages of his own magazine in 1961.

At the Cambridge event, after some introductory arguments from a couple of the fellows, Baldwin delivers his remarks. The video is worth watching in its entirety to appreciate, at least visually, the size of the deck that seems stacked against him. The entire audience is white, looking very much like…William F. Buckley, who sits in his famous reclined nonchalance, that could and maybe should be read as arrogance.

Baldwin delivers his remarks slowly, somehow seeming both passionate and cool, like jazz. He is mesmerizing, as shown by the camera cutaways to the audience that sits rapt.

It almost seems unfair, a distortion, to excerpt Baldwin’s remarks because as a work of rhetoric, it surpasses even the best of Martin Luther King or JFK. In the opening, he acknowledges the trap of segregation for the segregationists, that what he is discussing is a fundamental inequality born of an unjust system in which individuals are only actors:

“The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity.”

He then makes deft use of the 2nd person in order to draw a circle around the experience of being black in 1960s America:

“In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”

A small ripple of laughter coursed through the Cambridge fellows at that moment. A laugh not of amusement, but recognition.

Baldwin shifts to the first person, reminding the audience that the man in front of them is indeed part of this “you”:

“From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country--the economy, especially in the South--could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing."

The Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave.”

Baldwin hammers the “I” in his delivery in the first part. The final lines of this passage are delivered in some combination of sorrow and disbelief.

Baldwin then returns to his theme that black America is not the only group being destroyed by this system:

“Sheriff Clark in Selma, Ala., cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me. But he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman's breasts. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. Their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color.”

Baldwin finishes with this:

“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.”

Baldwin received a standing ovation from the very white, very British audience. The announcer says in the video that he’s never seen such a reaction at these events before.

where's olivia pope when cliven needs her most?

wired |  Chris Cuomo: Are you a racist?

Cliven Bundy: No, I'm not a racist. But I did wonder that. Let me tell you something. I thought about this this morning quite a bit.

CC: Please.

CB: I thought about what Reverend Martin Luther King said. I thought about Rosa Park taking her seat at the front of the bus. Reverend Martin Luther King did not want her to take her seat in the front of the bus. That wasn't what he was talking about. He did not say go to the front of the bus and that's where your seat was. What Reverend King wanted was that she could sit anywhere in the bus and nobody would say anything about it. You and I can sit anywhere in the bus. That's what he wanted. That's what I want. I want her to be able to sit anywhere in the bus and I want to be able to sit by her any where in that bus. That's what he wanted. He didn't want this prejudice thing like the media tried to put on me yesterday. I'm not going to put up with that because that's not what he wanted. that's not what I want. I want to set by her anywhere on that bus and I want anybody to be able to do the same thing. That's what he was after, it's not a prejudice thing, but make us equal.

"I understand that Martin Luther King's message was one of peace and freedom," Cuomo said in reply, adding, "when you suggest that you were wondering if blacks were better off as slaves, that's the opposite of freedom and very offensive to people. I think you probably know that." He probably does not. Bundy continued (once again, emphasis ours): 

I  took this boot off so I wouldn't put my foot in my mouth with the boot on. Let me see if I can say something. Maybe I sinned and maybe I need to ask forgiveness and maybe I don't know what I actually said. But you know when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings. We're not freedom — we don't have freedom to say what we want. If I call — if I say 'negro' or 'black boy' or 'slave,' I'm — If those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet. They should be able to — I should be able to say those things and they shouldn't offend anybody. I didn't mean to offend them.

The pair went on to argue for most of the remainder of the lengthy interview about race, about Bundy's decision to show a dead calf on air, and about the Constitution. The exchange, to be honest, progresses rather quickly from shockingly offensive to the ramblings of an old man out of his depth. We think this snippet sums things up nicely: 

CB: I don't even know how to talk about these ethnic groups.

CC: Then don't.

CB: But I'm going to because I'm interested in those people. I think they should have freedom and liberty.

racist: it's like a magic spell to win arguments...,

I don't agree with Bundy's actions.

I don't agree with Bundy's views.

But what I genuinely dislike is the willful misrepresentation of Bundy's awkward statements - now broadly propagandized - with the intention to prevent further constructive dialogue. 

Constructive dialogue and action-oriented engagement is the only hope you idiotic, broken-machine deuterostems have got. So you better suck up all that hysterical nonsense, disingenuous misdirection,  and get down to serious business of finding some common ground.

Bundy did not say that you negroes had it good during slavery. Bundy openly wondered whether prior circumstances had you negroes doing better than current circumstances. What this means, and he is clear about this, is that the institutional racism - of  the last 40 years of failed social engineering policy - have enslaved your poor urban negroe cousins more insidiously than Simon Legree.

Considering the incarceration rates, the school dropout rates, the poverty and drug abuse rates, and your poor urban negroe cousins are undoubtedly enslaved in a go-nowhere, collapsed political economy. You are of course, as are they, quite free to run your mouths about the situation, say a whole lot about nothing, and do even less than you talk. Bundy is of course not entitled to open his mouth about what he thinks and sees.

Bundy is neither an articulate or an educated man. He made the mistake of publicly expressing the fact that he sometimes wonders which slavery is worse.  Wondering about this out loud and in public does not make Bundy racist. He misunderstands freedom and law. What he does understand, however, is the necessity of self-reliance. The spirit of self-reliance and genuine self-worth has been destroyed among many contemporary negroes to a large extent by, and most insidiously, by the very institutions that purport to help.

By applying the word racist to anyone who expresses an opinion that does not conform to the narrow orthodoxy of politically correct speech on any subject vaguely related to race or culture, the Cathedral and its minions have only themselves to blame for robbing the word of any meaning.

As racism is now a meaningless word, it is pointless arguing whether someone is or isn't a racist. It's an empty argument. Why bother.

So, what is actually interesting about the Bundy situation? Federal bureaucrats turned a simple enforcement of court rulings into a mess. All they needed to do was have the federal court order the lower court to give the county sheriff an order that Bundy be brought in front of the court by such and such a date. That would have been that.  The posse comitatus (power of the county) would have had to escort its kith and kin to the county seat for the proper exercise of sovereign authority that Bundy acknowledges.

Bundy in a nutshell

Bundy has had his day (multiple days) in Court.

Bundy has lost every time.

We are a nation of laws and Bundy is WRONG - period.

See how easy that was?  Labeling people and ideas is the mark of a lazy mind and a sloppy thinker. Engage with the relevant facts directly. In general, that's a far more challenging proposition than simply labeling things. In the case of Cliven Bundy, however, sticking to the facts is like shooting fish in a barrel.

No troops. No national TV on the evening news. If course, that would have been too easy - and the SWATs and the militias would not have had the chance to dress up and play war.

Bundy is proof that we all must work harder to improve educational opportunities in this country. And perhaps even promote more lifelong learning and interpersonal communion with people superficially different from ourselves. Cliven Bundy is a living, breathing "teachable moment".

That Bundy suggests slaves led a happy life or that black people mistakenly left the Paradise of the South, where they had everything they needed--jobs, chickens, gardens, children, and unincarcerated menfolk -  is a two-dimensional version of black American history we should all be ashamed of. In fact, it's a two-dimensional version of history jarringly at odds with the saga of his own displaced and "misunderstood" Mormon forbears.

When people lack knowledge and diverse friendships, they rely on stereotypes.

One would imagine that the purported educators in the race studies vestibule of the Cathedral would have seized upon the opportunity to grace poor, ignorant Cliven Bundy with the ineffable riches of their highly overrated "priors"..., instead, they've simply, disingenuously, and self-servingly labelled him a racist - and in so doing - carried water for an institutional apparatus that thinks nothing of allowing its minions to needlessly and foolishly dress up and play soldier with citizens over civil legal matters that have already been decided on the facts, under law, and that can be settled at the county level.

the league of extraordinary black gentlemen

theatlantic | This is my reality: As an upper-middle-class black male, I am seen as part of the solution class tasked with rescuing my nation from its problem and my race from itself. Yet, ever since my childhood, I’ve been held at arms-length by two cultures. Many of my black peers were bused in from the other side of town; after hearing my diction and learning I lived in a suburb replete with green lawns, two-car garages, and debris-free streets, they labeled me an Oreo, a well-worn slight indicating blackness on the outside and whiteness on the inside. Meanwhile, as the only black kid in my neighborhood or honors classes, I was called a “raisin in a bowl of milk.” Some of my white friends invited me to their homes for parties and sleepovers, but introduced me as their “black friend Teddy.” I was never black enough for the ’hood, but always too black to exist without a race modifier in my own neighborhood.

As adults, we Tenthers joke about having our “black cards revoked.” And in the next breath, we trade stories of professional connections that masquerade as interracial friendships—so dependent on code-switching that we envision them telling each other, “It’s almost like he’s not really black.”

Both sides make the same basic claim about us: we are exceptional. But they don’t mean this in the usual way, as an objective observation of personal excellence or meritocratic achievement. Instead, it’s an assertion that sets us apart from the rest of black America, implying that we’re oddly different and a little less Negro than the others. We’re anomalies wherever we go, considered less authentic than the brothers in the inner city and certainly less-than-totally acceptable to the larger society. The solution is at hand, and yet, the problem remains.

And what have we accomplished? Segregated schooling and housing practices still exist, though they are now economic and social conditions instead of legal enforcements. The Tenthers haven’t been able to change the rigorous policing and biased sentencing that have imprisoned vast swaths of our communities, eroding families in the process. Despite the economic success of our privileged circles, black wealth, income, and unemployment are perpetually at recession and depression rates. Key victories for voting rights are slowly being rolled back. The results of all this include children who fall behind in school before they are even enrolled, health disparities made worse by poverty and racism, and public policy that maintains systemic inequalities.

The reality is, of course, we Tenthers were never the answer to begin with. We bought into the idea that education, personal fortitude, and hard work would be enough to overcome history and raze barriers to equality. But in the process, we’ve set ourselves apart from the two communities we were created to bring together.

How does it feel to be a solution? It feels like social carpetbagging, always code-switching to blend in with whichever environ we happen to be in. This is more than just a social survival skill; it’s become a matter of identity. There is no turning it off, only tuning the rheostat. We will never completely fit in America, and will always be confronted by preconceived notions. DuBois charged us with relieving the burdens of “an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.” Yet, we are an exercise in insufficiency.

only someone who's never gone toe-to-toe with a real racist would get his panties in a bunch over bundy's remarks...,

the truth is out: money is an iou and banks are rolling in it...,

guardian | Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

dementia sufferers have a duty to die...,

telegraph |  The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.

Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as "immoral" and "barbaric", but also sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters.

Lady Warnock, a former headmistress who went on to become Britain's leading moral philosopher, chaired a landmark Government committee in the 1980s that established the law on fertility treatment and embryo research.

A prominent supporter of euthanasia, she has previously suggested that pensioners who do not want to become a burden on their carers should be helped to die.

Last year the Mental Capacity Act came into effect that gives legal force to "living wills", so patients can appoint an "attorney" to tell doctors when their hospital food and water should be removed.

But in her latest interview, given to the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work, Lady Warnock goes further by claiming that dementia sufferers should consider ending their lives through euthanasia because of the strain they put on their families and public services.

Recent figures show there are 700,000 people with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in Britain. By 2026 experts predict there will be one million dementia sufferers in the country, costing the NHS an estimated £35billion a year.

Lady Warnock said: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

i'd rather be a cow manager than a people manager...,

NYTimes | The cows seem to like it, too.

Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past.

With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation.

The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day, which can indicate when she is in heat.

“The animals just walk through,” said Jay Skellie, a dairyman from Salem, N.Y., after watching a demonstration. “I think we’ve got to look real hard at robots.”

Many of those running small farms said the choice of a computerized milker came down to a bigger question: whether to upgrade or just give up.

“Either we were going to get out, we were going to get bigger, or we were going to try something different,” said the elder Mr. Borden, 59, whose family has been working a patch of ground about 30 miles northeast of Albany since 1837. “And this was something a little different.”

The Bordens and other farmers say a major force is cutting labor costs — health insurance, room and board, overtime, and workers’ compensation insurance — particularly when immigration reform is stalled in Washington and dependable help is hard to procure.

The machines also never complain about getting up early, working late or being kicked.

“It’s tough to find people to do it well and show up on time,” said Tim Kurtz, who installed four robotic milkers last year at his farm in Berks County, Pa. “And you don’t have to worry about that with a robot.”

The Bordens say the machines allow them to do more of what they love: caring for animals.

“I’d rather be a cow manager,” Tom Borden said, “than a people manager.”