government = protection racket for the 1%?

commondreams |  The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting. According to “Working for the Few,” a recent briefing paper from Oxfam, “In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.”

 Our now infamous one percent own more than 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 40 percent of the country is in debt. Just this past Tuesday, the 15th of April — Tax Day — the AFL-CIO reported that last year the chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million dollars compared to the average worker who earned $35,239 dollars.

As that analysis circulated on Tax Day, the economic analyst Robert Reich reminded us that in addition to getting the largest percent of total national income in nearly a century, many in the one percent are paying a lower federal tax rate than a lot of people in the middle class. You may remember that an obliging Congress, of both parties, allows high rollers of finance the privilege of “carried interest,” a tax rate below that of their secretaries and clerks.

And at state and local levels, while the poorest fifth of Americans pay an average tax rate of over 11 percent, the richest one percent of the country pay — are you ready for this? — half that rate. Now, neither Nature nor Nature’s God drew up our tax codes; that’s the work of legislators — politicians — and it’s one way they have, as Chief Justice John Roberts might put it, of expressing gratitude to their donors: “Oh, Mr. Adelson, we so appreciate your generosity that we cut your estate taxes so you can give $8 billion as a tax-free payment to your heirs, even though down the road the public will have to put up $2.8 billion to compensate for the loss in tax revenue.”

All of which makes truly repugnant the argument, heard so often from courtiers of the rich, that inequality doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent. It buys all those goodies from government: Tax breaks. Tax havens (which allow corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone). Loopholes. 

Favors like carried interest. And so on. As Paul Krugman writes in his New York Review of Books essay on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “We now know both that the United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than other advanced countries and that much of this difference in outcomes can be attributed directly to government action.”

american middle-class no longer the world's richest

NYTimes |  The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality.

Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.

In European countries hit hardest by recent financial crises, such as Greece and Portugal, incomes have of course fallen sharply in recent years.

The income data were compiled by LIS, a group that maintains the Luxembourg Income Study Database. The numbers were analyzed by researchers at LIS and by The Upshot, a New York Times website covering policy and politics, and reviewed by outside academic economists.

The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

LIS counts after-tax cash income from salaries, interest and stock dividends, among other sources, as well as direct government benefits such as tax credits.

The findings are striking because the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income. With a big share of recent income gains in this country flowing to a relatively small slice of high-earning households, most Americans are not keeping pace with their counterparts around the world.

“The idea that the median American has so much more income than the middle class in all other parts of the world is not true these days,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist who is not associated with LIS. “In 1960, we were massively richer than anyone else. In 1980, we were richer. In the 1990s, we were still richer.”

That is no longer the case, Professor Katz added.

Median per capita income was $18,700 in the United States in 2010 (which translates to about $75,000 for a family of four after taxes), up 20 percent since 1980 but virtually unchanged since 2000, after adjusting for inflation. The same measure, by comparison, rose about 20 percent in Britain between 2000 and 2010 and 14 percent in the Netherlands. Median income also rose 20 percent in Canada between 2000 and 2010, to the equivalent of $18,700.

The most recent year in the LIS analysis is 2010. But other income surveys, conducted by government agencies, suggest that since 2010 pay in Canada has risen faster than pay in the United States and is now most likely higher. Pay in several European countries has also risen faster since 2010 than it has in the United States.

Three broad factors appear to be driving much of the weak income performance in the United States. First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs.

there are no rights or freedoms: there is only power...,

howtosavetheworld | I have, of late, had a falling out with many of my fellow ‘progressives’, similar I suppose to that of Paul Kingsnorth, who is being savaged by Naomi Klein and others for giving up on the environmental movement and non-local activism, and by humanists for losing faith in our species’ capacity for innovation and change.

I should say at the outset that I agree that our political and economic and legal and educational and social systems are dreadful, unfair, teetering, and totally inadequate to our needs. I agree that this is a world of horrific inequality, inequitable and unjust privilege, massive suffering, and outrageous patriarchy. I agree that corporatism and corruption and propagandist media are rampant and destructive and destabilizing. I agree that militarized police and torture prisons and drone killing and massive global surveillance are repugnant and a fundamental threat to our personal safety and security and the very principles upon which our nations are founded.

And I fully acknowledge that the fact I’m white, male, boomer generation and relatively wealthy provides me with enormous privilege compared to others, including relative freedom of movement, freedom from fear of harrassment and assault, and greater social, political and economic opportunity.

But when I hear arguments that “we need” to stand up for our ‘inherent’ rights and freedoms, and wrest ‘control’ of the levers of power from the obscenely wealthy elite, and denounce and protest injustice and inequality, and acknowledge and renounce our role as privileged oppressors, as the first steps to a true social revolution in and political and economic reform, leading, somehow, to a radical redistribution of wealth and power, and a more just society, I am reduced to despair.

I used to believe people, and perhaps some other creatures, had ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’. I believed that someone was in control. I believed there were answers to the predicaments we face.

But now I realize that there are no rights or freedoms. The concept of rights and freedoms is a sop that the rich and powerful of this world use to appease the fury and frustration of the poor and disenfranchised. The ‘granting’ of rights and freedoms means nothing, because they can be and are taken away whenever those in power choose to do so, and are simply ignored when they interfere with the exercise of power or accumulation of wealth by those who allowed them to be granted.

what do you call armed private militias massing to oppose federal authority?

WaPo | The Senate majority leader who called President Bush a “loser” and a “liar,” declared former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a “political hack” and asserted that all Obamacare horror stories are “untrue” has now called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “domestic terrorists.”

The comparison is as noxious as it is absurd. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. The Unabomber was a domestic terrorist. Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph was a domestic terrorist. To equate Bundy and his supporters with these murderers is, quite simply, appalling. 

It was the federal Bureau of Land Management that provoked the confrontation — descending with 200 armed men, including some with sniper rifles, to seize the Bundys’ cattle on land their family has grazed since 1877. Whatever one thinks of the Bundys’ legal case over unpaid grazing fees — and the federal government’s desire to protect the desert tortoise — defending your property against a paramilitary force of armed federal agents is not the equivalent of blowing up a federal building or sending letter bombs.

It would be easy to dismiss Reid as a buffoon with a chronic case of logorrhea. But this was not a slip of the tongue on Reid’s part. Video shows that when Reid first used the phrase “domestic terrorists” at a Las Vegas Review Journal event, he looked down at his notes just before he spoke the words. It was a carefully planned line of attack. Then, when he was asked during a Nevada TV interview a day later “What did you mean by that?” he replied, “Just what I said” — before engaging in an extended attack on the Bundy family and its supporters. 

Why would Reid, the senior senator from Nevada, make such an outrageous accusation?

First, Reid is defending the Obama administration from the charge that it used excessive force to try to seize the land. Most Americans recoil at the sight of armed federal agents training sniper rifles on a group of Boy Scouts, veterans, parents and grandparents engaged in civil disobedience. But if Bundy’s supporters are not protesters but “domestic terrorists,” then sending a federal force to confront them is not excessive. 

Second, Reid is defending his former staffer, Neil Kornze, who presided over this debacle as the newly installed head of the Bureau of Land Management. Kornze, who is just 35 years old, was Reid’s handpicked choice to run the BLM. “Neil is just perfect for this position,” Reid declared when Kornze was nominated, adding that he “really understands the role of public lands in rural America, and natural resources across the West.”

In his first days on the job, Kornze demonstrated that understanding by launching a paramilitary raid against a Nevada rancher. Kornze tried to silence Bundy’s supporters by setting up “First Amendment Zones” where protesters would be corralled and fenced in like a bunch of cattle. And he provoked an armed standoff that might well have resulted in the death of innocent men, women and children. The only way his actions could be even remotely defensible is if he was confronting “domestic terrorists.”

cliven bundy and homeland security

rsn |   t’s a stark image: A supporter of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy lies prone behind a concrete retaining wall on a freeway overpass, training a rifle on federal agents.

He walked away a free man. When does that happen?

This episode, this time, involved a private rancher's self-proclaimed right to graze his commercial herd of cattle on public lands. The most coherent argument he makes is that his family has owned the adjacent ranch since the 1870s. The other arguments are more conceptual, focusing on issues like "natural law,” the “sovereign citizen movement,” and various other quasi-legal invocations based loosely and vaguely on the US Constitution and white-militia psycho-babble.

At stake clearly is the rule of law. “Terrorism” after 9/11, certainly in light the Patriot Act, is defined so broadly that any material act of opposition to the US Government can be prosecuted as an act terrorism and a matter of homeland security.

The images of fully militarized police beating unarmed Occupy protesters for nothing more than assembling in public places stands in vivid contrast to agents of Bureau of Land Management releasing back to Bundy and his heavily armed supporters 400 confiscated head of cattle.

Ultimately federal and state law enforcement officials would say they intended to handle it in court. But since the BLM operation was carried out pursuant to a federal court order, a subsequent court order is likely to carry the weight of a paper airplane. Make no mistake about it, this was a heavily armed standoff and the US Federal Government backed down.

Mostly white, middle aged, male, fiercely opposed to what they see as an oppressive government and just as fiercely loyal to the NRA, they took militarily-inspired positions in opposition to federal rangers with sights trained and fingers on triggers.

Civil War on the Table

“We’re about ready to take the country over with force!” Bundy bellowed to his supporters. There is no doubt that many of them wish they could. 

While this case of federal agents acquiescing to the demands of an angry mob with guns may be unsettling, the reality is that it might have been the right decision. Had the situation escalated, what followed might have ignited an American insurgency. Bundy’s supporters, it should be noted, had a vast tactical advantage. The BLM personnel and lightly armed park rangers were totally outgunned and would have stood little chance against the militias assembled. 

Yes, additional federal firepower could have been called in, in theory as much as needed, but had such an action resulted in significant loss of life the result could easily have been nationwide conflict.

the american deep state today

japanfocus |  The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.⁵⁶ A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.⁵⁷

 

It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.⁵⁸

This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration,

The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.⁵⁹

The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.⁶⁰ The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it.

It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.

But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.⁶¹

In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state.

Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.

deep politics

wikipedia |  Deep politics is a phrase coined by researcher and academic Peter Dale Scott, which he describes thus;

“My notion of deep politics… posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with equanimity.”^[1]

Scott has extensively researched political processes that fly under the radar of conscious political activity, are omitted from discourse on the right and the left, and are many times intertwined with global drug traffic. Here is Scott’s definition of “parapolitics”;

par a pol i tics (pa˘r ə po˘l ə tı˘ks), n. 1. a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished. 2. generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion, and deceit… 3. the political exploitation of irresponsible agencies or parastructures, such as intelligence agencies… Ex. 1. ‘The Nixon doctrine, viewed in retrospect, represented the application of parapolitics on a hitherto unprecedented scale.’ 2. ‘Democracy and parapolitics, even in foreign affairs, are ultimately incompatible.’^[2]

Although valuable, Scott ultimately found the label of parapolitics too limiting;

“…the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as a ‘system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.’ . . . I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional . . . it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture’s rational surface. Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”^[3]

David MacGregor is another academic who applies the ideas of parapolitics and deep politics to his own research. Here are some of his observations;

“Deep politics is a revision of Scott’s original concept of parapolitics first developed in The War Conspiracy. It responds to criticism that political conspiracies, like the murder of Kennedy, are too difficult to arrange and keep hidden…^[4]

“Scott came to see parapolitics as “too narrowly conscious and intentional to describe the deeper irrational movements which culminated collectively in the murder of the President.” In contrast deep political analysis presupposes “an open system with divergent power centers and goals” The collapse of the First Italian Republic in the mid-1990s, involving large-scale criminal influence in government, offers a telling example. It originated as an American parapolitical operation to suborn the threat of communism which parachuted prominent U.S. Mafia hoods into power in post-war Italy “[B]y the 1980s this . . . strategem had helped spawn a deep political system of corruption exceeding Tammany’s, and (as we know from the Andreotti trial of 1995) beyond the ability of anyone to call it off”. Another example… is the CIA-financed jihad against Russian occupiers in Afghanistan that flooded Europe with opium and helped create Osama bin Laden, a modern version of the Old Man of the Mountains, who’s [sic] 11th Century followers – the Assassins – “sacrificed for him in order to perpetuate his crimes”^[4]

at last - an honest and forthright corporate policy

the global drug metagroup

lobster |  In the last three decades, three important facts have emerged about the international drug traffic. The first is that it is both huge and growing.

Narcotics are estimated to be worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year, an amount, according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in remarks to a United Nations General Assembly session in June 2003, that is greater than the global oil and gas industry, and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.[2]

The second is that it is both worldwide and above all "highly integrated."[3] At global drug summits such as the one in Armenia in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach Organizatsiya, and Colombian drug lords, have worked out a common modus operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the lawless Russian banks.[4]

 

The third important fact, undeniable since the 1980 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, is that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of the drug traffic. It was striking in the 1980s that the CIA, in its choice of Afghan mujahedin leaders to back against the Soviet Union, passed over those with indigenous support in favor of those, notably Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who dominated the heroin trade. The result was to enhance Hekmatyar's power until he became a leading heroin trafficker, not just in Afghanistan but in the world.[5]

Three more important features of the global drug traffic have been less noticed; thus although I regard them as facts I shall refer to them not as facts but as propositions to be tested against evidence. The first proposition is that the highly integrated drug traffic industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its own political as well as economic objectives. It requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major growing area, from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.

Once the local power of drug armies was enough in itself to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.

Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin "family" in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.

One piece of evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called "the richest man in the world." Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:

1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden.

2) Soviet military intelligence.

3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic.

4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group.

5) (according to a well-informed Russian source) the CIA.

The third important proposition is that a meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I hope to show that it, and its predecessors, are powerful enough to help make history themselves. However they do not do so overtly, but as a hidden Force X whose presence is not normally acknowledged in the polite discourse of academic political scientists. On the contrary, as we shall see, references to it are usually suppressed.

the astounding conspiracy theories of mark gorton

gawker | Mark Gorton is a prominent financier and a respected entrepreneur. He founded the music sharing site Limewire, and he runs Tower Research, a famed high-frequency trading firm. Gorton also believes that the "ruthless" secret cabal that assassinated JFK and planned 9/11 could be coming to kill his family.

Mark Gorton does not have a reputation as a crackpot. Quite the opposite. He's been favorably profiled in the New York Times for his business acumen and charitable deeds. His experience as the head of Limewire—which disrupted the music industry and then lost a $100 million lawsuit as a result—was closely followed by the press. And when Michael Lewis's blockbuster new book about high frequency trading was published recently, prominent media outlets turned to Gorton to learn what HFT firms are really like. The Huffington Post even dubbed him "the new face of Wall Street." He is a very respected and very wealthy man. 

This week, we were forwarded documents that Gorton was sending out to employees at Tower Research. These documents—embedded at the bottom of this post—are essays by Mark Gorton, laying out his theories on the secret high-level murderous criminal "Cabal" that is responsible for, among other things, the JFK and RFK assassinations, the presidential careers of the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plot, and the murder of countless witnesses, politicians, and journalists who sought to expose them, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and even Hunter S. Thompson. Everything, according to Gorton, has been an inside job.

It is really something.

cultural supremacy mechanics...,

pnas |  An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to the process. Theoretical models suggest that short-term collective behavior and long-term cultural diversity are mutually excluding, since they require very different levels of social influence. The latter jointly depends on two factors: the topology of the underlying social network and the overlap between individuals in multidimensional cultural space. However, while the empirical properties of social networks are intensively studied, little is known about the large-scale organization of real societies in cultural space, so that random input specifications are necessarily used in models. Here we use a large dataset to perform a high-dimensional analysis of the scientific beliefs of thousands of Europeans. We find that interopinion correlations determine a nontrivial ultrametric hierarchy of individuals in cultural space. When empirical data are used as inputs in models, ultrametricity has strong and counterintuitive effects. On short timescales, it facilitates a symmetry-breaking phase transition triggering coordinated social behavior. On long timescales, it suppresses cultural convergence by restricting it within disjoint groups. Moreover, ultrametricity implies that these results are surprisingly robust to modifications of the dynamical rules considered. Thus the empirical distribution of individuals in cultural space appears to systematically optimize the coexistence of short-term collective behavior and long-term cultural diversity, which can be realized simultaneously for the same moderate level of mutual influence in a diverse range of online and offline settings.

understanding how the octupus operates...,

"I brought this information out eighteen years ago and I got shot at and driven out of the LAPD."  

The man who made this statement 18 years ago is dead by "suicide." 

Just like Gary Webb the San Jose Mercury journalist who broke the original "CIA dealing drugs in LA" story. 

Just like Mark Lombardi the american conceptual artist whose work carefully documented the Bush-Bin Laden family money laundering operation - before 9/11. 

Just like J.H. Hatfield Fortunate Son author who documented George Bush Jr's drug abuse and arrest for cocaine possession. 

Just like Danny Casolaro American writer who documented the Octupus a criminal network that also involved the Bush family.

Jes sayyin....,

why capitalists do not want recovery and what that means for america...,

bnarchives |  Can it be true that capitalists prefer crisis over growth? On the face of it, the idea sounds silly. According to Economics 101, everyone loves growth, especially capitalists. Profit and growth go hand in hand. When capitalists profit, real investment rises and the economy thrives, and when the economy booms the profits of capitalists soar. Growth is the very lifeline of capitalists.

Or is it?

What motivates capitalists?

The answer depends on what motivates capitalists. Conventional economic theories tell us that capitalists are hedonic creatures. Like all other economic “agents” – from busy managers and hectic workers to active criminals and idle welfare recipients – their ultimate goal is maximum utility. In order for them to achieve this goal, they need to maximize their profit and interest; and this income – like any other income – depends on economic growth. Conclusion: utility-seeking capitalists have every reason to love booms and hate crises.

But, then, are capitalists really motivated by utility? Is it realistic to believe that large American corporations are guided by the hedonic pleasure of their owners – or do we need a different starting point altogether?

So try this: in our day and age, the key goal of leading capitalists and corporations is not absolute utility but relative power. Their real purpose is not to maximize hedonic pleasure, but to “beat the average.” Their ultimate aim is not to consume more goods and services (although that happens too), but to increase their power over others. And the key measure of this power is their distributive share of income and assets.

Note that capitalists have no choice in this matter. “Beating the average” is not a subjective preference but a rigid rule, dictated and enforced by the conflictual nature of the system. Capitalism pits capitalists against other groups in society – as well as against each other. And in this multifaceted struggle for greater power, the yardstick is always relative. Capitalists – and the corporations they operate through – are compelled and conditioned to accumulate differentially; to augment not their personal utility but their relative earnings. Whether they are private owners like Warren Buffet or institutional investors like Bill Gross, they all seek not to perform but to out-perform – and outperformance means re-distribution. Capitalists who beat the average redistribute income and assets in their favor; this redistribution raises their share of the total; and a larger share of the total means greater power stacked against others. In the final analysis, capitalists accumulate not hedonic pleasure but differential power.

how diversity was killed in economics...,

adbusters | Innovation feeds on diversity, but diversity is scarce in economics. 

A little-remembered episode in the history of the discipline, told by Tiago Mata in his dissertation at LSE, reveals how diversity was killed in economics. Back in 1968, a group of young radical economists, the product of the campus unrest of the 60s and the anti-war movement, came to rock the discipline. Organized by the Union for Radical Political Economics, they called for a politicization of economics, accusing fellow economists of ignoring the important questions and being “instrumental to the elite’s attainment of its unjust ends.” They rejected the “marginalist approach,” today’s mantra in economics, for accepting the basic institutions of capitalism, and catering to improve only its administration … marginally.

The front-guard of the group was at Harvard, where non-tenured faculty Arthur MacEwan, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Thomas Weisskopf taught a course tellingly named “The capitalist system: conflict and power.” Older Harvard faculty found the course a disgrace. But these were still the 60s and economics was not yet economics. Harvard-based John Kenneth Galbraith, a non-conventional political economist, and a notable ally of the young radicals, was President of the American Economic Association. Galbraith was wary of economics becoming a system of belief and used his presidential address in 1972 to support this “new and notably articulate generation of economists” that was coming to ask politically-important questions. Not everyone agreed.

A campaign ensued the next few years to eradicate the young radicals from top positions. Contract after contract and tenure after tenure were denied, including to the Harvard four. 

Among them, the most notable case was that of Sam Bowles, one of the brightest economists of his generation, as confirmed by his later work. His tenure candidacy was rejected by a nineteen to five vote in 1973. He had received the support of the most prominent members of the department, J.K. Galbraith, and Nobel-prize winners Wassily Leontief and (yet to be) Kenneth Arrow. Albert Hirschman was one of the other two who voted in his favor, as recounted by his biographer in a talk in memoriam I recently attended in Boston and which brought the whole Harvard affair to my attention. 

Hirschman, a moderate economist, left Harvard bitter in 1974 for Princeton and so did Leontief for NYU in 1975, after serving Harvard for 30 years, and mentoring such conservative heavyweights like Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. Galbraith retired in 1975 after half a century at Harvard and Arrow departed for the West Coast. Bowles’ denial of tenure and the departure of Leontief, Galbraith, Hirschmann and Arrow brought an end to the notorious Harvard faculty battles between moderates and conservatives, not only over tenures but also University governance and student occupations, battles that had brought the department to a stalemate in the early 70s.

The young radicals did not have the luck of their more established elder supporters. They were relegated to universities of lesser prestige, radical refuges such as the New School in New York and UMass at Amherst. UMass offered Bowles the opportunity to set up an institute and host other ousted young radicals from Harvard, Yale and beyond, such as Marxists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff.

The American Economic Association judged that there was no political motivation behind the purge of the radicals, other than in cases where the FBI was found to be involved. The rationale, however, often used in many faculty decisions to deny the quality of the radicals’ research was that it was “political” and not scientific enough. Science and objectivity in economics came to be defined through these tenure battles not only as mathematical formalism (in this people like Bowles and Gintis excelled), but as one of a particular kind, based on the so-called “neo-classical” assumptions of a world consisting of selfish individuals maximizing their personal gain. This pre-analytic vision of a world of neo-liberal subjects was considered neutral, but deviations from it ideologically-motivated.

.001% have become criminally untouchable...,

democracynow |  Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi is out with an explosive new book that asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. In "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," Taibbi explores how the Depression-level income gap between the wealthy and the poor is mirrored by a "justice" gap in who is targeted for prosecution and imprisonment. "It is much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else," Taibbi says.

support the world economics association

   

Three years ago the World Economics Association (WEA) was launched to create an inclusive professional association for the global community of economists.  Already it is second in size only to the American Economic Association, from which it differs in two fundamental dimensions. 

One is the self-evident geo-political difference; the other is that the WEA is not committed to maintaining the hegemony of the neoclassical school.  Instead, in the tradition of the natural sciences and physics especially, it supports investigation of real-world economies from multiple perspectives.

I should also emphasize that the WEA is not the tool or creation of the world’s financial oligarchy; instead it is financially independent.

The WEA’s strength is the breadth and size of its membership.  Real communities consist of individuals.  And that is why I am inviting you, a RWER subscriber, to join.  The WEA membership is free, and I have two incentives to motivate you to give the two or three minutes that it takes to join.

Firstly, you will receive WEA periodicals free of charge.  The WEA already publishes three journals (with print copies soon to be available).  It also publishes a substantial bi-monthly newsletter, holds online conferences, and has a rapidly growing network of national chapters.  Membership will give you immediate access to all this, including email notifications.  The covers of the current issues of WEA periodicals are pictured below.

Secondly, you will be helping a good and important cause.  It is now commonly recognized that humanity is ill-served by the economics profession as currently constituted, and that the primacy of the one nation over a global professional focus is both absurd and unjust. The WEA exists to overcome these deficiencies.  By joining the WEA and donating your two or three minutes you will be helping it achieve these goals.

You may join here 

http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/membership

Hopefully,

Edward Fullbrook

Executive Director of the World Economics Association

Editor of the Real-World Economics Review

University of the West of England

research shows that democratic majoritarian peasants ain't isht...,

princeton |  Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics – which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide
substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.

While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism – Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate) Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.

Each of these theoretical traditions has given rise to a large body of literature. Each is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence – some of it quantitative, some historical, some observational – concerning the importance of various sets of actors (or, all too often, a single set of actors) in U.S. policy making. This literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how American politics works and has helped illuminate how democratic or undemocratic (in various senses) our policy making process actually is. Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the differing predictions of these theories against each other within a single statistical model that permits one to analyze the independent effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.

Here – in a tentative and preliminary way – we offer such test, bringing a unique data set to bear on the problem. Our measures are far from perfect, but we hope that this first step will help inspire further research into what we see as some of the most fundamental questions about American politics.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Fist tap Dale.

michael c. ruppert - RIP

fromthewilderness |  "This is the man who cost CIA Director Deutch his guaranteed appointment as Secretary of Defense after confronting him at Locke High School with hard facts about CIA dealing drugs." - Dick Gregory

 

" ...in the course of investigations in the mid 70's he came across information that the CIA was trading drugs in order to fund covert operations in the Middle East...Perot called him back to offer encouragement...Ruppert says that his main objective is to see that the country gets a leader worthy of its people. Even for Ross Perot those will be tough shoes to fill." - PEOPLE MAGAZINE 6/22/92

The Record is Here

Learn More: OPENING REMARKS OF MICHAEL C. RUPPERT for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (WRITTEN STATEMENT WITH EXHIBITS)

Full Disclosure Part I – Michael Ruppert's LAPD records
Full Disclosure Part II – The Legal Record Around His 1978 LAPD Resignation

The 1981 Herald Examiner Stories – Two consecutive front page stories got it mostly right but confirmed that Ruppert had stumbled on illegal covert operations:
Part One
Part Two

 

"Mike Ruppert is a one man crusade trying to expose America's bogus war on drugs. From the time we met on the campaign trail in 1992 while filming THE LAST PARTY, through his challenge to John Deutch, Mike Ruppert has been on the front line trying to get the story out." - Marc Levin, - Emmy award winning Director of PBS's The Secret Government, THE LAST PARTY and Producer of Bill Moyers' 1998 series on Addiction.

Michael Ruppert is the author of Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. Published in September 2004 and is one of the three best-selling books globally and in the US about the attacks of 9/11. Rubicon is the only book to show that Vice President Richard Cheney, the US government and Wall Street had a well-developed awareness of Peak Oil before the 9/11 attacks and that US policy since then has been consistent with Peak Oil imperatives. In May, 2006 Crossing the Rubicon was added to the Harvard School of Business library and released in a French version with distribution throughout all major book stores in France.

Mike is also the publisher/editor of From The Wilderness, a newsletter read in more than 50 countries around the world. Its subscribers include 60-plus members of the US congress, professors at more than 40 universities around the world, and major business and economic leaders. Since 9/11 Mike has been in demand as a university lecturer and has spoken on Peak Oil and 9/11 in nine countries. Recently, at the request of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, he served as an official questioner during a Congressional briefing looking into unanswered questions and the unaddressed flaws of the Keane Commission report. Having concluded that the US government and markets will be useless in preparing American citizens for the coming crisis, Mike's current focus is on individual and community preparedness for the coming challenges and the development of a reliable news service to quickly identify and track breaking developments around the world.

Mike is a former LAPD narcotics investigator, whistleblower and a 1973 Honors Graduate of UCLA in Political Science. After attempting to expose this he was forced out of LAPD in 1978 while earning the highest rating reports possible and having no pending disciplinary actions. In 1996, after 18 years of struggle, he finally achieved one of his deepest wishes in a face to face public encounter with then CIA Director John Deutch on national television. Washington sources later told Mike that Deutch's mishandling of the encounter cost him a guaranteed appointment as Secretary of Defense.

racial profiling, quotas, and secret "conviction bonuses"

alternet |  In the late afternoon of Jan. 3, Robin Dean, a 50-year-old county employee, pulled into a Durham, N.C., Burger King parking lot to give a friend a package of frozen chitlins that she had cooked over the holidays. After the transfer was complete, the pair said goodbye and parted ways. Both were subsequently pulled over by Durham Police.

Dean says an officer told her that there was evidence that she had just engaged in an illegal drug transaction, searched her car without her consent, and called for backup. When Dean worried aloud that she had been racially profiled, she says the white officer called her an “idiot,” although the nearly hour-long stop revealed nothing illegal apart from a window-tinting violation that was later dismissed.

In recent years, stories like this have come to epitomize heightened concerns that, as Durham becomes a regional center for sophisticated culture and cuisine, the drug enforcement strategies of its police increasingly assign second-class status to the city’s minority communities. Over the past several months, protesters alleging police misconduct have pummeled the city’s police headquarters with rocks and met tear gas along the usually amiable streets of this city of 240,000.

In seeking to understand the roots of the city’s divisive policing, lawyers at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice were astonished by what a recent round of public records requests produced. Not only was a federal grant subsidizing what they regarded as the most perniciously targeted drug enforcement operations of the department, but the grant — with a key “performance measure” emphasizing police report their sheer volume of arrests — also appeared to be incentivizing the department to raise its overall number of drug arrests, which overwhelmingly affect the city’s black community. SCSJ attorneys add that recently revealed evidence also indicates that the federally funded program included an illegal system of secret payments law enforcement made to witnesses who delivered successful drug prosecutions — another sign, they say, that the city’s policing has flown off the rails.

In a national context, such a discovery is not new. Groups like the ACLU have argued for over a decade that the performance measures of America’s largest federal policing grant, known as Byrne JAG, fuels racially biased, quota-driven policing in thousands of jurisdictions across the country. In this view, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Justice Department doles out annually under JAG acts as a quiet bureaucratic buttress for policing policies like New York’s “stop-and-frisk” that have become intolerable to the communities they target and that have risen to the center of a heated national debate.

"We know that, intentionally or not, the JAG funding sets a tone, highlights priorities and guides the culture of policing in ways that impact what happens on the ground all around the country,” says Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the ACLU. Most pressingly, says Gupta, is JAG’s emphasis on police departments reporting their volume of drug arrests as “performance measure” of the grant. As the ACLU documented in a report [3] last year, although there is little racial difference in the national rate of marijuana use, black people are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for using pot — a major contributor to the disproportionately high numbers of African-Americans imprisoned within the United States’ exceptionally large prison population.

silicon valley could force NSA reform tomorrow...,

rsn | With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it's time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren't they doing more to stop it?

The CEOs of the major tech companies came out of the gate swinging 10 months ago, complaining loudly about how NSA surveillance has been destroying privacy and ruining their business. They still are. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called the US a "threat" to the Internet, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, called some of the NSA tactics "outrageous" and potentially "illegal". They and their fellow Silicon Valley powerhouses – from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Apple and more – formed a coalition calling for surveillance reform and had conversations with the White House.

But for all their talk, the public has come away empty handed. The USA Freedom Act, the only major new bill promising real reform, has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence bill may be worse than the status quo. Politico reported on Thursday that companies like Facebook and are now "holding fire" on the hill when it comes to pushing for legislative reform.

The keepers of the everyday internet seem to care more about PR than helping their users. The truth is, if the major tech companies really wanted to force meanginful surveillance reform, they could do so tomorrow. Just follow the example of OKCupid from last week.

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, was under fire for hiring Brendan Eich as CEO because of his $1,000 donation in support of Prop 8 six years ago, and OKCupid decided to make a political statement of its own by splashing a message criticizing Mozilla before would-be daters could get to OKCupid's front page. The site even encouraged users to switch to another browser. The move made the already smoldering situation explode. Two days later, Mozilla's CEO was out of a job, and OKCupid got partial credit for the reversal.

The leading internet companies could easily force Congress' hand by pulling an OKCupid: at the top of your News Feed all next week, in place of Monday's Google doodle, a mobile push alert, an email newsletter: CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS. Tell them to SUPPORT THE USA FREEDOM ACT and tell the NSA to stop breaking common encryption.