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.”

the rise of the fatty

zerohedge | For all the talk about QE this, HFT that, crony capitalism, cold war 2.0, hyperinflation, hyperdeflation, social inequality, Keynesian dead end, global financial meltdown, perhaps the one more tangible threats to mankind as a whole (and to the future underfunded healthcare costs) is something fatr simpler: the rise of the fatty.

Below we present a candied look via Nature of, pardon the pun, society at large, and just why is it that those cuddly, jovial fat people, which seems to be growing exponentially in recent years, present a great danger not only to themselves, but to just as exponentially growing welfare costs in a world which already is, for all intents and purposes, insolvent (unless of course someone in charge gets a Swiftian idea to let the world's obese deal with their own problems just the way Charles Darwin suggested they should). 

They are everywhere.

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.