Bullying 2.0

 

I just read a silly screed deploring Matt Taibbi (a great investigative journalist IMHO) for rude/crude behavior many years ago in Russia….

 

Let it be known, I find rude and crude generally acceptable as long as the door isn’t locked and no one is required to listen in order to keep their job. If we women want to be seen as equal, we have to be able to function in the whole wide world and attempts to edit it to conform to recent Puritanical views are (to me) just a new form of Bullying.

 

Some years ago I started seeing the Bully as the new American role model. Now I’m seeing it further advance in an onslaught against egalitarianism, free speech and diversity. The very folks we might expect to promote diversity often now complain about ‘micro-aggression’ and demand ‘safe space’ where no contrary opinion is allowed. Those fighting to protect women from assault and intimidation have been joined by a pay-back crowd who seek celebrity based on cheap shots with little justification.  American culture at the moment has the character of a mob, bent on witch-burning and bringing down the house.

 

There are many ‘reasons’ for feelings of rage, impotence and disappointment- but there is only one real point to make here:

We are in an era of murder-suicide. The house that will topple is our own. Have we really run out of any other remedies or love for each other?

Cartoon: The populist menace

Cartoon: The populist menace

2014 “Noam Chomsky”: Why you can not have a Capitalist Democracy!

70% of Americans have no impact on government and are enslaved by Plutocrats who run our rigged system

The American Dream: you have to be asleep to believe it

The Rise of American Cannibals

The Economist  Nov 6th 2014

A NEW paper by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics suggests that, in America at least, inequality in wealth is approaching record levels. The authors examine the share of total wealth held by the bottom 90% of families relative to those at the very top. In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until well after the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks to collapsing wealth among richer households, broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and almost the same share as the bottom 90% of the population.

Read the full article here

The age of rentier capitalism (we’re more exploited than ever!)

 

     from the article: “….once economic liberalization [Neo-Liberalism] took off in the 1980s, the struggle was won decisively by capital, and labor’s share of total income has shrunk everywhere.”

   

Similarly, Neo-Libs and Neo-Cons have dominated politically, leaving little room for any who support social-democracy or justice. Power has consolidated against people.

 

How intellectual property makes us more unequal

Al Jazeera September 7, 2014  by Guy Standing

 

It is well known that globalization has put strong downward pressure on wages and benefits of workers in wealthy countries, as companies have offshored and outsourced labor to lower-wage locations and justified wage cuts to try to stay competitive. But politicians and economists have yet to come to terms with the fact that in the rich world the income distribution system itself has broken down irretrievably.

The 20th century was the only century in which most income was divided between capital (profits) and labor (wages), with the struggle for shares mediated by the state through regulations, fiscal policy and a system of social protection. But once economic liberalization took off in the 1980s, the struggle was won decisively by capital, and labor’s share of total income has shrunk everywhere.

Meanwhile, rental income, linked to the control of natural resources, property, financial assets and intellectual property, has become a dominant force in the global economy.

This is the age of rentier capitalism; rich countries are becoming rentier economies. A rising share of global income is going to rent, rather than to wages or profits from productive activities. This perpetuates inequalities: It disproportionately favors the wealthy, and accentuates inequality over generations.  read more here

 

Am I Next? America’s Militarized Police Forces

Daily Kos         Demonstrators Aaron Little (R), Gianni Cook (C) and Troy Jones hold signs while protesting against the death of black teenager Michael Brown, outside St Louis County Circuit Clerk building in Clayton, Missouri August 12, 2014.

If the murder in Ferguson, Missouri was an isolated case, it would be tragic enough. But how many Fergusons dot this country of ours? Likely innumerable, and that is an unbearable thought.

One Nation Under SWAT

War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing
11 Eye-Opening Facts About America’s Militarized Police Forces
Police Militarization In Ferguson – Business Insider

Update:  8/17/14

Police Threaten To Shoot, Mace Reporters In Ferguson

Update x2:

Pentagon’s 1033 Program is Preparing for War Against the Civil Population

By Martin Armstrong

This was the design of the military to prepare for civil unrest because the government WILL default on social welfare and social security not to mention confiscating pensions.

 

The United States Of Cruelty

By Charles P. Pierce,  June 24, 2014    Esquire

……We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled — until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics…..

read full article here

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine! – a must watch video

This Is A Must Watch Video

A brief and crucial history of the United States

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people” – John Adams – Second President – 1797 – 1801

Now is the first day of a new beginning.

Each one – Reach One- Each One – Teach One

Posted February 23, 2012 – Class War FilmsTranscript Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening. Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era. For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry. America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base. With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind. In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning. continue reading here “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”  –  Mario Savio – Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.

Water Liberty: How Innovation Trumps Privatization

By Rady Ananda
COTO Report     May 2, 2014

The World Bank joins Nestlé in wanting to privatize water, deeming it “extremist” to suggest that those born on this planet have a natural right to clean, potable water. Meanwhile, RT’s Abby Martin reports that the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International recently released a new analysis showing that:

“Investing in private water does not extend access and is also counterproductive for economic development. By contrast, infrastructure investment, abandoned by the corporate sector, is where real benefit can be achieved: the World Health Organization estimates more than $10 of economic benefit from every $1 invested in water infrastructure systems.”

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