Phi Beta Iota: If there is one video that could catalyze a General Strike and a demand for the impeachment of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, along with the recall of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, this is the one. The US Government–and the New York Police Department–are OUT OF CONTROL, committing crimes against humanity, and long overdue for abolishment and a clean-sheet fresh start. The Electoral Reform Act of 2012 may be the last opportunity for a non-violent revolution in what was once America the Beautiful.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best reality rant we have seen, kudos to Brother John for pointing it out. No one is qualified to run for office without reading this first. No on is qualified to vote without reading this first. This is the “reset” button on reality & integrity in the USA and elsewhere.
The fledgling Occupy Wall Street protests tap into a deep vein of public animosity toward the country’s major financial institutions, one that is on par with the deep negativity aimed at Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Public distrust of the federal government is growing, and well documented. In the new poll, more than two-thirds of Americans say they view Washington unfavorably, including nearly half who hold “strongly” unfavorable impressions. These sentiments spike higher among Republicans, and continue to fuel the tea party political movement.
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But there’s just as much negativity directed at Wall Street financial institutions. Fully 70 percent of those polled view such firms unfavorably, with strongly unfavorable mentions outnumbering strongly favorable ones by 8 to 1.
For political independents, there’s little love for either one: similar proportions — around seven in 10 — view government and Wall Street unfavorably. Most, 55 percent view both negatively.
Hmmmm. Can you spell unethical idiocy? AT BEST, the Iranian Liberation Nut-Jobs. AT WORST, another Israeli false flag operation. In the middle, the usual out-of-control lunatic covert action wanna-bees.
Robert Steele adds: if and when this becomes fully exposed, it will qualify as a “precipitant” of revolution, showing the public with stark immediacy the degree to which the US government lacks integrity as well as intelligence.
Fedor Dostoevsky:A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Carl Jung: The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.
Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger: The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
“The US secret intelligence community is long overdue for a draconian reduction of its budget from the $80-90 billion a year today that it wastes on contractors producing vaporware, to something closer to the $20 billion a year that Jim Woolsey is on record as saying would be sufficient, and for once I agree with him.”
“General Tony Zinni is on record as saying that when he was in charge of the US Central Command, the secret intelligence community provided, ‘at best' 4% of what he needed to know. The fact is that the secret world is primarily a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers to corporations and banks–it not only lacks intelligence, it lacks integrity.”
The preposterous claim that deviations from market efficiency were not only irrelevant to the recent crisis but could never be relevant is the product of an environment in which deduction has driven out induction and ideology has taken over from observation. The belief that models are not just useful tools but also are capable of yielding comprehensive and universal descriptions of the world has blinded its proponents to realities that have been staring them in the face. That blindness was an element in our present crisis, and conditions our still ineffectual responses. Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto while the world around them was falling apart.
to which I responded
What we are up against
A refreshing reminder of the staid mechanistic approach of so-called market-efficient economics. Good for the status quo as used to explain to the world WHY the Masters of the universe are in charge. I'm not sure how many of the deans of business schools and Harvard economics professors are prime advocates. But I imagine a substantial amount remembering the interviews that Ferguson did in the documentary Inside Job. They get very well rewarded for being apologists for the current system.
But I would like to take off from this point and try 500,000 foot summary of some of the issues. I am not sure how many people really understand the nature and the reasons for our problems I have a stack of books on my porch more than 3 feet high that I've read since 2008 attempting to grasp it. It is only with the addition of the latest by Nicholas Shaxson called Treasure Islands Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens that I feel I have made really significant progress.
Whether it is possible for the occupy movements to create among their followers and the wider public at large an understanding of the situation, I'm not sure. But I suspect that short of violent revolution which has never been a positive accomplishment–the only way forward is to formulate this broader understanding.
Below is a very interesting essay analyzing the evolution of culture, economics, and politics in United States. Other authors have done similar types of analyses, but this one has some interesting twists. It is a synopsis of a book just written by the author that blends together aspects of cultural, geographic and even religious anthropology, with history, politics, and political economy in a way that illustrates obvious synthetic potential of using GIS (computerized Geographic Information Systems) in efforts to evolve our understanding of history, political economy, anthropology and patterns of cultural evolution in general. The author ends on a shallow political note, laying out a counter-Tea Party strategy, but don't let that crassness turn you off from the larger intellectual possibilities implicit in this kind of work.
Even as the movement’s grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions that few of us understand.
By Colin Woodard, Washington Monthly,November/December 2011
