Political Myths We Live By

Here's an excellent itemization of the tacit assumptions that many people hold about our political situation, from Z Magazine:

It includes such very important points as

8. Public opinion is made by the public. (The Public Opinion Fallacy)

It isn't. It is made for the public by a process of selective filtering and re-framing on the part of the owners, managers and employed commentators of the corporate media. Corporate think tanks and PR machines also play important public opinion-forming roles, often behind the scenes. The important ideological and manipulative work of all these ‘pundits' is to keep public discourse within the tight parameters and limited concepts of allowed official discourse. The purpose is to manufacture consent for the decisions and policies of the ruling elites. There is no conspiracy involved here, it is a ‘natural' part of the system and works largely by cultural osmosis and conformity.

and

10. Economically, this is a Free Market Society. (The Free Market Fallacy)

There is no free market and never has been, even under the rule of the deregulating, neo-liberal state. A completely free market system would self-destruct in no time. Because it can, by definition, only care for its individual vested interests and not for the good of the whole system, capitalism needs constant saving from itself by the state. The capitalist state has always been there to massively support, gently oversee, subsidize and bail out the capitalist economy in countless ways, not only in times of crisis. Corporate and middle class welfare is actually its main game. The state helps capital privatise the profits and socialise the costs. It provides the physical infrastructure, educational development of the ‘human capital' and picks up the immense social, health and environmental costs of the latter's wrecking balls. All this happens whether the state is neo-liberal or social democratic (Keynesian) in nature.

Dennis Kucinich Answers Questions

Queenie's in trouble!

"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts."

A very clear discussion of the current heath care plans

Healthcare Napkins:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

Brazil TV host turned politician 'ordered killings to boost ratings'

This is could almost be the plot of a David Cronenberg film.

From The Guardian:

A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings.

Wallace Souza, a former police officer who used his lunchtime television slot to rail against the violence sweeping the jungle city of Manaus, is suspected of commissioning at least five murders to prove his claim that the region is awash with violent crime.

"Manaus can no longer live with this wave of crime," Souza, 50, frequently told the audience of his daily show Canal Livre. "Nowadays everyone is killing."

In a 2008 speech at Manaus's local parliament, Souza boasted that Canal Livre enjoyed complete editorial freedom and was conducted with "journalistic responsibility".

But prosecutors in the remote Amazon city say the politician's actions went far beyond the call of journalistic duty, accusing Souza of links to drug trafficking, death squads and organised crime, and possessing illegal arms.

"Our investigations indicate that they went as far as creating facts," Thomaz Augusto Correa, the local police intelligence chief, told a Brazilian news channel. "Crimes were committed in order to create news for the group and for the programme."

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

See this excellent summary of different demographics' daily activities, presented in the style of those Histograph of History maps:

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Who is that Pokemon?

FLAMING TETHERBALL

Back to the Future, part TWO

REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!

Quote of the day

One of the most famous of the Civil War balloons was made by the Confederacy of donated undergarments of the ladies of the South, all silk and the only source of silk the South had at the time. It was hoped that it would counter the shocking success of Union balloons which were providing airborne intelligence of opposing troop movements that was proving devastating. The southern patchwork balloon only flew once before it was captured by the Union, a disappointment and an afront for which General Longstreet claimed he never found it in his heart to forgive the Union.

(Lifting gases)

The End of Work

From Anxiety Culture:

Every technological advance implemented in industry effectively increases wealth - otherwise it wouldn’t be utilised. Wealth is piling up all around us. The technological revolution which brought this wealth should be seen as a social phenomenon – it was not created by any one individual or group; neither is it a creature solely of the marketplace – it rightly ‘belongs’ to everyone.

In a world of decreasing demand for human labour, the economic rewards derived from technology will need to be distributed to people in ways that have nothing to do with the amount of work, if any, they perform.

Big Brother: what's on your PC?

The U.S. and European governments are working behind closed doors to establish an international copyright treaty (ACTA, leaked here) that would create a global police force, answerable to no one, with the authority to seize and inspect any device, without recourse or the possibility of appeal.

What's more, this copyright treaty has now been classified in the "interest of national security".

What you are witnessing is a conspiracy perpetrated by global capitalists to cement their control, under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Treaties between nations are effectively law, and when they can be negotiated in secret without any public debate, then democracy is completely subverted. The government has no mandate from the people to carry out laws drafted in this manner, and when they do, they are acting on behalf of the corporate oligarchy.

On the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the holders of capital

Rich People Don’t Create Wealth. They Manipulate It.:

The point is that both intellectuals and labourers are definitely more valuable than wealthy executives who only know how to increase their personal fortunes (which we perceive as “making the company successful”). We all know that the real success of a company is a consequence of innovators, good labour, and good marketing. In most cases the extremely wealthy don’t directly involve themselves with those tasks, but rather leave them up to hired experts.

Rich people skim wealth off the surface and manipulate their wealth, thus creating the illusion that they’re performing an important service. In truth a computer could do most of what they do; hire specialists to manage their companies and hire workers to perform labour. The wealthy just have what, superficially, appear to be complicated jobs because they’re always leveraging their existing capital to make more money. That’s not really a useful job - that’s just the manifestation of their own self interest, and a consequence of our willingness to allow this parasitic elite class to exist.

United States Economic Collapse Facing Its Weimar Moment

From The Market Oracle:

As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.

But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.

It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.

Rushkoff on the Economy

This is a wonderfully discerning article by the famed media-counterculture master. Read it all.

LET IT DIE:

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

Move to Detroit

For Sale: The $100 House:

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

...

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

The real Dow Jones

When adjusted for inflation, the March 2009 Dow low is fractionally lower than the real Dow high in 1966.

"Going Galt"

And now, an anti- Ayn Rand rant: Where in the World is John Galt?:

...
Rand's world is a vast fictional explication of the concept of 'social darwinism'; through absolute selfish competition, those who are fittest rise to the top and collect the bulk of the wealth, and everyone else gets whatever level of power and wealth they are comptent to handle. This is not only a social reality but a moral imperative; anyone who tries to interfere with the function of the free market is a sinful parasite, and anyone preaching the virtues of altruism and the 'duty' of people to help the less fortunate is just trying to get theirs by subterfuge instead of honest hard work.

Or, you know, by skimming the cream off the hard work of others, because that's what capitalism is in reality. No mention is made of how Galt's Gulch feeds itself, of how a bunch of investor/inventors engaged in a kind of extreme tax evasion managed to convince people to come work in their factories (or even build them). Presumably Galt and his cronies did it all themselves. The idea is more or less the same as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, except that everyone's working for wages and gets to buy each other's products, and magically nobody falls to the bottom of the economic heap because they're all magic super-capitalists (or if they do, they're happy about it because they're fulfilling their maximum potential in life while getting the moral satisfaction of sticking it to those parasites outside); and if there's a fire or they get sick they'll most certainly have insurance, and if the commies come along to rob them of their capital they'll all just pick up their guns and fight back. In fact, the concept of 'going Galt' is lifted from Anarchism hook line and sinker; but where Anarchism is about people working together to free themselves from tyranny, going Galt is about declaring yourself to be intrinsically better than the masses of poor and the working class by virtue of your ability to stack up worthless pieces of paper via usury.

Erosion: Just Say No

Catastrophic landslides at a Malaysian tin mine:

I must introduce you to Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays.

The short of it: in a fully automated society, it is simply infeasible to have 100% (or even 50%, with most jobs moving into the service sector) employment.

Thus he proposes a $25,000/yr/person stipend funded from a combination of sources, including high marginal rates on new tax brackets for multi-million-dollar corporate salaries, various sales taxes, and the full reallocation of social spending in almost all other areas.

The result would be a complete elimination of poverty, the stigma of welfare, wage slavery, and the social security solvency problem, leading to a "supercharging" of capitalism via massive increases in consumption and ultimately "true economic freedom".

I find this proposal very appealing, yet lacking in other core respects; e.g., those countries and entities with the greatest access to natural resources will continue to be the root sources of growth and power, and as money is simply a tool for distributing wealth, it inevitably adapts to reflect the availability of wealth. Maybe he's also assuming energy from pervasive nuclear fusion? Moreover, extreme consumption and growth also translate into extreme environmental devastation. Increased economic activity invariably decreases our quality of life, at the very least in so far as our natural environment is concerned.

I was waiting for him to mention gift economies, but he seems to love the profit system too much to accept its fundamental infeasibility in the long term.