Unequal Union

"Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin."

-Joseph E. Stiglitz

(excerpted from:" Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" - Vanity Fair, May 2011)

The "Media"

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic."*

... "Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt - until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, blacks, and anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

*-Gore Vidal

Pledge Of Allegiance

Exxon Mobil's 2009 profits totaled $19 billion, yet according to its SEC filings, the company received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, plus, IT DIDN'T PAY ANY FEDERAL TAXES.

Bank of America made $4.4 billion in profits last year. This was after it received a $1 TRILLION BAILOUT from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, and A $1.9 BILLION TAX REFUND from the IRS.

General Electric has made $26 billion in profits in the United States over the past five years. It's also received a $4.1 BILLION TAX REFUND from the IRS. GE HAS CUT A FIFTH OF ITS AMERICAN JOBS in the past nine years, and is boosting jobs overseas - where tax rates are lower. And where it can continue evading U.S. taxes.

Chevron's IRS REFUND LAST YEAR TOTALED $19 MILLION, but it's 2009 profits came to a whopping $10 billion.

Boeing received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers. It also received a $124 MILLION REFUND FROM THE IRS.

Valero Energy made $68 billion in sales and received a $157 MILLION TAX REFUND check from the IRS. Over the past three years, it has received a $134 million tax break thanks to the oil and gas manufacturing tax reduction.

Goldman Sachs paid 1.1% OF ITS 2008 INCOME TAXES and received a $800 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department. Yet it made a PROFIT OF $2.3 BILLION in profit for the same year.

Citigroup profits last year totaled more than $4 billion. But it paid zero dollars in federal income tax, and RECEIVED A $2.5 TRILLION BAILOUT from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

Conoco Phillips' profits from 2007 through 2009 totaled $16 billion. BUT IT WAS STILL AWARDED $451 MILLION IN TAX BREAKS.

Carnival Cruise Lines' profit over the past five years totaled more than $11 billion, BUT ITS FEDERAL INCOME TAX CAME TO JUST 1.1%

Willing Prisoners


Joe Bageant

"Them that don't know don't know they don't know."*

"If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

We create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members.

Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.

The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political.

In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable.

But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.

Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge.

Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade.

Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon."

-Joe Bageant

*(excerpted from: "AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?")
Read the entire article HERE: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/12/america-y-ur-peeps-b-so-dum.html#more

Defenders of the Decline

"The struggle for human rights is a continuum with no beginning and no end. I don’t think there’s any such thing as “postracism.”

The militias are, in my opinion, the modern manifestation of the Klan’s tradition of violence and white rule. The militia agenda, in some respects and in many areas, is far more drastic than the Klan could have ever conceived. The Klan, by and large, was considered patriotic and supportive of the US government, whereas the militias want to overthrow the American federal government by force and rewrite the Constitution so that only Caucasian whites would have citizenship.
It would be, in effect, a 100 percent fascist, Nazi concept of America.
The Tea Party people are the counterparts of the first Nazi Germany storm troopers when Hitler had only a handful of them.
They’ve got the same sort of psychology and personality and potential for evil.

It goes without saying that the tendency of so-called law enforcement was—and this is municipal, state, county, and federal—to smile upon militias as good ol’ boys letting off steam who don’t mean anyone any harm. But one could imagine what would happen if the NAACP or Anti-Defamation League or B’nai B’rith or La Raza started wearing fatigues, carrying military weapons, and practicing warfare with live ammo. They’d all be behind barbed wire by sundown.

The prohibition against private armies is in there, it’s just not being enforced. I think we’re putting our nation in grave peril by allowing it to continue. I was saying things like this on a local radio station a while back, and the head of the area militia called in. I asked him, “Well, do you consider yourself well armed?” And he said, “Well, I certainly do.” Then he recited every weapon in his arsenal and was very proud of it. I asked, “Who are you planning to kill?” And he said, “Anyone who tries to take away my guns.” If the incumbent national administration happened to impose the constitutional statutory laws against private armies, I don’t know if we’d have a virtual civil war on our hands or not. These people are fanatics. My concern is not just racism—these people are large-scale counterrevolutionists, and by that I’m referring to the American Revolution. They are terrorists simply biding their time.

During the Great Depression, the American dream, the ultimate goal of society, was to have a “chicken in every pot.” Now it’s owning two automobiles and a runabout boat and all sorts of other things. During the middle of the 20th century, the US Chamber of Commerce’s slogan was “Build the Middle Class.” That is something worthwhile. Now, a half century later, we’re face to face with the phenomenon of the middle class being precipitously plunged into something less than middle class. And the flight of industry and capital to other low-cost labor markets in the world has left America to wither on the vine, so much that instead of worrying about “rust belts” we would do well to start worrying about a “rust continent.” To my mind, that is nothing less than high treason. Capitalists decided they were going to escape from two centuries of bloody, painful struggle to improve labor conditions. They packed it up to go to places where they didn’t have to worry about child-labor laws, workman’s comp, unemployment insurance, retirement insurance, safety regulations, or environmental protection. This means the Industrial Revolution is starting over again with no holds barred. What that means for the future remains to be seen. It has the potential of making us a third-world debtor, flash-in-the-pan, has-been nation."

-Stetson Kennedy

(excerpted from: "BUSTING UP THE KLAN AND STICKING IT TO THE MAN")
Read the entire article HERE:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v18n4/htdocs/busting-up-the-klan-771.php

Serf City Here We Come*

"Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still peasants as far as i can see"


-John Lennon ("Working Class Hero")

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxMyFe81FUg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

Emale

"In Antiquity, people sought moderation because they did not have it. In the Middle Ages, they sought logic because they did not have it. In modernism, they sought emotion because they did not have it. In post-modernism, they seek meaning because they do not have it. After post-modernism, they will seek man because they will not have him."

-Yorgos Lamprakos

Contact


2001: A Space Odyssey, (1968)

The Last Act

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

-I.J. Good (1965)

INFO:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html

Little People In Your Ears

"Just as there won’t be a clear distinction between nonbiological and biological intelligence, there won’t be a clear distinction between real and virtual realities. It’s going to be mixed up—we’re going to have augmented reality. You’ll look at someone and there will be little pop-ups and little virtual people who whisper in our ears and tell us what’s going on, or just remind us what people’s names are."

-RAY KURZWEIL

Read the rest at Vice Magazine:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n4/htdocs/ray-kurzweil-800.php

(illustration by: Eduardo Paolozzi)

Relearning Learning


Ken Robinson on reforming public education

Born To Buy

"Marketing is fundamentally altering the experience of childhood. Corporations have infiltrated the core activities and institutions of youth, with virtually no resistance from government or parents. Advertising is widespread in schools. Electronic media are replacing conventional play. We have become a nation that places a lower priority on teaching its children how to thrive socially, intellectually, and morally than it does on training them to consume.
Kids can recognize logos by eighteen months and before reaching their second birthday, they're asking for products by brand name. By three and a half years old, experts say children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities. Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke hundreds of brands, and he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented amount of possessions.
As kids age, they turn to teen culture, which is is saturated by the media with gratutious sexuality, based on unrealistic body images, constraining gender stereotypes, and, all too frequently, the degradation of women.
The dominant teen culture is also rife with materialism and preaches that if you're not rich, you're a loser. Adolescents are subjected to unremitting pressure to conform to the market's definition of cool. And now these values have migrated down to younger children. Eight and nine year olds watch reality shows and other prime-time fare ostensibly aimed at teens and adults. Marketers are deliberately investing children's culture with themes and sensibilities that have worked with teens - a widespread practice known as "tweening".
These developments have not been beneficial. Research has shown that involvement in consumer culture causes dysfunction in the forms of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints.
American youth has emerged as the most brand-oriented, consumer-involved, and materialistic generation in history."

- excerpted from Born To Buy by Juliet Schor

"The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant... *

*... is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments."

-Mad Magazine

Shop Till You Drop

"An important new issue is emerging in the arena of sustainable development that rivals environmental concerns in importance. It is consumption — or rather, mis- and over-consumption. This is a less tractable problem than environmental degradation in that politicians see efforts to contain consumption as a superb way to lose votes. It is at the heart of the sustainability debate, as it covers the depletion of natural capital, such as key non-renewable resources, and the capacity to absorb pollution."

-Norman Myers (from Confronting Consumerism, MIT Press)

INFO:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8734&ttype=2
http://web.utk.edu/~arouthe/mli/Confronting%20Consumption.pdf

"A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy."*

*-Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881), Speech in the House of Commons, Mar. 3, 1845

Give It A Go

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.


-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

("In Memoriam", 1849)