Barbarians In Oklahoma

From Esquire courtesy of BuzzFlash:

I am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night. It did so under the color of law, which makes every citizen of that benighted state complicit in the act of fucking barbarism. The governor of that state, a pink balloon named Mary Fallin, is a fucking barbarian. A state legislator named Mike Christian is a fucking barbarian, for reasons we will get to in a moment. Every politician in that benighted state belongs in a fucking cage this morning.

"Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday evening. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow. Officials later blamed a ruptured vein for the problems with the execution, which are likely to fuel more debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the U.S. Constitution's requirement they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment."

More here.

Putting this horrific event carried out by the government of Oklahoma aside for the moment, and it is horrific, to be sure, it is clearly an exception proving the rule: capital punishment is irredeemably evil, and we must end it right now.  

I mean, really.  Once we have a murderer behind bars, it is highly unlikely that he will commit murder again, especially when juries have been allowed to sentence convicts to life without parole.  So capital punishment doesn't protect society.  And it doesn't deter murderers, either.  So capital punishment doesn't prevent murders.  What's left, then?  Vengeance.  Blood lust.  Political points and expediency.  Stuff that doesn't really justify murder.  Because that's what capital punishment is.  It's murder.  You can dress it up with the law.  You can put bereaved widows and orphans on television crying.  You can watch Nancy Grace freaking out on television all day long.  But none of that changes the fact that capital punishment is murder.  Murder in my and your name.  Murder we think is righteous because we're murdering murderers.

How on earth does a heinous crime justify another heinous crime?  And, for that matter, how many exonerations do we need in order to show that a significant percentage of people sentenced to death were never guilty in the first place?  And why the hell do we grant the government the power to take away citizens' lives?  Talk about Big Government excesses.  Capital punishment is a vile filthy business.  It is a stain on our civilization. 

The only moral course of action is to end the death penalty immediately.

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Employee opens fire at FedEx sorting center

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A FedEx employee wearing ammunition draped across his chest "like Rambo" opened fire Tuesday at a package-sorting center outside Atlanta, wounding six people before committing suicide, police and witnesses said.

In addition to a shotgun, the gunman also had an undisclosed number of Molotov cocktails, but he did not use them in the attack, police said.

The suspect, identified by police as 19-year-old Geddy Kramer of Acworth, was found dead inside. He worked as a package handler at the sprawling facility, Cobb County police Sgt. Dana Pierce said.

Investigators have an idea of what his motive may have been, but they were not prepared to disclose it yet, Pierce said.

More here.

This happens so often now that I've totally lost track.  When was the last shooting spree before this one?  I have no idea.  Indeed, this isn't even a front page story.  I stumbled across it while I was digging through the national and international news section of the Houston Chronicle online, which means the mass media is getting used to this stuff, too.

Think about that for a moment.  We're getting used to freaked out postal dude shooting sprees.  They happen seemingly all the time, and we're getting used to it.  Just another man-bites-dog story out of hundreds.  Never mind the gun control debate, what is it about living in this country that makes this so seemingly inevitable?  I have some speculative answers to that question, but it is deeply disturbing to feel like I need to ask it at all.

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Save Net Neutrality

From CounterPunch:

These new rules shift the Internet from an open system where all data travels at the same rate to a pay-to-play system favoring preferential treatment for the giant content providers like Netflix or Google’s YouTube.  Apparently, the new rules will continue to prohibit blocking or discriminating against online content.  Had the new rules been adopted a decade ago, its anyone’s guess whether Netflix or YouTube would be viable companies today.

The FCC’s likely actions to end net neutrality is a result of a systemic campaign to privatization of the Internet and further the monopolistic efforts of the giant telecom and media companies.  Over this period, both Republican (e.g., Michael Powell) and Democratic (e.g., Julius Genachowski) commissioners of the FCC have been water-carriers for corporate interests; the one major exception was former commissioner Michael Copps.

Click here for the rest.

At the moment, this is the issue pissing me off the most.  And that's because it's so totally in-your-face, a PERFECT example of how corporations do almost ANYTHING THEY WANT in this country, and our elected representatives and leaders just let them do it.  Nobody wants this, I mean, nobody but a very small number of massive media corporations, and, it almost goes without saying, the politicians they own.  Everybody else, you, me, shitloads of small businesses, everybody, thinks this is just awful.  It's near monopolistic, anti-competitive, anti-business, anti-consumer, anti-everybody.  And it's going to happen. 

We're all going to pay more, and not simply for internet service, but for any and all services we get on the internet.  Companies doing business on the internet will now have to pay what will amount to a tax, albeit a tax levied by internet service providers, which will be passed down to consumers.  In addition to being really annoying, and infuriating, this will definitely stifle economic growth.  All because corporations own the government.  This is sick.  Twisted and sick.  Even more so when you consider the fact that the internet was researched, developed, and created using taxpayer dollars.  

We own the damned thing.  But we clearly don't control it.

And, oh yeah, this is Obama's FCC, and it seems he's not going to lift a finger to stop this bullshit.  I just love it when Democrats are down with the people.  It's a shame it hasn't been that way for twenty years. 

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Study: U.S. is oligarchy, not republic

From WorldNetDaily:

A recent study by professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page found that the U.S. now resembles more of an oligarchy than a democratic republic.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

The author of  a recent commentary about oligarchy in the 21st century, Matthew Continetti, of the Free Beacon, might even suggest that last phrase be repeated.

“Mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

“What we are in danger of losing because of the ‘extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information’ are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets,” he wrote.

More here.

I post stuff like this all the time.  I mean, for my money, it is THE biggest issue facing the United States today, the fact that what remains of our democratic republic is essentially the formal structures, but without any of the substance, that is, political theater and ritual void of meaning or impact.  In twenty first century America, the fabulously wealthy rule, not the people.  Indeed, I ran across this story in my left-wing reading only a couple of days ago, but decided not to say anything about it here because I'm talking about it all the time, anyway.  

Okay, so why am I posting this now when I had already decided against it?

WorldNetDaily, the site running the article, is an extreme far-right news and conspiracy site.  They put a conservative spin on it, of course, but it's more or less the same story I saw over at AlterNet or Talking Points Memo.  And I'm just tickled pink by that.  Because, really, the end of American democracy isn't a partisan issue.  It's not even an ideological issue.  It's an American issue, and it ought to be scaring the hell out of liberals and conservatives alike.  So to encounter an article like this coming down from the far right can only mean that the throw-money-at-the-rich concept, which has utterly captivated conservatives for three decades, is finally starting to collapse.  That is, the extremely wealthy have gone too far, so far that it's becoming obvious even to their supporters.

Or, at least, I hope that's what's happening.  And, to be sure, WND is a fringe site, out in right field even by the standards of, say, William Buckley's The National Review, which probably ISN'T running the article.  So we don't know what mainstream conservatives might be thinking about this.  Still though, this is definitely something, and it gives me great hope for some common ground in the near future shared by both the left and the right.

For the moment, things are looking up.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy on the Move

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From Baloon Juice, courtesy of Eschaton:

Never Saw This Coming

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy was quoted as saying to a group of supporters last Saturday. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
 
More here.

Crazy Nevada rancher-thief conservative cause celeb Cliven Bundy is also apparently a total racist. Funny how these radical libertarian types so often seem to have racist skeletons in the closet. And by "funny" I mean "horrifying."  No, seriously, Ron and Rand Paul both have racist presences rattling around in their peripheries, and this makes complete sense.  In the end, "libertarianism" isn't about freedom; instead, it's about property rights, especially property belonging to whites, who own most of the property, anyway.  It is no surprise, then, that so many straight-up racists are attracted to this "philosophy."  It allows them to be total racist dicks and say that it's not about race, but rather "freedom."

Entertaining this shit is just insulting to one's intelligence.  Fucking racist assholes.

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Despite Justice Sotomayor's Passionate Dissent, Right-wing Supreme Court Turns Another Blind Eye to Racism

From AlterNet:

In sum, Sotomayor said that the U.S. Constitution “does not guarantee minority groups guaranteed outcomes [or] victory in the political process,” but that “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to the process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently.”

Tragically, Sotomayor’s fair-minded view of race and participation is not the majority view on the Supreme Court. If anything, when we look at where the Court has decided to expand “access” to supposedly democratic public processes like elections, what we find is a persistent and ongoing institutional bias toward the wealthiest Americans—who overwhelmingly also are white.

More here.

Back in the early 2000s, I did a really close reading of Justice Scalia's dissent in Garner v Texas, the gay sodomy case.  My motivation was that I had heard how Scalia's writing is incredibly clear, which turned out to be true, but because he's what passes for the very best among conservative intellectuals, I also wanted to see some of that very best conservative intellectualism at play.  And I was disappointed.  What I found was some really clever reasoning based on some assumptions about reality that were so flawed as to be absurd.  I'm no lawyer, and I had to look up some terms and concepts in order to get the gist of some of what he was saying, but Scalia's famous clarity served to lay his ultimately faulty argumentation completely bare.  That is, you don't need to be a lawyer to see the false "facts" upon which the conservative jurist's arguments are based: when your facts are wrong, your arguments, as groovy and intelligent as they might seem, go absolutely nowhere.

So it was completely clear that Scalia had, and probably still has, absolutely no understanding of what gay people are about as human beings, and I mean that in terms of what contemporary psychology has been telling us about homosexuality for decades now.  He was completely divorced from reality in considering the question of whether consenting gay people should have the same privacy rights that straight people have.  Consequently, his conclusions were totally full of shit.  And you don't need a law degree to know that.

Flash forward to this recent ruling on a ballot initiative in Michigan banning affirmative action in university admissions.  While I haven't read the majority opinion, myself, I'm very inclined to believe Justice Sotomayor's assertion that the Court's conservative faction apparently has absolutely no understanding of the racial dynamic today in the United States.  And if that's true, then, as with Scalia's arguments in Garner v Texas, the entire majority opinion must necessarily be WRONG.  You just can't base a successful argument on faulty assumptions.  Such an argument is a failure from the very beginning.

For instance, have you ever noticed the tendency of black people to hang out with black people, and the tendency of white people to hang out with white people?  Right, it's obvious.  And there's been a lot of serious academic study about this.  Turns out, I mean, again, obviously, that people are more comfortable in the presence of people who are like them in terms of race and ethnicity.  Not racism, just people understanding better others who share a lot of their experiences.  But what happens during the interview process for people trying to get jobs?  That tendency is still there, but it's not about hanging out, it's about getting jobs, and, for most people, that tendency is not consciously understood: employers during interviews are, whether they want to be or not, more comfortable with potential employees of their own race and ethnicity, and that DEFINITELY affects the hiring process.  Now connect the dots.  This is still a white dominated nation, and that means whites are mostly in control of the hiring process overall.

And that means we have a MAJOR problem when it comes to equal opportunity, a problem unacknowledged by most whites because whites don't think about this kind of thing.  To date, affirmative action has been the ONLY plan for dealing with this kind of inadvertent discrimination.  It's the same thing with the university acceptance process, and I'd bet you credits to navy beans that the SCOTUS majority for this Michigan decision didn't consider these facts at all, which means that they necessarily arrived at a faulty conclusion.  The wrong conclusion.  One that allows systemic, chronic, gross denial of civil rights to huge populations within the US.

Oh, and let's not forget the recent study showing that desegregation in the public schools never fully happened, and that what desegregation did happen is now reversing itself.  Brown v the Board of Education ruled that separate cannot ever be equal, but separate is what we have.  For some reason the conservatives on the Supreme Court don't seem to acknowledge this gigantic turd in their color blind punch bowl, which, again, makes their notions of fairness and equality problematic, at best, and WRONG, at worst.

I mean, for god's sake, the whole Michigan ban on affirmative action is because it supposedly discriminates against whites!  That's just straight up fiction.  And the conservative Justices seem to believe the lie.

Actually, that's the most interesting question to me.  The Supreme Court's conservative wing appears to be totally out of touch with reality on various issues, which is why they get it wrong so often--it really does have nothing to do with interpreting the law; it's about understanding the reality in which we live.  But can it really be possible that such learned men are so freaking stupid?  Or, rather, are they simply offering pseudo-intellectual bullshit as cover for their preferred political outcomes?

I, for one, tend to never attribute to malevolence what can be better attributed to stupidity, and advanced degrees are in no way inoculation against stupidity.  But really.  How can these guys be so fucking stupid?  It strains the imagination.

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Group puts Confederate flag on Ga. specialty tag

From the AP via Yahoo:

Georgia officials have once again approved a specialty license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag, infuriating civil rights advocates and renewing a debate among those who believe the symbol honors Confederate heritage and those who see it as racially charged.

More here.

I think I should be allowed to have a license plate emblazoned with a Nazi swastika in order to honor my German heritage.* No, no, this has nothing to do with the death camps, antisemitism, homophobia, and slave labor. It's just about my German heritage, you know, apfelwein, Goethe, sausage, and the pragmatism and efficiency of German culture. When you tell me my swastika license plate is offensive, you're oppressing me.

 (* Actually, I have no German heritage. This is for satirical purposes only.)

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FUCK THE LIBERALS

From Paul Krugman's blog:

There Goes the Sun

What makes it even worse is that one (not the only) reason to like the solar revolution is that it helps fight climate change. So if you’re a card-carrying conservative, who believes that climate change is the biggest, most intricate, and most incredibly successful conspiracy in history — thousands of scientists around the world, and not one of them squealing! — you want to block solar even if it saves money.

More here.

To riff on what my favorite blogger Atrios said when he posted this over at Eschaton, the necessary conclusion that must come from realizing that hating liberals is very likely the most unifying philosophical principle among conservatives today is that there really is no unifying philosophical principle among conservatives.  

I mean, just consider Obamacare for a moment.  It was created by a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, for the express purpose of being the conservative alternative to liberal health care reform.  That's why Mitt Romney got it passed when he was governor of Massachusetts; it uses a "market solution" to solve a social problem.  And that's why Obama endorsed it, too, in order to head off a great deal of anticipated conservative opposition to health care reform.  But when Obama, who is perceived by conservatives as a liberal, decided to make the health care scheme his signature piece of legislation, all the conservatism that had gone into creating it in the first place was automatically voided within the conservative hive mind.

That is, if a "liberal" likes it, then conservatives must necessarily hate it.  But hate isn't really an idea.  It's certainly not a philosophy.  Rather, it's an emotion.  And that's all the conservatives have left for them these days.  Emotion.  Bile.  Venom.  Anger.  Hate.  Nothing else.  All they've got is resentment and anger.  Certainly not any ideas about how to make the nation better.   

In short, conservatives, the 21st century kind, at least, stand for NOTHING.  Kind of like the nihilists in The Big Lebowski. 

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TOTAL UNAWARENESS OF SELF

From AlterNet:

Maddow Asks: 'Why Do We Overlook Right-Wing Violence and 
Refuse to Call it Terrorism?' Answer: Because They're White

Patterns of violence by white people, most notably mass shootings by white men, apparently tell us nothing about Whiteness or white masculinity. Patterns of behavior that should be the basis of a critical inquiry about white culture (a logic that when applied to black and brown people inevitably returns to questions of "pathology" and “bad genes”), is a question that cannot be asked by the mainstream media, or in "polite" circles, as it is considered impolitic.

More here.

It seems to me that white Americans have absolutely no discourse, with self or others, about what it means to be white.  Certainly not compared to, say, African-Americans or Latinos.  I mean, okay sure, this kind of makes sense: when your ethnicity is not the dominant ethnicity, you must necessarily try to figure out what your identity is relative to the dominant culture, and this is an ongoing thing--virtually every moment of your life, if you are in the minority, you are reminded that you are not in the majority.  So, you know, what's it all mean, then?  Minority Americans have been working on this for almost the entire history of the republic.  But not whites.  Whites have no idea who they are simply because they've never thought ethnic identity is something that pertains to them.

This utter lack of self-awareness on the part of whites sets them up, again and again, for confusion about important issues.  It also makes them easily manipulated by clever politicians, PR people, and advertisers.  Oh, and let's not forget the weird resentments many whites have when it comes to considering Black History Month, and other manifestations of ethnic pride and awareness.  But as this nation becomes ever more diverse, and the prospect of whites becoming simply another minority among multiple minorities, a large one, to be sure, but definitely a minority, becomes ever more a reality, we'd better get it in gear on this.

Otherwise, we're just going to be standing around drooling and shocked everytime another Trayvon Martin happens.  And that's not a good place to be.

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"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

Easter Sunday is an excellent time to read one of my signature posts from back in the day, one which I consider to be too-hot-for-facebook.  But you can read it all here, in its entirety, on Ishtar.  I mean, Easter.

Click here for EASTER GRINCH.

Hoppy Easter!


 
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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Another special canine edition!

Lola

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Nevada rancher in tense standoff with federal government over cattle on rural public lands

From the New York Daily News:

A turf war has erupted in rural Nevada as a longtime rancher and hundreds of his supporters battle the federal government, which has moved to seize cattle that graze on thousands of acres of public land.

Cliven Bundy, 68, has been embroiled in a two-decade-long dustup with the federal Bureau of Land Management, which finally sent in men armed with large guns to surround Bundy's ranch in Bunkerville, west of the Arizona and Utah border, as contracted cowboys roundup the man’s 900 beef cattle during the next several days.

The beef has built up since 1993 when Bundy, whose family has long worked the land in Clark County some 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, refused to pay grazing fees on 600,000 acres of public land, dubbed Gold Butte, surrounding his 160-acre farm.

More here.

Crazy conservative cause celeb millionaire rancher nut in Nevada: a thief, of your tax dollars, who justifies not paying grazing fees for federally owned lands because of his "ancestral grazing rights." Whatever. A thief is a thief is a thief.

Also, creating an armed standoff with the feds, which is what happened with this last weekend, is a massive crime. It doesn't matter how much sympathy you have coming from Fox News. These are all criminals who should be in jail.  While I'm pleased that BLM agents did not take the bait on this, and withdrew, all these people need to be rounded up, the sooner the better.

That's what you do with criminals.  Round them up.

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5 Explosive Revelations Leaked from Senate Report Exposing CIA Torture

From AlterNet:

Based on CIA documents, senators on the powerful committee conducted a four-year long, $40 million inquiry into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which included torture tactics like the waterboarding of terrorism suspects, beatings and the smashing of suspects’ heads into walls. While the public may be aware of some of these practices due to past revelations, the information carries heavy weight because it is the Senate confirming many of those claims, which has oversight power over the agency.

The CIA’s torture program started soon after 9/11. The Bush administration signed off on what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but which clearly constituted torture, a crime under U.S. and international law.

More here.

Torture is deeply immoral.  Legal briefs don't change that.  The fact that official enemies of the US might use torture, too, doesn't change that.  That we, the United States, have tortured, again and again, in this misguided and destructive "War on Terror," has left blood all over our collective hands.  I mean, we already had bloody hands, from slavery, and then Jim Crow, and from the genocide of the Native Americans, and various other imperialistic atrocities.  But at least public discourse sort of acknowledges the existence of these grave sins.  

The American torture regime, in sharp contrast, hardly registers in the public consciousness.  The men who formulated plans for, and then ordered, these mass violations of human rights walk free.  The current administration, as well as the House and Senate, seem utterly unconcerned with justice, which makes them complicit in these high crimes against humanity.  America, like Iran, Baathist Iraq, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and countless others, is now one of those nations.  We torture, and then we put medals on the torturers.  This disgusts me.  And if you're an American with a conscience and a belief in justice and morality, you should be disgusted, too.

On the other hand, sweeping this all under the carpet the way we're doing is so very America-of-the-now.  From fraudulent and thieving bankers, to professional athletes using steroids, to parents harassing teachers and administrators until their C student babies get As, to blaming the poor for the actions of capitalists, and on and on and on: in the 21st century, we Americans don't take responsibility for ANYTHING.  

It's somebody else's problem.  Actually it's not even a problem.  There is no problem.  STFU, asshole.  You're killing my buzz.

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Florida artist smashes $1M vase in Miami museum

From the AP via the Tampa Tribune:

Maximo Caminero, 51, was charged with criminal mischief after Sunday’s incident at the Perez Art Museum Miami. According to a Miami Police Department arrest affidavit, a security guard told officers that Caminero picked up a colored vase by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. When told to put it down, the security guard said Caminero smashed it on the floor.

A police affidavit says Caminero told officers he broke the vase to protest the museum’s lack of local artist displays and because “the museum only displayed international artists’ art.”

More here.

Oh, I'm sure the guy has a point in there somewhere. It's just that I think that destroying art, for an artist, necessarily devalues art more generally, and therefore his role as an artist in society. I mean, postmodernism yadda yadda, it's a dumbshit protest, and conceptually counterproductive.

What a douche bag.

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NO, UNIONS ARE GOOD.

The only people in our society who have good reason to trash the concept of labor unions are management and capitalists, you know, real capitalists, the people who own and operate the nation. And really, it's not even good reason. It's just because they have an absurd notion that they should be able to exploit anything and anyone they want in order to make more and more money. But at least they have a motivation. Everyone else on the anti-union bandwagon are just fools. Total fools.

 As Noam Chomsky recently observed*:

"The whole system is being turned into something bought. It has very limited resemblance to democracy. It's plutocracy, and the only way to deal with this is by mass public organization to counter it, and, in fact, that requires associations. The major association that's always been in the lead on this is unions. So naturally during the neoliberal period, and, in fact, before, there's been a massive attack on unions to try to undermine and destroy them. That makes sense. They're the one major organization that allows working people, poor people, to come together to work out their programs, formulate their demands, defend their rights, to press for progressive developments elsewhere in society. So sure, they have to be wiped out. By now private sector unions are less than seven percent of the work force. So there has to be an attack on public unions because they've managed to survive, and you see that before your eyes. It's happening all over."
 
Yes, the evil bad teacher unions, among others. If you believe that, I've got some swamp land in Florida where I'm sure you'd love to build a nice retirement cottage.

*(I got this quote from a YouTube video saw back in February, and now it appears to no longer exist.  But I assure you, these are Chomsky's actual words!)

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Corporate Cash Hoarding Is Killing the Middle Class

From AlterNet, Florida representative Alan Grayson reads for us the writing on the wall:

As that finance newsletter proudly states, huge corporations don’t spend their money; they just sock it away. And the same thing is true of rich people, and banks, and multi-national corporations. The 400 individuals on the Forbes 400 list alone have accumulated more than $2 trillion in wealth, the great majority of which remains in their pockets year after year. We are ending up with enormous pools of cash that have been drained from the real economy, and are not reinvested in it. We have a national economy with a maximum possible economic output of $16 trillion each year, but much of it ends up in deep pockets with no holes, just sitting there. This creates a massive and chronic shortage in “aggregate demand,” a problem that John Maynard Keynes accurately described 75 years ago. If we allow demand to fall short, then unemployment explodes. Hence we paper over the evaporation of all that money from aggregate demand with federal deficits, “quantitative easing” and enormous personal debt.

More here.

As Marxist economist Richard Wolff has asserted endlessly, we don't have a massive debt/deficit problem due to reckless spending and a Big Government out of control.  Rather,we have a deficit/debt problem because, starting in the 1970s, we stopped taxing where the real wealth actually resides.  Adding insult to injury, a lot of that money, maybe most, which previously came into the federal government as tax revenue, is now loaned to us by the very same people we no longer tax.  Win/win for them.  Lose/lose for everybody else.  So the deficit is a bullshit "crisis" which, when you throw in militant and willfully ignorant Tea Party activists to the mix, now periodically threatens to upend the entire global economy, what with weird debt-ceiling posturing, and never-surrender budget negotiations.

But that's not even close to the end of the story.  As Grayson observes in his essay, this corporate cash-hoarding, when coupled with similar behavior from fabulously wealthy families and individuals, effectively renders inert as much as A QUARTER of the entire GDP.  That's because they just sit on this money--the old wives' tales about how throwing money at the rich stimulates the economy have been proven false by actual economic studies on multiple occasions.  So big business and the extraordinarily rich literally impede economic growth.  And when that happens, most of us suffer in countless ways.  Not them, of course, never them.

We really, as a civilization, need to get over this mindless worship of these masters of capital.  In the end, they're parasites on society, and we should squash them like the blood-sucking bugs they are.  Or tax the hell out of them.  One of those two.  Squash them or tax them.  I'm cool either way.

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