Wherein We Are Shewn How The Sausage Is Made
Politics: So Many Choices.
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GOP Confident Kavanaugh Is Cleared
-- CNN Headline, October 4, 2018
...By “epistemic world”, I mean a broadly shared framework for knowing [where] emotions, moral sensibilities and reason are all informed by certain values, either consciously or unconsciously... When our epistemic world is threatened, we feel ourselves being undone. As a philosopher, I am inclined to see [the nomination of Kavanaugh] as a war between two epistemic worlds.
In the first world, privileged white men get to do with impunity what other men at least have to think twice about, and for women who dare to speak of them, the punishment is swift and devastating. ... In the second epistemic world, the default position is to believe [the] women who make sexual assault allegations...
Much of the media spectacle around the Kavanaugh nomination has made it seem as if the epistemic battle is about the truth... Kavanaugh’s supporters want to be sure that what is at stake is not truth, but meaning. It isn’t really about
who you believe, so much as which epistemic world you believe in.
Will the first epistemic world retain its power to determine the status of such happenings, to determine what they mean, how they matter? ... make no mistake -- the “old” world ... is right here, right now, and despite the remarkable gains of the #MeToo movement, it controls every branch of our government.
-- Bonnie Mann,
"Trump’s New Taunt, Kavanaugh’s Defense and How Misogyny Rules";
New York Times, October 3, 2018 (Minor edits for clarity)
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A Simulacrum Of A Pretense Of Caring
...A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves.
The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about...
Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel. And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics.
It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.
But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too.
They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.
-- Umair Haque,
"Why We're Underestimating American Collapse";
Eudaimonia&Co., January 25, 2018
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Democracy Means Someday You Can Do It Too
Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Barstow, Craig and Buettner,
"Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father", New York Times, October 2, 2018
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Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Ogg Ogg
The Oldest Friend Asks: "Why do you undercut your writing with humor
that detracts from whatever your point is?"
Golden Days
America has a thriving mutual support network of family trusts and estates. The Trump administration is serving their interests well. What caught the headlines in Mr Trump’s tax bill last December was the cut in the corporate tax rate. Private wealth also had plenty to cheer. The bill doubled the floor at which people must start paying inheritance taxes.
Couples can now shelter their children from paying a cent on the first $22 million of what they inherit. The previous floor was already high, even by America’s standards. [In 2000, only] 2% of American estates paid any estate tax. That has now fallen to [ 0.01% ], according to the Joint Committee on Taxation...
...Mr. Kavanaugh boasted that he had “busted a gut” to make it to Yale, and benefited from “no connections”. In fact, he attended a Washington private school that churns out Ivy League material... Mr Kavanaugh’s grandfather studied at Yale.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kavanaugh offers a cracked reflection of society. America’s elites do not like what they see. It distorts their world as they like to see it: meritocratic, fair-minded, and politically correct. Each in their way presents a grotesquerie of America’s less noble side.
In Mr. Kavanaugh’s case, it is the slipped mask of a man trying to imitate Lady Justice. In Mr. Trump’s it is a president who reinforces an economic structure that sustains them.
-- Edward Luce,
"Donald Trump and The Golden Age Of America’s Oligarchy," Financial Times, October 4, 2018
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Is She Big Is She Moving Is She Hellbound
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
-- e. e. cummings, May, 1927; as quoted in George Firmage's
A Miscellany (1958)
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But, It Mimics Nature
In 2011, the Swiss Institute of Technology (
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule [ETH], Zürich) released a comprehensive study of the ownership structures of ~43,000 transnational corporations.
The ETH determined that all of them were owned by just 147 corporate entities, which they referred to as a 'Super Entity' -- and 75% of
them are financial corporations (Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston,
"The Network Of Corporate Global Control", ETH Zürich, 2011)
... But don't grab a pitchfork and head to the nearest Occupy protest just yet. Systems researchers say this isn't the result of an Illuminati-type global conspiracy, but rather a natural force to be expected.
"Such structures are common in nature," complex systems expert George Sudihara told NewScientist.
The researchers say that while there's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with the concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of companies, when those companies become too interconnected, they can cause chain reactions that can harm the economy.
-- Daniel Tencer,
" 'Super-Entity' Of 147 Companies At Center Of World's Economy, Study Claims", Huffington Post Canada, October 24, 2011
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Keep Them From Noticing The Fire As Long As Possible
What will trigger the next crash?
The $13.2 trillion in unsustainable U.S. household debt? The $1.5 trillion in unsustainable student debt? The billions Wall Street has invested in a
fracking industry that has spent $280 billion more than it generated from its operations? Who knows.
What is certain is that a global financial crash, one that will dwarf the meltdown of 2008, is inevitable. And this time, with interest rates near zero, the elites have no escape plan. ...
An emergency clause in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows the Fed to provide liquidity to a distressed banking system. But [After the 2008 Crash] the Federal Reserve did not stop with [providing banks with] a few hundred billion dollars. It flooded the financial markets with absurd levels of fabricated money. This had the effect of making the economy appear as if it had revived. And for the oligarchs, who had access to this fabricated money while we did not, it did.
...The global financial system is a ticking time bomb. The question is not
if it will explode but when it will explode. And once it does, the inability of the global speculators to use fabricated money with zero interest to paper over the debacle will trigger massive unemployment, high prices for imports and basic services, and a devaluation in which the dollar will become nearly worthless as it is abandoned as the world’s reserve currency...
...Given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be repaid, the banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt. This is why when you are late in paying your credit card the interest rate jumps to 28 percent. This is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for paying off your student loan, even as 1 million people a year default on student loans, with 40 percent of all borrowers expected to default on student loans by 2023.
This is why wages are stagnant or have declined while costs, from health care and pharmaceutical products to bank fees and basic utilities, are skyrocketing. The enforced debt peonage grows to feed the beast until, as with the subprime mortgage crisis, the predatory system fails because of massive defaults...
-- Chris Hedges,
"Conjuring Up The Next Depression", TruthDig, September 10, 2018
(Links Added)
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WALLACE GLADSTONE: ... And now, here's a contingent of our heroic POWs, many of whom spent years in prison in Hanoi, courageously resisting the persistent efforts of their North Vietnamese captors to brainwash them into thinking that the United States is run by a tiny clique of criminals, dominated by powerful business interests; bankrolled by huge, monopolistic corporations working hand in glove with the CIA in a campaign of intrigue at home and abroad.
BARBARA MERKIN: Jesus, why do they bother?
GLADSTONE: Oh; I don't know, Barbara.
-- "Impeachment Day Parade Coverage", Chevy Chase (Gladstone), Rhonda Coulett (Merkin); National Lampoon's Missing White House Tapes (Blue Thumb Records, 1974)
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