Tag: Class Warfare

Among the many ironies that characterize our chaotic era is the likelihood that the green dreams of environmental reformers will be realized in the nightmarish context of a class war that separates mankind into two groups: the rich and politically powerful, who will preserve high standards of living; and the poor and politically weak, who will sink into polluted misery as resource depletion, climate change, and social unrest ruin their lives.

Nobody is more eager to go “off the grid” than the predatory elites. Once they have isolated their lily pads of comfort from the decaying infrastructure of the mass societies that they exploit, they will have a far more efficient and profitable model for aggrandizing their wealth. The wealthy fully anticipate a die-off of the world’s excess population, and they have zero interest in any kind of shared sacrifice that might save a few billion people at the expense of cuts in their living standards.

Thus, creating enclaves that are ecologically self-sufficient is a high priority for those who intend to be among the survivors of the coming ecological catastrophes. Where possible, the wealthy will provide their own power, water, food, and security directly, but where they must depend on outside entities, they will work relentlessly to secure preferential access, mainly by insisting that the resources be provided by private corporations. The reason the rich love free markets is that they can always be the high bidders. Markets allow the rich to legally secure scarce resources. This is why there has been a steady drive to privatize the control of vital services worldwide. For example, water supply, which was once almost entirely in the hands of governments, has been steadily privatized all over the world. When clean water is provided by a corporation, all it takes is a single price adjustment to turn it into a luxury available only to the wealthy.

There is no realistic possibility of an ordinary middle-class household going “off the grid” without enduring a sharp drop in living standards. But the wealthy can afford the scale of investment required to replace costly shared infrastructure, or to buy dwindling shared resources at top-bidder prices. Thus the green future envisioned by environmental reformers is likely to be realized by the wealthy and powerful, and not by the mass of humanity, who, having exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, will die in misery outside the islands of comfort the rich have established in the green strongholds of their neo-medieval society.

When a society becomes corrupt it becomes economically unhealthy. Although it may continue to accumulate wealth through global plundering, the depletion of trust resulting from corruption undermines domestic productivity, as increasing numbers of citizens lose the incentive to cooperate constructively. The wealthy and powerful respond to the economic deterioration in classic zero-sum fashion: to preserve and extend their advantages, they extract more resources from the poor and the weak.

This is the situation America faces at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The rapacious rich, having consolidated their control over the government since the “Reagan Revolution,” have undermined the economic productivity of the United States to the point that their only remaining avenue for further enrichment is to extract wealth from the middle and lower classes. They will do this by causing the US Government to default on domestic obligations to the poor and middle class – specifically Social Security and Medicare.

The cutbacks will fall on the weakest members of society because the wealthy and powerful control the executive branch, the Congress, and the courts. Behind a huge propaganda blitz, and possibly a new war of choice, the middle class and poor will be told that “sacrifice” is every American’s patriotic duty. Meanwhile, CEO salaries will continue to rise and wealth will be further concentrated, as the oligarchy continues to feed on the decaying carcass of our former democracy.

When social conditions for the middle class reach a point of intolerable deterioration, a political backlash will develop, but this is likely to be brutally suppressed by “anti-terrorist” tactics similar to those utilized in third-world regimes. The people may ultimately prevail against the oligarchs, but the cost will be frightful.

Given the sociopathic character of the American economic elite and their highly perfected tools of political and media manipulation, this unhappy outcome is inevitable. The public Internet has arrived too late to halt America’s plunge into the abyss. The forces of greed have overwhelmed the nascent movements for justice and sustainable society. Something true, just, and decent may arise from the ruins of the American culture of predation, but it will not emerge from simple reason and honest communication; it will be the result of a colossal and costly failure, the global failure of selfishness and deceit in a world sustainable only through sharing and honesty.

Sometimes the White Man’s Burden is just unbearable. Try explaining that to my Stockholders now. All they want is a bottom line of profit. They don’t understand at times, what we are up against.

Katrina wasn’t enough, you know those levees had to fail for it to be the Perfect Disaster for a nice white Capitalist takeover. It was almost done. Most of the tract houses and apartment buildings are still boarded and abandoned. There were “just enough” people of color left to play for the Tourists on Bourbon. Maybe a couple Chiefs who can still convince themselves that there is “pride on Bourbon” enough to create a second line or two here and there; while working two jobs and moonlighting at the strip clubs as musicians. But overall, the Blacks and the Creoles left en masse, and the Real Estate is there for  the picking. Like manna from the heavens, room for all the rich white people who love just a “tiny bit” of color in their lives. You know, the “cultural absorption” spectator sport that convinced them in the past that seeing Buffalo Bills traveling Indian Show made them experts in Lakota, and that on Prince Spaghetti day everyone is Italian. God knows, there was no culture there in the slums, anyway. Poor people and their poor English, and the scariest of them at least stay way-back in the deep bayous. Those people are crazy.

We had such plans. The Resorts. The Marinas. The theme parks with genuine Cajun shrimp kabobs, but not too spicy for the freckle faced kiddies from the corn belt. Gauhrunteeeeed. Its not like we weren’t planning on buying east coast shrimp, anyway; and no one swims in the ocean when you have a series of cascading pools, but the smell? Its not just the oil and dispersants, now its dead fish too.

Goldman Sachs’ fraud epitomizes everything that is wrong with America: “the haves” repeatedly screwing “the have-nots,” not by being better or smarter, but through sheer, premeditated criminal fraud.

Goldman’s e-mails sound all too reminiscent of the criminal disregard for humanity at Enron before they collapsed (via Mish Shedlock, emphases mine):

Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive director facing a fraud lawsuit in the sale of a mortgage-linked investment, said an index that facilitated derivatives trading in the market was “like Frankenstein.”

The so-called ABX index is “the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a ‘thing,’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?'” Tourre said in a Jan. 29, 2007, e-mail released yesterday by Goldman Sachs. Watching the index fall is “a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor.”

In a March 7, 2007, e-mail Tourre describes the U.S. subprime mortgage market as “not too brilliant” and says that “according to Sparks,” an apparent reference to Daniel Sparks who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, “that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last too long!!!”

A few months later, a June 13, 2007, e-mail shows Tourre claiming, “I’ve managed to sell a few Abacus bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic ABS CDO2,” using short-hand for asset- backed collateralized debt obligations squared, or CDOs made up of tranches of CDOs containing asset-backed securities.

Of course they knew their financial products were 100% crap.  Such criminal fraud is at the very heart of Wall Street’s booms, busts, and bail-outs.  What in hell is Obama thinking?  Having the nation bail these criminal pricks out is beyond moral hazard.  Maybe like Bush “The Haves” and “The Have-Mores” constitute Obama’s “base,” as well.  His economic strategy sure looks that way.

This is a followup piece to my diary about the MSM noticing that on March 4, 2010 college kids all over the country were protesting the drastic tuition and fee hikes they are facing in order to try to continue their educations.

“It did get a bit disruptive”

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

Here in CA the state is raising tuition 32%,  while cutting funding to state colleges and universities by a total of 1.4 billion dollars.  Community colleges are also facing drastic cuts in funding for classes, meaning that there ARE no classes for 200,000 students.  

 In that diary I had a bit of a time getting a short little video to embed of protesting students in Oakland, who had marched several miles then got up onto the 880 freeway, which showed a view of the freeway, shot from above and at a distance out of somebody’s apartment window, with the cars stopped in the distance and the protesters were huddled up on the exit ramp below by the police. (thanks to Edger for fixing it)  

On the topic of cutting deficits at the expense of the social safety net, Barack Obama is a genuine charmer:

Everybody’s going to have some skin in the game.

Digby nails the key problem with Obama’s channeling of Rahm Emanuel:

The problem, of course, is that the best case has millionaires “sacrificing” being able to buy a bigger airplane while the average retiree has to sacrifice eating protein. This “game” we’ve all got our skin in has some much more serious consequences for some of us than others: since certain of the wealthy players just crashed the financial system a whole lot of soon-to-be seniors lost their nest eggs in both the real estate and stock markets (and are being priced out of the health care market just when they need the coverage the most.) If there’s a worse time to require these particular people to sacrifice more I don’t know what it is.

It’s also true that often the people for whom “sacrifice” is nothing more than a minor inconvenience are prone to lecture those for whom it is quite painful. It’s irritating.  

It’s well beyond “irritating,” beyond the need for sensitivity training, even beyond infuriating, embittering, enraging, or making my blood boil.  This wanker is a total riot, a real side-splitter.  A tumultuous uproar.  A howling, boisterous romper stomper of high jinx and merry-making.  

Remember when the bank bailouts happened virtually overnight?  

Hank Paulson said, “boo,” and Congress sat bolt upright: Here’s the first trillion!  Here’s the second trillion!  Here’s the third…

Everyday Americans going jobless for years?  Losing homes?  Health insurance? Going hungry?

Nada.  Zilch.  Dick.  Go fuck yourselves, really.  It’s still happening.

Compare and contrast.