Wrestling Greco-Roman Mythology

"Greece and our money"

You hear it all the time. The Greeks are lazy. Those indolent loafers deserve what they get seeing as they've been living high on the hog for the past decade on cheap credit. Retiring at 50 after a life on the payroll of the state where they took ouzo-filled three-hour coffee breaks filled with idle chit-chat about how to avoid paying their taxes before kicking off work early to head to the beach. It's all their fault the financial markets are gyrating wildly, freezing the lines of credit needed to feed the economic recovery that's just around the corner. Don't get me started on the Italians and how they'll be better off now that Berlusconi's gone. We all know his lascivious penchant for underage girls and bunga-bunga parties were the reason the bond market had turned its attention to Italy driving rates over the unsustainable 7% level. It's too perfect to be true and so, as usual, it isn't. Its all propaganda, doing its job of diverting our attention from what's really happening as democracy does its elephant imitation and returns to die in its birthplace.

Yeah, I know cliche, but c'mon. Tragedy, pandemonium, chaos and drama are all Greek words, tailor made for headlines that mix truth and lies. The stories are almost pre-written - the financial fixes proposed so far are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, water guns when we need bazookas and so on. Only farce could bring us the word play of a Papendreou being replaced by a Papademos on the orders of Merkozy or a surreal comedy get away with having a communist president finally replacing a buffoon like Berlusconi with a bankster butler named Monti. Yet neither Monty Python nor Groucho Marx had anything to do with it, the iceberg has already hit and it isn't very funny. Calling them unity or caretaker governments is meaningless as they aren't legitimate, nothing but our civilized version of a military coup with bankers in place of generals to pass and enforce austerity measures the people would never agree to and will be voted out once the dirty work is done. We'll pat ourselves on the back for returning the power to the people but it'll be too little too late.

Before we go back to the beginning, let's dispel a few of those myths that somehow make this takeover palatable. Greeks, along with the rest of the Club Med countries, work more hours per week and receive less paid holidays than German workers. At 42 hours/week, the Greeks top the EU table while you find the Germans mid-table at 36 and the Dutch at the bottom clocking in 31 hours. In fact, a quick look at all the OECD nations tells us the Greeks trail only the South Koreans in the developed world. The Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese and the Irish all retire later than Germans while the percentage of GDP devoted to public pensions is roughly the same in Greece, France and Germany. As for that profligate Greek spending, well they lay out less for their public sector as a percentage of GDP than the EU average. Yes, they've got some tax collection problems but it's clearly not the average Greek who's to blame for the problems and understandably don't want to be the ones to pay for them.

The next fallacy is that this is a crisis caused by Greek/Irish/Portuguese/Spanish/Italian debt. Neither jubilant crowds celebrating the departure of Silvio Berlusconi in piazzas across Italy, nor Greece swearing in a new cabinet after George Papandreou's resignation, nor Ireland paying billions to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders, nor Portugal's recently elected prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho promising his serious looking suit-clad visitors from Brussels and Frankfurt that his country will fulfill the pledges the previous caretaker government made, nor Spaniards replacing their government today with the same party that got them into trouble and promises to make deeper and more painful budget cuts, will get us any closer to solving the problem. No, no, no, no and no, we've been witness to a putsch executed with blietzkreig efficiency, a European disaster that is doing exactly what should have been expected, subsidizing German producers and punishing the PIIGS for feeding at the trough placed in front of them.

It's the Germans who have been the most heavily subsidized for the past decade thanks to the creation of the eurozone. Waaaaah? That's right. Think about it, the euro has given German producers a powerful boost while crippling the peripheral, low-capital investment economies. The 17 current members of the eurozone share the same currency but have wildly divergent cultures, economies and policies. Yeah, only in theater of the absurd could anyone have expected a worker in Greece to be as productive as a German given the capital infrastructure differences. Exchange rates have traditionally been the mechanism by which countries regain competitiveness but these countries have now had over 12 years of fixed rates (10 for Greece). So, not only has German industry been granted a huge barrier-free market but also a set exchange rate to keep its goods reasonably priced from Lisbon to Athens. The explosion of Benzes, Beemers and Audis on the streets of Madrid and Dublin created a surplus that found its way back to German banks who had to lend this money to someone and were happy to find eurozone approved customers from Porto to Thessaloniki so that they could buy more German cars and build beach resorts for their builders. If Germany had its own currency, the New Deutschmark would be like the Swiss Franc on steroids and appreciate dramatically while the currencies of other nations would fall making their products more competitive, helping their domestic industries while forcing German industry to contract.

"The traitor within the European family"?

It's hard to remember but the German economy still hadn't fully recovered from reunification by the launch of the euro, even falling in 2003 as the Economist wrote of the Teutonic Plague (there's those misleadingly true headlines again!). By setting interest rates artificially low, the ECB helped German and French exporters but it also inflated real-estate bubbles in Spain and Ireland. The resulting decade of eurozone-aided German current account surpluses and the corresponding accumulation of debt willingly doled out to the PIIGS has given rise to contagion fears of another kind, debt default. It's no coincidence that the combined $183 billion current account deficit of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are almost perfectly offset by Germany's current account surplus of $182 billion. The only solution we are told is for the PIIGS to implement austerity in exchange for more debt. Yet the only entities being helped by this are the banks while ensuring long term pain for everyone else in the countries receiving the 'help'. We've mentioned it here many times but it bears repeating, almost all of the bailout money winds up being siphoned out of the country by the banks and the payments only grow with each 'rescue' package. Meanwhile, the austerity measures demanded in return only serve to slow economic growth meaning further bailouts will be needed.

One need only have looked at the forerunner to the euro, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) based on the European Currency Unit (ECU) to have foreseen the impracticality of fixed exchange rates among countries without common economic policy. This was a semi-pegged system based on fixed currency exchange rate margins, but with exchange rates variable within those margins. Only looking between November of 1991 and July of 1993, the Finnish markka was first devalued by 12% then severed the link altogether, the British Pound fell to its lower limit leading to its suspension, the Italian lira was devalued by 7%, as was the Spanish peseta, first by 5% then later another 8% along with the Portuguese escudo by 6.5% and the Irish punt by 10%, then Sweden and Norway abandoned the peg until finally the trading band had to be widened from 2.25% to 15% to save the French franc. Yet, 1999 apparently offered a unique point in economic ceteris paribus time when currencies could forever be fixed againt each other. It's not that currency pegs have failed time and again or have ever given powerful exporting nations an advantage leading to balance of trade problems, otherwise we might have known the idea was doomed to failure.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
- Benjamin Franklin

The funny thing about the whole EU project has been how anti-democratic it's consistently been from its ECSC beginnings, from Maastricht through the Lisbon Treaty all the way up to murdering democracy in its cradle. Even opposing the idea has somehow always been considered heresy, you've gotta be a wacky UKIP supporter or conspiracy theorist to have questioned it at any point. Yet nobody voted for the Treaty of Paris in 1957 that created the first incarnation of the EU suprastate, the European Coal and Steel Commission between France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Though ostensibly a trade arrangement, Robert Schuman, the man who first proposed the idea, declared his aim was to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible." To do this, the temper of the people had to be cooled, no more nasty Hitler-type populism-fueled democratic uprisings. When the ECSC morphed into the EEC, again there were no ballots. From time to time, annoying national constitutions required a yes vote in a referendum. Given the choice, the Danes rejected Maastricht and the Irish Lisbon, but both were told they had voted wrong and made to do it right. So who was surprised when the Papendreou was forced out for giving the Greek people a choice of whether or not to turn up the torture of the past few years?

I pity poor Papendreou a bit. Elected in October 2009, he not only inherited a crisis but was finally forced to fully revealed the extent to which the Greek books were cooked. National debt had been concealed, hidden and masked in order to get them into the eurozone and had now exploded, making the debt to GDP ratio unsustainable. The austerity demanded by the troika (the ECB/EU/IMF) in exchange for bailouts to keep the debt payments being made to the (mostly) French and German banks not only adds debt to the numerator and lowers GDP in the denominator but also fuels skyrocketing suicide, drug use and HIV rates while crippling employment, support and hope. There was no alternative until he wanted to give the people one. Reality becomes conspiracy from this point as the elected leader of Greece was summoned to the G20 meeting early where he received a scolding of French in one ear and German in the other. We learned Merkozy was annoyed, orders were issued and we were told the Greeks would have a new prime minister. Oh, and there wouldn't be any kind of referendum as it would have to be about being in or out of the EU and not about accepting more debt in exchange for death.

Whether it was a political ploy on Papendreou's part or not, announcing a referendum on the latest plan to (en)s(l)ave Greece was the right thing to do. The headlines trumpeted the EFSF, the European Financial Stability Facility, as cutting Greek debt by 50% in exchange for another €100 billion or so and more austerity pain. However, €150 of the total €350 or so billion in debt, the portion lent by the ECB and IMF, wouldn't be touched by this plan, making it a reduction of less than 30% (do the math 200/2=100; 100/350=.2857). Even more importantly, the wording states the private lenders were 'voluntarily' accepting the plan. Ha! Who are they fooling? Oh, that's right, the ISDA, the body that determines when a credit event occurs (PDF) and triggers all the CDS (Credit Default Swaps, you remember those right?) and a replay of Lehman Brothers 2008. They're the big reason neither default nor leaving the currency could be discussed until now. Yet while Papendreou's gambit may have backfired, it has made leaving the EU a possibility. After over a year of strikes and rioting he finally knew it was time to ask the people after seeing the national day parades to commemorate the Greek refusal to surrender to a Hitler-backed Mussolini being halted by violence and the president being shouted down as a traitor.

(Not so) funny enough, across the Adriatic the Italians got a new PM with much the same credentials as the Greek PM and the head of the ECB. Yes, newly appointed (last week) Greek PM Lucas Papademos and Super Mario Brothers, as in the new president (as of November 1st) of the ECB Mario Draghi and new Italian PM Mario Monti (last week) are all Goldman Sachs alumni. Greece gets a former ECB official who worked at Goldman Sachs, Italy gets an EU near-lifer with a bit of Goldman advising thrown in all because the current Italian head of the ECB, another Goldman Sachs alumni won't bend the ECB directives to bail out his countrymen and print euros. While the Germans try to hold the line on turning on the printing press for fear of a 1930s style inflation disaster, the vampire squid has maneuvered its tentacles around the economic lifeline of Europe much as it has done in America. No wonder we can't talk about how we got here otherwise we might notice that the same folks who wrote the opening scenes of this farce are being placed in charge of fixing it.

We need to flashback again. The 1990s saw a number of countries, notably Italy and Greece deliberately engage in financial transactions with no other purpose than to mask their public debt levels in order to secure entry into the euro. We don't need to look far to find those who put these debt bombs in place; Greece's PM Papademos oversaw his country's entry to the euro running the Central Bank of Greece from 1994 to 2002 before he became vice-president of the ECB in between stints advising Goldman and indoctrinating the next generation of neoliberals from Colombia University; Italian PM Mario Monti had to quit his role as adviser to Goldman Sachs before taking his new job while Mario Draghi was head of the Italian Treasury from 1991-2001 before heading to Goldman until 2005 until he took over at the Italian Central Bank. By using complex derivatives supplied by Goldman Sachs, Italy and Greece were able to slim down the apparent size of their government debt, which euro rules mandated shouldn't be above 60% of the size of the economy and thus created the problem the technocratic rulers are now tasked with fixing.

"Resistance is Futile"
 - Locutus of Borg

I'm not the only to have noticed that it seems as though technocratic overlords have been dropped into erstwhile democratic nations in order to implement the medicine that their kind deems necessary. Goldman Sachs Conquers Europe; Goldman Sachs, le trait d'union entre Mario Draghi, Mario Monti et Lucas Papadémos; Our Friends From Goldman Sachs; The great euro Putsch rolls on as two democracies fall, read headlines from Paris to London. As the Financial Times itself said, it's like we've decided the Borg would make a better commander of the Enterprise than Jean Luc Picard. Worse yet, they have provided a smokescreen for the vile Berlusconi to transform himself from goat to sacrificial lamb. Instead of being tossed from the legislative to the prison chamber for any of the many criminal cases pending against him or new revelations of some perversion vile enough to revolt even his media desensitized pubic, he offered himself up in exchange for passing austerity measures the markets had suddenly deemed necessary. This despite the fact the country runs a primary fiscal surplus, its fiscal deficit to GDP ratio being only 60% of the OECD average, less than the euro area average and its ratio of non-financial private debt to GDP also being very low relative to other OECD economies. Every new announcement is met by cheers from the market, but each period of euphoria is shorter than the last, like a junkie perpetually searching for a quicker hit.  I'm taking bets Berlusconi's back in a few years and will be PM again as the Italians were robbed of the opportunity of purging the toxin themselves.

You'd think the Goldman/ECB/unity/caretaker/technocratic overlords in Italy and Greece would be careful about naming ministers representative of the people's wishes while (fourth)Reich-enbachs land in Athens and Rome to ensure compliance and Monti parrots Merkel's phrase about Europe facing its toughest test since WWII. No, Monti's cabinet is technocratic not democratic, consisting of bankers, soldiers and diplomats without a single elected member. It's worse in Greece where Papademos has named a motley crew with multiple links to the pre-1974 military junta. Full blown former fascists are being transformed into non-ideological technocrats to administer the neoliberal medicine to solve the problem, modern day quacks applying leeches to cure their patients. Terms of surrender are accepted not for fear of bullets and bombs but of losing our pensions and iPads, the former getting more elusive and the latter more addictive as it becomes harder to qualify for benefits and gadgets get ever more distracting. Few even noticed that while most Greek government bonds were issued under Greek law where the bonds could be redenominated in new drachma should they ever have to leave the euro, the deal stuck October 26th changes the jurisdiction governing the bonds to English law, making redenomination impossible, resistance is indeed futile, we're being assimilated.

You want worse? Well, the Spaniards are about to vote in the PP, the right wing freakshows that brought us the Jose Maria Aznar gongshow, now led by a non-entity named Mariano Rajoy because they'll do a better job of following the banksters orders. Yeah, right. Not only did the Irish people start paying back unsecured Anglo-Irish Bank bondholders as penance for their sins, they also watched as the one-time richest man in Ireland Sean Quinn who owes Anglo-Irish some €2.9 billion declare personal bankruptcy - in Northern Ireland where the law is more friendly. In Portugal, retired Col. Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, a leader of the democracy-restoring 1974 "Carnation Revolution", told Lusa news that a growing dissatisfaction with the government could trigger a military revolt. The entire euro zone is already in severe recession, yet the ECB, the Germans, the French and virtually every single policy maker in the core continue to advocate the economic equivalent of medieval blood-letting via ongoing fiscal austerity in order to keep the interest payments flowing to the banks so they can gamble on the commodity markets, driving the price of heating oil and corn up so we freeze and starve. And, surprise, surprise, the public deficits continue to grow. Americans can't be too smug about the situation seeing as their government was long ago taken over by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup et al and are about to pay their pound of flesh across the board as the 12 person "super committee" can't seem to agree how to serve 200 lobbyists rather than 300 million citizens. Wouldn't it be interesting if we spent more time talking about the reality of who this craziness is helping instead of the mythology of lazy Greeks and Berlusconi's bunga-bunga?

Ultimately Greece will have to default and in all likelihood so will Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal (and yes, eventually the UK and the US too). The technocrats are nothing but another ploy played by the bankers to keep skimming off as much as possible for as long as possible, repeating over and over that there is no alternative. As long as we keep believing their myths we'll stay pinned to the mat as our rights are slowly stripped away along with our wealth. We just need to turn our heads away from the screen to see the choices we really have instead of what they're offering us. Argentina declared bankruptcy as recently as 2001, Russia in 1998 as has almost every other nation on Earth while Greece was the first recorded case of sovereign default in 377 BC. You want a more modern model? Just compare Iceland's quasi-default to Latvia's austerity. Yes, it'll be a tragedy, pandemonium, chaos and drama but would it really be so bad if they had to import a little less stuff for a while? The money lenders will always return and at least it offers a light at the end of the tunnel instead of this cycle of doom and gloom. Modern Greece has already tried being a failed German state; it's time to shake off the myths and remember that Athenian democracy could only be established after Solon legislated "shaking off the burdens" to free the people from debt slavery.

A Corporate Death Penalty

Here at In Case You Missed It we like to fess up to our mistakes, errors, follies and bone-headed pleas whenever we can. A couple of years back we published one of our most popular posts titled Rent Seeking Parasites which accused the financial industry of parasitism, getting a free ride on the backs of its host, society - you and me. While this seemed a reasonable metaphor at the time operating as we were under the assumption that regulation and taxes would have to be reintroduced to curb their feeding excesses eventually, it has proven wrong. Parasites they are not - they are parasitoids, creatures that similarly live off the back of their hosts but eventually return the favour by killing them.

Don't you dare roll your eyes at the thought of another climate change, anti-oil screed, I promise to not even go there, even though it's the easiest path to prove our faith and reliance on crony capitalism and corporations is suicidal. No, instead we'll start in Greece, a country that's been forced to live under the indignity of not only being labeled one of the PIIGS but the worst of the bunch, a profligate, lazy, early-retiring, ouzo-swilling, tax cheater that built a shack out of straw. Despite the falsity of the stereotype or how they actually got in over their heads in debt, the Greeks have been pushed into debt-slavery, a no longer sovereign nation forced to accede to the austerity demands of the troika, the EU/ECB/IMF.

Strangely enough, these policies have not only led the Greek economy into a vicious debt trap circle - reduced spending leading to lower growth and the need for more borrowing to bridge the budget gaps provoking further calls for deeper cuts - but they've also effected people in the same depression-inducing way. Gross domestic product in the second quarter was down more than 7% from last year amid government spending cuts and tax increases that, combined, will add up to about 20% of GDP while unemployment is over 16%. Predictably, crime, homelessness, emigration and personal bankruptcies are on the rise. Tragically, as a result of these market forces, recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka.

The Greeks aren't alone in the suffering being induced in order to pay off the often fraudulent debt incurred in order to keep the financial ponzi scheme afloat while suffering under the humiliation of taking orders from the financial markets and their lackeys. Ireland's pot-o-gold bank guarantees led to overnight insolvency and a double austerity dose causing another mass emigration, Portugal's ignominious acceptance of the same troika treatment will produce the same cure as Ireland, Italy had their debt downgraded despite cutting, re-cutting and then cutting the budget some more to please the market wolves while Spain not only had a gun held to their head by the same hit men until they changed their constitution to 'limit' debt without a referendum a month before an election but also had to increase 'labour market flexibility', an Orwellian moniker which will somehow create more employment by making it easier to fire young workers. When markets attack French banks, rules are changed to protect them, but the assault on society causes lives to be lost when fruit stand owners use gasoline to light themselves on fire to draw attention to problems in Tunis or mix it with beer to literally drown their sorrows in Athens or when there's riots on the streets of London. The worst off seems to be Latvia, the anti-Iceland of Europe, a country that could become the first murder victim of neoliberal austerity measures.

Yet German bank inspired bailouts provided by the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism won't solve the problem, it will continue indefinitely without debt forgiveness. Ironically, these obligations being forced on the public will serve the same function as that of the war reparations forced upon Germany after the Treaty of Versailles when John Maynard Keynes warned the world that the "policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable...even if it does not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe". I think we can all still remember the seeds that were sown and how many lives were reaped thanks to that plan. 

In America we need to be granted a little bit of poetic license to expand the metaphor a bit, after all it is the land of the ever-expanding waistband. According the the General Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and around the world over the past couple of years. This goes along with the $1.2 trillion in slightly less secret back door loans we later found out about last year or the (only) $700 billion TARP money a couple of years back that everyone talks about. Hurray, the corporatocracy was brought back to life thanks to the politicians they paid for! Funny thing is this transfer of wealth hasn't trickled down to the people yet, nor have the efficiency gains of the past 30 odd years of economic growth. No, the result of the neoliberal free market driven policies of major tax cuts for high-income Americans, union-busting, aided and abetted by federal policy, and financial deregulation such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which has fed inequality because very high incomes come disproportionately from that sector, has strangely enough only benefited those the policies were meant to help, the rich and the corporations. Median incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen over that time while the number of Americans below the poverty line has reached 46 million with 21.6% of American children now living in poverty (predicted to hit 25% soon; it's 3.7% in Denmark). The very corporations who the Fed helped out instead of people are often making record profits from this poverty and play a part in the bloodbath, as this poverty is a death sentence.

Instead of using this infusion of cash along with the access granted to US and non-US banks and corporations to near-zero financing at the Fed window to you know, create jobs, financial firms have used it to increase our suffering while lining their pockets. They've thanked the people who cover their losses by betting on their death and creating new casino-like commodity markets, hurting the poor most as increases in the price of rice and gasoline hit them harder. The flip side of the profit prospect created by wheat price volatility for a corporation is starvation for the world's dispossessed thanks to the increased price of bread. A food system where Americans waste enough food everyday to fill the Rose Bowl is great for those who can afford the luxury. For those that can't, well, you know. Worse, a McDonald's corporation that took part in the $1.3 trillion short term lending bonanza gets to serve $5 Big Mac meals thanks in large part to the billions in corn subsidies lavished by the government in support of the unholy alliance of agribusiness and science to produce high-fructose corn syrop (HFCS) and ethanol to put in everything from french fries to feed for filet-o-fish or filling the Ford Fiesta.



The subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that budget wary consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit". This Super-Size-Me economy leads to early death through obesity, diabetes and heart disease. This lifestyle non-choice has played a big role in the decline of life expectancy for women over the past 20 years in 313 counties in the United States, a problem exacerbated by poverty, with the proof played out in the fact that those in the top 20% of American incomes live, on average, at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group. So you see, privatizing both profits and losses of corporations is paid for in not only gold but also lives by society. It's become more than a crime to be poor - poverty is a death sentence and corporations, who we're told over and over are job creators, are in fact, executioners.

In a culture where Orwellian political vocabulary turns the idea of universal single-payer health care into "death panels" while advocating actually killing grandma and rationalizes disenfranchisement of "non-productive citizens", it should come as no surprise that Obama's faux-populist promise to veto any budget proposal that doesn't contain tax increases can be turned into a class war, when, in fact, the war has been hot for decades and it's pretty clear which side is winning. The reality is this war doesn't differentiate between innocent and guilty when choosing its victims though it does discriminate based on race just like capital punishment. Just imagine the cognitive dissonance involved in being both pro-life and pro-death. Murderous spectacles are put on to appease the mob with circenses as if the panem killing them weren't enough. Maybe this explains the indifference to executing possibly innocent men like Troy Davis in Georgia or the Tea Party cheering for the straight shooting style of killing kids, the mentally ill and the innocent among the 234 people Rick Perry has executed in Texas:



It's a death sentence to be poor, especially if you're among the 49.9 million Americans who lack health insurance, a number that soared by 13.3 million since 2000. The main driver in both the national and personal bankruptcy story is a health care system whose costs are spiraling out of control thanks to corporate greed in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. State enforced patent protection of the latter isn't only killing AIDS babies in Soweto while thanks to the former, the only evidence that really matters in determining treatment based on evidence-based medicine is what's in your wallet. Tea Partiers like to cheer on this corporate killing too (listen for it at 0:55):

Killing requires a large staff

Poverty is also the best recruiting tool ever invented by the ultimate killing machine, the armed forces, and thus provides the fodder to feed the military industrial complex. Again, corporations are there to innovate new ways of killing and can even fill the void with corporate mercenaries when volunteers run short. The stark contradiction between the money making mantra of murder and Christ's advice, "If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me" lends a dark layer of irony to our present wars justified by condemning Islam as a death-glorifying cult. Even though we know innocent people will die when we're bombing, droning or whatever we call trying to kill brown people we've labeled terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan or Libya, it's somehow different than when those terrorists kill innocent people when they blow themselves up on buses in London or trains in Madrid. We're Americans celebrating the illegal killing of the most-wanted criminal of our generation thanks to our culture of death or out of relief from a false belief they wouldn't be called to die as the perpetual war on terror would end with Osama bin Laden's death? USA! United States of Assassination! Woo hoo death to international rule of law!



What? Killing bin Laden didn't solve that war on terror problem? You mean, it's all related, people blowing themselves up at outdoor cafes, creating terrorists by raining death down on Tripoli, Kabul and Baghdad or being the only vote in the UN to support Israelis killing Palestinians, allowing illegal settlements on their land or even denying them statehood next month. Killing is killing, whether in the name of good, Zeus, protection, defense or Allah. Once you accept it as no more than collateral damage you think differently, become indifferent to death and probably think it's ok to torture while praying in a church that covers up for pedophiles. Another victory for Oceania over Eurasia or Eastasia won't alter the course in the perpetual war because there's money to be made for McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, BAE and IBM from death.

But if, as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations are people then shouldn't they get the death penalty for killing people? Even at a time when slavery was legal, America had the morality to realize corporate killing wasn't. The corporate death penalty could be applied in cases of "operating contrary to the public interest" or those that saw "a pattern of abuses" and result in their charters being revoked. Ah, those were the progressive days, the very time today's right-wingnuts would like to take us back to with its lack of child labor laws, clean water protection and such. Trials might go something like this if such a world still existed I suppose:



Yeah. We not only wage war and trample human rights for oil companies' drilling rights, we just make them pay a fine for destroying entire ecosystems and spraying chemicals with unknown long-term effects to clean up the surface for the cameras. We enable through our continued consumption and ignorance of corporate evasion of responsibility for less visible murder via contamination or explosions in places like Ecuador or Nigeria. Move on to do the same in the Arctic while other gas companies extracting using hydraulic fracturing which pollutes the very water table we rely on for life will make sure we don't figure out how their harming human life. Car companies? What better way to kill millions than by rigging the game to ensure we drive cars forever? Big tobacco serves as a role model for the Catholic Church on how to cover up scandals after killing millions more. Obfuscate, donate and litigate.

Wait. All this and no mention of Bhopal. Yeah, that's right, when 3,800 people are killed almost immediately when tonnes of toxic gas escape and today more than 100,000 people remain chronically ill from exposure, it's more of the same, obfuscate (corporate takeover of Union Carbide by Dow Chemical - it's not our fault!), donate (maybe a stadium for the Olympics!) and litigate. Rinse and repeat. How about Monsanto? Who could have foreseen that allowing a corporation to patent life would have, well, life-ending consequences, right? DeBeers, turning blood diamonds into love? The beverage industry from Coca-Cola to Red Bull and Budweiser, the fashion industry or even Hollywood for toxification, body image distortion and indoctrination? As long as there's an app for you iPhone to keep you connected who cares how many Apple kills to make them. What about the billions of people whose lives are threatened by the ecological disaster sure to come about as a result of the greed for profit written into the DNA of the corporate psychopaths we've created. Oh yeah, that's right, I made a no climate change promise. That would be controversial and might give someone the idea to protest, maybe even occupy Madrid's Plaza del Sol or decide to march to Brussels or, heaven forbid, occupy Wall Street in the heart of NYC if perhaps the corpocracy's killing of the middle class and slaughter of the poor weren't enough. Oh, some people have already done that, are heading there and doing that (see below for live stream when available), fighting our fight. If they need a suggestion for one demand mine is to bring back the corporate death penalty - capital punishment for corporations!

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Further reading:
Occupy Wall Street 
March to Brussels
Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe 1919-2009
US Poverty figures
IMF inequality report
US Uncut / UK Uncut
Further Viewing:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
Food Inc. (It might take an extra click)
Clip from Inside Job
Interview with Josh Fox - maker of Gasland

Democrazy

"Choosing between AIDS and cancer"

So maybe not every democratic election is as bad as that in Peru. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, these were the alternatives facing Peruvians as they decided where to mark their ballot in last Sunday's presidential election. Yet, a closer look at the state of democracy around the world reveals an unsettling picture. Not only do most voters usually face a choice between bad and worse but those who we select seem to be wielding ever decreasing power. While disenfranchised peoples across much of the Middle East are dying for the opportunity that we take for granted, many of us are waking up to the realization that we really don't have any choice either. As elected politicians lose power to our unelected corporate masters, democracy is more and more resembling the pancurium bromide anesthetic in the lethal injection which paralyzes the condemned inmate before the potassium chloride of debt slavery stops the heart of the hitherto free people of the world.

Perhaps we should save a little room at our Peruvian pity party for the poor Portuguese. At least the voters in Peru had a choice, albeit a rather unappetizing one, between a fascist and Chavista (they went for the Chavista); the voters in Portugal on Sunday could vote for the incumbent PS, the "socialist" party to implement the austerity measures commanded by the troika, or the Social Democrat Party to, um, implement the austerity measures ordered by the troika. In case you missed it, the troika isn't a new Russian vodka, but the frontmen for the sovereign debt holders, the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. They dictate the terms of the austerity reforms that the overly-indebted nations must abide by in order to qualify them for more debt. Yep, the program that's working so well in Greece and Ireland has come to Portugal. Half a million people marching the streets to protest the program in March were ignored much like the millions who screamed their disapproval of the Iraq war in 2003. Our voices no longer matter as much as the bomb makers or the bond holders.

Portugal's Geração à rasca (or "generation of junk") proved no more effective in getting their message out and attaining their goals than Spain's Indignados last month. Real Democracia Ya! demanded political reform that would break the two-party rule and convinced much of the youth to withhold their vote in May's regional elections, votes that normally would have gone to the "socialist" PSOE party, to show they don't support the austerity program being installed there. Over 20% unemployment (43% for those aged 18-25) should be the priority of a government that calls itself socialist. The result? A near clean sweep for the PP, or Partido Populaire, the descendants of Franco's fascist regime. Fittingly, the righwing Social Democrat Party won in Portugal as well. It's the slow creep towards complete loss of autonomy that has lulled the majority to sleep. One step at a time, one country after another, eventually we will all wake up to a reality in which our future has been monetized and securitized in order to keep the interest payments flowing to the banks who own us. Organize and the government will declare it illegal. Protest and the state's security apparatus will be deployed against you.



Choice? When the Harper regime was forced to call a national election in Canada last month after being found in contempt of parliament, many Canadians decided to try to break the Conservative-Liberal duopoly by voting for the NDP or Greens. The result? While the hardcore rightwing voters remained faithful to the Conservatives, the leftwing vote was scattered which allowed the Conservatives to claim a majority 52% of seats with just 39% of the vote. The hocus pocus of the first to the post voting system stuck it to the UK just as bad last year. Many voters, fed up with more than a decade of Labour rule but unable in good conscience to vote Conservative, opted for the Liberal Democrats. The result? A Cameron Conservative minority government which asked Nick Clegg's Lib Dems to join a coalition, and presto change'o' - ConDem'ned to a failing austerity future. Woohoo, at least Vodafone and the banks are happy!



But it's that great bastion of liberty and freedom that is proving once and for all what a failure democracy can be. Anyone who didn't become disillusioned by the Barack Obama hope and change candidate turned corporate war monger president just isn't paying attention. Branded as a man of and for the people, few noticed that his biggest campaign donors were in fact Goldman Sachs et al who have got more than they paid for. What happened to single payer/public option health care? Remember financial reform, foreclosure protection, bank bailouts, and jobs-jobs-jobs? Remember Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, civil liberties, ? Remember global warming, offshore drilling, clean coal, and nuclear energy? Remember immigration reform, the Pentagon budget, repair of the infrastructure, military commissions, the suppressed torture photos, education reform, the US-enabled coup in Honduras, the continuing Cold War sanctions on Cuba, the Palestinian situation and the Obama wars, wars, wars? Remember restrictions on abortion, the Employee Free Choice Act, the Bush-Obama millionaire tax cuts? Me too. Well, after all, he was the lesser of two evils, right?

It gets worse as no longer will children want to grow up to be firemen or teachers as their unions will be broken and their professions downgraded to rent-a-cop status. No, they'll dream of being corporations when they grow up. After all, corporations are people, so why can't people be corporations? The Supreme Court's Citizen United decision was the final nail in the coffin for electoral fairness as the floodgates were opened wide to corporate sponsorship of candidates. We've made fun of the farce that is the Republicrat-Demopublican duopoly that is the American coin toss in the past but it's sure to get worse. The race for the White House in 2012 should more appropriately be called the race to a billion. As in, who can raise a billion dollars first, Obama or whichever monkey the Republicans manage to pick. Seriously, it seems the party of Lincoln is throwing out clowns like Bachman, Santorum and Gingrich in a vain attempt to make Sarah Palin look electable. Good luck with that America.

There's much to like about democracy in theory but we have to wake up the fact that it needs an overhaul or at least a tuneup as the cons begin to outweigh the pros. A misinformed electorate, abstruse voting systems designed to confuse and favor the incumbent alongside a devolution of powers to unelected bodies to name but a few. More dangerously, in many people’s eyes, certain government functionaries may legitimately take actions that would be condemned as criminal if anyone else were to take them. If I were to send a private Predator drone to Pakistan to fire explosive missiles into villages, killing women, children, and other innocents, I would be seen as a monstrous mass murderer. How did Barack Obama come by the right to kill innocent people? By democratic election to the presidency of the United States, of course. "When the president does it," Richard Nixon insisted, "that means that it is not illegal." Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command, nobody demands that the technician who sits comfortably in the United States and directs the lethal drone be brought to justice; he, as the saying goes, is "only following orders."



As much of the west heads for the austerity inspired double dip recession, spin control will go into overdrive. This time will be worse than 2008 as government debt loads have exploded everywhere leaving little fiscal policy maneuvering room, so in order to keep the bond holders happy and the interest payments flowing, more cuts will be demanded, leading to further slowing of the economy leading to, more cuts and, well, you get the picture. The corporate controlled media will dutifully report deceptive economic statistics about green shoots or some such nonsense all the while ignoring the one way out - actually asking the people what to do like they did in Iceland. Yep, home of Bjork and unpronounceable volcanoes that erupt whenever Obama comes to Europe, was also the first country to guarantee its banks debts back in October of 2008. Virtually unheard of in the west thanks to a media blackout, the Kitchenware Revolution, so-called because of the pots and pans used by protestors, forced the fall of the government.

Then Iceland did the unthinkable and asked her people if they really wanted to spend the next 15 years paying back $3.5 billion at 5.5% to British and Dutch banks thanks to the gambling losses of a few bankers. In American and the UK they turned on the printing presses, in Iceland they had not one, but two referendums in which they voted not to force every man, woman and child to pay back over $10,000 each. Instead, they voted in a new government, now led by the first openly gay Prime Minister, (Saint Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), convened a constitutional assembly made up of non-politicians to draft a new constitution and most importantly, began arresting the banksters who caused the crisis.

Democracy gives a free pass to those who rape and pillage African, Asian, South American and now European nations, in fact we call them socialists and wait until they rape hotel maids until we finally decide to prosecute them for their crimes. Until being caught with his pants down DSK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was the leading candidate to run for the presidency of France under the socialist banner. When democracy offers the choice between a neoliberal right winger in favor of cutting corporate taxes, services, pensions and regulations to support the gilded class and their banking buddies or, well, the same but with a different name, like socialist, no wonder much of the world is in fact turning away from democracy. Yep, the last five years has seen the world become less democratic. It's not hard to see why. While those who have languished under authoritarian regimes for decades fight for what they think will be a brake on unbridled greed and power, democracy in fact is fulfilling the iron law of oligarchs and doing the opposite. As Robert Michels stated, all organizations, no matter how democratic or autocratic inevitably develop into oligarchies, in the case of western democracies, one formed by the corporate class, the corpocracy, controlled by a sociopathic elite.

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchill

Meanwhile, so sure of the superiority of our democratic values we've spent much of the past decade (ok, maybe a little more) justifying bombing and killing brown people by claiming the moral high ground of spreading democracy. It's a useful fiction as many are duped into believing that somehow their quadrennial ballot box charade lends consent of the governed and thus legitimizes government when in fact it is the corporate overlords and their lobbies who write the laws for the governed. Strategic voting along with voter apathy, stupidity and cupidity are minor problems when compared with the damage done by those given the moral pass to commit the crimes they do once elected. Sadly, democracy, "rule of the people" has become "ruling the sheeple". I wonder if we were warned this would happen?

Bah, Humbug!

Thanks to the word of the year, austerity, the weeks leading up to Christmahanukwanza saw riots on the streets of London, Rome and Athens with images that we more easily associate with Dhaka, Nairobi or Quito. Brits woke up to photos of their terrorized prince and um, what do you call Camilla, splashed across the tabloid covers. Italians to scenes of scuffles in parliament overflowing to the streets. Meanwhile, the Greeks got another round of union protests devolving into street battles. Austerity, with its 14th century roots and feel of "enforced or extreme economy", is the price were being told we have to pay for an economic crisis that we now know was mostly caused by income inequality. In the perfect world, the IMF report detailing the mechanics of how a financial landscape overpopulated by the obscenely wealthy and desolately poor led to our problems should dovetail with the spirit of the season. Instead we get the farcical reality in which our attitudes have been hardening over the decades according to the British Social Attitudes Report, making us more likely than ever to blame someone for finding themselves poor and needy than we are to pity them while we proclaim the virtues of Christian charity by giving each other ever more extravagant gifts. And this. And whatever this is:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics - Plutarch

Debt is stealing from the future to provide for present needs. Sometimes this is a rational decision as the benefits of spending now accrue into the future and wind up providing a net gain for society. Much like in the run up to the Great Depression however, this latest round of debt binging since around 1980 has only enabled the majority of the population to feel like they were keeping up with the ultra rich. The evidence that this borrowing was the cause of the Great Recession has been mounting recently and now even the IMF has released a report titled Inequality, Leverage and Crisis (PDF) which documents how giving the top percentile of the wealthy a greater slice of the pie resulted in them lending their excess wealth to the rest of the population which in turn caused the financial industry to explode in size to facilitate this borrowing. It wasn't the banks per se who were the evil actors. Although they did take advantage of the situation to engage in rent-seeking, it was the policies that led to unequal distribution of wealth which in turn practically forced the financial industry to grow in order to keep up with the demand to cycle the wealth from top to bottom. The consumption gap was kept 'artificially' small through lending to help soothe the populace as they felt like they were doing better despite the fact that their real incomes were shrinking. Real hourly wages of the top 10 percentile increased sharply by a cumulative 70%, the real hourly wages around the median declined by 5%, while the wages of the bottom 10% declined strongly, by around 25%. The masses were pacified as long as they could buy a 50" flat screen in order to better see the details of the elite lifestyles without bothering with the small print in the loan arrangement with EZ Credit.

From 1980 to 2005, the richest 1% took 80% of all income growth in America (PDF)

Knowing this caused the crisis, the next question becomes "what caused the inequality?". The obvious answer is the economic policies of the past which in turn should lead us to change them if Plutarch's argument is true as it should be in the system's best interest to pay attention and change the structures that have created the present imbalance. That is of course unless zombies have already eaten our brains and the evidence they have is all around us. Supply-side economics became dominant only about 30 years ago but it already has the feel of a relic from another century. This trickle down or voodoo economics promises that we will all see benefits as a society if the rich can be given enough money for their wealth to reach a saturation point and thus begin to shower the rest of us with gold. Instead, we've been given a blinding golden shower with the press, or MSM, there to cheer on their paymasters. Debt, war and oil feed the fire as we are bombarded with an information blitzkrieg to win the battle for our hearts and minds. Stories will abound over the next few weeks of encouraging signs of recovery as evidenced by strong Christmas sales all the while ignoring the lesson of the past two years that our economy is but a Ponzi scheme primed for total collapse.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
 - Joseph Goebbels

As the Reagan revolution heralded the present catastrophe we've had lots of time to observe the disastrous results yet we still don't heed the call to arms thanks in large part to Agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth. More information discordantly leads to less knowledge in a world that is hard to keep up with as ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth - or drowning it out - or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not. We are living through a disinformation revolution where Orwellian doublethink, cognitive dissonance, epistemic closure, repetition and confirmation bias form a toxic brew of apathy. We're screwed if we don't pay any attention but even more so when we do as exemplified by the Internet's inherently agnotological side effects. People graze all day on information tailored to their existing worldview leading to epistemic closure. Even when bloggers or talking heads actually engage in debate, it often consists of pelting one another with mutually contradictory studies they've Googled: "Greenland's ice shield is melting 10 years ahead of schedule!" vs. "The sun is cooling down and Earth is getting colder!" allowing us the luxury of confirmation bias to avoid cognitive dissonance. War has become peace, ignorance strength and freedom slavery as we hurdle toward agnotological Armageddon where we argue about what the facts are instead of debating what they mean, allowing the status quo to be maintained as we slowly destroy the world around us. Have a listen to this as you read on:

You can donate to the Ku Klux Clan with Mastercard but you can't give money to Wikileaks

Once upon a time in America you had to justify your FCC broadcast license by providing news as part of your community responsibility. However, when the US government agency charged with regulating the communications industry was gutted in the 80's under the Reagan administration, the fairness doctrine was jettisoned, transforming news into an appendage of entertainment companies. Information consumption was further mutated by the 24/7 feeding tube of CNN and later Faux News, Headline News and MSNBC with their news, stock and terror level crawlers. Meanwhile the battle for truth and fairness was being lost in the Supreme Court as their rulings became increasingly pro-business. Sparked by the urging of then future-SCOTUS justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in 1971, American business interests have coordinated their actions through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filing and winning an ever increasing number of briefs and decisions. The resulting frenzy of deregulation has not only affected the financial industry, it has increased media ownership concentration, blunted environmental laws and turned corporations buying elections into citizens exercising free speech. What was once a counter-balance to the partisanship of Congress has become a right wingnut tool to advance their agenda; Justice Antonin Scalia will speak at a Tea Party seminar next month, Justice Clarence Thomas' wife headed a nonprofit group, Liberty Central, dedicated to opposing what she characterizes as the leftist "tyranny" of President Obama. A judiciary captured by the same people who pay for the political campaigns to install legislators to make the laws and take us to war. Lucky for Hollywood endings!

WTF - actual acronym of the task force set up by the CIA to appraise the impact of WikiLeaks 

The 80's not only saw us overwhelmed by the non-stop news cycle, we were further weakened by a sudden explosion in obesity incoherently coupled with a health consciousness kick driving a cost explosion only to see the disinformation coup de grâce delivered by the Internet. Even before the East Anglia email scandal, oil companies had succeeded in turning climate change into a boogie man invented by evil scientists so they could become as rich and powerful as oil company executives. Never before has so much been available to make people so uninformed in order to take away their power. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case for Wal-Mart which has the potential to change antitrust law forever and could lead to abolishing class action law suits altogether forcing individuals to fight mega-corporations alone. Imagine how easily big tobacco would have swatted away all those nasty health lawsuits without the class action option, or worse, a world without Erin Brockovich! Human rights and independent media websites are being attacked with impunity but when the same Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are directed at the heart of corporate power in an act of protest, they are hunted like dogs by the authorities and vilified by the public for disturbing their Christmas shopping. More ominous is the control being sought and wielded by the Obama administration to silence voices they don't want heard. Net neutrality, what's that? Sounds like another unkept Obama election promise traded to big business in exchange for their compliance.

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ" - Attributed to Pope Leo X by John Bale

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the renewed attacks on the first amendment. The new messiah of 2008 has turned out to be another democratic deception to pacify us into believing in hope and change for another four years. The Obama meaning of an Iraqi withdrawal is 50,000 uniformed troops and something like 100,000 mercenaries. The reduction in camouflage there has only meant an increase in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen where death falls indiscriminately from the sky thanks to the "liberal" president. Wasn't his first act to sign an order to close Guantanamo? Hmmm, funny more "detainees" there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing real charges than the day Obama was elected. Nobel Peace prize winning stuff in today's world! He has allowed the Bush Patriot Act provisions to be strengthened, encouraged government snooping on American citizens and authorized assassination of Americans accused of supporting terrorists - no arrest, nor rights or trial - just witch hunts, detention and murder. Successes like the health care and financial industry regulation bills? Don't make me laugh as the health care deal was simply a recycled Republican idea from the 90's guaranteeing an insurance company and big pharma bonanza while the Frank-Dodd big bank gift guarantees the next financial crisis will be bigger than the last. The 2300+ pages of financial regulation and 2409 pages of the new US health care bill may have been a "big f#cking deal" in size but they are perfect examples of complexity creating cover for confusion and corruption. Glass-Steagall provided financial stability for 80 years in 53 pages. How soon we forget the financial meltdown was driven by ignorance. Credit-default swaps were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they'd changed hands and been serially securitized a few times there was no telling what they were worth or the risks they entailed.

10% of casualties in WWI were civilians, 50% in WWII, 70% in Vietnam and 90% in Iraq
 - John Pilger, The War You Don't See

The dumps by Wikileaks and the Fed cast a dim light on the underbelly of the beast but if enough people can be convinced its all for their good the music will keep playing. Arguing about Julian Assange's rape allegations and calling Obama names distracts us from the fact that he has expanded the Bush/Cheney war on civil liberties as well as the wars abroad. Stories about Obama defending whistle blowers in NPR don't jive with the fact that his Justice Department is looking for new ways to prosecute them while Private Bradley Manning sits in solitary confinement 23 of every 24 hours for the 8th month while still awaiting charges. It's all just lipstick on a pig. We hear of progress being made in Afghanistan while according to reports in The Nation and elsewhere, Blackwater, which is now known as Xe, has contracted to send personnel into Pakistan to fight with the Joint Special Operations Command. They are just one part of a 225,000 strong contract army staffed by vigilantes to ensure the world order. US led forces have been in Afghanistan longer than the Russians were yet we're still fed the meme of progress being made. Meanwhile stories of prominent protesters chaining themselves to the Whitehouse gates to raise public awareness of the futility of the war are ignored by the MSM who prefer to feed the frenzy of fear of the other. We won't miss how corrupt the Russian legal system has become watching the nightly news but we need the 'fake' news of Jon Stewart to point out the hypocrisy of politicians who turned 9/11 into a catchphrase only to ignore the plight of 9/11 first responders. Step out a line, the man comes and takes you away while we fixate on empty symbols; bright, pretty lights and words like democracy and female emancipation can be so distracting, plus at least were not in Belarus, right?

Next time some Alex P. Keaton wannabee tells you over 40% of Americans (ie. poor people) don't pay any taxes, remind him/her that working Americans pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes starting with very first dollar they earn and as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded in a 2003 analysis, "three quarters of filers pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes." Then to piss them off let them know that 2/3 of US corporations paid no taxes from 1998 through 2005.

Most progenitors of what John Kenneth Galbraith termed Innocent Fraud are not deliberately in its service, unaware of how their views are shaped, how they are had. We've even renamed the economic system; capitalism, with it's potentially negative Marxist reference to the owners and managers of capital is now more often referred to as the "Market Economy" or simply the faceless free market. Capitalism evokes images of exploitation by the Rockefellers of the world over a century ago while the free market enables GE to earn over $10.3 billion and ExxonMobil $45.2 billion in profits while paying nothing in taxes to Uncle Sam (In fact, GE recorded a $1.1 billion tax benefit, the magic of a 24,000 page tax return). The widespread belief a hundred years ago that capitalism was not only exploitative, particularly after WWI where behind the slaughter were those who, for profit, made the guns, but also self-destructive after the great crash of 1929, led to war and revolution in Europe and legislation in America.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
 - John Kenneth Galbraith

In his final book in 2004 at age 95, Galbraith, who served in four presidential administrations and even as ambassador to India, was ultimately trying to warn of the uncontrollable nature of private/public power. The term innocent fraud is applied here as the conventional wisdom (a term he popularized in The Affluent Society) of how the American economic system works and the reality of its workings have drifted apart leading to a collective self-delusion - "The myths of investor authority, of the serving stockholder, the ritual meetings of directors and the annual stockholder meeting persist, but no mentally viable observer of the modern corporation can escape the reality. Corporate power lies with management — a bureaucracy in control of its task and its compensation. Rewards that can verge on larceny. This is wholly evident. On frequent recent occasions, it has been referred to as the corporate scandal." With such an oxymoronic title, much of his argument is based on semantics, how we describe phenomena in misleading ways, but there are concrete causes such as the failure of our education system as well as tangible results. The arms industry is but one example of the public realm being effectively controlled by the private sector - "While the Pentagon is still billed as being of the public sector, few doubt the influence of corporate power in its decisions." He also looks at the financial world which "sustains a large, active, well-rewarded community based on compelled but seemingly sophisticated ignorance" and in particular the Federal Reserve System, "our most prestigious form of fraud, our most elegant escape from reality."

In 1953 the top marginal tax rate in the US was 92%

Citing Murray Edelman's Symbols and Political Quiescence, Arnold Kling argues that the Insiders occasionally let us Outsiders win battles to give themselves cover for ever greater rent-extraction. We are allowed to win small progressive battles like the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell but the reality is they've just expanded their pool of war fodder. Able bodies are at a premium seeing that 75% of America's 17 to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service due to lack of education, obesity and other physical problems, or criminal history. Outnumbered but in firm hold of the controls, the Insiders, having more precise information, were rational enough to realize that offering the carrot of extending unemployment benefits would appease enough people while they not only extended the deficit busting Bush tax cuts (which will now be even harder to get rid of in two years time) but also paved the way for the elimination of the estate tax all within the framework of a thoroughly regressive tax deduction system. Since we live in a democracy, the ability of elites to use the government to their advantage requires our political institutions to have some minimum level of credibility. If everyone believed that government was simply a tool for the rich and powerful, the entire system would break down and would have to be maintained by force, if at all.

25 US hedge fund managers earned over $25 billion last year and had a lower tax rate than you

But really, how can the incoming chairman of the US House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus, get away with saying "My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks"; Scott Brown taking in behind the curtain donations from the financial industry while toiling to weaken the financial regulatory bill; Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, following the egregious example of his predecessors, mentors and colleagues such as Robert Rubin through the revolving door between government policy makers and financial industry titan, by moving from the White House to a job at Citigroup only four months after leaving government service; Republican members splitting from the once-thought-righter-of-wrongs from the financial meltdown, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, to issue their own report on what caused the crash. Hint: they eliminated any mention of derivatives, executive compensation, failed regulatory agencies and even the words “Wall Street” so the whole debacle could be pinned solely on government (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) and deadbeat Americans who took on predatory mortgages. Guess it's lucky for the powers that be that more Americans get there news from Faux News than anywhere as Rupert Murdoch's minions are the most misinformed segment of the population.

Silvio Berlusconi controls 90% of the Italian media

Remind you of anyone?

Murdoch is attempting to bring his media grip over the UK to Berluconian proportions by acquiring BSkyB, a move sure to be accepted by authorities now that Vince Cable has been shoved aside thanks to a sting operation mysteriously leaked to the BBC. He plays kingmaker while Berlusconi simply rules as king and is able to bribe opposition members to maintain his grip on power. Political parties make no difference to Rupert Murdoch, Conservative Thatcher one day and Bliar the next only to throw off Labour for Cameron knowing David would invite him to 10 Downing his first week in residence to help plot the end of the BBC. Sports, sensationalism and gossip have driven Murdoch's empire which preys on our narcissistic vanity as we celebrate the individual, the rights of each to pursue his or her own ends, the primacy of satisfying our personal needs regardless of the costs. Yet in the same way as the exponential growth of informational access the Internet has done, the explosion in TV channels has had the result of lessening our knowledge of the world around us while convincing us of the opposite.

British forces train death squads in Bangladesh

Orwell seems to be around every corner as the battle for control of the message is waged in an information confrontation between freedom and security. New tools are always being invented and old one's evolving in the hands of Sith lords like Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and Joe Lieberman. The Internet and its infrastructure, from ISPs, hosting companies, credit card and other payment intermediaries are nothing but landlords who can evict any of us renters at a moment's notice it seems. This imbalance in power allows the Insiders to use overt political dramas as symbols that placate the masses while using covert political activity to plunder them. What we now call rent-seeking succeeds because Outsiders are dazzled by the symbols while Insiders grab the substance. Lending any credence to states' faked outrage over whistle blowers creates smokescreens around those murderers, torturers, and downright criminals whose crimes were exposed making it less likely our governments prosecute war criminals instead of giving them awards. The media - and much of the public - falls for this, and so Julian Assange becomes the front page story, not the criminals.

In 2009, there was $1.53 trillion in global military spending, a 5.9% increase

Democracy has been reduced to a popularity contest in which the public are nothing but the audience as the puppet masters horse trade favours among themselves while throwing us crumbs in an attempt to jockey for poll position (did I just make a punny? Yike). Obama's election promises and calls for national sacrifice upon entering office have turned out to be as empty as the national coffers thanks to tax cuts and spending increases. With all the evidence that the game is almost up, from peak oil to debt collapse, both Insiders and Outsiders are more and more desperate to believe the story line, but even the house loses a rigged game now and then. This explains the increased military spending in times of austerity. When enough people find themselves with no choice but to rise up or a large enough percentage are able to see the social contract has been broken, the last line of defense is force. Pinning the blame for riots in London, Rome and Athens on hooligans and slackers with a sense of entitlement while claiming they have other avenues of protest is disingenuous at best. In London, as it has begun to dawn on the youth that it was their future the current generation mortgaged in order to live beyond their means and knowing they face a bleaker future with less access to education caused them to rise up which brought the full force of the law and the propaganda machine down on them. They are painted as no-gooders bent on wanton violence when in reality their motive is easy to discern and provocation came in the form of a Rolls Royce Phantom VI and its occupants whose maintenance is being paid for by stealing their future.

42% of American children live in low income homes; family income is a strong predictor of educational achievement; educational achievement is the strongest predictor of future income - do I need to draw a picture?

Hating what we have let democracy and capitalism become isn't anti-American/Christmas/the rich or pro-Socialism/Fascism/Authoritarianism, it's the result of realizing we are achieving less as a civilization than we are capable; potential social energy is lost as poor decisions affecting the available net social energy over time are made thanks to the machinations of those who would prefer to stay in power. Human capital is wasted by stuffing prisons full of people, bellies with Big Macs, and heads with garbage. Revolutionary movements have a lot of potential energy but need a social contract to build up the net social energy needed to force us onto a better decision making vector. Fundamentalists see financial crashes, peak oil and the prospect of peace much as they see evolution, alternative energy and the necessity for revolution thanks to our old friends confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and epistemic closure. One chooses, they can see the steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere as a good thing much like McDonald's advertising total burgers sold - Now over 390 parts per million! The fact is winter is still cold and most clients don't have a heart attack while they're eating the burger so it's hard to draw the connection.

Gold is up over 300% in the past decade; other precious metals up five fold

A key factor in the completion of the transfer of wealth from the sovereign states and people to the corporations, banks and their trans-governmental debt collecting agencies (your IMFs) is how will these masters of the universe keep those whose job it is to protect them on their side as they slowly strip away the protectors pay, benefits and dignity? Charlie Skelton thought he saw a chink in the wall behind the tear in the eye of the police comisario charged with protecting Bilderbergers making decision behind closed doors to cut their jobs, salaries and pensions to pay for their excesses. No, maybe it was just a coincidence they met in Greece last year and Spain this as the public sees no problem with spending millions in public funds to protect them while planning the host nations' debt-driven dooms. After all, it costs over $1 billion to do it in the open, like, say a G20 meeting in Canada. This summer Spain, next in line along with Portugal for the PIIGS roasting, saw firefighters march into Madrid's stock exchange carrying signs that read "The people pay for you greed" and "Markets caused the crisis" as they were among the first victims in the new world of austerity. Even having seen what has happened to Greece and Ireland hasn't tripped the wire yet because enough people think clicking a like button makes them politically active as we've been fooled into thinking the Internet in itself has given us some kind of magic knowledge/influence power. There's no all-encompassing conspiracy at play here, we're simply living in a fairy tale enough people are choosing to live in.

2009 was the deadliest year for NATO forces in Afghanistan until this year, the tenth year of the war, which has seen over 700 killed

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialist
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me