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The Gingrich Doctrine is decades of struggle against radical Islam.
Jim Roberts is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times. He tweets,
“Glimpsing an emerging Gingrich foreign policy: Preparing for decades of struggle against radical Islam.”
Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.
Alan Greenspan made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.”
In the wake of the recession, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.
When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.
Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly.
Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.
“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
“Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”
…Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd.
So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.
→ autonomous,
→ wireless,
→ remote
optical sensor measures fluorescence in the presence of E. coli
Finally a snoop doing something, er, useful:
December 14th, 2011 | interesting | Comments
1 in 4 earn less than $9 per hour.
I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents.
He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families.
Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.
“Keep America American” is Mitt Romney’s campaign slogan.
“Keep America American” is the 1920s slogan of the KKK.
I awoke this morning to read that a candidate for the Presidency (Newt Gingrich) believes we should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and Iran because he fears they are about to launch a nuclear missile to be “detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, (which) would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity.
Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones.
Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.
“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States.
Most scientists regard this as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic even if these two pygmy powers had such a rocket, and yet this man could seriously be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. This is like Ron Hubbard running for President on the Scientology ticket.
Jeffrey Winters, author of the 2011 book Oligarchy.
Winters coined the term “wealth defense industry” to describe this veritable army that serves the super-rich, and in a recent article in the American Interest he explained that it “is comprised of lawyers, accountants, wealth management consultants, revolving-door lobbyists, think-tank debate framers and even key segments of the insurance industry whose sole purpose is income defense for America’s oligarchs. “
It’s “a multi-billion dollar industry per year, and it feeds completely on the need of wealthy people to defend their wealth,” Winters says in an interview.
The paramount goal is simple and specific: “To not pay taxes and to keep as much of their fortunes as they possibly can across generations.”
The means are extremely complicated and expensive, typically involving individually tailored, painstakingly crafted techniques — or “structured tax products”– based on arcane interpretations of the nation’s 70,000-page tax code.
Those schemes often involve moving money through offshore tax havens and anonymous shell corporations — generally with the goal of sheltering the money and creating paper losses that can be applied to the client’s tax bill.
“The wealth defense industry arose as part of the demand on the part of wealthy people, but it’s now taken on a life of its own and is proactive.”
Our culture’s support for Republican errors via NYTimes:
this point is worth emphasizing once again. As Krugman notes:
…the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit.
All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.
The entire debate has been fake.
If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.
“So the idea that those at the very top, who now are richer than anybody has ever been; we now have people who are richer than any people have ever been in the history of the world; why they can’t pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes in crazy.
“Five days after George W. Bush became president, [five days!!] Alan Greenspan testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and said ‘we are in danger of paying off our national debt too fast. We have a projected $5 trillion surplus going into the next ten years and we very well may pay off the debt too fast, the federal government is in danger of having too much money.
“Then as soon as we started losing jobs and we’re in a recession, Bush said, ‘well we’re in a recession, we need to cut taxes because the economy’s bad.’ So in addition to ‘every time you cut taxes you increase revenue’ and ‘every time you cut taxes you decrease revenue’, there was also, ‘every time the economy’s doing well you have to cut taxes’, and ‘every time the economy is doing bad you have to cut taxes.’
“And then, when it needed one more element to become absolutely dangerous, and Dick Cheney provided that. Cheney said, ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. So Bush takes the biggest surplus in history and turns it into the biggest deficit in history, hands off a $1.2 trillion projected deficit to Obama, and an economy, here it is, I’ve done my job, we’re shedding 750,000 jobs a month.
“This is the most incomprehensible economic theory I’ve ever heard.”
Exactly What Is Crony Capitalism, Anyway?
Well, we should know this stuff.
Yo!
The point of an economy isn’t to make money.
The point of money is to make an economy.
“We overestimated capitalism’s ability to function properly without strong democratic checks.”
Elected officials and university administrators have felt no compunction about using force to prevent political dissent….
Contrast these actions with how our nation has dealt with the investment bankers, mortgage lenders, and hedge fund managers who wrecked the world economy.
It is hard not to conclude that the fix is in.
The degree to which our political and legal systems favor the wealthy and powerful is breathtaking in scope and arrogance.
Guy Davis – We all need more kindness in this world !
Tumors are not industrial.
The panel decided that men who have PSAs of 10 or less and Gleason scores 6 or less “should no longer be told they have cancer”.
Men with these criteria are not candidates for treatment, but for active monitoring, if you can find it.
December 11th, 2011 | interesting | Comments
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