Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Class War | 85 comments (85 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Class War (4.00 / 8)
I think you are overestimating the size of the problem.

Top down warfare is not happening because that is what the organizing principle the one percent is unified behind - after all, being rich in Sweden is vastly preferable to being rich in Zimbabwe, and the enserfment of the middle class is extremely counter to the interests of everyone that makes their money by actually making and selling things, rather than just being a corrupt banker. Poor customers means poor business, and the class solidarity exhibited by the upper crust is every bit as insane as the voting habits of Kansas. Single payer healthcare would almost certainly have saved the bacon of the Detroit automakers and countless other titans of industry, but lobbying for it was unthinkable to them because they were, and are, bamboozled by economic propaganda.

In other words, it is not a requirement of victory to defeat the unified ranks of the economic elite, it ought to be sufficient to break the heritage foundation, the clones of that foundation, and break the back of the finance sector.

In that order.

by Thomas on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 03:30:34 AM EST
Re: Class War (4.00 / 8)
I suppose you refer to the Heritage Foundation. Breaking that would be anti-constitutional, a pretty tall order, whereas legislation could redimension the rampant fiscalization of economies. A much harsher version of the Glass-Seagull Act is an absolute necessity. (Larry Summers should be tarred and feathered.)

Most titans such as GM beat the production sector by going into services and fiscalization. With fiscalization poisoning economies, the production of goods as community identity and value is dead. Companies that produced goods are simply no longer an integral part of the local social fabric. It's an optional. That involves dealing with messy humans, their present and future needs, as well as investing in long term projects. Why bother when a company can be made, broken, dismembered in seconds by economic rape and plunder?

The elites no longer have a nation nor a loyalty, and they possess and move a mass of funny money many times over the effective annual world production. With the crises, they've never had it so good: land, rents, strategic resources, state capture. Production of material goods and their placement is just one issue from their point of view.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 05:38:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (4.00 / 4)
Discrediting Heritage to the point where they are no longer taken seriously would pull their teeth, and then cost them their funding. Do not see how doing that requires any unconstitutional actions, merely getting them exposed for the frauds and liars that they are would suffice - These institutions are not doing honest research, and it ought, by golly, be possible to get people to laugh in their faces when they propose policies.
by Thomas on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 07:04:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (4.00 / 8)
The problem is that it makes no real difference if an argument is carefully debunked by serious scholarship. It happens all the time. This does not change a bit the public impact of artfully contrived propaganda masked as objective research. The false memes are simply reproduced by multiple sources to the point they become common knowledge.

The strategy is to get a falsehood advertised with the maximum of emotional impact so as to fix it in the mind of the public.

There are many examples of false commonplaces, such as the American landscape peppered with Soviet era nuclear suitcases, which despite being debunked continues to be an issue with rightwing pundits. The Team B findings have been debunked yet continue to make up an integral part of chickenhawk readings of history. False scholarship on alleged Soviet ties to Italian judges produced by the CSIS at the behest of Berlusconi continues to be used in Italy to attack the judiciary branch.

My impression is that deception, imposture and falsehood are the main staple of political conflict-  and not only- throughout history. Ideally, one might hope to educate youth to analyse public discourse and perceive false reasoning and hokum as second nature. I would like to recall Tudor England in which public school teaching was based on the Trivium- Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric- the three fundamental instruments we have for interpreting reality with a no-shit Sherlock attitude. Of course, educated commoners may not have significantly reduced the ruthless pretences of Tudor elites in the final analysis but it certainly contributed to progress in all human endeavors.

Back to think tanks, the American rightwing realized as early as the Sixties that the best way to sell their ideology was to package it in mock-liberal pseudo-scientific jargon. Rightwing think tanks that resort to militant and stridant discourse simply are not taken seriously, despite Rush & Company (I'd say they pace the mood and keep attention high regardless one's attitude). It is far better to attack, say, Chomsky's theses, from a mock-left position rather than an arch-conservative stance. This has become so commonplace especially in the golden age of Reagan that the baricenter of American political discourse has markedly shifted to the right, thanks above all to liberal punditry and the institutions that manufacture opinion. As has been often remarked here, the American left is conservative by European standards. We owe it to the seizure of public discourse as you no doubt may agree. But it does involve more actors than recognizably conservative think tanks.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 07:50:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (4.00 / 3)
I actually do think the Heritage Foundation, and lie factories like it, could be broken.

1 - Change the laws regarding charitable donations, and their tax exemption.  Right now, giving to a partisan operation like Heritage is a tax-deductible charitable organization.

2 - Tie tax-exempt NGO status to the actual performance of charity, with a maximum %20 percent overhead and expense cost, or something like that.  Current law allows organizations to maintain their tax-free status while barely doing any work that could be considered charitable.

3 - Organization like this would not have the resources to keep up the wingnut welfare network if there were few people in the USD $1 million dollar range of total assets, and almost nobody in the $5 million dollar and up range.  The simply couldn't raise the donations.

4 - Decentralized and independent media would also help.  Some would be conservative, as is only appropriate in an open and free society.  Many would not be, and some would be militantly so.  Shouting down BS in public can help.  Sometimes.

by Zwackus on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 07:56:36 AM EST
[ Parent ]
PN (none / 1)
The partner of Senator Glass was Representative Steagall.

But the spelling is hard to hear from the pronounciation.

Henry B. Steagall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest it was stee-gall (like the words tea and gall), with equal stress on each syllable. He added, "This pronunciation is generally used throughout the South, and rarely used in the North. American northerners persist in stressing the first syllable and rhyming the name with 'eagle'."[1]


Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
by A swedish kind of death on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 01:28:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: PN (none / 1)
I wondered if, perhaps, de Gondi was utilizing some obscure metaphor when he referred to the Glass Seagull Act.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 01:50:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: PN (none / 0)
I have heard it as Seagall, Segall, so Seagull is close enough.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
by A swedish kind of death on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 02:49:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: PN (none / 1)
I wrote off the top of my head or maybe slightly above the amygdula, w/o looking it up. Perhaps I have an association down under with glass seagulls, a memory image. I'm very bad with names and it's getting worse with age.
by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 03:17:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: PN (none / 1)
I don't know how many times I have googled 'Glass-Stegul' or some such variant to come up with the correct spelling. That is my recourse when spell check doesn't work or seems questionable. Google is a better, more flexible checker.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 07:07:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Yup, despite doing my grad school in ... (none / 0)
... Tennessee, good Buckeye that I am, I pronounce it to rhyme with Eagle.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Sun Aug 25th, 2013 at 11:27:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Yup, despite doing my grad school in ... (none / 0)
In Tennessee was it pronounced Stea gall, even accents on both syllables?

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon Aug 26th, 2013 at 11:08:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (none / 1)
It may not be a requirement, but it would certainly be the cherry on top.

In fact, it would be a lot more than just a cherry on top.  It would be a huge service to humanity.

by Zwackus on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 07:58:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (4.00 / 6)
I happen to think that the people who make their money by making and selling things are for the most part a minority these days amongst those with any amount of money and position.

That is, people who would be willing to spend the time and energy actually building a business, focusing on product development, and competing in a relatively open market on cost and quality of product or service, are in a dwindling minority.  Business these days is more and more about breaking the market and setting up rent-extraction services, and doing everything possible to avoid any sort of honest competition.

I'm not actually anti-capitalist, in I do think that private enterprise which competes in a regulated marketplace on price and quality is something that is worthwhile and produces value.  However, I also think that there's a tendency common to pretty much all human society for people at a certain level of wealth and power to get lazy.  Being a capitalist is hard work if you do it right, even at the top.  Even serious investors, like Warren Buffet, work their asses off.  I don't really mind people like that at all.  I don't begrudge them their wealth and their status.

My problem is not with them so much, as with the tendency of their compatriots to take the lazy way out.  Break the marketplace, establish monopolies, sweat the workers, and let the system run itself.  You don't have to compete if people have no choice but to buy your product, after all.  You don't have to compete if you can just print money.  And their kids are even worse - they grow up thinking they are naturally entitled to be rich and powerful, and that they deserve it because they really are smarter and harder working than the normal people.  It's the second and third generations that break the system, because they didn't build it, they don't understand it, and they're stupid little entitled brats.

Let a real industrialist or entrepreneur build their empire and reap their horde, within some reasonable limit.  But what they build dies with them, and their kids need to get a job just like anyone else.

by Zwackus on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 08:13:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Class War (none / 1)
There are so many of the conservative think tanks that the only feasible way to counter them is to undermine their viability, as Zwackus suggested. But that is much more likely to be accomplished   after   the political power of their contributors has been curbed. Chickens and eggs.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 10:48:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Class War | 85 comments (85 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Display: