- Good CounterPunch op-ed on why the “peace” president, the “openness” president, and the “dissent is patriotic” president is sending the FBI to terrorize anti-war organizers, calling the peace activists terrorist supporters.
- Hm. Barry Ritholtz is just discovering that the left-right political divide is bogus. He now sez it’s us vs corporations. Getting closer to the truth there, Barry. But still missing the point. Question (and A Clue) for ya: What’s the biggest corporate body in the whole, entire world?
- How come, in all the many articles about the CIA’s drone war in Afghanistan, nobody ever, ever, ever, ever, ever asks the fundamental question: What the hell is the CIA doing conducting bombing raids — anywhere, on anybody???
- I love Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: “I apologise to readers around the world for having defended the emergency stimulus policies of the US Federal Reserve, and for arguing like an imbecile naif that the Fed would not succumb to drug addiction, political abuse, and mad intoxicated debauchery, once it began taking its first shots of quantitative easing. My pathetic assumption was that Ben Bernanke would deploy further QE only to stave off DEFLATION, not to create INFLATION. If the Federal Open Market Committee cannot see the difference, God help America.”
- How have I been unaware of OK Go for all this time? The The dog video is so awesome I ended up buying a high-res copy of it (proceeds going to animal rescue). But all their music videos are strangely wonderful and such amazing works of precision (thanks, UnReconstructed). And how, with all that speeding up and slowing down, did they synch the lip-synching to the music on this one?
us vs corporations
I know you’re expecting the US gov as an answer….I’m tempted to say WalMart sarcastically, since 4 out of the ten richest Americans (according to Forbes) are Wally people…..”world wide” makes me think of insurance companies….but then, I get the words “big corporations” & monopolies mixed up…often….the article (and it’s comments section) makes some good points…
Based on lobbying, and regulating in their favor, maybe the corporations are bigger bullies than the US gov….
“What’s the biggest corporate body in the whole, entire world?”
Amen, Claire.
naturegirl, respectfully: consider your last comment there. By definition, one “lobbies” as a supplicant to the state. The whole intended product of such activity is the “regulating in their favor”, and they are there because they are asking Master for the handout.
I don’t see a lot of ambiguity as to who’s the alpha dog there.
There is certainly ample evidence of unholy collusion between mercantilists and the state (witness the fascism-in-all-but-acknowledged-name that we currently live in), but when it comes right down to it, the very existence of a corporation (defined as a registered legal entity enjoying an economically favored status) is controlled by the real puppet master.
Now…the state is quite happy to propagate the fiction that it is somehow an underdog, subject to the tender mercies of various shadowy “Mr. Burns” figures that, we are invariably told, threaten our very way of life. This is the classic sales pitch of any protection racket, as is the inevitable result of buying in to one over the course of generations.
Except that making such observations makes one a cynical, paranoid, heartless misanthrope, and a dangerous agitator, ultimately needing some form of “re-education”.
See how that works? 🙂
Ah, I see….sometimes it’s hard to tell which end makes the dog wiggle…..
I like to think that dogs always wiggle because they’re so gloriously above all this “humans acting dumb” crap. But I’m a bit of a romantic that way… 🙂
Thanks, Claire.
I’ll jump in on the ‘biggest corporation’ debate. Consider not only the article by Barry Ritholtz, but also the Ambrose Evans-Pritchard apology. We know Big Biz kisses Nanny Sam’s fat pork barrel behind to keep control over the individual, and Nanny Sam makes for one big corporate bureaucracy itself. But we also know Bailout Ben and his Fed cronies clearly believe (and have publicly stated) they are above the control of the govt. My vote, therefore goes to the central banksters around the globe.
…and any dog rules, as long as it’s a Beagle 🙂
The FBI raids are so last week. The god-king has now definitely earned the title of Tyrant. See
http://www.theagitator.com/2010/09/27/tyranny/
Greenwald’s analysis is more complete:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/25/secrecy/index.html
Greenwald interviews the brave lawyers defending the US citizen who is to be murdered because Obama sez so:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2010/09/28/assassinations/index.html
“Brave lawyer” is the right term, as they are challenging a man who can and will murder them for any reason, or no reason at all, and who will never be held accountable for his actions.
I don’t find Ambrose Evans-Pritchard so lovable. The snide remark about “hillsmen in Idaho, with their Colt 45s and boxes of krugerrands” was a gratuitous insult that added nothing to his report but did destroy any pretext of a genuine apology.
The man is a an apologist for government control of money. He quotes Irving Fisher, the most famously wrong economist in history, who stated days before the crash of 1929 that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Less than a month later, Fisher stated that the market was “only shaking out of the lunatic fringe.” Evans-Pritchard seems to gravitate towards people who use insults when logic fails them.
Fisher has been thoroughly refuted and discredited, but he is admired by big-government statists like Evans-Pritchard because his stupid theories advocate government’s violent intervention in the markets.
Evans-Pritchard is not your friend. He may be upset with the fed, but not because it is stealing from you. He’s upset because he is afraid that now they might steal from him as well.
-S, I can still enjoy Evans-Pritchard as a lively writer, a bold investigator, and a man who’s right at least some of the time. As to the remark about the well-armed Idahoans, I thought it was hilarious — a wry acknowledgment by E-P of his own snobbery. After all, how many other financial-world hot-shots would admit, in print or anywhere else, that “Idaho hillsmen” were smarter than they?
I love to read E-P. Doesn’t mean I have to agree with his every word.
I read E-P, but for the same reason I read the War Street Journal and other MSM “news,” I like to know whether we’re at war with Eurasia or Eastasia today.
Perhaps his humor escaped me, jokes are hard enough in person and much tougher via keystrokes. Add in British vs American ideas of funny and I may have missed the joke. His invocation of a quack economist really put me off, and after that I was not in a mood to laugh.
Oh well, at least I know a good dog vid when I see one.