Archive for the 'Lifelines' Category
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Powerful Evidence of Media Effectiveness
Turns out Americans are radically misinformed about the distribution of wealth in their own society, thinking it is much more equal than it actually is. Turns out the distribution of wealth Americans think would be ideal is far more equal still than that, and is basically Scandinavian:
Click image to enlarge
Slate commentator Timothy Noah, who blogs about the research showing the above, observes:
I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?
One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we’re living in a time of growing income inequality, Krugman told me, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is.” The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke. Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation’s net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or “top quintile”) account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Of course, sheer ignorance is indeed one reason for this fundamental failure of American democracy. But what, pray tell, is the cause of that sheer ignorance?
Answer: Our capitalist media, which would lose corporate sponsors and incur rightist flak attacks if they reported coherently and often on the distribution of income and wealth.
That, plus the Business Party, with its Republican and Democratic factions, which similarly steer clear of the topic, refusing to mention, let alone politicize, it.
Market totalitarianism, in other words.
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Quote of the Month
As our screamingly decrepit and hidebound overclass sets up camp atop its record piles of hoarded cash, let us recall what John Maynard Keynes concluded at the end of his magnum opus:
“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.”
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
Our Revolutionary Right/Duty
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Score One for the Masses
Many of my lefty blog buddies have been going through a phase of dumping on the masses.
But if the masses are somehow as dumb and responsible-for-what-happens as mainstream dogma insists and some weary comrades think, how does one explain this item?:
Monday, May 31st, 2010
Sound Familiar?
“What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?
“The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
“By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.”
Orwell, “England Your England”
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
And Now a Word FOR Our NON-Sponsor
TCT does not accept advertising, and never will.
Nevertheless, John Sayles is so awesome and his forthcoming movie is sure to be so roastingly, epically good, I have to take time from our core endeavor — exposing corporate capitalist cultural engineering — to mention it.
Originally titled Baryo, the film, now called Amigo, is Sayles’ historical dramatization of the first* large-scale act of U.S. overseas military imperialism: the invasion and occupation of the Philippines.
I can all but guarantee you that this film is going to rock your socks all the way to the toes. Just as Matewan is far and away the best labor film ever made by an American, I expect this will be the best anti-imperialist movie to emerge from our culture. Sayles is that talented and well-informed.
And, most of all, the facts of the matter are that profound and worthy of recall.
I’m beside myself with anticipation!
*The first domestic act was King Philip’s War. The first overseas act of military conquest was the seizure and annexation of Hawai’i, but that was small, in terms of actual combat.
