The Divine Mr. M

...this is from Jul. 23rd, 2013..I thought now would be a perfect time to re-post it...

"All politics is local." ~'Tip' O'Neill

~Which is why, in the end, democracy fails. Because humans are, as a rule, 'provincial', which is a socio-cultural way of saying that they are primarily concerned with their own immediate sphere of interest, tend to ignore everything outside of that sphere and react with fear/anger whenever the larger sphere impinges. That prevents most humans from thinking 'globally' or even 'nationally'. Now hold that thought...

"Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shit factory at the other." ~Aurelio Peccei, founder and first president of the Club of Rome

In 1972 The Club of Rome published a historical document, “The Limits to Growth,” described by Wikipedia as a “book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.” I remember at the time it generated a lot of speculation and controversy, but for the general population, like so many things before it, it went down The Memory Hole, eclipsed by Watergate and then the Fall of Saigon. [see "All politics is local."]

Aurelio Peccei was one the authors of that report and his sentiments are fairly clear.

“The Limits to Growth,” was also, I have come to believe, a warning to the population of Earth from The Western Financial Elites; “Since you are obviously incapable of controlling your own affairs and managing your own resources, we are going to gather up as much of them as we can lay our hands upon, build ourselves safe havens and let the rest of you drown in your own shit. In fact, we plan to expedite that by making things as bad as possible in order to get this over with as fast as possible.” In other words, a Culling.

I suspect they made that decision not so much because they are evil – though there is certainly some sociopathic reasoning in the mix – but because, seeing that “All politics are local,” they already knew that the solutions required to head off Global Catastrophe would be impossible to implement. Keep in mind that at the time The Cold War was still going strong, America was socioculturally unraveling and China had just wrapped up The Cultural Revolution.

In that context, I really cannot fault the logic, even if I am one of those likely to culled.

I have imagined snippets of conversations such as these, uttered not at secret meetings in darkened rooms, but at bright social gatherings over cocktails:

“Let it all got to hell.”

“They will rebel.”

“We'll make Consumerism ubiquitous and fund their social hatreds.”

“But we cannot control something like that.”

“No, but we can guide it and we can survive it. We'll surf the apocalypse.”

If I were in their position, I'd do much the same thing, though as those of you who know me will understand that my 'grand scheme' is of a somewhat different design. And because of that, while I expect this Culling will more or less succeed, I have my doubts that it will play out at all close to what The Elites hope for.

But the die have been cast and now what shall be, shall be...

~I have been posting this paragraph quoting the Chris Hedges article linked below for a while now. But I realized that by breaking it up into individual sentences, it becomes a Bill of Indictment...

"The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us.

Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it.

It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers.

Industries would mechanize their workplaces.

This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class - the bulwark of a capitalist system - that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant.

Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism."

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/06/02/karl-marx-was-right/

I wrote the following text back on Jan. 22nd, 2013...

"Obamacare is a classic example of how a really good idea is perverted by The Corporate State. Universal Health Care in a Modern Industrial State should be a Civil Right.

Obama, who is not a Liberal but a Center/Right Corporatist, faithfully promised a Public Option throughout the entire election, yet dropped it within months of getting elected. That was via the Insurance Industry because they knew that most folks would take the PO over their bullshit polices.

Said industry also help fund the Astroturf organizations that took over the early tea Party movement, switching them from a TARP related focus to an anti-Obamacare focus, giving Obama 'political cover' to dump the Public Option.

But this also had the effect of bringing all the loons in that movement to the fore, creating the most gridlocked Congress since the 1850's.

As I have said, "I believe The Corporate State has learned The Hitler Lesson, that once a political radical grasps the levers of power, you can no longer control him with money. [It'll be a 'him' every time] That is why they ran all of the loons the GOP base favored off the road with cash early on. Mittens was always a sacrificial candidate. The Corporate State is perfectly happy with that smart accommodating black chap.""

I retrospect it seems that the real Hitler Lesson is that when y'all use Racism as a political tool to divide and suppresses the interests of The People some manner of despot will inevitable arise.

Side Note: this was tagged with "most humans are servile ignorant scum"

"All politics is local." ~'Tip' O'Neill

~Which is why, in the end, democracy fails. Because humans are, as a rule, 'provincial', which is a socio-cultural way of saying that they are primarily concerned with their own immediate sphere of interest, tend to ignore everything outside of that sphere and react with fear/anger whenever the larger sphere impinges. That prevents most humans from thinking 'globally' or even 'nationally'. Now hold that thought...

"Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shit factory at the other." ~Aurelio Peccei, founder and first president of the Club of Rome

In 1972 The Club of Rome published a historical document, “The Limits to Growth,” described by Wikipedia as a “book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.” I remember at the time it generated a lot of speculation and controversy, but for the general population, like so many things before it, it went down The Memory Hole, eclipsed by Watergate and then the Fall of Saigon. [see "All politics is local."]

Aurelio Peccei was one the authors of that report and his sentiments are fairly clear.

“The Limits to Growth,” was also, I have come to believe, a warning to the population of Earth from The Western Financial Elites; “Since you are obviously incapable of controlling your own affairs and managing your own resources, we are going to gather up as much of them as we can lay our hands upon, build ourselves safe havens and let the rest of you drown in your own shit. In fact, we plan to expedite that by making things as bad as possible in order to get this over with as fast as possible.” In other words, a Culling.

I suspect they made that decision not so much because they are evil – though there is certainly some sociopathic reasoning in the mix – but because, seeing that “All politics are local,” they already knew that the solutions required to head off Global Catastrophe would be impossible to implement. Keep in mind that at the time The Cold War was still going strong, America was socioculturally unraveling and China had just wrapped up The Cultural Revolution.

In that context, I really cannot fault the logic, even if I am one of those likely to culled.

I have imagined snippets of conversations such as these, uttered not at secret meetings in darkened rooms, but at bright social gatherings over cocktails:

“Let it all got to hell.”

“They will rebel.”

“We'll make Consumerism ubiquitous and fund their social hatreds.”

“But we cannot control something like that.”

“No, but we can guide it and we can survive it. We'll surf the apocalypse.”

If I were in their position, I'd do much the same thing, though as those of you who know me will understand that my 'grand scheme' is of a somewhat different design. And because of that, while I expect this Culling will more or less succeed, I have my doubts that it will play out at all close to what The Elites hope for.

But the die have been cast and now what shall be, shall be...

Note: I wrote the above a little over four years ago. I'd say that given the recent electoral outcome the wheels may have come off the concept I proposed. Not that I'm saying it was not a valid hypothesis to begin with, but that its potential flaws are now glaringly obvious.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about why there has been more internet outrage over Cecil than over Sandra Bland and all the other situations like hers. It seems like almost everyone posted something about Cecil, myself included, but I didn’t see nearly as many posts about Sandra.

I think it has something to do with our essential powerlessness. We witness these tragedies happening daily, weekly, constantly; we see our society imploding around us; we know that there are monsters a-bornin’ all across the country, born from violence and drug addiction, born from the fact that they are far more valuable as fodder for a for-profit prison system than they are as modest taxpayers, so why invest in them having any future; the wealth of our nation is channeled upward, away from us, instead of outward, to serve us - and yet we’re easily played by politicians who cut more and more of our commonwealth and tell us it’s to save us taxes; we try to conduct our lives decently, but we have no power. Even if we have some protection from accidents of birth and privilege. Even if we’re hanging on to modest middle-class status by our fingernails. We have NO power. If we allowed ourselves to feel the outrage that is really there, we would die of rage and grief.

But then here comes this guy. This oily, smirking, wealthy white guy. If he’s not quite a 1%er, he seems damn close to it, as far as we can see. And this asshole tosses 50k, which is more than most of us make in a year, and half of what a reasonably comfortable home might run on, he blithely tosses fifty thousand dollars for the chance to destroy something beautiful. Because he can. Because fuck you, peasant. Because when I pump my crossbow bolt into something rare and special, it gives me that jolt I need to keep my jaded appetite alive. Because I can buy anything I damn well please. Because it’s super fun to kill big things. Because I need something new for my trophy room.

But then we see - he is, in fact, just one guy. And we’re all after him. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe we can catch him, and make him pay. And deep down, maybe that will help us feel like we were actually able to strike a blow about this deep sense of unraveling that is seeping into our consciousness, for anyone that is even the least bit awake.

Of course, this will do nothing to the people who actually own us - the ones whose level of power and wealth is, quite literally, unimaginable to us, the ones who hunt with such subtlety that we don’t even see it happening, the ones to whom this Minnesota dentist is nothing but a scurrying little toady. They take whole nations for their trophy room. And there is nothing that you or I can do about it.” ~Liz Anderson

Provisions that allow foreign investors to bypass the federal courts could undermine U.S. legal protections.

Alan Morrison Jun 23, 2015

It is January 2017. The mayor of San Francisco signs a bill that will raise the minimum wage of all workers from $8 to $16 an hour effective July 1st. His lawyers assure him that neither federal nor California minimum wage laws forbid that and that it is fine under the U.S. Constitution.

Then, a month later, a Vietnamese company that owns 15 restaurants in San Francisco files a lawsuit saying that the pay increase violates the “investor protection” provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement recently approved by Congress. The lawsuit is not in a federal or state court, but instead will be heard by three private arbitrators; the United States government is the sole defendant; and the city can participate only if the U.S. allows it.

It is not a far-fetched scenario. The TPP reportedly includes such provisions, as a means of solving a thorny problem. In the United States, the courts are, by and large, independent and willing to fairly decide challenges to arbitrary government laws and rulings, no matter who the plaintiff is. The same is not consistently true in less developed countries.

The solution proposed in the TPP is to allow foreign investors to bring claims for money damages over violations of the TPP’s investor protection provisions before a private arbitration tribunal that operates outside the challenged government’s court system. One arbitrator would be chosen by the investor, one by the country being challenged, and a third by agreement of the other two arbitrators.

The arbitrators are often lawyers who specialize in international trade and investment, for whom serving as arbitrators is only one source of their income. Unlike U.S. judges, they are not salaried but paid by the hour, and they can rotate between arbitrating cases and representing investors suing governments.

Despite the fairness of our court system, the U.S. government has consented in prior trade agreements, and in a leaked version of the still-secret TPP, to allow foreign investors to bypass our courts and instead move to “investor-state” arbitration. Thus, challenges based upon TPP to our duly enacted laws and other regulatory actions would be decided by three individuals who are not government officials and need not be American citizens. And they would have the final word as to whether the federal government will be compelled to pay damages, because there is no judicial review in any U.S. court of the merits of these arbitral rulings.

If such a case were brought, the foreign investor would sue the United States and ask that the arbitrators find that “investor-based expectations” under the TPP were violated. So, for example, it might claim that doubling the minimum wage from its prior level violated the TPP’s provisions requiring fair and equitable treatment of foreign investors. If the arbitrators agreed, they would assess money damages that would be paid from the federal treasury, but the San Francisco wage law would not be directly affected. However, because the ruling would open the door for other foreign investors in any number of businesses to bring similar claims, Congress would almost assuredly step in and override the wage increase to prevent opening the doors to the Treasury to every foreign investor in San Francisco. Indeed, in a similar situation Canada reversed a toxics ban and published a worldwide advertisement that the chemical was safe in order to avoid the possibility of having to pay substantial damages.

In recent years, there has been a major increase in the use of arbitration in the United States to decide commercial disputes, but those cases involve contracts in which the parties agreed to arbitration, with the outcome generally depending on how factual issues are resolved. TPP arbitrators, by contrast, will decide what is essentially a legal question: whether governmental actions, which are designed to protect our health, safety, environment and economic well-being, are consistent with the TPP. Those protections extend from locally enacted laws like the San Francisco minimum-wage provision, to state statutes and regulatory actions, to laws passed by Congress and decisions of federal regulatory agencies. And under the TPP, as under other trade agreements, decisions of a majority of the arbitrators on compliance with the TPP will not be subject to review in any court, federal or state. Among the other important public policy measures currently being debated that might be the basis for a TPP claim by a foreign investor include water rationing in California, the legality of selling e-cigarettes to minors, and the state regulation of medical facilities performing abortions. If a foreign investor won a TPP arbitration in these situations or the wage increase discussed above, that would not only cost the Treasury, but it would disadvantage American competitors who cannot benefit from TPP arbitrations, unless the offending law were set aside. And if governments feel compelled to set aside such laws in response to adverse rulings, the three arbitrators will effectively have substituted their own judgments for that of the electorate.

Under the TPP, the arbitrators will act like judges, deciding legal questions just as federal judges decide constitutional claims. However, unlike judges appointed under Article III of the Constitution, TPP arbitrators are not appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate, nor do they have the independence that comes from life tenure. And that presents a significant constitutional issue: Can the president and Congress, consistent with Article III, assign to three private arbitrators the judicial function of deciding the merits of a TPP investor challenge?

The Supreme Court has not ruled on this precise question. But the collective reasoning in four of its recent rulings bearing on the issue leans heavily toward a finding of unconstitutionality. The Court has placed significant limits on the ability of Congress to assign the power to decide cases traditionally handled by the courts to people other than Article III judges, even when the judicial substitutes are full-time federal officials, such as bankruptcy judges or the heads of federal agencies. Moreover, in each case in which the Court approved of a dispute being taken away from federal judges, there was judicial review at the end of the process, which is not the case with TPP. Moreover, although the Justice Department issued a lengthy opinion in 1995 on when arbitration can be used to replace court adjudication, it did not then, and has not since then, defended the constitutionality of arbitration provisions like those in the proposed TPP.

As it presses for the passage of TPP, the administration needs to explain how the Constitution allows the United States to agree to submit the validity of its federal, state, and local laws to three private arbitrators, with no possibility of review by any U.S. court. Otherwise, it risks securing a trade agreement that won’t survive judicial scrutiny, or, even worse, which will undermine the structural protections that an independent federal judiciary was created to ensure.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/tpp-isds-constitution/396389/

~I don't believe I'm really being all that paranoid when I think that the timing of The Duggar Scandal seems rather 'fortuitous' vis-a-vis the whole Trans-Pacific Partnership Fast Track issue. I can certainly see a pair of Fascist PR Operatives talking about it.

FPRO#1: “We're getting killed in the Media and On-Line and I'm taking a lot of heat from The Main Office. We need a nice juicy scandal to distract people. And quick!”

FPRO#2: “Limmi see what I got in the hopper. I'll get back to you asap.”

~a short time later~

FPRO#2: [excited] “I've got a beaut here. You know the Duggar family?”

FPRO#1: “Those Christian breeder freaks with a TV show?”

FPRO#2: “The very same. Seems Josh, the oldest son, molested his sisters when he was like fourteen.”

FPRO#1: “That is fucking perfect!”

FPRO#2: “Oh, it gets better. There is a whole network of pedos involved in this from top to bottom.”

FPRO#1: [laughs] “Thank you, Jesus!”

[they high five]

FPRO#1: “Yeah, throw him under the bus. They always gave me the creeps anyway.”

FPRO#2: “Consider it done.”

"Because both the Democratic and Republican parties are largely beholden to their Corporate Pay Masters in how they vote etc, their rhetoric must reflect the essential world view of their political base in order for them to retain any type of 'legitimacy'.

For the Democratic base, that means making 'Progressive' noise about Social Justice etc, even has the party keeps on moving Rightward as it has since the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. Every now and then it can toss its base a political bone, like Marriage Equality, something that does not have any real effect upon the fortunes of its Corporate Pay Masters.

For the Republican base, that means making more and more 'Conservative' noise as it keeps moving Rightward to stay ahead of the cynical Democratic shift. This has led the GOP into the territory of nearly pure Fascism, with all its trappings; War Mongering, Misogyny, Racism, Nativism, Religious Extremism, etc. Their Corporate Pay Masters are either indifferent to these things or supportive of them because they help generate profit and create a favorable operating environment.

Real democracy is a very tough gig and history shows that the average human is simply not up to the task. It is therefore quite easy for The Corporate State to use its wealth and power to manipulate and divide The Electorate. That even someone as well educated as Ms Douglas is so publicly polarized proves that point.

The truly well informed equally despise both parties, knows full well how thoroughly the system is rigged and that voting is largely a sucker's game."

..comment on We Can’t All Just Get Along

"The dumbest thing Marx ever did was fall for that "withering away of the state" business. Whether the state is "bourgeois" or "proletarian" or "cooperative" or "corporatist" or what have you, there is not the slightest reason for thinking that the state, as such, will come to an end. There is no reason at all for thinking that complex human societies can forgo politics, governmental organization, planning, the rule of law, coercive enforcement of the rule of law, the paternalistic socialization of children and the ongoing, organized defense of the realm against violent threats from potential predators. There is no reason at all to think that the many interlocking institutions in such a society can make everything work through "self-organization" or "emergent" patterns of pure voluntariness and spontaneous cooperation.

There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.

You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has been crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.

People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.

And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.

Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick

"The Poor of all ethnicities [there's no such thing as 'race'] have far more in common with each other than with The Rulers who oppress them. But The Rulers have known that since the early days of America and used human's innate Tribalism to build a very specific form of Racism into our Collective Culture in order to maintain control.

White=Overlords
Black=Property
Brown/Red/Yellow=Conquered and/or Subject Peoples

But now Economic Inequality is causing that paradigm to strain to its breaking point as more and more Whites begin to realize that The Rulers regard them as Niggers, too."