bank on it: riding the gatsby curve

Monopoly theories of profits. State sanctioned cartels. Wring out  last drop of blood, milking the last dollar. its ruling class economic-politics , closed and narrow, like minded, and they have a  self-perpetuating
control of the key establishments of the state. And when that is questioned, the religion card is played, meaning the corruption is holy and sanctified by the revelatory quality of the ideology.  The values  here, the high 1%, not Joe the Pizza pie owner who socked it nickel and diming his way in; is that in public discourse these values are self-evident truths, Newtonian, so that efforts to promote alternative views are seen as coercion or communism. Media wise, critiques of  the establishment is seen as constructive self-criticism, while identical accusation by outsiders is viewed as  as subversive and threatening.

Media, national security, military, judiciary,  are all self-perpetuating establishments barred to those who do not adopt the agenda. There is enormous  financial power centered in state-sanctioned cartels, and the set of values, colonialist, imperialist and often racist, are implicit and complicit to an understanding of coercion, moral suasion that always seems to coincide far more closely with interests of the wealthy establishment than with the interests of civil liberties. and things are better now, if we compare with the Great Depression mentality, the Pecora Commission, Shirley Temple Hollywod, McCarthy, although the same evil seems to always find comfortable lodging…

Read More:http://www.artsconnected.org/collection/103947/cats-and-dogs?print=true

From the New York times. The concerned liberal, anxious about their own place and privilege, slightly haunted by the inkling of overthrow, and reluctant, ultimately to change in status and distinction- social capital- and tolerating , if even vaguely, the great unwashed…( see link at end) …IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.


—And now, the US supreme court just consecrated one of the most corrupt acts of the US government over the past decade: its vesting of retroactive legal immunity in the nation’s telecom giants after they had been caught red-handed violating multiple US eavesdropping laws. Just as the Obama DOJ forever precluded any legal accountability for Bush-era torturers, the supreme court on Tuesday forever precluded any legal accountability for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and other telecoms for their crucial participation in the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (the Obama DOJ, needless to say, supported the position of the telecoms).—Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme-court-telecoms-win-immunity image:http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/paul-camenisch-cafe-commerce-suisse-1928-5504268-details.aspx

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism con


ed the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place….

 

—Last November, the Bank of Canada started circulating a new $100 banknote. They’re made of plastic polymer, and are extremely difficult to counterfeit. Yay.
So get this. One of the original images intended for the design showed an “Asian-looking” woman scientist peering into a microscope — meant to celebrate Canada’s medical innovations.
But focus groups were reportedly unhappy with the researcher’s Asian appearance, so the bank eventually had the image redrawn to represent a more “neutral” ethnicity: Asian-looking woman scientist image rejected for $100 bills.—Read More:http://blog.angryasianman.com/2012/08/asian-looking-woman-removed-from.html

Radio fallout
In an open prison
Jazz-based soul tinged
Watered down rhythm
Too many pretty sleeves
With nothing in `em
Johnny be good or bad
But not indifferent
Hard-core bland-out
Stocking filler
Soft-sell overkill
Tee-shirts given
Everybody’s wearing them
See you at the party tonight ( Godley & Creme, The Party)

…Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).

—That Iran is some major national security issue for the US is a concoction of the bipartisan DC class that always needs a scary foreign enemy. The claim is frequently debunked in multiple venues. But because both political parties embrace this highly ideological claim, Raddatz does, too. Indeed, one of the most strictly enforced taboos in establishment journalism is the prohibition on aggressively challenging those views that are shared by the two parties. Doing that makes one fringe, unserious and radical: the opposite of solemn objectivity.
Most of Raddatz’s Iran questions were thus snugly within this bipartisan framework. At one point, she even chided Biden for appearing to suggest that Iran may not be actively pursuing a nuclear weapon: “You are acting a little bit like they don’t want one”—Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objectivity

…There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve…..

—In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.
But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation’s most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.—Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/04/third-party-us-presidential-debate-deceit image:http://www.galerie-creation.com/willi-baumeister-willi-baumeister-et-la-france-q-2711839354.htm

…At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League’s own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: “No, I have a granddaughter. It’s not time yet.”

America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways….

… The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s…. Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

—When I queried this fellow about where one could find fascists in New York, his reply encompassed practically anyone who doesn’t support the Zuccotti Park commune, and especially “the bankers.”
The statement below was published by OWS Mutual Responsibility, in a flyer distributed at all information desks at the park.
“The free market, and its tycoons, will continue to thrive and be a central factor in this new stage of global development on condition that we learn together how to establish the relations between us and organize a social structure that truly benefits all. Economic prosperity cannot be achieved without considering universal social wellbeing.”
This sounds strangely like core fascist ideology of the twentieth century. This fellow might be surprised to know that Mussolini was hailed by Lenin as the most perfect socialist in the world.—Read More:http://www.lookingattheleft.com/2011/11/zuccotti-utopia-portraits-of-revolutionaries/

IN the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”

That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”

…It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?pagewanted=all

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