The Collapse

[pan]

OK, I'm an idiot - how do you upload video?

Watch this

[pan]

 Highlights by Mike Zmolek

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/28/richard_wolff_debt_showdown_is_political

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the debt talks, we’re joined by Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor here in New York at New School University, also hosts a weekly program on WBAI called Economic Update.

RICHARD WOLFF:  If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.

Let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home. If you go back to the 1940s, here’s what you discover, that the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. If you compare that to today, here are the numbers. For every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents. That is a dramatic change that has no parallel in the rest of our tax code.

Another example. In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.  {Comment from MZ: that's the highest tax rate the rich pay today: 35 cents out of every dollar meaning they keep 65 cents, or more.  Many corporations like GE after loopholes and incentives actually pay 0% in taxes today. Ordinary U.S. citizens pay upwards of 30%, comparable to 32% in France, but the French get free health care out of that; 55 cents of every tax dollar U.S. citizens spend goes to the military.}

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.

AMY GOODMAN: And the argument that if you give the money to the corporations and to the banks, they will help people? They are the generator of jobs?

RICHARD WOLFF: The Republicans say it, and President Obama has said it repeatedly. He is going to provide incentives, he said, for years now. He is going to provide inducements and support for the private sector to put people back to work. We have a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. That’s what it’s been for the last two years. That policy has not worked. If corporations were going to do what the President gave them incentives to do, they would have done it. They’re not doing it. There’s no sign they’re going to do it. You have to face it: that policy didn’t work.

What’s the alternative? Well, we don’t have to look far. Roosevelt, in the 1930s, the last time we faced this kind of situation, went on the radio in 1933 and 1934, and he gave speeches. And in those speeches, he said the following: if the private sector either cannot or will not provide work for millions of our citizens, ready, able and willing to work, then the government has to do it. And between 1934 and 1941, the federal government created and filled 11 million jobs.

The most amazing thing in the United States is not that we are not doing it. The most amazing thing is, there’s no bill to do it, there’s no discussion to do it. The president of the country never refers to it, keeps telling us—and the Republicans do the same—that the private sector is where we should focus our expectations. The private sector has answered: "We are not going to hire people here. We’re either going to hire no one, because we don’t like the way the economy looks, or we’re going to hire people in other countries, because they pay lower wages there." That’s a response of the private sector taking care of itself. It’s not a responsible way to run a society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And one issue that you raised, in terms of how the corporations and bank profits have recovered tremendously, but—and many of these companies are sitting on huge piles of cash, that rather than invest in new machinery or bring in new workers, they’re just sitting on their money, and presumably investing it, because they’re not going to put it in at the bank rates or CD rates, so they’re obviously investing the money that they have, rather than create those jobs.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, even more interesting, and maybe a bit of a shock to folks who don’t follow this, what the corporations are doing when they hold back the money—because it’s not profitable for them to hire—in large part, is they lend it to the United States government to fund these deficits. The United States government refuses to tax corporations and the rich. It then runs a deficit. It spends more than it takes in, because it’s not taxing them. And here comes the punchline: The government then turns around to the people it didn’t tax—corporations and the rich—and borrows the money from them, paying them interest and paying them back.

AMY GOODMAN: Pay even tax-deductible interest.

RICHARD WOLFF: Right, also. But if the government really wanted to do something, go get the money from them, stimulate, which will help them, and if you tax them to do it, you wouldn’t have a national debt. You wouldn’t run a deficit. We’re running a deficit because the people who run this society would like us to deal with our economic problems, not by taxing those who have it, the way we used to, but instead by endlessly borrowing them. And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt. And they want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation.

[Mouse]

 

 

A serendipitous effect of the setting sun, here in England.

 

 

[BO]

Beautiful Mousie. You truly are the magical one among us.

[littleoldme]

Sweet Miss Mouse!

[hannah j]

http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism...

 

These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.

Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time, will explode – but one can’t say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate them and defuse in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though. In case of the minefields laid out by soldiers of one army you can send other soldiers, from another army, to dig mines out and disarm; a dangerous job, if there ever was one – as the old soldiery wisdom keeps reminding: “the sapper errs only once”. But in the case of minefields laid out by social inequality even such remedy, however treacherous, is unavailable: putting the mines in and digging them up needs to be done by the same army which neither can stop adding new mines to the old nor avoid stepping on them – over and over again. Laying mines and falling victims of their explosions come in a package deal........more at link

[BO]

Yep, t'was a good read. Rage is cathartic. A direct result of income disparity. And it's coming to the USA.

[Cal]

Rode my bicycle plus camping gear on a cycling trip through the UK about 27 years ago.  Went through Birmingham ... I was about 28 at the time - the youth (15-18) we encountered en route were "frightening" to say the least. Maliciously giving us wrong directions when we asked the way, breaking down old stone structures along the country roads just for a laugh ... with almost no capacity for speech. These rioters must be their kids.  Hannah's right - it's not a revolution or social movement a la hippy 60's ... it's a minefield.  I have seen it over here for decades & it's the return of the dark ages.  At one time the SA unrest was a political/social cause for justice ... nowadays the killing of people for cellphones & fancy cars is a whole nother kettle of very smelly fish.  Is there hope for a populace with that 'mindless'?  I don't know ... I don't think so.  So is there hope for our species? ... ?

 

Need more witches and wizards to work Mouse's kind of magic big time out there.

 

 

[BO]

Probably something to be said for ignoring it all and just staying focused on your creativity. I spent the day working on a patio bench project that I've been putting off for a long time--simply due to the fact that the news has been pretty compelling lately, to say the least. And there's so damn much of it. I told myself I needed to go do something else as the apocalypse will continue without my full attention.

The dark ages are certainly here though. At least in my hood. But I think I've carped on that before, so I won't bore you with another round. Is that bore, or boar? I'm too fucking tired to look it up.

Wish I wasn't too old to surf. Or kiteboard. Or windsurf like I used to. Nothing like wind, waves and the surge of endorphins to put everything back into sync again. Maybe I should try and get this 60ish blubbery sack of flesh back into shape again. I envy you Stoney. You Hawaiians may just get to miss the uprising. 

[littleoldme]

Nah, won't happen here. The populace are too dumbed down. They believe the crap the gov and big business tell them. If they had only they had gotten off their lazy asses and worked another two or three jobs at less then a living wage, they too would be among gods chosen. They too would have less taxes, and a Mc-mansion in a gated to community. Besides that, our police shoot guns at rioters.

[waldopaper]

Well how fucked up is THIS: 

ever heard of the Bologna Process?  I had not.  Maybe Doktor Fruit knows something about it... but it sailed by my radar for the past 13 years.  Of course, when it was being hatched I was busy trying to deal with another really fucked-up idea.  And the two are directly related.  Don't panic, organize!  Aint gonna happen while we ping back and forth in the fake dialectic. 

Fucking great.  We finally figured out how to run a 19th Century factory.  Class, can you see any problem with that?  Dum guy in the back:  uhhh... cuz it aint the 19th century anymore?  Right-o-roni!  Plus some other pesky details,,, like we sent all our manufacturing to China an shit... so welcome to the collapse of global "capitalism."  It's here! 

Of course "Capitalism" like "Communism" or metaphysics or any other abstract noun cannot collapse.  What can collapse is our current notion of what these abstractions really mean.  Maybe there is some anonymous dill-hole somewhere who actually knows when the literal translation for "capitalism" became "looting." 

Winter is coming...

...no matter what the wonk-bats tell me about "rhetoric" or "academic discourse communities," our task is to get people ready for something we ourselves can barely imagine.  Our great-great grandparents saw the revolutions that swept the world in the 1800s... our parents and grandparents saw the great wars and pandemics.  We have witnesses. 

The poor wee spiders have naught but the claptrap their parents parroted from the tee-vee... and the marvel-comic drivel they get from the church inc. weekly.  Most theologians who have not rendered their brains unto Caesar know they are trapped between God and Santa Claus.  They put their robes on and ho ho ho out to mammon. 

I really get tired of being like those guys. 

 

[pan]

Foucault's Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison describes the theoretical prison architecture of the Panopticon and how its surveillance design has affected most developments of Modernism including the Fordist assembly line and the contemporary college classroom:

By carceral culture, Foucault refers to a culture in which the panoptic model of surveillance has been diffused as a principle of social organization, affecting such disparate things as the university classroom (see right for a prison school that resembles some classroom auditoriums); urban planning (organized on a grid structure to facilitate movement but also to discourage concealment); hospital and factory architecture; and so on. As Foucault puts it, the Panopticon.

is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoner, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. (Discipline 205).

 

An aside to waldo....the Panopticon would work well as a physicalization of the Trial:

 

Bentham argued in The "Panopticon" that the perfect prison would be structured in a such a way that cells would be open to a central tower. In the model, individuals in the cells do not interact with each other and are constantly confronted by the panoptic tower (pan=all; optic=seeing). They cannot, however, see when there is a person in the tower; they must believe that they could be watched at any moment: "the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so" (Foucault, Discipline 201).

[waldopaper]

Ja we have all become korporat apparatchiks... don need no tower.  we spy on ourselves.