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Our culture is based on two things; television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So, it is a small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we receive the conditioning required to sustain our acceptance of the sate brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, wars as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects of the corporate sponsored hologram.

We live in an age of corporate domination just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings and war lords. From inside the hologram there is no history, no memory, no way to equate the tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, and the home mortgage banks with the kind of debt bondage they actually represent. Yet we must pay such tribute to be allowed to survive in our society, even if that tribute is a trailer payment at usury rates or allowing a credit card company access to our medical insurance payment history. We must trade liberty and privacy in increments for comfort and perceived security. That has been the devil’s bargain from the beginning. If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try the door.

– by Joe Bageant from his book, “Deer Hunting for Jesus”

– We have no shortage of proof that things are not right and that the vast majority of us are being slowly and inexorably disadvantaged by the power and financial structures around us.   And that those who’ve managed to gain control of those structures are becoming richer and richer as we become more impoverished.

– The ‘controllers’ are smart.  They know that revolutions are quite unlikely while the oppressed still have full bellies.   So, even as we get poorer in terms of what our wages can buy us, we are guided into ever more soporific satiation with the media spectacles on TV and in the movies, with ever yet cheaper junk that fills the shelves of our monster WalMart and Warehouse stores.  

– We think the political debates raging in the media are about reforming the growing injustices but they are, in fact, mere stick sword fights between the tweedle-dees and the tweedle-dums put up in the political Gamelan shows to confuse us.

– The biggest game in town is the flow of riches to the few and the slow impoverishment of the rest.   But most of us haven’t seen it yet and we go on in our lemming ways rooting about for a slightly better rate on our house mortgage or a slightly better price on the next box of crackers we buy at the market.

– Someday, the awareness of what’s happening will finally grip the majority of us and the consequences will be dire.  But, until then, we remain asleep in the midst of a planet wide robbery spree.

– dennis

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As we’ve been noting, corporate profits have made it back to their pre-recession heights (even if corporate tax revenue hasn’t followed suit). In fact, in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950. But as Bloomberg News noted today, this hasn’t translated into wage growth or more purchasing power for workers:

Companies are improving margins and generating profits as wage growth for the American worker lags behind the prices of goods and services…While benefiting the bottom line for businesses, the decline in inflation-adjusted wages bodes ill for the sustainability of economic growth as consumers may eventually be forced to cut back. […]

Of the 394 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index that have reported since Jan. 9, earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 increased 5.1 percent on average and beat analyst estimates by 3.2 percent. Some 70 percent of the companies have posted better-than-projected results.

This pattern has become all too familiar during the slow economic recovery. In fact, real wages fell in 2011, despite record corporate profits. “There’s never been a postwar era in which unemployment has been this high for this long,” explained labor economist Gary Burtless. “Workers are in a very weak bargaining position.”

Between 2009 and 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages, a stat that is “historically unprecedented.”

– To the original… ➡

– That’s a tongue-in-cheek a title as I’ve seen in awhile.  

– When you read this, reflect that hundreds of people have spent time in jail recently for demonstrating against inequality and financial malfesance and yet, in spite of the massive global melt-down triggered by Wall Street’s greed in 2008, not one banker or Wall Street type has yet served jail time.

– dennis

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The Wall Street Journal reports today that between 2007 and 2010 a group of six big banks conspired to artificially manipulate a key interest rate, the yen London interbank offered rate, also known as yen Libor:

The yen Libor rate is set daily by a 16-bank panel, organized by the British Bankers’ Association. Around 11 a.m. London time every day, each bank submits estimates to the BBA of what rates it would pay to borrow from other banks for different time periods. The top four and bottom four quotes are then discarded, and Libor is calculated using an average of the middle eight quotes.

The Canadian watchdog [investigating the case] said lawyers acting for the cooperating bank had told it that traders at six banks on the yen Libor panel—Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and UBS—”entered into agreements to submit artificially high or artificially low” quotes, according to the court documents.

The traders used emails and instant messages to tell each other whether they wanted “to see a higher or lower yen Libor [rate] to aid their trading position(s),” according to a court filing. Each of the traders would then “communicate internally” with the person at their bank who was responsible for submitting the Libor quote, before letting each other know if this attempt to influence the quote had worked.

Just a few rogue traders, I’m sure. Nothing to be concerned about. Move along now.

– To the original story… ➡

– I have to say that George Monbiot is one of my favorites out there on the Internet.  He always seems to be able to incisively cut to the heart of the matter on whtever subject he tackles.   The piece below will not disappoint.

– dennis

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Now it’s a straight fight with the billionaires and corporations.

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers(1).

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)

Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”(3).

The institute has claimed that it is “a genuinely independent source of research and commentary”(4) and that “we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors”(5). But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that “we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving”(6).

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website, “of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It’s a completely absurd invention.”(7) The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol, has been paying him $5000 a month(8).

Robert Carter has claimed that he “receives no research funding from special interest organisations”(9). But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month(10). Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole(11,12)). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are. Invariably, organisations arguing for regulations to be removed, top taxes to be reduced and other such billionaire-friendly policies call themselves freemarket or conservative thinktanks. But according to David Frum, formerly a fellow at one such group – the American Enterprise Institute – they “increasingly function as public-relations agencies”(13). The message they send to their employees, he says, is “we don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat.”

– To more of this most excellent article… ➡