First article of any notoriety actually calling for a Revolution in America....
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnist...ion-in-the-air
In The USA: the Next Revolution
First article of any notoriety actually calling for a Revolution in America....
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnist...ion-in-the-air
Link to Zenpundit on possible collapse/revolution scenario written by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts former undersecretary during the Regan Administration. Scary stuff especially how it might happen
http://zenpundit.com/?p=3493
Link to article on riot in East Point,Ga. (Atlanta area)over applications for public housing assistance.
http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/_new...ay-after-chaos
The article in the initial post calls for the left wing of the Democratic Party to fight back more vigorously against Obama's middle-of-the-road policies. It isn't the usual call to arms from the Minuteman/Tea Party crowd.
Nor does it have anything to with Small Wars
or even warfare in general. The initial op-ed is pure political foolishness.Sheesh, creative writing at its campiest. Our Capital has been tone deaf all my life and until we start voting out all incumbents and get rid of political parties, it'll remain that way. Robert's polemic is dumber than a box of hammers."Throughout the nation there is outrage in the land, revolution in the air, insurrection in the wind from the left, right and center. The political ground is shaking from gale-force winds of a national demand for powerful change in the way our corrupted and tone-deaf capital does business."
On that last link, the Great East Point Riot, I'm sure the left will make a big deal out of it. Out of little or nothing; "Yet no arrests were made." (LINK). I lived in Atlanta for 12 years. East Point was a minor tinder box the whole time and has remained such. The various housing authorities in the Atlanta area have been and are a bed of consistent corruption. Housing authorities nationwide have problems; to be expected when dumb Congroids promise more than we can afford or deliver...
The Son who's an Atlanta metro area cop has a slew of tales about political shenanigans there and in Georgia Generally. The other two, the Soldat in the northeast and the Cop on the west coast also have a bunch from their regions. So does the NC Grandson in Law. Not to mention mine from here in Floridada. The point -- Flawed politics and tone deaf politicians are not restricted to DC, not by a long shot. They just make the national news easier and provide media and pundit fodder.
The Sky is Falling, 2010 Summer Edition. Penalty of being old: it's at least the thirtieth or maybe the fortieth time that I've seen our immediate demise from internal dissent, riots, militias, etc. etc. -- and fiscal ineptitude -- predicted ...
Oh, well, I'm still making plans for my Great Grandson's arrival and setting up a College savings account for him.
One could say that about many threads here....Originally Posted by Ken White
But I agree, the op-ed is pretty much speculation on par with Fallout III. Except that Fallout has better graphics...
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
Could not agree more
Right. Like that'll happen.Our Capital has been tone deaf all my life and until we start voting out all incumbents and get rid of political parties
Wall Street "small war"
Occupy Wall Street?
The last issue of Montclarion, a student newspaper at Montclair State University,#published an article of Grover Furr, about the Occupy Wall Street movement:
http://www.themontclarion.org/archives/3740261
Yes, rich people always want to be richer and richer. This is unfortunate; no one knows how to stop this, without taking away constructive motivation. What fraction of Bill Gates' fortune is consumed and what fraction is productively invested? My guess is that the first fraction is much less than 10%, and that he is not a rare exception.
What does Professor Furr have to offer us? Consider a complex machine which works but not perfectly. Anyone can destroy it; no advanced knowledge is usually needed to accomplish this. But one has to be highly knowledgeable in order to repair it, or to design a better replacement. I am thinking about sophisticated engines, airplanes, TV sets, X ray scanners, computers, airconditioners, oil refineries, etc.
The same is true for an economic system. No system is perfect; but some are more efficient than others. Trying to destroy US capitalism #without offering something better is likely to create a lot of misery. I am thinking about what Lenin and Stalin did, as decribed in my two short books. These books are now freely available online; the links are at:
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/links.html
Note that even now, one hundred years after the Soviet revolution, standards of living in Russia are much lower than in the US, and in other western countries.
Ludwik Kowalski#(see Wikipedia)
.
Ludwik Kowalski, author of a free ON-LINE book entitled “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality.”
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/intro.html
It is a testimony based on a diary kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA).
The more people know about proletarian dictatorship the less likely will we experience is.
Actually, economists, psychologists and a handful of good politicians know. The general population is largely clueless about it, of course.
Motivation is a tricky thing and the ridiculously dumbed-down, politicised concept of motivation that drives slogans and talking points is just that - ridiculous.
Here's an excerpt:
a) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is difficult to exploit for leaders, but powerful and long-lasting. Extrinsic motivation (such as cash) is easily exploited by leaders, but its effect wears off over time. Ever greater extrinsic motivation inputs are required for the same motivation.
b) People don't care much about absolute wealth, but a lot about relative wealth. People don't want to be at the social pyramid bottom. The life of a rich trader in the middle age was more rewarding than the life of an unemployed person of today who has iPod, TV, warm water and climate control indoors.
c) There's furthermore a huge psychological difference between having some wealth taken away and having some wealth increase taken away. German post-WW2 economic policy acknowledged this and strived for 'wealth for everyone' by (allowing) redistribution of wealth growth rather than aiming at redistributing of what little survived the war. (This wisdom was lost to us during the weak growth of the 80's, though.)
d) Having 1-5% of the population earn less (net) may damage their motivation (doubtful, see later) but 80-95% earn more certainly does boost theirs, right? The focus on the feelings of the top 1% is a typical U.S. perspective, fostered by the media.
Finally, would the rich push less for national economic success if they earned less millions for the same effort?
Their absolute wealth is quasi-irrelevant, their relative wealth ain't. In fact, most of them might be MORE motivated to push for more personal income (and thus, supposedly, for more national income) if you take more away from them because that means they would lose relative social status and that's something they'll fight against.
It’s Occupy Wall Street; not Occupy Silicon Valley.
Bill Gates is one of the most influential people in the computer industry; his company’s innovations over that last thirty years have impacted the entire world -- arguably for the better.
Contrast this with a Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon -- who are parasites. The financial industry contributes little social value, and the only financial innovation they have brought in the last thirty years has been the ATM card.
“[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson
Bill Gates and "innovations" in one line? I need to check whether I'm in the correct timeline, for in mine M$ is only good for absorbing others' innovations. That's being called technology dispersion. They are technology dispersers, not innovators.
Likewise, American hero Mr. Jobs was known for creating jobs in Taiwan...
Nevertheless, I get the point. The only halfway useful innovation of the financial industry is being said to be the ATM machine, but then again this was invented by a machine-builder company and THEN sold to the banks.
What Every Protester Should Know
One of the best explanations of the Money problem I have ever seen. Link to the video what every wall street protester should know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=gV9A2IGShuk#!
Until the plague came 'round, of course. I doubt that many of today's unemployed would want to trade places, if they had the chance, and if they did they'd regret it quickly.
The fallacy, of course, is that if the 1-5% earns less, the rest will therefore earn more.
In any event I don't see any real change coming out of the whole "Occupy Wall Street". The protesters seem to have only the vaguest notion of what they don't want, no idea at all of what they want, and nothing even resembling a practical program for change. It's somewhat like opening the window and shouting "I'm mad as hell...": cathartic and satisfying, but it doesn't change anything.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
I don’t know. I kind of buy the comparison to the Tea Party. Neither is exactly clear as to how they want to change things and in any case few are experts. But I don’t think anyone would argue that the Tea Party has not helped() shape the discussion. But both are made up of Americans, and in America we are free to yell about the government or Wall Street if we so choose.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Financialization, an experts’ endeavor if ever there were one, is doing a better job of destroying capitalism than Marxism ever did.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
I like the above statement. It reflects what a real economy is based on, which are either things that you (1) manufacture, (2) get out of the ground, or (3) grow on the ground.
However, things like Wall Street, banking, insurance, etc., are merely transfer payment industries. They are secondary to the real economy. These folks really don't do anything but find ways to skim money off of what they transfer around. There needs to be a recalibration and many heads need to roll. Nevertheless, the idiot protesters "occupying" Wall Street don't have a clue about reality. They are just another manifestation of the same iconoclastic psychosis that invents Global Warming, Global Cooling, Peak Oil, Malthusian food shortages, over-population, ozone depletion, ad nauseum infinitum
To a large extent true, but many people fail to appreciate how necessary those money-moving industries are, and how central the ability of money to seek return without government trying to tell it where to go has been to the economic success the US has achieved in the past. Not saying those industries couldn't use some changes - though again they have to share responsibility and the need for change with Main Street and Pennsylvania Ave - but talking about eliminating them or putting them under government control is beyond naive.
It's worth noting that nobody complains about the money-movers when bubbles are in their up phase.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
Banking at its core is a middleman function comparable to trade in necessity and utility. We need saving & loan institutions for an efficient allocation of resources into investments.
It all goes wrong if
a) banks do too many other things
b) banks become incompetent at allocation (getting the risk premiums wrong, for example)
c) credit is being used too often for consumption, not investment
d9) banks begin to exploit their power instead of serving the community for a normal "profit/equity capital" ratio
The next revolution - whining and complaining
I do agree with the first part of the original post - that Washington (both sides) are completely out of touch with "us".
Still, I think the next revolution will be one of "whining and complaining" as the number of entitlement recipients is strategically increased to a critical mass.
Just like any junkie, once you're on the drug (in this case the dole) then the pusher owns you. You think whatever and do whatever to keep the supply coming cuz' cold turkey ain't no fun at all.
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