How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?
|
The Villagers have spent the last 30 years chasing phantom hippies and black panthers.
|
The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government. Who, for instance, can really comprehend what to do about the number problems infesting Fannie Mae and the mortgages associated with her? There's really only one way out of this predicament: to get ready for a much lower standard of living and much different daily living arrangements. We can't wrap our minds around this, so the exercise du jour is to play games with numbers to persuade ourselves that we don't have to face reality. We're entertaining ourselves with shell games, musical chairs, Chinese fire drills, Ponzi schemes, and Polish blanket tricks (where, to make your blanket longer, you cut twelve inches off the top and sew it onto the bottom).
|
|
“You don’t argue with a police officer,” Colin Powell told Larry King, commenting on the Gates episode and his own personal history.
|
Sure, we should treat the cops with respect and society shouldn't encourage people to be reflexively hostile to police. They have a tough job, and we should all be properly respectful of people who are doing a dangerous and necessary job for the community. But when a citizen doesn't behave well, if not illegally, as will happen in a free society, it is incumbent upon the police, the ones with the tasers and the handcuffs and the guns, to exercise discretion wisely and professionally. And when they don't, we shouldn't make excuses for them. It's far more corrosive to society to allow authority figures to abuse their power than the other way around.
|
|
|
Joe Russoniello, US Attorney for the Northern District of California (a Bush appointee), says at a Hastings Law School forum that all medical marijuana dispensaries are profiteering operations in violaton of state law and therefore “fair game” for DEA raiders. He asserts that marijuana is “a more dangerous substance” than alcohol or tobacco... Dispensary operators who draw “reasonable compensation” and who only obtain their cannabis from and sell it to collective members hope they can be distinguished from “egregious offenders.”
|
To reverse what is happening, we must create strong alternative ideas and hardy alternative institutions and communities, a counter culture that rejects the myths of Washington and Wall Street just as, in the 1960s, a generation put the establishment on the defensive or in the closet. In any case, we need to act, but independent of those responsible for the mess, those exculpating them, those offering remedies that are mere manipulated shadows of the failure, and those engaged in misleading or misguided organizing on their behalf even if with purportedly noble intent. The collapse of American culture was an inside job. Its cure is to be found on the outside, in a counter culture that is clear and worthy in its goals, eclectic in its alliances, and which builds community, recovers integrity and helps us to sing again. If we can't save our culture, we can at least create a new one.
|
Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
|
In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF's power to create money and
|
"This crisis was caused by no black man or woman or by no indigenous person or by no poor person," Lula said after talks with the prime minister in Brasilia to discuss next week's G20 summit in London. "This crisis was fostered and boosted by irrational behaviour of some people that are white, blue-eyed. Before the crisis they looked like they knew everything about economics, and they have demonstrated they know nothing about economics." You go to a shopping mall and you are filmed. You go to the airport and you are watched. I can't imagine that only the financial system has no surveillance at all." Brown looked mildly uncomfortable during Lula's outburst.
|
There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
|
|
What is needed to fix this crisis is job security, and the only way to create that is by creating jobs. If the president really wanted to kick-start the economy, he would have announced a government program to directly hire the unemployed, by both the federal government and state and local governments (through block grants to the states), which would put people to work right now as teachers’ aides, park workers, school crossing guards, library assistants, companions for the elderly, city and rural clean-up crews, housing renovation project workers, mural painters, etc. Millions of out-of-work people could be put productively to work with far fewer dollars than what is about to be shoveled out to contractors to construct or repair bridges and highways a year or more from now.
|
|
|
|
Either the people in power in Washington and the financial community are total dimwits or they are manipulating an opportunity to redistribute wealth from taxpayers, equity owners and pension funds to the financial sector.
|
|
“If 14 gold medals aren’t enough to prove that marijuana users can achieve success and shouldn't be scrutinized, what will it take to break the stigma?” “The situation reeks of hypocrisy,” the petition states. “More than one hundred million Americans have smoked marijuana at least once in their lives (including the president, former presidents, members of Congress and justices on the Supreme Court). Smoking marijuana is not unusual behavior and you shouldn't hold Phelps to a higher standard.”
|
|
Ultimately, it is a question of whether the great depth of our Madness will carry us into a final conflict with biophysical reality – a madman flaying at imaginary demons while being tormented by a disinterested reality to which he is blind – or will we come again into the wind and the rain, into the seasons, cycles and other realities of earthly existence? My sensible reason answers that the Madness will dominate the final days of this iteration of my species, that over the next 30 to 80 years we will cling to the most misguided and defeating self-referenced notions of reality until an enraged environment indiscriminately smites the living world – and we will still behave badly even in the ruins of our world. But my capacity of imagination and wonder believes, in the way that the consciousness order designs impossible ‘possibilities,’ that we can come to see the madness and demand its retreat; the way that smokers now have to hide next to the dumpster in the back of the building.
|
