"The elites are not the problem right now, the people are"
One thing has become painfully obvious from this election cycle: we need to stop thinking in terms of left-right national politics.
There is no left in politics anymore.
There is no right in politics anymore.
There is no nation in politics anymore.
Those concepts were abandoned to the 20th Century.
There is now a global elite...and then there is the rest of us.
The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations.
In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.
In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.
From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.
In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.
Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.
When you consider that our political and business elites have zero patriotism, and no connection or empathy for the working class of this country, then their dedication to globalism and TPP (and fanatical opposition to Brexit) becomes understandable.
They are citizens of the global elite, not of any one country.
They do no respect you. They do not sympathize with you. They do not care about you.
Consider the President of Germany below.
The same disconnect applies to business leaders.
Speaking at a gathering of corporate and government leaders in Switzerland, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman told Bloomberg Television that he is bewildered about why Americans seem so discontented.
“I find the whole thing astonishing and what’s remarkable is the amount of anger whether it’s on the Republican side or the Democratic side,” the Wall Street mogul said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Bernie Sanders, to me, is almost more stunning than some of what’s going on in the Republican side. How is that happening, why is that happening?”
And then consider those that work in both politics and business.
The other conclusion that is inescapable is how our current political system, even the structure of our political debates, is total anachronistic to the times we live in.
Consider Hillary Clinton's campaign.
She is reaching out to the foreign policy establishment and the neocons. She is reaching out to Republican office-holders. She is reaching out to Silicon Valley. And, of course, she is reaching out to Wall Street.
Think about how little left-wing/right-wing political debate models apply here.
Our political and business leaders have left us behind. The current left-right debates raging on political blogs have as much to do with reality as medieval priests debating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Comments
And if you disagree
Then you are an ignorant racist
well, I kind of disagree ...
because the szenes you show for protests against Gauck are not what you seem to think they are.
The folks who attacked and insulted Gauck verbally are doing so for other reasons, I believe.
People like the former pastor and opposition leader and founder of the "Neues Forum" in the former DDR ,Jochen Tschiche has accused Joachim Gauck to run on a camaign for the next GErman President elections as a man of a former DDR civil rights leader. But Jochen Tschiche says that's wrong. Those folks protesting against Gauck, because they don't see him as what he portrays himself, a dissident against the former DDR regime,
The controversy over Gauck goes back to internal disputes between folks of the former DDR's resistance movement. Gauck sees himself as a civil rights leader that helped DDR folks towards the protests against the former regime. Over that self-portrayal some other folks from the former DDR are not happy. They say he wasn't a dissident or, if at all, just a civil rights leader of the last hour.
Protesters insult him as a "Stasi Pig". Well that's pretty off the chart. And they shouting "We are the people - Wir sind das Volk" has pretty little to do with exploited poor folks of Germany by the elites
It more represents still unresolved conflicts of former DDR people over their own roles before reunification but in resistance to the DDR regime. Hard for us to judge what is justified and what not.
In this video the first sentence Gauck is saying seems to be taken out of context. It would need the whole interview in which Gauck said that "the elite is not the problem, but the people are the problem".There is rivalry and opposition to Gauck playing this role as resister against the former regime. In how far that is justified or not I can't judge. I am not there and didn't follow that over the years.
I am not there to get a feeling about how the "general German population" relates to Gauck and am just 13 minutes reading German print press of that incident and some more. I don't see that this protest fits into the theme of your essay.
May be lotlizard will read this and can give her input. She might know who did protest against Gauck and why.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Wall People vs Web People
To quote the mighty mustache...
Cedric Is Getting No Help From Hollywood
One of the most insidious features of Skid Row is that it exists side by side with the fabulous wealth of the Hollywood entertainment industry and Beverly Hills. Cedric The Entertainer is keeping BLM at L.A. City Hall very well fed:
http://lawattstimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=370...
To my knowledge not a single entertainer has answered the call. If feeding the small group at City Hall is the best Hollywood can do they are more selfish and shallow than the National Enquirer makes them look.
Black entertainers and black atheletes could easily provide housing to every homeless person in L.A.
Skid Row is a moral blight on L.A. The callous disregard for homeless blacks in California shows what a moral and ethical abyss the elite inhabit.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
the new feudalism
not really so different from the old feudalism.
bygorry
Matt Taibbi
I never understood how the wealthy elite could think that the impoverishment of the working class could be a good thing until I ran across the story of Plutus the other day.
Plutus, the God of Wealth, was blinded by Zeus so that he would be able to dispense his gifts without prejudice for things like need. When a couple citizens of Athens decide to give Plutus back his sight, the Goddess of Poverty intervenes. She tells them that she is the source of all progress in the world, and that if poverty was eliminated it would destroy civilization.
That's when I realized that the High Priests of Economics aren't actually worshiping a Volcano God. They are worshiping the Goddess of Poverty.
"Thus you dare to maintain that Poverty is not the fount of all blessings!"
- Goddess of Poverty, 388 B.C.
"In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars."
–R.L. Bushman
Where do you go when you want to leave Omelas? n/t
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Re:
"The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
Basic value proposition: wealthy order society
Americans are pilloried daily in the mass media, schools, business seminars, etc. that the wealthy are responsible for the foundation order of society. They are the ones who give us our daily bread, provide us with jobs, generate any and all wealth. For them and for those indoctrinated with the idea, the lower classes do not contribute nor generate wealth. If anything they work against the order created by wealthy people.
One can see this in the min. wage debate. That debate is not about economics, but about class morality. People believe that giving the working poor an extra $6 or so hour will bring down the stability and functioning of entire cities due to hellacous prices and inflation. Giving money to the working poor will demean society. On the other side, of course, is that putting money in the hands of rich people (through lower wages), results in positives to society. The same argument is made over tax cuts--putting money in the hands of the rich elites only does good to society (but food stamps need to be lowered as giving government largess to poor people results in bad actions).
Just as a side note. Right wingers claim to be against "government welfare", but say nothing about corporate welfare of many sorts. At first I thought this was just straight out hypocrisy. Not so anymore. It makes sense given the moral value proposition. Government welfare is only wrong if the wrong people get it--such as the single mother. However, government hand outs to rich is morally acceptable because the right people got it.
I don't know whether I agree or disagree with part of what
you've posted but here's something I' ve been thinking about today.
Global monopoly capital, where multinational corporations administer prices rather than compete with other corporate entities for profits, cannot exist without nation states. One of the pillars of the global neoliberal order is the military, the US military in large part, to open up areas in the global south for exploitation. The labor arbitrage is alive and well and depends on both the hypermobility of capital and the very much slower mobility of labor. The extent to which workers can move to find a decent job is controlled by national police forces and the laws which govern their actions.
Even though the neoliberal corporate reach is nearly worldwide, the operations are headquartered in a handful of cities in the industrialized north. With international corporations moving away from owning factories by letting contractors build and maintain them, capital is freer to move faster than ever. If a contractor in Indonesia can't meet the mandated price, then the corporation just finds a contractor in Burma who will. Those who control the corporations are divorced from production and function more and more at the level of finance and profit maintenance.
The political class is complicit in this as is the media and the military. We're seeing it in plain view with both Trump and Clinton vowing to continue to provide taxpayer based service to maintain a system that is killing the planet.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Hillary is already running commercials on TV in SE MI.
OMG - I can't stand it. No one word about her or what she's done or will do. It is all Trump, Trump, Trump sucks, sucks, sucks. It is only August.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
dismal/shameful
record? Talk about the other guy. Kinda like Hitler saying, "I wasn't so bad, look what Stalin did"...
I moved to Texas and was confronted with what I call . . .
the Sharecropper Mentality.
I grew up in northern Iowa, where at that time we had the "Homesteader Mentality."
Sharecroppers always worship the bosses. Homesteaders are independents.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Other than the fact that homesteaders got land given to them
(early government giveaway, for a price, getting there and clearing land), I am not sure that sharecroppers were different, other than agrarian feudal society. See? regionalism shows its divisive face.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I think the Kennedys
were an exception and you have to hand it to them. Joe and Jack both in WW2. Joe KIA and Jack seriously wounded. Bobby and Ted both served in the military. Won't see that kind of patriotism these days from the elites...
Nation-state vs globalism is a hot dialectic
Hegel would predict a synthesis but it may take decades. What would it look like.
Part of me understands the benefits of a nation-state par of me sees all humanity as crew in Buckminster Fuller's spaceship Earth. The "elites" (in French it implies "selection", who voted for them?) play in a global world. Both the Clintons and Trump and his children, know the game.
The political revolution continues
It is done, no change will
It is done, no change will happen in time to save human civilization, and quite frankly, if it stays with this poor mentality of selfish greed and exploitation, I cannot say it deserves saving. I apologize for the good folks who hate what they have done here, but, the nasty ruling class need to not spread to other planets, do not deserve to continue in this pattern.
Killer Meteor 2016
Gamma Burst 2016
Either way, the problems will be over.
P.S. I know that was a simplistic response, the problem is deep, and complex, and involves the uber rich who can avoid being in the news, the corporates who run the news and this current course of the way we are treated, the politicians, the military who let themselves take such unlawful orders. They are stomping on democracy, free speech and exchange of ideas if it does not make them money, or suit their agendas.
Vote the usual suspects(Hillary/Trump) and I cannot shed a tear when folks complain. I have been an observer, and it seems that for decades Humanity has been letting these people get away with these things, and then vote the same parties instead of demanding fresh ideas, actual fresh ideas, and new players onto the stage to try to actually fix things. R/D they are all part of the fake ideals and dreams called America.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
The real culprits are the ignorant and hateful people
that vote for and support the ruling class of assholes, despite those assholes spitting on them. Their function is to keep the rest of us in check, and provide for a veneer of legitimacy to their feudalist empire.
The 'angels dancing' controversy
was a conscious reduction to the absurd in a debate of the objective reality of nature's supposed causative agents. Put it in modern terms and we could ask 'what's the weight and area of the Law of Gravity?' Which things have an objective existence and which are anthrocentric constructs?
As to the Top, it's objectively inarguable that their disinterest in, and annoyance with, and contempt for, most of humanity allows their delusions about their high status as well as creating their stupid blindness.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
The Facebook guy who renounced his citizenship
An example comes to mind. Remember one of the Facebook founders who renounced his citizenship to avoid paying taxes on his Facebook stock. I remember right wingers defending him as his tax burden was more important than his citizenship. In fact, one goper lawmaker got peeved and tried to, if memory serves, impose some sort of financial penalty. He was quickly shot down. The disgusting part to me as the child of war refugees is that his family moved from South America to avoid kidnappers and ransom demands. America provided his (rich) family protection from these crimes.
But in our modern day society we are taught that our first and most important value and loyalty is to money/profit. No other value is more important, and that includes loyalty to one's nation state.
One thing about the Kennedy's. There was an expectation even from the patrician classes that they had to serve the nation state which they helped rule. Remember, even Bush the Pappy served in World War II in a real combat role. As time has gone by, that ideal has gone to the wayside of course as there is no longer loyal patrician classes.
As for elites of high tech. Their own loyalty is fellow elites and profits regardless of what the pursuit of profits does to other Americans. They truly see themselves not as Americans but as part of a forward looking elite, and of course forward looking to build and maintain profits.
And wasn't this part of the tension between the Clinton's and Sanders? Bernie pushed an economic nationalism while Hillary opposed that economic (and social) nationalism. You know at one time the Clintons were good friends with the Trumps. They were from the same social and economic class. I remember early on Colbert where Clinton demeaned Sanders but had effusive praise for Trump.
"Mene mene tekel upharsin"
"Mene mene tekel upharsin"
It's gonna suck to be them
Rivers are horses - and kayaks are their saddles
And meanwhile, it sucks to be us.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
River Rover
Seeing your
I was reminded of this hauntingly beautiful song written by the Rolling Stones, and, here, sung by Susan Boyle whose voice does the song great and hauntingly beautiful justice
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DewLJyeLaU]
In some strange way, this song seems to fit the mood of this discussion --- my own observational intuitive perspective for what it's worth lol
The issue is not so much where we are.
I've read so much about that, it's frustrating. The issue is can we, at this point, do anything to make it different and, if so, what and how.
BTW, income inequality? Also not the real issue. The issues are things like wealth inequality, power inequality, corporate welfare, monopolies, allowing, even encouraging, appropriation and/or exploitation for private profits things that belong to all of us, including our tax dollars. Charter schools would be one example; deforestation of public lands is another. So is taking what sits deep below land, like oil, or what is above land, like air and airwaves. (We not only just about gave away broadcasting rights, we gave away monopolies in broadcasting rights.)
Harry Truman, one of most openly "anti-red" Presidents we've had:
more at http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1296&st=&st1
This is from the speech in which Truman famously spoke of Democrats succeeding when they are "real Democrats," rather than fake Republicans. That bit gets all the attention. We're so fucking easy, no one even has to buy us dinner--and so no one does.
Elites/Oligarchy/The Powers That Be
So, I wrote this comment in Don's diary about "not voting" --- I think it also fits in this discussion of gjohnsit's diary. I may sound angry, but I'm not. I'm resigned to the fact that a few evil nasty fuckers rule this capitalistic game of existence that is our current reality on this planet sphere. I aint always going to be liven here --- that's the fuckin good news! Or it could be bad news lol --- I won't know until I croak over and die. One day I'll be out of this wacky world, and, perhaps the next sphere will be even wackyer --- and I hope in a wacky way that's more spectacular than the rare spectacular moments I experienced here, on planet Earth. All I know is I hope for spectacular every fuckin moment of my next, after-Earth phase!