Immortal Technique on The Lessons of History

Immortal Technique breathes fire! He holds nothing back which is what I most admire. His command of history and politics is top notch and more young voices like this need to be heard. Check out more Immortal Technique here & here. 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

"The world is big. Some people are unable to comprehend that simple fact.
They want the world on their own terms, its peoples just like them and their friends,
its places like the manicured little patch on which they live.
But this is a foolish and blind wish.
Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet.
The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission
to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties.
Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have;
narrowness of heart and mind is not."

 
--Chinua Achebe (Bates College Commencement Address 27 May 1996)

OneLove

::::MME:::: 

The Lords Of Poverty

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it & usury, once in control, will wreck any nation....These popular sayings ring loud & clear in these troubling times. The money laundering and corruption exposed in this brief clip will probably not be covered in mainstream news outlets. From what I have read, heard and seen over the years, this is business as usual so everyone just shut up and play along. 

I see a storm over yonder.....

OneLove

:::MME:::

The Life Of A Visionary

We have all been inspired by the music of Bob Marley in some way. For many of us who grew up in the Caribbean, Bob Marley was a member of the family - our spiritual brother. This documentary highlights some of the salient moments of Marley's phenomenal musical and spiritual journey & his global impact which has made him one of the most important figures of the twentieth century.


Check out my "best of" playlist of Marley's music here


Also check out Sons of The King

OneLove


:::MME:::

Rotations: Cool VI -The Quietude Suite

                                                          MME's Quietude Suite

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
 

~ T.S. Eliot

Have a peaceful day.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Is Obama Worse Than Bush? That's Beside the Point by Gary Younge

Obama's transformation from national security dove to hawk is the norm: any president is captive to America's imperial power

Not long after the story into the National Security Administration's spying program broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion:

"I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy. I think it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate."

In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared, showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and the Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today. Referring to the Bush White House, candidate Obama says:

"This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not."

Referring to the NSA surveillance program, President Obama says:

"My assessment and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks."

Candidate Obama says of the Bush years:

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide."

President Obama retorts:

"You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices."

The notion that a president's record might contradict a presidential candidate's promise is neither new nor particular to Obama. And we should hope that politicians evolve as their careers progress and new evidence and arguments come to light.

What makes these clips so compelling is that they show not evolution, but transformation. On this issue, at least, Obama has become the very thing he was against. They're not gaffes. These are brazenly ostentatious flip-flops. And regardless of how much they cost him, Obama has clearly no intention of taking them back.

Given that he is not only defending but escalating the very things he criticized the Bush administration for, the accusation that many have made that he is "worse than Bush" on this issue, and others relating to privacy, security and drone attacks, is not unreasonable. Obama's administration has denied more Freedom of Information Act requests than Bush did, and prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.

But the charge also misses the point.

It should go without saying that Obama the individual is responsible for all that he says and does. It should also go without saying that once he ascends to the Oval office he is no longer simply talking for himself, but, as commander-in-chief, for the state of which he is the head.

Just as one head of a Chamber of Commerce may be more or less hostile than another to the labor movement, but is ultimately charged with representing the interests of the business community, so Obama's room for maneuver is constrained by the institutions in which he is now embedded.

Whereas Bush illegally invaded a nation with great fanfare, Obama has chosen to bump people off with great stealth (unless it's Bin Laden, in which case he metaphorically parades around with a head on a pike). Those are different strategies, but the discussion about which is better or worse is sterile precisely because neither is good and neither works. Whatever their declared intentions, both involve the murder of civilians and the creation of enemies, which in turn demand a clandestine security structure that seeks to pre-empt the metastasizing resistance to its policies both at home and abroad. The sprawling growth of its spying program is commensurate with the size of its military and the spread of its incursions into countries like Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan where it is not formally at war.

As I wrote the day before Obama's first inauguration:

"He has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless."

America did not come by that power through its own innate genius. It acquired it, as do all empires, in no small part through war, invasion, subterfuge and exploitation. Spying and lying about it comes with the job description for which Obama applied and was reappointed.

None of this is inevitable. But changing it cannot be entrusted to a single person at the top. It will change because there is a demand from Americans that is both large in number, deep in commitment and active in pursuit, to enable a fundamental change in America's role in the world. 

That does not exist yet.

Where Obama is concerned, this excuses nothing – but explains a great deal. Given the timidity of his campaign agenda, his supporters must, to some extent, own their disappointment. He never said he was a radical, nor proposed anything radical, even if he was happy at one time to be marketed as one.

Given that he kept on Bush's defence secretary and appointed an economic team friendlier to Wall Street than the poor, we should not be too shocked about these continuities. But there are some things he did promise to do – and was twice elected with a massive mandate to do them. Protecting civil liberties was one of them.

When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That's not the change people believed in.

Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US

OneLove


 :::MME:::

Poet's Nook: : "Prospero's Soliloquy" by William Shakespeare

 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life 

Is rounded with a sleep.

(taken from The Tempest)

OneLove

:::MME:::

From Ike to “The Matrix”: Welcome to the American Dystopia by Andrew O'Hehir

"Many societies in fiction are depicted as utopias when in fact they are dystopias; like angels and demons, the two are sides of the same coin. This seemingly paradoxical situation can arise because, in a dystopia, the society often gives up A in exchange for B, but the benefit of B blinds the society to the loss of A; it is often not until many years later that the loss of A is truly felt, and the citizens come to realize that the world they once thought acceptable (or even ideal) is not the world they thought it was. That’s part of what is so compelling—and insidious—about dystopian fiction: the idea that you could be living in a dystopia and not even know it."

John Joseph Adams

American society has been sliding toward the realm of dystopian science fiction — toward a nightmarish mishmash of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick — since at least the early years of the Reagan administration, and arguably a lot longer than that. (Since Watergate? The Kennedy assassination? The A-bomb? Take your pick.) We may have finally gotten there. We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.

Let’s step away from the brainiac analysis for a second and give full credit to the small-town Republican and war hero who warned us about what was coming, more than 50 years ago. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower spoke gravely about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that lay in the coming coalition between “the military-industrial complex” and “the scientific-technological elite.” It would require “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Ike cautioned, to make sure this combination did not “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” As we say these days: Our bad.

I can’t find any direct evidence that Eisenhower had ever read Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World,” let alone that they shaped his insights into the heretical possibility that the alternative to Soviet-style Communism might turn out to be just as bad in its own way. Ike wasn’t the country bumpkin that many East Coast intellectuals of that era assumed him to be (English was his best subject at West Point), but he favored history and biography over literature and philosophy. His dire and all too prescient vision of the American future was no doubt drawn from the cultural climate around him, so perhaps he can be said to have absorbed the Orwellian vision by osmosis and made it his own. (Intriguingly, his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, an eminent foreign policy expert, seems aware of the connection and cites “1984” as a formative influence on her own career.)

After the recent revelations about grandiose NSA domestic surveillance campaigns, complete with PowerPoint presentations that look like material from an unreleased mid-‘90s satire by Paul Verhoeven, we learned that sales of one recent edition of Orwell’s “1984” had apparently spiked by almost 7,000 percent on Amazon. Are these facts actually connected? Are these facts even facts? There’s no way to be sure, which may illustrate how difficult it is to know or understand anything amid the onslaught of pseudo-information. Maybe our current situation (as many Twitter users observed) owes more to Franz Kafka than to Orwell.

If people are really going to read “1984,” instead of just throwing it around as a reference, that can only be a good thing. (You can also watch Michael Radford’s excellent film version, with John Hurt and Richard Burton – actually released in 1984! — online right now.) It’s a devastating novel by one of the best writers of English prose of the last century, and a work that shaped both the thinking and the vocabulary of our age. But as a predictor or manual for the age of permanent war, permanent political paralysis and Total Information Awareness (Adm. John Poindexter’s much-mocked predecessor to PRISM), it gives you only part of the story.

If the technology of the national security state has finally caught up with, and indeed surpassed, anything imagined by Orwell’s Big Brother, who must rely on two-way “telescreens” and regular old secret agents to keep tabs on every citizen, the context is almost entirely different. Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Orwell imagined an indefinite combination of postwar British poverty and austerity mixed with the drab, monochromatic austerity of the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalin years. He was also imagining the aftermath of a future world-transforming war that would be even worse than the last one. Although it’s more widely understood as a political metaphor, “1984” also points the way toward “Planet of the Apes,” “The Hunger Games” and countless other post-apocalyptic visions.

Our own society, with its endless array of electronic gizmos, opulent luxury goods and a vibrant and/or morbid pop culture capable of invading every waking moment (and the sleeping ones too), looks nothing like that. At least on its surface, it more closely resembles the pharmaceutically cushioned, caste-divided and slogan-nourished Dr. Phil superstate of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which is built around constant distraction and consumption and in which all desire for transcendence and spirituality can be answered with chemicals. But we certainly don’t live in the atheistic, full-employment command economy envisaged by Huxley either — he was imagining an unholy technocratic union of Lenin and Henry Ford — even if many people on the right remain convinced that Barack Obama is leading us there.

For a long time, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was customary for intellectuals who addressed the differences and similarities between Orwell and Huxley to assert that “1984” had not come true and that Huxley had come closer to predicting, as Christopher Hitchens put, it the “painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus” and “blissed-out and vacant servitude” of the postmodern age. I think the best of these comes from Neil Postman’s withering assessment in the foreword to “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a landmark work of cultural criticism published in 1985:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut. What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t be seen. Read carefully through the recent news about the NSA revelations and you can see a few tendrils of this stuff: We know more than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do. On the international stage, America plays a grotesque supervillain role, blundering from nation to nation like Robocop in an endless war that has yielded only hatred and mockery. Radical Islam has always been our enemy, except when our enemy has always been Communism.

In 1946, two years before writing “1984,” Orwell wrote an essay about the new form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:

These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

That vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in (with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group, or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in “The Matrix,” we chose the simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.


(More Andrew O'heir articles here.)

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”


- Muhammad Ali

Sidestepping America's Electronic Stasi

Ok, so now we know for a fact that the US population has been spied upon by their own fellow Americans (with top secret clearances) without any reason/justification whatsoever. So much for all those bullshit privacy policies we wasted our time reading through. 

The work of Edward Snowden has cut the intelligence community deep. His revelations, reported in the Guardian and Washington Post revealed the stunning extent of NSA's/FBI's PRISM snooping.  Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and others are the nets that put us all in the potential Enemy of The State category. They probably know more about us than we can imagine.

One should never put blind trust in any online activity, be it online banking or Google searches. If you have, shame on you! Anyway, there are still ways you can use the Internet without having to surrender your personal information, data and Internet habits to interested parties.You can use various proxies based outside of the US where the American government has no jurisdiction—bearing in mind that other governments may have their own surveillance programs, and anything you share publicly might be scooped up by security agencies anyway.

That said, here’s a guide to using the Internet without using PRISM companies.

 

Search

Forget Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are other search engines which will allow you to surf anonymously  like Blekko and DuckDuckGo. For non-American services, you could use Russia’s Yandex,  or the Netherlands-based StartPage. Consult this impressive Wikipedia list of options.

 

Document collaboration

If you’re working with friends or colleagues on a collaborative document, you might be using Google Drive (formerly Google Docs). There are a few other options out there, like Zoho Thinkfree.

 

Email

Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple’s email offerings, and Hotmail/Outlook will get ya! There is a  self-hosted email option and Webmail services like Zoho Mail, Fastmail.fm (not free), Hushmail, Lavabit, and Thunderbird. 

File sharing

The PRISM document leaked to the Guardian and Washington Post indicated file storage and sharing service Dropbox is due to join the program soon. Thankfully, there are plenty of other ways to share large files without having to explode your email storage limit or mail a USB stick. Box has a few gigabytes of free storage, and Kim Dotcom’s Mega has 50GB of space for free (though there have been some security concerns). Wikipedia, again, has a large list

(You always have the option of sending legal files to which you own the copyright through BitTorrent as well).

 

Video sharing

YouTube is out. If you’re looking to share a video on the Internet, you might look to Dailymotion, Vimeo, or Liveleak

 

Maps

So long, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps! Privacy advocates might just be switching back to printing out 10 pages of Mapquest directions.  OpenStreetMap is a cool alternative and ArcGis is also pretty nice.

Blogging

Come and get me, filthy spy! We know that Google-owned Blogger, and Yahoo-bound Tumblr.are part of PRISM. Alternatively, there is WordPress or LiveJournal. I will take my chances on this one. I am no threat to anyone, after all.

Voice/video chat

Skype, a Microsoft entity, is on the PRISM list. You might wish to avoid Google Hangouts and Apple’s Facetime as well now. There are a few options here, such as Tinychat, ooVoo, and meetings.io, all of which are free.

Photo sharing

 Instagram is owned by Facebook. Yahoo owns Flickr. You know what's up. To share your photos via a non PRISM-affiliated company, you could share photos directly on Twitter, use Reddit’s Imgur, or go to DeviantArt (of course, there is still that old-school PhotoBucket) .

Operating system/smartphones

Microsoft and Apple are reputedly part of PRISM, meaning that the Windows and OS X operating systems on your computer might just be transmitting data back to the government. You might want to read up on which flavor of Linux fits your needs. Personally, I like Ubuntu. Linux Mint is also pretty slick. As for smartphones, iPhones, Android phones, and Windows Phones run on operating systems provided by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. With privacy concerns gaining momentum, try switching to BlackBerry or use a phone without any Internet features (not much fun). It wouldn't really matter though as the government is collecting data about your phone calls, too.

For more alternatives, check here.

I am tired of folks who make the foolish argument, "Well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about". I don't think folks who take this position deserve a response. Let them marinate in their stupidity. 

The real alternative to combat these police-state tactics is to either exercise extreme caution online & not put anything out there not fit for your mama's eyes or just disconnect everything and go back to what we used to do so well for generations: communicate face to face. Impractical, yeah I know, but at least your information won't be warehoused & potentially used against you......

OneLove

:::MME:::

The Body Snatchers

These are some dark times....It sometimes feels like we. the human species, are gasping our last breaths before some disturbing & unimaginable event. I am not talking about some fundamentalist Rapture here. I am talking about our collective stupidity which is spiraling out of control. From human-induced ecological destruction  to corporate greed/exploitation, we seem to be going nowhere fast. 
  
As if things weren't bad enough, we now have the National Security State looking over our shoulders to wipe out whatever shred of dignity we had left. The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major internet companles — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook. The Guardian and the Washington Post revealed the top secret program, code-named PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs. "Hundreds of millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions – in fact billions of people around the world – essentially rely on the internet exclusively to communicate with one another," Greenwald says. "Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat, and social media messages, and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication." This comes after Greenwald revealed Wednesday in another story that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. "They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another … that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time."

What kind of times are we living in? Personally, I don't think this will end well....

OneLove

:::MME:::

The World Economy Is a Ticking Time Bomb (and The Fuse is Burning) by Richard Eskow

 Respected economist John Kay is about to make a public statement which essentially says that the world economy is a ticking time bomb and global markets are a lit fuse."We actually benefit from downturns,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told investors earlier this year 

Kay is a professor at the London School of Economics, a columnist for the Financial Times, and the author of a widely-read report on stock market flaws which was commissioned last year by the British government.

Kay says that the world is “waiting for the next crisis.” He’ll present that conclusion in a keynote speech which was previewed and extensively quoted earlier this week.

Correction Time

“Prices are driven to silly levels,” Kay says, “but everyone makes a load of money in the meantime, and then you get a correction.”

What is known as a “correction” in financial parlance is better understood by most people as a recession or depression resulting in lost jobs, wealth, health, and security.   The lords of finance have been disarmingly frank about this money-making strategy at times.

“We actually benefit from downturns,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told investors earlier this year. After the 2008 crisis Dimon told reporters he had explained downturns to his seven-year-old daughter by saying they’re “something that happens every five to seven years.”

In case you haven’t been counting, the last crisis occurred five years ago.

Arbitraging the Future

Tomorrow’s crisis is already making billions today for bankers and investors. But then, there’s almost no way for financiers to stop profiting from the next crisis under current conditions. The Federal Reserve and other central banks have flooded them with cheap money, making it inexpensive to borrow.

That was the right thing to do, but these low-cost loans should have come with strings, especially requirements that the money be used to provide consumers and small businesses with loans that could benefit the real-world economy in which most people live. Instead, as Prof. Kay points out,

“(T)he system is geared around trading profits, which are, in large part, money that is borrowed from the future. A crisis results from the moment at which this money has to be paid back.”

On Borrowed Time

“Margin debt” – money which is borrowed to invest in markets – has soared to pre-crisis levels, according to the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks are running as far ahead of inflation expectations as they did in the run-up to the last two crises.   And yet there is very little sign of dramatic improvement in traditional economic indicators such as employment or consumer confidence.
That has given us the “Truman Show” economy, with an artificial veneer of prosperity for the many – and great wealth for the few.

Prof. Kay says that he considers the Eurozone the likeliest spot for the next disaster. But wherever the spark is struck, disaster seems imminent. In the meantime, bankers are making enormous amounts of money with borrowed money … and on borrowed time.

The Dance

Many financially sophisticated investors and bankers will say privately that they agree with Prof. Kay – that it’s only a matter of time until the next crisis comes.  Why do they do it, then? Chuck Prince, the ousted CEO of failed megabank Citigroup, probably put it best of all. “As long as the music is playing,” he said of the run-up to the last downturn, “you’ve got to get up and dance.”

That’s the paradox of the modern banker, who is both the lord of his or her domain and its servant.  They’re arbitraging the future for short-term gain, making money by laying the groundwork for a massive wave of oncoming misery. But they’re also caught in ta fiscal frenzy, as Prince’s graphic description illustrates, jerking back and forth in the grip of forces greater than themselves.

The economy that enriches them is already dead, and their movements are its St. Vitus’ Dance.

Returning to the Real World

If these involuntary fiscal movements are the problem, what solutions are available? The first step is tougher and smarter regulation.  A few good people are also trying to instill the banking profession with a better moral conscience. But ultimately we’ll need to fundamentally re-envision our concept of a national and world economy.

We’ve replaced the traditional image of economic well-being – which includes well-paying jobs, upward mobility, and consumer confidence – with the speculative, get-rich-quick world of heavy trading. But, as Prof. Kay notes, it’s no longer clear that stock markets provide real economic value.

Financial intermediaries are capturing an increasing share of monies exchanged, rising from 5 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 2010, an enormous take for the industry that failed so spectacularly only two years earlier. Financial-sector profits have once again soared to their bloated pre-crisis levels, consuming nearly a third of all corporate profits– and after-tax corporate profits haven’t been this high in modern history.

“As long as the music’s playing …”

To paraphrase an old saying: It’s still good to be Prince. (Although he lost his job, he went away wealthy.) But tens of millions of people – perhaps hundreds of millions – are still suffering the after-effects of the last crisis. What happens when the next one comes along?  It’s a frightening prospect, filled with the threat of even greater tragedies – and perhaps widespread social unrest.

We can learn the lessons of the past and stop stealing from the future, or we can face an uncertain fate so that a few people can keep on dancing.



...tick...tick...tick...tick.....

OneLove

Dr Dyson On Pres. Obama's Morehouse Commencement Address

President Barack Obama                                  Dr. Michael Eric Dyson 

Dr. Dyson is really on point on this. Pres. Obama can come off as a jerk sometimes just to score political points and it matters not, it seems, who he hurts in the process,,,,Quite sad.... 


OneLove


 :::MME:::