Impose a Supertax to Recoup the Money Robbed from our National Treasuries

After the UK bank bailouts in 2007-8, which the National Audit Office said emptied the British exchequer by almost a trillion pounds, UK Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, said the banks were henceforth to show restraint, and boasted of the 50 percent supertax he had imposed on bankers’ bonuses. Actually, it was a one-off payroll tax that would only raise £550 million—about 0.06 percent of the money the robbers had received. The bleating professional defenders of the City called it a fresh attack on that sacred institution, but nothing is being said about it now that banks are rewarding their executives, like Stephen Hester of RBS, for that staggering robbery of the treasuries of all the leading capitalist countries, leaving everyone except the ruling junker class tantamount to being bankrupt.

The measure, feeble and ineffective as it was, would prompt defections from the City, the publicity lobbyists claimed. All of these bankers can, apparently, get immensely rewarding jobs anywhere else in the world, and now they shall! It is their own propaganda, though doubtless, like all greedy opportunists, they believe it. And Darling said the banks would actually pay the bonuses tax, so the burden again falls on us, guileless slaves of the rich, whether it is through the exchequer or through the banks that we are robbed. John Whiting, tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, immediately warned that the banks would find ways around the tax!

Bonuses are only part of the problem. Income tax is not merely unfair, it is regressive—the richer you are, the less you pay. One of the very richest men in the USA, Warren Buffett, has openly admitted that his tax rate (18 percent) is lower than that of his lower class secretary (30 percent). Can anyone deny that it is grossly unfair that the rich should pay less national tax than those who are much poorer? How is it possible? When income tax was introduced temporarily in 1842, even Queen Victoria paid it. The monarchy later, when it became a normal feature of government funding, was excused it. But in 1992, the British Queen volunteered to pay it again—no doubt with some persuasion—but hoping to gain popularity at a time when monarchy was under criticism.

In 1909, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, set income tax at 9d (9 pence) in the pound (3.75 cents in the dollar), for incomes less than £2,000, which amounts to about £160,000 at 2012 values. He set a higher rate of 12d (one shilling, or 5 percent) for incomes above £2,000, and an additional “surtax” or “supertax” of 6d (another 2.5 percent) on the amount by which incomes of £5,000 (£400,000 today) or more exceeded £3,000 (£240,000 today). This scheme, applied today, would mean rich people simply pay tax, not supertax, on earnings up to £240,000, but would owe the exchequer £4,000 as soon as they earned £400,000. Effectively, the rich would experience a hike in tax of just 1 percent of their income when they went through the £400,000 barrier, hardly a backbreaking jump. As things stand, the megarich would simply hire top accountants, lawyers and lobbyists to ensure the nation never gets the money they owe it, if everyone else does! But, if this sudden hike were sufficiently large, and avoidance and evasion of it were treated strictly as criminal, banks and corporations would not be inclined to overpay directors, and they would not want to recieve more than the limit and suffer the penalty of the tax barrier.

Republicans brag that, when they took Congress in 1994, they lowered taxes creating an improvement in the economy, and higher tax revenues. Since then they have perpetually called for the same strategem, even though the improvement they boasted of was short lived. What they want is lower taxes for the rich, but it is cutting taxation of the poor and middle classes that improves spending, business transactions, and ultimately the economy as a whole. Money rises like a gas through the classes of any capitalist society like ours, it does not trickle down like water, at least, if it does, it does not trickle down at home where it is needed!

Time series suggest that governments resist raising tax from the rich except in crises. Then they have sometimes lifted taxation into the supertax category of over 90 percent. When this is done, the revenue is fed in at the base of the economy in public projects and better benefits, lifting spending power at the base and thereby stimulating the economy throughout by the multiplier effect—the way each dollar or pound is spent over and over again, once someone poor gets it to spend in the first place, and the way an initial expenditure triggers further ones, like a tin of paint for the front door stimulating the decoration of the rest of the house, which now looks shabby, then new furniture, and with fresh aspirations, a new car, a new home, and so on. It is Keynesianism. It works! So, taxing the richest boosts the economy. Reducing taxes on the rich induces them to accumulate more capital which they regretably are too often ready to invest overseas for even better profits. Meanwhile, our own economy is deprived of liquidity and unemployment and poverty rise. Tax rates for the richest were being cut until 1928, but they failed to stop, and arguably exacerbated the Great Crash of 1929 and the following long depression, ended only by WWII. Our situation today is frighteningly similar.

Curiously, considering that the upper classes in the USA—not to mention many of the middle classes too, albeit perhaps influenced too much by patriotic propaganda—constantly demand foreign wars, the top rates of income tax go up while wars are being fought and afterwards when their costs have to be met. In WWI, the top US rate of income tax reached 77 percent, but in the aftermath of WWII it went as high as 94 percent. The US Right Wing, who bleat their propaganda line that Obama is a “commie” when he is not being a Moslem or a Satanist, would be certain that supertax equates to communism. Yet it has inevitably preceded the US economy picking up, so that the supertax was soon lifted. Perhaps too soon. UK supertax was lifted in 1973, but replaced by rates of income tax progressiing from zero for the very poorest to much higher levels for the rich, albeit falling short of a supertax. Maybe now, it should be a permanent feature of the modern capitalist state.

HM Revenue and Customs (UK) claims that twice in the post-war years, special tax rates have pushed income tax above 100 percent. Sad parasites of other people’s work received unearned income from stocks and shares, and apparently paid the taxman more than they earned. They must have been Warren Buffets living in cardboard boxes under railway arches. It is a highly dubious calculation which must assume that the different rates are applied additively. They were not. Some rates were either/or, not both in succession. No wonder the tax men leave the calculations to each of us ourselves to submit via self assessment. The people who do pay rates of over 100 percent are the poorest—those on benefits who lose all of certain benefits when they earn above certain levels of income. Unless the increase in income exceeds that lost by loss of benefits, income declines, so the effective tax rate of such poor people is over 100 percent. This is very common indeed, and explains why many people give up looking for work.

When a nation is divided into two contending classes, both cannot have their own way. Democracy is meant to ensure the majority rules, subject to its laws not oppressing the minority, but, for that, it has to be fair. It is not fair when one section owns all the media, and the rich can do that through their wealth. The American paranoia about socialism leads ordinary Americans to accept the rich man’s propaganda, and support the rich man’s interests contrary to their own. So that when sensible policies are proposed the people are confused by those who want a less practicable and more greedy policy, so that what emerges is precisely the wrong kind—acquiescence in wasteful policies, such as militarism and imperialism, rather than taking steps in the right direction.

The British Labour Party has exactly the same problem. Beguiled by Blairism and topped up in the Blair years with careerists and opportunists, it is quite incapabale of taking the right decisions. Even though the Con Dem coalition is on shaky ground, and the people are sick of the succession of Thatcherite policies over the last thirty years by successive governments, the Labour leadership is tied to its outdated mode of thinking—deregulated neo-liberalism—when something new, and actually left wing is needed in the face of the bankers and the junkers.

US Credit Worthiness, Tax Hikes and the Balancing of the Federal Budget

Krishna Tummala, director of Kansas State’s public administration program and professor of political science simply explains the reason for the nation’s burgeoning debt:

People demand more services but are not always willing to pay taxes. The politicians promise more services without telling them the cost and that they must be paid for. Instead, they use the so-called painless way to go about this by allowing deficit budgets. This means not only the politicians must educate themselves on the issues, but their constituents as well.

He adds that the argument that the federal government should live like we do, within our means, is hypocritical. The personal debt of Americans is close to $2 trillion, so effectively we all live in debt. The federal government just is behaving like we do. Moreover, it has the responsibility for the common welfare and general defense, as the Constitution requires. Yet state governments, 48 of which require a balanced budget by law, are favorably compared to the federal government. But state governments differ in their budgeting compared to the fed. The federal government has only one budget, but each state has two, a current account and a capital account. Only the state’s current account—effectively its day to day running costs—must be balanced. The capital account is the place for major project expenditures, and they have to be carried forward annually.

The federal government borrows money through Article I of the US Constitution, and had it not been able to, it could not have borrowed $15 million from Britain in 1803 to complete the Louisiana Purchase. It doubled the size of the country, made it possible for it to be united coast to coast, and without it, it perhaps would never have become the world power it is. Now the national debt is $14 trillion, but it is not owed to the British. The Chinese have around $3 trillion of it.

People who want a balanced budget, many of them Republicans, have to realize that it will need taxes to be raised. Cutting expenditures will not be enough, and will shut down the country first. But Republicans will not condone tax hikes because the people with the money are leading Republican donors. So, cooperation between the parties has been lacking, only quarreling, a lot of posturing and little dialogue. The deadline for increasing the debt ceiling is 2 August, with the country’s credit worthiness at stake. If the debt ceiling is not extended, the country will default, hitting the economy of the whole world, everything now being so interconnected.

The country’s credit worthiness underpins the financing of debts. Foreign countries must have confidence in the US economy or they will not be willing to lend. Of course, credit ratings agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s can evaluate the soundness of the US economy but the ratings agencies were giving excellent ratings to the financial sector “before it went belly-up”, Tummala wryly concluded!

Are Americans Sick Of War?

A poll by “Pulse Opinion Research” shows that 72 percent of likely voters in the US think that the country is fighting too many wars abroad. Operations continue incessantly overseas and new ones always arrive when old ones seem to be getting settled, like Libya after Iraq. The US people increasingly want to know when the military will finally listen to the people and step back.

Americans see the country deep in hock, and millions unemployed and underemployed, while millions more, even middle class people, worry about the possibility of getting the bullet—fired! Or their compensation slashed in some economy drive. Yet administrations always have plenty of money to fight foreign wars. Something Americans can do without in these allegedly hard times is their tax dollars wasted on useless wars.

With Americans wanting out, this administration is doing little. Yet Obama campaigned under the banner of “Change”, of which ending war was one prominent constituent part, but like Clinton he has broken every promise and spinelessly has bent over to the militarists and the armamaments manufacturers, introducing the US into more wars on his watch. Even a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, thinks these wars “endless” and “unwinnable”.

Is Paul doing the same as Obama? Codding the voter? Elections in the USA are an utter fraud. It does not matter who wins, the same policies—aimed at keeping the military and industrial barons and their financiers in banking and insurance swimming in profits—are retained, and the professional lobbyists in Washington with their bucketloads of bribery dollars can always get their own way with grasping representatives. They all have their price, and it isn’t high for the filthy rich minority with enough megabucks to control the USA.

Yankees threw off the yoke of the English, but now they'll have to throw off the yoke of their home grown oppressors. The Brits had to do the same. They threw out the king in the seventeenth century, but kings returned. In the nineteenth century, they had to strike and riot to get the two reform acts passed that pulled the greedy rich into some order for a couple of centuries. Now the British will have to do it again, too!

Houston, a Glimpse into America’s More Caring Future?

The 2011 Kinder Houston Area Survey took in a representative sample of 750 Harris County residents—including 240 respondents contacted by cell phone. The University of Houston administered the survey. Survey author, Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Institute and professor of sociology, said:

Houston is where America’s four major ethnic communities—Anglos, Asians, blacks and Latinos—meet in more equal numbers than almost anywhere else in the country. The challenges and opportunities of creating a more unified and inclusive multiethnic society will be seen here first.

As a city at the forefront of the country’s demographic revolution, Klineberg thought that Houston offers a glimpse into America’s future, and the survey’s assessment of the city may offer important lessons for strengthening the rest of the country:

• create policies that moderate the inequalities
• nurture a far more educated workforce
• develop cities into environmentally and aesthetically appealing destinations
• empower all members of a multiethnic society.

Though Texas is a red state traditionally wanting less government, a majority of Houstonians today (52 percent) said that government has a responsibility to help reduce the inequalities between rich and poor in America (up from 45 percent in 2009). This year 48 percent said that “government should do more to solve our country’s problems” (up from 36 percent in 1996). 72 percent of respondents thought most poor people in the US today are poor because of circumstances they can’t control (up from 68 percent in 2007, and 52 percent in 1999). Although 86 percent agreed “if you work hard in this city, eventually you will succeed”, 67 percent also think “people who work hard and live by the rules are not getting a fair break these days”.

Respondents are a bit more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks—26 percent (up from 20 percent in 2010) report improving personal financial conditions—but remain pessimistic about the long term national prospects—only 31 percent (down from 43 percent in 2007) believe that young people will eventually have a higher standard of living than adult Americans today:

Houstonians feel that the bleeding has stopped, but a robust recovery is not yet on the horizon.

Stephen Klineberg

78 percent disagreed with the statement “A high school education is enough to get a good job”. The percent of people who spontaneously mentioned education when asked to name the biggest problem facing people in Houston jumped to 7.6 percent this year from just 1.7 percent in 2009 and 2 percent in 2010:

There’s a new awareness that this is now a high tech, knowledge based economy and there aren’t many good jobs for people without a college education. Education is more important than ever. Long gone are the days when you could get a job out of high school, work hard and make enough money until you retire. The resources of the knowledge economy are not found in factories, they are situated between the ears of the best and brightest, who can live anywhere.

Klineberg

Public support for new initiatives to improve the quality of life in Houston has remained firm or grown stronger across the 30 years of the survey. Area residents support measures to enhance the city’s green spaces and bayous, revitalize and preserve urban centers and improve air and water quality.

Though most respondents (52 percent) said they would prefer to live in a single family residential area, a large minority (45 percent) would choose an area with a mix of homes, shops and restaurants. In 2010, 41 percent said they’d prefer a smaller home within walking distance of shops and workplaces, rather than a single family home with a big yard “where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go”.

Asked how they would feel if a close relative of theirs wanted to marry a non-Anglo, 8 percent of the Anglo respondents this year said they would disapprove, down from 13 percent in 2002 and 23 percent in 1995. Among the Anglo respondents under the age of 30, 93 percent said they would approve of such intermarriage, compared with 69 percent of those 60 or older. Seventy percent of Anglos under 30, but only 35 percent in the older group, said that the increasing immigration into this country today mostly strengthens American culture. 73 percent of the younger respondents, compared with 52 percent of those 60 or older, said they are in favor of granting illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship if they speak English and have no criminal record.

So, older Houstonians’ attitudes toward diversity, which will continue growing rapidly, are in conflict with younger Anglos more comfortable with the demographic trends.

How Incentives Destroy Co-operation and Will Destroy Society

Human societies depend upon each of us helping our neighbors, and not exploiting them, and about 80 percent of us are willing to participate fairly in joint projects of mutual benefit. The other 20 percent are skivers, people who will try to get the benefits with as little effort as they can get away with. The skiving free loaders are not popular with the others who pull their weight, and usually sanctions or punishments are applied to those who try to exploit other people’s mutual effort for their own gain. It is called norm enforcement, the norm being that everyone should pull their weight, and those who do not are deviants from the norm.

Data like these are not difficult to get by testing in controlled situations. If my neighbor and I could each build a house on our acre plot in six months, but by co-operating we could do a better job making use of our complementary skills and finish the two houses in eight months, then we have a clear benefit from co-operating. If the houses still took six months each and were no better, we might as well build our own, and we only have ourselves to blame for anything that goes wrong. The act of co-operating must itself have a benefit or there is no point in it. So setting up a test in which people can share a sum of money they have been given with other participants to get a benefit from the pooled resource mimics my neighbor and I helping each other build a house, as long as it is likely that by sharing we can all be better off.

In such tests, Professor Stephan Meier, Assistant Professor in Management at Columbia Business School, and co-worker, Andreas Fuster, PhD candidate, Harvard University Department of Economics, discovered that when people were given private incentives, norm enforcement became less effective. The incentives seemed to take the edge off the hard feeling towards the skivers.

1. Participants were asked to contribute to a common pool of cash to be divided equally among them all at the end of each of six rounds, whether or not all participants contributed. No kind of norm enforcement was used. People gave only small amounts to begin with, and gave less in each round.
   
2. By adding an incentive to contribute (a lottery ticket), with no opportunity to enforce norms, people contributed more gladly, including free riders.
   
3. Norm enforcement was introduced to the first test, in the shape of a fine on free riders at the end of each round. Those who were fined, most of them, increased their contributions in subsequent rounds.
   
4. Adding the lottery ticket incentive made contributors scale back their punishment of free riders by almost half, and free riders were less likely to make larger contributions in subsequent rounds whether or not they were punished. The result tended towards the previous test without incentives.
   

Fuster says:

Individual incentives can really change the structure of how we deal with one another, what the norms are, and how we enforce norms. If social forces in an organization are important, managers need to be attuned to norm enforcement and peer effects. They should understand that adding monetary incentives can dramatically change this dynamic and lead to a net negative effect.

The point is that the lottery ticket became the aim of participating, there being nothing to be gained by sharing through the common pool. Free riding therefore became irrelevant. Everyone would give just enough to get a lottery ticket, whether a free rider or not.

On the face of it the experiments are flawed. There is no co-operative gain to be made by contributing to the common fund. The pool needs to be enhanced in some way to make it more like human co-operation. Even so, it is easy to see that a separate incentive can draw attention from the whole point of a co-operative venture—the advantages of co-operating—by distracting attention from the primary objective.

It is the reason, for example, why sports can be so easily disrupted by gambling. Whatever is to be gained from illegal betting can make sportsmen actually want to sabotage the supposedly co-operative team objective, and lose for their personal gain.

The same is true of senior managers and board members who begin to give themselves bonuses from the company’s earnings. The drive to maximize bonuses distract from the corporate aims, and when shareholders will not sack managers and board members who are lining their own pockets at the expense of the shareholder, then the managers can run amuck.

That is what happened in our banks. Barclays’ shares for example sank by a half over several years when top managers in most banks lifted their own compensation, including bonuses, by obscene amounts, and shareholders let them get away with it. Needless to say, the holders of large blocks of shares, able to sway any shareholders’ meeting, are often themselves large banks and city institutions, so effectively they are in a scam to rob the ordinary small shareholder and the customers.

Politicians are the same. Their objective is supposed to be to represent the interests of the people who vote for them, but they are all too easily distracted by the wads of maney waved at them from corporate bosses. Tony Blair is getting his compensastion now for his sacrifice of pretending to be a Labour Party Prime Minister, when he was a Republican Quisling. The incentives of the rich soon make most career politics forget what they are there for.

Our societies used to take an extremely dim view of bribery, but no longer. Bribes are today incentives, and the law enforcers themselves are too ready to accept them. A cabal of superrich people have corrupted the western world beyond redemption. Western society is decadent and immoral. Democracy is superficial. We are run by this megarich class, which controls every party with its incentives, incentives to do as they want, and not what is good for society.

The often despised Arabs are showing more courage and awareness now than the once militant workers of the UK and France. Workers in the US have always been too easily fooled by their betters. Even after thirty years of declining real wages, longer hours and poorer conditions for those in work, and a labor pool of twenty or thirty million unemployed or part time workers, while the top thousand or so people have trebled their wealth, the average American is still beguiled by the moribund American dream, Republican crooks and pastors, and their own inability to comprehend what is going on. They are the ones without the incentives, but rather are offered carrots.

Carrots might be incentives for donkeys, but Americans ought to be more sophisticated than those famously uncomplaining beasts of burden. Its time they started to do what the Arabs have already begun. Get out in mass on to the streets, trash a few corporate HQs and banks, and threaten revolution. Social instability is one thing the rich do not like, and can do little about, except getting national guards to shoot citizens.

Then everyone will realize that the state is not theirs, and democracy is an illusion.

How the Bankers’ Greed is Ruining the US Internationally

The United States has slipped from second place to 13th out of 34 countries in the number of students enrolled in university, and it is stagnating in science teaching—in 17th place—and doing poorly in math, in 25th place. In contrast, more Chinese are enrolling in universities, which means there will be more scientists in China than there are in the US, driving up Chinese scientific output, said Penn State professor Caroline Wagner at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

At a time when the greed of bankers has forced United States and Europe to make severe cuts in government spending on social services, but also on support for industry and science, China has significantly increased spending on science and technology, said Denis Simon—a professor at Penn State University who is also the science and technology adviser to the mayor of the Chinese city of Dalian—at the AAAS meeting. Simon said that the Chinese hope to spend around 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of a nation’s annual output, on research and development by 2020.

In the United States, Republican lawmakers are talking about trimming a billion dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public research institute, and slashing funds for other science and research agencies, negating the billion dollar boost President Barack Obama proposed for science and health research in his 2012 budget. Republicans want to make Joe and Jane pay in poorer wages and conditions for the trillion dollar US deficit, much of which was incurred by the treasury in bailing out moribund banks “too big to fail”. Knowing that, the mainly Republican banksters milked their bonus scam—collecting huge bonuses for selling and reselling junk bonds in a type of Ponzi scheme which inevitably would collapse, but not before bankers and financiers had lined their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer.

The Republicans also want to slash funds for education by some $5 billion, even though Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, has warned that the United States must better educate its kids, especially in science and math, or risk becoming uncompetitive in the global economy.

Another sign that China is moving to the top of the science league, the number of quality scientific papers coming out of the country—measured by how often they are cited in other studies—is growing exponentially. How often a peer reviewed scientific paper is cited by another scientist is a key measure of quality. The proportion of Chinese papers being cited is up, while the proportion of citations of US and European papers is down. China already produces more research papers in the fields of natural science and engineering than the United States, which as yet remains in total the biggest producer of scientific papers in the world. But Wagner warned:

On current trends, China will publish more papers in all fields by 2015.

Getting Conned by Bogus Investment Schemes—and Real Ones!

University at Buffalo sociologist, Lionel S Lewis, author of four articles in the journal Society about Madoff investors, explains how the Ponzi scheme works. He says:

To understand how confused thinking is, you need to understand how a con game works and the fact that it requires a “mark” willing to suspend his or her judgment.

First, the “roper”, who could be a brother-in-law, approaches the “mark” and says, “Listen, Bernie can make you a lot of money—a 16 or 20 percent return”. Now this is a far greater return than the standard investment produces, but the “mark” is greedy, like many people, and suspends reason in pursuit of easy cash. Remember, the “mark” is always a willing participant in pursuit of an unlikely outcome.

The con man—Madoff in this case—takes the “mark”’s money and spends it. He doesn’t invest it. He doesn’t realize a “return” on an investment. He just pays millions of dollars in finder’s fees to the “ropers”, gets them to pull in more “marks”, and uses that cash to pay off any of the “marks” who pull out of the scheme early, and spends the rest on estates, cars, vacations and yachts until the money is used up. Eventually the scheme collapses. The “marks” lose their money. In con terms, they’re “trimmed”. At this point, it is the job of the roper and other inside men in the con to “cool the mark out”—calm the waters to protect those perpetrating the con.

They do this, Lewis says, by pointing out to the mark that “he knew he was taking a risk (‘16 percent return? What were you thinking?’) and could have lost more, then sends him off, embarrassed, with his tail between his legs, but with a little cash, glad he’s not living on the street in a refrigerator carton”. The well cooled mark, according to Lewis, recognizes his part in the con. He’s not happy but he doesn’t call the cops, grouse about his losses on TV or blow up Madoff’s house.

Lewis is saying that people are voluntarily conned. They take a silly risk with their own money, knowing it looks fishy, but are so greedy, they do not accept a quick profit themselves from the scam, and get out while they are in the black. Instead, they hang on and on, reaping in the ill-gotten gains, maybe investing some of it anew, until the scheme inevitably falls apart. It is a pyramid selling scheme. It is illegal, and no one is justifying Madoff. He is in jail where he belongs, but the victims are still beefing, though it was a case of caveat emptor. They were buying a share in the scam, and were getting paid as long as new “marks” were being found. Now, they say they are victims of an investment con, that there were proper investments and they did not get their proper share. But there never were any proper investments! Lewis says:

Despite the fact that Madoff never ran an investment fund, no money was “made” on their behalf and there are no profits to return to them.

The scheme got so big and collapsed so swiftly that the “marks” were never cooled out:

So we find them posturing loudly as enraged victims online and off—in the papers, on television and radio—demanding “profits” they apparently think actually exist—they do not—and are owed to them—which is not legally the case.

Lewis focused on 167 people who invested with Madoff. He collected oral and written testimony, including lengthy interviews, from 42 of them and used other written material. Some investors, however angry and ashamed they are, and regardless of how much money they lost, have not sued and made a fuss. A lot of those people won’t talk to anybody. Lewis says:

Some who lost a lot were grateful they hadn’t invested more or glad to get back even a tiny percentage of what they lost, while others who lost less want everything they were “promised”—the 16 or 20 percent profit. They won’t accept that the “promise”, along with their gullibility, was part of the con, that they never could have won at this game, and still can’t, no matter how many attorneys they hire or how often they get on television.

What is sad is that many of those “trimmed” in the scam had worked hard to put together some cash, then greed got the better of them, they thought they could join the ruling class, and make buckets of money, and opted for Bernie Madoff’s shortcut to riches. They were gambling with their life’s savings, and gamblers know that they should only play on their gains, and should cut their losses. Of course, any pyramid scheme ends up with far more losers than winners, but the few winners can make fortunes out of all the little steers who are roped in.

The answer with any gambling—investing, if you prefer to call it that—is not to invest more than you can afford to lose. The trouble these days, is that the ruling caste are forcing the small guy into risky investments because the return at interest has been cut to zero. We can leave our life savings in the banks earning nothing, but eroding away by inflation and bankers’ bonuses, so we have to put the cash into something riskier.

Stockmarket crashes suit banks and financial speculators because it is the small investor who loses by bad timing and their inability to swing markets with sheer volume of investment, or influence, by buying stocks, talking them up with rumours of takeovers and such like, then selling at a profit while the stock is high. Joe and Jane will read the rumours and buy in too late when the stock has started to rise, then find the stock crashing again when the big man sells out. They lose! These are not strictly scams because it is all legal since Reagan had his bonfire of the regulations, a reason for much closer new regulation of the money markets. But Republican propaganda has it that regulation is a bad thing. Yes, it is bad for the crooks at the top, but just fine for the rest of us.

Powers of Persuasion—Marketing by Metaphor

Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, says:

We can’t talk about any complex situation—like crime—without using metaphors. Metaphors aren’t just used for flowery speech. They shape the conversation for things we’re trying to explain and figure out. And they have consequences for determining what we decide is the right approach to solving problems.

Test subjects were asked to read short paragraphs about crime rates in the fictional city of Addison, including some startling figures about how much crime had risen, and then were asked to answer questions about the city. The researchers wanted to know how people answered when crime was described as a beast compared with when it was described as a virus. The subjects’ response depended on the metaphor used. 71 percent of participants called for more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison.

But only 54 percent wanted more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison.

Asked to say what part of the report had influenced them most in their decision, only 15 of 485 participants said the metaphor. Most of the rest else said it was the figures. Boroditsky said:

People want to believe they’re logical. They like to think they’re objective and making decisions based on numbers, but really they’re being swayed by metaphors.

As expected Republican participants were 10 percent more likely to suggest enforcement, but reading that crime was a beast swayed 20 percent more to suggest enforcement than reading that crime was a virus, whatever their political persuasion.

It explains why right wing politicians and their supporters like to be so doom laden and aggressive. When we are faced with Godless commies who eat babies, the poor dupes called the public are more ready to send their sons to fight foreign wars, and cut the unemployment roll. When we are faced with evil Moslem terrorists who want to destroy our civilization, we are again ready to send half educated country boys and black urban youths in uniform to fight for western freedom and Christianity.

These powers of persuasion are very well known in our capitalist society which uses them daily to mould our tastes, and influence the brands we prefer, and the places we go. It’s called marketing. Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders warning us against it half a century ago. By now, Joe and Jane Public ought to know all about it so that they are not so easily duped, but that is not what our leaders want. We are meant to be easily duped. The ruling caste would rather dupe us into fighting each other than fighting them, the real enemy!

Who are the “Mindless” Ones?

UK Students Protest Vigorously Over Political Liars

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats in the UK’s Con-Dem coalition government voted to increase university tuition fees by 100 to 200 percent. Some did vote against and a few abstained, and even a few Tories voted against the outrageous measure, but sufficient members voted for it to ensure a government majority of 21 in the House of Commons. The Tory House of Lords, newly packed by Tory leader, David Cameron, with a load of Tory time servers, will back the motion.

Students are so outraged at this that they have started a campaign to register their utter disapproval by confronting the state, and particularly, that section of the coalition, the Liberals who solemnly pledged before the election that they would not support the Tory proposals for higher university fees under any circumstances. Liberal leader, Nick Clegg, says the pledge was a mistake because the Treasury is worse off than he and his party had reckoned. It therefore cannot be honored.

Indeed, there can be no honor among thieves and Clegg had his own excellent education because he is from a long line of them. His family are among the country’s rich, he had a private education at Westminster school, and went to one of the UK’s best universities, Cambridge, because his father was a banker, and his varied family background includes Ukrainian nobility. He is, in short, not without a few quid to his name.

Now, having joined the coalition government led by another rich Tory, David Cameron, he has decided that the country can no longer afford free, or even cheap, university education because the Treasury is deep in debt, and the country has to fill it and meanwhile service its borrowing requirements—we have to borrow from the banks to pay the interest on our debts, and so we cannot afford public services like free education any more!

The Banks—Robbers!

The students, however, unlike many trades unionists and Labour Party supporters are intelligent enough to realize the public purse is empty because we have given all our money and more to the banks to bail them out of insolvency when they were on the verge of collapse two years ago through speculative investments meant to further enrich already super rich financiers, and line the pockets of their agents the bankers simultaneously, through the enormous bonuses they paid themselves for robbing the rest of us.

All of this done under the innocent and admiring gaze of the pathetic supporters of the criminal New Labour Party of one T Blair, otherwise known as T Bliar, who is now coining it for his neoconservative takeover of the British traditional trades union and socialist party on behalf of the big criminals who bribed him to support the US Bush administration in its greedy adventures, and are now faithfully rewarding him with their spare change.

Students know it, and are young enough and angry enough to want to do something about it, unlike most of the British working class who are gulled into a zombic stupor by a media controlled by the same class of megarich criminals feeding them mindless reality TV, soap operas and a “get rich quick” celebrity culture that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality for many. The students, after sleeping for almost fifty years, are now waking up to the state of the nation. We are not broke, but we have been robbed in a blatant scam, and the students of the future are among the ones who will have to pay for the heist.

Note thet these mindless students are not protesting for themselves. Most of them will have graduated before the measures are brought in, but the university under-graduates have been supported by many school pupils and students of pre-university sixth form colleges, who know they will be affected by the government class-laden legislation. Class-laden? Young people from poor families will hesitate getting into massive debt before they even start on their adult careers, and the assurances of grants and special measures for the poorest does not impress them. They are sops to get the measures passed, and need be worth nothing more than the Liberal “pledge” to oppose such acts. That was plainly worthless!

Mindless MPs

Yesterday’s demonstrations ended up chaotic, and the culprits are being called names by the media—“mindless” and “thugs”. It is the media pundits who are mindless, and the idiotic MPs who think they can gull the people forever. The students are showing that is not the case. Unjust societies fall apart because people will not put up with it, and the British are beginning to realize how they have been tricked. It is simply that they have lost the will or the courage to publicly demonstrate their diaproval, but students are leading the way.

The students are not “mindless”, it is liberal MPs like the local empty-headed idiot, Don Foster, who represents the rather posh city of Bath. Someone threw a rock through his window, and Mr Foster responded that he did not enter politics to win a popularity contest but to change things. He seemed quite oblivious to the fact that he actually stood as an MP in a popularity contest—it is called democracy! MPs are elected when they gain the popularity of the electorate, and that popularity is based on what they promise to do.

The half witted Foster, reneged on his promise and merely had a brick through his window. Next time, if the electorate are learning anything, he will be evicted. The local MP for this constituency of Somerton and Frome, David heath, a Liberal Democrat, who has had a narrow majority for several elections can hardly expect to remain in his seat in parliament now that he too has voted against the students’ and the country’s best interests. These two and their fellow opportunists will doubtless by then have abandoned all pretence of being Liberals and will have joined the Tories.

Mindless Media

Media pundist are never “mindless”. They write their columns and usually have sufficient ego not to want to humble themselves even when proved to be wrong. One of them, on Murdoch’s TV tried to bombast an NUS spokesman into condemning the NUS organized demonstrations, but the young man admirably stood his ground despite the anchor man speaking over him, and attempting to harass him into slipping up. The demonstrations had been taken over by “anarchists”! It is a general assertion made by media pundits trying to make out that demonstrations are fundamentally vehicles for what they also like to call “rent a crowd”, professional rioters. Quite where these professionals hide or make aliving when there are no riots to lead, is hard to figure, but they always emerge mysteriously when a demonstration gets out of hand. No one ever seems to figure that it is frustration and anger at being duped by professional careerists called policemen and politicians.

No one ever considers either that, it being in the interest of the state apparatus to discredit demonstrations by introducing petty but violent acts, they have undercover agents provocateurs actually causing and inciting trouble. Any self respecting professional rioter, having broken into Millbank or the Treasury building would have set them both on fire, but these professional anarchists only set fire to a few placards and wooden staves in the streets. These professionals could hardly expect to get employed again, could they?

Mindless Police

Certainly the police professionally anger crowds by their so-called “crowd control” techniques. They “kettle” crowds or sections of a large crowd—confine them by force—into a narrow space and refuse to allow them to pass. This naturally causes immense frustration when people want to relieve themselves or to go for food or drink. Yesterday, a section of the crowd were induced to cross Westminster Bridge to escape the kettle, but then were stopped half way across and confined for hours in the narrow space of the bridge. The police are meant to be the guardians of the right of lawful citizens to move along the Queen’s highways, but they wilfully break the law themselves, with the result that violence is the only way to escape. Innocent people have died in these kettles, and a young man needed a three hour brain operation yesterday after a baton attack. It goes without saying that any rogue policeman will be innocent.

The police too are “mindless” because the media are forever highlighting violent protests but ignore peaceful ones. A peaceful “candle lit” vigil across the bridge in the South Bank was hardly mentioned by press or TV. So the provocation of the police and their plain clothes agents might actually be giving the publicity that will arouse the sleeping giant of the British public and their generally compliant trades unions from their slumbers.

The Effective Tactic—Destabilization

If Parliament relies on demonstrations being forever peaceful, and therefore of no consequence so it can simply ignore them, it is making a big error, one it has often made before. The present situation is plain to anyone who thinks just a little. The rich get richer even when the country is, they tell us, broke. Only last week, Ireland had to go cap in hand for a large multibillion Euro loan to bail out its own banks. This week the Irish banks are handing out tens of millions in bonuses, just as British and US banks have done. The banks and their employers, the super rich financiers, gleefully put up two fingers to the world, while the people have to scratch about to pay their mortgages and rents, aye and taxes, if they can. That is why the students are angry, and why we all should be angry too. It is why we should support them and ignore the whingeing special pleading of the press and the broadcast media.

Listen! The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns over $200 trillion. No need to guess where most of the 1 percent live. Maybe as little as 5 percent of this largess would solve the world’s economic problems, but Obama has just caved in to the rich man’s lobby in the US called the Republican Party, and most of the world’s leading developed countries have bailed out their banks while putting the burden of their empty treasuries on the people, not where it should be, on the minority who own as much as the rest put together. Governments ought to be joining together to ensure the rich are taxed and pay it.

Curiously many, the most intelligent among the rich, do not mind it as a temporary burden! Those rich people not among the “mindless” realize that their riches are most secure in a stable world, and corporate and financial greed is now destabilizing the world. That they do not like. It follows in all logic that the best way to get the rich to pay their fair share towards economic stability is to threaten instability. That is what “mindless” students are doing.

Another Election: But US Voters Still Not Being Heard

A poll in Ohio shows independent voters are unhappy with the political system. Previous polls have already demonstrated a low level of trust, among independents especially. 70 percent of respondents reported low satisfaction with Ohio politics, with higher figures among independents than among Democrats or Republicans. Dr John Green, distinguished professor of political science at UA, said:

This unhappiness raises questions about the legitimacy of the political process.

Independent voters thought the political system has been unresponsive to the public, especially on the economy. Participants had a variety of views about the problem:

• we’re not being heard
• politicians were self-serving careerists
• politicians were arrogant and insulated from the problems of the public
• corruption was a common allegation, symbolized by the large sums of money raised and spent in campaigns
• politicians should “wear patches on their suits from their sponsors” like NASCAR drivers.
• people were alienated from the political process
• public officials were puppets of special interest groups.

In the US political system, the buck stops at the presidency, so Obama carried the can, not just for Tea Partyers, but because he had not done enough to address the problems of the average American. But views on Congress were also negative:

• it needed to be revamped
• anything would be better than the system we have now
• members of Congress did not respond to the needs of the public at large
• we just need new people in government
• parties were viewed as hell bent on their own agenda
• parties too far apart on every issue
• it takes years to get anything done
• parties needed to put America first
• parties needed to stay more to the Constitution
• a third or fourth political party was needed to keep the system honest
• a “common sense” party was needed to revive the economy and limit the size of government.

Some thought additional parties would not be “common sense” parties, but a base for lunatics, and would not be competitive. If any were a base for lunatics, it would have to be competitive to match the Republican Tea Partyists. Indeed, many independents were skeptical of the Tea Party agenda, but others were supportive. Many accepted that problems were partly their own fault for not being more involved in politics, but anger and distrust were strong motivations for political activity:

• the people need to exercise their power
• it is time for a revolution

There needed to be more free access and response from politicians:

• more and regular town hall meetings
• quick and thorough responses from contacted officeholders
• a greater presence of politicians in the community
• being a politician should not be seen as a job choice but a service to the country.

These lists of solutions offered are incoherent and inconsistent, illustrating the voter disunity, and failure to comprehend what is happening. It reflect the sense of being ignored by the government among independent voters. There is no way that Americans can solve the problem. They live in a society in which the ordinary people, workers and middle classes, refuse to accept they live in a class society in which the ruling class, the rich elite, control their system from top to bottom. As long as that is so, there can be no change unless the ruling class volunteer to give up some of their wealth and power in a redistribution for fairness and justice. It is not likely to happen. So, revolution is the only option, but that requires unity, and US workers are utterly divided and will remain so while the right wing media are so influential, and their target audience are so gullible.

God or Liberty? A Fair Society, Please!

Not Freedom from Taxation, Nor Mystical Faith, but a Fair Distribution of Wealth and a Functioning Society

US religious and social history has been characterized by a periodical pulsation of religious fervor. Since the 1980s, the pulsation has been upbeat, evangelical movements and their leaders grabbing a lot of publicity and political power. These periods of religious fervency rarely last over half a century, so the latest one is probably on the wane, and the religious enthusiasts are riding the Tea Parties as if it were a religious revival. But Pulitzer Prize winner, Jon Meacham, a journalist and a historian, sees the Tea Party as “nationalistic, not moralistic”.

Tea Partyers are less concerned about the moral issues and more concerned about economic ones. It is conservative Christians who still say, “We need government to protect our morality, to protect us from ourselves”.

The myth stems from the original event in 1773, the Boston Tea Party, which was an act of rebellion against taxation without representation. The colonies were ruled by the King Georges of England and had no say in their own affairs. Three years later, the American colonies rebelled, and won independence. For Meacham:

It is liberty, less than religion, that holds us together.

S Augustine, in City of God, defined a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” The “City of God” he meant was the Christian Church, in those days, the Catholic Church, and the objects of their love were their fellow human beings, and, of course, God, in the form of Jesus Christ, who had identified himself with the meek and the downtrodden in the world. When the new Christian religion began to spread from the original Jews to gentiles in the Roman empire, it was indeed the poor and the downtrodden who responded, and a much smaller number of mainly rich women, glad to give up their legacies for salvation.

For modern American Christians none of that applies. According to Meacham, “the attack culture has subsumed everything else”. American conservative Christians, like those who supported Bush, and who are now supporting “Tea Parties” to get rid of Obama think, and like to say, that the United States is a “Christian nation”. Even many liberal Americans agree. They think the country’s founding principles are based on Christianity, through the settlement of New England by the Pilgrim fathers in 1620.

It was not the Christian ideas of the Pilgrim Fathers who initially settled in America, but the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers of the new republic who set out the documents that proclaimed the nature of the new political entity, and set out its founding principles, principles that still apply. Since the country’s founding, Americans have confused its defining features.

Mark McGarvie, a history professor at the University of Richmond, points out that the stress on man’s duties and responsibilities towards his fellow man, according to the teaching of Christ, was an element in the motivation of the founding of some of the early US colonies, but Christianity had nothing to say about anyone’s individual freedom. Christ had nothing to say specifically about slavery. Plainly, though, slaves fell into the category of the poor, the meek and the downtrodden, people whom Christ said were blessed, would enter the kingdom of heaven and ought to be treated like God. The man Christians treat as their God, Paul, the one they prefer to cite rather than God—Christ whom they largely ignore—told slaves to settle for their lot. Paul marginalized Christ’s emphasis on being loving and kind to each other—on works, as the New Testament calls it—by substituting for Christ’s practical teaching his own mystification, faith in God and the body of Christ!

The Declaration of Independence was based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, the teachings of Locke and Rousseau, as expressed by Jefferson and Madison. These men were also concerned with the poor and downtrodden, with the centuries of oppression people had suffered while Europe was ruled by the Church, and its hereditary nobility, who wanted the people to believe that kings were divinely appointed and had to be obeyed, even when they were wicked. It is what S—Paul taught, but not Christ.

With the rise of the merchant class of capitalists, the Feudal System of government by the nobility and royalty was doomed, but struggles were needed to put it firmly in its grave, and the American Declaration of Independence was one of the acts that established that kings were not divinely right! Instead of the divine right of kings, the Enlightenment idea was that God had nothing to do with individual rights, except that free will meant everyone was personally free in God’s own view! The Enlightenment was about protecting individual rights, in contradiction of divine rights.

Now the point of individual rights is not that everyone should do as they like, for that would be intolerable, and indeed would be quite alien to anything that Christ taught or any Christian should believe. The Founding Fathers thought that humans were primarily good to each other, and that society should allow them to prosper according to their good nature. They inscribed on the country’s Great Seal the motto “Out of many, one”. Americans were to pursue their own interests and desires with the ultimate aim of doing good not just for themselves but for a whole united society.

The other side of the US Great Seal has two mottoes, one of which announces that the birth of the USA begins a “New Order of the Centuries”, while the other is simply “It Has Favored Our Efforts”, “It” meaning Fortune or Providence, according to your religious inclination. So, although Christians will read this as being God’s Providence, and therefore God, the deists who drew up the documents could be more neutral and read it as Fortune. Even here, then, a Christian interpretation is not the only one. Deists believed in a God, but not one that twiddled with the world he made.

The conflict between the mystified Christianity of Paul and Luther, and the practical Christianity of Christ himself, filtered through the Enlightenment, existed from the outset of the USA, and there seems little to be gained in denying it. Christians nevertheless do, or they do not recognize it at all.

In modern practical terms, freedom is the freedom of the hyper rich one or two percent of the people to take the enormity of the country’s wealth that leaves the poor and even the middle classes struggling, either to stay alive or to maintain their standards. It is not social schemes like health and education, schemes that no civilized country can do without but which are being starved of sufficient cash to offer a proper service, both in the US and abroad. Christ went about curing people gratis and blessing the poor like Lazarus, the beggar, while approving the damnation of the rich, like Dives, the rich man. The greed of the minority is the real moral problem of all societies. That is what Christ taught.

It is all very simply set out in the Christian gospels but none of the evangelical crowd, who think Tea Parties are sent by God, have read or comprehend the teachings of Christ. They believe what their Republican pastors and politicians tell them, and, as Limbaugh and Beck prove, being idiotic is what the conservative Christian loves—“That’s just how I feel. Boy aren’t these guys just great!” They are too easily conned to see they are being conned! These guys are not idiots. They are! They are being taken for a ride, and the only benefactors are the Republican grandees, the mega rich, whom they think will help them by reducing taxation when all it does is leave those with the income worth taxing, better off.

Why Do Americans think Obama is a Moslem?

A Pew Research Center poll in August 2010 found that 18 percent of Americans believe Obama is a Moslem—up from 11 percent in March 2009—even though he’s a practicing Christian, and the poll was conducted before Obama’s recent explanation that the US constitution supports freedom of belief, and that must apply to Moslems who want to rebuild an Islamic center which includes a mosque near New York’s Ground Zero, just as there are Christian churches and Jewish synagogues nearby.

So, what motivates Americans to believe President Obama is a Moslem? Spee Kosloff, a Michigan State University visiting professor of psychology, and colleagues suggests it is not just simple ignorance, it is because other clues remind them Obama is different from them. The obvious one is that he is the first black president and he is educated, but also that his father was a Moslem, and he lived with his anthropologist mother a while in Moslem Indonesia.

Kosloff argues judgments like these do not follow and are stimulated by “irresponsible” media that perpetuate the lies for less than honorable reasons.

Careless or biased media outlets are largely responsible for the propagation of these falsehoods, which catch on like wildfire. And then social differences can motivate acceptance of these lies.

The MU scientists started their study before the 2008 US presidential election, because the candidates were constantly being smeared by their opponents. It’s the first comprehensive experimental study of the psychological factors that motivate Americans to believe lies.

In four separate experiments, three before the election and one after, the researchers looked at both conscious and unconscious acceptance of political smears by mostly white, non-Moslem college students. For the conscious trials the participants were shown a false blog report arguing that Obama is a Moslem, or a socialist, or that John McCain is senile. The unconscious trials involved gauging how rapidly subjects could identify words meant as smears such as "Moslem" or "turban" after Obama’s name was presented subliminally. They found:

1. Initially, among those who supported McCain, 56% guessed Obama was a Moslem. When they were asked to fill out a demographic card asking for their own race, the percentage jumped to 77%. So, simply thinking about a social category that differentiated participants from Obama was enough to get them to believe the smear.
2. Participants undecided about the candidates said there was a 43% chance McCain was senile—a number that increased to 73% when asked to list their own age on a card.
3. Undecided participants said there was a 25 percent chance Obama was a socialist—a number that jumped to 62 percent when they considered race, even though being a socialist has nothing to do with race, the respondents irrationally tied the two together.

The research suggests that the president’s unpopularity fuels American’s readiness to accept untrue rumors. People felt Obama is not on their side, a feeling stimulated by Republican and right wing authoritarian Christian talk show hosts in the media, and so they question his democratic stance and his religion. Kosloff said:

Unfortunately, in America, many people dislike Moslems, so they’ll label Obama as Moslem when they feel different from him.

It is the adult version of “Fatso”, “Frogface” and “Foureyes”—or more pertinently, “Nigger”—calling people names. Sadly, name calling is much more serious among political candidates who do not measure up to the authoritarian values of the Protestant moral majority. The Republicans’ childish but venomous Christian propaganda machine can make it highly uncomfortable for anyone it chooses to denigrate. They prefer their authoritarianism, which is not dissimilar to that of Hitler and the Nazis, to the tolerance the US constitution tried to enshrine. The trouble is that these right wing, so called, Christians know neither anything about Christ’s actual teaching, nor anything much about the formation of the US constitution. So, it does all boil down to ignorance in the end—wilful ignorance in the US!

Like the unwashed masses living twenty to a cellar room in nineteenth century Britain, the ignorant Christian masses of modern America consider themselves to be blessed with God’s imperial majesty—that is that their sorry personal condition is alleviated by the imperial conquests of their superior nation. It is all temporary. Once the Moslems conquered half the known world!

War Criminal Blair Tries to Buy Redemption

Catholic Demon tries to buy Sainthood.

This man along with his master, George Bush, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people, and disrupting and destroying  what had been a stable country, albeit under a dictator supported for decades by the US. He has reaped his reward addressing conventions of rich Republicans, advising banks and businesses, getting unknown expenses and no one knows what other rewards as a so called Middle East ambassador for Israel the United Nations, and now getting an advance on his memoirs of around £5 million. This latter sum and any additional royalties from the book, he has donated to a military charity for damaged servicemen, of which there are quite a number to add to those who are dead. Some of the families of dead soldiers say this is blood money.

Charles Taylor, a petty but cruel dictator of another country, Liberia, is standing trial for much lesser crimes than Blair and Bush, supporting the bloody rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone, financed allegedly by “blood diamonds”, where Blair, attempting to imitate his heroine, petit bourgeois Tory shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher, by sending in a British battalion, got his first taste for military glory.

If this petty murderer is standing trial, then why isn’t Blair and his puppet master G W Bush. Impeach the War Criminals and have them face a judge and jury too.

The Hidden Persuaders

The mention of manipulating the people reminded me that Vance Packard wrote in 1957 (The Hidden Persuaders) that Americans had become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was pulled open in 1990, so who absolutely are the most manipulated people in the world now? In fact, the people of the Soviet Zone were not so much manipulated as given no choice about what they could think. They were fed one viewpoint, the Marxist-Leninist one approved by the state, and that does not require much in the way of manipulation, or is the crudest form of it. Western manipulation was, and remains, more subtle.

Nominally, we in the west can do, say and read whatever we like, though, in practice we do not. The range of viewpoints offered to us as acceptable to reason—ie not extreme—is remarkably narrow and skewed frighteningly toward the right. It is, of course, the product of manipulation. The acceptable US conservatism of the Republican Party verges on fascism to Europeans. Indeed European fascists are encouraged by what they see in the US. Equally liberalism is dangerously socialist to the average American. Even many Democrats seem hardly democratic to Europeans used to a wider range of acceptable political options. For Americans, socialism, and—God Forbid!—communism are not acceptable at all. When the whole of the left wing of politics has been manipulated out of existence, what remains of democracy? Socialism and communism are forbidden and liberalism is considered a dangerous aberration from the American Dream that everyone can be a millionaire, leaving the choice between liberalish conservatism and fascistic conservativism.

Unfortunately, the American Dream can only ever remain a dream for most of the dreamers. The reason is the distribution curve of wealth. Unless some attempt is made to change this distribution curve to give the poorer people a greater share of the wealth than they have at present, few people have any chance of getting further towards the rich end of the scale, the nature of which is that only a small proportion of the population are rich while the large bulk of people are close to average or are below it. Redistribution of wealth to the poor means squashing the distribution to make it narrower. More people are average and fewer are rich or poor. For everyone to be rich, everyone would also be poor. There would be no difference between them and the American Dream will have been attained.

It would mean everyone had the same, and the distribution of wealth would have become ideally communistic. Thus the American Dream is attainable only when America becomes communist, and so it is in contradiction with the propaganda of the megarich classes and their publicity agents in the media and academia. The American Dream is a propaganda pipe dream. It suits the rich to spread the fantasy that every American can be rich. It keeps them onside as supporters of capitalism against socialism, but it is pure manipulation. No one will want to criticize a system which notionally allows them to join the megarich, so the alternatives are beamed out constantly as unacceptable and contrary to the American dream, and lotteries and celebrity reality shows let them think it is all just so easy!

And the class of the megarich is largely now a caste made up of the descendants, the kids and grandkids, of pioneers and entrepreneurs who once had a good idea to benefit themselves, and the community at the time. Now the kids own their grand pappy’s earned wealth and have done nothing to earn it themseves. They just pay a little of it to their publicity agents and politicians to protect the system that benefits them. This caste has one idea only, and that is to protect their inherited wealth and status.

Newspapers and advertisers use psychological methods to manipulate public opinion, and now the internet is providing new and comprehensive ways of obtaining information about people’s preferences to allow them to be manipulated more effectively. The American Dream is one such method, an old one but evidently still effective, not least because some people can occasionally find their way through the system into the top class. There they join the old school and begin to sponsor their publicity agencies.

Even with their huge propaganda armory, the leaders of the megarich political class, Leo Strauss’s “Gentlemen”, are not averse to straightforward lying. Strauss’s school of neoconservatives even boasted about the myths they created to keep the gormless masses onside. “Myths&rdquo = “Lies”. Few people in the USA seemed to notice, or create a fuss, and those who did got minimal publicity, so as not to rock the gravy boat. Saddam’s WMD was one such myth, and probably al-Qaida was another, but unfortunately one that dissident Islamists thought was quite a good myth—for them! They took to saying they were this or that branch of it.

The American public are now like Pavlov’s dogs. They are conditioned! And what the Americans do, we all do a little later!

The Rules of Chaos in Afghanistan Today

Stephen Vizinczey wrote “The Rules of Chaos”, a much quoted book, which considered the problems offered by the Vietnam War. So Vizinczey can claim some authority as an analyst of American political and military strategies. An article by him in the UK Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet not known for leaning leftwards, had the headline:

Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it. The only consequence of long-term conflict in Afghanistan, and anywhere else, is to increase the number of our enemies

For Vizinczey, the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago. The reason is one that is so plain to see that it is surprising Americans have not worked it out for themselves, even the rednecks with the IQ of a passenger pigeon who often call themselves Republicans. It is what Vizinczey calls an iron law of human conflict—almost everyone hates it when foreigners occupy their country forcing them to do what they do not want to do. People like to rule themselves, and anyone in a democracy ought to be glad to let them get on with it. Not Americans, though. They suffer from a self centered blindness that allows them to see good only in their own acts, however barbarous they might be, and blinds them to the complaints of others that they are indeed acting barbarously.

The aim of some New York Moslems to demolish an old tenement and convert it into a Moslem center, including a mosque, has some other New Yorkers objecting on the grounds that it is an insult to 3000 dead Americans, killed in the 9/11 atrocity of 2001. The Moslems wanting to build the Islamic center are not the ones who killed the 3000 Americans—they are, in fact, mainly Americans themselves. The Americans who object think it is insensitive that Moslems want to build a mosque so close to “ground zero”. As ever, these Americans can only see the motes in the eyes of the Moslems they consider as their antagonists. They never see the beams in their own eyes.

An imam suggested that Americans had some responsibility for the original atrocity, but few of them could see that, and accused him of being a terrorist himself! Killing 3000 innocent people is an incomprehendable and unpardonable act, but the killing of 2,000,000 Vietnamese was a shocking failure of “the good guys’” will. It is not at all evil to kill 2,000,000 peasants in a foreign land—their own—but to have the temerity to mount an effective retaliation when the Americans had used Zionists for decades to kill and humiliate Moslems in Palestine labels all Moslems as terrorists and their sympathizers. Americans cannot see that what is good for the goose is good also for the gander.

Why then does Obama persist in protracting the agony? Ignorance, perpetuated by the baneful influence of the US megarich class via their ownership of the media, the op-ed influence of their gentlemen servants among the academies, and the open scheming of the Washington caste of professional politicos. That is the thinking of the otherwise thoughtless, conditioned Pavlovian style. The ignorant majority, taking all its cues from the megarich, then forces any progressive US presidents to go with its views. Needless to say, this majority is gung ho about foreign invasions, persuaded that they are angels and the rest of the world are devils.

Obama continues the Afghan war because too many Americans have been persuaded by the gaggle of oil barons and gunrunners that rule the country that just one more push will bring victory. More troops are sent, more money spent on armaments, and energy demanding manufacturing, keeping the gunrunners and oil moguls happy, and US unemployment lower than the depression levels it would otherwise reach. No one seems to think the whole country, not to mention the peasants of Afghanistan, and unfortunates elsewhere suffering US torture and oppression, would be better off if workers manufactured socially useful products by working in health and welfare.

Vizinczey pointed out that there has to be a shared purpose between a population and the invading armies for an invasion to triumph. When the Americans fought in Europe, they were not fighting the people, who were themselves thoroughly opposed to the Nazi occupation. The Americans fought for over a decade in Vietnam and lost because they were fighting practically the whole people, not—as the propaganda made out—an invading army from the north, the communists. The situation was the same in Iraq, even though there was at first a considerable body of people glad to be shut of Saddam. The long period of US sanctions that had not harmed Saddam or his own cronies but only ordinary Iraqi children, the old, and the poor, alienated many. Subsequent murderous attacks like that on Fallujah alienated the rest.

It is still the same in Afghanistan. The propaganda story is the usual manifest rubbish, so easily believed by the brain dead redneck, that outsiders called Al Qaida, were causing the trouble, and the people welcomed them being attacked by the allies. As there turned out to be no one from Al Qaida conveniently handy to shoot, soon the enemy had become the Taliban, but they too were outsiders, or at least were morally—most people, especially women and children, did not want them to resume their oppressive rule. But the US soldier has never been bothered to distinguish one gook or raghead from another.

Now there are few Afghans who do not support the Taliban, because everyone wants the US and its allies out, and it is the Taliban who are determined enough to try to effect their eviction. Even Afghan soldiers are not interested in serving the putridly corrupt Hamid Karzai government, favored by the Americans. Why should it come as a shock that Afghan soldiers turn around and shoot the occupiers? These are the impatient ones. The patient ones are simply waiting until they get some autonomy, then they will get rid of the corrupt Karzai, and use their weapons to revert to home rule!

It’s simple enough—every enemy killed in a foreign country increases the number of enemies exponentially. In Afghanistan, the parents, the in-laws, the relatives of the dead, turn against the West. They may not take up arms and they may not join the Taliban, but they will certainly not oppose anybody who wants to kill the men who killed their loved ones.

Stephen Vizinczey

The military documents revealed by Wikileaks show what is obvious to everyone except a Yankee—Nato has been promoting Islamism by the day. Vizinczey argues that Bush would never have started the Aghan war without a deep faith in US invincibility. Faith, for a lunatic Christian, like Bush, and many more uncritical Americans is the appropriate word. They entertain the belief that “the good guy always wins”. Like the neoconservative belief that the truth is what you decide it to be, this is utterly self destructive. It requires the facts to be ignored in favor of hope and prayers—it conditions them to disregard all contrary evidence, just as Bush did over Saddam’s WMD.

The idiotic excuse for the war is the supposed necessity of defeating terrorists at source. Yet the terrorists who have been found in the UK have all been British Moslems, mainly of Pakistani descent. At home, terrorists can be tailed, their phones tapped, they can be seen on surveyance cameras, their language is our own. Were they to succeed, their success does not get them allies but angers the mass of the people. The truth is that we can fight terrorists here at home because the people are predominently on the side of legality, even the Moslems, reluctant though some are to accept that the Quran can be read in shocking ways by extremists.

In the UK only lunatics support bombing innocent people as long as we have effective democratic methods of protest available. The similar but more serious threat from the northern Irish nationalists, who felt they were justified in bombing because the political system of northern Ireland had been heavily weighted against them, did not cause anything like the panic in government circles as the present Islamist threat, despite being more destructive. In fact, in the streets, neither threat bothered many people at all. London had been blitzed by Hitler and had not yielded. A few IRA bombs was unlikely to cause a panic. The same remains true of the Islamic threat.

The real danger has always been that governments will suppress democratic rights in the so called war against terrorism to such an extent that Parliament and the police lose popular backing. Then either the government falls, or it becomes utterly oppressive. That is now a much greater danger than any threats from terrorists.

Voters Hear What they Want to Hear!

People interpret the same election message in different ways, according to their personal political views:

It is possible for two well informed groups of people faced with the same evidence to reach completely different conclusions about what should be done.

Martin McKee and David Stuckler, British Medical Journal

In an American study, three groups who described themselves as Democrats, Republicans or Independents were randomly given four versions of a news story about diabetes. The stories were the same apart from how they described the causes of diabetes—one said nothing while the other three alluded to individual lifestyle choices and social determinants such as economic status.

Democrats and Independents were likely to agree with the social determinants explanation but it had no effect on the Republicans. Democrats were more likely than the Republicans to support action to tackle diabetes, such as restrictions on junk food.

In a study on brain activity in Democrat and Republican research participants exposed to contradicting messages from both parties, those registered as Republicans identified the contradictions voiced by Democrat politicians, but saw little contradiction in statements by Republicans, and vice versa:

Politicians are often criticized for being all things to all people and for making promises that they then fail to keep. However the problem may be less what the politicians are actually saying but rather how their words are heard and interpreted.

Time for Obama to be Tough on Banksters not in Afghanistan

Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the US military nor the US government can afford to waste.

Andrew Bacevich, former US Colonel, Professor of history at Boston University

NY Times columnist, Bob Herbert, told Obama as soon as he began his new job over a year ago that “the US military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan”:

The troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional men and women—some to die, some to be horribly wounded—on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness.

He thought Obama may feel he had to demonstrate his toughness, and that Afghanistan was the place to do it. It seems that is just what Obama felt. The US is still in there with more troops than ever!

Obama could show his own courage as commander in chief by quitting this absurd war. Dwight D Eisenhower, a Republican president, was not ashamed to say, “I hate war”. Eisenhower described “its brutality, its futility, its stupidity”, and could say it in defiance of his redneck supporters, having lived and breathed a proper war for four long years (1941-1945) against a real army, Hitler’s German army of well equipped and battle hardened troops. In Afghanistan, Obama wants to prove his courage against a rag, tag and bobtail army of farmers and peasants, brave but ill-equipped with largely home made weapons, whose defenseless wives and children cower in mud huts being bombed and shot at by well equipped and battle hardened soldiers, who are our own!

And what is Obama achieving? He is driving angry men into Pakistan, a nuclear power, plainly destabilizing it and threatening to make it a failed state whose natural enemy rather than natural friend would be the US, and its spineless allies in the west.

No country poses a greater potential threat to US national security—today and for the foreseeable future—than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake.

Professor Colonel A Bacevich

It is absurd to attempt to restrict potential terrorists by occupying a large and mountainous country. It should not need the spending of countless tax dollars when we face far more dangerous crooks, robbers and terrorists at home sitting behind the desks of Goldmann Sachs executives, and those of other infallible banks. The banks have become a fetid hothouse of corruption, a haven of gangsters and weasels whose salute is the upturned palm. Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, our banks are shot through with corruption and graft. They are no longer offering a public service for which they want a fair return, but exist only for the enrichment of those who run them.

Are our soldiers putting lives on the line for the corruption of banksters, Like Richard Fuld, and political monsters like Richard Cheney?—described now as the two Dicks!

Let us kill two birds with one stone by putting the desk clerk crooks and slime bag politicians in uniform and sending them to Afghanistan. US prospects might not be so good in Afghanistan, but they will be much improved at home.

Dick Cheney Supports Waterboarding. Does God?

Paradigms Lost at True Slant reports that in an interview with the Republican ex-vice President, Dick Cheney answered in the style we have come to expect of him. He said he questioned whether “this guy” is taking the war on terror seriously. The Religious Right always know what God wants, so it seems unbelievable to hear words of frustration:

“At the same time that American is engaged in a global fight against terror, in which thousands of American lives are at stake, God seems more concerned with setting snowfall records along the Eastern seaboard. Personally, I long for the days of fire and brimstone.”

God is not doing enough to fight terror, and he longed for the Rapture, the days when God let His will be known.

“I was a big advocate of waterboarding. I was a big advocate of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

God is not supportive. Asked, “Didn’t Jesus say ‘love your enemies’? So torture in not at all Christian!”, Cheney replied:

“No one was tortured during the Bush Administration, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing it because it is absolutely essential in the war against terror.”

David Knowles at Paradigm Lost reports he repeatedly went after God. Mr Cheney approved of rescinding the military’s controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but said it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that his own daughter is a lesbian.

Asked whether the same logic held true for interrogating prisoners, seeing that the Bush administration overturned the Army field manual when it authorized the use of torture on enemy combatants, Mr Cheney’s reported reply was:

“Why don’t you ask God that question?”

Cheney has never got over no longer pulling God’s strings as he used to when he controlled Bush in the Whitehouse, a man who thought he was God. A former member of the Bush team said its like he wants God to fail, but it’s just Dick being Dick! Or was it a dick?

Paradigms Lost was unable to get God for a comment. Of course, they might be joking!

Republican Rambo Rednecks Don't Like the US to be Liked

Patricia Reaney of Reuters Life! reported that the United States is now the most admired country in the world, thanks to President Barack Obama, according to a new poll of 20,000 people in 20 rich and developing countries, asked to rate 50 nations in categories such as culture, governance, people, exports, tourism, landscape and education. The US rose dramatically from seventh place last year, after the eight G W Bush years, to go ahead of France, Germany, the UK, and Japan, the current top five nations in the Nation Brand Index (NBI). During the monstrous foreign policies of the Bush administration, the US declined in image globally, pleasing his Rambo supporters, but, despite the turmoil in world economics, its status has risen under Obama. Iran came in last at number 50.

The US right wing was not pleased. An apparently oxymoronic Republican website entitled American Thinker, seemingly a cover for a cabal of Zionists, responded:

Of course the world loves Obama. After all, he loves the world, right?… there might be some question about how much he loves the part that he lives in—but that’s beside the point. Once again, the USA is on top, kicking butt and taking names and… What the people of the world love about Obama is that… the US will be a good little world citizen and kow tow to the United Nations, that we will embrace our enemies and kick or friends in the teeth, and that he will subsume American interests in favor of the interests of other countries… The thug nations of the world are satisfied.

Readers’ comments to the article included:

Since when does any real American give a rat’s a$$ about what anyone else thinks about us?

If everybody is happy, you’re doing something wrong…

Of the 130+ nations fully 100+ are dictators or totalitarian regimes that hate democracies and especially the US.

Another reason they hate us is because most of those countries have dictators and dictators don’t allow their people to know the truth about America and her greatness. The people just believe what they are told. But if they had a taste of our Freedom they would no doubt overthrow their dictatorship governments and join us!

So a bunch of tyrants, thugs, dictators and totalitarian whack-jobs dearly love us now?

Well, there you are, the American Thinker! These are the pious Judeo-Christian supporters of Bush and Cheney thinking deeply. These are the people who are proud to display their utter ignorance and bigotry in public, then think the world was ungrateful to dislike them. They are the people who seem utterly unable to consider that most of the world’s dictators are actually supported by the USA. “They just believe what they are told” and “the thug nations of the world are satisfied” are hilariously oxymoronic… or are this simply hilariously moronic? Republican wing nuts like these like to kick ass, as they put it, but don’t like it when some little kid kicks the bully back. He’s a dictator then, little tyrant.

Obama has done a little, very little so far, to get sanity back into US foreign relations, but getting brains into US rednecks is a lot more difficult.

The Leaders of World Capitalism!

Exploiting “inferior” nations has been the main objects of US statecraft for a hundred years. It is not for trade that this policy has been adopted. One can trade more fairly with nations that are independent. Exploitation is the correct word to use, for the domination of foreign peoples is purely for US investment, and control of vital resources like oil. US diplomacy has been the servant of US business and finance. Bush and Cheney are the most obvious and least subtle example. These men should be impeached. Such men get their way by appealing to national prejudice and manipulating it as they like. Then citizens who otherwise would be outraged that the government is spending their tax dollars on overseas adventures suddenly get a patriotism overload and send their sons and daughters to their deaths so that rogues can fill their coffers with someone else's hard earned dollars. Taxpayers incur the military expenditure and the adventurers reap the benefit, sometimes even in suitcases of dollars handed over under the cover of war expenditure. Republican voters do not notice when the administration is Republican, only when it is Democratic, because they dance to the tune of an army of Republican cheerleaders in the press and local radio and TV. The evil and corruption US policies produce at home, the death and devastation they spread abroad, and the reaction of the desire for revenge among the inferior “gooks” and “rag heads” are the price which the world has to pay for its tolerance of the self-seeking liars and greedy crooks who lead world capitalism.