With views reminescent of Dickensian England, the Rich are back with a vengenance! You can't keep good billionaires and their intellectual lackeys down:
At the Atlantic Magazine's "Aspen Ideas Festival," the idle rich go to a ski resort town and pay the Atlantic Media Co. a great deal of money to listen to rich people with intellectual credentials of some kind talk at each other for a while. It may surprise you to learn that these wealthy elites think the biggest problem facing America today is that the wealthy elite have to pay taxes, while the poor and unemployed sit around collecting "Social Security" and "food stamps" and "unemployment benefits."
Salon, Rich people have solution to economic crisis: Make lazy poor get jobs
[Niall] Ferguson called for what he called "radical" measures. "I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness."
Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, Scenes From The Ideas Festival
Those damn incentives for idleness. We should ignore that there are 6 unemployed for every job opening. Let them eat cake if they have no bread.
Ferguson also "praised 'really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system'" and "unleash entrepreneurial innovation." Otherwise, Ferguson warned: "Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it." Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, Scenes From The Ideas Festival
Paul Ryan, of course, is the one who wants to privitize social security.
Neill Ferguson is a neo-imperialist historian who left the United Kingdom in favor of the new empire, the United States:
For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate "blemishes" that have been over-rated and over-stated.
"If it hadn't been the British, it might have been somebody worse," he says. "In any case, empires have been with us as a means of power and control for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on the British Empire." He adds, "I am fundamentally in favour of empire," and says the Americans should be our successors as imperial rulers of the world.
snip
"Thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa," he says mistily about growing up in Kenya. "Scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief ... It was a magical time."
Perhaps for him. Ferguson does not accompany this account of his childhood with even a passing mention of the fact that he was surrounded by the very recent survivors of gulags and torture centres built by his beloved Empire. Less than a decade before, the mass British theft of Kenyan land had prompted a backlash. Thousands of destitute Kenyans began to fight against the British. They responded by herding more than 300,000 Kenyans into gulags to be whipped, castrated and raped. Many had their eardrums burst with knives, others were doused in paraffin and burnt alive. The soldiers were told they could kill anyone they wanted "so long as he is black" - and they slew more than 50,000. Ah, such mischief.
Today, Ferguson poses as somebody who is simply providing a hard-headed balance sheet of Empire. Yes, there were "drawbacks", he admits - but we have to weigh them against the good things. The problem is that his calculations consistently underestimate or ignore the massive crimes of Empire, and grossly overstate the benefits.
snip
But whenever somebody argues that there are great swaths of humanity inherently incapable of self-rule who must be forever subject to imperial masters, it's an essential act of intellectual hygiene to condemn them. With uncharacteristic politeness, Ferguson does not tell us precisely who these people who must be always subject to colonial domination are. But I think we can assume that - like the servants and maids who waited on him as a child - they are black- and brown-skinned, bwana.
Johann Hari: There can be no defence for empire, 6/12/06
As the center/right New Republic says, "You don't have to be a Marxist to detect a certain class bias at work in the Atlantic Monthly's "Ideas Festival."
Digby also has a good take on this:
Alex Pareene reports that the aristocrats have decided that they've just about had enough of all this whining from the lower order
Digby, Don't Rain On Their Parade
Meanwhile, in other news, Republican "independent groups" plan to spend $200 million on 2010 elections
If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending -- roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.
It's class war and the rest of us have been losing for a long time. November 2010 is a battle we must win.