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Chadds Ford. Photo by joanneleon. January, 2013
Aerosmith - Janie's Got A Gun
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News and Opinion
We read the whole thing last night. Well I read it to KBO from my Android as we drove the length of Delaware. You have to put aside the time to read the whole thing, imho. I appreciated the time that Taibbi put into this. However, I could not help but ask myself why he waited until after the election for this. There is no new information in here and it appears that most of the stuff came from Neil Barofsky and/or Barofsky's book. And even more than that, if you knew all this and felt this way, Matt, then why did you attack people who were having a hard time coughing up votes for the D column? Seems that it might have been better to just let things be? That was pretty strange. Well, now that the election is over, we can all go back to howling about the banks and bail outs and figure out what we can do to try to move that mountain.
Secret and Lies of the Bailout
In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.
Hard to excerpt but a thought provoking read.
Late Stage Capitalism And The Shame Haunted Life: You Can't Kill Trauma With A Gun
In an era of corporate-state colonization of both landscape and mental real estate, when the face of one's true oppressors is, more often than not, hidden from view, thus inflicting feelings of anxiety borne of powerlessness over the criteria of one's life and the course of one's fate, often, to retain a sense of control, people will tend to displace their anger and shame. Firearms provide the illusion of being able to locate and bead down on a given target. (How often does a person without wealth, power, and influence have any contact with -- or even a glimpse of -- the financial and political elite whose decisions dictate the, day by day, criteria of one's existence?)
[Emphasis added]
"People will tend to misplace their anger and shame". In a different sphere, in my opinion, misplaced anger and shame is at the root of a lot of the pie fights at dkos too.
The Truth Behind the Fiscal Cliff’s Reality TV Show
To appreciate how the kabuki theater works, consider three big outcomes of the fiscal cliff legislation that the attendant reality TV show never highlighted:
1. Bush defeats Clinton: President Clinton’s tax rates delivered big budget surpluses and one of history’s strongest rates of economic growth. By contrast, President Bush’s cuts to those tax rates birthed massive deficits and the slowest rate of economic growth in modern history. Yet, faced with the fiscal cliff’s choice between Clinton and Bush tax rates, both parties agreed to ratify almost all of the latter.
[...]
2. Nobody in Washington cares about deficits: During December’s “fiscal cliff” TV show, D.C.‘s reality stars told us that they were focused on reducing the budget deficit. But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the final bill will increase the budget deficit by $4 trillion.
3. Corporate welfare is sacrosanct: For all the effort to make wasteful spending the villain in the “fiscal cliff” TV show, Congress ultimately refused to touch that spending. Somehow, defense contractor largesse in the bloated Pentagon budget was off the table. Somehow, subsidies to corporate agribusiness were separated from the negotiations and then extended. Meanwhile, as the Roosevelt Institution’s Matt Stoller documented, the final “fiscal cliff” bill included taxpayer handouts for everything from NASCAR racetracks, to Hollywood studios, to a new Goldman Sachs headquarters.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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