“Lay the scourge upon those in want for if not, they will only desire more.” — from the Complete Sayings of American Jesus, in the year of our Lord, MMXII, at age 31.
1. Alabama is one of the country’s poorest states, and it taxes its poor residents’ incomes the most. The state has a poverty rate of 17.4 percent, which is among the nation’s highest. It also has the fifth-lowest median household income. A family of four at the poverty line must pay $548 in income taxes. This amount has consistently increased since 1994. Additionally, Alabama has the second-lowest tax threshold in the country. A single-parent family of three making $9,800 — or 55 percent of the group’s poverty level of $17,922 — remains subject to income tax.
2. Illinois taxes families of four making 57 percent of the poverty level. This means that a family earning $13,100 a year must pay income tax. Due to state fiscal issues, Illinois raised its flat income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent in 2011. This caused income taxes for a family of four at the poverty line to increase by $322. However, the state plans to fully implement tax credits for low-income families by 2013, which “will almost completely offset the impact of the income tax increase for poor families,??? according to CBPP.
What swell people! They’ll implement a tax credit by next year, maybe!
Rounding out the ‘top 5’, Hawaii, Oregon and Georgia.
The whole purpose of Facebook is to supersede the world of the open web and replace it with a fenced place, immune to search and value, maximized for user churn to be presented as marketing data to clients. It really doesn’t matter what the user churn is. And to that end Facebook has made algorithms that virtually guarantee the suck, or excrement, is at the top, the middle and the bottom of your feed. All the time.
It does it through a combination of things. One of these is a ranking system that hides Facebook posts in your feed.
On Facebook, users gather ‘friends’ willy-nilly. For most, it’s counter-productive, although Facebook hides it rather cleverly. As you gather ‘friends’ you’ll invariably pick up those who view the social-networking system as a way to an audience. They’re not interested in interaction. They’re interested in you sharing their stuff and that stuff is always taken from somewhere else because it’s easier to scrape content than make it.
They’re better viewed as micro-blog spam ‘bots masquerading as people.
And they have firmly grasped the idea that the way to optimize this is to post as much as possible to their wall, which Facebook also adds to the conglomerated feed you see when you log on.
Providing content takes work and time. To make the most of the opportunity to stuff the Facebook feed, users quickly adopted that process which takes the least work but which offers the most ‘stuff’ and potential return in ‘likes’ for least effort per post. And that’s the picture meme.
You have also discovered that commenting in anything longer than one or two sentences has no value. As soon as you do, Facebook hides it and shows only “read more.”
Guess what? No one “reads more.” This revises TL — DNR, the net contraction for “too long — did not read” even further downward. On Facebook, one sentence is best, or a fragment, something like “TL — DNR.”
And try to be the last person in the discussion before it peters out. Because Facebook will hide everything above it, possibly more tendentious and thought-provoking, quickly and efficiently.
So you now have discovered that your custom feed is swamped by people publishing captioned-pictures and the same web articles from whatever their favorite political sites are as fast as they can. They are accompanied by exhortations to ‘share’ and ‘like’ because Facebook’s algorithms assign value to both.
In conjunction with the hiding feature it combines to disappear what many ‘friends’ in your list are actually doing. If you actually know them in the real world because they were the first ‘friends’ you acquired on Facebook, you may wonder why you never see anything from them,
And then be surprised they actually have been posting things of interest to you on their wall when you visit them directly.
That is because the promotion of the audience hounds and picture spammers by Facebook’s ranking scheme have erased them from your world.
When you muster the effort to finally start pruning your bloated ‘friends’ list you’ll seem them reappear.
Maybe you don’t want them to.
Because, in reading this, you recognize yourself as one of the daily feed stuffers, logging on just before or after work, letting your world know that you’ve digested the best of the web’s liberal or extremist writings. Along with the 100 other people doing the same thing as fast they can peddle it in your 200-plus size ‘friends’ list.
As you divest yourself of the panderers — and the numerous postings of the alleged gnomic sayings of old famous leaders made before the poster was born, the shared purloined and allegedly pointed bromides and putdowns plastered on the pix of current politicians, the thousands of photos of cozy animals cuddling, the friend you see twice a week for drinks, who you thought had stopped having anything to do with Facebook, is revealed as having never gone away.
In other words, if you have an expanding list of ‘friends’, unless you’re a celebrity and don’t need it anyway except as a sop to your minders and people in entertainment journalism, Facebook is playing you for a chump.
Most people can’t bear to hear this. It suggests to them they’ve enlisted in a culture and social network that is optimized to reward lickspittles and then, only very cheaply. Deep down they know having a couple hundred or more ‘friends’ on Facebook is worthless and that they’re being cheated of something. But they don’t know precisely how or why.
Last week Paul Krugman published a few charts showing the fundamental and long-standing problem with the US economy — while productivity soared the benefit went to the very top, the holders of capital. Nothing was shared with the working class. Pay stagnated for almost everyone except the titans of business.
Austerity economics forced big cuts and lay-offs and at the state and local levels across the country.
The next graph shows the national increase in “income security” spending since 2007 — money for unemployment compensation and food stamps, surging for the people put out of work.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran another damning piece on Apple.
Unsurprisingly, Apple — the wealthiest company in the country — is big corporate tax evader. The company’s defense, for most of the piece, seems to be that they’re not alone in this — which is true. Everyone Apple’s size is a tax cheat.
Apple’s hub is in Cupertino, CA. It has a subsidiary in Reno, NV, for the express purpose of legally cheating the state of California out of tax on its business.
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
Of particular interest is Apple’s use of Luxembourg, an insignificant small country in Europe in the Ardennes Forest whose primary industry is financial services enabling legalized tax cheating and money laundering.
To avoid paying tax on the sale of popular music through it’s iTunes store, Apple funnels much of the digital purchasing through Luxembourg.
For instance, one of Apple’s subsidiaries in Luxembourg, named iTunes S.à r.l., has just a few dozen employees, according to corporate documents filed in that nation and a current executive. The only indication of the subsidiary’s presence outside is a letterbox with a lopsided slip of paper reading “ITUNES SARL.???
Luxembourg has just half a million residents. But when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East — and potentially elsewhere — download a song, television show or app, the sale is recorded in this small country, according to current and former executives. In 2011, iTunes S.à r.l.’s revenue exceeded $1 billion, according to an Apple executive, representing roughly 20 percent of iTunes’s worldwide sales…
The country has promised to tax the payments collected by Apple and numerous other tech corporations at low rates if they route transactions through Luxembourg. Taxes that would have otherwise gone to the governments of Britain, France, the United States and dozens of other nations go to Luxembourg instead, at discounted rates.
It’s no secret I despise everything Apple. But the New York Times points out, repeatedly, how the company actively works to deprive the state, local and national governments of potential tax revenue.
California, Apple’s home state, has a severe budget crisis. It has led to firings and shortfalls across the entire state’s education system, from primary education to college.
The Times describes how tiny De Anza community college, the school which counted Apple founder Steve Wozniak as a student, is struggling:
A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a “death spiral” …
But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
“I just don’t understand it,??? he said in an interview. “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.
“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.???
The Times’ continuing series of investigative pieces on Apple have landed heavy blows. It is now fair to view Apple often as a gigantic, selfish and predatory business, doing everything it can to maximize earning and profit despite the toll it takes on everyone else.
From the exploitation of abhorrent labor practices and lack of environmental and labor law in China, to outsourcing and offshoring, to legalized tax-cheating, Apple — the company that produces the beautiful consumer electronic computing baubles everyone covets like life itself — does it all.
The primary excuse from the company, to repeat — everyone else is into gathering the most spoil immorally but legally, too.
In a response to the Times, one can read it at the newspaper’s piece, Apple points to the jobs it has created in the United States and the taxes its individual employees pay.
Part of this seems to rest on the idea that Apple’s app-based hardware has generated as many as half a million jobs in the US.
This meretricious meme, like everything from Apple, is a bit hard to take. It is akin to believing Jeff Bezos is a job creator because he came up with Mechanical Turk, the service that allows Americans, and everyone else, to bid on human intelligence jobs that pay pennies. Everyone, therefore, who uses Mechanical Turk, can be said to have some type of job, if they want it.
Or to believe that everyone with a channel on YouTube with AdWords/AdSense monetization, has a job created by Google.
In this way the information tech industry which has creatively destroyed jobs claims to be creating new opportunities, pathways to profound systemic un-success, fruitless work for the majority disenfranchised in the great contraction.
Half a million jobs created by Apps. Really? And what, pray tell, is the average salary and benefits package?
Finally, the serial aggravation of columns which interview small business owners, trying to always float the idea that American workers are truly worthless.
I present a series of them, the interviewees nasty and complaining pieces of work, for a variety of reasons shifting all blame to the downright laziness and unsuitability of average Americans.
And we offer a competitive wage: $8.50 to $9.50 an hour. The $8.50 is just the starting wage. After 90 days we increase it to $9.50 to $10 an hour.
But many people add up their constantly renewed unemployment, food stamps and housing assistance and realize that they can make as much not working, as working.
We could raise wages to $100 an hour, fill the positions and then go out of business, taking all our jobs with us.
The man’s all heart, telling CNN that now he only hires people who have worked for a temporary staffing agency for three months, first.
We hosted a job fair where we hired 40 people. Twenty-five showed up for training. Only two lasted more than a couple of weeks. People work for three months and get themselves fired so they can collect unemployment for another year.
We have learned to document everything we do with an employee. We’ve become sticklers for regulation. Finally, we hired an inside recruiter and created surveys designed to discover who is truly serious about working.
We’ve raised wages from $12 per hour to between $15 and $18 per hour plus commission, meaning a salesperson starts between $24,000 and $38,000.
Again, in SoCal, the starting pay puts you right on or below the poverty line.
And the guy who’s business only exists because of the war on terror.
His firm, AEGIS Finserve Corp., provides payroll services to government agencies.
The lament? Americans fail background checks and — more importantly — they don’t have security clearances.
It’s a pain getting someone a security clearance. Aegis wants them pre-installed, at government expense so to speak, by people already vetted by employment in endless war.
Since the Patriot Act was passed, the time frame to get a clearance went from 90 days to nine months. While we conduct in-house due diligence, the 32-page trust application is forwarded to government agencies, such as the FBI, NSA, etc., and costs the firm upwards of $25,000 per candidate.
If a criminal record, psychological issue, poor credit or other problem, comes up, a candidate could be disqualified. Aegis then eats the due diligence costs …
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conclude, we are more optimistic about getting qualified people. Former military applicants have held or can get security clearances. We find they make excellent representatives for our company.
From the Center of Economic and Policy Research on such arguments, the assertion that it has always been this way.
“[Unemployment] may run into the millions, but as the iron, steel, and metal-working industries improve, a scarcity of skilled workmen is developing, states the magazine Steel this week.”
This shows that technology might change rapidly, but economic reporting at the Washington Post doesn’t. Many of the stories it has written in the last two years about shortages of skilled workers in the midst of mass unemployment could have been plagiarized from this 1935 piece.
It is also striking that this piece, like much current economic reporting, relies exclusively on business sources. The article does not make any reference to any independent experts and of course, no one from a union or any workers’ organization.
A biographical sketch of Paul Ryan’s political career at New York magazine attributes the difficulty in dismissing him and his horrid ideas: He’s good-looking and passes off as hand-ringingly sincere.
Our Jimmy Stewart gone to Washington couldn’t possibly mean to hurt the poor and sick!
Ryan is specific about two policies: massive cuts to income-tax rates, and very large cuts to government programs that aid the poor and medically vulnerable. You could call all this a “deficit-reduction plan,??? but it would be more accurate to call it “a plan to cut tax rates and spending on the poor and sick.??? Aside from a handful of exasperated commentators, like Paul Krugman, nobody does.
[Ryan’s Ayn Rand] centered libertarian philosophy around a defense of capitalism in general and, in particular, a conception of politics as a class war pitting virtuous producers against parasites who illegitimately use the power of the state to seize their wealth.
“It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason,??? Ryan said in 2009. “It is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack, and it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on.??? Ryan’s philosophical opposition to a government that forces the “makers??? to subsidize the “takers???— plying the poor with such inducements as food stamps and health insurance for their children has sapped their desire to achieve, a problem Ryan proposes to solve by targeting them for the lion’s share of deficit reduction.
The idea was to gin up the rotten reputation and inspire tourism which has taken a hit because of the war on terror.
One of recent results has been the above video commercial bit, entitled “Anthem.” It’s explained here.
Naturally, you know I view it as crap. It’s high production value, no expense spared, simple-minded pandering using Rosanne Cash’s maudlin “Land of Dreams.” Just come to the glorious USA. Don’t think about the TSA, visas, proving you’re not a terrorist, and enduring customs for something high rent, blighted and really not quite worth the trouble.
However, last week my song, “The National Anthem” took an unexpected bump upward in views. Drilling down through the statistics I found viewers were fortuitously coming over from “Brand USA Anthem” because YouTube was displaying my tune to the side in its related videos list.
Ha ha!
By comparison, “The National Anthem” is catchy, funny and the truth. It rocks. In stark contrast to “Brand USA” it is not marinating in deluded bathos.
Now, it still doesn’t have the view count of the latter. But I didn’t have the advertising and promotional dollars to shove it like its corporate minders.
A recent New York Times story here shows how much muscle the US government and recruited high-power ad agencies are putting into the “Brand USA” campaign. This, to spur tourism, because it’s one of the only ways they can think of to hike employment — more minimum wage jobs as waiters and hospitality industry staff.
Go out to the “Brand USA: Anthem” video at YouTube and take a look at the comments. Doesn’t look like it’s working too well, now, does it?
Such transparently dishonest things deserve all the superciliousness, and more, that comes their way. They are perfect examples of Paul Fussell’s BAD — something phony, witless or vacant passed off as uplifting, genuine or in some way, worthy of praise just because.
It is another in a huge collection of fool’s gold-painted trinkets fresh from our culture of lickspittle.
Hit “The National Anthem” up a few ticks today. Feeling inspired? Post it somewhere, just so they can’t be rid of it dangling maddeningly in the related videos column. Post it in the comments.
What happens when you ask someone who has never established any credentials in the hard sciences — like biology or chemistry — about the future of bioterrorism?
PAUL SOLMAN: Or maybe creating problems, says Marc Goodman, if the bio-hacker is so inclined.
MARC GOODMAN: As it becomes democratized, I can go ahead and capture your DNA and come up with a particular attack that’s targeted against you specifically.
PAUL SOLMAN: And all you have to do is shake my hand or something to get some DNA.
MARC GOODMAN: And I would have to do is shake your hand, get the coke can that you throw away, get the pen that you signed something with.
PAUL SOLMAN: And then cook up the Paul Solman virus — one and done.
The man doesn’t know anything about real world bioterrorism.
Indeed, one oddly named Genome Compiler Corp, paradoxically seems to indicate he’s never actually been in a lab that would lend practical expertise to the matter. On the other hand, it does have a nice glitzy look one associates with glib snake-oil peddling.
Anyway, with futurism, this isn’t the point. What’s important is that you sound good to laymen.
And that’s easy work in these environs. Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, made a fortune on it decades ago. In fact, the bio-hacker making custom viruses for individuals was basically in one of his their books, War and Anti-War, published at least fifteen years ago (probably longer). Anyone who has read Wired, at least semi-regularly, for any length of time during its history of publication has also seen it many times.
Many can, and literally have, said viruses custom-made to kill you are
coming on the menu. And they’ll be puffing and squirting from the garage or basement because, if you read all the stuff at the PBS link, Petri dishes, DNA sequencing and making life has become so cheap. Evolution is so last decade.
It’s a story that gets repeated over and over, one that does well because it’s appealing and fun, just like tales about Bigfoot, magic, electromagnetic pulse guns and paranormal activity.
If you go out to the PBS link, you’ll see most of it is focused on the story-telling of Singularity University.
Singularity University is the work of Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant man who came up with optical character recognition and software for early synthesizers.
Kurzweil’s also about the clap-trap of the Singularity meme — that idea predicting achievement of God-like power through the the intersection of vast computing power and total control over biological systems.
For the rest of us, well let’s just say they’ll be no infinity-achieving computers, pet nanobots and popping of forever-pills. Sorry, only for the swells.
The Live Forever crew is now horribly common. With Kurzweil and others, it’s the fetish of gobbling vitamins and supplements daily, being frozen cryogenically, or becoming a cyborg. Custom viruses made from your handshake is very small beer. Indeed, how would they kill once you’ve attained computerized immortality?
If you momentarily click on the links, you’ll see custom Google lists of endlessly deadening articles about technological supremacy and the achievement of everything, all just around the corner.
However, if you read this blog regularly and actually like it, I’d imagine you’ve probably avoided it, just as one would steer clear of plates of singing maggots.
I guess it’s predictable that Paul Ryan (for foreign readers, the fellow pictured prominently in the above video) is now trying to say he was never an Ayn Rand fan. This because religious scholars have bricked him on passing off his austerity plans to cut foodstamps to the poor as informed by his Catholic faith. Rand was notorious for reviling religion.
And Ryan has made himself an equally notorious liar.
In the Catholic faith there are two types of sin: venal and mortal. Mortal sins queer your relationship with God. You have no chance to ascend into Heaven with one on your soul. You will go to Hell. But the sacraments of Confession and Penance allow you to take care of that, making your soul, once again, white as a new sheet.
Breaking any of the ten commandments is a mortal sin. However, lying is a bit more subtle in interpretation. Lying can be venal or mortal, depending on the gravity and depth of the truth intentionally deformed or misinterpreted by the lie.
Has Paul Ryan committed a mortal sin? Yeah, probably, since it’s such a big issue reaching into every corner of American society.
However, the news archive of the Internet won’t let him get away with it — except in GOP circles. Evidence of any kind makes no difference there, ever.
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict – individualism versus collectivism.”
In that struggle, Ryan argued that shifting Social Security (which he called a “collectivist system”) toward personal investment accounts was not only good policy, but would change the political landscape, according to a recording of the event made by its host, The Atlas Society.
“If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society. That’s that many more people in America who are not going to listen to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues,” said Ryan.
Sadly though, the contest was not meant to be. Not only were Apple marketing gurus against the promotion, but California state law prohibits contests that require a purchase to enter.
Yeah, in this case too bad lots of people buy iKit in California, sadly including the DD band’s fine drummer.
One suspects Cult of iKit fans would have lined up to the moon for an expensive ticket, made in China, and a chance to be tortured by Steve Jobs channeling Willy Wonka.
You doubt it? Just look at those meat blobs. They’re born for it, the kind who’d eat a bag of rabbit turds that cost ten dollars if Apple’s name was on it.
Civilization and society rests on morals, morals rest on religion, religion rests on the Bible and faith in God and in Jesus Christ. The Bible doesn’t condemn any man because of his wealth! The Bible says any man who don’t provide for his family is worse than an infidel. According to our standard of gold and silver, Abraham was worth a billion and a half dollars, David was worth three billion, Solomon was worth five billion! Solomon could have carried Andrew Carnegie for a butler … and John D. looked to black his boots! America needs to be taken down to God’s bath house and the hose turned on her. The time isn’t far distant when the wheels of God’s judgment are going to go scraping through this old God-hating world! — evangelist Billy Sunday, 1929
1929 was the year of the great market crash and the start of the Great Depression. Billy Sunday had been the country’s first major traveling evangelist. Popular in the midwest — he was a staunch Republican — his influence had waned by then. In another six years he was dead.
Using religiosity to justify rewarding the wealthy — investments equal virtue, and clobbering the poor — lack of money equaling degeneration, is a common theme in the United States.
But for Paul Ryan it earns condemnation, today from scholars just as he’s planning to visit their school.
Faculty members and priests at Georgetown said they could not condone a spending plan they warned would hurt society’s most vulnerable.
The House budget chairman is due to deliver a keynote lecture at the Jesuit college on Thursday morning …
“We would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few,” said the letter by 90 faculty members and priests to the Wisconsin representative.
The letter adds: “In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The scholars do not add that it is also decidedly peculiar to pass off the beliefs of Ayn Rand, who was — bluntly — a God-hating atheist, as having something to do with Catholic faith.
Update: ThinkProgress reports that now that Paul Ryan has been blasted for idiotically trying to pass off the philosophies of Ayn Rand as faith-based policy making, he’s repudiated his former inspiration. It’s become too inconvenient for even the most stupid to overlook, apparently.
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,??? Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged??? and “The Fountainhead.???
Ryan also noted in a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.???
But today, Ryan is singing a far different tune.
From an interview with National Review’s Bob Costa this week:
“I reject her philosophy,??? Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,??? who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,??? he says.
It’s understandable why Ryan would back off his former political muse. She described altruism as “evil,??? condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor …
… whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: “The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry: the clothing you shut away, to the naked: and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.”
It’s also not news that a strong Tea Party/GOP belief is it was the undeserving poor who caused economic calamity. They got those subprime loans they should not have — liar loans — and this is what caused the investment banks to fail. It is another variation on scapegoating one of many enemies within, the parasitic poor dragging everyone down, common through history.
A quick news bit on CNN from a couple years ago shows who twisted up they got over it. What to preach? The flock might stop tithing.
Too many pastors opt for offering pulpit platitudes because they are afraid parishioners will stop giving money if they hear teachings against greed, said the Rev. Robin R. Meyers, senior minister of Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City.
“Money is the last taboo in church. It’s much easier to talk about sex than money,??? said Meyers, who wrote about greed and the other seven deadly sins in his book, “The Virtue in the Vice.???
The anxiety from the pews has become so palpable for some pastors, though, that they now feel like they have no choice.
Andy Stanley, a prominent evangelical leader, said some in his congregation cheered when he launched a preaching series called “Recovery Road??? to talk about politically touchy issues such as personal greed, the federal deficit and the sins of subprime loans.
Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. — Alan Greenspan, on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, 1957
DD band drummer Mark and your host watched Atlas Shrugged, Part 1, the partial adaption of the book, last night.
It was a box office bomb, failure attributed to a vast conspiracy in the liberal media.
It’s a legitimately bad movie though it is not sufficiently horrendous to have campy fun viewing.
All the characters are unlikeable and wooden, their unpleasantness and lack of redeeming qualities varying only by degrees.
The good people, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are only marginally hard to watch. Their love scene, near the end, made me squirm, even though it doesn’t last long. Scientists, people from the US government, the uncaring wife, are worse. They’re either loathsome in action and words or physically ugly in some odd way, as in Hank Rearden’s wife’s unfortunate red hair. (You have to see it, used to underline her character as harridan.)
The State Science Institute in Shrugged is unintentionally hilarious, but only briefly, showing — as it does, the Republican/libertarian antipathy toward “experts,” a word hurled like a curse.
As a paranoid nervous tic, it permeates the script. Experts are always subverting the businessman, government scientists conspiring to condemn Rearden’s railroad steel, just like they promote the hoax of global warming, one supposes.
America’s business talent is mysteriously disappearing, leaving factories empty. A ridiculous machine the size of a loaf of bread which makes electricity from air is abandoned. If the viewer isn’t familiar with the novel, and my friend Mark wasn’t, they’re adrift.
The movie’s failure, aside from a general lassitude, is in adroitly showing what’s actually transpiring. If you’re not in the Atlas Shrugged fan crowd, the story is not rendered clearly.
John Galt, seen in a hat the shadows his face, is going from town to town, usually on rainy nights, to have a talk with America’s industrialist brains and talent. He convinces them to leave rotten America, away from the parasites, for a better place where they will be appreciated although it’s not at all clear this is what’s going on to the uninitiated.
The movie ends with an industrialist’s voice, a man who has set his shale oil and natural gas field on fire before vanishing, declaring he has gone “on strike.”
Too bad this hasn’t yet occurred to the heads of all the firms in the fracking industry.
What is happening to most citizens in a country? When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefited tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working …
We are facing a very difficult transition from manufacturing to a service economy. We have failed to manage that transition smoothly. If we don’t correct that mistake, we will pay a very high price. Already, the average American is suffering from the failed transition. My concern is that we have set in motion an adverse economics and an adverse politics. A lot of American inequality is caused by rent-seeking: Monopolies, military spending, procurement, extractive industries, drugs. We have some economic sectors that are very good, but we also have a lot of parasites. The hopeful view is that the economy can grow if we rid ourselves of the parasites and focus on the productive sectors. But in any disease there is always the risk that the parasites will devour the healthy body parts. The jury is still out on that …
It will require a strong third party or civil society to do something about this.
It is unusual but welcome to see the word “parasites” used in association with “monopolies,” “military spending,” and “extractive industries,” the latter which includes Wall Street.
Very fundamentally, Stiglitz is telling the interviewer that America can’t be a decent country, in any sense, where the majority is left to exploit or rot for spoil and the sole benefit of those at the very top. Plus, the the evil-doers may win.
