inside job - see it NOW while you can

[lektrode]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

....

My own view is this: the government is controlled by Wall Street, the big corporations, and the war machine. The politicians are merely front men for the real rulers.

to put it mildly... the terms BOUGHT OFF, LACKEYS, PUPPETS, STOOGES, SELF-AGGRANDIZING, IMMORAL, CORRUPT also come to mind

[tsetsefly]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

I guess I'm not clear on your point here. Clearly it was the government that bailed out the banks and played a key role in the looting of America. Are you agreeing with me here, or do you think I'm letting the government off the hook by also pointing the finger at Wall Street?

My own view is this: the government is controlled by Wall Street, the big corporations, and the war machine. The politicians are merely front men for the real rulers.

I agree with you, I was pointing out the general sentiment in the media and America(for the most part they let the government off the hook, by signaling out Wall Street). They continue to believe in their government.

My point is the government is always up for sale. Right now FIRE and the war machine dominate the pocketbooks of our elected leaders. When government is given more power they can more easily vote in favorable measures for a specific industry, as was done with FIRE. The solution can never be more power to government, it will only make it easier for them to game the system.

[Dave Stratman]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

[QUOTE=

lektrode;186668]

what do you think of this ?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...896954626.html

* OPINION
* JANUARY 11, 2011

In Budget Crises, an Opening for School Reform
School systems can put students first by making sure any layoffs account for teacher quality, not seniority.

By MICHELLE RHEElektrode--Thanks for posting this WSJ article. Rhee is a sophisticated spokesperson for the most destructive corporate-led education reforms that I was describing earlier.

StudentsFirst's efforts will center on three key areas:

• Treating teachers like professionals. Compensation, staffing decisions and professional development should be based on teachers' effectiveness, not on their seniority. That means urging states and districts to implement a strong performance pay system for the best teachers, while discontinuing tenure as job protection for ineffective teachers. This will ensure that the money spent on teacher salaries goes to the hard-working professionals who are improving student achievement every day.

The budget crisis inevitably requires layoffs of school staff. Teacher-layoff policies are a good example of how recognizing quality over seniority translates into responsible decision-making during difficult economic times. Currently, layoff decisions are based on seniority, which means the last person hired is the first person fired. However, research, such as a recent study by Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington, shows that when teacher layoffs are determined by seniority it hurts students and teachers.

Check out the logic here. "The budget crisis requires...layoffs." In other words, we gave all your money to the banks, so now teachers and students have to pay for it.

"Performance pay" is different language for "merit pay." Staff teamwork is an essential element of effective schools; students' needs cannot be met effectively unless teachers are encouraged to work together and have time to do it. Merit pay pits teachers against each other for the approval of teh principal. System-wide merit pay schemes, where teachers are rewarded according to the standardized test scores of their students, inevitably benefits the teachers in the wealthiest schools and penalizes teachers who teach students from poor families.

Ending tenure is another way of frightening teachers into passively accepting whatever crap the legislators push at them, no matter how destructive for their students. Why was teacher tenure instituted in the first place? Because without it every school becomes the personal fiefdom of the principal. These proposals are usually linked to giving the principal power to hire and fire his staff. It's a recipe for patronage and corruption. Suddenly the principal's brother-in-law becomes miraculously meritorious.

Empowering parents and families with real choices and real information. Parents, especially those who live in lower-income neighborhoods, have limited educational options for their children. StudentsFirst believes that states and school districts must remove the barriers that limit the number of available seats in high-quality schools. This includes allowing the best charter schools to grow and serve more students. It also means giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools. All children deserve the chance to get a great education; no family should be forced to send kids to a school they know is failing.

StudentsFirst also urges legislation to equip parents and communities with the tools they need to effectively organize and lead reform efforts when their public-school system fails them. California's "parent trigger" law, for example, forces the restructuring of a poor performing school when more than 50% of the parents whose children attend it sign a petition.

This item is intended to promote school privatization by expanding charter schools and giving poor families scholarships to private schools. What's wrong with these measures? Charter schools are funded with public money that is deducted from public school funds. One difference between charter and regular public schools is that charter schools can choose their students; for example, they don't serve disabled students, who are much more expensive to educate than most students, and they don't serve students with low test scores--since these schools want to look good. Charter schools are for the most part for-profit schools. Therefore they hire the least-experienced--and therefore cheapest--teachers and use them for a few years. These young teachers typically burn out quickly, since at the charter schools they have no union protection against the principal and, in most cases, do not make union scale and therefore do not make a living wage.

There is another insidious purpose behind this section. These proposals are designed to encourage parents to compete with each other rather than to work together; for example, private schools scholarships will available only to a certain percentage of parents who must compete to get their child into the private school.

These programs remind me of how forced busing worked--and still works--in Boston, where my children (and grandchildren) attended school. Busing was used--designed, in my opinion--to break up neighborhoods and the bonds that families form with teachers and with each other, centered around their neighborhood school. There are no real neighborhood schools in Boston anymore and haven't been since busing began in 1974-75. Parents are in a lottery each year; you list your first three choices and hope for the best. Our children attended six different schools in their K-12 years. It makes it very difficult to develop strong ties with a school, teaching staffs, and other parents, and destroys the power of neighborhoods. (The situation has improved somewhat in these past few years. Our five grandchildren were all together in the same school for two years, until the older ones moved on.)

Ensure accountability for every dollar and every child. Due to the financial downturn in the states, it is critically important to ensure that every dollar spent on public education has a positive impact on student learning. Unfortunately, billions of dollars today are wasted on things such as paying for advanced degrees for teachers that have no measurable impact on student achievement.

States will continue to find it difficult to solve budget deficits if they continue to ignore problems surrounding the current structure of their benefits and pensions for teachers and administrators. For example, states and districts must shift new employees from defined-benefit pension programs to portable, defined-contribution plans where employees can contribute a proportionate amount to their own retirement savings. This will help ensure that states aren't draining their budgets with pension payouts.

Sometimes only a shakeup in the school governance structure can bring about fiscal responsibility. After all, the buck has to stop somewhere—and knowing exactly who is responsible and accountable for spending and academic achievement has proven to show positive results. Mayoral control is one way to achieve this. We've seen success is places like Washington, D.C., and New York City, where funds are directed toward initiatives that improve achievement, and test scores and graduation rates have greatly increased.

Advanced degrees for teachers--e.g., every teacher in Mass. is required to earn a Master's Degree--were imposed by ed reform; now I suppose TPTB have changed their minds. Or maybe this language is designed to encourage hiring untrained people, as a way of cutting wages.

Rhee is proposing a raid on teachers' pensions. In the 1980s and '90s, the private sector succeeded in rescinding defined benefit pensions and replacing them with IRAs. Now TPTB want to do the same thing with public sector employees--because of the "banking crisis." Besides, Wall Street needs the money.

Mayoral control is a way of doing away with elected school boards and depriving big-city residents of any voice in how their schools are run.

[lektrode]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

I agree with you, I was pointing out the general sentiment in the media and America(for the most part they let the government off the hook, by signaling out Wall Street). They continue to believe in their government.

the question re: "their government" is: just _whos_ gov is it, anyway?
IT SURE AS HELL ISNT "ours" ANYMORE!

i think it simply outrageous how the lamestream media in this country has so thoroughly abrogated their 'responsibilty' to be OUR watchdog vs the gov - esp when their fave party is charge - i mean could you just imagine if the 'pubs had been running congress the past 2 years, the howls we would have heard from the media regarding the bailouts of the ny banks, the auto/municipal unions aka 'the stimulous' that didnt , never mind what the financial sector regulations "overhaul" did to screw us - again, the HYPOCRISY = BREATHTAKING

and THEN all we seem to hear about is how foxnews is 'polluting the airwaves' or 'misleading the public' by merely presenting diff/contrasting viewpoints on topics that cnn,abc,cbs,nbc gloss-over, if bring up at all, in their 30second soundbite presentations - essentially filler between the commercial breaks - when they arent giving the full spotlight to their own pet projects, now shining on guns, after droning on endlessly about dontask-dontell!

and dont even get me going about how all thru 2008 (leading up to the elections) the focus on the economy was ALL BAD NEWS ALL THE TIME - and then in 09?
"green shoots all over the place, things are lookin up, real estate has bottomed (with the $8000 giveaway)", with basically the same set of facts/figures that existed the prev year when it was all bushes fault, obviously now that "we have 'competency in the whitehouse' " everythings gonna be alright???

even orwell couldnt have done a better job in 'shifting reality'...

My point is the government is always up for sale. Right now FIRE and the war machine dominate the pocketbooks of our elected leaders. When government is given more power they can more easily vote in favorable measures for a specific industry, as was done with FIRE. The solution can never be more power to government, it will only make it easier for them to game the system.

why methinks that krugman is the quarterback in the scheme....

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

It has an ideology which is more akin to the "plan" that appears to animate an ant colony and yet cannot be located no matter how hard one looks.

Good stuff, Dave and oddlots.

I'd like to suggest that you (oddlots) have touched on the central point involving all these "conspiracy theories": what is the locus of the conspiring.

With the ant colony as with our human civilization, what happens is more than just the sum of the individual activities. Ants and humans form higher level structures, which take on a life of their own. Humans form families, gangs, villages, cities, states, nations, businesses, corporations, institutions, schools, universities, fan clubs, web forums, and various other self identifying groups. These groups take on a life of their own. Sometimes a group might last centuries or millenia. Sometimes a group might evolve to have a plan, an order, a purpose, an affect that no one individual particularly supports, or perhaps even understands very well. The boundaries of groups can be fuzzy; groups routinely overlap in membership (I'm an iTuliper, a Dad, a cat owner and a retired Linux kernel hacker); some groups impose stronger demands on members than others.

So far, I'm being rather boringly obvious. Let me fix that, with a more controversial claim.

Within each group, from the perspective of that group, what the group does usually makes sense, usually seems reasonable.

When someone, such as yourself oddlots, doubts a "conspiracy theory" as you've done, observing that it doesn't seem plausible that some "elite" group would set out to mess with the lives and well being of so many ordinary people, you're likely right -- from the perspective of the groups you might be in.

I would suggest that what Dave describes has indeed been happening, but that those insiders who bear the most responsibility for these events don't look at it that way. Those elites were doing their part, in accordance with the dynamics of the groups to which they belong, as best they could. From our perspective, it all rather sucked; from their perspective, it mostly seemed rather necessary, but for perhaps some unfortunate accidents.

A key step in unraveling this puzzle is to figure out who all "they" are. What groups are in play here, and what is the essential contract with destiny that each such group holds.

(To blame all this on "class warfare", between the rich and the poor, or between the owners and the renters, or whatever usually greatly oversimplifies the question of who "they" are, and who "we" are. Like life in an Amazon rain forest, the group structure of human civilization is a vast teeming complex of interacting and evolving diversity.)

[oddlots]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

Thanks for the encouragement PC. I'm not sure whether my post was central or whether I was making a distinction without a difference, but you've helped me to rethink it a bit.

My criticism of DS's use of "class war" and "rulers" really just boils down to this: I think it suggests an agency and a plan that is conscious and concrete in an unrealistic, cartoon way that discredits his otherwise excellent analysis.

His response was an excellent refutation of this with both a) some very concrete examples from his own experience (in the area of education policy) and b) a great citation of Buffet invoking class war, proof that the term does have a "folksy," common sense usage (Cue duck that walks and talks.)... as well as several other points.

At this point I'm wondering whether I had a point to make. If I do I think it's this: I think a term like "class warfare" only becomes useful and illuminating after the spell of the ideology that has dominated our thinking has been broken. Prior to that it becomes a hindrance to understanding because it is so freighted with discredited (?) associations and the spell remains in effect.

This may be a projection of my own way of learning onto others. It may be academic. Perhaps what people need is focussed anger. But there are plenty of common words that describe the problem - fraud, for instance - that don't carry the baggage and accurately describe the panorama of malfeasance and self-dealing. So why employ a term like "class warfare" at all?

Well I think you do need a somewhat structural view of the economy in order to "get" how and why things have gone the way they have, so it's not the abstraction of the term that's the problem. The "FIRE economy" term is a good example in my opinion. So what's wrong with "class warfare.?" I think you will arrive at effective class warfare when you look honestly at the self re-inforcing trends toward wealth concentration in the era of high finance that is presently in convulsions. I just doubt that the term can be usefully employed short of arriving at this point of analysis. In fact I think the effectiveness of Inside Job is that it avoids these kind of drawstring terms and shows rather than describes.

(That said, I think DS's point about the film's focus on the relatively minor bailout, leaving the panorama of the, in toto, much larger programs that support the banks at the expense of the economy - if all goes well (cough) - is a punch that lands hard.)

[lektrode]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

...in fact I think the effectiveness of Inside Job is that it avoids these kind of drawstring terms and shows rather than describes.

precisely - even tho the storyline behind the 'great meltdown' wasnt at all that clear to me while it was happening - in spite of (because of?) reading the wsj on a daily basis, it wasnt until i had EJ's perspective on it all that i realized just how pervasive the con/fraud had become (and the journal's complicity in it all, never mind the rest of the lamestream corporate media abject FAILURE to even portray it effectively)

.....? where was i.... (as you might guess, all this heavy thinking isnt my forte and i gotta get my longjohns on, as the stinkeye from the other side of the room is having its intended effect ;)

but what sent home the movie for me was, A: it wasnt a leftwing propaganda piece, as 'an inconvenient truth' and 'supersize me' were so blatantly - and it certainly didnt appear to favor one political mob(party) over the other (was quite pleasantly surprised that the dems were so highlighted, and central to the theme, when i fully expected it to be character assasination of the usual suspects on the right/pubs) - would say it was an 'equal opportunity' smackdown of the whole FIRE/financial-industrial complex - but other than all that, i'm getting to my point B: it PUT THE FACES AND THE TONGUES OF THE PERPS RIGHT ON THE CAMERA'S so we could watch them try to _squirm_ their way out of what is, in my not so humble opinion, THE CRIME OF THE MILLENIUM

and how these miserable bastards dont seem to think they did anything illegal???
(one of my brothers has a degree in economics, did time in M&A, quit the industry years ago, after he got chance to see it all up close/personal - because he thot they were the scum of the earth - and has been slooooooowly educating me about who the real enemies of The Public really are - i'm finally starting to agree with him)

but i still say its the political aristocracy that are/is the ultimate perps in the whole thing - and on this, INSIDE JOB, made it purrfectly clear to me

TERM LIMITS NOW

[lektrode]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

I agree. I just had a look at the comments on "naked capitalism." Incredible how they got immediately into this crazy argument about Tucson and gun control. That is the usual role played by the left: focus on the divisive BS and obscure what's really being done to us.

How's this for a crazy use of Tucson? In the Boston Globe this morning, Social Security offocials announced that they will no longer be sending representatives to meet with seniors in smaller Mass. communities--because of "security concerns" raised by the Tucson shooting.

uh huh - i figger it'll only be a matter of time before they pass laws that make it legal for them to carry, but not the rest of us (while the liberals in the judiciary/justice system allow the criminal class to run wild in the streets, since its "costing so much" to keep em 'on the inside' )

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

I think a term like "class warfare" only becomes useful and illuminating after the spell of the ideology that has dominated our thinking has been broken. Prior to that it becomes a hindrance to understanding because it is so freighted with discredited (?) associations and the spell remains in effect.

Yup. That often happens with popularized terms, they become a hindrance to understanding.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

TERM LIMITS NOW

Would not Term Limits just recycle the puppets, not the puppet masters?

[Dave Stratman]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

Good stuff, Dave and oddlots.

Thanks for the kind comments, Cow.

With the ant colony as with our human civilization, what happens is more than just the sum of the individual activities. Ants and humans form higher level structures, which take on a life of their own. Humans form families, gangs, villages, cities, states, nations, businesses, corporations, institutions, schools, universities, fan clubs, web forums, and various other self identifying groups. These groups take on a life of their own. Sometimes a group might last centuries or millenia. Sometimes a group might evolve to have a plan, an order, a purpose, an affect that no one individual particularly supports, or perhaps even understands very well. The boundaries of groups can be fuzzy; groups routinely overlap in membership (I'm an iTuliper, a Dad, a cat owner and a retired Linux kernel hacker); some groups impose stronger demands on members than others.

So far, I'm being rather boringly obvious. Let me fix that, with a more controversial claim.

Within each group, from the perspective of that group, what the group does usually makes sense, usually seems reasonable.

When someone, such as yourself oddlots, doubts a "conspiracy theory" as you've done, observing that it doesn't seem plausible that some "elite" group would set out to mess with the lives and well being of so many ordinary people, you're likely right -- from the perspective of the groups you might be in.

I would suggest that what Dave describes has indeed been happening, but that those insiders who bear the most responsibility for these events don't look at it that way. Those elites were doing their part, in accordance with the dynamics of the groups to which they belong, as best they could. From our perspective, it all rather sucked; from their perspective, it mostly seemed rather necessary, but for perhaps some unfortunate accidents.

This enumeration of various groups misses a fundamental question. What are the goals of the groups? Some of the groups named are simply attributes people might have in common--cat owners, dads, etc.--and are not organized into self-conscious entities with specific goals, such as corporations, the goal of which is to seek profit. Other groups (not mentioned above) consist of associated heads or representatives of individual entities; their purpose is to support and promote the goals of the individual entities.

The Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable are examples of this type of organization. They represent the common interests of their member corporations in various ways. They lobby and wage public campaigns against regulations which would contribute to their costs. They lobby and wage campaigns for corporations and the wealthy to shift the tax burden onto others. They work to undermine social programs and to insure that the cost of bank bail-outs, foreign wars, and other extravagances are borne not by corporate America but by ordinary people.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your language here, but you seem to be suggesting that members of such groups are unaware that their goals and interests are in conflict with working people's, or that they do not see the destructive developments of the last years as their responsibility. I think this is pretty clearly untrue. On the contrary, what most of us see as problems--unemployment, bank bailouts, jobs outsourced or automatized out of existence, rising inequality and lack of democracy in society--they see as solutions.

Corporations are well aware that it is in their interest to drive wages and labor costs down and they work very consciously inside the corporation and in unison with their trade associations and the government to achieve this goal. The measures that I've mentioned before, such as tax incentives for corporations to ship jobs overseas and to replace workers with machines; treaties like NAFTA which, among other things, flooded Mexico with cheap US corn, collapsing subsidy farming in that country and driving millions of immigrants North as a fresh pool of very cheap and easily intimidated labor, while it sucked millions of US jobs in auto and other industries South into the maquiladores; attacks on pensions; the War on Terror; these and numerous other measures, both corporate and governmental, were intentionally designed to make people feel frightened and vulnerable, so that they would accept lower wages, loss of benefits, and in other ways be more controllable and profitable.

A bit of very obvious evidence that these entities--the government and the corporate CEOs and the bankers and the warmakers--that is, the ruling class--know very well that their interests conflict with the public's is the extent of systematic lying they engage in. Where the heck are those WMDs that Saddam had? How the heck did those 19 A-rabs manage to get the US Air Force to stand down? We're in Afghanistan to find Osama, aren't we? We gave that money to the banks because, well, something really really bad would have happened if we hadn't. It could have cost us trillions! And that oil spill wasn't so bad. And unemployment is only 9% and there's no inflation....

These lies and more have all been articulated by the government and CEOs in the service of the ruling class, spread through their media, trumpeted by their politicians, repeated and taught in their schools and universities. There is not an institution in capitalist society--the Republican and the Democratic parties, the media, the churches and synagogues, the labor unions, the schools and universities--that is not dominated by the owner class and used to consolidate its power.

A key step in unraveling this puzzle is to figure out who all "they" are. What groups are in play here, and what is the essential contract with destiny that each such group holds.

It's not such a puzzle to figure out who "they" are. Whoever defined government as "the organized violence of the ruling class" wasn't far off. The laws and lawmakers, the police, the courts, the military are all instruments in the hands of those who hold power, as well as the media, the schools, etc.

But we can get more specific in describing the history of the past forty years. I've mentioned before that the last four decades have been marked by a counteroffensive by the rulers against the revolution of rising expectations that swept the globe in the late 1960s-early '70s. In September, 1972 the CEOs of the 200 largest corporations came together in Washington, DC to form an organization, the Business Rountable, to coordinate efforts to strike back against labor and popular unrest. (See Thomas Ferguson, The Knights of The Roundtable) (To coordinate international policies, David Rockefeller and others organized the Trilateral Commission, involving represntatives of the US, Western Europe, and Japan.)

Corporate and government leaders undertook a massive public relations effort to convince the public that the gains working people had made during the '60s were having a negative effect on the competitive position of the US. An oft-cited Business Week editorial proclaimed in 1974:

"It will be a bitter pill for people to swallow--the idea of having less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation or any other nation has done in modern history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept the new reality."

Corporate and government leaders pressed their counteroffensive on many fronts. Corporations went on the attack with sharply-intensified supervision and disciplinary practices, speed-up, and other measures. They began to spend millions on union-busting consulting firms. They began to "deindustrialize" America. Doug Fraser, then the president of the United Auto Workers union, said that business "has declared a new class war."

The big business counteroffensive continues to this day. The banking crisis of 2008-09 was but the latest strategy for imposing a "new normal" so that "big business can have more."

(To blame all this on "class warfare", between the rich and the poor, or between the owners and the renters, or whatever usually greatly oversimplifies the question of who "they" are, and who "we" are. Like life in an Amazon rain forest, the group structure of human civilization is a vast teeming complex of interacting and evolving diversity.)

"Class warfare" is between the owners and workers, not "the rich and the poor, or between the owners and the renters." These other categories you mention do not capture the dynamic at the heart of class war, which is that workers and owners have opposing roles in society, opposing interests and, in my view, opposing goals.

*Opposing roles: The workers produce, the capitalists profit.

*Opposing interests: To capitalists, workers' are a cost of production which capitalists seek to eliminate or reduce--by wage cuts, speed-up, automation, deskilling, outsourcing, union-busting, and other means.

*Opposing goals: At the heart of society there is a conflict over gaols and values. Working people in general value solidarity, equality, and rule from below. Capitalists and other elites value competition, inequality, and rule from above. The class war is about money to some extent, but it is about much more. It is a struggle over the direction of society and the goals and measure of human life. It is a struggle over what it means to be a human being.**

Why do the government and corporations lie to people so much? Because they are promoting policies which, if they told people the truth, the people would utterly reject.

Does the word "worker" fully describe a person? Of course not. He may be a Dad, a cat lover, a Linux guy, and a million other things. But the fact that he is a worker says something fundamental about his role in creating and sustaining the basis for human society. Does the word "owner" fully describe a person? No again, but it says a great deal about his role in society, and where he is likely to line up on some fundamental questions.

Class warfare is not a simplistic analysis. It is rather a framework that starts with an initial insight into the dynamic at the heart of society and then permits the analysis to evolve to include all the richness of life in society.

It's true, of course, that we are activley discouraged by our schools, the media, and by every other institution from thinking about "class" and certainly about "class war." After all, aren't we supposed to live a in a classless society? Aren't we all "middle class?" In the 1930s and '40s and '50s, most newspapers had their "Labor Page(s)." No more. There is tremendous pressure not to conceive of society in class terms. We're supposed to think of ourselves as Black women or Hispanic (Black) or Hispanic (white) or Pacific Islander or Asian or angry white male. Anything but seeing ourselves as part of the working class. Anything but seeing what we have in common. (I should mention that the blue collar workers, mainly autoworkers, I am friends with see the world in very sharp class terms and definitely think they are in a class war. So part of the question here is one of audience.)

The test of the adequacy of a theory or view of the world is two-fold:
1) how fully it explains the facts;
2) how successfully it enables us to act.

In my experience class analysis best explains the history of the past forty years (and before) and is also the approach that enables the broadest segment of the population (here and in the world) to act most effectively.

**I should mention here that I reject Marx's conception of class struggle. Marx thought that workers and capitalists were both motivated primarily by self-interest, but that their interests were in conflict. He did not see workers as an active humanizing force with goals fundamentally opposed to the goals and values of capitalism.

[Dave Stratman]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

uh huh - i figger it'll only be a matter of time before they pass laws that make it legal for them to carry, but not the rest of us (while the liberals in the judiciary/justice system allow the criminal class to run wild in the streets, since its "costing so much" to keep em 'on the inside' )

lektrode--I see no evidence that "the liberals in the judiciary/justice system" are letting criminals run wild in the streets. The US has the highest number of people in its jails and prisons of any society in the world. This to me is a national disgrace and is a good example of how ugly and dysfunctional our culture has become. Our own liberal Governor Deval Patrick has just called for more stringent parole regulations, thus guaranteeing a larger prison population.

Where I agree with you is in disagreeing with the liberal/left agenda: gun control, gay marriage, affirmative action, "identity politics," forced busing to achieve school desegregation, and all the other BS. The left sees working people as racist, sexist, and homophobic, and unworthy to have real power in society. The left is not revolutionary. It is not trying to change the world; it is trying to change people.

Here's a flyer on affirmative action that explains my position on that controversial subject:
Affirmative Action -- or Class Solidarity?" (http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/affirm.htm)

[mooncliff]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

To be released on DVD March 8.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Job-Mat...5384398&sr=8-1

[Dave Stratman]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

Cow--It occurred to me as I was out shoveling more @#$! snow: we both want to change the world and both are following our own routes to doing it. This really is what it comes down to: What approach will best enable us to create a more just and equal and sustainable world? That's why I think focusing on the dynamic of class war is crucial. It is richly explanatory and extraordinarily helpful when attempting to identify who are our friends and who are our enemies and to organize forces for change.

The Powers That Be want us to think of ourselves and other people not as workers or part of the worldwide class that creates and sustains society but merely as Consumers, that wretched word intended to make the working class disappear from our mental apparatus and replace it with a passive mass whose only function is to shop, eat, watch TV, and die.

This reminds me of a quote from Marx that I greatly admire: "The philosphers have only contemplated the world; the point, however, is to change it."

[oddlots]

Re: inside job - see it NOW while you can

Hey DS,

Very thought-provoking commentary. I've been thinking about it on and off all day.

Here are a few things I'd like to throw in the ring for consideration:

Are "workers" and "owners" interests really diametrically opposed in a world of pension-fund socialism? Ultimately in a world where CALPERS or the Ontario Teacher's Fund can fund massive investments is there not some overlap between owners' and workers' interests? After all investment is ultimately a conversation between generations. Investment is entirely necessary, but this quickly raises the issue of the distribution of returns that pits present workers against past retirees, quite apart from the perennial issue of workers versus owners. I think this cuts across class lines and yet is a permanent condition.

I don't mean to suggest either that workers rights as owner/investors/pension-holders are equally matched with the rights of capital. The more and more outrageous skew in incomes, especially as it relates to the rise of FIRE, make it plainly an unequal contest. But I do wonder whether it's a matter of degree rather than kind. I think Canada, for instance, has done relatively well because there is still some effective pushback against the interests of investors or owners, ensuring that there's a more equitable distribution of the fruits of both labour and capital. This has a lot to do with both higher unionisation rates and a belief that government power can effectively act as a needed counterweight against the interests of private capital.

In other words, I tend to view the present crisis not as a crisis of capitalism per se but as a crisis of finance capitalism, in other words, a crisis brought on by mindless de-regulation of banking twinned with globalisation and propelled forward by the corrupting influence of the dollar standard. I would agree that the results look very much like a "class war," indeed are a "class war," but I think this analysis is not in the end pointing to something that is a permanent condition a priori. I would vote with Henry George I suppose: if you can adjust for income inequality through progressive taxation, discourage rent-seeking activity by taxing away its benefits and still have all the benefits of an entrepreneurial, vibrant free-market economy then I'm all for capitalism.