Moyers interviews David Simon

[oddlots]

Fascinating interview with David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire. Simon was a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun before becoming a producer / writer. The amount of insight he imparts in this interview is really astounding. Gives an interesting institutional analysis into our problems that is backed up with years of - undoubtedly - depressing experience with the "unnecessary" citizens in a post-industrial economy. A good balance to our (my?) obsession with economics. Highly recommended.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/watch.html

[cjppjc]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

Fascinating interview with David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire. Simon was a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun before becoming a producer / writer. The amount of insight he imparts in this interview is really astounding. Gives an interesting institutional analysis into our problems that is backed up with years of - undoubtedly - depressing experience with the "unnecessary" citizens in a post-industrial economy. A good balance to our (my?) obsession with economics. Highly recommended.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/watch.html

They cover a lot in this interview. Simon is silent about Kurtis Schmoke. Mayor of Baltimore in the 90's. Schmoke often said the war on drugs was a battle that couldn't be won.

[Sapiens]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

Thanks for sharing. So hard to figure out the fundamental reason for all the decay, that being, the money system, usury...

[Diarmuid]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

Thanks for sharing. So hard to figure out the fundamental reason for all the decay, that being, the money system, usury...

Catherine Austin Fitts does a good job detailing this process on her site for those who may not have seen it - is quite a read time wise but very worth while imo

http://www.dunwalke.com/introduction.htm

Extract

With this in mind, I decided to write “Dillon Read & Co Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits” as a case study designed to help illuminate the deeper system. It details the story of two teams with two competing visions for America. The first was a vision shared by my old firm on Wall Street — Dillon Read — and the Clinton Administration with the full support of a bipartisan Congress. In this vision, America's aristocracy makes money by ensnaring our youth in a pincer movement of drugs and prisons and wins middle class support for these policies through a steady and growing stream of government funding and contracts for War on Drugs activities at federal, state and local levels. This consensus is made all the more powerful by the gush of growing debt and derivatives used to bubble the housing and mortgage markets, manipulate the stock and precious metals markets and finance trillions missing from the US government in the largest pump and dump in history — the pump and dump of the entire American economy. This is more than a process designed to wipe out the middle class. This is genocide — a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts.
This case study provides a detailed example of the financial kickback machinery that makes the process go. It works something like this. A group of executives and investors start a company. Rather than build a business the old fashioned way, company profits are pumped up with government legislation, contracts, regulation, financing, subsidies and/or enforcement. This dramatically increases the value of the company's financial equity. The company and its initial investors then sell their stock at a profit. Such profits replenish contributions made to the kind of politicians who can arrange such government benefits. Such profits also fund philanthropy to foundations and universities that have large endowments that invest along side the investors. These tax-exempt organizations provide graduates to staff positions in the game, intellectual justification to attract popular support and photo opportunities which bestow legitimacy and social stature. Personnel cycle through the management and boards of business, government and academia, as real productivity falls and government deficits grow.

[Spartacus]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

he doesn't mention Schmoke, but at the 7:20 minute mark he talks about how he tried to present the view as a reporter that the drug war wouldn't work.

And the paper's columnist in the same edition would write about how "we have to get tough on drugs"

They cover a lot in this interview. Simon is silent about Kurtis Schmoke. Mayor of Baltimore in the 90's. Schmoke often said the war on drugs was a battle that couldn't be won.

[cjppjc]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

he doesn't mention Schmoke, but at the 7:20 minute mark he talks about how he tried to present the view as a reporter that the drug war wouldn't work.

And the paper's columnist in the same edition would write about how "we have to get tough on drugs"

I mention Schmoke because he was way ahead of the curve on the issue. As Mayor of Baltimore, he spoke out against the drug war, and the way it impacted the inner cities. People called him crazy. No elected official, before or since has spoken about the issue like he did.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

The Wire was incredibly good television.

[halcyon]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/watch.html

Great interview, thanks! Haven't watched the series due to other commitments, but this certainly notches up my interest quite a bit.

[Sapiens]

Re: Moyers interviews David Simon

This quote by David Simon made me recall an article about the policy that Zbigniew Brzezinski was or is espousing about the future society and work:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04...anscript1.html

DAVID SIMON: "What am I doing here? What am I doing here?" You know, all the same problems that a guy coming out of addiction at 30, 35, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we-- our economy doesn't need them. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we're actually including them in the American ideal, but we're not. And they're not foolish. They get it.

Here is a quote from the article I recalled:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/02/280805.shtml

Globalization: The 20-80 Society

World Leaders Underway to Another Civilization

By H.P. Martin and H. Schuhmann

[This excerpt from "The Globalization Trap" (1997) by H.P. Martin and H. Schuhmann is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.systemfehler.de/global.htm.]

... The pragmatists in the Fairmont Hotel reduce the future to a pair of numbers and a term: "20 to 80" and "tittytainment".

20 percent of the working age population will be enough in the coming century to keep the world economy going. "More workers will not be needed", said magnate Washington SyCip. A fifth of all jobseekers will be enough to produce all the goods and perform all the top-flight services that the world society can afford. This 20 percent will actively participate in living, earning and consuming. One or two percent may be added, the discussants admit, perhaps wealthy heirs.

What about the others? Will 80 percent of those willing to work be without a job? "Certainly", says the US author Jeremy Rifkin, author of the book "The End of Work". "80 percent will have enormous problems." Sun manager Gage puts some more coal on the fire and appeals to his boss Scott McNealy: The question in the future will be "to have lunch or be lunch", to eat or be devoured.

As a result, the top-flight discussion circle on the "future of work" focuses on those who without work. According to their firm conviction, dozens of millions of people worldwide may feel nearer the pleasant everyday life in the San Francisco Bay area than the struggle for survival without a secure job. In the Fairmont, a new social order was sketched: rich countries without an appreciable middle class and without opposition.

The term "tittytainment" makes the rounds. This term was coined by the old war-horse Zbigniew Brzezinski. The native Pole, National Security advisor of US president Jimmy Carter, has been occupied with geo-strategic questions. "Tittytainment", Brzezinski explains, is a combination of "entertainment" and "tits", the American slang for bosoms. Brzezinski thinks more of the milk streaming from the breast of a nursing mother than of sex. The frustrated population of the world could be kept happy with as mixture of numbing entertainment and adequate food.

The managers soberly discuss the possible doses and reflect how the wealthy fifth can employ the superfluous remnant. Given the global competitive pressure, social engagement of businesses is unreasonable. Others must worry about the unemployed. The discussants expect creative meaning and integration from a wide field of voluntary community services, neighborhood assistance, sports activities or all kinds of associations. "These activities could be upgraded by a modest salary that would promote the self-esteem of millions of citizens", Professor Roy remarked. People will clean the streets for almost nothing or work as house servants in the industrial countries, the corporate leaders imagine. The industrial age with its mass prosperity was no more than a "blip in the history of the economy", future researcher John Naisbitt concludes.

The organizers of the three memorable days in the Fairmont imagined themselves underway to a new civilization. However the direction envisaged by the assembled experts from the executive floors and science leads directly back into the pre-modern age. The two-thirds society, feared by Europeans since the 1980s, no longer describes the future distribution of prosperity and social positions. The world model of the future follows the formula 20 to 80. The one-fifth society is brewing in which the excluded will be immobilized with "tittytainment". Is all this a vast exaggeration?

The fundamental point is that under this economic system of Usury only the criminal and ruthless thrive, while others decay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittytainment
Tittytainment is a term describing the propaganda designed to protect the capitalist and neo-liberal principles that govern globalization.

It is a form of censorship, propaganda and disinformation with the fundamental objective of minimizing, in the eyes of democratic countries populations, the toxic effects that the current globalization is starting to create on a big part of the world population, according to anti-globalization groups.

Etymology and explications

The word "tittytainment" was coined for the first time in 1995 by the neo-liberal ideologue Zbigniew Brzezinski, member of the trilateral commission and ex-national security adviser of United States President Jimmy Carter, during the conclusion of the first "State of the World Forum", which was hosted at the Fairmont Hotel in the city of San Francisco. The objective of this meeting was to determine the state of the world, suggest desirable objectives and principle activities to achieve them, and to establish global politics to match them. The attendees to this meeting (Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, etc.) arrived at the conclusion that a 20:80 society is inevitable. This means that the work provided by 20% of the world population would be sufficient to sustain the world economy, while the other 80% would be without work or opportunities, nourishing a growing frustration.

This is where Brzezinski's concept came into play. Brzezinski suggested that "tittytainment," a mix of physical and psychological methods, be used to control people's frustration and predictable protests. He then explained the term as being a portmanteau fused from tit and entertainment, alluding to the sleeping and lethargic effect that is produced when a baby is breastfed.