Verrry interesting. The slow tap tap of her heels … in all that silence. Just devastating.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Judt, in The New York Review of Books: This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.

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Thom Hartman on Alternet CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it’s such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult—so impossible for mere mortals—that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it’s the sociopath part. Read the rest of this entry »

{ reblog, via kvasir } “If human vices such as greed or envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.”
Small is Beautiful — E.F. Schumacher, 1973: p.18

Worse than that, I would think the evidence is here before us: A society driven by greed and envy. (Marx, I keep tellin’ you, Marx, people. There must certainly be a better way than this. To distribute in such staggeringly wide array the end of discomfort and suffering—yet to do so upon the backs of other people? Hello?) Read the rest of this entry »

InterimTom: How to trust a journalistic culture that fails to question why corporations, which are essentially wealth accumulation mechanisms, are granted human status in the United States.

Well honey, see, they are part of the corporation. There is no free press. The media got bought, sold and traded like so many pork bellies, and not half as good a market. Read the rest of this entry »

Now I could have this all wrong—though offhand, I don’t recall that ever happening—but it sure looks like normal people will never again be able to afford a second home, a cabin in the woods, a pile of dirt, at Tahoe. The Rich have descended, that swarm of wealthy locusts, and the price for even a pile of dirt, well, dream on. The thing about being one of the Not-Rich is, you cannot imagine how far money goes, its vastness all out of proportion to human life. Which Karl Marx said, but no, you wouldn’t listen. And now you can drive around the lake, but don’t touch. None of it will ever be yours. Maybe a motel room in Manteca. Those’ll be the family memories.

Make no mistake, when The Rich buy up the land and homes where ordinary people used to live and play, they buy up great chunks of your experience. Your past and your potential future. They make your life smaller, more guarded, more fretful. And you pay taxes so they can! Is this a great country or what!

I think we all know capitalism sucks, in theory. But did you ever imagine that its truth would arrive on your doorstep, come into your house, sit down and change the channel this way?

Anyone, any single being among the Not-Rich who votes Republican ought to have his or her head extensively and professionally examined. It’s unfortunate that the political parties are divided quite so sharply, but there you are. You could drive up to Tahoe and directly hand the money to a Rich Person. Same thing, though I think they’d prefer the indirect route.

The valley I lived in for twenty years, in a county north of San Francisco, used to be so much further away. Folks there were safe to be as backwards and out of step as they liked. Which was, believe me, a much easier life. Chasing after style is a neverending source of exhaustion and bad mood. All in all, the Rich are a testy lot, which is why they put many pictures in the paper looking jolly.

In time, as life and driving speeded up, even country people wanted, as people will, more. And the Eighties gave it to them. If you went into the Eighties with a little money, any fool could come out with a whole huge lot. There were tax loopholes you could drive a Mercedes through. Fleets of Mercedes Benz. And then some wise-ass farmer tore out his prune orchard—okay, maybe there wasn’t a driving demand for prunes—and planted the first fateful vineyard.

Now there is a jet airport in that valley—for private jets—and I don’t know where all the families went who had farmed that land for generations. I don’t want to know—I left. The town square is four sides of boutique—christ, the town is boutique.

You have to buy stylish thing things.

You have to keep on buying them.

Those are the two main rules.

Though there are an awful lot of rules to being Rich, which is what makes it such a tiring life. But this one is central to the whole endeavor: We shall never think or speak of the family we displaced.

And really, why should they.

The sense of entitlement that comes with money … is a wonderment. Money begets the sense of entitlement to more money, pretty soon those with less begin to look like so many chickens, there for the plucking, the chickens of course come to think of themselves as a bunch of dumb clucks—I mean, look, if you can buy and sell me, I must be worth shit. As Marx so famously said.

Viva la revolucion? Not gonna happen. Better the dwindling middle class get down on its knees and pray the economy keeps trickling on down.