Just What IS The G20, And Who Is Protesting It?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 28, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, June 28th, 2010Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel last weekend, the protesters mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. And is the G20 creating the new world order? Maybe.
 Whatever the G20 is up to, it gets their fans more excited than Detroit Tiger fans in 1984 |
If you don’t feel like you have a clear idea of what the Group of Twenty really is, you’re not alone. More than half the people randomly surveyed on the streets of New York recently had no idea either. Is it a luxury car? A high-powered handgun? A French supermarket chain? A group of avant-garde Belgian artists? While the answers to all those questions are “yes”, we’re talking about the G20 that met in Toronto over the weekend. And the answer to what that G20 is is a little more complicated. If you’re a little more on the paranoid side, you’re probably convinced that it’s the public face of the mysterious Bilderberg Group, and that it’s an evil cabal engineering the demise of the US Dollar and planning a global currency so that its members (essentially bankers and multibillionaires) can take control of the global economy, and thereby have secret control of all the nations of the world. And who knows; you may be right. In spite of the Group of Twenty’s wall-to-wall media coverage, we still mostly only hear about how much their meetings are being protested, not what they’re actually planning. I personally don’t get a warm tingly feeling about the organization; if you look at the member list, you’ll note that the US representatives are two of the geniuses – Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke – that spin back and forth through the revolving doors of Wall Street, the Treasury Department, and the Fed Bank, and can largely be given credit for getting the economy in the mess it’s in in the first place. Which should be reason enough to protest them. But seriously, what are the protesters protesting? Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel, they mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. But this piece on SocialistWorker.org probably sums it up with the least hyperbole I was able to find, and it boils down to this: the G20 is a handful of bankers and world leaders that no-one has asked to get together and decide that they know what’s best for over 6 billion people, and they haven’t shown in the past that they really have anyone’s interest in mind but their own. And who exactly are the protesters? Well, it’s hard to tell, because the Black Bloc strategies used by the more violent ones dominate media coverage, to the extent that the more “wingnut” sources perform in-depth shoe analyses to imply that the black bloc protesters are actually cops. But if you visit a site like TorontoMobilize.org, it appears the bulk of the protesters were Toronto-based organizations of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, the working class, queer and trans people, and disabled people, and that they just may have some legitimate complaints. Read the rest of this entry »
Collapsitarian Visions Of A Shiny New Apocalypse
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, June 21st, 2010The fact that our civilization is doomed doesn’t make me a pessimist.
There’s An Elephant In The Room
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010The GOP’s mascot is an excellent symbol for the dysfunctional oblivion of America these days.
There’s a big elephant in the room we call America, and it’s making me a little uneasy. Although I joked recently that a monkey would be the perfect mascot for the American voter, it had never struck me until today how appropriate the GOP’s mascot is if you can pause and view the nation as one big dysfunctional family. After one of the most self-righteous and elitist administrations of my lifetime gutted the economy and destabilized the world in general with their clearly ill-conceived agenda, we now have to listen to former Bush buttboys like Karl Rove implying that the BP spill in the gulf is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”, as if a man-made and Bush-enabled catastrophe can somehow be compared to a hurricane and a shockingly inept and profoundly unqualified FEMA director. And this is just the most recent glaring example of the self-deceit of a typical GOP supporter these days. Don’t get me wrong, I hardly define myself as a Democrat; what makes me even crazier is that this kind of self-delusion seems to cross all party lines when it comes to economics. Have you noticed that as huge segments of the global economy skid into the ditch, what mostly is going on is that people in general and the media in particular keep acting like somehow the trillions in imaginary money that the world is loaning itself is somehow going to materialize later in some magic fairy bank of the future? To me it feels like the global economy is a cartoon character that just skidded off a cliff and hasn’t fallen into the abyss because it hasn’t looked down yet.
Vampire Squids Causing American Brain Death Epidemic?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 5, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010Will the SEC’s investigation into Goldman Sachs finally help Americans pull their heads out of their asses and right some of the wrongs with the virulently corrupt banking and insurance industries? No.
Do you know what frightens me more than any terrorist ever could? The average American these days. They’re a scary bunch. Hostile, frustrated, and often either misled or just plain ignorant. And the scariest part? I think they actually mean well. I was reminded of this the other day as I took a train to Chicago. The passengers in the seats on both sides in front of me were pretty average married couples in their seventies. They had just met on the train, and as they started talking, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a strange queasiness. I usually tend to get along really well with most people of their generation, because I’m a bit of a cultural/moral Luddite myself; I think making money through the misfortune of others is bad, I think we should help each other out when needed, I have a practical level of materialism, and an old-fashioned work ethic. So what caused the queasiness I’m referring to? Well, the utter loss of hope for humanity any rational person might feel as a result of simply listening to their conversation. They started their dialog by agreeing how terrible it was that our president isn’t a US citizen. And then lamented that he had already destroyed the economy and the American way of life with his evil socialist agenda. I knew it would be an exercise in futility, so I didn’t bother asking them why the judicial system and congress and all of Washington was letting a known illegal alien run the country. I also didn’t ask them why, if the president was a socialist, he had so many bloodthirsty capitalists working at his side to prop up the biggest capitalist fraud in history and thereby Read the rest of this entry »
Wealth Care For All
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 22, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, March 22nd, 2010If America were one hundred people, one would have forty-two bucks while eighty others shared seven dollars.
Now that they seem to have that “health care for all” thing fixed, maybe America should get to work on WEALTH care for all. I mean, somebody besides the Billionaires For Wealth Care that is, whose motto is “if we’re not broke, don’t fix it”. Yeah, it’s nice that Ben Bernanke is all outraged now that the money has changed hands and he still has a job. But I bet he’s still against the idea of wealth redistribution otherwise, even though he was behind one of the most epic examples of it. But seriously, what is wrong with redistribution of wealth? And when did so many working stiffs start thinking it’s a horrible idea? Let’s ponder for a moment the concepts of “fairness” as it pertains to wealth distribution. If, because of our God-given right to explore our Darwinian right to survival of the fittest in our laissez-faire capitalist society, I guess it’s fair that if you can horde a few billion dollars for yourself, well, more power to ya. At the point where you have 6 or 7 houses and as many cars, as well as virtually no worries in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and FU luxury items, still we might say well, go ahead. You’re a selfish ass, but go ahead. But when you reach this level of surplus and the citizens of the country that got you there are literally starving, I think any reasonable person would say maybe it’s time for you to cut a few bucks loose simply out of human decency. I mean really, you can’t drive seven cars at once, can you? In my opinion, if by this point you haven’t decided on a little serious philanthropy, that’s still your choice. But in the interest of maintaining the “survival of the fittest, every man for himself” theories that you justify your behavior with, I think that’s when it becomes fair for the rest of us to kill you and eat you. Because science shows that money only makes you happy when you know that you have more than others, and you can’t see us anymore through your smoked-glass limo windows. And we just want you to be happy. So once we’ve wrecked your life and you’re unemployed (we weren’t really gonna eat you, you probably taste like crap) you can rediscover that giving even feels good when you’re jobless. On a serious note: you always hear statements like “one percent of Americans have ninety-nine percent of the wealth”, but no-one ever gets the infographic right. They always use plot lines and pie charts. We have a better example below, feel free to share it. Read the rest of this entry »