Classism

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class – the rich class – that’s making war, and we’re winning.
- Warren Buffett (2006)

It’s been over two years since I wrote this Manifesto. The Occupy movement was in full swing; they had Wall Street occupied and America hypnotized. It hadn’t yet branched out into all areas of American life, as it has done since, in an attempt to rehumanize the way society, business, health-care, and pretty much everything else works.

Precaution. Stop shifting the baseline. Stop mucking around because you have no common sense but plenty of computer engineering ADD-ADHD or what have you, on that autism spectrum. What have you, stop enlisting these money changers and game changers to define community.

MEXICO CITY — Are we living in a time when ordinary people have forgotten their history, when all those who fail to remember the past will be condemned to relive its harsh reality?
I thought of this as two Canadian tourists marched with thousands along the Paseo de la Reforma last week to demonstrate opposition to the energy “reform” bill being debated by Mexican legislators. The new law would allow foreign oil giants into the country for the first time in 75 years.

In science, a theory is abandoned or substantially modified if it does not concur with the emerging facts, fails to predict important events, or is contradicted by experiments. That, alas, does not seem to apply to economic theories.
Free-market (neo-liberal) capitalism has been the dominant type of capitalism for the last three decades; it failed spectacularly to predict the 2008 global economic crash, the second largest economic crisis in history, after the great depression.

It seems we in the west no longer believe in ourselves, and our capacity to generate prosperity for all. Is this surprising given the dismal state of the European and American economies? In other words, since the 2008 financial crash people around the world but especially in Europe and America, don’t see the future as being any better for the next generation. There is a loss of trust in the system itself it seems. In this sense 2013 is the year Globalisation has gone bust.

Thanks to the East Bay Express and editor Jay Youngdahl for supporting Dissident Voice and allowing us to re-post his piece on the Bay Area. In fact, San Francisco is Seattle is Portland is Phoenix is, well, you get the picture, no?
We had it here, at DV — “Collective Stockholm Syndrome . . . “

Here it is, really – the bold-two/faced lie of the liberal class, the 19 percenters holding up their share of the pain for the rest of us. We make paltry livings and have zero benefits. We see the cuts to food assistance, see the massive funding of transfinancials through our hard-earned work. We see the dumbdowning of America, the dog-eat-dog reality of these rabid souls. You can name them in your nightmares, or see them on Charlie Rose.

As a preface here, as I have done many times as my role as writer for DV, I have to default to the local, as in, where you see fault lines and bright lines in a local situation, you can pretty much make the larger microcosmic statement about many things for a state, region, country, culture, what have you.
The School to Prison Pipeline has been written about many, many times, and my hat goes off to some of those writers:
The ACLU has it on its radar: ** 

Chris Hedges says that while people are disgusted with the centers of power, unless there is a constructive alternative, any eruption will be nihilistic and could be fascist.