There are two Americas. In one, bankers get golden parachutes, insider traders return to society as well-paid consultants, and influence is for sale. In the other, opportunity is scarce and forgiveness scarcer, jail awaits those caught possessing recreational drugs, and cries for help are ignored. Society preaches forgiveness for the rich and retribution for the poor.
Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have “deepened” the gap between the rich and the rest of us and “stalled” upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be “a year of action” in the opposite direction.
Hate the super rich because their greed is ungodly. If true democracy is to be restored, then Americans need to be much more than dissatisfied. They need to get more emotional. They need to hate. Then they must convert that hatred into political demands and actions.The post Hate the Super Rich? appeared first on BSNEWS.
In Paine’s time, the enemy was a distant and easily identifiable king, but in ours, the enemy is within and mostly invisible. Our public officials are only the cabana boys and girls, or waiters, of this sick system, and they’re certainly not serving us. In fact, we can’t even press our noses against the glass to see who are dining within. Standing out back, we fight among ourselves for the discarded scraps and that, for now, is our only battle. We’re sad.The post American Crisis appeared first on BSNEWS.
There was a time before the NSA was able secretly to collect personal data about us all, all the time. There was a time when it was much harder for our governments to know what we were up to. There was a time when they struggled to control the flow of information.The post Before the NSA, this is how they spied on us appeared first on BSNEWS.
In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.
Instead of an ownership society, we are evolving into a society of mortgage debtors, corporate debtors and government debtors. And as far as the supposed savings (“financial ownership”) are concerned, John C. Bogle has observed that instead of the economy being dominated by individual investors , it is being financialized into “an intermediation society dominated by professional money managers and corporations.” This trend “has not been accompanied by the development of an ethical, regulatory and legal environment … The ownership society is over.
King wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.The post Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Solution to Poverty appeared first on BSNEWS.
That the funds the government already spends on antipoverty programs, if cashed out, would be more enough to raise everyone above the official poverty line.
The news that Switzerland will hold a referendum on a proposal to provide every citizen with an unconditional grant of 2,500 Swiss francs a month (about $2,800) has sparked renewed interest in the old idea of a universal basic income (UBI).
