He walks on, doesnt look back | He pretends he cant hear her | Starts to whistle as he crosses the street | Seems embarrassed to be there
The exemption of property and the wealthy (through capital gains) from taxation places the tax burden squarely on the shoulders of a poor and middle-class base that feeds the greedy by foregoing its right to social security and health care. The need to subsidize the rich reduces these essential services to 'add ons', paid for privately by an increasingly impoverished populace.¹
And it's not only Joe Soap that keeps the likes of Senators Dodd and Frank fat, sleek, and silver-haired. Curtailed public spending promises infrastructural collapse. But why build new roads, bridges, and buildings when you can milk the average wage earner tolling existing infrastructure until it collapses? Should Obama's stimulus package pay off in infrastructure, the poor — rather than the rich benefiting from easier access to their dubious services, will pay for it.
Private jets don't come cheap and every source of income — from the real economy, must be exploited to profit those inflating the financial economy.
Nigel Rees's observation that "Democracy is too good to share with just anybody" holds good. A luxury previously affordable in Western countries founded on Third World sweat, it's now too expensive for those countries to maintain. Why? Because the kleptocrats made it so. As Hudson points out, developed European and Asian economies — financed by the real wealth of their citizenries and pandering to the 'needs' of the American consumer, have sunk themselves chasing an illusory financial wealth.
They have no counter but the most radical to American profligacy. The answers must come from within the belly of the beast.
I'll be forever grateful to The Happy Tutor for his noting the Berlin Wall's downing on December 9, 1989 signalled the demise of communism and democracy. The realization of Ronald Reagan's demand "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" erased the naive mythology attending both systems of command and control. Political systems mirror the economies of societies and, while increasingly exploited workers cosset memories of better times, the now authoritarian Western 'democracies' reflect the neoliberal financial wars being waged globally by the rich on the poor.
Hudson details, through their refusal to allow land to contribute its wealth to the common weal (as it has done for thousands of years), the ease with which today's self-serving New Mandarins have exempted themselves from the common law. Democracy and empire make uneasy bedfellows, especially in an age where industrial overlords' socially engineered wants clash with citizens' barely considered needs.
Scars remaining on the global psyche preclude incisive introspection and overt opposition to authoritarianism. Just as former East and West Germans still aver cultural differences and refer to "... the wall in the head", ordinary people pervert Kundera's observation of memory and forgetting to facilitate their increasing enslavement. They do so by wallowing in a nostalgia capable of obliterating — like The Wall, a brutal present and uncertain future. A gift to their new and unscrupulous overlords, their willing blindness serves only to increase the abridgement and, in many cases, abolition of their civil liberties.
They are the new public servants, their dumb indenture ensured for as long as they continue to remember themselves as private citizens flourishing in a system that once accommodated and distinguished between public and private sectors. Their unthinking obeisance is assured for as long as they do not entertain the common sense that it is the rich, rather than the poor, that should contribute excess wealth to the tax base.
They will continue to believe these things only because they are allowed to continue believing these things.
Sadly, we are all clerks now.
Even so, "mutual distrust about both sides' intentions has grown," says Lieberthal, 65, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
On a recent trip to Beijing, he says he discovered that many Chinese — officials and ordinary citizens — believe the U.S. purposely triggered a global financial crisis to thwart China’s growth. Likewise, many Americans assume a stronger China would marginalize the U.S.
"Each side hedges against what they fear the other might try to do," Lieberthal says.
Bloomberg | Obama to Borrow China’s Wealth, Clout in Effort to Steady World
I wonder why ...
¹ This entry, comprising ill-formed afterthoughts and equally ill-informed ruminations, flows from that posted yesterday. Should its subject be of any interest, follow yesterday's links to, in the main, Professor Michael Hudson's work.
Oh think twice, its another day for | You and me in paradise | Oh think twice, its just another day for you, | You and me in paradise
Cholera Grips Zimbabwe as Mugabe Alleges Coup Plot
She calls out to the man on the street | He can see shes been crying | Shes got blisters on the soles of her feet | Cant walk but shes trying
Oxfam agreed that there are likely to be thousands of unreported deaths.
"When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it's really just a recipe for disaster," a spokeswoman said.
Guardian | Thousands of 'unrecorded' cholera deaths in Zimbabwe
Unicef "... has warned 60,000 cholera cases could emerge in the coming weeks." It's about time the mainstream press latched on to this simple truth:
"Many more deaths are going unrecorded because hospitals and clinics are shut, health groups warned.Bob? Bob has other fish to fry. Having seen off Tsvangirai, Mbeki, and others who feel election results should be respected, he alleges Britain and the U.S. are planning his ouster. The BBC reports:
Itai Rusike, executive director of the Community Working Group, said: "Phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died."
The Zimbabwean presidential spokesman told the state-owned Herald newspaper that Western countries were planning to bring Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council by claiming the cholera epidemic and food shortages had incapacitated the country's government.Bob should look closer to home. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has called for "foreign intervention", either by way of an African Union (AU) force or a United Nations (UN) mission to rescue those dying of cholera, starvation, AIDS, etc.
"The British and the Americans are dead set on bringing Zimbabwe back to the UN Security Council," George Charamba was quoted as saying. "They are also dead set on ensuring that there is an invasion of Zimbabwe but without themselves carrying it out. In those circumstances, they will stop at nothing. We would not be surprised if they spring a 'mission' involving the UN," he added.
Africans are understandably loath to take this on. South Africa has probably the largest military in the region, but we don't have the logistical means or necessary defensive capacity to carry it out. A multinational force would need planning, training, time, and money. We don't have any of these things.
More important, perhaps, we have this outdated belief that unsanctioned forces invading foreign, sovereign states — no matter the cause, to be against international law.
It's a bugger. Meanwhile, thousands are dying and the cholera has crossed our border into Limpopo.
"Dead people are better off. They don't need water or sadza (maize porridge). They're just lying there nicely in their graves."
Independent | 'Dead people are better off'
Oh lord, is there nothing more anybody can do | Oh lord, there must be something you can say
Just Another Manic Tuesday
You can tell from the lines on her face | You can see that shes been there | Probably been moved on from every place | 'cos she didnt fit in there
The protest action left a wide swathe of violence across the city, as the early-morning sun shone through a blanket of smoke from out-of-control mountain fires above Gordon's Bay.
Independent | Commuters flee rampaging taxi drivers
The mountains are burning, i.e. aflame in 35-degree heat around the Peninsula and the sky's a tan pall of smoke. Several houses have gone in Gordon's Bay. Our firefighters, professional and voluntary, are saints.
A power outage in the CBD this morning heightened fears that a taxi and bus-driver protest at the Civic Centre, after city-bound motorists were stoned this morning, might turn ugly. A police helicopter clattered tight circles around the inner-city's hazy sky and blue-lighted police cars huddled around main intersections.
I've just received a report that cops are swarming all over our suburb. Turns out they've cordoned off a large area in the wake of a xenophobic attack by taxi drivers on a couple of Somali vendors. Lots of cops with automatic rifles and taxi drivers lying on the ground.
Out on the N2, the cops have just shot a taxi driver who fired on them after trying to push their vehicle off the road. They chased the minibus, shot the driver, and arrested the passengers. Figure it out ... the taxi must have been moving, its driver with a bullet in his head, his passengers wondering "WTF?".
On the other side of town, outside Masipumelele, there's an armed stand-off between taxi drivers and Metro cops ...
And now some guy's just phoned in to the radio station to report he's been hijacked ...
Ah fuck it; just another day in paradise ...²
"Over the weekend, in informal settlements we responded to about 27 incidents. There were three deaths that I know of," said the city's chief fire officer Ian Schnetler.
Independent | Heat wave fans fires ahead of tourism season
Oh think twice, its another day for | You and me in paradise | Oh think twice, its just another day for you, | You and me in paradise
Phil Collins | Another Day in Paradise
² It's been one of those days worthy of J.M. Coetzee, writing The Life and Times of Michael K, In the Heart of the Country, or Waiting for the Barbarians. In a good way, I must add ... it is, after all, Monday evening.
