"Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be. Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them. Without love deeds, even the greatest, count as nothing. Our Lord's love shines forth as much in the simplest of souls as it does in the most highly gifted, as long as there is no refusal of His grace." Thérèse Martin de Lisieux
Showing posts with label american psycho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label american psycho. Show all posts
“We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.
If you have not chosen the kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.”
William Law
"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The [first world] war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.
American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy. By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery."
Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."
Erich Fromm
Greed does not need— it wants. It is a sickness that consumes, and craves more. Until it consumes itself.
Visiting in-laws, extended family, and the newborn from the youngest goddaughter makes his debut.
"Financial predators are usually narcissistic and audacious criminals. They regularly have an extreme sense of entitlement coupled with high self-efficacy. Many of them have a charismatic quality and are preternaturally persuasive. Financial predators are commonly shameless and quite adept serial liars. They perceive themselves having near unlimited guile and resourcefulness to extricate themselves out of any compromising situations."
Russ Alan Prince, Forbes
"You've taken obvious joy in talking about how the agency will help banks a lot more than it will help consumers, and how upset it must make me. This isn't about me. This is about active duty military. It's about first responders and students and seniors and familiess— and millions of other people who need someone on their side when consumers get cheated. You are hurting real people to score cheap political points."
Elizabath Warren to Mike Mulvaney on the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
"You should thank God for bank bailouts— absolutely required to save your civilization. So I think when you have troubles like that you shouldn't be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger. You should thank God the government saved the big banks and their investors.
Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies. Suck it in and cope."
Charlie Munger
"Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by twenty well-documented traits and characteristics. The most visible are glib/superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self worth, a strong need for stimulation (that is, psychopaths are easily bored) and impulsivity.
However, there are others, which they successfully hide from view, in particular pathological lying, conning, manipulation, a lack of empathy, remorse and guilt. Over time, one might begin to see examples of irresponsibility, lack of realistic, long-term goals, and their failure to take responsibility for their own actions."
Paul Babiak, co-author with Robert Hare of Snakes In Suits
I know, let's pursue a system that lacks regulation, justice, and transparency, and relies on the 'good nature' of some of the greediest and most ruthless elements in its society to make most of the important decisions. And whoever can collect the most dirty money through whatever means gets to be in charge.
The sad truth is that old Charlie is just saying what the rest of his moneyed class and their enablers and courtiers have been thinking and saying to each other for quite a while. They are just not old and dodgy enough to blurt it out publicly.
We are living in a time of a general plague in human morals, and a sickness upon the American soul.
Stocks were choppy today, attempting to recover and find a footing among recent declines. They were not quite able to make it.
Indicators are flashing danger signals for an equity market that is likely mispricing the risks in the credit and consumer markeets.
Former IMF economist Olivier Blanchard addressed a meeting at the Boston Fed, and suggested that if there is another financial crisis and severe recession that the Fed should engage in 'unusual monetary policy' and intervene in the equity markets to buy stocks in order to artificially prop up their prices and further distort credit risk.
Well, he didn't say that last part. But that is what he is really saying, along with the understand that the Fed should provide a more direct subsidy to the wealthiest ten percent and their stock holdings.
And the Boston Fed Chair Mr. Rosengren said that things are just so good that the Fed should start considering 'restrictive' interest rates before something awful like wage inflation can take root.
Gold and silver declined just a bit, along with a weaker Dollar and a lower VIX Clearly, all is well.
A state of emergency has been declared in the Carolinas and Virginia on the approach of Hurricane Florence, which appears to be heading for a direct landfall while strengthening to a robust Category 4. And their are two other hurricanes following this one in their westwardly path across the Atlantic.
Rudy Giuliani is calling for the FBI to investigate the anonymous Op-Ed writer, saying that if they could leak something like this to the Times, then they might leak it to someone else like a foreign power. Sounds like the movie Minority Report, right?
If these jokers are so good at crime fighting that they can spot crimes before they occur, why don't they do something about the robo-call epidemic. It's a good thing that my home phone is on the government 'Do Not Call' list, because otherwise I might get more than the ten or so fake and fraudulent calls that come in each day. Luckily there is a service that my cable provider offers that pre-empts these fraud calls, and it works. But that's beside the real point, isn't it? Fraud protection and law enforcement is not a privilege, but a right that everyone pays for, but not everyone gets.
A visitor from China noted that our public infrastructure, in particularly the commuter rail systems, are remarkably underdeveloped and in poor condition. Perhaps we should create a Patreon page, and try to fund infrastructure development in the US in this way?
Yeah, but does China have a wall better than ours (as it is some day conceived to be)? Uh, oh yeah they have been there and done that. I've even climbed some restored portions of it. Quite impressive. Trump should make a note of it and its durability.
How about a major national infrastructure and public works program to stimulate well-paying jobs and general pubic productivity as FDR did with the highly success CCA and WPA programs? Oh yeah, I guess we have that, but its virtual or something still rattling around in the corporatist black box of the Beltway.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.
Psychopaths often come across as arrogant, shameless braggarts—self-assured, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They love to have power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs.
What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out.
The most debilitating characteristic of even the most well-behaved psychopath is the inability to form a workable team.
The majority of people and therefore workplaces are easy prey, because we still want to believe that people are inherently good. We don't really want to believe that such people exist...Wherever you find money, prestige and power you will find them.
We are far more likely to lose our life savings to an oily-tongued swindler than our lives to a steely-eyed killer.
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience
And this is why people must come together, to create a system of laws and transparency, of checks and balances, of objective oversight.
It is difficult to believe that we have to remind otherwise intelligent adults, who might be temporarily, but too often enthusiastically, blinded by some utopian ideology too often crafted by devious intents, that not everyone is good, law-abiding, and honest.
"What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish."
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a range in human behaviours. There may be a baseline, but not all are the same.
And this is why theories that assume that everyone has a basic world outlook that is the same like you, that all people have a natural desire to be friendly, helpful, and sharing falter out of either a good nature or from a good maximizing, selflessly reasoning behaviour, falter so badly when applied to the real world.
When a society fails to restrain the worst behaviours of those who prey on others through the abuse of power or money, their example brings out the worst in a much larger subset of the population. Bad behaviour breeds bad behaviour, and those who profit by it find ways to justify this through self-serving social and political theories. People who have this weakness in their character are naturally attracted to high profile positions of power. Psychopaths breed and nurture sociopaths, imitators who are able to extinguish their own empathy and remorse through ideology and excess.
What would you do to protect your children from people like this? Throughout history people have banded together in order to establish and maintain the rule of law against the tyranny of a few.
This is why romantic notions about markets and societies without law and transparent regulation are so harmful. They turn the power of the markets and the laws over to the least scrupulous and self-controlled in a society. This is why any social system without checks and balances, without transparency and restraints, will eventually deteriorate into a dysfunctional system of self-interest and looting.
People are not perfectly rational angels. It is hard to believe that one must say that to an adult audience, but ideology and conditioning can make people blind to their own faults. 'Men go mad in herds, but come back to their senses, one at a time.'
Society is generally based on consumption, production, and cooperation. A system that has become tainted by the sickness of the disordered mind and soul is based on debt, coercion and extraction, serving only money, power, and itself.
What then are we to do?
Do not spend your time trying to look into the minds and hearts of others at a distance, saying this one or that one is clearly disordered and evil, calling them out for it. Rather, look first into your own imperfectly human heart, and find the fear, selfishness, envy and greed within.
And with open eyes, having seen this inhuman behaviour for what it is, acknowledge it, bring it under your control, subdue it and extinguish it by having remorse for past wrongs, and a sincere desire to act up to your light, more fully and wholly human, in the future.
Put more simply in the words that echo down the long halls of history, see your sins, acknowledge them, repent and ask for forgiveness, ask for the strength to act up to your light, and then go and sin no more. For if the seeds of wickedness and inhuman behaviour are stilled within you, then the madness that roams the world like a roaring lion will not find a way to steal your humanity and your heart.
"A personality disorder characterized by grandiosity; an expectation that others will recognize one’s superiority; a lack of empathy, lack of truthfulness, and the tendency to degrade others."
"Narcissism becomes particularly malignant (i.e. malevolent, dangerous, harmful, incurable) when it goes beyond mere vanity and excessive self-focus. Malignant narcissists not only see themselves as superior to others but believe in their superiority to the degree that they view others as relatively worthless, expendable, and justifiably exploitable.
This type of narcissism is a defining characteristic of psychopathy/sociopathy and is rooted in an individual’s deficient capacity for empathy. It’s almost impossible for a person with such shallow feelings and such haughtiness to really care about others or to form a conscience with any of the qualities we typically associate with a humane attitude, which is why most researchers and thinkers on the topic of psychopathy think of psychopaths as individuals without a conscience altogether."
"There is nothing about the man that is service-oriented. He’s only serving himself.”
"Behind the ostensible Government sits enthroned an invisible Government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
Theodore Roosevelt, The Progressive Platform
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests...
Any individual who is able to raise enough money to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress."
Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, 1992
"Last year, pressed by progressive donors at a dinner party to act more like the progressive they thought he was, Obama responded sharply, 'Don’t you remember what happened to Dr. King?'”
"The TPP, along with the WTO and NAFTA, is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history. It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals.
These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws."
Ralph Nader
"Citizens in many countries wonder how certain government policies can persist in spite of widespread popular opposition or clear perceptions that they are harmful. This persistence is frequently attributed to a 'deep state.'
'The Establishment,' as it’s been called in the United States, where it evolved from the Washington-New York axis of national security officials and financial services executives. They are said to know what is 'best' for the country and to act accordingly, no matter who sits in the White House."
What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.
The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“They often make use of the fact that for many people the content of the message is less important than the way it is delivered.
A confident, aggressive delivery style - often larded with jargon, clichés, and flowery phrases - makes up for the lack of substance and sincerity in their interactions with others ... they are masters of impression management; their insight into the psyche of others combined with a superficial - but convincing - verbal fluency allows them to change their personas skillfully as it suits the situation and their game plan.
They are known for their ability to don many masks, change 'who they are' depending upon the person with whom they are interacting, and make themselves appear likable to their intended victim...
Psychopathic workers very often were identified as the source of departmental conflicts, in many cases, purposely setting people up in conflict with each other. “She tells some people one story, and then a totally different story to others...The most debilitating characteristic of even the most well-behaved psychopath is the inability to form a workable team.
Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits
Politicians do not get the attention that so many of them deserve in this documentary.
I think organizations, and even nations, can give themselves over to a kind of collective madness, and harden their hearts over time through fear and fashion.
One of the most concerning trends is the sanctification of violent, deceptive, selfish, and self-deluding behaviour in our society. We fear nothing but power, respect nothing but power, despise and abuse the weak in our bitterness, and believe that anything goes in the service of greed and power.
And the worst is that with all this endless war culture of selfish thieving, we fancy ourselves to be a paragon of history, the culmination of progress, and exceptional for our virtue. There is a downfall, and a tragedy, in the making.
"The Know-Nothing party was a U.S. political party that flourished in the 1850s. The Know-Nothing party was an outgrowth of the strong anti-immigrant and especially anti-Roman Catholic sentiment that started to manifest itself during the 1840s. A rising tide of immigrants, primarily Germans in the Midwest and Irish in the East, seemed to pose a threat to the economic and political security of native-born Protestant Americans.
In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city.
Members, when asked about their nativist organizations, were supposed to reply that they knew nothing, hence the name. As its membership and importance grew in the 1850s, the group slowly shed its clandestine character and took the official name American Party. As a national political entity, it called for restrictions on immigration, the exclusion of the foreign-born from voting or holding public office in the United States, and for a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship.
By 1852 the Know-Nothing party was achieving phenomenal growth. It did very well that year in state and local elections, and with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 it won additional adherents from the ranks of conservatives who could support neither the proslavery Democrats nor antislavery Republicans. When Congress assembled on Dec. 3, 1855, 43 representatives were avowed members of the Know-Nothing party.
That, however, was the peak of Know-Nothing power. At the American Party convention in Philadelphia the following year, the party split along sectional lines over the pro-slavery platform pushed through by Southern delegates."
"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.'
When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
The Know Nothing Party enjoyed a localized resurgence in the post Civil War period as the Ku Klux Klan, which held a deep prejudice against Black, Catholic, and Jewish Americans and 'foreigners'. It favored the use of violence and terror. The first Klan was a purely Southern phenomenon that died out around 1870.
The resurgence of the Klan was prompted by D. W. Griffith's glamorized portrayal of the Klan in 1915's Birth of a Nation. The 1920's was its period of greatest and most widespread power. It gradually declined in the Second World War.
"The second Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality as typified by divorce, adultery, defiance of prohibition, and criminal gangs In the news every day. Secondly, it was a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews with non-Protestant cultural values. [prejudice against Black Americans and foreigners is always assumed in these movements.]
By the mid 1920s the second Klan had a nationwide reach, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana. The Klan became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit, and Dayton in the Midwest; and Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis, and Houston in the South. In Michigan, close to half of the state's 80,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit."
The nativist movements are just another nearly forgotten chapter of American history that seem to recur whenever change and turmoil arises.
This is why nice, neat theories of perfectly rational economic behavior fall apart quickly in reality.
This is why regulation is necessary. Because there is a tendency in some people to break the rules, and to bend them over time to serve their disordered minds and appetites.
This is why there must be checks and balances on power. Especially when that power appeals to noble symbols as a cover for their excessive misdeeds and complex secrecy.
We have seen entire sections of corporate organizations bent to the will of persuasive psychopathy. And even when they fail, they will rise up to find a new place to obtain what they need, without shame or remorse, or even a genuine understanding of why they have failed, although they may get better at the execution of their schemes. They will blame everyone else for being unworthy of them.
And sometimes an entire culture can take on the character of the psychopath, especially under periods of intense or protracted stress, when they surrender their wills to the powerful wills of a few. And they will project their increasing deformity on to others, even as they descend steadily into the abyss.
They maintain an emotional detachment, a kind of moral high ground in their own minds, by rationalizing the consequences of their increasingly monstrous behavior and excess by pointing out the failings of others. 'I did not make them believe my lies. They believed because they are inferior. They did not stop me, so they deserved it. '
If they ever speak frankly about their view of things amongst their confidants, the normal person would be stunned by their distorted world view, often writing off large segments of the population as unworthy and disposable, for the most part because they impede their desires, although they will often ascribe it to some irreparable defect in these others, making them unworthy of life.
The high performing psychopath gravitates towards positions of power, saying or doing whatever it takes to get the ability to satisfy their own desires which are insatiable, because they are caught in the hell of being unable to love and feel genuine love in return. They are a black hole of desires and needs.
And psychopaths breed sociopaths, imitators who are able to extinguish their own empathy and remorse through ideology and excess including violence, sex, and drugs.
What would you do to protect your children from people like this? Throughout history people have banded together in order to establish and maintain the rule of law.
This is why romantic notions about markets without law and transparent regulation are so harmful. They turn the power of the markets over to the least scrupulous and self-controlled in a society. This is why any social system without checks and balances, without transparency and restraints, will eventually deteriorate into a dysfunctional system of self-interest and looting.
People are not perfectly rational angels. It is hard to believe that one must say that to an adult audience, but ideology and conditioning can make people blind.
"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not.
And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else."
Neil Barofsky
Do you see why there is no real reform now? Do you understand the hard choice that a person of honour and conscience is given? Who will make such an unfashionable choice when they have so few models to follow and almost no moral encouragement to find in this vile era of selfishness and greed?
Do you understand now why laws that are widely opposed by the people like the secret pre-approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership can be bullied through a Congress with an approval rating in the single digits, seemingly without a care?
And abroad
“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
John Adams
Do you see why suddenly a nation must be broken by fraud or by force and rebuilt, bent to the will of the powerful. Why its people can be devastated by harsh policies that make no sense, its sovereignty replaced by a puppet regime, while its assets are privatized and sold?
And if a person follows their conscience and sacrifices greatly for the truth, do you offer any comfort and encouragement, or even a thought or a prayer for them? Are you capable of even caring? Or is it all just another opportunity to make some quick money for yourself?
Would it be any different, if instead of placing bets on the sickness and misery of women and children, you simply murdered them, and took their possessions for yourselves, and sold their clothes, even their teeth and their hair?
It is a hard world after all. And you would become truly exceptional then.
This video below may help one to understand some of the seemingly obtuse demands from the Troika with regard to Greece.
The video is a bit dated, but the debt scheme it describes remains largely unchanged. The primary development has been the creation of an experiment called the European Union and the character of the targets. One might also look to the wars of 'preventative intervention' and 'colour revolutions' that raise up puppet regimes for examples of more contemporary economic spoliation.
From largely small and Third World countries, the candidates for debt peonage have become the smaller amongst the developed Western countries, the most vulnerable on the periphery.
And even the domestic populations of the monetary powers, the US, Germany, and the UK, are now feeling the sting of financialisation, debt imposition through crises, and austerity. What used to only take place in South America and Africa has now taken place in Jefferson County Alabama. Corrupt officials burden taxpayers with unsustainable amounts of debt for unproductive, grossly overpriced projects.
It would be wrong in these instances to blame the whole country, the whole government, or all corporations, except perhaps for sleepwalking, and sometimes willfully, towards the abyss. For the most part a relatively small band of scheming and devious fellows abuse and corrupt every form of government and organization and law in order to achieve their private ambitions, often using various forms of intimidation and reward. It is an old, old story.
And then there is the mass looting enabled by the most recent financial crisis and Bank bailouts. If the people will not take on the chains of debt willingly, you impose them indirectly, while giving the funds to your cronies who use them against the very people who are bearing the burdens, while lecturing them on moral values and thrift. It is an exceptionally diabolical con game.
The TPP and TTIP are integral initiatives in this effort of extending financial obligations, debt, and control. You might ask yourself why the House Republicans, who have fought the current President at every turn, blocking nominees and repeatedly staging mock votes to denounce a healthcare plan that originated in their own think tank and was first implemented by their own presidential candidate, are suddenly championing that President's highest profile legislation, and against the opposition of his own party? Where did that come from?
The next step, after Greece is subdued, will be to extend that model to other, larger countries. And to redouble the austerity at home under cover of the next financial crisis by eliminating cash as a safe haven, and to begin the steady stream of digital 'bailing-in.' They will not even have to ask, as if it mattered.
This is why these corporatists and statists hate gold and silver. And why it is at the focal point of a currency war. It provides a counterweight to their monetary power. It speaks unpleasant truths. It is a safe haven and alternative, along with other attempts to supplant the IMF and the World Bank, for the rest of the world.
So when you say, the Philippines deserved it, Iceland deserved it, Ireland deserved it, Africa deserves it, Jefferson County deserved it, Detroit deserved it, and now Greece deserves it, just keep in mind that some day soon they will be saying that you deserve it, because you stood by and did nothing.
When they are done with all the others, for whom do you think they come next? If you wish to see injustice stopped, if you wish to live up to the pledge of 'never again,' then you must stand for your fellows who are more vulnerable first.
The economic hitmen have honed their skills amongst the poor and relatively defenseless, and have been coming closer to home in search of new hunting grounds and fatter spoils. There is nothing 'new' or 'modern' about this. The only thing that changes are the names for it.
This is as old as Babylon, and evil as sin. It is the power of darkness of the world, and of spiritual wickedness in high places. The difference is that it is not happening in the past, or in a book, it is happening here and now.
"Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain. As a result, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which becomes the only rule."
Francis I, Laudato Si
You may also find some information about the contemporary applications of these methods in The IMF's 'Tough Choices' On Greece by Jamie Galbraith which I highly recommend.
"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
"It was the incarnation of blind insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs: it was The Great Butcher — it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh."
Upton Sinclair
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."
Erich Fromm
Surely you cannot be surprised by this headline.
Greed is incapable of having enough, by its very definition.
Wall Street Front Group Pleads for Government Help in New York Times OpEd
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
June 17, 2015
After the U.S. government pumped the secret, astronomical sum of more than $13 trillion into Wall Street during the years surrounding the 2008 financial crisis to bail it out of its own greedy and reckless gambles, Wall Street is shamelessly asking for more government handouts in the opinion pages of the New York Times. The woman pitching this pathetic poppycock, Kathryn S. Wylde, was actually on the Board of Directors at the New York Fed during the crisis – the very institution that sluiced the secret $13 trillion into Wall Street’s coffers.
If you live outside of New York City, you’ve never heard of the Partnership for New York City. Even if you live inside New York City, unless you’re part of the black tie cocktail circuit, you’ve still never heard of the group. So when the New York Times gave a chunk of its opinion pages on Monday to Wylde as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City to plead for government help for Wall Street, it really needed to do the ethical thing and fess up that this is a brazen front group for the financial services industry...
One sharp-eyed New Yorker caught this red flag in Wylde’s pitch in the New York Times when she was spinning how vital Wall Street is to the city’s economy. Wylde wrote:
“All told, the [financial services] industry accounts for 62 percent of private-sector wages in the city, and more than one-third of its $700 billion annual economic output. It contributes about $8 billion a year in city taxes — equivalent to the combined budgets of the city’s police, fire and sanitation departments — and one-quarter ($2.5 billion) of personal income taxes.”
A comment was posted by “David H” noting the following interesting math in the above:
“According to Ms. Wylde, the financial industry accounts for 62 percent of private-sector wages in the city, but only one quarter of personal income taxes. This strikes me as an empirical basis for a very different op-ed.”
Kelly Boling of Hudson, New York commented along the same lines:
“Let’s indeed invest in the infrastructure needed to keep New York globally competitive–and pay for it by requiring financial service executives to pay taxes on their incomes and capital gains at rates equal to the effective tax rates paid by New York’s middle class.”
...This shameless propaganda piece, in drag as an OpEd from some civic organization, was titled: “Yes, Wall Street Needs Help.” We certainly agree. But it’s more along the lines of psychiatric help for having the temerity to ask for a handout for its billionaires when the Coalition for the Homeless reports that the number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping in municipal shelters is 72 percent higher than a decade ago and has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression; when there are an estimated 1.3 million children and teens enrolled in public schools across the U.S. who are homeless – an 85 percent increase since the start of the Wall Street recession; and when Wall Street even gets tax perks to ghoulishly and secretly collect billions of dollars each year on the tragic deaths of workers...
Read the entire piece at Wall Street On Parade here.
Do not be surprised if there is another financial crisis, and the Banks come back again with a long list of demands, threatening chaos and despair if they are not swiftly granted all that they desire, either openly or secretively. Why wouldn't they?
Remember Jesse's Law.
Since money is power, the greater the concentration of money in a society, the greater will be the concentration of power. And therefore the less free and broadly productive it will be, and the more inclined that this power will be to narrowly private abuses.
Unregulated greed will rise to exceed and eventually overwhelm all rational expectations of theoretical market behavior because men are not angels. And further, there is a determined minority in any society that is given over to irrational behavior and pathological obsessions that delights in abusing reason and rules, even to their own eventual destruction.
Rational expectations, and therefore market and social forces and their models, will fail when undermined by the unbridled greed for money and power.
"I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d'etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government.
To be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own ends and unslakable will to power.
This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.
But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."
The article which I wrote was based on the insightful and largely ignored work by renowned economist Simon Johnson called The Quiet Coup.
This lecture by Stiglitz below is a little 'wonky' and uses some terminology which may be unfamiliar.
Nevertheless if you listen to it and just try to capture the main points of his discussion it will be worthwhile.
His basic premise is to ask why capitalism has shown a tendency to stagnation since 1980 in the United States and other parts of the West.
I am, as you know, an adherent to the belief that there has been a soft coup d'état in the US. One can always quibble about the exact dates, but that is of less importance. I have said it was shortly after Greenspan's 'irrational exuberance' speech, although the stage was certainly set for this during the 1980's with the rise of the efficient markets hypothesis, the assumption of rational wealth optimizers in the markets, and of course, the laughable supply side economics which are the old trickle down canard in drag.
The point, rather, is to understand what has happened, to continue to shine a light on it, and to hope that Simon Johnson is correct, that the overreach of the 'winners' will eventually provoke a reaction.
Quite frankly I had thought it would have come by now. One can rarely go wrong betting on the power of apathy and momentum, and the persistent greed of the sociopaths and their enablers.
They are instructed to hate anything that benefits the public without putting an abundant stream of income into the pockets of their corporate money masters. This explains their virulent animosity to Social Security, public transportation, public healthcare, public education, public infrastructure, consumer protections, environmental laws, safety regulations, product safety measures, and any sort of financial regulation that inhibits the greed and power of the Banks.
And we should be ashamed for continually standing quiet in the face of such pathological incivility.
But I can almost guarantee that if this crash had been the result of some sort of despicable act of terrorism for example, the public coffers would already be wide open, flowing with a Niagara of funds for homeland security and the militarization of domestic law enforcement. Millions for the corporatized state, but little or nothing for the people.
I am increasingly concerned that, as has happened so many times in the past, the status quo will greet this eventual reaction for reform, justice, and equality with repression and even draconian measures to maintain what they perceive as their rightful place and power.
Like apathy and momentum, it is also difficult to underestimate the self-delusion and overreach of sociopaths who would be as gods, even if they are gods of the damned.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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