Eric Peters

Strong passions have to be released somehow. Else, they might erupt in unpredictable ways. The state understands this – and desires that strong passions be released in a harmless way – to the state that is.

Enter the modern, near universal obsession – in particular, the male obsession – with football and organized, mass spectacle sports generally. These things are the actualization of the fictional Two Minutes’ Hate in Orwell’s 1984.

A means by which the passions – the frustrations and anger of men in particular – are diverted and dissipated. In order that they aren’t directed at anything actually important – such as the ever-increasing control exercised over men by the state. The stifling of independent action, the punishment of deviation from any official orthodoxy… and most of all, the relentless suppression of independent judgment and self-reliance. The systematic thwarting, simply put – of a normal man’s inclination to be a man.

The average man has virtually no real control over his life in modern America. He must Submit and Obey at every turn, from the moment he awakes to the moment he lays his head down on the pillow at night. He must never raise his voice, at work or in public. He must avoid confrontation at all costs. (This lesson, in particular, is really being hammered home to today’s boys – who are told in no uncertain terms by the authorities that they cannot even defend themselves when attacked by a bully. And the boys’ fathers are told they must teach them to accept this.)

He stews in silent, impotent fury as a cop half his age lectures him about “buckling up for safety” in front of his kids. Or as he submits to having his wife and kids get fondled by useless-eater (and probably pedophilic) blue-shirted poltroons at the airport. He must put up with being told what to do – and even worse, what not to do – by smarmy little busybodies, stretchpants-wearing females. From the Parent-Teacher Association to the Department of Motor Vehicles to the Home Owners Association, he is hectored and hemmed in at every turn.

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Ellen Brown

Interest charges are a strongly regressive tax that the poor pay to the rich. A public banking system could realize savings up to 40 percent - allowing taxes to be cut, services increased and market stability created - with banks feeding the economy rather than feeding off it.

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water to, 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany.

Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of U.S. business profits in 2006. That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.

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Barry Grey

A Progressive Surge - The “rising American electorate”
carried Obama and a strong slate of Democrats to victory.
(According to "The Editors" at The Nation magazine)

The Nation’s promotion of such political filth is of a piece with its support for a right-wing government, a party and political system dominated by a financial oligarchy, and the criminal policies they carry out against working people both within the United States and internationally.

The response of the Nation magazine to the reelection of Barack Obama underscores the deeply reactionary role of the “left” liberals for whom the publication speaks, and the politically diseased character of their obsession with racial and identity politics.

The tone was set in the magazine’s postelection editorial, posted on its web site November 7, entitled “A Progressive Surge.” The editorial makes the preposterous argument that the narrow election victory for Obama, whose right-wing policies resulted in a net loss of more than 7 million votes from his total in 2008, represented a triumph of progressive forces over the forces of reaction.

Of an election in which popular disillusionment with the political system and both major parties resulted in a net drop of nearly 10 million votes for president, with voter turnout declining in every state, the editors write: “This right-wing coalition was defeated at the polls by a ‘rising American electorate,’ a coalition of women, African-Americans, Latinos, the young and unionized blue-collar workers in Midwestern battleground states.”

The article gushes over the victory of “several stalwart progressives” in Senate races, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, “who will become the first gay or lesbian to serve in the Senate, where she will join the ranks of a record number of women senators.” “The new Democratic majority in the Senate,” the editorial asserts, is “decidedly more progressive than the one it will replace.”

The editors are, inconveniently, obliged to note that the “progressive” president and his party are about to enact “devastating cuts to social programs” and are proposing a “grand bargain” on the deficit that “will end up dealing out the most pain to the people Romney disparaged as the ‘47 percent.’”

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