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Weekend Economists Going for the Gold August 9-11, 2013
As promised, we will look at MEDALS: Starting with this one: 
Obama to award Oprah, Bill Clinton Presidential Medals of Freedom
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-to-award-oprah--bill-clinton-presidential-medal-of-freedom-214439983.html
President Barack Obama announced on Thursday the latest recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor presented to "individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States," "world peace" or to "cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." Among them, two of the president's biggest political supporters: Oprah Winfrey and former President Bill Clinton. According to the White House release, Winfrey is being honored as "one of the world’s most successful broadcast journalists" and for "philanthropic causes and expanding opportunities for young women."
Winfrey and Clinton aren't the only Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients with historical ties to Obama. The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye represented Obama's home state of Hawaii on Capitol Hill. Ernie Banks, the Hall of Fame slugger, played his entire career for the Chicago Cubs — the crosstown rival of the White Sox, the president's preferred hometown team. And former Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican who served with Obama on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Obama was a junior senator from Illinois, will be honored for his "bipartisan leadership and decades-long commitment to reducing the threat of nuclear weapons."
“The Presidential Medal of Freedom goes to men and women who have dedicated their own lives to enriching ours," Obama said in a statement announcing this year's list.
I CANNOT BELIEVE HE OPENLY REVEALED THAT!--DEMETER
Also among the 16 recipients named on Thursday were writer and women's rights activist Gloria Steinem; the late Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut to travel to space; jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer Arturo Sandoval; and legendary college basketball coach Dean Smith. Two advisers to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Cordy Tindell "C.T." Vivian and the late Bayard Rustin — were named for their efforts during the civil rights movement.
The awards will be presented at the White House later this year. More than 500 people have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom since President John F. Kennedy established it in 1963.
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-to-award-oprah--bill-clinton-presidential-medal-of-freedom-214439983.html
President Barack Obama announced on Thursday the latest recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor presented to "individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States," "world peace" or to "cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." Among them, two of the president's biggest political supporters: Oprah Winfrey and former President Bill Clinton. According to the White House release, Winfrey is being honored as "one of the world’s most successful broadcast journalists" and for "philanthropic causes and expanding opportunities for young women."
Winfrey and Clinton aren't the only Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients with historical ties to Obama. The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye represented Obama's home state of Hawaii on Capitol Hill. Ernie Banks, the Hall of Fame slugger, played his entire career for the Chicago Cubs — the crosstown rival of the White Sox, the president's preferred hometown team. And former Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican who served with Obama on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Obama was a junior senator from Illinois, will be honored for his "bipartisan leadership and decades-long commitment to reducing the threat of nuclear weapons."
“The Presidential Medal of Freedom goes to men and women who have dedicated their own lives to enriching ours," Obama said in a statement announcing this year's list.
I CANNOT BELIEVE HE OPENLY REVEALED THAT!--DEMETER
Also among the 16 recipients named on Thursday were writer and women's rights activist Gloria Steinem; the late Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut to travel to space; jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer Arturo Sandoval; and legendary college basketball coach Dean Smith. Two advisers to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Cordy Tindell "C.T." Vivian and the late Bayard Rustin — were named for their efforts during the civil rights movement.
The awards will be presented at the White House later this year. More than 500 people have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom since President John F. Kennedy established it in 1963.
When JFK started this, I'm sure he had something a little nobler, and less self-serving, in mind....after all, his book Profiles in Courage didn't extend to women who buy houses like pairs of shoes....or men who pardon merchants of death and fraud....
But that's just me. I'm cranky and tired and I really need a Vacation after my "vacation".
So, I'm off to play Euchre, this being the designated night, and I'll return to post more of the coming Apocalypse. Be seeing you!
PS: We all know who #2 is, who is #1?
81 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Jul 12, 1862:
Medal of Honor created
President Abraham Lincoln signs into law a measure calling for the awarding of a U.S. Army Medal of Honor, in the name of Congress, "to such noncommissioned officers and privates as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action, and other soldier-like qualities during the present insurrection." The previous December, Lincoln had approved a provision creating a U.S. Navy Medal of Valor, which was the basis of the Army Medal of Honor created by Congress in July 1862. The first U.S. Army soldiers to receive what would become the nation's highest military honor were six members of a Union raiding party who in 1862 penetrated deep into Confederate territory to destroy bridges and railroad tracks between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1863, the Medal of Honor was made a permanent military decoration available to all members, including commissioned officers, of the U.S. military. It is conferred upon those who have distinguished themselves in actual combat at risk of life beyond the call of duty. Since its creation, during the Civil War, more than 3,400 men and one woman have received the Medal of Honor for heroic actions in U.S. military conflict.
Here.
One of the first, here
Reverse of a Medal of Honor awarded to Seaman John Ortega, USN, who served twice with landing parties from USS Saratoga during the Union blockade in August and September of 1864. Ortega, a resident of Pennsylvania, was a Spanish immigrant who joined the Union Navy from his adopted home state of Pennsylvania in 1863.
An era before self-serving became cool...
Prometheus Among the Cannibals: A Letter to Edward Snowden JULY 18TH Rebecca Solnit
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/letter-to-edward-snowden_b_3616828.html
Dear Edward Snowden,
Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.
I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety -- if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life -- with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.
I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.
Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes -- Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi -- endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.
The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.
Private Eyes and Public Rights
Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy -- even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified -- is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand -- you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy -- is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.
You yourself said it so well on July 12th:
“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any time. That is the power to change people's fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice -- that it must be seen to be done.”
They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata -- the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content -- is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.
The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates, "is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.”
Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.
Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,
“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”
You said, "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me." Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people -- those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.
What You Love
What’s striking about your words on video, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions... but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant." You love our world, our country -- not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).
You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:
"I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics."
Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?
What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.
“This country is worth dying for,” you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier’s courage with a thinker’s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That’s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.
When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult and a violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It’s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.
Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century
How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put “building a bridge to the nineteenth century” on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.
The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.
What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century’s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don’t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.
Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.
Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from the World Trade Organization actions of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.
Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil’s bargains of the twenty-first either.
Prometheus and Being Burned
I think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It’s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.
It seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last month held up signs in New York’s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in pizza orders to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together, only together.
There were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us. What will we do with what you’ve taught us? That’s up to us, but for anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power, just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.
And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said, "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and Congressman Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school."
Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn’t work, that should explode. And perhaps we’re watching it explode.
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you’re a sacrifice. In the process, you’ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you’ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.
Love,
Rebecca
Like Edward Snowden, Rebecca Solnit has a GED, not a high-school diploma. She lives in Silicon Valley’s shadow, in a city where billionaires race $10 million yachts and austerity is closing the community college. Her newest book is The Faraway Nearby.
EXTENSIVE THOUGHTFUL COMMENTS FOLLOW AT LINK
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2011/12/13/31916/
Summary: We can all learn much from reading Lord of the Rings about the new America now emerging. A stratified society, with great and small people. Tolkien, ever the realist, shows how the small people can prosper in the 21st century — as America comes to resemble Middle Earth.
Always on the top of my reading list is the London Review of Books, with each issue explaining much about our past, present, and future. Here we have an excerpt from Jenny Turner’s brilliant essay “Reasons for Liking Tolkien” in the 15 November 2001 issue.
We too live in Middle Earth, a nation with great and powerful wizards who can accomplish deeds beyond the imagination of lesser folks. Celebrities who live out their hedonistic fantasies, unrestrained by our laws and moral codes. Politicians to whom we give our hearts — such as Obama, Ron Paul. Wealthy businessmen who rape our economy, operating above our laws.
These people own our government. Charities are determined by their priorities. Their hired hands write our laws, pass judgment in our courts. Their police suppress protests. The great Wall Street banks are engines shaping society to their design. The news media tell their narrative explaining events (as in this op-ed by suck-up expert David Brooks). The major think-tanks create stories justifying their plans for America.
American politics is little but jousts among factions of the rich. Republican presidential candidates compete to see who can tax the rich the least, shift the most of the tax burden to the middle class, and slash the largest amount of benefits to the poor. Success comes to those who most skillfully pander to their pretenses and most successfully advance their interests.
Like Bill Gates, a next-gen American prince. Here we see his version of Rivendell, built on a hillside overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. 66,000 square feet on 5.15 acres; assessed value $200 million.
?w=600
?w=600
Summary: We can all learn much from reading Lord of the Rings about the new America now emerging. A stratified society, with great and small people. Tolkien, ever the realist, shows how the small people can prosper in the 21st century — as America comes to resemble Middle Earth.
Always on the top of my reading list is the London Review of Books, with each issue explaining much about our past, present, and future. Here we have an excerpt from Jenny Turner’s brilliant essay “Reasons for Liking Tolkien” in the 15 November 2001 issue.
Depressed people report feelings of powerlessness to be an index of their condition; and just look at how power is distributed on Middle Earth. Aragorn has it, Gandalf has it, Galadriel has it, because of what they are (a king, a wizard, an elf-queen) rather than what they do. To hold power is to be good-looking: ‘great and beautiful’ (Galadriel), ‘in the flower of manhood’ (Aragorn).
There isn’t a lot of magic on Middle Earth: rabbits don’t come out of hats, no one gets turned into a stone or a poodle. Its place is taken by something more plausible-seeming and refined. Political power (being a king, a wizard, a queen) is elided with willpower, an ability to make things happen. Powerful people run faster and have stronger characters (which, as we know, is why they cannot bear the Ring). They have and make use of televisual devices (the palantírs of Orthanc and Gondor, the mirror of Galadriel), bending them to their bidding. They build sanctuaries – Rivendell, Lórien – in which they ca n protect the beautiful and the good. ‘An essential power of Faerië is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of “fantasy”,’ as Tolkien says in ‘On Fairy-Stories’.
In a politics like this, hobbits are in a subordinate position, always slightly left out.
They don’t have any special powers or dispensations, unless they can cadge some from the big guys: hospitality and amulets and potions from Elrond, Galadriel, Treebeard.
They offer themselves as pageboys, they hitch a ride on Gandalf’s horse.
They bow deep to Théoden, Denethor, Faramir, Aragorn.
They are ‘flotsam and jetsam’, ‘small ragtag’.
Once or twice, they even get mistaken for orcs.
In the movie trailer Cate Blanchett murmurs some placatory nonsense about how even the smallest person can change the world, but that is the same tokenism that allows a hobbit to stab at an evil ankle. Gandalf says at one point that the Shire has a sort of magic, but it is just small-town volkischness, sentimental and slightly sinister. This is especially evident when they arm themselves with hammers and axes in ‘The Scouring of the Shire’. In the end, hobbits are small and weak and furry-footed, and Tolkien has given tallness and strength and glinting grey eyes far too much weight in his world for this not to count.
The politics of The Lord of the Rings, in short, comprises a familiar mixture of infatuation with power with an awareness of one’s own helplessness beside it. One’s best hope, really, is to suck up to the big people, in the hope they will see you all right. It’s the perennial fantasy of the powerless.
There isn’t a lot of magic on Middle Earth: rabbits don’t come out of hats, no one gets turned into a stone or a poodle. Its place is taken by something more plausible-seeming and refined. Political power (being a king, a wizard, a queen) is elided with willpower, an ability to make things happen. Powerful people run faster and have stronger characters (which, as we know, is why they cannot bear the Ring). They have and make use of televisual devices (the palantírs of Orthanc and Gondor, the mirror of Galadriel), bending them to their bidding. They build sanctuaries – Rivendell, Lórien – in which they ca n protect the beautiful and the good. ‘An essential power of Faerië is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of “fantasy”,’ as Tolkien says in ‘On Fairy-Stories’.
In a politics like this, hobbits are in a subordinate position, always slightly left out.
They don’t have any special powers or dispensations, unless they can cadge some from the big guys: hospitality and amulets and potions from Elrond, Galadriel, Treebeard.
They offer themselves as pageboys, they hitch a ride on Gandalf’s horse.
They bow deep to Théoden, Denethor, Faramir, Aragorn.
They are ‘flotsam and jetsam’, ‘small ragtag’.
Once or twice, they even get mistaken for orcs.
In the movie trailer Cate Blanchett murmurs some placatory nonsense about how even the smallest person can change the world, but that is the same tokenism that allows a hobbit to stab at an evil ankle. Gandalf says at one point that the Shire has a sort of magic, but it is just small-town volkischness, sentimental and slightly sinister. This is especially evident when they arm themselves with hammers and axes in ‘The Scouring of the Shire’. In the end, hobbits are small and weak and furry-footed, and Tolkien has given tallness and strength and glinting grey eyes far too much weight in his world for this not to count.
The politics of The Lord of the Rings, in short, comprises a familiar mixture of infatuation with power with an awareness of one’s own helplessness beside it. One’s best hope, really, is to suck up to the big people, in the hope they will see you all right. It’s the perennial fantasy of the powerless.
We too live in Middle Earth, a nation with great and powerful wizards who can accomplish deeds beyond the imagination of lesser folks. Celebrities who live out their hedonistic fantasies, unrestrained by our laws and moral codes. Politicians to whom we give our hearts — such as Obama, Ron Paul. Wealthy businessmen who rape our economy, operating above our laws.
These people own our government. Charities are determined by their priorities. Their hired hands write our laws, pass judgment in our courts. Their police suppress protests. The great Wall Street banks are engines shaping society to their design. The news media tell their narrative explaining events (as in this op-ed by suck-up expert David Brooks). The major think-tanks create stories justifying their plans for America.
American politics is little but jousts among factions of the rich. Republican presidential candidates compete to see who can tax the rich the least, shift the most of the tax burden to the middle class, and slash the largest amount of benefits to the poor. Success comes to those who most skillfully pander to their pretenses and most successfully advance their interests.
Like Bill Gates, a next-gen American prince. Here we see his version of Rivendell, built on a hillside overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. 66,000 square feet on 5.15 acres; assessed value $200 million.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/rand-paul-knows-nothing-of-milton-friedmans-work/278517/
Reports of Milton Friedman's death have not been greatly exaggerated. That's because he passed away in 2006. But this fact may have eluded Senator Rand Paul, who told Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek in a somewhat strange interview that, if he had to pick a living person, he'd pick Friedman to run the Fed. Yeah, about that...
Now, it's not clear if Paul is just joking here, but what is clear is he doesn't know anything about what Friedman actually thought about monetary policy. See, Paul is a case of the apple not even falling from the tree. Like his father, he's no fan of the Fed, and thinks quantitative easing has only created an "illusory" recovery. So when he says he thinks Friedman "would be better than what we have," he almost certainly means that Friedman wouldn't be buying bonds like Bernanke has. And that, of course, couldn't be more wrong.
Reports of Milton Friedman's death have not been greatly exaggerated. That's because he passed away in 2006. But this fact may have eluded Senator Rand Paul, who told Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek in a somewhat strange interview that, if he had to pick a living person, he'd pick Friedman to run the Fed. Yeah, about that...
Now, it's not clear if Paul is just joking here, but what is clear is he doesn't know anything about what Friedman actually thought about monetary policy. See, Paul is a case of the apple not even falling from the tree. Like his father, he's no fan of the Fed, and thinks quantitative easing has only created an "illusory" recovery. So when he says he thinks Friedman "would be better than what we have," he almost certainly means that Friedman wouldn't be buying bonds like Bernanke has. And that, of course, couldn't be more wrong.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/fannie-freddie-and-the-destructive-dream-of-the-ownership-society/278561/
More than four years ago, President Obama assumed office promising dramatic reform to the housing market. After all, it was the housing market that triggered the financial crisis, and the vast proliferation of low-quality loans that had fueled the housing bubble. But politics delayed those reforms, and now the president is reopening the issue with a call to wind down the two main federal mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "For too long, these companies were allowed to make big profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag," the president said this week. "It was 'heads we win, tails you lose.'"
Well, not entirely. The U.S. government and taxpayers did rescue these agencies in 2009 (to the tune of nearly $200 billion), and, after injecting them with capital and essentially nationalizing them, these companies started to turn a profit as the housing market slowly recovered. This month, they contributed more than $15 billion to the U.S. Treasury, and have been one factor in sharply reducing government deficits.
Even more, Obama's targeting of Fannie and Freddie is part of a larger narrative -- on both the left and the right -- that banks and government colluded to produce the financial crisis and the continuing drag on the United States. To be fair, Obama in the same speech this week acknowledged that much of the housing crisis was the product of "banks and the government...[making] everyone feel like they had to own a home, even if they weren't ready and didn't have the payment." But that chord is a decidedly minor one in a general atmosphere of blame.
Over the past decade, we have collectively spun a story of the financial crisis. It goes something like this: in the 2000s, government regulation of the financial system loosened as large banks, in collusion with free-market ideologues in government, convinced regulators that risk was a thing of the past. They then took advantage of easy money and lax regulation and began to push mortgages to speculators and low-credit individuals, who bought homes they couldn't afford. Those mortgages were then packaged and used as the fodder for financial derivatives, which turned bad loans into a global crisis. Meanwhile, millions of people lost homes and jobs; the government spent hundreds of billions to bail out the banks, and those millions of citizens were left with shattered credit, no employment, and fractured communities such as Detroit.
More than four years ago, President Obama assumed office promising dramatic reform to the housing market. After all, it was the housing market that triggered the financial crisis, and the vast proliferation of low-quality loans that had fueled the housing bubble. But politics delayed those reforms, and now the president is reopening the issue with a call to wind down the two main federal mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "For too long, these companies were allowed to make big profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag," the president said this week. "It was 'heads we win, tails you lose.'"
Well, not entirely. The U.S. government and taxpayers did rescue these agencies in 2009 (to the tune of nearly $200 billion), and, after injecting them with capital and essentially nationalizing them, these companies started to turn a profit as the housing market slowly recovered. This month, they contributed more than $15 billion to the U.S. Treasury, and have been one factor in sharply reducing government deficits.
Even more, Obama's targeting of Fannie and Freddie is part of a larger narrative -- on both the left and the right -- that banks and government colluded to produce the financial crisis and the continuing drag on the United States. To be fair, Obama in the same speech this week acknowledged that much of the housing crisis was the product of "banks and the government...[making] everyone feel like they had to own a home, even if they weren't ready and didn't have the payment." But that chord is a decidedly minor one in a general atmosphere of blame.
Over the past decade, we have collectively spun a story of the financial crisis. It goes something like this: in the 2000s, government regulation of the financial system loosened as large banks, in collusion with free-market ideologues in government, convinced regulators that risk was a thing of the past. They then took advantage of easy money and lax regulation and began to push mortgages to speculators and low-credit individuals, who bought homes they couldn't afford. Those mortgages were then packaged and used as the fodder for financial derivatives, which turned bad loans into a global crisis. Meanwhile, millions of people lost homes and jobs; the government spent hundreds of billions to bail out the banks, and those millions of citizens were left with shattered credit, no employment, and fractured communities such as Detroit.