Here’s a brief color film showing London in 1927. It’s part of the British Film Institute’s collection. Someone added New Age-ish music.
It’s a sure-fire distraction from fake scandals (Benghazi, the IRS) and real ones (spying on the Associated Press, cutting government spending during a recession).
http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/1927_london_shown_in_moving_color.html
At an art auction on Tuesday night, an anonymous buyer bid $43,800,000.00 (that’s 43.8 million dollars) for this painting (the blue thing with the white stripe, not the gentlemen in suits).
We could draw lots of conclusions from this latest Gilded Age moment. At a minimum, we ought to have a progressive sales tax, one that applies higher rates to more expensive purchases. For this particular purchase, I’d recommend a tax of at least 100%.
Joan Didion and her husband visited El Salvador for two weeks in 1982. This wasn’t a vacation, since a civil war had begun a few years earlier, after many years of political unrest. As usual, the U.S. was supporting the military dictatorship, not the left-wing guerillas. The war wouldn’t end for another 10 years. It was common for ordinary citizens to be tortured or to disappear. When four American nuns and another woman were raped and murdered by the National Guard in 1980, the U.S. suspended military aid to the Salvadoran government, but just for six weeks. The United Nations later estimated that more than 70,000 people were killed during the war.
One reason to read Salvador is to see how little has changed: “The American effort in El Salvador seemed based on auto-suggestion, a dreamwork devised to obscure any intelligence that might trouble the dreamer.” A later Congressional report argued that “the intelligence was itself a dreamwork, tending to support policy … ‘rather than inform it’, providing ‘reinforcement more than illumination’, ‘ammunition rather than analysis’.”
Another reason to read this book is to enjoy Didion’s prose. A couple of examples:
“For the several hours that preceded the earthquake I had been seized by the kind of amorphous bad mood that my grandmother believed an adjunct of what is called in California ‘earthquake weather’, a sultriness, a stillness, an unnatural light; the jitters. In fact there was no particular prescience about my bad mood, since it is always earthquake weather in San Salvador, and the jitters are endemic.”
“Colonel Waghelstein is massively built, crew-cut, tight-lipped, and very tanned, almost a cartoon of the American military presence, and the notion that he had come up from Panama to deal with the press was novel and interesting, in that he had made, during his tour in El Salvador, a pretty terse point of not dealing with the press”. (4/13/13)
It’s good to be skeptical about the results of public opinion polls, especially if it’s only a single poll reporting a result.
On the other hand, if this is true, it explains a lot. Personally, I can’t believe that 18% of Democrats believe this. Maybe they’re worried about the Tea Party taking over?
From a Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind poll released today:
“Supporters and opponents of gun control have very different fundamental beliefs about the role of guns in American society. Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years, with another five percent unsure. However, these beliefs are conditional on party. Just 18 percent of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary, as opposed to 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.”
Hedges argues that there is a power elite that controls the corporations, which completely control the economy, government and media. The power elite has instituted a permanent war economy that will shortly lead to financial and ecological catastrophe. This process began with the government’s use of propaganda to suppress opposition to World War I. Political liberals might have stopped the ascension of the power elite if they had stayed true to principles of peace and justice.
But the “liberal class” no longer speaks truth to power. Liberals in government, academia and the media may call for reform, but they are powerless to change anything, having been bought off by their corporate masters. There is nothing for reasonable people to do but retreat into small self-sustaining communities (similar to the monasteries of the Dark Ages) and/or perform acts of rebellion that are likely to have little effect on the status quo.
Given the thesis of this book, it hardly seems worth pointing out that it is repetitious and strangely organized, with sections that aren’t always related to the chapter headings. It also focuses almost completely on the United States, except for one brief section on working conditions in China. Hedges may be right that we are heading for catastrophe as a nation and a planet, but those are different propositions. His principal argument concerns the failure of political liberals to stop the corporate takeover of the United States. He seems to think that global climate change might have been avoided if corporations had less power in the United States, but that doesn’t follow.
Death of the Liberal Class is written with such force, that it is surprising to read on the dust jacket that the author is a columnist for a political website, writes for numerous publications (including Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones), and lives in Princeton. This makes him sound, accurately or not, like a member of the liberal class that he excoriates with such passion in this book. (12/20/10)
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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