June 21, 2015

Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism

Legitimizing State Violence
Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism

by HENRY A. GIROUX


In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”

While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society, I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984 as well as Huxley’s Brave New World in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Both authors provide insights into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portend of the unfolding 21st century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control, “Big Brother” intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the punishing state—which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence–and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow market-driven orbits of privatization–these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.

Orwell’s “Big Brother” found more recently a new incarnation in the revelations of government lawlessness and corporate spying by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden. All of these individuals revealed a government that lied about its intelligence operations, illegally spied on millions of people who were not considered terrorists or had committed no crime, and collected data from every conceivable electronic source to be stored and potentially used to squelch dissent, blackmail people, or just intimidate those who fight to make corporate and state power accountable. Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state in which privacy was no longer valued as a civil virtue and a basic human right, nor perceived as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. In Orwell’s dystopia the right to privacy had come under egregious assault, but the ruthless transgressions of privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. The claim to privacy, for Orwell, represented a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power, and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. Orwell’s warning was intended to shed light on the horrors of totalitarianism, the corruption of language, the production of a pervasive stupidity, and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens in the mid-20th-century. .................(more)

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/orwell-huxley-and-americas-plunge-into-authoritarianism/

June 20, 2015

Here Are All the Reasons Walmart’s Business Is Not Sustainable

(The Nation) You probably paid a cheap price for those groceries at Walmart this week, but you almost certainly didn’t pay a fair price.

Walmart is a case study of how the “free market” can distort the value of a basic human need: Every price tag in Walmart’s food inventory—which accounts for a quarter of the nation’s grocery bill—is the product of agricultural subsidies, financialized commodities exchanges, and hyperinflated marketing. So to uncover the true cost of cheap groceries, the advocacy group Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) followed the supply chain and uncovered violations at every link in the retailer’s “ethical sourcing” system.

Facing public pressure, Walmart has developed guidelines for ethical and sustainable sourcing, pledging that all outlets and suppliers “must fully comply with all applicable national and/or local laws and regulations…related to labor, immigration, health and safety, and the environment.” Specifically, the company mandates that suppliers follow legal protections for “health and safety of workers” and implement “measures for reducing air and water pollutants, energy and water usage, and waste.” The company recently launched a flashy “sustainability product expo” and rolled out new animal-welfare guidelines for livestock.

The human-welfare department appears to be lagging. While Walmart has come under fire for mistreating its store associates, the supply-chain workers are exploited in even more complex ways, with even less recourse against the company, as Walmart does not directly employ them. ......................(more)

http://www.thenation.com/blog/209281/here-are-all-reasons-walmarts-business-not-sustainable

June 20, 2015

Wave of Defaults, Bankruptcies Spook Bond Investors

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street.

First things first: Investor desperation for yield, any discernible yield no matter what the risks, and blind confidence that all this will work out somehow are waning.

Now questions pop up here and there, and investors are beginning to open their eyes just a tad amid waves of defaults and bankruptcies, after years of worriless fixed-income bliss during which cheap new money made investors forgive and forget all sins of the past. But now investors are pulling big chunks of money out.

For the week ended June 17, investors yanked “a whopping” $2.9 billion out of junk bond funds, according to S&P Capital IQ/ LCD’s HighYieldBond.com, on top of the $2.6 billion they’d yanked out in the prior week. Those redemptions dragged down the year-to-date inflows to $3.6 billion, nearly 40% below last year at this time. But $201.5 billion remain in those funds.

Leverage-loan funds have been plagued by outflows as investors have been warned for a couple of years about their risks. Banks extend high-risk loans to over-indebted, junk-rated companies but don’t want to keep these iffy loans on their books. So they sell them to loan funds or repackage them into CLOs and then sell them. Even the Fed has gotten concerned. This week brought more of the same, with $311 million leaving leveraged-loan funds, bringing year-to-date outflows to $3.6 billion. Total fund assets are now down to $94 billion. ...............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/wave-of-defaults-bankruptcies-spook-bond-investors.html

June 20, 2015

Ecuador Puts Piketty Into Practice

Ecuador Puts Piketty Into Practice

Saturday, 20 June 2015 00:00
By Josh Hoxie, Foreign Policy in Focus | News Analysis


Few Americans could likely find Ecuador on a map or pick its president, Rafael Correa, out of a lineup. However, Correa recently announced an economic plan that should make us pay closer attention to this small South American nation.

Citing the corrosive impact of excess inherited wealth on democracy, Correa proposed a steeply progressive tax on large inheritances. It’s like an estate tax, but with a twist: Revenue from the plan would be issued as dividends directly to workers, rather than going to the government.

The number of families paying the tax would be quite low, since just 3 in every 100,000 Ecuadorians receive an inheritance worth more than $50,000. On that $50,000 they’d pay just $350 in taxes, or 0.7 percent. The beneficiaries, on the other hand, include the entire population.

The plan speaks to a central problem of modern economies. As Thomas Piketty illustrated in his blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century, wealth concentrates at the top when left to its own devices. When that happens, the only effective counterweight is a tax. ......................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31423-ecuador-puts-piketty-into-practice

June 20, 2015

Demonstrators March on U.K. Parliament to Protest Austerity

[font size="1"]Demonstrators gather at the Bank Of England to protest against austerity measures, in London on June 20. Photographer: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images[/font]


(Bloomberg) Thousands of people from across the U.K. marched from the Bank of England to Westminster on Saturday to protest planned government spending cuts.

At least 50,000 and up to 75,000 people were expected to participate in central London, a police spokesman said at the start of the march near the Bank of England.

The People’s Assembly Against Austerity, which organized the rally, says the new Conservative government will deliver “nasty, destructive cuts” to the National Health Service, welfare, education and public services. It staged the march “right on the doorstep of the very people who created the crisis in the first place, and marching to the doorstep of Parliament,” according to a statement on its website.

The Conservative’s surprise outright victory in last month’s election means they can implement their manifesto without having to offer concessions to coalition partners.

Chancellor George Osborne, who will announce a budget next month, is seeking 30 billion pounds ($48 billion) of spending cuts by 2018, including 12 billion pounds of welfare savings, to help return Britain to a surplus. ................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-20/protesters-to-march-on-u-k-parliament-today-to-oppose-austerity

June 20, 2015

from 2008: Clinton Touts White Support................

..............Since we're going to "go there"


As if the divisions between race and gender in the Democratic Party hadn’t been further exposed through Tuesday night’s exit polls — and by a very heated exchange on CNN between Donna Brazile and Paul Begala — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interview with USA Today on Wednesday is further mining those tense depths.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in the interview, citing an article by The Associated Press.

It “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

While she said her remarks weren’t meant to be divisive, they’re already whipping around the Internet. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that,” she said in the interview. (Hint, hint, message to the superdelegates still undeclared.)

In Indiana alone, six in 10 white voters went for Mrs. Clinton, where she narrowly won the primary. ................(more)

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/clinton-touts-white-support/?_r=0

June 20, 2015

Plundering Our Freedom with Abandon - Robert Scheer on Reality Asserts Itself (pts II & III)

Published on Jun 19, 2015
On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Scheer talks about his father's thirst for freedom and how that influenced his life; Scheer says defense of the U.S. Constitution, in spite of its flaws, is critical in defending against the erosion of democracy

June 20, 2015

“It’s not just another unusually hot summer—it is climate change."

This piece originated with Climate News Network.

CHENNAI—India, one of the key players in the efforts to reach an international agreement on global warming, has no doubt of its malign effects. It was, says a government minister, the warming climate that caused last month’s devastating heatwave.

From mid-April till the end of May, nearly 2,200 people were killed by the heat—1,636 of them in Andhra Pradesh, the worst-affected state. The normal May figure for the whole of India is about 1,000 heat-related deaths.

Dr Harsh Vardhan, India’s Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, has blamed the heat deaths squarely on climate change.

Improve understanding

Launching a supercomputer at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting to improve understanding of climatic changes, he said: “It’s not just another unusually hot summer—it is climate change.

“Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heatwave and the certainty of another failed monsoon.” ................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/india_blames_heatwave_deaths_on_climate_change_20150619

June 19, 2015

NY: $3.9B World Trade Center Transit Hub Nears Completion

NEW YORK (AP) — The $3.9 billion transportation hub at New York's World Trade Center will open later this year.

That's when visitors will get to decide for themselves whether architect Santiago Calatrava's bird-in-flight design has been translated into a grand public space that justifies years of delays and cost overruns.

The transportation hub is supposed to create a seamless connection between PATH trains to New Jersey, 11 New York City subway lines and a Hudson River ferry terminal.

It's also supposed to provide lower Manhattan with a counterpoint to midtown's beloved Grand Central Terminal. ..............(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/14011303/39b-world-trade-center-transit-hub-nears-completion

June 19, 2015

Wireless carriers sue to block cell phone radiation warning requirement

Wireless carriers sue to block cell phone radiation warning requirement
City of Berkeley claims cell phone radiation "exceeds federal guidelines."

by Jon Brodkin - Jun 9, 2015 11:11am EDT


The biggest wireless industry trade group is suing the City of Berkeley, California to stop a requirement that cell phones come with radiation warnings.

The Berkeley City Council last month passed an ordinance requiring cell phone retailers to provide the following notice to all customers who buy or lease phones:

To assure safety, the Federal Government requires that cell phones meet radio frequency (RF) exposure guidelines. If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This potential risk is greater for children. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual for information about how to use your phone safely.

CTIA- The Wireless Association, which represents carriers and suppliers, sued in US District Court yesterday, saying the "required disclosure... impermissibly abridges CTIA’s members’ First Amendment rights," that it is "preempted by federal law," and that there is no scientific basis for the warning.

"The Federal Communications Commission ('FCC') implements a mandate from Congress to create a nationwide, uniform set of regulations for wireless communications devices," CTIA wrote. "Pursuant to that mandate, the FCC—consulting with expert federal health and safety agencies and drawing from international standards-setting bodies—has carefully reviewed the scientific studies that have examined cell phones for possible adverse health effects, including health effects from the radio waves—a type of radiofrequency energy ('RF energy')—that cell phones emit in order to function. The FCC has determined, consistent with the overwhelming consensus of scientific authority, that '[t]here is no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other problems, including headaches, dizziness or memory loss.'" ..................(more)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/wireless-carriers-sue-to-block-cell-phone-radiation-warning-requirement/