'OWS' - Gerald Celente: "Wall Street is Washington; Washington is Wall Street,"

[marmar]

Run time: 09:52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNX7u39JnY   Posted on YouTube: October 20, 2011 By YouTube Member: OurNeedToAwaken Views on YouTube: 93   Posted on DU: October 20, 2011 By DU Member: marmar Views on DU: 2093

 

[proud patriot]

1. This would make a good sign IMO

"Wall Street is Washington; Washington is Wall Street,"

[Capitalocracy]

6. My less concise version from a couple days ago

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2144388

[abelenkpe]

2. I really don't like this

Yes there is rampant corruption with wall street paying thousands of lobbyists to pressure politicians and revolving door antics with corporate CEOs being appointed as regulators over the industry they worked in. But libertarians and Ron Paul folk are the ones pushing for OWS to protest DC and the government and the FED. They want the focus back on blaming the government for everything and taking it off of wall street. There certainly is a lot of corruption that needs to rooted out but the source of the corruption is wall street and unfettered greed.

[xchrom]

4. it's not the same message as the libertarians. nt

[civilisation]

7. This is a two way street., did you miss that?

"Wall Street is Washington, Washington is Wall Street."

No one is taking any guilt away from either,. the two are so interwoven as to be one thing.

[abelenkpe]

8. As one who has spent years debating libertarians

I can tell you that Celente is a favorite among libertarians and that this is exactly what libertarians are calling for. They want everyone to focus instead on government as the problem and not wall street. I'm well aware of the corruption in government but government can be reformed by removing corporate money from elections, bans on corporate lobbying and gong back to the days (which weren't so long ago) when one could not immediately leave public service for a cushy corporate job and vice versa.

[stockholmer]

10. read some Gabriel Kolko to start to see the nexus of big banks/business and government

What you have is an artificially constructed choice called either 'deregulation' by the so-called right-wing, OR 'government oversight' by the so-called left-wing. Both are false paradigms. The last thing the systemic controllers want is a 'level playing field'.

The problem with the US experiment is not big government per se, it is big government that has morphed in all areas over the last 100 years into nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for the systemic controllers. Agencies that should be for the public good are simple the tools of the elite designed to to crush all competition from small and mid-size firms.


This started in the USA during the so-called Progressive Era under Theodore Roosevelt, wherein huge monopolies like Standard Oil, etc, utilized a 'don't throw me in the briar patch' argument to get the force of government into regulating business practices (regulations that many times in the 100 years since they have written, then had a bought and paid for Congress pass). Far from creating a free market, this quashed their rivals in so many cases, and made it exceedingly hard for small entrepreneurs to compete.

The US Animal ID act is a perfect example, wherein a small sized chicken farmer has to pay exorbitant licensing fees per chicken, thus forcing them out of business, whilst monstrously huge consortiums like Tyson, etc, simply are allowed to buy one large bulk license that covers millions of birds.

Check out New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, who in his book "The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916."
In it, he lays out a case for the rise of modern corporatist system during the Progressive Era.
This in turn, allows for the violation of a anti-fascistic principle – No socialization of losses and privatization of gains
(ie the confluence of big business and big government in mutual reinforcement)

http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Conservatism-Gabriel-Kolko/dp/0029166500

http://www.4shared.com/document/Psy6aMNF/Gabriel_Kolko_-_The_Triumph_Of.html pdf


Kolko was soon joined by other New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams in challenging the reigning "corporate liberal" orthodoxy. Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms," it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.

.............in advancing the corporate liberalism idea whereby the old Progressive historiography of the "interests" versus the "people" was reinterpreted as a collaboration of interests aiming towards stabilizing competition . According to Grob and Billias, "Kolko believed that large-scale units turned to government regulation precisely because of their inefficiency" and that the "Progressive movement - far from being antibusiness - was actually a movement that defined the general welfare in terms of the well-being of business" . Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era. He discovered that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the twentieth century; meanwhile, corporations reacted to the free market by turning to government to protect their inherent inefficiency from the discipline of market conditions. This behavior is known as corporatism, but Kolko dubbed it "political capitalism." Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government-business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today . Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation (see Weaver's The Suicidal Corporation <1988>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Kolko
http://users.crocker.com/~acacia/kolko.html
http://miltenoff.tripod.com/Kolko.html
http://www.stateofnature.org/liberalElitesAnd.html

[stockholmer]

11. you seem to be lumping (via stereotyping) many different types of libertarians,especially left-wing

ones into one monolithic train of thought. Even the type that the American corporate media portrays in childish, simplistic manner are not what they are described to be. Real plumbline anarcho-capitalists are definitely not 'rich mens' anarchists' who favour unchecked corporate power. This is simply a smear and not grounded in US political reality. If they were indeed pushing this line, then billions in corporate contributions would have flowed to them over the last 30 years. Instead they are marginalized, as they would take away the huge corporate crony-capitalism power that they use the government to re-enforce.


Here are some links for left libertarianism, anarcho-socialism, and other concepts that are common place here in the EU, but alien to most in the US :

Peter Vallentyne http://philpapers.org/s/Peter%20Vallentyne (left libertarian),

Michael Otsuka http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio (left libertarian), even much of Noam Chomsky (he has called his libertarian socialism an anarchist philosophy)

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"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance.

Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace .

Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution."


– Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory & Practice, 1947


http://www.iwa-ait.org /

http://www.iww.org /

http://workersolidarity.org /



other links to left forms of democratic workplaces and social structuring


"The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm" by David Ellerman

http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/demofirm.doc



"Libertarianism Without Inequality" by Michael Otsuka (free PDF)

http://ebookee.org/go/?u=http://depositfiles.com/files/m0uj43n84


Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried

PETER VALLENTYNE,
HILLEL STEINER, AND
MICHAEL OTSUKA
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio/leftlibP&PA.pdf



http://newpol.org /
New Politics, published since 1986 as a semi-annual, follows in the tradition established in its first series (1961-1978) as an independent socialist forum for dialogue and debate on the left. It is committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements. It stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action. In our pages there is broad coverage of labor and social movements, the international scene, as well as emphasis on cultural and intellectual history.

Above all, New Politics insists on the centrality of democracy to socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for progressive social transformation.

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One variant of contemporary left-libertarianism affirms the classical liberal and libertarian idea of self-ownership, while rooting a robust version of economic egalitarianism in this idea. It combines the conventional libertarian idea of self-ownership with unconventional views regarding the ownership of land and natural resources (e.g. those of Henry George), residual claimancy vis-à-vis the firm, or both.

http://praxeology.net/all-left.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

here are some more new left scholars that do not fall into the camp of easy-labeling

Hillel Steiner http://philpapers.org/profile/2771

Philippe Van Parijs http://www.uclouvain.be/en-11688.html

David Ellerman http://philpapers.org/s/David%20Ellerman

Antonio Negri http://www.egs.edu/faculty/antonio-negri/biography /
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Autonomism http://www.autonomism.com/autonomism /


"A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result -- and a natural one -- has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent."

Lysander Spooner



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cheers

[abelenkpe]

12. I totally respect where you are coming from and yes I'm lumping

I have a lot of respect for left wing libertarians. Just have never physically met one in the US. My sister actually freaked out and stopped talking to me cause when she announced she was a libertarian and I asked left wing or right wing. She freaked. She's a Ron Paul fan and totally right wing. Those Ron Paul fans usually don't even want to admit there is such a thing as a left wing libertarian. :)

But excellent post! Full of great links. Thanks!

[stockholmer]

13. I wish you the best of luck, and hope that your sister reads a variety of libertarian thought

Perhaps she needs to actually read Ron Paul on the nexus of big government/big business, and how his ideas to combat this are absolutely not what it sounds like she thinks they are (she sounds at first glance more co-opted Tea Partier than anarcho-capitalist). I may have her totally pegged wrongly, but her reaction to you doesn't sound like one coming from a plethora of well-rounded thought.

cheers from Sweden

[xchrom]

3. political atheist. i like that. nt

[fascisthunter]

5. and Thus we all live in a Fascist America

[DeSwiss]

9. Say it loud, Gerald.

An excellent question, Gerald. Why, indeed? Why would anyone still be listening to any of these people? Neither the obviously stupid ones, nor the slick-talking faux-populists? Why? Why? Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect">The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

- That's why......

K&R