#mattea kramer

[trmpt]

Today’s Most Dangerous Drug

Loneliness, Donald Trump, and You

BY MATTEA KRAMER AND SEAN FOGLER

“Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt understood isolation and loneliness as the essential conditions for the rise of an autocratic ruler. For a politician to seize absolute power, she wrote in 1951 in The Origins of Totalitarianism, people must be isolated from one another. So long ago, she referred to widespread isolation as a ‘pre-totalitarian’ state, suggesting that totalitarian domination ‘bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.’”

[thearbourist]

When A Voice Tells You You'll Never Be Enough - Mattea Kramer

When A Voice Tells You You’ll Never Be Enough – Mattea Kramer

   Welcome to the particular mental hell that many women inhabit.  In an insightful article on Tom’s Dispatch by Mattea Kramer we see how the negativity toward women in society internalizes itself and become women’s own inner self-critical voice.

  “Girls observe and absorb such double standards, as well as the criticism they receive for speaking up. Then they police themselves. As adults in…

[racingtoaredlight]

RTARL tries to explain a holistic view of economics

This is going to be mostly devoid of specific sourcing and functions more as a placeholder for some far off future deep dive into these ideas so adjust your expectations thusly. Also, the images from the original film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers don’t explicitly relate to the content other than the idea of pods. If I’m wrong about that tell me.

The main thing I really want to put forward is this idea circling my brain that our economy is best described as a series of pods. Each of those pods (on a segment basis such as “military”, “food”, “manufacturing” and so on; on a specialized industry basis, on down to the company basis) is organized as a top down ideal where the ideas and capital come from a leader/group of leaders, the work goes through the employees, and the profits cycle back to the leader(s). You can add profit-sharing to some degree but the basic model remains the same and if you think about it long enough the distance between American-style capitalism and high middle ages feudalism become less and less apparent. More a change in venue and messaging than in practical division of resources and spoils.

What made me want to put these words on this podunk website for this mostly disinterested audience on this day? I was made aware of tomdispatch.com and this outstanding piece by William Hartung to delve into the full military budget of the United States government. (Thanks, Jeremy Scahill!) The backbone of American economic planning is generically termed “defense.” Defense can mean almost anything and necessarily affects everything if that is the base of all principles. It can and will be argued that the U.S. overspends from a defense mindset but this isn’t necessarily the case as it’s based on what other nations spend relative to their own economic power (viewing said nations as singular actors.) Is the U.S. the Earth’s largest empire because of its own prioritization or because of other nation’s lack of prioritization? I shouldn’t bring that up because it leads down its own unending rabbit hole in regards to nation building and entanglements and deep state/covert activities. That isn’t the discussion going on in my mind here right now.

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What’s interesting to me about the expanded scope of Hartung’s (and before him Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer) is the better view of what can be classified as defense spending. There is dimensionality to that view far beyond merely the budgeting at hand. This is a window into how all budgeting and economic organization works in our system and, as a result, how the spoils flow back to the top of the pyramid. Is this efficient in an overall sense? No, I don’t think it is.

It acts, in a simplified sense, as mind control for the masses as a means to continue on in this way where the haves have more and more comforts precisely because there are have-nots. If you take the money in a closed system (in this example the defense budget) and you spread it around to enough pods (armed forces, administrators, intelligence agencies, contractors) it becomes easy for those who are charged with allocating resources to put those resources into the hands of their cronies and allies.

The expansion of the contracted segment of defense spending over the past several decades acts as a wash on those resources so that a handful of “well-paid” contractors cover up for the exorbitant over-paying of their employer and disguises the spoils being given to Blackwater, Dyncorp, et al. In a full profit share model the employees of those corporations would be much more richly compensated, giving a clearer picture to military enlistees how much money they are not getting and, perhaps, pressuring the Pentagon to stop using so many contractors in the first place. This is separate but not unrelated to the actions of those contractors, which are often employed as a way of getting around more strict engagement rules for direct military personnel.

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The lack of transparency between employer and employee in regards to profits of the company are, as the concept goes, a feature and not a bug. A somewhat desperate but not quite destitute general populace is more likely to go along with whatever they are given rather than drop out of the system in despair or, more problematically for “the ruling class,” attempt to develop strategies for leveling the playing field or decimating it altogether.

The pod structure of our economy is also a feature that helps to divorce workers from their neighbors and a larger idea of who is on what side in a given economic conflict. A microcosm of how this works is the political focus on immigrants and foreigners “stealing jobs” from Americans. Were these jobs available to Americans in the first place if a factory is closed in South Carolina while another one is opened in Shenzen? Are the Chinese employees who take these jobs that are suddenly available the violent actor in this scenario? No and no. The workers in America that lost their jobs are in service to the same forces as the workers in China that found them. The enemy, if you choose to view things in those terms, are the organizers of that system - the CEO, CFO, Board of Directors, company president - that made the decision to divest from one geographic area and locate the factory in another. This seems obvious but is still not grasped easily in a landscape that is as much beholden to media coverage as it is to daily practical realities.

This pod setup becomes more problematic as an organizing principle in a world where there are vastly more human beings than there are reasons to employ them. How does our post-feudalist system continue in a nouveau feudalist manner if the populace has tipped from dependent to desperate? There is opportunity on all sides here but the ability to aggregate information and organize physical actors is weighted more towards the top of the pyramid.

Inefficiency within this system as it stands stems from the idea that those on the top of the pyramid are acting in good faith for all of those below them. There is no evidence to support this theory. If anything, the history of labor strife supports quite the opposite. Post-strife companies tend to be more productive, innovative (in a real-world sense, not in Silicon Valley parlance), and remunerative. This is a larger topic that I’ve been meaning to study for years through the prism of MLB vs. MLBPA but it is consistent in other industries.

This is a stream of consciousness ramble in search of a financial backer to become something more. I’ll be back to mindless sports pablum and dick jokes in no time. Sorry for the abrupt ending this is as far as I can make it without adding footnotes and writing a million words.

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[thefrogholler]

Musical Birthday Notes - June 21st

Musical Birthday Notes – June 21st

Aerosmith

Kathy Mattea – country singer/songwriter/musician – multi-Grammy winner – two time CMA Female Vocalist of the Year – hits include – 18 Wheels And A Dozen Roses – Goin’, Gone – Walking Away A Winner – 1959

Joey Kramer – rock drummer/songwriter – Aerosmith – 2001 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – group hits include – Sweet Emotion – Walk This Way – I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing – 1950

Kip Winger–…

[mdye]

Mattea Kramer

Could the president be influenced by threats to his profit margin?

The post These Protesters Are Hitting Trump Where It Actually Hurts appeared first on The Nation.

[nc4l]

Four Spending Myths That Could Wreck Our World

Spending Myth 1:  Today’s deficits have taken us to a historically unprecedented, economically catastrophic place.

This myth has had the effect of binding the hands of elected officials and policymakers at every level of government.  It has also emboldened those who claim that we must cut government spending as quickly, as radically, as deeply as possible.

In fact, we’ve been here before.  In 2009, the federal budget deficit was a whopping 10.1% of the American economy and back in 1943, in the midst of World War II, it was three times that -- 30.3%. This fiscal year the deficit will total around 7.6%. Yes, that is big. But in the Congressional Budget Office’s grimmest projections, that figure will fall to 6.3% next year, and 5.8% in fiscal 2014. In 1983, under President Reagan, the deficit hit 6% of the economy, and by 1998, that had turned into a surplus. So, while projected deficits remain large, they’re neither historically unprecedented, nor insurmountable.

More important still, the size of the deficit is no sign that lawmakers should make immediate deep cuts in spending. In fact, history tells us that such reductions are guaranteed to harm, if not cripple, an economy still teetering at the edge of recession.

A number of leading economists are now busy explaining why the deficit this year actually ought to be a lot larger, not smaller; why there should be more government spending, including aid to state and local governments, which would create new jobs and prevent layoffs in areas like education and law enforcement. Such efforts, working in tandem with slow but positive job growth in the private sector, might indeed mean genuine recovery. Government budget cuts, on the other hand, offset private-sector gains with the huge and depressing effect of public-sector layoffs, and have damaging ripple effects on the rest of the economy as well.

When the economy is healthier, a host of promising options are at hand for lawmakers who want to narrow the gap between spending and tax revenue. For example, loopholes and deductions in the tax code that hand enormous subsidies to wealthy Americans and corporations will cost the Treasury around $1.3 trillion in lost revenue this year alone -- more, that is, than the entire budget deficit. Closing some of them would make great strides toward significant deficit reductions.

Alarmingly, the deficit-reduction fever that’s resulted from this first spending myth has led many Americans to throw their support behind de-investment in domestic priorities like education, research, and infrastructure -- cuts that threaten to undo generations of progress.

 - Mattea Kramer