Links are short tonight. I sometimes worry that my occasional personal disclosures read as if I am playing for reader sympathy. I still on a MLK weekend trip, and my host developed an incapacitating stomach bug that apparently has been going around. I feel like I may be succumbing to it and if so, you won’t see much of me for at least the next 24 hours.
Global warming: Impact of receding snow and ice surprises scientists Christian Science Monitor
The vindication of Dick Cheney Glenn Greenwald
The “Liberal” Blogosphere, Blindspots, and Fear of the Working Class Marcy Wheeler, FireDogLake
If Obama Moves Right He Loses Everybody – And Everybody Loses Richard Eskow, Huffington Post
The myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ implodes Guardian
China strengthens rare-earth regulation MarketWatch
Downtown Hartford Office Buildings Nearly One-Third Empty Hartford Courant (hat tip reader Scott)
Study Points to Windfall for Goldman Partners New York Times. The concentrated returns to the management committee members has a long history at Goldman.
Antidote du jour:
54 comments
Comments are closed.
Been dealing with my own stomach bug that’s been circulating through the community and my family. On the mend thankfully now, it appears. Stay hydrated.
Thank you for all the hard work you do.
Re the “liberal” blogosphere:
Part of the problem is the level of analysis which thinks China isn’t capitalist because it’s run by something that calls itself the Communist Party. But communism was always state capitalism, and neofeudalism through the vehicles of corporatism and globalization is simply the final totalitarian form of capitalism.
..almost no one is offering an affirmative ideological alternative to the neoliberalism of the Village.
In all modesty, I am. And more broadly, there’s a well ramified structure of anarchist sites and blogs, starting with the encyclopedic Anarchist FAQ:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
Anarchism simply means true political and economic democracy. It simply means political self-rule and responsibility and economic self-management.
But since at least the 30s there’s been a systematic alliance on the part of liberals, communists, conservatives, and fascists to suppress knowledge of the facts that:
1. Anarchism is a comprehensive, exhaustively articulated system of political thought;
2. Which has worked well in practice, most spectacularly in 1930s Spain, wherever it had the opportunity and until it was destroyed by liberal/communist/fascist violence.
Today there’s no communists left, but the liberal/conservative/fascist agreement is still in place. (Which is why I was so turned off by that post; it’s part of this conspiracy to suppress.)
One suggestion for those who are currently ideologically unmoored: It’s not coherent to reject the Democrats but still go looking for a “better” alternative party.
If one correctly rejects the delusional, “we need better Democrats!”, but still subscribes to the almost identical “we need better representative elites!”, then one hasn’t made much progress.
Just as much as Democrats and Republicans, it’s centralized representative government itself which has proven to be irremediably corrupt and impractical.
If humanity is to continue, it’s finally time for us to take adult responsibility for ourselves and stop looking for “grown-ups” to tell us what to do. We need to stop being so childish.
Taking responsibility for ourselves means recognizing that morally, rationally, and practically there’s only one way forward – direct federative political and economic democracy.
Well..There’s the rub..It is what keeps me awake nights.
After 1000 years of being told what to do and when. Being told what to think and what to ignore. Is the western part of mankind so condition that we will destroy each other rather than comtemplate change, or allo diversity?
I think even now the conditioning, like most conditioning, is shallow and can change rapidly.
I agree that the conditioning can be changed very rapidly, especially among the working class.
Yesterday I got a haircut, and this twenty something girl who cut my hair was complaining about the US infrastructure, how it was falling apart, she’d watched a 3 hour documentary on history channel, and why doesn’t the government do something, why aren’t they putting money into a jobs program, since we had bailed out the banks and so forth. And then she mentioned that her husband was back from Afghanistan but getting increasingly desperate because he could not find a job, and he was suffering from PTSD, why aren’t the veterans getting more help from the government she asked me?
She knew something was wrong with this picture, but hadn’t quite connected the dots. And so I gently pointed her in the right direction by asking a few questions, such as “why do you think the government bailed out the bankers, yet they’re not creating jobs to repair bridges or water lines, etc, and why aren’t they helping your husband, despite him risking his life in the service of our country? How many of our leaders do you think have their own kids risking their lives in any of these wars?
And near the end of a 15 minute haircut, it was like she had this eureka moment, the next thing I knew *she* was the one who said we need a revolution to overthrew the government, because I never suggested anything like that.
And this morning I had a very similar conversation with a black guy working in an Exxon service station, I have similar experiences almost every time I speak to working people and I speak to them every chance I get.
Working people are not nearly as stupid as our elites imagine them to be. They know what is going on and I believe there is a limit to how much abuse they’re willing to take.
I sure hope there’s a limit.
Also, I think by now it’s probably the more formally “educated” who are more likely to be terminally conformist, ignorant in the sense that they’re unable to correctly process information, and just flat out stupid, because by now the more education one gets, the more thoroughly brainwashed into corporate cogdom one is likely to become.
Although there are some notable exceptions, as a general rule the more “higher education” a person has been subjected to, then the more brainwashed and conformist they tend to be.
Amen to that. Every time I speak with anyone in retail or service industries I ask them if they “are being treated
right” and if they have profit sharing, stock options etc. The answers of course are usually “no”. “There’s not
going to be a job left in this country pretty soon”
Everyone, from the mailman to the gardeners to the
bus drivers all heartily agree.
Here’s a story
that reflects the corrosive effects of bottom line economics on our basic infrastructure:
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Inside-Recent-Phone-Outages-113427559.html
“When NBCLA questioned AT&T about the Bennett’s three-week wait to get their phone line fixed, the company immediately sent a technician to fix their phone.
But many other AT&T and Verizon landline customers have been told it will be up to a month until their service is restored.
The long wait for repairs, insiders say, is because AT&T has been cutting the workforce that repairs landlines.
In fact a document NBCLA obtained from the California Public Utilities Commission, shows that AT&T cut its total landline workforce 61%, from 1991 to 2008.”
Meanwhile they are spending hundreds of millions on
advertising to convince you to buy yet more services that they can’t maintain.
Amen to that. Every time I speak with anyone in retail or service industries I ask them if they “are being treated
right” and if they have profit sharing, stock options etc. The answers of course are usually “no”. “There’s not
going to be a job left in this country pretty soon”
Everyone, from the mailman to the gardeners to the
bus drivers all heartily agree. There is a latent rebellion brewing out there–to what end though?
Here’s a story
that reflects the corrosive effects of bottom line economics on our basic infrastructure:
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Inside-Recent-Phone-Outages-113427559.html
“When NBCLA questioned AT&T about the Bennett’s three-week wait to get their phone line fixed, the company immediately sent a technician to fix their phone.
But many other AT&T and Verizon landline customers have been told it will be up to a month until their service is restored.
The long wait for repairs, insiders say, is because AT&T has been cutting the workforce that repairs landlines.
In fact a document NBCLA obtained from the California Public Utilities Commission, shows that AT&T cut its total landline workforce 61%, from 1991 to 2008.”
Meanwhile they are spending hundreds of millions on
advertising to convince you to buy yet more services that they can’t maintain.
Darn, must be water in my cable box, sorry for the double post.
Thanks for that link attempter, looks like a great site.
I read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid a couple of years ago and am reading it again now. A wonderful book. But I read it in ignorance of anarchism, and knew nothing about Kropotkin. Reading it was and is one my efforts to understand money, economics, the Universe, etc., efforts which have led me rather inexorably to anarchism and anti-hierarchy. Towards true democracy is where we have to head, even though the challenge is, as Paul Repstock points out, enormous. If we don’t undertake it though, I feel sure we’ll destroy ourselves, probably this century.
Speaking as someone previously ignorant of the delightful order and freedom inherent in anarchic thought (is that the right expression?), I suspect one of the most important things to point out to those suspicious of anarchism, as I was, is how orderly it is in its thinking. It is not anti-order, just anti-state, anti-hierarchy, which even a quick look at the etymology demonstrates.
“those suspicious of anarchism” (It is order, just state, hierarchy}.
Skippy…funny how those that fear so much are them selves Purveyors Rex, of that which afflicts them so badly.
You’re right, Toby and Skippy. As soon as people overcome their conditioned aversion to the term “anarchism” and read what it’s about, they find it well thought out, and they like it. The only exceptions are those with a vested interest in coercive hierarchies, and other incorrigible authoritarians.
“As soon as people overcome their conditioned aversion to the term “anarchism” and read what it’s about, they find it well thought out, and they like it.”
I can assure you this is not true.
“The only exceptions are those with a vested interest in coercive hierarchies, and other incorrigible authoritarians.”
This is a labeling/nullification argument that has no place is thoughtful discussion and seems to have not even a tangential relation to reality or facts either.
“Which has worked well in practice, most spectacularly in 1930s Spain, wherever it had the opportunity and until it was destroyed by liberal/communist/fascist violence.”
OMG. This is just what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent. What nonsense. You really believe the “destruction” part is divorceable from the whole birth-death cycle of anarchism? The power vacuum created by the anarchism makes the statist violence inevitable. Is that really so difficult to wrap your head around? I mean, seriously, this is embarrassing.
The only thing embarrassing is the way a nihilistic troll like you keeps slinking about pretending to care about things but is really just looking for excuses to tear people down. That’s all I’ve ever seen you do here.
The only thing I ever saw you say which wasn’t a lie was when you expressed your admiration for Obama and how intelligent you think he is. That pegs you exactly. You’re the exact same supercilious nihilist sociopath. Except that his con was far more successful.
@Anonymous Jones
If you have nothing constructive to offer, why not leave?
Looks like your friend Obama turned out to have no skills whatsoever beyond campaigning, he’s so totally self-involved, so wholly-owned by the banksters, that he probably has no idea what is going on in the world.
And so what does that make a dumb-ass like you who fell for his marketing schtick?
Where I come from, if “well thought out” is the best thing you can say of a movement or ideology, well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOuCbDkKIs4
Who said that was the best thing I could say about it? I said people think anarchism means chaos, when it means the exact opposite.
I am not against what you say but have a couple of thoughts.
Lao Tze said: The way that can be named is not the real way.
I think that this applies to religion and socio-political structures.
How do you get anywhere from here? Unfortunately, the current American political economy is in blindly driving off a cliff for all but the ultra rich. Pressure is building for change that is not being addressed which leads me to believe that when change does come it will be accompanied by mass social upheaval that plays into the strategy of the current folks in control. It is not like there is a NEW WORLD that disaffected folk can go to and set up a new ….ism or …..acy.
Folks are going to transcend their differences and come together to build a more just and equitable world or not. It would be nice to see more steps being taken in the positive direction than currently by Yves continues to show that all is not lost.
I believe and hope that the days of rampant consumerism as an economic strategy enforced by American imperialism over the past 50+ years are soon over. It has driven quality out of products, regardless of their relative social usefulness (i.e. refrigerator versus a toy). To me, these are the sort of attitudes that need to be attacked and deprecated.
It would be nice to see some folks in jail for the recent political economic excesses. I believe that if that doesn’t start happening soon, the wrong folks are going to start ending up there from more expressions of frustration.
Psyco…Yves and many others here are doing the best they are able, given that they are constrained by applying their integrity within a system which is already irretreivably corrupted. This is perhaps not good and probably a bit of a cop-out. However, we have all been conditioned; to not rock the boat, to not bite the hand which feeds us, and to make the best of whatever reality we find ourselves in.
We are all taught risk aversion and resistance to change from the moment we leave the crib.
For the present, the only way there from here is for the people who share these ideas and principles to live according to them as much as possible under these adverse conditions, and to do all we can to tell others about them.
It’s a process of building the new within the decrepit. It’s a gradual evolution. But the more people try to live as cooperatively and democratically as possible, and the better organized we become, the better able we’ll be to withstand the travails and assaults of this system’s collapse, and the better positioned we’ll be to offer our way as the new way, to fill the void left by the absolute discredit and then collapse of the old way.
Psycho, Zhuangzi said it more explicitly than Laozi when he wrote the world ‘does not need governing. In fact, it should not be governed.’
He was probably a true Neanderthal descendant.
By the way, the beauty of Laozi, as understood by generations of anarchistic Chinese, is that while his eternal Way is not namable, he did expend thousands of words on naming it.
touche!
“The second major difference concerns the form of anarchist economy proposed. Individualists prefer a market-based system of distribution to the social anarchists need-based system. Both agree that the current system of capitalist property rights must be abolished and that use rights must replace property rights in the means of life”
Use rights versus property rights is a bit of a rub.
The difficulty of controlling a non-heirarchical movement also lead to some bomb throwing by its (we will be polite) fringe. Something the tea party – Glenn Beckians also would have a concern with.
The distinction between useful possession and constrictive “property” is at least intellectually clear. As long as one is occupying only as much land as one can use, and is in fact productively using it, then no one would have a right to encroach.
But if land is simply lying unused, then either the community could vote some use for it, or if they don;t do that, then any individual could workstead on it.
As for fringe lunatics, all we can do is be clear that anarchism rejects violence against persons except in direct self-defense, and call out all allegations to the contrary as the pro-criminal lies they are.
More rain.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/severe-storms-batter-floodravaged-region-20110119-19w2f.html
@Attempter
Angry Nerds
How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types.
http://www.slate.com/id/2281133/
Skippy…me to YS lol bacterial flood waters.
Skippy,
Hang in there…..on a liquid note:
Defeat is not bitter if you don’t swallow it.
Think of how bored you were before….in the good old days, before the interesting times.
Never have, never will.
Personally I prefer the tender mercy’s of the Universe than those of the elitist, one makes you strong but, the other sucks the spirit right out of ya.
Skippy…I’d rather be here and now than any posh sanitized point of designation. Its just to bad Oprah missed it, now that would have been grand!
That article’s pretty good. Probably the best I’ve seen in the MSM. I’m surprised it didn’t mention Leopold and Loeb, similar misinterpreters.
I’ll just add one thing the article doesn’t mention, that in spite of his frequent use of militaristic metaphors, Nietzsche never supports physical violence as any sort of affirmative act. (It was part of N’s delight in writing that he liked using the preferred metaphors of his ideological enemies to promote ideas opposed to them. But this has hindered his reputation, as it leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and intentional distortions.)
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/positive-freedom-nietzsche-marx-and-anarchism/
Extracts from a highly opinionated body of work easily make for damning evidence.
Nietzsche’s ‘list’ of flawed enterprises or persona included orthodox religion (particularly Christianity), philosophers of his (or any other) age, charity, skepticism, cynicism, nihilism, German nationalism, militarism, internationalism, science (in some respects), democracy, women, der Englander, Jews (at times) and various former associates and intellects of his time.
The list is by no means exhaustive.
Nietzsche feared his writings being misinterpreted in his own time, something he saw come to bear; that his inflammatory commentary in selective rantings should also be part of his legacy is unfortunate, but inevitable.
By the way, Nietzsche is not easy reading, although relative to the intellectual fog of say Heidegger, a case could definitely be made.
Dear Yves,
You may like this article published in Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/MA06Dk01.html
Best regards.
Just a reminder, today’s the day the banksters are supposed to demonstrate why they should be allowed to continue ramming through uncontested foreclosures in NJ.
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/foreclosure-moratorium-looms-in-nj/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/12/major-servicers-face-possible-suspension-of-foreclosures-in-new-jersey-over-robo-signing.html
Yves we know that if you were suffering from bubonic plague and trapped in an elevator in Ulan Bator you would apologise for producing only three or four pieces instead of the usual five or six.
LOL – mostly you end up with pneumonia in Ulan Bator. OH, the dust! The windy season is incredible.
But you are totally right. Yves suffers, and we benefit, from serious perfectionism issues. ;)
re: anarchy, floods: my current reading: rebecca solnit, a paradise built in hell. has good brief intro to kropotkin.
here’s a sample (pp. 110-111):
“While Soviets built collective shelters, American citizens were encouraged to build their own: destruction was the government’s job, survival the citizen’s. But the public stalled before the moral quandaries private shelters represented. The burning question was this: if you built a shelter for yourself and your family–an option available largely to families with backyards, not city dwellers or the poor–would you let the neighbors in? . . .
“Las Vegas’s civil defense leader provoked widespread outrage when he proposed assembling a five-thousand-man militia to keep bombed-out refugees from California from flooding the desert town. Preparing for this vision of war meant preparing to go to war against the neighbors in their hour of desperation. Twenty years later, one historian concluded that ‘slowly but surely millions of Americans were coming to the conclusion that private fallout shelters were morally indefensible.’
“It was a remarkable moment upon which few remarked: ordinary citizens balked at taking steps for their own survival at others’ expense, even in a time of great fear of nuclear war and suspicion that collective solutions and solidarities smacked of communism. Dorothy Day and the pacifist Catholic Worker community refused to participate in the statewide civil defense drills that began in New York in 1955. Instead they showed up defiantly at Manhattan’s city hall while everyone else went underground. Day was sometimes arrested, sometimes ignored, during her group’s annual public refusal to cooperate, until 1961, when two thousand people showed up to protest and the drills came to an end.”
Yves, Get well soon. Thanks for all you do. Any plans to have another social get together in NYC so we can come shake your hand?
Loved the term “neofuedalism” in the Gauardian article. It’s got more syllables than “wage slaves” so it’s sure to be a winner!
Re: “The myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ implodes Guardian”
That’s a pretty good article, but I have one beef. Wolff does a good job in laying out how the rich have endeavored, since the beginning of the GFC, to end what he calls “American exceptionalism” (I would have called it the American dream, because American exceptionalism conjures up something very different than the rise of the American worker in the period following WWII and ending in the 1970s). However, Wolff is silent on the role the rich played in undermining the bargaining position of the U.S. worker in the 35 or so years before the GFC.
Here’s what Wolff has to say about the pre-GFC period:
Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women’s liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour.
It seems like, if anyone had had any concern for the American worker beginning in the 70s, the following policy changes would have been in order:
1) Less immigration of both varieties: the highly skilled variety (which tends to be legal) and the unskilled variety (which tends to be illegal)
2) Shorter work weeks and earlier retirement
3) Restrictions on trade and capital flows
However, U.S. policy makers went just the opposite direction. This didn’t happen by accident, but because the rich wielded their inordinate political power to make it happen.
This becomes appallingly clear when one takes a look at the extreme measures the U.S. took to open up Latin America to free trade and capital flows. The U.S. sponsored a number of murderous dictators in Latin America, including those in Argentina and Chile, who tore down the barriers to the flow of goods and capital into and out of their countries. Paul Cooney explains how it went down in Argentina here. Greg Grandin explains how it went down in Chile here.
All this was done in the name of democracy and capitalism: “imposing the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees at gunpoint if needed” as the neocon writer Max Boot put it. But the rank and file of Argentina and Chile certainly didn’t benefit. It has been immiserated, just as the rank and file of the United States has been. The only winners have been a handful of wealthy US, Argentine and Chilean bankers and businessmen.
I think #2 doesn’t get near enough attention. There’s enough in the world and to spare, and (at least right now) the labor requirements to feed, clothe and house EVERYBODY is far less than the pool available.
Reminds me of this essay by Russell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vceIV4Arpmg
I’ll add in a similar vain, one of the most nefarious U.S. interventions south of the border, the 1950’s United Fruit-Guatemala regime change in which the democratically elected government of Guatemala was replaced in a CIA backed Coup d’état with one more in line with United Fruit’s interests.
Guatemalan agrarian land reforms of the early 50’s ran counter to UFCO’s corporate bottom line which through lobby and intervention of the U.S. government, saw CIA involvement under cover of Communist-linked paranoia of the times.
Although the subject wasn’t “free trade”, the underlying objectives and consequences in perpetrating injustice for corporate self-interest (perceived or otherwise) were the same.
Uh, you don’t need to have an excuse. You can just say that you’re taking the day off, or that something has come up, or that you just need a mental health day. This blog is a service to the rest of us, and you get to take time off with any explanation, or none at all.
Take care of yourself. Travel can be tiring. I worked myself into a serious case of pneumonia that had me on antibitotics for 45 days back in 1990.
As I recall Jim Henson died of pneumonia and it was like a wakeup call to me. I kicked back and took a couple days off and cancelled the international trips for a month.
As an aside, did you know if you take enough antibiotics of the right type it can mutate the bacteria in your mouth? In this case it made the bacteria black, so it made my tongue turn black. Now that will put the fear of God in you, if one does not know that it is a simple bacterial mutation. Nothing like looking at your tongue turned black in the mirror in the morning to get you to the doctor’s office. lol.
As the British historian G.D.H. Cole said, “The anarchists were anarchists because they did not believe in an anarchical world…”
The classic anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin the man of science notable among them, perceived the depravity of the social darwinism and planned chaos inherent in capitalism. They sought alternatives based on cooperation and mutual aid, which are as or more easily demonstrated in the natural world as the capitalists ideology of the war of all against all.
As traditional employment and benefits collapse here in the US, alternative economic structures such as cooperatives are likely to get another look. Let’s hope that occurs, along with conscious and militant stirrings among the working class.
That’s why economic democracy is the only rational choice going forward. If we look at the way this system’s going, the way its only policy imperatives are accelerating command corporatization of the economy and intensifying wealth concentration, it becomes clear that there’s absolutely zero future for “reformism” within neoliberal capitalism.
Cooperative mindsets, actions, and structures are the only plausible alternative.
I see the post format has change. I don’t like the posts collapsed if clicking “Read the Rest…” loads a new page.
Oh, and a small request (if you happen to read this): is it possible to make the links on your site open in a new tab by default, or allow an option to do so like eschatonblog? My browser can force links to open in new tabs, but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument.
This hand-wringing about the structure and purpose of the lefty blogosphere is silly, and such a liberal thing to do. Why talk about issues when you can talk about talking? How delightfully meta.
I don’t know if I should gag at all the solemn mumbling about a blogger’s duties, or be glad that people take it so seriously, but either way it’s an extraordinarily bit of elitism.
‘Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies. What was once viewed as the signature of Bush/Cheney radicalism is now official, bipartisan Washington consensus: the policies equally of both parties and all Serious people. Thanks to Barack Obama, this architecture is firmly embedded in place and invulnerable to meaningful political challenge.’ — Glen Greenwald
Greenwald is right, and it’s why I find Blurbman Kurgman’s monomaniacal, simplistic caricature of white-hat Democrats vs. black-hat Republicans so exasperating. When it comes to the near 5 percent of GDP commandeered for world domination (at the expense of the domestic economy), there’s only one party in Washington: the War Party.
And so, tomorrow at noon, we usher in the eleventh year of the Bush-Obama-Cheney administration. Celebratory drone strikes are planned in Waziristan, according to the authoritative NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/world/asia/18terror.html?scp=1&sq=drones%20north%20waziristan%20militants&st=cse
Strange — these blood sacrifices of little brown people on the other side of the globe don’t seem to appease the gods any more. Why do they hate us?
Galleon update, “Chiesi admits “crossing the line” in Galleon case”:
Chiesi, who used to work for New Castle Funds LLC, could serve up to four years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement. Her lawyer, Alan Kaufman, said outside the courtroom that Chiesi had not agreed to cooperate with the government in the Galleon probe and that prosecutors had not asked her to.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70I43G20110119
That last bit is interesting. She wasn’t even asked to give up anything on her boss. If there’s no snitching required, is it a slam dunk on Raj?
Thanks for your blog Yves. Hope you are well, or getting better soon.
This will be of interest to your readers, if you haven’t already linked it.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPa
Remember last summer’s Mosque story? Well, apparently the entire scam was funded by a Wall Street hedge fund manager:
“Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the giant hedge fund manager Renaissance Technologies, appears to have financed the ad campaign entirely himself, through a $1 million contribution on July 26 to the New York State Conservative Party, according to a filing today by the party’s housekeeping account….
….some hedge fund figures were worried that the state would intervene in trading, and the ad buy could have been a signal to Andrew Cuomo of their willingness to spend millions attacking him over the issue.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0111/Hedge_Fund_figure_financed_mosque_campaign.html
Typical scapegoating…divert anger away from the banksters and towards something else, anything else, Muslims, public sector workers, *anything* but Wall Street. Tomorrow it will be Eurasia perhaps and if that doesn’t work out then Oceania will become the new enemy.