Some Snippets from What I've Been Reading Lately

Here are some snippets and links to some of the fine articles I've read in the past few days.

Greed is Not a Virtue
by David Korten

We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.

But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism — an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others.

In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin.

Having established control of the institutions of the economy, media, education, government, and even religion, market fundamentalists initiated a global social experiment to test their theory. The results are now in...

Despicable Lies, Delusional Economic Recovery, Hyped Unemployment Numbers...
by Joel S. Hirschhorn

The US government lies. Sure looks like most Americans gobble up false and misleading information that is nothing less than political propaganda. Take the highly hyped unemployment number for March, 2011 of 8.8 percent that moved like a tornado through the media and was praised by Democrat politicians and the White House. As if that number is accurate, as if it fairly describes unemployment. It does not. What is called by experts, such as Leo Hindery, as the real unemployment number was actually 17.7 percent, which is remarkably higher. To appreciate that much higher number is to throw a large bucket of cold water on all the political spin on the economic recovery.

The official government unemployment figure has been carefully crafted to intentionally underestimate actual unemployment. The way the data are collected through a survey of homes intentionally ignores a number of unemployed and underemployed Americans. The latter includes those who have stopped looking for a job because it has become crystal clear to them that there are no jobs for them, as well as those working part-time when what they really want is a good full time job.

Similarly, Gallup polling which takes into account these other factors found the total number for March up slightly to 20.3 percent of the US workforce...

The Link Between War and Big Finance
by Kevin Zeese

Americans are recognizing the link between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street oligarchs—a connection that goes back to the beginning of the modern U.S. empire. Banks have always profited from war because the debt created by banks results in ongoing war profit for big finance; and because wars have been used to open countries to U.S. corporate and banking interests. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan wrote: “the large banking interests were deeply interested in the world war because of the wide opportunities for large profits.”

Many historians now recognize that a hidden history for U.S. entry into World War I was to protect U.S. investors. U.S. commercial interests had invested heavily in European allies before the war: “By 1915, American neutrality was being criticized as bankers and merchants began to loan money and offer credits to the warring parties, although the Central Powers received far less. Between 1915 and April 1917, the Allies received 85 times the amount loaned to Germany.” The total dollars loaned to all Allied borrowers during this period was $2,581,300,000. The bankers saw that if Germany won, their loans to European allies would not be repaid. The leading U.S. banker of the era, J.P. Morgan and his associates did everything they could to push the United States into the war on the side of England and France. Morgan said: "We agreed that we should do all that was lawfully in our power to help the Allies win the war as soon as possible." President Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned saying he would keep the United States out of war, seems to have entered the war to protect U.S. banks’ investments in Europe...

Dirty Energy's Dirty Deeds
by Ellen Cantarow

In fact, “tar sands” is a colloquialism for 54,000 square miles of bitumen that veins sand and clay beneath the boreal forests of Alberta, one of Canada’s western provinces. Black as it is, bitumen isn’t actually tar, though it looks and smells like tar, and has its consistency on a very cold day -- hence, that term “tar sands.” (The corporations that produce the stuff prefer “oil sands.”)

Unlike oil, bitumen does not flow. Gouged and steamed out from under the forest, it is wrenched from the soil, barreled, and then refined into synthetic crude oil -- at shattering environmental costs. The tar sands industry has ravaged Alberta’s forests, poisoned its air and water, and wrecked the livelihoods of its indigenous peoples. Moreover, producing synthetic crude from a barrel of bitumen generates at least twice as much greenhouse gas as producing a barrel of normal crude oil. At 1.5 million barrels of tar sands oil a day, that’s a lot of global warming.

But for corporations intent on profits in a world rocked by Middle East and North African uprisings that might threaten global oil supplies, and by declining reserves of normal crude, environmental catastrophe is trivial collateral damage. The tar sands’ great selling point in the U.S. is that it comes from a friendly neighbor. Russ Girling, president and CEO of TransCanada, typically touts tar sands as improving "U.S. energy security and reduc[ing] dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East and Venezuela," At a White House meeting in early February, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper assured President Obama that "Canada is the largest, the most secure, the most stable, and the friendliest supplier of that most vital of all America's purchases: energy...”

Alan Greenspan Is Once Again Banging the Drum for Deregulation -- Is he Just Crazy?
By Orson Aguilar and Preeti Vissa

Some people never learn, and it seems that Alan Greenspan is one of them. The former Fed chair, who ignored repeated warnings of trouble in the subprime mortgage and derivatives markets and whose inaction played a key role in the crash of ’08, is now claiming that the reason the economic recovery is so weak is too much government action.

Is he kidding?

For a while, Greenspan seemed to have learned at least a little from the crisis, acknowledging that he’d put too much faith in the ability of financial markets to self-correct. But lately he’s retreated back into free-market fantasyland...