Word of the week “Plutocracy”
Definition of PLUTOCRACY
Examples of PLUTOCRACY
- If only the wealthy can afford to run for public office, are we more a plutocracy than a democracy?
- corporate greed and America’s growing plutocracy
The term “plutocracy” is formally defined as government by the wealthy, and is also sometimes used to refer to a wealthy class that controls a government, often from behind the scenes. More generally, a plutocracy is any form of government in which the wealthy exercise the preponderance of political power, whether directly or indirectly.Plutocracy may also have social and cultural aspects. Thus, in Democracy for the Few political scientist Michael Parenti is led to comment “American capitalism represents more than just an economic system; it is an entire cultural and social order, a plutocracy, a system of rule that is mostly by and for the rich. Most universities and colleges, publishing houses, mass circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations, professional sports teams, foundations, churches, private museums, charity organizations, and hospitals are organized as corporations, ruled by boards of trustees (or directors or regents) composed overwhelmingly of affluent businesspeople. These boards exercise final judgment over all institutional matters.”The question of whether or not the United States could be said to be a plutocracy is discussed at length in Who Rules America, by sociologist G. William Domhoff. There Domhoff remarks: “The idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people might shape the economy and government for their own benefit goes against the American grain. Nevertheless . . . the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant power figures in the United States. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington. Their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments.” In the US, plutocratic governance is abetted by mass media owned by the hyperwealthy and operated in their own economic self-interest, the failure to provide public financing to political candidates, poor oversight of the electoral process, elitist Supreme Court appointments, the organization of wealth into socially-irresponsible corporations, the collapse of meaningful regulatory regimes, plutocratically financed “think tanks” (propaganda distribution centers), and an impoverished educational system that has failed utterly to provide Americans with the elements of political literacy (all of which have their foundations in philosophy).
A Guide to the Open Internet Even You Can Understand
If you love your Internet, you should familiarize yourself with this guide to The Open Internet and the concepts of Network Neutrality. Network neutrality is the idea that your cellular, cable, or phone internet connection should treat all websites and services the same. Big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to treat them differently so they can charge you more depending on what you use.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently debating legislation to define limits for internet service providers (ISPs). The hope is that they will keep the internet open and prevent companies from discriminating against different kinds of websites and services.
Four Cyber Threats for 2011
Internet Superweapons to Facebook Crimes, Security Experts Predict New Web Attacks
In late 2010, a new kind of computer worm attacked an Iranian nuclear facility and so altered the course of cyber warfare that the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs marked the attack as the beginning of a new era: The Age of Stuxnet.
And while the Stuxnet worm may be the most identifiable, ominous new threat to cyber security as the new year begins, security experts have predicted 2011 will also be a year of dynamic shifts in online threats in other areas, including social media and political “hacktivism.”
Here are the top four security concerns that cyber experts see coming over the digital horizon:
Cyber War’s Newest Superweapon: Stuxnet and Copycats
Stuxnet was first discovered in July 2010 by a security firm in Belarus, but didn’t make global headlines until months later when Iranian state media announced the Middle East nation had been the target of a coordinated attack.
The worm was “the first of its kind, written to specifically target mission-critical control systems running a specific combination of software and hardware,” a Department of Homeland Security official told ABC News.
But experts said the worm is not limited to any single type of target and can be altered to attack several key components of any nation’s infrastructure, from electricity grids to oil rigs.
“The idea that a piece of malicious code can target physical systems and create real-world impacts is something that’s been speculated in the industry for quite some time and certainly was largely understood to be possible. Stuxnet was the first widespread implementation of that kind of attack,” Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager for cyber security firm Symantec, told ABC News.
Symantec’s number one prediction for 2011 was increased cyber attacks on critical infrastructures just like the nuclear facility in Iran, and Stuxnet is only the beginning. Read more…
Earth May be Uninhabitable for Future Generations
Humans are in danger of making large parts of the Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years because of man made climate change, according to new evidence based on geological records.
The US study predicted that if society continues burning fossil fuels at the current rate, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide could rise from the current level of 390 parts per million (ppm) to 1,000 by the end of this century.
The last time the world had such high levels of carbon dioxide temperatures were on average 29F(16C) above pre-industrial levels. Evidence has been found of crocodiles and palm trees at the Poles and only small mammals were able to survive.
Jeffrey Kiehl, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), who carried out the study, said the Earth could return to such temperatures over hundreds or even thousands of years.
But unlike last time, when it happened over millions of years, temperatures will rise too fast for species to adapt and change.
In the short term he said temperatures could rise by more than 10.8F (6C) by the end of the century, which will also wipe out species.
“This is happening at such a rate how will species, including humans, respond? The implications for the biosphere is of great concern.”
Dr Kiehl not only looked at geological records but also computer models to predict what will happen if carbon dioxide levels rise at such a rate.
He included ‘feed back factors’, such as melting sea ice, methane released from thawing permafrost and Amazon die-back.
This showed that temperatures will increase much faster than previously thought as a result of rising carbon dioxide.
“If we don’t start seriously working toward a reduction of carbon emissions, we are putting our planet on a trajectory that the human species has never experienced,” he said. “We will have committed human civilization to living in a different world for multiple generations.”
Dr Kiehl hit back at critics who claim that acting on climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels will upset the world order.
“A truly conservative position is to conserve what we have, to not radically change things and if we do not want to radically change the environment then the conservative approach is to conserve the Earth as the human species has known it ever since we have been around on this planet.”
TSA Now Forcing Opt-Outs To Walk Through Body Scanners
Agency claims machines are “switched off,” traveler says policy is part of psychological ploy to coerce subservience from other passengers
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
If the experience of a man traveling through Baltimore Washington International Airport last night is anything to go by, the TSA is now forcing people who opt out of the naked body scanner to walk through the machine as part of a psychological ploy to coerce subservience out of other travelers.
Alexander Petersen was passing through security to board a domestic flight to Florida with his wife and three children. After the backscatter x-ray machines were turned on, TSA staff started corralling passengers to go through the naked body scanners. Petersen’s family escaped selection but when he was told to submit to a scan, Peterson declined and opted for the invasive pat down instead.
“They then called for an “opt-out” pat down and still told me I had to go through the machine,” writes Petersen. “I said no, and reiterated that I opt for the pat-down. They said that I just have to walk through the machine and that they won’t turn it on. I said “how do I know it’s not on, just because you say so?” Then, one of the other workers stood inside of the machine where the footprints were and waived for me to go through. With that, I assumed that it was indeed off, and proceeded through the machine for my enhanced pat-down molestation.”
After receiving his advanced grope down, during which a TSA worker felt his crotch and backside, much to the confusion of Peterson’s young son who asked, “what is that man doing to you?,” Petersen reflected on being forced to walk through the machine with assurances that it was “switched off,” even though he had declined to be body scanned.
The Rise of the New Global Elite
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
By Chrystia Freeland
The Atlantic
If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.
This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.
This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”: Read more…
Giving personal information to websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Gmail is about as secure as putting it on “a postcard”
An Icelandic politician whose Internet records are being targeted by Washington’s WikiLeaks investigation warns that giving personal information to websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Gmail is about as secure as putting it on “a postcard.”
“They are on a fishing expedition,” Birgitta Jonsdottir told The Globe and Mail editorial board, making some of her first public comments since learning that U.S. prosecutors are after her Twitter account. Her private messages, credit-card and telephone numbers are all being sought from the social-networking site – and, almost certainly, from other U.S.-based Internet corporations, too.
The request speaks to how state secrets will be won, lost and protected during the Internet Age, where libraries worth of data can be uploaded onto thumb drives, and where unfathomable amounts of person-to-person correspondence reside on corporate computers inside the United States.
A freedom-of-information advocate, Ms. Jonsdottir, 43, became a crucial WikiLeaks volunteer in 2009, but left last fall amid fallings-out with the leadership of founder Julian Assange. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is now under tremendous pressure to charge Mr. Assange amid the deep embarrassment caused by the ongoing disclosure of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables. Read more…
Why Are Commodity Prices Rising? Let Me Count the Ways
Our overview of 2011 ‘What Ifs’ concentrated on the concepts of bifurcation and biflation. Those themes are already playing out just a couple of weeks into the New Year. Inflation in all types of commodities has ramped up even further, leaving countries like China, India, Brazil, Thailand and South Korea to deal with more than their fair share of these inflationary forces. Meanwhile, easy monetary policy in the U.S. and Europe just adds fuel to the inflation fire.
The United Nations food agency (FAO) kicked off 2011 by announcing that December of 2010 saw food prices eclipse the record levels hit during the 2008 food crisis, which triggered riots in Egypt, Cameroon, and Haiti at the time. The current spike in food prices has already caused violent food riots in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan.
Food Inflation by the Numbers
Food inflation has already hit double digits in China, India and Brazil. It’s not hard to see why when you look at how some of the major soft commodities have performed over the last 12 months:
- Corn: + 69%
- Wheat: + 47%
- Soy Beans: + 44%
- Sugar: + 15%
- Coffee: + 65%
- Cotton: + 105%
(Trailing 12-month price moves as of January 12, 2011)
While these price spikes are causing food and clothing prices to rise, those effects will undoubtedly be exacerbated by the simultaneous rise in energy and raw materials we have seen:
- Oil: + 15% over 12 months and + 30% since the August, 2010 low
- Copper: + 30%
Overall, you can see the rise in commodity prices in the CRB Index, up about 30% since August of 2010, but well off the parabolic peak of 2008: Read more…
Tunisia Riots: Government on brink of Collapse
Unity Government in Tunisia Fractured by Resignations
Police formed a line in front of protesters in Tunis on Tuesday.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
TUNIS — Five or more ministers from opposition parties resigned from Tunisia’s unity government on Tuesday, bowing to a wave of street protests against the cabinet’s domination by members of the ousted president’s ruling party and putting mounting pressure on his prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, to resign as well.
As the leaders of the established opposition parties renounced the unity government, the revolutionary passions unleashed across the region continued to reverberate, as two more men in Egypt set themselves ablaze on Tuesday and a third was stopped before he could do so. Those self-immolations followed six others, all in apparent imitation of the one that set off the Tunisian uprising a month ago.
The new unity government was showing strains practically from the moment it was sworn in on Monday, with new protests focused on its links to the former president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Read more…
Gold May Gain as Europe Debt Concern, Price Drop Spur Demand
Sungwoo Park
Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) — Gold may gain as concerns that the European sovereign-debt crisis may linger boost demand for precious metals as a protector of wealth, and as a price drop in the past two weeks spurs physical buying. Platinum gained.
Bullion for immediate delivery was little changed at $1,364.18 an ounce at 1:33 p.m. in Seoul. The metal, which rose to a record $1,341.25 in December, dropped 4 percent this month, heading for the first monthly decline since July. The February- delivery contract rose 0.2 percent to $1,363.50 an ounce in New York.
“Around this level, we still see quite good physical demand,” Bruce Ikemizu, head of commodity trading at Standard Bank Plc in Tokyo, said today by phone. “I’m rather pessimistic. The problems won’t be resolved overnight. This European financial problem will be a long-term bullish factor for gold and precious metals.”
The euro was little changed against the dollar after yesterday falling 0.7 percent amid concern that an agreement among European finance ministers will fail to contain the region’s debt crisis. Euro-area finance ministers indicated after a meeting yesterday they aren’t facing immediate pressure to tame the crisis, while pledging to strengthen the safety net for debt-strapped countries.
Morgan Stanley raised its gold forecast through 2015, the bank said in a report today. It expects gold to average $1,400 an ounce this year, 6 percent more than a previous forecast.
Assets in 10 gold exchange-traded products dropped 6.54 metric tons to about 2,078 tons as of Jan. 14, the lowest since Sept. 15, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Platinum for immediate delivery gained 0.5 percent to $1,813.70 an ounce. Spot palladium declined for a fourth day, dropping 0.4 percent to $791.50 an ounce, while silver was little changed at $28.2975 an ounce.
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