Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Townsend Farms Hepatitis A Outbreak Hits 87
At least 87 people in eight states are now known to have been sickened with hepatitis A in the outbreak connected to Townsend Farms frozen berries sold at Costco stores, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At least 36 people have been hospitalized. Based on known information, roughly 66 percent of cases are female, with the age of those infected ranging from 2 to 84.
Townsend Farms recalled all potentially contaminated products on June 4, including a berry mix sold at Harris Teeter stores. No illnesses have been associated with the Harris Teeter mix.
The Costco product was sold in a 3 lb. bag labeled “Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend, with UPC code 0 78414 404448.
Early tests have identified the virus as genotype 1B, a type rarely found in North America but more common in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Those investigating the outbreak say the contamination came from the mix’s pomegranate seeds, which were grown in Turkey.
Symptoms of hepatitis A infection include fatigue, aching muscles, nausea, fever and abdominal pain.
Those who ate the berries but have not experienced symptoms may be able to prevent infection by receiving a hepatitis A vaccine within two weeks. Those who have received a vaccine in the past do not need another one and should not fall ill.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Join Britain in cringing at Alex Jones
By Rob Beschizza
Alex Jones, American radio host and conspiracy theorist, was invited to the BBC's Sunday Politics. It is not to be missed.
Alex Jones, American radio host and conspiracy theorist, was invited to the BBC's Sunday Politics. It is not to be missed.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
The Next American Revolution Has Already Begun: An Interview With Gar Alperovitz
By Gar Smith, The Berkeley Daily Planet
Gar Alperovitz, currently a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been writing books about wealth, democracy and national security for 48 years. In addition to serving in several government posts (including Special Assistant in the US State Department), Alperovitz is a founding principle of The Democracy Collaborative and a boardmember at the New Economics Institute.
What Then Must We Do? (his latest book and his twelfth since 1965) is a breezy, conversational read filled with somber forecasts, hopeful alternative economic strategies and lots of surprising facts and stats (Some examples: If the nation's personal wealth were divided evenly, a family of four would receive $200,000 a year. The hourly US minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is now $2 less than it was in 1968. The US is such a large country "You can tuck Germany into Montana!")
What Then Must We Do? (the title is borrowed from Tolstoy) explores a challenging premise: "The coming painful decades may be the prehistory of the next American revolution – and an evolutionary process that transforms the American system, making it both morally meaningful and ecologically sustainable."
Daniel Ellsberg calls this book possibly "the most important movement-building book of the new century" and Juliet Schor, author of True Wealth, hails it as "the most compelling account yet of how we can move beyond the piecemeal, project–by–project transformation of our political economy to truly systemic change."
Alperovitz recently took time from his busy schedule to discuss the arguments in his new book and explore the ramifications of social and economic change in an era of pending systemic collapse.
Gar S: You point out that 400 plutocrats in the US now own more wealth than 180 million other Americans. A scale of inequality that ranks as “medieval.” Shortly before his assassination, Dr. King noted America's problems could not be solved without “undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”
Gar A: The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that's the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
You mentioned Martin Luther King, citing some of the quotes I included in the book. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and we will be doubtless be hearing a lot about that and Dr. King’s leadership on racial equality and civil rights. I worked with him on neighborhood ownership questions we were looking at in the Senate at the time; and then again, a few years later, when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was also questioning the distribution of wealth, citing the “triple evils” of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. At the end, right before he was assassinated, he even began to talk about changing the economic power structure, even occasionally, using the words “democratic socialism.” In this era of difficulty we would do well to remember Dr. King as a visionary who was beginning to step out beyond the cramped consensus to ask far deeper questions about the nature of America and the possibilities for a different future for this country. That is our challenge today.
Gar S: You argue that it was not politics but circumstance (the Great Depression, followed by WW II) that precipitated the New Deal's progressive change and the country’s post-war economic prosperity. I was surprised by your assessment that an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression is no longer likely. Could you explain?
Gar A: Despite the systemic problems a crisis collapse of the scope and scale of the Great Depression is not likely. Here are a few reasons. First, the size of ongoing government spending stabilizing the economy is much, much larger than it was at the time of the Great Depression. Government spending—the floor under the private economy, if you like—was at 11 percent in 1929, now it is roughly 30 to 35 percent of the economy (depending on the year, and whether we are in recession.) The economy may decline rapidly, but the floor is three times higher than it was during the 1930s. Second, today we have built-in economic “stabilizers”—spending that kicks in to help offset the decline when recessions begin to get underway: unemployment insurance, food stamps, and so on. Then there is the sea change in politics. The American public now holds political leaders responsible for making sure the economy works—or at least does not totally fail. There is a heavy political price for any politician who fails to deal with truly massive economic pain. Perhaps most importantly, when push comes to shove, major corporate leaders also support action to counteract truly major economic contractions. You saw it in 2008 and 2009 when business leaders demanded action—including the stimulus plan.
So massive and sustained economic collapse of the kind that opened the way for extremely unusual and far-reaching policy change in the Great Depression and New Deal era, though not impossible, is no longer likely. This is not to say great recessions, ongoing economic pain, and high unemployment may not occur for long periods of time. Indeed, that is what we face at present.
Gar S: The new word for economic performance is no longer “growth” but “stagnation.” One percent of the country controls so much wealth but—unlike the middle class and working poor—the rich don't spend a significant part of their wealth.
Gar A: This prospect of stagnation—or “punctuated stagnation,” as I write (there may be small intermittent upticks; plus oil and other commodity price explosions)—is very important to grasp. I believe (along with many observers) that we are entering an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. One problem is lack of demand in Keynesian terms, but I think it’s far deeper than that. We are returning to a pattern of stagnation that was common before the Depression collapse, on the one hand, and the extremely unusual conditions that prevailed during the postwar economic boom, on the other.
A short form of the argument would be this: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, up to World War I, there was decay, decline, and indeed major recession and almost depression. We don’t know what would have happened; World War I intervened, bailing out the economy. Same story with the Great Depression: World War II, not the New Deal, solved the economic problem in the second quarter of the century. In the third quarter of the century the post-war economic boom—brought about partly by savings built up during the war, partly by military spending in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the big military budgets of the Cold War, and partly because US competitors (Germany, Japan, and many others) had been significantly destroyed—was an extremely unusual boom moment—the greatest sustained boom in our history. But thereafter the pattern of economic difficulty resumed in the final quarter of the century. Even though military budgets are high today in absolute terms, they are comparatively small as a share of GDP. And I think nuclear weapons now preclude an industrial-scale global war like World War I or World War II. We can have small horrible wars, but they don’t function economically in the way that larger wars did previously.
Now these difficulties could be resolved if you had sufficient political power to mount a traditional Keynesian solution. But what is significant—and this is the heart of the matter—is that such a solution is no longer available, politically, for a number of reasons. I could go into a lot of them, but the principal one is the decline of organized labor. Labor union membership, the muscle behind progressive politics, was at its peak of around 35 percent just after the war, but is now down to the 11 percent range (and the 6 percent range in the private sector). Liberal reform now lacks an institutional basis. So that’s a picture of decay, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out.
Gar S: You argue that “evolutionary reconstruction” does not flow from reform or revolution but rather “from building institutions, workplaces and cultures concerned with democratizing wealth.” How significant are cooperative enterprises in today's economy. Could you describe the current state of America's cooperative economy?
Gar A: Given that the economy is unlikely to truly collapse and provoke explosive change—for all the reasons I have indicated—and given that a “reform” solution like the New Deal is extremely difficult in the absence of a strong institutional power base for liberalism (e.g. labor unions), we face an extremely unusual political situation. I believe we are entering an extended period, a multi-decade period, in which the dominant reality is likely to be one of erratic growth, stagnation, periodic inflation, substantial political stalemate and decay.
In such a context, the prospects for near-term change are obviously not great—especially when such change is conceived in traditional terms. On the other hand, for precisely such reasons, there is likely to be an intensified process of much deeper probing, much more serious political analysis, and much more fundamental institutional exploration and development. In fact, this is already well underway. Beneath the surface level of politics-as-usual, continuing political stalemate and the exhaustion of existing approaches have begun to open up some very interesting strategic possibilities. These are best understood as neither “reforms” (policies to modify and control, but not transcend, current corporate-dominated institutions) nor “revolution” (the overthrowing of current institutions), but rather a longer-term process of “evolutionary reconstruction”—that is, institutional transformation that unfolds over time.
Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public (rather than “the one percent”) increasingly comes to own more and more of the nation’s productive assets. As the old system decays, an evolutionary reconstruction would see the foundations of a new system gradually rising and replacing failing elements of the old.
Though the press doesn’t much cover this, such processes are already observable in many parts of the current American system. Some numbers: There are now ten thousand worker-owned companies of one kind or another in the country. And they are expanding over time, and they’re becoming more democratic rather than less. There are 130 million people who are members of one or another form of cooperative. A quarter of American electricity is produced by either municipal ownership or cooperatives. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is, in other words, “socialized.” There are neighborhood corporations, land trusts, and other municipal and state strategies. One can observe such a dynamic developing in the central neighborhoods of some of the nation’s larger cities, places that have consistently suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. In such neighborhoods, democratizing development has gone forward, paradoxically, precisely because traditional policies have been politically impossible.
All this has been building in scale and sophistication to the point that growing numbers of people now talk about a “New Economy.” It doesn’t yet compare to the giants of Wall Street and the corporate economy, of course. But it is growing to the point where challenges are also becoming possible. Move Your Money campaigns have seen billions transferred out of Wall Street banks into credit unions and local and community banks. If you add up the credit unions they are the equivalent of one of the largest US banks, knocking Goldman Sachs out of the top five.
I see this era as something akin to the decades before the New Deal, the time when experimentation
and development in the state and local “laboratories of democracy” laid down the principles and programs that became the basis for much larger national policies when the right political moment occurred.
Gar S: You clearly show that regulating Wall Street doesn’t work and breaking up large banks is unlikely to last. The conservative Chicago School of Economics, you point out, had a solution: essentially any business “too big to regulate”” should be nationalized. “Take them over; turn them into public utilities.” Could large banks really be taken over and transformed?
Gar A: The old conservative economists were right: Regulation doesn’t work; they capture the regulators. Anti-trust doesn’t work; if you break them up, they re-group. Look at Standard Oil. Look at AT&T and the telephone companies. In fact, the major banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” They imperil the entire economy. So ultimately the only answer, logically, is to take them over at some point. Milton Friedman’s revered teacher, H.C. Simons, the founder of the conservative Chicago School of economics, was one of the first to point out this logic. He argued that this was necessary because it was the only way to preserve a genuinely free economy.
Can it be done? We just did it in one form: In response to the financial crisis the federal government essentially nationalized General Motors and A.I.G. and was in a position to do the same with Chrysler and several major banks because of the huge injections of public capital that were required to save them from bankruptcy. At one point, Obama frankly told the bankers that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks. What happens when the next financial crisis occurs (as most observers on left, right and center think inevitable)? Or the one after that?
There are also already alternative models at hand. Most people don't realize this, but the federal government currently runs 140 different government banks. They aren’t always called banks, although sometimes they are, like the Export-Import Bank and the National Cooperative Bank. But sometimes they take the form of small business loans programs or agricultural programs. Then there is the Bank of North Dakota, a public bank that has been there for ninety years. It's a state-owned bank, very popular with small business but also labor. Twenty states have introduced legislation to create public banks of their own. States have huge tax flows, which could capitalize such banks. Once you start to look more carefully, beneath the surface of media attention, it may be that far more is possible much earlier and much faster than many now imagine.
Gar S: If you don’t like corporate capitalism or state socialism, what’s left? Shouldn’t a fundamental goal be to prevent accumulations of great wealth. Once great wealth or power is attained, there is a tendency to fear the majority and seek to protect one’s fortune at all costs.
Gar A: That is a fair question, and most people don’t face it squarely: “If you don’t like corporate capitalism, where the corporations dominate the political system, and you don’t like state socialism, where the state dominates the system by virtue of its ownership, what do you want?” I think the developments reported on in the book point towards something very American, something that might be called “a community sustaining system”—one in which national structures and regional structures and local structures are all oriented to producing healthy local community economies, and thereby healthy and ecologically sustainable democratic communities.
We are at a very remarkable moment in American history: Even as we face massive economic, social and environmental challenges, more and more people are beginning to see that politics as usual doesn’t work, that the problems are fundamental to the system itself. These issues are on the table for the first time in many decades. So there needs to be an answer at some point, in terms of system design, to the question of what a system looks like that isn’t corporate capitalism and isn’t state socialism but begins with community and how we build it.
The truly central question is who gets to own the nation’s wealth? Because it’s not only an economic question, it determines politics in large part. The corporate capitalist system lodges such power in the corporations and tiny elites. An alternative system must begin at the bottom and democratize ownership from the bottom up—all the way from small co-ops and neighborhood corporations on up through city and state institutions and even, when necessary, regionally and nationally.
I think we can see the outlines of such a model already emerging in developments in the New Economy. It might be called a “Pluralist Commonwealth.” Plural forms of common wealth ownership. Worker ownership, co-ops, municipal utilities, neighborhood land trusts, state ownership of certain national firms. Plural forms. It’s not very sexy language, but it attempts to get to the idea that you must change ownership of wealth in many different ways in order to achieve democratic results and achieve cultural changes that allow us a democratic solution to the systemic problem. The key thing is that just below the surface of media attention a great deal is going on—many, many new developments that move in the direction of democratic ownership, starting at the very grass roots level, and moving up.
All of this ultimately also puts “the system question” on the table. We need a serious and wide-ranging debate around a broader menu of institutional possibilities for America’s future than the stale choices commonly discussed on both left and right.
Gar Alperovitz, currently a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been writing books about wealth, democracy and national security for 48 years. In addition to serving in several government posts (including Special Assistant in the US State Department), Alperovitz is a founding principle of The Democracy Collaborative and a boardmember at the New Economics Institute.
What Then Must We Do? (his latest book and his twelfth since 1965) is a breezy, conversational read filled with somber forecasts, hopeful alternative economic strategies and lots of surprising facts and stats (Some examples: If the nation's personal wealth were divided evenly, a family of four would receive $200,000 a year. The hourly US minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is now $2 less than it was in 1968. The US is such a large country "You can tuck Germany into Montana!")
What Then Must We Do? (the title is borrowed from Tolstoy) explores a challenging premise: "The coming painful decades may be the prehistory of the next American revolution – and an evolutionary process that transforms the American system, making it both morally meaningful and ecologically sustainable."
Daniel Ellsberg calls this book possibly "the most important movement-building book of the new century" and Juliet Schor, author of True Wealth, hails it as "the most compelling account yet of how we can move beyond the piecemeal, project–by–project transformation of our political economy to truly systemic change."
Alperovitz recently took time from his busy schedule to discuss the arguments in his new book and explore the ramifications of social and economic change in an era of pending systemic collapse.
Gar S: You point out that 400 plutocrats in the US now own more wealth than 180 million other Americans. A scale of inequality that ranks as “medieval.” Shortly before his assassination, Dr. King noted America's problems could not be solved without “undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”
Gar A: The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that's the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
You mentioned Martin Luther King, citing some of the quotes I included in the book. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and we will be doubtless be hearing a lot about that and Dr. King’s leadership on racial equality and civil rights. I worked with him on neighborhood ownership questions we were looking at in the Senate at the time; and then again, a few years later, when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was also questioning the distribution of wealth, citing the “triple evils” of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. At the end, right before he was assassinated, he even began to talk about changing the economic power structure, even occasionally, using the words “democratic socialism.” In this era of difficulty we would do well to remember Dr. King as a visionary who was beginning to step out beyond the cramped consensus to ask far deeper questions about the nature of America and the possibilities for a different future for this country. That is our challenge today.
Gar S: You argue that it was not politics but circumstance (the Great Depression, followed by WW II) that precipitated the New Deal's progressive change and the country’s post-war economic prosperity. I was surprised by your assessment that an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression is no longer likely. Could you explain?
Gar A: Despite the systemic problems a crisis collapse of the scope and scale of the Great Depression is not likely. Here are a few reasons. First, the size of ongoing government spending stabilizing the economy is much, much larger than it was at the time of the Great Depression. Government spending—the floor under the private economy, if you like—was at 11 percent in 1929, now it is roughly 30 to 35 percent of the economy (depending on the year, and whether we are in recession.) The economy may decline rapidly, but the floor is three times higher than it was during the 1930s. Second, today we have built-in economic “stabilizers”—spending that kicks in to help offset the decline when recessions begin to get underway: unemployment insurance, food stamps, and so on. Then there is the sea change in politics. The American public now holds political leaders responsible for making sure the economy works—or at least does not totally fail. There is a heavy political price for any politician who fails to deal with truly massive economic pain. Perhaps most importantly, when push comes to shove, major corporate leaders also support action to counteract truly major economic contractions. You saw it in 2008 and 2009 when business leaders demanded action—including the stimulus plan.
So massive and sustained economic collapse of the kind that opened the way for extremely unusual and far-reaching policy change in the Great Depression and New Deal era, though not impossible, is no longer likely. This is not to say great recessions, ongoing economic pain, and high unemployment may not occur for long periods of time. Indeed, that is what we face at present.
Gar S: The new word for economic performance is no longer “growth” but “stagnation.” One percent of the country controls so much wealth but—unlike the middle class and working poor—the rich don't spend a significant part of their wealth.
Gar A: This prospect of stagnation—or “punctuated stagnation,” as I write (there may be small intermittent upticks; plus oil and other commodity price explosions)—is very important to grasp. I believe (along with many observers) that we are entering an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. One problem is lack of demand in Keynesian terms, but I think it’s far deeper than that. We are returning to a pattern of stagnation that was common before the Depression collapse, on the one hand, and the extremely unusual conditions that prevailed during the postwar economic boom, on the other.
A short form of the argument would be this: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, up to World War I, there was decay, decline, and indeed major recession and almost depression. We don’t know what would have happened; World War I intervened, bailing out the economy. Same story with the Great Depression: World War II, not the New Deal, solved the economic problem in the second quarter of the century. In the third quarter of the century the post-war economic boom—brought about partly by savings built up during the war, partly by military spending in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the big military budgets of the Cold War, and partly because US competitors (Germany, Japan, and many others) had been significantly destroyed—was an extremely unusual boom moment—the greatest sustained boom in our history. But thereafter the pattern of economic difficulty resumed in the final quarter of the century. Even though military budgets are high today in absolute terms, they are comparatively small as a share of GDP. And I think nuclear weapons now preclude an industrial-scale global war like World War I or World War II. We can have small horrible wars, but they don’t function economically in the way that larger wars did previously.
Now these difficulties could be resolved if you had sufficient political power to mount a traditional Keynesian solution. But what is significant—and this is the heart of the matter—is that such a solution is no longer available, politically, for a number of reasons. I could go into a lot of them, but the principal one is the decline of organized labor. Labor union membership, the muscle behind progressive politics, was at its peak of around 35 percent just after the war, but is now down to the 11 percent range (and the 6 percent range in the private sector). Liberal reform now lacks an institutional basis. So that’s a picture of decay, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out.
Gar S: You argue that “evolutionary reconstruction” does not flow from reform or revolution but rather “from building institutions, workplaces and cultures concerned with democratizing wealth.” How significant are cooperative enterprises in today's economy. Could you describe the current state of America's cooperative economy?
Gar A: Given that the economy is unlikely to truly collapse and provoke explosive change—for all the reasons I have indicated—and given that a “reform” solution like the New Deal is extremely difficult in the absence of a strong institutional power base for liberalism (e.g. labor unions), we face an extremely unusual political situation. I believe we are entering an extended period, a multi-decade period, in which the dominant reality is likely to be one of erratic growth, stagnation, periodic inflation, substantial political stalemate and decay.
In such a context, the prospects for near-term change are obviously not great—especially when such change is conceived in traditional terms. On the other hand, for precisely such reasons, there is likely to be an intensified process of much deeper probing, much more serious political analysis, and much more fundamental institutional exploration and development. In fact, this is already well underway. Beneath the surface level of politics-as-usual, continuing political stalemate and the exhaustion of existing approaches have begun to open up some very interesting strategic possibilities. These are best understood as neither “reforms” (policies to modify and control, but not transcend, current corporate-dominated institutions) nor “revolution” (the overthrowing of current institutions), but rather a longer-term process of “evolutionary reconstruction”—that is, institutional transformation that unfolds over time.
Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public (rather than “the one percent”) increasingly comes to own more and more of the nation’s productive assets. As the old system decays, an evolutionary reconstruction would see the foundations of a new system gradually rising and replacing failing elements of the old.
Though the press doesn’t much cover this, such processes are already observable in many parts of the current American system. Some numbers: There are now ten thousand worker-owned companies of one kind or another in the country. And they are expanding over time, and they’re becoming more democratic rather than less. There are 130 million people who are members of one or another form of cooperative. A quarter of American electricity is produced by either municipal ownership or cooperatives. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is, in other words, “socialized.” There are neighborhood corporations, land trusts, and other municipal and state strategies. One can observe such a dynamic developing in the central neighborhoods of some of the nation’s larger cities, places that have consistently suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. In such neighborhoods, democratizing development has gone forward, paradoxically, precisely because traditional policies have been politically impossible.
All this has been building in scale and sophistication to the point that growing numbers of people now talk about a “New Economy.” It doesn’t yet compare to the giants of Wall Street and the corporate economy, of course. But it is growing to the point where challenges are also becoming possible. Move Your Money campaigns have seen billions transferred out of Wall Street banks into credit unions and local and community banks. If you add up the credit unions they are the equivalent of one of the largest US banks, knocking Goldman Sachs out of the top five.
I see this era as something akin to the decades before the New Deal, the time when experimentation
and development in the state and local “laboratories of democracy” laid down the principles and programs that became the basis for much larger national policies when the right political moment occurred.
Gar S: You clearly show that regulating Wall Street doesn’t work and breaking up large banks is unlikely to last. The conservative Chicago School of Economics, you point out, had a solution: essentially any business “too big to regulate”” should be nationalized. “Take them over; turn them into public utilities.” Could large banks really be taken over and transformed?
Gar A: The old conservative economists were right: Regulation doesn’t work; they capture the regulators. Anti-trust doesn’t work; if you break them up, they re-group. Look at Standard Oil. Look at AT&T and the telephone companies. In fact, the major banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” They imperil the entire economy. So ultimately the only answer, logically, is to take them over at some point. Milton Friedman’s revered teacher, H.C. Simons, the founder of the conservative Chicago School of economics, was one of the first to point out this logic. He argued that this was necessary because it was the only way to preserve a genuinely free economy.
Can it be done? We just did it in one form: In response to the financial crisis the federal government essentially nationalized General Motors and A.I.G. and was in a position to do the same with Chrysler and several major banks because of the huge injections of public capital that were required to save them from bankruptcy. At one point, Obama frankly told the bankers that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks. What happens when the next financial crisis occurs (as most observers on left, right and center think inevitable)? Or the one after that?
There are also already alternative models at hand. Most people don't realize this, but the federal government currently runs 140 different government banks. They aren’t always called banks, although sometimes they are, like the Export-Import Bank and the National Cooperative Bank. But sometimes they take the form of small business loans programs or agricultural programs. Then there is the Bank of North Dakota, a public bank that has been there for ninety years. It's a state-owned bank, very popular with small business but also labor. Twenty states have introduced legislation to create public banks of their own. States have huge tax flows, which could capitalize such banks. Once you start to look more carefully, beneath the surface of media attention, it may be that far more is possible much earlier and much faster than many now imagine.
Gar S: If you don’t like corporate capitalism or state socialism, what’s left? Shouldn’t a fundamental goal be to prevent accumulations of great wealth. Once great wealth or power is attained, there is a tendency to fear the majority and seek to protect one’s fortune at all costs.
Gar A: That is a fair question, and most people don’t face it squarely: “If you don’t like corporate capitalism, where the corporations dominate the political system, and you don’t like state socialism, where the state dominates the system by virtue of its ownership, what do you want?” I think the developments reported on in the book point towards something very American, something that might be called “a community sustaining system”—one in which national structures and regional structures and local structures are all oriented to producing healthy local community economies, and thereby healthy and ecologically sustainable democratic communities.
We are at a very remarkable moment in American history: Even as we face massive economic, social and environmental challenges, more and more people are beginning to see that politics as usual doesn’t work, that the problems are fundamental to the system itself. These issues are on the table for the first time in many decades. So there needs to be an answer at some point, in terms of system design, to the question of what a system looks like that isn’t corporate capitalism and isn’t state socialism but begins with community and how we build it.
The truly central question is who gets to own the nation’s wealth? Because it’s not only an economic question, it determines politics in large part. The corporate capitalist system lodges such power in the corporations and tiny elites. An alternative system must begin at the bottom and democratize ownership from the bottom up—all the way from small co-ops and neighborhood corporations on up through city and state institutions and even, when necessary, regionally and nationally.
I think we can see the outlines of such a model already emerging in developments in the New Economy. It might be called a “Pluralist Commonwealth.” Plural forms of common wealth ownership. Worker ownership, co-ops, municipal utilities, neighborhood land trusts, state ownership of certain national firms. Plural forms. It’s not very sexy language, but it attempts to get to the idea that you must change ownership of wealth in many different ways in order to achieve democratic results and achieve cultural changes that allow us a democratic solution to the systemic problem. The key thing is that just below the surface of media attention a great deal is going on—many, many new developments that move in the direction of democratic ownership, starting at the very grass roots level, and moving up.
All of this ultimately also puts “the system question” on the table. We need a serious and wide-ranging debate around a broader menu of institutional possibilities for America’s future than the stale choices commonly discussed on both left and right.
The Deeply Embarrassing Senator of the Week Award
And now it’s time to present the Viewpoint award for the deeply embarrassing
senator of the week.
Never easy to narrow it down to just one, but this week the honors go to Georgia’s own, Saxby Chambliss. Who famously ran for senate in ‘02 against Democrat Max Cleland, a guy that lost 3 limbs in Vietnam — a war Saxby supported, but got student and medical deferments to avoid serving in.
Fortunately Saxby released a TV ad showing actual war hero Cleland side by side with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, thereby, electing Saxby in a landmark moment in American political toolery.
Never easy to narrow it down to just one, but this week the honors go to Georgia’s own, Saxby Chambliss. Who famously ran for senate in ‘02 against Democrat Max Cleland, a guy that lost 3 limbs in Vietnam — a war Saxby supported, but got student and medical deferments to avoid serving in.
Fortunately Saxby released a TV ad showing actual war hero Cleland side by side with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, thereby, electing Saxby in a landmark moment in American political toolery.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Lawrence O'Donnell on Rudy Giuliani's rewrite of history
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani cited his terrorism experience
in criticizing security failures in the Benghazi attack. In his Rewrite
segment, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out what Giuliani did–and
did not do– before 9/11.
Cenk Uygur's response to the NSA cell phone scandal: ‘Barack Obama is a liar.’
In light of the reports that the National Security Administration has been
collecting information from American citizens’ cell phones, Cenk calls out
President Obama for false campaign promises to fight terrorism while protecting
our privacy and civil liberties.
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Obama promised in 2008. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…that’s not who we are.”
“Well, that’s not who we’re supposed to be, but that’s exactly who Barack Obama is,” Cenk says.
“He lied. It’s not subtle. He said ‘there will be no spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.’ He lied. There is spying on all of us, and we are not suspected of a crime. Barack Obama is a liar.”
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Obama promised in 2008. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…that’s not who we are.”
“Well, that’s not who we’re supposed to be, but that’s exactly who Barack Obama is,” Cenk says.
“He lied. It’s not subtle. He said ‘there will be no spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.’ He lied. There is spying on all of us, and we are not suspected of a crime. Barack Obama is a liar.”
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Is Ken Emanuelson the most honest Republican in America?
Cenk Uygur talks to “Young Turks” producers Hermela Aregawi, Logan Pollard, and
Jayar Jackson about Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party leader from Texas who has come
under fire for his comments at a recent GOP event.
In response to a question regarding the Republican Party’s struggles to gain the black vote, Emanuelson replied, “Well, I’m going to be real honest with you. The Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.”
Emanuelson has since walked back his statements, but our panel appreciates the rare honesty from a politician. “Of course he’s right,” Cenk concludes. “I mean, the whole point of the voter ID laws was to make sure black people don’t vote.”
In response to a question regarding the Republican Party’s struggles to gain the black vote, Emanuelson replied, “Well, I’m going to be real honest with you. The Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.”
Emanuelson has since walked back his statements, but our panel appreciates the rare honesty from a politician. “Of course he’s right,” Cenk concludes. “I mean, the whole point of the voter ID laws was to make sure black people don’t vote.”
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
The IRS has silenced us, say tea party members on thousands of radio and TV shows
From the June 4, 2013, edition of “Viewpoint.”
John Fugelsang:
I’m John Fuglesang, and I’d like to appeal to all you kind Americans out there and ask you to open your hearts and lend a hand to one of the most persecuted, oppressed and voiceless groups in all of America. Of course, I’m talking about the tea party.
Recently, we learned that during the time when [the IRS] was headed by Douglas Shulman, certain midlevel bureaucrats at the IRS office in Cincinnati targeted tea party groups unfairly. Now, I know this is shocking — the idea that something interesting could ever happen in Cincinnati. But tea partyers had to face the worst thing any decent American ever faced, my friends: increased, inconvenient amounts of paperwork to prove that groups holding signs saying “Impeach Obama” shouldn’t pay taxes because they’re obviously not political.
Now, this kerfuffle caused the tea party to experience the worst human-rights abuses since the Stark family went to that wedding on “Game of Thrones.”
Becky Gerritson, my friends, president of the Wetumpka, Alaska, tea party, said, “This is not an accident. This is a willful act of intimidation intended to discourage a point of view.”
Yes, the tea party was intimidated into complete silence to such an extent that the only place she was allowed to say this was before a committee of congressmen in front of millions of viewers on CSPAN, CNN and Fox News.
Now let me ask: How would you like it if the IRS wanted to know if you’d been cheating on your taxes, when all you did was carry around a big sign that said, “Taxes are a crime against humanity”?
It’s not right, and the tea party needs your help. They need 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status so they can hide the identities of their completely nonpolitical donors. They need ink so they can keep on non-politically drawing Hitler mustaches on posters of Obama. And they need funds to buy vintage military outfits that best express the America they believe in — and they need a lot of money for that because authentic Confederate soldier uniforms can get a little pricey.
But don’t take my word for it. Please listen to Lester Derndack, a tea party member who suffered the oppression of the Obama administration firsthand. Lester?
Frank Conniff as Lester Derndack: I applied for tax-exempt status from the IRS and was subjected to all sorts of abuse. I was given extra paperwork that I was forced to sign and spend the whole better part of an afternoon working on. And look at our Muslim president — he’s allowed to serve in office with only two birth certificates. Have you seen them things? I had a nightmare of copies and triplicates that took up an entire hour. I’m telling you, I do not recognize America anymore. Benghazi!That is very brave, Lester. You’re proof that real teabaggers don’t choke. And there are millions more — exactly, completely like him.
So won’t you please help? These tea party members have been silenced, and they now have no voice in society, as they’ve said thousands of times on the thousands of radio and cable TV shows they’ve appeared on relentlessly. These loyal patriots who only want to bring down our government and turn the country over to Wall Street oligarchs have been trying to scrimp and scrape by with only a few million-dollar contributions from billionaire, anonymous supporters like the Koch brothers.
Without your help, they might suffer the fate of Emerge America, a liberal group targeted by the IRS for being political, that was actually, really forced to disclose its donors and lose tax-exempt status, which still hasn’t happened to a single one of these tea party groups that shouldn’t pay taxes because they’re so not political.
Are you going to let the IRS get away, my friends, with breaking zero laws and ensuring people pay their taxes?
All of your contributions are tax deductible. And remember: If you care about the tea party, do everything you can to impeach the president who appointed Douglas Shulman to run the IRS.
The Dishwasher 2 hacked for PC — and the developer's mostly OK with it
By Stephanie Carmichael
Piracy is the hated scourge of the game industry, but many people — like Russian hacker Barabus — believe it’s bad and do it anyway. Sometimes they even invent crazy justifications to mask that it’s theft. Unofficially releasing a PC port of the beat-em-up The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, for instance, isn’t “stealing.” It’s a way to give back to developer Ska Studios and its fans.
Vampire Smile, which released in 2011, is the sequel to the 2009′s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. Both appeared exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade. Barabus believes it was OK to pirate and modify the game without Ska Studios’ permission because the developer wouldn’t lose any profits, anyway, according to Indie Statik. After all, the developer had no plans for a PC version, and a new platform release would only help more people find the game.
The hacker even blamed Ska Studios for not thinking of it first.
“The view was expressed that, with respect to the authors, it is not very nice to publish the game on the PC,” Barabus wrote on the gamedev.ru (via Google Translate). “I have to argue that the part of the authors are not very nice to publish the game exclusively for the Xbox 360, making it impossible for PC gamers to play such a great game.”
He added, “Piracy — yes, that is bad. On the other hand, we did not steal the game for the Xbox 360; we released it for the PC port. Given that the developers ignored the PC platform, about any loss of profit for them is not out of the question. After all, if they wanted to earn money, then the game would be issued on all available platforms. If the game came out on PC officially, then this thread would not exist.”
Designer James Silva said he had mixed reactions about the port, but ultimately he was OK with it — even “flattered,” he said.
Silva is currently working on a new beat-em-up called Charlie Murder with Microsoft Game Studios as publisher.
Piracy is the hated scourge of the game industry, but many people — like Russian hacker Barabus — believe it’s bad and do it anyway. Sometimes they even invent crazy justifications to mask that it’s theft. Unofficially releasing a PC port of the beat-em-up The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, for instance, isn’t “stealing.” It’s a way to give back to developer Ska Studios and its fans.
Vampire Smile, which released in 2011, is the sequel to the 2009′s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. Both appeared exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade. Barabus believes it was OK to pirate and modify the game without Ska Studios’ permission because the developer wouldn’t lose any profits, anyway, according to Indie Statik. After all, the developer had no plans for a PC version, and a new platform release would only help more people find the game.
The hacker even blamed Ska Studios for not thinking of it first.
“The view was expressed that, with respect to the authors, it is not very nice to publish the game on the PC,” Barabus wrote on the gamedev.ru (via Google Translate). “I have to argue that the part of the authors are not very nice to publish the game exclusively for the Xbox 360, making it impossible for PC gamers to play such a great game.”
He added, “Piracy — yes, that is bad. On the other hand, we did not steal the game for the Xbox 360; we released it for the PC port. Given that the developers ignored the PC platform, about any loss of profit for them is not out of the question. After all, if they wanted to earn money, then the game would be issued on all available platforms. If the game came out on PC officially, then this thread would not exist.”
Designer James Silva said he had mixed reactions about the port, but ultimately he was OK with it — even “flattered,” he said.
@robotvevrything I’m not even mad, I’m impressed!“But I’m bewildered by the cracker’s attempt to justify the morality of it,” he told Indie Statik. “He assumes a lot about why Vampire Smile’s not on PC yet, and he could have cleared up a lot of those assumptions by just emailing me. I get that piracy is a service problem, but that’s a consequence, not a justification.”
— James Silva (@Jamezila) June 4, 2013
@alejandrodaj @robotvevrything Yeah, I’m fine with letting it happen, but I’m annoyed at the entitlement/revenge angle.GamesBeat has reached out to Silva for comment.
— James Silva (@Jamezila) June 4, 2013
Silva is currently working on a new beat-em-up called Charlie Murder with Microsoft Game Studios as publisher.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
GOP Outraged At Obama Plan To Stop Future Wall Street Bailouts
By Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario
On Monday, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) designated at least three financial institutions as “systematically important.” In other words, they are “too big to fail” and require increased oversight and regulation to keep them from dragging the entire financial sector under in a replay of the 2007-2008 collapse.
Via Bloomberg:
Think of it this way: you live in a building built on columns that collapsed a few years ago. The building was rebuilt with the same blueprints. This is not a cause for feeling secure. However, you are informed that only three or so of the columns are crucial to the integrity of the building. If the other columns collapse, you’ll be fine, if a little shaken, as long as the main columns are still standing. Oh, and those main columns will be inspected on a regular basis now.
It’s understandable why a bank might not want this label; it could be taken as a sign that they are unstable and opponents of the vital regulatory reform mandated by Dodd-Frank will not hesitate to paint it that way. The reality is that the designation has nothing to do with the health of the institution, simply that it is large enough to cause massive collateral damage should it fail for any reason, even one not of its own doing.
Will it keep the gamblers from taking extraordinary risks and making extraordinary profits? Probably. But those extraordinary risks (otherwise known as “unfettered greed”) are what plunged the country into the worst recession in almost a century. Keeping the economy safe by pissing off greedy market manipulators? That’s a risk worth taking.
On Monday, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) designated at least three financial institutions as “systematically important.” In other words, they are “too big to fail” and require increased oversight and regulation to keep them from dragging the entire financial sector under in a replay of the 2007-2008 collapse.
Via Bloomberg:
AIG and Prudential, in statements issued yesterday after a meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, said they were notified of the proposed designations. Russell Wilkerson, a spokesman for GE Capital, said in an e-mail that his company also received a notice.
The council didn’t identify the companies it decided should be subjected to heightened Federal Reserve oversight. AIG, Prudential and GE Capital had previously said they were in the final stage of review.The companies so labeled will have 30 days to contest the finding in court and try to have it reversed. Of course, Republicans are appalled at the idea of staving off another wide-spread collapse by identifying institutions that will drag down the entire sector should they fall:
The council’s move puts taxpayers at “greater risk of being forced to fund yet another Wall Street bailout,” Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said in a statement. “Designating any company as ‘too big to fail’ is bad policy and even worse economics.”Actually, alerting stockholders that a financial giant is simply too large to be allowed to run unregulated is pretty damn smart. What better way to increase confidence than by knowing that these “too big to fail” institutions are going to be under increased scrutiny? Not only will this significantly reduce the kind of reckless behavior that wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth just 6 years ago, but it also means that the other banks are not in a position to take out the entire economy if one of them collapses. Republicans are always crying about how “uncertainty” is bad for the economy, aren’t they? This is one way of alleviating the dread uncertainty that your bank will implode and make all of your money disappear again.
Think of it this way: you live in a building built on columns that collapsed a few years ago. The building was rebuilt with the same blueprints. This is not a cause for feeling secure. However, you are informed that only three or so of the columns are crucial to the integrity of the building. If the other columns collapse, you’ll be fine, if a little shaken, as long as the main columns are still standing. Oh, and those main columns will be inspected on a regular basis now.
It’s understandable why a bank might not want this label; it could be taken as a sign that they are unstable and opponents of the vital regulatory reform mandated by Dodd-Frank will not hesitate to paint it that way. The reality is that the designation has nothing to do with the health of the institution, simply that it is large enough to cause massive collateral damage should it fail for any reason, even one not of its own doing.
Will it keep the gamblers from taking extraordinary risks and making extraordinary profits? Probably. But those extraordinary risks (otherwise known as “unfettered greed”) are what plunged the country into the worst recession in almost a century. Keeping the economy safe by pissing off greedy market manipulators? That’s a risk worth taking.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Chuck Schumer Destroys Right Wing Talking Points
David Gregory bravely repeated right wing talking points, but Sen. Chuck Schumer
put a stop to that nonsense and schooled the 'liberal' reporter.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Japan Suspends U.S. Wheat Purchases After GMO Discovery
Japan, the largest international buyer of U.S. wheat, has canceled its tender to buy U.S. white wheat after the discovery of a test strain of Monsanto’s genetically modified wheat had been found on an Oregon wheat farmer’s land, Reuters reports.
Monsanto tested the Roundup-resistant wheat from 1998 to 2005, but it was never approved for consumption. The agriculture company abandoned the project due to international rejection of genetically modified (GM) cereals.
Japan and other Asian countries remain skeptical of GM foods, and Japan has approved only a select number of GM products for human consumption, including corn, but not wheat.
The GM wheat was discovered when an Oregon wheat farmer tried spraying an undesired patch with Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup, but the weedkiller — to the farmer’s surprise — didn’t do the job.
The farmer then contacted Oregon State University researchers who determined the wheat contained genes from Monsanto’s abandoned wheat project. The crop otherwise consisted of natural wheat.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is now investigating whether the GM wheat in Oregon is an isolated issue or the genes have spread to other crops. There is no scientific evidence that suggests GM wheat is unfit for consumption.
Monsanto’s strains of genetically modified corn and soybeans now dominate those two markets.
Viewpoint’s revoltingly fake Christian of the week
Tonight we are thrilled to announce a new segment on the show: Viewpoint’s ‘revoltingly fake Christian of the week.’
Congressman Stephen Fincher, a Republican from Tennessee, just took the Bible so far out of context he had to apply for a visa.
Fincher is a fierce opponent of food aid for poor Americans. You know, like Jesus. He recently fought to cut 4.1 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. If you only watch Fox, that means ‘food stamps.’ And thanks to the fine work of Fincher and his colleagues, 2 million working American families, children and seniors have already been cut off from food assistance.
So during a recent House agricultural committee debate, he decided to show how Christian it is to turn your back on unemployed suffering Americans by quoting one of the favorite Bible passages of revoltingly fake right-wing Christians—2 Thessalonians 3:10—”anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
But here’s the thing—ya see,Thessalonians isn’t god or Jesus talking, it’s believed to have been written by Saint Paul. And in Paul’s day, many apocalyptic Christians believed Jesus was coming back really soon and the world was going to end anyway—so why work?
These early rapture-heads were hurting the local economy and threatening the functioning society of Thessalonica—and I do hope I pronounced that right. And Paul makes a good point—the “Left Behind” books may be junk theology, but Kirk Cameron still shows up at his job.
So in that context, the quote makes sense. In Congressman Fincher’s context, it’s pretty much the opposite of everything Jesus Christ ever stood for.
Now, Congressman Fincher went on to say, quoting from the book of selfish toolery, “the role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” Really, congressman? Washington steals and gives to others?
Because here’s the other thing—while Fincher was passing bills to take food out of the mouths of the poor, he was supporting a proposal to expand crop insurance by $9 billion, and I’m sure the fact that he is the second most heavily subsidized farmer in Congress and one of the largest subsidy recipients in the history of Tennessee, had nothing to do with this.
Between 1999 and 2012, Fincher, opponent of poor lazy people, put out his tin cup and collected $3.5 million in government money. This guy isn’t just a welfare queen, he’s a welfare kingdom with a moat, castle and a catapult that shoots government money over the wall into his boiling cauldron of hypocrisy.
The average Tennessee farmer gets a subsidy of $1,500. In 2012 alone, Fincher was cut a government subsidy check for $75,000, which is nearly double the median household income in all of Tennessee.
So he votes to cut food stamps and expand crop insurance subsidies by $9 billion. This guy is swimming in so much dirty pork, he could single handedly unite the Muslims and the Jews.
The biggest right-wing fake Christian argument is, “yeah Jesus said help the poor but he didn’t say the government should steal from me to do it! Benghazi!”
But here’s the thing, Jesus lived under European imperial occupation. He didn’t have democracy. We do. So if you want to follow the teachings of Christ—who constantly talked about caring for the poor—then in a democracy, Christians get a chance to vote for the candidate who will most follow the teachings of Christ and care for the least among us, as he commanded in Matthew 25—that filthy hippie.
But Fincher and the GOP don’t do that. They cut services for the poor and taxes for the rich. And it’s a free country. They’re allowed.
But if you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying you want a country based on Christian values. Because you don’t.
And that’s why representative Fincher is our ‘revoltingly fake Christian of the week!’
Thursday, May 30, 2013
All Hell Broke Loose - Why MoMA Is Exhibiting Tetris and Pac-Man
By Bo Moore
Last November, the Museum of Modern Art said that it had acquired 14 videogames, adding working copies and the source code of games like Tetris and The Sims to its collection. The collection’s curator was not prepared for what happened next.
“All hell broke loose.”
In a TED talk released yesterday, MoMA senior curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli discussed the decision, explaining the importance of interaction design.
“I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression,” Antonelli said in the talk.
“I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.”
Antonelli began bringing examples of interaction design to MoMA several years ago with acquisitions such as Martin Wattenberg’s “Thinking Machine,” the Sugar interface from the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and Philip Worthington’s “Shadow Monsters.”
But videogames proved more controversial. Some argued that games were not art and as such should not be in the MoMA, while others said that videogames could not be art because they are something else: code.
Antonelli said she believes that is the wrong argument: “There’s this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art,” she says, “or the idea that designers would like to be called artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers.”
In the MoMA, the games collection is displayed in a minimalist fashion, modeled after Philip Johnson’s 1934 exhibition “Machine Art,” in which he displayed propeller blades and other pieces of machinery on white pedestals and white walls.
“He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were.” Antonelli says. “I would like to do the same with video games.”
In choosing which games to acquire, Antonelli and the MoMA worked with videogame designers and academics on four basic criteria: Behavior, Space, Aesthetics, and Time.
The team had to decide where to draw the line on violent videogames. “It’s considered that in design and in the design collection,” Antonelli said, “what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it’s an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it’s in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument.”
Following those principles, the team included games such as Portal, where you shoot walls to create paths, and Street Fighter II “because martial arts are good,” but excluded games such as Grand Theft Auto III.
Other games picked for the initial batch included Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online and Canabalt. MoMA plans to acquire more in the coming years.
Antonelli likens the process of acquiring a videogame to her aspiration to acquire a Boeing 747 that would at the same time be a part of the MoMA collection while continuing to fly, or the recent acquisition of the @ symbol, which is both in the museum while remaining public domain.
The end goal is to acquire the game’s original source code, which can be quite difficult to pry away from secretive gamemakers. If that’s not possible at first, Antonelli at least wants to wedge her foot in the door.
“We’re going to stay with them forever,” she said. “They’re not going to get rid of us. And one day, we’ll get that code.”
Chris Hayes Delivers MSNBC's Lowest 8 PM Ratings Since 2006
MSNBC’s great experiment of putting Chris Hayes at 8 PM has turned into a total disaster as All In is delivering the network’s lowest ratings since 2006.
Chris Hayes’ second full month in prime time since taking over for Ed Schultz saw total viewership drop by 32%, and viewership among those age 25-54 decline by 13%. All In’s bad ratings caused The Rachel Maddow Show to deliver its worst ratings month since 2008.
Maddow’s ratings are down 21% in terms of total viewers, and 22% with viewers age 25-54. The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell had the smallest decline in total viewers at 18%, but suffered a 33% decline with viewers age 25-54.
Chris Hayes is going to take a lot of heat for these ratings, but it isn’t all his fault. Phil Griffin and the other “geniuses” running MSNBC tossed Ed Schultz out of weeknights because they thought they could remake the network as wonk TV, and attract more younger viewers with Chris Hayes.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The problem has been that Chris Hayes isn’t well suited for primetime. He was a fine weekend morning host, but his EmoProg Obama bashing style is the complete opposite of who MSNBC’s audience was.
MSNBC primetime is still the audience that Olbermann built, and the audience in general reflects the Obama coalition. The Obama coalition is the majority on the left. The problem is that Chris Hayes doesn’t speak to the majority of the left. Instead of embracing who their audience is (mainly Obama supporters), MSNBC tried to program their primetime around who they wanted their audience to be. The result has been an epic failure that has seen Fox News, CNN, and Headline News all gain viewers while MSNBC has declined.
The bad news for MSNBC is that they may not be able to fix this. Ed Schultz may not want to go back to primetime, at least not without a sizable raise. MSNBC has hired a lot of wonkish types over the last few years. They don’t have the kind of liberal firebrand on the bench that could immediately revive 8 PM. The network could always move Chris Hayes back to Up, and take a shot with Joy Reid or Melissa Harris-Perry but that is unlikely since the network bypassed them when they promoted Hayes. The most likely outcome would be somebody like Ezra Klein moving into primetime.
There is one man out there who could immediately step back into the 8 PM anchor chair and deliver a million viewers, but pigs will fly before Phil Griffin and Keith Olbermann ever work together again.
It is clear that MSNBC has to do something soon. (Just asking MSNBC viewers about Chris Hayes and his show provoked strong negative reactions on Twitter. Generally speaking viewers tend not to like Hayes’ politics, and they are bored by his program.)
It looks MSNBC may end up going bust, because they made a bad bet by going all in with Chris Hayes.
Michele Bachmann's greatest hits
Rep. Michele Bachmann has announced that she will not be seeking
reelection in Minnesota, and The Last Word has put together a
compilation of her greatest hits of her political career.
In honor of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s announcement that she will not be seeking reelection in Minnesota, we’ve compiled a few of the congresswoman’s most bat-crap crazy soundbites over the last few years. Check it out!
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