A video about BRICS and Brazil

A video with a few thoughts about the recent election in Brazil (2014) and the long term prospects for the BRICS...

And for us...

Vada a bordo...!

I've learned a new expression today. It is Italian.

"Vada a bordo, cazzo!"

Google it.

I think it should be a new motto for us all...Italians, Americans, Europeans...all of us...

It is what we need to snarl at our supposed leaders...the men and women who have so often betrayed us for their own selfish gain...

more on ows and the media

watching a Daily Show re-run. In it, John Daily & Co. show a number of clips from various news and chat shows ... mostly on Fox, I assume...that basically trashed the Occupy Wall Street Movement as being somewhere between idiotic and treasonous, if not both.

Depressing. I am not sure which is worse. The misrepresentations of those who are blatantly lying, or dimness of those who fail to grasp what is happening.

Libya 2: The Dictator’s Children, and What They Teach

(Now that I have confessed my own failures, let me turn to our national, American elites…)

I am going to argue that our American elites—the bankers, the lawyers, the Wall Streeters, all the rest—should be paying very close attention to Libya. Or, more particularly, to the Children of Colonel.

I confess, I knew almost nothing about Gadhafi’s children prior to the current revolution. I suspect that very few of us did. For a long while, they were sort of invisible. Oh, I’m sure Gadhafi’s sons, daughters, and potential heirs were known in governmental and diplomatic circles, but to the average American they were as little visible as ghosts in the noonday sun. One simply didn’t think of them.

But, they existed all the same. And now, we learn that they’ve been playboying it up around the world for decades. We get stories of champagne parties on Caribbean islands where big name entertainers are paid millions for a song or two. Like the sons of Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein, they have lived the lives of princes, consuming much, and producing little.

And the frightening thing is how familiar they seem. When you look at Gadhafi and his family, and you look past the trappings of revolution, the uniforms, the colorful “native” garb displayed at ceremonies, and all the rest of it…you find they look pretty much like our own privileged classes. You watch them on TV or the net, and they are in the same business suits and corporate casual attire. They have the same fashionable hair cuts. They drive the same expensive cars. They attend the same schools. They party on the same islands and sleep with (or try to, anyway) the same models and movie stars.

They are, we belatedly discover, simply one more variety of the global, international, jet-setting, rootless, world elite.

Something which, by the by, may explain much of how and why it was so easy for our leaders to forgive Gadhafi for so much, so quickly. It explains why a short few years after the Lockerbie massacre, Tony Blair stood smiling beside him, George W. Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to woo him, and our companies and corporations pressed in upon him almost hysterically, like Teenyboppers around a rock star.

It was because they recognized one of their own.

Which brings me to my point …to why I say our elites should be paying very close attention to international affairs.

Gadhafi is falling.

He may not be dead yet. In the end, he may manage to turn Tripoli into a kind of fortress city-state, separate from the rest of Libya. There, he and his heirs might hang on for a while yet.

But, in the end, he’s finished. The expense of holding on to power will vastly exceed his revenues. The very best he can hope for is to be a marginal figure, squatting Hitler-like in his bunker, and watching the empty hours pass.

Why do I stress that? Why do I say that our own privileged classes should note well his passing? Because they should keep in mind that if he can go, they can go.

Of course, no one in America is in Gadhafi’s league. No one has shot protestors recently, nor bombed and strafed innocent civilians. But, still our elites have not behaved well of late. They have done much to bankrupt the nation. They have outsourced and off-shored. They have been indifferent to the fate of their countrymen.

And if they keep on as they have done…laying off and cutting back, reducing men and women to drones and drudges, pretending that they do this only because of the inevitable laws of economics and that they have no choice in the matter … then, ultimately, they, too, will face consequences.

Like Gadhafi, they may survive. But they must ask themselves, now, before it is too late…will accounts received be equal to expenditures? Will it really be profitable to practice repression when a few compromises might defuse the ticking bomb?

Or, to put it another way, how comfortable are they, really…

In the bunker?

And we decline still further...

Fascinating article at New York Times which asks the question "Corporate Profits Are Booming? Why aren't jobs?"

Answer: because it is not in the short term interest of certain members of our national elite to let them bloom.

But the kicker is "short term." In the long...well, that's another story entirely.

The line in this article which says it best, I think, comes near the end. It reads, "Some economists, conservative and liberal, divine forbidding portents in all of this. If profits and employment no longer rise and fall together, they worry, then an already strained social compact will grow yet more frayed."

Who can doubt that they will be frayed, indeed?

Link to story is below:

Profits Are Booming. Why Aren't Jobs?