“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, October 9, 2011

"We are the 99%"

Perhaps the most fatuous thing David Brooks has said in a while is his gripe against this slogan of the Occupy movements. On the Friday PBS News Hour (bam, ba-bam, ba-bam baaaaaam! [wait for it, wait for it...] It's BULLSHIT!) he was heard saying something like “It's just divisive to single out the top 1%, we're all in this together.”

It was Edmund Burke plus WWII with a dash of the old switcheroo. What is divisive is precisely the top one percent of earners getting all the breaks, while everyone else gets zip. And a deliberate tin ear for the quotation marks around the number: no one person is singled out as the 1%—that's the point.

We're talking about structural, deeply engrained, zombified, Milton Friedmanism plus Reagan plus Thatcher. It is over. Monetarism is now destroying the very societies that spawned it.

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