cobblehillbilly: December 2014

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Panglos Links

Whistleblower Protection Working As Designed: Marisa Taylor: McClatchy
Justice Working As Designed: : The Concourse
Security Working As Designed: Glenn Grenwald: The Intercept
The Economy Working As Designed: James Boyce: TripleCrisis
Prisons Working As Designed: Chris Hedges: Truthdig
Welfare Working As Designed: Daily Take Team: Truthout

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Racist Police Links

Origins Of The Police: David Whitehouse: WorksInTheory
Stop Kidding Yourself: Sam Mitroni: LAWCHA
Americas Biggest Police Force: Ganeva & Gottesdiener: Salon
How One Of Them Got It Wrong: b: Moon Of Alabama
This Year In Racism: Doug Muder: WeeklySift
Two Party Racisim: Doug Muder: WeeklySift

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Links

Defending Money: Gary Brecher: Pando
The Freedom They Hate Is Dick Cheney's Freedom To Torture Them: Mike Shedlock: Global Economic Analysis
Torture Shown To Induce Aversion To Torture, Even In Republicans: Jim Wright: StoneKettleStation
Why Vote?: Burnham & Ferguson: Naked Capitalism
Our Criminal Justice System: Jed Rakoff et al.: NYROB
No One Is Innocent: Alex Tabarrok: Marginal Revolution
Predatory Fining And Mass Surveillance: Alex Tabarrok: Marginal Revolution

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

When I began this blog, my second post was an outline of how I understood the civilizational competition I saw in the world around me. In the intervening half decade, the world has begun to move decisively on. The PRC has changed the most, Russia and India are increasingly dynamic and even Iran appears to be evolving beneath it's conservative-ism. In my analysis then, these competing systems were all hobbled to varying extents by internal corruption that prevented them from economically empowering their citizens. This domestic social policy failure robbed them of the power to compete with an American system where a residue of the New Deal still promised, if reinforced, to sustain the economic freedom that drove the productive growth of the US centered system.

In 2009 we in the US were in the depths of a financial crisis and had just elected a decisive majority of Democrats to resolve it: it looked for all the world like a replay of the Roosevelt election of 1932. The optimism was euphoric, to the extent that even the Nobel Committee bit on its "hope" rather than the unfolding reality of no "change" when it gave our new President a Nobel Peace Prize. I closed that essay with this, to my eyes at least, accurate statement: "The last thirty years, with the enfranchisement of cash by the Supreme Court in Buckley v Valeo, our system has converged to a dangerous extent with these competing systems. While I can vote, I can not get my representatives attention. I have a formal political power that has been robbed of substance by money. In the Peoples Republic of China, what the Party wants the Party gets. In the United States, the Republic of Cash, what money wants money gets."

Money indeed got what money wanted. With control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, had the Democrats really wanted to reform our financial system, all of the tools were in hand and the industry so profoundly disgraced any serious reform proposed would have had massive popular