Capitalism Hits the Fan – Richard Wolff is the item mentioned in the previous post Professor Victor Wallis Speaks on the “Roots of the Current Crisis.”

I have found many links and videos of Richard Wolf and his topic. This particular video was recorded at Brown University, Providence RI, December 12, 2009. I have watched about an hour so far of the 1 hour 45 minute video below. There are about 7 minutes of introduction before you get to Richard Wolff. This is so important that I wanted to post the video, even before I finished watching the whole thing.

Well, I have now finished the whole thing and all I can say is Wow!

I have never seen the root causes of our current societal situation put together in quite the way that Richard Wolff does. It makes a lot of sense. You may experience a number of Aha! moments. (I think I will just have to forgive a tiny bit of mathematical hocus-pocus that he used in the beginning to make one exaggeration.) (I know I am a sucker for a good sales pitch, but even if you don’t buy it, it ought to make you think. By the way, he is not necessarily selling you a solution, so there is nothing to buy.)

The YouTube video in Occupy Vancouver / TZM on NATIONAL CANADIAN TELEVISION!! (CTV) #occupyeverywhere offers the best explanation of the immediate purpose of the movement that I have heard. During yesterday’s general assembly at Occupy Worcester, I wish I had had these words to offer to explain our goals to this relatively new manifestation of the movement.

I’ll provide a rough transcript of the key part of the interview.

Raise awareness of the fundamental problems that plague our society from the social, economic, and political spheres to all the problems in society, the war, corruption, poverty, environmental destruction. Basically to open it upup a platform for people to discuss the root causes of the problems and pose possible alternatives.
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At this point it is basically about spreading awareness of these problems. There are many organizations who are going to be in attendance who are posing possible alternatives.

While the occupy movement explicitly doesn’t have one defined solution, it’s basically meant as a platform for other organizations to discuss their possibilities.

The interviewee mentions The Zeitgeist Movement. The link to their web page in the previous sentence will give you a starting point for more research on the movement.

The video below is Pt2 Gareth Porter: Critical two weeks missing from FBI account.

I blogged Part 1 in Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting.

The video in this post has a lot of speculation on what may be in the missing two weeks and why it may be missing. They don’t talk about the possibility that nothing happened in those two weeks. With that in mind, you have to treat this speculation as possibly being completely off the mark. If true, however, it puts a new twist on the story.

From The Free School University at OccupyBoston we have Professor Victor Wallis Speaks on the “Roots of the Current Crisis.” Video 1 of 3

There is much that Professor Wallis says that matches what I have been saying on this blog and in private conversations. I’ll name just a few below.

1. The existence of Socialist and Communist governments scared capitalists into making concessions to the middle-class. Once Communism was defeated, all hell was free to break loose
2. Politically educating the public is the first priority of a President or of a political movement

Some items mentioned in the video that I want to remember to follow up include:

Capitalism Hits the Fan – 1 hour lively lecture. Rick Wolfe

Open Media Boston

The “S” Word: A short history of an American tradition, Socialism – John Nichols book.

October 16, 2011.

Part 2 of the video has been posted.

I am not as infatuated with this part as I was the first part.

Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting comes from The Real News.

Gareth Porter: Evidence points to an FBI sting that creates rational for stepped up campaign against Iran

Here is the video.

I have shown my skepticism about this story in two previous posts, Petraeus’s CIA Fuels Iran Murder Plot and War with The U.S. Is of No Interest to Iran; Who Invented This Absurd Plot?

Speedy neutrino mystery likely solved, relativity safe after all explains how the mystery was solved.

Those weird faster-than-light neutrinos that CERN thought they saw last month may have just gotten slowed down to a speed that’ll keep them from completely destroying physics as we know it. In an ironic twist, the very theory that these neutrinos would have disproved may explain exactly what happened.

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Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands went and crunched the numbers on how much relativity should have effected the experiment, and found that the correct compensation should be about 32 additional nanoseconds on each end, which neatly takes care of the 60 nanosecond speed boost that the neutrinos originally seemed to have. This all has to be peer-reviewed and confirmed, of course, but at least for now, it seems like the theory of relativity is not only safe, but confirmed once again.

I had always suspected the issue would be in measuring the distance between two point 450 miles apart with enough accuracy to say that the small discrepancy was proof of a violation of the theory of special relativity rather than experimental error.

The article The Public Option in Banking: Another Look at the German Model by Ellen Brown is an extended explanation of the public option in banking. Just to prove to you that this can only be some far out European scheme, here are some snippets from the article:

In the US, North Dakota is the only state to own its own bank. It is also the only state that has sported a budget surplus every year since the 2008 credit crisis. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans. It also has oil, but so do other states that are not doing so well. Still, the media tend to attribute North Dakota’s success to its oil fields.

What about other example?

We don’t hear much about a public banking option in the United States, but a number of countries already have a resilient public banking sector. A May 2010 article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the world in the last few years.

So if the previous post Michael Hudson on the Need to Treat Banks as Utilities was more than you could take, the above article by Ellen Brown may be a gentler introduction to the idea.

I think the Occupy Wall Street movement is wise to be careful before it makes specific demands.  This goes right to one of the key failures of the Obama administration.  There is a long period of educating the public that must precede any attempt at huge change.  If you haven’t done the education first (as the right wing has done for their ideas over the past 30 years), then it will be too easy for the opposition to roll out their propaganda (that they have been pumping for 30 years) to steal the public support away from you.  If you still believe that Obama really wanted to make change you can believe in, then his  failure to understand the need for education first is his biggest failure.

For men to understand the concept, maybe I should call the education process forework and liken it to foreplay in sex.  If you still don’t get it, then ask a female significant other to explain it to you.  For homosexual couples I don’t know who to advise who to seek explanation.

Also tucked into this video is an explanation of why Occupy Wall Street wants to avoid making specific demands at this point in the life of the organization.

As I see it, there are two ways to treat the video below.  One way is to view it with the attitude that you are going to look for the flaws in the argument so that you can ignore what is being said. The other way is to try to learn something from what Hudson says and try to pick out the ideas that you find significant and worth more thought.

Even if you find these ideas more radical than your brain can manage, you can view this as only a mild extreme that could occur if the “system” refuses to respond to the concerns of the protesters.

In Nouriel Roubini’s article The Instability of Inequality, he recognizes the successes and failures of varous economic systems. (I have added the emphasis in quotes below.)

Some of the lessons about the need for prudential regulation of the financial system were lost in the Reagan-Thatcher era, when the appetite for massive deregulation was created in part by the flaws in Europe’s social-welfare model. Those flaws were reflected in yawning fiscal deficits, regulatory overkill, and a lack of economic dynamism that led to sclerotic growth then and the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis now.

But the laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon model has also now failed miserably. To stabilize market-oriented economies requires a return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of unregulated markets and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Even an alternative “Asian” growth model – if there really is one – has not prevented a rise in inequality in China, India, and elsewhere.

Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.

I often wonder why the global social system must swing from one extreme to another.  Of course it is true that conditions change and social systems must adapt.  However, the social system going to an extreme so that it sows its own seeds of destruction is a mal-adaptation that it would be nice to stop.

The article War with The U.S. Is of No Interest to Iran; Who Invented This Absurd Plot? casts lots of doubts about this latest alleged plot by Iran.  Here is a single example.

Iranian intelligence is famously efficient at hiding its tracks. Though many believe that it was the Iranians who blew up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 — in retaliation for the shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the U.S. Navy ship the USS Vincennes — no convincing trail has ever come to light. Yet it is supposedly Iranian intelligence that wired $100,000 to the used car salesman, allegedly a down payment for Los Zetas, using a known Al Quds force bank account.

If the bid was a false flag operation mounted by the Saudis or Israelis, an open transfer of money would be one obvious tactic. The U.S. has made swift use of dubious “plots” in the not-so-distant past.

War with Iran is also of no interest of the people of the U.S., but the politicians might find it a useful distraction.  No more worries about cutting the deficit or creating jobs, just send the unemployed to fight a war in Iran no matter the cost.