Has anyone researched how many kleptoplutocrats live within "disaster range" of nuclear power plants?

Short of the 24/7 television visual horror of the Katrina catastrophe, what might it take to penetrate the country's painstakingly constructed wall against reality? Surely we can't be rooting for the worst-case nuclear scenario in Japan, can we?

by Ken

I hope everyone has read Howie's post earlier today on the subject of the reaction of people supposedly "in the know," technically speaking, about the Japanese nuclear disaster-in-the-making. As he notes, this is yet another case in which the screeching ignoramuses and murderous kleptoplutocrats of the Right have been caught laying the groundwork for future episodes of the (in this case literal) destruction of the country as we once knew it. Nuclear disaster -- what, we worry?

Last month I took a lingering look at a New Yorker blogpost by Andrew Solomon on the developing insurgence in Libya, who had written about the Qadaffi regime for the magazine in 2006. One of the things that popped out at me was his description of one of the basic mistakes the regime had made since he wrote his piece, its "lack of attention to the poverty of the population."

Libya is North Africa’s most prosperous country, given its tremendous oil wealth and small population. Yet most Libyans live in deplorable conditions. The state provides little by way of civil society and does not take care of even the most basic government obligations. There are police to control people who stray from supporting the Leader, but there is little else. As a housing crisis has escalated in the past few years, the regime has made no effort to provide adequate public accommodation. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. It would have been easy for Qaddafi to raise the standard of living for the population as a whole either by creating a sustainable non-oil economy or simply by distributing some portion of oil revenues, but he chose to do neither. [Emphasis added.]

Since then, I've had occasion to read a wide assortment of reporting and commentary on the situations in, among others, Egypt and Tunisia and Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Burma. With eerie resonance, every single story included a local version of the same disconnect between the government (and the economically privileged elites who are in cahoots with it) and the general population. To a degree that beggars comprehension, the rulers have been in varying degrees ignorant of and utterly indifferent to the way the overwhelming majority of their subjects live.

Now these are all places in what we think of patronizingly as the "Third World." But the quotes kept sounding like the morning news here in the First World, where we reality has been overturned by a bizarre coalition of rampaging ideological hooligans, cultivatedly ignorant masses of stooge followers, and especially the financial kingpins pulling the strings.

Oh, Americans have stumblingly started to grasp the message that Somebody Up There doesn't give a crap about them. But in the cruelest of ironies, they've been gulled -- in part by the daily onslaught of lies from bought-off cynical exploiters like Rush and Bill-o and Sean and Glenn -- into blaming mostly the wrong people, in particular overlooking the kleptoplutocratic economic elites who have bought and paid for all the supposedly "grass roots" far-right-wing movements of the last several decades, up to and emphatically including the Teabaggers.

As raging sociopaths like the House Thug Republican leadership and satraps of criminal and societal malfeasance (you know, the people Howie's been writing about regularly (here, for example), like the Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, and Mitch Daniels of Indiana) do everything in their power to take a torch to civil society as it's evolved over the course of human existence, they count on the anger, fear, and carefully bred effective imbecility of the American masses.

Of course this behavior is nothing new to American right-wingers. Once you've sufficiently dumbed the populace down sufficiently, it's easy to assail and

the importance of labor unions and an entire system of government regulation that stand as, basically, our only counterweights to the tyranny of the Big Money kleptoplutocrats, who have shown themselves prepared to fight to with every resource at the disposal (with both the resources and the ability to use them have been increased humongously by its docile government stooges, emphatically including the predatory thugs of the tenaciously cutltivated extreme-right-wing Supreme Court majority), no matter how many billions of dollars it costs, to maintain their grasp on the trillions they've become accustomed to extorting and just plain plundering from the rest of us.

As Republicans announce their new laundry lists of mad-dog spending cuts, neither they nor the infotaniment noozers who pass on their latest ravings as if it was just political business as usual (which I guess it has indeed become) are concerned that they literally don't have a friggin' clue what they're talking about. It's only every now and then that around the edges a ray of reality illuminates a bit of the festering hellhole into which the elites plan to turn the country that most of us live in, as Howie pointed out in the case of the huge slashes the Republican crazies have planned for matters of nuclear safety.

But it's only when catastrophe strikes on a scale sufficient to compel the attention of the infotainment noozers and of a ghastliness sufficient to penetrate the reality-blocking fortress walls of the minds of the American public through endless TV repetition that Americans at large sort of get a primitive version of the lesson of conservative "governance" (nongovernance would be more accurate -- or, better still, misgovernance). Honestly, I thought Americans were so heavily fortified against reality that even those days of nightmare TV images of Katrina-struck New Orleans wouldn't register, but it turned out that I was wrong.

I wasn't the only one who was wrong, though. Remember Young Johnny McCranky and "Chimpy the Prez" George Bush cutting birthday cake while the city drowned in the wake of years of plutocratic neglect of the flood-control system and days of meteorological warnings which should have allowed for at least some preparation to cope with what was coming, with general complicity from a federal bureaucracy that had been transformed into a do-nothing network of crooks who took it as their mission to prove that government can't do anything right.

As I hinted above, we mustn't for a moment underestimate the importance of the crucial, long-in-the-works project of stupidification of the American public, about which both Howie and I have written frequently. From the standpoint of the economic elites, America needs morons, and their billion-dollar think tanks have found ways to deliver them.

Nor is it a coincidence that the Right, whose existence is predicated on its famous Noise Machine, made up of a cluster of hard-core liars whose every word is aimed at making its listeners know even less than they did before about subjects they previously knew very little about, launched an utterly bogus but tragically successful campaign against ACORN, which had committed the cardinal sins of providing assistance to the economically nonprivileged and adding large numbers of such people to the voter rolls. (As Michael Moore pointed out recently, the one thing we have going for us against the kleptoplutocrats is our potential large numerical advantage at the ballot box, and they're only too keenly aware of the danger to them of actual democracy.)

Or that they've targeted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio, since public radio in particular is perhaps the only quasi-organized voice that at least attempts to penetrate the veil of nonreality so rigorously maintained by the combined infotainment noozemedia. The terrible thing is that virtually all of these fact-free lynch-campaigns undertaken in the last dozen years have succeeded. The people who should have been in the trenches fighting back have generally sat back cowering if not actually, and incredibly, nodding agreement.

It's a reminder that the kleptoplutocrats can't do it on their own -- not even with the redoubtable assistance of all their hired stooges. They count on being able to hornswoogle a nation of painstakingly cultivated morons. Only a sucker would bet against them.


SPEAKING OF "OUT OF TOUCH," YVES SMITH PAYS
TRIBUTE TO OUR EVER-CARING FEDERAL RESERVE

NY Fed Prexy William Dudley -- "Let them eat iPads"?

While we're on the subject of the powers that be being totally disconnected from the general population, Yves Smith has a great post on her Naked Capitalism blog, prompted by a stupefying piece of bluster from New York Fed President William Dudley. Reuters reported that Dudley, faced with "persistent questions from the audience on food inflation . . . said people forget that even as the price of food is rising, other prices are falling. He mentioned the price of the iPad 2, prompting guffaws from the audience."

Yves continues:

Now before you forgive this as standard economist thinking . . . the Wall Street Journal’s Economics blog makes clear Dudley was speaking to people in Queens:

The central banker hit the iceberg when he was trying to defend his belief–one shared by many private-sector economists–that underlying inflation in the U.S. economy is low despite a worrisome surge in commodity prices which Dudley said the Fed would be “unwise” to overreact to. The grief Dudley got indicates the Fed is facing a growing gulf between how it and the public at large perceives inflation. If this disconnect widens, it could risk undoing the public’s confidence that the Fed will be able to keep price pressures at bay.

Dudley’s day went south when he was pressed by several audience members about how he can view inflation as low when things such as grocery prices are marching higher. One participant asked “when was the last time, sir, you went grocery shopping?”

The central banker told the audience “I certainly acknowledge food prices have gone up.” But he added some prices are lower and noted “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1, that’s twice as powerful,” as an example of favorable price dynamics. His example was greeted with widespread grumbling in the audience, in a display of conspicuous discontent unusual for a Fed speaking event.

The WSJ piece is still a bit of a fail, in that it attributes the gulf between the Fed and the great unwashed as being due to that food prices are “highly visible” and hence are in everyone’s face when they rise.

Hello! What planet are these people from? Yes, the food and fuel prices are noisy, so the Fed focuses on so-called core inflation. But using only one metric is naive and in this case overlooks the fact that food and fuel loom large in the household expenditures of lower income people. And does Dudley not understand that eating, heating your house, and getting to work are non-discretionary activities, contrary to technology purchases like the iPad?

Plenty of finance ministers and central bankers in emerging economics believe QE2 [i.e., the Fed's second round of "quantitive easing," in which, according to Wikipedia, "the central bank creates money which it uses to buy government bonds and other financial assets, in order to increase the money supply and the excess reserves of the banking system"] has played a significant role in stoking commodities inflation, including food prices. There is some evidence to support that view although the jury is very much out (perishable commodities, which cannot be hoarded and thus reflect fundamentals better than ones that are storable, as well as non-exchange traded commodities in India, such as cooking oil, do not show the same degree of price appreciation as exchange traded agricultural goods have). But there is a large cohort that would applaud if the idea that Bernanke had said, “Let them eat iPads” got traction.

If only people of a Teabagger-type mentality understood that they're funded and consequently manipulated by the very people in cahoots with the likes of "iPad Bill" Dudley to make sure that absolutely as few dollars as absolutely necessary are permitted to trickle out of their clutches down to us unwashed masses.

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