wondermark.com
Posted on 07/16/2010 4:35:54 AM PDT by rellimpank
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class."
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Bump for later.
Yep, that’s right but I wish I could change it.
I was once a Dem and signed up as a semi-troll. FR showed me the way within a few months :)
Take care FRiend
The only problem being a guillotine operator in such times is the distinct chance of being bumped out of position by a still more eager operator, and into the waiting line for its services.
Well, we are glad to have you on-board. Regards, TQ.
“(well, they may interview the guillotine operator and ask him whether he realizes he got a $400 tax refund)”
Now that did make me LOL. So true, so true.
..“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
I’ve a feeling NFHale already has a few in mind...”
Horsewhipping comes immediately to mind...
I’m just SAYIN’, is all....
People who have the experience or knowledge or will or cunning or ruthlessness or energy or information always come out on top of those who don't.
Overturn one elite with a mass movement and when the dust clears what you've got is another ruling elite in charge.
Current elites learn from the mistakes of past elites. They try to avoid the policies and attitudes that were the undoing of their predecessors.
Yet in a deeper sense, the new elite doesn't entirely escape the arrogance and complacency of the earlier elite it displaced.
Over time the new rulers come to resemble what they rebelled against.
James Burnham's The Machiavellians deals with this dilemma.
...
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.
This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.
This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.
But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
....
wondermark.com
>>I was once a Dem and signed up as a semi-troll.
Seriously?
Correction: “The American way is to get the folks out of power, undo their mistakes, and then go on from there... and merrily spend generations paying off the 12 trillion dollars looted from the national treasury by the former ‘folks’.
Another bump
...for those interested and who may have missed it. :D
Excellent! Thanks for posting this! ............................ FRegards
This is a MUST read!
There does seem to be a bit of frustration building up among American fans of liberty these days. At the same time that the left seems more conniving and desperate to close the deal on the conversion to what ever pseudo-socialist despotism they have in mind.
Fertile grounds for anger and action. Ample reason for discussion to turn to the possibility of Civil War II..
...such discussions always result in the inevitable: A CWII Ping!!
The last recourse, but not one that couldn’t happen.
Bump for an important, comprehensive, and clearly written article offering insight into the scum that presumes to “rule” us.
Lock and load. The time is at hand.
The PROPER way is to make tyranny so expensive in terms of the lives of tyrants that no one will ever want to do it again. That means using the guillotine or the gallows liberally.
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