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Libertarian Fantasies, Obama's Summers and Using TPP to End America; ie, a rant

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If it's Wednesday, it must be my rant day. Actually, any day will do. 
I just rejected an article that blamed government for unemployment. Hilariously, it suggested that since the beginning of the industrial revolution, government was the problem. 
From http://www.flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/5425907494/: Ayn Rand-- world renowned narcissist or psychopath-- take your choice
Ayn Rand-- world renowned narcissist or psychopath-- take your choice by DonkeyHotey

This is like libertarian porn fantasy stuff. It doesn't belong on a progressive site. Fortunately, the wise heads of the managing editor team advised that the ability to comment on queue rejections disabled. Good thing-- I get in trouble when I comment on some of them. Nuff said. 
There are loads of prize winning economists, particularly from the Chicago School of Economics who will attack government and regulations and blame them for economic problems. They are proof of the failure of economic theory so far. 
Joseph Stiglitz, in a column today,  How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics,  describing the influence of his attending the MLK I Have a Dream speech 50 years ago on his career, commented,
" While there were a few scholars (including several of my teachers) who cared deeply about the issues that had led me to the field, most were unconcerned about inequality; the dominant school worshiped at the feet of (a misunderstood) Adam Smith, at the miracle of the efficiency of the market economy. I thought that if this was the best of all possible worlds, I wanted to construct and live in another world.
In that odd world of economics, unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers. One Chicago School economist, the Nobel Prize winner  Robert E. Lucas Jr. , would later  write : "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution." Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School,  Gary S. Becker , would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn't exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Sophistry!! Google defines it as "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intent to deceive."

I will grant some Libertarians some slack on that definition, which I do believe applies to many Libertarians. The thing is, there are also the narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths who may actually believe the pule and garbage put out by libertarian economic minds. I really do think that the people who come up with these sophist theories are pandering to the worst instincts of people. 

Pornography aims to stimulate sexually. Libertarian economics aim to stimulate heartlessly. 

The beneficiaries of libertarian theories are indeed narcissists-- people who are extremely selfish and self centered. That also applies to sociopaths and psychopaths. And of course, that applies to corporations, which are, by nature and charter, psychopathic. 

It is sad, not, make that disgusting and despicable (it would be sad if it was by no fault or by accident, which is not the case) that Barack Obama has embraced a team of Robert Rubin economists who don't give a flying f*ck about people or the middle class. 

The fact that Obama is gearing up to appoint Larry Summers, the point man Clinton used to end Glass Steagall, to replace Ben Bernanke for a ten year term as head of the Federal Reserve is no less than a total betrayal of all the dupes and suckers who still believe in him. It should come as no surprise. Obama has surrounded himself with Robert Rubin acolytes since day one. What does that mean. It means he's been working to empower and strengthen bank deregulation, helping to enrich the worst criminals in the banking world. 

Greg Palast recently wrote about how Summers was instrumental in instituting world trade organization policies that forced most of the nations of the world which were signatories to WTO, all except Brazil, to allow policies that supported the kinds of bank trading that led to the financial collapse of 2008. 

After Obama puts Summers in to replace Bernanke, it will be time to fast track the Trans Pacific Partnership-- TPP-- which will be worst and last trade agreement the US signs. I wonder whether the US and its middle class will survive this weapon of economic mass destruction. 

Any legislator who ratifies it should be jailed as a traitor. That tells you what I think of Obama, for pushing it so hard and in such secrecy. 

The ironic thing is that the big government deals that authorize these trade agreements area ll eroding government regulations-- you know, the protections that prevent psychopath corporations from hurting people, cultures and communities. 

The reality is that Libertarianism is being brought to life, but in a way that does not support individual freedoms, but instead, the support of corporate freedoms. Those corporations, particularly banks and finance companies, are viciously deadly predators. Economics visionary Ellen brown writes, in her latest article,  The Leveraged Buyout of America

"Giant bank holding companies now own airports, toll roads, and ports; control power plants; and store and hoard vast quantities of commodities of all sorts. They are systematically buying up or gaining control of the essential lifelines of the economy. How have they pulled this off, and where have they gotten the money?"

After Obama appoints Summers to the Fed, they will ram through the TPP and make it much, much easier for the banks to do to all nations what they're doing to the USA. 

When libertarian, Ayn Rand admiring tea partiers attack government, they are really attacking the protections that keep the corporate wolves at bay. Their hypocrisy is screamingly obvious as they ignore the cancerously massive military, surveillance and police states-- excusing them. 

Libertarians are a mixed bag. I realize that some believe they are fighting for freedoms, particularly from government control. But the truth is that Libertarians are the willing helpers and enablers of the worst corporate intentions.

There are a lot of libertarians out there. They are on the right track when it comes to social issues. And there are ways that government is bad

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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