Maybe... there's some hope.
Limbaugh's lost scores of advertisers.
ALEC is starting to see an avalanche of lost sponsors.
The accusation that the right is engaging in a war on women seems to be sticking.
Obama is pushing for passage of the Buffet tax law. That will force top execs to pay the same taxes on stock option income that their secretaries pay.
Don't get too excited. The sociopaths who run the fortune 1000 have thousands of projects and tens of thousands of lobbyists all aimed at protecting the interests of this most toxic .001%.
Listening to Paul Ryan, a lying sociopath, talk about his tax ideas, it's frightening. He's a psychopath, I have no doubt, but he's also brilliant, and mixes half truths and misleading facts with his arguments, to make them convincing. Talk is, he'll be the GOP's VP choice-- a potential heartbeat away from the presidency.
I've, for the most part, given up on electoral politics. I'll vote, but I don't expect Democrats or Republicans to extricate us from the situation we're in. It will take mass activism to do it.
You look at the mlitarization of the local police and it's clear that anarchist street tactics won't work, not that I ever advocated for them. But street actions and mass movements-- millions getting in the streets are really the only answer to taking back democracy and justice, rescuing the middle class...
What is the middle class? I asked economist William Lazonick, Professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director of the UMass Lowell Center. He replied,
that you have a degree of economic security where you can basically do the things you need to do. You don't have a lot of money to waste, live in a home, be secure in that, have a job that's not going to disappear tomorrow, or if that job disappears, you have skills so you can find another job, and you have security for retirement". and finally, that this can be passed on to the next generation. The notion that people could aspire to this kind of security really started setting in in the post war two decades, at least for whites. In the sixties and seventies, aided by the war on poverty, African Americans began to also enjoy" They were also among the first to experience the disappearance" in the 1980s. Over the last three decades a lot of that has been disappearing for a lot of people.
In my interview with Lazonick, he told me that we're not talking about the one percent or even the point one percent. There is a small group of people, the top paid heads of corporations, who are responsible for the lobbyists and influences on legislation and policy that is beating up and decimating the middle class.
We need to start targeting that group-- the point zero zero one percent -- .001%.
Don't be surprised, that, if we do, that they get themselves added to the protections the fascist NDAA act provides, so, protesting against a corporate fat-cat becomes an act of terrorism. They have the juice with the corporate-owned congress to make it happen.
Funny how this article was inspired. I responded to a positive psychology listserve discussion about a teacher who'd said that leaders were psychopaths. Here's what I wrote:
I've done a few interviews about the idea of psyopathy and on sociopath CEOs on my radio show.One, with a psychologist, discussed psychopathy and evil.He pointed out, "t he Psychiatric DSM manual doesn't use either term(psychopath or sociopath,) instead using "Antisocial personality disorder.He also pointed out that the estimate is that one percent of the population fits the diagnosis-- which works out to about three million. I pointed out that there are two million prisoners in jails, that the rest must be politicians. (half joke)
In another interview with writer, radio and TV host Thom Hartmann, who was one of the first to put out the meme that it takes a sociopath to run a fortune 1000 company.
and here's a link to a directory page on my website on psychopathy.And no, most of the writers are not using DSM4. Lynn Johnson has a reasonable point. But I think it is worthwhile exploring this topic from multiple perspectives.And here's a tag with some articles talking about sociopaths, which, from what I understand, get the same DSM diagnosis.I did a poll on my site asking readers if MBA heads of big corporations are sociopaths-- totally unscientific, and only 78 responded. But 86% thought so.I know-- flaming lefties.Still, these are the people who control the lobbyists that block ecological and worker protections, who maintain welfare for corporations-- they are the .001 Percent.
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