STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 12 December 2014

[Demeter]

5. America's Obscenely Rich Know Full Well That They Are Destroying America

http://www.alternet.org/media/americas-obscenely-rich-know-full-well-they-are-destroying-america?akid=12560.227380.b9crtG&rd=1&src=newsletter1028422&t=4

INTERESTING SCREED THAT GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS IN LAST THREE PARAGRAPHS:

...in a republic, some citizens have to uphold codes of honor and civic loyalty that are strong enough to keep power responsive to social purposes that can’t be met by markets and can’t be bought off or finessed by them. If capitalism becomes predatory and insinuating, citizens’ codes and trust of one another become empty, the stuff of slick videos and click-bait that lead to slavery.

And the predators lose their ability to tell the difference: “Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.”

That was written by the British economic historian R.H. Tawney in May 1926, in the New Republic — whose present owner is bewildered and bleating. But journalism isn’t justice. It would take a lot more disciplined defiance to make prosecutors and police officers bleat, too. From Nathan Hale and Thomas Paine to Jonathan Schell and Edward Snowden, some Americans have always emerged to announce the need and others to lead in breaking ties that had to be broken and framing new understandings and courses of action that had to be tried.