Tuesday Trio
Today is Tuesday, 22 February 2011.
1.
The second largest shareholder in News Corporation, after Rupert Murdoch and his family, is Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if bin Talal and/or Murdoch are personally anti-Semitic, but it is interesting that Fox News features the anti-Semitic ravings (especially about George Soros) of Glenn Beck.
2.
As I’ve before noted, it is the height of hypocrisy for American media figures to continue to use the term, “Big Labor”, considering that only some 12% of the USA/USE workforce is currently unionized.
Given that many, if not most, of the gains in income and benefits enjoyed today by the American workforce are the direct result of the struggles of unionists, the current attack by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), and others of his ilk, on the unions of state employees, it is evident that these attacks are meant to continue and accelerate the stagnation and rollbacks of income and benefits for all working Americans, which have taken place since the institution of “Reaganomics" in the 1980s.
Many “middle class” Americans enjoy looking down on what they perceive as the “working class”, the “lower class”, or “blue collar workers”. They must awaken: unless one is part of the tiny upper class, and can live solely on the fruits of invested capital, one is working class.
America is, in reality, a two-class society.
3.
The uproar when Dick Cheney referred to Hosni Mubarak as a “friend” to the USA/USE was entirely misplaced. Of course, an administrator of a corrupt Third World dictatorship, no matter how squalid, can be a friend to the American Empire, so long as that dictatorship serves American interests. Had the accidents of history been different, M. Gaddafi would have been gladly accepted as a partner by regimes Democratic as well as Republican.
Gaddafi’s behaviour has always been, to be polite, “eccentric”. His Mary Poppins-like brief television statement last night was particularly troubling: sitting in a vehicle in the rain with umbrella, rambling about, “I intended to stay up late with the young people in Green Square, but it started raining”. Today he was back in his old form, ranting about “drugged rats” controlled by “foreign agents”, and promising to die a martyr, if necessary. (I was put in mind of Glenn Beck, were the latter to adopt Bedouin drag. All Gaddafi needed was a whiteboard and a George Soros effigy.)
Gaddafi has never been a revolutionary; he has always been an opportunistic peronist. Perhaps his martyrdom could not come too soon.
1.
The second largest shareholder in News Corporation, after Rupert Murdoch and his family, is Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if bin Talal and/or Murdoch are personally anti-Semitic, but it is interesting that Fox News features the anti-Semitic ravings (especially about George Soros) of Glenn Beck.
2.
As I’ve before noted, it is the height of hypocrisy for American media figures to continue to use the term, “Big Labor”, considering that only some 12% of the USA/USE workforce is currently unionized.
Given that many, if not most, of the gains in income and benefits enjoyed today by the American workforce are the direct result of the struggles of unionists, the current attack by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), and others of his ilk, on the unions of state employees, it is evident that these attacks are meant to continue and accelerate the stagnation and rollbacks of income and benefits for all working Americans, which have taken place since the institution of “Reaganomics" in the 1980s.
Many “middle class” Americans enjoy looking down on what they perceive as the “working class”, the “lower class”, or “blue collar workers”. They must awaken: unless one is part of the tiny upper class, and can live solely on the fruits of invested capital, one is working class.
America is, in reality, a two-class society.
3.
The uproar when Dick Cheney referred to Hosni Mubarak as a “friend” to the USA/USE was entirely misplaced. Of course, an administrator of a corrupt Third World dictatorship, no matter how squalid, can be a friend to the American Empire, so long as that dictatorship serves American interests. Had the accidents of history been different, M. Gaddafi would have been gladly accepted as a partner by regimes Democratic as well as Republican.
Gaddafi’s behaviour has always been, to be polite, “eccentric”. His Mary Poppins-like brief television statement last night was particularly troubling: sitting in a vehicle in the rain with umbrella, rambling about, “I intended to stay up late with the young people in Green Square, but it started raining”. Today he was back in his old form, ranting about “drugged rats” controlled by “foreign agents”, and promising to die a martyr, if necessary. (I was put in mind of Glenn Beck, were the latter to adopt Bedouin drag. All Gaddafi needed was a whiteboard and a George Soros effigy.)
Gaddafi has never been a revolutionary; he has always been an opportunistic peronist. Perhaps his martyrdom could not come too soon.
posted by HH at 4:20 PM
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