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(4,325 posts)as stupid does. It is just plain stupidity. I don't think they would be devious (smart) enough to
figure out how to do something like this.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)1.a deliberate strategy of certain leaders to exploit crises by pushing through controversial, exploitative policies while citizens were too busy emotionally and physically reeling from disasters or upheavals to create an effective resistance.
2 That practitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which usually requires a violent destruction of the existing economic order, since the existing order features policies, laws, and practices that interfere with laissez-faire capitalism.
3 The similarities between economic shock doctrine and CIA-funded shock therapy studies in which electric shocks far exceeding normal therapeutic levels were applied to patients in mental hospitals in an effort to destroy psychological resistance and create a tabula rasa personality, upon which doctors could imprint whatever they wanted.
Anyway ..... see Shock Doctrine.
ProfessorPlum
(11,257 posts)The Shock Doctrine outlines a clear strategy that explains just about everything that has and will happen to this country. It is shocking, depressing, and sad, and the most important book I've ever read.
Everyone should read it, and understand its implications for our country and world.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)Ukraine has beem in gave financial difficulties. Last fall the International Monetary Fund offered Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich a bailout, under conditions that reportedly included a doubling of prices for gas and electricity to industry and homes, the lifting of a ban on private sale of Ukraines rich agricultural lands, a sale of state assets, a devaluation of the currency and cuts in funding for schools and pensions to balance the budget. In return, Ukraine would have got a $4 billion loan, a small fraction of what was needed.
Then the Russian Federation offered a $15 billion loan and a 30 percent cut in gas export prices. Naturally Prime Minister Yanukovich accepted. Then all hell broke loose.
Arseny Yatsenyuk
Arseny Yatsenyuk
A mysterious sniper killed peaceful demonstrators in Maidan square in Kiev and, as has happened with mysterious sniper attacks in Venezuela, Thailand and other countries, the killings sparked a violent uprising.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said in a leaked telephone conversation with the Ukraine ambassador that we want the former banker, Arseny Yatsenyuk, installed at Yanukovichs replacement, rather than some more popular politician. And thats what happened.
Yatsenyuk said he will do whatever it takes to get IMF financing, even though this probably will make him the most unpopular prime minister in Ukraine history. He in fact has little choice. The Russian offer has understandably been withdrawn, and Ukraine is in a much more desperate plight than it was six months ago.
Elections are scheduled for May, but thats plenty of time for Ukraine to be locked into binding commitments to the IMF.
Ukraine is a country rich in natural resources but poor in money an inviting target for financial speculators. Based on what has happened in other countries in like situations, I look for Ukraines resources and assets to be sold off at bargain prices.
I dont see what business a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State has trying to name the head of a foreign government, or how this in any way benefits the American people. It seems to be an example of the workings of Wall Street as a component of Michael Lofgrens deep state.
http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/the-shock-doctrine-in-ukraine/
About Deep State
All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep States protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, the deciders.
more: http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
ProfessorPlum
(11,257 posts)brush
(53,794 posts)I don't get it either. Why do they want to live in a country where the vast majority of people are unhappy and have to wait for crumbs to "trickle down" from the elite?
Historically that type of society has eventually been overthrown, and violently. Maybe they feel they will be able to forestall that indefinitely or at least long enough for them to have gotten theirs and lived the good life in their walled and gated compounds.
It's puzzling because they have to know somewhere in the back of their minds that even us hoi polloi, ninetey-nine percenters, or whatever you want to call us even the lumpenproletariat will somehow figure out a way to get over those walls, pitch forks and all.
Cha
(297,347 posts)can swoop in with their billions and take over the reigns. Now, who they gonna get to usher them to the WH? mitt didn't work out.. Christie's lookin' like a sleazyball more and more everyday.. rand the idiot paul?
Baitball Blogger
(46,744 posts)They are establishing a dichotomous society. They don't want anyone catching on to the schemes of the pillaging class.
And, unfortunately, the State Attorney's office and the FBI are complicit by doing fuck all nothing.
jsr
(7,712 posts)deutsey
(20,166 posts)By Richard Wolff
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/capitalism-relocation-pauperised-middle-class
SNIP
Detroit, Cleveland, Camden and many other cities display what capitalism left behind after it became profitable for capitalists to relocate and for new capital investments to happen more elsewhere. Capitalism and its driving profit motive first developed in England before spreading to western Europe, north America and then Japan. Over the last two centuries, those areas endured a growing capitalism's mix of horrific working conditions, urban slums, environmental degradation, and cyclical instability. Capitalism also brought economic growth, wealth for a minority, labor unions and other workers' organizations. Writers like Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, and Gorky saw that capitalism's workings clearly, while those like Marx, Mill and Bakunin understood it critically.
Workers' struggles eventually forced capitalists to pay rising wages, enabling higher living standards for large sections of the working classes (so-called "middle classes" . Capitalists and their economist spokespersons later rewrote that history to suggest instead that rising wages were blessings intrinsic to the capitalist system. How wrong that was, as I describe below.
SNIP
Starting especially in the 1970s, several historical trends coalesced to provoke a massive, historic relocation of capitalists and of capitalism's growth. One trend grew out of a US growth spurt after the war ended in 1945. That spurt renewed capitalists' self-confidence and determination to roll back the New Deal and to secure better control of government. They systematically destroyed the social forces (unions, socialists, and communists) that had produced the New Deal and the greatest wave of criticism of capitalism in US history.
MORE at link
n2doc
(47,953 posts)Easier to steal elections, money, land, resources, etc., etc. Poor, stupid, scared, angry people are easier to manipulate.
Basically you have an entire party devoted to scamming America. And they have help from some members of the other party as well.
Glitterati
(3,182 posts)In the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes described the effect of this sort of monetary policy on workers: the object of credit restriction
is to withdraw from employers the financial means to employ labour at the existing level of wages and prices. The policy can only attain its end by intensifying unemployment without limit, until the workers are ready to accept the necessary reduction of money wages under the pressure of hard facts.4 Keyness description of this policy seemed to frame it as a form of Procrustean class warfare. Those who are attacked first are faced with a depression of their standard of life, because the cost of living will not fall until all the others have been successfully attacked too; and, therefore, they are justified in defending themselves
they are bound to resist so long as they can; and it must be war, until those who are economically weakest are beaten to the ground.5 Keynes concluded, It is a policy, nevertheless, from which any humane or judicious person must shrink.6
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/sado-monetarism