Monday, January 09, 2012

ANS -- Full-Blown Civil War Erupts On Wall Street – Financial Elite Start Turning On Each Other

Did you know that the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency) is suing 17 Big Banks for fraud?  We had heard about the fraud, but didn't know anyone was doing anything about it.  We weren't familiar with this website, so Joyce searched to see if this is true, and found it had been previously reported in the Wall Street Journal, in the real estate section.  This happened last September.  Did you hear about it?
Find it here: http://wakeup-world.com/2011/09/06/full-blown-civil-war-erupts-on-wall-street-financial-elite-start-turning-on-each-other/  
There's a video at the end that I don't think comes through here in email-land.
--Kim

Noise Pollution Makes Some Birds Less Attractive »

Full-Blown Civil War Erupts On Wall Street – Financial Elite Start Turning On Each Other

[]

Reality Finally Hits The Financial Elite As They Start Turning On Each Other

By David DeGraw - ampedstatus.org

Finally, after trillions in fraudulent activity, trillions in bailouts, trillions in printed money, billions in political bribing and billions in bonuses, the criminal cartel members on Wall Street are beginning to get what they deserve. As the Eurozone is coming apart at the seams and as the US economy grinds to a halt, the financial elite are starting to turn on each other. The lawsuits are piling up fast. Here's an extensive roundup:

Time to put your Big Bank shorts on! Get ready for a run… The chickens are coming home to roost… The Global Banking Cartel's crimes are being exposed left & right… Prepare for Shock & Awe…

Well, well… here's your Shock & Awe:

First up, this shockingly huge $196 billion lawsuit just filed against 17 major banks on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bank of America is severely exposed in this lawsuit. As the parent company of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch they are on the hook for $57.4 billion. JP Morgan is next in the line of fire with $33 billion. And many death spiraling European banks are facing billions in losses as well.

FHA Files a $196 Billion Lawsuit Against 17 Banks

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises), today filed lawsuits against 17 financial institutions, certain of their officers and various unaffiliated lead underwriters. The suits allege violations of federal securities laws and common law in the sale of residential private-label mortgage-backed securities (PLS) to the Enterprises.

Complaints have been filed against the following lead defendants, in alphabetical order:

1. Ally Financial Inc. f/k/a GMAC, LLC – $6 billion
2. Bank of America Corporation – $6 billion
3. Barclays Bank PLC – $4.9 billion
4. Citigroup, Inc. – $3.5 billion
5. Countrywide Financial Corporation -$26.6 billion
6. Credit Suisse Holdings (USA), Inc. – $14.1 billion
7. Deutsche Bank AG – $14.2 billion
8. First Horizon National Corporation – $883 million
9. General Electric Company – $549 million
10. Goldman Sachs & Co. – $11.1 billion
11. HSBC North America Holdings, Inc. – $6.2 billion
12. JPMorgan Chase & Co. – $33 billion
13. Merrill Lynch & Co. / First Franklin Financial Corp. – $24.8 billion
14. Morgan Stanley – $10.6 billion
15. Nomura Holding America Inc. – $2 billion
16. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC – $30.4 billion
17. Société Générale – $1.3 billion

These complaints were filed in federal or state court in New York or the federal court in Connecticut. The complaints seek damages and civil penalties under the Securities Act of 1933, similar in content to the complaint FHFA filed against UBS Americas, Inc. on July 27, 2011. In addition, each complaint seeks compensatory damages for negligent misrepresentation. Certain complaints also allege state securities law violations or common law fraud. [read full FHFA release]

You can read the suits filed against each individual bank here. For some more information read Bloomberg: BofA, JPMorgan Among 17 Banks Sued by U.S. for $196 Billion. Noticeably absent from the list of companies being sued is Wells Fargo.

And the suits just keep coming…

BofA sued over $1.75 billion Countrywide mortgage pool

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) was sued by the trustee of a $1.75 billion mortgage pool, which seeks to force the bank to buy back the underlying loans because of alleged misrepresentations in how they were made. The lawsuit by the banking unit of US Bancorp (USB.N) is the latest of a number of suits seeking to recover investor losses tied to risky mortgage loans issued by Countrywide Financial Corp, which Bank of America bought in 2008. In a complaint filed in a New York state court in Manhattan, U.S. Bank said Countrywide, which issued the 4,484 loans in the HarborView Mortgage Loan Trust 2005-10, materially breached its obligations by systemically misrepresenting the quality of its underwriting and loan documentation. [read more]

Bank of America kept AIG legal threat under wraps

Top Bank of America Corp lawyers knew as early as January that American International Group Inc was prepared to sue the bank for more than $10 billion, seven months before the lawsuit was filed, according to sources familiar with the matter. Bank of America shares fell more than 20 percent on August 8, the day the lawsuit was filed, adding to worries about the stability of the largest U.S. bank…. The bank made no mention of the lawsuit threat in a quarterly regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just four days earlier. Nor did management discuss it on conference calls about quarterly results and other pending legal claims. [read more]

Nevada Lawsuit Shows Bank of America's Criminal Incompetence

As we've stated before, litigation by attorney general is significant not merely due to the damages and remedies sought, but because it paves the way for private lawsuits. And make no mistake about it, this filing is a doozy. It shows the Federal/state attorney general mortgage settlement effort to be a complete travesty. The claim describes, in considerable detail, how various Bank of America units engaged in misconduct in virtually every aspect of its residential mortgage business. [read more]

Nevada Wallops Bank of America With Sweeping Suit; Nationwide Foreclosure Settlement in Peril

The sweeping new suit could have repercussions far beyond Nevada's borders. It further jeopardizes a possible nationwide settlement with the five largest U.S. banks over their foreclosure practices, especially given concerns voiced by other attorneys general, New York's foremost among them…. In a statement, Bank of America spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens said reaching a settlement would bring a better outcome for homeowners than litigation. "We believe that the best way to get the housing market going again in every state is a global settlement that addresses these issues fairly, comprehensively and with finality. [read more]

FDIC Objects to Bank of America's $8.5 Billion Mortgage-Bond Accord

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is objecting to Bank of America Corp. (BAC)'s proposed $8.5 billion mortgage-bond settlement with investors, joining investors and states that are challenging the agreement. The FDIC owns securities covered by the settlement and said it doesn't have enough information to evaluate the accord, according to a filing today in federal court in Manhattan. Bank of America has agreed to pay $8.5 billion to resolve claims from investors in Countrywide Financial mortgage bonds. The settlement was negotiated with a group of institutional investors and would apply to investors outside that group. [read more]

Fed asks Bank of America to list contingency plan: report

The Federal Reserve has asked Bank of America Corp to show what measures it could take if business conditions worsen, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the situation. BofA executives recently responded to the unusual request from the Federal Reserve with a list of options that includes the issuance of a separate class of shares tied to the performance of its Merrill Lynch securities unit, the people told the paper. Bank of America and the Fed declined to comment to the Journal. Both could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters outside regular U.S. business hours. [
read more]

Bombshell Admission of Failed Securitization Process in American Home Mortgage Servicing/LPS Lawsuit

Wow, Jones Day just created a huge mess for its client and banks generally if anyone is alert enough to act on it. The lawsuit in question is American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. v Lender Processing Services. It hasn't gotten all that much attention (unless you are on the LPS deathwatch beat) because to most, it looks like yet another beauty contest between Cinderella's two ugly sisters. AHMSI is a servicer (the successor to Option One, and it may also still have some Ameriquest servicing).

AHMSI is mad at LPS because LPS was supposed to prepare certain types of documentation AHMSI used in foreclosures. AHMSI authorized the use of certain designated staffers signing with the authority of AHSI (what we call robosinging, since the people signing these documents didn't have personal knowledge, which is required if any of the documents were affidavits). But it did not authorize the use of surrogate signers, which were (I kid you not) people hired to forge the signatures of robosigners. The lawsuit rather matter of factly makes a stunning admission… [read more]

Fraudclosure: MERS Case Filed With Supreme Court

Before readers get worried by virtue of the headline that the Supreme Court will use its magic legal wand to make the dubious MERS mortgage registry system viable, consider the following:

1. The Supreme Court hears only a very small portion of the cases filed with it, and is less likely to take one with these demographics (filed by a private party, and an appeal out of a state court system, as opposed to Federal court). This case, Gomes v. Countywide, was decided against the plaintiff in lower and appellate court and the California state supreme court declined to hear it

2. If MERS or the various servicers who have had foreclosures overturned based on challenges to MERS thought they'd get a sympathetic hearing at the Supreme Court, they probably would have filed some time ago. MERS have apparently been settling cases rather than pursue ones where it though the judge would issue an unfavorable precedent

3. The case in question, from what the experts I consulted with and I can tell, is not the sort the Supreme Court would intervene in based on the issue raised, which is due process (14th Amendment). But none of us have seen the underlying lower and appellate court cases, and the summaries we've seen are unusually unclear as to what the legal argument is. [read more]

Iowa Says State AG Accord Won't Release Banks From Liability

The 50-state attorney general group investigating mortgage foreclosure practices won't release banks from all civil, or any criminal, liability in a settlement, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said. [read more]

Fed Launches New Formal Enforcement Action Against Goldman Sachs To Review Foreclosure Practices

The Federal Reserve Board has just launched a formal enforcement action against Goldman Sachs related to Litton Loan Services. Litton Loan is the nightmare-ridden mortgage servicing unit, a subsidiary of Goldman, that Goldman has been trying to sell for months. They penned a deal to recently, but the Fed stepped in and required Goldman to end robo-signing taking place at the unit before the sale could be completed. Sounds like this enforcement action is an extension of that requirement. [read more]

Goldman Sachs, Firms Agree With Regulator To End 'Robo-Signing' Foreclosure Practices

Goldman Sachs and two other firms have agreed with the New York banking regulator to end the practice known as robo-signing, in which bank employees signed foreclosure documents without reviewing case files as required by law, the Wall Street Journal said. In an agreement with New York's financial-services superintendent, Goldman, its Litton Loan Servicing unit and Ocwen Financial Corp also agreed to scrutinize loan files for evidence they mishandled borrowers' paperwork and to cut mortgage payments for some New York homeowners, the Journal said. [read more]

Banks still robo-signing, filing doubtful foreclosure documents

Reuters has found that some of the biggest U.S. banks and other "loan servicers" continue to file questionable foreclosure documents with courts and county clerks. They are using tactics that late last year triggered an outcry, multiple investigations and temporary moratoriums on foreclosures. In recent months, servicers have filed thousands of documents that appear to have been fabricated or improperly altered, or have sworn to false facts. Reuters also identified at least six "robo-signers," individuals who in recent months have each signed thousands of mortgage assignments ­ legal documents which pinpoint ownership of a property. These same individuals have been identified ­ in depositions, court testimony or court rulings ­ as previously having signed vast numbers of foreclosure documents that they never read or checked. [read more]

JPMorgan fined for contravening Iran, Cuba sanctions

JPMorgan Chase Bank has been fined $88.3 million for contravening US sanctions against regimes in Iran, Cuba and Sudan, and the former Liberian government, the US Treasury Department announced Thursday. The Treasury said that the bank had engaged in a number of "egregious" financial transfers, loans and other facilities involving those countries but, in announcing a settlement with the bank, said they were "apparent" violations of various sanctions regulations. [read more]

This Is Considered Punishment? The Federal Reserve Wells Fargo Farce

What made the news surprising, of course, was that the Federal Reserve has rarely, if ever, taken action against a bank for making predatory loans. Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, didn't believe in regulation and turned a blind eye to subprime abuses. His successor, Ben Bernanke, is not the ideologue that Greenspan is, but, as an institution, the Fed prefers to coddle banks rather than punish them.

That the Fed would crack down on Wells Fargo would seem to suggest a long-overdue awakening. Yet, for anyone still hoping for justice in the wake of the financial crisis, the news was hardly encouraging. First, the Fed did not force Wells Fargo to admit guilt ­ and even let the company issue a press release blaming its wrongdoing on a "relatively small group."

The $85 million fine was a joke; in just the last quarter, Wells Fargo's revenues exceeded $20 billion. And compensating borrowers isn't going to hurt much either. By my calculation, it won't top $20 million. [read more]

Exclusive: Regulators seek high-frequency trading secrets

U.S. securities regulators have taken the unprecedented step of asking high-frequency trading firms to hand over the details of their trading strategies, and in some cases, their secret computer codes. The requests for proprietary code and algorithm parameters by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a Wall Street brokerage regulator, are part of investigations into suspicious market activity, said Tom Gira, executive vice president of FINRA's market regulation unit. [read more]

And here's part of the Collapse Roundup I wrote on August 25th, referenced in the beginning of this report – as you will see, I would probably make a lot more money as an investment adviser:

Collapse Roundup #5: Goliath On The Ropes, Big Banks Getting Hit Hard, It's A "Bloodbath" As Wall Street's Crimes Blow Up In Their Face

Time to put your Big Bank shorts on! Get ready for a run

The chickens are coming home to roost. Reality is catching up with the market riggers (Fed, ECB, PPT, CIA) and the "too big to fail" banks are getting whacked. Trillions of dollars in bailouts and legalized (FASB) accounting fraud cannot save these insolvent zombie banks any longer. The Grim Reaper is on the horizon and his sickle will do what paid off politicians won't, cut 'em down to size. So get your silver stake ready, time to plunge it into their vampire squid hearts….

What about Warren Buffet? He saved Goldman Sachs with a bailout in 2008. Can he save Bank of America?…

Warren's bailout will help BofA over the short run, but $5 billion is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to their problems. The only thing his $5 billion will accomplish is a temporary run up in stock value so everyone who has been killed on the plummeting stock price can then jump out without complete loss….

Trouble a-comin'…

Goldman Sachs TANKS After CEO Lloyd Blankfein Hires Famous Defense Lawyer

Is the Goldman Sachs CEO facing a new lawsuit?

The market seems to think so. Goldman Sachs just tanked in minutes before the close after news that Lloyd Blankfein hired a lawyer famous for defending vilified execs. It's back up a bit since dropping over 5%, but the news is still concerning.

It's unclear whether the lawyer is for him, Goldman Sachs, or both, but Goldman Sachs's CEO Lloyd Blankfein hired Reid Weingarten, a high profile defense attorney who says "I'm used to these monstrously difficult cases where everybody hates my clients," according to Reuters.

Reuters says the hire might have something to do with accusations of Blankfein's committing perjury. Or something else:

One former federal prosecutor, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Blankfein may have hired outside counsel after receiving a request from investigators for documents or other information. [read full report]

Speaking of hiring lawyers…

The Global Banking Cartel's Crimes Are Being Exposed Left & Right… Blowing Up In Their Face… Prepare for Shock & Awe… BOOM!

Moody's exposed:

MOODY'S ANALYST BREAKS SILENCE: Says Ratings Agency Rotten To Core With Conflicts

A former senior analyst at Moody's has gone public with his story of how one of the country's most important rating agencies is corrupted to the core.

The analyst, William J. Harrington, worked for Moody's for 11 years, from 1999 until his resignation last year.

From 2006 to 2010, Harrington was a Senior Vice President in the derivative products group, which was responsible for producing many of the disastrous ratings Moody's issued during the housing bubble.

Harrington has made his story public in the form of a 78-page "comment" to the SEC's proposed rules about rating agency reform….

Here are some key points:

* Moody's ratings often do not reflect its analysts' private conclusions. Instead, rating committees privately conclude that certain securities deserve certain ratings–but then vote with management to give the securities the higher ratings that issuer clients want.

* Moody's management and "compliance" officers do everything possible to make issuer clients happy–and they view analysts who do not do the same as "troublesome." Management employs a variety of tactics to transform these troublesome analysts into "pliant corporate citizens" who have Moody's best interests at heart.

* Moody's product managers participate in–and vote on–ratings decisions. These product managers are the same people who are directly responsible for keeping clients happy and growing Moody's business.

* At least one senior executive lied under oath at the hearings into rating agency conduct. Another executive, who Harrington says exemplified management's emphasis on giving issuers what they wanted, skipped the hearings altogether. [read full report]

BOOM! The SEC Caught Covering Up Wall Street Crimes:

Matt Taibbi Exposes How SEC Shredded Thousands of Investigations

An explosive new report in Rolling Stone magazine exposes how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's largest banks and hedge funds, including AIG, Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and top Wall Street broker Bernard Madoff. Last week, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said an agency whistleblower had sent him a letter detailing the unlawful destruction of records detailing more than 9,000 information investigations. We speak with Matt Taibbi, the political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine who broke this story in his latest article….

KA-BOOM! The Fed And All Their Crony-Capitalist Cartel Members Exposed, Yet Again:

Wall Street Pentagon Papers Part III – Are The Federal Reserve's Crimes Still Too Big To Comprehend?

Another day, another trillion plus in secret Federal Reserve "bailouts" revealed. Bloomberg News exposes this latest Fed "deal" after winning a long Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legal battle to get the details on what was done with the American people's money. Their report runs with an AmpedStatus style headline: "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion From Fed."

The aristocracy is alive and well… thanks to the Fed, of course.

Keep in mind, this $1.2 trillion is in addition to the $16 trillion the Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit revealed and the over $2 trillion in Quantitative Easing the Fed dished out, not to mention the now continued promise of the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). This is also separate from the $700 billion TARP program that Congress approved. This is yet another unknown secret program, throwing another mere $1.2 trillion in public money at the Wall Street elite (global banking cartel), just being revealed now.

Those of us paying attention over the past three years have had Fed crony-capitalism on steroids fatigue for awhile now. Nonetheless, this is deja vu all over again as another mindbogglingly huge story that must be covered comes to light.

Here are the details of this latest revelation:

[read full report]

Speaking of the $16 trillion GAO audit…

BOOM! GAO audit exposed, missing some vital details:

More on how the GAO's Fed audit failed to disclose some dirty secrets about BlackRock and JP Morgan

In its review of the Fed's outsourcing practices, it failed to mention the most damaging and suspicious sole-source (no bid) contract awarded to BlackRock, which was for handling the New York Fed's toxic Bear Stearns portfolio, otherwise known as Maiden Lane. This contract would generate $108,000,000 in fees and was one of the largest awarded during the bailout period, but it might also have saved JP Morgan $1.1 billion in losses from its Bear Stearns acquisition….

Also, BlackRock was also one of the managers of the NY Fed's separate $1.25 trillion MBS purchase program as part of QE1. Contrary to the lie on the NY Fed's webpage (that the MBS auctions were conducted via competitive bidding), the NY Fed's own purchasing manager, Brian Sack, admitted in a paper that, "the MBS purchases were arranged with primary dealer counterparties directly, [and] there was no auction mechanism to provide a measure of market supply."

Putting it all together, it looks like Jamie Dimon signed off on hiring BlackRock for no justifiable reason to trade the very Maiden Lane portfolio that could have caused his bank, JP Morgan, to lose up to $1.1 billion. And, it was entirely possible that BlackRock saved the portfolio by trading the MBS portion of ML with the New York Fed directly as QE1 was underway. [read full report]

BOOM! Bear Stearns exposed:

Report Says Bear Stearns Executives Sold Illegal RMBS and Covered It Up

Former back office employees from Bear Stearns are coming out of the woodwork to explain how Tom Marano's mortgage group cheated their own clients out of billions. This week I reported at The Distressed Debt Report, EMC insiders say they were told to make up the classification for whole loans, packaged into mortgage securities, to get them switched out of the trust. By classifying the loans as 'prepaid' or having 'subsequent recoveries' Bear employees were able to fool the trustee into giving them back loans they were not able to legally service. A move New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is actively investigating now.

In my latest DealFlow story we hear from EMC staffers who describe how subprime loans, that would have been sold by Bear Stearns trader Jeff Verschleiser's team, never had a proper servicing license in West Virginia when they were packaged into the residential mortgage backed security. In 2003 Bear/EMC put $100 million of subprime loans from West Virginia into a few RMBS transactions. EMC, the banks wholly owned mortgage servicing shop, would service all of Bear's RMBS after they were sold.

A year latter, when senior executies realized the mishap instead of Bear going out and informing their regulator and applying for a license, they orchestrated a cover up and even threaten EMC employees not to talk about it. [read full report]

The big banks are getting lit up!

You shall reap what you sow.

Karma is a … bit@h. [read full report]

Let's end with this video. We need to keep in mind that the Federal Reserve has known about all of this criminal activity from the start. Yet, they have done everything they could, and are still trying, to keep this criminal operation up and running. As all these criminal banks begin to blow up, let's not forget who their central bank is and what they have done to the American people.

Cenk, take it away and drive the point home:

- David DeGraw is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com. His long-awaited book, The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III, will finally be released on September 28th. He can be emailed at David[@]AmpedStatus.com. You can follow David's reporting daily on his new personal website: DavidDeGraw.org

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Bailouts, Fraud, Lawsuits, Wall-Street

ANS -- Explaining Socialism To A Republican

If you have friends and relatives who are confused about what modern socialism is, this article will help to explain it. 
Find it here:  http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/11/07/explaining-socialism-to-a-republican/comment-page-1/#comment-40283
--Kim


Explaining Socialism To A Republican

November 7, 2011
By Nurse Pam

[]

I was talking recently with a new friend who I�m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side.

When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word �socialism� came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said �All socialism isn�t bad�.  She became very serious and replied �So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?�  I smiled and said �No, not at all.  Why do you think socialism mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?

�Well it is, isn�t it?� was her reply.


I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democratic Socialism consists of a democratic form of government with a mix of socialism and capitalism. I proceeded to explain to her the actual meaning terms �democracy� and �socialism�.

Democracy is a form of government in which all citizens take part. It is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Socialism is where we all put our resources together and work for the common good of us all and not just for our own benefit. In this sense, we are sharing the wealth within society.

Of course when people hear that term, �Share the wealth� they start screaming, �OMG you want to rob from the rich and give it all to the poor!�  But that is NOT what Democratic Socialism means.

To a Democratic Socialist, sharing the wealth means pooling tax money together to design social programs that benefit ALL citizens of that country, city, state, etc.

The fire and police departments are both excellent examples of Democratic Socialism in America.  Rather than leaving each individual responsible for protecting their own home from fire, everyone pools their money together, through taxes, to maintain a fire and police department. It�s operated under a non-profit status, and yes, your tax dollars pay for putting out other people�s fires. It would almost seem absurd to think of some corporation profiting from putting out fires.  But it�s more efficient and far less expensive to have government run fire departments funded by tax dollars.

Similarly, public education is another social program in the USA. It benefits all of us to have a taxpayer supported, publicly run education system. Unfortunately, in America, the public education system ends with high school.  Most of Europe now provides low cost or free college education for their citizens. This is because their citizens understand that an educated society is a safer, more productive and more prosperous society. Living in such a society, everyone benefits from public education.

When an American graduates from college, they usually hold burdensome debt in the form of student loans that may take 10 to even 30 years to pay off. Instead of being able to start a business or invest in their career, the college graduate has to send off monthly payments for years on end.

On the other hand, a new college graduate from a European country begins without the burdensome debt that an American is forced to take on. The young man or woman is freer to start up businesses, take an economic risk on a new venture, or invest more money in the economy, instead of spending their money paying off student loans to for-profit financial institutions.  Of course this does not benefit wealthy corporations, but it does greatly benefit everyone in that society.

EXAMPLE  American style capitalistic program for college: If you pay (average) $20,000 annually for four years of college, that will total $80,000 + interest for student loans. The interest you would owe could easily total or exceed the $80,000 you originally borrowed, which means your degree could cost in excess of $100,000.

EXAMPLE European style social program for college: Your college classes are paid for through government taxes.  When you graduate from that college and begin your career, you also start paying an extra tax for fellow citizens to attend college.

Question - You might be thinking how is that fair? If you�re no longer attending college, why would you want to help everyone else pay for their college degree?

Answer - Every working citizen pays a tax that is equivalent to say, $20 monthly.  If you work for 40 years and then retire, you will have paid $9,600 into the Social college program.  So you could say that your degree ends up costing only $9,600. When everyone pools their money together and the program is non-profit, the price goes down tremendously. This allows you to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Health care is another example: If your employer does not provide health insurance, you must purchase a policy independently.  The cost will be thousands of dollars annually, in addition to deductible and co-pays.

In Holland, an individual will pay around $35 monthly, period.  Everyone pays into the system and this helps reduce the price for everyone, so they get to keep more of their hard earned cash.

In the United States we are told and frequently reminded that anything run by the government is bad and that everything should be operated by for-profit companies. Of course, with for-profit entities the cost to the consumer is much higher because they have corporate executives who expect compensation packages of tens of millions of dollars and shareholders who expect to be paid dividends, and so on.

This (and more) pushes up the price of everything, with much more money going to the already rich and powerful, which in turn, leaves the middle class with less spending money and creates greater class separation.

This economic framework makes it much more difficult for average Joes to �lift themselves up by their bootstraps� and raise themselves to a higher economic standing.

So next time you hear the word �socialism� and �spreading the wealth� in the same breath, understand that this is a serious misconception.

Social programs require tax money and your taxes may be higher. But as you can see everyone benefits because other costs go down and, in the long run, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Democratic Socialism does NOT mean taking from the rich and giving to the poor.  It works to benefit everyone so the rich can no longer take advantage of the poor and middle class.

ANS -- The Four Flavors of Republican

Here's an interesting article, by Doug Muder, explaining what is going on with the Republican Party, and why they keep switching top candidates, still looking for one they can all agree on.  It clears up some of the mystery. 
find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2012/01/09/the-four-flavors-of-republican/  
--Kim



Tagged constitution, law |

The Four Flavors of Republican

[]

As I've explained elsewhere, the news media does a good job at telling us what is new today, but a bad job of explaining the context-providing frames that the insiders have known all along.

That is showing up big-time in the coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. Let a new poll come out or one candidate launch a new sound bite at another, and CNN is all over it, whether it actually makes any difference or not. That's how we wind up with so much coverage of manufactured events like August's Iowa Straw Poll, which in retrospect did not even say much about last Tuesday's Iowa Caucus, which in itself was a bit of a manufactured event.

On the other hand, the background truths that insiders take for granted are never "new", so they don't make headlines.

I thought I'd fill in one of those gaps by asking: What is this thing called "the Republican Party"? What are its components? How do they fit together? And how do the various candidates relate to them?

The four components. Republicans come in one of four basic flavors: NeoCons, Corporatists, Libertarians, and Theocrats. I don't call them factions because the boundaries between them aren't clear-cut. You can pitch many of the same pitch ideas to all four, but each requires its own spin.

Take global warming. All four flavors are potential climate-change deniers, but each requires its own argument: Tell Corporatists that regulating or taxing carbon will cut profits. Tell Libertarians that global warming is a conspiracy to impose world government. Theocrats will also buy the conspiracy angle, if you emphasize that the plot was concocted by the same evil scientists behind the evolution conspiracy. Tell NeoCons that any carbon restrictions we accept will work to the advantage of the Chinese.

But they aren't just tribes speaking different languages. Their substantive differences show up most clearly on drugs. Libertarians want to legalize drugs, because what business is it of the government's anyway? This position is anathema to the Theocrats, who see the government as the guardian of public morality. NeoCons fundamentally don't care, while Corporatists would happily make money selling either heroin in elementary schools or helicopters to the DEA or both.

Get the idea? Now let's go through them one by one.
  • NeoCons are the people who gave us the Iraq War. Their highest priority is that the United States remain the top military power in the world, and that we use our power to prevent the rise of any rival powers. Their #1 issue in this election is Iran. When a candidate says we have to do "whatever it takes" to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, he (now that Bachmann has dropped out I'll refer to candidates as he) is appealing for NeoCon support. Of all the remaining candidates, Newt Gingrich is the clearest NeoCon choice.
  • Corporatists champion the interests of corporations and want to weaken government, unions, or any other power that might resist corporate dominance. Often they borrow the individualistic rhetoric of the Libertarians, but their motivation is different: They want decisions made by individuals because individuals are no match for corporations. Mitt Romney was the corporatist candidate even before he said, " Corporations are people, my friend."
  • Libertarians want government restricted to defending people and property against crime, defending the borders against invasion, and enforcing contracts. If you don't want the government to restrict your neighbor's right to build a nuclear power plant in his back yard, you're a Libertarian and your candidate is Ron Paul.
  • Theocrats (a.k.a. Social Conservatives or the Religious Right) believe that morality is eternal and established by God, and that society will collapse if it diverges from this God-given script. Therefore the government should promote true morality and punish deviance. They are especially obsessed with anything that changes gender roles: abortion, gay rights, and even contraception.

It's possible to organize them on two axes, as in the diagram: Corporatists and Libertarians want weak government, while Theocrats and NeoCons want government strong enough to control your bedroom and tap your phone. Libertarians and Theocrats have a populist/outsider mentality that is suspicious of experts and prone to conspiracy theories. Corporatists and NeoCons have an elitest/insider mentality, believing that people are stupid and need to be manipulated into doing what's best. Insiders see outsiders as useful idiots; outsiders sense this attitude and resent it.

Trust and volatility. This coalition goes back to Reagan, who virtually invented the useful-idiot theory, using social issues as bright, shiny objects to get Theocrats' attention, but not actually doing anything about them once in office. As Thomas Frank put it in What's the Matter With Kansas?:

Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. … Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists, receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

The outsider groups have been catching on lately, which is how they turned the tables in the 2010 elections: The Tea Party was supposedly all about economic issues, but once in office the first priority was restricting abortion.

That's why the Republican electorate has been so jittery in the 2012 cycle, jumping from candidate to candidate and asking who the "real" conservative is. Everybody is afraid of getting played ­ except for the Corporatists, who have complete confidence in Romney.

Agree/Disagree. Four groups means six relationships.
  • Corporatist/NeoCon. Agree: Control the world's oil. Install pro-capitalist, pro-globalization governments. Disagree: Iran (Corporatists want to make money trading with them) and immigration (NeoCons worry about the border, Corporatists want cheap labor).
  • Corporatist/Libertarian. Agree: Cut taxes and regulations, including regulations on campaign contributions. Disagree: convergence of Wall Street and Washington (Libertarians want to abolish the Fed, Corporatists want cheap loans from it).
  • Corporatist/Theocrat. A diagonal relationship; mostly they can co-operate because their issues have so little to do with each other. Agree: oppose anti-poverty programs, see wealth as a sign of God's blessing. Disagree: globalization.
  • NeoCon/Libertarian. Another diagonal relationship, but more fraught. Agree: on substance, not much. Disagree: foreign wars, civil liberties.
  • NeoCon/Theocrat. Onward Christian soldiers. Agree: American exceptionalism, Pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, no gays in the military. Disagree: NeoCon indifference to social issues.
  • Libertarian/Theocrat. Agree: against liberal judges. Disagree: government as a moral watchdog.

Unifying rhetoric. Talking out of four sides of your mouth is a good trick, even for a professional politician. So spinmeisters have developed variety of rhetorical tropes so that the same words are heard differently by different people.

To give just one example, Theocrats and Libertarians share attitudes, but not policies. Both are nostalgic: Libertarians for the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s, Theocrats for the Great Awakening of the 1700s.

Worshipful rhetoric about the Founders is designed to appeal to both. Theocrats believe the Founders established a Christian Republic, while Libertarians identify the Founders with limited government ­ too limited to get into your bedroom or your medicine cabinet. So a candidate need only say "the Founders" and each group will fill in the picture it likes.

Fault lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush unified the four flavors, but this year no candidate does. NeoCons can't support Ron Paul, Libertarians can't support Rick Santorum, and Theocrats can't support Mitt Romney. That's why Republican insiders keep having fantasies about some new candidate ­ it's basically the same fantasy they had about Rick Perry before he turned out to be an idiot: a tough-talking, pro-business, Christian Reconstructionist who wants to abolish the EPA.

Each non-fantasy candidate exposes a different fault line, so expect Obama to run differently depending on who the Republican nominee is. His increasing economic populism of late is evidence that he expects to run against Romney.

Saturday, January 07, 2012

ANS -- Under-reported Stories of 2011

Here's Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift and his list of under-reported stories of 2011.  Have a look. 
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2012/01/02/under-reported-stories-of-2011/#comments   
--Kim

Under-reported Stories of 2011

You didn't need some blogger to tell you that Charlie Sheen flipped out in 2011, or that Kim Kardashian got married and divorced. It was everywhere. You couldn't miss it. But one valuable service that the blogosphere and the alternative press provide at the end of every year is to raise the question: What important stuff didn't you hear about?

It's got a few flaws, but my favorite such list for 2011 is AlterNet's. These stories weren't censored, exactly, they just went by so fast that you had to really be paying attention to catch them.
  1. 2011's carbon emission increase was the largest ever.
  2. 50,000 Iraq War refugees have been forced into prostitution in Jordan or Syria. (Thanks for liberating us, America.) [Caveat: The links AlterNet gives are horrifying, but I can't find the 50K statistic in either of them. This study looks authoritative and says 5,000, which is bad enough. Maybe somebody at AlterNet typed too many zeroes.]
  3. More activity-duty troops are killing themselves than are dying in combat.
  4. Drone strikes kill innocent civilians.
  5. Record numbers of US kids face hunger and homelessness. The homeless total is higher than after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2006. The 2010 raw numbers for hunger were a record, but the percentages were about the same as 2009.
  6. Prison hunger strikes protest long-term solitary confinement. If you aren't crazy when you start your ten-year time-out, you will be when you finish.
  7. 5,000 kids are native-born American citizens, but they're in long-term foster care because we deported their parents.
  8. The FBI is training its agents to suspect all Muslims. The religious bigotry here is bad enough by itself, but it also promotes the very terrorism the FBI is supposed to fight: "depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins ­ as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict."

Several other most-under-reported lists were less interesting ( New Republic's, for example). But BlackAmericaWeb.com has a suggestion that could be on the list every year: any missing black woman. Derrica Wilson of the Black and Missing Foundation says, "It just seems like our lives are less valued."

A couple of stories suggested by Current TV's Josh Sternberg are worth a look:
Every year has dogs that didn't bark ­ important things that should have happened, but didn't. Usually those non-events pass without notice, so hats off to the NYT for highlighting this one: After investigating the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, Congress should have closed the loopholes that let Massey Energy risk its employees' lives until 29 of them died. But it didn't.

Religion never gets covered properly in the corporate media. When the media pays attention at all, it's usually for some stupid reason like the trumped-up War on Christmas, or to cover some tiny sect of weirdos like the Westboro Baptists. But religion is pretty important in America and important developments must happen there from time to time. So who covers that stuff?

Check out Religion Dispatches. In particular, look at their Top 2011 Religion Stories That Weren't: the Vatican's clout in historically Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland is shrinking; a pioneering gay-friendly church is losing its identity now that mainstream denominations are open to gays; fewer Americans believe the US plays a special role in God's plan; plus several other developments you won't see on CNN.

But I especially want to call your attention to this neglected religion story: "Upside-Down Ideas About Religious Liberty" (which Kevin Drum also noticed).

In the past, the social service arms of religious bodies understood that if they wanted public money they would need to honor public law regarding the disposition of the money: i.e., provide the full range of mandated services on a universal basis. We used to say to objectors, "If you don't like the mandate, don't take the money."

Apparently such a commonsensical response is now insufficiently deferential to religion. More and more people seem willing to say that if a Catholic health care provider doesn't "believe" in providing reproductive health care to women, that private belief can trump public law.

A lot of attention has come to this issue lately because Catholic Charities is pulling out of Illinois rather than help gay couples adopt children. The bishops are getting away with painting this as a religious liberty issue when it really is nothing of the kind.

The principle here is pretty simple: If you take public money, you have to serve the public ­ the whole public, not just the portion of the public you happen to like. Nobody in Illinois state government is stopping Catholic Charities from arranging adoptions. They can even keep discriminating against gay couples, as long as they raise their own money. The only change is that Illinois tax dollars will no longer support a bigoted program. That's right and just, and infringes no one's religious liberty.

Friday, January 06, 2012

ANS -- Review: Amy Schalet, Not Under My Roof

Here's another one of those strange articles by Brad Hicks.  It's about the cultural differences between Americans and the Dutch, especially with respect to teenage sex.  I've included the discussion because he elaborates some there.  There's also an interesting Anonymous comment that illustrates the article -- an American insisting that his attitude is reasonable, and it's exactly the weird attitude described in the article. It illustrates how blind people are about seeing another world view.  It's very difficult to see from another's point of view. 
Find it here:  http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/455194.html?view=8787738#t8787738
--Kim




Review: Amy Schalet, Not Under My Roof

  • Jan. 3rd, 2012 at 9:35 AM
Brad @ Burning Man

Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they're drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they'll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.

 
Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it's leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn't cooperate, nobody will make it.

 
Call the first rowboat "America." Call the second rowboat "the Netherlands."

 
That's the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.

 
It's a glaring difference, and it has to do with what American and Dutch parents and teens "know for a fact" about teenage sexual development and maturity during puberty. American parents and their teenagers both "know for a fact" that adolescent male sexuality is dominated by hormones that completely obliviate any capacity developed, up to that point, for sexual and emotional self-regulation. The parents also "know for a fact" that teenage boys are incapable of actually loving their partners; the sons all know that they have genuine romantic emotional feelings, but all feel freakishly abnormal and different from their peers because of this, because they "know" it's true of all the other teenage boys around them. All of them, parents and teen boys and teen girls alike, also "know for a fact" that there are two kinds of teenage girls: the "good girl" majority who desperately want someone to love them but who think that sex is icky and unpleasant, and the "slut" minority who want sex just as much as the teenage boys do, and who have no more self-control. As a result, parents and teens participate in a process of dramatization, intended to exaggerate the expected consequences of any teenage sex or romance, and that also relies on control and punishment by the parents in an attempt to prevent their teenagers from succumbing to those out-of-control hormones, punishment starting at loss of privileges and potentially (or at least threatened) to go as far as parental abandonment, as far as expulsion from the home and imposition of homelessness. Teenage girls are taught to fear rape, infection with STDs, and unwanted pregnancy by out-of-control boys; boys are taught to fear infection with STDs and the imposition of crushing child-support burdens that will drop them out of the middle class for all eternity, stranding them irretrievably among the poor. Despite this, at around age 15, teenage boys and girls assert their independence, and exercise the emotional and physical drives that will push them towards eventual independence from their parents, by "sneaking around," occasionally re-establishing emotional contact with their parents by "getting caught," until they are either married or "can put their own roof over their heads," because officially, those are the mnimum preconditions before any American can legally and morally be allowed to have officially sanctioned sex.

 
Dutch parents and teenagers, on the other hand, "know for a fact" that only an infinitesimally small number of teenagers, insultingly called "pubers," have out-of-control hormones that they have to grow out of; every parent and most kids have at least heard, second or third hand, of somebody who once knew somebody who knew somebody who might have been a puber once, but nobody interviewed could name one. They "know for a fact" that around age 13 or 14, boys and girls both start thinking about wanting romantic and family relationships of their own like the ones that their parents have. They "know for a fact" that by age 15 to 17, all but a few really abnormally immature children just normally and naturally find a partner they genuinely love, and with who they just naturally want to be cozily together with. They "know for a fact" that through consultation and proper education, parents and society have taught them that this is perfectly okay, as long as it's someone who's also willing to be cozily together with, comfortable with and acceptable to, the parents. They also "know for a fact" that any normal child, having been raised since early childhood to eroticize condoms, and any normal girl, having probably gone on hormonal birth control (for free) as soon as she started menstruating, isn't going to hurt anybody or disrupt the all-important family bond if they bring their romantic partner over to sleep with them a couple of nights a week. They "know for a fact" that children that young will make the occasional mistake, and get gently humiliated by their parents and peers for immaturity, for having shown that they weren't really ready or that they did a bad job of accommodating everybody in the family's needs, and that they'll learn from that how to self-regulate their behavior in harmony with the cozy, comfortable family that they "know for a fact" everybody, including teenagers, wants. (Parents do, however, worry about their children forming relationships with people who "don't fit in with the family," by which they mean "poor people or immigrants." But they express confidence, for the most part, in their ability to steer their children towards someone more comfortable for the family. There's also a grating confidence that none of their children are "asocial" enough to be homosexual or polyamorous.) And, after all, since everybody in the Netherlands has free universal comprehensive health care, including birth control, STD treatment, and abortion, and nobody over the age of 16 needs so  much as a parent's permission to use it, and since everybody gets a guaranteed stipend to pay for their own living expenses any time they want to move out, as long as they're still in school, everybody, parent and child alike, "knows for a fact" that the worst thing that can happen if somebody makes a mistake is temporary discomfort and embarrassment. The most important thing, then, is to make sure that nobody feels any need to be "sneaky" or "secretive" about any part of their life, because that might disrupt cozy togetherness.

 
I am, for the second time in two years**, convinced that I live in a country full of superstitious, primitive, blood-thirsty savages.

 
So, what's this got to do with rowboats?

 
In interviews about this book, Schalet got asked a lot about what her opinion was, what did her research show, about why we're so different? Why did we go in opposite directions after our sexual revolutions? That's not her speciality, although she does speculate about it, some. She points out that hierarchical domination and winner-take all are also normal paradigms for American businesses and in American politics, whereas Dutch politics and Dutch businesses are a lot more collaborative; on some level, the difference in parenting styles do a pretty good job of preparing American teenage boys to appear to submit to those above them while sneakily seeking to form their own dominance hierarchies in which they can earn the privilege of dominating others, a pretty good job of preparing Dutch boys to go along to get along, to make and expect concessions, as part of collaborative structures in the rest of their adult life. But it's a unsatisfying explanation; both cultures changed more that way in their politics and business around the same time as they changed in their attitudes towards adolescent sexuality and child-raising, so there's more likely a common cause.

 
She speculates, at one point in the book, that the defining difference is this: around the time of our respective sexual revolutions, the two countries experienced radically different disasters. The Americans experienced Vietnam, which set the young against the old and corporations and their defenders against poor conscripts, in a struggle for life and death, and normalized the language of intergenerational conflict. The Dutch, who mostly stayed out of Indochina, instead experienced a series of catastrophic nationwide floods, which taught every single person in the Netherlands that unless they all cooperate, unless they all give as much as they can, unless they all move out of their comfort zone a little, they'll all drown. Or, in my metaphor: two different lifeboats.

 
* The lifeboat that's out of food is an imperfect metaphor, but I knew it would be vivid for any of you who haven't studied extreme survival. It turns out that a lifeboat at sea, after about three days, accumulates a thriving ecosystem on the bottom of the boat, making it relatively easy to fish for turtles and other sea life for food, and their spinal fluid for water. Survive the first three days, and there's no reason to sacrifice anybody. How many Americans do you think would actually think of that? Or, not knowing that, be willing to risk it, in hopes that "something will come along" to make it possible for everybody to survive? I think maybe a few of us, but the rest of us have been conditioned to be quick to try human sacrifice, throwing some people overboard, as the first thing to try in any disaster.

 
** See Thomas Geoghan, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.


Comments

( 21 comments ­ Leave a comment )
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[info] lysystratae wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 05:11 pm (UTC)
Further proof that I'm weird - my first thought on the rowboats was 'that's stupid, if you don't have oars just take turns swimming and pushing the boat'.
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Brad @ Burning Man
[info] bradhicks wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 06:11 pm (UTC)
I'm watching Star Trek: The Original Series on Netflix lately, and one of the earliest episodes is "The Conscience of the King:" an actor in a traveling Shakespeare troupe is suspected of being the notorious criminal Kodos the Executioner. What was Kodos's crime, for which he's still being hunted 18 years later? The colony he was on had a sudden disaster that left them with only half the food they would need until their next food shipment, so he assumed control of the colony by force and executed the least-worthy half of the population, over 4,000 people. He is quite peeved that nobody think this was a good idea, since he had no way of knowing that, only a couple of days later, an unscheduled food shipment would arrive in time to save everybody.

Of course, this episode was aired back in 1966. Back in 1966, leaving the least worthy of us to die in order to save the rest of us would have been looked down upon.
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Brad @ Burning Man
[info] bradhicks wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 06:19 pm (UTC)
And you're not the only one.

There's a Heinlein novel, written during the Vietnam War, in which the main character compares Vietnam-era conscription to an old Russian fable about a group of people on a sleigh, being chased through the woods by wolves. Every time the horse gets tired enough that the wolves are catching up, they throw another person to the wolves to lighten the load.

The first time I read that, I thought, "Well, that's stupid. All that does is guarantee that when the wolves do catch you, you've got nobody left to help you fight them off except one completely exhausted horse. And the wolves will be well fed."
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[info] skull_bearer wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 08:33 pm (UTC)
I remember one sci-fi story, I think it was call the Cold Equations or something, about a stowaway on a ship which has only enough fuel to transport a single person, so of course, she gets throw out of the airlock. Which would have been fine, if the story hadn't mentioned all the furniture on the spaceship they could have thrown out instead...
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[info] simulated_knave wrote:
Jan. 7th, 2012 02:46 am (UTC)
I believe the furniture didn't weigh as much as she did.
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[info] sci wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 06:20 pm (UTC)
I liked this read. Though each description is a generalisation, the one regarding the USA does seem in line with a lot of first-hand accounts I read. I don't know the same about the Dutch, having only a few contacts there, though the idea of "social" being an alternate word for "normal" is a particularly worrying thought.

I would say for all our close physical location to Europe, the culture of the UK is very largely (as far as public perceptions go) on the American side of things. The only major exception really being the kicking out of home issue, probably as a result of our affordable housing shortage which is perpetually in the public eye. To kick a child with child out on the streets here is doing exactly that; making them homeless, not pushing them to stand on their own.
Maybe it's just the people I hang around with though, but I still have hope and suspect the actual actions and accepted behaviour differs radically from what people admit. People here may talk like they're following that American model, but out of the public eye they're a lot more accepting. Mob dynamics at work.
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[info] anitra wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 07:20 pm (UTC)
In (most of) the US, we're actually having the same sort of problem with housing and entry-level job shortages... but it's still new enough (less than a decade) so that "moving back in with your parents" is still generally looked down upon - even though nearly every person I know under 24 lives with their parents. Nearly every parent-of-twenty-somethings I know is trying to figure out how to get their kids to move out, without pushing them out onto the streets.
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[info] ff00ff wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 08:55 pm (UTC)
I think you misunderstand the American mindset. For a pair of parents kicking their child out of the home for some offense or another, the more they know the child will suffer for that decision the more likely it makes them to kick a child out of the home. It makes them feel better about themselves, more righteous, more committed to justice and right. The more suffering you can cause for an ideal, the more worthy an ideal is to many Americans. We're ever a breath away from just outright human sacrifice to a deified George Washington. The entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars are discussed in our media as logical blood sacrifice to our chief deity "freedom".
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Brad @ Burning Man
[info] bradhicks wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 12:38 am (UTC)
Regarding "the idea of 'social' being an alternate word for 'normal'": Schalet uses the hell out of two Dutch words that, she says, do not translate precisely into single English words: "gewoon," meaning simultaneously customary and healthy, and and "gezellig," meaning simultaneously comfortable (or cozy, as I came to think of it) and social. She says that the reason she uses the heck out of those words is that you cannot discuss social policy, economics, culture, history, or family life with anybody who grew up in the Netherlands without them using each of those words in one out of every three sentences.

The net effect comes across as almost oppressive; I can't imagine the pressures that must come to bear on anybody who wants to do something that isn't customary, or who wants to be a loner, in a culture where everybody just takes it for granted that everybody wants to do what is gewoon, especially including always being gezellig. She makes that feeling quite explicit in one regard: by all but emotionally blackmailing kids to have all of their sex at home, and to do most of their drinking at home, and then getting to mock the kids if they do these things in ways that the parents think are immature, the parents have far, far more powerful tools for controlling their teens ... all under the soft illusion of always "consulting" with the teens and "coming to agreements" in which "everybody makes concessions."

Schalet accuses the Dutch model of deliberately hiding power differentials under a fog of fake consensus building, in which the less powerful always make more concessions than the most powerful, but everybody maintains the fiction that it isn't so. On the other hand, I'm also reading Pivens at the moment, and I suspect that she would dismissively reply that all political systems coerce concessions from the less powerful; at least the Dutch model gives the less powerful, whether the poor in a rich state, or kids in the home, or ethnic immigrants, at least one way to extract concessions without having to riot in the streets, by shaming the elites over their failure to be gewoon, specifically by failing to be gezellig with the less privileged. From what I see in Schalet, she at least thinks, as someone who grew up as a first-generation immigrant in the Netherlands, that such shaming of elites actually works there.
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[info] sci wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 01:56 am (UTC)
I'm sorry this is such a trite reply but it's well into the AM here now and all I can think is the terrible pun that an English-language book on the subject could be titled "Gewoon, Gewoon, Gone." But that probably also only works in certain pronunciations.
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[info] silveradept wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 06:24 pm (UTC)
The summary you've given makes it sound like a lot of our modern society is messed up because our sexual politics is very much messed up thanks to things "everyone knows". And, possibly, the toxic mess that results by combining the myth s above about sexuality and the myth of rugged individualism and bootstraps.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 08:07 pm (UTC)
Proper Families vs Incremental Hedonism
It's easy for me to see that the concept of a 'proper family' is what's guiding parents. Speaking as an American with three teens living at home, my answer has been to stress abstinence before adulthood. I do not see any benefit whatsoever in allowing people who are not consenting adults to act as if they were. In other words, I use the term 'statutory rape'. In the same way, I don't particularly expect that the experience of a babysitting job adequately prepares anyone for being in the workforce. In short, my attitude about teen sex is that more people are talking about it than are actually doing it, and those who are doing it are doing it all wrong. The idea that taking all of the risk out of the consequences that might lead to a shotgun wedding or herpes via a safety net sounds Orwellian to me. I like the idea that sex is complicated and dirty - that getting naked is not easy and casual.

I expect at long last that the results of the sexual revolution in the West will turn out to show a skew in our societies as much as the One Child policy in China. It is inconceivable to me that the historical norm has been so out of touch with reality and that the benefits of feminism are simple but have been overweighted. In short, I don't believe in social liberation through sexual freedom, but rather through the evolution of property rights. Women and children are not property and freeing them from those traditional constraints were necessary and sufficient to greater liberty - however to assert the additional demands of radical feminism (ie to properly have men 'deal with their female side', or question the roles of men & women in family life) was a gross error with significant detrimental consequences for the concept of family. And I think it is becoming more clear that having women think of sex outside of marriage as a liberating thing has worked primarily to the advantage of polygamous men.

So the very idea that this is a lifeboat kind of situation begs the question of the centrality of sexuality in our humanity and exactly what sort of benefits we have gained by focusing on upending our attitudes and trying new practices. It is my opinion that focus on sexuality tends to be dysfunctionally individualistic, and so it is not surprising that it brings into question those sacrifices necessary for family stability. Why is teen sex so important? I think it has to do with the improper way many Westerners conceive of freedom.

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[info] bradhicks wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 12:11 am (UTC)
Re: Proper Families vs Incremental Hedonism
The "proper families" model you describe assumes that teens will start dating at 16 but will abstain from sex until at least a couple of years after they graduate from college, a gap of nearly ten years. How's that working out for you?

Don't bother to answer that, the answer is in the book: American and Dutch teens have sex at equally early ages. The Dutch kids average fewer sexual partners, far fewer pregnancies, almost no sexually transmitted diseases; they also drink approximately equal amounts of alcohol, and the Dutch kids use marijuana and other drugs at a fraction of the rate Americans' kids do, smoke far, far less tobacco, and stay in school longer.

Americans have spent the 40 years since the sexual revolution trying to stop kids from having sex, from smoking, from drinking, and from doing drugs until they have a house or apartment of their own. All they really achieve is guaranteeing that the kids do it by sneaking around, and without even minimal health care or other preparation.
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[info] naath wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 03:30 pm (UTC)
Re: Proper Families vs Incremental Hedonism
I think it's true though - that people are guided by what they think of as a "proper family" when it comes to raising kids. Of course ideas about what a "proper family" might be vary hugely (and the effectiveness of the enforcement on the kids varies hugely too).

Although the US model (as described in this post) is obviously (to me) nasty; the Dutch one is, on closer examination, also nasty. Both involve parents attempting to compel their children to act in ways they find "proper" - the Dutch are apparently more successful at the compulsion, which is good where it leads to fewer unwanted teen pregnancies but I'm not sure that it is overall good. Of course had I children I don't think I could avoid attempting to convince them that "my way" is the right way; although I like to think I would never actually make it my way or the highway (not that I have or want children, so moot point).
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[info] brynndragon wrote:
Jan. 3rd, 2012 10:13 pm (UTC)
The paragraph on how our (America's) approach to teen sex affects men made me wonder how it affects women. Did Schalet only speculate on how it affects men? If so, what the hell?

(Also, the "everyone knows" bits for America are extremely gender-essentialist, which the Dutch ones are not; way to make me hate you, America.)
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Brad @ Burning Man
[info] bradhicks wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 12:06 am (UTC)
There's stuff all through the book about it. (The basic structure of each chapter: a chunk of sociology jargon, an explanation of the sociology jargon, two anecdotes about American parents, two anecdotes about Norwegian parents, one anecdote each about an American and a Norwegian teen boy and a girl, summary that shows the commonalities by using the sociology jargon.)

One thing that really, really stuck with me was that there is a long, and very good, section in there about the differences in "slut shaming" between the Netherlands and the USA. Dutch girls never brought the subject up on their own, and when asked about it said that the only way to be labeled a slut was to be having a romantic relationship with more than one new person every two weeks or more than one at once; American girls brought up the subject immediately, and said that any girl who was known or suspected to have had sex before she moved out of her parents' house was widely labeled a slut and her life was basically permanently ruined.

In the bit about how the different models maybe prepare people for the two different economic and political cultures, she does say outright that while the Dutch model is in theory compatible with teaching Dutch children of both genders how to get along in society, in practice, it isn't either: there are tremendous pressures on women to stay out of the workforce or only work part time, they're supposed to use their compromise and negotiation skills, and their learned cultural preference for cozy togetherness, to control their kids, not in public. And the American model is just flat bizarre unless you assume that only sluts work outside the home, which just isn't even vaguely true.

Nevertheless, you're not wrong; all the way through the book, it does paint the American version as far more gender essentialist, in that Americans' concept of how sexuality works treats it as primarily a problem of containing and controlling nearly-unstoppable male sexual appetite for novelty, and protecting basically sexless girls from being tricked or bullied into getting labeled as sluts for falling victim to it.
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[info] tzaddi_93 wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2012 06:13 am (UTC)
Where did the Norwegians come into this?
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[info] all_unnecessary wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 02:59 am (UTC)
A country full of superstitious, primitive, blood-thirsty savages
Yes.

Schalet was on the Thinking Allowed podcast recently. Interesting to get the British perspective, which is closer to the Dutch than to ours.
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[info] bander wrote:
Jan. 4th, 2012 05:39 pm (UTC)

I am Dutch.

If you want to understand the Netherlands a bit better, a very important fact is that is very densely populated, about equally dense to the state of New Jersey. This, I think, pretty much forces people to be social. This is also why New York City reminds me of home in a good way.

As Brad mentions, 'gewoon' and 'gezellig' are very core concepts to the Dutch, and they can't be directly translated into English.

To explain 'gewoon' a bit better, a well-known Dutch saying is ' doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg': there's a strong social pressure to act normal because there's simply not enough room in the country for you to be an asocial loner, to the point that 'social' and 'normal' are two possible meanings of that one word.

The best translation I can come up with for 'gezellig' is 'having a good time', but with the caveat that it's always with other people. It can be having tea with grandma, but also hanging out with friends at that new hip restaurant.

Brad and anybody else, if you'd like to know more about Dutch culture (and lack thereof), I can heartily recommends The Undutchables. It picks apart the peculiarities of the Dutch culture in a very humorous way.
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[info] tzaddi_93 wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2012 06:16 am (UTC)
That makes a lot of sense, especially when you contrast it with the varying population density of the US. If you are uncomfortable with a highly dense population in this country, there are all sorts of places you can go where there are fewer people.
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[info] kimchalister wrote:
Jan. 7th, 2012 04:57 am (UTC)
Have you read...?
Brad -- Have you read The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille? It's about what makes different cultures different -- what the individual attitudes are that make a culture (and how to manipulate it for advertising or campaigning). I think you would get a lot out of it.
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