{"id":1254,"date":"2009-03-23T07:54:26","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T07:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1254"},"modified":"2014-03-06T12:50:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T17:50:31","slug":"lurching-leftward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1254","title":{"rendered":"Lurching leftward"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I must be getting soft-headed, or something. It just seems <i>obvious<\/i> to me that (a) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.juancole.com\/\">Juan Cole&#8217;s Informed Comment<\/a> is <b>right<\/b> about most of the issues it raises (for example, his treatment of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.juancole.com\/2009\/03\/osc-khameneis-speech-replying-to-obama.html\">Khamenei&#8217;s Speech Replying to Obama<\/a> is vastly clearer than other stuff I&#8217;ve seen), and (b) Matt Taibbi&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/story\/26793903\/the_big_takeover\">The Big Takeover<\/a> (&#8220;The global economic crisis isn&#8217;t about money &#8211; it&#8217;s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution&#8221;) nails what happened\/is happening better than most of what I hear or read.  viz:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren&#8217;t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system \u2014 transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I must be getting soft-headed, or something. It just seems obvious to me that (a) Juan Cole&#8217;s Informed Comment is right about most of the issues it raises (for example, his treatment of Khamenei&#8217;s Speech Replying to Obama is vastly clearer than other stuff I&#8217;ve seen), and (b) Matt Taibbi&#8217;s The Big Takeover (&#8220;The global [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argybargy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2384,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions\/2384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}