There is such a big divide between the haves and have lesses and have nothing at alls that either this has always existed or that now it is in the realm of active engagement letting all manner of conspiracy theorists, closet anarchists and wacky soapbox preachers from all spectrums on the public commons. As some pundits like Michael Ferguson have asserted, America is heading for a divorce between competing and non compatible visions of society, and though the Golden Age may be within grasp, it will be bumpy arriving at the destination.
It is said that life is like a wheel, but to many that wheel is stuck in the mud and won’t turn; Margaret Atwood’s book Payback is dealing with that concept of debt, the ideas of what we owe each other and what we owe to society and even to ourselves. She is no stranger to the dystopic world of literature and in her own extreme secular visions, money is imaginary and debts are real.
In essence, the Left is the authentic spokesperson of the human condition. But, like in ancient times, we all end up crossing paths at the city gates; all with tales of woe on a common voyage. While many suffer from debt, in part on choice and free will of which they willfully engaged, others have accumulated more personally than at any time in history where investors like Gates and Buffet exceed the wealth of nations and have engaged a process of philanthropy unprecedented in history in what they consider an equally authentic vision of the world, a capitalist utopia.
Read More:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/29/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=full ---If you were one of the 1,011 billionaires in the world, what would you do with all that money? Famed investor Warren Buffett (net worth: an estimated $47 billion) and Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($54 billion) have an idea: Give at least half of it away. The two billionaires have been traveling the world -- first to China and soon to India, as well as around the United States -- on a mission to create a global club of "Great Givers" who will transform philanthropy from a pastime of the wealthy into a calling for everyone who is rich. Since 2006, when Buffett pledged to give 99 percent of his assets away to charity -- much of it to Gates's foundation, which spends more than $2 billion yearly on programs to improve public health and development -- the two have emerged as an unlikely and formidable pairing of wealthy evangelists, preaching a breathtakingly ambitious new gospel of how capitalist riches can solve global problems. That became clear this year when Gates joined up with Buffett's project to convince the wealthiest elite from Silicon Valley to Shanghai to donate half their wealth, a challenge that, if answered by all America's billionaires, let alone the world's, could bring an estimated $600 billion to needy and deserving causes. So far, 40 billionaires have signed up---
The paradigm is this: Someone owns an orchard call it justice. Two people guard it. One is crippled and one is blind. The cripple looks at justice as a ripe fruit and wants it. But he or she cannot reach it so asks the blind person to hold them on their shoulders, guiding , taking with both of them enjoying the spoils. The we say there is a lack of justice in the world, the wealthy spoils are stolen, like a Madoff, devoured into a black hole; the blind and the crippled protest their innocence based on their impairments. Do you put the lame on the shoulders of the blind man and punish them together? As a body and soul avoiding punishment for guilt?
Read More:http://www.more.ca/attitude/profiles/margaret-atwood-payback/a/41238 Wuthering Heights. 1939. Margaret Atwood:The help part we couldn't function without. A human being by themselves with no clothes and no tools... you got them from somewhere, you weren't born with them. You put the person in the middle of nature somewhere and they're just not going to survive. Look at an anthill. The ants of course are the most reciprocal creatures on the planet. Each ant is a creature of the hive and they help all the other ants in their hive and they help ants who aren't in their hive. Pretty powerful stuff.
Margaret Atwood: The big story is the industrialists, who are making kajillions of dollars some of the time, and at other times are undergoing big busts in which they close factories and everyone’s thrown out of work.
That’s when investment in the stock market became a thing. People didn’t really understand it. (And they still don’t!) Little old ladies would put their money in and they’d get an income, but then something would happen, as in “Cranford,” and they’d lose all their money. “Wuthering Heights,” when you’re 20, is about the mad passion of Cathy and Heathcliff. When you’re 50, it’s about, “Where did Heathcliff make his money? How did he get so rich?” What was the Great Gatsby doing that caused him to have all those nice pastel shirts — which have always struck me as a nice detail — and that allowed him to pursue his passion for Daisy? What was he doing? There was something dishonest; something having to do with money that we didn’t entirely understand but we knew was shady. Read More:http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/margaret_atwood_talks_revenge/
Read More:http://popcandyarcade.blogspot.ca/2010_11_01_archive.html ---Atwood:Amongst the
mpanzees it is true that if you scratch my back, I will eventually scratch yours. Apparently they keep track of each scratch. That's what we do isn't it?
ADDENDUM:
The most horrific sequence [in the film] is the Albanian blood feud: so primitive, animalistic, even though the perpetrators wear watches and clothes and live in 2012, they can kill each other without fear of reprisal.
That’s what happens when there isn’t a functioning criminal justice system. It’s what people resort to when the criminal justice system breaks down or it doesn’t function in their area. They will set up a tit-for-tat system arrangement and that’s why you find dead bodies floating in the river. Either it’s part of gang warfare in which one gang is eliminating members of the other gang or it’s within the gang and someone has stepped out of line. All this stuff going on in Mexico is horrific.Read More:http://www.more.ca/attitude/arts-and-culture/margaret-atwood-payback/a/41238/2
Read More:http://authenticityhoax.squarespace.com/ ---On the side of a building facing the vacant site from the east (above), Fairey painted a mural that showed a dove in flight above the word "peace" and the number 69. The locals didn't seem to like the mural or its message. After the mural went up it was immediately defaced with "NO PEACE!" and "Go home Yankee hipster". A few days later, Fairey was beaten up outside a nightclub in Copenhagen's rather douchey meatpacking district (very similar look and feel to New York's) by someone who called him "Obama illuminati" and ordered him to "go back to America". It really is an appalling work -- the street-art equivalent to John Lennon's ode to empty-headed peace-mongering, "Imagine". Fairey tried to make it better by trying to tidy up the work and make it cooler by adding a black helicopter to the bottom, but that only seemed to make the locals angrier. The thing continues to get vandalized, to the point where the bottom twenty feet are a riot of paint-bombed resentment. ---
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