Gracias. Cezanne is to painting as Nietzsche is to philosophy. There's my SAT style analogy for the day.

Like I said before, I'm not talking about a third party with a different ideology than the democrats or republicans; I'm talking about a third party that runs on the platform of harnessing the collective knowledge of their constituents.

Whose collective knowledge are you speaking of? Those who froth at the mouth whenever their sacred cows are even remotely questioned. Or are you talking about politics by algorithm. I'm sure public opinion and knowledge can be optimized, so those who want certain results get them. Bernays and his ideological children in public relations and marketing (with demographers, political scientists and operatives, and big data prophets mixed in) could serve up all the common knowledge necessary so one could govern however they wished.

It's not that people don't believe in the system, it's that the system doesn't believe in the people.

The mistake your making here is that if you vote in an election in the US, that your voice really matters. You could vote, r, d, mickey mouse, or count chocula, and in the end, the only voices that matter are the ones writing the checks (the Kock brothers, Wall St, the Silicon Alley sharks, etc.)

No the right solution is to suspend the extension of Pfizer's patents, and tax them more for relying as heavily as they have on the basic research funded by the American taxpayers. Pfizer is a rentier corporation that has a dramatically shrunken pipeline because they have spent more money on marketing than they ever did on research. I don't really think we need to give tax breaks to marketing companies masquerading as research companies.

You should be thinking of something like ACORN, or the civil rights era NAACP. Social media is a tool for organizing and education. Organizing real people for direct action campaigns targeted at those in power is the only way to change things. And this requires years of effort, possibly even multi-generational. Rosa Parks didn't just decide one day to not go to the back of the bus. She was trained to do it. She wanted to do it. And when she did it, there was a plan in place to make the bus boycott successful and to keep people getting to their jobs (which was aided by the availability of automobiles).

The internet is revolutionary, but it isn't the revolution.

Do you really believe that tax policy is the main driver of inequality in this country? It is the culture of learned powerlessness. You want people to give a shit about tax policy when they can't ask for a raise for fear of being fired. The reality is that work, jobs, employment is highly contingent for most people because they have no protections in an at-will world. The same world where the petty tyranny of the employer is legally and illegally sacrosanct. The people don't care about tax policy because they may not be paying taxes tomorrow, because they're going to be out on their ass.

The ones who gobble up the trite talking points, are the Baby Boomers, you know, the generation that actually has some wealth lying around.

The recovery, was about cementing the Wall Street's vision for Main Street. When candidate Obama signed onto the Paulson-Geithner plan to save the banks above all else (and in Geithner's charming description of "hosing the runway" so the banks could survive the self-inflicted collapse of the housing bubble), we should have known there would be no recovery.

The purpose of Main Street is to be a permanent source of wealth extraction for the banksters of Wall Street. The politicians, regardless of party, all follow the dictates of the money crowd -- because hey, that's how it is.

Persisting in the illusion that either party actually gives a damn about its constituents, is sophmoric in the most generous of arguments. Remember and understand C.R.E.A.M. Your elected representatives sure do.

http://brankomi.wix.com/inequality http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/is-piketty-all-wrong/

The Krugman piece references other conversations about the FT takedown, but the general consensus seems to be most of the flaws are understandable given the datasets, though there is one class of flaws that need explanation.

One other point to consider, unlike Rogoff & Reinhart, Piketty has made all the data and formulas he used, available online. R & R refused to release their formulas to the public. They did release them to the student who discovered there "errors." I think hubris did them in there.

Ah the old legitimate versus illegitimate forms of protest argument. And yet, no one in power ever brooks the question of the legitimacy of their power, which is why people take to the streets, masked and unmasked, peacefully or looking for a pig to kick in the ass.

Too bad this isn't getting shared more. Whatever the nastiness of the juggalo culture (nastiness that can be found in most subcultures), the way the state treats people who identify as juggalos, is symptomatic of the repressive conformity that is idealized in the media.