Crude oil tops $140, predicted higher this summer

Libya threatens to cut output (here) and OPEC president Chakib Khelil predicts between $150 and $170 a barrel during the summer, adding he didn’t think oil would hit $200 CNN.

Dow has worst June since Great Depression

Report here.

A hungry man is not a free man

These days we’re all about exporting democracy and freedom to foreign counties. And using war to do it. The global America-for-export dream is us, walking into mud-flat third world nations, nailing victory into place and unfurling the banners of abundance.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture reveals that at home, 4% of American households are going hungry for lack of money (that’s 4.4 million households), and another 12% are food-insecure: they eat if they don’t pay rent or other bills.

American poverty is a multifaceted disaster. Why do we export liberty and abundance to other lands when America is not taking care of its own?

We have a conservative leadership. Many conservatives simply don’t want to take care of our poor. More welfare, according to Social Darwinists, just encourages the poor and then they won’t work. These conservatives are proud of their ruthlessness.

Those conservatives who do believe in helping also believe that the only help should be in the form of charity.

Many conservatives believe that charity is the answer to poverty.

(This is obviously wrong, because if charity really worked, there would be no more homeless and hungry.)

What’s the catch?

The catch is the conservative mindset that charity should only be given to people who are ‘deserving.’ (And conservatives insist on making that judgment themselves.)

So we have 18% of American children living in poverty, and the numbers are growing. We’d rather give charity to foreigners. Conservatives are giving charity selectively because of their prejudice against the poor. — These kids’ parents are welfare cases, so are not ‘deserving.’

But a nation with many hungry millions cannot be a strong nation. A hungry person is not a free person (originally Adlai Stevenson’s conclusion) because hunger is coercive. A well-fed person can explore his options, read, and act as an informed member of a democracy. But a hungry person is a problem: he’s distracted, fearful, resentful, and he must look for food.

Unequally distributed hunger creates a division in a society.

Next: in a dangerous dog-eat-dog world, which conservatives insist, there’s Darwinian competition between nations. Conservatives keep saying: to survive, we have to be top dog. But how can we be top dog, with these internal divisions? Outsiders, looking at us, certainly see us weakened by them.

I’m not saying conservatives are rational.

Taking care of our own would heal us, naturally. But fathoms deep in the conservative mind is some dark, lurching logic that weakens us. Something even stronger than the fear of outside threats prevents them helping their fellow Americans.

An absurd calculus. It means that while America is the biggest exporter of food, we have hunger. We have poverty and blight. From the outside it cannot look like America is the land of the free.

Related article here.

Survey shows corporations prefer dictatorships

Businesses say they spread freedom and democracy. Not by this survey. More…

1% now owns 40%

Imagine if you were on an airplane where 1% of the passengers had 40% of the seats? That’s approximately the wealth pattern in America. More…

A strong society means you can trust your neighbor

Put together this little game and check out the real motives of person sitting next to you. It’s called the Nuts Game. More…

No new refineries have been built in the US in 29 Years

Report here. (They’re not cheap at $2 B – $4 Billion each. here).

Chomsky on the left ideology vacuum

At the end of this rambling response (link), Chomsky delivers a stunning point: left intellecuals don’t make ideology any more. So there’s a huge gap.

Think you’re liberal?

Try this.

On one side of a city there are people so wealthy that after big parties, they are throwing out meat. On the other side there are people so poor, they cannot afford to buy meat.

Is this a moral problem?

–This question is a litmus test. It is attributed to John Rawls, liberal theorist from the 1970s. Free market and laissez faire conservatives see no problem – they think it’s “in the nature of things” that some people have more than they know what to do with, while others live with scarcity. For them, the inequality is simply not an issue.

Next, there are people who say it’s a technical problem of not enough food being grown to keep everybody in abundance, not a moral problem.

But liberals see it differently. Liberals feel there is something wrong with a system (city, nation) which in total, contains enough food for everybody, but not everyone is able to get it. The situation is unjust.

Liberalism – the left – rests on moral judgments. A prime moral is justice.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Is this a coincidence?

The heart of conservative economics is the idea that rich people’s wealth eventually benefits everybody. Rich people begin businesses, hire the poor people and pay them. Rich people spend money on goods the poorer people manufacture. So the wealth at the top “trickles down.”

We’re supposed to see a picture here of the shape of society as roughly like a diamond, with most people in the middle class. And as the rich get richer, the top of the shape moves up, pulling lower ranks up.

But actually the bottom of society is not moving up. So as the top goes up, society just gets longer and more unequal. That’s what’s happening.

Trickle down theory is fairy dust. (But it drives government policy.) To a large extent, very wealthy people invest in things that bring no benefit for the working poor: paintings, jewelry, real estate.

What’s the alternative? Well there’s a new idea called the Winner Take All theory which says in this competitive society people have an intense drive to win. And the prize for rising to the top is that you grab it all – or a huge percentage – then the losers divide up what’s left.

A winner-take-all society has a different shape. A tall pyramid.

That shape is more accurate, because currently the top 1% of our population actually owns 40% of the wealth. This means a sharp inequality.

So are the rich get richer at the expense of the poor?

The Left is naturally opposed to laissez faire (free market) economics because it produces wealth only for some people. What it always produces in inequality. The Left doesn’t like hierarchy (inequality) anyway, and the inequality creates great pain for the people left behind. The Right actually encourages social inequality. Some of them say it makes the economy run better.

There’s a statistic which population experts now use called the Gini Index. It shows how unequal a society is. It runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) and in the U.S. it has been increasing steadily, and stood at 0.47 in 2005. If the Gini Index gets high, it predicts social unrest.

And there’s some new scientific research showing the more social inequality in a country, the lower the life expectancies. For everybody. Naturally, the Right is vigorously ignoring that research. But it’s your health. It is the single biggest threat to free market economics.

More here.