Ryan Lubell
Monday, April 21, 2014
Paranoid Politics
Paranoia can best be defined as the mental process of thinking that one is in harm’s way for little to no reason at all. Matt Taibbi, is an American author and journalist for the Rolling Stone, who wrote the book “Griftopia”. This book discusses the financial crisis that America has been undergoing the past few decades and states factual evidence describing many conspiracy theories involved with the financial decline of America’s economy. Taibbi discusses in great detail, the housing bubble, Obamacare, and many other political issues, but in the end it always ties back to Wall Street and the one percent of America that owns 40% of America’s wealth. Due to extensive research and evidence shown throughout the book “Griftopia”, I agree with Matt Taibbi paranoid point of view and do no think he is being overly paranoid about America’s financial crisis.
Matt Taibbi, born on March 2, 1970, is an esteemed journalist and novelist who reports on media, sports, finance, and politics mainly for the Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. Taibbi grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Bard College in 1992. Mike Taibbi, Matt Taibbis' father, is an NBC television reporter and was the main motivation for Matt in his early years. Taibbi spent his early years of his career free-lancing, where he started The eXile with Mark Ames, and later branched out to write for magazines like Playboy, New York Press, The Nation and later on Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi has always been interested in political issues, even covered the 2008 presidential campaign for Real Time with Bill Maher and has discusses politics on many different occasions on the MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Taibbi also discusses p...
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...o turn their securities back into AIG and demand billions of dollars. AIG was faced with a problem and they had to start asking subsidiary insurance companies to liquidate their pension and insurance holdings so they could cover their losses. If this happened those customers would have received a fraction of the money due to them and would ensure a global crisis. Of all the people complaining about AIG, Goldman-Sachs was doing it the most frequently and the loudest. An audit of AIG showed that they had no liquidity to pay off the bulk of what they owed so the Federal government issued a bail out of $80 billion which later elevated to $200 billion. Goldman-Sachs received the largest percentage of that $200 billion and would have torched the entire country in order to get that money that felt they deserved; and the housing-market bubble was just at the beginning of it.
Orwell himself is the one who coined the term of political purpose, and because of this, he seems to be the best person to compare other writers to when discussing political purpose. Orwell defined political purpose as, “Desire to push the world in a certain direction,” and he writes, “…no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (3). Orwell, therefore, believes that art is ultimately political in purpose whether that was the intention or not. He believes that no work can be “free from political bias.” He seems to be of the opinion that art must have political purpose or else it will be “lifeless,” much like his earlier writing. Alternately,
Being a veteran journalist focusing on politics and social issues in the print and television arena, Philip Seib, authored Beyond the Front Lines. He wrote several other books including Headline Diplomacy: How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy, and The Moral Journalist: Covering the Post-Cold War World. His accolades consist of multiple awards recognizing his newspaper columns and television reporting skills worldwide. Although Seib is a Princeton University and Southern Methodist University graduate, he is now a journalism professor at Marquette University and his curriculum explores international news coverage, media ethics, and new technologies that impact print and television journalist.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Revolutionary Thomas Paine describes the government, which may seem evil at times, as a necessity for becoming a functioning society. A lot of responsibility is entrusted onto today’s government to create a safe, law based environment in which everyone can live and prosper. Although without the structure of a government to create laws and have the authority to enforce them, society itself would become chaotic. If a strong government ever became corrupt, it would have the ability to keep control on society by creating laws that limit people’s free-will. This creates a dystopian society for every person living under that government.
Conflict is in relation to air. Air is ubiquitous and can be in anything. Conflict is comparable to air by the reason air is also omnipresent and is in most places. In Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rainsford encounters man versus man, man versus self, and man versus nature conflicts.
The Man in the High Castle: Criticisms of Reality and Dictatorship by Philip K. Dick
The author of the novel 1984, George Orwell, is a political critic. Therefore, he used very precise descriptions of situations and words to provide the reader a clear understanding of the entity he is criticizing. When Winston describes the destruction of past records to create new ones to Julia, he says: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” (pg. 162). Here, instead of only saying “Every record has been destroyed or falsified”, Orwell describes in-depth which materials exactly were destroyed. This provides the reader a better picture of the situation in Oceania because instead of only thinking that paper records were rewritten, now the readers know that even street names were constantly rewritten, which makes the people’s lives more problematic due to the learning curve involved with new street names. This description of rewriting of records really shows to what extent the government is willing to go to achieve full control of the past and gives the reader a very scary feeling on a totalitarian system. Orwell also uses some unique word choice to express the feelings of his characters. When Winston describes Syme, he alleges that he is a “venomously orthodox” (pg. 52). Instead of using an adjective like ‘extremely’, Orwell takes it to another extent by applying the adjective ‘venomously’. Use of this adjective provides a darker feeling about Syme because the word venom is usually associated with ...
Power to me is when you are given the special ability to do something that no one else can do, you are given these powers by someone or it is inherited by a family member. The quote “ it is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible “ by David Brin is saying power makes people corrupts but it's more true that corruptible people are attracted to power. An example in real life of this would be Adolf Hitler he let his popularity and power get to his head which led to racial prejudices and murder. The Germans were giving their power to Hitler so in conclusion the Germans had to live a hard life due to him. Power corrupts people because they let having so much power get to their head and act any way they want.
The surveillance and ethics in Fahrenheit 45, by Ray Bradbury, construct a dystopian world where expression, opinion and knowledge are pointless. The citizens of this dystopian world are forbidden from reading books, thus forbidden from acquiring new knowledge. By doing this, Bradbury creates a dome which restricts the knowledge of characters in the plot. If any character refuses to be constricted to the dome, and acquires new knowledge through reading, firefighters are sent to his or her house. In this dystopian world, firefighters are tasked with starting fires instead of extinguishing fires. Specifically, firefighters burn the books and home of those who rebel from the rules and read books. The firefighters harm the lives of others without
Surveillance is a highly contentious topic in the modern day and yet in a world more connected than ever through globalization and the internet, surveillance seems to be frighteningly more pervasive than ever. With the rise of Facebook, Google, and NSA data collection, privacy seems to have become a relic of the past. In this paper I will argue through an American perspective that Glenn Greenwald’s assessment of surveillance as a form of power for government oppression and control is apt and that the harms of surveillance outweigh its benefits. First, I will present an overview of Greenwald's piece "The Harms of Surveillance". Next I shall focus his argument through a Foucauldian lens comparing modern day surveillance tactics to the Panopticon
In the article Threshold of Violence published by The New Yorker Magazine, author Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the cause of school shootings and why they transpire. Gladwell tries to make sense of the epidemic by consulting a study of riots by stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter sought to understand “why people do things that go against who they are or what they think is right, for instance, why typically non-violent, law-abiding people join a riot”(Granovetter). He concluded that people’s likelihood of joining a riot is determined by the number of people already involved. The ones who start a riot don’t need anyone else to model this behavior for them that they have a “threshold” of zero. But others will riot only if someone
This book was a good read for me, but I also read book reviews to help me keep track on what I am reading. These book reviews just made a better understanding of what I was reading.
The article “A Surveillance Society” By William E, Thompson States that surveillance is a major part of today’s society and most people throughout their day wouldn’t even notice if they were being watched. Cameras can be found on almost every street corner and in every gas station or convenient store. In The terrorist attacks of 9/11 played a major role in starting this technology trend, the United States government and Law enforcement started using cameras that they had set up to more or less spy on the US population. The US government then revised and expanded the Patriot Act in 2006, which in a nut shell meant, they were allowed to spy on anyone they wanted to through there daily routines. But it doesn’t stop there, large corporations and
The strength of a classic noel lies in its ability to make the reader analyse their values and beliefs whilst making them question the world in which we live. George Orwell’s novel “1984” successfully achieves this through its themes, ideas and characters.
What was once the unthinkable occurred on September 16, 2008. On that date, the federal government gave the American Investment Group - better known as AIG (NYSE:AIG) - a bailout of $85 billion. In exchange, the U.S. government received nearly 80% of the firm's equity. For decades, AIG was the world's biggest insurer, a company known around the world for providing protection for individuals, companies and others. But in September, the company would have gone under if it had not been for government assistance.
Imagine that the U.S government is placing hidden cameras all over your house. Being watched without consent is very frightening because you are having your privacy taken from you. In 1984 this scenario is their reality every day of their lives and it does not bother most people, except for Winston. Winston and the rest of his society are robbed of their freedom of thought and their privacy due to being monitored and told what to do all the time. The reality in the world of 1984 is like ours, but it is not to the same degree of surveillance. Our world is becoming like the world of 1984 because the U.S Government and The Party’s surveillance over their citizens causes paranoia and a lack of trust in the government.