Living in the second great age of monopoly capital

We need to intervene. I am a good person, this needs to stop. Oh my god, worms!

Harris’ success has been built on his parents’ wealth, his connections, and a media and audience lusting after the kind of warmongering-but-liberal calls to action that he spouts, touched up with a veneer of intellectual credibility.

Google Earth as an aid to dialectical materialism.

A Piketty-Graeber Dialogue: how to get out of debt. Translated from the French.

The youth unemployment debate generally ignores the rapidly changing nature of the US economy. Youth unemployment is the highest in recorded history.

There is a lot more to this struggle than meets the eye.

if you like sick burns, then "the imperial messenger" by belén fernández is where you want to go, she provides them by the spoonful, sometimes it seems as though they'll never end. you're caught up in a whirlwind of sick burns, ascending to heaven as she delivers killing blow after killing blow against the great mustachioed master of the new york times op-ed page.

I went to a speech about the "Arab Spring" at the LSE last year and stood up to ask why Bahrain was never talked about. Why is it that Bahrain is unworthy of mention? I think this is why it's important to accept that on one hand, yes, the Arab Spring is legitimate and comes from people's desires to shrug off the yoke of oppression. On the other hand, it is a media narrative that has been utilized to push neoliberal policies in the region. This media narrative is subject to power interests. This explains very well why Bahrain has been "forgotten".

So the question is, where does the United States go from here? The transnational capital class (TCC) has not just taken flight, it has turned the American population into a festering sore it can suck on whenever it needs to. OWS was great, but unfocused. It turned cannons on the TCC, rightfully so in some cases, but gave the government a pass. Many who were involved or supported it will no doubt vote for Obama again in the coming election. The major problem I can see is that the citizenry believes that the government is still accountable to the people, that it remains an impartial mediator between capital and labor.

the truth of all the degenerate failed modern ideologies are to be found in islam. dumpster diving: sunnah?

We have arrived, as a species, at a peculiar juncture in the development of our shared world-system. An interdigitating set of political-economic and ecological crises looms large, threatening centuries of deprivation for our descendants, if not outright extinction. An absurdly unjust system of global capitalism, benefitting a tiny minority of kleptocrats and criminals, staggers mindlessly toward oblivion. As unrest grows and these crises intensify, it has become painfully obvious that no reform of this revolutionary state-capitalist machine is possible. It will destroy itself, and us with it, plunging us into debt-serf neofeudalism or worse, if we do not stop it.

In a neoliberal framework, choice is paramount. Contemporary notions of human rights stress the importance of a person living free from state coercion and this has filtered through our culture to mean that no one should be able to tell you what to do over your own wishes - so long as you hurt no one else. Cajoling and manipulation are evidently okay, but someone cutting to the chase and telling you you "can't" or "shouldn't" do something chafes our sensibilities. Politics becomes something that is negative-rights based.

Notions of broad American populism are popular on the white “left”, but nearly all the gains from broad American populism go to a privileged strata of white people. When radicals divorce the 99% rhetoric from the history of American populism, they are ignoring how that broad rhetoric has been used to exclude the needs of the disenfranchised. Without a POC-centered strategy, nothing is stopping the ruling class from using the same tools to reduce class tensions.

For the most part, the directors (“interventors”) of the new state industries were competent, however, some were not, and it was difficult to determine the difference with the few existing channels of communication between industry and state. In August of that month, Fernando Flores, the young intellectual who had been named General Manager of the CORFO, the state institution that regulated the recently nationalized factories, flew to England to meet with a very peculiar man. Bearded and eccentric, lacking any formal degree in cybernetics or computer sciences, Stafford Beer was a visionary in the mold of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, with one key difference – he was a socialist, even a techno-communist. He spoke no Spanish. However, he communicated to Flores – in broken Latin – that he very much desired to offer his expertise to the Chilean project.

the working class is under attack worldwide and will not gather around one flag because the one flag concept is what is attacking them. leftist protesters in the united states have the wherewithal to wave flags. they don't mind. they understand the forces at work against them are flagless, and we count on footage of pigs trampling the flag while they beat your ass to stir that kernal of patriotism still embedded deep in every american thanks to years of pledging the damn thing in grade school. it's a smart move and very practical at this juncture. globalization depends on a fake front of dissolution of nation states to get by.

I'm a straight cisgendered white male so I speak from a position of privilege on basically all issues of gender and sexuality but I find it extremely problematic that the liberal gay rights movement bases its position on a sort of sexual-essentialism, that gays are "born this way" and "cant help it". It is about as scientific and coherent as race science. Sexuality is behavior, and obviously can be controlled and channeled in many, many different ways. This is clear from history and comparative anthropology. There is no such thing as a "gay" person, nor a "straight" person. These are boundaries peculiar to a given culture, and the antagonisms between them are disciplined by the prime socioeconomic forces of the day: i.e. capitalism.

The world-historical consequence of the Occupy movement needs to be put in this perspective. This is the same world and involves one of the same powers. So far, the Occupy movement has involved a tiny minority of Americans, and at very little expense for these people. There are attacks with irritants on protestors, but most violence has been one-sided and limited. Importantly, what are the changes in business-as-usual that this movement seeks to put into place?

right wing parties worldwide point to this migrant labor as the cause of many ills. crime, disease, increased cost of services, depression of wages, whatever. while some might argue we need to drop the "PC" pretenses and man up to these challenges, generally approaching the subject in this way results in passing laws about giving water to "Illegal Humans" dying of thirst in the desert.

of course all this came crashing down sometime in the last 6 or 8 years, when all of the sudden we were suddenly supposed to be putting ourselves online. the anarchy of identity had to be corralled somehow and exposed to the market. imagine, you go up to a stranger on the street and start to discuss the most personal parts of your sexuality and experiences with them... of course, this is quaint and a little perverted - yet totally acceptable! - within an anonymous framework, when we can never really be sure if the other is telling us the truth (and they always are in a way) and so we chalk it up to the strangeness of the medium. but is the medium changing us now?

Post 1970's abandonment of the Bretton Woods system there came about a fantastic chain of events that threw the entire world on the fast track to destruction. Neoliberalism had been incubating at the University of Chicago for some years, but they were suddenly tapped to provide answers for where a sudden glut of gulf oil revenue should go. Their answer: To The Third World! After all, Mr. Woods was no longer around to lend a helping hand, the Soviet Union was lolling around like fat idiots getting ready to melt, and there's no better time like the present to introduce finance into every market available.

“For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California . . . Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.” -- Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism

The Center for American progress recently released a report entitled "Fear, Inc." that regards and examines the institutional and mainstream phenomenon of Islamophobia in the United States. This 138 page report outlines the major donors of the movement, the pseudo-scholars, the activists, the enablers, the grassroots networks, and the elected officials that are part of this highly-organized and effective movement. I read the whole thing so you don't have to...

What's better than a mutual assured destruction? 'Better' can only ever be that which is more convenient for the Dragon of Capital, and what does she seem to prefer these days? If the Dragon is not pleased with the WWWIII (Cold War) stalemate scenario, where does she go from there?

As the plague preceded the renaissance so too the scourge of the satellite precedes the the birthing pains of an unknowable new era of global economy and endless war. There are many kinds of technology but the technology that reigns supreme is INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, the wooden horse that brings along open markets, apache helicopters, and the apocalypse of culture as we can relate and know it. The richest men in the world are those that deal in communication, be it in the transmission or architecture of words, feelings, desires, or standards. Whoever owns the satellites, the media monopolies, or the IT hubs also directs the ebb and flow of events.

The rich of this Gilded Age are isolated and live in jets and fortresses. They don’t just hire security – they hire media firms and think tanks and create a culture of docile security. Our prisons are overflowing and our heads are empty. We elected a man who ran on “change” and he delivered us more of the same but in the way of a grotesque pornographic minstrel show for the rich. Do we see how tight the noose gets before we start thinking how to get out of this?

If history is the alchemy of theory, then communists turned gold into lead in Palestine. When I first arrived in 2009, I was one of those hand-wringing well-meaning comrades who shed tears over the absence of a progressive political left in Palestine. No doubt, there exists in Palestine some of the strongest and bravest leftists in the region, but their work is for naught and their books (printed with French, German, and Canadian money) get used to warm hovels in Askar refugee camp.