Thank you America.
This is a most excellent birthday present.
POLITICS
Rule By The Rich
“The oligarchs are smart. They have realized that the global economy is starting to die. It’s short on resources, and the costs for what remains are skyrocketing. The prospects for rapid economic growth in the real economy, and for sustained high-level “surplus value,” are sharply diminished. So, many of the wealthy are coming to the view that they will no longer seek business growth, per se. More and more of them are seeking political control as a way of gaining economic expansion. They can squeeze out more by controlling the political process—toppling unions, gaining subsidies, cutting their taxes, gaining offshore havens—and, perhaps most of all, by privatizating services like education, transportation, the military, security, Medicare and Social Security, health services, and many aspects of the natural commons, like fresh water. That’s their big new market: commodification of the commons.” [quoting from retired businessman Jack Santa Barbara]
Republicans and especially Tea Partiers are now also advocating for privatizing whole government agencies, even those providing welfare services, for example. It represents a very profound shift in corporate/state/oligarch strategy, and is potentially much more pervasive and dangerous. All of it has been made necessary by the reality of declining resources and the stunted growth potential of the usual means of wealth expansion. Through campaign contributions, this class of super-rich already “owns” many of the U.S. state houses and legislatures, the House of Representatives, and, as we said, an alarming number of U.S. senators. The election of 2012 has a fair chance to also bring them control of the Senate, and quite conceivably the presidency. If so, we should probably start calling it neofeudalism. A privatized country.
— via jhnbrssndn
‘Stephen Lawrence’ by Carol Ann Duffy
Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sowed
into hard ground –
your life’s length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love’s just blade.
This Is Not Reality
reblogged form motleyglue:
“So about those Polar Bears. Let’s be clear; nature does not line itself up, all “raw” and “visceral” and hurl itself into our telly screens for consumption. It’sproduced; from the moment a documentary is concieved, it is contrived and constructed.
Okwonga’s angle typifies our habitual misconception and fetishisation of photo-reality as reality. (But this guy works in media? Don’t they immunise you against that on the first day?). Reality, went. Ages ago. And the line between photoreality and ‘CGI’ is pixel-thin, overlayed a few times and with a shed-load of blur to give the impression of depth of field.
(It’s all ‘enhanced’! Everything!! Look!!!)
OK that’s not so bad. What’s terrible is that anyone gives a monkey /polar bear/ whatever. Because in the REAL world, Cameron has left the UK floating up the Atlantic without a paddle, or a friend (except the US, but that’s ok cuz the dollar will never collapse, right?), and the inquiry into the really properly morally destitute media whores is re-opened.
I don’t subscribe to the theory of a singly masterminded conspiracy. But. When the media is so desperate to distract us from both what IS newsworthy, and from the stink of its own backfired distractions – with a well-timed soup of such cute fluff and contrived confrontation as would make Simon Cowell proud – the icky symbiosis of governance and media is horribly, scarily obvious.
The reality or honesty that I want from media is more fundamental than location or editing. If necessary, composite Cameron’s head onto some fuzzy bear cubs, and then lets have discussion and debate of something relevant to our interests.”
The Common Good.
“Take a walk through any big city. Do you see anything that needs improvement? There are huge amounts of work to be done, and lots of idle hands. People would be delighted to do the work, but the economic system is such a catastrophe it can’t put them to work.
The country’s awash in capital. Corporations have so much money they don’t know what to do with it – it’s coming out of their ears. There’s no scarcity in funds – these aren’t “lean and mean” times. That’s just a fraud.”
50 years: Amnesty International by Carlos Lascano (2011)
Making of here.
Journal For the Protection of All Beings, 1961
“Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.”
(reattributed July 2018)
Albert Einstein: Why Socialism? 1949
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time.
It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil… This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.”
“This is what democracy smells like”
“It came as no surprise to me that the Government won its vote on tripling tuition fees, although the initial maths being passed among the crowd did seem to suggest more Lib Dem abstentions than votes against. But the pain and fury among the students – freezing, passionate – was as evident as it was heartbreaking. This unelected, unelectable cabinet of millionaires had persuaded the Commons to ignore an unprecedented wave of public anger and concern over a key plank of its policy. And sent heavily armoured goons out to apply state-sanctioned violence to those forced to suffer the consequences.”
–- read the rest at jhn brssndn!
Paul Greer 