nebris: (Bachmann Pancake)
America does not have a far left movement.

Our far-right are Fascists.

Our center-right are extremist nationalists.

Our center-left are classical conservatives.

Our far-left are moral centrist moderates.

Any objective political compass would place politicians like Sanders or Warren barely left of center.

A real far-leftist movement would be advocating for forced property seizure of the Capitalist Ruling class by the Working class.

Instead our far-left is like "don't let people die in medical poverty, please"

Nebs Sez

Jul. 6th, 2022 10:18 am
nebris: (A Dark Boy)
July 6th, 2022

The Human Race is riding a runaway train to hell [aka Accelerating Climate Change] while we argue about Profits and Pronouns, about when Life legally begins, about Borders and National Identity, most of us willfully ignoring the looming doom of our species.

I'll be seventy years old in a month and a half. My goal is to outlive our cats and my wife. Then I'll be free to punch my ticket if so moved. *shrugs* Not much else I can do really...

...and so it is.

Nebs Sez

Jun. 24th, 2022 09:40 pm
nebris: (A Dark Boy)
~These seemingly endless and exhausting battles over Abortion Rights and Gun Rights are just distractions. Their purpose IS to 'distract and exhaust' us while Corporations devour The Commons. In the mean time, Accelerating Climate Change is relentlessly bearing down upon us.

Nebs Sez

May. 23rd, 2022 01:29 am
nebris: (A Dark Boy)
~Even though I am ostensibly Progressive – Pro-LGBT, Pro-Reproductive Rights, Pro-Marriage Equality, Pro-Labor, Pro-Income Equality, etc – I have come to despise The American Left. I'm old enough to remember when we got out into the streets and fucked things up. If the cops came at us, we went at them. We actually believed in Revolution, even if we were a little vague on its specifics.

But now the so-called Left has become a bunch of chickenshit mealy-mouthed whiners.

They've become so 'inclusive' that they don't really believe in anything.

They preach Tolerance, but cannot practice it because everything triggers them.

They rant about Cultural Appropriation when they produce absolutely no culture themselves.

They lament the political violence of the Right, yet demand we disarmed ourselves.

And they endlessly debate and parse every tiny cultural detail and political nuance to death and so render themselves fatally divided and utterly impotent.

Worse of all, they have so become thoroughly Petite Bourgeois in their world view – Everything Must Be Safe And Everyone Must Be Nice, All The Time, Everywhere – that they are now The Perfect Tools of The Corporate Confederacy, not Citizens, but Conscious Consumers.

The American Right is the same in its own way, but it has the advantage of being able to Hate without any need to 'understand' anything beyond its own mindset. That is the great power of Fascism, being allowed to openly hate that which you fear and do so without any shame.

Nebs Sez

Jan. 6th, 2021 05:55 pm
nebris: (Bachmann Pancake)
~Back in 2008 I pointed out that the Democrats had been steadily moving Right after Mondale got trounced by Reagan in 1984, and that the GOP in response had itself moved more to the Right and had now found itself painted into a corner way out in Bat Country. Well, over the past four years we have discovered just how very very far out that corner of Bat Country truly is...
nebris: (Default)
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/covid-19-sickness-food-supply/
nebris: (Default)
Director Erika Cohn’s new film, Belly of the Beast, part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival which goes digital in the U.S. from June 11 to 20, brings to the fore the undeniable and continued legacy of eugenics and forced sterilization in the state of California.

The documentary follows the case of Kelli McDonald, a black mother who was told she had cysts and needed surgery while incarcerated, only to discover, over a year later and after months of menopausal symptoms and extreme weight loss at the age of 24, that she had been given a hysterectomy (McDonald’s doctors never told her they had performed a hysterectomy on her). Risking retaliation, McDonald decided to speak out even while she was still in jail and teamed up with the prison abolition legal aid organization Justice Now, founded by attorney Cynthia Chandler, to find justice. Belly of the Beast is about the freedom work McDonald, Chandler, and the Justice Now team—whose board members are all currently incarcerated women—do against all odds in the service of female survivors of all kinds of violence, not just at home but from the state.

In the U.S., many regular people still believe in eugenics, particularly when it comes to the country’s enormous incarcerated population, and especially when those people are poor black women. This makes sense because the practice of eugenics was pioneered in California beginning with a 1909 law that sanctioned the sterilization of those deemed “unfit,” from poor black and Native mothers to people with mental and physical disabilities to the criminalized. In fact the Nazis borrowed their eugenics project from the U.S. and the state of California specifically. Much of what American schoolchildren are taught are evils that originated in the sick minds of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels in fact were first practiced by their own state officials.

To the film’s great credit, instead of performing typical liberal disbelief around the discovery that eugenic sterilization persists today, Belly of the Beast shows how the very practice springs forth from the U.S. project and white American imagination. When journalist Corey G. Johnson published his article on the present-day sterilizations-sans-consent happening in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a deluge of racist and fascist comments came in from regular people about how (to paraphrase) “all black people should be sterilized” and performing eugenics, especially on people who are incarcerated or on welfare, is “A-OK.” This is the reality McDonald, Chandler, and organizations like Justice Now fight against: The U.S. is a country in which degrading and devaluing human life in order to “save the state funds,” as eugenics doctor-in-chief James Heinrich put it, is deemed reasonable in the court of public opinion, and even—often—in the judicial court system as well.

This is why, at the center of Belly of the Beast, the projects of prison abolition and reparations are essential. There is no reforming a system that systemically and illegally sterilizes its women in order to save the state welfare dollars. Two of the CDCR nurses interviewed in the documentary even admit they didn’t know the practice was actually banned, and had been since 1979. One of the nurses, who participated on the condition of anonymity, says that she wouldn’t have made anesthetized—in other words, drugged up—women sign their rights away if she had known it was illegal; but later, she confesses that she thinks sterilization should be legal in prisons, and that Dr. Heinrich, one of the many doctors who haphazardly and evilly carried out these sterilizations, was right to want to save the state money. The interview makes it clear that prisons are not designed to rehabilitate—quite the contrary. The other CDCR nurse underlines this point by saying that even if it had been technically legal (which it wasn’t), there’s no way for a person to consent to any major decisions while incarcerated, since prison guards and administrators have too much power over them. This is why, for example, the law deems it impossible for a person to consent to sex with a correctional officer while incarcerated. This is our U.S. correctional underworld, where you must be protected—at least technically speaking—from your own lack of rights.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inside-america-horrifying-modern-day-085759022.html
nebris: (Away Team)
BY NOW, the shortage of medical supplies in the United States is a notorious fact. The nation has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators; it may need a million. Masks, gowns, face shields, gloves, bottles of hand sanitizer, and tests for the virus are all in short supply.

The shortage has come as a great surprise, because the government has been contracting with private firms to make these supplies for years, and private firms, as everybody knows, will provide more of any product at a lower price than any central planner ever could. Responding to market signals like greyhounds leaping out of the gates, they race after efficiencies, pushing down costs and boosting productivity.

Yet every day brings fresh evidence of market-based inefficiency. To pick only one example, The New York Times reported on March 29 that a medical supplies company in Costa Mesa, California, which had won a competitive multimillion-dollar contract to make ventilators in 2008, had yet to deliver a single unit. How could a private firm fail so spectacularly to meet the public demand?

A hundred years ago, the economist and satirist Thorstein Veblen was pondering a similar question. In his 1921 book The Engineers and the Price System, he noted that the recent war had demonstrated the tremendous industrial capacity of the advanced nations, yet after the war, unemployment rose and production fell, pushing the industrial world into recession. Machines and men stood idle everywhere, to the great detriment of the public. “[P]eoples are in great need of all sorts of goods and services which these idle plants and idle workmen are fit to produce,” he wrote. “But for reasons of business expediency it is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen go to work.”

“Business expediency” meant nothing more than profitability, which Veblen thought was not at all the same thing as productive capacity. In fact, the executive’s job was to reduce the latter in order to ensure the former. “[I]t has become the ordinary duty of the corporate management,” Veblen wrote, “to adjust production to the requirements of the market by restricting the output to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, what will yield the largest net earnings.” Contrary to popular belief, corporate management doesn’t spring forth like a greyhound; it dawdles like a Great Dane.

Veblen had a name for this kind of foot-dragging: sabotage. He pointed out that the word itself derives from the French for “wooden shoe” (sabot), and so it denotes “going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on.” Because profitability required scaling back production to maximally profitable levels, it followed that economic sabotage “is the beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business enterprise.”

Even if the industrial supply chain is more complicated in our day than it was in Veblen’s, it is still possible to catch the economic saboteurs at work. Returning to the Times story, the original bid-winning company was bought up by another, larger company called Covidien, which begged the federal government for more money, shuffled key employees around the firm (effectively gumming up the gears), and then demanded to be released from the contract. As a result, they received millions of public dollars but provided not a single unit. Veblen would insist that this was not a failure of the free market “price system.” On the contrary, the price system had worked according to its basic laws. As industry observers and government officials explained to the Times, “building a cheaper product […] would undermine Covidiens’ profits from its existing ventilator business.”

Who will save our economy (not to mention countless lives) from these vandals? In order to frighten financiers, “absentee owners” of capital, and other guardians of the status quo, Veblen suggested that they should all be replaced by a “Soviet of technicians.” It was the engineers, he argued, who actually knew how to run the factories.

"Without their continued and unremitting supervision and direction the industrial system would cease to be a working system at all; whereas it is not easy to see how the elimination of the existing businesslike control could bring anything but relief and heightened efficiency."

Given the manifest failure of privatizing pandemic preparedness, Veblen’s proposal looks pretty good. Perhaps it is still true, 100 years later, “that there is no single spot or corner in civilized Europe or America where the underlying population would have anything to lose by such an overturn of the established order as would cancel the vested rights of privilege and property.” If so, then it is time for the state to start buying up industries rather than bailing them out and then staffing them with technicians who will run them with an eye to the common good, rather than the interests of shareholders.

But what is the common good, exactly? Veblen’s proposal looks suspiciously like a technocracy, in which a credentialed panel of engineers decides what the public needs. In a pandemic, the public’s needs may be clear enough, but that is seldom the case. The crucial questions — What do we need? Who gets what? Who decides? — have no technical answers. They are open-ended political questions, but Veblen’s proposal lacks a place for deliberative democracy.

This is probably because he put little stock in the wisdom of crowds. Americans believed in the price system too strongly. “This commercialized frame of mind,” Veblen regretted to say, “is a sturdy outgrowth of many generations of consistent training in the pursuit of the main chance; it is second nature, and there need be no fear that it will allow the Americans to see workday facts in any other than its own perspective, just yet.” It would take something really incredible, “harsh and protracted experience to remove it.”

Veblen died in 1929, just a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. The Depression was eventually harsh and protracted enough to inspire mass movements in favor of federal involvement in the economy and a new social safety net. In our own day, the government’s response to the pandemic has so far favored capital holders and other members of the “kept classes,” as Veblen liked to call them. It seems safe to conclude, as he did, that “[t]here is nothing in the situation that should reasonably flutter the sensibilities of the Guardians or of that massive body of well-to-do citizens who make up the rank and file of absentee owners, just yet.”

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran and Loyola Marymount University. A winner of the National Book Critics “emerging critic” award, he has published reviews and essays in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Point, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-sabotaged-the-american-economy-thorstein-veblen-knows/
nebris: (Away Team)
He is an inevitable result of a society that overvalues profit and undervalues human lives. If Trump had never been born, we would have some other equally vile sack of excrement sitting in the Oval Office. He is symptomatic of our collective terror and ignorance around the pace of social change. Like God, if Trump did not exist, we would have to invent him.

In terms of the election this year, a vote against Trump is absolutely meaningless if it is also a vote *for* a return to the political and social status quo in which he arose. Any vote that is not essentially revolutionary will only serve to strengthen Trump's position -- specifically because it is the popular longing for a return to normalcy that created his presidency in the first place.

Voting for Biden is not a protest against Trump, it is a fear-based reactionary scramble for safety. As such, it is doomed from the start because all such scrambling only reinforces the political trajectory that has already culminated in Trump's election. Why would the country elect Biden, when we already have a president who embodies everything he stands for but without the cheap and frankly insulting veneer of faux civility?

Joe Biden opposes universal healthcare (he says everyone deserves "affordable" care, which is code for "healthcare should only exist as a side effect of making some asshole a billionaire"); he opposes network neutrality; he supports imperial wars; he supports propping up banana republics to secure resources; he opposes economic security for the working class (again, unless it makes a profit for someone). Personally he is a sex creep and he can barely string a sentence together better than Mango Mussolini can.

If you want to vote for Biden, please do it for the same reason I am doing it: so you can tell the useless liberals and centrists that you did play the game by their rules and we all still lost. Don't do it because you think there's any fundamental difference between Trump's outright fascism and the DNC's fascism-with-a-wink."

- Pango Gillespi

Nebs Sez

Mar. 6th, 2020 04:26 am
nebris: (A Manga Thang)
All the "Warren was defeated by Sexism" memes are sprouting and Biden supporters are trying to blame Bernie for that. And plenty of y'all seem willing to suck up that bullshit.

What Bernie said to her in a private conversation was that "it is very hard for a woman to become president in America's present sociopolitical climate", *not* that a woman 'couldn't be president'. That is simply acknowledging reality. Warren either misheard that or deliberately distorted such to use as a political weapon. Clearly, it didn't work.

But where she really lost her bid was her flip flop on Medicare For All in Oct. Any review of her poll numbers, which were soaring at that point, shows them tanking steadily from then on out.

That is the thing about us true Progressives; we pay *close* attention to policy positions. That she's bunting on endorsing Bernie or Biden shows her commitment to her stated principles is iffy. She knows that if she endorses Bernie, she alienates the Dem Establishment. But if she endorses Biden, she’s dead to the Progressives. So she's playing the 'middle game'...which only helps Biden.

I still like Elizabeth Warren and would have voted for her come Nov. But all this has badly disappointed me. She has a lot of bridges to repair. /sigh

As for Bernie, remember that he was fighting for Racial and Sexual Equality back when Liz was still a Goldwater Republican. And please note that Nina Turner is a national co-chair of Sanders's 2020 campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Turner
nebris: (A Guru)
~Elizabeth Warren came in third in her home state. Her main shortcoming is that she is at heart an Academic, not a Politician and does not have a real killer instinct. She now has one of three choices.

#1: She can 'stay the course' and probably help set the stage for a brokered convention, which is likely going to happen whatever she does.

#2: She can drop out and endorse Bernie, which will alienate the Democratic Establishment, tho at least she would remain true to her principles.

#3: She can drop out and endorse Biden, in which case she will be dead the Progressive Movement.

I feel bad for her.

Nebs Sez

Nov. 25th, 2019 07:23 am
nebris: (Default)
Sigh...

Your problem is that you, like so many others, are still trying to save The Republic. Sorry, pal, but The Republic died during the Reagan administration, both for the obvious reasons and because the Democrats abandoned the New Deal paradigm and became fully fledged Corporatists.

The Clintons are Corporatists. Obama is a Corporatists. And so is Smilin' Joe. That is just more of the same shit that makes The Rich richer, The Poor poorer and is sucking the life outta the Middle Class. We are now an Oligarchy.

RE Trump's supporters: "Trump hates what they hate and is destroying what they feel has been stolen from them. His base is happy to see it all burn down."

I support Bernie [and probably Warren] not because I think he'll save The Republic, but because I'm pretty sure his policies would make the last few decades of my life a bit easier.

As for the long run...? Well, I wrote the below about ten years ago:

TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY TAKES PATIENCE AND GUILE

“Do not expect to defeat The Corporate Confederacy at the ballot box. Big Money can power its way through almost any election cycle. That is not however a call for Revolution. Big Money can power its way through those as well and rather unpleasantly.

Instead it must always be remembered that by its conscienceless and rapacious nature, the thing sows the seeds of its own destruction. Therefore what is required is both the ability to survive its collapse *and* to have another functional structure extent to replace it. Anything else is empty rhetoric.”

It's seems pretty clear y'all are operating from the Same Ol' Same Ol'. I understand. The future that confronts us IS Fucking Scary. [see Catastrophic Climate Change, Super AI, Nenotech, Genetic Engineering, etc] But the old paradigms ain't gonna save us...
nebris: (A Guru)
The Fed’s latest figures on American household wealth paint a rosy picture – in the aggregate. US households now own a record-breaking $107T worth of assets!

But drill into those figures and you’ll notice that almost all of this new wealth has landed in the pockets of the top 1% of households. That’s not unusual: America has been on a glide-path to oligarchy since the Reagan years. What’s also not new is that the share of wealth owned by the bottom 50% of American households has continued to fall, while their debts have continued to rise: the bottom half own 6.1% of all US wealth, while they are burdened with 36% of America’s debts. When you subtract debts from assets, the bottom half of US households account for only 1.9% of America’s assets.

What that tells us is that the top 1%’s growth can no longer come from the bottom half, the people whose political woes and economic anxiety do not provoke regulators or lawmakers to actions.

And indeed, when you look at the Fed’s quarterly figures, you see that the biggest decline in household wealth is now coming from the upper middle class, the 50%-99% of households, who are, basically, the last people left in America with piggybanks for oligarchs to empty.

There’s lots of ways in which wealth-transfers from the upper-middles to the super-rich are effected: while upper-middles might own stocks, they don’t get to buy into private equity funds or VC funds, where table-stakes are $5m. Meanwhile, the most common assets for the middles – CDs, savings accounts – have been stagnant for more than a decade, thanks to the Fed’s low-interest policies.

Meanwhile, the things that define middle-class life – quality health care, post-secondary education, decent housing – have soared in costs, far, far ahead of the modest gains experienced by the 50-99%. Those increased costs are largely due to market-cornering and price-gouging by companies that have been bought up by the private equity sector whose beneficiaries are almost exclusively the super-rich.
https://boingboing.net/2019/11/14/thats-where-the-money-is-2.html
nebris: (FemJihad)
Oct. 8th, 2016 at 3:16 PM

~45 years ago, Gloria Steinem, a feminist writer and former CIA employee, founded Ms Magazine. She said she wanted 'a magazine owned and operated by and for women', of which there was none at the time. And the publication pioneered many Women's Issues. But it also did something else, something rather more subtle; it shifted Feminism away from Radicalism and mainstreamed it into the American Corporate Culture.

In the process it turned Feminism from a vital social movement into a Marketing Niche. Once again, actually. Edward Bernays had done that with women publicly smoking cigarettes as an 'act of freedom' back in 1920. Virginia Slims reproduced that model quite successfully in the 1970's.

This Corporate Feminism told women [though mostly White Middle Class woman] that they 'could have it all' within the Capitalism paradigm if they just worked hard. Of course the actual Corporate World [White Males] fought that tooth and nail and many of those women who tried to 'have it all' dropped out exhausted. Some, like Hillary Clinton, became even worse than most of the bastards they were up against, Hillary still having to use one of those bastards as a wedge to push her way in.

And now, here she is, at the pinnacle of her 'have it all' career and she cannot even put away a goon like Donald Trump. It's not because she's a woman, though that is a factor. No, it is because she is so obviously a Corporatist and the Electorate hates that now, having been plundered and pillaged by Corporations for decades.

This is ultimate betrayal of Feminism in all its forms. When the perfect Corporate Feminist reached her moment of triumph, Corporatism has become so toxic she will be lucky to scrape out a victory against the most vile and hated presidential candidate since Huey Long.

And that is why so many of you women who have committed to this brand of Feminism – and have no doubt it IS a Brand – are losing your minds. It's not about Hillary. It's not even about Trump. It is that the failure of your Brand is now stark and undeniable, though of course you'll keep denying that to the very end.

...and of course, Hillary did lose.

Exchange

Jun. 18th, 2018 11:45 am
nebris: (Hazmat)
~Mentions Fully Automated Luxury Communism to Conservative Person in response to his mention of The Cloward–Piven strategy~

Moi: “Unfortunately, Catastrophic Climate Change is gonna shitcan that idea. Not sure how bad it will be, but it's going to 'crash the system' one way or another.”

Conservative Person: “The earth always go through cycles and I think we can equate it to those who bought up the mountains in CA in the 1970's bc a fault was going to make that beachfront property.” ::smile emoji::

Moi: “Yes, the earth goes thru cycles and a warming trend was on the menu, temps going up few degrees over a few centuries. What humans did was pump trillions of tons of extra hydrocarbons into that cycle and accelerate it. Now temps are rising further and faster, several degrees over only several decades, That s what makes this Climate Change cycle 'Catastrophic'. It's too much, too fast and it is hitting all of earth's systems too hard.

How bad it is going to be I cannot say. As ever, the Global South will suffer more than the Global North, The Equatorial Regions will be hit the hardest, may even become uninhabitable for a period of time, which will of course drive more refugees north, creating violent social confrontations. Coast lines will recede, cities will drown and previously useful farmland will die, causing famine. Increased heat will also cause an increase in disease.

But those are all things we as a species can survive.

At the other extreme, the surface of the planet might become entirely uninhabitable for centuries, dividing the survivors into those who live underground and those who live in space, basically the metaphor of the Morlocks and the Eloi. Each group will have to 'engineer' themselves, Genetically and Cybernetically, in order to adapt.

But, as I said, I cannot say how bad things will get. One thing I'm fairly certain of; Catastrophic Climate Change will kill Capitalism dead. We'll likely even see trials of Corporate executives for Crimes Against Humanity, tho that also depends upon how fast and how far things go in the shitter.”
nebris: (FemJihad)
Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

In a preface to “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx wrote:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.


Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. We are called to study Marx to be ready.

The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.

But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.

Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

Marx warned that in the later stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” he wrote. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPP and CAFTA to further weaken the nation-state’s ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end these corporate monopolies would obliterate free market competition.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/karl-marx-was-right-2/
nebris: (The Temple 2)
...I wrote this early in the morning of June 12th, 2016 regarding the outcome of the California Primary..I'd say it's even more valid now...

~So, once again, my foray into American Electoral Politics is ending in Disappointment and Depression...and a fair amount of Rage. I knew better, but 'hope' seduced me. I allowed my cynicism to abate. More the fool me...

...and that brings me to this meme I created a half dozen years ago and which still holds true:

TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY TAKES PATIENCE AND GUILE

“Do not expect to defeat The Corporate Confederacy* at the ballot box. Big Money can power its way through almost any election cycle. That is not however a call for Revolution. Big Money can power its way through those as well and rather unpleasantly.

Instead it must always be remembered that by its conscienceless and rapacious nature, the thing sows the seeds of its own destruction. Therefore what is required is both the ability to survive its collapse *and* to have another functional structure extent to replace it. Anything else is empty rhetoric.”


For me, that 'functional structure' is The Sisterhood. So once again I need to refocus upon the Liber Sorores. What has been written needs some editing - like the Preface now that my mother is dead - and obviously the whole thing needs to be finished...

…I wrote the above in a burst on June 8th and then the aforementioned 'Disappointment and Depression' ground me to a halt. This has stewed the past few days [it's a bit after 4am on the 12th] and it finally dawned upon me how I was 'seduced'. I want things to 'be okay', at least for a while. And that is what is driving so many now, especially Hillary supporters and those Sanders supporters who've turned on a dime to become the former.

But that's not going to happen, kids. I finally remembered my Primary Mantra; "It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." And that's what supporting Bernie – and then Hillary – is all about. We all want to 'be okay' with what we've got...and that is killing us.

Bernie means well, Goddess Bless him, but he's trying to fix something that is irrevocably broken and so many of are desperate for that to happen because we're rightly afraid of what comes next.

So Her Prophet is back once again to where he is supposed to be; working as hard as he can on building that other 'functional structure', the one he probably will not get to see, which makes said work very lonely and sad, but that is my Path and such is what I must do...

...and so it is.



*I call the thing a 'Confederacy' instead of a 'state' because it is not monolithic, but a series of groupings that compete among themselves, but are more of less unified in their general outcome, which is to own everything and keep 'the masses' under control.
nebris: (FemJihad)
~45 years ago, Gloria Steinem, a feminist writer and former CIA employee, founded Ms Magazine. She said she wanted 'a magazine owned and operated by and for women', of which there was none at the time. And the publication pioneered many Women's Issues. But it also did something else, something rather more subtle; it shifted Feminism away from Radicalism and mainstreamed it into the American Corporate Culture.

In the process it turned Feminism from a vital social movement into a Marketing Niche. Once again, actually. Edward Bernays had done that with women publicly smoking cigarettes as an 'act of freedom' back in 1920. Virginia Slims reproduced that model quite successfully in the 1970's.

This Corporate Feminism told women [though mostly White Middle Class woman] that they 'could have it all' within the Capitalism paradigm if they just worked hard. Of course the actual Corporate World [White Males] fought that tooth and nail and many of those women who tried to 'have it all' dropped out exhausted. Some, like Hillary Clinton, became even worse than most of the bastards they were up against, Hillary still having to use one of those bastards as a wedge to push her way in.

And now, here she is, at the pinnacle of her 'have it all' career and she cannot even put away a goon like Donald Trump. It's not because she's a woman, though that is a factor. No, it is because she is so obviously a Corporatist and the Electorate hates that now, having been plundered and pillaged by Corporations for decades.

This is ultimate betrayal of Feminism in all its forms. When the perfect Corporate Feminist reached her moment of triumph, Corporatism has become so toxic she will be lucky to scrape out a victory against the most vile and hated presidential candidate since Huey Long.

And that is why so many of you women who have committed to this brand of Feminism – and have no doubt it IS a Brand – are losing your minds. It's not about Hillary. It's not even about Trump. It is that the failure of your Brand is now stark and undeniable, though of course you'll keep denying that to the very end.
nebris: (The Temple 2)
~So, once again, my foray into American Electoral Politics is ending in Disappointment and Depression...and a fair amount of Rage. I knew better, but 'hope' seduced me. I allowed my cynicism to abate. More the fool me...

...and that brings me to this meme I created a half dozen years ago and which still holds true:

TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY TAKES PATIENCE AND GUILE

“Do not expect to defeat The Corporate Confederacy* at the ballot box. Big Money can power its way through almost any election cycle. That is not however a call for Revolution. Big Money can power its way through those as well and rather unpleasantly.

Instead it must always be remembered that by its conscienceless and rapacious nature, the thing sows the seeds of its own destruction. Therefore what is required is both the ability to survive its collapse *and* to have another functional structure extent to replace it. Anything else is empty rhetoric.”


For me, that 'functional structure' is The Sisterhood. So once again I need to refocus upon the Liber Sorores. What has been written needs some editing - like the Preface now that my mother is dead - and obviously the whole thing needs to be finished...

…I wrote the above in a burst on June 8th and then the aforementioned 'Disappointment and Depression' ground me to a halt. This has stewed the past few days [it's a bit after 4am on the 12th] and it finally dawned upon me how I was 'seduced'. I want things to 'be okay', at least for a while. And that is what is driving so many now, especially Hillary supporters and those Sanders supporters who've turned on a dime to become the former.

But that's not going to happen, kids. I finally remembered my Primary Mantra; "It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." And that's what supporting Bernie – and then Hillary – is all about. We all what to 'be okay' with what we've got...and that is killing us.

Bernie means well, Goddess Bless him, but he's trying to fix something that is irrevocably broken and so many of are desperate for that to happen because we're rightly afraid of what comes next.

So Her Prophet is back once again to where he is supposed to be; working as hard as he can on building that other 'functional structure', the one he probably will not get to see, which makes said work very lonely and sad, but that is my Path and such is what I must do...

...and so it is.



*I call the thing a 'Confederacy' instead of a 'state' because it is not monolithic, but a series of groupings that compete among themselves, but are more of less unified in their general outcome, which is to own everything and keep 'the masses' under control.

Nebs Sez

Jun. 9th, 2016 09:48 am
nebris: (A Manga Thang)
"Okay, Bernie has a sit down with POTUS and Smilin' Joe. He's talked with Hillary. And he's staying in the race until Philadelphia even though he seems to know she's gonna take it. As I've said, he's made a heavy investment in the Democratic Party and I suspect he plans to call in all his chips in order to play ball. He also said “Donald Trump cannot be president,” more than once.

That sends him back to the Senate with a lot of juice. From here on in, whenever he talks, a large number of Americans will listen. So expect him to hold Hillary's feet to the fire...if of course, she can actually beat Trump, which is not a sure thing in my books.

As I'm in California, I possess the luxury of not having vote for her. She'll win the state no matter what. I might vote for Jill Stein. I might sleep in. Too early to tell...."

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