Anarcho-Capitalism: Jeff Bewick interviews Lew Rockwell. 3 Things That Must Happen for Us To Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy. August 25, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Transforming the United States into something closer to a democracy requires: 1) knowledge of how we are getting screwed; 2) pragmatic tactics, strategies, and solutions; and 3) the “energy to do battle.”
The majority of Americans oppose the corporatocracy (rule by giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials); however, many of us have given up hope that this tyranny can be defeated. 1. Harriet Tubman conducted multiple missions as an Underground Railroad conductor, and she also participated in the Union Army’s Combahee River raid that freed more than 700 slaves. We are ruled by so many “industrial complexes”—military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, and so on—that it is almost impossible to stay on top of every way we are getting screwed. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows that the deal is rotten.” Three Things That Must Happen for Us to Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy. Transforming the United States into something closer to a democracy requires: 1) knowledge of how we are getting screwed; 2) pragmatic tactics, strategies, and solutions; and 3) the “energy to do battle.”
The majority of Americans oppose the corporatocracy (rule by giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials); however, many of us have given up hope that this tyranny can be defeated. Among those of us who continue to be politically engaged, many focus on only one of the requirements—knowledge of how we are getting screwed. And this singular focus can result in helplessness. 1. Harriet Tubman conducted multiple missions as an Underground Railroad conductor, and she also participated in the Union Army’s Combahee River raid that freed more than 700 slaves. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows that the deal is rotten.” But what doesn’t everybody know?
2. 3. Can one have hope without being an insipid Pollyanna? Can Communities Reclaim the Right to Say "No" to Corporations? | Environment. August 24, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. It's no wonder that many communities want nothing to do with the natural gas drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or " fracking. " The practice, which involves pumping chemical-laced water underground at high pressure, results in millions of gallons of frack wastewater that's been found to contain dangerous levels of radioactivity, carcinogenic chemicals, and highly corrosive salts. Last year, 16 cattle died after being exposed to the wastewater; a famous scene in the documentary Gasland shows a resident lighting his tap water on fire. But communities trying to protect their drinking water from fracking haven't found it at all easy to do.
No Right to Self-Government? In August, a circuit court agreed, invalidating the city's ordinance. Since the early part of the 19th Century, the U.S. The 5 Most Horrifying Things Corporations Are Taking Over. It's true that a part of us dies every time we see Dr. Dre doing Dr. Pepper commercials, but in reality we've pretty much accepted that "selling out" is a part of life. Everybody needs to get paid, right? But sometimes corporate sellouts involve more than cringe-worthy ads and intrusive product placement. . #5. It's kind of hard to trash talk mercenaries when The A-Team made it clear that next to being an astronaut fireman, there's just about nothing as cool as being a soldier of fortune.
GettyGuarding opium harvests. The Sellout: When the U.S. military is stretched too thin, private firms like Blackwater and DynCorp have graciously offered to fill in the gaps. Since 2000, Blackwater alone has received at least $600 million in contracts from the CIA and over a billion dollars from the federal government. GettyAnd buying wicked cars for their phat cribs. The problem, though, is oversight. Via Qwiki.comAhhhh, good times, guys. . #4. Well, here's the thing ... GettyOh yeah. . #3. Does Capitalism Make Us More Materialistic? - Ben O'Neill. There was a time when the advocates of socialism argued that it would lead man to material abundance, whereas free-market capitalism would lead only to increasing misery and would ultimately collapse under its own internal stresses. You don't hear that too much these days, and for good reason. A century of empirical evidence has shown the contrary — that the free market leads to increasing wealth and material freedom, while socialism leads us only to poverty, state supremacy, and ultimately, mass murder.
These days the attack has shifted. Capitalism does not lead us to poverty; it leads us to too much wealth. This makes us "greedy" and "materialistic. " Indeed, there has been a recent resurgence of academic critiques and self-help literature lamenting excessive "materialism" and "consumerism," much of which lays the blame squarely at the feet of free-market capitalism and its lifeblood, money. Alienable and inalienable goods Money and alienable goods He further observes that Notes. Anti-capitalism protests strike chord. NEW YORK – New York’s budding anti-capitalism protest movement began last month with a vague sense of grievance over the widening gap between the rich and poor in America. But in three weeks, it has provided fuel for a broader national anti-corporate message, drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring but struggling to define its goals beyond a general feeling that power needs to be restored to ordinary people.
Now similar protests are springing up elsewhere; organizers in Washington, D.C., plan a march Thursday to “denounce the systems and institutions that support endless war and unrestrained corporate greed.” Despite having no single leader and no organized agenda, the protesters insist they are on the verge of translating their broad expression of grievance into a durable national cause. Brought together by social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, participants hope the New York protests can plant the seeds of a permanent national movement. Not everyone was impressed. One Third of Americans One Paycheck Away From Homelessness. This stunning factoid was reported in DS News last week and appears not to have gotten the attention it deserves. A mid-September survey ascertained that a full one third of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, and if they lost their job, they would not be able to make their next rent or mortgage payment.
And the article stresses this was not a function of being in or near the poverty line (hat tip reader May S): Despite being more affluent, the poll found that even those with higher annual household incomes indicate they are not guaranteed to make their next housing payment if they lost their source of income.Ten percent of survey respondents earning $100K or more a year say they would immediately miss a payment….Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said if they were handed a pink slip, they would not be able to continue to make their mortgage or rent payment longer than five months.
The implications are grim. We've socialized losses and privatized gains. - storify.com. Whither Capital Markets? » ThickCulture. By Kenneth M. Kambara, Aug 5, 2011, at 05:14 am This CollegeHumor parody eTrade ad has been making the rounds. In light of the recent stock market “correction”, what is underscored is there is a two-tiered market, as Jon Stewart claimed when he had Jim Cramer on The Daily Show in 2009—one for the powers that be and one for the rest of us. Economic sociology blasts apart the naïve assumption that markets have “atomized” agents guided by rational choice.
As an aside, as one who has ditched the ivory tower for navigating the entrepreneurial waters, I can say one thing that I knew all along, but is abundantly clear in so many ways—the system is geared towards business and doors open that are closed to individuals, save for those with great means. In light of the threat of the “r” word—recession, it’s easy to second-guess the “jobless recovery” and US economic policy aimed at bailouts {Obama style} and propping up the capital markets. Thewherefores: Capitalism in a simple graphic:...
Capitalism’s golden age v a lost 30 years – great infographic. Jonathan Langdale - Google+ - Capitalism will not last ♻:… Francis Fukuyama: How Capitalism Survived the Crisis. Crack Capitalism. We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable, advancing all the time, threatening to crush us all to death. There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing. From time to time there are elections about how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant: They make some people more comfortable, others less so; they may even affect the speed at which the walls are moving, but they do nothing to stop their relentless advance.
As the walls grow closer, people react in different ways. Is the advance of capital unstoppable? John Holloway is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power, a book about the Zapatista movement. How Investing in Corporate Banks Corrodes the Soul. Toward a New Stage of Capitalism. The Empire of Lies. Eight years on, we now have the proof that the US preemptive war on Iraq was based on lies. An Iraqi exile, Rafid al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA, has revealed that he fabricated the story of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the UK’s Guardian that he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader – and I stress the word careful – several disturbing facts emerged from the Guardian’s report. One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had traveled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. That last point is quite literally true. The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism. John Bellamy Foster (jfoster [at] monthlyreview.org) is editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, and author (with Brett Clark and Richard York) of The Ecological Rift (Monthly Review Press, 2010). Robert W. McChesney (rwmcches [at] uiuc.edu) is Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review Press, 2008) and (with John Nichols) The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010).
The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. That is not all.