quillette | There’s no reason to think that the definition of racism will stop
expanding any time soon. And there’s no reason to think that
progressives will ever stop demanding institutional reforms to fix
racism—up to and including attempts to reform our subconscious minds
with such things as mandatory implicit bias trainings. In a BBC feature on racism, the acclaimed poet Benjamin Zephaniah
remarked, “laws can control people’s actions, but they can’t control
people’s thoughts. As racism becomes more subtle, we need to keep
pressuring our institutions to change.”
Black political debate and action through the early 1960s
focused on concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization,
discrimination in specific venues and domains—rather than an abstract
“racism.” It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative
victories that defeated southern apartheid and restored black
Americans’ full citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the
default explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities.
If the early 1960s were about reaching the mountaintop, then the
modern era is about running on the Treadmill. Coates’s refrain,
“resistance must be its own reward,” has become the watchword of the
movement.13
The War on Racism, though intended to be won by those prosecuting it,
will, in practice, continue indefinitely. This is because the stated
goals of progressives, however sincerely held, are so apocalyptic, so
vague, and so total as to guarantee that they will never be met. One
often hears calls to “end white supremacy,” for instance. But what
“ending white supremacy” would look like in a country where whites are already out-earned by several dark-skinned ethnic groups (Indian-Americans top the list by a large margin) is never explained. I would not be the first to point out the parallels between progressive goals and religious eschatology. Coates, for instance, professes to be an atheist, but tweak a few details and the Rapture becomes Reparations––which he has said will lead to a “spiritual renewal” and a “revolution of the American consciousness.”14
Staying on the Racism Treadmill means denying progress and stoking
ethnic tensions. It means, as Thomas Sowell once warned, moving towards a
society in which “a new born baby enters the world supplied with
prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day.”[15]
Worse still, it means shutting down the one conversation that stands
the greatest chance of improving outcomes for blacks: the conversation
about culture.
By contrast, getting off the Treadmill means recognizing that group
outcomes will differ even in the absence of systemic bias; it means
treating people as individuals rather than as members of a collective;
it means restoring the naive conception of equal treatment over the
skin-color morality of the far Left; and it means rejecting calls to
burn this or that system to the ground in order to combat forms of
racial oppression that grow ever more abstract by the day. At bottom, it
means acknowledging the fact that racism has declined precipitously,
and perhaps even being grateful that it has.
resilience |It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives.
By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics
and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea
for which he has no rightful claim.
In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,
published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race
has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the
European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those
who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as
pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he
glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the
world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will
continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.
His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On
one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new
favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely
excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic,
incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation,
sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively
optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian,
laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults
the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure:
Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)
In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read
his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker
to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes.
Pinker is,
after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of
global society. He spoke to the world’s elite this
year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he
calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s
“100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers
an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices
that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous
response.
Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is
stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide
incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that
should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all
sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity,
education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of
much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so
dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and
eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my
response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like
him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.
This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my
view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in
common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m
close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the
coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary
audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it
where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly,
ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth
can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.
NewYorker | Locke relished every
titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes.
Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of
McKay’s protest poem from “White House” to “White Houses”—an act of
censorship that severed the two men’s alliance. “No wonder Garvey
remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to
Locke. “When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!”
And
such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke
brought voices to “The New Negro” that challenged his own. Among the
more scholarly contributions to the anthology was “Capital of the Black
Middle Class,” an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by
E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years
later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro
professionals in his study “The Black Bourgeoisie.” A work of Marxist
sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New
Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had “either ignored the
Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they
revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses.” Aesthetics had
been reduced to an ornament for a feckless élite.
The
years after “The New Negro” were marked by an agitated perplexity.
Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to
nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He’d been formed and polished
by élite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great
Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project,
pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte
Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with
“primitive peoples.” Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black
culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual
values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still,
through the Negro’s unspoiled heart.
Mason was rich, and Locke had
sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art.
Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community
Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life
until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a
gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously
didn’t align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was
prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her
funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the
work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile
“mid-wife” of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers—much
to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a
supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed
down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.
nakedcapitalism | According to David Harvey, neoliberal globalization is comprised of
four processes: accumulation by dispossession; de-regulation;
privatization; and an upward re-distribution of wealth. Taken together
they have increased both economic insecurity and cultural anxiety via
three features in particular: the creation of surplus peoples, rising
global inequality, and threats to identity.
The anxiety wrought by neoliberal globalization has created a rich
and fertile ground for populist politics of both right and left. Neither
Norris and Inglehart nor Laclau adequately account for such insecurity
in their theorization of populism. As we have seen, populism can be
understood as a mobilizing discourse that conceives of political
subjectivity as comprised of “the people.” Yet this figure of “the
people,” as Agamben has indicatedin What is a people? (2000)
is deeply ambivalent insofar as it can be understood both in terms of
the body politic as a whole (as in the US Constitution’s “We the
People”), or in terms of what Ranciere calls the “part that has no
part,” or the dispossessed and the displaced; as in “The people united
shall never be defeated,” or in the Black Panthers’ famous slogan: “All
Power to the People.”
In this dichotomy, the figure of “the people” can be understood in
terms of its differential deployments by right and left, which
themselves must be understood in terms of the respective enemies through which “the people” is constructed. And this is the decisive dimension of populism.
Right populism conflates “the people” with an embattled nation
confronting its external enemies: Islamic terrorism, refugees, the
European Commission, the International Jewish conspiracy, and so on. The
left, in marked contrast, defines “the people” in relation to the
social structures and institutions – for example, state and capital –
that thwart its aspirations for self-determination; a construction which
does not necessarily, however, preclude hospitality towards the Other.
In other words, right-wing or authoritarian populism defines the
enemy in personalized terms, whereas, while this is not always true,
left-wing populism tends to define the enemy in terms of bearers of
socio-economic structures and rarely as particular groups. The right, in
a tradition stemming back to Hobbes,
takes insecurity and anxiety as the necessary, unavoidable, and indeed
perhaps even favourable product of capitalist social relations. It
transforms such insecurity and anxiety into the fear of the stranger and
an argument for a punitive state. In contrast, the left seeks to
provide an account of the sources of such insecurity in the processes
that have led to the dismantling of the welfare state, and corresponding
phenomena such as “zero-hours” contracts, the casualization of labour,
and generalized precarity. It then proposes transformative and
egalitarian solutions to these problems. Of course, left populism can
also turn authoritarian – largely though not exclusively due to the
interference and threatened military intervention of the global hegemon
and its allies – with an increasing vilification of the opposition, as
we saw in Venezuela and Ecuador with Rafael Correa.
thenextweb | The Guardian reports Berlin-bound artist and independent researcher Adam Harvey is developing a new technology which aims to overwhelm and confuse computer vision systems by feeding them false information.
The Hyperface Project,
as Harvey calls it, revolves around printing deceitful patterns onto
attire and textiles with the purpose of rendering your face illegible to
surveillance systems.
The method essentially dodges facial recognition by presenting
computer vision devices with an overload of patterns closely resembling
facial features like eyes and mouths.
As Harvey explains, the Hyperface technology ultimately prevents
computers from scanning your face by inundating “an algorithm with what
it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the
computer vision algorithm.”
The patterns, which Harvey developed in collaboration with interaction studio Hyphen-Labs, can then be worn to shield off the areas facial recognition systems seek to interpret.
MIT | Sue Ding interviewed the creators of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism,
an ambitious and richly imagined project at this year’s Sundance New
Frontier. Artists Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ashley Baccus Clark, Nitzan
Bartov, and Ece Tankal are part of of Hyphen-Labs,
a global team of women of color who are doing pioneering work at the
intersection of art, technology, and science. Together they draw on a
formidable range of expertise, including engineering, molecular biology,
game design, and architecture.
NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism consists of three components.
The first is an installation that transports visitors to a futuristic
and stylish beauty salon. Speculative products designed for women of
color are displayed around the space. They include sunscreen for dark
skin, a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software,
earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations, and a
reflective visor that lets wearers see out while hiding their faces.
The second part of the project is a VR experience that takes place at
a “neurocosmetology lab” in the future. Participants see themselves in
the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they
are about to receive Octavia Electrodes—cutting edge technology
involving both hair extensions and brain-stimulating electrical
currents. In the VR narrative, the electrodes then prompt a
hallucination that carries viewers through a psychedelic Afrofuturist
space landscape.
The final component of the project is Hyphen-Labs’ ongoing research
about how VR can affect viewers, potentially reducing bias and fear by
immersing participants in positive, engaging portrayals of black women.
The team would eventually like to use functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) technology to study how participants respond to the
experience.
WaPo | Amazon has been essentially giving away facial
recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando,
according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of
Northern California, paving the way for a rollout of technology that is
causing concern among civil rights groups.
Amazon
is providing the technology, known as Rekognition, as well as
consulting services, according to the documents, which the ACLU obtained
through a Freedom of Information Act request.
A coalition of civil rights groups, in a letter released Tuesday,
called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because
it could lead to the expansion of surveillance of vulnerable
communities.
“We demand that Amazon stop
powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave
threat to customers and communities across the country,” the groups
wrote in the letter.
Amazon spokeswoman Nina
Lindsey did not directly address the concerns of civil rights
groups. “Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be
responsible when they use AWS services,” she said, referring to Amazon
Web Services, the company’s cloud software division that houses the
facial recognition program. “When we find that AWS services are being
abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our
services.”
She
said that the technology has many useful purposes, including finding
abducted people. Amusement parks have used it to locate lost children.
During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to
identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos
is the owner of The Washington Post.)
The
details about Amazon’s program illustrate the proliferation of
cutting-edge technologies deep into American society — often without
public vetting or debate. Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons
and the wearable body cameras for police, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition
for its body-worn cameras, prompting a similar backlash from civil
rights groups. Hundreds of Google employees protested last month to
demand that the company stop providing artificial intelligence to the
Pentagon to help analyze drone footage.
DARPA | DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office is hosting a Proposers Day to
provide information to potential applicants on the structure and
objectives of the new Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy
(URSA) program. URSA aims to develop technology to enable autonomous
systems operated and supervised by U.S. ground forces to detect hostile
forces and establish positive identification of combatants before U.S.
troops encounter them. The URSA program seeks to overcome the inherent
complexity of the urban environment by combining new knowledge about
human behaviors, autonomy algorithms, integrated sensors, multiple
sensor modalities, and measurable human responses to discriminate the
subtle differences between hostile individuals and noncombatants.
Additional details are available at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-18-48/listing.html.
Please address administrative questions to DARPA-SN-18-48@darpa.mil, and refer to the URSA Proposers Day (DARPA-SN-18-48) in all correspondence.
DARPA hosts Proposers Days to provide potential performers with
information on whether and how they might respond to the Government’s
research and development solicitations and to increase efficiency in
proposal preparation and evaluation. Therefore, the URSA Proposers Day
is open only to registered potential applicants, and not to the media or
general public.
Full URSA program details will be made available in a forthcoming
Broad Agency Announcement posted to the Federal Business Opportunities
website.
NYTimes | Most
Americans assume that democracy and free markets go hand in hand,
naturally working together to generate prosperity and freedom. For the
United States, this has largely been true. But by their very nature,
markets and democracy coexist in deep tension.
Capitalism
creates a small number of very wealthy people, while democracy
potentially empowers a poor majority resentful of that wealth. In the
wrong conditions, that tension can set in motion intensely destructive
politics. All over the world, one circumstance in particular has
invariably had this effect: the presence of a market-dominant minority — a
minority group, perceived by the rest of the population as outsiders,
who control vastly disproportionate amounts of a nation’s wealth.
Such minorities are common in the developing world. They can be ethnic groups, like the tiny Chinese minority
in Indonesia, which controls roughly 70 percent of the nation’s private
economy even though it is between 2 percent and 4 percent of the
population. Or they can be distinct in other ways, culturally or
religiously, like the Sunni minority in Iraq that controlled the
country’s vast oil wealth under Saddam Hussein.
Introducing
free-market democracy in these circumstances can be a recipe for
disaster. Resentful majorities who see themselves as a country’s
rightful owners demand to have “their” country back. Ethnonationalism
rears its head. Democracy becomes not a vehicle for e pluribus unum but a
zero-sum tribalist contest. This dynamic was also at play in the former
Yugoslavia, in Zimbabwe, in Venezuela and in virtually every country
where there has been a market-dominant minority.
For
most of our history, it seemed as though we were relatively immune to
dynamics like these. Part of the reason is we never had a
market-dominant minority. On the contrary, for 200 years, America was
economically, politically and culturally dominated by a white majority —
a politically stable, if often invidious, state of affairs.
But
today, something has changed. Race has split America’s poor, and class
has split America’s white majority. The former has been true for a
while; the latter is a more recent development, at least in the intense
form it has now reached. As a result, we may be seeing the emergence of
America’s own version of a market-dominant minority: the much-discussed
group often referred to as the coastal elites — misleadingly, because
its members are neither all coastal nor all elite, at least in the sense
of being wealthy.
But with some
important caveats, coastal elites do bear a resemblance to the
market-dominant minorities of the developing world. Wealth in the United
States is extraordinarily concentrated in the hands of a relatively
small number of people, many of whom live on the West or East Coast.
Although America’s coastal elites are not an ethnic or religious
minority, they are culturally distinct, often sharing similar
cosmopolitan values, and they are extremely insular, interacting and
intermarrying primarily among themselves.
They
dominate key sectors of the economy, including Wall Street, the media,
Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And because coastal elites are viewed by
many in the heartland as “minority-loving” and pro-immigrant, they are
seen as unconcerned with “real” Americans — indeed as threatening their
way of life.
weforum | Neuroscience has offered some evidence-based claims that can be
uncomfortable because they challenge our notions of morality or debunk
the myth about our ‘rational’ brain.
Critically, neuroscience has enlightened us about the physicality
of human emotions. Fear, an emotion we have inherited from our
ancestors, is not an abstract or intangible sense of imminent danger: it
is expressed in neurochemical terms in our amygdala, the almond-shaped
structure on the medial temporal lobe, anterior to the hippocampus.The amygdala
has been demonstrated to be critical in the acquisition, storage and
expression of conditioned fear responses. Certain regions in the
amygdala undergo plasticity – changes in response to emotional stimuli –
triggering other reactions, including endocrine responses.
Similarly, the way our brains produce moral reasoning and then
translate it in the social context can now be studied to some extent in
neuroscientific terms. For instance,the role of serotonin
in prosocial behaviour and moral judgment is now well documented, with a
demonstrably strong correlation between levels of serotonin in the
brain and moral social behaviour.
Neuroscientists have also looked at howpolitical ideologies
are represented in the brain; preliminary research indicates that an
increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex can be
correlated with inclinations towards liberalism, while increased gray
matter volume in the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system and
thus concerned with emotions) appears to be associated with conservative
values. These early findings, of course, are not meant to be
reductionist, deterministic, or politically pigeonhole one group or the
other, nor are they fixed. Rather, they can help explain the deep and
persistent divide that we see in party politics across the world. It
would very valuable to look into whether these preliminary findings
pre-date political affiliation or occur as a result of repeated exposure
to politically-inspired partisan and emotional debates.
More recently, policy analysis has turned to neuroscience too. For example, in the US2016 election cycle, some have correlated the appeal of some candidates to the so-calledhardwiring
in our brains, and to our primordial needs of group belonging, while
others have explored the insights from neuroscience on the role ofemotions in decision-making. Similarly, the attitudes surrounding “Brexit” have also been analysed with references from neuroscience.
Divisive politics – what does neuroscience tell us?
The short answer is: some useful new insights. To be sure, some
findings in neuroscience might be crude at this stage as the discipline
and its tools are evolving. The human brain – despite tremendous
scientific advances – remains to a large extent unknown. We do have,
however, some preliminary findings to draw on. Divisive politics have
taken centre stage and neuroscience may be able shed some light on how
this is expressed in our brains.
“Us” vs. “them”, cultivating fear and hatred towards
out-groups that are deemed different (ethnically, ideologically,
religiously, etc.), and vicious and virulent attacks against them, are
all part of an unsettling picture of growing ethnic and racial
hostility. Philosopher Martin Buber identified two opposed ways of being
in relation to others:I-It and I-thou. I-It means perceiving others as objects, whereas I-thou refers to empathic perceptions of others as subjects.
Cognitive neuroscientists have studied this distinction with brain
imaging techniques and the findings – unsurprisingly – tell us a lot
about our increasingly polarised world today and the ways our brains
process the distinction between us and “others”.
bigthink | We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our
families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even
identify tribally just based on where we live. Go Celtics, go Red Sox,
go U.S. Olympic team! One study asked people whether, if they had a
fatal disease, would they prefer a life-saving diagnosis from a computer
that was 1,000 miles away, or the exact same diagnosis from a computer
in their town, and a large majority preferred the same information if
the source…a machine…was local.
Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior,
readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name
of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically,
tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep
our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our
tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different
faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic
scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs. What stunning
evidence of the power of tribalism! (By the way, it wasn’t just geocentrist
Catholics in the 16 adn 1700s who denied evidence that the earth
travels around the sun. Some Christian biblical literalists still do. So
do a handful of ultra orthodox Jews and Muslims.)
Yet another example is the polarized way we argue about so many
issues, and the incredible irony that as we make these arguments we
claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close
our minds to views that conflict with ours. Dan Kahan, principal
researcher into the phenomenon of Cultural Cognition,
has found that our views are powerfully shaped so they agree with
beliefs of the groups with which we most strongly identify. His
research, along with the work of others, has also found that the more
challenged our views are, the more we defend them…the more dogmatic and
closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of ‘circle-the-wagons,
we’re under attack’ tribal unity. Talk about tribalism overruling
reason.
NYTimes | The
heartening truth is that until now, the United States has, by and
large, done a good job of insulating the economy from political
interference. Should that insulation wear down, though, we will find
ourselves in a troubling world. That’s why President Trump’s campaign
against Amazon is worthy of continuing scrutiny.
Moreover, the president’s motivation for focusing on Amazon is open to question. One plausible hypothesis is that Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, owns The Washington Post, which has unflinchingly reported on the Trump presidency.
Any
possible interference with freedom of the press endangers the economy —
and much more. An efficient economy — and a democracy — requires
uniform application of the law.
We
live in partisan times. But we all can root for the rule of law. It’s
not a particularly exciting cause, but it is in dire need of supporters.
CNN | The Council voted 8-to-1 to pass a compromise tax that will charge
businesses $275 per-employee per year, instead of the $540 per employee
figure initially proposed. The city expects the tax to raise roughly $47
million per year.
• The City of Seattle lost: It failed to
articulate a a well-thought out strategy for dealing with homelessness;
passed a watered-down bill that alienated the business community; and
only won half as much revenue as it said it needed.
• Amazon and big business lost: Amazon fought the Council with threats
and criticism rather than seizing the opportunity to take the lead on an
issue that it has demonstrated a commitment to elsewhere.
•
The homeless lost: The nearly 12,000 homeless people living in King
County are worse off because Seattle and Amazon got in a pissing match.
What went wrong: This could have been avoided, our sources say: Seattle
Mayor Jenny Durkan could have brought the City Council together with
Amazon, Starbucks and other businesses to hash out a plan that made
sense for both sides. Seattle and Amazon could have then trumpeted their
success as a model for how liberal cities and tech companies plan to
deal with the homeless epidemic they've helped to create.
strategic-culture |So: America is a dictatorship by the billionaires.
And this means that it operates by fooling the public. France is
similar, though it achieves this via a different way. And, in both
countries, deceit is essential, in order to achieve its dictatorship.
Fooling the public is now what it’s all about, in either
case. Democracy can never be won by fooling the public; because fooling
the public means removing the public’s ability to control the
government. So, calling such a nation a ‘democracy’, is, itself,
deceiving the public — it’s part of the dictatorship, or else support of
the dictatorship.
In
former times, this system was rationalized as ‘the divine right of
kings’. Now it’s rationalized as ‘the divine right of capital’. But it’s
also become covered-over by yet another lie: ‘democracy’. This is a
‘democratic’ aristocracy; it is an ‘equal opportunity’ aristocracy. In
it, each citizen has ‘equal rights’ as every other citizen, no
matter how wealthy. It’s just a castle of lies. And its doors are
actually open only to the few richest-and-well-connected.
Here, a former CIA official tries
to describe how the American dictatorship works — the enforcement-part
of the system, and he does (even if only by implication) also touch upon
the financial sources of it. Starting at 1:07:35 in that video, he
discusses his personal case: why he could no longer tolerate working for
the CIA. But his description of how he, as an Agency official, saw the
system to function, starts at 3:45 in the video. Key passages start at
12:45, and at 20:15. Maybe any American who would email this article to
friends who don’t understand how the system functions, will come under
increased US surveillance, but that CIA official’s career and family
were destroyed by what the system did to him, which was lots worse than
just surveillance. Remarkably, he nonetheless had the courage to persist
(and thus did that video). However, when one sees how politically
partisan (and so obtuse) the viewer-comments to that video are, one
might be even more depressed than by the account this former CIA
official presents. But, even if the situation is hopeless, everyone
should at least have the opportunity to understand it. Because,
if the aristocracy are the only people who understand it, there can’t
be any hope for democracy, at all.
democracynow | Look, Amy, in slaves-owning societies or in the Middle Ages, we had
production. People worked, toiled the land. Then we had distribution.
The lord would send his henchmen in, his sheriff, to take his cut. So
you had distribution—production, distribution. The lord’s cut would then
be sold in markets. He would get money out of it, and then you would
have finance. So we had production, distribution, finance.
With capitalism, we had the reversal of that. First you’d get the
debt, to set up the—you know, to employ people. So you have finance,
then distribution, and the last thing that happens is production. So,
debt is central to capitalism. Now, that means one thing: The banker,
the financier, has an exorbitant privilege. He’s like the sorcerer who
has the capacity to push his hand through the time line, snatch value
from the future, that has not been produced yet, and bring it in to the
present to help orchestrate the production that will create the value
that will be repaid in the future. But, effectively, you’re creating a
class of people, the financiers, who then have complete control over
society. And they can keep doing this a lot more, until the present can
no longer repay the future, and there is a huge crash. And then what
happens? Because they have this privileged position, they can make you
and me, President Obama, whoever, Larry Summers, bail them out. So, they
win if their bets succeed, and they win if their bets lose. What kind
of political economy is this, when you have one class of people who win,
whatever they do, and everybody else loses, whatever they do?
AMYGOODMAN: Is this what you refer to the black magic of banking?
YANISVAROUFAKIS: That’s exactly right.
AMYGOODMAN: And so, what’s the cure for this?
YANISVAROUFAKIS: Well, the cure of this is, effectively, to do that which FDR did in the 1930s.
AMYGOODMAN: President Roosevelt.
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
President Roosevelt—to put the financial genie back in the bottle. Make
banking boring again. Put huge constraints upon them. Nationalize the
banks and turn them into institutions for public purpose. And if
even—you don’t necessarily need to nationalize, as long as you really
keep them under strict control. Remember Bretton Woods, which designed
the golden era of capitalism. Bretton Woods was a conference in 1944,
and there 120 different countries agreed on the system which saw, in the
1950s and 1960s, the longest period of steady growth, with shrinking
inequality and low unemployment and low inflation. FDR
had one condition slapped onto membership of that Bretton Woods
Conference. Do you know what it was? No banker was allowed in the
Washington—the Mount Washington Hotel. So you had a monetary and
financial system that was designed in the absence of bankers. That’s
what we should do again.
AMYGOODMAN: What is apolitical money?
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
In this country, you have a lot of people, good people, who are fed up
with politicians, who are fed up with the Fed, and who believe that—they
believe in true money, in honest money, that money should be somehow
independent of the political process. Remember the gold standard? They
still hanker after the gold standard. They would like the quantity of
dollars printed to be linked to the quantity of gold that the Fed owns,
so that there would be no political influence of the quantity of money,
because they fear that—they fear the government will print too much
money, and there will be inflation, and the value of money will be
effectively eaten away—the gold bugs, as you call them in this country.
Bitcoin—Bitcoin is a digital form of the gold standard. And so, the
backlash against political control—
AMYGOODMAN: The Bitcoin folks are moving into Puerto Rico right now, has been devastated by Maria.
YANISVAROUFAKIS: Of course it’s been devastated. But the solution is not Bitcoin.
AMYGOODMAN: But they’re moving in fast.
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
Yes, but it’s—you know, it’s just a bubble. It will burst. And the
reason is, however much we loathe the political process because it is
controlled by oligarchs and by the same old financiers who are behind
the politicians who are bailing them out whenever the finance is
needed—however much we dislike that, there is no alternative to
political money. Why? Because the quantity of money must be in sync with
the quantity of output of goods and services. If those two go out of
sync, you have deflationary bouts. You have to—that will lead to
depression. So, to put it very bluntly and simply, the quantity of money
must be decided democratically. At the moment, it’s not being decided
democratically. It’s decided politically, but oligarchically. The
solution is not to take it and tie it to some algorithm.
AMYGOODMAN:
In the United States, you—in the United States, you only refer to
oligarchy when you’re talking about Russia, the oligarchs. But
billionaire businessmen in the United States, you do not refer to as
oligarchs.
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
But the United States of America is the prime oligarchy. The difference
between the United States of America and Russia is that the United
States is a more successful oligarchy. But it is an oligarchy
nevertheless.
AMYGOODMAN: Explain.
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
Well, think of 2008. President Obama is sworn in on a wave of
expectation by the victims of the financiers. And what does he do? First
thing he does is he appoints Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the very
same people who had actually unshackled the financiers in the late
1990s, allowing them to do everything that brought so much discontent to
the very same people who then entrusted President Obama. President
Obama, very soon after that, lost his credibility with those people, and
the result is Donald Trump. That’s an oligarchy.
AMYGOODMAN:
And so, why is Donald Trump so fiercely opposed to President Obama—is
it just racial?—given that he laid the groundwork for the oligarchs, for
people like Donald Trump, if, in fact, he does have money?
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
Well, the ruling class has a fantastic capacity, like the working
class, to be divided. Donald Trump was never in the pocket of Wall
Street. He used Wall Street. He used Deutsche Bank. He used all the
people he dislikes, in order to keep, effectively, bankrupting his
companies and profiting from it. So he’s really very good at that. But
he was never very successful as a businessman, certainly not as
successful as Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan. And he was always on the
margins of the capitalist order of things in the United States. He
understood that in order for him to gain more power, more—both
discursively and politically and economically, he had to ride the wave
of discontent against Obama. And he did this magnificently. And the
Democrats let him. The Democrats brought their own distress and failure
upon themselves.
AMYGOODMAN:
So I want to talk about the rise of the right, but go back to World War
II—actually, between World War I and World War II in Germany. How do
you see the growth of the support for Hitler and how he took power in
Germany, going back to World War I and the devastation of Germany?
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
The combination—the combination of a humiliated populace. The
humiliation is very important, Amy. When you humiliate a whole people in
the middle of a great depression, great economic crisis, you have a
political crisis. So the political center implodes, which is what
happened with the Weimar Republic, and then all sorts of political
monsters ride up—rise up from that. We saw this in the 1920s, the 1930s,
in the midwar period in Germany. But we saw it in—we see it in Greece
today, after—do you know we have a Nazi party in Greek Parliament—in the
country that, along with Yugoslavia, fought tooth and nail against
Nazism in the 1940s. We had a magnificent resistance movement against
Nazism. In that country now, the third-largest party is a—not a neo-Nazi
party, fully old-fashioned Nazi party.
AMYGOODMAN: And this came into the Parliament when?
YANISVAROUFAKIS:
They came into Parliament in 2012, at the time of a humiliated public
in the clasp of a great depression, just like in Germany in the 1930s.
But allow me to make a point, because there is a great
misunderstanding about Germany of the midwar period. Usually people say,
“Oh, it was hyperinflation. It was the fact that prices were rising
exponentially that brought Hitler to power.” Not true. It is true that
hyperinflation depleted the middle class, effectively destroyed the
middle class’s savings and shook the system and made the Weimar Republic
extremely fragile and ready for the taking. But if you look at the
electoral performance of the Nazi Party in Germany, there is a direct
correlation, not with inflation, but with deflation. You had Chancellor
Brüning, who in 1930 decided to slam the brakes on the economy and to
use large doses of austerity in order to make inflation go away—a bit
like Paul Volcker when he pushed interest rates up in the early '80s,
remember, to 20-something percent—and a lot more fiscal austerity, not
just monetary austerity. It was at that point when prices started
falling in Germany. Prices started falling, and unemployment ballooned.
And that is when you have a major jump in the support for Nazis.
Deflation breeds fascism. And that is something that we've got to
remember. And I’m making this point because, unfortunately, the European
Union’s economic policies today are producing deflationary forces that
are being exported to the United States and to China. And that does not
augur well for progressive international politics.
AMYGOODMAN:
So talk now about the far right in Europe and also in the United
States. But in Europe, you’re talking about Poland, you’re talking about
Hungary. You’ve got Golden Dawn, not to mention the Nazi party, in
Greece.
YANISVAROUFAKIS: Oh, that’s the Golden—the Golden Dawn is a Nazi party. That’s the Nazi party I was referring to.
tripzine | Much of the Hermetica circulated in Latin, and the word "incorporation"
appears quite notably in the lexicons and basic operations of alchemy.
Its Latin root incorporatus describes a process of embodiment or giving of material form.
A typical goal in the creation of a servitor was to substantiate the
proxy mechanism until the form itself became embodied and
self-perpetuating, albeit under the control of the alchemist. One finds
this goal reflected in a motto of Hermeticism: solve et coagula.
This denotes an alchemist reaching into the ephemeral and numinous
"above", then transmuting part of that essence into a substantiated form
in the mundane world "below".
The synthesis here concerns how Elizabethans architected plans for building commerce based on international trade and colonization, i.e. through a globalization process...
Elizabethans employed what they understood to be the rhyme and reason of
the world. They went out and created a form suitable to achieve their
goal. Translating back through the centuries, our modern legal process
of incorporation literally refers to the creation of a "legal person" as
a fiction, serving as a proxy mechanism for its owners. Arguably, this
form is created much like a servitor, applying the formula solve et coagula, giving material form to an essence. The sigil corresponds to logo and trademark, and the charter symbolizes daemonic essence.
There you have an outline for a qualitative model, submitted for your
approval. [Description follows of a quantitative model, based on a
"proxy mechanism" that applies attention economic theory in the four domains listed above — edited out for space.]
Political Evolution
Let's review the evolution of political system, vis-a-vis corporate
governance. Elizabethan England made a bold proclamation in the name of
humanism. They effectively said: "Fucke Spain & thee Catholycks. Yn
the cominge yeres of Newe World Order, rules of the game changeth and
none of their bloodie golde shall matter not one wit." The English
reckoned that if Church and cojones were removed from the political
equation, the Crown and its people could prosper. They invented
corporations to implement that plan and serve the Crown. That worked
remarkably well.
Americans came along and objected to corporations, wishing to empower
individual sovereignty based on property rights. They reckoned that if
the Crown were removed from the political equation, then representation
of individuals could reign over corporations instead. Their experiment
died within a few decades, and arguably the United States became the
first flag of convenience.
Socialists noted problems due to corporations in both England and the
US. They reckoned that if individual property rights were removed from
the political equation, societies could reign over corporations instead.
They attempted to organize politics to mimic the corporate structure
itself, which has so far proven to be problematic.
Where do we stand now?
Humanists of all varieties have struggled to control corporations for
the better part of four centuries. They failed. They lacked a
fundamental understanding of the problem. Game over. Direct confrontation of the corporate form does not work, because such efforts inevitably become sublated.
To confront a corporation with any significant force, one must stop
thinking like a speciesist. Following the psychological imperative from
the study of autopoiesis and dissipative structures, one must
contextualize the problem first. To contest a firm such as Nike or
Monsanto, one must recognize that they are merely instances of a
particular form. To fight the WTO, one must recognize that it is merely a
temporary mechanism of that same form. To fight a particular action by a
particular corporation, one must recognize that action as a
well-defined reflex of the corporate form.
So, I present a media-theoretic model: the qualitative and quantitative
anatomy of a transnational. Perhaps it may become useful for developing
strategies and forecasts to gain advantages over corporations. I have
several ways to apply this theory, but that's a topic for another
article altogther...
NewYorker | Several distinct
cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate
women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had
in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation.
The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond
what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave
women certainty and company in these convictions. And the
Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people
to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and
restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can
and should choose who they want to have sex with.
In the past few
years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have
constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young,
beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy.
They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially
inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also
diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of
females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a
fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads.
The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with
women does not appear to have occurred to them.
The incel ideology
has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot
Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured
fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me
of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and
injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on
Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also
include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and
left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own
virginity.
The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined
by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really
looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex,
defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred
sort of proof.
If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for
instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels,
being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of
“whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire;
they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of
fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to
improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that
women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible
affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed
through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more
respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of
chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage
intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts
but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate
scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the
highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and
feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our
suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones
who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on
our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”
CounterPunch | Without an understanding of the particularity of American fascism, we
will, following Trotsky, be compelled to flippantly answer “yes” to
both of these questions. But now that it is clear that Trump is not the
apocalypse as we were told by so many liberals and leftists leading up
to and following his election, such an answer would leave us politically
incapacitated. If we want to begin to understand fascism in America, we
must turn to Black Panther Party Field Marshal George Jackson’s
analysis of fascism in his 1971 book, Blood in My Eye.
As opposed to Trotsky’s one-dimensional “butcher” view of fascism,
Jackson proposes that fascism has three faces: “out of power,” “in power
but not secure,” and “in power and securely so.” The fascism that
Trotsky describes is a depiction of the second face, which is “the
sensational aspect of fascism we see on screen and in pulp novels.”
However, in America, fascism shows its third face, during which “some
dissent may even be allowed.” Jackson explains American fascism in this
way:
Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and
efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders
allow us the luxury of faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and
they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night
and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.
Never has a better diagnosis of the conditions which allow antifa and
the anti-Trump movement to have “the luxury of faint protest” been
given. To draw a parallel with Jackson’s own European example, just as
Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce was permitted to publish an
anti-fascist manifesto in 1925, three years after the fascist march on
Rome, American antifa intellectuals with groups like the Campus Anti-Fascist Networkare
free to remain aboveground in the nation’s most elite colleges and
universities and condemn fascism openly without fear of repression from
the state.
What’s more, they are even allowed to openly express hatred
for other white people with little more than an eyebrow raised from
conservatives and intermittent pats on the back from liberals.
In direct contrast to the line of Refuse Fascism and other
anti-fascist organizations active in the United States, Jackson’s
analysis shows that fascism hardly started with the Trump
administration. Many have failed to notice this reality since fascism
has most frequently deployed its third, not second, face against the
left in recent decades. However, while fascism is in power and securely
so for the time being, Trump has produced contradictions in its
efficiency and disguise by challenging the liberal ruling class with appeals to industrial capitalists and workers, tariffs that drove his own economic adviser to quit, and challenges to the Pentagon’s increasingly hawkish attitude toward Russia.
The left’s failure to understand fascism in general and the
multiplying and intensifying contradictions of the Trump era in
particular is largely traceable to its underdeveloped understanding of
whiteness. While black America has been subjected to mass incarceration,
police terror, relentless gentrification, and disproportionate deaths
on the front lines of America’s imperialist wars for decades, many white
leftists have determined that it is not these historical experiences of
fascism in America, but the recent rise of Trump, that is most
deserving of outrage and resistance.
This failure to understand fascism in relation to the color line
takes its most egregious form in organizations like the Campus
Antifascist Network, who attack right-wing “fascism,” yet say nothing of
the liberal university’s mass participation in research for war-making,
policing of poor and working class black neighborhoods, and central
role in the viscous gentrification of America’s blackest cities. This
analysis has the effect of obscuring rather than clarifying the
contradictions we face today. The contradiction between Trump and large
segments of the ruling class illustrates a political climate that C.L.R.
James described in The Black Jacobins in reference to the Haitian Revolution:
The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt
form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the
situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling
classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do
not fear the mass seizure of power.
The question is, then, how can we understand and use the mushrooming
and intensifying social contradictions of the Trump era not to side with
the liberal wing of the ruling class against the conservative one, but
to seize power from the ruling class as a whole? Fist tap Brother Makheru
theatlantic | The defining challenge of our time is to renew the promise of
American democracy by reversing the calcifying effects of accelerating
inequality. As long as inequality rules, reason will be absent from our
politics; without reason, none of our other issues can be solved. It’s a
world-historical problem. But the solutions that have been put forward
so far are, for the most part, shoebox in size.
Well-meaning
meritocrats have proposed new and better tests for admitting people into
their jewel-encrusted classrooms. Fine—but we aren’t going to beat back
the Gatsby Curve by tweaking the formulas for excluding people from
fancy universities. Policy wonks have taken aim at the more-egregious
tax-code handouts, such as the mortgage-interest deduction and
college-savings plans. Good—and then what? Conservatives continue to
recycle the characterological solutions, like celebrating traditional
marriage or bringing back that old-time religion. Sure—reforging
familial and community bonds is a worthy goal. But talking up those
virtues won’t save any families from the withering pressures of a rigged
economy. Meanwhile, coffee-shop radicals say they want a revolution.
They don’t seem to appreciate that the only simple solutions are the
incredibly violent and destructive ones.
The American idea has always been a guide star, not a policy program,
much less a reality. The rights of human beings never have been and
never could be permanently established in a handful of phrases or old
declarations. They are always rushing to catch up to the world that we
inhabit. In our world, now, we need to understand that access to the
means of sustaining good health, the opportunity to learn from the
wisdom accumulated in our culture, and the expectation that one may do
so in a decent home and neighborhood are not privileges to be reserved
for the few who have learned to game the system. They are rights that
follow from the same source as those that an earlier generation called
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yes, the kind of change that really matters is going to require
action from the federal government. That which creates monopoly power
can also destroy it; that which allows money into politics can also take
it out; that which has transferred power from labor to capital can
transfer it back. Change also needs to happen at the state and local
levels. How else are we going to open up our neighborhoods and restore
the public character of education?
It’s going to take something
from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be
the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our
eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can
do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors. We
should be fighting for opportunities for other people’s children as if
the future of our own children depended on it. It probably does. Fist tap Dorcas Dad.
How much did the 14th Amendment actually get used to benefit African Americans?
Writing fifty years later in 1938, US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black echoed Lincoln's eleventh-hour realization: "...of the cases in this Court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than fifty per cent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations... "
The notion that corporations self-organize, self-reproduce, self-maintain, self-perpetuate, etc., should not be a huge conceptual hurdle. Consequently, theory about the phenomenological description of an organism based on ideas about linguistic domain — well, that's a mouthful, but it comes in handy for analyzing the corporate form.
On a related track, a former UCLA professor and noted economic theorist named Kenichi Ohmae specializes in the analysis of emerging globalism. He also predicted (some say "encouraged") at least two recent world financial market crashes. Dr Ohmae has proposed a theory about how corporations operate. Namely, to participate in the global economy circa 2000, a transnational must operate simultaneously in four "dimensions". Dr Ohmae articulates these as the visible dimension, the borderless dimension, the cyber dimension, and the dimension of multiples. These translate, respectively, to the arena of "bricks and mortar" business and social contract, the global markets enjoyed by transnationals, the area of computers and media, and the arbitrage of financial instruments (e.g., currencies, stocks, pensions, etc.) in general.
I propose reframing Ohmae's four "dimensions", stated in terms of linguistic domain along the lines of how I just described where a corporation "lives". In that sense, we find a basis of four domains: social contract, law, media, and arbitrage. We may also borrow a fine set of modeling tools from biology for describing the phenomena of corporate form. Recalling the historical opinion stated earlier, the representation of sublation as a corporate belief structure, and the observed rate of sublation as a reflex mechanism, it is no stretch to talk about corporations in terms of phenomenology and metabolism. Armed with 21st century tools, one can trace the autopoiesis of corporate metabolism quite readily. In particular, they behave in some ways (organization) like sponges, in other ways (reproduction) like bacteria, and in other ways (adaptation) like slime molds.
Again, if you use that notion, cite me. This represents original work here, folks, slime molds and all, unveiled in print for the first time. Paco Xander Nathan - Corporate Metabolism
tripzine | Thank you for having me here. You are most kind. The title may seem odd,
but I assure you that I have spent quality time studying corporations, up close and personal.
For that matter, as a computer scientist, we are trained to analyze
dynamic systems based on linguistic artifices; corporate activity most
certainly satisfies that description.
An interesting notion which traces back to the writings of Hobbes and
Marx is to understand corporations better by analyzing their general
form as a kind of organism living in media. I would like to present a
qualitative and quantitative study that traces the development of
corporate form all the way from alchemy to autopoiesis. Admittedly, some
of my remarks and focus may seem well outside the mainstream, so please
keep in mind two caveats: I do not recognize that any kind of omnipotence
exists; and I do not wish to promote or engage in any manner of
"conspiracy theory" thinking. The point here is to examine the general
form — a "platonic ideal", if you will — of transnational corporations
as a formulaic approach for perpetuating power. I have no interest in
assessing the attributes of any particular company, executive, etc.
Keep in mind a third caveat: in terms of "power" and "metabolism", I
tend to characterize corporations much like spoiled brats: immature,
self-destructive, dependent, difficult to understand, annoying, and
fragile. Even so, most attempts at tending after these brats — whether
from a Supreme Court bench, a NY Times op-ed, or an anti-WTO protest rally — demonstrate remarkably little depth about how they develop. Let's change that, eh?
First off, as we get into this, I would like you all to track four essential words: (1) colony, (2) attention, (3) sublation, and (4) demon.
Thank you.
Question #1: What would you call beings which (a) don't have physical bodies, (b) seem relatively crafty, and (c) appear to be immortal?
A tulpa, a djinn, or a familiar? Ghosts? Spirits? Gods? Demons? How about corporations?
Question #2: When was the first corporation established?
Granted a charter by Queen Elizabeth I of England on 31 Dec 01600, the
East India Company seems to have been the first corporation. Its origins
arose out of an Elizabethan shopping mall for international trade
called the Royal Exchange of London. After the fall of Iberian sea
power, the Dutch had scrambled to monopolize former Portuguese trade
with the East, so the English sought to beat the Dutch at colonizing the East Indies.
Question #3: Can anyone here define the essence of a corporation in ten words or less?
Here's my shot at it, in seven words actually: "Externalize risk and perpetuate wealth for shareholders." For the purposes of this discussion, we'll focus on transnationals,
mostly firms attempting to become monopolies, generally following the
Anglo-American model — not the "ma & pa" liquor store on the corner
that has a "Chapter S" corporate charter.
Now, I need a fifth volunteer to write down what I just said, and be
ready to repeat it aloud a few times: "Externalize risk and perpetuate
wealth for shareholders." Sure, the proper legal definition of a
corporation is more about having a chartered company that combines the
principle of joint-stock along with something called limited liability. However, those seven dirty words are just fine for describing the essence and purpose of a corporation.
RightWingWatch | As Jared reported earlier today, Jerome Corsi, the Washington bureau chief for Alex Jones’ Infowars, who has spent hours online every day for the last several
months “decoding” the cryptic message-board posts made by an anonymous
figure known as “QAnon,” has declared that “Q” has been “compromised”
and that his postings can no longer be trusted.
Many fringe right-wing activists believe that QAnon was a high-level
Trump administration official who has been leaking secret intelligence
information to them via the anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan and
Corsi was among the most vocal proponents of the theory, having once
even claimed that President Trump himself had directly ordered QAnon to release information.
Recently, Corsi began to sour on QAnon and today he joined Jones on his radio program
where Jones claimed that he had personally spoken with QAnon and had
been told that the account had been compromised and should no longer be
trusted.
“I was on the phone this morning talking to some folks who were out
playing golf with people that have been involved in QAnon, they say,
‘Hey, that’s been taken over, we’re unable to even post anymore, that’s
not us anymore,'” Jones said. “I’ve talked to QAnon. There is only about
five or six that have actually be posting. I’ve talked to QAnon and
they are saying QAnon is no longer QAnon.”
“Stick a fork in the avatar of QAnon,” Jones declared. “It is now an overrun disinformation fount.”
exopolitics | According to veteran investigative reporter and best selling author,
Dr. Jerome Corsi, he was approached three years ago by a group of
generals and told that Donald Trump had been recruited by U.S. military
intelligence to run in the 2016 Presidential elections, and subsequently
help remove corrupt Deep State officials from positions of power. Corsi
claims that QAnon represents the same group of senior military
intelligence officials who are exposing the Deep State corruption and
officials involved in a history of treasonous actions against the U.S.
Republic.
This is what Corsi said at a meeting on April 11, which also featured the founder of InfoWars.com, Alex Jones:
About
three years ago a group of Generals came to me, and it was explained to
me that they were ready to conduct a coup d’etat. They were ready to
move Barack Obama from office with military force. And then a few weeks
later I got another call and said they were reconsidering.
You
know why they were reconsidering? [audience calls out answers] Because
they talked to Donald Trump, and Trump had agreed he would run, and they
agreed that if he would run, they would conduct their coup d’etat as a
legitimate process, rooting out the traitors within government. And
that pact between the military and Donald Trump has held, as we have
been interpreting and watching, and Alex has been following QAnon.
QAnon
is military intelligence and close to Trump, and the intelligence we’ve
getting, that we’ve explained on Infowars, really is a lot of the
inside script.
While Corsi
didn’t name the generals or provide hard evidence for his startling
claim, an examination of public comments by President Trump, QAnon and
related political events do make Corsi’s extraordinary claim very
plausible.
It’s
important to note that Corsi’s speech happened only a day after a tweet
by President Trump featuring him with 20 senior U.S. military officials
who dined with him the previous night:
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