Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:
"Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism "
-
Instead of governments taking on debt to stimulate the economy, individuals and families did so, including some rather poor ones.
Crouch argues that this explains why workers in the Anglo-American world were willing to maintain consumer confidence when their equivalents in many continental European countries were highly unwilling to spend. Rising house prices allowed the former to borrow money. At first this was accidental – it soon became a necessary condition for governments to do what they wanted to do. In a key paragraph, he argues:
The dependence of the democratic capitalist system on rising wages, a welfare state and government demand management that had seemed essential for mass consumer confidence has been withering away. The bases of prosperity shifted from the social democratic formula of working classes supported by government intervention to the neoliberal conservative one of banks, stock exchanges and financial markets. Ordinary people played their part, not as workers seeking to improve their situation through trade unions, legislation protecting employment rights and publicly funded social insurance schemes, but as debt-holders, participants in credit markets. This fundamental political shift was more profound than anything that could be produced by alternations between nominally social democratic and neoliberal conservative parties in government as the result of elections. It has imparted a fundamental rightward shift to the whole political spectrum, as the collective and individual interests of everyone are tied to the financial markets, which in their own operations act highly unequally, producing extreme concentrations of wealth.
More succinctly financial “irresponsibility became a collective good,” albeit a perverse one – no-one wanted the party to stop or the bezzle to be revealed.
"So if Wal-Mart is a life-form, it is an unclassifiable one, at least in ordinary terrestrial terms. It eats, devouring acre after acre and town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names -- Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the U.K. -- to trick the unwary. Yet in its defense in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart suit, Wal-Mart claims to have no idea what it's doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or perhaps a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that's for sure is, should the Supreme Court decide in favor of Wal-Mart, we'll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized "persons" who insist that they can't control their own actions."
it's a whole lot easier to document the projection involved. That's because the dynamic of wealthy special interests supporting street thuggery against "the left" is exactly how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power.
-
The corporate role in orchestrating this thuggery is not just an allegation, or an observation. It's been confirmed by the perpetrators themselves, as Greg Sargent reports:
, but people of all social classes making choices that go against their better judgment because they believe it’s really the only sensible way to act under the circumstances. It’s as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self- interested, short- term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society. The more decisions we make in
this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that—all things being equal—we’d prefer not to make.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in corporat...
-
The System
Items: 2 | Visits: 2
Created by: Robert Vouter
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo