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"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."
"This time when we go down it will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth."
"The real jaw dropper is this person’s proposals about the benefits of big business: Big business creates products, jobs, and wealth. How can anyone who has watched the last fifty plus years of deregulation believe this? What fantasy world are they living in? Under deregulation we’ve seen the massive disappearance of jobs as they’re shipped elsewhere where production is far cheaper (meaning that it is of little help to either the people who take over those jobs nor, obviously, to those that lose them). In the United States we have seen massive wage stagnation for decades. We have also seen a significant growth in unemployment. We have also seen a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Finally, we have witnessed recurrent unstable markets that endlessly go through boom and bust cycles. All of these phenomena are a direct consequence of “pro-business” policies premised on the idea of trickle down economics where it is assumed that deregulation, lower taxes, etc., will produce jobs and wealth for all. The exact opposite is true."
"But mostly what happens, what the Republicans expect to happen because they work to make it happen, is that people either don’t allow themselves to think about it or they scapegoat.
They don’t have to think about their kids, don’t have to worry about them. Their kids are going to be fine. Their kids and grandkids are going to be among the winners. It’s their kids who’ll suffer. Them. Those others. The losers."
Now, I don't think Americans will take to the streets to oust their government. The challenge of the democratic, developed world is a quieter rebellion: against a bankruptcy not just of the pocketbook, but of meaning. It's not to take a stand against a dictator, but to take a stand against an unenlightened, nihilistic, hyperconsumerist, soul-suckingly unfulfilling, lethally short-termist ethos that inflicts real and relentless damage on people, society, the natural world, and future generations.
Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
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Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
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Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
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But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke.
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A short history of why we eat oil, can't smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need
Taibbi gives a good rant on the subsidies that boosted Goldman Sachs profits to record levels.
"On those two dubious adjectives “rational” and “efficient” an enormous theoretical superstructure of models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations was built. And without this intellectual framework, the bankers and politicians would never have built the towers of bad debt and bad policy that have come crashing down."
in list: Economic Crisis
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Because that’s what this is. We—small businesses, startups, independents—taken as a whole we’re more than all the large-scale corporations combined. Maybe not in revenue, but that’s a hedge until I see the numbers. But in terms of work and knowledge and agility, we win.
Don’t care what those people in the big Old world think. That’s not a slangy lyric missing its pronoun, it’s a fucking imperative. Stop caring about what those people think. Stop golfing. Stop going to dawn breakfasts to rub shoulders with people who just got lucky and think being rich is proof of their acumen. Stop going to seminars. Stop asking.
Better you ask 100 random people for help—at the same time they’re asking you—than ask one Professional for Expensive Advice.
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