Brilliantly illustrated analysis of why Capatilism screws us.

[blutto]

Stimulating Thread!! A+!!

...agreed!...

...and what is really interesting here is how this thread has rearranged some of the camps that usually engage each other on these pages...heck I've even found common ground with TFF..so I have to officially drop the aka SFB and see TFF as a work in progress and not an insufferable doctrinaire troglodyte...wonders never cease...and who knows if we behave we may even be exchanging Christmas cards...

...and here is a bit of info for those who may want to expand their understanding of the battlefield that this economic war is being waged on...there is a book, The World of Goods, by Mary Douglas...in it, Ms. Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, takes issue with the theoretical musings of one, Milton Friedman, who is one of the major pillars of this new world order that is screwing us all so mightily...long story short, the wise lady takes a sledgehammer to Friedman, and pummels him into a pile of rubble...

...a great read if just a wee bit on the dry academic side...

...and thank you so much Mr. Webster, for throwing this log on the fire...its burning clean and bright...chapeau...

Cheers

blutto

 

[CycloErgoSum]

Enron produced energy at a profit for many years. Those that ran Enron into the ground are at fault for it's demise, not Capitalism.

Profit at all costs is not the basis of most corporations.

"Government should cater their policies to people first and not corporations..."
Who is it that supports government? Where does the means to cater to the people come from? A magical source? It comes from the labor of others. The question then becomes, "what is the correct ratio?" We can't provide the basics at a zero tax rate and 100% tax rate is a bit too high in my opinion.

Are governments able to be corrupt in your view? You point at Enron as if it'd the boogey man. I don't know where you are from but in th USA there is corruption at every level of government and it runs basically unabated.

Clean up government and that will amount to be a giant step in the right direction.

You deserve credit here: Enron doesn't equal capitalism, but corruption. By the same token we can say as much about the Soviet Union not equaling communism, either. Actually, the economies of Soviet Russia, China and Cuba et al can be more accurately described as 'State Capitalism', consisting of planned economies of nationalised corporations (along with a not insignificant dollop of corruption).

You and others are also right to claim that one of the principles of classical capitalist economics is the imperfectibility of man. He certainly is capable of corruption, but not in every case. The other premise usually trotted out by free-marketeers that man is perfectly rational in his pursuit of self-interest is, however, complete rubbish. The simple examples of altruism and akrasia falsify the latter premise.

However, your earlier argument that 'man has limitations' and your invocation to 'clean up government' appear to be contradictions. Doesn't the former render the latter impossible?

Ideologies are rarely descriptive of human nature - a concept not easily defined itself. For example, some consider human nature to be consistent with man's earliest state. Others, such as Aristotle, consider human nature to be realised only at the end-point of human development. On this reckoning, human nature is still evolving. Classical Marxism also applies a similar caveat: communist societies must evolve along with human nature; they cannot be forced into existence.

Let's brush the rhetoric, name-calling and side-taking away. We need a system that allows us to express both human creativity, initiative and invention along with the nobler instincts of goodwill, compassion and honesty. We need both the freedom to better ourselves and freedom from fear and poverty. This is only impossible if we say it is.

I cannot offer the details of a better system than our present one, although I'm led to believe Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz can. I'm going to check him out.

 

[CycloErgoSum]

I am stuck at home reading negligence torts.

I just heard a frightening figure. Since 1980 the top 5% of the wealthy have earned 40 Trillion dollars. That is more wealth than had been created in the world prior to 1980.

This "tax is evil" sh!t is the most irresponsible mantra in our country. I hear a lot of conservatives talk about passing debt to our kids. Exactly what is it they have done to reduce the debt or raise revenue? (and don't tell me that reducing taxes will raise revenue. It is a damn lie.)

Yes, macroecomonic textbooks say the same thing: during booms govts need to tax and run budget surplusses and do the opposite during downturns, reduce tax, run deficits and spend on public works to drive the economy.

The Tea Party rhetoric along with the Cameron/Clegg alliance in Britain risk disaster by inverting this. They think corporations will lead economies out of recession by reducing their taxes and therefore hiring. That's rather optimistic, if not outrightly stupid. Modern Western economies are consumption-based, so making sure people have jobs and money to spend is the only way out of recession. The point of Govt is public policy: shielding the public from harsh economic realities. Private corporations have no such public policies and therefore cannot be relied upon.

 

[CycloErgoSum]

I've arrived late to the party as usual. Everyone one else has hooked up and gone home.

 

[Ferminal]

The Tea Party rhetoric along with the Cameron/Clegg alliance in Britain risk disaster by inverting this. They think corporations will lead economies out of recession by reducing their taxes and therefore hiring. That's rather optimistic, if not outrightly stupid. Modern Western economies are consumption-based, so making sure people have jobs and money to spend is the only way out of recession. The point of Govt is public policy: shielding the public from harsh economic realities. Private corporations have no such public policies and therefore cannot be relied upon.

Hey, I'm here!

Indeed, it's amazing how we're only two years after government spending around the world saved us from a bigger global disaster, yet fiscal conservatism is now winning in politics (despite most of the OECD still having unacceptable levels of growth/employment).

I would be worried if I were in the UK.

 

[CycloErgoSum]

Hey, I'm here!

Indeed, it's amazing how we're only two years after government spending around the world saved us from a bigger global disaster, yet fiscal conservatism is now winning in politics (despite most of the OECD still having unacceptable levels of growth/employment).

I would be worried if I were in the UK.

Alright! Maybe I'll get my freak on after all.

Yeah, it might be a natural response to the gorging that took place leading up to the GFC. It's funny (but also kind of predictable) that the the ordinary citizen is the one doing penance for the largesse of the bankers (who keep on keeping on).

The UK has a failsafe: blame the immigrants. Works every time.

Edit: Maybe it's not capitalism that needs re-thinking but democracy. I have serious misgivings it works very well, especially with a non-engaged and mostly ignorant populace.

 

[titan_90]

 

[buckwheat]

Money Hoarders

This town's full of money grabbers
Go ahead
Bite the Big Apple
Don't mind the maggots

Shattered

What exactly did those jolly good folks at Enron produce? The fact that the downfall of Enron crushed, destroyed, annihilated the pensions of PGE workers actually did take the labor of another, quite a few actually, so your view of capitalism as having its hands clean when it comes to pillaging from the work of others may not be entirely valid.

Ever watch the documentary 'The Corporation'? A major aspect of the doc is to assess the actions of a corporation and to see where those actions would fall in the DSM-IV, which is the diagnostic manual used to treat mental disorders. The documentary found that 'the profit at all costs' ethos of corporations, such as Enron for example, have a tendency to act like psychopaths. Yes, that's right, psychopaths.

This isn't to say that I think socialism is the answer, but rather that democracy or how it should be qualified is not really self-evident. Qualifying it strictly in terms of being the best social framework for Capitalism to thrive is a bit misguided in my view. Governments should cater their policies to people first and not to corporations and one doesn't have to be sacrificed at the hands of the other.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=a_general_theory_of_keynes



Keynes instead foresaw a time when "the love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -- will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

Keynes was just as unambiguous about the role we could expect of conservatives in helping reach such a world: "Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard; it is not even safe, or calculated to preserve from spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained."

 

[buckwheat]

...oooh...this is getting very scary...you are actually saying things that I agree with...or is this a dream?...

...Happy Halloween...what are you going out as?...me I'm going out as one the Szczmengi Brothers...

Cheers

blutto

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/


Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

 

[buckwheat]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_recipe_for_fascism_20101108/

A Recipe for Fascism

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

 

[Anonymous]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/


Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

Wow. Hedges sounds more angry than normal.

That's a tough way to go through life.

I can see Chris now standing on a stage screaming to fellow Socialists in the crowd ..." IT'S TIME TO DISMANTLE THE CORPORATE STATE!!!"

I'd prolly pay to see that.

I just looked at his new column today. This is an absolute gem.."All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace."

Really? He was probably driving his Benz to the office when that thought came to him.

This is a good one too... "It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits."

Hmmmmm, how to be competitive in a world marketplace with $70/hour laborers? That really is the question isn't it?

I wonder how much of his wealth he gives to his gardener? Probably none.

Look up Fraud in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of this D-bag.

 

[rhubroma]

What exactly did those jolly good folks at Enron produce? The fact that the downfall of Enron crushed, destroyed, annihilated the pensions of PGE workers actually did take the labor of another, quite a few actually, so your view of capitalism as having its hands clean when it comes to pillaging from the work of others may not be entirely valid.

Ever watch the documentary 'The Corporation'? A major aspect of the doc is to assess the actions of a corporation and to see where those actions would fall in the DSM-IV, which is the diagnostic manual used to treat mental disorders. The documentary found that 'the profit at all costs' ethos of corporations, such as Enron for example, have a tendency to act like psychopaths. Yes, that's right, psychopaths.

This isn't to say that I think socialism is the answer, but rather that democracy or how it should be qualified is not really self-evident. Qualifying it strictly in terms of being the best social framework for Capitalism to thrive is a bit misguided in my view. Governments should cater their policies to people first and not to corporations and one doesn't have to be sacrificed at the hands of the other.

This in the aftermath of the November 7, 2010, 93th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Grover Furr, one of the most blacklisted profs in the US (who is a medievalist!) had this to say about the event:

Dear Fellow Marxists,

We should all celebrate it. Today the working class seized state
power, and kept it -- for decades.

Here is a link to the New York Times' article about the Bolshevik
seizure of power of November 7, 1917:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1107.html

The Bolsheviks set up again the Communist International, or Comintern.
The Comintern became the greatest force for liberation in the history
of the world. It led the fight for freedom from imperialism and
colonialism all over the world. Where it did not lead this fight, it
inspired and aided those who did.

Workers and employees throughout the world got social welfare benefits
because their own struggles were inspired by the successes of the
Bolsheviks in taking and holding state power, and also because
capitalists around the world yielded reforms to try to keep workers
from leading revolutions and overthrowing the profit system
altogether!

The Comintern led the world in fighting racism and sexism. It inspired
the greatest works of 20th century art. It opposed religious
obscurantism...The Communist movement led the fight against fascism everywhere.
Fascism -- the ideology of capitalism in crisis -- killed tens or
hundreds of millions, but in the last analysis was no match for the
communist movement.

For tens of millions of working people, intellectuals, students, and
others, the title "communist" became the proudest badge of honor.

No movement in world history is so rich with lessons, both positive
and negative, for the working people of the world to study and learn
from, in order to do it better next time.

The Comintern and world communist movement ultimately turned into
their opposites. They reverted to capitalism. This happened because of
internal weaknesses, contradictions, and errors.

It also happened because the Bolsheviks were the first! Many of the
mistakes they made, they made because they were "blazing the trial",
trying to build communism when it had never been done before. Major
errors were inevitable. We can, must, and will learn from them.

The Bolsheviks did the main thing RIGHT! They dared to seize power
from the capitalists, and dared to fight hard and successfully to hold
onto it.

We are, and should be, inspired by them. We "stand on the shoulders of
giants", the Bolsheviks, who led the first successful working-class
communist resolution 93 years ago today.

Sincerely,

Grover Furr

I find the current neoliberal form of financial capitalism horrible
and iniquitous (With Enron and Wall Street being simply among the most visible cases of what's wrong). The inhumane concentration of wealth it breeds, along with the exploitation of labor overseas, the anti-social culture at its basis, its hyper-materialism and unchecked and egotistical individualism, which has been the driving force behind the totally chaotic form of globalization we have in the world today, is something which needs to be totally rethought. The neoliberal and subsequent neocon forms of the State have had their origins in Reganomics and the Thatcherist idea of a Western Democracy, which, with the fall of the Soviet Union, had nothing to prevent them from obtaining total global hegemony. It, the "Anglo-Saxon" problem, furthermore has certainly been one of the decisive causes of the decline of continental Europe's social democratic States, the so called Third Way with its emphasis on solidarity, which has seemed preferable to me; because it accounted for social needs (health care, education and pensions), while accommodating individual desires and self-realization.

The great problem, as I have seen it, with the way communism had been established during the 20th century (under Lenin, Stalin etc and, subsequently, Mao) - and here the "many of the mistakes they made" mentioned by Prof. Furr - was that it was founded upon repressive regimes, which is something to which I could never aspire even if the alternative has been the disaster we live with today. And I doubt that pure communism could have been realized otherwise, not because I challenge in any way its philosophy (which is simply the most noble ideology): but because in the spirit of Heraclites, who taught that everything is in a state of constant flux, and in that of Marcus Aurelius, who was skeptical of the long term good intentions of men, I can only see that such noble philosophy is quite beyond us. We have simply never been up to its worthy intentions, precisely because we lack the worthiness in us. The struggle must continue, though it mustn't ever wind up in a regime State of any form. I don't have the solutions (and I'm well aware that what we have is a capitalist regime disguised, or rather given "legitimacy," because under the aegis of so called democracy and so called freedom). I find, however, that if there is a solution to the grave problems the world faces today, then it must be approached by rejecting any form of totalitarianism. But, again, I don't presently know where that might be found.

 

[rhubroma]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/


Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

Great post!

What we have today is pure Philistinism among the majority classes (and the so called liberal direction) that aspires to nothing other than the pursuit of its own base material ends and makes a convenient tool of the popular anti-socialist propaganda of the neoliberal capitalist democracy to claim the high moral ground.

For those who may not know: Philistinism was a derogatory term used in the XIX and early XX centuries to describe a particular attitude or set of values. A person called a Philistine (in the relevant sense) is said to despise or undervalue art, beauty, intellectual content, or spiritual values. Philistines are thus materialistic, to favor conventional social values unthinkingly, and to favor forms of art that have a cheap and easy appeal.

Goethe had several comments on the type. "The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own", and "What is a philistine? A hollow gut, full of fear and hope that God will have mercy!"

Philistinism affords a contrast to Bohemianism, as the character of a smugly conventional bourgeois social group perceived to lack all the desirably soulful 'bohemian' characteristics, especially an artistic temperament and a broad cultural horizon open to the avant-garde. To the chosen few, the 'Philistines' embodied a smug, anti-intellectual threatening majority, in the 'culture wars' of the 19th century. And that's what is lacking in today's society a Bohemian spirit. Thirty years of base materialism and Western government and corporate propaganda have drugged the masses into utter compliance to the Master's of the Universe. Here's an excerpt from Vladimir Lenin's State and Revolution (1917). You may have already read this, but if you haven't, you may find it interesting:

Russian philistines are inclined to utter a few phrases borrowed from Spencer of Mikhailovsky, to refer to the growing complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so on....

The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of state power is raised here. The main point indicated is: what is it that places them above society? We shall see how this theoretical question was answered in practice by the Paris Commune in 1871 and how it was obscured from a reactionary standpoint by kautsky in 1912.
"Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class...." The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both...." Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.
Such, we may add, is the Kerensky government in republican Russia since it began to persecute the revolutionary proletariat, at a moment when, owing to the leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats, the Soviets have already become impotent, while the bourgeoisie are not yet strong enough simply to disperse them.

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, "wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the "direct corruption of officials" (America); secondly, by means of an "alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America).
At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have "developed" into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions.

90 years later, and nothing's changed.

 

[buckwheat]

Wow. Hedges sounds more angry than normal.

That's a tough way to go through life.

I can see Chris now standing on a stage screaming to fellow Socialists in the crowd ..." IT'S TIME TO DISMANTLE THE CORPORATE STATE!!!"

I'd prolly pay to see that.

I just looked at his new column today. This is an absolute gem.."All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace."

Really? He was probably driving his Benz to the office when that thought came to him.
This is a good one too... "It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits."

Hmmmmm, how to be competitive in a world marketplace with $70/hour laborers? That really is the question isn't it?

I wonder how much of his wealth he gives to his gardener? Probably none.

Look up Fraud in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of this D-bag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

Where do you come up with this stuff?

Hedges, an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, was also an early and vocal critic of the Iraq War. He questioned the rationale for war by the Bush administration and was critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading". In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying:[citation needed]

"We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security."Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, although some applauded. Hedges' microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try to prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal denounced Hedges for his anti-war stance on May 24. His employer, The New York Times, criticized his statements and issued him a written reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." Hedges, refusing to accept these restrictions, left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

Hedges has stated that he is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo, designed to stop campaigns of genocide. He nevertheless describes war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind."



Listen to Physical Graffiti to take the edge off bro.

 

[Anonymous]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

Where do you come up with this stuff?

Hedges, an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, was also an early and vocal critic of the Iraq War. He questioned the rationale for war by the Bush administration and was critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading". In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying:[citation needed]

"We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security."Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, although some applauded. Hedges' microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try to prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal denounced Hedges for his anti-war stance on May 24. His employer, The New York Times, criticized his statements and issued him a written reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." Hedges, refusing to accept these restrictions, left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

Hedges has stated that he is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo, designed to stop campaigns of genocide. He nevertheless describes war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind."



Listen to Physical Graffiti to take the edge off bro.

Yeah, I saw that. Hedges is too far left of the NY Times (no mean feat). I also read how much of an admirer he is of Karl Marx.

I nearly fell out when I read that because his views and writing seem so mainstream.

I actually enjoy reading Hedges for the same reason I like reading posts from Rhubroma.

 

[rhubroma]

Yeah, I saw that. Hedges is too far left of the NY Times (no mean feat). I also read how much of an admirer he is of Karl Marx.

I nearly fell out when I read that because his views and writing seem so mainstream.

I actually enjoy reading Hedges for the same reason I like reading posts from Rhubroma.

The NY Times is not a leftist daily. I know conservative America thinks so, but it is not. That's because left-wing journalism, apart from the underground and radical publications that are not mainstream and thus make no significant impact on the way Americans think, has been crushed by the corporate universe there.

All I read are the most wishy-washy stuff that never takes a real strong position on anything in the tradition of the social-leftist sense that we still get in Europe. Le Monde , El Pais, La Repubblica, il Manifesto the Berliner Zeitung these can be considered intellectually and in the journalistic spirit, leftist dailies, not the NY Times.

 

[buckwheat]

Yeah, I saw that. Hedges is too far left of the NY Times (no mean feat). I also read how much of an admirer he is of Karl Marx.

I nearly fell out when I read that because his views and writing seem so mainstream.

I actually enjoy reading Hedges for the same reason I like reading posts from Rhubroma.

And Obama is a socialist!

 

[Anonymous]

And Obama is a socialist!

From your wiki link:

"Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle was published in July 2009. An exposition of Hedges's socialist opinions, Empire of Illusion is heavily influenced by Marxist Critical theory: Hedges repeatedly references the ideas of Theodor Adorno and Karl Polanyi, and also refers to Karl Marx's concepts of "superstructure" and an inevitable collapse of capitalism."

Roll eyes indeed.

 

[rhubroma]

More from Lenin's State and Revolution:

...after formulating his famous proposition that "the state withers away", Engels at once explains specifically that this proposition is directed against both the opportunists and the anarchists. In doing this, Engels puts in the forefront that conclusion, drawn from the proposition that "the state withers away", which is directed against the opportunists. One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard about the "withering away" of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware, or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10, probably nine do not know the meaning of a "free people's state" or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people's heads in the shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and "forgotten"!

What strikes me is how this last bit (which is outrageously rash and brazen!), and this ties into what Buckwheat has previously said, is that it reminds me of how in the post-communist era history is being written in terms of a triumphalist process of capitalism's indomitable ability to spread prosperity and virtue throughout the globe - while neglecting all the other opptions. Nobody is any longer discussing capitalism as a model per se. So it basically has been universally accepted as an unchallengeable model, while the victors in power have even "obscured" and made "forgotten" any of the social democratic principles which in Western Europe had been the very driving forces behind their modern democratic States.

And this is what's really a shame that the prevailing ruling class has allowed the masses to slide into philistinism and opportunism for their own private gains, where the corporate and financial worlds are becoming so protected by the State, even at the expense of taxes being spent on social causes (at times just to bail them out): that the components of the machine are ever more appearing to operate like the secret societies (masonry and the like) of XVIII and XIX century colonialist and imperialist Europe and America.

This is not what is in the better interests of the mass working class society, and yet their victory has been so thorough that those masses don't even realizes that their apathy and lack of attention is furthering the cause that's working to their complete submission before the neoliberal regime. It's positively astounding!

 

[buckwheat]

Obama is just barely left of lunacy.

 

[Anonymous]

More from Lenin's State and Revolution:

...after formulating his famous proposition that "the state withers away", Engels at once explains specifically that this proposition is directed against both the opportunists and the anarchists. In doing this, Engels puts in the forefront that conclusion, drawn from the proposition that "the state withers away", which is directed against the opportunists. One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard about the "withering away" of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware, or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10, probably nine do not know the meaning of a "free people's state" or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people's heads in the shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and "forgotten"!

What strikes me is how this last bit (which is outrageously rash and brazen!), and this ties into what Buckwheat has previously said, is that it reminds me of how in the post-communist era history is being written in terms of a triumphalist process of capitalism's indomitable ability to spread prosperity and virtue throughout the globe - while neglecting all the other opptions. Nobody is any longer discussing capitalism as a model per se. So it basically has been universally accepted as an unchallengeable model, while the victors in power have even "obscured" and made "forgotten" any of the social democratic principles which in Western Europe had been the very driving forces behind their modern democratic States.

And this is what's really a shame that the prevailing ruling class has allowed the masses to slide into philistinism and opportunism for their own private gains, where the corporate and financial worlds are becoming so protected by the State, even at the expense of taxes being spent on social causes (at times just to bail them out): that the components of the machine are ever more appearing to operate like the secret societies (masonry and the like) of XVIII and XIX century colonialist and imperialist Europe and America.

This is not what is in the better interests of the mass working class society, and yet their victory has been so thorough that those masses don't even realizes that their apathy and lack of attention is furthering the cause that's working to their complete submission before the neoliberal regime. It's positively astounding!

Well, there's at least one American who gets it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=namL_pIqsVo

I can't even imagine how castigated this guy would be (by the left) if he were to advocate this position from spectrum right.

 

[Anonymous]

Obama is just barely left of lunacy.

Obama is just not qualified. It's really that simple.

 

[buckwheat]

Well, there's at least one American who gets it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=namL_pIqsVo

I can't even imagine how castigated this guy would be (by the left) if he were to advocate this position from spectrum right.

This coming from the blind, deaf, man.

When is the Sharon Angle, 2nd Amendment remedy offensive supposed to kick off?

No need to imagine.

You didn't read your script?

 

[Anonymous]

This coming from the blind, deaf, man.

When is the Sharon Angle, 2nd Amendment remedy offensive supposed to kick off?

No need to imagine.

You didn't read your script?

Sharon who?

I must have missed the msnbc host frothing over her... I mean being blind and deaf and all.

 

[buckwheat]

Sharon who?

I must have missed the msnbc host frothing over her... I mean being blind and deaf and all.

I'm sorry but how else would you explain not knowing about Sharon Angle and the Tea Party.

You know what happened with the Boston Tea Party?

You do know that Tea Party people were attending Health Care Town Halls with guns?