Showing posts with label occupation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label occupation. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 5
Friday, August 31
Monday, August 13
“Cleaning Up” America Por los Touristas
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| Priam Rosenberg |
In Times Square ... well then it's obviously right and proper that you get sprayed with (twelve!) bullets instead. America: FUCK YEAH!
Kill-shots are so manly. N'est-ce pas?
Friday, May 25
You say you got a real solution
Eh bien, vous savez ...
Yes, the incentives given to business and investment leaders to motivate them to work harder and trigger growth benefit all. But are the incentives really market incentives, predicated on unfettered economic interaction, or has the system been fine-tuned to disproportionately benefit those who lead organizations, make investment decisions, and run boardrooms? It is true that governments have been unable to do much of what they should to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more. But is creating a false choice between governments and markets, as so many politicians have done, productive or practical when neither can do the job of creating a thriving or just society alone?
Tuesday, May 22
More “Pierce-ing” Disapprobation
Why Is America So Happy for Facebook?
w/ Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo
w/ Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo
If we cheer for big money simply as big money, we're simply never going to get right again. If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again. This was a triumph of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again, over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the institutions of self-government. This does nothing to ameliorate the effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing it with anyone.
Thursday, May 10
Homeland in the (Rearview) Mirror
President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. The great liberating tradition to which he refers is, to a considerable extent, poppycock. The president celebrates freedom without defining it, and he dodges any serious engagement with the social, cultural, and moral incongruities arising from the pursuit of actually existing freedom. A believer for whom God remains dauntingly inscrutable might view the president’s confident explication of the Creator’s purpose to be at the very least presumptuous, if not altogether blasphemous.
Still, one must acknowledge that in his second inaugural address, as in other presentations he has made, President Bush succeeds quite masterfully in capturing something essential about the way Americans see themselves and their country. Here is a case where myths and delusions combine to yield perverse yet important truths.
Reinhold Niebuhr helps us appreciate the large hazards embedded in those myths and delusions. Four of those truths merit particular attention at present: the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism, the indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple solutions, and, finally, the imperative of appreciating the limits of power.
Andrew J. Bacevich in World Affairs - Winter 2008
Tuesday, May 8
Un Autre Couple Historique
When a natural system reaches the point of criticality and collapses through a phase transition, it goes through a simplification process that results in greatly reduced systemic scale, which also reduces the risk of another megaevent. This is not true in all man-made complex systems. Government intervention in the form of bailouts and money printing can temporarily arrest the cascade of failures. Yet it cannot make the risk go away. The risk is latent in the system, waiting for the next destabilizing event.
One solution to the problem of risk that comes from allowing a system to grow to a megascale is to make the system smaller, which is called descaling. This is why a mountain ski patrol throws dynamite on unstable slopes before skiing starts for the day. It is reducing avalanche danger by descaling, or simplifying, the snow mass. In global finance today, the opposite is happening. The financial ski patrol of central bankers is shoveling more snow onto the mountain. The financial system is now larger and more concentrated than immediately prior to the beginning of the market collapse in 2007.
p. 211
“Fun-house” Mirrors of History
The deployment of the B-17s [in the Philippines] and the hopes vested in them revealed American attitudes on the brink of war and during it: a chronic underestimation, rooted in part in racial stereotypes, of Japanese military abilities and a persistent overestimation of American technology. In turn, so opinion polls showed, most Americans seemed to view war with Japan—though not with Germany—eagerly, almost cavalierly. "U.S. Cheerfully Faces War with Japan," Life claimed on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Americans felt, "rightly or wrongly, that the Japs were pushovers," a schoolboy’s word congruent with [Magaret] Mead’s metaphor of a nation placing a chip on its shoulder.98 The hope of unleashing its bombers against Japan, perhaps in a surprise attack, also accounted for much of the indignation felt about Japan’s act of "infamy" (as FDR called it) on December 7. What galled American leaders was not simply Japan’s treachery but their frustration at having it occur before the United States could mount its own surprise.
p. 62
98. On polls and Life, see O’Neill, Democracy at War, 73.
Sunday, May 6
“Merkozy Sweepstakes” circa 1848
...a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force...
Saturday, May 5
Echos From The Graves Of Our Forefathers
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.
In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.
Thursday, May 3
Catching Up With “Piercing” Disapprobation
Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch. The SEC isn't looking into lawyers who were complicit in the fraud. It is looking into lawyers who helped build the stonewalls that went up when the true breadth and depth of the scandal started to come to light. This is a huge and messy legal fight – looked at in a certain way, the SEC may well be going after those lawyers for what they did on behalf of their clients, a tactic usually used against mob lawyers, and one that has been the occasion for a lengthy and brutal battle of the motions — but what it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.
This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani's and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet.
Wednesday, April 4
“catalogue of swindles and perversions”
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Monday, March 19
Limits? We Don't Need No Stinking Limits
And yes. these are our limits
...[T]he reconciliation of the people and the army turned out to be a chimera. When the chips were down, "supporting the troops" elicited plenty of posturing but little by way of binding commitments. Far from producing a stampede of eager recruits keen to don a uniform, the events of 9/11 reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else’s kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy and ensure access to the world’s energy reserves. In the midst of a global war of ostensibly earthshaking importance, Americans demonstrated a greater affinity for their hometown sports heroes than for the soldiers defending the distant precincts of the American imperium. Tom Brady makes millions playing quarterback in the NFL and rakes in millions more from endorsements. Pat Tillman quit professional football to become an army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Yet, of the two, Brady more fully embodies the contemporary understanding of the term Patriot.
Monday, March 12
Tuesday, February 28
frebaYse economy journalism
The greater the Occupy resistence grows, and it will in direct proportion to an early spring thaw and continued marathon of the meretricious Republican primary pretenders, the harder is the top down sales invective from our corporate overlords.
No longer subjecting myself to the horrors of American broadcast/cable media, I'm thankfully ignorant of it's current state. There's a framework in play and if you're working for the crony capitalists that own the prole feeding news outlets, you know how to keep your job.
Just don't report on anything too substantively critical of the paymasters.
I weighed the options. And hesitated. It is one thing to be arrested as an independent journalist in a centrally located public square, where mainstream news cameras and spectators function as Klieg lights. They increase the likelihood that police officers involved will be held accountable. But it is another to get arrested in more distant outposts. Working journalists, after all, have been corralled and arrested, and occasionally punched, at demonstrations around the country, some on videotape. I often wonder about other independent journalists who have tried to cover Occupy events in out-of-the-limelight spaces. I also wonder about the communities who rely on them, and on student journalists, for news coverage that speaks to their particular concerns. “The news landscape has changed to the point where grassroots media is more important” than ever, argues Susan Mernit, editor-in-chief of the Oakland Local, a three-year-old startup that uses freelance and citizen journalists.
Tuesday, February 21
We're All “Brothers” Now
No Name In The Street (1972)
I told him that Americans had no business at all in Vietnam; and that black people certainly had no business there, aiding the slave master to enslave yet more millions of dark people, and also identifying themselves with the white American crimes: we, the blacks, are going to need our allies, for the Americans, odd as it may sound at the moment, will presently have none. It wasn't, I said, hard to understand why a black boy, standing, future-less on the corner, would decide to join the Army, nor was it hard to decipher the slave master's reasons for hoping that he wouldn't live to come home with a gun; but it wasn't necessary, after all, to defend it: to defend, that is, one's murder and one's murderers. “Wait a minute,” he said, “let me stand up an tell you what I think we're trying to do there.” “We?” I cried, “what motherfucking we? You stand up, motherfucker, and I'll kick you in the ass.”
Monday, February 20
Tuesday, February 14
“Operation Indigenous Liberation”
Or Not
Just like Tunisia and Egypt - and unlike Libya and Syria - the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain was indigenous, legitimate, non-violent and uncontaminated by Western or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) infiltration.
The response was a major crackdown plus a Saudi Arabian invasion over the causeway to Manama. That was the tacit result of a deal struck between the House of Saud and Washington; we give you an Arab resolution allowing you to go to the UN and then launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing on Libya, you leave us alone to smash this Arab Spring nonsense (see Exposed: the US-Saudi Libya deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011.)
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