Dégringolade

 Source:   nakedcapitalism By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at  @matthewstoller . Originally published at  Observations on Credit and Surveillance Here’s  part one  of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime. It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing. Here’s the backstory. As I wrote in  part one of this series on the origin of modern American trade policy , the first real mention of NAFTA in the Congressional record tha...

...to act like a State and not like an "organization."

  By   Derek Ford  - September 17, 2021.  Source:   Liberation School All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them? It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work,  Pedagogy of the Oppressed . One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orient...

POSTED ON  SEPTEMBER 17, 2020  BY  WRENCHINTHEGEARS SOURCE:  Wrench In The Gears I asked this question on social media today and got quite a few very thoughtful replies. One person asked me what led me to ask the question, and this was my response: I believe we’re teetering on the brink of worldwide techno-fascism. Well, it’s pretty much blowing out in certain quarters already. The program has been wrapped in progressive language. As a result, many have unknowingly been led to embrace the creation of a global digital jail. We’ll soon see the roll out of Internet of Things social credit scoring and human capital bonds. The rules of the game will be the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This is the World Economic Forum / Davos global economic reset. This is the advent of Globalization 4.0. This is “wrong kind of green” financialization of nature. Predatory poverty mining by nonprofits for hedge funds. Covid the trigger event; Klaus Schwab the helmsman. We n...

Source:  Off-guardian Earlier today, Hamas launched a “surprise attack” on Israel, allegedly killing dozens. Israel has already struck back at Gaza. According to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel is now “at war”. You can almost hear the glee in the words of the  Atlantic Council’s experts . It started this morning (the Washington Post  has a handy timeline ) with Hamas launching rockets at several Israeli cities including Tel Aviv. After that Palestinian fighters broke through the Southern border, “taking over Israeli towns” and kidnapping civilians to use as hostages. We know this because they helpfully recorded themselves doing it and uploaded it to the internet. Then came the insurgents on  motorised hang-gliders: The Israeli response has been as hard as you’d expect. Two-hundred civilians are said to have been killed already. Exactly 50 years and one day since the Yom Kippur war, we have a new war to talk about. …and talk they are. Already the hot takes ar...

  First Published : Jean-Paul Sartre, «Élections, piège à cons»,   Les temps modernes , n° 318, janvier 1973; Source :  Good Morning, Revolution HTML Markup : for marxists.org by  Zdravko Saveski , 2021. In 1789 the vote was given to landowners. What this meant was that the vote had been given not to men but to their  real  estate, to bourgeois property, which could only vote for itself. Although the system was profoundly unfair, since it excluded the greater part of the French population, it was not absurd. The voters, of course, voted individually and in secret. This was in order to separate them from one another and allow only incidental connections between their votes. But all the voters were property owners and thus already isolated by their land, which closed around them and with its physical impenetrability kept out everything, including people. The ballots were discrete quantities that reflected only the separation of the voters. It was hoped that w...