Idiocy as WMD » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views
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The more oppressive a political system, then, the greater its assault on its subjects’ minds, for it’s not enough for any dictator, king or totalitarian system to oppress and exploit, but it must, and I mean must, make its people idiotic as well
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whatever utility it may have for the disenfranchised and/or rebellious, the Web is most useful to our rulers. As Dmitry Orlov points out in a recent blog, the internet is a powerful surveillance tool for the state and, what’s more, it also keeps the masses distracted and pacified
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Not content to kill and loot, America must do it to pulsating music; cool, orgasmic dancing; raunchy reality shows and violence-filled Hollywood blockbusters, and these are also meant for its victims, no less. In a 1997 article published by the US Army War College, Ralph Peters gushes about a “personally intrusive” and “lethal” cultural assault as a key tactic in the American quest for global supremacy. As information master, the American Empire will destroy its “information victims.” What’s more, “our victims volunteer” because they are unable to resist the seductiveness of American culture.
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Obama to World: Bad News. The American Empire Is Dead. | The Cable - 0 views
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"The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries," he said in his address before the 193-member General Assembly. "The notion of American empire may be useful propaganda, but it isn't borne out by America's current policy or public opinion."
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The danger for the world is that the United States, after a decade of war -- rightly concerned about issues back home, aware of the hostility that our engagement in the region has engendered throughout the Muslim world -- may disengage, creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill
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In addressing the conflict in Syria, Obama said U.S. aims were largely humanitarian. "There's no 'great game' to be won, nor does America have any interest in Syria beyond the well-being of its people, the stability of its neighbors, the elimination of chemical weapons, and ensuring it does not become a safe haven for terrorists,"
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Turkish police 'seize Islamic State coin-makers' | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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Turkish police have arrested six foreign nationals and seized material allegedly used by Islamic State (IS) militants to produce coins for the group
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the coins produced are used as currency in IS-controlled areas
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IS announced last year that it would start producing its own currency in an effort to "emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system".
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LENIN'S TOMB: Why neoliberalism persists - 0 views
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Finance has enjoyed hegemony in the past partially on account of its role in the British empire. Britain's overseas trading companies such as the East India Company or the Hudson Bay Company were based in the City of London, and it was the City's activities which financed the planters and traders. The capital's financial centre was the nexus between domestic producers and the colonies. Undoubtedly, finance has a similar role in today's imperialism, the mechanism by which surplus extracted in the 'periphery' is transferred to ruling classes in the 'metropole'. In fact, one of the reasons why the British government started to take a keen interest in consolidating the City's global role in the late 1960s was due to the loss of the colonies and the need to take on rising financial competitors, not least Wall Street.
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The fact of the matter is that there often hasn't been enough profit to be had in productive investment, while high-risk speculation has consistently delivered, and will continue to do so as long as the public bails the bankers out at moments of crisis. Just how much neoliberalism has delivered is suggested by the fact that by 2006, two fifths of all corporate profits in the US were accumulated in the financial sector - more than double the ratio at the height of 'Reagonomics' two decades before.
Tied to a drowning man - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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Unlike the Soviets, who had the good grace to implode pretty much alone, collapse of the United States could bring down the international capitalist system along with it.
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Globalisation has drastically tilted the balance of the struggle between labour and management in favour of trans-national corporations. In the US, the result has been five decades of falling median wages. (Total wages, on the other hand, have soared, with the rich and superrich raking in more than ever.) Easy credit provided a Band-Aid to rising income equality during the 1980s and 1990s. When the housing bubble burst and the credit markets froze in 2008, American consumers - who drive 70 per cent of economic activity - went from feeling poor to being poor. Un- and underemployed, they couldn't earn money. Their credit lines cancelled and curtailed, they couldn't borrow it. Forced to live within their increasingly limited means, the formerly middle class stopped spending. And here we are. Gross domestic product would have to be at least 4 per cent on an annualised basis to start to bring down unemployment. The actual figure is 0.8.
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Everywhere you look, there's terror that the world, by tethering itself to the once-invincible US monolith, has handcuffed itself to a fat, drowning man—one who's about to suffer another heart attack. The central bank of China, the communist-in-name-only nation that holds $2tn in its foreign exchange reserves—more than two-thirds of the total—plus $1.2tn in US Treasury bonds and notes, is loudly demanding that the US cut its deficits.
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UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker | Business ... - 0 views
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the rioting reflects a deeply flawed economic and social ethos… recklessly borrowed consumption, the breakdown both of top-end accountability and of trust in institutions, and severe failings by governments over more than two decades
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an over-consuming west has borrowed and spent the surpluses of the increasingly productive and under-consuming East
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Saving needs to be encouraged, and private investment needs to be channelled into asset creation, not asset inflation
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Follow the petrodollars: Why Gulf wealth matters to Britain is a question everyone shou... - 0 views
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“The strategic value of the Gulf Arab monarchies to British capitalism and the British state,” Wearing writes, “has meant that securing and defending those monarchies from the threat posed by their own populations has long been a priority for London.”
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“the data show that the British government’s response to the new wave of demands for democracy region-wide was to continue a sharp increase in arms supplies to its key authoritarian allies”
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Without doubt, Britain’s impressively violent imperial history also raises all manner of “moral questions”. And as Wearing makes clear, it was during this very period of empire - comprising a century and a half of British dominance in the Gulf - that the foundations for contemporary interdependence were established.
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'Everything we've heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong' - researchers ... - 0 views
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Widely accepted numbers on how much of the world's population lives in cities are incorrect, with major implications for development aid and the provision of public services for billions of people, researchers say
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Using a definition made possible by advances in geospatial technology that uses high-resolution satellite images to determine the number of people living in a given area, they estimate 84 percent of the world's population, or almost 6.4 billion people, live in urban areas.
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Asia and Africa, which are routinely cited as majority-rural continents that are rapidly urbanizing, turn out to be well ahead of figures in the U.N.'s latest estimates.
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Lessons from an ex-British MP who stood on a street corner in Beirut | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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Matthew Parris - South African-British columnist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament - treats us to an account of “What you learn standing on a street corner in Beirut.” The corner in question is located on Rue Qobaiyat in the trendy Mar Mikhael neighbourhood, which Parris incorrectly identifies as Beirut’s “Armenian quarter”. So much for learning things.
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the role of spontaneous sociocultural analyst
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To be sure, the trope of the unpredictable and irrationally violent Arab is a mainstay of Orientalist discourse, and visitors to Lebanon from the oh-so-civilised West often can’t resist the temptation to detect in every trivial occurrence a potential throwback to the brutal civil war of 1975-90 - an affair which, it bears mentioning, took place with plenty of outside interference, including from the West itself.
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Did the British Empire depend on separating parents and children? - Imperial & Global F... - 0 views
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Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception
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Transoceanic empires built by corporations like the British and Dutch East India Companies faced even greater problems because they lacked the sacred aura that surrounded kings and helped maintain nominal loyalties. It took nearly half a year for an inquiry or command to reach a functionary in Asia and it took many more months before a report or an excuse would come back. The military, commercial, or political situation could change dramatically in the interim. Many readers will be aware, for example, that the British and Americans continued to fight for six weeks in 1815 after the peace treaty was signed between the two powers
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Corporations growing into empires, such as the Dutch East India Company and English East India Company were keenly aware of what modern organization theorists, such as Oliver Williamson, have termed the “agency problem.” This is simply the difficulty of monitoring subordinates and ensuring that they act mainly in the interest of those (“the principals”) whose “agents” they had been hired to be
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Beware thought leaders and the wealthy purveying answers to our social ills - 0 views
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“Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it,” Wilde wrote, “so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
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“For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is — above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners,”
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to question the system that allows people to make money in predatory ways and compensate for that through philanthropy. “Instead of asking them to make their firms less monopolistic, greedy or harmful to children, it urged them to create side hustles to ‘change the world,’ ”
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Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with
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Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed
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medieval Africa suffered no dearth of cultural accomplishments. There is, for example, evidence of long-distance trade as early as the ninth century between northern African settlements and caravan towns like Aoudaghost, at the southern edge of the Sahara. Manufactured copper goods were sent south in exchange for gold dust, to be cast into ingots out of which much of the fast-rising Arab world’s coinage was struck.2 To illustrate just how well established these commercial exchanges were by the late tenth century, Fauvelle describes an order of payment—what we might call a check3—sent by a sub-Saharan merchant to a businessman in the Moroccan town of Sijilmasa for the sum of 42,000 dinars
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Westphalia to Communicate: Sovereignty, Confusion, and the International Order - 0 views
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whatever exactly China is doing Westphalia-wise, it’s not good
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To make matters more confusing, everyone seems to agree that the European Union, built around the idea of countries pooling their sovereignty to become something else, is fundamentally at odds with the Westphalian order. But no one seems the least bit worried about it
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When invoked casually, the Westphalian order misrepresents both the past and the present, distorting history to dodge hard questions about America’s role in the world today. At worst, the conventional version of Westphalian punditry posits the existence of some centuries-old order based on sovereignty and secularism, suggests that America is merely trying to uphold these time-tested principles, and then berates other countries who don’t immediately want in
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