Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and of all persuasions are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it.
There is, however, a prior question that few if any bother to ask: Do capitalists want a recovery in the first place? Can they afford it?
We are in the mad-mad-mad world of delusions and Pokémon. Sure, that Fukushima premature, err, glow, solved by dental lead bib over the ovaries and testes (see photo directly below). Yep, the world has gone to Type Three Diabetes. Quoting that article on radioactive proof of our dumbdowning DNA. Is it HFCS that’s eating away at our noggin? Those 10,000 newly compounded chemicals produced each year chipping away at IQ?
In Switzerland a petition from 100,000 people, or about 1.25% of the population, creates a public referendum. By this means, last March, Swiss voters created strict limits on executive pay.
Friday midtown. Friday payday.
“CEO Tobacconists.” Quality, overpriced cigars. Walk-in humidor. Air-conditioned smoking room. Customers relax. Smoke. Watch wide-screen TV. Recite the Smoker’s Ode:
green gone
brown dead
resurrection fire
leaf life
tumors bloom
like tulips
or teeth
oh wet pink lungs
People should oppose GMOs for a myriad of reasons based on:
1) the precautionary principle
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan wrote another excellent academic paper, Can Capitalists Afford Recovery?:
I call America’s pattern of behavior since 9/11 a “great transformation” because it involves revolutionary changes for the country and, unavoidably, the entire world. In its internal affairs, America has effectively weakened the protections of the Bill of Rights and instituted many of the practices of police states – all under the insidious rationale of “protection from terrorists,” a subject heading which incapacitates the courts and serves to draw a great dark cloak over matters vital to all.
A decade has passed since President Thabo Mbeki’s consent to the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act (53 of 2003). Also known as BBBEE, or simply BEE (if the prefix ‘Broad-based’ is dropped), the act has recently been amended and is set to be applied much more comprehensively from 2014 onward. As wonderful as ‘empowerment’ may sound, BEE comes with dire consequences for holders of property rights and for the overall South African economy. Moreover, the act is ironic because, despite its name, it is patently harmful to the vast majority of black South Africans.
[Note: More New Statesman non-news in a time of global Big Brother, Climate Calamity, $5.5 Trillion Held by 1,400 People, War is Peace, Lies are Truth, in a piece, titled: "A Discourse on Brocialism ... On Brand, iconoclasm, and a woman's place in the revolution: a dialogue with Richard Seymour on the question of how to reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fall down when
