As an intended outcome of neoliberal doctrine and a natural stage of capitalist development, global financialization constructs a borderless nexus of power in which debt and austerity fuels a cultural, political and economic landscape bound to enduring structures of domination, and creates unprecedented wealth through the accumulation of suffering.
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Two officers sought me from within a crowd at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. They seemed to know who I was. They asked me to follow them, and I obliged. Being of Arab background, often renders one’s citizenship almost irrelevant.
In a back room, where other foreigners, mainly Muslims, were holed for ‘added security’, I was asked numerous questions about my politics, ideas, writing, children, friends and my late Palestinian parents.
I think it’s very clear that we could not reach consensus, but the differences were not papered over, they were clearly stated.
— Angela Merkel, BBC News, July 8, 2017
It was recently reported that Hawaii may be the first US state to introduce Universal Basic Income (UBI). Given that it’s generally a good idea to be deeply suspicious of anything that any capitalist government does, perhaps this piece of news is not quite as hopeful as it may appear.
In the brilliant but flawed David Fincher film Fight Club, based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk, Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt) underground boxing club reconfigures itself into something called “Project Mayhem,” a skulking, surreptitious program to wreak havoc on the consumerist hive of corporate America. Typical projects included mandates to “destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar” in a single act and set skyscraper offices on fire to create a fiery smiley face when viewed from afar.
It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.
Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government – along with the rest of the world – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.
These are some of the news headlines that appeared when searching for “charter schools” in GoogleNews in June 2017:
