The transnational capitalist class is pouring billions of dollars into the rapid digitalization of global capitalism as the latest outlet for its surplus accumulated capital and hedging its bets on new investment opportunities in a global police state. But will these ballooning sectors of the global economy allow the world capitalist system to avoid another catastrophic crisis?
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
— “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
It barely registered a murmur across the Australian press, though it caused the traditional ripples over the protester fraternity. Christian activists, collectively known as the Pine Gap Pilgrims, had received sentences pursuant to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 (Cth), a cold war relic used by the Australian government to conceal the nature of Canberra’s association with the joint US-Australian signals facility.
Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything.
— Fidel Castro
He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.
– President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.
There is no image of prosperity which is not at the same time an image of crisis. I modify here Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum from Über den Begriff der Geschichte.1 For the current American context, we’ve advanced into a period where national prosperity is realized through social and cultural damage.
Following the devastation of WWII, many survivors of the armed sieges sought refuge in lands that were not their own. Among them were not just the beleaguered, but also the ordained. Here I write not of the papacy, but of an equally powerful cabal of power-holders who envisioned the continual progression of Western-and indeed non-Western, as well- societies towards Edward Bernays’ coveted ideal of a modern democracy.
In a recent piece published on Politico, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, that “crusty ex-cargo pilot,” makes us privy to another of his unnerving assessments of the world-at-large, “The Russians have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.” The last time Mr. Clapper assured us of something, it was that the intel community wasn’t spying on us. We saw how that turned out. But that was under oath before Congress.
Ask any student of history, and you’ll be told that institutionalized slavery has been outlawed for lifetimes here in the Occident. Posit an idea to the contrary, and you’re sure to receive a sharp rebuttal.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
