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I suggest you go to Counterpunch and read the whole article, but here we see the benefit of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
“In Stack’s “manifesto”, he quotes Karl Marx. Ironically, Marx is useful here. Explaining how human labor-power is objectified in commodities, which then become realized as social relations once they are put to use, Marx demonstrates how through our labor, which is our dominant mode of social relation, we are all connected. Marx was fond of using linen as an example. A weaver’s social value is realized after a person wears a coat made by the tailor. That is, these heretofore unrelated persons now share a common relationship. If we expand upon this and ask how many people today are involved in producing the coat we wear, from the electricity that powers the sewing machines to the petrol used for delivery, the answer is infinite; the answer is all of us. Marx further explains how once the “universal equivalent”, or money, is supplanted as a metric for our labor, that organization of production tends toward profit rather than collective good.
This is a powerful tool in understanding how we share a common relationship with a destitute Greek worker or an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and/or other psychological disorders. With wages earned from our labor we purchase German goods, exacerbating the economic imbalance between Germany and peripheral countries like Greece, thereby adding to the extreme suffering Greek workers are being forced to endure. It can explain how a solider, upon his or her return home, cannot easily reveal that the jingoist notions of freedom, liberty and security we are all imbued with had no role to play in the killing that we as a society, at least through our taxes, tacitly asked of them. It can further explain how police can criminalize the indigent for their own victimization. As Stack described, the loss of jobs from L.A. caused some Los Angelians to lose their already precarious footing in American society, namely Blacks and Latinos. Combined with systemic, inter-generational poverty and racism, it is all too easy to mistake the symptoms of this malaise for its etiology.”
What would you suggest as a metric for determining the quality of governance? Gail Dines has a simple suggestion (taken from a counterpunch article on contrasting styles of governing):
” […] a government that has demonstrated a capacity to work for the people rather than just corporate interests, and a government that works for the people has a compelling interest in protecting citizens from harmful corporate practices.”
The capacity to work for the people. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Edmonton’s Upcoming Fiscal Black Hole
Edmonton needs a new hockey arena about as much as an elephant needs that desperately sexy pair of high heels. Before breaking metaphorical language any further, lets look at the price tag for this boondoggle in waiting. Thanks to the Edmonton Journal for the numbers.
All in, $601 million. That breaks down as:
– Arena construction, $480 million
– Winter Garden pedestrian bridge across 104th Avenue, $53 million
– Arena land, $25 million
– Community rink attached to arena, $21 million
– Pedestrian corridor through the arena, $15 million
– Link to MacEwan LRT station, $7 million
$601 million so we can have rubber disk chasing in our downtown core. I know I am terribly excited over the entire notion. What is even more exciting is who gets to pay for these shiny new elephantine high-heels.
– The city: $219 million ($140 million for the arena, $25 million for the Winter Garden, $25 million for the land, $15 million for the pedestrian corridor, $7 million for the LRT and $7 million for the community rink).
– Katz Group: $143 million ($115 million for the arena, $28 million for Winter Garden).
– Ticket buyers, through a surcharge: $125 million.
– The province: $107 million ($100 million for arena, $7 million for community rink).
– The feds: $7 million for rink.
What is interesting to me, and by “interesting” I mean peeved, is that I fall into three categories that are donating to the Rubber Disk Arena construction fund. I reside in Edmonton and thus pay municipal taxes, Edmonton also happens to be in Alberta thus I pay provincial tax aaaaaand Alberta happens to be in Canada and ‘Lo I also pay federal taxes.
Therefore, I get to pay $335 million while the dude that owns the team chips in $143 million to build a house for his team and he will get to keep all the revenue generated once the Rubber Disk Arena is built. I need to get on the same plan as the Edmonton Oilers Owner; you know the one where you get to use public money to take the majority of risk and build stuff that will make me money once its built.
As the person indirectly responsible for funding this bedazzling misadventure, it would be sensical to point out that if private industry wants to build a new Rubber Disk Chasing Emporium, they should damn well pay for it themselves and not expect the public to fund their private ventures.
(ed. Very proud not to have used the words “fucking insane waste of public money” in this article.)
Noam Chomsky is considered a rogue commentator in the United States. His critiques of power illustrates the gross realpolitik that runs the US government and its foreign policy. Traditionally, we tend to think of ourselves as the “good guys”. In reality though, we seldom have that role. A look at the recent history of the Middle East confirms this hypothesis, excerpt from Alter.net.
Q: Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?
NC: The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources — the main concern of U.S. planners — have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism — mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.
Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.
Most of what Rand has to say about economics and politics is complete bunk. The idea that we should not restrict the wealthy classes in their endeavours strikes me as the fast forward button on the decline of Western Civilization. Altruism and empathy are the qualities that will save our civilization, their antithesis, aka much of what Rand proposes, will not. Alter.net has a great article about Rand and what it is doing to our societies, I reproduce the section dealing with corporations and what they are actually mandated to do, as opposed to what they do now.
“Ayn Rand envisioned a world without governments – a world where the super-rich are free to do as they wish.
We tried that during the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century – before Ayn Rand was alive. If she’d watched the ruthlessness of the Robber Barons like she did the Bolsheviks, she may have reached different conclusions.
She may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.
Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America. We’d be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.
As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative, argued in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”
Capitalism is all find and dandy, until you run out of people and resources to exploit. But, let’s let Ronald Wright do the talking from his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” on this one.
“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”
Ah the resurgence of religious belief – colour me unsurprised that it heralds the doom of the society in question.
Well. I’m glad to see the Catlicks coming around on such an important issue to women and their rights. This is an object lesson for the deluded pro-life movement. Your fetus worshipping is useful for whipping up the frenzy and getting people all frothy, but when serious issues come, its time for you to sit the frack down and shut the frack up on cue while the adults talk about the serious issues.
From the Alter.net article –
[…]
And all of this—all of it—goes back to the Church’s insistence that life begins with your very first hell-worthy dirty thought and must be protected at all costs, despite all consequences, including, of course, the consequence of dead women, whose lives are not nearly as valuable as the “life” of an unborn fetus. In just the past year, the Church has called upon its faithful followers to march, to starve themselves, to go to jail, to even take up arms—all to protect those fetuses. No exceptions. None. Not if the fetus is already dead inside the womb. Not if the fetus is going to kill the actual living woman carrying it. No goddamned exceptions EVER.
Well, except for one: when it’s going to cost the Church money.
Turns out, when a man sues a Catholic hospital for malpractice because his wife and the twins she was carrying inside her died when she turned up in the emergency room and her doctor never bothered to answer a page—well, things get a little tricky. Yes, the Catholic hospital adheres to the strict Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church, as set forth by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And yes, those directives include the claim that “[t]he Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn” and a mandate to uphold “the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.'” But come on. That obviously does not apply when Catholic Health Initiatives, the Church-affiliated organization that runs the Church-affiliated St. Thomas More Hospital where a young woman and her two unborn fetuses died, is the lead defendant in a lawsuit:
Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
Thank you, counselor, for totally undermining everything the Catholic Church has ever said about women and health care and fetuses and the “sanctity of life,” just to save a buck, thereby confirming how very empty and meaningless all that rhetoric really is. Praise the Lord.
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