This is the sixth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful. Marx is probably too taken with a kind of scientism by proposing...
Capital
Democratic voters are depressed, demoralized, and tuning out — and there's no use in denying it. Amanda Marcotte In a couple of weeks, the world will come together in Glasgow, Scotland, in what is yet another attempt for worldwide action to attempt to prevent planetwide devastation trajectory we have yet to slow...
The US calls it “forced diversion” and the EU uses “State Hijacking”. Belarus’s Lukashenko regime resembles a successful 1/6 with rogue international behavior, martial law and questionable elections, complete with client relations resembling the Soviet era. The latest is interfering with air transport to arrest a dissident journalist. RIGA, Latvia — European leaders...
Bullwinkle Badgers: “Be loud … fly low over the crowds,” said one unidentified member of the Lakota crew, describing the mission parameters as they understood them. Apparently an “unidentified subordinate” modified the mission. Last Summer did feature another stunt at St Johns Church to serve the Trump 2020 election bid, including an...
More elephants will get killed as trophies. Cash-short countries do have to think about revenue, and carrying capacity is but a rationalization when eco-tourism is crippled by a pandemic. What’s worse is that killing bushmeat remains always remains an option beyond the poaching for ivory. x “We can expect not...
Because of new post-Brexit rules, a marine boundary dispute required the UK to dispatch two naval vessels to deal with a blockade of French fishing boats off the main port of the island of Jersey. Not exactly the Falklands crisis of 1770, or the Anglo-Vichy war of 1940-42, but there...
From The Daily Beast: Josh Mandel—the far-right, former Ohio state representative now running for Senate—has recently joined the chorus of conservatives railing against Big Tech. But before he turned against Silicon Valley, Mandel was a Facebook stock investor who made tens of thousands of dollars. And even after he turned...
Likely Trump will continue to be banned from Facebook, but just in case, it is worth speculating what would happen if he returns. His general laying-low these days is probably in hopes of getting a reprieve. Facebook’s oversight board will announce its ruling on whether former President Donald Trump’s account should...
Likely Trump will continue to be banned from Facebook, but just in case, it is worth speculating what would happen if he returns. His general laying-low these days is probably in hopes of getting a reprieve. Facebook’s oversight board will announce its ruling on whether former President Donald Trump’s account should...
“Dadirri listens and knows, witnesses, feels, empathizes in the pain under the anger, and, if the anger is accompanied by action, seeks to understand the thoughts and feelings behind the action. Dadirri then seeks to find the source of that pain in knowledge-building for a deepening understanding of the more...
Who failed: “The FedEx gunman legally purchased his two semiautomatic rifles just a few months after the police seized a shotgun from him amid concerns about his mental health. Authorities apparently didn’t consider him subject to Indiana’s red flag law.” “Red flag”laws only work when they’re properly applied: Indianapolis police...
So much still unresolved from the Trump era installed in 2016, and continued through 2020, a Russian intelligence operation. Hard to tell whether it ranks with Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, or even Operation Pandora, the plan to foment a US race war in the 1960s, although the Trump win could...
Anand Giridharadas wrote a piece for The Atlantic asserting that Biden has been moving leftward. This may only be a short term impression only because the GOP is trying to find its way after the previous guy is gone and before he may be indicted. The real problem lies with...
More attention should be paid to an economy that might be in trouble this summer especially as there will be something, something military that will require US attention somewhere, somewhere. That increased military activity might distract from finally indicting the previous guy, who apparently allowed the Chinese economy to become #1...
Can’t wait to see this asshole go: 📹On @FOX43, Sen. Toomey says he wants PA to adopt Georgia's new election laws. I ask what he says to BPOC who say those policies make it harder to vote? He said it's a "ridiculous argument." "Are we really supposed to believe African...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
The stuck ship does tell us something about the fragility of global trade and the flow of capital. Fungible Space Logistics, that concept popularized by United Parcel Service is also about the spatial problems of concrete versus abstract global networks. x Everyone is talking about the big ship getting stuck...
Not unlike addressing a conjoined Alaska and Hawai’i statehood, airports and car dealerships should be the least of criteria for statehood, and the 2.8 million Puerto Ricans should be part of the deal. “D.C. would be the only state — the only state — without an airport, without a car dealership,...
More “bad days” ahead. We’re not going to throw up our hands even as social media now shifts to predictable Islamophobia. Notable is that the shooter in Boulder bought his gun on the evening of the Atlanta shootings. A Brady Bill might have stopped him. By the end of February, people around...
It always seemed absurd to me that hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens have no effective representation in Congress. And I’m not just talking about Alabamans. But to hear some conservatives tell it, that’s as it should be because, you know, D.C. doesn’t have a car dealership. And they already make their...
Received this e-mail from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden’s (D. OR) re-election campaign: Taking back our democracy from those that wish to undermine Americans' fundamental constitutional rights will take work on several fronts: tightening election security, ending voter suppression, making the vote more accessible to everyone who's eligible, combating coordinated disinformation,...
Twitter is dragging Jonathan Turley because of attributing a Rousseau quote to the Reign of Terror, but more likely because they mistook him for Jeffrey Toobin. That’s the nature of conservative culture war, making class warfare a struggle more transcendent and less applicable in times of right-wing insurrection. x Since philosopher Jean...
CA-22 remember that treasonous cowpoke Devin Nunes voted against the $1,400 hitting your bank account. x Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) calls out Devin Nunes, Ron Johnson, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans in Congress for being Russian assets. pic.twitter.com/JTNP4lgFWv — Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 17, 2021 I’m proud that Chairman...
Like Chicago gangsters a century ago prosecuted for tax evasion, the Chicago way may catch up to Trump. As Elliot Ness is purported to have said, “no deals”. Cy Vance and Leticia James continue an untouchable investigation into only one aspect of Biglygate. Except, as Mother Jones confirmed, the loan wasn’t sold to Trump,...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
Darn those class commitments, aligning us to our political choices in a democracy, made worse by all those folks who knew they were in that Gilded Age. “If the future of the Democratic Party is in the rich suburbs, the future of American politics is another long Gilded Age.” Matt...
There’s a sizable population of Trumpists at large, some of whom would be willing to kill members of Congress. Fortunately the cosplay of Designated Survivor requires much larger capital resources and smarter members of the GOP/GQP. “…they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible...
For a brief interval following the Jan. 6 insurrection-palooza, I thought the conscience of our nation—and, by extension, that of the Republican Party—might finally be shocked into dropping the grotesquely irresponsible “this election was stolen from Donald Trump” canard. I mean, people died as a direct result of this lie,...
Look, say Republican Senators. “Biden wants respect and bipartisanship, so all we are asking for is that his nominees show us the respect we so rightly deserve.” We therefore demand. All nominees must agree with us, especially women with their own “ideas”. All nominees must have been nice to us,...
Beto O’Rourke (D. TX) had some harsh words yesterday: x “We are nearing a failed state in Texas. And it has nothing to do with God, or natural disasters. It has everything to do with the leadership and those in the positions of public trust who have failed us,” says...
Let real wages (of $15+/hour) grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. We have been misled by neoliberal economics for now many decades, it’s time to turn many things around in what is becoming a second-rated US economy, recently crippled by the...
“Democracy is not self-executing.” Trump manufactured numerous technicalities to make a long-shot work, and failed. He tried to fabricate a state of martial law via an inside job, as the Trump Defense Secretary disarmed DC National Guard prior to the 6 January insurrection. Fortunately the proto-fascists in the mob were far...
'GQP' – Republicans announce themselves as a Trumpist party We cannot ignore the growing threat of right-wing extremism and its enablers any longer. x “McCarthy claims he has received private assurances from Greene that she no longer wishes death on Pelosi.“ -Washington Post — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 5, 2021...
This is something I have been considering for a long time [10 years or so] and the events of January 6th 2021 are slowly coalescing my thoughts on the subject. Or maybe I’m just slow. An article in the FT written in 2008 The new Russo-Chinese model is authoritarian and...
“Can anyone honestly say that if some of those in the mob with zip ties, stun guns and other weapons actually came upon a member of Congress in the Capitol on Jan 6, they'd have just stopped and asked them to pose for a selfie?” x Anyone who thinks Trump...
As Climate Crisis returns to the new US administration agenda, negative emissions technologies (NETs) may find their implementation hindered by neoliberal financialization. An earlier ACM story showed how Steve Keen’s critique of Nordhaus’s use of discounting climate change demonstrates that orthodox economics is incapable of accelerating innovation especially in...
The best explanation of short selling (as it applies to GameStop) that I've read pic.twitter.com/o9ZL5HqsKf — John M. Cunningham (@jmcunning) January 28, 2021 1/2Short selling means borrowing shares and immediately selling them. When the price goes down, they buy them back for cents and return them to the lender. This...
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice...
Large hedge funds representative of fictitious capital aka “dumb money” got screwed by swarming reddit collective action. Numerous “redditors” caused a small scale version of (short) market chaos. WE GOT JON STEWART TO JOIN TWITTER He's right tho… https://t.co/iHedgMhKqg — WSB Mod (@wsbmod) January 29, 2021 UPDATE: It's definitely not a...
This really is not taking a position, but just recognition of what is going to happen tomorrow (maybe) and how this is going to impact market investments going forward. I am sure many of you have heard about the GameStop phenomenon, but it is not being that well explained in...
Not really a heist film, but a brief amusement worth another cinematic treatment of financial markets like Trading Places. If not, here’s a quick recap: a bunch of traders — many amateurs — got together on the online discussion forum Reddit and decided they were going to pump up GameStop’s...