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...
Wealth
If you haven’t seen Netflix’s Squid Game yet—well, what are you waiting for? If anything is a parable for our time, this is it. Too often meteoric cultural phenomena that purport to capture the zeitgeist fail to capture my interest, but this one is different. If you believe, as I...
Living with the nagging uncertainty of being racially discriminated against and worst not being believed shatters the psyche. The most devastating effects are that people of color start to accept their treatment as their unchangeable fate. Asking white friends to hail a cab at night, telling one’s kids to keep...
Several hundred million pounds of the UK Treasury may get allocated to a new, replacement yacht for the Queen, likely to be used more by Prince Chuck. Because that’s where national wealth should go. Most of the announcements have resembled Trumpist PR for Space Force. The "national flagship" announcement has no...
I don’t know if this statement has been diarized, my apologies, but it bears repeating often, so if anyone missed it. The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards The Bolding is mine Introduction We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have...
Critical Race Practice. Organizers have canceled plans for an afternoon of speeches and performances commemorating the centennial on Monday of the Tulsa massacre. This reminds us that the early 1920s was a mass othering of America that includes events like the Wall Street bombing of 1920, whose death toll was exceeded in the Tulsa...
Oklahoma’s right-wing politicians would like to erase history because that’s what they do, whether it’s the omission of facts or rewriting them to favor those in power. Historical guilt and its associated media effects cooties can’t be part of public school curricula. H.B. 1775 implies that the past prior to 1776...
Meandering nonsense highlighted by searches for bamboo fibers, and official lies issued from Mar-a Lago, are exactly what Donald Trump expected to be doing in 2016. The 2020 election with Joe Biden as his opponent was what he expected the first time around with Hillary Clinton; a loss. I am...
Because Hawley’s whines about Big Tech while promoting sales of his book on Amazon, the epitome of …. Big Tech. “Democrats are eyeing a comeback in Missouri, believing the Capitol riot hurt Republicans in the state, not least because of Josh Hawley’s prominent role.” “Don’t try to censor, cancel, and silence...
Received this e-mail today from Marine Veteran Lucas Kunce’s (D. MO) U.S. Senate campaign: President Biden, labor activists, and everyday workers across the country are all calling on the U.S. Senate to pass the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act. They’re absolutely right, we need this bill to get...
For some reason I don’t have complete faith in this vote audit they’re performing in Arizona. For one thing, hardly anyone heard of Cyber Ninjas, the company that’s performing the audit, before this farce commenced. For another, the company is named “Cyber Ninjas.” That’s like going with a wealth management firm called...
A little over a year ago, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham postured that helping out hungry Americans would make them lazy. “Very few people would choose work over unemployment benefits that provided moderately more money,” said Graham. Not only was this an attack on those in need but their work ethic...
I grew up in Wisconsin, so I happen to know there are thousands of Ron Johnsons haunting various backwater dairyland redoubts, oafishly sounding out exotic menu items like “jalapeño poppers” at supper clubs, ordering one brandy Old-Fashioned after another, and dribbling chunky rivulets of tartar sauce down their chins onto musty,...
If anything a nightly rant by David Letterman about Madoff marked the 2000s, with $65 billion swindled. x T***p surprised some observers by not pardoning Madoff (through brokerage) & by not staging a Kent State massacre of protesters; but he more than made up for these omissions by facilitating the...
“As in the Times Op-Ed from which the book originated, the title refers to the results of studies conducted in Germany from the mid-nineteen-eighties onward, which reported, among other intriguing findings, that eighty per cent of East German women always experienced orgasm during sex, compared to sixty-three per cent of...
Change as a rising tide seems to be falling short as history’s stream is not as mighty. Apparently slavery is still “ordained by God for ultimate good” at Baylor University, as a RW campus group wants to accuse the University of canceling its “Christian identity”. No mention of its athletic team’s...
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...
As many here know I am a Democratic Socialist and a long time Bernie supporter. I listened to Biden today and was impressed as he sounded like a democrat of old, i.e. what present day republicans would term as a screaming raving socialist. I was happy with my vote for...
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...
Received this e-mail today from U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen’s (D. MD) re-election campaign: Wealth and income inequality in America have been increasing dramatically for decades and Trump’s 2017 billionaire tax-cut made this situation even worse. We are now experiencing the extreme inequality levels that existed just prior to the...
From Rolling Stone: The Covid relief package is providing a platform for a historic Senate newcomer to deliver for a long-struggling constituency: black farmers. Led by Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Senate Democrats are touting a $5 billion provision in the relief bill that will wipe out federal debts...
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...
Texas is the coalmine canary of failures in the GQP’s industrial policy. The “clusterfuzzle” appears to be only in Texas: perhaps they skimmed on costs and failed in winterizing their plants. The structural failure comes from the anti-federal, deregulatory policy of the Texas grid which reveals itself in the disinformation...
Received this e-mail today from U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D. GA) in support of U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan’s (D. NH) re-election campaign: Sen. Maggie Hassan (D. NH) 1,017 votes. That was the margin in Democrat Maggie Hassan's U.S. Senate election in New Hampshire in 2016. Well now Maggie is up...
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...
Let me clear from the start, I respect other peoples religions based purely on personnel faith and belief just as long as they don’t try and force them upon me or others. I’m not in favour of an imposed group think. Conspiracy theories and organized religion play upon the same...
Conservatives love to mythologize wealthy people as brave, resolute, patriotic captains of industry who won’t let anything get in the way of their success. At the same time, they also frequently portray the rich as timid little whelps who will instantly grab their balls and go home if anyone tries to pluck...
For a brief moment after Trump sent his myrmidons to storm the Capitol where Mitch McConnell was telling the Senate the Biden election was legal, he was angry at what had just happened that he actually showed emotion. “The mob was fed lies,” the GOP leader said on the Senate...
This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx Reproduction and accumulation Capital is “self-valorising value”. But for capital to continue to generate new value and create surplus-value, this surplus-value must itself by reinvested back into production – that is, surplus-value must be...