AUDIO LINK Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue. “Lucky…
Posts tagged capitalism
WFHB’s Interchange – An Interview with Jasper Bernes on Logistics and Food Systems
AUDIO: Capital’s (Hidden) Art of War and the Belly of the Revolution In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh rejects the grain offering of the farmer, Cain, while accepting the flesh offering…
Explanation and Example: Capitalist Nationalism
**Reformist consciousness was famously described by Gramsci as “dual” or “contradictory”; on the one hand accepting the permanence of the system, on the other rejecting the effect of its operation. The most basic expression of…
The Tragedy of Influential (White Supremacist) Liars: Distorting the Commons (Against Fair Housing and Civil Rights)
How can we measure the influence of bad ideas? If there is anything to learn from the “system” of social media it’s that bad news travels and expands exponentially while the “good news” is always…
Happiness Is Notoriously Difficult To Describe
Preface to the Paperback Edition of George Kateb’s Utopia and Its Enemies (1972, 1963). “Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among human beings; but perhaps it could be…
Vitruvius (and Lego) Against the Imagination
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent Lego movie. It’s gotten a good critical response based first on the ability of the “digital magicians” to make the action appear as if it were filmed via the manual…
The Plunder Years
It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he…
The Fiscal Freedom to Inculcate Evil
The following snippet is from a piece by Andrew Leonard on the SCOTUS ruling striking down the Montana Supreme Court decision to limit political contributions (in the teeth of Citizens United). It’s a clear loss…
Okay, I Guess, Whatever
The paradox of the mercantile culture we label “capitalism,” or probably more descriptively and truthfully for most of us, consumerism, is in its “false” interconnectedness. At the level of production, at the level of industrialized…
Indolence! Undercutting the Cult of Mammon
A recent report on Inequality in America from Stanford details the extent of the wealth disparities. Salon has a brief post on it (United States of Inequality) offering this example of the self-perpetuation of winners…