US

How America Overdosed on Capitalism

 

America is something like history’s greatest experiment in capitalism. In a sense, we’re lucky to have it — it’s rare that a society devotes itself furiously, single-mindedly, one-dimensionally to an ideology, rejects the world, and pursues its own course. Here we have something truly rare and unique, which doesn’t happen often in social thinking: a perfect experiment to test the hypothesis — what would happen if a society only ever chose capitalism?

Waves of capital began to corrupt the political system. In other words, capital was beginning to corrode democracy. The idea of the neutral, benevolent capitalist, in other words, was beginning to be revealed as a myth.

 

Or, one I like better: what would happen if capitalism were given total freedom to be itself? If it could unfold according to its own logic, rules, choices, destiny — what would it naturally become? What is its nature? Now we can answer that very question, not with theory, but with reality.

http://bit.ly/2Q9wTJO

How the U.S. Helped Prevent North Korea and South Korea From Reaching Real Peace in the 1950s

 

Signing the Armistice ending three-year conflict in Korea, on July 30, 1953. Lt. Gen William K. Harrison, Jr (seated left), Chief UN Delegate and Gen Nam Il, (Seated right), Senior Communist Delegate, sign at Panmunjom. PhotoQuest/Getty Images

In the long history of Korea, nothing compares to the 20th century division of the peninsula or the war that followed. That war has not finished, and a peace treaty remains elusive. China, North Korea and South Korea all seek a peace treaty, but 11 U.S. presidents since 1953 have been unwilling to agree.

If President Trump turns out to be the exception, that shift could help put an end to more than a half-century of conflict — and the role of the United States in determining whether peace arrives is not a small one. Neither is it coincidental: in fact, the U.S. has played a key role in keeping the conflict going as long as it has.

The division of Korea is not what Franklin Delano Roosevelt intended as World War II ended. Read Morenorth,south

The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump

 

Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying. Read More

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse – Eudaimonia and Co

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.
Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Read More