Monday, August 30, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, August 30, 2021

Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of a brief meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com. Ron H.

If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.
  • Can Human Solidarity Globalize? from Great Transition Initiative. (Note: This is a complex post starting with Richard Falk's essay, followed by panels (Debating the Prospects and Making It Happen) each of which offers other essays in response to Falk's essay. I obviously haven't had time to read each one so I don't know if anyone offers important insights--I'll leave that up to you.)
It is an open secret that the defeated ISIS fighters were airlifted from Syria by what is known in local folklore as Daesh Airlines who are today the cutting edge of the ISIS-K. Hamid Karzai himself has spoken about unmarked helicopters under cover of darkness dropping strangers in remote areas. And this when the Afghan airspace was under NATO control!
This post is about how criminal enterprises grow inside of a societal institution resembling "legitimate" capitalist enterprises. As a social system capitalism differentiated people into two basic classes: those who owned property and those that did not. Later capitalist societies developed into various classes depending on the extended families' relationship to the ownership of property, and created gross inequality among the various classes in terms of material well-being and societal influence. This inevitably poses questions about the capitalist system itself: are capitalist enterprises legitimate in the broadest sense (def. #2).
 
This article is by two criminologists in crime-ridden Venezuela. The two authors describe the development of criminal organization as roughly following four steps:
 
1) Being a bad, daring, reckless, brave, or evil kid was the way of “being someone” for a person who has no other chance of a decent job or access to schooling that may allow them to improve their living conditions. These characteristics are valued in these excluded territories.
 
2) ... gangs are turned into criminal enterprises that function just as a company would, with a logic of capitalist accumulation, surplus investment, recruiting more workers to lower costs, reinvest and expand. We observe a change in the nature of gangs that have become instrumental enterprises, mainly concentrated in illicit markets with managerial rationality. They are armed capitalist enterprises.

3) As a result of police violence and mass imprisonment, many gangs shifted from being gangs that were pitted against other gangs to organizations that began to effectively control the drug market and territory. Predatory crimes came down and the gang in the area dedicated itself to selling drugs or other more complicated activities such as extortion, extortion in informal mines, the issue of the border, etc.
 
4) ... the gang began to develop armed resistance capabilities, yielding the ability to negotiate with the state. This is another transformation that was alien to criminals before. Traditional criminals did not negotiate because it was a matter of reputation: “I don’t care if they kill me.” Now, gang leaders are able to sit down with so-and-so to pay him or to negotiate politically: “we guarantee that there will be peace here, there will be no violence, but you will not enter.” This demonstrates an effective, successful capacity to establish negotiations that had been alien to the traditional criminal logic.
 
But as we see in the USA, numerous criminal organizations have taken another step by merging into ruling capitalist classes and become "legitimate" (def. #1). This US phenomenon was dealt with at length by Oreskes and Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt. This latter phenomenon lends greater emphasis to the profound question of whether capitalist societies are legitimate.
  • The Importance of Arctic Sea Ice featuring the views of Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--09:29m), who has fearlessly focused his attention throughout his career on the climate crisis.