The brave new world of work: where employees are treated as criminals

Click here to access article by Anthony Elliott from The Conversation (Australia). 

We have seen this new world of work expressed accurately as a "race to the bottom" for workers. The bottom as recently appeared in Bangladesh where over 1000 (and counting) low wage workers died in a building that did not meet required building standards and was ignored by officials --after all, workers are disposable in this brave new world of work. 

This bottom of working conditions that enriches major international corporations does not go without its effects on working conditions in the technologically advanced countries. Workers in these countries are fully aware that their jobs may be subject to off-shoring; and now with high unemployment rates nearly everywhere, they cling tenuously and anxiously to their own jobs where their performance is closely monitored. The author describes the increasing introduction of electronic monitoring methods.

Coup d’Etat to Trade Seen in Billionaire Toxic Lead Fight

Click here to access article by Andrew Martin from Bloomberg News. 

Here we see the early signs of the brave new world of neoliberalism that capitalist ruling classes are preparing for us. It's surprising that this prime capitalist media corporation allows such a headline, which accurately recognizes the likely outcome of a legal dispute in Peru, as a "coup d'etat".

“It’s like a quiet, slow-moving coup d’état,” said Lori Wallach, director of the Global Trade Watch division of Public Citizen, a nonprofit that opposes many aspects of trade pacts. Investors and corporations are “using this regime to have another front at trying to limit the governance authority of nation states.” 

New Compass Meeting about Participatory Democracy at the World Social Forum

Click here to access article from New Compass (based in Norway). (Note: the introductory article contains links to both an audio and a written transcript of the WSF meeting. The transcript is accessed as a Microsoft Word document.)

One important point about participatory democracy is to make sure that the institutions really empower the citizens. Often “participatory democracy” is just a political move made by the local authorities to attract votes, a communication move that only serves to legitimate decisions that already have been taken by the authorities. To ensure real participation and decision making power to citizens, the cooperative has created the Intervention Charter. Local authorities committing to the charter are put in front of the people and held to account. The idea is that it is the people who are the experts. But implementing such a practice encounters several difficulties: the fear of the local authorities to be directly confronted by their citizens, and the difficulty of convincing both citizens and experts that ordinary citizens know what is good for their community. Low participation of citizens can also be a problem sometimes. It is not easy to mobilize people to participate nowadays. [My emphasis]

I see a danger in this presentation of participatory democracy. One must never forget that capitalist ruling classes will never voluntarily relinquish control over important decisions. The fact that they permit local experiments such as depicted in this presentation does not in any way refute this point. You see, under globalized capitalism, local decisions matter very little to capitalist ruling classes. Most tax money is spent by national governments that are controlled by these ruling classes, and local communities have lost most of the important decisions. Consider how corporations can elicit all kinds of subsidies and favors from local communities so that corporations will set up operations in their communities. This lack of power over important decisions is clearly the reason why there is "low participation of citizens...."

However, I believe that such participation is desirable in that it offers a training experience for people to prepare them for self-government.

Female 'Purity' Is Bullshit

Click here to access article by Lindy West from Jezebel.

The author looks at the issue of the tendency for women to be reduced to sexual objects in a society that is infected with notions of sinfulness associated with sex. Hence, there are "good girls" and "bad girls", Madonnas or whores. This issue in general is, as illustrated by this article, usually dealt with as an issue of men versus women, with the female author arguing that men are evil-doers. As with many other issues, I think that a class-based analysis of the topic sheds much more light. See if you agree with my reasoning.

I think that both cultural phenomena, sexuality as sin and the sexual objectification of women, are fostered by the class structure of capitalism, a system that empowers one small group, "owners" of productive property, over all other people. Because of their privileges of "ownership" that has evolved over time, such people have the power to decide on how much net wealth that is created in productive enterprises go to a class known as workers versus how much they, the "owners", keep for themselves. This fundamental division of humanity has created a pattern that is repeated throughout all institutions in society because "owners" who by the advantageous nature of this division have assumed a leading role in governing societies, that is, they constitute a ruling class of people.

Regarding the sexuality as sin issue, libertinism has often been practiced, and even celebrated, among ruling classes throughout history. You will never find a reference in history to a worker or peasant "libertine". Hence, unrestrained sexual practices have always been the privilege of ruling classes for obvious reasons. Ruling classes want workers and peasants to devote their entire lives to producing things that ruling classes want and they want to accumulate most of the wealth generated by this production.

The other issue, the sexual objectification of women and its corollary, the Madonna or whore syndrome, can also be seen as serving the ruling class. First of all, the Madonna or whore phenomenon applies only to working class women, never to ruling class women. You will find that the latter's prolific practice of sexuality is romanticized throughout most of literature, for example, George Sand. Although you will never see this observed in popular versions of historical dramas about aristocratic life such as is frequently shown over PBS TV, but it was a common practice of aristocrats to regard peasant women, and probably men also, as completely available to provide them with sexual favors (see this and this).

Then there is the fundamental tendency found in capitalist societies to reduce everything to a commodity, and that applies to working class women as "whores" who offer their bodies for sale in the sexual market.

What we frequently see nowadays reflected in "feminist" literature and writings is a ruling class framing of the sexual objectification issue as one of men abusing women. This is precisely the tone of this article. Such framing serves the divide and rule strategy very well. To divide working people on this issue provides a very good distraction from thinking about how the capitalist ruling class continues to thoroughly rob working people of their homes, jobs, pensions, and life savings.

Looking at these issues from a class-based perspective does not for an instant justify any exploitative behavior regardless of who is the agent and who is the victim. I am merely pointing out how the issues are usually dealt with in capitalist society. The framing of these issues are used against working people to serve ruling class interests. 

The real focus should be on the socialization of these attitudes in our current society. The fact is that both sexes are indoctrinated in the same ideas and participate in the indoctrination of succeeding generations in these attitudes. It is not a question of sex, it has more to do with gender indoctrination, that is, how we are indoctrinated and socialized to behave in certain ways. The only real difference between the sexes in terms of behavior is that we act on our socialization according to our sexual identity.

The Reverse Revolving Door: How Corporate Insiders Are Rewarded Upon Leaving Firms for Congress

Click here to access article by Lee Fang from The Nation.

Disclosures reveal that corporations and lobbying firms award six-figure bonuses to staff who leave to take powerful positions on Capitol Hill.

Here we see a liberal media outlet report on this practice as if it were a sensational discovery. What is really significant about this report is the framing of the report as a sensational discovery. Reporting it this way furnishes more evidence of the overwhelming power of corporate media and ruling class control of education to shape the views of most Americans to believe that it is even possible for government institutions to function in some kind of independent way in a class-structured society. 

What we see here is "government as usual" under capitalist so-called "democracy". I never cease to be surprised that there are so few Americans aware of the fact that the government is essentially a branch of American capitalism and its sole function is to pretend to be some sort of legitimate democratic institution.

Global corporations and the Bangladesh building collapse

Click here to access article by Peter Symonds from World Socialist Web Site. 

Two weeks after the Rana Plaza building collapse, global retail giants that source their garments in Bangladesh such as Walmart, Primark, Benetton and others are engaged in a cynical public relations exercise to distance themselves from the tragedy and preserve their image and their profits.
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As of yesterday, the official death toll had reached 705, with hundreds more injured, making the collapse the worst industrial disaster in country’s history and one of the worst ever in the world.

This latest tragedy joins the huge line of similar tragedies that are an integral part of a system that seeks to reduce costs to a minimum regardless of the consequences to workers and their families. After all, as expressed so well by Margaret Thatcher, "there is no such thing as society, only individuals (capitalists) and their families." In this brave new neoliberal world, workers everywhere in the world are expendable and profits are everything.

In bed with Bibi

Click here to access article by Gilad Atzmon from Intrepid Report. 

We call on people of the world to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the Syrian people.

I was shocked by the names Atzmon cited who signed on to such a statement and immediately looked for documented evidence for this charge. It didn't take long. The author put it front and center in the article. So, why haven't I seen any similar views from the names he cited published in any source up to now? Have they been too embarrassed to express them? 

There are times when one must face a situation where both parties in a conflict are engaging in despicable acts, but in this conflict these "progressives" by default are supporting the most dangerous force in the world today: the Empire and its Zionist allies who are engaging in the most heinous acts in their attempt to destroy another nation.

Post navigation ← Older posts Greece’s depression is IMF’s idea of ‘progress’ May8

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

Austerity programs are designed with ideology in mind, not with economics based on the real world. One clue to this is that “structural re-adjustment” programs invariably demand sell-offs of public assets — holding fire sales of state enterprises means private capital can scoop them up at very low prices, and profit nicely from doing so at public expense.

The neoliberal concept is that people exist to serve markets rather than markets existing to serve people.

Why is Corporate America fanning the flames of violence in Chicago?

Click here to access article by  Bob Simpson from Zcommunications.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in full control of the public schools and enthusiastically represents corporate interests.  CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett of the Chicago Public Schools(CPS), answers directly to Rahm.

CPS currently is proposing 61 school actions involving a total of 133 schools. Students from schools that are closed must go to what CPS calls “welcoming schools”, whence the figure of 133 affected schools. Most of these proposed school actions would take place in working class neighborhoods of color, many of them predominantly African-American. Some of these school actions could have deadly consequences.

He goes on in the article to explain the "deadly consequences", and points to some answers to the question posed in the headline.

After referring to the establishment crackdown on the Black Panthers who were making successful efforts at organizing multiracial communities in Chicago in the 1970s, he suggests that their current efforts are designed to serve corporate interests and to sow disorganization among the poor. In other words, a renewed class war.

And Then There Was One: The Last Empire?

Click here to access article by Tom Engelhardt from his blog TomDispatch. 

The title refers to the Anglo-American Empire enforced ultimately by NATO that has been imposed on the rest of the world. I refuse to quibble over some of his observations (for example, he suggests that the Soviet Union was an Empire) because his overall thesis is right on target.

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature. 

Why You're in Deep Trouble If You Can't Afford a Lawyer

Click here to access article by Hannah Levintova, Jaeah Lee, and Brett Brownell from Mother Jones. 

Back in 1963 at the height of liberal (in the American political sense) influence the One Percent's Supreme Court was a bit embarrassed by the obvious fact that civil rights, like everything else, were essentially for sale under capitalist rule in the US. So our ruling class set about establishing a cover for this embarrassment with the provision of a "public defender". 

The article exposes what lies below this fig leaf: the obscenity of class based justice. Predictably, the editors of this liberal publication frame the issue as one that can be solved within the system. Thus, you can ignore their naive solutions, instead focus on the reality of injustice under the public defender arrangement.

Building The Commons: 2013 Forum

Click here to access posting by davana from Making Worlds: a commons coalition.

The significance of this post is to illustrate that the Occupy Movement has not disappeared, but is undergoing a period of consolidation, reflection, and rebirth. Here we visit people in New York City who are involved in the work of building a commons. They are people from a variety of activist and ideological backgrounds: Transition Towns activists, community organizers, Occupy Wall Street activists, Hurricane Sandy relief workers, academic intellectuals on the left, etc. 

I think one of the core commonalities that all of them share is a sense that people must re-assume responsibility for their own lives simply because their capitalist masters have little-to-no regard for them. It is a new consciousness that our society is manipulated by people who have separated themselves from communities and who have agendas at odds with the needs of communities. These activists know that they are faced with a massive project that includes new ways of thinking and relating to each other, in short, the construction of a new consciousness and culture. It is no place for individuals who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the capitalist belief that the solutions to all problems can be obtained immediately by shopping and accumulating the stuff they want to sell you, or even a liberal's belief that participating in protest demonstrations can, by themselves, fundamentally change anything.

Anyway, I invite you to explore this website (for example, links like this and this) to understand where the commons/Occupy movement is today: it is a place where people are beginning to lay the foundations for a new society by asking important questions such as:

• How are people in NYC creating common spaces?
• How can commoning efforts support and strengthen each other?
• How do communities identify with and participate in the process of commoning?
• How can commoning be a form of resistance to neoliberal privatization?
• How can we construct a commons-inspired "Occupy theory" of collective action?

The Robot Revolution

Click here to access article by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin from News Beacon Ireland. 

Will we have more leisure time? That is predicated on the idea of a social fund created by society to pay for education, health, transport etc. But where will that money come from? The beneficiaries of robot production (which will no doubt be private) will be the owners and shareholders of robot producing companies and factories supplying robots to universities, hospitals, libraries etc. not society as a whole.

This may seem fantastical now during this transition phase of development but already relatively undeveloped robots are being used as tour guides and remote doctors. As more privatisation puts more people at the mercy of the profit motive, exposure to replacement by robot is only limited by the current capabilities of contemporary science.

Oh, I'm sure we will have much more leisure time. We are already experiencing much more leisure time while being jobless, although I don't think we can enjoy it much while being forced out of our homes and into lines at a local food bank.

The marvelous development of technology, which is a legacy of so many generations of humanity and a product of human ingenuity, has under capitalism been secured by a few for their benefit. Under their system of capitalism, they own this technology and the sophisticated tools it has produced; and they have been, and will continue, to use it against us.

The author does us a great service in pointing out the contradictions that many millions across the globe are increasing being confronted with, however his conclusion seems rather lame to me.

Only stronger ties building on the common interest between the unemployed and employed can possibly resist this coming workplace crisis. 

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew Holds a Closed Door Meeting With Jamie Dimon and Hedge Fund Titans

Click here to access article by Pam Martens from Wall Street on Parade.

For obvious reasons it is very difficult to discern the real power centers in the One Percent ruling class, however one cannot be far off base to mark the Council on Foreign Relations as one of the primary nerve centers in the brain of the Empire's ruling class. I think you will find that this article reinforces that impression. The people gathering at this secret meeting are some of the primary directors of this class.

Americans have suffered for the past five years the economic nightmare that grew out of backroom deals, Wall Street and Washington’s revolving doors and crony capitalism. Lew continues the abhorrent tradition of drawing a dark curtain around the government’s interactions with Wall Street. 

The Syria-Iran red line show

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

This eminently Bushist Obama "red line" business, applied to Syria, Iran or both, is becoming a tad ridiculous.

Click here if you wish to access the source or the transcript of this interview with Escobar in which he provides an astute assessment of the latest Empire engineered disaster in the Mid-East. From RT.

U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator

Click here to access article from Reuters via Chicago Tribune.

Strange, how this piece of news failed to make it into any mainstream sources that I viewed this morning. Well, our masters who manage the media certainly wouldn't want an independent source to conflict with the propaganda they have been spewing out for the past two weeks--it might spoil the false flag operation.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

Climate Crisis Will Bring Drought In Temperate Areas, Fnds NASA

Click here to access article from CounterCurrents.

A recent NASA study indicates what other scientists have been saying for some time: we can expect our future climate to be characterized by extreme weather events, more extreme drouths, more extreme rain storms, more wildfires, etc, resulting in more disasters for populations.

"These results in many ways are the worst of all possible worlds," said Peter Gleick, a climatologist and water expert who is president of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland research organization. "Wet areas will get wetter and dry areas will get drier."

Questioning Labor Imperialism in Egypt: A Critique of the Solidarity Centre’s “Justice for All” Report

Click here to access article by Michael Barker from One Struggle. (a "best post")

In this rather lengthy, but very scholarly report, Barker illustrates in his examination of NGO operations in Egypt the Empire's use of intellectual workers employed in NGOs fronting as labor, pro-democracy, and human rights organizations to co-opt and otherwise undermine any real movements that might challenge the Empire's engine of capitalism. The article abstract spells out the significance of this examination:

People power is the dynamic driver of social history, with history merely being the documented response of elite power-brokers to popular demands for justice. Recognizing the latent power and desire of normal people to overthrow their oppressive rulers, more far sighted elites have long recognized the need to channel such unrealized power into non-revolutionary political alternatives: a process which entails their intervening at the grassroots level of civil society to ensure that such threats never coalesce into a force powerful enough to upset the capitalist status quo. In this way, US elites have created what many authors have amorphously referred to as a non-profit industrial complex, which forms a “natural corollary” to the prison industrial complex. Overseas, such technologies of repression play a central role in sustaining imperial domination; and while their role is largely ignored by most writers (even radical ones), their importance has nevertheless been thoroughly documented.

Of course, in this age of globalization the ruling class's use of the "non-profit industrial complex" in foreign countries applies equally well to domestic operations. The genius of the Anglo-American Empire has been its refinement of methods to manage the perceptions of people. To accomplish this, Empire agents have recruited large numbers of intellectuals in this service by offering them numerous and generous monetary inducements. With this careful examination of such operations in Egypt, Barker does us a great service by exposing how they function. 

U.S. Financed Independent Polls Are Not Independent

Click here to access article by Bernhard from his blog Moon of Alabama. 

A favorite ploy used by agents of the Empire to manipulate elections is spotted by this keen observer being implemented in Malaysia.

Such tight independent polls usually carry the smell of U.S. interference.

A tight independent poll will show the U.S. favorite candidate may win. When the election then goes against the U.S. favorite the tight independent poll will be used to claim election fraud and to instigate riots to then somehow wrestle the U.S. favorite into power.

We have seen this scheme in various color revolutions in eastern Europe, in Thailand and recently also in Venezuela. 

Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb

Click here to access article by Laurent Guyénot from Voltaire. 

This piece offers an excellent review of US relations with Israel since the latter's founding. You will learn about Kennedy's attempts to curb Israeli influence over our government; following his assassination, Israel's successful efforts to influence the US government; Israeli espionage activities in the US; and their use of a false flag attacks--most notably on a US ship with the collaboration of the Johnson administration in an attempt to bring US into war against Egypt. (For more information on the latter, see this, this, and this.)