The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this essay... Who’s Winning? By FABIO VIGHI ‘The West has become a totalitarian space – the space of a self-defensive hegemony defending itself against its own weakness.’ (Jean Baudrillard) One of the most frequently referenced scenes in Arthur Penn’s  Night Moves  (1973) features a despondent Gene Hackman slumped in front of a small black-and-white television, half-heartedly watching a game of American football. When his wife walks in and asks, “Who’s winning?”, he mutters: “Nobody. One side’s just losing slower than the other.” As consciously depressing Hollywood films like  Night Moves  foresaw, the crisis of the 1970s was already signalling the end of capitalist socialisation: a structural and soon-to-be global socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological debacle that is now entering its phase of rapid escalation (though Hollywood this time is in full denial). As it’s becoming increasingly clear, the s...

  Face To Fasces Evil-doers do evil Radio Far Side "Destiny’s powerful hand has made the bed of my future, and it’s up to me to lie in it. I am destined to be a superhero, to right wrongs, and pound two-fisted justice into the hearts of evil-doers everywhere. You don’t fight destiny. No sir! And you don’t eat crackers in the bed of your future, or you get all… scratchy. Hey, I’m narrating here!" —  The Tick , 1994 As a freelance writer and editor, I work on a lot of high-level international documents. Though they are freely available on the interwebs, very few of us actual humans ever read them, and with good reason. If I didn’t get paid to do it, I would rather pull my own teeth with tweezers. These reports, roadmaps, frameworks, and studies clearly lay out the machinery of global governance. They go into excruciating detail on the legal and regulatory foundations for how governments blend with NGOs, blend with financial institutions, blend with “stakeholders” (how I detest ...

  O Death IRINA SLAV In February this year, Barclays  announced  it would stop direct financing for “energy clients, for upstream oil and gas expansion projects or related infrastructure.” The bank followed a massively popular trend in the industry of boosting support for transition-related businesses at the expense of traditional energy because traditional energy was the new plague, at least reputationally speaking. There must have also been plans to profit from the transition, no doubt, because forecasts and projections said it would be profitable. Fast forward five months and imagine my surprise when Barclays’ CEO, CS Venkatakrishnan  told  Bloomberg this week that banks couldn’t just quit oil and gas “cold turkey” and that the “reality is that for quite some time, fossil fuels will be with us.” In the same report, Bloomberg graciously informed us that Barclays is not the only one having sort of second thoughts about this whole move away from oil and gas busi...

  TEOTWAWKI And I feel fine RADIO FAR SIDE On the 6th of June 1974, the Watergate scandal was in full bloom, the global economy was in the crapper, and I was anxiously awaiting my 13th birthday to become a full-fledged teenager. President Nixon had instituted a national 55mph speed limit, which essentially pissed off everyone who lived west of the Mississippi River. Japan was the China of the day and the Vietnam war was nearing the end of its decade-long stranglehold on Merkin culture. At that moment, Prince Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were  sitting down to change the world  and create an empire. The Petrodollar Pact, among other things, forced the world to buy oil and gas in US dollars, and created Saudi Aramco, the single most powerful energy company ever. At the same time, Nixon had ended  the Bretton Woods agreement  and closed the gold window at the Federal Reserve Bank, thus severing US currency from its Constitutional lin...

  The Fed's "Doomsday Book" Has Been Revealed THE CORBETT REPORT by James Corbett Back in 2011, shareholders of insurance giant American International Group (AIG) filed a $40 billion class action lawsuit against the US government over the terms of its controversial bailout of AIG during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2014, the trial case  came to focus  on an intriguing oddity. In cross-examination, the plaintiffs learned of a set of documents that the New York Fed—the heart of America's  Federal Reserve central bank  and the primary wheeler-dealer in the chaotic days of the global financial collapse—dramatically refers to as its "Doomsday Book." This book, it was discovered, contained the various legal opinions and memoranda that the Fed used to determine what power it has to manipulate the financial system in the event of a large-scale crisis. And, it seemed, there was a good chance that the central broke its own rules with all its bailout shenanigans and f...