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 system today survives onl

  Crony Capitalism: Everything Has a Price Supplemental industries for sale Donald Jeffries When I was a boy, an obese boy when obesity wasn’t cool, I never dreamed that one day we would all know the glory of paying for water. I would bring a thermos with ice water to baseball games. For basketball games, I drank out of the gym’s water fountain. I had no idea what was in that non-purified water. Fluoride was first added to our water supply in 1945. But that was only in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of the initial proponents of putting this known poison into our drinking water was Harold Hodge, who was part of the human radiation experiments taking place around the same time. You know, where they injected vulnerable “test subjects” with plutonium and uranium. I guess they anticipated something wonderful happening as a result. The “science” behind putting a deadly toxin in our water was provided by some of the largest corporations in the country; Alcoa, the American Petroleum Institute, Du

  Walking Away From The Marketplace John Michael Greer The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin  leno , a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the current state of affairs in the United States and its close allies. Everyone seems quite aware of the fact that most of the people who make big money in our grand post-industrial kleptocracies are doing it by exploiting those who actually produce goods and services, in exactly the same way that a pimp exploits sex workers. No, the question that’s come up over and over again is as simple as it is challenging:  what can we do about it?  I offered one answer  a month ago , discussing the way that modern lenocracies work by dangling various baits in front of you. If you take the bait—and nearly everythi

 The first article can be found here ... The Secret of the Sages John Michael Greer Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited by interests that contribute nothing to the transaction but must be paid off before the transaction can take place.  Lenocracy is a feature of all complex human societies, for much the same reason that every animal species has parasites:  whenever freeloading on someone else’s labor and resources instead of doing the work yourself is an option, someone or something will be found to fill that niche. A handful of bloodsucking leeches. I’ll let you figure out why I’ve included this picture. Yet societies vary in the amount of lenocracy they tolerate. In particular, when markets are relatively f