The Party Of Wall Street

The Article: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis by David Harvey at VersoBooks.

The Text: The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.

The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.

These principles and practices do not arise out of individual greed, short-sightedness or mere malfeasance (although all of these are plentifully to be found). These principles have been carved into the body politic of our world through the collective will of a capitalist class animated by the coercive laws of competition. If my lobbying group spends less than yours then I will get less in the way of favors. If this jurisdiction spends on people’s needs it shall be deemed uncompetitive.

Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are only “following orders,” as Adolf Eichmann famously claimed, or “doing what the system demands” as others now put it, acceding to the barbarous and immoral principles and practices of the Party of Wall Street. The coercive laws of competition force us all, to some degree or other, to obey the rules of this ruthless and uncaring system. The problem is systemic, not individual.

The Party’s favored slogans of freedom and liberty to be guaranteed by private property rights, free markets and free trade, actually translate into the freedom to exploit the labor of others, to dispossess the assets of the common people at will and the freedom to pillage the environment for individual or class benefit.

Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at below market value to open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example) and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital gains taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers. They deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan, and FEMA and “heck-of-a job” Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that the state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in improving the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And, finally, they use the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states claim, to exclude the public from much of what passes for public space and to harass, put under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize and incarcerate all those who do not broadly accede to its dictates. It excels in practices of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the illusion of freedom of expression as long as that expression does not ruthlessly expose the true nature of their project and the repressive apparatus upon which it rests.

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Take Your Pick: Jackson, Tyson, Jordan, Game 6

Niggas in Paris by Jay-Z and Kanye West off of Watch the Throne

Earl The Pearl Versus The Philosoraptors

In 1971 I wrote and shot a scene for Annie Hall involving the Knicks and Earl The Pearl. I was extolling the concept of the physical over the cerebral, so I wrote a fantasy basketball game in which all the great thinkers of history – Kant and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – played against the Knicks. I cast actors who looked like those philosophers to play those roles and they played against the real Knicks. We used the players on the team at that time including Earl, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, and we shot it inside Madison Square Garden after the last game of the season. Of course the Knicks were smooth and beat the philosophers easily; all their cerebration was impotent against the Knicks.

Via greatest blog ever, Spike Lee and Woody Allen at Knicks Games.

drunken missives —-reverb—-

artifice as vé·ri·té

so

just say how to make it right and i swear ————————————————-

]revisions and gaps in history[

you…. you still have all the answers.

Morning After In America

Simultaneously the comedian and the punch line, the United States today is a joke, though perhaps the funniest thing about it is that we don’t actually mean to be. The easiest way to appreciate the humor is by looking at the rather slapstick slew of 2012 Republican primary candidates: there’s Michele Bachmann, who actually believes that if gay people were given rights everyone else would lose theirs while Herman Cain, the presidential hopeful du jour, is now known primarily for his Sim City-inspired tax plan and for his alleged sexual harassment of women.

Always lurking in the distance is Susan Boyle lookalike Newt Gingrich, whose highly intolerant statements are alarmingly similar to the late Osama Bin Laden. Then there’s Rick Santorum, whose talents include owning nice suits and utilizing his First Amendment rights to display his own ignorance to a national audience. And of course, one cannot forget the tanned and innocuous Mitt Romney; or actually, one can. Most neglect to mention Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman, mainly because there’s nothing particularly funny about knowledgeable individuals who base their beliefs on actual principles.

News for the Nescient

Much like a senile uncle at a family reunion, the 2012 Republican primary race has provided the much-needed comedic relief in an otherwise overwhelmingly depressing juncture. The facts are crippling and the foreseeable future is rather bleak: no one wants to talk about rising unemployment and poverty rates, an abysmal and ineffective prison system, mindless resource consumption, or the score of other problems that over the next few decades will prove to be crippling, if not fatal, in the global society.

It is not surprising then that as Greece teeters at the precipice of a national economic default with global aftershocks that American news sources have instead focused primarily on a potential paternity suit for pop sensation Justin Bieber, the failed marriage of Kim Kardashian whose lifespan was less than that of a brine shrimp, and the alleged sexual history of Republican candidate Herman Cain. None of these things matter, yet Americans consume them as real “news.”

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