Shadow World

Through the insights of whistleblowers, investigators, prosecutors, military and industry insiders SHADOW WORLD reveals how the international trade in weapons – with the complicity of governments, their militaries and intelligence agencies, defense contractors, arms dealers and agents – fosters corruption, determines economic and foreign policies, undermines democracies and creates widespread suffering. The film unravels a number of the world’s largest and most corrupt arms deals through those involved in perpetrating and investigating them. It illustrates why this trade accounts for almost 40% of all corruption in global trade, and how it operates in a parallel legal universe, in which the national security elite who drive it are seldom prosecuted for their often illegal actions. SHADOW WORLD posits alternatives through the experience of a peace activist and war correspondent, as well as through the voice of Eduardo Galeano who contributed selections from his stories for the film.

Ultimately SHADOW WORLD reveals the real costs of war, the way the arms trade drives it, how weapons of war are turned against citizens of liberal democracies and how the trade inhibits rather than enhances security for us all. In shedding light on how our realities are being constructed, the film offers a way for audiences to see through this horror, in the hopes of creating a better future.

Broken Lives

This thought-provoking film highlights the lives of twelve homeless people living in Florida. Their stories all begin differently. None of them expected to become homeless, but life happened......

Racial Justice Doesn't Trickle Down

Writer Andrea Flynn explores the persistence of hidden, racialized barriers to economic equality in the US, and explains why a 'class only' attempt to address inequality for all Americans fails to confront the legacy of systemic racism - via mass incarceration, spatial segregation and the wealth gap - blocking Black Americans from prosperity and equal access to the economy at large.

Andrea is co-author of the book The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy

The Paradise Papers Are Proof That Capitalism and Racism Fuel The Global Plutocracy by Sam Adler Bell

The Paradise Papers, a stash of over 13 million documents from 19 tax-haven nations and two offshore law firms leaked this month to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, present an archive of global avarice.

Today, the richest one percent own half of the world’s wealth. The Paradise Papers show how this global elite uses offshore tax arrangements, often perfectly legal, to circumvent both the obligations of citizenship as well as the consequences of ownership. The demands which apply to the rest of us—the obligation to pay our taxes, to pay our debts and our civil liabilities—do not apply to them. In many ways, the class war has been won, and the spoils of the victors sit safely sheltered in the Cayman Islands.

The documents reveal that thousands of the world’s richest individuals and companies engage in regulatory arbitrage to evade tax authorities in their home countries. An estimated $8.7 trillion—10 percent of world’s GDP—is currently stashed offshore, almost all of it belonging to the richest 0.1% of households.

This system of global tax evasion exacerbates inequality and deprives governments of resources that could be used to benefit the public. Up to $699 billion sits in offshore accounts. According to a 2016 study, the United States alone loses $111 billion in taxes each year due to this practice. Yet, at this moment, Republicans in Congress are moving forward with a tax-reform bill that would significantly lower the tax burden on the super-rich. And the GOP bill, which would balloon the federal deficit, is almost certainly a prelude to deeper cuts to the social safety net. Rather than punishing the selfish and destructive behavior of the super-rich, Congress is poised to reward it.

That billions of dollars in wealth is now sitting stowed away in the Caribbean while every day families in America struggle to feed themselves is an injustice of cosmic proportions. This fact should blare like a siren every time we see a homeless person, every time we hear the story of an uninsured child, every time we sit down to balance a tight family budget. And it should motivate us to fight the obscene inequality that pervades our society.

But, for the most part, it doesn't. A number of Democrats, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have seized on the revelation that Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross hid financial ties to Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. Bernie Sanders, true to form, has called for an end to the “global oligarchy.” Yet the Paradise Papers, like the Panama Papers before them, have generated no great backlash in the United States. Many Americans seem resigned to the explanation offered by Trump’s chief economic advisor Gary Cohn that “this is the way the world works.”

But why? Where is the rage? How can Americans be placid in the face of injustice so transparent? This is the question we should be asking ourselves.

Part of the answer is that we lack a clear outlet for our rage. Our democracy has become so captured by the influence of big money on our political system that the available pathways to channel our anger into reform can appear scant. Another answer is less widely acknowledged, but no less important. Today’s economic robber barons are sheltered from the ignominy of their crimes by the resurgence of a parochial, racist nationalism. Financial elite such as Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, both Trump administration officials, are perfectly happy to make common cause with white nationalists like Steve Bannon. Why? Because more than anything, what the super rich need is someone else to blame.

It’s no coincidence that many white workers believe their antagonists are working people of color and immigrants, rather than the wealthy capitalists who control their lives. Though most working-class whites believe the economic system unfairly favors the rich, they also tend to believe welfare recipients are gaming the system—especially if those welfare recipients are non-white.

A recent poll shows that 68 percent of working-class whites believe the United States is “in danger of losing its culture and identity.” And racial resentment, political scientists Jason McDaniel and Sean McElwee have found, is a strong predictor of opposition to government aid to the poor. By stoking racial animus, those in positions of extreme power and wealth are able to fleece the working class and protect the interests of their fathomlessly affluent friends while redirecting white anger towards the racial other.

A coalition of racists and plutocrats have stigmatized our best means of fixing inequality—redistribution and social programs—by associating them exclusively with supposedly “undeserving” outsiders: “welfare queens” (Ronald Reagan’s dog-whistling term for poor black mothers), undocumented immigrants or Muslim refugees. In this way, the wealth of the one percent is shielded by white racial panic.

The mistake many liberals and leftists make is imagining that these twin threats can be disentangled. That we can confront the racists without confronting the super rich as well, or vice versa. That, perhaps, the globetrotting economic elite can be an ally in the fight against resurgent nationalism. But this is a fantasy. There’s no need for the one percent to sign on a dotted line approving this bargain. The financial elite are chief beneficiaries of racial division and the policies they support exacerbate it.

The truth is, there are free riders in our economic system—people who have never known a hard day’s work and who enjoy the benefits of society without bearing its responsibilities. But they aren’t the urban dwelling poor of the conservative imagination. Rather, they’re the children of extreme privilege, the names listed in the Paradise Papers, who leech off the largesse of a system designed to cater to their every whim.

Getting a majority of Americans to understand this, and to collectively organize to change it, will require fighting racism and economic inequality together, as mutually-reinforcing conditions of the status quo. The Paradise Papers should serve as a reminder of the urgency of this task.  

Don’t Just Give Thanks: Pay It Forward One Act of Kindness at a Time by John W. Whitehead

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

— John F. Kennedy

It’s been a hard, heart-wrenching, stomach-churning kind of year filled with violence and ill will.

It’s been a year of hotheads and blowhards and killing sprees and bloodshed and take downs.

It’s been a year in which tyranny took a step forward and freedom got knocked down a few notches.

It’s been a year with an abundance of bad news and a shortage of good news.

It’s been a year of too much hate and too little kindness.

Now we find ourselves approaching that time of year when, as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we’re supposed to give thanks as a nation and as individuals for our safety and our freedoms.

It’s not an easy undertaking.

How do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded? How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day? How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?

It’s not going to happen overnight. Or with one turkey dinner. Or with one day of thanksgiving.

Thinking good thoughts, being grateful, counting your blessings and adopting a glass-half-full mindset are fine and good, but don’t stop there.

This world requires doers, men and women (and children) who will put those good thoughts into action.

It says a lot (and nothing good) about the state of our world and the meanness that seems to have taken center stage that we now have a day (World Kindness Day) devoted to making the world more collectively human in thoughts and actions. The idea for the day started after a college president in Japan was mugged in a public place and nobody helped him.

Unfortunately, you hear about these kinds of incidents too often.

A 15-year-old girl was gang raped in a schoolyard during a homecoming dance. As many as 20 people witnessed the assault over the course of two and a half hours. No one intervened to stop it.

A 28-year-old woman was stabbed, raped and murdered outside her apartment early in the morning. Thirty-eight bystanders bystanders witnessed the attack and failed to intervene. The woman, Kitty Genovese, died from her wounds at the locked doorway to her apartment building.

A 58-year-old man waded into chest-deep water in the San Francisco Bay in an apparent suicide attempt. For an hour Raymond Zack stood in the shallow water while 75 onlookers watched. Police and firefighters were called in but failed to intervene, citing budget cuts, a lack of training in water rescue, fear for their safety and a lack of proper equipment. The man eventually passed out and later died of hypothermia. Eventually, an onlooker volunteered to bring the body back to the beach.

A homeless man intervened to save a woman from a knife-wielding attacker. He saved the woman but was stabbed repeatedly in the process. As The Guardian reports, “For more than an hour he lay dying in a pool of his own blood as dozens walked by. Some paused to stare, others leaned in close. One even shook his body and then left, while someone else recorded a video of the entire proceeding.”

This is how evil prevails: when good men and women do nothing.

By doing nothing, the onlookers become as guilty as the perpetrator.

“If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity,” declared Albert Einstein.

It works the same whether you’re talking about kids watching bullies torment a fellow student on a playground, bystanders watching someone dying on a sidewalk, or citizens remaining silent in the face of government atrocities.

There’s a term for this phenomenon where people stand by, watch and do nothing—even when there is no risk to their safety—while some horrific act takes place (someone is mugged or raped or bullied or left to die): it’s called the bystander effect.

Psychological researchers John Darley and Bibb Latane mounted a series of experiments to discover why people respond with apathy or indifference instead of intervening.

Their findings speak volumes about the state of our nation and why “we the people” continue to suffer such blatant abuses by the police state.

According to Darley and Latane, there are two critical factors that contribute to this moral lassitude.

First, there’s the problem of pluralistic ignorance in which individuals in a group look to others to determine how to respond. As Melissa Burkley explains in Psychology Today, “Pluralistic ignorance describes a situation where a majority of group members privately believe one thing, but assume (incorrectly) that most others believe the opposite.”

Second, there’s the problem of “diffusion of responsibility,” which is compounded by pluralistic ignorance. Basically, this means that the more people who witness a catastrophic event, the less likely any one person will do anything because each thinks someone else will take responsibility. In other words, no one acts to intervene or help because each person is waiting for someone else to do so.

Now the temptation is to label the bystanders as terrible people, monsters even.

Yet as Mahzarin Banaji, professor of psychology at Harvard University points out, “These are not monsters. These are us. This is all of us. This is not about a few monsters. This is about everybody. It says something very difficult to us. It says that perhaps had we been standing there, we ourselves, if we were not better educated about this particular effect and what it does to us, we may fall prey to it ourselves.”

Historically, this bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex.

So what can you do about this bystander effect?

Be a hero, suggests psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

“Each of us has an inner hero we can draw upon in an emergency,” Zimbardo concluded. “If you think there is even a possibility that someone needs help, act on it. You may save a life. You are the modern version of the Good Samaritan that makes the world a better place for all of us.”

Zimbardo is the psychologist who carried out the Stanford Prison Experimentwhich studied the impact of perceived power and authority on middle class students who were assigned to act as prisoners and prison guards. The experiment revealed that power does indeed corrupt (the appointed guards became increasingly abusive), and those who were relegated to being prisoners acted increasingly “submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest.”

What is the antidote to group think and the bystander effect?

Be an individual. Listen to your inner voice. Take responsibility.

“If you find yourself in an ambiguous situation, resist the urge to look to others and go with your gut instinct,” says Burkley. “If you think there is even a possibility that someone is in need, act on it. At worst, you will embarrass yourself for a few minutes, but at best, you will save a life.”

“Even if people recognize that they are witnessing a crime, they may still fail to intervene if they do not take personal responsibility for helping the victim,” writes Burkley. “The problem is that the more bystanders there are, the less responsible each individual feels.”

In other words, recognize injustice. Don’t turn away from suffering.

Refuse to remain silent. Take a stand. Speak up. Speak out.

This is what Zimbardo refers to as “the power of one.” All it takes is one person breaking away from the fold to change the dynamics of a situation. “Once any one helps, then in seconds others will join in because a new social norm emerges: Do Something Helpful.”

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation,” stated Holocaust Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986.  “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, too many Americans have opted to remain silent when it really matters while instead taking a stand over politics rather than human suffering.

That needs to change.

I don’t believe we’re inherently monsters. We just need to be more conscientious and engaged and helpful.

The Good Samaritans of this world don’t always get recognized, but they’re doing their part to push back against the darkness.

For instance, earlier this year in Florida, a family of six—four adults and two young boys—were swept out to sea by a powerful rip current in Panama City Beach. There was no lifeguard on duty. The police were standing by, waiting for a rescue boat. And the few people who had tried to help ended up stranded, as well.

Those on shore grouped together and formed a human chain. What started with five volunteers grew to 15, then 80 people, some of whom couldn’t swim.

One by one, they linked hands and stretched as far as their chain would go.The strongest of the volunteers swam out beyond the chain and began passing the stranded victims of the rip current down the chain.

One by one, they rescued those in trouble and pulled each other in.

There’s a moral here for what needs to happen in this country if we only can band together and prevail against the riptides that threaten to overwhelm us.

Here’s what I suggest.

Instead of just giving thanks this holiday season with words that are too soon forgotten, why not put your gratitude into action with deeds that spread a little kindness, lighten someone’s burden, and brighten some dark corner?

I’m not just talking about volunteering at a soup kitchen or making a donation to a charity that does good work, although those are fine things, too.

What I’m suggesting is something that everyone can do no matter how tight our budgets or how crowded our schedules.

Pay your blessings forward.

Engage in acts of kindness. Smile more. Fight less.

Focus on the things that unite instead of that which divides. Be a hero, whether or not anyone ever notices.

Do your part to push back against the meanness of our culture with conscious compassion and humanity. Moods are contagious, the good and the bad. They can be passed from person to person. So can the actions associated with those moods, the good and the bad.

Even holding the door for someone or giving up your seat on a crowded train are acts of benevolence that, magnified by other such acts, can spark a movement.

Imagine a world in which we all lived in peace.

John Lennon tried to imagine such a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, no greed or hunger. He was a beautiful dreamer whose life ended with an assassin’s bullet on December 8, 1980.

Still, that doesn’t mean the dream has to die, too.

There’s something to be said for working to make that dream a reality. As Lennon reminded his listeners, “War is over, if you want it.”

The choice is ours, if we want it.

Forced Anthem Adherence Antithetical to Justice by Linn Washington Jr

This history-making black Major League Baseball player called out race prejudice in all sectors of American society including prejudice practiced by U.S. presidents, lawmakers, law enforcers and others.

This player’s poignant observations about the sinews of the prejudice infecting American society focus antiseptic illumination on toxic stances taken by President Trump on the rights of black pro-football players to protest race-based injustices including police brutality.

Interestingly, this player’s critique of patriotism shares some similarities with a stance taken by U.S. Senator John McCain, a man widely respected for his Vietnam War service — the service that President Trump has repeatedly disparaged because McCain ended up a POW after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam.

In May 2015 McCain issued a report that slammed the U.S. Department of Defense for funneling millions to pro sports leagues to conduct patriotism inspiring events during games. NFL players standing for the national anthem, now the center of controversy between Trump and some NFL players arose largely from that DoD funding that McCain railed against in the report “Tackling Paid Patriotism.”

This history-making black Major League Baseball player is not Jackie Robinson, the legendary figure who broke the no-blacks-in-MLB barrier in 1947 with his play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Prejudice ran so deep in the all-white MLB that in 1945 one pro team fielded a player who only had one arm, refusing to retain any of the phenomenal players of the all-black Negro leagues who were as good as and better than the best MLB players.

This history-making baseball player was Moses Fleetwood Walker.

Walker, a University of Michigan graduate, was the first and only black to play in Major League Baseball in the 19th Century before segregation soiled that sport. Walker, a catcher, made his mark on baseball in May 1884, when he played his first MLB game, over sixty years before the barrier shattering feat of Jackie Robinson. Robinson had to break the barrier a second time, because MLB officially banned black players in 1889.

Walker’s accomplishment of breaking an unwritten barrier the first time is featured in an exhibit inside the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian facility located not far from the White House.

President Trump did a [photo-op] visit to that facility in February 2017 where he pledged to fight against bigotry, proclaiming his intent to bring a “divided” country together –- another pledge he has failure to keep.

During Trump’s tour of that museum, where he praised the “beautiful” tributes to “so many American heroes,” he apparently did not absorb the import of those tributes. In that museum’s sports section is an exhibit on Walker and other exhibits detailing black athletes who used their sports platforms to protest against race-based injustices in America. One exhibit is the 1968 Olympics protest by American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos who stood on the winner’s podium and raised their fists against institutional racism in the United States.

Smith and Carlos were viciously castigated for this protest – conducted months after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. –- with critics calling them unpatriotic, faulting them for inappropriately injecting politics into sports. Yet a dozen years later, the U.S. boycotted an Olympics held in Moscow over a political tiff with the then USSR –- the host country.

In August 2016, when Colin Kaepernick, the now former pro-football quarterback, launched his protest against police brutality by not standing for the national anthem, he told a reporter that there were “bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Kaepernicks’s observation on failures of authorities to hold police officers accountable for unnecessary fatal shootings and the failures of those shootings to elicit wide public condemnation in many ways mirrors an observation about lynchings that Moses Walker made in his 1908 book Our Home Colony.

Walker, when assailing racist violence against blacks from lynchings to fatal shootings in his book, wrote that those “things have become so common as scarcely to excite more than passing comment.”

Participants in lynch mobs, that often included police and prosecutors, were rarely arrested and less than one percent of those arrested were ever convicted.

When an interracial group of Americans sent a petition to the United Nations in 1951 condemning the racist policies/practices of the U.S. government as genocide against African-Americans, that document linked lynching and police brutality: “Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet.”

President Trump’s tarring of black pro-football players as unpatriotic for staging anti-injustice protests during the national anthem is a time-worn tactic where practitioners duplicitously extol patriotism while totally disregarding the dynamics of the racism that ravishes non-whites…a process Walker, noted in his book.

“The Negro has often been credited with possessing a strong patriotism; yet the treatment given him at the hands of his fellow citizens is designed ultimately to make him an enemy of government,” Walker wrote.

“Persecution never rendered a people patriotic.”

The “Tackling Paid Patriotism” report issued by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake criticized the NFL and other pro leagues for accepting millions of dollars from the Department of Defense for staging extravagant \patriotic spectacles tributes that including “performances of the national anthem.” American military services, according to this report, spend $53 million on “marketing and advertising contracts with sports teams between 2012 and 2015.”

Senators McCain and Flake felt “this kind of paid patriotism is wholly unnecessary and a waste and abuse of taxpayer funds.” Actions by those Senators caused the DoD to stop such paid patriotism.

That federal funding paid for game tickets and other perks, expenditures that the McCain and Flake report noted were “questionable and the benefit to taxpayers undefined.”

President Trump ramped up his rhetoric against protesting black NFL players a few weeks after he uttered the statement that “very fine people” were among the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that staged violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia this summer.

Neo-Nazis are persons who hold a love for Hitler and the era of Nazi rule in Germany before and during WWII. Hitler’s Nazi Germany institutionalized hatred for Jews, racial minorities, gays, gypsies and religious minorities.

Many feel that an American president praising Neo-Nazis is the antithesis of patriotism, considering such praise an affront to the nearly 200,000 American soldiers and sailors killed during WWII fighting Nazi Germany.

Linn Washington, Jr. is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion , (AK Press). He lives in Philadelphia.

Capital's Class War in Brazil

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Brazil is the second largest economy in the Americas, and at the time of the coup, the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world. What kind of example does it make to the United States, to have another major economy in the Americas that doesn't follow the neoliberal economic policies of the US? That provides an alternative - that raised its minimum wage by 100% in real terms, where public university is free, with a relatively good health care system by third world standards - this is a thorn in the side of the US, from a hegemony perspective. 

Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier examines the Brazilian corporate media's role in capital's class war, and new evidence indicating capital's collusion in the country's 2016 coup - from the opposition government's destabilizing of the economy ahead of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, to US and petroleum industry influence over Brazil's post-coup privatization scheme.

Brian recently wrote the article The State of the Brazilian Left: Analysis from an American in Brazil   for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

Musings

The Death Knell of Democracy by River Sun

Censorship is the foe of freedom. It comes in many forms. The choking grip of control silences dissent. The bullhorns of propaganda blare out lies and fictions of consent. The maddened clench of greed stifles outlets for a diversity of expression, creativity, opportunity, and invention. The lurking spies of mass surveillance send chills down once-fearless spines. The data collectors of corporations mine our lives for ways to shrink-wrap our worldviews into commoditized sales pitches.

We think of censorship as cutting off a voice or silencing an outspoken dissenter. It is much worse . . . censorship today happens at every level of society from our minds to our platforms to our search engines. We dream in tight little boxes of permissible ideas. We speak only what others wish to hear. We gain access to platforms only by conforming to comfortable lies. If an uncomfortable truth manages to leap the hurtles and reach the outer rim of a listener’s ears, then the listener quickly brushes it aside, dismissing it as conspiracy or nonsense. The totalitarianism of our censorship happens inside each person. Critical thinking skills are shut off and intellect is replaced with blind conformity and dogmatic loyalty to patriotism, religious ideology, and brand names.

This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. It is the death of democracy. Without dissent and discourse, freedom is a hollow word. Without freedom, there can be no honest democracy. At the trial of democracy’s murder, it would be found that a lynch mob beat it to death. The corporate media is guilty. The telecom and tech companies that manipulate search engines and unequal Internet speeds are guilty. The corporations are guilty. The politicians are guilty. And we are guilty.

In an era of uncomfortable truths, the choking of truth is the strangulation of our lives. If we cannot speak about catastrophic, man-made climate change; or the concentration of wealth and simultaneous economic collapse that is impoverishing millions; or the corporate and oligarchic takeover of our country; or the creeping and pervasive spying of the mass surveillance apparatus; or the propaganda and control of corporate advertising; if we cannot speak of and challenge these things, we will continue to die of these injustices. Our death knell is a resounding silence built of censorship and the shrieking sales pitches of profitable lies.

Every human possesses the skills to resist this. We were each born with the ability to shout out that the emperor has no clothes. To speak truth in a time of lies takes courage, but not superhuman powers. We must listen and speak truth. We must discourse – not dismiss – one another. We have to build the means of honest communication. Democracy can be resurrected by breaking silence and listening to complex, uncomfortable truths. Tear your eyes away from mind-numbing sales pitches. There is more to life than blind consumption. We are humans, not locusts. The life of our Earth, our communities, and ourselves, depend on our willingness to break through the many facets of censorship and let truth, freedom, and democracy arise.

In-Shadow: A Critique of Our Times

IN-SHADOW: A Modern Odyssey is an impressive short film, which paints a dark and satirical portrait of our modern society. During 13 minutes, this short film directed by Lubomir Arsov connects symbols and metaphors, attacking with a rare energy the excesses of capitalism, from the fashion industry to social networks through the world of finance and politics. Embark on a visionary journey through the fragmented unconscious of the West, and with courage face the Shadow.

From Shadow into Light. Simply beautiful.

Standing Army

Scratch below the surface & understand why things are the way they are.....

The Rise of the Oligarchs

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Wealth inequality has risen to stratospheric heights. The statistics, the real statistics, sound like fragments spun off from a madman’s dream.

Eighty-five people have as much money as three and a half billion other people. Look at it like this: 85 people = 3,500,000,000 people.

Forbes Magazine, which used to gleefully refer to itself as a “capitalist tool,” creates an annual list of the richest 400 people in the world. Ten years ago, their combined wealth was $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars). Now, after a world wide crash and all sort of bailouts, their combined worth is $2,000,000,000,000. They have doubled their money. How have you done?

Did their money come to them because the magic of the market realised how ultra-special talented they were? Or because of power? Manipulating laws, buying politicians, even taking over governments. Has the power of money in the United States grown so great that democracy is just a charade? A large, frenetic, incredibly expensive one, but still, just play-acting and a dumb show for the public?

While all the real decisions come from a small group of the ultra-wealthy, to some degree very consciously, but to an even larger degree by the sheer weight of their incredible wealth, the Oligarchs.

That much money, it has to be about power.

Musings

Poet's Nook: "I Come To You Without Me" by Rumi

Art by Van Gogh

I come to you without me, come to me without you.
          Self is the thorn in the sole of the soul.
                         Merge with others,
If you stay in self, you are a grain, you are a drop,
If you merge with others, you are an ocean, you are a mine.

What Would Happen If We All Refused To Go Quietly To The Slaughterhouse? by Rivera Sun

We are serving ourselves up on silver platters to the oligarchs and giant corporations. We have apples of misinformation in our mouths and sprigs of patriotic parsley tucked behind our ears. Must we complacently acquiesce to being pot-roasted pigs? Rise up!

The situation is more than intolerable . . . it is ridiculous . . . it is obscene. Our citizenry behaves like swine in the feedlots of the giant corporations and their rich owners. We eat the swill they slop down of toxic food, poisonous lies, mind-numbing media, and soul-crushing policies of oppression. We roll in the muck too moribund to rise up and organize for life, liberty, and love!

A Culture of Death

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President Trump’s presidency is so “annihilatonist” that it may very well be the last presidency of the United States says Professor Vijay Prashad at the CODEPINK Summit. This brother speaks brutal truth which we should not shy away from. #Resist

The Power of Propaganda

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Stuart Ewen, Professor and Chair of the Department of Film & Media at Hunter College and author of Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture joins Chris Hedges for a conversation on the power of mass propaganda. Quite thought-provoking.

Offshore Secrets of the Rich Exposed

The Paradise Papers are a huge new leak of financial documents, these documents consist of 13.4 million files mostly from one leading firm in offshore finance, Appleby. In these documents we see how the powerful and ultra-wealthy, including the Queen's private estate, secretly invest large amounts of cash offshore in places known to be tax havens. From these papers we also see Trump's Commerce Secretary shady dealings with Russian individuals who have been sanctioned by the US.

Follow the money...always follow the money.

The Time of the Intellectual-Activists Has Come by Creston Davis

The time is now for intellectuals to rise up and create spaces in which new futures can be created -- without putting students in harm's way -- through ourselves, and not the 1 percent.

A crucial element of change happens when people realize that the current state of things no longer works. Change is a fundamental aspect of all areas of life -- growth requires change. But institutions that benefit from keeping things the same have a vested interest in resisting change. The more powerful the institution, the more it seeks to resist change. Even the threat of change is a threat to powerful economic and social institutions because change shifts perspective and imagines a different world.

There are many examples of how established institutions resist change. Take the example of religion. The Christian church in both its Protestant and Catholic variants is notorious for resisting change, in part because it claims to hold absolute truths about the meaning of life, and so the act of challenging the authority of the church is to threaten the very foundations of its monopoly on the absolute.

One recent such form of coercion is citizen debt. Compare the last year of Jimmy Carter's administration, when US household debt was at 47 percent vis-à-vis GDP, versus 98 percent in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush's presidency. There's a very simple correlation between indebtedness and the implementation of neoliberalism beginning with Ronald Reagan. The upshot is equally simple: By disciplining citizens into massive debt, students are far less likely to resist and be critical of authority. Furthermore, the more in debt a citizen becomes, the less likely they will participate in local democratic processes. The more in debt you are, the longer your work hours become, and the less time you have to participate in civic debates and actions. Said differently, the chronic indebtedness of citizens reproduces and reinforces the greatest form of institutional power in the United States that, according to author and professor David Harvey, decisively sides with corporations over the general welfare of citizens. Indeed, the power of neoliberalism is so pervasive that even the president of the Magistrates' Union of Belgium, Manuela Cadelli argues that, "Neoliberalism is a species of fascism."Another example is the dogmatic belief of a "free-market" economic ideology that sides with privatization of goods and services for the 1 percent, over a public and shared commons for the 99 percent. Financial institutions like banks, insurance companies and hedge funds, private corporations like mainstream media, even the European Union and the United States are institutions that have greatly benefited from this neoliberal economic ideological monopoly. The ability of these powerful institutions to resist change cannot be overstated. One basic way for institutions to maintain power is two-fold: (a) by undermining resistance, free speech and critical thinking; and (b) creating legal forms of labor coercion.  

To restate my claim: Power resists social change. If the rules of the game are based on a logic and practice of keeping the citizenry permanently in debt, then the less likely those citizens will be to question how social power works and work to change that.From the perspective of the basic driver of society, namely the economic logic of neoliberalism, it is not difficult to observe how other social institutions have wielded and strengthened their claim on power. We can think of how politicians in Washington are fed by Wall Street and corporate interests, as Bernie Sanders pointed out in his campaign for the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. Think, too, of the National Rifle Association's manipulation of politicians in Washington that puts society in preventable violent acts of mass killings. As a result, increased mass killings strengthen the misguided argument that local police forces need to be militarized to control the threat of mass killings, and this further jeopardizes critical peaceful resistance necessary for a healthy democracy.  

The Toxic Higher Education Scam

I am an educator, and part of my responsibility is social -- global, even. As a professor, it's my basic responsibility to recruit, nurture and shape students in order to pass knowledge on from one generation to the next. Inherent in this responsibility is to ensure that truths are acquired, adjusted, accurate and adapted in order to empower citizens with an apparatus of critical reasoning and civic discourse. To my mind, the classroom is a microcosm of how society should function at the macro level. Years ago, while teaching at a good private liberal arts college, I noticed that students were reporting to me not only how deeply in student loan debt they were, but also how they were unable to acquire employment commensurate with their level of education. More complaints began piling up, both in frequency and in severity, to the point where, as a professor, I could no longer ignore them. This prompted me to research the root causes of a situation that, when examined, increasingly looked toxic and potentially verging on a crisis for the younger generation. Based on the extensive data I have researched on trends in higher education, I realized my students were being systematically placed into harm's way through coercive indebtedness.

It is true: I could have continued ignoring the plight of my students' debt and employment crisis, but if a professor takes their responsibility seriously, not only relative to the content and material they teach, but also the context within which teaching happens, as well as the negative effects of said practices, then, at a certain point, decisions and actions need to be made that address the total effects of one's profession. And this includes the systematic, societal effects of higher education and its potential harm on students' lives. Education isn't just about passing on knowledge from one generation to the next, it also includes the responsibility of how the system functions. The current higher education system directly harms students by forcing them to rack up astronomical debt to banks and other financial institutions, including their own college or university. American student loan debt is now over $1.5 trillion.

The basic problem is that students increasingly have to resort to massive student loans just to be able to access even less-expensive educational institutions, such as community colleges, and they do so without being fully aware of the dire and daunting consequences of what it means to enter into massive debt for a degree that increasingly has less economic earning power, not to mention less opportunities for employment.The younger generation, especially from the middle, working and poor classes, have always been told that if you get an education and work hard, you will climb the social ladder. But what worked well in previous generations works far less well (if at all) in today's toxic neoliberal context; indeed today's younger generation may be the first to earn less than their parents' generation.

If you were to honestly advise each student about the real economic consequences of how a university education actually functions with its ill effects on their own economic and employment outlook, my guess is that you would see a massive drop in student enrollments. Said differently, the student loan and underemployment crisis in the US preys on the necessity for students to acquire an education in order to rise above poverty or maintain a middle-class lifestyle. The only issue is that the consequences of getting out of poverty (or even maintaining a middle-class lifestyle) actually reproduce the very crisis itself. In light of this, professors need to seriously reflect on how their position in a toxic industry like higher education directly condones and even reproduces a grave injustice to the younger generation. The contradiction is clear: being part of the toxic, and by extension, unjust system of higher education may do more harm to students than good and it's a question that merits serious reflection. And this is not to include the spike in tuition costs and even how a tenured position directly vitiates against the overworked and underpaid adjunct and non-tenure track professors that today make up an average of 70 percent of faculty.

Consequently, there is a moral mandate for professors to care for their students on all levels including the systemic, structural and economic level. To me, this means that professors must take a stance against the system as it currently exists because of the harm it imposes on students financially and eventually, by extension, psychologically.

This basic responsibility as an educator soon came into conflict with me being part of the system of higher education itself. I could have ignored the problem, rationalizing it by thinking I was superior and skilled enough to justify my position as an associate professor, but that reasoning is the same employed by the elite 1 percent; they are superior and thus justified. This reasoning fails, too, on the level of one's professional responsibilities to society as a professor who professes truths in the face of powerful toxic and anti-democracy institutions. That's our job.

As a result of confronting the toxic nature of higher education and the harm it's inflicting on students and society as a whole, I began dialoguing with other academics and intellectuals who felt similarly. Through these conversations, which lasted a few years, what emerged was a real need for intellectuals and professors to organize an alternative teaching space that would recruit, nurture and assist students holistically, not just within the classroom, but also as human beings living in capitalism.

The result was that over 100 leading intellectuals founded the nonprofit, debt-free school, The Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS). That was four years ago, and just recently, we opened a debt-free program in Ireland that offers BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees in the interdisciplinary field of social and political thought. By drawing on available technologies, we are able to bring together students and researchers from all over the world with leading visionaries, philosophers, social scientists and eco-theorists without forcing students into harm's way through massive debt to banks. In this way, we're able to both teach how ideas and truths can assist in the process of empowerment and liberation on the personal level, and do so in a way that keeps students out of harm's way on a social and economic level.

The GCAS Research Institute Ireland is the first program in modern history offering debt-free interdisciplinary and applied degrees in social and political thought that was founded, organized and operated by intellectuals. It was not founded by a person in the elite wealthy class, but by hard-working, conscientious intellectuals who care about truths and how those truths are passed on into the future. We have worked with intellectuals like Lewis Gordon, Oliver Stone, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Alain Badiou, Henry Giroux, Adrian Parr and Richard Wolff, just to name a few.

The time is now for intellectuals to rise up and create spaces in which new futures can be created -- without putting students in harm's way -- through ourselves, and not the 1 percent. Let's think new and better futures together, from the environment to healthy food, and from clean water to sustainable green energy.

Intellectuals of the world unite.