Matt Stoller on Goliath & The Lost Art of Anti-Monopoly

 Source: Lapham Quarterly

“There are many arguments for what is at the root cause of our current social dysfunction,” journalist Matt Stoller writes at the beginning of his book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “Various explanations include the prevalence of racism, automation, the rise of China, inadequate education or training, the spread of the internet, Donald Trump, the collapse of political norms, or globalization. Many of these explanations have merit. But there’s another much simpler explanation of what is going on. Our systems are operating the way that they were designed to. In the 1970s, we decided as a society that it would be a good idea to allow private financiers and monopolists to organize our world. As a result, what is around us is a matrix of monopolies, controlling our lives and manipulating our communities and our politics. This is not just happenstance. It was created. The constructs shaping our world were formed as ideas, put into law, and now they are our economic and social reality. Our reality is formed not just of monopolized supply chains and brands, but an entire language that precludes us from even noticing, from discussing the concentrated power all around us.”

“There are many arguments for what is at the root cause of our current social dysfunction,” journalist Matt Stoller writes at the beginning of his book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “Various explanations include the prevalence of racism, automation, the rise of China, inadequate education or training, the spread of the internet, Donald Trump, the collapse of political norms, or globalization. Many of these explanations have merit. But there’s another much simpler explanation of what is going on. Our systems are operating the way that they were designed to. In the 1970s, we decided as a society that it would be a good idea to allow private financiers and monopolists to organize our world. As a result, what is around us is a matrix of monopolies, controlling our lives and manipulating our communities and our politics. This is not just happenstance. It was created. The constructs shaping our world were formed as ideas, put into law, and now they are our economic and social reality. Our reality is formed not just of monopolized supply chains and brands, but an entire language that precludes us from even noticing, from discussing the concentrated power all around us.”

United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America

Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and the president of the Media Freedom Foundation highlights his latest book (co-authored with Nolan Higdon) United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America.

A former reality television star is President of the United States and has declared a war on the media. The relationship between Presidents and the press has always been fraught with political pitfalls. A free press is enshrined in our constitution and is intended to be a bulwark against abuses of power, shining a light on wrongdoing and holding politicians' feet to the fire. But today corporate-controlled media dominate the journalistic landscape and a handful of media outlets enjoy such a cozy relationship with the White House that they are little more than mouthpieces of propaganda.

How did we get here? Mickey Huff breaks it down into super bite sized chunks...

Musings

                                                        
What Makes us Human?

A Brazilian boy by the name of Diego was photographed crying while playing the violin.

Escaping TrumpWorld

Poet's Nook: " “Bani Adam (Children of Adam)" by Saadi Shirazi

 

The sons of Adam are limbs of each other,
Having been created of one essence.
When the calamity of time affects one limb
The other limbs cannot remain at rest.
If you have no sympathy for the troubles of others,
You are unworthy to be called by the name of a Human.
                                          
                                    ***********

 (I was inspired to look this poem up from Coldplay's latest release, "Everyday Life" which features this inspirational poem & provides the foundation for this beautiful album~~peace, fellow travelers)

CIA Search for Mind Control

.

Chris Hedges talks to author Stephen Kinzer about the CIA’s quest for mind control through its experiments in drug and torture during the 1950s and 1960s, both domestically and internationally. Kinzer’s new book is titled Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Dr. John Gartner - A Warning!

. .
Source: The Truth Report

Dr. John Gartner is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. Gartner was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President." Along with two other mental health professionals, he wrote the recent USA Today op-ed proclaiming that "Trump's rash Syria move looked like a 'hypomanic episode.'"

Dr. Gartner explains how Trump’s mental state and the likelihood of impeachment will force the president to act out in even more dangerous and unpredictable ways.

Gartner also details how Trump’s malignant narcissism manifests itself through sadistic pleasure, which may even be sexual in nature. And Dr. Gartner ponders what will happen to Trump’s followers and their “fascist fever” when Trump is eventually no longer president of the United States.

Death by Oligarchy by Chris Hedges

Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. I saw these distortions among my rich classmates as a scholarship student at prep school and at Harvard University, an institution designed, like all elite schools, to perpetuate the plutocracy. Living in privilege spawns callousness, even cruelty, to those less fortunate and feeds a bottomless greed.

Poet's Nook: "case of climate catastrophe?" by Raymond Nat Turner

frantic footprints are framed
on white streets where the
temperature suddenly
dropped
from
83
to
13

there is no normal now…
they left home in tank tops,
flip-flops, shorts and short sleeve shirts…
but in the blink of an eye—chattering teeth,
shivering shoulders caught out…
trudge home to hoodies, down
jackets, boots—cursing this
Chinese
hoax!!

The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America by John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America.

The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

This is America’s dirty little secret.

Cognitive Dissonance at a Dead End: On the Promise of Counterculture Today

Writer Curtis White explains why we need counterculture - as people trapped in a dead end of capitalist stagnation and impending ecological collapse, hope for the future won't be found in clinging to the failing structures of this world, but in building and exploring new worlds of our own making.

Curtis is author of Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today .

Byron Allen: "This Is Bigger Than Me"

Byron Allen's racial discrimination case against Comcast came before the Supreme Court on Wednesday (11/13/19). At issue is whether Allen's $20 billion lawsuit should have survived beyond the pleading stage by merely proving that his race was a "motivating factor" in Comcast's decision to deny carriage of his company's channels. The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Allen last year, and some of the justices found fault with the lower court's reasoning. Allen, CEO of Entertainment Studios joined Roland Martin in studio to discuss his $20 billion suit against Comcast and the Supreme Court hearing where he presented his case against the cable giant. I gotta say, I learned a HELL of a lot from this interview!

China Breaks the Western Debt Stranglehold on the World by Peter Koenig

The west has colonized, exploited, ravaged and assassinated the people of the Global South for hundreds of years. Up to the mid-20th Century Europe has occupied Africa, and large parts of Asia.

In Latin America, though much of the sub-Continent was “freed” from Spain and Portugal in the 19th Century – a new kind of colonization followed by the new Empire of the United States – under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe (1817 -1825), forbidding Europeans to interfere in any “American territory”.

Suicidal Wasps, Zombie Roaches and Other Parasite Tales

We humans set a premium on our own free will and independence ... and yet there's a shadowy influence we might not be considering. As science writer Ed Yong explains in this fascinating, hilarious and disturbing talk, parasites have perfected the art of manipulation to an incredible degree. So are they influencing us? It's more than likely.

Donald Trump: An American Tragedy for the U.S. and the Entire World by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

“If this [U.S.] government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."
-- Frank Church (1924-1984), American lawyer and U.S. Senator, chairman of the Church Senate Committee, (in an interview with TV program ‘Meet The Press’, Aug. 17, 1975)

Musings

UNDER CONSTRUCTION...

Capitalism Created the Post-Truth Society — & That May Be Its Undoing by Keith A. Spencer

No economic system has lasted forever. And I imagine that some day, when historians are studying the rise and fall of capitalism, they might look back at Glenn Beck's 2010 Earth Day meltdown as a seminal moment  — an exemplar for how capitalism created the post-truth society that seems destined to doom its ability to function.

Poet's Nook: "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" by Tracy Chapman

Don't you know
They're talkin' 'bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
Don't you know
They're talkin' about a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
While they're standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion

They Live, We Sleep: Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst by John W. Whitehead

    “You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Dr. Cornel West on Maintaining Hope in the Time of Struggle and Darkness that is the Age of Trump

                                                         

                                                LISTEN: West / DeVega Conversation


Cornel West is one of the United States’ and the world’s leading public intellectuals and truth-tellers. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. He is the author of several bestselling books including Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He is also a frequent guest on CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now.

In this enlightening conversation with the always entertaining & insightful Chauncey DeVega, Cornel West explains why hope must be kept alive in times of darkness and struggle, the power of the Black Freedom Struggle and blues sensibility to sustain and improve American democracy, and why neoliberal gangster capitalism’s assault on our humanity must be resisted.

Thoughts on Violence and Death and Life in this Hell World

Writer Luke O'Neil explores the fear and violence of daily life in mid-collapse USA - on the wrong side of class lines, regular people are sold war overseas and paranoia at home by a media and political class with no real besides collecting profit and floating high above the chaos they sow.

 Luke is author of Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dysopia

We Are the Zombies of Our Capitalist Apocalypse by Kelly Hayes

 Source: Transformative Spaces

When it comes to cinema and television, Americans love a good apocalypse. I’m no exception. From hellmouths to zombies, I am fascinated by horror films and the lessons they sometimes impart about who we are. Zombie films are a particular favorite subgenre of mine — from the racial terror captured in Night of the Living Dead (1968) to Santa Clarita Diet’s (2017-2019) portrait of a suburban couple who attempt to ethically source human flesh, I have watched countless hours of the undead ravaging humanity. Perhaps that’s why I have zombies on my mind lately as the world unravels, not because I think late capitalism and climate collapse will lead to the rise of the undead, but because of the lose/lose component of most zombie narratives. With rare exception, zombies in television and film aren’t “winning” as human beings lose. They are merely shuffling through the end of the world, consuming, deteriorating, and playing their role in the downfall of life as we know it.
In cinema, zombies have long been viewed as vehicles for our political anxieties. From reinforcing racist tropes to highlighting racism as a death-making force, the undead are interpreted in the context of our fears. In the words of Erin C. Cassese, “This is the utility of the zombie as a political metaphor — it’s flexible; there is room enough for all our fears.” But what happens when we, ourselves, are the world-ending force at work?

In the horror show of late capitalism, we are the zombies. But we don’t have to be.