thenatureofmind

David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep

In an essay penned shortly before his death, David Graeber argued that post-pandemic, we can’t slip back into a reality where the way our society is organized — to serve every whim of a small handful of rich people while debasing and degrading the vast majority of us — is seen as sensible or reasonable.

"At some point in the next few months, the crisis will be declared over, and we will be able to return to our “nonessential” jobs. For many, this will be like waking from a dream.

The media and political classes will definitely encourage us to think of it this way. This is what happened after the 2008 financial crash. There was a brief moment of questioning. (What is “finance,” anyway? Isn’t it just other people’s debts? What is money? Is it just debt, too? What’s debt? Isn’t it just a promise? If money and debt are just a collection of promises we make to each other, then couldn’t we just as easily make different ones?) The window was almost instantly shut by those insisting we shut up, stop thinking, and get back to work, or at least start looking for it."

David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep

 

 

David Graeber speaks at Maagdenhuis Amsterdam in March 2015. (Guido van Nispen / Wikimedia Commons)

Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, The Pitchforks Are Coming | Nick Hanauer

Billionaire Clinton "Hillblazer" Pushes New Tax That Funnels Middle Class Money To Wall Street

Leading the charge is billionaire financial oligarch Tony James, who is COO of private equity giant Blackstone. Mr. James is a generous contributor to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential run, and is listed as a “Hillblazer” by her campaign for having raised at least $100,000 toward her candidacy.

While many Americans already know that much, most of you will be totally unaware of his aggressive plan to force a 3% payroll tax on the public which will be immediately funneled to Wall Street management firms, including “alternative managers” such as hedge funds and private equity. It seems like a very bizarre time to initiate such a proposal considering many public pension funds are actively ditching alternative managers after realizing they’ve been paying extraordinarily high fees for pitiful performance. In other words, they’ve been ripped off.

Billionaire Clinton "Hillblazer" Pushes New Tax That Funnels Middle Class Money To Wall Street

The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like GDP, commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically attacked rather than advanced. 

More than any prior stage of history, we know not what we are doing at that macro level of life organization, nor why no uptick of American sales can remotely solve the problem of collapsing social and natural life support systems. Greece – the world’s emblem of the sacrifice of society to debt servicing – is now 45% more in debt than it was before the “austerity” programs started. Global social and ecological collapse proceed in lock-step with the ruling paradigm’s transnational corporate and bank prescriptions, and they increase in their demands the more they fail to provide for societies life needs and development. 

The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution