The Chris Hedges Report Podcast speaks with the economist Richard Wolff about inflation, growing income inequality and the looming disasters built into the U.S. economic system
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast speaks with the economist Richard Wolff about inflation, growing income inequality and the looming disasters built into the U.S. economic system
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”. Frederic Bastiat
The people have been turned into "hosts" (a food source - rent payers) for the 1% parasites (leeches - rent collectors) by the re-establishment of the "West Virginia Coal Mine Experience"™ (circa 1900). See Earned Vs. Unearned income
by incrementally monopolizing (privatizing)necessities (food, water, shelter, utilities, even information), by debt expansion, and by wage suppression: we now work in their company "mines" (cube farms, whatever), live in their company housing (mortgage, rent) shop in their company store (credit card debt), and pay MONOPOLY prices for basic necessities.
Literally, cradle to grave slavery to a small collection of "Nanny" Transnational Corporations (all owned at the top by a handful of the Davos jetting World Economic Forum, transnational investor class.)
It's fitting that this evening Pres. Biden will be lavishly entertaining French President Macron at a State dinner while: railroad workers are fighting for a paltry few days of paid sick leave; while thousands of Americans have no home to sleep in; while thousands more Americans are relying on charity food banks in order to eat at all. If she weren't dead, I'm sure Marie Antoinette would be on Biden's guest list.
You must understand that the ruling class not only fears us, they hate us.
We are their butlers, their maids, their carhops and their busboys.
"But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.”
Karl Marx, final editorial in the Neue Rheinische Zietung
Take a look at the sell out of workers going on at the New School where Wolff teaches or the UC workers, 48,000 strong, UAW members on strike.
We must unite all segments of the working class and those with no work to beat back this machine
And yes......America's abandonment of the working class is an international crime. But that America intends to bring that corporate rape and pillage system to the entire world, should tell us who leads the movement against acknowledging that climate is the real catastrophe coming for all of us.
A belief in the lack of any limits is a sign of insanity...Amerika's wealthy class invests in space travel and research into immortality. What could be more delusional.
Everything grows. Plants, bus, insects, bacteria. But what sustains this growth and if it is for use or for profit for me is the distinguishing feature.
Even collapse.......the death that is part of our living web.....is turned to profit by them. Witness the current wars all over the planet, those acknowledged and those ignored. All profit for the armaments makers.
That depends. Some of the beliefs of New Age seekers seem to me to have an underbelly of incipient fascism. I dabbled with it years ago....but swore off once I learned that 'the universe wants you to be wealthy'.
An image of Christ on his Cross followed by the best line in the Bible, "you can't serve God and Mammon' sent me back out into the wilderness to find my own spiritual centre.
Still today........its the land, the water, the air and the stars. Earth and air and fire and water. And I think I'm a bit aware of the cancer that's threatening them.
Climate change and credits is how this ruling class thinks it can dig its way out of the crisis of accumulation.
they are sadly wrong and as you say are destroying the climate for their children and ours at a rapacious speed for pillage and plunder is a disease of the mind, a subjective deformity under crass material conditions of capitalism.
Is it delusional because of the pending catastrophe? I do believe that save for the possible coming doom's day we eventually will be able to conquer the space and also obtain immortality.
You're drinking koolaid my friend.....because until you calculate who loses in your quest for conquest of the universe and endless time in which to pursue it, you aren't behaving in a proper spiritual manner. We can't blow off certain deaths and destructions.....and like Madeleine fing Aldark, claim the deaths of 500,000 Iraqui children were 'worth it'.....and imagine we are one of the divine children, or doing God's work.
Yes, and the Kool-Aid is just fine. I was not thinking about religious old or new age cancerous creeds. In my opinion, the true spirituality, that evolution gifted to us, is the capacity to inquire on the unknown along with the appreciation of beauty and just these two qualities have allowed us to enjoy life through the arts and sciences. In the last 200 yrs we have doubled our average age span and recently we have been able to create synthetic life from scratch. Every day we see progress in our quest for our immortality that could be obtained by genetic or bio-engineering improvements or perhaps by digitizing our minds on robots. Yes, the expanding multiverse in its vastness is a huge enterprise to conquer by us humans or hybrid-humans. Yeah, this Kool-Aid is really good, but my question to you is this: isn't dreaming based on real possibilities "behaving in a proper spiritual manner?'
Another issue is the cost of realizing those dreams which I feel is your concern.
I think that the majority of the people will get the benefits of our progress only with a fair political system that could be socialist or communist but not the rapacious capitalism of ours that deny health care and quality high education to the poor and feel they have the divine right to murder people in other nations where they seek profits to make. Well, the Kool-Aid is gone. I appreciate your comment and wish you answer my question.
The problem I have with your perspective (an inordinate faith in human ingenuity and inventiveness, and its ability to 'conquer' not only the galaxies but death itself, is that such a faith intrinsically loses all regard for limits.
The belief in endless possibility has been one of the crowning conceptual beliefs of western capitalism. You may profess to want a fair world....a socialist world....where everyone can become immortal.........but to achieve that, infinite recourses would be required. If we assume these immortals continued to have sex and reproduce, a natural assumption, since sexuality is one of the best gifts of human life, then for sure, we'd have to populate the universe.
The only trouble is Julio, that the resources do not exist to even begin to pursue both quests. The vast distances between the stars...........the finite number of life fertile planets that are out there...(we haven't found any gardens of eden to date)...........means we'd have to exhaust much of what's left of earth's resources to find, never mind populate, these distant fertile planets.
And prior to that march across the heavens, I assume we have to have achieved immortality...so as to survive the long trip. Now there is another big ask.......given the junk food and toxic chemicals that have actually weakened the human genome over the last couple of centuries.
It's a Star Wars complex you have my friend..........and staying in that fantasy bubble may be keeping you from recognizing the extinction stalking our species just now. Hot house earth is a condition mammals won't survive..........at least not us big uns. Too few understand the real risks we face from a runaway rise in mean global tempertures. It won't take many degrees to cook large sections of our planet....to the point where food won't grow and herbivores won't prosper.
Take the extreme weather we're experiencing now...and multiply it by a factor of 10. Throw in the ideological wars the west has pursued around the globe since WWII.....and multiply that by a factor of, say, 2. Imagine the climate refugees, the war refugees flooding your homeland...perhaps you're already seeing the first wave.
Factor in racism, white supremacy, fears of 'being replaced'. Mix well with a gaggle of opportunist populist simple think politicians....you have a few in Amerika.....
And I don't know about you, but what I come up with is a literal hell on earth....we aren't moving toward social justice for mortal men, women and children. Nevermind your male fantasy of endless conquest of the outer regions of space....it's far too late for even the uber rich, like your Elon Must........to achieve.
Robots???? Who cares one way or another what galaxies they 'conquer' after we, their creators, are toast???
Ingamarie, I don't believe that we should have limits to the progress of the human race which includes the saving of our planet from the coming collapse. I perfectly understand the seriousness of the danger we are now and that is why I have voted green in the last four presidential elections. I agree that sexuality is the best gift of evolution but, you see, our belief in endless possibilities has made us to invent the contraceptives. All we need to do is to send to Guantanamo those fundamentalists that are limiting the women's right to choose what to do with their bodies and, also, it would be beneficial to curtail the influence of the sects that converted Christianity into a bedroom code of manners. In addition to the fascist's greed, I also blame the millenarian religions (that preach about life in the after-world and are praying for the end of this world) as a cause of the ecological catastrophe.
Fantasy is not limited to males. In fact I believe women are better than us in this field as testified by the great amount of their master pieces in all the arts. In science too. Every day I learn of new female stars in the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics.
If I saw the Star Wars movie I don't even remember it. The robots I was talking will be computers where we have down-loaded our brains. In other words they are us in silicon suits and when I say conquering the outer space I don't mean going around with sophisticated guns killing antennae galaxy neighbors to stablish McDonalds food restaurants there. What I mean is conquering the knowledge of the universe required to preserve our world
and our human species.
Thank you for your reply, I greatly enjoy your posts
And thanks for your detailed response. I still believe that 'death is a debt to nature owed'....as someone said many years ago....but I share your hopes that we will work together to save the ecospheres we all depend on....and I do tend to agree that Christian fundamentalists on the right of the political spectrum are a bit of a drain on all of us.
I often feel sorry for Jesus...he put up with so much, died in such an agonizing way....and this is the best we could do with his teachings??? Legislate for others??? Force women to give birth because we fear the white race is losing the baby boom competition??
It's all so silly. I have 6 grandchildren, and the latest, little Zach, is only two weeks old. His mom is Pilipino, my son is English/Norwegian/Polish. We'll love him for all we're worth. But we would no more have insisted our kids have babies than we would be upset because we have international grandbabies. Three others are Cuban Canadian...and we're sickened by those hideous sanctions your country continues to impose on our Cuban side of the family.
Learning to live well within the constraints of a limited planet will be adventure enough for the future..........I think if we stopped consuming and started 1. producing, 2. thinking, 3, creating sustainable homes, fields and livelihoods,that leave no one out........we'd be surprised how happy we could be........AND....how long we would live.
From everything I learn from reading and listening to sites like this....it seems that America is practising a form of high end, expensive suit Fascism. There's only one class they serve and that is the few wealthy folks at the top. Life becoming too expensive for the majority doesn't matter a wit, because inflation plucks the many and pads the off shore tax havens of the obscenely rich. Poverty is never a problem for the wealthy..........'the poor we have always with us' is their attitude. They depend on poverty to pad their profits.
Where else would they get the cheap labour and the docility that keeps them playing their casino games? And let's not forget....the most elaborate game of Corporate fascists is war. It makes them money coming and going.......when they sell the weapons of mass destruction, and when they send in their 'developers' to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Too bad climate change is going to eradicate all of us....except perhaps a few of these f....ks holed up in elaborate underground bunkers.
Surprised that Richard Wolff did not mention the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and the effect that has had on energy prices (and everything else) in Europe. Did he not mention it because it's suspected the U.S. was responsible for the destruction? Did he not mention it because, in a determination to demonize Putin, the U.S. has caused the suffering of what, supposedly, are its European 'allies' (with a friend like that, who needs enemies?).
He did not mention it for it is not a detail within the thirty minutes he had to speak on the subjects he said he would speak on.
He could have talked about 911 too, or the JFK assassination but the point is energy prices are up in Europe and destroying countries and Wolff is trying to explain how capitalism causes this.
Pretty sure it was Jimmy Dore where Wolff talked about Nord Stream. As a good interview guest you try to focus on the specific questions of the host. It should have gotten a mention but fairly certain it was a byproduct of organic conversation not a hint of ruling class allegiance.
What a wonderful interview! For me especially the comparison with the situation in Germany between the World Wars is thrilling - do we never learn anything? I guess not ... I love Prof. Wolff and his rich knowledge about this terrible time in Germany and Austria (my parents born 1914 and 1922 went through all this and told me many stories about the miseries, which we pampered children never really could understand - but our society is heading there, because our politicians are sociopaths and preparing the ground for another 'Fuehrer'!! No empathy, only bottomless greed of people who have already more 'riches' than they ever can use (as my father always said: you cannot take it with you!!). I sincerely hope that the railroad workers stand strong and STRIKE (at least it could be a beginning!!)!
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital.”
----- Karl Marx
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
This is what Technocracy looks like! - Frightening!! - and yet, coming to a country near you has always been the plan.....
from the comments section:
"As some have been saying for many years - if you want to know where they are taking us - look at China. That's the template. I fear many of us, still sleeping, who have digested the conflicting lies and hang on to irrational narratives, will still go along.
You are so right. We are nothing but actuarial tables for the power elite.
Take a look at this. Most know nothing about it and it is ongoing.
"Are you worth more dead than alive to your employer?
Dead peasant insurance is a slang term for a life insurance policy that a company takes out on its employees. When the employee dies, the company collects the death benefits. The worker does not have to die while at the job or even be a current employee for the company to collect this insurance money. He or she just has to die. It is sometimes called dead janitor insurance or by its legal name: corporate owned life insurance, or COLI.
Dead Peasant Insurance-Where did the term ‘dead peasant’ come from?
According to the website www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, the term dead peasant was first used by an insurance company that wrote life insurance policies on Winn Dixie employees.
Winn Dixie took out life insurance policies on nearly 36,000 of its employees without their consent and named itself as the beneficiary. As the story got leaked to the press, so did the use of the term dead peasant to describe the Winn Dixie employees."
"As gruesome as it may sound, dead peasant insurance policies are legal.
Although a 2006 federal law requires employers to get a worker’s permission before taking out a dead peasant life insurance policy, Michael Myers, who runs www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, says many companies are ignoring that law.
Chicago Public Radio recently reported that Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has introduced legislation that would ban corporate owned life insurance polices on workers making less than $1 million dollars a year."
Until 201, this corporate practice of insuring low-level workers for life insurance, without them or their families knowing it, was legal WITHOUT TELLING THE WORKER.
Now it is said the worker must be told by law.
And see the liberal response of trying to reform what can only be said to be necrophilia by the corporations.
Grave robbers.
Under capitalism every bone in our body, every cell in our system is privatized.
The result is:
“Not only is an object produced for the subject, but a type of subject is created for that object.”
The answer is to organize and this is very hard for many who have grown up under Reaganomics.
Many have learned that up is down, unions are bad, libertarian good, go it alone capitalism, I got mine you get yours al of thus is psychic trauma.
Morality needs to play a huge part in our struggle. And it needs to be emphasized.
We need to understand the hegemony of capitalism and its culture and as Havel noted, set up parallel structures and slowly withdraw from this silent scream of madness.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”. Frederic Bastiat
The people have been turned into "hosts" (a food source - rent payers) for the 1% parasites (leeches - rent collectors) by the re-establishment of the "West Virginia Coal Mine Experience"™ (circa 1900). See Earned Vs. Unearned income
by incrementally monopolizing (privatizing)necessities (food, water, shelter, utilities, even information), by debt expansion, and by wage suppression: we now work in their company "mines" (cube farms, whatever), live in their company housing (mortgage, rent) shop in their company store (credit card debt), and pay MONOPOLY prices for basic necessities.
Literally, cradle to grave slavery to a small collection of "Nanny" Transnational Corporations (all owned at the top by a handful of the Davos jetting World Economic Forum, transnational investor class.)
It's fitting that this evening Pres. Biden will be lavishly entertaining French President Macron at a State dinner while: railroad workers are fighting for a paltry few days of paid sick leave; while thousands of Americans have no home to sleep in; while thousands more Americans are relying on charity food banks in order to eat at all. If she weren't dead, I'm sure Marie Antoinette would be on Biden's guest list.
You must understand that the ruling class not only fears us, they hate us.
We are their butlers, their maids, their carhops and their busboys.
"But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.”
Karl Marx, final editorial in the Neue Rheinische Zietung
Take a look at the sell out of workers going on at the New School where Wolff teaches or the UC workers, 48,000 strong, UAW members on strike.
We must unite all segments of the working class and those with no work to beat back this machine
emulating them damn French
where Politics IS The NFL would
serve Us too and Surprisingly well
our Priorities being vastly Misplaced.
Awesome comment!
Brilliant comments
(Anna & August] !
“This is what Marx meant when he wrote that:
“A people which oppresses another cannot be free.”
'Liberate the Billionaires'?
not merely their
noggins?
And yes......America's abandonment of the working class is an international crime. But that America intends to bring that corporate rape and pillage system to the entire world, should tell us who leads the movement against acknowledging that climate is the real catastrophe coming for all of us.
A belief in the lack of any limits is a sign of insanity...Amerika's wealthy class invests in space travel and research into immortality. What could be more delusional.
Growth for growths sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Growth for profits is the disease.
Everything grows. Plants, bus, insects, bacteria. But what sustains this growth and if it is for use or for profit for me is the distinguishing feature.
Under capitalism, growth is only for profit.
Even collapse.......the death that is part of our living web.....is turned to profit by them. Witness the current wars all over the planet, those acknowledged and those ignored. All profit for the armaments makers.
Yes. Fortunately there is no cancer in spiritual matters.
That depends. Some of the beliefs of New Age seekers seem to me to have an underbelly of incipient fascism. I dabbled with it years ago....but swore off once I learned that 'the universe wants you to be wealthy'.
An image of Christ on his Cross followed by the best line in the Bible, "you can't serve God and Mammon' sent me back out into the wilderness to find my own spiritual centre.
Still today........its the land, the water, the air and the stars. Earth and air and fire and water. And I think I'm a bit aware of the cancer that's threatening them.
Climate change and credits is how this ruling class thinks it can dig its way out of the crisis of accumulation.
they are sadly wrong and as you say are destroying the climate for their children and ours at a rapacious speed for pillage and plunder is a disease of the mind, a subjective deformity under crass material conditions of capitalism.
Is it delusional because of the pending catastrophe? I do believe that save for the possible coming doom's day we eventually will be able to conquer the space and also obtain immortality.
You're drinking koolaid my friend.....because until you calculate who loses in your quest for conquest of the universe and endless time in which to pursue it, you aren't behaving in a proper spiritual manner. We can't blow off certain deaths and destructions.....and like Madeleine fing Aldark, claim the deaths of 500,000 Iraqui children were 'worth it'.....and imagine we are one of the divine children, or doing God's work.
Yes, and the Kool-Aid is just fine. I was not thinking about religious old or new age cancerous creeds. In my opinion, the true spirituality, that evolution gifted to us, is the capacity to inquire on the unknown along with the appreciation of beauty and just these two qualities have allowed us to enjoy life through the arts and sciences. In the last 200 yrs we have doubled our average age span and recently we have been able to create synthetic life from scratch. Every day we see progress in our quest for our immortality that could be obtained by genetic or bio-engineering improvements or perhaps by digitizing our minds on robots. Yes, the expanding multiverse in its vastness is a huge enterprise to conquer by us humans or hybrid-humans. Yeah, this Kool-Aid is really good, but my question to you is this: isn't dreaming based on real possibilities "behaving in a proper spiritual manner?'
Another issue is the cost of realizing those dreams which I feel is your concern.
I think that the majority of the people will get the benefits of our progress only with a fair political system that could be socialist or communist but not the rapacious capitalism of ours that deny health care and quality high education to the poor and feel they have the divine right to murder people in other nations where they seek profits to make. Well, the Kool-Aid is gone. I appreciate your comment and wish you answer my question.
The problem I have with your perspective (an inordinate faith in human ingenuity and inventiveness, and its ability to 'conquer' not only the galaxies but death itself, is that such a faith intrinsically loses all regard for limits.
The belief in endless possibility has been one of the crowning conceptual beliefs of western capitalism. You may profess to want a fair world....a socialist world....where everyone can become immortal.........but to achieve that, infinite recourses would be required. If we assume these immortals continued to have sex and reproduce, a natural assumption, since sexuality is one of the best gifts of human life, then for sure, we'd have to populate the universe.
The only trouble is Julio, that the resources do not exist to even begin to pursue both quests. The vast distances between the stars...........the finite number of life fertile planets that are out there...(we haven't found any gardens of eden to date)...........means we'd have to exhaust much of what's left of earth's resources to find, never mind populate, these distant fertile planets.
And prior to that march across the heavens, I assume we have to have achieved immortality...so as to survive the long trip. Now there is another big ask.......given the junk food and toxic chemicals that have actually weakened the human genome over the last couple of centuries.
It's a Star Wars complex you have my friend..........and staying in that fantasy bubble may be keeping you from recognizing the extinction stalking our species just now. Hot house earth is a condition mammals won't survive..........at least not us big uns. Too few understand the real risks we face from a runaway rise in mean global tempertures. It won't take many degrees to cook large sections of our planet....to the point where food won't grow and herbivores won't prosper.
Take the extreme weather we're experiencing now...and multiply it by a factor of 10. Throw in the ideological wars the west has pursued around the globe since WWII.....and multiply that by a factor of, say, 2. Imagine the climate refugees, the war refugees flooding your homeland...perhaps you're already seeing the first wave.
Factor in racism, white supremacy, fears of 'being replaced'. Mix well with a gaggle of opportunist populist simple think politicians....you have a few in Amerika.....
And I don't know about you, but what I come up with is a literal hell on earth....we aren't moving toward social justice for mortal men, women and children. Nevermind your male fantasy of endless conquest of the outer regions of space....it's far too late for even the uber rich, like your Elon Must........to achieve.
Robots???? Who cares one way or another what galaxies they 'conquer' after we, their creators, are toast???
Ingamarie, I don't believe that we should have limits to the progress of the human race which includes the saving of our planet from the coming collapse. I perfectly understand the seriousness of the danger we are now and that is why I have voted green in the last four presidential elections. I agree that sexuality is the best gift of evolution but, you see, our belief in endless possibilities has made us to invent the contraceptives. All we need to do is to send to Guantanamo those fundamentalists that are limiting the women's right to choose what to do with their bodies and, also, it would be beneficial to curtail the influence of the sects that converted Christianity into a bedroom code of manners. In addition to the fascist's greed, I also blame the millenarian religions (that preach about life in the after-world and are praying for the end of this world) as a cause of the ecological catastrophe.
Fantasy is not limited to males. In fact I believe women are better than us in this field as testified by the great amount of their master pieces in all the arts. In science too. Every day I learn of new female stars in the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics.
If I saw the Star Wars movie I don't even remember it. The robots I was talking will be computers where we have down-loaded our brains. In other words they are us in silicon suits and when I say conquering the outer space I don't mean going around with sophisticated guns killing antennae galaxy neighbors to stablish McDonalds food restaurants there. What I mean is conquering the knowledge of the universe required to preserve our world
and our human species.
Thank you for your reply, I greatly enjoy your posts
And thanks for your detailed response. I still believe that 'death is a debt to nature owed'....as someone said many years ago....but I share your hopes that we will work together to save the ecospheres we all depend on....and I do tend to agree that Christian fundamentalists on the right of the political spectrum are a bit of a drain on all of us.
I often feel sorry for Jesus...he put up with so much, died in such an agonizing way....and this is the best we could do with his teachings??? Legislate for others??? Force women to give birth because we fear the white race is losing the baby boom competition??
It's all so silly. I have 6 grandchildren, and the latest, little Zach, is only two weeks old. His mom is Pilipino, my son is English/Norwegian/Polish. We'll love him for all we're worth. But we would no more have insisted our kids have babies than we would be upset because we have international grandbabies. Three others are Cuban Canadian...and we're sickened by those hideous sanctions your country continues to impose on our Cuban side of the family.
Learning to live well within the constraints of a limited planet will be adventure enough for the future..........I think if we stopped consuming and started 1. producing, 2. thinking, 3, creating sustainable homes, fields and livelihoods,that leave no one out........we'd be surprised how happy we could be........AND....how long we would live.
From everything I learn from reading and listening to sites like this....it seems that America is practising a form of high end, expensive suit Fascism. There's only one class they serve and that is the few wealthy folks at the top. Life becoming too expensive for the majority doesn't matter a wit, because inflation plucks the many and pads the off shore tax havens of the obscenely rich. Poverty is never a problem for the wealthy..........'the poor we have always with us' is their attitude. They depend on poverty to pad their profits.
Where else would they get the cheap labour and the docility that keeps them playing their casino games? And let's not forget....the most elaborate game of Corporate fascists is war. It makes them money coming and going.......when they sell the weapons of mass destruction, and when they send in their 'developers' to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Too bad climate change is going to eradicate all of us....except perhaps a few of these f....ks holed up in elaborate underground bunkers.
They are a 'class onto themselves in and for themselves', and they are inept but organized.
We must do the same: organize and become a working class in and for itself without the ineptness.
Yes. If enough of us can figure it out in time....and do something with our time and money other than donating to right wing none sense causes.
well the Good News is
there's no longer
any Mineshaft
Gap!
.
the Bad News is
Nine Billion Souls
will NOT be Invited.
Surprised that Richard Wolff did not mention the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and the effect that has had on energy prices (and everything else) in Europe. Did he not mention it because it's suspected the U.S. was responsible for the destruction? Did he not mention it because, in a determination to demonize Putin, the U.S. has caused the suffering of what, supposedly, are its European 'allies' (with a friend like that, who needs enemies?).
Maricata
just now
He did not mention it for it is not a detail within the thirty minutes he had to speak on the subjects he said he would speak on.
He could have talked about 911 too, or the JFK assassination but the point is energy prices are up in Europe and destroying countries and Wolff is trying to explain how capitalism causes this.
That was his point.
Pretty sure it was Jimmy Dore where Wolff talked about Nord Stream. As a good interview guest you try to focus on the specific questions of the host. It should have gotten a mention but fairly certain it was a byproduct of organic conversation not a hint of ruling class allegiance.
What a wonderful interview! For me especially the comparison with the situation in Germany between the World Wars is thrilling - do we never learn anything? I guess not ... I love Prof. Wolff and his rich knowledge about this terrible time in Germany and Austria (my parents born 1914 and 1922 went through all this and told me many stories about the miseries, which we pampered children never really could understand - but our society is heading there, because our politicians are sociopaths and preparing the ground for another 'Fuehrer'!! No empathy, only bottomless greed of people who have already more 'riches' than they ever can use (as my father always said: you cannot take it with you!!). I sincerely hope that the railroad workers stand strong and STRIKE (at least it could be a beginning!!)!
Any ration system will and would just turn into a black market.
There is only one way to live: kill the system
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital.”
----- Karl Marx
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Is everyone seeing this?!
This is what Technocracy looks like! - Frightening!! - and yet, coming to a country near you has always been the plan.....
from the comments section:
"As some have been saying for many years - if you want to know where they are taking us - look at China. That's the template. I fear many of us, still sleeping, who have digested the conflicting lies and hang on to irrational narratives, will still go along.
More than ever, Do Not Comply."
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/china-in-five-tweets?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=400535&post_id=88563445&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR1uVUpDsCrAXrzpLMy3gHNbNl61hmnLBMXpI5aRBWW7RU1MIJbqIUBAVz8
You are so right. We are nothing but actuarial tables for the power elite.
Take a look at this. Most know nothing about it and it is ongoing.
"Are you worth more dead than alive to your employer?
Dead peasant insurance is a slang term for a life insurance policy that a company takes out on its employees. When the employee dies, the company collects the death benefits. The worker does not have to die while at the job or even be a current employee for the company to collect this insurance money. He or she just has to die. It is sometimes called dead janitor insurance or by its legal name: corporate owned life insurance, or COLI.
Dead Peasant Insurance-Where did the term ‘dead peasant’ come from?
According to the website www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, the term dead peasant was first used by an insurance company that wrote life insurance policies on Winn Dixie employees.
Winn Dixie took out life insurance policies on nearly 36,000 of its employees without their consent and named itself as the beneficiary. As the story got leaked to the press, so did the use of the term dead peasant to describe the Winn Dixie employees."
"As gruesome as it may sound, dead peasant insurance policies are legal.
Although a 2006 federal law requires employers to get a worker’s permission before taking out a dead peasant life insurance policy, Michael Myers, who runs www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, says many companies are ignoring that law.
Chicago Public Radio recently reported that Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has introduced legislation that would ban corporate owned life insurance polices on workers making less than $1 million dollars a year."
https://iowalum.com/what-is-dead-peasant-insurance/
Until 201, this corporate practice of insuring low-level workers for life insurance, without them or their families knowing it, was legal WITHOUT TELLING THE WORKER.
Now it is said the worker must be told by law.
And see the liberal response of trying to reform what can only be said to be necrophilia by the corporations.
Grave robbers.
Under capitalism every bone in our body, every cell in our system is privatized.
The result is:
“Not only is an object produced for the subject, but a type of subject is created for that object.”
---- Karl Marx
Cc
The answer is to organize and this is very hard for many who have grown up under Reaganomics.
Many have learned that up is down, unions are bad, libertarian good, go it alone capitalism, I got mine you get yours al of thus is psychic trauma.
Morality needs to play a huge part in our struggle. And it needs to be emphasized.
We need to understand the hegemony of capitalism and its culture and as Havel noted, set up parallel structures and slowly withdraw from this silent scream of madness.
If you means is it time to roll out the guillotines. Yes, but subjectively the people are still laboriing under false consciousness.