Post war boom

The Panama Papers and Capitalism’s Perpetual Myths

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"Bosses of the Senate." by Joseph Keppler, 1889. At the height of the Gilded Age, private oligopolies in cahoots with the state controlled much of society.

“Bosses of the Senate.” by Joseph Keppler, 1889. At the height of the Gilded Age, private oligopolies became as powerful as, if not more so than, states.  The more things change…

Alas, capitalism, we hardly knew ye! Actually, we’ve known ye all along, and we know that you can sometimes be a real sumbitch.’ But thanks to the not-surprising-yet-still-infuriating revelations highlighted in the Panama Papers, we know at lot more about the world’s most notorious open secret: global capitalism has allowed private interests to thrive unencumbered by the whims of states, democratic or otherwise.

In fact, you might say that capitalism as practiced by the neoliberal global order is really just a front for perpetuating a modern feudal system. The Road to Serfdom indeed.

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The 2014 Midterms, Old People, and Entitlement: A Manifesto

JarretR 28 Comments
Old white people rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.

Old white people rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.

Well, the 2014 midterm elections are over, and, depending on where you stand politically, they were either a smashing vindication or a mega-blowout. Count me in the latter camp. That’s right, the Republican Party absolutely dominated, expanding their already swollen (and, thanks to their shady gerrymandering of districts), near incontestable dominance of the House and winning control of the Senate. And I couldn’t be more pissed off, and not just because I’m an unabashed liberal (and if you don’t agree with me, too bad, ’cause you’re wrong). No, there’s a bigger story regarding the outcome of the 2014 midterms that is both glaringly obvious and yet still underappreciated: the mind-blowing hypocrisy of old, white American voters.

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Poverty, Shopping, and American Inequality

JarretR 4 Comments
This American consumer doesn't believe in class. He knows that he runs fast enough, he'll catch up with the plutocrats and end up rich. Some day...

Just keep on running, American consumers, because you’ll catch up with the plutocrats and end up rich, some day…

Americans love to shop. More than a mere mundane exercise in the exchange of script for goods and services, shopping in the U.S. has long been a kind of secular ritual. During this ongoing rite, the trembling, plastic and paper contents of Americans’ collective purses and wallets are gleefully drawn and quartered through millions of soulless, retail card-swipe machines or fed into the ravenous, gaping maws of insatiable cash registers in an orgiastic display of consumerist debauchery that would make Caligula blush.  Indeed, so intense is the American consumer’s desire to please the market and retail gods that we even have a term, “citizen-consumer,” to describe how Americans want to define and project their personal identities via the buying of goods and services.

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