jesus christ

At this point the earth is just begging to be destroyed. Let's just see what happens.

Binro the Nihilist. This is a new development.

We(I'm speaking broadly of the left) really haven't done any fighting at all when compared to the historical sacrifices that radical social movements have made. In fact, here in Seattle the local Democratic party is helping big businesses drive the city into full Red Scare mode against the local anarchist community. I still can't breath properly from whatever the hell the police were using against us at the Mayday anti-capitalist march.

It's like the Democratic party collectively read Chris Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class and decided that this time, they wanted to screw themselves even worse by destroying radical movements before they even get off the ground.

I'm not being facetious or rhetorical when I ask if there's ANY subject you don't have a staggeringly childish view on?

Wait, are you talking about the left or the Democrats OOOH SNAP DAWG

The wealthy are the most likely to prosper even in the case of economic calamity. A rising tide may lift all boats, but a sinking boat drowns all steerage passengers.

Thank you, Bort.

Well, everything else we've tried has been so fucking effective, hasn't it?

The banking industry carved up our country like a God-damned cake and wolfed it down. Have any of them been punished? Will they ever be? Not bloody likely.

It's okay, though, because a lot of people who were fucked by the economic bubble got together and marched through Wall Street. How effective was that? Well, the assholes who fucked our economy were so rattled, they stood on a restaurant balcony smiling and raising their champagne glasses to the mob below without worrying a molotov would come flying at their smug faces at any moment.

And why should they have been afraid? The cops were down there gleefully assaulting the marchers with impunity, not even deterred by the presence of numerous cameras. And why should they have been deterred? They've never suffered any punishment for anything they did, apart from a few snide quips from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. The majority of the country, who consider themselves "middle class" approved of what they did to the protestors.

This same vast majority of people also seem perfectly fine with the fact torture and assassination have openly become part of our national defense repertoire. And the man we worked so hard to make president, the man we put into the Oval office against monumental odds, the man we hoped would change all that shit seems perfectly fine with it, too. Not only is the prison at Guantanamo Bay still full of people who have never been charged with a crime, it remains open even though those prisoners are literally starving themselves to death.

Our President is also apparently fine with sending remote-control death machines out to kill innocent civilians if it means taking out a few not-so-innocent assholes along with them. Hell, the guy sent an elite squad of Navy Seals into a foreign country in violation of international law to shoot an unarmed old man in the face. Has any of this made our country safer? Has it improved our standing with the international community? Did it even get any of the assholes who hate him so much to feel any respect or admiration for him? No. No to all of the above.

But that's okay, we made great strides in social policy. we fixed our health care system! Oh, wait, no we didn't We didn't reduce health care costs. We didn't help ensure everyone has access to the care they need. We just set aside another big pile of Federal money for the same greedy assholes to get their clutches on.

We can't get a ban on assault weapons. Hell, we can't even get broader background checks or close loopholes for purchasing assault weapons even after twenty-six people, most of them children under the age of ten, get massacred in a middle-class, mostly-white suburban school. I mean seriously, what the fuck? I know most of these mother-fuckers don't care if innocent black or hispanic kids die senselessly every day, but you'd think a bunch of dead white kids would have some impact on them.

Hey, at least our efforts to promote environmental awareness are paying off. Oh, wait, no they're not. Schools are afraid to teach their students anything as controversial as "pollution is bad for the environment." People would rather have hydraulic fracturing in their back yards than wind or solar plants.

Even our victories turn to ashes in our hands. Even when we do manage to push through a policy that we think will do some good, it gets subverted and bowdlerized. The Dodd-Frank act has been hamstringed by cuts in funding and a tangle of loopholes. McCain-Feingold is irrelevant since Citizens United. No bill that will eve make any difference will ever be allowed to pass. Republicans and Democrats alike have too much to lose if they do.

And no, I'm not as stupid as you all seem to think I am. I know the rich would get even richer if we let the right wing fully take over. I'm not talking about dragging them down with us. They'll probably never really ever go down, not in this day and age. They sleep the sleep of people who have completely insulated themselves from all risks and dangers in the world.

I'm talking about taking down the FOX-News-Watching, Freeper dipshits who think the reason they have so little is because we give a pittance to the needy. Let them see how much their "heroes" really care about them once there's nobody to keep them in line. Most of them will still probably blame us, but maybe enough of them will figure it the fuck out.

I feel sorry for the poor bastards, in a way. As frustrating as they are, I find it hard to be really angry at them. They're not bad people, no more so than most other people, anyway. They're just scared, scared and angry and naive enough to believe the world is a just place where hard work and sacrifice are fairly rewarded. They've worked hard, they've sacrificed and they haven't been rewarded. They're as fucked as the rest of us, but don't yet realize they're blaming the wrong people for it.

And no, I'm not talking about abandoning the people who need us. We can provide for them to some extent out of our own pockets. If a shitty collectible card game about Japanese schoolgirls getting raped by tentacle monsters can get funded through crowd sourcing, surely we can raise money for something truly important like medicine or food for the poor. As limited as my own resources are, I still give faithfully to reliable charities. I can't be the only one who does that. We just need to coordinate our efforts better.

I don't mean to come off as cynical, I really don't. I'm just so fucking tired of rolling the rock up the hill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog4U_EwZ_g

He goes into some of this but without the cartoon.

Also, I cannot express how much fun it is citing this guy in research articles in business school. You would think b-schools would be full of die hard Friedmanites, but mine, at least, is not. But then again, I'm not at an "elite" school or for profit university.

That's the most reassuring thing I've heard all week.

This doesn't seem so much "marxian" as "logical" to me.

What I find is that if you basically offer ideas from market socialism, they follow very well with more innovative theories on management and human relations. You do have to do it without saying its market socialism, however, because classmates, not so much the professors, but classmates will have a knee jerk reaction once you put the name to it. I find this is hard to overcome, but that they too support a lot of cooperative and wide span ideas of management. Plus, if you're going to help organize labor, I cannot stress how relevant an MBA is to the concept, despite a knee jerk dismissal of the degree by some on the "left".

I'll probably end up listening to everything this guy's done over the weekend.