Market ‘solutions’ neutralizes and captures any social effort to counter the bad outcomes of capitalism.
In a comprehensive and well argued essay Peter Smith (‘Rewilding’) takes us on a tour of the last century of such ‘captures’, the most prominent being Labour Unions transformed from Class Struggle formations into Lobbying outfits and the Environmental Movement turned into consultancies for financialization of natural resources.1
The conclusion is that the real problems are not attacked but fragmented and commodified for intensified extraction by new and old classes of rentiers....
AI is a Cognitive Drug and Big Tech are the new Drug-lords Having used AI for a while now I am scared by how addictive it is.
Still AI is in an introductory phase and you can do meaningful work without being charged. So a lot of people and organisations are giving it a test. As addiction grows and usage takes off charging will go up too. Providing AI is the ultimate capitalist trick: addict your customers and squeeze them - ensuring a permanent and growing demand....
Corporations rule the world - for how long? In Norway the king died recently. The Parliament declared: “The King is dead. Long live the King!” and put a new one onto the throne.
Ambrus Béla, however, declares sovereignty dead - for good.
Also Kristian Thyregod is concerned about sovereignty, although thinking that it - like security - gradually may become indivisible, so that the sovereignty of one state cannot be considered independently of other states....
US raises walls, EU to follow After the US turned away from free trade and imposed tariffs on most of the world - and in particular China, the EU got really scared that China now will flood Europe with cheap products it can no longer sell in the US.
So the EU - founded as a champion of free trade - now looks poised to ‘going Trumpian’ and erect trade barriers against the Chinese inflow....
Lily357 is active as ever - providing three very helpful reminders on essential parts of geopolitical history.
I will try to pick out major points as an appetizer - you should read all three!
Middle East under UK/US control Her latest trilogy starts out with the story of how Britain took control of the Middle East oil in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
The British Navy switched from coal to oil by 1914....