London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
Slavoj Žižek
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.
Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.
Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).
Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.
Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
Monday, February 6, 2012
US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins
Gary Younge, guardian.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".
Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.
So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."
The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
This is not new. But since a 2010 supreme court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and unions, it has become particularly acute. Moreover, the contributors can remain anonymous. The organisations that are taking advantage of this new law are known as Super Pacs. Even at this early stage of the presidential cycle, their potential for framing the race is clear. In the whole of 2008 individuals, parties and other groups spent $168.8m independently on the presidential election. This year on Republican candidates alone, where voting started less than a month ago, the Super Pacs have reported independent expenditures of almost $40m. In 2008 election spending doubled compared with 2004. This year industry analysts believe the money spent just on television ads is set to leap by almost 80% compared with four years ago.
Money in American politics was already an elephant in the room. Now the supreme court has given it a laxative, taken away the shovel, and asked us to ignore both the sight and the stench.
The only real restriction is that there should be no co-ordination between the candidate and the Super Pac. In practice, this is little more than a fig leaf. A few weeks ago one of the ads, funded by the Super Pac supporting Gingrich, was slated for its many brazen inaccuracies. At a campaign stop in Orlando, Gingrich told supporters: "I am calling on this Super Pac – I cannot co-ordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you – I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film."
Romney is no less compromised. His former chief campaign fundraiser and political director work for the main Super Pac supporting him, which was set up with the help of a $1m cheque from an ex-business partner. "This legalism of 'no co-ordination' is a filament-thin G-string," wrote Timothy Egan in the New York Times recently. "Everyone co-ordinates."
Money alone can't guarantee success. Santorum spent around 74 cents a voter in Iowa and narrowly won; Perry spent around $358 per vote and came a distant fourth. Debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role. But the fact that money is not the sole determinant doesn't mean it's not the key one. Two months ago Gingrich's surge in Iowa was halted after Romney's Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Romney's commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich's Super Pac injected several million dollars.
This is not a partisan point. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the government should limit individual contributions – with a majority among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The influence of money at this level corrupts an entire political culture and in no small part explains the depth of cynicism, alienation and mistrust Americans now have for their politicians.
The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. As a whole, the polity's median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation's top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that's before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.
The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.
Last week in a Massachusetts Senate race, both the Republican incumbent and his likely Democratic challenger signed a pact agreeing not to use third-party money. The trouble is that the agreement is completely unenforceable. Already at least one pro-Republican group has refused to commit to it.
Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade.
[....]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".
Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.
So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."
The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
This is not new. But since a 2010 supreme court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and unions, it has become particularly acute. Moreover, the contributors can remain anonymous. The organisations that are taking advantage of this new law are known as Super Pacs. Even at this early stage of the presidential cycle, their potential for framing the race is clear. In the whole of 2008 individuals, parties and other groups spent $168.8m independently on the presidential election. This year on Republican candidates alone, where voting started less than a month ago, the Super Pacs have reported independent expenditures of almost $40m. In 2008 election spending doubled compared with 2004. This year industry analysts believe the money spent just on television ads is set to leap by almost 80% compared with four years ago.
Money in American politics was already an elephant in the room. Now the supreme court has given it a laxative, taken away the shovel, and asked us to ignore both the sight and the stench.
The only real restriction is that there should be no co-ordination between the candidate and the Super Pac. In practice, this is little more than a fig leaf. A few weeks ago one of the ads, funded by the Super Pac supporting Gingrich, was slated for its many brazen inaccuracies. At a campaign stop in Orlando, Gingrich told supporters: "I am calling on this Super Pac – I cannot co-ordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you – I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film."
Romney is no less compromised. His former chief campaign fundraiser and political director work for the main Super Pac supporting him, which was set up with the help of a $1m cheque from an ex-business partner. "This legalism of 'no co-ordination' is a filament-thin G-string," wrote Timothy Egan in the New York Times recently. "Everyone co-ordinates."
Money alone can't guarantee success. Santorum spent around 74 cents a voter in Iowa and narrowly won; Perry spent around $358 per vote and came a distant fourth. Debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role. But the fact that money is not the sole determinant doesn't mean it's not the key one. Two months ago Gingrich's surge in Iowa was halted after Romney's Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Romney's commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich's Super Pac injected several million dollars.
This is not a partisan point. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the government should limit individual contributions – with a majority among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The influence of money at this level corrupts an entire political culture and in no small part explains the depth of cynicism, alienation and mistrust Americans now have for their politicians.
The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. As a whole, the polity's median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation's top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that's before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.
The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.
Last week in a Massachusetts Senate race, both the Republican incumbent and his likely Democratic challenger signed a pact agreeing not to use third-party money. The trouble is that the agreement is completely unenforceable. Already at least one pro-Republican group has refused to commit to it.
Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade.
[....]
White Supremacists Love Ron Paul
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9801-white-supremacists-love-ron-paul
[....]
Hacktivist collective Anonymous struck a gold mine with Operation Blitzkrieg - an effort to hack into and shut down White Nationalist (WN) websites and forums. Anonymous leaked thousands of emails and private messages from the white supremacist network American Third Position, which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anonymous also leaked the address, phone number, social security number and resume of White News Now owner and administrator Jamie Kelso on this website. But in leaking the emails and messages, Anonymous also discovered that a vast number of A3P members claim to be high-ranking members of the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul's campaign has some serious explaining to do if this is true. Read what the SPLC has to say about A3P:
The American Third Position is a political party initially established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party has big plans to run candidates nationwide.
The SPLC also has quotes from Kelso and Johnson, in detailed profiles from their website.
"No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race.... Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States." - Bill D. Johnson, 1985
"... in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival ... The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit." - Jamie Kelso, 2006
In leaked private messages, Kelso claims that he and Johnson are top organizers for Ron Paul's campaign.
"I'll give you some more real-life examples of WN folks like us who are very successfully navigating back and forth between great White Nationalism and full mainstream activism. I'll introduce you to folks like William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the A3P, who is simultaneously Ron Paul's #1 man in Southern California. When Ron has VIP get-togethers at $2,000 a plate they are in Bill's dining room on his 80-acre estate."
Kelso also boasted repeatedly about meeting with both Ron and Rand Paul during the 2011 CPAC for three consecutive days.
"Then I'm heading to DC to meet up with Ron Paul and Rand Paul, personally, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12.
"Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Rand Paul. I'm in a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen.
"We'll be meeting with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Bill and I got to talk with Ron tonight by phone."
In private messages, Ron Paul organizers in A3P forums essentially admitted to each other that Ron Paul's base was overwhelmingly white, and ripe for inclusion in their own network. They even spoke of being the bridge being the White Nationalist movement and Ron Paul supporters.
"All of us who have helped organize events among these Ron Paul millions are keenly aware that 98% of these folks are White (look at any photo of a Ron Paul rally ... look at my photos of the crowds of 15,000 each on the west lawn of the Capitol on July 12, 2008 and at the Minneapolis counter-convention on September 2, 2008), and that almost all of these White folks want the non-White invasion of our White lands stopped yesterday."
"Anyone who can't see that Ron Paul is the best viable candidate from a pro-White perspective is not bright enough to be of any value to the pro-White movement."
"The most important of those innovations is BRIDGING from our tiny EXPLICITLY pro-White movement to the huge IMPLICITLY pro-White revolution that has been gathering ever since Ron Paul started it rolling in mid-2007."
Even when confronted with any of the ugly, bigoted remarks in his newsletters, or the more recent evidence that Ron Paul actually signed off on each newsletter before they went public, or when shown the picture of Ron Paul posing with campaign donor Don Black of Stormfront, Ron Paul's campaign has soldiered on. But his campaign owes the people and the media a direct response to A3P's claims that Ron and Rand Paul met in private at CPAC with a former Klan leader's right-hand man.
Ron Paul supporters are always quick to dismiss accusations of racism when they point to his opposition to the drug war. Indeed, his pro-decriminalization platform along with his anti-war credentials and his advocacy for tighter regulation of the Federal Reserve have won supporters from the right and the left. But now, no mainstream American should be able to throw their support behind Ron Paul with a clear conscience until he openly disavows his associations with the white supremacist movement and returns all the money donated to his campaign from its leaders and members.
[....]
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9801-white-supremacists-love-ron-paul
[....]
Hacktivist collective Anonymous struck a gold mine with Operation Blitzkrieg - an effort to hack into and shut down White Nationalist (WN) websites and forums. Anonymous leaked thousands of emails and private messages from the white supremacist network American Third Position, which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anonymous also leaked the address, phone number, social security number and resume of White News Now owner and administrator Jamie Kelso on this website. But in leaking the emails and messages, Anonymous also discovered that a vast number of A3P members claim to be high-ranking members of the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul's campaign has some serious explaining to do if this is true. Read what the SPLC has to say about A3P:
The American Third Position is a political party initially established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party has big plans to run candidates nationwide.
The SPLC also has quotes from Kelso and Johnson, in detailed profiles from their website.
"No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race.... Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States." - Bill D. Johnson, 1985
"... in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival ... The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit." - Jamie Kelso, 2006
In leaked private messages, Kelso claims that he and Johnson are top organizers for Ron Paul's campaign.
"I'll give you some more real-life examples of WN folks like us who are very successfully navigating back and forth between great White Nationalism and full mainstream activism. I'll introduce you to folks like William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the A3P, who is simultaneously Ron Paul's #1 man in Southern California. When Ron has VIP get-togethers at $2,000 a plate they are in Bill's dining room on his 80-acre estate."
Kelso also boasted repeatedly about meeting with both Ron and Rand Paul during the 2011 CPAC for three consecutive days.
"Then I'm heading to DC to meet up with Ron Paul and Rand Paul, personally, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12.
"Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Rand Paul. I'm in a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen.
"We'll be meeting with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Bill and I got to talk with Ron tonight by phone."
In private messages, Ron Paul organizers in A3P forums essentially admitted to each other that Ron Paul's base was overwhelmingly white, and ripe for inclusion in their own network. They even spoke of being the bridge being the White Nationalist movement and Ron Paul supporters.
"All of us who have helped organize events among these Ron Paul millions are keenly aware that 98% of these folks are White (look at any photo of a Ron Paul rally ... look at my photos of the crowds of 15,000 each on the west lawn of the Capitol on July 12, 2008 and at the Minneapolis counter-convention on September 2, 2008), and that almost all of these White folks want the non-White invasion of our White lands stopped yesterday."
"Anyone who can't see that Ron Paul is the best viable candidate from a pro-White perspective is not bright enough to be of any value to the pro-White movement."
"The most important of those innovations is BRIDGING from our tiny EXPLICITLY pro-White movement to the huge IMPLICITLY pro-White revolution that has been gathering ever since Ron Paul started it rolling in mid-2007."
Even when confronted with any of the ugly, bigoted remarks in his newsletters, or the more recent evidence that Ron Paul actually signed off on each newsletter before they went public, or when shown the picture of Ron Paul posing with campaign donor Don Black of Stormfront, Ron Paul's campaign has soldiered on. But his campaign owes the people and the media a direct response to A3P's claims that Ron and Rand Paul met in private at CPAC with a former Klan leader's right-hand man.
Ron Paul supporters are always quick to dismiss accusations of racism when they point to his opposition to the drug war. Indeed, his pro-decriminalization platform along with his anti-war credentials and his advocacy for tighter regulation of the Federal Reserve have won supporters from the right and the left. But now, no mainstream American should be able to throw their support behind Ron Paul with a clear conscience until he openly disavows his associations with the white supremacist movement and returns all the money donated to his campaign from its leaders and members.
[....]
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory
http://downthetubescomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/call-for-papers-from-akira-to-zizek.html
FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2012
Call for Papers: From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory
Papers are now being invited for the academic comics tome Studies in Comics (volume 3.2).
Guest editor Tony Venezia tell us this special issue - sub-titled From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory - seeks to provide a forum for new articulations between comics studies and contemporary cultural theory.
Be warned, it's heady stuff for those of us with low attention spans, perhaps.
"The importance and continued relevance of post-structuralist/postmodernist thought, the Frankfurt school’s studies of mass culture, McLuhan’s media theory and Bourdieu’s critical sociology are rightly acknowledged," notes Tony.
"Such figures dominate theoretical academic discourse on comics, as in other areas of cultural studies, often at the expense of engagement with alternative strands of critical thinking.
Rather than risking stagnation, Tony argues comics studies needs to "critically engage with theoretical paradigms not yet sourced". And that's the brief for this volume.
Submissions are welcome from scholars and enthusiasts that explore the conjunctions of comics and cultural theory. These could be engagements with the work of specific thinkers or emergent schools including, but not limited to:
Bruno Latour and ANT – Michel Serres – Paul Virilio – eco-criticism – thing theory - N. Katherine Hayles – Teresa de Lauretis - Franco Moretti – Manuel De Landa – Manuel Castells - cognitive capitalism – transmedia narratives – Giorgio Agamben – Édouard Gissant – Jacques Rancière – Friedrich Kittler – non-representational theory - speculative realism/materialism - Alain Badiou – Zygmunt Bauman – Rosi Braidotti – Antonio Negri – Jan van Dijk - affect theory – Lev Manovitch - Kojin Karatani – visual culture studies - and Slavoj Žižek...
Articles should be 4,000-8,000 words from any discipline with a strong critical focus. Abstracts should be received by 1st May 2012 in the first instance.
Please send 300 word abstracts to studiesincomics@googlemail.com and include the word ARTICLE in the subject heading. Please indicate the intended word count of the article.
Completed papers will be required by 15th August 2012. All submissions are peer reviewed and papers must be in English. Reviews of publications and exhibitions are also welcome, as are creative submissions, by the same deadlines indicated above.
- More info: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=168/view,page=2/
FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2012
Call for Papers: From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory
Papers are now being invited for the academic comics tome Studies in Comics (volume 3.2).
Guest editor Tony Venezia tell us this special issue - sub-titled From Akira to Žižek: Comics and Contemporary Cultural Theory - seeks to provide a forum for new articulations between comics studies and contemporary cultural theory.
Be warned, it's heady stuff for those of us with low attention spans, perhaps.
"The importance and continued relevance of post-structuralist/postmodernist thought, the Frankfurt school’s studies of mass culture, McLuhan’s media theory and Bourdieu’s critical sociology are rightly acknowledged," notes Tony.
"Such figures dominate theoretical academic discourse on comics, as in other areas of cultural studies, often at the expense of engagement with alternative strands of critical thinking.
Rather than risking stagnation, Tony argues comics studies needs to "critically engage with theoretical paradigms not yet sourced". And that's the brief for this volume.
Submissions are welcome from scholars and enthusiasts that explore the conjunctions of comics and cultural theory. These could be engagements with the work of specific thinkers or emergent schools including, but not limited to:
Bruno Latour and ANT – Michel Serres – Paul Virilio – eco-criticism – thing theory - N. Katherine Hayles – Teresa de Lauretis - Franco Moretti – Manuel De Landa – Manuel Castells - cognitive capitalism – transmedia narratives – Giorgio Agamben – Édouard Gissant – Jacques Rancière – Friedrich Kittler – non-representational theory - speculative realism/materialism - Alain Badiou – Zygmunt Bauman – Rosi Braidotti – Antonio Negri – Jan van Dijk - affect theory – Lev Manovitch - Kojin Karatani – visual culture studies - and Slavoj Žižek...
Articles should be 4,000-8,000 words from any discipline with a strong critical focus. Abstracts should be received by 1st May 2012 in the first instance.
Please send 300 word abstracts to studiesincomics@googlemail.com and include the word ARTICLE in the subject heading. Please indicate the intended word count of the article.
Completed papers will be required by 15th August 2012. All submissions are peer reviewed and papers must be in English. Reviews of publications and exhibitions are also welcome, as are creative submissions, by the same deadlines indicated above.
- More info: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=168/view,page=2/
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Summer School, Universität Bonn
http://www.philosophie.uni-bonn.de/aktuelles/third-annual-international-summer-school
Third Annual International Summer School
"The Ontological Turn in Contemporary Philosophy" (July 2 - 13, 2012)
Organizer:
Professor Dr. Markus Gabriel
Chair in Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (Bonn University)
Keynote Addresses/Visiting Professors:
Prof. Ray Brassier (American University, Beirut)
Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol)
Prof. Martin Hägglund (Harvard/London Graduate School)
Prof. Graham Harman (American University, Cairo)
Prof. Slavoj Žižek (Ljubljana, NYU, Birkbeck, European Graduate School)
Course Description:
What is the world? What do we mean when we speak of the world in philosophy and claim things such as true thought being about the world? Is the world "out there," as Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore's "absolute conception of reality" suggests, or is it a horizon or regulative ideal guiding our epistemic practices?
In metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology it is common to speak of the world without bothering to explicate what this term means. Even though it features in debates concerning our access to the external world and even in book titles like Mind and World, it usually does not seem to express more than the vague realist assumption or platitude that not all objects or facts are made up, hallucinated, or in some way or another constructed by thinking subjects. Much of the 20th century's linguistic turn, both in the analytical and in the hermeneutical/phenomenological traditions, assumes that the world is what we have access to with truth-apt thought, yet also is that which might be distorted by our attempts to grasp it as it is in itself. Over the last decade, many voices (such as Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Boghossian, to name a few) have urged that the overall territory of the debate regarding the position of thinking in a world of facts is fundamentally confused by missing the very facticity of the world. This has triggered a thoroughgoing return to realism, prominently figuring in the thought of the avant-garde movement of "speculative realism" or "speculative materialism," as it has been labeled. Interestingly, the debates often associated with Badiou's ontology and the critique of all transcendental philosophy in Meillassoux's After Finitude have, in a recent turn, led to a reassessment of German idealism, for example in the work of Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Slavoj Žižek. On a closer look, it turns out the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel's criticisms of Kant can be read as attempts to overcome transcendental epistemology and themselves motivate an ontological turn.
This year, we will discuss an array of perspectives on the ontological turn developed by the organizer and visiting professors in recent work. In particular, we will address the concepts of speculative philosophy, the relation between transcendental philosophy and ontology in general, the issue of contemporary forms of realism and materialism, and the prospects for a suitably realist or materialist reading of figures such as Schelling, Hegel, and Derrida. The philosophers assembled will present and discuss their recent work in the form of a lecture followed by a seminar.
[....]
Third Annual International Summer School
"The Ontological Turn in Contemporary Philosophy" (July 2 - 13, 2012)
Organizer:
Professor Dr. Markus Gabriel
Chair in Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (Bonn University)
Keynote Addresses/Visiting Professors:
Prof. Ray Brassier (American University, Beirut)
Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol)
Prof. Martin Hägglund (Harvard/London Graduate School)
Prof. Graham Harman (American University, Cairo)
Prof. Slavoj Žižek (Ljubljana, NYU, Birkbeck, European Graduate School)
Course Description:
What is the world? What do we mean when we speak of the world in philosophy and claim things such as true thought being about the world? Is the world "out there," as Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore's "absolute conception of reality" suggests, or is it a horizon or regulative ideal guiding our epistemic practices?
In metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology it is common to speak of the world without bothering to explicate what this term means. Even though it features in debates concerning our access to the external world and even in book titles like Mind and World, it usually does not seem to express more than the vague realist assumption or platitude that not all objects or facts are made up, hallucinated, or in some way or another constructed by thinking subjects. Much of the 20th century's linguistic turn, both in the analytical and in the hermeneutical/phenomenological traditions, assumes that the world is what we have access to with truth-apt thought, yet also is that which might be distorted by our attempts to grasp it as it is in itself. Over the last decade, many voices (such as Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Boghossian, to name a few) have urged that the overall territory of the debate regarding the position of thinking in a world of facts is fundamentally confused by missing the very facticity of the world. This has triggered a thoroughgoing return to realism, prominently figuring in the thought of the avant-garde movement of "speculative realism" or "speculative materialism," as it has been labeled. Interestingly, the debates often associated with Badiou's ontology and the critique of all transcendental philosophy in Meillassoux's After Finitude have, in a recent turn, led to a reassessment of German idealism, for example in the work of Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Slavoj Žižek. On a closer look, it turns out the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel's criticisms of Kant can be read as attempts to overcome transcendental epistemology and themselves motivate an ontological turn.
This year, we will discuss an array of perspectives on the ontological turn developed by the organizer and visiting professors in recent work. In particular, we will address the concepts of speculative philosophy, the relation between transcendental philosophy and ontology in general, the issue of contemporary forms of realism and materialism, and the prospects for a suitably realist or materialist reading of figures such as Schelling, Hegel, and Derrida. The philosophers assembled will present and discuss their recent work in the form of a lecture followed by a seminar.
[....]
Romney Isn’t Concerned
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/krugman-romney-isnt-concerned.html?_r=2
If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”
This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?
[...]
Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.
Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.
So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.
Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.
So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.
Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?
And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.
And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.
Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/krugman-romney-isnt-concerned.html?_r=2
If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”
This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?
[...]
Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.
Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.
So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.
Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.
So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.
Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?
And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.
And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.
Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.
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