Big Brother: what's on your PC?

The U.S. and European governments are working behind closed doors to establish an international copyright treaty (ACTA, leaked here) that would create a global police force, answerable to no one, with the authority to seize and inspect any device, without recourse or the possibility of appeal.

What's more, this copyright treaty has now been classified in the "interest of national security".

What you are witnessing is a conspiracy perpetrated by global capitalists to cement their control, under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Treaties between nations are effectively law, and when they can be negotiated in secret without any public debate, then democracy is completely subverted. The government has no mandate from the people to carry out laws drafted in this manner, and when they do, they are acting on behalf of the corporate oligarchy.

On the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the holders of capital

Rich People Don’t Create Wealth. They Manipulate It.:

The point is that both intellectuals and labourers are definitely more valuable than wealthy executives who only know how to increase their personal fortunes (which we perceive as “making the company successful”). We all know that the real success of a company is a consequence of innovators, good labour, and good marketing. In most cases the extremely wealthy don’t directly involve themselves with those tasks, but rather leave them up to hired experts.

Rich people skim wealth off the surface and manipulate their wealth, thus creating the illusion that they’re performing an important service. In truth a computer could do most of what they do; hire specialists to manage their companies and hire workers to perform labour. The wealthy just have what, superficially, appear to be complicated jobs because they’re always leveraging their existing capital to make more money. That’s not really a useful job - that’s just the manifestation of their own self interest, and a consequence of our willingness to allow this parasitic elite class to exist.

United States Economic Collapse Facing Its Weimar Moment

From The Market Oracle:

As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.

But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.

It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.

Rushkoff on the Economy

This is a wonderfully discerning article by the famed media-counterculture master. Read it all.

LET IT DIE:

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

Move to Detroit

For Sale: The $100 House:

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

...

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

The real Dow Jones

When adjusted for inflation, the March 2009 Dow low is fractionally lower than the real Dow high in 1966.

"Going Galt"

And now, an anti- Ayn Rand rant: Where in the World is John Galt?:

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Rand's world is a vast fictional explication of the concept of 'social darwinism'; through absolute selfish competition, those who are fittest rise to the top and collect the bulk of the wealth, and everyone else gets whatever level of power and wealth they are comptent to handle. This is not only a social reality but a moral imperative; anyone who tries to interfere with the function of the free market is a sinful parasite, and anyone preaching the virtues of altruism and the 'duty' of people to help the less fortunate is just trying to get theirs by subterfuge instead of honest hard work.

Or, you know, by skimming the cream off the hard work of others, because that's what capitalism is in reality. No mention is made of how Galt's Gulch feeds itself, of how a bunch of investor/inventors engaged in a kind of extreme tax evasion managed to convince people to come work in their factories (or even build them). Presumably Galt and his cronies did it all themselves. The idea is more or less the same as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, except that everyone's working for wages and gets to buy each other's products, and magically nobody falls to the bottom of the economic heap because they're all magic super-capitalists (or if they do, they're happy about it because they're fulfilling their maximum potential in life while getting the moral satisfaction of sticking it to those parasites outside); and if there's a fire or they get sick they'll most certainly have insurance, and if the commies come along to rob them of their capital they'll all just pick up their guns and fight back. In fact, the concept of 'going Galt' is lifted from Anarchism hook line and sinker; but where Anarchism is about people working together to free themselves from tyranny, going Galt is about declaring yourself to be intrinsically better than the masses of poor and the working class by virtue of your ability to stack up worthless pieces of paper via usury.