Status Updates From Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Capitalism: A Ghost Story by
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sofía
is on page 96 of 136
Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just ‘human rights,’ and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.
— Jul 10, 2021 04:25PM
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sofía
is on page 94 of 136
All these wars from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have claimed millions of lives—all of them fought to secure ‘the American way of life.’
Today we know that the ‘American way of life’—the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire toward—has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth of half of the population of the United States.
— Jul 10, 2021 04:24PM
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Today we know that the ‘American way of life’—the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire toward—has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth of half of the population of the United States.
sofía
is on page 91 of 136
Two weeks ago the Kashmir police published ‘survival tips’ for nuclear war. Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: ‘During a nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles.’
— Jul 10, 2021 04:21PM
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sofía
is on page 64 of 136
The case against Kopa [Kunjam] has begun to fall apart as the police witnesses, including the man who was kidnapped, have disowned the states they purportedly made to the police. It doesn't really matter, because in India we all know the process is the punishment. It will take years for Kopa to establish his innocence, by which time the administration hopes the arrest will have served its purpose.
— Jul 10, 2021 04:17PM
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sofía
is on page 45 of 136
...despite having successfully powered through economic reforms,despite having waged wars&militarily occupied countries in order to put in place free market ‘democracies,’Capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself completely yet.Marx said,‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, are its own grave-diggers.Its fall&the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
— Jul 10, 2021 04:07PM
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sofía
is on page 44 of 136
Being a ‘strategic partner’ of the United States does not mean that the heads of state make friendly phone calls to each other every now and then. It means collaboration (interference) at every level... It means an unequal partnership in which India is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.
— Jul 10, 2021 04:04PM
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sofía
is on page 36 of 136
Viewing gender... shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It's what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem.
— Jul 10, 2021 02:01PM
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sofía
is on page 36 of 136
When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it's not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It's not about the burka. It's about the coercion.
— Jul 10, 2021 01:54PM
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sofía
is on page 36 of 136
The NGO-ization of the women's movement has also made Western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism.
— Jul 10, 2021 01:53PM
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sofía
is on page 33 of 136
Inadvertently (& sometimes advertently) they serve as listening posts, their reports and workshops and other missionary activity feeding data into an increasingly aggressive system of surveillance of increasingly hardening states. The more troubled an area, the greater the numbers of NGOs in it.
— Jul 10, 2021 01:34PM
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sofía
is on page 33 of 136
[NGO's] sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries. (The Ford Foundation requires organizations it funds to sign a pledge to this effect.)
— Jul 10, 2021 01:32PM
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sofía
is on page 31 of 136
Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretense of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment's notice) under the roof of a single overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all...
— Jul 10, 2021 01:25PM
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sofía
is on page 31 of 136
Scholars of the foundations-friendly version of economics & political science were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments, and jobs. Those with foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalized, and ghettoized, their courses discontinued.
— Jul 10, 2021 01:24PM
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sofía
is on page 31 of 136
Corporate-endowed foundations are the biggest funders of the social sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in development studies, community studies, cultural studies, behavioral sciences, and human rights. As US universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of students, children of the Third World elite, poured in.
[*looks at whitexicans*]
— Jul 10, 2021 01:20PM
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[*looks at whitexicans*]
sofía
is on page 29 of 136
Like all good Imperialists, the Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating & training an international cadre that believed that Capitalism, & by extension the hegemony of the [US], was in their own self-interest. And who would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in the ways native elites had always served colonialism.So began the foundations foray into education & the arts...
— Jul 10, 2021 01:12PM
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sofía
is on page 28 of 136
Twenty years later, young Chilean students, who came to be known as the Chicago Boys were taken to the [US] to be trained in neoliberal economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago (endowed by J.D. Rockerfeller), in preparation for the 1973 CIA-backed coup that killed Salvador Allende & brought in General Pinochet & a reign of death squads, disappearances, & terror that lasted for seventeen years.
— Jul 10, 2021 01:06PM
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sofía
is on page 27 of 136
There's a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
— Jul 08, 2021 11:00PM
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sofía
is on page 26 of 136
Thought it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US State Department. Its project of deepening democracy and ‘good governance’ is very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardizing business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market.
— Jul 08, 2021 10:38PM
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sofía
is on page 23 of 136
The idea of these [corporate-endowed] foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power?
— Jul 08, 2021 10:30PM
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sofía
is on page 20 of 136
If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criteria for stone throwing, then the only people who qualify are those who have been silenced already. Those who live outside the system; the outlaws in the forests, or those whose protests are never covered by the press, or the well-behaved Dispossessed, who go from tribunal to tribunal, bearing witness, giving testimony.
— Jul 08, 2021 10:20PM
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sofía
is on page 17 of 136
War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, ‘opinion-makers’—it has to be ‘perception management.’ And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
— Jul 08, 2021 10:07PM
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sofía
is on page 8 of 136
In India the 300 millions of us who belong to the new, post-International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘reforms’ middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, & denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, & of the 800 million who have been impoverished & dispossessed to make way for us.
— Jul 08, 2021 10:00PM
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