Status Updates From Capitalism: A Ghost Story

“By manipulating the disbursement of the funds, the foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what “political” activity should be.”

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.

The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict...can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators.

...corporate or foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance's way of buying into resistance movements, literally as shareholders buy shares in companies ... They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along with 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 idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. ... Bill Gates's obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and 'scorecards of progress' [is] as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.

Though this isn’t saying anything new, it’s fact driven and raw style is compelling.