Prometheus 6

{ahem}.., glad to see you been digging in the NACLA record box since peeping Dr. Sheila Walker's article on Brazilian Africanity. As to the exceedingly timely point you raise here, Judaism and the Protestant variant of anti-Christianity are foundational to the rise of corporatism. While Orthodoxy and even Shinto play their honourable part in resisting the rush toward Americanized corporatist porno-trash non-culture, it is pre-eminently Islam that is the biggest stumbling block in the way of the hegemon.

Islam is a profoundly and genuinely democratic faith, as opposed to corporatist (one dollar/one vote) sham ‘democracy’. Following on from this, Islam also hold true to economic democracy in the form of the prohibition of usury.

Blackness instantiated as hiphoprisy is an even more meritocratic cultural form than Islam, suffering from none of the arabic tribal baggage that has historically compromised and constrained the utterly exogamous strategic possibilities of Islam.

The emergent qualities of sampling, mastery culture, improvisation, call and response validation, etc.., make hiphop the popular face of open source culture. Hiphop and open source are of a piece in my occasionally humble opinion. In their own undeniable hacktivist ways, these expressions are also giving the corporatist hegemon fits, though no open declaration of perpetual war has yet been made on these influences...,

This Brooks character of the nyt is the same person who quoted, in one his past works, white nationalist steven sailor of VDARE.com when commenting about american white birth dynamics or who most recently when discussing the "middle class" conversion to bush in 2004 as if whites were the only middle class group in existence in the US.

So one can get a flavor of his skin color sentiments quite easy from the Tmes itself.

GDAWG

Yeah, that's him. Brooks. And if he knew enough to find Sailor he knew enough to recognize what he was co-signing.

Brooks got nothin on Olivier Roy

Typing, for example, Krugman and the first line of one of his articles in blogsearch.google.com will pretty reliably get the entire text of an article, posted illegally on someone's blog.

I found brooks amusing in a clown sort of way.  Over at slate a Jody Rosen does a takedown of his article

http://www.slate.com/id/2130120/fr/rss/

More interesting to me is the question of where to place the African-French community.  From New York they are in terms of distance and expense to reach there as far away from me as African-Americans in Seattle or LA.

There is the language thing.  And there is the fact that no government has authority over both of us. But I find that there are compelling questions about whether or not African-Americans and African-French are, could be or should be one community. 

http://furax.free.fr/albums/k7_concept.jpg

OneBlackMan

My youngest is in his second year of french language immersion and cracks us up when he jumps into his b-boy stance and commences fledgeling attempts to flow in french..., on the serious though, my longtime friendships with Congolese and Senegalese made this one a no brainer for me personally...,

Looked at the Oliver Roy's piece and feel Brook's piece is considerably more poisonous, racist, and devoid of any real analysis other than the typical racist noe-con dribble. Ms. Rosen in her Slate analysis tore Brook's butt up. GDAWG

The last paragraph of the NACLA article on cultural remittances that P6 originally linked to - set the level for my responses;

New and promising cultural processes do not necessarily translate easily into more directly political strategies and lines of analysis. Whatever the progressive implications that innovations in the cultural field may carry, they need not be initiated or informed by a resolute intention to foment social changes of a structural kind, or be directly aligned with activist social movements. What the resonant effects of cultural remittances do indicate, however, is that present-day struggles for change must be transnational in scope and vision, and at the same time sharply attuned to issues of cultural identity: what people call “home� and the ways that they identify themselves beyond the bounds of circumscribed national territories and traditions. As the historian of global diasporas Robin Cohen succinctly puts it, diaspora peoples have changed “from victims to challengers,� a transformation of social roles that contemporary political thinking about Latin America can ill afford to overlook.

and the question P6 posed;

This begs the question: if Brooks thinks "American ghetto life...defines for the young, poor and disaffected what it means to be oppressed," what does it define for those privileged American children that end up in law school?

kind of sort of maintained the thrust, though the introduction of Brooks inanity into the proceedings degraded to an extent the possible arc of the whole. Brooks makes a turettish outburst against the power of black urban youth culture. It's a subject with which he is not personally or directly familiar, and what he fears is something he can't completely articulate, but it makes him uneasy. Brooks is strictly punkazz....,

Roy, on the other hand, has a sophisticated understanding. His analysis of what I will refer to as open-source revivalism within Islam gives me pause when he proceeds from there to comment on HipHop as part of the transnational underclass bulwark against westernism. I find this a little troubling if for no other reason than that he's taken seriously by serious people, unlike Brooks.

I originally attempted to post the comment on Lieken to this thread, but ran into a drupal/browser/latency induced error as I backarrowed to recover typed in text in limbo, this resulted in my inadvertently posting it over yonder. IMO, what Lieken attempts is naked perpetration. At the end of the day, the issue as I see it is not racism, jihadism, or any of a number of other hot-button divide and conquer distractions, rather, it is resistance to corporatism and the potential embodiment of that resistance in urban black youth culture. At present, it's been badly co-opted and degraded, but there is no reason to believe that HipHop culture cannot rise from its 15 years of lying down with corporate dogs.

Axiomatic to this angle is the understanding that;

westernism=corporatism

Got it!!!!!! GDAWG

Gwynne Dyer excised the Goebbellian disinformation in the U.S. media....,

The real problem is not the failure of multiculturalism. The Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution). The Paris riots are not a Muslim uprising. They are not even race riots. They are outbursts of resentment and frustration by the marginalized and the unemployed of every ethnic group.

The low-income housing estates that ring Paris and other big French cities are dumping grounds for everybody that hasn't made it in the cool 21st-century France of the urban centers, the old white working class as well as immigrants from France's former colonies in Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan black Africa and from all the poorer countries of Europe. Unemployment there is often twice the national average of 10 percent. But they are not Muslim- or even nonwhite-majority communities.

Ethnic groups live jumbled together in apartment towers. The kid gangs that dominate the estates steal from strangers and residents alike and fight among themselves for control of the drug trade. But these are models of racial and cultural integration. What is happening now is neither an intifada nor a race riot - small comfort to the owners of the 28,000 vehicles burned on those estates so far this year.

This is an incoherent revolt by kids, many of them gang members, who would once have formed the next generation of the French working class. No longer needed in that role, they have no future, so they are very angry. But they are not politically organized, so after a few more nights the violence will die down again for a while.

These are neither American-style race riots nor a Muslim rebellion. About half the kids burning cars and buildings are white, working-
class, post-Christian French, and they get along with the black and Muslim kids just fine.

The Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution).

Semantic Attacks: The War of Words in France does a very nice job of parsing the political and verbal nuances of the situation that American disinformation apparatchiks attempted to spin as Muslim, convergence point with HipHop, potential jihadist point of entry into America, etc..,

Of course, we must content ourselves with merely knowing the truth, as none of these damnable Murkan mainstream slanderers will be held to account for their flagrantly dishonest attempts to exploit American fear and ignorance. The real story appears to be rooted in some fairly nasty French identity-politics temperature taking;

On October 25th, Sarkozy responded to his waning fortunes by firing an opening salvo that would help spark the gravest civil unrest France has experienced since May 1968, or perhaps even since colonial Algeria's war for independence stirred near civil war in France almost half a century ago. He took a retinue of journalists for an American-style photo-op to the "territoire" of the estranged young of one of Paris's poorest suburbs. There, he boasted about the success of his hard-line anti-crime policies. Standing outside one of the drab, run-down cement high-rises that are typical of such cités, surrounded by TV cameras, Sarkozy shot back at a woman who had cheered him from her window: "I'll get rid of this 'racaille' for you!"

The full force of this insult has not been captured in the American media, where the word racaille has been regularly translated as "scum," or alternately, as "rabble" or "hoodlums." At the time, a French right-wing blogger used a quote by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus to justify the Minister of the Interior's use of just that word: "Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison,...les honnêtes gens pourraient respirer" ("If you put all this scum in jail,...honest people could breathe.") Yet "scum" fails to capture the actual subtext of racaille for a French ear. An extreme right-wing web site, closed down in 2003 with jail time and fines for inciting racial hatred, was simply called: SOS-racaille.

Transnational conservatism says Let them eat Merde!!!

When Chirac says "Whatever our origins, we are all the children of the republic and we can all expect the same rights," he is in direct opposition to the rightwing globalizer, Sarkozy, who dismisses Chirac's "children of the republic" as "yobs," "fundamentalists," "riff-raff," and "vermin" and speaks of the need for the suburban ghettos "to be cleaned out with Karsher" - an industrial cleanser.

Sarkozy’s problem, and George Bush’s, is that fifty years on there are millions of Rosa Parks around the world who are refusing to be moved to the back of the bus.

On another recent thread I challenged the "wabbit's" contention that France's policies toward its immigrants were liberal, and stated they were no different than America's monocultural hegemonic project--no hyphens, no problem. Here's a quote from a speech given by archconservative and former Senator Malcolm Wallop last night at the Ronald Reagan Gala, the same affair Dick Cheney used as a platform to attack critics of the war.

DW put on your rabbit ears... this one's for you:

"Yet with all of that the American people stand proud. They live their lives, raise their children, worship in their chosen ways, support their communities and make a nation strong.

They do not live with hyphens to define them. And when, to our sorrow, they die in service to our country their markers do not read “here lies an Hispanic-American soldier, nor a Jewish-American soldier, nor an African-American soldier. It says here lies an American soldier.”

They are first and last Americans regardless of their color, their national heritage. Oh yes they resist when their government challenges their liberty, restricts their movement, and taxes their labor. Yet they go to work, and live with a serenity that only lives lived in freedom can provide.

Politically correct hyphens divide us unnecessarily. Indeed in the search for a mandated celebration of diversity we have, in the name of tolerance, become a sadly intolerant country. It is wrong and can be seen as needlessly wrong.

Did we not see a spectacular example of that a couple of weeks ago when Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol? She lay in state not as an AFRICAN AMERICAN but as a true American heroine whose quiet dignity and courage expanded the freedom of each of us. She was recognized not for her race but for her defense of liberty. No hyphens here. Only her national stature, earned in front of us all, brought the thousands of Americans by to celebrate her life."

For those of you who can stand to read the rest of Wallop's codswallop here's a link to the entire speech.

Wallop is just the type of hypocritical bitch who would've got on the bus and demanded Rosa Parks give up her seat. Talk about historical revisionism.

Your thoughts on the assertion that the great satan is corporatism? Further, what do you make of this specious unitarian talk coming from high places?

Do you suppose that there is a degree of trepidation on the part of the fable-ists concerning the power of their big lies to hold things together? I mean, very obviously it still seems to work on Cobbs and hassenpfeffers - but does it seem to you like there is a rebellious groundswell of cognitive activistism potentially capable of sweeping a lot of just plain folks into alternative points of view?

just now received in my inbox...,

in the existing democracy, corporate citizenship is
oftentimes prerequisite for a public representation.
further, corporate machinery often functions as its
own form of corporate governance and an agent of
change. yet this has nothing to do with democracy.
a corporation is much more akin to an empire, its
CEO an emperor, in a larger corporate imperium.

the mass-media who supposedly are to represent
the human citizenry, do so not only as cyborgs in-
side a corporate machinery, and through a social
construction of an incorporated reality, -- further,
they do so not as democratic citizens on the job,
but as highly-controlled and managed (political-
economy) representatives of the media empire
which they are human constituents of, though as
a technological component adapted to this media
machinery, a fixed part of this cybernetic organism
which is at times more like a monster than a human
being in its functions, appetites, desires, and goals.
that is, what drives it, for what reasons, and to what
end? is it simply that a mass media corporation of
100,000 workers and billions of dollars in revenue,
with vast holdings and franchises in nuclear power,
entertainment themeparks, movies, advertising,
magazines, internet access, real estate, hotels
and resorts, and infrastructure is simply going to
represent - or rather, sell - a view of what is real?

and will such a transaction between the views and
values of individual humans and corporate machines
profit each alike, or might there be inherent bias in
the reporting, and the direction of such a lifeform?
and if such corporation representatives have been
given a public trust (the electromagnetic spectrum
in which to pursue such, at times, very private ends)
what happens if what is represented is, in the final
analysis, against the very idea of human democracy?

that is, in its current functioning, in relation to issues
of human representation, whereby a new balance is
realized between private corporate interest and public
human interests, which work with one-another within
a shared and mutually beneficial framework, versus
an entropic system of exploitation which is dismantling
the public state, by default, for corporate democracy.

thus, this is not simply a case against 'the media', but
instead: it is a structural issue which is being exploited
by natural (evolutionary, inhuman) forces which harness
such conditions, and by fiat of growth do real harm to
democratic governance by the people, for the people.

that is, the relationship between the citizen and the
state, how they are defined, represented, made real.
human citizens have to compete within a 'free market'
petri-dish in order to have the state serve their needs,
while stronger, larger, and more powerful cybernetic
organisms became ideal citizens: corporate-machines.

humans now serve such machinery, and represent its
needs as lobbyists for hire in the halls of government,
on behalf of such corporate representation, bypassing
the traditional electorate to directly engage the elected
officials and full and equal (if not moreso) constituents.
the end result for humanity is to strip it of its remaining
autonomy from a world governed by and for machines.

the market of democratic representation is thus now
completely dominated by such special interests of a
particular group of citizens, who happen to be machines.
that is, organization structures and mechanisms which,
with the addition of human power and human workers,
adds up to a type of functioning organism with a certain
set of traits or behaviors, a highly-refined intelligence in
a given realm of inquiry (such as energy ecosystems),
yet which can also be completely unintelligent, rightly
so, with regard to other aspects of experience outside
its domain and self-interest (such as human rights).

what evolves in such an environment is a crude type
of sentient machinery, composed of both humans and
technologies, which create a larger sentient machinery,
like Lewis Mumford's Megamachine, a crude yet ever-
refining type of intelligence which ultimately is totally
dehumanized and beyond any human governance.

humans no longer compete against and cooperate
with one another, nor will humans and corporations
continue to be juxtaposed in such existential matches:
within a democratic environment, such machinery can
now compete against itself and cooperate with itself for
greater representation, ('reality, inc.'), and for the state
to serve its interests, values, and to develop accordingly.
devoid of human goals, needs, oversight, or principles.

the .US constitution as it exists legitimates, protects this.
the government as it exists, serves this basic planning.
the mass media, by default, represents, promotes this.
that is, if it is left outside of public review and critiques,
and is considered profane by fundamentalist decrees
that the sanctity of tradition today remains untouched
by a vast new electromagnetic paradigm and its reality.

when 2/3rds of a public believe the state is headed
in the wrong direction, and yet the basic steering or
governing of the state is basically fixed to a set of
beliefs which are, at their core, a major cause of the
larger events (such as poverty, hunger, disease, etc.)
it becomes a question of the impossibility of challenging
the prevailing paradigm of such an incorporated reality,
monopolized by mass media markets and their private
representations of events themselves, and how to lay
siege to this built-in mentality that itself does not serve
the human constitution and democracy, as it foils any
attempts at greater questioning by way of self-interest.
as it would impinge upon its (a corporate machine that
is a citizen in a democratic state) right of representation.

the internet and networks recently emerged from such
a context, and currently have become a balancing force,
potentially. to attempt to democratize monopolistic mass-
media markets by placing under review how events are
being represented, and to provide an alternative version
of the reality portrayed as in the public interest - that is,
to differentiate between human and corporate citizenry.

“Your thoughts on the assertion that the great satan is corporatism?”

I see Corporatism as just a tool of capitalism, a mechanism or apparatus that assumes whatever form or adopts whatever policy is needed to advance the interests and objectives of those who seek to monopolize and maintain the private ownership of capital. Other than the military industrial complex, lobbying perhaps serves as the best example of corporatism run amok in America. Through the outright bribery of politicians, corporate lobbyists have seized control of the US government and the US Treasury. Annually, lobbyists spent over 1.5 billion in Washington on behalf of corporate interests. They receive a huge return for their investment. Public Citizen, the non-profit government watchdog group, offers this brief but lurid description of government/corporate thuggery:

“Each year, U.S. taxpayers subsidize U.S. businesses to the tune of almost $125 billion, the equivalent of all the income tax paid by 60 million individuals and families. These corporations receive a wide range of favors: special corporate tax breaks; direct government subsidies to pay for advertising, research and training costs; and incentives to pursue overseas production and sales. While Congress institutes dramatic cuts in funding for traditional support programs for individuals and families, corporate giants continue to live off the dole. Each dollar spent on these "aid for dependent corporations" welfare programs means one dollar less for environmental programs, support for education, assistance to those in need, tax breaks for families, or deficit reduction.”

The bigger question is: what can be done about it? Elections will not solve the problem because politicians are bought and paid for. Those of us who bother to pay attention know the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans is a hoax. America is ruled by a Corporate Party. Partisan politics are merely a diversion, a farce played out to divert the public’s attention while corporations and their lackeys loot the public coffers and enact laws to extend their hegemony over public and private life.

Organizing workers cannot solve the problem due to the global labor market. Corporate outsourcing of high-tech jobs and off-shoring of manufacturing jobs has severely eroded the power of American workers to demand change. Bush, who has hired or appointed more corporate hacks to government office than any other President in history, wants to relax immigration rules to allow the continued influx of cheap labor from across the Mexican border. This policy will further devalue wages, and restrict many workers to a permanent underclass destined to serve the interests of the military industrial complex or the prison industrial complex. Either way, they will be exploited as spare parts for the capitalist machine.  

But back to the bigger question: how do we exorcise the demon known as corporatism? Somehow I don’t think this procedure will work. But it does provide an interesting model.

I believe we’re at the point where not even an American revolution can defeat Beelzebub and the bourgeois corporatist minions he animates and embodies. The uprising will have to be global in nature and influence. Americans have absorbed too much zombie dust. Consumerism has become our crack cocaine, and like most junkies we are unwilling or unable to “free” ourselves.

"Further, what do you make of this specious unitarian talk coming from high places?"

Could you please elaborate?

"Do you suppose that there is a degree of trepidation on the part of the fable-ists concerning the power of their big lies to hold things together? I mean, very obviously it still seems to work on Cobbs and hassenpfeffers - but does it seem to you like there is a rebellious groundswell of cognitive activistism potentially capable of sweeping a lot of just plain folks into alternative points of view?"

I don't think the fable-ists are too worried. There are far more ill-telligent and illiterate than there are intelligensia in this country. The narratives are designed for that crowd, to spin them on cue in any direction or mis-direction the fable-ists see fit to conjure.

Wagging the dog also works. Pulpit pimps use it on Sundays--conjuring threats from homosexuals, evolutionists, nonbelievers, etc.--to line their pockets.

If Bush continues to fall in the polls, planes might start crashing into skyscrapers again. The gullible will be easily convinced it's right to suspend the constitution, declare martial law, and allow him to remain in office until the war against "terrah" is won.

I play am talk radio as a daylong irritant and this may have led me to a biased perception, but it seems to me that there is a full court press on by the GOP, GOP cheerleading big media, and even corporate leadership, {judging from some of the public forums that have been held lately hereabouts} to persuade us that the corporatist leadership has been operating in complete good faith to preserve our way of life. The excerpts you posted upthread were spot-on this theme.

While I take a jaundiced view of these faux communitarian appeals, {if it were more than lip service, the quality and tangibility of American interpersonal communion would be entirely different than what it is - frankly I take these marketing appeals no more seriously than I take the seasonal pleas to shop, spend money and eat to excess in the name of thanks and jesus} Like I said y'day in response to P6's post that the Big Lie has limits;

Never has there been a use of public resources on such a scale on the basis of less hard evidence for all to see -- or in support of something less clearly defined, with less clear objectives (beyond the vagaries of public rhetoric), or with less clear motives. Something really special is going on.

I don't remember any previous juncture at which those in authority felt that such appeals for unity had to be made. I believe that previously consumption as the axis of our way of life never needed to be abetted by appeal to unifying patriotic sentiment.

If Bush continues to fall in the polls, planes might start crashing into skyscrapers again. The gullible will be easily convinced it's right to suspend the constitution, declare martial law, and allow him to remain in office until the war against "terrah" is won.

That was the theme-du-jour with Walter Williams gibbering in for Rush Limbaugh today. Williams had Tony Blakely on and the fear mongering was intense. A russian nuke wielded by al-qaeda, 100's of thousands of casualties, failure of the U.S. economy and other unspecified unintended consequences. The pitch around which all this candy coating was arrayed was for biometric national ID's, a two year renewable declaration of special executive powers {think martial law/patriot act on steroids} and the unified political will to enable the powers that be to wage the war on terra with whatever degree of ruthlessness they deem necessary.

Interestingly as I listen to all this, not once has it ever occurred to me to be fearful of international terra. Rather, the only aspect of the situation that I'm even a little concerned about is the domestic terra that such extraordinary enlargement of government power would engender. Seems to me that management and its sundry spokespeople are beginning to take the collective temperature for a technology-enabled fascist clampdown.

"Seems to me that management and its sundry spokespeople are beginning to take the collective temperature for a technology-enabled fascist clampdown."

I feel the screws tightening everyday.

 it seems to me that there is a full court press on by the GOP, GOP cheerleading big media, and even corporate leadership, {judging from some of the public forums that have been held lately hereabouts} to persuade us that the corporatist leadership has been operating in complete good faith to preserve our way of life.

They have been...but take into account am talk radio's audience. 

American ghetto life, at least as portrayed in rap videos, now defines for the young, poor and disaffected what it means to be oppressed.

Now, if they could find a pleasant, orderly way to be oppressed... 

They have been...but take into account am talk radio's audience.

I'd note an operational distinction here P6. While it is abundantly clear that corporate management works in diligent good faith to maximize benefit to the corporation and the corporate way of life, most could not care less about continuation of popular American enjoyment of the same.

I was in discussion with a U.S. heavy equipment manufacturer last week and one of the individuals responsible for Asia Pacific business noted matter-of-factly that China now accounts for 2/3rds of this company's global sales. China is what matters to this company, and great many like it.

Now that the furor over Enron and defrocking of Arthur Anderson has died down, what if anything have you heard lately about compliance with and enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?

I'd note an operational distinction here P6. While it is abundantly clear that corporate management works in diligent good faith to maximize benefit to the corporation and the corporate way of life, most could not care less about continuation of popular American enjoyment of the same.

F'sho. But the citizenry doesn't have to maintain the same level of enjoyment to maintain the corporate way of life. 

"China now accounts for 2/3rds of this company's global sales. China is what matters to this company, and great many like it."

Americans see China as a vast marketplace for selling goods and products. But for every dollar America earns from trade with China, Walmart, by itself, returns fifty cents through its purchases of Chinese goods.

The other day I asked a Chinese colleague how to say "good morning" in Mandarin. I tried several times but I just couldn't get the pitches right. My colleague used to teach English in China. She informed me there are as many Chinese English speakers as there are Americans. China graduates five times as many engineers as America every year. I'm sure similar statistics exist in every other academic and technical field. How will America compete when Johnny can't read beyond the fifth grade level? Hell the president can't read beyond the fifth grade level.