More Recent Reading and Viewing

Just saw Zeitgeist Film's “The Corporation” last night. We spent about four hours watching both the feature film and many, though hardly all, the extras on the DVD version.

It’s a must-see for all who want an in-depth film look at where we are in this global capitalist world of ours, and how we might effectively begin to shut down the amoral psychopaths in our midst (see the film).

Make sure and buy it from the filmmakers to support the making of such films, or some other non-corporate source, not, if you can help it, from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or, god forbid, from Wal-Mart. And if you rent it, make sure and support your small local rental stores, if possible, not Blockbuster etc.

As for reading, I’ve been finishing up the books by Emmanuel Todd ("After the Empire") and Senator Robert Byrd ("Losing America"), and have added George Soros’ “On Globalization” (2002). I think I will also soon add his newer book “The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power” (2004).

I’ve also been making forays into Canadian philosopher John McMurtry’s dense analyses of late stage capitalism, including “Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy,” and “The Cancer Stage of Capitalism” (links to Amazon.com: sorry, couldn't find other good pages to the books.)


(On McMurtry also see here )

McMurtry’s work is not for the faint of heart or mind, only because his is a “high-end” academic discourse style. Since I myself am an academic intellectual, it works fine for me, but even I usually read less headily conceived stuff. Nevertheless, if it suits your tastes McMurtry will provide insights aplenty on the contradictory-laden thin gruel of propaganda that underpins the new endless capitalist war of terror.

McMurtry begins “Value Wars” with a smart observation on how in the wake of the Soviet collapse, once communism was declared dead, the “Free World” adopted the chief characteristic of militant Marxism—its metaphysic of historical inevitability—for its own. It was the proclaimed inevitability of the Marxist social revolution that philosophers and political diatribists alike had always condemned in communism; only now it is “liberal democracy and free markets” or better, corporate capitalism, that declares itself the only and inevitable social/economic system available to humankind. The “Free World” has become the inimical Other that it projected all through the Cold War.

I glimpsed something similar in my inaugural post on Manifest Democracy, seeing our current situation as a growing showdown between global capitalism and democracy.

McMurtry foresees and tracks the return of genocidal wars; the use of insecurity and constructed crises as a strategy of control; the military and bellicose underpinnings of the slick business-suit front of corporate power; all part of the larger pattern of the New Totalitarianism of the Global Market.

In the second half of the book McMurtry turns from analysis to alternatives, however, and treats at length a different “Life Economy” rooted in a value system that nourishes, not destroys, life. I shall begin to incorporate his insights into my thinking as I absorb them (I’m not done with the book yet.)

I've been doing some follow up on the shape of the "PanAm" element of the corporate empire, looking at the Houston, Monterrey, Panama, Guantanamo Bay, Bermuda connections, and I will be trying to put some of this together in coming days. For now we should all be keeping our eyes on VENEZUELA, since it is the loose cannon in the empire's grand plans. Too bad for Halliburton and Bush Co. that Latin American social/political discourse has not been dumbed down to a 2-year-old doublespeak level as it has here stateside thanks to MediaCorp. running the propaganda mills.

In fact, if we can think of good and creative ways to help out the Venezuelans in their struggles against the barbarian corpoRATocrats, we should put those plans into action....