LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA

hunting and gathering to herding and settling Things haven't always been this way and things won't always remain this way. Much like our underlying knowledge we will someday be no longer, we all understand this but don't particularly care to dwell on it. While we can physically see many of the more tangible things change- like our jobs, friends, homes, physical appearances- we sometimes don't see, or maybe even refuse to see, our institutions, our political realities, our "world," so to speak, change. For much of the 200,000 years us homosapiens have been around, we've been communists. Now, as far as words in the English language with baggage attached to it go, communism must be close to the top of the list. Let me explain. Of course I'm not talking about the "Communism" we all learned about in school with its gulags, its Stalin, its dreary sunless and Godless skies; I'm talking about hunter-gatherer societies where every ab...

From IDOM : One could easily be forgiven for thinking the Baby Boomers appeared out of nowhere. The way it’s presented in the media, it would seem they just suddenly appeared -- near retirement, of course -- with their hands cupped firmly open, waiting to be paid. They’re going to break Social Security! Ever since I can remember, this has been the spin. Because “big government” can’t do anything right, all the money you paid in is hopelessly lost. This is a fundamental, and cynical, misunderstanding of Social Security. It’s a distortion of both what it is and how it works -- and convenient cover for those who want to dismantle and privatize it. But first off, what about those Baby Boomers? Did people really not notice they were packing four or five lunch boxes instead of two or three after the second World War ended? Well, of course they did. And so did the government. In fact, it was the now infamous but then-rockstar Alan Greenspan, along with the conservati...

I sit at the edge of the beach with a bottle of wine and profound thoughts in my head. In the darkness I think of the emptiness of the sea. I can only hear the waves crash against the shore. But the sea is teeming with life. Life is in abundance in what seems to be the darkest and loneliest of places. Such is the contradiction of our existence! Just then a drunken man takes a piss over my shoulder. The unmistakable feeling of relief hits him as he sighs in certain approval. My profound thoughts are reduced to the more urgent thought of remaining piss free. Fuck it. I throw the near empty wine bottle into the sea. There is no message, time, or tiny ship in this bottle. Only salt water, wine, and the memory of profound thoughts. Profound thoughts which, like all profound thoughts, are servants to a stream of piss. - Tyrrhenian Sea, Tuscany, Italy

http://www.marxist.com/usa-historic-nurses-strike-in-minnesota.htm

Contradictions! Contradictions! Contradictions! Now that the big European economies have decided to unabashedly, in no uncertain terms, put their pocketbooks where their mouths are and bail out capitalism (as if there was any doubt), the markets have rallied. Even the currency markets soared. At one point during the day the Euro gained over two percent on the dollar. This comes only a few days after investors were convinced the sky was falling. It's now a distant memory, but remember when the Dow fell nearly one thousand points during the day? (It eventually gained back a good deal of that, but the psychological damage was done.) Much of this was blamed on the near default in Greece. But there were also reports of someone accidentally putting an extra zero somewhere in an electronic trade. Oops! Some Monday detail and all hell breaks loose! The NY Times described it like this: A bad day in the stock market turned into one of the most terrifying moments in Wall Street history on Th...

We throw away a lot of stuff. In my near decade of manufacturing work, I'd say I've seen millions of dollars worth of products thrown out. Surely some of this was because of defects affecting performance. This is to be expected. But there's also a much more troubling side to the full dumpster at the end of the shift. Many of the items thrown out were perfectly functional. Because of any number of hundreds of small defects, they were simply tossed. Why? While their use value remained fine, their exchange value had dropped to the point of them being unprofitable to sell. At first thought, this isn't too controversial. It's just sort of the way things are. When someone asks why we're throwing away so many usable products, as I have many times, the typical answer given is something along the lines of "a customer judges what's on the inside of a product by its appearance on the outside." This is no doubt true. As Fabio's once great career can atte...

From IDOM ... As they wait for the arrival of the President, the militias stand listlessly, or sit on the ground to eat a sandwich. Some rest on their rifles, and one or two even had the muzzle of their AK-47s resting on their boot – a somewhat risky practice, one would have thought. In fact a professional drill sergeant would doubtless have a heart attack, looking at these half-trained civilians with guns. But this impression would be entirely false. These militias are the lineal descendants of the Cuban guerrillas, of the militias that fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, of the workers´ militias that overthrew the Tsar in Russia in 1917, and if we go even further back in history, of the armies of the French Revolution and the militias of the American Revolution in the 18 th century.