I must be hallucinating.

Have I understood rightly?
I'm watching CTV......and....
I must be misunderstanding...
But it seems that these politicians who are not engineers, and not scientists,
and have no real knowledge....
have just told a young man that he must study what companies want....
which means technical subjects...

Errrr, politicians who know nothing of science.
(No, I don't count Neo-Classical Economics or Law as Sciences.....)

In other words, you must be a slave to Capital---from your earliest years...............
In other words, you must serve the interests of those who have given us another Crisis.....

But these guys who are pompously giving advice are neither scientists nor engineers........They do, however, serve the interests of the ruling class.

And, so you say that what's just is what's in the interest of the strong?
And, what if the strong make a mistake?
What if they make a mistake about what's in their interests?.............

(Capital quae capital always accumulates?)

corruption falls from the sky like acid rain

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a Czech raised outside of the Czech Republic.  So, we spoke in English.

I told him about the lie that Detroit is bankrupt, and how the bankruptcy lawyer is living in an expensive apartment paid for by the mayor, and how the workers at GM lost their pensions so that banks could be paid, and other horrors of capitalism.

And he answered by saying, "So, you have corruption too?"

And I said that Czechs were naive in imagining that only they had these problems.

When I said that, I imagined I was being brave, but I wasn't.  What I really think is that the problem is capitalism.  It is a distraction to speak of corruption as if the problem were merely bad individuals.

Recommended Links:

New report exposes lies used to justify Detroit bankruptcy, World Socialist Website,
22 November, 2013:  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/22/detr-n22.html

The Guardian's article on the Demos study:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/detroit-accused-exaggerating-18bn-debts

Did I imagine it?

Miners in the Czech Republic are striking.  They don't want their wages decreased. (|At any rate, that's what I understand of the matter.)
Recently the mine owner appeared on TV with a union representative.
The moderator became excited when the mine owner talked about harming the company.
He turned to the union representative, and asked (something like) "Are you trying to hurt the company?"
Let's stop for a minute.  The company is not a person.  Miners are people.  We might equally well ask: Is the company hurting the miners?  Or, are the owners of the mine trying to hurt the miners by decreasing their wages?
Of course, no one said any of that.

The union representative did win my respect by calmly remarking that strikes always hurt the company.  (And they hurt the strikers too, since they don't get their wages!)
Duuuhhhh. What kind of idiot was that interviewer?  Can you imagine that a strike doesn't hurt people?

Really, this is a shocking level of ignorance.  (Perhaps some ideology is at work?)

our current woes

I told one of my students that elections were irrelevant because bankers were running the world anyway.   Whoever got elected would take orders from the bankers.  (Cf. Yanis Varoufakis's useful coinage:  bankruptocracy) 

At the following link, Texan John Weeks (transplanted to the UK)  tells it like it is:

http://economistsagainstausterity.wordpress.com/

in the innocent, oh-so-innocent, east.............

My student asked me: Why don't you have a car?

---You are a teacher after all.

And I was stunned,

speechless,

almost embarrassed.

Thoughts tumbled through my mind,

and I suppressed annoyance at the simplicity of the question.

And, so,

I began to explain the expenses involved in owning a car.

Instead of saying that I don't want to be a contributor to climate destruction,

which is what I think.

Instead of saying that I cannot understand how anyone today can innocently

ask such a question.

But later I thought,

that this was so terribly capitalist:

seeking individual solutions for a social problem,

because there is money to make public transport comfortable,

to make buses or trams or trains frequent,

and un-crowded.

And I also thought of the remark Chomsky once made,

that smoking cigarettes is,

today,

in the USA,

the prerogative of those who work in the offices of the universities,

while students are largely tobacco-free.

And I saw my student had something in common with

an office worker in the Land of the Free,

standing outside in the cold,

working hard to ingest enough of the drug,

before she returned to her boring job.


We are all trying to squeeze something out of life,

but,

in the meantime,

we are being squeezed,

twisted,

brought into line,

the life wrung out of us every day.

Capitalism's lack of respect

I just noticed a small box with the words "Killing Arafat" at the website of the so-called liberal newspaper, "The Guardian."

The murder of Arafat is a crime, and it is good that it has been made public.

Turning the thing into a piece of advertising is altogether a different matter. 

It's just not respectful when it becomes "another story".  And, there's no easy way to describe the problem here because it is systemic, and omnipresent.

The short form of the problem is:  capitalism respects nothing and no one.

To the extent that Al-Jazeera makes the truth known, that's good.  But, it is a sign of the degraded nature of the system that even this good thing must be packaged and twisted around to satisfy advertising and marketing managers.......to satisfy the god of profit........

The USA's Institutional Disrespect for the Elderly

In 2009 when I returned for what was to be a three year stay with my parents, my father was using a cane. My mother was, at that point, walking unassisted.

A couple of years later both of them got walkers.

We later learned that both of them had received walkers which did not fit.  My father, a tall man, had received a walker that was too small, forcing him to stoop.  My mother, a short person, had received a walker which was too tall, forcing her to walk on her toes.

Somehow, for two years, no one noticed this error--not the doctors, not the nurses, and not even the physical therapists.  Oh, sorry, there was one therapist who noticed my father's mis-fit; she suggested I take a power tool and adjust the handle of my father's walker upward.  Not being skilled with power tools, I was reluctant to damage my father's walker.  (There is, in fact, a world of presumption in her suggestion.  I have never owned a drill, and have rarely used one; but never mind, that's what comes from being a member of the precariat.)

Finally, my parents were forced to purchase new walkers.  Because the USA health system is cheap, stingy, and refused to recognize the error which had been made.  In other words, my parents paid for someone else's error. (How like the crisis!)

And, of course, the manufacturers of medical devices made a double profit on this error.

Now, the same thing has happened with the hospital beds my parents are using.

Several years ago, early in the morning I was awoken by my mother's startled scream.  My father had fallen out of bed.  By some miracle, I managed to lift him back into the bed.  About this time, my father had a stroke, and he needed all the help I could manage to provide.   (Today my father is frail, and falling out of bed would be very dangerous.)

Hospital beds have railing, which itself can be dangerous, but also can prevent falling out of bed.

I remember when my father's bed was delivered.  It was just before Christmas, and, as holidays (time off from work) are such a rare thing in the USA, I was sympathetic to the plight of the men delivering the bed.

Now, more than two years later, my mother has informed me that the bed they delivered had the wrong mattress, and it was set up incorrectly.

So, who will pay for the new mattress?

Here we go again.  Double profits for the greedy capitalist firms, and another hole in the meagre savings of an elderly couple.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

The USA system of medical care is nothing to be proud of.

As Richard D Wolff remarked recently, this miserable and ineffective system of medical care is proof of what a profit-based capitalism produces.  In fact, I would add, the sort of stories I've told above very much remind me of the fabled inefficiency of "communism".....

I recently heard a doctor bragging about the quality of USA medical care. Yeah, for the rich, it works fine.  But the system, as a system for everyone (why, wouldn't that be what you'd expect in a real democracy?..duhhhh....) doesn't work.  I could say a few things about the stilted mind-set and emotional life a person who is proud of this system, but let's just say that he's missing something..........