Posts Tagged ‘Change’
Slavoj Zizek Joins Occupy Wall Street
Amy Lee Huffington Post 10/10/11
Occupy Wall Street got some Slovenian philosopher star power on Sunday, as Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek joined the movement.
“We are not destroying anything,” he said. “We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself.”
Using the “Human Microphone” system, where protestors repeat back the words of the speaker so that others can hear, Zizek spoke for over an hour to the enthusiastic crowd, who whooped and cheered as he went on.
While in China, entertainment programming that depicts alternate reality and time travel has been banned, in the U.S., we have a different problem, according to Zizek.
“Here we don’t think of prohibition, because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream, ” he said. “Look at the movies that we see all the time — It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, an asteroid destroying a whole life, but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here?”
Zizek also advised the people to see the Tea Party as a sister movement — “They may be stupid, but don’t look at them as the enemy,” he said.
But he warned the protestors against succumbing to the excitement of the immediate events instead of keeping their eye on the prize: True social change.
Zizek is just the latest of the prominent figures who have come to lend their voice in Zuccotti Park, alongside activists like Michael Moore, writer Naomi Klein as well as actors including Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, and Roseanne Barr.
Also: Slavoj Zizek: The Delusion of Green Capitalism
Egypt: History Will Be Made Tonight!
See Al Jazeera Live or at YouTube and also their Live Blog
Wael Ghonim vs. Barack Obama: Change we Can Believe in, Yes we Can
02/10/2011 by Juan Cole
It is no secret that President Barack Obama has been in some regards a profound disappointment to the American Left, and his erratic and often disgraceful performance on the Egypt crisis exemplifies his faults in this regard. (Tom Engelhardt puts it best regarding the administration: “It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.”) Obama just seems to lack empathy with the little people and is unwilling to buck the rich and powerful, even though they all opposed his run for the presidency. As Iran’s speaker of the house put it, the Obama administration, faced with a choice of supporting the youth revolution or the camels unleashed on it, has chosen the camels. It makes a person think there should be rule that no one can run for the presidency who didn’t have a proper father figure in his or her life (Bill Clinton, W., Obama), since apparently once they get into office they start thinking the billionaires are their long-lost parent, whom they have to bend over backward to please.
Obama dealt with the Wall Street crisis by rewarding with more billions the corrupt and/or grossly incompetent financiers who threw millions of Americans out of work and out of their homes, and by appointing persons to deal with the crisis who had been among its instigators. He declined to end the abuses against the Bill of Rights of the Orwellian-named ‘PATRIOT Act,’ even though he had a Democratic House and Senate. Indeed, the Left was put in the humiliating position of being grateful to Michelle Bachman for helping do what Obama would not, when she and other Tea Party Republicans joined the principled Democrats in the House to decline to extend the human rights abuses embedded in that infamous Act.
FYI: changed look of blog site
After fussing around with the too-light look of quotes, making them bold to compensate etc, I’ve decided to try a new look for this blog. Who knows, I may switch again…..Any comments on the switch-up are welcome! I’m going for readability, and function but style tips would probably help alot.
PS: the format of older articles may change for the worse………
Niall Ferguson- Complexity and Collapse
Empires on the Edge of Chaos 
Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.
NIALL FERGUSON is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.
The real pandemic: willful suspension of disbelief
Americans always expect a “savior” to show up at the last minute to save the day. Generations of movies with happy endings, soppy political speeches and focused advertising pitches have not been wasted: Americans’ rose-colored glasses make the targets painted on their chests quite invisible.
Paul Street of ZNet recently commented on a Frank Rich column about the Corporatist “Punking” of America:
In an opinion-editorial bearing the provocative title “Is Obama Punking Us?” Rich notes the absurdity of Republican efforts to frighten the electorate by claiming that Obama is a socialist. “They have it backward,” Frank observes (without bothering to explain what would be wrong with having a socialist president). “The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.” ……
Rich is on to something, no doubt about it. But isn’t a little late in the game for the Sunday Times’ reigning “left liberal” to be figuring this basic sort of stuff out? When exactly did he wake up to the discomfiting but elementary and long-understood fact that American “representative democracy” is crippled by “too much [corporate and military] representation” and “too little [actual popular] democracy” (Arundhati Roy)? It’s more than a century past the time when the prolific American philosopher John Dewey darkly noted (in the age of U.S. Steel. JP Morgan, Social Darwinism, and the Billion Dollar Congress) that “politics is the shadow cast on American society by big business.” ……
….what has U.S. President Barack Obama (endorsed by the Times as a change candidate before 2008 election) – Mr. “Change” himself – tried to accomplish other than to make the American corporate profits system “work more efficiently” without “dismantling the [capitalist] framework” and with power (and wealth) still concentrated “at the top?”
I admit to doubting that Americans will ever wake from their self-imposed hypnosis. At least until they and their ragged childen must roam the streets for scraps. What is certain is that the Lone Ranger will not be coming this time.
