Oz the Great and Powerful

The movie, "Oz the Great and Powerful", is a propaganda film that extols:

• The usual Disney myth of the correlation between beauty and goodness;
• The capitalist hero myth;

The younger sister, Theodora, prefers to keep her ugliness as a manifestation of the hate she feels inside.

The eldest sister, Evanora, does not have a political program to explain her rule. Why did she overthrow her father? Why did she think she was a better ruler of Oz than her father.

Her political program of control is profess the myth of a liberator, while portraying herself as the defender of Oz.

She has the caste of flying monkeys to terrorise the countryside. She has an official enemy to blame all of the acts of terror on. Thus, she would justify her rule as protector against the terror she creates in the chaos after the death of her father.

I would have to assume that she wanted power and wealth for herself. Terror is a means to an end.

The younger sister believes the propaganda. It is only when Oz betrays her that is converted to the dark side, as it were.

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Bankistan Vanquishes America

Barry Ritholtz watches as Bankistan Vanquishes America and issues a call to arms to liberate America. Wolverines!.

Ritholtz still has not caught with Lenin's idea that Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Of particular interest, chapter 3 "Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy" has the quotes:

It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier, who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions.

(Kindle Location 929-932)

And, the big four (4) countries were, prior to the First World War, Great Britain, United States, France, and Germany.

Together, these four countries own 479,000,000,000 francs, that is, nearly 80 per cent of the world’s finance capital. Thus, in one way or another, nearly the whole world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these four international banker countries, the four ‘pillars’ of world finance capital.

(Kindle Location 954-956)

One hundred years later, the only thing that has changed is the ordering at the top. Lenin wrote:

Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.

(Kindle Location 707-709)

Does Ritholtz really think that financial capitalism is a recent innovation? If he does, then the ideological state apparatus has been extraordinarially effective. Lenin writes that:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

(p.52)

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"You've got ping, but they've got no pong"

Seth Godin ponders what to do when "You've got ping, but they've got no pong".

You can take a great deal of responsibility for creating this mutual enthusiasm, and you can put the effort into creating an environment and a story where it's likely to happen.

Connection requires energy and insight and enthusiasm from both sides, and if your partner isn't responding, look hard at why. Of course, if you can't bring your half, stay home.

This is an interesting problem for revolutionaries. New recruits have lots of enthusiasm and ideas, but the daily grind of facing apathy and hostility wears them down.

Enthusiasm is cheap, commitment is expensive. It is in the interest of the ruling elites to keep it so.

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2 Year Anniversary of Fukushima

Barry Ritholtz posts on the 2 Year Anniversary of Fukushima.

The list of articles presented is disturbing. Nuclear power is so bloody dangerous.

The article concludes:

We don’t mean to pick on Japan. After all, the American government is dictating nuclear policy in Japan. American reactors are even more dangerous than Fukushima. And a secret report confirms that Southern California Edison knew of major problems at the San Onofre nuclear plant… but let the slipshod expansion and remodeling project continue anyway.

As the article, United States: A Fukushima-style disaster is waiting to happen, notes:

The US is just as likely to see a devastating “perfect storm” as Japan.

Another claim is that US nuclear regulators are much more stringent than Japan. But that rings hollow in the face of the facts.

A 2010 study of nuclear plant safety by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found US plants experienced at least 14 “near misses” last year. The report overview explained that “many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems”.

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The four corporate industries that rule Australia

The four corporate industries that rule Australia are:

1. Mining
2. Banking
3. Superannuation
4. Gambling

These four (4) industries are able to direct government policy at all levels through campaign donations, media campaigns, and threats to withold investments.

The only really productive industry is the first: mining. Banking and superannuation are financial capitalists. While the last (gambling) is just a parasite—it adds no real value to the Australian economy.

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A Disgusting TV Ad in Favor of Gay Marriage

Ted Rall is against A Disgusting TV Ad in Favor of Gay Marriage.

Rall argues for the abolition of marriage as it …causes untold misery and reinforces outmoded systems of patriarchy, hierarchy and capitalism.

But more importantly, [o]ppressed peoples should support one another rather than rely on the oppressors to grant rights to one section of the oppressed.

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The Bolsheviks and the Soviets

Chapter 35 of History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky covers The Bolsheviks and the Soviets.

In this chapter, Trotsky explains the shifting focus on the slogan, All Power to the Soviets!.

Although the soviets of the soldiers and the workers were set up in 1905 and again in 1917 as the expressions of popular will, Trotsky contends they lagged behind the masses in the expression of the popular will. This was most clearly seen in the July Days when the soviets came out against the people's uprising.

Lenin's argument was to move the focus of Bolshevik political activity closer to the worker and the soldier. It was only on this basis that an insurrection could suceed.

The soviets had been captured by the Compromisers for the Capitalists, and so, had to be fought against.

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What became of Detroit?

Dan Little asks What became of Detroit?

Little thinks that White racism is the root cause:

If I had to single out a single fact out of this complicated story as the most important factor that led to these toxic changes, I would identify the mechanisms of racial residential segregation that Detroit has embodied for almost a century. For decades Eight Mile represented a key racial division in the city, and a plethora of mechanisms of exclusion conspired to maintain this division. If the city could have settled into a racially and economically mixed pattern of residence in the 1940s, much of this story would have been different. Population exit would not have reached crisis proportions; businesses would have been less likely to relocate out of the city; and a schooling system that was very successful in the 1950s could have maintained its effectiveness. This implies that Detroit is victim to the continuing tragedy of America's inability to heal its racial divisions and antagonisms.

Emphasis Mine

And yet, Little ignores the vital role racism plays in Capitalism. This role is that of control. Racism is control both blacks and whites in order to make them fearful of each other.

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