Archive for the 'Lifelines' Category
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Quote of the Month
As our screamingly decrepit and hidebound overclass sets up camp atop its record piles of hoarded cash, let us recall what John Maynard Keynes concluded at the end of his magnum opus:
“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.”
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
Our Revolutionary Right/Duty
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Score One for the Masses
Many of my lefty blog buddies have been going through a phase of dumping on the masses.
But if the masses are somehow as dumb and responsible-for-what-happens as mainstream dogma insists and some weary comrades think, how does one explain this item?:
Monday, May 31st, 2010
Sound Familiar?
“What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?
“The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
“By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.”
Orwell, “England Your England”
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
And Now a Word FOR Our NON-Sponsor
TCT does not accept advertising, and never will.
Nevertheless, John Sayles is so awesome and his forthcoming movie is sure to be so roastingly, epically good, I have to take time from our core endeavor — exposing corporate capitalist cultural engineering — to mention it.
Originally titled Baryo, the film, now called Amigo, is Sayles’ historical dramatization of the first* large-scale act of U.S. overseas military imperialism: the invasion and occupation of the Philippines.
I can all but guarantee you that this film is going to rock your socks all the way to the toes. Just as Matewan is far and away the best labor film ever made by an American, I expect this will be the best anti-imperialist movie to emerge from our culture. Sayles is that talented and well-informed.
And, most of all, the facts of the matter are that profound and worthy of recall.
I’m beside myself with anticipation!
*The first domestic act was King Philip’s War. The first overseas act of military conquest was the seizure and annexation of Hawai’i, but that was small, in terms of actual combat.
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Regular Bag of the Month
“The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned, their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them.” — Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (1960)
