It’s impossible to agree to disagree with someone when there is no mutually agreed upon reality. It’s impossible to agree to disagree with a person who refuses to accept the equal right to life of a person who looks different or worships another god. It’s impossible to build a democracy with those who have given themselves over—mind, body, and soul—to authoritarianism.

https://www.guernicamag.com/why-we-cant-agree-to-disagree/

#video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AITRzvm0Xtg

Human beings have long built new habitations quite literally from the rubble—the fallen stones and timbers—of earlier ones. Perhaps it’s time to think about what kind of a country this place—so rich in natural resources and human resourcefulness—might become if we were to take the stones and timbers of empire and construct a nation dedicated to the genuine security of all its people. Suppose we really chose, in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, “to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Suppose we found a way to convert the desperate hunger for ever more, which is both the fuel of empires and the engine of their eventual destruction, into a new contentment with “enough”? What would a United States whose people have enough look like? It would not be one in which tiny numbers of the staggeringly wealthy made hundreds of billions more dollars and the country’s military-industrial complex thrived in a pandemic, while so many others went down in disaster.

This empire will fall sooner or later. They all do. So, this crisis, just at the start of the Biden and Harris years, is a fine time to begin thinking about what might be built in its place. What would any of us like to see from our front windows next year?

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-empire-decline/

Capitalism itself is a failed utopian project. Its most ardent supporters claimed capitalists had brought us to the end of history, the apex of human civilization, where the comforts and conveniences of capitalist production would be enjoyed by all. Instead it has delivered a system that has abandoned all but an elite class to die. Amid a pandemic, in 2020, the wealth of America’s billionaires expanded by nearly a trillion dollars; the only thing that grew for everyone else was misery and desperation. The ideology of “technology,” as it is expressed by the tech industry and its thought leaders, is the necromancy that keeps this zombie capitalist system from staying in its grave.

But there is power in seeing that the world is dominated by grand (failed) utopian projects like capitalism, because it means utopias are possible. We live with the effects of capital’s totalizing schemes for how to organize society. They have become entrenched and normalized, “utopias” to the elite few who benefit from them even as they are dystopian to everyone else. In other words, utopia already exists; it’s just unevenly produced and distributed. Recognizing this opens imaginative space for trying to actualize different utopias that would benefit the disempowered and disenfranchised.

https://reallifemag.com/future-schlock/

"As Bill Clinton described the world to come during his inaugural January 1997 inaugural address—the starting pistol of the era, if there ever was one—“ports and airports, farms and factories will thrive with trade and innovation and ideas, and the world’s greatest democracy will lead a whole world of democracies.” Globalization was a phenomenon sustained by American-based, American-dominated rule-making groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Any nation that wished to be part of the emergent world order had to adopt not just its rules into its legal system, but incorporate the cultural values which undergirded them as well"

"Just as fast food represents a culture unattached to any place in particular, the industry which sells it has stretched the franchise model to evade obligation to any one jurisdiction. As national governments quibble with each other, and borders and cultural identities are hardened, businesses without any national loyalties are integrating as aggressively as ever. Contrary to what apologists like Friedman told us a generation ago, what fast food tells us now is that the American officials who gave rise to globalization have ceded its control to the businesses they always intended it to benefit. The dream of a global polity, wherein even the lowliest person, committed to the values of internationalism, can achieve membership as a “global citizen” is over. The reality of a global market and its corollary, the global consumer, is only becoming more advanced."

currentaffairs.org/2021/01/what-fast-food-tells-us-about-the-world/

#books

"One could therefore argue that Eurocentrism, as an intellectual and ideological framework, was not simply imposed by European actors on other societies. In fact, thinkers in non-European societies — more specifically, nationalist ones — had a great deal to do with the entrenching of Eurocentrism. In other words, Liu’s work shows why we cannot fully understand the making of Eurocentrism without adopting a non-Eurocentric lens. This lens allows us to recognize Eurocentrism as a global project, into which global capitalism drew both European and non-European actors."

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/tea-war-book-review-capitalism-china-india/

Hello friends, I was recently laid off from Walmart, and went on unemployment because of that. However, because of the American government’s refusal to act quickly, I have not been paid any unemployment benefits in a month. I’ve been struggling to pay bills and I have been donating plasma twice a week so I can afford to eat.

I’m here now asking if you have any money to spare, if you could help me out by donating anything at the link below. If not, sharing this around is much appreciated. Thank you. - Gray

www.ko-fi.com/graylion

"For Charles Koch and other captains of industry, the calculation behind crushing unions isn’t complicated: Weaker unions mean a weaker opposition to right-wing policies, including the sort of regressive climate and energy measures they’ve helped push around the country through the American Legislative Exchange Council. The right’s general project of minority rule—whether in weakening small-d democratic institutions like unions, gerrymandering congressional districts, or suppressing votes—is incompatible with climate action and democracy itself. Big business has long understood this."

https://newrepublic.com/article/160885/right-to-work-hot-planet

"Vietnam’s success in combatting the virus cannot therefore be attributed to state repression or economic centralization. Its swift-footed response was well within the means of richer liberal-democratic nations, had they summoned the political will.

[...] On 1 January a new Labour Code came into force, allowing the existence of independent Worker Representative Organisations for the first time, unaffiliated to the state-controlled General Confederation of Labour. This could mark a significant change in industrial relations, potentially freeing organized labour from the dominion of the Communist Party. But this victory may yet be counterbalanced by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, an agreement negotiated in secrecy over the past seven years, which has been widely condemned as an attempt to erode workers’ rights. It is thus an open question whether Vietnam’s decades-old tradition of self-organised labour militancy will persist into 2021, or whether the freedoms enshrined in the Labour Code will come up against greater obstacles."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/vietnams-pandemic