Bulletin N° 915
Subject:
Sterile Corporatist Ideals of "social order" and a Revolutionary
Socialist vision of the future.
Grenoble,
25 July 2020
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Several years ago, I was visited unexpectedly
by an Italian colleague who brought with her an English teacher of journalism.
She had been dazzled by my outspoken radicalism on campus, and she wanted to
introduce her Anglo-Saxon friend to me. (It was my fault; I had no desire to
dazzle anyone, and her neoliberal friend was determined to burst my bubble.) It
was rather a comic scene out of Monty Python. He looked around my library, a
life-time collection of books which I deemed as “old friends” in my home. The
English teacher held in his left hand a pocket calculator, and with the index
finger of his right hand he never stopped punching keys, even when he was
talking. I asked him what he was calculating and he replied, “Oh, it’s just a
habit of mine!” And he put it away in his shirt pocket, but in a few minutes he
was at it again.
The actual conversation was without much
content, and I soon made an excuse to end this encounter with his fetish,
risking my relationship with my colleague, to be sure. This kind of tourisme
sauvage was not uncommon a decade and more ago, when neoliberalism was
still fashionable and Tom Wolff was all the rage in French schools of
journalism. The “revolutionary capitalists” at the time were out en force
to prove that even the most radical ideas could be co-opted by the market
economy. They failed, of course, but the unquestioned use of number crunching
remains as a remnant of this movement.
A case in point is the “Coronavirus
Dashboard” site @ https://ncov2019.live/
,
Here we are invited to indulge in the
fetish of fictional calculations. For example: Total world population = 7.8
billion, Total confirmed cases of covid-19 = 15.9 million, Total number of
worldwide “covid deaths” = 643,000. With these general statistics, we are
invited to calculate the contagion rate and the rates of “death-with-covid”.
Estimated world pop. (as of March 2020)
= 7.8 billion.
Estimated US pop. (as of July 24, 2020)
= 331,002,651.
Estimated New York State pop. (2020) = 19.5 million.
Worldwide:
total confirmed covid contagion
rate = 0.0545% of total population.
total world death rate attributed to
covid-19 = 0.00824% of total population.
total world death rate among people
infected with covid = 4.03% of confirmed infected population.
USA:
total confirmed covid contagion
rate = 1.2835% of total population.
total national death rate
attributed to covid-19 = 0.04486% of total population.
total national death rate among
people infected with covid = 3.4952% of confirmed infected population.
New York:
total confirmed covid contagion
rate = 2.2248% of total population.
total state death rate attributed to
covid-19 = 0.1675% of total population.
total state death rate among people
infected with covid = 7.4504% of confirmed infected population.
What is the use of such information?
Well, it depends on who is using it, and how….
The story of the Zen Master seems
pertinent under these circumstances:
In the middle of a field the Zen master
gave a lesson to his pupil. He stood holding a stick above the head of his
seated student and stated: “If you move, I will hit you. If you don’t move, I
will hit you. And I will hit you anyway.” He then pounded his student on the
head with the stick and said, come back tomorrow for the next lesson. This
routine continued day after day, until finally his student achieved
enlightenment: He simply reached up and removed the stick from his teacher’s
hand to put an end to the painful beatings.
It seems axiomatic that the only
solution to the crimes of state capitalism is to seize control of the
institutions that govern us and to reshape them in order to collectively govern
ourselves, employing as guiding principles Equality and Justice.
The matrix of human relationships we
experience is all the more challenging today by structural shifts in society
and in the natural environment, which bring many old ideas to the forefront.
Minor (often discredited) ideas which have long circulated within ruling class
circles (like eugenics, euthanasia, white supremacy, the end of class struggle,
etc. etc) suddenly loom large, while cogent structural critiques of capitalist
relationships are frequently lost in a cacophony of justifiable complaints that
flare up periodically, then disappear.
The selected items below expose the
sinister and shallow ideas now circulating on how to achieve a “perfect
corporate harmony,” where conflict is nonexistent. We are asked to believe that
the international Oligarchs who rule us also love us and are concerned with
nothing more than assuring our good health and overall well being. It is easy
to unroll a dystopia from this callow thinking, which unfortunately is now
being implemented in real time with the collaboration of the corporate media
and the usual instruments of cultural hegemony which echo the interests of the
corporate capitalist system, attempting to legitimize itself by claiming to
protect the population from the very barbarism that they have unleashed.
See, for example, the 2011 science fiction
film, by Andrew Niccol and staring Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian
Murphy:
"In Time”
(1:40:46)
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
___
Professeur honoraire de
l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur de Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
1)
“Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli
Intelligence-Linked Firm” – by Whitney Webb
Published on
July 21, 2020.
2)
“Maxwell, Epstein and the Control of Science since WW2” - with
Amazing Polly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHex-kecZGk&feature=share&app=desktop
(48:01)
Published on
July 11, 2020.
3)
“The Gates Foundation and the Subversion of Public Health Policy
in India” – by Colin Todhunter
Published on
July 12, 2020.
4)
“Whitney: Looks Like Sweden Was Right After All” – by Tyler
Durden.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whitney-looks-sweden-was-right-after-all
Published on
July 11, 2020.
5) “Indian Farmers
Are Staring at Suicide as Modi Government Looks the Other Way” – by Yves Smith.
Published on July 23, 2020.
6)
“Protest against Africa’s 1st COVID-19 vaccine test shows fear” –
by Cara Anna.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/protest-against-africas-1st-covid-19-vaccine-test-shows-fear
Published on
July 16, 2020.
7) “Looking
Forward to the End of Humanity” – #PropagandaWatch.
(20:28)
Published on July 1, 2020.
8)
“On African Liberation Day, the Black Alliance for Peace Demands
U.S. Shut Down AFRICOM” – by Black Alliance for Peace.
Published on
May 27, 2020.
9)
“Africa to Become Testing Ground for “Trust Stamp” Vaccine Record
and Payment System” – by Raul Diego.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/africa-trust-stamp-covid-19-vaccine-record-payment-system/269346/
Published on
July 10, 2020.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2020
Subject: [MCM] The Rockefeller playbook for what's happening now?
For those who haven't seen or heard of this
2010 report, here's the link to “Scenarios for the Future of
Technology and International Development,” the Rockefeller
Foundation's detailed outline of four possible futures for the world.
"Lockdown," the first of those
"scenarios," seems especially prescient.
MCM
http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf
11) “Almost
no one understands what’s at stake” - commentary by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Published on
July 21, 2020.
12) “New
World Next Week” - with James Evan Pilato and James Corbett.
(21:40)
Published on July 16, 2020.
13) “Ripple
Effect On The Gates Agenda and Why It Matters” – with James Corbett
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1557-ripple-effect-on-the-gates-agenda-and-why-it-matters/
(1:30:04)
Published on June 23, 2020
14) “Is
America Facing a Covid Collapse?” – with Dell Bigtree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLnZZxJgIzg&feature=youtu.be
(21:18)
Published on June 23, 2020
15) “Trump’s
Troop Surge to Democratic Cities & Whether He’ll Leave Office if He Loses”
– with Noam Chomsky.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/24/noam_chomsky_on_trump_s_troop
(19:08)
Published on June 24, 2020
16) “Humanity
needs a Revolution in Consciousness” – with James Corbett.
(36:21)
Published on June 24, 2020