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”

https://youtu.be/XXA2CvN-4B4

(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

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/07/reports/alleged-salas-family-assailant-previously-worked-for-us-israeli-intelligence-linked-firm/

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

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/12/watch-the-gates-foundation-and-the-subversion-of-public-health-policy-in-india/

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.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/indian-farmers-are-staring-at-suicide-as-modi-government-looks-the-other-way.html

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.

https://www.corbettreport.com/looking-forward-to-the-end-of-humanity-propagandawatch/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29

(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.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/african-liberation-day-black-alliance-peace-demands-us-shut-down-africom

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.

 

 

10)   News From Underground

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.

https://www.marktaliano.net/almost-no-one-understands-whats-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.

https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1564-new-world-next-week-with-james-evan-pilato/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29

(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.

https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1565-james-corbett-in-democracy-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29

(36:21)

Published on June 24, 2020