Anthony Gregory:

“A movement finely focused on resisting Washington’s corporatism and bailouts, however, could potentially be much stronger and wider, bringing together at least some of the anti-Obama Right, elements of the anti–Wall Street Left, and libertarians too. The conservatives would have to agree to leave their anti-immigrant and prowar signs at home, and the lefties would have to put aside their demands for national healthcare and prohibitions on gasoline.

Such a movement, involving the better people on both sides, could potentially make a difference, but it would require a far more cooperative spirit than we’re likely to see any time soon. With progressives siding firmly with Obama as he demonizes the tea parties, and conservatives cheering the cops on as they beat the Wall Street occupiers into submission, it would seem that more than economic theory separates these disaffected groups of dissidents. Call it the culture war or partisanship, but whatever it is that divides Americans against one another — distracting them from the real problem in Washington, DC — is also no hero in this story.”

Comment:

I’ll try to round out that excellent passage by Anthony Gregory.

What separates America on this is what always separates America, because it is in the interests of the state to keep the population always divided. And what separates always is race. The rabid left sees the Tea Party as selfish white “haves”. The rabid right sees OccupyWall Street as grasping non-white “have nots”.

Why not? At subliminal levels that is how the two movements have been projected in the media. The state always uses race as a wedge issue, whether stated or unstated, because it works, every time. The media love race because it sells.  The mob loves race, because it’s personal and they can relate to it.

Then why do I raise the issue of race..and religion…on this blog?

Because when individuals talk  about race freely, voluntarily, in the spirit of reason and civility, it is a vastly different thing from when race is used as a tool of state manipulation.

Individuals talking about race or religion serve the cause of truth, even if imperfectly.

“Drop by bitter drop” knowledge accumulates, refines itself, sees itself mirrored somewhere else, clarifies the sight, sharpens the hearing, and strengthens the heart.

Words spoken have a vibration that depends on the energy that goes into them. This is not New Age nonsense or sentimentality. It is hard fact.  Vibration to vibration the soul moves matter across distances.  The flutter of a  butterfly’s wing sets off an event at the opposite end of the moral universe.

Word unspoken but imbued with the same energy do the same.

Consider it your own inbuilt “twitter” account.  Google can’t rank it, squash it, distort it or destroy it. The government can’t demand its tweets or its IP.  Your enemies can’t hack it,  drown it out, or threaten it with multi-million dollar law suits.

Since you have not spoken, you cannot be refuted. Since you have not acted, you cannot be thwarted.

It speaks anonymously and somewhere angelic forces respond.

The hacker group Anonymous claims to be “legion” (like the demonic forces cast out by Jesus). I have my doubts about Anonymous, as I had about Wikileaks, and the choice of this moniker betrays some intention to provoke fundamentalists and Catholics, who saw in “V for Vendetta” an anti-Christian New Age film.

But  vibrational energy allows even an isolated blogger to create his own invisible network, born from the level of truth he is able (or unable) to speak.

American Spectator:

“Doubtless if unsurprisingly he never saw it coming. But Iran just sent a torpedo amidships to the Ron Paul campaign.

Remember Congressman Paul back at that Fox debate in Iowa saying to Chris Wallace that the threat from Iran was “small”? That “Iran does not have an air force that can come here…. They can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves…” This was in addition to Paul’s attack on former president George W. Bush for signing an executive order designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group.”

All are of a piece in the consistent Ron Paul theme that many see as a McGovernite foreign policy. Not only far-left wing philosophically but with a startling — and dangerous — naïveté about the nature of America’s enemies.

Comes now the news that lo and behold Iran is being accused by the FBI — with the charge backed up by House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican — of plotting not one but two attacks on American soil. The targets being the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. and the Israeli Embassy.

The attack was stopped, the plot unraveled. And the plotters? That would be, reports Newsmax, two suspects arrested who are connected to “Iran’s Quds Force, an element within Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps that is known for carrying out operations beyond Iran’s borders.”

All of which is to say, Congressman Paul’s theories about Iran have just been blown to smithereens.

Iran didn’t use an air force to get to America — it had an Iranian, American-naturalized citizen Manssor Arbabsiar — already here.”

Comment:

Could the Saudis and Israelis be conspiring in this in some way?  After all, that’s what 9-11 looked like to me…

Maidhc O’Cathail:

“Writing this week in two of the neoconservative flagship outlets, Commentary and The Weekly Standard, Max Boot argues for a more aggressive U.S. approach to Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. “I suggest we start treating Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency the way we treated Iran’s Quds Force in Iraq,” Boot opines in Commentary, an influential magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee, a key component of the pro-Israel lobby. “That is to say, apply the full range of our power–everything from diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, to kinetic military action–to curb the menace posed by this group.”

Currently a senior fellow in national security studies at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Max Boot clearly has the kind of influence that could turn his not-so-humble suggestion into American policy. In March 2010, General David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, turned to Boot for help when some articles appeared in the American media noting that Petraeus’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee implied that Washington’s uncritical support of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians was hurting U.S. interests in the region.

Petraeus forwarded one of the articles to Boot, with a note saying, “As you know, I didn’t say that. It’s in a written submission for the record….” In his reply, Boot dismissed the source’s credibility, but promised Petraeus that he would write “another short item pointing people to what you actually said as opposed to what’s in the posture statement.” Appreciative, but clearly still concerned to ingratiate himself with Israel’s powerful supporters, six minutes later Petraeus wrote back: “Thx, Max. (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…).” When the Russian-born Jewish writer assured the four-star general that this wasn’t relevant since he wasn’t being accused of being anti-Semitic, a relieved Petraeus signed off with a “Roger!” followed by a smiley emoticon.

The embarrassing spectacle of one of America’s most eminent military commanders seeing fit to grovel in such a demeaning way before a young pro-Israeli hack would surely have ended General Petraeus’s career in Washington before it began if the American public had been made aware of the incident. The Israel-centric U.S. media, however, chose to studiously ignore the revealing Petraeus-Boot correspondence. As a consequence of the media’s silence, the servile Petraeus is currently director of the CIA, overseeing the murderous drone strikes which are predictably enraging the Pakistani people; while his self-assured confidant is goading American policy-makers from his safe perch at the neocons’ primary warmongering media outlets to escalate such provocative policies against the world’s sole Islamic nuclear power–a country which, not insignificantly, has been designated as Israel’s greatest strategic threat by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.”

From an interview with the remarkable activist Jeffrey Blankfort, who deserves to be called the conscience of the Jewish intelligentsia for his consistent criticism of the Israeli lobby:

“Jeffrey Blankfort: “And this feeling of the victimization of Jews in World War II was something that Jews growing up with, including myself, felt very strongly. So the notion of blaming Jews was to them going back to periods of anti-Semitism and playing into a right wing and what they call “a neo-Nazi agenda.”

The fact of the matter is, however, that it was a Jewish state, done in the name of Jews, [that] had ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and it was Jewish organizations that were lobbying, not only in the United States, but throughout Western Europe, for continued support of what Israel was doing — not only ethnic cleansing but all its wars against the Palestinians, against the Lebanese. And whereas Professor Chomsky says, “None of this would have been done without the U.S. authorization,” it’s simply not true.

As a matter of fact, when Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, annexed the Golan Heights in Syria, Ronald Reagan was on a trip to Europe and it was like [he was] blindsided. Chomsky will also, by the way, point to a situation where the United States was very unhappy and complained when it was discovered that Israel had been selling Falcon radar warning devices to China without U.S. approval, and there were some U.S. parts in this. Now, Chomsky and his supporters say, “Where was the lobby on this?” And, in fact, the lobby was not informed and felt blindsided. It was very embarrassing for some of the neocons in Washington, like Douglas Feith, one of the instrumental people in giving us the war in Iraq.

They felt blindsided by it because the Israelis, who basically have very little respect for their American counterparts — they had made a deal with China without notifying the Jewish establishment here in this country. So that was an embarrassment on their part, for them. And they were quite upset with their Israeli friends because they weren’t notified about it.

There are issues in which the Israeli lobby — actually, it’s more of a hotel or a Leviathan or an octopus — is not dominant, but it is when it comes to Middle East policies, certainly when it comes to Palestine and pushing toward the war in Iraq, pushing for the war against Iran. Up to now, they haven’t succeeded, largely because there are people in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies that know that a war or attack on Iran would be a global disaster — not only bad for United States, but bad for the world economy.

Nevertheless, it seems now that the possibilities of an attack on Iran are greater than ever. And this has been at the top of the agenda of the Zionist establishment since the attack on Iraq. You could just go to the AIPAC website, the website of the American Jewish Committee, which is a very important, probably the second most important organization in the Jewish community. It’s the foreign policy arm of the Israel lobby with offices in Latin America, Africa, Europe. And they have been lobbying foreign governments for years to take pro-Israel positions.

The head of that organization, David Harris, is probably the most well-known American Jew outside the United States. He meets regularly with the heads of state of all the European countries — our NATO allies — with Mexico [and] countries in Latin America, Africa, and so on.

If there is going to be a war against Iran, there is no way that it could not be said that it is a war for Israel. As a matter of fact, the United States, since the defeat of George Bush, Sr., has increasingly made Israel’s enemies our enemies.

So where Hezbollah and Hamas are not American enemies (they’re seen as Israel’s enemies) they have now become our enemies.

Yet Hezbollah has never [been] proven to have done anything to attack the United States [although] they were accused of being responsible for the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, where I happened to be at the time. Hezbollah formed as a resistance organization to the Israeli occupation, and there are a lot of questions as to who actually carried out that bombing, but it has never been proven that Hezbollah did it. Hezbollah has never launched a terrorist attack against the United States, nor has Hamas, and yet those two organizations are now considered to be U.S. enemies because they’re essentially Israel’s enemies.

Kathleen Wells: We’re covering a lot of ground here and I can hear your critics say that you are contending that there is a cabal driving U.S. foreign policy.

Jeffrey Blankfort: When it comes to the Middle East, there is no question about it. It is not only outside of the government. Let’s [look at] what it consists of: You have AIPAC; you have the American Jewish Community; you have the Anti-Defamation League, which is quick to call any critic of Israel an anti-Semite. It is actually an organization that has been spying on American leftists since the 1930s, including me and thousands of other political activists, including the NAACP –– virtually every political group that might have an issue around Israel.

We have a group called the Israel Project, which is a propaganda arm of Israel which holds regular events, press conferences in Israel and has 18 members of Congress on its board of directors. Eighteen members of the U.S. Congress on the board of a pro-Israel lobbying group which, of course, is tax exempt [and is
not required to register as a foreign agent.]

You have a number of think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was founded by AIPAC in 1985, whose talking heads appear every Sunday, every … they’re on NPR, they’re on PBS, and they are never identified as being part of an Israeli lobby institution.

The American Enterprise Institute is also a pro-Israel lobby institution. You have the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, which you never hear about, but this has members of Congress, senators, a former CIA chief, Jim Woolsey [who] is on every one of these pro-Israel lobbying groups — every one of them. You have JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, founded in 1976, which has about
20 former generals and admirals on its board but also has many of the neocons:

Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman. These are the ones — people who are very much involved in fomenting the Iraq war; Paul Wolfowitz. There was PNAC, Project for New American Century from 1997, which called on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which had some of the very same people on it — mostly Jewish neocons — which is largely a Jewish movement, although not exclusively Jewish.

Fomenting the war on Iraq was done on every single level in the media. You had op-ed pieces written by William Safire in the New York Times; Abe Rosenthal in the Washington Post. You had Kristol, Chuck Krauthammer, and you had Mortimer Zuckerman, who is the owner of the US News and World
Report and the New York Daily News, writing op-ed piece after op-ed piece calling for an attack on Iraq. You had Kenneth Pollack, the head of the Brookings Institution Saban Center writing a book called “The Gathering
Storm” endorsing the war on Iraq.

It is a cabal, and it’s not a hidden cabal. It’s quite public, except those people who don’t want to see it don’t look at it. It’s like the monkey: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. This is how the solidarity movement has been when it comes to this cabal.”

This extensive interview was published in three parts, all three of which now can be found
online.

Comment:

This is a wide-ranging interview and is excellent on many points, especially in pointing out Chomsky’s disturbing blind spot on this crucial matter, a distinct anti-Americanism (in the real sense, that is, blaming America without giving a full picture of events).

However, I don’t agree that Iran is where future Israeli attention is turned. I think that is somewhat of a feint, on the part of the powers-that-be.  Iran has already been attacked (via Stuxnet) and surrounded.

Much more plausible to me is escalation of attacks on Pakistan and the undermining and eventual fragmentation of India, bringing the whole sub-continent under the control of the Anglo-Jewish power again.  Let’s call it what it is.  The revival of the British empire, with British referring both to the power of the global bankers, historically centered in London, as well as the race theory that arose from the empire –  British Israelism, from which Zionism appears to have derived.

Richard Edmondson:

“Whether Zionists initiated and organized the Occupy San Diego protest, I do not know, but certainly they seem to be liberally sprinkled among the crowd. As I’ve noted in previous posts (see here and here ), there seems to be a distinct unwillingness to talk about Israel at the Occupy Wall Street protest as well. I encourage people to go to John Friend’s blog and read his entire post on the matter. “I should preface these videos by saying that less than 5 minutes before I began the speech in the video below, organizers for Occupy San Diego called a rally and asked people to come speak their mind on the megaphone if they were so inclined. I was and I did,” he says. View the rest of his commentary, additional videos, as well as comments from readers. It’s all quite eye-opening.”

Whew. What a surprise.  Only people fed an endless diet of plastic thought and homogenized emotion could be taken in by OW as “grassroots”, however much one might sympathize with outrage and anger at the bail-outs and corruption.

Adbusters? Glossy magazines, “culture-jamming”? This is going to fight the ultimate tyranny of mind and soul? Tyranny of the soul can be fought only with actions from the soul. This is what Gandhi meant by soul force, satyagraha (literally truth-force).

The language of the enemy is mass (corporate/statist) culture. The enemy cannot be fought with those tools. The medium will overwhelm the message every time.

Public banking, “debt-free” money,  more credit and more public services for society at large, no word about recompense for the actual victims of the vast fraud of the markets (savers, pensioners world-wide), no word about the civilian deaths and the destruction of whole countries. No word about a wicked foreign policy and the blood of millions of innocent people. No word about prosecuting the leading criminals in the whole scam. No word about compensating the real victims.

Instead, the population is being bought off. As I said, bribery and blackmail is the modus operandi of the NWO.

Looking for previous references to Mary Daly, a theologian I hadn’t heard of until I saw a post at The Daily Bell, I came across this intriguing post on what looks like the website of Rosanne Barr, who had a popular TV show in the days (more than a decade ago) when I even bothered to watch one of those things.

Barr is loud and crude, which endears her to no man I know. But she can be funny and smart.

She links to Alex Jones, and she calls herself an anarchist.

Notice, in this post about Mary Daly, the reference at the end to the rebuilding of the Temple?

It pops out at me now.  So does the reference to Dalits (lowest caste in Hindu society) and to upper-class Hindus.  In fact, nearly every meme of the power-elite is represented here:

1. Extreme feminism (Mary Daly called for the reduction of the male population to 10% to prevent ecocide)

2. Extreme environmentalism (A belief that depopulation is necessary to prevent environmental destruction)

3. Promotion of  the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem

4. Association of all the evils of the police state and imperialism with Gentiles – either Republican, Christian and/or white (Bush, Cheney) or Democrat, secular,  and/or black (Obama), thus appeasing both left-wing and right-wing constituencies, with no word about the heavy hand of the Israeli/Jewish lobby, finance, and media.

5. Demonizing of Hinduism and Brahmins (pointed out in Rajiv Malhotra’s influential book, “Breaking India”), by raising the issue of caste in a divisive manner, although there are far more quotas and set-asides for lower castes in India than have ever existed in the US, where white females have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, not racial minorities (or so I read).

Moreover, India has had numbers of women (PM and President), Muslims (President and others), Sikhs (PM), Christians and immigrants (Sonia Gandhi), Dalits (Dr. Ambedkar and many others) in high office. Many more than the US ever had.

The aim of all this is to pit lower castes, Christians, and Muslims against upper castes and Hindus. No word about India’s active Jewish community, which is often involved in these sorts of controversies (note the Leela Samson controversy over the Christianization of the premier center of Bharathanatyam in Chennai, as well as the alleged Mossad involvement in the Mumbai bombing).

6. Promotion of an expanded state through the welfare system

7. Promotion of Mormonism (for some reason I don’t quite get)

Mormons are favored by the power elites, witness Glenn Beck and Mitt Romney. My explanation of this is British Israelism, of which Mormonism seems to be one variant.  Zionism, I see as another variant. To put it crudely, British Israelism is the religio-political race theory behind Anglo-Jewish imperialism.

[BTW,  some British Israelite writers  suggest that some branches of the ancient Israelites became the Scythians, a central Asian tribe which actually invaded India and settled as far south as the Malabar coast. In that case, since I have one set of ancestors who likely have Scythian blood, I  too can make a tenuous claim to lineal descent from the Biblical Israelite.  It gets worse. Like everyone else on this planet, I can trace my ancestry right back to Adam…]

8. Assertion that the Catholic leadership (Vatican) dominates the power-elite, rather than the Zionist (this is a promotion of Alex Jones’ as well).

Rosanneworld.com:

“The dalit in india suffer so terribly due to their backward superstitions and religions, but to watch one of the indian intellectual classes discuss his religious beliefs about how the dalit deserves his/her fate was the thing that most radicalized me in Hollywood’s fundraising world–200 billionaires reward themselves for giving one million dollars for good pr.

The Daily Bell:

“Behind closed doors much would be tolerated. But public displays, especially “immoral” ones, would be frowned upon.”

Exactly.

The most civilized world will be a world with marked boundaries between the private and the public. This would allow for the maximum of individual, idiosyncratic behavior expressing different people’s minority opinions/cultures, peculiar temperaments, unique problems, astrological aspects, familial complexes, personal traumas, and genetic/racial heritages, while allowing for the decorum and public culture most suited to the majority tradition.

Indeed, most traditional Asian cultures followed this model until recently. Well before my teens were over or the Indian market and culture had been opened up to the globalists across the board, I came across transvestites, lesbians, eunuchs, hermaphrodites, occultists,  and non-conformists of all kinds, who lived with a fair degree of freedom because they didn’t feel the need to become an avenger on society at large for their differences from the mainstream.

No one I knew even thought much of any of these differences. They simply existed. One noted it, sometimes with giggles….among the mean-spirited, with scorn, but since the mean at heart are scornful even of mainstream differences, their opinion hardly mattered to good people…and actually earned their targets more favor in everyone else’s eyes.

Individual morality is not simply hard to judge in public, it is impossible.

Public (legal) infractions and criminal wrong-doing (where there is a public concern) are another thing. But even in those cases,  there are such things as statutes of limitations.  The idea that public shaming should be eternal – as it is, with the net – is something only those religious sects which rejoice in the eternal torment of sinners would countenance.

And even so,  the eternal torments of the religious usually needed two separate “judgments,” if I recall it right.

On the net, mostly, such infamy follows without thought of any kind, let alone judgment.

God. After my brief encounter with the confused cogitations of David Graeber, I think there’s room for another revolution. Occupy Harvard! (Actually, Graeber is a product of Yale, but Harvard has a better ring).

Withdraw all federal funding from the universities. Let the states or private organizations fund them, if they will.  Better yet, as Rush Limbaugh suggests quite usefully,  give them some government land out in the west somewhere,  and let them go and create their own society, with no technology, plenty of leisure and  Marxist theory.  Why don’t they go, I wonder. A little too attached to being “slaves” in America?

Update 2:

Some anti-Zionist activists, like the ones at Veterans Today, are taking the OW protests seriously, and don’t see the lack of interest in talking about 9-11 as  a red flag. I am not sure what to make of this. Again, I should say, at this point it scarcely matters if a national infrastructure program is instituted, since things are so bad. Except, of course, the usual corporate cronies will fatten off the contracts, making them even more powerful. And it will create more dependency, more demands, more constituencies, a bigger political class, distort the market further, postpone and thus prolong the process of correction.

Update:

To be clear, I write from the perspective of an eclectic or syncretic Christian whose views would be rejected by most fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholics etc.

ORIGINAL POST

David Graeber is one of the mouthpieces of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A Marxist academic and the son of a working class family, his father fought in the Spanish Revolution, Graeber himself is a Yale graduate and a leading light in anthropological theory. His mentor is another Marxist anthropologist Maurice Bloch, of the LSE, who has argued that religion is nothing special, but still central, surely a most revealing assertion. Bloch believes that the development of “imagination” in prehistoric man is what allowed the idea of “god” to emerge in human thought. That is, God was imagined in the same way that nations are imagined.

Is there a hint here that, like nationalism, religious beliefs are now going to be taken down by the powers-that-be, in the interests of universal humanity, world government, and the salvation of non-existent souls?

Bloch’s protege continues in the same vein of adolescent iconoclasm.

He argues – ambitiously, given his age – that all previous histories of money are wrong. Menger and the Austrians, especially, are wrong (Bob Murphy has critiqued this, in his usual modest fashion at the Mises forum).

Barter did not arise first, to be followed by money and credit. Instead, credit and debt arose first.

In the beginning, man lived in a kind of primitive community in which money played no role. Then came war and conquest. Debt and debt bondage arose from the victor’s impositions on the vanquished.

Whatever merit one might detect in such a sweeping starting point is quickly erased when we find that the author’s destination is the all too familiar territory of greenbackism (i.e. debt jubilee and debt-free money).

Next, we are told that modern Anericans are no better than the chattel of by-gone years. Of course, the slaves of old, who were whipped, sold on blocks, manacled and deprived of all rights, might argue the point. But college professors routinely make up in rhetoric what they lack in knowledge and rationality, and we see no need to hold Professor Graeber to standards that have long vanished from academia.

Americans are slaves, and Graeber is Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks combined. Or do I mean, Marx and Lenin combined? For while Graeber somehow feels the need to turn to Christianity for his rhetorical flourishes (forgiveness of debt is sacred in Christianity, quoth he), it’s still communism that is the real force behind his manifesto, as the video above indicates.

Notice the subversion of language in his claims here, and elsewhere.

The sacred essence of Christianity – the salvation of the soul and the resurrection of the body – is eliminated. In its place, he focuses on the mechanism of salvation.… and misconstrues it.

Claiming that both words, debt and sin, have a common origin, Graeber conflates them and discovers in the conflation the means to transform the unique moral act of a particular being (forgive them, father) into a diktat of communism (cancel all debts).

In the Christian world view, Christ’s redemptive substitution for sinful humanity on the cross is a “forgiveness of sin” that only the “sinless one” could accomplish precisely because he was sinless.

Secondly, even if sin and monetary debt are equated, “forgiveness of debt” is enjoined on Christians only because debt itself, like sin, is of such paramount consequence.

Debt is consequential because to take without giving is a form of theft. The Old Testament law, on which Christ’s teachings were based, would not have countenanced borrowing with no intention of repaying, any more than it would have countenanced lending in the hope of default, able-bodied idlers, mass gambling, improvidence, shiftlessness, profligacy, or any of the moral sins endemic in society today.

Not content with mutilating Christian doctrine to suit his communist agenda, Graeber then foists his slogans on economic activity. For him, normal cooperation between human beings is a feature of “communism.”

Thus he can argue that capitalism is a method of organizing “communism” (since, even at work, human interaction proceeds without economic considerations).

From there, he can argue that the economy should be driven by “altruistic” considerations.
The confusion is so enormous that a book would be needed to fully explore the ways in which the man has misunderstood these terms.

In the first place, capitalism – or better, free markets – has never denied altruism or any other psychological trait its place in human life.

Nor has any intelligent free market theorist equated the whole of life with economic interaction. {Although, I’m not entirely sure that we would be worse off if  they did. Certainly, there is a great deal to be said for contracts, even within families, witness the rise of prenuptial contracts, living wills, family trusts, guardianships,  and so on, which certainly have smoothed many aspects of family life.

Nor does anyone outside academia assume “rational” actors or “economic” men.

Men act from all sorts of reasons. They run companies for all sorts of reasons, and money is often the least of them.

In short, Graeber, after having first assumed a model of capitalism that would be an embarrassment in a freshman essay, devotes his energies to refuting it with anecdotal evidence, which he then mysteriously dubs communist.

Is it not possible to behave decently to another person without being a communist? Who made communism – a theory about economic production and ownership – a system of ethics?

I would be puzzled, except for the leveraging of Christianity in Graeber’s polemic.

Now it is clear.

When you forbid divinity anywhere in the universe but in man’s imagining, it follows that you will restrict paradise to man’s own creations.

Stripped of all obfuscation, Graeber’s language betrays the covergence of the binaries – capitalism and communism – characteristic of the arbiters of the New World Order.

Activist Post:

“Noble intentions, divorced from a complete understanding as to the nature of the movements themselves have led to an “army of dupes” working unknowingly against their own ideals and against their own best interests. Movements.org is but one of many corporate subsidized organizations masquerading as a progressive movement. George Soros, a billionaire bankster (banker + gangster) runs Open Society which funds an almost endless list of similar organizations. Thailand’s Prachatai website leads off to several of these organizations, while it itself is funded by US money via the National Endowment for Democracy.

Conclusion

Thailand is but one example of genuine people being exploited by immensely disingenuous, insidious agendas. The same could be said about Serbia’s Optor, where many of the members discovered the opposition was organized and funded from abroad and were disillusioned and angered at what they had participated in. Foreign Policy reported that “Like the entire opposition to Milosevic, Otpor [now known as CANVAS] took money from the U.S. government, and lied about it. When the real story came out after Milosevic fell, many Otpor members quit, feeling betrayed.” Otpor would become CANVAS, and would end up training and building fake revolutions around the world in scores of nations. Egypt, being one of them, has played out as a textbook case of inconspicuous foreign meddling leading thousands of well-intentioned people down the road toward a corporate agenda.

While activists in Thailand claim it is time for change, that Thailand’s traditional institutions represent the “dark ages” and Thaksin’s “red shirt” movement represents the cries of an oppressed people, in reality they are making way for a new-monied elitist to implement his own hereditary dictatorship – as the fugitive living in self-exile in Dubai literally has his sister running in his place for the upcoming July elections. Thaksin’s backing by the international corporatocracy ensures that no matter how firmly in the hands of the people activists think this movement is, at the end of the day they will be exposing Thailand to unprecedented exploitation, not by an incompetent group of local aristocrats (of which Thaksin himself is counted amongst), but by a scientific dictatorship harboring a limitless amount of resources and knowledge with which to bear down upon the Thai people.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting change – change that is much needed. However the only way to ensure ownership of that change remains in the hands of the people, is to pursue local pragmatism where you are know, meet, and are certain of everyone contributing to your efforts. One would be surprised by the amount of good simply getting active locally and independently can accomplish – especially pragmatically. Teaching, building, growing, and exploring ways to improve the lives of people locally have always outmatched campaign promises made by corrupt, crooked, self-serving politics. Collectively, people pursuing real local pragmatism can effect real, tangible change. Because for all the good people claim Thaksin did for the rural poor and “oppressed” of Thailand, his ouster in 2006 took with him the socialist handout “house of cards” with him. Had he really did any good for the people he exploited to get into and stay in power, they would have thrived long after he was swept from office. For real freedom is independence, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency, not servile dependency on one man and his generous subsidies.”