If Americans will trample one another just to save a few dollars on a television, what will they do when society breaks down and the survival of their families is at stake? Once in a while an event comes along that gives us a peek into what life could be like when the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is stripped away. For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey there was rampant looting and within days people were digging around in supermarket dumpsters looking for food. Sadly, “Black Friday” also gives us a look at how crazed the American people can be when given the opportunity. This year was no exception. Once again we saw large crowds of frenzied shoppers push, shove, scratch, claw, bite and trample one another just to save a few bucks on cheap foreign-made goods. And of course most retailers seem to be encouraging this type of behavior. Most of them actually want people frothing at the mouth and willing to fight one another to buy their goods. But is this kind of “me first” mentality really something that we want to foster as a society? If people are willing to riot to save money on a cell phone, what would they be willing to do to feed their families? Are the Black Friday riots a very small preview of the civil unrest that is coming when society eventually breaks down?
Category Archives: Economics/Class Relations
A Thanksgiving Message in Solidarity with Walmart Strikers 1
Walmart is the largest employer in the U.S with more than 1.4 million workers. And it’s one of the most virulently anti-union employers. In the handful of cases where employees have managed to unionize (most notably meat cutters at the store in Windsor, Ontario), Walmart has closed stores to prevent the cancer from spreading.
This time, though, Walmart workers are doing something different: They’re organizing by just doing it, without even trying to jump through hoops and certify union locals under the Wagner Act.
The main organization involved in coordinating their efforts is OUR Walmart, backed by SEIU and UFCW. Starting with a walkout from a Los Angeles store on October 9 — apparently the first ever in the U.S. — Walmart workers struck in dozens of stores around the country. They protested in the hundreds outside company headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Striker spokespersons around the country took advantage of the publicity to air Walmart’s dirty laundry, including cuts in hours and other reprisals against workers who raised concerns with local management.
Meanwhile, warehouse and supplier workers have disrupted the Walmart corporate supply chain with wildcat strikes. Matthew Cunningham-Cook refers to it as workers “using globalization against Walmart” (WagingNonviolence.org, October 24). This model — “wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain” — is “unprecedented.” The worldwide distribution of supply chains, with components manufactured at hundreds of locations around the world, was originally a weapon to defeat labor by offshoring production to low-wage areas. But workers are beginning to discover that distributed supply chains are a two-edged sword:
Anarcho-Feudalism as Practical Model of National-Anarchism Reply
This article is included in the recently released National-Anarchism: Theory and Practice, edited by Troy Southgate and available from Black Front Press.
By Craig FitzGerald and Jamie O’Hara
The unification of National-Anarchist theory and practice will take as many shapes as there are tribes. The very nature of this philosophical school requires a wide range of cultural values, methods of organization, economic systems, industrial aspirations, social institutions, and more. National-Anarchism is reminiscent of the natural environment, and its diverse communities are like the myriad life forms on our planet. This being the case, to speak of National-Anarchism in purely practical terms is to be either extremely general or extremely personal. However, it is useful for both National-Anarchist discourse and application to explore various ideas for putting principle into action. Anarcho-feudalism represents one possibility of National-Anarchist organization.
The historical concept of feudalism is not without controversy. Many modern scholars question both the usefulness and the accuracy of the term.# This is partially because feudal systems in different areas had divergent social and political structures, and therefore do not fit perfectly in the same category. But despite the many ways in which feudalism varied from one locality to another, certain characteristics of the term are consistent enough to merit its use, especially with some qualification. More…
WAYNE STURGEON INTERVIEWS CRAIG FITZGERALD ON NATIONAL ANARCHISM Reply
This interview is included in the recently released National-Anarchism: Ideas and Concepts, edited by Troy Southgate and available from Black Front Press.
1) Please could you introduce yourself, your background, and how you define national anarchism?
I am a native New Yorker, agrarian separatist homesteader, and spokesman for the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance NY. I was raised around the patriot/militia movement and since my early teenage years I have been involved with a wide array of radical political groups and causes from anarchist groups to populist American nationalist and anti-Zionist circles. More recently but previous to the founding of NATA in 2010, I mainly focused my attention on attempting to build bridges between the radical and anti statist “left” and “right” (with limited success). I have worked with the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, WeAreChangeNYC, Young Americans for Liberty, End the Fed, the John Birch Society (JBS), and been involved with the Constitution and Libertarian parties. More…
Tribal America Reply
On our suddenly race-obsessed politics.
By Mark Steyn
National Review
To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election-night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73 percent Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72 percent and he did. Beckel’s assertion — that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate you also knew the result — turned out to be correct.
10 Myths About Obama and the Democrats Reply
Delusions of the Liberal Intelligentsia
By Jason Hirthler
Counterpunch
As we head into The Chosen One’s second term, it might be useful to explode a few of the chronic myths that cling to the man more tightly than his shadow. Myths that have helped liberal intelligentsia justify its enthusiastic support for this lesser of two evils. Here are the myths as articulated by a young, imaginary, and starry-eyed Obama progressive, momentarily detached from the stampeding liberal herd, just long enough to have a conversation with a leftist on the political fringe…
Voting By Sex, Age, Race, Money, And Education Reply
businessinsider.com
Henry Blodget
The New York Times has an awesome graphical breakdown of voting data from the 2012 Presidential election.
In case you had any doubt about how the country breaks down along gender, age, race, financial status, religion, education, and community lines, just have a glance at these stats. More…
One of America’s Most Notorious Militias Reply
Walter Kaufmann on “Equality of Opportunity” Reply
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Right now, I’m having an enjoyable time reading through my years-long-neglected hardcover copy of Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy, a relatively obscure work by prominent Fritz-translator Walter Kaufmann. I’m thinking about dedicating a post or two to this work, which could be read as Kaufmann’s culmination of the Nietzschean project, but for now, I’m just gonna share a few illuminating passages on “equal opportunities” with you…
10 Good Reasons Not to Assassinate Obama Reply
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America has now elected its first half-black president to a second term, which, if you understand math, means that America has finally elected a fully black president to one term. A little more than half of America is gloating like drunken pigs on moonshine. A little less than half of America is brooding with a smoldering sense of resignation and perhaps permanent cultural defeat.
Among the latter contingent is a young fat blonde pimply idiot woman in California who recently Tweeted the following:
Another four years of this nigger, maybe he will get assassinated this term..!!
Several news agencies blacked out (pun intended) the word “nigger,” while others opted for variants such as “(N word)” and “n———r,” the latter of which may have caused unsuspecting souls to wonder whether she meant to say “nitpicker,” “Northerner,” “naysayer,” “NASCAR driver,” or “nougat-eater.”
Keith Preston interview with RT.com on Obama’s victory Reply
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More than four years ago, as part of my efforts to promote and protect tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy, I narrated this video explaining the economic benefits of so-called tax havens.
Pay close attention at the 1:07 mark.
Yes, you heard right. A former bureaucrat from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development actually called for the forcible annexation of low-tax jurisdictions, writing in the Financial Times that, “Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man should simply be absorbed lock, stock and barrel into the UK…Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein should be given the choice of ending bank secrecy or facing annexation.”
He wasn’t quite so belligerent about Switzerland, perhaps because all able-bodied male citizens have fully automatic assault weapons in their homes. But he did urge financial protectionism against the land of chocolate, yodeling, and watches.
What a bizarre attitude. It’s apparently okay for certain countries to…
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2012 Election Results and Pan-Secessionism 2
2012 election results color coded by state. Blue states for Obama, red states for Romney.
2012 election results by state, redrawn to visually represent the size of state by population.
2012 election results by county. Blue indicates a county that voted for Obama, red for Romney.
The Lull Before the Social Storm 1
By Jack D. Douglas
Lew Rockwell
Vast social revolutions and wars are often preceded by periods of giving up on reforms, despairing withdrawal from public life by the best and brightest, and even peacefulness which seems to have become the normal condition in spite of deep conflicts and growing crises beneath the surfaces of public life. Often, earlier periods of intense conflicts and crises have been overcome and resolved, so it comes to look like that is the normal in life. This lulls most people into assuming their worse fears cannot happen, but this leads them to lowering their guards against growing conflicts and crises, so small ones can more easily cascade down into massive ones. If people expected they could become vast wars or revolutions or implosions, they would take more precautions to prevent that. But when lulled in expecting the worst cannot happen, the worst than they could ever imagine often explodes suddenly.
Fascism Under the Cloak of Liberalism Reply
I use “fascism” here not as a cliché, but as an historical-structural formation principally rooted in the mature stage of capitalism, in which business-government interpenetration (what the Japanese political scientist Masao Maryuma called the “close-embrace” system) has created hierarchical social classes of wide differences in wealth and power, the militarization of social values and geopolitical strategy, and a faux ideology of classlessness to instill loyalty for the social order among working people. In fact, each of these factors is already present to a high degree in America–superbly disguised however by the rhetoric of liberalism, as in Mr. Obama’s presidency.
IMF study: Peak oil could do serious damage to the global economy Reply
The world isn’t going to run out of oil anytime soon. But there’s still concern among various geologists and analysts that our oil supply won’t grow as quickly or as easily as it used to. We’ll have to resort to harder-to-drill oil to satisfy our crude habits. More expensive oil. That would push prices up. And high oil prices could act as a drag on growth. More…
Occupy Sandy Relief NYC Reply
We are not only bringing in relief to areas that are not experiencing government aid, but also working with existing organizations to build strong community centers. We are building a relief effort that will still give communities access to necessary resources 5 yrs from now. People who’s homes were lost and businesses destroyed may not have the resources to rebuild their lives. These are the people who are forgotten by short-term shelters and Red Cross tents, because they require a sustainable, local, long-term approach. More…
The Winner of the Election: George W. Bush 1
I’m calling the election. The winner will be George W. Bush.
Whether Obama serves a second term or hands the reins to Romney, we will face another four years of Bush’s policies.
H.S.H. Prince Hans-Adam II – The State in the Third Millennium Reply
The progressive case against Obama Reply
President Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
A few days ago, I participated in a debate with the legendary antiwar dissident Daniel Ellsberg on Huffington Post live on the merits of the Obama administration, and what progressives should do on Election Day. Ellsberg had written a blog post arguing that, though Obama deserves tremendous criticism, voters in swing states ought to vote for him, lest they operate as dupes for a far more malevolent Republican Party. This attitude is relatively pervasive among Democrats, and it deserves a genuine response. As the election is fast approaching, this piece is an attempt at laying out the progressive case for why one should not vote for Barack Obama for reelection, even if you are in a swing state.
Are Widening Class Divisions Overshadowing the Culture Wars? Reply
Some hot-button issues in previous presidential campaigns have hardly surfaced in the 2012 race, which is all about the jobs and the economy.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. presidential campaign has focused heavily on jobs, pushing other once high-profile issues to the side. It dismays activists who have spent decades promoting environmental issues, gay rights, gun control and other topics to the center of national attention.
Topics suffering downgrades in campaign attention include these:
Peak Oil and the Challenging Years Ahead Reply
Without substitutes at a price that the economy can afford, economies will adapt to lower amounts of oil they can afford by worsening recession, debt defaults, and reduced international trade. There may be tendency for international alliances (such as the Euro) to fall apart, for countries to break into smaller units (Catalonia secede from Spain, or countries break up the way the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia did).
More…
