I'm Sure The Children Of Gaza Are Happy To Hear Your Yoga Practice Goes Well

It's only when you start seeing articles about yoga in the Wall Street Journal - that chronicler of American capitalism, chaos, and corruption - that you understand what Slavoj Žižek meant in 2001, when he said, "New Age is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism." 

 Remember, Buddha: 

 Only those, in the most "enlightened" state of mind, bomb other nations and rip citizens off.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy: Missing The Forest For The Trees

"New Age is establishing itself as the ideology of global capitalism." - Slavoj Žižek (2001) 

   

 It's pretty amazing that, by 2023, presidential candidates haven't read the pertinent literature.

 

Ass Up, Head Down, Quiet, And Awaiting Instruction (The Way Men Want Them)

Yoga as Capitalism Without a Product: The unbearable anxiety of the aspirational self 

 AKA No matter what pose, they twist themselves into, they're still vapid.

 

Tom Petty Knows U.S. Blacks Must Live Like Refugees

"Beyond the flag issue, we're living in a time that I never thought we'd see. The way we're losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What's going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That's a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, 'You mean we privatized the prisons so there's no profit unless the prison is full?' You'd think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We're creating so many of our own problems,..."

- Tom Petty "gets" it - after causing black fans decades of discomfort - in "Rolling Stone"

Why "The New Jim Crow" Ain't Really Nothing Too New

Taking off the hoods was highly effective - for a while: Too bad they also can't shut-up

News stupid fuckers can use - if they want to be Americans - ever:

"5 Ways Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Underdogs"

Can you imagine? In America? Shameful,...

The Rollercoaster That's Become The Republican Party Is About To Come In, Stop, And Start Emptying It's Cars

The Right will die for it's insincerity regarding the betrayal of blacks and the Republican name

The more I read of slavery, the more one thing becomes clear: Just as capitalism drove slavery, it was conservatism that protected it - and contemporary conservatives are lying about that fact, hiding behind the storied Republican label for cover. Ted Cruz and his ilk have absolutely nothing to do with the brave and moral people involved in the abolitionist movement, and, to this day, they still spout the bogus religion and "state's rights" arguments of the slavers - not to mention maintaining the same culture of arrogance, and general disdain for others, needed to abuse people for money over a lifetime. Read your history and don't be fooled:

The Republican Party was great, but it's current officeholders (and most of their supporters) are anything but,...

When George Carlin Embraced The Conservative Mind

Everything Done To Blacks Was Done To Whites First

One of these days, America's racism will be seen as the obstacle to justice that it is, but, until then, take race out of it:

"Slavery’s Shadow on Switzerland"

Extending the shame of unwarranted, and state-sponsored, "beatings, starvation and sexual abuse" - by trying to silence the truth - only makes the lives white people think of as a money-making enterprise costlier.

Which kinda defeats the point.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat,...

"This Phone Call Is A Really Amazing Representative Example Of Why I Don't Want To Stay With Comcast"

Uneducated blacks must have LOVED hearing from this guy

This is also a great example of what it's like to try and convince whites that slavery, Jim Crow, etc. - and racist attitudes in general - have led to mistrust and a prevailing sense that whites enjoy injustice. Reparations are "only business" now, right? Trying to save a few dollars, rather than a few lives? Want "peace" for yourselves and damn other Americans?

 Why, oh, why won't blacks see things as our torturer's culture has? 

 Listen - and see how convinced you are of that position,…

 

Why Whites Get Uncomfortable Talking About Slavery

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

- Abraham Lincoln

 

Awkward

Dear White People: I Found A Black To Pour Scorn On

Have at it - give him everything you've got,...

The Nigger Problem (Making Our Way To The Numbers)

"The United States stole an estimated $100 trillion dollars for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865,…"

And one more time:

  "No Capitalism? No Slavery - No Slavery? No Capitalism"

No Capitalism? No Slavery - No Slavery? No Capitalism

"At the very time that, in Europe, Marx and Engels were developing their analysis of capitalism as the commodification of human labor, the slaves were reaching the same conclusion. The implication was revelatory: the American workers with the most advanced understanding of the alienation and commodification of capitalist exploitation were not the white wage earners of Northern factory towns but the enslaved African-Americans of Southern plantations."

The Next Time, Reparations Comes Up, Quote Solomon

Worked to death, People - I mean, they worked her to death - and what's left of her family should expect nothing from this wicked country in return but sickening white demands for loyalty:

“I had not learned the measure of 'man’s inhumanity to man,' nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.”

If this was the abuse of their family, whites would feel different,...

 

The So-Called Culture Of Corruption (Started In Slavery)

Slavery is always about the past:

The story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity.

Yet to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.

But it's also about today:

Warren Stephens, an investment banking CEO, took the stage in a Confederate flag hat and sang a song about the financial crisis, set to the tune of “Dixie.”

Dollar Signs

How Slavery Led To Modern Capitalism

The Arc Of History Is Long But It Bends Toward Justice

This seems pretty simple to understand, using straight-forward logic, reason - and even American values. Except, maybe, to those who identify with the American lie we were raised in:

"For me, the main point is the intangible, immaterial, and fundamental issue – that fundamental issue that when crimes are done to human beings and the world takes note, reparations are paid.

The fact that people of African and indigenous descent have not been treated the same way suggests that the same lie that was invented to justify the slave trade still holds: that we are somehow less than human, and don’t rate the same respect.

But the monetary side is also fundamental. The modern capitalist world was built on the forced labour of the people of the ‘new world’ and that debt has yet to be paid.

The institution of slavery dehumanised everyone, no matter what their origin. The process of beating down the enslaved dehumanised the enslavers. We have only to look at how we have designed our city and our public institutions to understand that we don’t really believe in our full humanity yet."

Homeless in the streets, the insane there with them, chasing phantoms,…seriously:

I betcha Philip Seymour Hoffman would've said it's correct,…

 

No One Listening Is O.K.: I Don't Have To Win Elections

"We have the Ani DiFranco drama. Yes, public outrage shut down her ridiculous retreat at a slave plantation. Yet Nottoway Plantation remains open, emerging from the PR wreckage largely unscathed. The plantation was even able to continue portraying itself as a benign educational site, despite the fact that it’s nothing more than a racist shrine to the “good old days”. For Nottoway Plantation, a successfully managed scandal is just free publicity.

I don’t want people to stop talking about these issues, they are important. However, are these discussions providing us with real analysis of oppression, or is it just shallow posturing? I’m not entirely sure."

“Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) transformed the way we understand the legacy of slavery and colonization in Sub-Saharan Africa,....

...The premise of Rodney’s historical socio-economic analysis,... is that the poverty and inequalities of Sub-Saharan Africa are reflections of historical relationships of exploitation. This exploitation, he argues, was total: countries were dispossessed of all resources deemed useful to Europeans, including human labour.

In his assessment of pre-colonial and colonial European systems of exploitation, Rodney demands that readers confront the historical roots of ‘underdevelopment’ and he challenges us to rethink global history through Africa, self-emancipation and the politics of domination and resistance.”

“The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.”

Art In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave

"Slavery existed as an industry for over 230 years. It’s such a colossal stretch of American industrial and social history and yet there are hardly any films that exist either as documents of fictionalised accounts of that time. That, to me, is pretty astonishing. You can claim that it’s a lost piece of history but the reality is that people don’t want to look at that particular period of time. They’re embarrassed and ashamed."

"Racism and slavery go hand in hand. You can’t separate the two. Far from it — the notion that at that time black slaves were not seen as human reinforces that. You can look at it in terms of industry, you can look at it in terms of economy and capitalism but as far as what it is and how it was, it was maintained because people had to somehow justify the fact that people were put into slavery, and they did it through racism."

"Slavery is violence. How could you make a slavery film without violence? It’s impossible. If people don’t like the violence then that’s fine. I’m not trying to please everyone. But you can’t make a film about a people who were incarcerated for hundreds of years and pretend they were handed out lollipops and given a fair deal. Blood was spilt."

"Slavery is a huge subject matter and I hope we get more people coming out willing to explore it. There never seems to be a shortage of people wanting to make Second World War films, why not slavery? The Second World War lasted what, five years? Slavery is a very rich subject matter. There are so many stories to tell. I might possibly tell a few more myself someday. For now, this is a call to action. I’m not talking about racism or slavery specifically, I just hope that after seeing this film people ask themselves what they can do for others. Call a friend who’s having a hard time, help a neighbour, do something for someone. It could go a long way."