Among the characteristics of late capitalism (or the 'third age' of capitalism after freely-competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism) are said to be:

* the hypertrophy of the state, and systematic attempts by the state to moderate economic fluctuations as well as exerting more and more social controls;
* intensified monopolistic and oligopolistic competition for superprofit in world markets;
* the co-optation and integration of trade union and oppositional political movements into the state apparatuses;
* the globalisation of financial capital, commercial capital and production capital;
* a third technological revolution (electronics, synthetics, computerisation, biotechnology) and accelerated technological innovation;
* accelerated turnover of capital and the pressure to engage in comprehensive economic planning of investments;
* An increase in the rate of surplus value attributable mainly to increased productivity of labour;
* a permanent arms economy in which the military industry becomes a significant factor in economic growth;
* permanent currency inflation and growing debt levels;
* the hyper-concentration and centralisation of capital ownership and management on a world scale, in giant industrial and banking corporations;
* neo-colonialism involving unequal exchange and humanitarian imperialism where armed intervention in foreign countries is morally justified by reference to humane concerns;
* the corrosion and breakdown of all traditional social institutions by market forces, leading globally to a succession of continual wars, armed conflicts and unarmed social conflicts;
* (according to Leo Kofler) an optimistic belief in the power of technology to solve all problems, or, alternatively, a cultural pessimism. Some writers like Andre Glucksmann extrapolate this pessimism as a nihilist ideology; others like Elmar Altvater and Tariq Ali have interpreted it as a retreat to fundamentalism; and yet others like Frank Furedi see the pessimism as a cult of human vulnerabilities diminishing human potential and sowing unwarranted anxieties;
* an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, within and between countries, as strong market actors defeat the weaker ones;
* the growth of "excess capital" (overcapitalisation) and "excess capacity", meaning that much additional capital is no longer invested in expanding production, but diverted to trade and capital accumulation based on already existing physical and financial assets - with obvious effects on employment opportunities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitali...

All societies have a basic structure of social, economic, and political institutions, both formal and informal. In testing how well these elements fit and work together, Rawls based a key test of legitimacy on the theories of social contract. To determine whether any particular system of collectively enforced social arrangements is legitimate, he argued that one must look for agreement by the people who are subject to it. Obviously, not every citizen can be asked to participate in a poll to determine his or her consent to every proposal in which some degree of coercion is involved, so we have to assume that all citizens are reasonable. Rawls constructed an argument for a two-stage process to determine a citizen's hypothetical agreement:

* the citizen agrees to be represented by X for certain purposes; to that extent, X holds these powers as a trustee for the citizen;
* X agrees that a use of enforcement in a particular social context is legitimate; the citizen, therefore, is bound by this decision because it is the function of the trustee to represent the citizen in this way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justic...

THIS IS OUR AMERICA - ALL OTHER ARGUMENTS ARE SOPHISTRY

I grew up in Hermosa Beach and Pasadena (public school), so I've got a very good understanding of the corporate/education/race/poverty dynamic that dominates Los Angeles. But of course Hillary wants more H1B visas. I am so scewed when I graduate...I better enjoy my last year of freedom!

I'm going to have to pimp these two LA books:

http://www.amazon.com/Southern-California-...
http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavati...

George Bush and Felipe Calderon

Feature: Is Mexico's Drug War "Calderon's Iraq"?
Printer Friendly Version Printer Friendly Version Email this Article Email this Article
from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #490, 6/15/07

Almost as soon as he took office late last year, incoming Mexican President Felipe Calderon tried to win public support by sending out the military to take on the country's violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations, the so-called cartels. Now, six months into Calderon's anti-drug offensive, more than 24,000 soldiers and police are operating in a number of Mexican states and cities, but the death toll keeps rising, the drugs keep flowing, and Mexicans are starting to ask if it's all worth it.

According to Mexican press estimates, more than 2,000 people died in prohibition-related violence last year. With about 1,000 killed already this year, 2007 is on track to be the bloodiest year yet in Mexico's drug war.

Most of the victims are members of the competing trafficking gangs -- the Juarez Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel -- or their enforcers, like the ex-elite soldiers who switched sides and morphed into the Zetas or the former Guatemalan soldiers and gangsters known as the Kaibiles, or a new and shadowy presence on the scene, the Gente Nueva (The New People), a group supposedly formed of former police officers to take on the Zetas.

The violence among the battling cartels, factions, and enforcers has risen to horrific levels, with bloody beheadings taped on video and released to web sites like YouTube, heads being thrown on night club dance floors, and tortured bodies left on roadsides as exemplary warnings to others. On one day last month, at least 30 people died in prohibition-related violence.

But it's not only cartel soldiers dying. Hardly a day goes by without a police officer being gunned down somewhere in Mexico. Sometimes the attacks are spectacular, as when cartel gunmen attacked Acapulco police headquarters with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenade launchers, or when assassins killed the new head of the attorney general's national crime intelligence center in a brazen shooting in the upscale Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan last month.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/490/me...

http://www.aaafoundation.org/pdf/Distracti...
Although only 3.5 percent of Pennsylvania crashes were identified as involving a
distracted driver (compared to 8.3% of drivers in crashes on the CDS datafile), the
hierarchy of distracting events was very similar, with events outside the vehicle leading the list, followed by adjusting the radio or audio system controls, and other occupants in the vehicle. Even in the more recent Pennsylvania data, cell phone use was identified in just 5.2 percent of the distracted driving crashes. The Pennsylvania data also included information on whether the identified distraction was a primary or non-primary contributory factor, information that is not available on the CDS data. Based partly on these findings, the Pennsylvania Commission concluded that, “A statutory or regulatory restriction on specific driver distractions does not yet appear to be warranted based upon available data” (Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission, 2001).
--------

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has estimated that
driver inattention or distraction is responsible for 25% to 30% of police-reported traffic crashes, or an estimated 1.2 million crashes per year (Sundeen, 2002; Shelton, 2001). This study performed for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety is one of only a few studies identified in the literature to examine the full range of distractions contributing to crashes. It is also believed to be the first to collect real-world driving data on the frequency and duration of these distractions and measures of their effects on driving performance.

-------

Altogether, excluding any time spent conversing with other passengers in the vehicle, drivers were engaged in some form of potentially distracting activity up to 16.1 percent of the total time that their vehicles were moving (assuming no overlap among the various activities). Eating and drinking (including preparing to eat or drink and holding food in one’s hands) headed the list at 4.6% of the total time vehicles were in motion. This was followed by internal distractions at 3.8%, and external distractions and smoking (each at 1.6%). Completing the list were manipulating audio controls (1.4%), using a cell phone (1.3%), other occupant distractions(0.9%), reading or writing (0.7%), and grooming (0.3%). Again, both
event frequency and duration factored into these overall results.

--------

It has long been recognized that drivers themselves cause the vast majority of crashes.Indiana University’s landmark, in-depth crash causation study conducted in the mid-1970s revealed that human factors (including improper lookout, excessive speed, inattention,improper evasive action, and internal distraction) were probable causes in 93%of crashes, environmental factors in 34%, and vehicular factors in 13% (Treat, Tumbas,et al., 1979). The NHTSA has estimated that driver inattention or distraction is responsiblefor 25% to 30% of police-reported crashes, or an estimated 1.2 million crashes per year (Sundeen, 2002; Shelton, 2001).

-----

http://www.aaafoundation.org/pdf/Distracti...

But I'm just playing games with statistics right?

Histories (100-110)

* It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.
o Book I, 1

* Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.
o Book I, 39

* The desire for glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.
o Book IV, 6

* Deos fortioribus adesse.
o Translation: The gods are on the side of the stronger.
o Book IV, 17

Annals (117)

* The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.
o Variant: The more corrupt the state, the more laws.
o Original Quote: And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.
o Book III, 27

* He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.
o Book VI, 39

* What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.
o Book XI, 24

* So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.
o Variant: So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
o Book III

Marx hated the peasants because they were stupid and silly, Mao loved them for that but demanded they have leadership. I think the middle road is somewhere in between. That means we need to both fight the power-elite and mitigate bourgeois greed while at the same time raising up the bottom. It is not an either/or situation, that is black and white thinking and actually is counterproductive to the worker's revolution. What the hell do poor people gain by fighting other poor people? I want to scream everytime I hear a report about another factory raided x/illegal immigrants arrested. Fuck that bullshit, arrest the owners and throw away the key. Whatever happened to "workers of the world unite?" Intellectuals are the vanguard of the worker's revolution. The problem is that we now teach to the test, humanities and social science degrees are either filled with corporate mumbo-jumbo (see the Chicago school of sociology) or are hollow academic exercises. Whatever happened to moral history? Whatever happened to the concept of justice? Capitalism is diseased and is beginning to decay. Long live the People's Liberation Army!

Encirclement is a military term for the situation when a force or target is isolated and surrounded by enemy forces. This situation is highly dangerous for the encircled force: at the strategic level, because it cannot receive supplies or reinforcements, and on the tactical level, because the units in the force can be subject to an attack from several sides. Lastly, since the force cannot retreat, unless it is relieved or can break out, it must either fight to the death or surrender. Encirclement has been used throughout the centuries by military leaders, including famous generals such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Sun Tzu, Wallenstein, Napoleon, von Rundstedt, Zhukov, and Patton. Sun Tzu suggests that an army should not be completely encircled, but should be given some room for escape, in order to prevent that 'encircled' army's men lifting their morale and fighting till the death - a more optimal situation would be them considering the possibility of a retreat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encirclement

"“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part II.

"The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed."

(Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-born U.S. political philosopher. The Origins of Totalitarianism, pt. 3, ch. 12, sct. 3 (1951).)

I fail to see how the jungles, deltas, paddies, and mountains of "Indochina" have been any different...

A brilliant and prolific member of Democratic Underground.

An avatar was mentioned above, and I thought, I don't think we have a veterans rights avatar, and to create one would be a good way to honor Monkeyman. Unfortunately, I'm not the computer graphics type but I think the typescript of the Democratic Underground along the lines of "Support Veterans Beyond Battle," although my intent is hardly to dictate the text or form of such an avatar.

The fee's they want to charge these people is outrageous, $5000 when most probably don't make more than 8-12 thousand a year if they're lucky.

Deaniacs come from all walks of life, we are main street America. I have never seen such a diverse group of people as I have at many Dean events. I once had the privilege of seeing Howard address a room of 75-100 people at East Los Angeles Community College (He spoke in both English and Spanish). SEIU workers both white and Hispanic, African-Americans, students, office workers, housewives. Howard is rapidly approaching the point where in some sense we have rebuilt the old FDR coalition.

Fucking MSM.

There are tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq with small children, and some of them may never see their children ever again, and even more will return home with severely broken bodies.

The Hollow Men - T.S. Eliot(1925)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead

A penny for the Old Guy


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html

Saying Abu Ghraib is a separate matter would be like saying Gestapo prisons are a separate matter from the death camps. The fact of the matter is that this administration has systematized torture in secretive prisons around the globe with no review process and has willfully ignored basic standards of the Geneva conventions in regards to prisoners in Iraq. Moreover, the concept of a "customary" standard of conduct by armed forces in war is hogwash, no such custom exists. By your logic the use of chemical and biological weapons, given that they have been used frequently in the past, does not constitute an illegal act. The fact of the matter is that our government has committed enough separate acts in Iraq from the rise of Saddam on wards that if the term genocide is not applied it becomes hollow.

I would again point out that neither the United States nor Iraq are party to the ICC and that both states are not party to the various relevant United Nations Conventions. Thus the relevant international body is not the ICC but the ICJ. Should the United Nations choose to pursue the matter it would likely establish a special tribunal ala Rwanda, "Yugoslavia," and Nuremberg. The ICC definition is incredibly weak and requires no standard of systematization because the United Nations correctly realizes that genocide is often the fruit of the indifference of the heads of state to the actions of its agents. I would also point out that the decision I believe you are referring too was not in the ICC but in the ICJ (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/63... ).

Frankly, Rosalyn Higgins should be ashamed of herself because her decision is incoherent and contradicts the caseload of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. i.e. the special tribunal. Over one hundred individuals have already been convicted for their crimes, including the charge of genocide. Methinks the ICC is playing politics with genocide in the name of getting as many countries as possible to sign onto their "project." Frankly, I hope the United States doesn't sign onto the ICC because it is just another League of Nations, to weak to survive, much less do its job. The key difference as it would appear to me is that the Genocide Convention does not have the systematization requirement that the ICC does. I really hope we do not sign onto the ICC because ICJ and the special tribunals have been shown to be effective.

I really should write a book entitled "The Varieties of Genocidal Experience."

I will again compare the two differing operative definitions of genocide for DU in general:

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide. "

For the definitions (rather lengthy) in the Rome statue see: http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/99_corr/...

Additional Relevant Statues:

Article 25
Individual criminal responsibility

(e) In respect of the crime of genocide, directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide;

(f) Attempts to commit such a crime by taking action that commences its execution by means of a substantial step, but the crime does not occur because of circumstances independent of the person's intentions. However, a person who abandons the effort to commit the crime or otherwise prevents the completion of the crime shall not be liable for punishment under this Statute for the attempt to commit that crime if that person completely and voluntarily gave up the criminal purpose.

Article 28
Responsibility of commanders and other superiors

In addition to other grounds of criminal responsibility under this Statute for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court:

(a) A military commander or person effectively acting as a military commander shall be criminally responsible for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court committed by forces under his or her effective command and control, or effective authority and control as the case may be, as a result of his or her failure to exercise control properly over such forces, where:

(i) That military commander or person either knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit such crimes; and

(ii) That military commander or person failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress their commission or to submit the matter to the competent authorities for investigation and prosecution.

(b) With respect to superior and subordinate relationships not described in paragraph (a), a superior shall be criminally responsible for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court committed by subordinates under his or her effective authority and control, as a result of his or her failure to exercise control properly over such subordinates, where:

(i) The superior either knew, or consciously disregarded information which clearly indicated, that the subordinates were committing or about to commit such crimes;

(ii) The crimes concerned activities that were within the effective responsibility and control of the superior; and

(iii) The superior failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress their commission or to submit the matter to the competent authorities for investigation and prosecution.

The American Exceptionalism in this thread is astonishing.