JR'S Free Thought Pages
                                                                No Gods  ~ No Masters    ~ No Bullshit

Capitalism’s Psychopathic Authoritarianism, Mutations, Co-options, Boondoggles, Hucksterism, Swindles and Endless Bailouts

Is This Oligarchic System of Socialism for the Rich and Vicious Competition for the Working Classes the Best We Complacent Unthinking Homo Saps Can Do?

Capitalism is not only killing the natural world – its species, waterways, air and soils – it’s atomizing and making many people both mentally and physically sick. This is especially the case with many poor and homeless people as the age of the onset of failing debilitating health, diminishing life spans, disease and ultimate death have in the past few decades increased dramatically.

By JR, November 2024

In the early 1960s University of California student at Berkeley Mario Savio was a huge part of the hopeful Student Free Speech Movement. Part of his speech was referring to the vile immoral capitalist system that has only become more contemptible in devouring, assimilating, exploiting and co-opting everything and anything in its totalitarian agenda in the name of greed, control monopolization and profit. Savio referred to this Godzilla monster as “the machine”. Of course as Noam Chomsky observed in a capitalist culture of hierarchy, authoritarianism, greed and exploitation “moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege”.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious it makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the entire apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!

Introductory Remarks

Power is concentrated within small wealthy elites. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it’s designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” These are the basic dictums of the capitalist world. – Noam Chomsky

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies – Noam Chomsky

The United States happens to be the only state in the world condemned by the World Court for international terrorism – Noam Chomsky

Capitalism is an undemocratic system in which the central institutions are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist. That is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the control of its participants, it’s pointless to talk about democracy - Noam Chomsky

Surely anyone willing to pay attention can see that in 2024 we have a capitalist world order that is totally out of control ravaging and pillaging what’s left of the natural world. This deeply immoral vile system of theft of everything including the human psyche is not about free markets and never has been. Rather, it is monopolization and control of everything so that nothing remains of the public realm including any sense of democratic oversight or community. In addition to the control and manipulation by corporations, the capitalist state and their endless marketing and social media platforms,  Byung-Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power introduces the insidious voluntary self-inflicted mechanisms of globalized digital control and exploitation. This is accomplished seamlessly by devices and media platforms such as mobile phones, Google and the myriad surveillance mechanisms of social media that serve as forms of self-exploitation via releasing reams of voluntary personal data and confessionals (face book is the church) and other personal information used by predatory corporations primarily for marketing purposes. Capitalism’s latest totalitarian scheme (AKA neo-liberalism) is an all-encompassing form of 24-7 domination of one’s life whereby freedom for the average worker (the power of positive thinking combined with the entrepreneur of the self) is a wage slave “career” with exploiters such as Door Dash or Skip the Dishes. Both Marx and Nietzsche considered wage slavery is inherently degrading, a condition enabled by the capitalist state which they also both despised. In today’s neo-liberal fascist financial predation, once touted as “Freedom 55”, a retirement on pensions and benefits back in the late 1970s as everything was beginning to be revoked, rescinded and unravelled for the average worker, most of who will now work until they drop dead. Today it’s called “Freedom 95”.

As Han explains, capitalism has little time for sophisticated contemplation, the intellectual life or for any sub-surface depth of philosophical thought. Capitalism is all about marketing, sales and profit and how mindlessly and quickly one can be compelled to consume. As Korean citizen living in Germany professor Han indicates in his book published initially in German in 2013 (conditions are now far worse today) is an attempt to attach neo-liberal ideology and strategies of subjugation in a single concept, or, rather, operation, which he inscribes in Foucault’s biopolitics, Deleuze’s society of control and Bernard Stiegler’s brain dead passivity, what he called psycho-technological telecracy - the diminution of people to compulsive creatures of consumption through primarily visual spectacle and mind numbing subliminal messages. Han’s brief book is written in a typically aphoristic style reminiscent of Lao Tzu and Friedrich Nietzsche [1a], yet resonating with the counter-cultural messages of contrarian thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj  Zizek. Psychopolitics is a compilation of Han’s previous ruminations on the internalization of power operations, the disappearance of free time, the contemplative life combined with self-imposed participatory surveillance. The book also sheds new light on the intrusions and implication of big data analytics for micro-targeting and the shaping of our digital unconscious paving the way for the dubious agendas of AI which will invariably prove to be a disaster. Its primary objective is that the cherished Western Enlightenment concept of freedom has been an abysmal failure. So much so that it has led to servitude and lack not only of critical thought, but any serious thought at all. As the late Michel Foucault has convincingly argued, centuries of bio-political discipline in educational, religious, medical and penal institutions have led to remote, technologically sophisticated mechanisms of control that dominate fragmented not independent minds, but rather automatons. This has further led to pervasive digital addictions, widespread surveillance and the idolatry of mostly useless data, void of real knowledge, intellectual content and most importantly judgement and wisdom. The ubiquitous data collection, both for the purpose of value extraction, marketing and overt control that Han defines as a “technology of domination” that stabilizes and perpetuates the prevailing capitalist system by means of psychological  terrorism via indoctrination and programming.

One is thereby inculcated and indoctrinated into the mind destroying capitalist system and consequently straight-jacketed into the atomized ruthless banalities and monotonous routines of consumption and competition with all humans beings encountered through life’s assembly line. As domesticated animals for food (highly polluting livestock and pets) are exploding and polluting the planet, all other diminishing and disappearing wildlife, including insects are deemed superfluous and expendable by the drive for money and profit. In one of his many revealing books about the horrors of global capitalism and its corporatist neo-fascist cyberspace surveillance state, Han informs us that:

“The sacred unites those things and values that give validity to a community. The formation of community is its essential trait. Capitalism, by contrast, erases the distinction between the sacred and the profane by totalizing the profane. It makes everything comparable to everything else and thus equal to everything else. Capitalism brings forth a hell of the same.”

Optimism, hope and positive thinking are the antithesis of logic and critical thought and are reserved is for the masses of delusional docile obedient fools; but this inherently immoral system will eventually implode and collapse into its own cess pool of corruption, decadence and depravity as every hierarchical system has throughout human history. There is nothing just, democratic or egalitarian about capitalism in its various mutations and reformulations as conditions continue to deteriorate. The United States is the world’s biggest debtor with zero chance of any of the debt being repaid but the financial parasites and the market manipulators (the latest is the bloated stock market AI bubble) will in the meantime steal everything in sight. Watch the cultural wasteland of television such as pro wrestling or the barbarism of UFC, surf the wicked web, check your hand-held mobile dumb phone and social media misinformation platform and while you’re at it place a few bets on pro sports on the waste of time and money gambling web sites – again on your mind numbing mobile phone, etc. etc, as a few more of your brain cells die. The mega-machine gears of capitalism never stop and will grind on presses the stop button – even the covid-19 pandemic could not stop capitalism and its billionaires like Bill Gates (the biggest owner of US farmland), Jeff Bezos and Leon Skum (AKA dyslexic Elon Musk) from increasing their obscene wealth.

As philosopher of education and social critic Henry Giroux points out:

“Education within the last three decades has diminished rapidly in its capacities to educate young people to be reflective, critical, and socially engaged agents. Despite all attempts to degrade the value and purpose of education, the notion of education as the primary register of the larger culture persists. Yet, under a neo-liberal regime, the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public and higher education as a public good capable of promoting social equality and supporting democracy have become too dangerous for the apostles of neo-liberalism. Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat to a neo-liberal paradigm in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that legitimate it merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone.”

Within the anti-intellectual dumb and dumber capitalism humans are portrayed as morons as we are endlessly heading for a deadly uncertain future of imperialistic wars of profit and a dismal incomplete future from a foggy present and unknown history which has been deemed a superfluity by the financial parasites, corporate cockroaches, billionaires and masters of mankind. Han once again:

“We are losing the capacity for closure and this means that life is becoming purely an additive process. For something to die life must find its own closure. If life is deprived of any possibility of closure it will end in non-time. Because it rushes from sensation to the next, even perception is now incapable of closure…Where everything is connected no closure is possible as the loss of forms of completions that accompany overproduction and over consumption lead to systemic collapse. The neo-liberal imperative of optimization and performance does not allow for any completion. Everything is provisional and incomplete; nothing is final and conclusive…The person that is capable of joint action is also a form of closure. Today, it disintegrates into egos who voluntarily exploit themselves as entrepreneurs of their own selves…Flexibility is enforced by the ruthless destruction of bonds… “The greater power is, the more quietly it works. It just happens: it has no need to draw attention to itself…Indeed power can even use freedom to its own ends… Smart power cozies up to the psyche rather than disciplining it through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs and hopes and preferences in order to reveal all about our lives. Friendly power proves more powerful, as it were, than purely repressive power. It manages not to be seen at all”.

The power held in my so-called smart phone is friendly; it is simply trying to help me become my best self. But in so doing, Han argues, it is leading me to become my own drill master. “People are now master and slave in one”. As my own drill master, as master and slave, I become a docile obedient subject to subtle coercive forces of which I am not fully aware, forces whose ultimate aims I cannot begin to understand – and most don’t even try. This, he suggests, is where the new, insidious smart power lies: within our very psyches. And what is the result? A crisis of freedom since truly smart “power can even use freedom to its own ends” 

In the United States, Canada and other countries of the world that claim to be a “democracy” is farcical, stripped of all its original conception as the will of the people; that is, the vast  free thinking informed un-indoctrinated majority. The substantive differences between  Conservative v Liberal or Republican v Democrat are only superficial as when in power either party of the duopoly support and look after the interests of capitalist wealth and power following the bought and paid for elections. And to refer to capitalism as a free market is a bad joke. And the only free lunch is served to the banking mafia who can create money out of nothing and bail themselves out. In fact the blood sucking capitalist are protected from competition and the chaotic vagaries of the stock markets which are rigged and manipulated beyond belief, one of which is insider trading today pretty much restricted to stock buybacks which like much else on the markets was deemed a criminal act. Banks, other financial predators and sources of corporate power are monstrosities of the capitalist state and the enabling laws that allow them legalized theft.

Capitalism is and always has been antithetical to democracy - a plutocratic and oligarchic system and source of special pleading and privilege with laws crafted too secure their interests and right to unlimited profit and monopolization. The coercive enclosure of public lands, control of real estate, subsidies and government preferential tax treatment, large scale absentee ownership and more recently with behemoths such as Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies, in addition to pharmaceutical companies make billions in profits from the disgusting scams and swindles of “intellectual property rights”. It is estimated that today what are referred to as “Hedge Funds” and “Asset Management Corporations” such as Black Rock, Vanguard and UBS control over $145 trillion in assets up from roughly $85 trillion in 2016. These parasites often have the controlling shares in some of the largest global companies and are responsible for most of the trades many triggered by algorithms on the outrageous illicit major stock markets throughout the world.

This paper attempts to explain the sociopathic human behaviour that motivates corporate and banking CEOs and their hierarchies of management  and the repulsive ideologies of gangster capitalism under the deceptive misnomer “neo-liberalism” that have been brutally imposed during the past 50 years. Our misconceptions regarding our malleable notions of liberalism and human nature and the equally odious manipulations and endless iterations of capitalist hierarchies, conservative elites, limousine liberals, Christian fascism and other forms of sociopathic authoritarianism. Banks for example including the authoritarian privatized unaccountable central banks such as the US Federal Reserve and World Bank (WB) are powerful global mafia pure and simple. Numerous injustices such as grotesque economic inequalities are historically unprecedented as the wealthy oligarchs, the growth of obscene multi-billionaires who align themselves with far right wing autocrats and their enablers in the corporatist state who perpetuate this hideous state of affairs such as rampant homelessness. Moreover, humans are facing multiple existential threats from a variety of sources, least of all, the so-called “climate crisis”, a euphemistic expression for global heating, widespread species extinction, contamination of soils, waterways and air, over-consumption, overpopulation, pollution and ecosystem collapse. The prognosis for all living things on earth including the procrastinating increasingly delusional, indoctrinated and ignorant humans is indeed grim. Moreover, assholes and bad behaviour are becoming the norm as witnessed by TV ads that pollute every square millimetre of space on the planet.

Although I believe it’s far too late, for even a minimal probability of survival we require the semi-intelligent apes called humans to abandon both the state undemocratic capitalist political and economic systems that have intellectually and environmentally characterized our failing planet for the last half-millennium. We are heading for calamities that will devastate the natural world.

The major villain is capitalism and its fundamental unsustainable doctrines of infinite growth-at-any-cost, and the state system which supports and protects it. It must abandon its oversized authoritarian model and submit to a world of small-scale, non-pollutant, non-aggressive peaceful direct democracy societies that can exist on few resources and human-scale self-government. And as a root case for illness, isolation and dysfunction, capitalism is quite literally making may people sick psychologically and physically as millions in the US and Canada are taking anti-depression and anti-psychotic drugs, including pills for the epidemic of obesity.

Not too many years ago comedians and social critics (the good ones such as George Carlin and Robin Williams are now gone) were complaining that many dimwitted corporate leaders such as Goldman Sachs’ Jeff Blankstein who following the 2008 global financial meltdown and disgusting bailouts declared, “We’re doing God’s work”. How can one respond to something so incredibly absurd? But we had many corruption, thievery and bag men such as Lyin’ Brian Mulroney and Bill Clinton who ought to be serving long prison terms. And of course there were the village idiots, buffoons and intellectual dwarfs such as the two Bushes and the bumbling Ronald Ray Gun who were instrumental in the market collapses of 2007-09. By the late 1990s we were privileged with outrageous bloviating charlatans, neo-fascists, buffoons and autocrats. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsanaro, Scott Morrison, Narendi Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu (Nutter Yahoo – a psychopathic war criminal who belongs in a mental institution), Rodrigo Duterte (now replaced by a son of the infamous corrupt Marcos clan who robbed the Philippines of tens of billions of dollars), Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Javier Milei, Geert Wilders – just a short list. These are deeply flawed, immoral depraved human beings, most probably outright psychopaths. Democracy is of course a cruel joke and always has been; we live in the era of kamikaze capitalism and kleptomaniac killer clowns. It cannot and will not last (Second Law of Thermodynamics) and sadly will get worse. In Canada we have the potential for far right wing anti-science homophobic anti-vaccination conservative creeps (in BC John Rustad) to take the government in British Columbia on October 19^th and next year in the upcoming Federal Election with the dimwitted demagogue Pierre Poilievre.

UBC Professor Emeritus Robert Hare is considered the world’s leading authority on psychopathic behavior with his books Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits. One can consult the widely accepted” Hare Checklist” used to test for the nasty characteristics of a psychopath. One can also read the excellent books The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl, a PhD student of Hare’s and The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson who has quoted Hare as saying, “I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.” But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths?’ the interviewer asks. ‘”Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob. “Corporate and political psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” Who in hell were the degenerate criminal bastard banks and other corporate vultures and psychopaths that demolished the global economy in 2007-09 and were then bailed out by the capitalist nanny state to the tune of multi-trillions of $. The cost to taxpayers in the US alone was $17 trillion. They corporate con men were bailed out and granted get out of jail free visas and then many of these same corporate crooks were invited into the Obama administration after Bush II in the 2008 election, the illiterate village idiot who orchestrated the global financial larcenous fiasco. How is such a debased and grossly immoral system of capitalism still tolerated by the masses? Where are the millions of people in the streets with baseball bats, clubs, pitchforks, pillories and firing squads?

Furthermore, anyone who thinks we live in democracies based on bottom-up community, solidarity, ethical oversight and justice for all at any time in our whitewashed history and has ever experienced the real thing throughout our nauseating history plagued by obsessive power which is invariably corrupt, cruel, acquisitive and manipulative needs a brain transplant. I challenge the reader to cite just one. Some indigenous cultures at least before they were subjected to racism, genocide and slavery by so-called enlightened Christian Europeans may have come close to democratic societies as even their women had far more freedom than the pious Europeans.[1]

"The chairman of the board may sincerely believe that his every waking moment is dedicated to serving human needs. Were he to act on these delusions instead of pursuing profit and market share, he would no longer be chairman of the board." - Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Pluto Press, 1991, p.19

During the countless recurring crises capitalism invariably turns to fascism to save itself as it did in the 1920s and 30s and is doing now; the cancer of capitalism ought to have ended after the global market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed but the dry rot of monopoly, gross inequality and depravity have only accelerated especially in the past fifty years. Recent studies claim that by 2030 the richest 1% will control two-thirds of global wealth. But up to and long before the second odious debacle of the global stock market meltdown and nauseating bailouts with trillions of phantom dollars there were ominous signs of moral decay and outright criminality by the financial oligarchies and the lickspittle government lackeys who enabled it. Capitalism is not only an undemocratic mentally ill patient void of an ethical compass for which capitalists and their business and corporate entities have more rights than ordinary humans, if it was human, capitalism would be declared a deranged psychopath. Democracy is of course a fraud as political and economic rights are only conceded when the ruling classes fear revolution.

Consider labour rights of workers in our phoney enlightened Western “democracies” that were reluctantly conceded during the Great Depression as fear of revolution by our capitalist masters who wield power over us (with the backing of police, spy agencies and the military if required) was very real. These “rights” were of course only meant to be temporary as after the Second World War, far right politicians were scheming to restore the tyranny of capitalism to its normal conditions of neo-fascist power to profit and exploit workers as in the past. By the late 1970s and into the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney years, the demolition of trade unions, rollback of worker’s rights and restoration of normal predatory capitalism and privatization of everything was well under way as the dogmas of neo-liberalism (AKA fascism) is now as of 2024 essentially a dictatorship of anything goes predatory financial plunder. Notwithstanding the wretched lives of unliveable low paid gig jobs, permanently unemployed and underemployed, wage slaves and the homeless, the lives of the vast majority of working people, even those with a liveable subsistence pay spent in workplaces that operate by actively barring all possibilities of personal development and fulfilment, their futures look bleak with financial security and retirement a chimera. The endless bombardment of mindless marketing and advertising on TV and the internet repeatedly promise fulfilment to potential customers, which must be continually renewed without ever being satisfied. For most, daily life is so exhausting that even free time spent in mindless forms of stupidity such as buying useless lottery tickets and waste of money and precious time betting on pro sports is often spent merely recuperating in preparation for the next day, when it’s not spent engaging in the aforementioned forms of escapism, not infrequently through harmful and self-destructive addictive routines. For yet others, engaging in rewarding activities such the prohibitive costs of college or the intellectual life is too costly - or the free time allotted insufficient. And this is not to speak of the innumerable people whose living circumstances are so wretched, whether lacking shelter, food, or a basic sense of security, that even the concept of free time has melted into an undistinguished stream of mindless entertainment such as the banalities and cultural wasteland of superfluous technology, social media and hundreds of idiotic cable TV channels, what education and cultural critic Neil Postman recognized even several decades ago as “amusing ourselves to death”.

A brilliant contemporary social and education is Henry Giroux who in a recent post on Counterpunch titled “Resisting Youth in the Age of Fascist Dream Worlds wrote:

“Hyper-capitalism is the death knell of democracy. It reduces everything to a commodity, monetizing and pathologizing every aspect of life. The blind faith in markets and unfettered individualism has dismantled the social state, ravaged the environment, and fueled staggering inequality. By divorcing economic activity from its social costs, liberals have obliterated civic culture, creating a vacuum filled by despair and alienation. Into that vacuum emerged a band of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, radical Christian nationalists, and a cruel band of misogynists and neo-liberal fascists.

Let’s be clear: liberals have never escaped the shadow of Reagan, whose anti-government rhetoric and racist spectacles reshaped the political landscape or that of Milton Friedman, whose dogmatic worship of capitalism and contempt for social responsibility set the stage for decades of exploitation. Liberals have not only failed to dismantle these legacies—they’ve deepened them. They accelerated the war on Black women, expanded the incarceration state and gutted the working class with NAFTA and under Obama who cozied up to bankers while millions of Americans lost their homes and livelihoods in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

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This generation of youth recognizes that education and culture are vital battlegrounds where fascist ideologies wage war through manufactured ignorance, systemic racism, and the deliberate erosion of imagination. They understand that culture and power are not abstract notions but concrete forces that shape agency, politics, and the possibilities for liberation. For these young activists, the relevance of education goes far beyond academic settings—they see it as central to shaping the broader political landscape.

They are acutely aware of what pedagogical terrorism looks like: the suppression of critical thinking, the distortion of history, and the imposition of ideologies designed to stifle dissent and dehumanize the oppressed. At the same time, they understand the transformative potential of an emancipatory pedagogy, one that challenges authoritarianism, fosters critical consciousness, and empowers communities to reclaim their voices and futures. Education, in their eyes, is a democratic space where the fight for justice and freedom begins.

Youth resistance has become a powerful force for the revitalization of cultural politics and the role of free speech and the building of social movements, while stressing the importance of education as a democratizing force. The current wave of protests across the country, particularly in support of Palestinian rights and sovereignty, illustrates this growing momentum. Young people are crafting a critical pedagogy that not only resists the encroachments of authoritarianism but also actively promotes civic engagement and reclaims culture as a site of power, resistance, and empowerment.

In this struggle, they have become “border crossers,” bridging divides between academia and society, theory and practice, education and action. Their work is transformative, mobilizing social movements and redefining education as a tool for resistance and liberation. They remind us that the classroom is not a retreat from politics but a crucible for imagining and building a more just and democratic world.

Unlike liberals, they are keenly aware of how neo-liberalism has transformed universities into market-driven institutions that prioritize profit over democratic values, civic responsibility, and critical thought. They have voiced concerns about the rise of “neoliberal fascism,” a fusion of corporate power and authoritarianism, which erodes academic freedom and marginalizes public intellectuals. Given their critiques the corporatization of universities, which reduces education to careerism and consumerism, while silencing dissent, they have not only criticized higher education for investing in the war machine and Israel’s genocidal war, but they have also called  for universities to reclaim their democratic mission by fostering critical thinking, resisting authoritarianism, and addressing social and environmental injustices.

Against the rising tide of fascism in the United States and across the globe, young people have bravely asserted their voices, pushed up against the forces and pedagogical instruments of domination, and crossed boundaries to share their hope and the possibilities for a new world. In doing so, they offer not just hope but a defiant call to dismantle the vast machinery of pedagogical terrorism wielded by the financial elite—figures like Elon Musk. They have not merely critiqued the disimagination machines and cultural apparatuses that churn out lies, conspiracy theories, and assaults on critical agency and resistance. They have envisioned something greater: the reinvention of democratic practices and collective struggle, emphasizing cultural transformation as indispensable in the battle against fascist ideologies.”

This dismal state of affairs, and the psychopathic nature of the systemically corrupt corporate culture was the prophetic verdict of law professor Joel Bakan, author of the ground breaking 2006 book The Corporation and the follow-up New Corporation in 2020 and the excellent documentary based on the books. It is arguably the most authoritarian socio-economic doctrine of all the historical tyrannical precursors such as monarchy, theocracy and the myriad forms of dictatorship. In our abominable socio-economic system of greed and uncaring exploitation called Capitalism that is now a global disgrace, the bureaucratic hierarchies called corporations such as any of our banks, financial institutions and other parasitic corporations were actually human they would meet the criteria for a psychopath and be detained in an asylum for incurable psychopaths. This is the verdict of Bakan and UBC psychology professor and most well known expert on the nature of psychopaths, Dr. Robert Hare who created a checklist. Hare has written two books on his research, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits, the latter on the moral pathology of corporations and their profit/greed ridden manipulations and total lack of empathy.

The American Psychiatric Association identified the pervasive and growing preponderance of psychopathic abominations and perversions of both humans and institutions as serious mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The consensus today is that at least 5% of the world population of homo saps are psychopaths which are listed in the DSM as “antisocial personality disorder”. In popular culture such as novels and film the affliction is depicted with horrifying images of violence, horror and evil. When we think of the term psychopath, many people tend to envision someone like Hannibal Lecter in the movie Silence of the Lambs, the Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen characters in the 1973 movie Badlands and notorious sexual predators and killers like Ted Bundy. Many of you may recall the scene from A Clockwork Orange in which young thugs kick and beat up an elderly helpless homeless man. In Canada there’s the shocking case of Ken and Barbie Doll psychopaths Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka which was so gruesome it was made into at least two movies. There are many more examples that could be cited. And surely the disturbing heartless uncaring commanding officers (“they died wonderfully”) in the 1957 anti-war movie , Paths of Glory that takes place during World War I - featuring a brilliant performance by Kirk Douglas -are classic instances of heartless psychopaths.

Researchers who have expanded on Hare’s inquiries have argued that not 1% but rather currently 5% of the general population are incurable psychopaths; hence there would be several in your neighbourhood. One of these entitlement bullies and manipulative and harassment jerks lives across the street from my wife and I. I’m no fan of cops, but I and at least one of my neighbours have had to call the police on this intimidating know nothing asshole on several occasions in the past few years. In The Psychopathy of Everyday Life, Martin Kantor (2006) argues how the majority of psychopaths are not necessarily lawbreakers or violent, but are living everywhere among us. Kantor gives a profile of those less serious and more common psychopaths, showing how they are blended in with our friends; families and neighbourhoods informing us that they are in some ways more dangerous to society than severe psychopaths who could potentially maim or kill you. Most of us naturally trust our fellow human beings and tend to think that people generally have good intentions. We can hardly imagine that there are people who deliberately try to exploit, manipulate and even destroy us. In fact, encountering a psychopath can turn our notion of humanity completely upside down. The aforementioned psychopath expert Robert Hare offered a profile of those psychopaths as people “without conscience”, the title of one of his books. In his book Hare mentions the checklist he created a litany of symptoms and behaviours pointing to their primary characteristics as lack of caring about others, remorse or empathy along with pathological egocentricity, lying, callousness, superficial charm and phoney friendships that are part of his manipulations, selfishness and egotism. Many also suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect of narcissism, inflated egos and exaggeration of their intelligence, abilities and skills. Donald Trump anyone?

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system - Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and activist leader for more than fifty years in numerous battles for social justice

Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds - Martin Luther King, ‘Drive to End Slums’ (1967)

Nothing is more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all - Fred Hampton, Promising young Black Panther leader murdered in his bed by the FBI and Chicago Police (1969)

Since 1492 and the cannibalistic Columbus followed by rapacious Christian European settlers in the New World have acquired the property of not only other land owners by pillaging across the planet through the Americas to dispossess Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere from Australia to Asia. Into the Middle East, South Sea Islands, and Africa; they want it all. This avaricious theft has accelerated in the past 40 years with an anti-democratic authoritarian profit driven infinite economic growth model of corporate capitalism and the privatization of everything and anything. The massive sucking sound of real estate vermin and territorial plunder you hear seems endless on a finite planet that has placed all life forms on the extinction list and any threadbare democracy that may have existed has been obliterated. FDR’s New Deal following the 1929 global crash during the Great Depression was always deemed temporary as fascism arose (as it often does to block any modicum of socialism) as the markets took three decades to recover. The New Deal social programs were never intended to be permanent and after World War II with the McCarthyism purges of unions and left wing groups and clandestine and often violent anti-communist witch hunts both conservative and liberals began the plans to dismantle everything that conflicted with the drive for untrammelled anti-community disease of capitalism and its drive for unlimited profits. During the fabricated Cold War both the FBI and CIA terrorized anything on the left, especially the Communists parties who were not delusional reformist socialists but libertarian socialist revolutionaries so they had to be crushed and eliminated. And about 20% of the CPUSA members were FBI plants and informants.

By the 1980s it was in full swing as far right wing government began the decimation of trade unions, rescinding of social assistance and other social programs. Any semblance of ersatz democracy, social justice and economic parity making life at least tolerable for all and to not have to live in old age poverty stricken has been destroyed by corporate greed and profit before all else. These conditions had its infancy with centuries of colonialism and the theft of Native American land, genocide of its inhabitants and the demolition of the commons. Those radicals, environmentalist, anti-authoritarians, critical thinkers and who believe in moral principles such as the golden rule and who challenge the status quo of endless growth on a finite planet are called “extremists” or even “terrorists”. But the real extremists and terrorists are those who destroy life for profit. And since Columbus little has changed in the moral landscape as I write in October of 2024.

Globalization, corporate fascism, banker fraud and the endless bailouts, the biggest theft in history added to the creation of the global war on terror, the war on drugs, endless wars for oil and resources, global pollution of air waterways and soils, ecosystem destruction, war debris everywhere including the bottom of our contaminated oceans, depleted uranium and endless wars for extraction abroad, while any semblance of political freedom and real bottom up democracy has been extinguished. It’s a bleak future facing humanity with global heating, rampant wildfires, floods and other climate calamities. These facts are available for anyone with sufficient curiosity and desire for the truth. You could start with Canadian Professor Anthony Hall’s incredibly informative and well argued two volume over one thousand page books called The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl With One Spoon, Part One and Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism. These books were published in the aftermath of the 2007-09 global market meltdown and multi-trillion dollar bailouts of criminal corporations and bandit banks. It traces the sordid ideology of capitalist theft all the way back to Columbus’ invasion of Turtle Island. No one is ever held accountable for capitalism’s abominations, including the 2007-09 global market debacle and subsequent nauseating public bailouts of corporate and financial crooks. As Martin Luther King remarked on the cusp of his likely insider job assassination in the 1968 year of global unrest, anti-war marches, social justice demonstrations and turmoil, what we have is “socialism for the rich and dog eat dog capitalism for the working classes.” This was a gross understatement given the dire socio-economic conditions of 2024.[2] The stark reality of capitalism is that t has, like every other tyranny in history, been a deeply divided coercive class system enabled by the state from grotesque billionaires, financial oligarchs, power elites, the corrupt and rigged electoral system, the wage slave and working poor (Skip the Dishes, Uber and Door Dash anyone?) treated as commodities to those millions of homeless and  destitute living on the streets.

From its very beginnings there have always been simultaneously advocates and critics of capitalism. Political freedom has always been a joke for those on the left such as communists, Black Panthers, anarchists, anti-war and environmental activists and countless others on the left as their agendas are attacked, misconstrued and criminalized by both conservative and liberals who control the endless indoctrination of the education systems and corporate media. During the counterculture of the 1960s and into the early 70s as the attacks began on the unions, social programs, public utilities and health care, pensions and other social programs for working people and the poor, young people began to protest the ersatz democracy and the ongoing horrors of the Vietnam War. One of the important college organizations in the US was Students for a Democratic Society which was quite obviously created under the assumption that “democracy” did not exist, never did exist and has become even more remote today. Radical leftist movements such as SDS, Black Panthers and leftist organizations were invariably and consistently infiltrated and even co-opted (as was the Communist Party from its infancy) by spy agencies such as the FBI and CIA. By the 1970s SDS and many other progressive movements were destroyed. The ludicrous notion that capitalism is synonymous with democracy is a cruel joke as it has created an oligarchic wealthy elite class (the richest 100 people now have more wealth than half the global population of 4 billion) and grotesque conditions of economic inequality. Moreover it certainly has not solved the serious issue of global poverty, destruction of the natural world, runaway global warming, bellicose militarism and ongoing imperialist wars.

The 9-11blowback attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the on the Pentagon were conveniently invoked to justify and expand the grab for wealth, energy and resources worldwide – and the infamous GWOT (Global War on Terror). In the second book Dr. Hall compares the similar treatment of indigenous peoples by both Canadian and US authorities as both governments are racist mass murders and rapacious thieves. You will read details of US, the province of British Columbian and Canadian theft and development of former Indian lands; you will find shocking and nauseating facts not taught in the whitewashed pabulum in high school history courses. Our future is looking extremely grim with multiple existential threats and if we continue to allow the corporate oligarchs and banking mafia to continue their greed, exploitation, ecosystem destruction and theft of everything in their path, we’ll be lucky to survive the 21^st century. The signs are everywhere for anyone sufficiently inquisitive. Nothing short of global revolution will save us and in fact many climate scientists inform us it’s too late;  just prepare for the coming dystopian Armageddon.

And don’t look for the wealthy elites and the liberal and conservative enablers in our farcical so-called “democracies to change anything. They are like boot licking statues permanently fixed into place by wealth and power. The world is locked into a New Gilded Age that makes the Mark Twain Robber Baron Gilded Age era pale in comparison to the current neo-liberal dictatorship of capital where the rich and powerful con men and hucksters pretend to fight for economic equality and justice in ways that do not in any way threaten the social order and their position at the pyramid of oligarchic power. With their phoney charities and hypocritical lame attempts at philanthropy which is a huge tax write-off for Gates who now owns more farm land in the US than any other American. His phoney monopolistic intellectual property rights” are justified by his PC operating system that he purchased originally from IBM. Nothing created or invented out of a vacuity or totally unique; after all there are multiple precursors that lead to anything” new”. Intellectual property rights are one of countless scams concocted by capitalist con men. These hypocrite halfwit hucksters who for the most part come from privileged backgrounds like Gates and Musk redefine themselves as self-made men who are saviours of the destitute, homeless and impoverished in devious ways that preserve the status quo with themselves perched at the top of the authoritarian capitalist pyramid. They and their corrupt corporations have legions of lobbyists which are in reality bribery and influence peddlers who grease the palms of equally corrupt neo-con and neo-lib politicians.

Anyone interested in how this dystopian morass all came about can merely read Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754) who wrote:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

Once the commons (that is, all the culture and land of the earth that belongs to no one) was confiscated by the monarchs and lords of capital in the 18^th and 19^th century that kick started the infamous industrial revolution, its didn’t take long to consider the privatization of everything, even products of the intellect which is invariably parasitic on prior knowledge and “discoveries: The objection to these transformations began long before Marx, the Levelers and the Jacobins being just two examples. Today there is nothing sacrosanct for the privatization of anything and everything which includes the privatization of rapidly diminishing fresh water; is our contaminated air next on the list. That will be $10 for a gulp of antiseptic air says Fresh Air Inc. Biotechnology, medicines, AI, genomics, phony patent rights like “intellectual property” that made billions for freeloading leeches like Bill Gates are merely other forms of dispossession that differ only in kind from the enclosures of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Soon capitalism will totally destroy biodiversity and the natural world and none of this will matter. The law of entropy ensures that everything dies and this is true of all life forms as does empires and toxic ideologies such as capitalism. In any event with global warming, dying oceans, 8 billion humans, their pets, industrial agriculture and livestock consuming and gobbling up  while and using the earth as a trash can for centuries, we’ll be finished as a species as will all others, all of which are currently in extinction mode. [3]

For the average European, America is both appalling and alluring in the same way that for the average socialist, capitalist modernity that like a mutating plague subsumes and devours everything, is both horrifying and debilitating. The United States is, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed during a tour of the country at the height of the Reagan era, “a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence.” But, sitting in a Manhattan bar or racing toward a vanishing point on an endless empty freeway, it is hard to shake the feeling that among this mess there is “something of the dawning of the universe.” Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in one of his many revealing books pointed out that every era could expect a rerun of fascism in new and differing materializations. [4]

The Roman Empire collapsed from endless wars, decadence, corruption moral degeneracy and an overextended empire addicted to conquest and exploitation. Similarly the British Empire collapsed ungracefully after World War II but their odious, anachronistic, disgraceful and debauched monarchy continues to exist as a symbol of power, keeping the credulous masses docile and compliant. The symptoms of decline and impending collapse of the US Empire have become patently obvious in the past several decades. Their economic model of imperialism, militarism, infinite growth and mindless consumption on a finite planet is unsustainable that currently become a global dogma with profit the only raison d'être, literally co-opting and overpowering all else. Any country that challenges domination and hegemony by United States corporate or military power will invariably be the target of a sustained propaganda and demonized campaign and failing the success of that, become a target for political intervention or military invasion and was done in Cuba, Iraq, Chile and elsewhere. Lately the lies consistently issued in an invective against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of intensity. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in American corporate media outlets.

Not unlike Cuba, Venezuela has much higher literacy rates than the US and it cares for its citizens with universal government health care and a plethora of other social services. The United States is able to enforce its sanctions, and force other countries to comply, because of its stranglehold on the world financial system which is primarily the universality of US dollar for most international transactions.

The United States government holds power that no country has ever held, not even Britain at the height of its thieving brutal Empire. And that government, regardless of which party or what political leader is in the White House or in control of Congress, is ruthless in using its power to impose its dominance and control. And that government also covets access to Venezuelan oil on its own terms, not those of Venezuela. We do well to consider the full spectrum of international interests before drawing conclusions about a Global South country, particularly one long the target of lies, sanctions, violent coup attempts and military maneuvers.

Although written in the late 1960s Guy Debord’s influential Society of the Spectacle describes demented modern capitalist societies as accurately as anyone and if he were alive today. Debord would be shocked by its far more gross stupidity and moral depravity than when he wrote his brilliant analysis in the 1960s when at least hope was still alive for a better world. Spectacle is an apt metaphor for life in an increasingly atomized, discombobulated and disengaged capitalist society of the techno-zombie cell phone walking dead. The notion of spectacle suggests that we are ADHD mesmerized, infatuated, spellbound, bewitched, beguiled, and eventually seduced by a perpetually unfolding market extravaganza of superfluous commodities, postmodern images and representations, the overwhelming majority of which are demonstrably mind numbing and idiotic. Today people are depicted on TV marketing as hopeless and helpless unthinking morons often counterproductive to the intellectual life, contentment, community, common sense parenting and wellbeing. All this as global IQs of 8 billion homo saps are in free fall.

But not unlike former empires, the signs of impending societal and economic collapse are everywhere. Corporate corruption, financial predation, widespread pollution, ecosystem degeneration, species extinction, lack of ethical understanding, pervasive bad behavior and the mollycoddling of our youth by a misconstrued self-esteem is just for starters. The banality of mass culture that now includes “anything goes capitalism” whereby online gambling on pro sports, WWF and UFC as blood sport where two people are caged up like wild beasts and beat their opponent into submission, the removal of great books and lack of critical thinking in the school curriculum, narcissism, loneliness, homelessness, epistemic and moral relativism, mass marketing that depicts people as bumbling idiots, poor parenting, lack of community, empathy and caring,, out of control obesity, lack of self-control and self-discipline, addictions to medicinal and street drugs including of course the ever-present cell phone that serves as a pacifier. Decline has been detected in the nuclear family, illiteracy and innumeracy, psychological dysfunction and despair, falling IQs, death of a liberal education that has been corporatized at all levels, despite five centuries of a scientific and humanist revolution, persistent widespread delusions such as fairy tale religious pabulum and other superstition nonsense such as astrology, New Age gobbledegook and much more. Two of the most common of numerous irrationalities and cognitive malfunctions and fallacies are cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias which are rampant among many who cannot get accept reality and the truth so get through the day with comforting supernatural mythologies, gods, demons, angels and other absurdities. As the great novelist and anti-capitalist Upton Sinclair wrote almost 100 years ago, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”  

Unfortunately humans are not unlike other animals dominated by both natural and unnatural forces most do not comprehend; the only difference being humans can recognize their ignorance. The beginning of the end of the hopeful atmosphere of the 1960s counterculture, expressed in the uplifting music imagining a better world, was symbolized in the closing scene of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes [5] with the Statue of Liberty mostly submerged in the desolated sandy beach.

Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination and racism – mainly exercised outside of Europe. It is highly significant that many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism – Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

The truth is markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and locales throughout human history but capitalism is a relatively recent phenomenon which has perpetuated its authoritarian ideology for roughly five centuries. What makes capitalism unique isn’t its demented form of manipulated markets, but that it is organized around narcissistic nihilistic hyper-individualism and perpetual infinite growth on a planet that is finite. It is an unsustainable system that exploits both the natural world and expanding quantities of human labor into profit driven cycles of wealth accumulation in fewer and fewer hands functioning according to a simple formula of “take far more than you give back”. The drive for ever diminishing economic growth has prompted pleas for women to have more kids, on an insanely grotesquely overpopulated world of 8 billion that can sustain at most 3 billion. W C Fields was surely right when he said “anyone who hates kids and dogs can’t be all bad”.

The ecological crisis is an inevitable consequence of this immoral and untenable system. Once we understand this fact, new questions arise such as: how did this toxic undemocratic system of greed and exploitation take hold?  The typical ruse is that it’s in our human nature to be self-interested, maximizing assholes, what some idiotic economists have described as homo economicus, the greed ridden profit-seeking automatons that we read in boring economics textbooks. We are taught that this natural tendency gradually broke through the constraints of feudalism, put an end to serfdom and gave rise to riches and prosperity for all. That’s the bullshit fairy tale story, like the meritocracy myth and self-made man fairy tale that is repeated so often by the churches, schools and corporate controlled mass media that everyone just accepts it. Like our phony democracies, it’s an inculcated propaganda story of manufactured consent as Noam Chomsky called it that has become so entrenched in our culture and unthinking grey matter. But it’s simply not true; this capitalist bedtime story didn’t just pop up out of nowhere or by some evolutionary process. There was no smooth, natural transition from feudalism to capitalism; it was a political agenda concocted by ruling elites that have always existed in some form or another. Truthful historians have a much more interesting and significantly depressing story to tell that reveals verities and ugly facts about how our economy actually works and clues about how we can change it.

The infinite growth model of capitalism applied to a finite planet was destined for disaster from its infancy in the 16^th century. And capitalism’s evolution has not been an uplifting story, especially for workers and the natural environment which is in a death spiral. We typically describe capitalism with familiar descriptors such as “free markets” which it has turned out is not very “free” but rather corrupt and manipulated to serve the elite capitalist classes. But markets and trade have existed for centuries and can be traced to hunter gatherer societies. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history such as monarchy, feudalism and theocracy is that grounded in the dogma of constant exploitation, expansion and “economic growth”. But, who benefits from this dubious model of ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Growth and profit are the prime dictates of capital but not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but, like cancer, growth for its own sake. And it has a hierarchy and totalitarian logic to it which are intrinsic to any corporation of large business enterprise. And we’re told by power elites that technology such as AI or the electric vehicle will save us. Dream on. Moreover, in surveys the majority of people in both Europe and North America (higher in the global south) agree that capitalism is intrinsically undemocratic and unfair and that its corporations and financial entities such as banks are hopelessly corrupt. Following Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Simon Fraser University professor Donald Gutstein has written about the propaganda, lies, deceit and mythologies of big business, corporate controlled media, their lying lobbyists and boot licking political puppets:

Business must obscure the extent to which corporate power is anti-democratic, resulting in a crucial need for corporate sponsored propaganda. Public opinion must be managed to prevent it from becoming hostile to corporations and the big banks….A democratically elected government with a mandate from voters to protect jobs, regulate environmentally destructive industry and insure business pays its fait r share of taxes, presents big risks to business limiting a company’s ability to produce ever-increasing profits to their executives and shareholders.

 In the 1980s a bottom up grassroots movement called the Situationist International went far beyond the standard Marxists critiques of greed, exploitation and profit before all else and extended it to not only traditional work-place struggles for fairness, decent pay and civilized working conditions but to the pervasive hum drum, mindless marketing, banality, hypocrisy, tedium, conformism, dullness and anti-intellectualism that permeate everyday life. With the current stock market hysteria regarding AI which very well ought to be aborted, we’ll see much more of the same that may include hundreds of millions of job losses word wide, this time many from not only professional and white collar workers, but policing, military, and governance from what threadbare “democracy” that currently exists. AI has the potential for moral conundrums “solved” by algorithms that will perhaps extend into education, law and medicine thus creating chaos and instability.

For 97% of human life on earth, we have lived in harmony with the natural world as indigenous populations considered all life and the natural world interconnected and sacrosanct, private property was non-existent and we have been cooperative with our neighbours even if only as a survival mechanism. [6] From its infancy coterminous with the privatization of the commons which was referred to as the “enclosures”, we were informed by the ruling aristocracies and moneyed classes as early as the 16^th century (later reiterated by Adam Smith) that it’s our “nature” to be self-interested, self-serving agents motivated by selfishness and greed.  This notion of so-called human nature (people as uncaring self-seeking compassionless automatons) has been continually rammed into our minds, culminating with Margaret Thatcher’s ludicrous assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. But we have no reason to believe any of this capitalist hype and propaganda that was graphically expressed by the Wall Street vulture capitalist creep Gordon “greed is good” Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street.

When capitalism is seriously threatened from below and the propaganda is not working, violence is invoked, typically by the police, the existence of which has its origins with capitalism and its exploitation of workers and the poor. In fact policing has its roots in Adam Smith’s writings and the subsequent long barbaric path of capitalist exploitation, imperialism and plunder. It continues with the current financial parasitism of globalized zombie capitalism that has now resorted to cannibalizing its own people such as low paying gig work and debt peonage of young people exploited by predatory private banks in the form of debilitating college student loans. No one can deny that police exist to serve and protect capitalist wealth and power. If anyone is sufficiently interested in capitalism’s primary theological guru look no further than Adam Smith and his sacred book of scriptures called The Wealth of Nations. In this1776 bible of capitalism he connected the actual details of the exploitive labour process to the world market of commodities taken to its neo-liberal extreme of profit before all else and transforming everything on earth including people into a commodity. Smith wrote: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the sanctity of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”  His student, Adam Ferguson, reiterated quite plainly by rightly claiming that “wealth comes from inequality.” In other words slaves and the working poor created wealth - although not for them – but rather the boss man and owner of capital. The same relationship exists today, perhaps even worse for the worker and yes slaves which still do exist.

These ideas first appeared as “police” as reported in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Police (c.1763) delivered in Glasgow, a new hub in the Atlantic economy for banking and commerce of tobacco plantations.  He defined police as “cleanliness, security, cheapness and plenty.” At first, then, “police” encompassed health, commodity, market, privatization, labour, and force. Already policy makers and profiteers were studying the intricate political relationship between low wages and high food prices. Although political economy and police violence were soon to separate as different limbs within the ruler’s body politics, they never lost their actual association with its heart. The goal was to make people work longer and harder. Adam Smith’s contemporary wrote An Essay on Trade and Commerce (1770). “A multitude of people being drawn together in a small territory will raise the price of provisions; but, at the same time, if the police are good, it must keep down the price of labour.” The poor house must become “a house of terror.” The workers are “a many-headed monster which everyone should oppose.” To establish the six-day working week, “a good police must be established.”

And the shocking truth is this: in the 21^st century the world is dominated by a socio-economic dystopian Godzilla called capitalism aided and abetted by elected liberal and conservative capitalist political lackeys and ass kissers in what are throughout the world called “democracies”. The odious system of privatized profit and socialized losses operates on a simple formula of taking back far more both from the natural world and workers than it gives back. This cruel totalizing authoritarianism is at best a cruel joke that has been perpetrated on the masses by ruling oligarchs throughout recorded history and capitalism may be the worst of all systems socio-economic tyrannies including theocracy and monarchy. And the capitalist system didn’t come about by public assent but rather by violent takeover by plunder of the commons and mass murder of naysayers, dissenters and revolutionaries that has its origins in the early feudalistic 14^th century all occurring with the complicity of feudal lords and the Christian church hierarchy.

Perhaps we are now truly living in a kakistocracy? For those not familiar with this term it can be defined as a state (a bad idea from its inception) and its government led by incompetent buffoons and moral degenerates.  

But this docility and acceptance of corrupt authoritarian kleptocratic states of affairs is consistent with the free fall in IQs and general condition of idiocy of its unthinking ADHD cell phone addicted “citizens”.

How many recall the movie from about two decades ago called Idiocracy? It has become all too close to reality as capitalism which has since its arrival been intrinsically without moral principle has descended into an ethical abyss from which there is no return. It cannot and therefore will not be fixed.

                   When Dotards Run the World - CounterPunch.org

Consider the ineptitude and incompetence of so-called “elites”, those alleged geniuses who run our corporations, banks, investment funds and their ass kissers in government (it’s called “democracy” folks).

Merely consider the silver spoon billionaires and multi-millionaire pampered intellectual dwarfs that meet at the stunningly boring Davos Forum each year. These are the people who are allegedly preparing the “Great Reset”, the New World Order to control the uneducated ignorant masses. These uncurious narrow-minded dogmatic bozos don’t seem to be particularly good at predicting, planning or organizing anything, especially what they call the global ”economy” and so-called “free markets” which are systematically manipulated relentlessly to satisfy their greedy class interests, the real “entitlements”.

Remember that none of these talking heads predicted any of the market crashes such as the Dot Com Bubble and the calamities of 2007-09. And the few contrarians and sceptics who did predict the meltdowns were depicted as lunatics. Who can forget George W Bush’s clownish incompetent bumbling Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, a man living in a Christian Science fantasy world who had no idea what to do as the global economy was collapsing into a pile of dog shit. Then there is the incredible bore know nothing Larry Summers, one of Obama’s corporate lizards who was part of the big business criminal and financial talking head con men who advised the “do nothing” Wall Street mascot Obama on the massive multi-trillion dollar bailouts of the mafia banks and other corporate parasites. If you actually are involved in what is called “investing” in the stock market, never follow the advice of these idiots or those on business news networks. The “buy and hold” strategy on to infinity is a fool’s game as these creeps never recommend shorting or selling anything. It’s called conflict of interest and it’s a key strategic component of the ruling class kakistocracy and idiocracy.

These are the same narrow minded dogmatists that have ignored the advice of climate scientists for over 50 years regarding global heating, species extinction, widespread pollution, human overpopulation, ecosystem collapse, contamination of air, water and soils and a host of other urgent problems that are ignored by our ruling elites and their lap poodles in government because they impinge of corporate profit. We are now heading for apocalyptic times as Mother Nature is like a groaning 95 year old smoker, boozer and ADHD cell phone zombie on her death bed.

Remarks on Socialism and Anarchism

 Some people have a vague idea of socialism but when it comes to anarchism, it is one of the most maligned misconstrued and distorted political concepts and world views, often construed synonymous with chaos and nihilism. Anarchism is the exact opposite, an anti-authoritarian socio-economic theory of genuine democracy and freedom challenging all sources of political and socio-economic power including the undemocratic controlling hierarchies of monarchy, church, the capitalist state and other forms of elitism and privilege. Anarchists argue for direct democracy and holding to strong ethical adages such as the golden rule, that people can organize themselves in what is typically construed as libertarian socialism. Capitalism and the authoritarian state that represents a noxious ideology of greed and plunder is one of the most intrinsically immoral and coercive socio-economic systems ever conceived. Anarchists and other anti-capitalists realists have no illusions about reformism and promote the total take down of all capitalist foundations including its endless imperialist wars, mafia banks, fascist corporations, propagandizing media, parliamentary circuses, farcical and fraudulent  and elections that would be illegal if they changed anything. Capitalism’s continued existence is supported by the non-stop indoctrination of mass media, churches, schools and if required the violence of police and military that serve and protect their existence. Violence by cops and military are deployed when the indoctrination, propaganda, brainwashing and bullshit fail at controlling the impoverished masses.

Anarchists terrify privileged elites, the lords of finance. their despotic followers and political lap poodles not simply because the primary goals of the anarchist movement have been to abolish the sources of elite power – the state, patriarchy and capitalism – but because anarchism offers a viable alternative form of social and political organization grounded in workplace collectives, neighbourhood assemblies, bottom-up federations, child-centered free schools and a variety of cultural organizations operating on the basis of cooperation, reciprocation, solidarity, community, mutual aid and direct participatory democracy. Opposed to all forms of hierarchy, domination, power and exploitation, anarchists work to create a culture grounded in equal access to resources making the genuine exercise of freedom possible. Over the past century and a half, and particularly in the last two decades, the self-managing principles of anarchism have proliferated throughout the world and have also become part of the standard operating practices of environmental and social justice movements and protest. Since elites would be rendered redundant in an anarchist egalitarian society, it is understandable they are terrified at the thought of anarchist ideas and why anarchist philosophy and its uplifting genuinely democratic ideas are subjected to grotesque caricatures, demonized, denigrated and distorted by our ruling classes.

Real democracy and the manipulated elections (not unlike the so-called “free” markets of capitalism) are and always have been a cruel joke, a raving farce. After all, when the vast majority of people have no control over or responsibility for life’s important decisions in their lives such as real estate development and housing, education or the workplaces and who owns them, the important aspects of our lives become obstacles to fulfillment, mutual aid and community development.  As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly stressed, capitalist states (and the notion of the nation state in general) exists to preserve the status quo of entrenched power, coercion and control backed by police and military. Anarchism has many nuances; Noam Chomsky prefers a form of syndicalism or libertarian socialism as espoused by Rudolf Rocker. Anarchists correctly argue that for most of human history people have organized themselves collectively and cooperatively to meet their own requirements and needs. Social and economic organizations are conceived as a network of local voluntary groupings by recommending a decentralized society, without a central political body or even political parties as Simone Weil preferred. [7] Real democracy entails people managing their own affairs free from any hierarchy, coercive force or external elitist or hereditary authority. These self-governed communities could coalesce freely at regional or even larger organizations to ensure autonomy, co-ordination and mutual defence but with local elected policing while their autonomy and inimitability is maintained. Each locality will decide freely which social, cultural and economic arrangements are pursued.  Rather than a pyramid, anarchist associations would form a horizontal web.

Anarchists sometimes refer to medical services, utilities such as power to homes, post offices and transportation systems as examples of the way in which local groups and associations can combine to provide complex networks of functions without any central authority but an increasing number of these services have been privatized with the goal of profit, not people. For example, postal services have worked as a result of voluntary agreements between local post offices in different countries without any central world postal authority. But these and other public entities are being increasingly privatized as cost to the people rise ever higher. Read the books of anarchist Colin Ward for the ideas of justice, egalitarianism and the public good. As Ward suggests, “Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy.”

Contra the anarchist notions of justice and the public good, the douche bag Maggie Thatcher and dumb and dumber Ron Ray Gun, we’re informed by our masters of mankind that there are no alternatives to vulture capitalism, its endless imperialist wars, obscene wealth coterminous with exploitation, destruction of the natural world, widespread poverty and homelessness. Is this the best we homo saps can do? Double Duh!

Read Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism”; also Oscar Wilde, G A Cohen and Nathan J Robinson (his website is Current Affairs)

Why You Should Be a Socialist — and a Marxist (jacobin.com)

Free markets would be fine if we actually had them, although worker control of business enterprises are the ideal democratic option. Corporations, on the other hand, are hierarchical, anti-democratic and authoritarian, characteristics confirmed by Joel Bakan’s 2003 book The Corporation and the subsequent documentaries which can be viewed here and here.

Social Democracy as exemplified in Post WW II Scandinavia was a lame attempt to put a human face on the hideous capitalist Godzilla which lasted for a few decades until the neo-fascist Ronnie Ray Gun/ Douche Bag Thatcher revolution. The global world order is called neo-liberalism but classical liberalism as construed by lefty liberals such as J S Mill and John Rawls is a rotting corpse. The only remaining freedoms are the freedom to exploit and profit and to hell with the common good and caring about your neighbour that was expressed in so many songs of the 1960s and 60s such as Bill Wither’s Lean on Me and The Hollies He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother. Capitalism ought to have died following the 1929 Wall Street melt down, subsequent global economic collapse and Great Depression. It took over 30 years for stock markets to recover; it happened again in 2007-09 but this time the capitalist bought and paid for governments bailed the bastards out to the tune of trillions of dollars worldwide. And who paid the piper? The indoctrinated masses that were subjected to grinding austerity, a vile subversive program that has become permanent and continues as inflation spirals out of control and will likely persist until the entire system implodes. Is anyone old enough to remember stagflation? It’s back!

In the meantime, with our corrupt over-valued stock market (another bubble-boom-bust-bailout sequence that will be paid for by citizen suckers) why are docile obedient people not in the streets with pitchforks and pillories?  Wake the fuck up sheeple.

One possible solution but far too late, given the grim state of affairs such as imperialist wars, WW III threatening, global heating, species extinction and contamination of air, water, soils and pollution (including constant NOISE) are:

Abolish the debilitating corrupt Capitalist State, its pervasive tentacles into every aspect of life and other forms of neo-fascist corporatism, anti-democracy and authoritarianism. The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis (one of the very few worth noting) calls our predicament techno-feudalism; check him out. Other innumerable serious issues include:

Wildlife and all species including insects are in extinction mode while at the same time overpopulation of humans and their pets has become a serious problem for our future. In 1925 the global population was 2 billion, one quarter of today’s bloated population and within my own lifetime the world populations has more than tripled to an unsustainable 8 billion. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University zoologist wrote The Population Bomb in the late 1960s and argued that the current population at that time of roughly 3.5 billion was unsustainable. The United Nations projects that our current world population, assuming nothing is done to address the serious problem of human overpopulation while every other living thing is becoming extinct, will surpass 10 billion by 2100. Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson, viewing the impact of human population growth upon all aspects of the environment, called this growth “the raging monster upon the Earth.” More people use more resources and pollute the planet, contaminating air, water and soils. No living population, human or otherwise, can increase exponentially and continue to survive within an ecosystem without imposing biophysical limits. Capitalism with its refusal to impose limits on growth, the infamous GDP and increasing limitless profit is the major factor that is destroying all life on our finite planet. In order to survive (and we’ve likely crossed the point of no return) in likely a human population of 2 billion which was the global population about a century ago. The situation on planet earth is desperation as condition are extremely dire and getting worse much faster than expected even by many climate scientists.

Epidemics of bad food, lack of moderation and self control, widespread obesity becoming the norm, gluttony, excess, copycat fetishes such as tattoos and nose and tongue rings, no self discipline of and not instructing children on proper behaviour. Surely you have not failed to notice most TV ads lately that feature gross stupidity and irrationality of many adults and the typical non-existence of parenting concomitant with their out of control brats. Moderation and balance in life has disappeared in all things – and on it goes with the predominating capitalist culture accepting these pervasive irrationalities and bad behaviours (because these appalling behaviours are profitable of course and gambling online vices is just fine. Capitalism will accept anything if there is a profit to be made. Faith, hope and positive thinking are not solutions, but rather, delusions. And what has become of the private life, the need for quiet, solitude and serenity in a crowded planet of constant noise? Airplanes constantly roaring overhead like a war zone  is becoming a major annoyance and source of stress.

The abominable dual realities of billionaires and homeless people are a disgrace as are the grotesque economic inequalities throughout the world.  In the Fraser Valley and the fast growing smelly city of Chilliwack where we live, real estate development is totally out of control and combined with as is the norm, no democratic control or input by residents. Back in the 1980s I fought these real estate developer predatory bastards in the community of Panorama Ridge in Surrey. These vultures were like foreign invaders violating not only Surrey’s zoning bylaws, but destroying the quality of the community for residents, some  who had lived there for three decades. But neither of these conditions mattered to the uncaring capitalist lickspittle pimps at City Hall. As the representative of my community I discovered that democracy was non-existent, even when face to face with rapacious uncaring real estate developers and their bought and paid for bureaucrat assholes at the municipal level. While the real estate developer merely smirked and said nothing, realizing the outcome of my plea was a fait accompli, I lost on both counts - the legal and the moral argument.

This disturbing tale is likely the case anywhere you live, but in my city of Chilliwack the infrastructure as it currently exists, including roads and highways plagued by potholes, combined with air and noise pollution caused by industrial agriculture (farmers are allowed to burn anything) and constant noise from small aircraft are pervasive and irritating. That’s just for starters. The latter creates a condition not unlike a war zone as small private aircraft and the annoying cacophony are a constant source of stress and irritation and inability to concentrate. I complained about these joy riding clowns with their bomb diving small aircraft with too much time and money to the municipality which has strong anti-noise bylaws. Most of the daytime is like a war zone. But they simply informed me this was a federal jurisdiction and provided me with a Transport Canada 1-800 number for another uncaring bureaucrat. It’s about as futile as appealing to one of literally hundreds of fabricated Sky Daddy’s who, if they did exist, are asleep at the wheel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Like pretty much everything else in our fraudulent “democracies”, professional  sport has already been degraded and morally contaminated by sociopath capitalist cockroaches in suits as mega-corporations and billionaires who own most of the pro teams. The scams of lotteries and betting on sports once deemed anathema to basic decency and even minimal ethical standards like the Golden Rule are now legal.

These and other forms of human dumb down depravity, credulity and idiocy can now be carried out on your dumb smart phone and the same dolts rush out to buy the newest overpriced overrated mobile phone from the bullshit company Apple with book value of over one trillion dollars. This squandering of time and money abominations are peddled relentlessly on TV and elsewhere with the mostly grossly obese actors depicted as bumbling out-of-control morons. Have you noticed that common sense (what your mother ought to have taught you) is not very common these days?

Has kamikaze cancer capitalism which now can only be described as a psychopathic Godzilla reached rock bottom morally and culturally yet?  Back in 1949 George Orwell could never have envisioned the severity of capitalist authoritarianism, indoctrination and such depths of depravity as we have today when he proclaimed that, “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”  I wrote this blurb a couple of years ago in one of my darker moments and the only thing that has changed is everything is far worse and our demise is accelerating since NOTHING is done by the authoritarian neo-fascist maters of mankind who own the wealth and control our lickspittle politicians. Elon Musk (aka Leon Skum) a dyslexic Trump worshipper is one of the most vile and if there is ever a global revolution against these moral degenerates, Skum and his buddy Trump will be two of the first to the wall.

Our young people are not only confronting precarious perilous futures in the form of college debt, unlivable wage slavery, lack of meaningful employment or unemployment, political dysfunction in the form of ersatz “democracy”, a rerun of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism combined with a plethora of existential challenges in the form of widespread species extinction, human overpopulation, pollution and the most serious existential threat of Ecosystem Armageddon.

Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College of London Bill McGuire avoids vacuous euphemisms such as “climate change” and has the moral fiber and integrity to refer to our most serious predicament as “global heating”. Will anything be done with a dire situation we’ve been warned about for at least the past 50 years? So far it’s been NADA. Any potential remedy or policy that compromises the mafia banks, decadent deranged lives of wealthy oligarchs and political elites getting richer and impacts corporations bottom line will be tossed into the trash can.

And do the stock markets, lords of finance, economic theologians and ghoulish gurus with their hocus pocus mathematical algorithms, theological mysticisms about the “invisible hand of the market”, "efficient market hypothesis” (EMH) and multiple other vacuous obscurantist absurdities combined with the market corrupt stock buybacks and manipulations give a damn? No, they look for more ways to dupe the credulous public and ways to profit from the impending disasters and collapse .Pro sports betting with the convenience of your addictive cell phone is the latest swindle that is raking in huge profits

Prepare yourself for even more calamities that we are already experiencing because we have very likely crossed the borderlines of a point of no return. The massive floods in the Fraser Valley a couple of years ago and the ongoing massive wildfires in the interior are just a miniscule taste of what is to come. The only question that remains is: how bad will it get?

John Maynard Keynes, along with Bertrand Russell, Virginia Wolff, G E Moore, E M Forster and other writers, intellectuals and philosophers belonged to the famous progressive and counterculture society called The Bloomsbury Group. Russell (1872-1970), one of the great mathematicians, philosophers and most brilliant individuals of the early 20^th century was impressed by the intellect of Keynes, an economist who freely admitted that economics was mostly claptrap and bullshit.

Keynes was once asked about the stock market for the long run. Keynes reply was “In the long run we are all dead”.

Were they alive today, I ponder on what this group of brilliant democratic socialists, anarchists and liberal thinking men and women would think about the “progress” humankind has made in the past century or more? Not much. The downward slide in sociopathic behavior and free falling IQs continues unabated.

The greatest intellectual still alive at 95 Noam Chomsky argued much the same in his hundreds of books and particularly the 1990s must read prophetic books Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Conditions have deteriorated exponentially since linguistics Professor Chomsky wrote these great books. The world is FUBAR, is not democratic and never has been. Capitalism ought to have died from its own cancerous ideology in 1929 and then in 2008 when the entire global system was bailed out by the government and the outstanding debts of multi-trillions of dollars still being paid by the average impoverished wage slave and the governments that exist to serve the interests of an elite oligarchy and plutocracy. This system of capitalist thievery that Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism needs to be taken down. Our young people can’t wait for a dying natural world, ecosystem collapse and the political, economic and cultural dry rot have set in and the US Empire implodes. Action is required now despite the reality that it’s very likely far too late to save a contaminated heating planet in which all life forms are on the extinction list, a list that the semi-intelligent apes called humans will eventually be added.

The volatile stock markets are fraudulent manipulations driven primarily by the insatiable crusades for monopolization, privatization, stock buybacks and most trades executed by automated mathematical algorithms. Economics (the dreadful “science”) is and always been a form of mysticism with its priesthoods on Wall Street and Bay Street, mere dens of inequity. For the rampant corruption in Canada, read Bruce Livesey’s The Thieves of Bay Street and then Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands on the “get out of jail free card” tax havens where the big banks, corporations and wealthy elites hide their billions from income taxation that you and I must pay or spend time in jail. I’ve been involved in four class action suits with the banking mafia - in my case RBC and TD and getting nowhere or even compensation for their crimes - I have no illusions about their criminality. Banks and many other important institutions in a decent fair society ought to be public utilities. But as the natural world dies a slow death by capitalist exploitation and greed, none of this will ultimately matter. I’ve always considered hope -and especially “faith” in supernatural entities to save our collective asses - as useless irrationalities and emotional vacuums but during the upbeat counterculture (especially the music) of the 1960s and early 70s the door was slipped open for a brief period of optimism for a far better world.

As a socio-economic system, neo-liberalism which should be properly called state capitalism, underwrites, protects, promotes and bails out vulture capitalists every time greed and the drive for profit get the better of them as they regularly overshoot and screw up one can only describe it as a dramatic failure, engendering a devastation of the natural world, ongoing crises of hopelessness, isolation and dissociation. Capitalism has become a disease and mental illness unresponsive to the needs of ordinary people who have descended into mindless out of control consumerism and a nihilistic meaningless, devoid of a moral compass. If we were to caricature an oligarchic empire ruled by global finance capital, that system might look similar to the neo-fascist one we actually have in 2024 – as Donald Trump has been elected for a second term in the USA. We must dramatically reposition our political and economic institutions, cultivating active and direct resistance to the dominance of capital and the state over human life. We can only meaningfully counter their dominance by understanding their interrelatedness and history. The dominant system whether neo-liberalism, state capitalism, monopoly capitalism, state monopoly capitalism, neo-fascism needs to be rejected and taken down; but how? Too many people are complacent and don’t care. Even as the state and capital grow in power together, they have not dominated everything quite yet. Surely the only reasonable philosophical position today is pessimism. At least you’ll never be endlessly disappointed.

PS: Yesterday Professors Richard Wolff and Yanis Varoufakis weighed in on the significance of Labor Day. I highly recommend all of Varoufakis’ books; I just finished reading his latest book Techno-Feudalism which is, as usual, brilliant. Check out Wolff’s books as well.

We are screwed and as I approach my ninth decade on this noisy pitiful garbage dump planet, the infinite dreamless sleep is looking not so bad after all.

Notes:

[1a] People who have read a few of Nietzsche’s vitriolic voluminous writings would know that he was no socialist, but he was at the same time highly critical of capitalism which, not unlike Christianity, he despised. Life under capitalism during the late 19^th century was oppressive, highly exploitive and nihilistic divided between the unfulfilling drudgery and boredom for the typical wage slave workers. This was of course incited by the contemptible conniving calculating lives of ruthless businessmen, predatory property owners and entrepreneurial demons of capital aided and abetted by the hypocritical sycophant nanny capitalist bought and paid for state politicians and lap poodle bureaucrats. Of course if Nietzsche were alive today, he’d be shocked at what has unfolded especially in the past four or five decades of untrammelled neo-fascist greed of financial pillage and plunder that has led to disgusting grotesque levels of global economic injustice and inequality. Grinding poverty and homelessness are appallingly widespread throughout the world as Mother Nature cries “gang rape”. Nietzsche held the recklessness and hucksterism of the business classes in his own day with utter contempt. As in Nietzsche’s day and in today’s workplace, the worker sees his employer as a “cunning, bloodsucking dog of a man who speculates on all distresses and whose name, figure. Manner and reputation are completely anathema to him.” (The Gay Science)

Of course both Karl Marx and Nietzsche were highly critical of Christianity which they considered mere adjuncts of the power of capital and other forms of capitalist sources of indoctrination, oppression and totalitarian control. Marx referred to Christianity as “the opium of the people” whereas Nietzsche deemed religious faith as delusional and “not wanting to know what is true”. It needs to be pointed out that Nietzsche harboured a distorted and confused notion of both socialism and anarchism. Although Nietzsche opposed tyranny and oligarchy, his misconceptions of anarchism are not unlike the nonsense spewed out by mainstream conservatives and liberals. Anarchist philosophy has many nuances but it universally holds to the dictum that “power corrupts”, challenging all forms of authoritarianism such as church and state. Anarchism has a long and flourishing history of mutual aid libertarian socialism, community and human liberty, the only genuine conception of democracy. The interested reader could begin with Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and contemporary anarchists such as Noam Chomsky and David Graeber.  I recommend the interested reader consult the Anarchist Library web site at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index

[1] The French anthropologist Pierre Clsatres wrote of the pathetic turn of Geronimo’s career after the Apache warrior had been a successful leader of troops in battle and tried to make himself into a chief with political power, demanding that the Apaches join him in further wars against the Mexicans and other enemies of their societies: “He attempted to turn the tribe into the instrument of his desire, whereas before, by virtue of his competence as a warrior, he was the tribe’s instrument.” Quite naturally, the Apaches would have nothing to do with him, and he spent the next twenty years in asinine futile battles with a handful of followers, becoming a chief and heroic, only in the eyes of the white myth-makers who never understood. Clastres’s conclusion for the Apache, as for the dozens of Central American cultures he has studied: “One is confronted, then, by a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination; where, in a word, no relationship of command-obedience is in force.” Even those tribes that create leaders of a kind, people we might call chiefs, do not invest them with power:

The chief has no authority at his disposal, no power of coercion and no means of giving an order. The chief is not a commander; the people of the tribe are under no obligation to obey. The space of the chieftainship is not the locus of power, and the “profile” of the primitive chief in no way foreshadows that of a future despot. . . .

Mainly responsible for resolving the conflicts that can surface between individuals, families, lineages and so forth, the chief has to rely on nothing more than the prestige accorded him by the society to restore order and harmony. But prestige certainly does not signify power, and the means the chief possesses for performing his task of peacemaker are limited to the use of speech . . . the chief’s word carries no force of law. Even the word “chief,” it should be noted, is European. Such cultures as these have neither the word nor the concept. Furthermore, there are many other examples of non-coercive stateless societies to be found in more contemporary history. In sixteenth-century Ireland there was “no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, and no public enforcement of injustice … no trace of State-administered justice.” The Swiss Confederation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, was so formless that it had no central government at all but rather an obedient secretariat of two regular officials and a few aides that moved around the country from canton to canton. And although most have sadly abandoned their autonomy and sense of solidarity and submitted to the greed and business models of capitalist ideology, religious communities as the Quakers, Doukhobors, Mennonites and Hutterites have lasted for centuries without any trappings of the state and some still do not formally recognize the civil states that in many cases continue to condemn and oppress them (the case of the Doukhobors in Canada was particularly detestable) with their own law and governance as established by their religion, custom, community and popular democratic assemblies.

 [2] In North America (both the USA and Canada) the 19^th century and into the early 20^th, rampant corruption in the form of real estate plunder, killing off the wild buffalo herds and wanton theft of Indigenous land which was then controlled and sold off in a frenzy of corrupt dealings that involved real estate crooks and a compliant equally corrupt conservative state. What followed was railroads, corporations, land speculators, mining interests, and stockmen who gorged on the public domain, aided and abetted by the fabulously pliable General Land Office in the US which from 1812 until its closure in 1946 privatized more than one billion acres, roughly half the landmass of the nation. Canada’s building of the CPR was plagued by deceit and swindles involving the conservative government of the boozing John A Macdonald, his dishonest swindling administration and their own versions of the robber baron. In fact the undemocratic BNA Act was written during a drunken binge. The corruption in the West was such that by 1885 The New York Times denounced the “land pirates” whose “fraud and force” had excluded the citizen settler from “enormous areas of public domain” and “cheated and robbed him of the heritage to which he was entitled.” And the so called cattle barons were not cowboys but rather real estate hucksters, railroad and timber tycoons, bankers and of course asshole lawyers – not cowboys or dirt farmers. This sordid state of affairs that entails wanton capitalist desecration and pillage throughout the world continues in various forms today as ecosystems, biodiversity, species extinction and the natural environment withers and perishes in its wake.

Of course the desecration and pillage of the natural world is underwritten by the Holy Babble by the Christian God of Genesis 1:26 and 27: “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creep upon the earth.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints concocted by their polygamous Joseph Smith (aka Mormons) with their own sacred book of mumbo jumbo is even more absurd than the standard Xian drivel in their Book of Moron. On the plains of Utah they took the Book of Genesis dictums of subduing the earth literally, especially the part about the cattle which decimated the delicate ecosystems and every living thing within them.

[3] The Gig Economy, Trickle Down (Robin Williams called this idiocy “Someone Pissing on you”) and other Capitalist Scams and Swindles

Nearly a quarter of Canadians work in the so-called Gig Economy including the taking on of  second low paid Gig jobs to stay afloat

Labour researchers says it's a sign traditional jobs are not keeping up with financial pressures such as inflation and wage slavery

By JR, Diatribe of Thursday October 10, 2024

The poll conducted in collaboration with the Angus Reid Institute found that nearly a quarter of respondents participate in gig work, defined as short-term jobs or tasks that do not guarantee steady work. You are designated as an entrepreneur of the self, must use your own transportation and are only paid if you get a delivery request by “Skip”. Did someone say skip? Yeah, FUCK SKIP, Door Dash, Uber, Lyft and other sociopathic exploiters of cheap labor. Skip has apparently announced the firing of hundreds of their slaves.

About a third of gig workers surveyed said they need the work, despite 44 per cent making more than $100,000 per year.

Even workers that are bringing in incomes that just a few years ago we would have thought would be more than sufficient are feeling the financial strain of ever rising prices due to inflation and typical monopolist capitalist price gouging. 

"Gig economy", "flexible labor”, "precariousness", “wage slavery”, etc are merely different names for the same kamikaze hyper-capitalist labor bashing that has resulted in gross levels of economic inequality throughout Canada and the rest of the world. For about 40-50 years workers in most  areas of the world have been losing bargaining power, remuneration and company benefits that have eroded, stagnated or been eliminated even as productivity has increased; health coverage, pensions and retirement investment have diminished . In the USA and UK, economic inequality has reached record levels as homelessness and destitution are widespread.  Canada is not far behind and if we are stupid enough to elect conservative governments federally and provincially the current dire conditions will become even worse. When have conservatives ever cared about working people? Never have and never will – it’s in their DNA. False consciousness is widespread and credulous minds will believe demagogues and creepy conservative Bible banging anti-science hyper capitalist homophobic serial liars like John Rustad and Pierre Poilievre. These assholes are NOT your friend. Most people will work until they drop dead as poverty in old age increases exponentially; one witnesses the destitution and poverty of old people, many still working at shitty low paid  job into their eighties.

Welcome to Uncaring Capitalist Dystopia

The corporate cockroaches and bloodsucking wealthy elites and their hedge fund “private equity” parasites, bailed out mafia banks and their bootlicking politicians have screwed the working classes and stomped them into the pavement. No one but the ruling elite corporate oligarchs, financial parasites and their investment behemoths wanted deregulated global free trade, destruction of the unions and privatization of everything on the planet. As George Carlin once remarked, “They own not only 99% of the wealth; they own the mass media, government lackeys and they own you”. Any working class stiff ought to have known this whole agenda that started as early as the 1970s was a scam. Thanks Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, Ronald Ray Gun and the Douche Bag Bitch Maggie “There is no society” Thatcher. Only a massive bottom up revolution will save us but with the declining IQs, unthinking brainwashed complacent masses of today that resemble mesmerized zombies addicted to their disinformation platforms such as social media (also controlled by multinationals) and smart phone (that make them even dumber than ever), it won’t happen.

Many of these people who can’t survive on full time job incomes (and that seems to be approaching the majority), however inadequate are often the same lazy ass dupes who use Skip the Dishes and other overpriced food services (learn how to cook twit– it’s not rocket science), buy lottery ticket scams and engage in waste of time and money delusional sport betting swindles and finance an overpriced piece of shit BMW or Mercedes that is no more reliable than a 7 year old Mitsubishi (10 year bumper to bumper warranty when new) or Hyundai but costs a fortune to repair – how stupid is that? Yes lotteries and online gambling should be illegal to protect unthinking morons from themselves and their complacency, ignorance and stupidity - but it would appear you can’t fix stupid.

Before I retired as a Mathematics Teacher I worked with a progressive group attempting to introduce logic and critical thinking programs into the schools. The amazing programs we created from various universities including UBC were invariably, systematically unsurprisingly blocked, primarily by the decadent Dark Age Christian churches and the equally reactionary decadent capitalist Chambers of Commerce and other big business agencies, conservative groups and lobbyists. It’s not in their interest to have thinking people who can figure out they’ve been thrown of the bus decades ago and why. These institutions do not want highly intelligent thoughtful critical thinking people who can figure out they have been lied to about pretty much everything, scammed and cheated. They prefer obedient docile workers who know nothing of labor history and how we got to arguably the most authoritarian tyrannical system in history. It’s called capitalism folks and it’s also killing our finite planet and the natural world with its infinite growth model of plunder and pillage and greed and profit before all else. Every species including insects are on the extinction list except human who keep reproducing (now 8 billion contaminating the globe) but once biodiversity is destroyed and ecosystems collapse, we homo saps will be on the list. Incidentally Homo sapiens is a Latin expression for “wise man” – what a misnomer. Semi-intelligent ape would be more apt. Once again…

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

People are enslaved by their social media platforms and stare at their cell phones 24-7. Perhaps these are many of the same mindless zombie dick heads to vote for calcified conservatives and most phoney liberals these days who have never given a rat’s ass about them. Wake the fuck up sheeple! Try thinking and getting involved politically like starting a bottom up revolution of the 99%. Get out the pitchforks and pillories. Your kids, if you are dumb enough to bring in to this FUBAR world already have a grim future.

To evaluate the ethics and humanity of any government, look at their prisons, behaviour of their trigger happy club carrying cops, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s a fucking disgrace. Any country that doesn’t prioritize its worst off and care for them is not a moral entity and not even remotely a “democracy” which has been a farce since day one. Oh, of course there’s the fairy tale of the “self made man” espoused by billionaire silver spoon Trump loving fascists like Elon Musk who was handed a 99 metre head start in the 100 metre race in life.

Wake the fuck up sheeple!

And what about the possibility of retirement; dream on sucker.

Anyone who says they stayed working rather than choose retirement on their substantial pensions (when they actually existed) savings and investments because they love their job is a fucking liar or just plain stupid; so much for people valuing autonomy and freedom.

On moral principle alone, I would never use Skip the Dishes, Uber, Door Dash or any other delivery service that hires slave labour. Boycott these bastards.

If you do work that demands physical labour you will likely be a cripple by the age of 50. So you better have a backup plan – or prepare yourself for early death or an old age of grinding poverty and immobility.

I’ve seen this scenario many times before. I mean for starters the intrinsically corrupt and manipulated bloated stock market now driven by corporate insiders and algorithms which is set to blow up soon. Not one mainstream corporatist economist predicted the 2008 global debacle for which the financial criminals and mafia banks were bailed out and never prosecuted for the crimes and theft of trillions word wide. Will the oligarchs use the meaningless “too big to fail” bullshit story again? Perhaps – most people are dumb enough to believe it like the Iraq War lies by the dumb and dumber village idiot George W Bush cabal. First casualty of war – the truth!  Prepare yourself for another 2008 meltdown complete with bailouts like the covi-19 multi-trillion dollar handouts to save the market sand get out of jail free cards for the Wall Street corporate hucksters and banking vermin – as hundreds of thousands in the US died of the virus (worst kill rate on the planet). The AI bubble alone might do it but these bastards have no sense of moderation and their greed knows no limits. One of our mafia Canadian Banks Toronto Dominion (a larcenous bank like all others for which I’ve been involved in four class action suits in the past four decades) was recently charged with money laundering which for an ordinary citizen would probably be prosecuted and get 20 years in jail. But for TD, nothing happened at all; not even an attempt at prosecution. But this banking criminality such as offshore tax havens reserved for their wealthy clients goes on ad infinitum. Just like the financial crooks and cheats who were not prosecuted following the sordid global meltdown in 2008, they were given a free ride and their criminal CEOs were invited into the governments. Obama’s administration was polluted with these vultures and crooks. And when the covid-19 hit us the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the US Jerome Powell could care less that American were dying in the thousands he only cared about saving the stock markets. We’ll “”whatever it takes” he declared; the end justifies the means and the quintessence of evil.

Consider Canada, one of the most corrupt countries on the planet (just read Thieves of Bay Street by Bruce Livesey). There are two important elections pending, one in BC in a couple of weeks. If the two conservative science denying hyper-capitalist working class hating bible banging pricks in BC and Ottawa (John Rustad in BC and Pierre (Steven Harper 2.0 Beta Version) Poilievre in Ottawa) get elected in upcoming elections (the federal affair likely next year) we are screwed – heading for even more natural and ethical disasters.

Why working stiffs vote for these pompous ass bloviating creepy neo-fascist far right wing assholes mystifies. I grew up in Prince George, a working class town that invariably voted far right wing authoritarian government for decades. The greedy creepy toad John Rustad grew up in PG; his family owned a logging and sawmill operation that plundered the forests and hinterland contaminating and destroying a few good fishing lakes in the process, much to the chagrin of my Dad and I who loved to fish. And who cleaned up their mess? Certainly not the Rustad family who operated under the capitalist credo of “privatize profits and offload collateral damage”  onto the public such as turning the forests into a trash heap and demolishing good fishing lakes and other costs of their logging outfit (tree butchering Inc) onto the public.

                                               Typical contaminated waters of Planet Earth

[4] I can recall several years ago reading Michel Foucault commenting on the sordid role of doctors in overseeing torture under the military dictatorship in Brazil. But for Foucault, “Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century but by the most sinister, boring and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable. Himmler was a vaguely agricultural type, and married a nurse.  We must understand that the concentration camps were born from the conjoined imagination of a hospital nurse and a chicken farmer. A hospital plus a chicken coop: that’s the phantasm behind the concentration camps.

Millions of people were murdered there, so I don’t say it to diminish the blame of those responsible for it, but precisely to disabuse those who want to superimpose erotic values upon it. The Nazis were charwomen in the bad sense of the term. They worked with brooms and dustbins wanting to purge society of everything they considered unsanitary, dusty, filthy syphilitics, homosexuals, Jews, those of impure blood, Blacks, the insane. It’s the foul petit-bourgeois dream of racial hygiene that underlies the Nazi dream. Eros is absent.” (Late Fascism by Alberto Toscano, 2022, p. 135-36)

[5] Anyone observing the global warming garbage dump called planet earth and sufficiently inquisitive regarding real bottom up human history (not the fairy tale conservative high school hogwash versions) would agree with the apes in the 1968 movie when they cited a passage from their sacred scrolls describing the vile species Homo sapiens:

Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.

As one of the most beautiful relatively uncontaminated areas on the planet in Canada’s Jasper National Park is on fir and likely will be for months. Next on the list will be an equally pristine area called Banff National Park both with small towns and resorts.  I know these areas well. The town of Jasper is over 30% burned; is Banff next? It seems inevitable. This is the upshot of decades of ignoring the science as profit and plunder are the only priorities of a vile systemically immoral capitalist ideology of selfishness, greed and arrogance.

[6] When Europeans began to invade and colonize the Americas in the decades after Columbus’ excursion in 1492, they were not motivated by the narrative of exploration and discovery, as our sanitized high school history courses would have it. Colonization was a reaction to the problems of diminished wealth accumulation by the monarchical and aristocratic classes due in large part by the long overdue peasant revolutions in Europe. As ruling elites destroyed common land, resorting to “enclosure” (i.e., privatization) at home, they sought new frontiers for accumulation in what was called the “new World. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred100,000 recalcitrant peasants, Spain’s King Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honor to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slaughtered at least 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and demolished the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The equivalence of these two tragic events is shocking and was instrumental in the emergence of capitalism, enclosure, colonization, pillage and slavery which were intrinsically connected.

The scale of racism, colonial theft, genocide and appropriation was staggering. From the early 1500s through the early 1800s, European colonization plundered over 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes alone and into European ports. To get a sense of the scale of this wealth, consider a thought experiment: if invested in 1800 at the historical average rate of interest that quantity of silver would today be worth $165 trillion – more than double the contemporary world’s GDP. And this doesn’t include the huge quantities of gold that was extracted from the Americas during the same period. This massive influx of wealth funneled primarily to an elite minority was a key factor in the rise of European, and now North American, imperialist capitalism that continues to this day.

In India, British colonizers extracted extraordinary sums of money in the form of taxes and resources. Between the years 1765 and 1938 the Brutal Brits vacuumed out the equivalent of $45 trillion from India alone and into British coffers, typically to the monarchy. This massive vampire blood lust facilitated and permitted Britain to buy strategic materials such as iron, tar and timber, which were essential to the country’s industrialization at the time. They also used it to finance the industrialized thievery of white settler colonies like Canada and Australia and to pay for the British welfare system that, after the 1870s, finally started to address the misery and grinding poverty caused by destruction of the commons called enclosure. This essentially quite similar how capitalism has worked for several centuries (basically outright theft) and how it works today: privatize profits and socialize losses – socialism for wealthy elites and vicious dog eat dog drudgery capitalism for the working classes.

[7] French philosopher and revolutionary radical Simone Weil (1909-1943) wrote, “Whether the mask is labelled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police and military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.” Nothing has changed since Weil wrote this; in fact as I write the situation in our fraudulent democracies has deteriorated dramatically as fascism has returned. Regardless of the political party whether liberal, conservative of social democrat such as the once proud socialist contrarianism of the NDP in Canada (formerly CCF of the inimitable Tommy Douglas and the Regina Manifesto), all have betrayed truth, justice, the public interest, common good and sold out to the totalitarian scripts of banking hucksters, corporate oligarchs and financial parasites who move billions of dollars throughout the world with a mouse click. As every anarchist knows “power corrupts and for voracious capitalists money is power as it is the driving force for our farcical elections. As the great novelist and muckraker of the early 20^th century, Upton Sinclair remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. We are heading for a dark place intellectually and morally as fascist moral degenerates, serial liars and ignoramuses like Donald Trump are becoming the norm in politics throughout the world.

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