society of control
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How to Repurpose the First Amendment as Corporate Weapon
Originally—and up until fairly recently—the First Amendment was understood to be a shield protecting individual liberty. But the Roberts Court seems increasingly intent on turning the First Amendment into a weapon against the American people, not to mention basic fairness… Continue reading
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Noam Chomsky | Whose Security? How Washington Protects Itself and the Corporate Sector
What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989? Answer: everything continued much as before.Source: www.truth-out.orgThe Security State as mask for the Society of Control. Continue reading
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Our twin presiding deities: irony and violence
The current mainstream debate regarding the crisis in Iraq and Syria offers a near perfect example of both the death of historical memory and the collapse of critical thinking in the United States. It also signifies the emergence of a… Continue reading
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A Prefabricated and Spent Life
Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t… Continue reading
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Police Departments Gearing up for War at Home
Congress created the military-transfer program in the early 1990s, when violent crime plagued America’s cities and the police felt outgunned by drug gangs. Today, crime has fallen to its lowest levels in a generation, the wars have wound down, and… Continue reading
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Moving forward with the Society of Control
Six reasons to fear the evolving alliance of the global corporate techno-economic progress machine and the national security state. Continue reading
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Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times
…[Noam Chomsky’s] many recent books, articles, and interviews have addressed how the new reign of neoliberal capital is normalized not only through military and economic relations but also through the production of new forms of subjectivity organized around the enslavement… Continue reading
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Wolves of Wall Street: Financialization and American Inequality
It’s no secret by now that the recent spike in American inequality, and the gains rapidly accruing to those at the upper end of the income distribution ladder, are driven in large part by “financialization”—the growing scale and profitability of… Continue reading
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Enjoying the powerless features of Democracy
Not really all that amazing but it does make one want to say something facile like “amazing” . Plutocracy is alive and thriving while the great mass of citizens play at republican democracy, enjoying all the best features–like voting, a… Continue reading
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How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine | The Nation
Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As… Continue reading
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The “Deep State” – How Much Does It Explain?
…[T]here is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only… Continue reading
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The internet is a utility
…[C]orporations that control internet access insist that they’re providing specialized services that are somehow different than water, power, and telephones. They point to crazy bullshit you don’t want or need like free email addresses and web hosting solutions and goofy… Continue reading
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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations – The Intercept
…[T]hese agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, arecompromising the integrity of the internet itself. Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false… Continue reading
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Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair | Moyers and Company
Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few… Continue reading
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Military Metaphysics: How Militarism Mangles the Mind
Homer in “The Iliad” showed his understanding of war. His heroes are not pleasant men. They are vain, imperial, filled with rage and violent. And Homer’s central character in “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, in his journey home from war must learn… Continue reading
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It Is Expensive to Be Poor – Barbara Ehrenreich – The Atlantic
The Great Recession should have put the victim-blaming theory of poverty to rest. In the space of only a few months, millions of people entered the ranks of the officially poor—not only laid-off blue-collar workers, but also downsized tech workers,… Continue reading
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Capitalism vs. Democracy – NYTimes.com
Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.Piketty, a… Continue reading
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How Wall Street Power Brokers Are Designing the Future of Public Education as a Money-Making Machine
Financial Capitalism–subordinating all processes of production toward amassing the greatest amount of excess monetary value through constantly changing financial networks–has nowhere left to turn besides the local after absorbing all international, national, and regional systems of output. And we should… Continue reading
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