The black hole of capital

The bus company was let loose "to the market", some ten years ago.
In the First Great Depression Era stealthily all public transport was nationalised in NL by a regime dedicated to Free Markets and a Strong God-fearing Government. And New Labour ended it all, because sixty years of government exploitation had led to - good functioning, which was simply unbearable.

The bus company had changed its name from the North Holland Autobus Company into - merged with several other regional bus companies - Connexxion. Some people pronounce it as an English word, which really makes you feel at home. Just like Arriva and Veolia, appearing in all kinds of places since Competition had been introduced. Makes you feel like you are in Wales. Or England. Or France. Or Italy. Or Spain. Or Portugal. Etcetera. Oh glorious Market!

Soon Connexxxxxxion advertised travels to New York, a place I know very well how to visit and do not need a regional bus company for. At the same time all bus connections to the village where my working shed was located were stopped, to be run by volunteers whenever they felt like it (this was advertised as Strengthening The Community, another dear New Labour toy - it simply meant the end of public transport full stop).

Then there was the mail service. Actually it was older than the monarchy in NL so when it was privatised They decided to call it Royal Mail, but since this privatised thing had swallowed the Australian company TNT it was renamed to TNT, still showing a stylised crown but for the rest of it a formidable real estate dealer (all these post offices that it could close down now), under management of the former New Labour prime minister, incidentally (he also runs the former state telephone company, the former bank of the Post, an arms factory and Shell - you are not thinking of the word corruption, are you?). TNT apparently should be pronounced as an English acronym, once again to make you feel at home, and since Barack Obama is very much New Labour himself all TNT-cars now have the phrase "Sure we can" at their sides. In English, yeah.

In the first week of August our distinguished friend Alex posted my author's copy of Religious anarchism. I am now celebrating the eighth week of its non-arrival. I could have walked vice versa several times to England all this time, even try my luck at walking on water. Somewhere during the weeks past I lost faith in its ever reaching me.

I am told this is a NL specialty, although the British Royal Mail seems to have built a name for itself in losing packages and letters to - whatever wherever. Academics in NL say ordered books hardly ever reach them anymore, due to total liberalisation of delivery services. But where do they end up then? In a second hand store?

Whatever. Don't ya know the mail service is no longer supposed to be about delivering mail but about making profits?
Do you, pinko, not realise that the bus company is about making profit, now calls itself a Global Player with better things to do than running a line to your pitiful village?

It is not the only cause for the Second Great Depression, but it certainly is more realistic to call it a cause than bonuses former New Labour prime ministers and other grabbing "managers" hand themselves.
It is this willful and conscious wrecking of services which had to provide the infrastructure for the smooth operation of everyday capitalism now running aground because the services had to play Market and Make Profits.

On this optimistic note - it cannot last very much longer this way, I think - I enter the ninth week of the non-arrival of the first reader on religious anarchism on the planet, of which I was a proud contributor (the fun part of it has been slightly spoiled, I admit).

Dying to get better

Chris Hedges, the author of the beautifully titled I don't believe in atheists wrote this inspiring piece on the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh Pa.. Note that the starting place is the Thomas Merton Center:

The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists—none of whom will be inside their security perimeters—who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason.

The longer we speak in the language of global capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the free market—even as we funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large corporations—the longer we live in a state of collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess to hate government and government involvement in the free market, who claim they are the defenders of competition and individualism, have been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn socialized medicine although we have become, at least for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth. The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we actually embrace has rendered us incapable of confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old language of markets, capitalism, free trade and globalization the longer the entities that created this collapse will cannibalize the nation.

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by Bail Out the People Movement (BOTM). The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far denied protesters permits while it determines the size of the “security perimeter” it will impose around the world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of $ 9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class that is trashing the world’s economy. These elites will appear from behind closed doors with their communiqués and resolutions to address us in their specialized jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to convince us they have not lost control. They will make recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a knife into the backs of the working class. They will insist that the world can be managed and understood exclusively through their distorted lens of economics. But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have nothing left to say to us.

“Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

If you can, go to Pittsburgh. This is an opportunity to defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in words that describe our reality. The power elite fear these words. If these words seep into the population, if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use to barrel us toward neofeudalism. And these words, when they become real, propel men and women to resist.

“The end of something often resembles the beginning,” the philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “More often than not our nose-to-the-glass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization’s self-confidence—limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory—and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion. … Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation.”

h/t: The Christian Radical.

Policing the crisis

"We will not pay for their crisis" has been called a bad slogan, because it is not anyone's fault in particular that the system is grinding to a halt. That is right - but it stil is their crisis since every form of (re-)producing dominant ideology has been selling the system as the best, nay the only possible world. And they are still trying to sell it that way.

This being said, let us have a look at the policing indeed. How convenient that the highly dangerous terrorists of Pakistani descent have been released on the day the UK budget was getting all the attention. They were not charged of anything.
Apart from being Pakistani apparently, and to be thrown out of the UK because of that.

And of course the officer that beat Ian Tomlinson to death, or Nicola Fisher to the ground, or the officer who was looking forward to beating up long-haired "hippys" (!) at the G20-demonstration of April 1st are all just bad apples in a very sound - erm - orchard.

Let the poster speak for itself. Click on it for a good viewing.