Skip to content

Archive

Tag: American Empire Project

Tom Engelhardt the creator of tomdispatch .com and co-founder of the American Empire Project has published an article that focuses the lens on the election life cycle of candidates, “Now, the president himself essentially begins his campaign for a second term almost as soon as he enters the Oval Office.” Engelhardt plays on the word ‘Election’, “Sometimes words outlive their usefulness. Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us. ‘Election’, ‘presidential election campaign’, and ‘democracy’ all seem like obvious candidates for name-change … You vote for the president to spend some part of 20 per cent of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy … and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.”

 

Inspired by Tom Engelhardt http://ow.ly/8eWnJ image source truthdig http://ow.ly/8eWqs

Steve Fraser the US labor and economic historian and co-founder of the American Empire Project has put forward a modest proposal for the Occupy Wall Street Movement to consider in an Aljazeera publication. Premised on a famous essay from Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public”. Swift’s simple idea was “the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food”. Fraser states, “The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99% of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.  It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is ‘the Vatican of capitalism’ … Anticipating Swift, we are already eating our own children or, at least, the futures available to them.”

 

Inspired by Steve Fraser http://ow.ly/82L9t image source facebook http://ow.ly/82Luc

Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button Youtube button