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M E D I A R C H Y

Accountable Publishing Inc.

Volume Two, Number Three           Third Quarter, 2025

                                                  Home of The Wry Maker

SILENCE OF THE ABSENCE

Baffled Rich Person Martino.jpg

END TIME:
TIME OF SILENCE

EDUARDO SUBIRATS

Progress—that most modern of all modern categories—has seen its own ethical, political and historical meanings turned upside down and inside out. Once, not too long ago, it had been the culminating synthesis of all the revolutionary aspirations of the French eighteenth century; but its ties to democratic reforms began to fray after the failed European revolution of 1848, and to disintegrate entirely with the expansion of colonial and postcolonial wars to the four corners of the world. For the socialisms of the nineteenth century, the real progress of industrial society came at too-high a human cost: its technological advances and economic splendor required the misery of millions of people who had been torn away from their historical environments and natural habitats and thrown into the industrial suburbs as proletarian masses, whose biological reproduction served the overriding purpose of capitalist production. In the twentieth century, progress became one of the most effective weapons of seduction, conquest and subordination that industrial and post-industrial imperialisms wielded against the postcolonial peoples and nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Faced with the ongoing horrors of the modern era—the rise of totalitarian systems; two successive world wars that effectively industrialized death and destruction; the holocausts of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the expansion of colonial exploitation and human misery across the planet—the historical and revolutionary ideals of progress, and the actual construction of this progress in historical time, have collapsed into mere propaganda. The intimate association of progress and poverty, of progress and totalitarian civilization, of progress and barbarism has spread across the globe, under the protection of the ideologies of the West and their modern imperial expression: a Cold War and an indefinite global war that have prolonged the self-destructive logos that began at Ground Zero Hiroshima in 1945 and culminated provisionally at Ground Zero Manhattan in 2001. Progress has taken on a variety of political forms and military strategies, depending on whether the nations were neocolonial or postcolonial, and depending on whether they were subjected to so-called liberal or totalitarian administrations. Under the aegis of these successive wars and increasing ecological catastrophes, the concept of progress could no longer be identified with any of the technological or epistemological aspects of postmodern life. Since the world wars of the last century, the historical progress of humanity has been defined as an endless continuum of devastated cities, destroyed natural landscapes, suppressed cultures, and annihilated gods and languages. Real historical progress today converges with a process of decadence, agony and extinction that encompasses climate, biology, political economy, culture and human intelligence itself. Our civilization’s historical progress is self-contradictory. It legitimizes a post-industrial system that constitutes an indefinite process of regression. This explains, among many other things, the complete absence of any definition of progress that may enable us to confront the real dilemmas of our present predicament. What can the word progress possibly mean in an age that explicitly contemplates the future as a climatical, biological and intellectual limit whose meanings are all terminal, be they ecological and meteorological catastrophes, nuclear and biological warfare, or the electronic manipulation of millions of people reduced to masses? What can progress really mean in an historical age that negatively measures future time through a continuous growth of global temperature, which in itself entails the biological decline of the planet? Progress—the highest expression of the secularized values of capitalist civilization and of this civilization’s unilateral vision of universal history—has become in the twenty-first century a category devoid of any empirical references. An empty slogan. We do not live in an era of progress. We live in an age of biological, ecological, political and spiritual decline. An end time. * End time defines the historical time of progress but inverts it. It marks the transition from the ideal of revolutionary progress in the sense of social equality, freedom and harmony into its opposite: an arrested time, an eternal present in which human and lived time, as well as political and historical time, have all become frozen. A time without memory and without creativity. Time without past or future. Dead time. But end time also means something else. Postmodern civilization is dominated by a destructive power that has grown to such proportions it now disrupts the essential balance of the biosphere itself. Our civilization drives the development of a growing scientific and rational capacity for chemical, biological and nuclear destruction of planet Earth. End time is a time administered by electronic systems of propaganda, surveillance and permanent punishment. This terminal time is run, throughout, by the logos of a total war that is financial, propagandistic, political and military. It brandishes mutual and universal self-annihilation as its ultimate legitimation. End time defines a process of indefinite involution, which is at once biological, political and spiritual. Its quintessential expression is anguish. An existential and social anguish. Fear of violence, crime and civil destruction; a growing fear of the massive contamination of rivers and acquafiers, of the earth and the air; an insecurity in the face of the industrial devastation of the last rainforests, global warming, and the biological agony of species; a fear and trembling in the face of the angry fire of weapons and wars. Terror in the face of totalitarianism and tyrannies. Despair in the face of the self-extinction of the human race by means of the very same Promethean instruments that characterize this inverted progress. Anguish in the face of an end time. Final Time is the age that presides over two oil paintings by Edvard Munch: Geschrei (Scream, 1893-94) and Angst (Anguish, 1894). Two representations halfway between the languages of European realism of the nineteenth century and the expressionism of the following century. Both works describe the same scene: a bridge that crosses the landscape of a fjord in the middle of a magical and infinite nature, which Munch emphasizes with dramatic carmines, yellows and violets, intense contrasts of light and turbulent strokes. In the background, the bright sky of dusk. On that bridge appears a crowd that has been frozen by fear, their faces completely de-individualized and emitting in unison a human cry of terror: Ich fühlte das große Geschrei durch die Natur. (I felt the great cry through nature) Final Time is a time of silence. The silence that accompanies anguish and fear. Silence in the face of a terror that cannot be expressed in words. Akiya Utaka, a poet who survived the Hiroshima nuclear holocaust, wrote: “I only believe in those words that occupy silence, words that transmit risk.” Requiem auf Hiroshima, by composer Siegfried Behrend, musically describes agony and ecstasy with disconcerted and disjointed rhythms and phonemes, wrapped in silences… “To express extreme horror through silence” was the formula with which Adorno summed up Paul Celan’s poetry in the face of the Jewish Shoah… Silence has surrounded the massacres and genocides that have occurred indefinitely in the world since 1945. A time of silence also defines an age of suppressions, exclusions and cancellations. It is the silence of gags and censorships, masked under the banners of neoliberalism and a mutilated notion of “Human Rights.” This silence coexists with a cacophony of mass-media slogans and an unrelenting bombardment of captivating images, and the resonant disorder of denunciations and desperation that accompanies them. In the empty spaces created by this silencing of human intelligence, prêt-à-porter jargons expand without any restrictions: While some hawk their politically correct discourses, others sell their fundamentalisms and demagoguery. End time has been the age of the last concert, the last painting and the last book, proclaimed a thousand times in the streets and classrooms. It is the age of an agonizing art, literature and philosophy. Presided over by anti-aesthetics and anti-philosophy as its trophies and banners, the end time has been announced by the slogans of post-nature, post-history and post-politics. It’s crowing jewel? The internally broken, split and empty Titan that is the posthuman subject. The end time is a time without name and without spirit. This silence is reconciled with the nightmares of the end of the world that have multiplied in recent decades. First of all, because he was a pioneer of postmodern historical consciousness and critical theory, we must mention Walter Benjamin and his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which provide a vision of progress as an indefinite accumulation of ruins. We can also mention the more recent Amerindian prophecy of the “falling of the sky” and of the end of life in Amazonia and throughout the entire world, formulated by the shaman Davi Yanomani. And there are plenty more examples that deserve to be mentioned, drawn from our bookstacks or from social movements, Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future among them. Not a single discourse about our historical time fails either to announce or denounce this terminal time. In literature and the arts, we find countless testimonies that have given voice to this apocalyptic historical consciousness. A final time and a time of silence are described by the historical landscapes of Beckmann’s The Sinking of the Titanic, the dehumanized faces of fascist Berlin portrayed by Grosz, the moral decomposition narrated in hyperrealist terms in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange or Scott’s Blade Runner; it is also the temporality represented by the linguistic agony of Beckett’s clowns, to mention but a few notable testimonies. In Tierschicksal Franz Mark exposed this final time with expressions of the fragility, bewilderment, and fear of deer trapped between two violently opposed forces in the center of the natural and historical landscape of modern Europe. Picasso’s Gernika and Jorge Castillo’s Palomares similarly expose a time of silence and a final time: two visions of the European military devastation by fascist armies and the global disasters of nuclear war respectively. Silent Time confronts us emotionally and spiritually with the limit of human history. In the final canticle of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Gesangszene, Giraudoux’s words declaim: “Et c’est la fin du monde. Le monde disparaît. Le rideau tombe” (“It is the end of the world. The world disappears. The curtain falls.”) * In the years of the European and American protests against nuclear energy corporations and their dangers, and in anticipation of their short- and long-term ecological consequences, and their military implications, back in the 1980s, I had the opportunity to talk with one of their intellectual leaders: Robert Jungk, the biographer of the first nuclear explosions at Los Alamos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and author of Der Atom-Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (“The Atomic State: Progress Towards Inhumanity”) – a reconstruction of the political strategies around nuclear energy, and of its technocentric and structurally totalitarian rationality. Jungk had just given a lecture whose political and ecological prediction were not exactly optimistic. Although they were not completely catastrophic either. During a dinner held in his honor, this intellectual added a comment that caught my attention. “If the history of humanity follows this increasingly violent and self-destructive path,” he said, “we can no longer count on much space and very little time to think, develop and put into practice the project of a humanized future. Yet, however limited and closely guarded this space for reflection and freedom may be, we must use it to its limits, always with the aim of presenting and developing both the critique of our historical time and our affirmative programs, objectives and projects necessarily associated with this critique. Lastly, it is our responsibility for the future to preserve and increase those intellectual and religious traditions that have sustained the free development of humanity…”

NO KINGS, NO PEOPLE,
ONLY OLIGARCHS

CHRISTOPHER BRITT ARREDONDO

There’s no doubt that the revolutionary spirit of 1776 animated the “No Kings” marches of June 14, 2025. The protests aimed to resist the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump administration. Demonstrators rightly drew attention to instances where executive overreach has threatened the balance of power among the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. However, their rhetorical fixation on “kings” betrays an anachronistic understanding of modern political power. Since the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, sovereigns in the West have mostly reigned in a symbolic capacity without truly governing. The real power has shifted elsewhere—specifically, to bureaucrats and technocrats who have tended to administer public policy under the guise of intellectual expertise and moral authority. Yet this modern displacement of political power has by no means been limited to kings alone. In liberal democratic theory, “the people” are presumed to be the wellspring of legitimate authority. In practice, however, the people are as ceremonial as any modern monarch. Periodically, they are invited to the ballot box to lend legitimacy to a process over which they exert no control. Once elections are over, governance is handed back to professional politicians, lobbyists, and career bureaucrats who claim to act in the people’s name but rarely in their interest. In this way, the people too have been divested of the intellectual power and moral independence needed to govern themselves. At best, “We the People” play a pitiful role in the performance of democracy; but otherwise, we are excluded from it. This double exclusion of king and people is no historical accident; to the contrary, the architects of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a political system that would truly include only men like themselves. Their grievances with Britain, encapsulated in the slogan “No taxation without representation,” were as much about economic self-determination as they were about political ideals. When they invoked the idea of “self-government,” they meant the rule of men like themselves—literate, property-owning elites—rather than the undifferentiated mass of men. The Founding Fathers, despite their revolutionary credentials, were deeply suspicious of democracy. To them, democracy represented a descent into mob rule, and their constitutional design sought to curb its influence. The checks on direct democracy—such as the Electoral College, the Senate, and the limited suffrage of the early republic—reveal the fundamentally aristocratic impulse at the heart of the American political project. The transformation of this would-be aristocracy into an oligarchy was perhaps inevitable. Having eliminated both the monarch and the people, America’s would-be aristocrats celebrated themselves as an exclusive source of political virtue. Over time, this elite has degenerated into a ruling class concerned less with republican virtue and more with economic self-preservation. Today, we find ourselves mired in an oligarchic age—one where financial power seamlessly turns into political influence and vice versa in an endless whirl of the proverbial revolving door. The U.S. system has become a machinery of legalized bribery, a plutocracy governed by and for millionaires and billionaires. Elections are less about representation than about capital deployment; governance is indistinguishable from lobbying; and the coercive power of the state ensures this arrangement is enforced. In the end, the slogan “No Kings” misses the mark. Not only do we not have a king, we also don’t have a people. What we do have is a well-entrenched oligarchy that governs without accountability and enriches itself while invoking the rituals of democracy to mask its rule. The true sovereign in modern America is not a president with regal aspirations, but the billionaire class that underwrites elections, owns media platforms, funds think tanks, and steers public discourse. These are the modern oligarchs, unelected and unaccountable, yet deeply influential. They operate behind the façade of constitutional checks and balances, shaping policy through lobbying, campaign contributions, and backdoor influence. Meanwhile, presidents and legislators—whether Republican or Democrat—often act as their functionaries. The Founders feared both kings and crowds; today’s citizens must learn to fear—and confront—the class that rules without ruling, the new sovereigns of the plutocracy.

IS MOTHERHOOD RELEVANT?

ELIZABETH BARNET

In her classic 1988 examination of women and economics, Counting for Nothing, New Zealand economist, Marilyn Waring, references the word ‘economy’ from Xenophon’s use of the word “oikonomikos,’ the management or rule of a house or household. The raising of children most often arises in the context of the family. Value it or not, the position of mother sets the tone. That tone is elusive and infinitely varying. Motherhood is a kind of fantasy of love and hope that curtains other realities. (Fantasy because the imagination is large and impressionable. Hope because we can imagine better things.) The drapes are drawn (or peeked through or thrown open) but to mother is to wrap bats’ wings around, to hover, to fly hungry at dusk, to nurse, sometimes upside down. My mother entered a Catholic marriage in 1954. By 1965 that marriage was annulled and she was raising her six children alone. NOW, the National Organization of Women, was founded in 1966. By 1970 memories were forming in my pre-adolescent mind - recollections of small women’s meetings in our home merge with a rousing awareness of things so much weightier than my wide and eager eyes could comprehend. Childhood innocence and wonder caught a glimpse of the responsibility and possibilities emerging out of simply being female. That those inklings arose in me, in a large university town in an idyllic mountain landscape, intensified the experiences and the memories that sustained. Less than thirty years later I gave birth to my first child. It fit well with the beginnings of my part time yoga teaching career - a word I was reluctant to apply for most of the decades my work transpired. My outside teaching focus was on seniors and adaptive yoga and I could teach through all three of my pregnancies - and the stages that unfolded. One of the perks of teaching senior yoga to adults my senior was the uninvited advice to younger me. “How can you stand to be alone at home with your children?” asked Wilma, a student, a woman in her late seventies, married to a psychiatrist; she obviously lived through that same 1960s era but half a generation older than my own mother and with different circumstances. She mothered in New York City, her husband focused on his career in psychiatry and she seemed to have remembered that experience as one of being abandoned at home with her two girls. I gathered that marital relationship entertained explorations that left the unhappy mother further isolated and resentful. Wilma was genuinely perplexed, even incredulous at my response. “I love being pregnant and being a mother,” spoken with asserted tone I could not hide as I was equally offended and surprised by her disbelief. Indeed, I felt defensive. I remember her asking me this when I had one child, then piercingly three years later when I had two, and then again with extra irritation, when I was pregnant with my third. It did not stop with pregnancy. Those kids, the three of them, three years apart, they grew. Like caterpillars. Or like George the runt, a pig we raised, who would eat anything. And mothering meant feeding - feeding hunger-for-learning which rages in the young. Hunger-for-learning. But learning feeds itself, will grab at anything. And mothering meant teaching, meant seeing what comes next, meant adjusting to each new stage. Mothering meant figuring out and quickly concluding what kind of a world presented itself so as to determine what to serve. We’re all a bunch of copy cats. And without some reflection on what we had consumed to make us who we were, as new parents, we’d be passing that along too, almost as true as the color of our eyes. But really there was no time for that. As it was for me, for us, mothering was parenting – shared with a husband who cared - a man who made it possible to hold the family in the center. Other circumstances also allowed for an intact family, even though we had both come from ‘broken homes.’ Like the plot of land we could live on the first six years with our two trailers joined by a craftily constructed shed of used plywood and sheet metal with woodstove for heat in the winter. Somehow we kept the mice out of the house though we heard their scampering in the walls. Our trailer/shed home featured a stained clawfoot tub next to a picture window at the sole entrance from which we could view a small garden where we grew corn ready to barbecue not just on the cob, but on the stalk. Sure we did not entertain much, mostly family, but life was dear and intimate. Life was tender. It was possible to relish the cocoon of parenting, which in turn, morphed into all kinds of learning inclusive of homeschooling. Leaping along, thirty years upon another thirty years, still grappling with the illusive nature of mothering which almost defines nature. Plans – futures - much wondered about but not counted on, are now in place. Yet we still hang in the sidelines, wondering how to be of service. Ready to serve. And ready, also, to stay out of the way. Do we call this sacrifice? Did we make an exchange? What, exactly, did we give up?

EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY, AUTHORITY, POWER

IVAN FENN

Historically, it appears that all real and definitive collective action has required at least the temporary formation of an hierarchical arrangement. This dismays the heartfelt democrat, as he perceives it as an irreconcilable obstacle to the democratic principle of equality. Yet, such a reaction reveals a misinterpretation of democracy. Equality is, and must necessarily be, the starting point of democracy, after which one view or individual will come to predominate the rest; this is the process of democracy. Clearly, if one attempts to formally and artificially maintain equality throughout the democratic process, nothing will come of it, as all views and individuals involved will remain on an equal footing, and no position or direction will make any headway or gain any ground – failure to launch. To ever be equally powerful is to ever be equally powerless. In fact, to try and prevent the natural organization of an hierarchy of ideas and persons which develops through the process of democracy is anti-democratic; it is the negation of each and every progressive step within that process. It is an attempt to formalize democracy, when in truth the very essence of democracy is that it is informal, fluid, and entirely unpredictable. The place of equality in democracy is only the starting point of the democratic process. Society needs an authority which is not a power. Presently, the traditional distinction between the two – that is, the distinction between church and state – is neither remembered nor enforced. People receive their trusted information from the cabal of corporate media which colludes with the government, from state-funded organizations, and from state and federal agencies; these are “official” or “verified” sources. One might believe that these bodies have our best interests in mind, and they may in part or in principle. But the fact is, accepted truth comes directly from power, and power is not a principle, but a bare reality, a force. It is impossible for power to remain strictly disinterested in the preservation of itself, which does not always align with the general welfare of society. People in power will lie to preserve it; this occurs routinely, as we know very acutely. But it is a mistake to assume that only some powerful people lie, while others do not. It is a mistake to accord trust to anyone who holds a great deal of power. This is why we need an authority that is not a power.

ON FASCISM

CHARLES SCHULTZ

It is a time of Darkness? Facism is on the rise? Where was this concern, this plague of sorrow and grief, all my life? Now the brutal lawless activity of the executive matters? And never an American crisis without a huckster to the rescue. In this case a one time scholar who wants now to be a World Moral Leader, to give slow impassioned talks about Dark and Light, Good and Evil, and, the Bad Men, over there. Here, in the nick of time, is the Yale-bound Serious Man, Timothy Snyder, who lives in and espouses these terms. He posts pictures of himself and Vladimir Zelensky sitting at a table -- the errand boy of Ukrainian oligarchs dressed up like their personal trainer. They’re going to push for the burn together. Tim knows that Russia is Evil, such a deep and controversial thought, as though the Cold War hadn’t perverted the post-War period of American life and the world with its distortions and lies. Tim claimed in 2023 about Joe Biden, “Credit where due. Biden warned of the Russian invasion. He reacted wisely and flexibly. And now he has gone to Kyiv to give hope. We haven’t had a statesman like this in a long time.” The Egyptian mummy we had as president? Installed merely to block the very mild socialist policies of Bernie Sanders which threatened the donors of the DNC? Biden who handed that office back to Trump on a platter just one year after Tim’s insight? He is so convinced of American virtue, he wrote recently that one of the things that must happen, to forestall Trump’s fascism, is, “Big business should support democracy.” I’ll call them. If I could reach the late railroad magnate Jay Gould, he might reply with his famous quip, “The great thing about America is that I can pay one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Now, I don’t think Tim wrote that about Big Business hysterically laughing when he got another check for being vigilant in his fight against “Fascism”. When Tim says, “Fascism!”, he is calling to the source of his career to declare his loyalty. He is almost unemployable if he doesn’t moan about Putin and Trump. Serve power or serve nachos. Go ahead and tell the truth about American Empire, but “for his money” as the expression goes, he’s staying on the right side of New Haven (like all urban areas in America, it has extensive slums -- probably Putin’s fault.). Tim stopped being a scholar a while back. He preens and poses and declaims his moral insights now. None of his statements place the crimes of American Empire at the center of our various crises, none center the accusations of villainy on the Atlantacist or American elite. It is always, and this is how you know a moral leader, a courageous voice: someone else’s fault. Maybe you need to stand up to that Other, and join Tim on the rampart, but you know, ‘cause he tells you, it’s not you. Fascism? If it has a meaning at all -- endlessly abused as a term by these hustlers who, remember, do not care enough to examine their own prejudices, ever -- we know as the common practice of the endless bureaucracies of the United States of America and its formal, if highly symbolic, democratically elected government. It is unfair to Tim. He is just an Imperial Pervert. He is passionate about what he says. But he has abandoned common sense or elementary morality to be the great tribune of American Empire. Elites assume that they must control the masses, else chaos. But they forget that the masses can now listen to their plans. Tim Snyder would have lived, and been influential, in exactly the same way as his predecessors, the nightmare McBundy brothers and Walt Rostow (servants of the Democratic Party only because they didn’t know enough Mandarin to get in with Mao), but the internet puts him out there. You can see his position and bent of his interests. Tim cries out: The Other is evil, and must be hated: War is Virtuous, Victory is Necessary, Hail Raytheon, God Bless General Dynamics. For those of you who don’t know, those who little Timmy has gotten to perhaps, let me explain what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. The Clintons thought that there was no chance that their hold on African American voters could slip. For sixty years, the Democratic Party polled around 90 percent of the Black vote. So they thought: they can only vote for us. And the Clintons’ had experience: In 1996, several moribund trade unions, still choking on NAFTA, said they would not vote for Bill Clinton. He replied, “Good for you. Vote for Bob Dole.” And the unions backed down. So given their idea of captive voters, they pursued this strategy: the future of the Democratic Party is white suburban Republican women. And the Campaign, so in touch with reality, went for it. Who didn’t? African Americans didn’t turn out in Philadelphia, and Detroit and Milwaukee. That was it. Trump was in. A Michigan Democrat congressman said that December, “She didn’t do any labor-specific events that I’m aware of.” Lots of those black people that didn’t go out to vote? Some current, many more former: union workers! Hillary ran no ads in Michigan, zero, until the last few weeks of the campaign. This is a Party which has run on a platform for decades as one Black academic, who used to work at Yale, described as offering, “Hard times and bubblegum, and we’re fresh out of bubblegum.” Another Black man, commenting in Detroit said of the choice between Clinton and Trump, “When there’s nothin’ on the menu, nobody eats.” This is all very mundane. It would take a miracle not to understand it. Hilary tried to blame Russia, which is hilarious. She counted on the American middle class having been so well propagandized from 1945-1994 that she could just say that, and avoid any critical examination of herself and the interests she represents. And you bought it. And now I have to hear Tim Snyder, some craven Chautauqua clown, intone about fascism. To make people really stupid, you have to focus them on abstractions, concepts without definite boundaries. In America for many decades, Identity performed that miracle. When it fails in its mission to captivate and discipline the American population, you hear things about Russia, as though the Cold War had never ended. And since 2014, the new “two-fer”, Do you know how gay people are treated in Russia?! Exactly what they said to sell Iraq, “Do you know how Arab men treat women?!” It is just to sell and use weapons, which makes a lot of money. Ignore Tim Snyder, and his profound truths about Evil, and reacquaint yourself with reality, which almost never includes a person from Yale saying anything wise.

BANALITY OF
THE COMMONS

PAUL FENN

The Tragedy of the Commons is the sad fact that commonly shared resources and places tend to be neglected, vandalized, stolen. Waterways are perhaps the saddest example of a Commons. The world’s oceans have become a global garbage can. Here in Western Massachusetts, the Connecticut River is an open sewer. Virtually every community here has dumped its sewage and landfill leachates into the region’s rivers for many decades: all of them running into the Connecticut and down to Long Island Sound. As the landfills were inundated with heavy metals and PCBs in the past half-century, waste management practices did not change. As plastic packaging replaced traditional paper and glass packaging, local governments didn’t seem to notice. Landfilling, incinerating, and waste-to-energy plants cause toxic airborne pollutants and debris resulting from burning waste, as well as water contamination from landfilling and sewage. Seventy percent of municipal solid waste will not be recycled, and thirty percent will never be recyclable (non-recyclable plastic, contaminated plastics and medical waste, sewage sludge) Waste to energy plants in Western MA polluted communities and collapsed in 2022; the Chicopee landfill recently closed. Today, local towns haul and dump our waste in Vermont, South Carolina, Ohio and in New York along the Canadian border on native reservation lands. There it is incinerated or landfilled in what are typically lowest income and most vulnerable communities. It is an immoral society that exports its toxic waste to poorer communities. In the process, however, these Western Massachusetts neglected to export one thing into someone else’s body: their legacy landfill leachates. And as Forever Chemicals became a ubiquitous presence in virtually all food packaging in the past few decades, the practice of running landfill leachates through waste treatment plants was maintained. There perhaps was the delusion that, as if chemicals used to decontaminate sewage would somehow “treat” PFAS - the Per Fluoryl Alkyl Substances that cause a dozen deadly diseases and sterilize children, not to mention do the same to fish and all living things, and which bioaccumulate in all of us when we eat them. In Northampton, the City dumps PFAS-laden sewage into the Connecticut River on a weekly basis. Without discussion or thought, despite awareness of the problem, the City government quietly poisons its own people. Perhaps it should be called the Pathetic Commons, more pathetic than tragic, because no one is crying. We have seen this before, with climate change, where a widely recognized problem goes unaddressed for 35 years until it is declared to be “too late.” What then? The state commences to building sea walls, the federal to bail out displaced homeowners. They wait until it is too late, then the Big Spend comes, on stupid things, ineffective: too little, too late. The world is irreparably damaged, late investments misinvested, a future squandered, a society undermined. Enshittification. At least, with climate change, the cause was tragic: energy. We feel a common responsibility for destroying the Commons of a habitable planet, because we need energy. The problem we have seems to be technological: how to meet our needs. But there was no need for PFAS. It was not about needs. It was about convenience and comfort: stick-free pans, wicking underpants, grease-free pizza boxes, waterproof to-go coffee cups. PFAS are found in most toilet paper, clothing, furniture, adhesives, food packaging, heat-resistant non-stick cooking surfaces, home furnishings, insulation of electrical wire. Pathetic. For these obese, lazy extravagences, we bioaccumulate chemicals that cause kidney cancer, testicular cancer, damage to reproductive health and fetal development, reproduction, thyroid function, damage to the immune system, liver disease, and increased cholesterol issues. PFAS do not break down in the environment, can move through soils and contaminate drinking water sources, and build up (bioaccumulate) in fish and wildlife. It is not only the ocean that is a garbage can: you are. Part of the tragedy the Commons is that commonly held resources are squandered. The other part is that everyone is guilty. Every community in Western Massachusetts is doing it. All the landfill leachates from all communities in the entire Connecticut River Watershed are doing it, from the Canadian border to Lyme, Connecticut. Like the Endless Wars, we are unable or unwilling to stop them because we are guilty of having allowed them in the first place. When you do evil, you become evil. The question is, are we destined to remain so? Against this pathetic human and democratic failure is an inconvenient, hopeful truth: there are other ways to manage waste. There are existing technologies to prevent PFAS and plastics from entering the food chain, and we could be using them today. We are not. Instead, we are looking the other way.

THE LOCALIST
MANIFESTO

PAUL FENN

Energy democracy is revolution. There is “democracy.” This idol, this cross on the wall, which explains and justifies all, yet is nowhere to be found. Democracy is just a symbol - a word that slips out, a lie that justifies anything yet signifies nothing. What is democracy? Why do we utter it so often but practice it never? You watch representations of representatives. You choose a channel whose representation you prefer. This is your choice. Maybe you pick a “representative” - an unknown master who will rule you. And you get a sticker for your chest to display, imbecilically: “I voted.” You are in on the lie. Of “democracy.” Then there is “you.” Here too, much of what you call “you” is not you. It is energy. You do not go anywhere. Energy goes there. You don’t clean the house, your clothes, yourself: Energy cleans. You don’t mow the lawn. Energy mows the lawn. In recent years, you stopped doing research. Energy does research. Now, you will not even think. Energy - AI - will think. You don’t do much of anything, anymore, except use energy. Machines. People don’t. Energy does. Nothing in your life exists without it: even the food you eat, the screen you watch, the voices of your loved ones, familiar but rarely present, and even then, only because energy brings them to you: and takes them away again. So what is energy? Who controls it? Who owns it? How does it work? What do you know about it? And if you, like so many, know so little about something that really is so much of “you,” then what are you, really? Answer: an absence: smoke. What you neglect to do has caused an uncontrollable global epochal catastrophe. What? Me? Who? You are taught to think of energy as fuel and technology. But energy is your civilization: of solitude; an experience: of transcendence - a way of life against everyone and everything else. Energy replaced slavery. It is the over-arching cause of climate change and war. But it made us “free.” The transition between what energy and democracy mean, and how they work, is a splash of icy water in the face! Without it, there is no point thinking about your world at all. This is why “energy democracy” will be the Revolution. * Cowardice undermines a civil society because, if the strong do not defend it, confront destruction, who will? And if no one will, our society loses coherence. We no longer have natural social lives based on where we live. Few tolerate the stress of human encounter. The “heaviness” of neighborliness fatigues the atrophied post-citizen - this new voluntary servant - who would prefer wars, climate crisis, or extinction to an interruption of his beautiful insularity – who would tolerate the epochal catastrophe of climate change, just to avoid the unpleasantness of human contact. Civic cowardliness plagues our society - what would have been called an effeminate fatigue has now emasculated us all in regimes of national reconciliation by resentful ex-slaves - to borrow from Nietzsche – those who would place the politics of identity above universal political and economic truths that bring coherence to, or destroy, civil society. The liberated slaves instead seek to transform the imperfect morals of their former masters, whose daughters declare themselves oppressed, and by extension, innocent. They cling to a dead, negative image of our lost (European) American cultural past. A finger-waving political correctness is nothing but the replacement of civic virtue. The twin mores of wokeness and consumerism demonstrate that doing no harm includes doing nothing: which is now evil under anthropogenic conditions of crisis where a response is required. This idol - the consumer - is the re-defined subject of America’s post-democratic society, who produces nothing. But our trance into “consumers” was induced. Our government acted servile when it promised to be run “like a business,” and that the taxpayers “should be treated as our customers,” not just citizens. What sounded like a promotion was the opposite! They promised “better service” and delivered surveillance, censorship, war, and corruption. With their smiling promise, an “End of History” was declared: the ultimate cowardly lion’s roar. There is nothing to say: it is the coward putting on superior airs to conceal trembling. For the past thirty years, the US government re-purposed the machinery of Cold War propaganda into a domestic psyops procedure. Half-involuntary, a seizure, a kind of hysterical laying on of hands followed: a missionary proselytism: the identity politics of transvaluation and ideological rapture. The children were converted, inverted, then perverted into ingrown toenails of fanatical body anarchism and identity mania. The entire organism of civil society was gas lighted and thrown out of a helicopter. A traumatized political theology hangs like a cloud of gas over America’s long Cold War victory lap. Americans and the too-grateful West have been cheering since 1991. We Americans toy resentfully with apocalyptic impulses like youthful, petulant suicides, naive to the tragedy we sluttishly tease. Seeking revenge on our forefathers through waves of mutilation, indifferently, sheepishly, we desecrate the world’s oldest civic culture. Surely, humans have done this before! On the eve of Athens’ disastrous imperial wars, anonymous youths of the city ran through the streets destroying sacred images. But our empire is uneventful; we chastise no client states here, neither upholding nor enforcing doctrines, shattered by an ongoing civil pogrom of “values.” Nietzsche would claim reason was too highly esteemed without madness, without which he said no civilization will survive. Indeed, our “representative” imperial state induces a public madness to euthanize civil society. But is this madness, or is it death-instinct? A suicidal impulse? These naïve Greek archetypes of Dionysus and Apollo, our original, generative cultural formulae, assume the Modern progressive trend - the very desire we have lost to gossip and compulsive psychiatric self-diagnosis. Was desire lost because Dionysus was lost, as Foucault claimed, when madness had been isolated and rendered taboo by Reason? Or is there not something new at stake here? Something simpler? Are we not ambivalent about democracy itself? And is there not something rotten in the very idea of would-be democratic national republics like the United States? Is our disgust and nonparticipation not rational? Their consequences are not. Where originates acceptance of Homeland Security, of habeas corpus forfeit, widespread domestic spying, daily corporate censorship, and assassinations by presidential decree? How did we nod off to climate collapse, to worldwide species extinction, the medicalization of childhood, and the criminalization of anger? No epiphany of danger is sufficient, it would seem, to awaken public alarm. Let me rephrase to you, Mr./ Ms. American, with this question: Why do you accept these things? You say you don’t, no doubt. But you do nothing? You get along to go along. What is this complacency, this ennui? Because you, dearest, are a coward. You yawn and look away while the bully abuses and beats your neighbor. Now it’s your turn. He sees that you smile when you are afraid: the rodent who survives massacre by hiding under the bodies of his family. You are bored with catastrophe, in a somnambulistic witch doctor dance of oblivion, you abandon your civic responsibility, but not the robes of republican dignity! Your emotional needs supersede such questions. It is socialized narcissism: a conspiracy of boredom. This description of a criminal, or medical psychiatric failure, is really a description of Americans like you, who pass as normal, ethical, law-abiding citizens. How could decency prevail among cowards and imperial idiots – as in the ancient Greek definition of those who only concern themselves with private life at the expense of public responsibility - attacking the world? The Nazis taught the world you don’t need the will of the people, or the commitment of the people, to effectuate a takeover of the government, control public opinion, and conduct world war - all you need is the separation of Reason from Belief. The effrontery of belief destroys a tension between seer and seen: the withdrawn perception of what you observe - what you say that is happening historically and politically - and the passion with which you judge and react. Without this tension, you have ceased to be historical. To act in history is the effectuation of Positive Dialectics, which is a projection of metaphysics into physics. Positive Dialectics is change that is projected, forced – directly effectuated by philosophic intent, in the geographic place of political time. Failing to resist the amnesic spell of propaganda that erases memory of increasingly unfamiliar Enlightenments, we must congregate, re-enact-, renew and reveal an unfamiliar, immanent Enlightenment. I propose a resuscitation of old muscles with new work. We need fights with neighbors, which everybody today fears and avoids, so lame and tired, like the boy who is too shy to kiss a girl, or too afraid to jump into cold water. His shyness hardens into indifference, his fear into amnesia. It is so small, this mortification. It is a social disease that everybody has contracted - a venal sin, perhaps, and therefore universally overlooked like a bad memory we would rather forget. Guilty, you forget, to protect a fictional experience. The normalized neurosis, fear, of an unpleasant confrontation with one’s neighbor, threatens all; because we cannot muster the courage, we embrace extermination as if wise to the mere fact of death. We must re-enter a local existence. This is to accept, indeed embrace the “decline” of an empire of madmen, “who create a desolation, and call it: “freedom.” America once proudly proclaimed a resentment of the British depredations of 1776 and 1812 - even into the late 20th century. Having lost it, imperialism is a part of what we Americans are today, but it’s not all we are. It’s a contradiction that plagues us: an historic moral conundrum. There is still time. We must get the ennui behind us to escape the cultivated paranoia and passive aggression of 21st century American society. But first, we must attend to the source of our fear: a profound imperial dependency. Energy is obverse slavery – a Rockefellerian virtual plantation defined by vertically integrated supply chains, monopolies and cartels. But at bottom, energy is a condition of humanity defined not by technology but by politics. Energy is a system of political economy and way of life that depends upon it. Climate change is both the offspring and the nemesis of this system. 75% of the cause of climate change is energy, roughly one third burned to make electricity, one third burned burning to heat buildings, and one third burned for transportation. While most analyses of climate crisis assume energy demand levels are irreducible and therefore also assume that reducing the cost of technology to supply energy demand must be the main barrier to the solution, the enabling or efficient cause - of both the irreducibility of energy demand and the cost of supplying that irreducible demand - is our system of representative government. A creature of the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries’ First and Second World republics, centralized national governments are too large to be democracies, and are thus ruled by representative governments with counterfeit claims to democratic “values.” This form of government is the efficient cause of global catastrophe, its formal cause being in the illusions of its subjects: the primitive, magical idea of representation. We find, and demonstrate here, that incipient municipal intervention, rather than the stale promises of national reform or international agreements of representative governments, is required to untie the Gordian knot of “energy crisis.” To emerge like a Phoenix from the ashes of climate chaos and the poly-crisis it measures in CO2 and rising seas, we must initiate actual democracy in the “sleeping giant” of municipal politics: the discarded ancient little Republics that we inhabit. Transfusing merely technological discourses about energy with a consciousness of culture, how we live and indeed survive, this Manifesto exposes the naivety and incoherence of two precious idols of Enlightened thought: representation and sustainability. Captive to a fanatical political ideology that is both unconscious and fierce, shrouded in a passive aggressive disorder and paranoia, their meaning is transmuted into the double entendre of sacrifice and progress: for our security, our representation must be more democratic, our energy empire more sustainable. But we never get there. Idols become cyphers, you must see by now; you will never make it to the promised land. National democracy is hopeless. The recurring catastrophes of national politics underscores the poverty of hope for a “mass movement” as a pathetic ahistorical nostalgia for nineteenth century impulses that were put to the torch in the Great War of the 20th century. If we - the West - are to learn from this epochal failure, a century later - now that the Cold War is obsolete, its warring ideologies thoroughly leached of all but the weakest rhetorical power - it is recognition of the inadequacy of representative government as a theater of democratic idealism. Overwhelmed by the Pandora’s Box of the Anthropocene era, we must frankly admit that the aspirational horizon or collective hope of Enlightenment cannot be found on this stage. It may be found in municipal politics, if this political ghetto can be roused into action. The Manifesto highlights the essential role not merely of activists, but of intellectuals, to shift our aspirational horizon from central to local politics. It is blunt about the dormant, often decadent condition of this discarded “lower” sphere in the afterglow of imperial glamour. Today, it is a ghetto. But you must want it to see it coming. Trespassing specialized technical knowledge and lawgiving unseen since Montesquieu and the American founding fathers seized upon kingly prerogative to invent the now failed modern nation state, it is to the town and city halls that intellectuals must go to answer the unprecedented crisis of modernity: climate collapse, endless wars, extinctions, disease, and social disintegration that the thing we call “energy” has brought about. The Manifesto is a history of the present: a cultural, political history of energy not merely as an industry, but as the consecrated idol of a struggle between empire and republic, between self-governance and technological slavery. Viewed not merely as a tool, but an infantile dependency laundered into distant fires, rising oceans and proliferating nuclear weapons, energy is the cultural silence laid upon an inchoate explosion of immoral technologies and ahistorical moral fanaticisms. Set against this history of contemporary slavery is the past, the pre-history of energy: of European feudalism. We must undress “the system” that supports what we call modern life, and our idea of life that has evolved within it. You must confront the omnipresent, ghostly slave within your life. You drive your car between buildings and pay energy bills to corporations that destroy nature and control our government. Oil tankers are protected by US navy shipping channels, but also fuel their endless, meaningless wars. In a security apparatus of total surveillance, hand in hand with the national state, the energy corporations is co-master of the society over which it presides as owner of mineral rights and life support of modern society, the center of which is Orwellian espionage, competitive intelligence, 24/7 litigation, corrupting representatives, and propaganda. A spy operation crossed with a law firm, the energy corporation is the bad brother of government; but indispensable, as he brings home the bacon. Then there’s the good brother, the federal government: your protector. These, not democracy and sustainability, are your household gods. You feel, vaguely, this is all necessary to keep your lights on. To feel safe. But you aren’t safe.Within a system of relentless destruction, humans are going mad. Energy is not just energy. Energy is the omnipresent Ghost in the Machine that defines modern life, encompassing home, work and mobility. Americans are made to accept fictions from their masters, trust in whom gives you permission to ignore your slave. Master and you share this little secret. If you pretend your master represents you, then you are entitled to a life of fantasy. Keeping this secret even from yourself earns you a morally laundered life experience of guilt-free automation. What little guilt you feel is assuaged by the promise of progress: - that your codependent harm will be mitigated - over time, you are assured, and assure yourself, the system will be become more democratic, more sustainable. In your guilt-ridden dream of security, any action to actually avert climate change or stop endless war and ban nuclear weapons appear impossible. We can’t turn off the power plants! We can’t give up the bomb! This is how people become evil. Indeed, all the encrusted castes of American bureaucracy serve an instrumentalized cowardice and guilt. The now wholly electronic media class are culpable handmaidens to energy empire. Educational institutions have enjoined their monastic devotions to the choir of media bishops in their spectacular rituals of mythic rotations reflecting official majority party values. Of course! that way it’s democratic, right? At least as close as possible? Unified and ever concentrated among the husks of institutions representing “civil society”, the myopic intelligentsia are now a prime cause of the howling crescendo of irresistible war, inevitable climate collapse, a numbing mass extinction: and public madness. And then there is you. Truly, it is all of us who are mentally captured in a deadly ennui of a pernicious state ideology; but to understand it, you must see that you have internalized it, too. In the schoolyard bully-scene of a degenerate governing class and an illiterate civil society, even those who still care at all are trained to fix their environmentalist eyes upon green technologies as religious idols or the bone-relics of saints: the dead hope of techno-fix-ism. Whether Democrat or Republican, American political thought vacillates between paranoia and ennui. Consuming greenness in an orgiastic proliferation of products that signal personal virtue and affluence, from electric vehicles to solar panels, lithium batteries, and windmills you follow a religious path of technological idols garnished by government incentives and goals: never deeds. Unwittingly, environmentalists are reduced to the cheering sectarians of a state religion: the green sect of the capitalist religion. It is a Godless religiosity that surrounds your ahistorical thoughts. It is not your fault, but it is your problem; a private, personal catharsis and escape from failed democracy only throws more dirt upon its grave. The oceans rise sweet and warm. * This Manifesto places the epiphanic crises of energy, most undeniable among them climate crisis, in historical and cultural context of religion, feudalism, slavery, the Enlightenment the Scientific Revolution, Working Class Movements, Fascism, and neoliberalism, as the catechisms of its original, political, mortal Sin: national power. Drawing lines from rising seas to the dreams of Francis Bacon and the Philosophes of the 18th century, the Manifesto seeks to render coherent the economic and technological discussions of energy within political theory, and presents a proof of concept demonstrated by thousands of cities and towns throughout the United States. As such, this Manifesto lays the foundation for a new system of political economy, focused on municipal political action and voluntary economic cooperation, not acting alone in isolation as a consumer in the market, or Direct Action as a stateless person, or through your representatives in Congress, the State House or the White House, but as the occupant of a specific geographic place: acting with your neighbors at the local Town/City Hall. Our revolution is not of a proletarian variety, nor a cultural variety: it is municipal. This democracy is not a territory, domain or polygon that contains, represents or authorizes truth, but a place, a point of liberty, an outward exertion. Shaking off the dust of Cold War ideology, we articulate a local democratic, cooperative foundation upon which to create new economies outside of global markets and new democracies outside the confinements of central government policy and power. This Manifesto gives democracy - indeed! - a reason to be: something to do. This is not just a theory. It is an unprecedented opportunity to create a genuinely new system of political economy built for a man-made world - taking over nothing old, but making something wholly new.

WHITE
BOY

JULIA PETERS

I am the sister of six brothers, the daughter of a man, the mother of two sons, the granddaughter of two men and the wife of a man; they were all of them white boys once upon a time. They were variously living in a trailer with a single mom, playing Pop Warner football, immigrating from a country destroyed by hyper-inflation and war - or descendant from those fleeing a country starving from potato blight, smoking too much pot, tending goats, ceasing to drink alcohol, becoming a hockey team captain, excelling in school, dropping out of school, punching each other, mowing many lawns, fathering in exceptional and loving ways - more often than not, finding some spectacular women, finding some not so spectacular women, losing a mother at a young age, at last finding solace in other male friends, going mad, crying as though their hearts would break. None of them, insofar as I know and I don’t know everything about all of them, disrespected women, or harmed gay people, or were (“consciously”) racist. They did not seek empire, they were not colonialists, they did not appear to do so much better than women in similar jobs with respect to pay - many of them ran their own businesses: house painter, therapist, dentist, trash hauler, consultant. Coming up as I did, ceasing to shave my college shins and armpits, during waves of feminism, deconstruction of All Canonical Text by men who were once white boys - which is most of canonical text, civil rights, anti-colonialism and apartheid, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism - “Vive la Résistance!” - was always to be found the common theme, the reason for it all, the fulcrum of evil: the White Boy. I must ask this question now - does power stem from the white boy or did the white boy stem from power? How much of it does he still have? And how many of him really do have it? In a state with a lesbian Governor, I can say that my observations about the promise of “women leadership offering peace and collaboration” is not necessarily borne out in practice. People have been marginalized by the white boy’s power, but there are yet innumerable examples of others exemplifying “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Power does not discriminate by gender, race, or sexuality. In 2019 I had a good chuckle when it was reported that the CEOs of four of the five largest U.S. defense contractors were women. Score one for feminism! This on the heels of the weeping about the loss of a woman president in 2016 - asserted by every woman I know to simply be about the fact that she was a woman, not that she was a liar, a war hawk. She primarily received her cash from corporate financiers like Goldman Sachs, those who contributed to the sub-prime financial collapse, itself in large part caused by the fantastically irresponsible financial deregulation perpetrated by the Clinton administration - “it’s the economy stupid.” Meanwhile, what of the white boy in the United States today? Because, it seems in many ways he has been rendered back to a kind of boyhood. He seems to commit suicide rather a lot - as by gender, race and ethnicity white men committed suicide at the highest rate, and certainly by far the most in raw numbers, at nearly 70 percent of deaths by suicide (2022), yet 30% of the population. Increasingly our white sons don’t seem to be reaching for a college degree. In 1995 25% of men - not only white - were equally likely as women, also 25%, to hold college degrees. By 2020, that split skewed towards young women, with 60% of our daughters enrolled in colleges, while only 40% our sons. Back when I was still on the horror that is Facebook, I put that statistic out into that sad little universe and the replies were primarily from white women - “about time,” “and the problem is what?” It reminded me of an interaction I had several years ago, regarding a study of adolescent boys. In this case the reader was delighted to report the result that the author discovered these young men were actually “emotional.” The author was so pleased to realize that while she thought boys didn’t really feel emotions, upon sitting down and talking to them (listening to them) she discovered that they were emotional beings after all! When I criticized her assumptions, I was met with dismay and hurt, because the discussion became about the tender and injured emotions of the AWFL (American White Female Liberal) contradicted, rather than about the substance, the subject, itself - oh right, Boys. When poor George Floyd died in the appalling manner he did, the sensationalist press that is a hack business and no longer a source of investigative journalism, beat the drum that unarmed black boys are twice, or three times, as likely as unarmed white boys to be shot by police. This statistic, amplified to zeitgeist, became the rallying cry for the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many sought to assuage their grief and anger by posting a sign on their lawn, irrespective of what subsequent research has unearthed about the utter lack of efficacy of so many lawn signs. As it happened, the deaths of unarmed men (as it is primarily men) by police, including black men, had gone down significantly in the previous fifteen years. The total number of unarmed men killed by police in 2018 was 60, as in on average slightly more than one unfortunate man per state. Of course it goes without saying that 60, or even one, is too many. While black people account for about 13 percent of the population, the number of deaths (depending on reported data) exceeded that percentage by about two times - reported at between 25 and 30. It is also, sadly, true that while unarmed black victims were twice as likely to be shot, they were also twice as likely to commit a violent crime; in 2025 53% of violent offenders were white (at 60% of the population) and 25% black (at 13% of the population), and the rest by other races. The history of racism, trauma, epigenetics, family dynamics are large and much explored topics in black America, and I will acknowledge them here - they are critical to understand and must be our collective will to face. However, it does not necessarily follow that the propagandizing by apparatchiks of Critical Race Theory asserting the original sin of white five year olds is necessarily the cure. At last, a further sad little side note is that Tony Timpa, a young and mentally unstable man was suffocated by police neck restraint - 14 minutes in this case - in 2016, but he was white. Women work and assert their equality to the extent they can - a battle to be sure - but there is still the biological fact that they have a womb and milk in their breasts. According to “The State of American Men 2025” 86% of men and 77% of women continue to define manhood as being a “provider.” The end of the Cold War seems to mean that we no longer discuss capitalism. We don’t talk about corporate malfeasance. We don’t talk about the Whore that is our government. We don’t talk about swallowing the pill of living in obscene economic disparity, bankrupted by health care bills, excluded from higher education, living cheap on toxic food, mental instability and addiction. When adjusted for inflation, the 2024 federal minimum wage in the U.S. was over 40 percent lower than the minimum wage in 1970. In 2023 median net household income was about $80,000 - of which one third on average went to housing, and upwards of $12,000 annual health care cost per resident, inclusive of Medicaid. Of course, we know that white boys earn more than white girls typically, and more than black and brown boys, but not always (Nigerians, and those originating from a certain number of Asian countries come to mind). Economic suffering discriminates by race and gender, but the majority of races and genders suffer economically. Is the white boy welfare recipient in Alabama, the heroin addict in New Hampshire, the suburban insurance adjuster hanging on by his fingernails to make the mortgage and car payments so his wife can work fewer hours but still get the health care and childcare benefits for their three kids - are these men really the problem? Are they so different from the black addict in East Oakland, or the suburban black dad in Atlanta running the Amazon distribution center while his wife, a nurse, faces union strikes for poor pay and unsafe conditions, as she battles every day in the emergency room the detritus of so many addicted and sometimes violent men, broken, those veterans of needless and criminal wars about oil and regime change (so amply supplied by those defense contractors)? Seventy two percent of all men agree with this statement: “Men can have their reputation destroyed just for speaking their minds these days,” with highest levels of anxiety felt by white men. If I post this, I might receive “boo hoo, poor them” replies from my put upon white sisters. We live in polarization, Manichaeism, good and evil, black and white, the extraordinary reductionism that disables our capacity to communicate, learn, think, speak, where we confirm biases rather than challenge assumptions. This is very related to the collapse of the Anthropocene. Being of the majority doesn’t make you less worthy - as Nixon would remind us. Let’s fight the bad white men, and all of the bad people regardless of race, gender, and sexuality - but let’s not kick every freaking white boy under the bus while we sip our lattes and flick between Netflix channels.

OURSELVES

GEORGE FENN

The Enlightenment is characterized by an Oedipal Complex towards the Reformation. Instead of taking the insights learned with gratitude, it was all rejected as equally worthless. This was done by the capitalists, who thought they were good because they did well in peace. Commerce, as opposed to conquest, is an exchange of wealth by consent. It was done by Catholics because they hate free inquiry, believing it to lead to asocial behavior. Many Enlightenment figures were French. What occurred was a sublimation of five polity options. Anglicanism declares arbitrary central authority. Catholicism declares good central authority. Both are top down. As political theories these are unappealing, except that they are descriptions of what already exists: or rather the negative - arbitrary and positive - good - interpretations of such. The others are appealing, because they would give more authority to the subjects. These are three: Presbyterianism, Congregationalism and Quakerism. The former is a model of parliamentarism: how we wish it were, with an Aristocratic bent: the Church made up of smaller and smaller units, at each level joining together to pick the higher. But basically it is pyramidal in shape. Then there is the Congregational. This does not attempt to dominate a national Church. It allows there to be diverse churches, and yet does not give up the idea of quality. It is convinced of the superiority of a minority, but will not centralize power for them, by vote or divine right. They are thus exclusive. Finally there are the Quakers, who deny the superiority of anyone over anyone, and therefore any power over anyone: one over another, a few over one, many over one. All are, in short, convinced that either very few or no one should rule another. None of them would allow the possibility that all people might come together and judge one another. This attitude was tolerable for the Church, because ultimately it didn’t matter. Power was merely the right to damn, and if nothing comes of it - as, if you will be so tolerant, is the case - whether the system works or not is irrelevant. But people were not content to let these polities rest in the religious sphere. They immediately tried to drag them into the secular. Thus Hume observes at the front of the Parliamentary Cause in the Civil War were the Presbyterians. Likewise in the French Revolution, a polity that was similar to Congregationalism, Genevan Calvinism, was translated by Rousseau and Robespierre tried to implement it, resulting in the Terror: when the people were deemed not pure enough to rule themselves. We have had similar experiences here. The Federal Constitution is a Presbyterian text, and the various measures like Prohibition stem from the Congregationalists, through Unitarianism. Then Quakerism is there to say let no one rule another, which is really a typical servile philosophy, combined with a noble conception of society. Ultimately, however, it leaves the power to anyone, and is content to shake signs. It will do this because it preaches weakness of all people who tell the truth: that truth is weak. The first four are elitist. Quakerism is not, but as a result forgoes all responsibility to lead, and so feeds into elitism, which accepts the status quo, and is content to half-heartedly try to convert them. In no instance is there a church polity which accepts the physical and psychological importance of organization. The individual is weak alone. Organization is essential, centralization is not. But then the small organizations must be everywhere to not be mere toys of the central. These must be organized not on the basis of revelation, but self-reliance. The problem was power. But the solution was neither representation nor predestination nor conversion, all of which cannot happen, but are mere pointings in the direction. The sought could be realized, but only if the material conditions reflect. Aristocracy only works in feudalism: where elites are evenly distributed throughout the land, and are in place for a very long time. However, the aristocrat maintains his force by violence, and disappears as he becomes just. Inherited wealth corrupts. The successor of his weakness would degrade his inferiors or join them. Then there is a totalitarian state, which does not even have the virtue of competition, which might make lords less tyrannical. The only acceptable relation is one in which there is no hierarchy, but rather leadership, which occurs when there is an emergency. And this can only be good when the group is small enough, that interpreters cannot surround the halls of power, and obscure the view of the people. Normally there should be no exercise of authority. This requires that the Federal Government be stripped of much of its power, and its role in the world be merely defensive. All its power are bandages on the capitalist system, which if transformed at the local level would make them unnecessary. Thus parents who are not degraded can teach their children. Old people whose children love them do not need pensions. People who eat good food do not need doctors. People who had good lives are willing to die. Likewise the evils like the media and entertainment would disappear, because people would not need distraction from their suffering. Our society, in a capitalist form, makes men and women live in ways that are unnatural: getting up to clocks, being humiliated by inferior people, eating poison, sending children away, being with strangers, doing things only for money, not because the activity makes sense. All these can be dealt with because they are what affect all of us, as we are human and from a relatively common culture. Finding the way is merely a matter of details.

CONTEMPLATE
EVIL

HOLLY ELIZABETH MUÑOZ

This past weekend, editor friends of mine reviewed a long, ranty thought piece I had written about land trusts in Massachusetts. Together, over homegrown carrots and strong coffee, we focused in, over and over, on the absurdity of philanthropy. Trust us. We’re a non-profit. Give us your money now. Give us a bigger gift over the next couple of years. Give us your home when you die. By giving us these material assets – which we pretty much always immediately liquidate and invest in the stock market – you become us. A trustworthy part of a machine that is making the world a better place. You, through your generosity, help us help people like you watch birds forever. It doesn’t matter what’s happening right now. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to the thousands of working class people being human trafficked by our corporate-captured government. It doesn’t matter what is happening in Florida and Texas and Louisiana, with the rapid deployment of our federal taxpayer dollars to stand up concentration camps for “illegals” who have done nothing other than grow our food and process our waste. It certainly doesn’t matter what’s happening in Yemen. Or Sudan. Or Burundi. Don’t even think about saying Palestine. You did, didn’t you? You thought about it. Well, we’ll get back to that. But for now, what is important is the 67,000 acres of land that we oversee, and by oversee, I mean, own. These trails. These mansions. These “special places.” “For everyone. Forever.” As we sat and talked, someone described the phenomenon of philanthropy as “Bambification.” The fantasy of alleviating suffering at scale with even the tiniest amount of charity. The juvenility of believing that an organization must serve as an intermediary of how one shares one’s wealth. The lunacy of wanting to control anything after you’ve died. It is perfectly legal and appropriate to give money to other people. Cash. A check. Wire transfers. You can give money to people you know. And you can give money to people you don’t know. In fact, you can give anyone up to $18,999 without having to file any paperwork with the IRS. Nothing. Literally nothing happens to you, except that you’ve immediately, directly helped someone else. But why would you do this? Give the gift of money directly to someone else? Because they need it, and you don’t. It isn’t any more complicated than that. I’m encouraging everyone I meet to stop “investing” in large, bloated non-profits and instead give money directly to people in their communities who need it most. The most vulnerable people. The families of workers who are about to go on strike. The people who are trying to get their loved ones out of ICE prisons. You can do this. Give money to people, without strings attached, without expectations. And from there, it’s like a snowball. You can tell people about it. I did this. This way. Because it literally doesn’t matter who they are or what happens to the money after the transaction is complete. I don’t need to have control of it. I don’t need to “entrust” it to a non-profit organization to legitimize it. I don’t need to make sure someone is doing the “right” thing with money they clearly need. I’m not into overseeing. That’s what slave owners did. That’s so Florida, right now. The more I talk about philanthropy and wealth hoarding, out loud to anyone with critical thinking skills, the more embarrassed I am. For us, as a society. That we cannot see this massive sleight of hand. I’m also deeply ashamed that I didn’t put all of this together sooner. That it took twenty years, working inside of some of the largest, most bloated pretend non-profits, to realize these corporations (that’s what they are) are making things worse. Time is of the essence. Contemplate evil, quickly. The people who grow our food and process our waste are being kidnapped by bounty hunters and sent to for-profit prisons where they will continue to grow our food and process our waste as slaves. Meanwhile, we are inspired by the idea that the Democratic party is reformable and the GOP will go away if we just keep standing out? Y’all, we need to infuse the most vulnerable people in our communities with capital. Cash. From your retirement fund to their grocery cart. Why? Because it is the right thing to do. And we all need to be doing the right thing right now to upend the system. To build different, better, non-exploitative, non-destructive, non-violent systems. We do not have luxury to argue about the best approach to build bases of power to flip the House in 2026.* You know who the most vulnerable people are in your communities. You do. You just don’t want to interact with them. You don’t want to see yourself in them. But you must find them. You must interact with them. You must see yourself in them. And then you must give them as much money as you can afford to give them. Non-profits are designed to exist, hat in hand, forever. Just like our corporate-captured two-party electoral system is designed to keep us fighting, amongst ourselves, forever. Corporations, especially the ones charading around as non-profits, are criminal. You should not trust them or what they say they are going to do with the money you give them. Instead, gather your friends around a table and figure out how you’ll give away your money to the people in your community who need it most. Direct support to the most vulnerable people in your community. Again, you are not overseers of vulnerable people. You have enough. It is high time to share. It’s late in the game, but it’s not over yet.

WHAT'S UP, BIBI?

SCOTT LICHTENSTEIN

Dear Prime Minister, Thank you for your WhatsApp message yesterday requesting an overview of our service. As you may know, we at Avelli Consulting offer political consultancy to political leaders across the world and count amongst our clients Jair Bolsonaro, Georgia Meloni, Viktor Orban and Boris Johnson-just your type of peers wouldn’t you agree? To that end I thought I would set out our service as you lead Israel into the next election.I think you’re going to need all the help you can get because there’s still a possibility that you might win and nobody wants that do they? Let me state the problem as I see it and potential ways forward for a successful outcome, outlining what we’ve done for some other clients. Once you understand our revolutionary theory of politics everything will be crystal clear. Let’s start with conventional political theory. Since Machiavelli (1532) it’s been assumed that political leaders always seek to obtain and retain power, doing whatever necessary – including corrupt dealings with old school chums and ultra right wing coalition partners as you’ve done. This is erroneous. It is wrong because all the data runs in the opposite direction. The big mistake is to follow Machiavelli and assume that political leaders seek to acquire and retain power. The reality is the opposite: they seek to avoid power or cede it if, by accident, they acquire it. Why? Because working beneath the surface is a much stronger force to do the opposite: to avoid power and thus any kind of accountability and responsibility. In effect, if the cost of power is responsibility then most politicians prefer to be in opposition. So they say they want power but look at all the screw ups they make when they’re in power, like yourself? It should be self evident that these can only be explained when we accept that political leaders don’t want power because it brings responsibility and they’ve got better things to go than to make the world a better place. So rather than follow Machiavelli’s dictum, you need to do the opposite: don’t seek power and if the opposition is even more incompetent than you are and by accident you get re-elected, you’d better engage in even more rash and illogical actions as possible to ensure your supporters or benefactors in your case - the US billionaire war profiteers - remove you. This is self evidently a better explanation for political leadership because to assume the opposite is to assume political incompetence and malevolence is an accident rather than the very bedrock of the system. To remind you: politics is not abetting power and taking responsibility but avoiding both. Let me use some of my former clients, the UK and US to illustrate the point. As I pointed out to him, why would you want to earn what Boris Johnson did as Prime Minister $205,100/£158,000 instead of what he earned for writing a newspaper column $325,000/£250,000, be on TV a lot, earn more on outside jobs, and never be accountable for anything? Just think, no UN, no human rights conventions and no threats of getting bombs cut off. Johnson even wrote two different news columns depending on whether he was going to support Brexit or Remain campaign and obviously thought that as every economist said Brexit would be economic suicide and every policy expert said leaving the most successful political alliance the UK has ever been in would be political suicide, the best course of action was to support the losing side and avoid any responsibility whilst getting paid large amounts of money elsewhere. But then enough people believed his fabrications and Johnson accidentally won the Brexit vote; he was responsible for having to do something about it. Fortunately, it was clear to everyone he wasn’t capable of running anything and Theresa May won the leadership. Remaining on the margins of success without actually achieving any can be a tricky thing. When Theresa May failed to get her legislation through and he tripped himself up by accidentally beating his opponent, Jeremy Hunt, Johnson was confronted with the obvious problem: how to get out of office and pronto. Fortunately, COVID came to the rescue: He went to parties in Downing St when he knew it was against his own rules, shook hands with COVID patients despite being warned not to, refused to publish a report about dealings between the Tories and Russia, and illegally awarded contracts to his chums: amongst other things. Now, I’m not claiming that he consciously did these things on purpose – that would require a degree of intelligence beyond him, but rather, that history works to help leaders avoid responsibility by encouraging them to say stupid things and thus never get elected, or if they do, get quickly ousted by saying and doing even more stupid things. Just look at Biden! It’s not restricted to Brits. Think how Trump inadvertently beat Hilary Clinton and then ensured he would fail at the next election helped by COVID: a dog could have eaten Scrabble tiles and shit out a better COVID strategy than Trump’s. But also failed to build a wall or make Mexico pay for it, or didn’t make America great again. He couldn’t just thank the American people for removing him, so he made a fuss about election fraud that never occurred and argued having 74 million votes automatically meant he had more than Biden’s 81 million votes. I mean, even a child knows the math doesn’t work but that’s the point: he doesn’t want to get power back, he just wants to revel in the publicity, the life protection, and the immunity from prosecution just like you do. He’s got to be making all these mistakes on purpose, hasn’t he? OK, now let’s turn to you. You’ve got a terrible mess on your hands. Crushing all those Gazans with bulldozers would upset anyone. Putting those brave IDF soldiers in such difficult conditions and having no choice but to shoot terrified toddlers, I hurt for you. The world sympathises with your situation: having to face the threat of Palestinian children being treated in hospital, of course they need to be bombed! Admittedly, the UN finding that your government implemented a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system does question your narrative that that it was all down to stray Hamas rockets. Of course there is an acceptable justification for burning people alive while they are attached to life support systems…I just can’t think of any right now. Shooting a newborn baby because …um…let’s move on. One thing we can work with is the political capital for having to deal with those intolerable counter-terrorist. When asked what his message to Biden was, murdered Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar replied, “Compel the occupation to adhere to international law and international resolutions. If the occupation complies, there is a possibility for a long-term truce.” I mean really, who could be expected to work with someone like that!? I can’t see why the Palestinian people hate you, can you? And your defending Israel against journalism is to be marvelled at: murdering 177 journalists in one year – more than WWII and Vietnam combined - makes Saudi prince MBS look like an amateur! I think you are an ideal candidate for our services, and although you may not be conscious of it yet, we can also help you achieve your aims but in a conscious way: escape the responsibility of power and avoid prosecution whilst gaining the publicity you desire, secure some lucrative jobs, immunity of prosecution and leave making the world a better place to someone else. In my experience you show all the signs of wanting to be relieved of the burden of implementing a solution to the conflict, why else at the threat of a ceasefire would you murder the moderate chief negotiator if you actually wanted a settlement? It’s obvious you’re ready for new challenges. ‘It’s going to be a challenge with the benefactor you’ve got in Trump. We are going to have to work on your benefactor who is slow to get the message about your new direction. Trump like Biden told you that if you didn’t stop it he would have no choice but to send you more weapons time after time! And if you don’t stop shooting at UN peacekeepers, aid workers and starving innocent Gazan women and children Trump would have angry words with your arms dealer! We’ll have to find other ways to incentivize Trump to facilitate your transition. I mean, how much reckless war crimes from a fugitive of the ICC does it take for him to get the message?’ I think you’re unique amongst our client list in that you are showing all the signs of not just wanting to escape the hassles of leadership, but statehood as well. Breaking 65 UN resolutions including two conventions of war, committing mass atrocities across different countries, allowing death squads to kill indiscriminately in the West Bank, top experts in international law finding the ‘homeland of the Jews’ guilty of Apartheid, Illegal occupation, ‘probable genocide’ and and and- not the behaviour of an ethno-state that wants the responsibility of Statehood. So, we can talk through some ideas of how to kill two birds with one stone. Just like Northern Ireland has a power-sharing agreement under the umbrella of a state, Israel could become the Puerto Rico of the dessert - a protectorate: leave the headache of statehood and making the Middle East a better place to someone else. Take a leaf from your own Orthodox voters - they’ve been protesting against the responsibility of having to carry out military murder, who can blame them? Leave it to someone else. We can brainstorm suggestions, such as setting up METO – a Middle East Treaty Organisation, based on NATO. You’d be doing NATO a favour - they wouldn’t have to keep carrying out regime change in the Middle East under their name, like in Libya - oy veh! As a formalised arms dealer you could escape prosecution and still do what you do best which is procure arms. Imagine, North Carolinians got a paltry $750 per person for rebuilding after the hurricane; with the quadrupling of the money to Israel for the war every Israeli citizen is being subsidizes by the US taxpayer to the tune of £2,200/per Israeli citizen - you’re a natural! Anyway, must go now, I have Trump on the line. If you want us to help you unburden yourself from the responsibility of making the world a better place, make lucrative contracts and be immune from prosecution then please respond - by WhatsApp obviously! Worst of luck with the war, Marc E. Avelli Political Advisor to the World’s worst leaders Geneva, Switzerland Uzi1 M16

PROGRESS
AND PROFIT

CHRISTOPHER BRITT ARREDONDO

Progress is the modern idea par excellence. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, it has been portrayed as the emergence of humanity from the darkness of ignorance and superstition into the light of reason, which is thought to reveal all that which is true, beautiful, and just. Progress claims that, rather than feeling overwhelmed by their vulnerabilities and living in a state of constant anxiety and uncertainty—Will the Gods strike us dead with thunderbolts? Or will they favor us with a good hunt and fruitful harvest? —people can learn to dominate nature, predict outcomes, and effectively determine their own historical destiny. Reason is that force by means of which humanity progresses from the fantastical belief that magic and witchcraft can reliably control outcomes to the philosophical understanding that, insofar as science discovers and explains the laws of nature, it also uncovers God’s plan for the universe. Indeed, as Francis Bacon imagined it in his Christian utopia of 1623 titled Nova Atlantis, the modern expansion of humanity’s techno-scientific imperium over nature and history correlates with God’s providential plan for the salvation of humanity. On this view, modern progress promotes the techno-scientific advancements of the industrial revolution as a means to accelerating the expansion of Christian empire. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, among the would-be enlightened Christian European nations, this understanding of progress as a form of providentially ordained enlightenment would lead to a “scramble for empire” in Africa and Asia. American imperialists of the time, such as Hearst, Pulitzer, Roosevelt, Lodge, and Taft, feared that their country, despite its “Manifest Destiny” to spread economic and political freedom everywhere, would be left behind. So, in 1898, they threw themselves into this scramble for empire with tremendous enthusiasm and came away, after a “splendid little war” against Spain, as a transoceanic empire, with newly acquired colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. These progressive imperialists had taken on their share of what Rudyard Kipling famously called “The White Man’s Burden.” In this regard, American imperialists told themselves that, by means of conquest and colonization, they were bringing enlightenment to people who were less fortunate and less competent too—people who supposedly were still seated in the darkness of pre-modern ignorance and superstition. By 1901, the imperialists of America would complete the construction of the Panama canal and create a nominally independent Panama, by means of which they would oversee the flow of goods and capital that linked commerce between the USA’s far-flung colonies in the Pacific and the Caribbean to markets in the imperial heartland. Indeed, it would seem that another aspect of the “White Man’s Burden” that American imperialists were eager to take on was to assure that the progress of civilizational uplift should prove profitable. Progress, they reasoned, ought to benefit everyone: it should provide uplift for the colonized, and for the imperialists, it should provide perpetual profit. This providentialist view of progress as profit is not, however, strictly modern. In fact, its history, like the history of debt, credit, and profit itself, is much older. From the American imperialists of 1898, we can reach back across an historical continuum to the providentialist views on history that informed the Founding Fathers and the establishment of the US as an “empire of liberty.” And from here we can reach back still further to the medieval era and the classical idea of the translatio imperii et studii, according to which new Christian empires inherited the political dominion and moral authority of previous ones, thus circumventing the distressing threat of decadence implicit in the cyclical rise and fall of empires. But, in order to fully comprehend how the tradition of the translatio imperii et studii creates a historical continuum that prolongs imperial time, we must reach back in our cultural tradition even further still, beyond any distinct knowledge of the events of the past, to the inchoate apocalyptic imagination of the Christian-Judaic tradition. Ever since Saint Agustine, in The City of God, shared his interpretation of the apocalypse, Christian theologians have thought of Christian empire as the katechon: that is, as a force capable of creating a temporal caesura that interrupts the passage of divine time, ultimately enabling the Church to expand, become truly catholic or universal, and thus prepare as many people as possible for salvation from perdition. For, according to the apocalyptic imagination of the apostles and prophets of the Christian faith, the end of the world is supposed to coincide with the salvation of those who recognize Christ as their savior. At the start of these so-called “end times,” the Antichrist is supposed to reign; then, Christ is supposed to come back a second time, defeat the Antichrist, save the true believers, and usher in a thousand-year reign of peace and glory. But because God wants to save as many people as possible, he commands his believers to proselytize, evangelize, and seek to convert all of the nations that make up humanity to the Christian faith. In order to carry out this evangelical mission and effectively expand, the Church and its ministers require more time. By withholding divine time, Christian empire restrains the Antichrist, while also delaying salvation. This delay permits the Church to grow. The gathering of believers over time into the ever-expanding community of the Church: this is what the Church fathers thought of as historical progress. This apocalyptic understanding of progress has provided a providentialist justification for American empire, from the revolutionary times of the Founding Fathers to the “splendid little war” of 1898 and beyond. During the Progressive Era, imperial progress—understood in its original evangelical sense as the expansion of Christianity and the gathering of converts into the fold of the Church—was secularized as a gathering of assimilated “converts” to the American Way of Life into the fold of liberal democracy and capitalism. What Progressives like Dewey called “Industrial education” was, in this sense, a secularized catechism by means of which Progressives aimed to convert subject peoples into citizens. This was the case as much in the American homeland—where Progressives imparted industrial education to African-Americans, Native-Americans, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Asia—and in the imperial hinterlands, like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Hawaii and the Philippines. This process of acculturation was known at the time as Americanization. While it claimed to want to make these colonized people industrious and prepare them for democratic self-government, it actually aimed to make them as politically incompetent as they were economically dependent. Of course, from our postmodern perspective today, we can see that this promise of salvation has actually always and already been used to justify the secular subjugation of conquered and colonized peoples. Indeed, the divine bureaucracy of the Trinity—which effectively removes God the Father from the world, leaving its governance in the hands of the ministers of the Holy Spirit—serves in the modern era as the model for secular governmentality. “Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion” (Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 287). Insofar as modern secular governmentality centers on the economic, it identifies sovereignty not with the imagined virtues of either the king or the people but with the economic self-interest of idiots. Idiots. The ancient Greeks used this term to designate people who had been banned from participating in politics because they had placed their own self-interest above the common good. No Kings. No People. Only idiots focused on making a profit. Such are the political consequences of the providential progress of the modern era. Politics has been emptied out of all meaningful content and reduced to economics. Instead of cultivating republican virtues and providing for the common good, the political economy of our post-modern era promises salvation to all those who, out of self-interest, have accumulated debts. Capital offers this salvation by means of credit. The market for indulgences, it seems, is forever expanding, promising perpetual profits to everyone.


The Wry Maker

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