NM's blog

Excerpt from Howl by Allen Ginsberg , 1955-56 What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open          their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-         nation?  Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob         tainable dollars! Children screaming under the          stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men          weeping in the parks!  Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the          loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy          judger of men!  Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the          crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of          sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!          Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-         ned governments! ...

Those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money … The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it. —John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

 A review of A People’s Guide to Capitalism

Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

A book review A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (The book is currently half price on Verso website and even cheaper as an e-book)

The conflict in Yemen is not really about Iranian influence, as is often claimed to and in Western capitals. It’s certainly not about legitimacy or democracy, nor yet about sect, creed or colour. It’s about filthy lucre, and the corrupt access to it via state-capture. The Arab Spring—a rising up of the “street” against the  kleptocracy —was co-opted and corrupted in Yemen by  political factions  (and their foreign sponsors.) The UN-sponsored  National Dialogue Conference  supposed to be a national fresh start after decades of corruption, nepotism and misrule, was itself corrupted by those very factions it sought to replace: many of the ancien regime were able to retain and leverage ill-gotten political and financial resources, despite those being the major cause of the 2011 uprising. And the West stood idly by. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas "Greed is the root of evil"

Keynes, civilisation, and the long run