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Quote of the Week: When Crimes Begin to Pile up They Become Invisible

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.    When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems

Israel’s Permanent ‘War Economy’

It is a good summary and a well-researched article . I think it needs more elaboration on Israel’s shift to ‘a neoliberal economy’.  The Israeli’s economy is not just a ‘war economy’. It is 1. a capitalist political economy with its internal dynamics and 2. a global political economy. Class is absent in the analysis as if Israel is a unique case where ‘nationalism’ (and religion or both) decide rather than a ruling class or a coalition that represents different classes. Falling rate of profit or as Nitzan and Bichler put it in a seminal work that serves as a background and a starting point of Israel economy today “the profit margins of dominant capital started to feel the pinch.” This is a major factor in the form of capitalism Israel shifted to in order to maintain or increase the regime of capital accumulation.  Related After the economic crisis that hit a few countries in the 1990s then the 11 of September attacks on the US, the crisis reached Western countries. “The i...

Quote of the Week: Men and Making History

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

Trump: A Calamity or a Problem?

‘Be honest’, Dimon said, ‘He [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.’ —Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan In other words, classic liberal-capitalist policies,  à l’américaine . This is why  Trump continues to be a problem and not just a calamity .”

Quote of the Week: You Will Have a Good Life When …

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats... — Wilhelm Reich,  Listen, Little Man!