Capitalism is like cigarettes by diomedes77, blogging at Daily Kos. Since this is so short and there’s no way to elegantly excerpt it, I’m posting the whole thing here with apologies to diomedes77. Something tells me that diomedes77 probably won’t mind seeing this message spread here, too:

And neither liberals, progressives or conservatives understand what that means.

The right wants their ciggies without filters. Liberals and progressives, OTOH, want to smoke, too, but they want filters in place. Even smart liberals and progressives, who seem to get that smoking is bad for you and why, don’t want to get rid of cigarettes. They just want to “contain” the damage they do. They can’t make the logical leap to ridding the planet of those ciggies entirely. They can’t seem to draw the logical inference that even filtered cigarettes cause cancer.

Conservatives and right-wing libertarians (propertarians) want their capitalism straight up, no mixer, no ice. Progressives and liberals want to add soda, pour it on the rocks, and drink a lot of water afterwards. But they still get drunk, just like righties, and their livers are still rotten.

No matter what we do to capitalism, no matter how we filter it or mix it with soda or pour it on the rocks, it’s never going to be anything more than an infernal machine to create economic apartheid and destroy the planet. Its very nature is to extract wealth and resources from the earth, workers and consumers and hoover it all up to the very top, thus forever creating massive inequality. Baked right into the system is theft—theft from workers, consumers and Nature itself. It’s very nature is irredeemably in conflict with the interests of the vast majority of humans and the planet itself.

It can not be “managed” or “filtered” or sustained. It must always expand, and its expansion means greater and greater instability, inequality and the destruction of our environment. It is nothing but a cancer, and its own “success” means the destruction of its host.

If the OWS movement is not “anti-capitalist” at its very core, then it is nothing but a movement to filter and manage and contain some of the damage fomented automatically by our economic system. If it is not in favor of an entirely new, structurally egalitarian economic system, then it might as well just call itself “The Third Way” or “No Labels” and be done with it.

Want to reverse the tide of inequality that has swept the world? Want to reverse the damage wrought on our environment, our seas, our land? Want to create a livable future for everyone? Then we must stop deluding ourselves that capitalism can be “fixed”. It is beyond redemption.

Slavoj Žižek at Cooper Union in NYC, 2009

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek poses some interesting questions in a new essay titled “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning,” which was prepared from the remarks he made at Occupy Wall Street on October 10th (video of that below).

This except from the full essay, which you can read at In These Times, discusses answering conservative’s hollow critiques of the OWS movement:

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer.

Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are done — –but what is this violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

The protesters are called “losers” — but the true losers are on Wall Street, bailed out by hundreds of billions of our money.

They are called socialists. But in the United States, there already is socialism for the rich.

They are accused of not respecting private property — but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day. Think of the tens of thousands of homes foreclosed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990. The communists who are still in power run the world’s most ruthless capitalist system (China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is a sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce.

The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—that are threatened by the system.

The protesters are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.

The protesters are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything. They are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What the protesters are doing is reminding those in power to look down.

Read more of “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning” by Slavoj Žižek at In These Times
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…

A long-distance photo of the plane and banner

By now you’ve probably heard about the plane that was flown over NYC today with a flowing banner behind it reading: “THANKS FOR THE DOWNGRADE. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED.”

Fortune magazine’s Dan Primack learned who flew the plane: It was a Lucy Nobbe, a vice president with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Nobbe is a single mother from St. Louis who is angry with Wall Street and Washington and wanted to vent her frustration:

“I originally wanted to fly it over Washington, D.C., but learned that you can’t do that,” says the banker, who asked to remain anonymous for job security reasons [She revealed herself subsequently—RM]. “So I chose Wall Street instead, but didn’t specifically intend it to fly over S&P. I’m just a mother from St. Louis who feels the only reason we got downgraded was people in politics.”

More from Foster Kamer at The Observer:

A friend of the woman who flew the plane who requested anonymity spoke to the Observer by phone, confirming that her friend is in fact a single mother of two from St. Louis. We were told she is an investment banker (Fortune noted her as a “broker”) and as her friend explained to us, “she woke up pissed about everything in Washington, especially now with the downgrade.” She wanted to fly it over D.C. but she couldn’t because of the restricted airspace; her original intent wasn’t to fly the plane “at” Wall Street, per se.

“She’s not mad at S & P, she’s mad at Washington D.C. She called me up to have me talk her out of it, and of course, I didn’t,” her friend noted, “because I think it’s funnier than shit.” According to her friend, the woman “does not have a lot of discretionary cash as others are saying. She’s a single mother of two. She’s been working and paying taxes since she was 16 years old.”

Is she of any particular political persuasion? “Nope,” her friend notes. “Not really. It’s directed at Washington. The Republicans, Democrats, President. Not at S & P.” We noted—as we’ve heard from friends, colleagues, and sources that the banner is likely making quite a few people smile.

“I think she’d be happy to hear that. She can’t reveal herself because she doesn’t want to lose her job, obviously,” her friend noted, “but I think she’d be happy to hear that.”

I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Capitalism a Love Story. No fan of Capitalism and a big Moore fan, this looks like a treat for moi.

Capitalism, A Love Story