Revolution Will Not Be Funded Quotes

Kinzie smiled smugly. “You admire our base of operations? Yes, our distribution system is worldwide. It took many years and most of our fortune to build. Now, finally, we’re turning a profit. The mortals don’t realize they are funding the Amazon kingdom. Soon, we’ll be richer than any mortal nation. Then—when the weak mortals depend on us for everything—the revolution will begin!” “What are you going to do?” Frank grumbled. “Cancel free shipping?

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.

The mortals don’t realize they are funding the Amazon kingdom. Soon, we’ll be richer than any mortal nation. Then—when the weak mortals depend on us for everything—the revolution will begin!” “What are you going to do?” Frank grumbled. “Cancel free shipping?

She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures...

In some cases, they are already doing so. Influenced by a coalition of community groups, the New York City Council passed a historic budget in the summer of 2014 that created a $1.2 million fund for the growth of worker-owned cooperatives. Richmond, California has hired a cooperative developer and is launching a loan fund; Cleveland, Ohio has been actively involved in starting a network of cooperatives, as we’ll see in the next chapter; and Jackson, Mississippi elected a mayor (Chokwe Lumumba) in 2013 on a platform that included the use of public spending to promote co-ops. On the federal level, progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders are working to get the government more involved in supporting employee ownership.130

Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites.” This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don’t even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you’ll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.

Now, I don’t want to come over all cynical, but doesn’t that imply that you could dispense with the entire democratic process and simply award power to the party with the most money in its campaign fund? Yes. It does. Maybe not always, just every, single time in history so far.

Basic research leads to new knowledge,” Bush wrote. “It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...

Still, despite controlling both houses of Congress during the second Reagan administration, they let a brain-dead right-wing president get away with carrying out an HBO miniseries’s worth of Iran-Contra crimes, which was pathetic. And here’s a dose of irony to sweeten the pill: Reagan selling arms to Iran in order to fund rape squads in Central America really did make Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.” So if libs want to keep holding up Watergate as a historic triumph for the forces of good, they’ll have to admit that letting Reagan off the hook represents a far greater historic triumph for the forces of evil.

foundations have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as “cooling-out” agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests of philanthropists.

Gore pushed the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, which made the Internet widely available to the general public and moved it into the commercial sphere so that its growth could be funded by private as well as government investment.

When wealthy people create foundations, they’re exempt from paying taxes on their wealth. Thus foundations essentially rob the public of monies that should be owed to them and give back very little of what is taken in lost taxes. In addition, their funds are derived from profits resulting from the exploitation of labor. That is, corporations become rich by exploiting their workers. Corporate profits are then put into foundations in order to provide “relief” to workers that are the result of corporate practices in the first place.

we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean.

Dylan Rodriguez defines the non-profit industrial complex as “a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

However, even before the orgies of neoliberalism it was obvious that capitalism is not socially efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially useful science to the existence of public education and public transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had capitalism foisted on them.3 All this testifies to a “market failure,” or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-capital and every other4—and which is propelled by the structural necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard neoclassical economics, which makes such assumptions as perfect knowledge, perfect capital and labor flexibility, the absence of firms with “market power,” the absence of government, and in general the myth of homo economicus—the person susceptible of no other considerations than those of pure “economic rationality”—is societal harmony going to result.

Their room, board, and tuition were paid directly by Babel, so they never even saw the bill – on top of that, they received their stipend of twenty shillings a month, and were also given access to a discretionary fund they could use to purchase whatever course materials they liked. If they could make even the flimsiest case that a gold-capped fountain pen would aid their studies, then Babel paid for it.

The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty. They activated critical constitutional doctrines that gave the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched. He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians. With their reverence for states’ rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these historic feats. Hamilton

Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his letter that he and Allen had used more than $40,000 worth of computer time to make BASIC, he omitted the fact that he had never actually paid for that time and that much of it was on Harvard’s military-supplied computer, funded by American taxpayers.

The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French. Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were nearly equal parts French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid by France, and protected by de Grasse’s fleet. Without French funds the Revolution would have collapsed; by a conservative estimate, America’s independence cost France more than 1.3 billion livres, the equivalent of $13 billion today.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

How many cities of forty thousand, which is the population of Burlington, have a foreign policy? Well, we did. During my tenure as mayor we made the point that excessive spending on the military and unnecessary wars meant fewer resources to address the needs of ordinary people. Somewhere in the Reagan Library, or wherever these things are kept, there is a letter from the mayor of Burlington opposing the U.S. funding of contras in Nicaragua. The letter stated, “Stop the war against the people of Nicaragua. Use our tax dollars to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Stop killing the innocent people of Nicaragua.” As

Germany sent Vladimir Lenin into Russia, potentially as part of a strategy to destabilize their then-rival in war. Antony Sutton’s books document how some Wall Street bankers apparently funded the Russian Revolution (and how other Wall Street bankers funded the Nazis years later). Leon Trotsky spent time in New York prior to the revolution, and propagandistic reporting from Americans like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so useful to the Soviets — and so misleading as to the nature of the revolution — that he was buried at the base of the Kremlin Wall. Surprise: the Russian Revolution wasn’t done wholly by Russians, but had significant foreign involvement from Germans and Americans.

landscape that makes political fodder of this liberationist legacy. With increasing frequency, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal and “multicultural”/“people of color” liberal imagination that venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.

Perhaps the most uplifting interpretation of all came from David Howell. As a Rhode Island delegate, Howell was on record as regarding the western lands as a source of revenue. But as a true believer in the semi-sacred character of republican values, his view of the west assumed a spiritual aura that Jefferson himself would later embrace in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase: The Western World opens an amazing prospect. As a national fund, in my opinion, it is equal to our debt. As a source of future population & strength, it is a guarantee of our Independence. As its Inhabitants will be mostly cultivators of the soil, republicanism looks to them as its Guardians. When the States on the eastern shore, or Atlantic shall have become populous, rich, & luxurious & ready to yield their Liberties into the hands of a tyrant—The Gods of the Mountains will save us.28

Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the last century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture. In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research. Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard’s at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world. Over his three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined. Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars. Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them.

I look around and see many shelters and services for survivors of domestic violence, but no large-scale movement to end male violence. I see many batterer intervention programs, but few men involved in challenging sexism. The loss of vision that narrowed the focus of men's work reflects a change that occurred in other parts of the movement to end violence, as activists who set out to change the institutions perpetrating violence settled into service jobs helping people cope. [...] Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence. In my travels throughout the United States, I talk with many service providers, more and more of whom are saying to me, "We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change. I meet more and more people who are running programs for batterers who say ,"We are only dealing with a minute number of the men who are violent and are having little impact on the systems which perpetuate male violence." [...] While there is some overlap between social service provision and social change work, the two do not necessarily go readily together. In our violent world, the needs and numbers of survivors are never ending, and the tasks of funding, staffing, and developing resources for our organizations to meet those needs are difficult, poorly supported, and even actively undermined by those with power and wealth in our society. Although some groups are both working for social change and providing social services, there are many more groups providing social services that are not working for social change. In fact, many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo. After all, the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) wouldn't exist without a lot of people in desperate straits. The NPIC provides jobs; it provides opportunities for professional development. It enables those who do the work to feel good about what we do and about our ability to help individuals survive in the system. It gives a patina of caring and concern to the ruling class which funds the work.

Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

The Sputnik moment for the Open Classroom movement came in 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell, delivered a scathing report, entitled, A Nation at Risk, whose famously ominous conclusion warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The response this time was a fervent and growing bipartisan campaign for more accountability from schools, mostly in the form of more of those standardized tests. And by 2001, “accountability” had become a buzzword. Under President George W. Bush that year, the “No Child Left Behind” Act tied federal funding to students’ performance on tests. Eight years later, President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program sought similar results, although this time using carrots instead of sticks. However the federal policy was constructed, the message was becoming clear: for schools to survive, their students would have to score high on mandated tests. Teachers consequently understood that to preserve their own jobs, they’d have to spend more time and energy on memorization and drills. The classrooms of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution began to look ever more like the dreary common schools of the turn of the twentieth century, and the spirit of Emile retreated once again.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.

One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers. There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77 So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

How exactly the debt should be funded was to be the most inflammatory political issue. During the Revolution, many affluent citizens had invested in bonds, and many war veterans had been paid with IOUs that then plummeted in price under the confederation. In many cases, these upright patriots, either needing cash or convinced they would never be repaid, had sold their securities to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. Under the influence of his funding scheme, with government repayment guaranteed, Hamilton expected these bonds to soar from their depressed levels and regain their full face value. This pleasing prospect, however, presented a political quandary. If the bonds appreciated, should speculators pocket the windfall? Or should the money go to the original holders—many of them brave soldiers—who had sold their depressed government paper years earlier? The answer to this perplexing question, Hamilton knew, would define the future character of American capital markets. Doubtless taking a deep breath, he wrote that “after the most mature reflection” about whether to reward original holders and punish current speculators, he had decided against this approach as “ruinous to public credit.”25 The problem was partly that such “discrimination” in favor of former debt holders was unworkable. The government would have to track them down, ascertain their sale prices, then trace all intermediate investors who had held the debt before it was bought by the current owners—an administrative nightmare. Hamilton could have left it at that, ducking the political issue and taking refuge in technical jargon. Instead, he shifted the terms of the debate. He said that the first holders were not simply noble victims, nor were the current buyers simply predatory speculators. The original investors had gotten cash when they wanted it and had shown little faith in the country’s future. Speculators, meanwhile, had hazarded their money and should be rewarded for the risk. In this manner, Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions. The knowledge that government could not interfere retroactively with a financial transaction was so vital, Hamilton thought, as to outweigh any short-term expediency. To establish the concept of the “security of transfer,” Hamilton was willing, if necessary, to reward mercenary scoundrels and penalize patriotic citizens. With this huge gamble, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s future financial preeminence.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party—that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never adequately addressed white supremacy and institutional racism, or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to mitigate some of the suffering that plagued working men and women. There was never enough social mobility, but there was some.

Reagan would then go on to encourage Saddam Hussein, then the United States’ close friend, to lead Iraq into invading Iran in 1980 in order to try to overturn the Iranian Revolution. This deadly war, which lasted until 1988, resulted in the deaths of around one million people, and included Saddam’s gassing of Iranians, and Kurds as well, with US knowledge and acquiescence. To make matters even worse, Reagan at one point helped arm Iran during the war, even as he was aiding Iraq, in order to obtain needed cash to fund the Nicaraguan Contras—a terrorist group which Congress had stopped funding because of their abysmal human rights record—and in order to weaken both Iran and Iraq as powers in the Middle East.

The reasons for cooperatives’ success should be obvious by now, but they are worth reiterating: “The major basis for cooperative success…has been superior labor productivity. Studies comparing square-foot output have repeatedly shown higher physical volume of output per hour, and others…show higher quality of product and also economy of material use.”118 Hendrik Thomas concludes from an analysis of Mondragon that “Productivity and profitability are higher for cooperatives than for capitalist firms. It makes little difference whether the Mondragon group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with small- or medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragon group is more productive and more profitable.”119 As we have seen, recent research has arrived at the same conclusions. It is a truism by now that worker participation tends to increase productivity and profitability. Research conducted by Henk Thomas and Chris Logan corroborates these conclusions. “A frequent but unfounded criticism,” they observe, “of self-managed firms is that workers prefer to enjoy a high take-home pay rather than to invest in their own enterprises. This has been proven invalid…in the Mondragon case… A comparison of gross investment figures shows that the cooperatives invest on average four times as much as private enterprises.” After a detailed analysis they also conclude that “there can be no doubt that the [Mondragon] cooperatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”120 Recent data indicate the same thing.121 One particularly successful company, Irizar, which was mentioned earlier, has been awarded prizes for being the most efficient company in its sector; in Spain it has ten competitors, but its market share is 40 percent. The same level of achievement is true of its subsidiaries, for instance in Mexico, where it had a 45 percent market share in 2005, six years after entering the market. An author comments that “the basis for this increased efficiency appears to be linked directly to the organization’s unique participatory and democratic management structure.”122 A major reason for all these successes is Mondragon’s federated structure: the group of cooperatives has its own supply of banking, education, and technical support services. The enormous funds of the central credit union, the Caja Laboral Popular, have likewise been crucial to Mondragon’s expansion. It proves that if cooperatives have access to credit they are perfectly capable of being far more successful than private enterprises.

Justice Mahoney ruled, “These Federal Reserve Notes are not lawful money within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States and are null and void. Further, the Notes on their face are not redeemable in Gold or Silver coin nor is there a fund set aside anywhere for the redemption of said notes.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

There’s nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It’s certainly better than a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research . . . because that would lead to thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that . . . the military people make no bones about what they want, so we’re not under any subtle pressures. It’s clear what’s going on. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people good in defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we’d have it.

According to a recent report drafted by thirty-nine physicians from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and endorsed by some 2,500 medical doctors, a movement to “a single payer system would trim administration, reduce incentives to over-treat, lower drug prices, minimize wasteful investments in redundant facilities, and eliminate almost all marketing and investor profits. These measures would yield the substantial savings needed to fund universal care and new investments in currently under-funded services and public health activities—without any net increase in national health spending.

Revolutions can even be faux revolutions when, through the careful manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces, they demand not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites. The Central Intelligence Agency has long been a master of this technique. It organized street demonstrations and protests in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and his cabinet. It funded and stoked protests again in 1973 in Chile to prompt the Chilean military to overthrow President Salvador Allende.

In defending his plan, Hamilton did not speak just in arid technical terms. He talked of justice, equity, patriotism, and national honor. His funding system was premised upon a simple concept: that the debt had been generated by the Revolution, that all Americans had benefited equally from that revolution, and that they should assume collective responsibility for its debt. If state debts were unequal, so were the sacrifices made during the fighting. Praising the “immense exertions” of indebted Massachusetts, for instance, Hamilton stated, “It would not be too strong to say that they were in a great degree the pivot of the revolution.

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

marines – I imagine that marines who don’t eat meat are a small demographic. I then chatted to a few lads. Mostly they were working-class boys who were always destined to end up in a violent gang of some description and had sensibly joined a very well-funded one.

When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of

Federal funding of the interstate highways, whose routes often deliberately tore through communities of color, literally paved the way for white flight. At the same time, federally guaranteed mortgages issued by the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration made home ownership accessible to millions of Americans living in neighborhoods that were restricted to whites through overt measures such as restrictive covenants (contracts signed by property owners in all-white neighborhoods prohibiting the sale of homes to nonwhites) and through the stealthy acts of realtors and neighbors.

SANDINISTAS. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—FSLN), more commonly known as Sandinistas, ruled Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, attempting to transform the country along Marxist-influenced lines. The group formed in the early 1960s, and spent the first two decades of its existence engaged in a guerrilla campaign against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, receiving backing from Cuba which remained a close ally when the Sandinistas took office. With popular revulsion towards Somoza rising, in 1978 the Sandinistas encouraged the Nicaraguan people to rise up against his regime. After a brief but bloody battle, in July 1979 the dictator was forced into exile, and the Sandinistas emerged victorious. With the country in a state of morass, they quickly convened a multi-interest five-person Junta of National Reconstruction to implement sweeping changes. The junta included rigid Marxist and long-serving Sandinista Daniel Ortega, and under his influence Somoza’s vast array of property and land was confiscated and brought under public ownership. Additionally, mining, banking and a limited number of private enterprises were nationalized, sugar distribution was taken into state hands, and vast areas of rural land were expropriated and distributed among the peasantry as collective farms. There was also a highly successful literacy campaign, and the creation of neighborhood groups to place regional governance in the hands of workers. Inevitably, these socialist undertakings got tangled up in the Cold War period United States, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan began funding oppositional “Contra” groups which for the entire decade waged an economic and military guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista government. Despite this and in contrast to other communist states, the government fulfilled its commitment to political plurality, prompting the growth of opposition groups and parties banned under the previous administration. In keeping with this, an internationally recognized general election was held in 1984, returning Ortega as president and giving the Sandinistas 61 of 90 parliamentary seats. Yet, in the election of 1990, the now peaceful Contra’s National Opposition Union emerged victorious, and Ortega’s Sandinistas were relegated to the position of the second party in Nicaraguan politics, a status they retain today. The Marxism of the Sandinistas offered an alternative to the Marx- ism–Leninism of the Soviet Bloc and elsewhere. This emanated from the fact that the group attempted to blend a Christian perspective on theories of liberation with a fervent devotion to both democracy and the Marxian concepts of dialectical materialism, worker rule and proletariat-led revolution. The result was an arguably fairly success- ful form of socialism cut short by regional factors.

The leveling effects of fairness concerns were significantly mediated by regime type. In World War I, the democracies of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were prepared to “soak the rich,” whereas more autocratic systems such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia preferred to borrow or print money to sustain their war effort. The latter, however, later paid a high price through hyperinflation and revolution, shocks that likewise compressed inequality. Especially during World War I, before a common template for funding mass mobilization warfare had been established, the mechanisms of leveling therefore varied considerably between countries.

The two branches of Freemasonry—the Templars and the Rosicrucians (Sionists)—were to play a major part in the American and French revolutions. In the end, the Priory of Sion would prove itself dominant over the Templars. They seemed to be better entrenched in the European power matrix as well as being better funded. The Templars—Sion’s partners-in-crime, so to speak—were behind the American Revolution and with regard to the French Revolution, both the Templar and Rosicrucian factions combined forces to avenge the death, four centuries earlier, of Jacques de Molay the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was burned at the stake by Philip IV of France in 1314. The French Bourbons were related to Philip so Louis XVI’s beheading, in 1792, was meant as penance for de Molay’s death. Chapter 10 - Sion's Army.

And if you don’t believe me or even Charley, remember that Warren Buffett, perhaps the greatest investor of our time, has opined that all investors would be better off if their portfolio contained a diversified group of index funds.

Most institutional and individual investors will find the best way to own common stock is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results [after fees and expenses] delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.”1 —Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway

The UNFPA and other population control organizations are loath to report the truth about falling fertility rates worldwide, since they raise funds by frightening people with the specter of overpopulation. They

H. Srikrishnan, then head of transactional banking and operations, gave me an example, ‘We looked at funds transfer—which was manual—such as MTs (mail transfers) and TTs (telegraphic transfers). When we implemented a centralized banking solution, the key things we could do were to sweep across multiple locations and get the balances of customers or transfer funds from one location to another using core banking. Those were big problems we solved.’ HDFC Bank was thus the first among Indian banks to have a centralized system. Whilst foreign banks like Citibank had centralized systems, they lacked the branch strength to fully leverage them. It is worth remembering that in the mid-1990s, banking didn’t really exist in the form that we know of today. Customers could open bank accounts, but the whole gamut of products (home loan, car loan, etc.) and services (Internet banking) was just not available. Salaries would still be paid by cheque and employees would have to take time off from their jobs to go to the bank, write a deposit slip, hand it over to the teller and then wait for the cheque to get cleared. Also, the employer would have to take time off to sit and sign numerous salary cheques to be given to all the employees. Compare this to the instant, online credit of salary today and a notification by SMS and email at the end of every month! HDFC Bank’s centralized technology platform allowed it to kick-off a revolution in how employees were paid their salaries.

A higher deductible will mean lower premiums in all kinds of insurance—but you definitely wouldn’t want a deductible that is higher than your liquid cash fund.

Indeed, the kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian’s paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests, like roads, court systems, and police, are missing. In Somalia, where a strong central government has not existed since the late 1980s, ordinary individuals may own not just assault rifles but also rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft missiles, and tanks. People are free to protect their own families,

Congress stopped funding anything that smacked of the words “revolutionary” or “groundbreaking” years ago.

FARC, the Colombian rebels who’ve been funding their revolution against the state with kidnapping, extortion, and drug dealing.

The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.

The comments section on the Marginal Revolution blog post about the Death Star calculation is a case in point. Here, even now, sober economists hash out questions about the variables: Whether to factor in the slave labor of Wookiees (which was partly responsible for its construction, according to the novel Death Star). Or whether you could fund the whole thing from taxes on the population of Coruscant (which is said to have a trillion inhabitants, thus funding the Death Star at a cost of roughly $8,000 per person). Or whether a quality assurance engineer should have nixed a thermal exhaust port two meters wide that led directly to the main reactor shaft, and what effect this oversight might have had on the Empire’s chances of getting an insurance policy on its second Death Star.

While the average satellite in orbit costs around $100 million to build, Tyvak’s start at $45,000. Their clients range from well-funded high school science clubs to NASA. Given the revolution in accessibility, it’s possible to imagine other nonstate actors having a go at space as well. Nongovernmental organizations may start pursuing missions that undermine governments’ objectives. An activist billionaire wanting to promote transparency could deploy a constellation of satellites to monitor and then tweet the movements of troops worldwide. Criminal syndicates could use satellites to monitor the patterns of law enforcement in order elude capture, or a junta could use them to track rivals after a coup.

Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, the ICI spin-off that now exclusively funds and controls Breast Cancer Awareness Month, earns more than $300 million a year from the sale of a carcinogenic herbicide (acetochlor) while simultaneously marketing Tamoxifen, which has now become the world's bestselling cancer therapy drug.

First of all, we've never had capitalism, so it can't end. We have some variety of state capitalism. If you fly on an airplane, you're basically flying in a modified bomber. If you buy drugs, the basic research was done under public funding and support. The high-tech system is permeated with internal controls, government subsidies. And if you look at what are supposed to be the growing alternatives, China is another form of state capitalism... The question is whether these systems, whatever they are, can be adapted to current problems and circumstances. For example, there's no justification, economic or other, for the enormous and growing role of financial institutions since the 1970s. Even some of the most respected economists pint out that they're just a drag on the economy. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says straight out that the financial institutions shouldn't be allowed to have anything like the power they do. There's plenty of leeway for modification and change. Worker-owned industries can take over. There's interesting work on this topic by Gar Alperovitz, who has been right at the center of a lot of organizing around worker control. It's not a revolution, but it's the germ of another type of capitalism, capitalism in the sense that markets and profit are involved.

The 9/11 Commission warned that Al Qaeda "could... scheme to wield weapons of unprecedented destructive power in the largest cities of the United States." Future attacks could impose enormous costs on the entire economy. Having used up the surplus that the country enjoyed as part of the Cold War peace dividend, the U.S. government is in a weakened financial position to respond to another major terrorist attack, and its position will be damaged further by the large budget gaps and growing dependence on foreign capital projected for the future. As the historian Paul Kennedy wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, too many decisions made in Washington today "bring merely short-term advantage but long-term disadvantage." The absence of a sound, long-term financial strategy could bring about a deterioration that, in his words, "leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense." Decades of success in mobilizing enormous sums of money to fight large wars and meet other government needs have led Americans to believe that ample funds will be readily available in the event of a future war, terrorist attack, or other emergency. But that can no longer be assumed. Budget constraints could limit the availability or raise the cost of resources to deal with new emergencies. If government debt continues to pile up, deficits rise to stratospheric levels, and heave dependence on foreign capital grows, borrowing the money needed will be very costly. [Alexander] Hamilton understood the risks of such a precarious situation. After suffering through financial shortages, lack of adequate food and weapons, desertions, and collapsing morale during the Revolution, he considered the risk that the government would have difficulty in assembling funds to defend itself all too real. If America remains on its dangerous financial course, Hamilton's gift to the nation - the blessing of sound finances - will be squandered. The U.S. government had no higher obligation that to protect the security of its citizens. Doing so becomes increasingly difficult if its finances are unsound. While the nature of this new brand of warfare, the war on terrorism, remains uncharted, there is much to be gained if our leaders look to the experiences of the past for guidance in responding to the challenges of the future. The willingness of the American people and their leaders to ensure that the nation's finances remain sound in the face of these new challenges - sacrificing parochial interests for the common good - is the price we must pay to preserve the nation's security and thus the liberties that Hamilton and his generation bequeathed us.

I’m not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to bring Kanish to Mel Odious Sound yesterday. Bringing a Billionheir to a large recording complex full of Producers is like opening a bag of chips at a seagull convention. It wouldn’t be long before every Producer within earshot swooped in to aggressively pitch his latest and greatest pet project, most of which would likely prove unprofitable. Rev is obviously going to pitch a project, and it very well may be something amazing. But as I’ve pointed out, in order for Kanish to make a profit, he would have to pick up half the Publishing—a non-starter for the Rev. He’s not a Songwriting Producer, so he likely doesn’t have a sufficient portion of the Publishing to share. And even if he did, no seasoned Producer is going to give half of their equity in a song in order to basically secure a small loan from an outside investor. There’s no upside. For starters, Kanish has no channels of Distribution beyond Streaming, which is already available to anyone and everyone who wants it, and which is currently only profitable for the Major Labels and the stockholders of the Streaming services themselves. Everyone else is getting screwed. And please don’t quote me the Douchebag Big Tech Billionaires running big Streaming Corporations. They are literally lining their pockets with the would-be earnings of Artists and Songwriters alike. What they claim as fair is anything but. Frankly, I don’t think we should be comfortable with Spotify taking a 30 percent margin off the top, and then disbursing the Tiger’s Share of the remaining 70 percent to the Major Labels who have already negotiated top dollar for access to their catalog. This has resulted in nothing but some remaining scraps trickling down to the tens of thousands of Independent Artists out there who just want to make a living. You can’t make a living off scraps, or even a trickle, for that matter. Mark my words, we are currently witnessing the greatest heist in the annals of the Music Business, and that’s saying something given its history. Can you say Napster? Stunningly, the only place that Songwriters can make sufficient Performance Royalties is radio—a medium that is coming up on its hundred-year anniversary. To make matters worse, the Major Distributors still have radio all locked up, and without airplay, there’s no hit. So even now, more than twenty years into the Internet revolution, the odds of breaking through the artistic cacophony without Major-Label Distribution are impossibly low. So much for the Internet leveling the playing field. At this point, only Congress can solve the problem. And despite the fact that Streaming has been around since the mid-aughts, Congress has done nothing to deal with the issue. Why? Because it’s far cheaper for Big Tech to line the pockets of lobbyists and fund the campaigns of politicians who gladly ignore the issue than it is to pay Artists and Songwriters a fair rate for their work, my friends. Same is it ever was. Just so I’m clear, there is a debate to be had as to how much Songwriters and Artists should be paid for Streaming. A radio Spin can reach millions. A Stream rarely reaches more than a few listeners. Clearly, a new method of calculation is required. But that doesn’t mean that we should just sit by as the Big Tech Douchebags rob an entire generation of royalties all so they can sell their Streaming Corporation for billions down the line. I mean, that is the end game, after all. At which point, profit for the new majority stockholder will be all but impossible. How will anyone get paid then?

The legislation I introduced was, according to the veterans’ organizations, the most comprehensive piece of legislation offered for them in many decades. Sadly, despite the strong support of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and other organizations, my legislation only received fifty-six votes on the floor of the Senate—all of the Democrats, but only two Republicans. We needed sixty votes. It turned out that Republicans loved veterans very much, except when it came to funding their needs

Iran’s zeal to export the Islamic Revolution and expand its network of terror did not end with the creation of Hezbollah. That was simply the beginning. A much larger and more sinister goal is afoot. And in order to achieve this goal, Iran is creating a network of terror with a global geographic reach. In order to defeat Israel and the United States, Iran is working with its centuries-old rivals, even funding certain terrorist groups in some regions while battling those same entities in other regions. These unholy alliances between Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas destabilize communities, murder countless humans, and endanger our national security.

And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece’s shadow economy—unreported income hidden from the tax authorities—constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP.24 A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve.

So we call it “the estate tax,” which sounds very adult and respectable and vaguely French Revolution. Nobody really thinks of themselves has owning an “estate,” because the term conjures images of castles and butlers and possibly vampires. So the concept of its implementation seems distant and unlikely, even if we admit the possibility we might ourselves one day succumb to mortality. The notion behind the tax is that we don’t want these “estates” popping up all over the place, as it would lead to “castle overcrowding.” An estate tax takes big enough chunks of the money you leave behind after you die, discouraging castle speculation. Families must work harder to find tax loopholes and establish trust funds if they want to remain aristocrats. Discouraging

Several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to propagate this idea.

As Thatcher imposed the policies which earned her the name “The Iron Lady,” unemployment in Britain doubled, rising from 1.5 million when she came into office, to a level of 3 million by the end of her first eighteen months in office. Labor unions were targetted under Thatcher as obstacles to the success of the monetarist “revolution,” a prime cause of the “enemy,” inflation. All the time, with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploiting the astronomical prices of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil, never a word was uttered against big oil or the City of London banks which were amassing huge sums of capital in the situation. Thatcher also moved to accommodate the big City banks by removing exchange controls, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotted industrial base, funds flowed out to speculate in real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America.

Christopher Columbus had been born in Genoa, Venice’s rival, but as a young man had moved to Portugal, training among the greatest sailors of the day. In the 1480s, after years spent traveling on merchant voyages around the known Atlantic, he presented an audacious plan to the Portuguese Crown. He would sail west across the Atlantic in order to reach the East. Portugal passed on the proposal, so Columbus took it to Portugal’s neighbor and nemesis, Spain, which agreed to fund the expedition. Columbus, of course, never reached Asia. But his gamble opened the Americas to state-backed European projects of exploration and exploitation.

volunteer labor by individuals who supported themselves with day jobs. However, not everyone has the same day job. Some day jobs provide more resources and free time than others. If these organizations do not collectivize the resources from these day jobs, then a class structure develops in which those with better day jobs have more opportunities to engage and thus control the organization.

Two decades later, when the American semiconductor industry was facing an all-out battle with Japanese competitors, U.S. electronics companies complained loudly that Japanese firms had an unfair advantage because much of their development funds were provided by the government in Tokyo. On this point, the American manufacturers lived in glass houses. The government in Washington—specifically, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department—played a crucial role in the development of the American semiconductor industry. The Apollo project was the most glamorous early application of the chip, but there were numerous other rocket and weapons programs that provided research funds and, more important, large markets when the chip was still too expensive to compete against traditional circuits in civilian applications. A study published in 1977 reported that the government provided just under half of all the research and development money spent by the U.S. electronics industry in the first sixteen years of the chip’s existence.

Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.

Nukes and Peace It takes hundreds of years of hard work to build a civilization, and yet with the press of a button we can destroy it all in a day. Let us not press the button my friend. In fact, if we must destroy something let us destroy the very button of destruction, both from outside and inside. Let us incapacitate every single button of death and destruction, be it technological or psychological, and redirect that energy towards creation and conservation. You see, destroying the nukes mean nothing. Destroy one, another will be built in its place in a matter of months. We have to nuke the hate in us first, so that we no longer feel the need for nukes against our own kind. However, for the sake of investigation, let us forget the common sense of peace, and talk defense strategy for a moment, in a way that might make sense to world leaders. You see, the best defense against a nuke is not another nuke, but a code. It is the best defense because it is exponentially less expensive. In a technologically advanced world, the most powerful nation is not the one with nuclear power, but the one with coding power. So, to the so-called leaders of the world I say - if you're still foolishly worried about your neighbor's nuclear capabilities, don't go about wasting billions of dollars on a nuclear program, just spend a fragment of those funds on post-launch warhead hacking. But then again, it would open up a new realm of problems at a different level, because any nation with exceptional wireless channel manipulation expertise can remotely take over the command of another nation's nuclear warheads. So, at the end of the day, so long as there is animosity among the nations of the world, between mind and mind, sustained by stupid borders and foul ideologies, there is no safe way out. I'll say it to you plainly. Wasting nuclear power on warheads is a barbaric use of a scientific revolution. Let me elaborate with some numbers. A single nuclear warhead contains nearly 4 kilograms of Plutonium-239, which in a nuclear power plant can produce sufficient heat to generate about 32 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, that is, 32 Gigawatt-hours (GWh). 1 GWh of electricity powers about 700,000 households for one hour, hence 32 GWh would power about 22.4 million households for one hour. Now, if we divide that number by the number of hours in a year, that is, 8760, we are confronted with an astounding revelation. It is that, the radioactive material from one nuclear warhead can power over two thousand households for a year (2557 to be exact). And that's just the radioactive material we are talking about. Many more resources are required to set up a nuclear program. The point is, instead of wasting such potent and precious resources on fancy, frivolous and fictitious geopolitical insecurities, let us redirect those resources to alleviate actual, real human suffering from society. Let us use them to empower communities rather than to dominate them - let us use them to elevate the whole of humankind, rather than to downgrade the parts that we do not like. Because by degrading others, we only degrade ourselves, whereas by lifting others, we rise ourselves. Remember, there is no world peace, so long as fear is off the leash.

Everyone, whether an educator, a health care worker, or a domestic violence advocate is working in pseudo-corporate environments where the culture and organization of the market is increasingly encroaching on our lives. Instead of organizers, we have managers and bureaucrats, receptionists and clients. Instead of social change, we have service deliverables, and the vision that once drove our deep commitment to fighting violence against women has be replaced by outcomes.

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

The burgeoning government sales not only provided profits for the chip makers but also conferred respectability. “From a marketing standpoint, Apollo and the Minuteman were ideal customers,” Kilby said. “When they decided that they could use these solid circuits, that had quite an impact on a lot of people who bought electronic equipment. Both of those projects were recognized as outstanding engineering operations, and if the integrated circuit was good enough for them, well, that meant it was good enough for a lot of other people.” One of the major pastimes among professional economists is an apparently endless debate as to whether military-funded research helps or hurts the civilian economy. As a general matter, there seem to be enough arguments on both sides to keep the debaters fruitfully occupied for years to come. In the specific case of the integrated circuit, however, there is no doubt that the Pentagon’s money produced real benefits for the civilian electronics business—and for civilian consumers. Unlike armored personnel carriers or nuclear cannon or zero-gravity food tubes, the electronic logic gates, radios, etc., that space and military programs use are fairly easily converted to earthbound civilian applications. The first chip sold for the commercial market—used in a Zenith hearing aid that went on sale in 1964—was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.

Social change is only radical if it promotes struggle and growth at every level—for the society at large, in our intimate and everyday relationships, and internally within ourselves.

Then, some reading on 20th Century history: Curtis Yarvin: Unqualified Reservations — a broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 20th and 19th centuries. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago — what the Soviet Union was actually like. Yuri Slezkine: The House of Government — how the Soviet Union actually worked. Janet Malcom: The Journalist and the Murderer — how journalists “befriend and betray” their subjects for clicks, a book taught in journalism schools as something of a how-to manual. Antony C. Sutton: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler — how different groups of capitalists funded the communist and fascist revolutions respectively. Ashley Rindsberg: The Gray Lady Winked — how The New York Times systematically misrepresented the truth over the 20th century.

To do this, Koch employed a tactic known as the “echo chamber,” of which it had become a master. The echo chamber allowed Koch to amplify its message while hiding its hand. The strategy originated from the network of think tanks and academic programs that Charles Koch had been building for almost forty years. In 1974, when Charles Koch laid out his strategy for launching a libertarian revolution in the United States, he listed education as the first of four pillars in his strategy.III He had pursued this strategy with great success, building the Cato Institute think tank and academic centers like the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. These efforts had a philosophical, almost noble, feel to them. The stated goal was to fund scholars and big ideas that would slowly move society toward an understanding of Charles Koch’s political vision. By 2009, the educational enterprise had become a network of shell enterprises and hidden funding streams that gave immediate tactical support to Koch Industries’ lobbying goals. Ideas are the raw material of all legislation. In Washington, DC, there is a surprisingly small congregation of think tanks, policy shops, media outlets, and academic institutions that shape the daily political conversation. Over the decades, Koch Industries became adept at seeding this territory with its own ideas, and its own thinkers, in a way that hid its influence. The echo chamber tactic began when Koch’s lobbyists would commission and pay for an academic study, without claiming credit for it. That study, seemingly independent of Koch, was then fed into a series of think tanks and foundations that Koch controlled. Finally, the work of those think tanks was weaponized into the raw ammunition of political campaigns. Taken together, it had the effect of making the message from Koch Industries’ lobbying shop seem far louder, and far more popular, than it really was. This, in turn, had a surprisingly strong effect on senators and other lawmakers, who paid close attention to public sentiment.

The concept of the end of policing and prisons was not new in 2020. There have been leftists advocating for police and prison abolition for as long as I’ve been politically conscious. Activists demanding the abolition of police had a large corpus of theoretical writing to draw from. But there was usually a key difference between the older school of police and prison abolition and the demands of the most impassioned days of 2020: the former almost always imagined that a world without formal policing would emerge only after other society-altering changes had taken place. Typically, this was defined as the fall of capitalism and the establishment of some sort of socialist system, a system without poverty and deprivation. In other words, the radicals I knew might imagine the end of the police, but they imagined that end would come after the revolution. To debate the concept in 2020 was to skip a lot of steps. This was a general issue in the first year after Floyd’s murder, a sense that people wanted to dodge the hard work that would have been necessary before society-altering changes could take place. In part because of the extremely low odds of success for a police abolition movement, many who supported defunding the police insisted that the intent had never been to abolish the police at all. In this telling, “defund the police” means reducing the budgets of police departments, drawing down their resources, and redirecting some of those funds to other uses,

In no way an unexpected aberration in the order of things, violence is the knife that cuts and the thread that sews this racist imperial nation together; violence is the global order of things.

The Reason Revolution has no formal leaders, no central planning, no headquarters, no founding documents, and no funding. It is an organic movement whose participants envision a better, more humanitarian world without religion. As our numbers and proportional representation increase, and as the supernaturalist theology of religionists arcs toward irrelevance, reason will overtake faith. It is only a matter of time.

Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as “an aberration” nearly unique to this country, a theory of “a world built on hatred” that “would self-destruct in three seconds.” Yet the vitality of this once- or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election cycle, when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the Republican debates thanks to the impressively determined and youthful “army” fighting for his “rEVOLution.” (The capitalized words spell “LOVE” backward.) This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn Rand’s novels. Yet

The Transcendental Meditation Foundation, which taught me to meditate, conducted an experiment in Washington to evaluate the effects of concentrated meditation on that city’s crime figures. They got a group of people, ranging from a few hundred to a thousand, to meditate in a hotel, to see if this would impact the behavior of the wider community. From a cynical perspective, it was a bold experiment to embark upon. Why would a bunch of … I’m going to assume hippies, sitting still in a room thinking a word change the way a criminal outside in Washington would behave? In fact who funded this madness? It makes no material sense. “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” sang Madonna. And she’s right, it is and she is. Quantum physicist John Hagelin was one of the scientists behind this experiment. I’ve chatted to him about meditation and asked for neurological data that advances meditation beyond an esoteric practice for bearded wizards in the Himalayas. Transcendental Meditation, though, was actually brought to the West by a bearded wizard from the Himalayas. Known as the Maharishi, you might recognize him from “the sixties,” when he was at the epicenter of a countercultural explosion, perched cross-legged on a flower-strewn stage with the Beatles. The technique of TM that the Maharishi taught them is the type of meditation that I use. Hagelin describes it as a tool to get “beyond thought to the source of thought.” When scanned in a meditative state, the brain behaves in a tangibly distinct electrophysiological way. It’s a fourth state of consciousness. Awake, asleep, dreaming, and the meditative state. There is some distance to traverse, according to conventional thinking, between meditation producing unusual brainwaves and crime falling in a major metropolis as a result of a group of people practicing it. Over the course of the two-month experiment, crime fell by 23 percent. What’s more, the figure increased in tandem with the number of people practicing. John Hagelin said through meditation we can access “the unity beyond diversity.” That beyond the atomic, subatomic, nuclear, subnuclear, there is a unified field. The results of this experiment suggest that if a significant proportion of a population regularly meditated it will affect consciousness—beyond the people involved. Burglaries, street crime, and violence all fell as a result of the state of consciousness achieved by a group of people inwardly thinking a word until a state beyond thought was reached. That’s weird. It is irrefutable proof that beyond the world that we can currently measure with tools as yet inept for such an advanced task, there is a connection between the apparently separate consciousness of individuals. Consciousness exists beyond your head, between our heads, and it can manifest harmony. That is perilously close to affirmation of a Higher Power. My experiences of meditation began before bearded pajama time, which a friend of mine is encouraging me to describe as a mental breakdown.

a system of relationships between the State (or local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and non-profit/NGO social service and social justice organizations.

As an ideology, neoliberalism is predicated upon the belief that the maximization of social good requires locating all human action in the domain of the market.

This system of charitable giving increased exponentially during the early 1900s when the first multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Russell Sage, created new institutions that would exist in perpetuity and support charitable giving in order to shield their earnings from taxation.

foundations were a “grave menace”6 because they concentrated wealth and power in the service of ideology which supported the interests of their capitalist benefactors.

Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner talks about the foresight of right-wing funders such as Richard Scaife, who saw the importance of political education. “Right-wing victories,” he notes, “started more than twenty years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America.…These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives.

In his germinal work, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, reprinted in part in this anthology, Allen documents how the Ford Foundation’s support of certain Black civil rights and Black Power organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) actually helped shift the movement’s emphasis—through the recruitment of key movement leaders—from liberation to Black capitalism.

So, essentially, foundations provide a cover for white supremacy. Reminiscent of Rockefeller’s strategy, people of color deserve individual relief but people of color organized to end white supremacy become a menace to society.