A New York Times report confirmed drilling for oil sets off earthquakes and detailed how a drilling project near San Francisco and a similar project in Basel, Switzerland were shut down over concerns they triggered damaging earthquakes. Both diggings involved fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep.
A playful place, a place of fun, a dancing world of bright colors, a world in which we bubble and overflow into one another and beyond.
A world without hard lines - a world in which identities exist only to be transcended.
A world in which the basis of human existence is not identity, but the mutual recognition of our dignities.
Not 'I am', 'you are' — but I-you-we do-create-become.
A different form of organization, a different form of coming together.
The mutual recognition of humans, and also, in a different way, the mutual recognition of human and non-human forms of life.
Nonsense, of course, were it not for the fact that it already exists – as potential, as rebellion, as the force of the 'not yet' in the present.
To find the world that could exist after capitalism, we must look to the anti-worlds already being created in countless struggles against capitalism – countless cracks in the texture of capitalist domination.
A world beyond capitalism can only be a distillation of the dreams dreamt against oppressions –
A redemption of the longings of all who have struggled for a better world.
Look then, to the experimental anti-worlds being created in the struggles against capitalism, to the assemblies that characterized the Occupy movement, and its rejection of representative "democracy".
To the protests against guns and violence and war, to the movements not just against male domination, but for the overcoming of all classifications of people by sex and sexuality.
To the millions who fight against the destruction of the Earth by developing a different conviviality with non-human forms of life.
To the constant push for living in a time liberated from the clock, in the space freed from the measuring rant.
To the constant drive inseparable from our humanity to determine our own doing.
In the cracks, in the refusals and creations in the anti-worlds of daily struggles.
That is where the urgently necessary world beyond capitalism is to be found.
Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft
legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the
lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.
One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services
Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury
Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to
e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would
exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.
In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington,
Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70
lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial
paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other
Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word.
(Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)"
As we previously reported, on May 7th, nine deregulatory bills sailed through the House Financial Services Committee. We wrote about one of them, HR 992, and this particular bill garnered only SIX "nay" votes, out of SIXTY-ONE total representatives on the Committee.
This egregious bill, which is named "Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act", but it should be called, "If Banks Get Bailed Out, We'll Get Sold Out. Again," was written in large part by Citigroup. As the NTYimes reports:
"Citigroup and other major banks used a similar approach on
another derivatives bill. Under Dodd-Frank, banks must
push some derivatives trading into separate units that are
not backed by the government’s insurance fund. The goal was
to isolate this risky trading.
The provision exempted many derivatives from the
requirement, but some Republicans proposed striking the
so-called push out provision altogether. After objections
were raised about the Republican plan, Citigroup lobbyists
sent around the bank’s own compromise proposal that
simply exempted a wider array of derivatives. That
recommendation, put forth in late 2011, was largely part of
the bill approved by the House committee on May 7 and is
now pending before both the Senate and the House."
Citigroup was responsible for the death of Glass-Steagall, which led to the free-wheeling and casino-lifestyle that caused the 2008 Financial crisis. Citigroup mismanaged their firm and loaded up to the hilt with toxic mortgage products, requiring a massive taxpayer bailout. And if that weren't enough, they also received a total of $99.5 Billion in secret loans from the Federal Reserve after the crisis to avert their own ruin. And now, they're writing our laws to tear down even the paltry protections put in place post-crisis.
First of all: there seems to be some kind of misconception among some people, of what capitalism actually is. There are some who believe that where there is a market economy, money and competition, then that’s automatically capitalism. That’s not true. In capitalism there is of course a market economy, but that can exist in other systems as well.
What characterizes capitalism is that there is private ownership of the means of production. That’s when you know you’re dealing with a capitalist system. If this feature is absent, if it’s not the case that some individuals privately own the means of production others are using, then it’s no longer capitalism. If it instead was a system in which, let’s say, the workers themselves controlled and managed the means of production democratically at the place where they worked, and that these institutions were operating in a market system, then that would be some kind of market socialism etc, not capitalism.
A system that allows a few individuals to have undemocratic control and power, not only at the workplace, but in society in general, is unacceptable; a system that allows some individuals to exploit and profit on other people’s misery is unacceptable; a system that allows more and more cash to be shuffled into the pockets of the owners and the wealthy, is unacceptable.
When people from two different countries hate you, that means you are a public enemy. Last week, the richest man in the entire world, Carlos Slim, attempted to use a philanthropic gift to cover up the fact that his monopolistic practices have impoverished all of Latin America, with headway being made to raid the coffers of the United States with over $451.7 million taken in from subsides from the government of the United States every year.
First of all: there seems to be some kind of misconception among some people, of what 
