Americas (South & North)

The key moment in many revolutions comes when police and militaries refuse to fire on crowds. But what is difficult to explain about those moments is their infrequency. Soldiers and police come from the same society as the crowds. Why do they kill them? Why are elites and authorities able to rest so comfortably in the knowledge that in the final analysis, thousands of armed men will do what they are told? I think this is one of the most important questions we can ask, and not enough of us ask it.

I have some disagreements with Joel Olson's article, "Whiteness and the 99%", but I will start with some agreements.

I agree that "biologically speaking, there's no such thing as race."

I spent the weekend in Salina, Kansas, of all places.

I read:

Anthony James Joes's Urban Guerrilla Warfare
The US Marine Corps's Guerrilla and how to fight him
Carlos Marighella's Manual of the Urban Guerrilla

The latter 2 books are from the 1960s and I read them as background. Joes is a counterinsurgency theorist who analyzes a wide range of urban insurgencies and comes to several interesting conclusions:

1. Urban insurgencies almost always fail militarily because they lack any safe areas and because they attack their enemy where it is strongest.

Published on ZNet

Ha-Joon Chang is a development economist with a special interest in economic history. His most recent book, “23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism”, as well as previous books, have critiqued neoliberalism and laissez-faire economics. I interviewed him by telephone on August 9.

Sorry for the hiatus. Partly I've been busy with work and life and been unable to spend as much time doing articles. Partly I am trying to train myself to not relate to the world through 2000 word articles but to have a little more variety, including longer things (ie., books), one of which I am actually going to publish after having it sit on my hard disk for a few years. Related, I have been trying to stop and think, to be less in a reactive mode, which is what the twitter and blogging and surfing seem to encourage me to do.

Wikileaks and the future of information from Justin Podur on Vimeo.

Philanthrocapitalism, a book by Bishop and Green, argues that philanthropy will help the public accept a new age of plutocracy (the rule by wealth). The rich are giving their money away so effectively, they say, that the public won't mind increasing inequality.

Jaron Lanier, author of "You are not a gadget", is very well-informed about what he is writing about, which is some of the social consequences of the internet, and some of the implicit ideologies that are built into the internet as we are living with it today. Lanier was one of the early minds behind virtual reality and has helped create a lot of the technology that shapes how we live and how we think. In his book, "You are not a gadget" (Knopf NY 2010) he offers some reflections on this technology, recent trends and coming trends, and the relationship of the technology to society.

For various reasons I found myself with several hours on public transit and with Raj Patel's fine book "The Value of Nothing" in hand. I really liked a few things about it. First, it's a very readable summary of a lot of economic theories (and ideologies) that guide policies today. For a more mathematical treatment of these I really like Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics" which is recommended by Jonathan Nitzan, another very interesting political economist who argues that money is the commodification of power, and makes the argument utilizing some interesting analyses of data.