The UK's newspaper of record, The Guardian, revealed today that among the latest documents on the Iraq war given to them by the Wikileaks site, are systemic killings, thousands of uncounted civilian deaths, and regular stories of torture, terror, and murder, painting a very different picture of… Read full post »

So what is the solution to the present crisis, and to the inner contradictions of the system?

In Zombie Capitalism, economist Chris Harman begins by discounting the solution offered by today's most radical apologists for the system, the Keynesians:

"But even most of the 'radicals' usually start by ta… Read full post »

One of the main questions for radical thinkers and activists today is how much can be done and in what way.  The question of contingency versus determinacy is of general importance to any discussion of modern society and modern philosophy.  But it takes on special significance, and special… Read full post »

In his film "Shock Doctrine," based on Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, director Michael Winterbottom shows us some of the historical and practical effects of neoliberal policy.  Klein's term, "disaster capitalism," better describes the implementation of de… Read full post »

Spoiler Alert: The following post contains details about the film "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," including details about its climax. 

I wrote in my previous posts about the importance of re-establishing a formalistic method of approaching today's troubling economic… Read full post »

Over the past few decades we've seen a huge production of anticapitalism.  This doesn't only refer to the criticism of BP and the banks and Enron and other corporations in the news.  It also takes in the rise of anti-globalization movements, the halting of the WTO by developing nations over… Read full post »

Ultimately what Zizek and the other critics that he draws upon are pointing to is that the value of a good structural critique is to make it clear that all a structure represents in a society is the way in which people interact in that society.  Zizek says that from a&nb… Read full post »

In the Netherlands in November 2004, artist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh is shot eight times.  His assailants then attempt to decapitate him with a knife which they later insert into his chest pinning a note there that rants against his involvement in a film which critically d… Read full post »

In part 2 we discussed Karl Polanyi's work criticizing the early neoliberal theories of the Mont Pelerin group, and his predictions about what he saw as the inevitable results: a widening gap between rich and poor, and the establishment of a global ruling class.

To Polanyi's mind this would lead… Read full post »

In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, author David Harvey traces the rise to hegemony of the ideas and policies of the philosophy known as "neoliberalism," from the late 1970's up to today.

As described previously, the implementation of neoliberalism was accomplished with such brutal efficien… Read full post »

In the spring of 1998 a large hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), widely considered one of the most successful and creatively forward-looking financial institutions in the world, began to show serious stress.  In successive months they posted losses of 6 a… Read full post »

Two reporters at the Washington Post worked for two years examining the vast security apparatus built up in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks, first under the Bush administration and now under Obama.

PBS' own Frontline will examine the Post series and the subject of security spending in a special repor… Read full post »

(Above: Suspect A and Suspect B) 

I'm sick of hearing about how different this administration is supposed to be from the last one.  The really ironic, and in an historical sense, really creepy, thing about this is that those doing the defending most of the time are supp… Read full post »

A few weeks back I posted on OS about an idea that was floating around--helped along by very public support from British PM Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy--for the levying of a Tobin Tax.  The idea behind the Tobin Tax is to place a small surcharge on every transaction co… Read full post »

Yesterday I posted about a proposal by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French president Nicolas Sarkozy to introduce a tax on financial transactions, a so called Tobin Tax, to pay for the cost of the limits on greenhouse gas emissions being discussed in Copenhagen.

James Tobin was… Read full post »

Over this past week, while delegates were toasting each other in Copenhagen and trying to hammer out a framework to fight global warming, some world leaders were meeting to discuss the next phase in financial reform following the banking crash.  One idea to emerge from some pretty powe… Read full post »

This has become something of an internet-wide phenom: teeth cleaning, teeth whitening, tooth repair, oral surgery... 

The constant flashing of images of open and diseased mouths in the margins of the internet-zone, I am beginning to believe, is part of some evil plot by TV networ… Read full post »

(We might ask ourselves, before we begin, does the labyrinth have a definite topology, a predefined psychogeographic space that we can survey and map out, inch by inch?  What is the cartographic scale of this maze we've entered, that we already live inside?  Is there a key?  A holograp… Read full post »

The Internet is everywhere, it is in everything I encounter, always-already.  I have tried to get it off my tail (lizard or otherwise), but it keeps returning, popping up in front of me, jumping out of the bushes, sliding in under my door--far more persistent than TV, but different.  M… Read full post »

What if you could time travel back to, say, early March 2008 and tell everyone on Wall Street about the impending crisis?  What if you could, somehow, convince all those high-profile, high-octane types running up and down the pad beneath the big-board at NYSE, and in London, and in Singapore, an… Read full post »

Illness has been in the news a lot lately, although its presence has usually been assumed rather than talked about.  In the rising and falling swells of attention being given to healthcare reform, the body politic has taken on something of the old coherent meaning it once had in its representati… Read full post »

Last night I saw a film that was equally fascinating and frustrating, a sure double measure that should accompany any recommendation of any film worth watching.  After all, we don't have much time, between the womb and the grave, and we should spend it doing something worthwhile--and this was ex… Read full post »

What will happen to poor little television?  Long considered to be next on the chopping block for the internet's buzz-saw--the recording industry was its first real summarily sliced and diced victim--it lingers on.  Not knowing how to compete with the weird world of YouTube and MySpace, whe… Read full post »

Introduction: And What Does Philosophy Have To Do With Anything Anyway? 

 Anyone who has been watching the healthcare reform debate in Washington this past summer must have noticed the widening gap between the president and Congress, whether one is considering the wild and wacky opposi… Read full post »