On April 27 a bot began viewing one post on EconoSpeak every five minutes. It continued to do so until yesterday when I reverted the post to draft. That’s 288 fake views every day for a little over a month. Looking back at overall EconoSpeak traffic there are unexplained spikes that occur every two months or so. Tens of thousands of "views" suddenly appear out of the blue. There is so little real friendship in the world.

The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence by Henry Giroux, January 10, 2016:

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television

During the time he was drafting collective bargaining legislation for the National Industrial Recovery Act in July 1933, Leon Keyserling wrote to his father: Under a capitalistic society, the same people who profited by the anarchy are likely to work most of the controls, and in the same stupidly selfish and self-destructive manner. Without revolution which transfers power to the workers and sets up a socialized state, little will be gained. But the establishment of controls and the centralization of authority make the revolution more likely, because the excesses of the capitalists will become so great and their abuses so violent that the reaction will be terrific.In February 1934, he wrote the following in a letter to his father:I am very much afraid that the country is recovering too

An Army of All-American Paramilitary Death-Squad Soloists

In their 2014 Super Bowl ad (declined by the NFL), Daniel Defense, the AR-15 merchants of death, EXPLICITLY tied a ‘paramilitary army-of-one’ motif to its role as a military-industrial complex supplier. A man arrives home — presumably from a tour of duty — and enters the house past a conspicuously displayed, framed photo of him in his Marine uniform. Behind that photo is another photo with a wide frame labeled “FAMILY… they are always…” the last words are hidden behind the photo of the Marine. 

He walks into the next room where his wife is folding baby clothes and they hug. His voice over narrative: “And my family’s safety is my highest priority. I am responsible for their

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence by Henry Giroux, January 10, 2016:Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.Mass Shootings: The Vicious Cycle Fueled By America’s Toxic Cult of Violence by John W. and Nisha

And Babies?

Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture. 

The same political process that led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam continues to perpetuate the slaughter of innocents in American schools, supermarkets, nightclubs, subways, and synagogues.

It is not just the “extreme right” doing this. It is the cultural consequence of the political aspects of full employment. It is the result of the pursuit of full employment through a perpetual war economy, as Michal Kalecki warned about 80 years ago. I posted Kalecki’s Political Aspects of Full Employment to EconoSpeak in 14 installments 13 years ago. If anybody wants

In their 2014 Super Bowl ad (declined by the NFL), Daniel Defense, the AR-15 merchants of death, EXPLICITLY tied a ‘paramilitary army-of-one’ motif to its role as a military-industrial complex supplier. A man arrives home — presumably from a tour of duty — and enters the house past a conspicuously displayed, framed photo of him in his Marine uniform. Behind that photo is another photo with a wide frame labeled "FAMILY… they are always…" the last words are hidden behind the photo of the Marine. He walks into the next room where his wife is folding baby clothes and they hug. His voice over narrative: "And my family’s safety is my highest priority. I am responsible for their protection."  [embedded content]The two of them then walk over and peek into the baby’s room. Baby is awake so

Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture. The same political process that led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam continues to perpetuate the slaughter of innocents in American schools, supermarkets, nightclubs, subways, and synagogues.It is not just the "extreme right" doing this. It is the cultural consequence of the political aspects of full employment. It is the result of the pursuit of full employment through a perpetual war economy, as Michal Kalecki warned about 80 years ago. I posted Kalecki’s Political Aspects of Full Employment to EconoSpeak in 14 installments 13 years ago. If anybody wants to argue "we’re not really doing that," please explain to me

"The evenly-divided Senate approved the legislation – formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – on Wednesday in an 88-11 vote, garnering strong support from both Democrats and Republicans. The House of Representatives passed it by 363-70 last week."Do Americans really think politicians who eagerly approved a $777 billion military industrial complex bill by an 8-1 margin in the Senate and a 5-1 margin in the House will "do something" about civilian gun violence? Democrats and Republicans have their priorities on which they are unequivocally "bipartisan."

UPDATE (May 15, 2022):I started reading Buffalo shooter’s manifesto expecting the same eco-fascism/green nationalism type language we saw in the El Paso and Christchurch shooters’ manifestos and sure enough: “green nationalism is the only true nationalism” pic.twitter.com/Pbb81Y6EMj— Tad DeLay (@taddelay) May 15, 2022When remembered at all, Edward Abbey is mostly thought of as an environmentalist and anarchist but there is no gainsaying the racism and xenophobia on display in his 1983 essay, "Immigration and Liberal Taboos." The opinion piece was originally solicited by the New York Times, which ultimately declined to publish it — or to pay him the customary kill fee. It was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Mother Jones and

…to keep it holy.In The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak does not f***ing roll on Shabbos. Why not? The Old Testament gave two rationales for observing the Sabbath. The first, in Exodus, was that God created the earth in six days and on the seventh, He rested. Deuteronomy gave a different rational: And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord your God took you out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm; therefore, the Lord, your God, commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.Reading Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in the early 1980s, I became convinced that the story about the golden calf and Moses’s two forays up Mount Sinai suggested that the second set of tablets could not have contained the same text as the first. Thus the

Channeling Great Grandfather Mayer May

Mayer May was born in Bavaria in 1848 and immigrated to the United States in 1869 when he was 21 years old. Bavaria had universal military conscription at age 21. I was born in 1948 and immigrated to Canada in 1967 to resist the draft.

Over the years, I have experienced intense fascination regarding certain topics. For example, in the early eighties, I was intrigued by the story of Moses at Mount Sinai and was convinced that the second set of stone tablets must not have contained the same text as the first because there were abundant clues in the book of Exodus that they weren’t the same.

I was very attracted to the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater” was the

Mayer May was born in Bavaria in 1848 and immigrated to the United States in 1869 when he was 21 years old. Bavaria had universal military conscription at age 21. I was born in 1948 and immigrated to Canada in 1967 to resist the draft.Over the years, I have experienced intense fascination regarding certain topics. For example, in the early eighties, I was intrigued by the story of Moses at Mount Sinai and was convinced that the second set of stone tablets must not have contained the same text as the first because there were abundant clues in the book of Exodus that they weren’t the same.I was very attracted to the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose "Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater" was the focus of the last chapter of my Master’s thesis. The last numbered paragraph of the

Rabbi Mayer MaySandwichman’s maternal great-grandfather, Rabbi Mayer May, was rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland, Oregon from 1872 to 1880. According to newspaper reports, on October 1, 1880, Rabbi M. May was involved in an altercation with A. Waldman, during which he fired two shots from a pistol, neither of which struck his assailant.The incident occurred on Front Street, near the Esmond Hotel where U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes was staying during his historic 71-day tour of the West. For some years, Rabbi May had been embroiled in doctrinal disputes with some members of his congregation as he tried to introduce the Reform Jewish prayer book, which several Orthodox members resisted. Waldman was one of the dissidents and had leveled charges of impropriety and immorality

The Obsolescence of Nostalgia

As the crow flies, it is around 200 kilometers from Michilimakinac, where Kandiaronk’s Wyandot people settled in 1671, when he was around twenty years old, to Tehkummah on Manitoulin Island where Isabel Paterson was born 215 years later. 

It gets even cozier because the Wyandot had been displaced from the south shore of Georgian Bay by the Iroquois Five Nations, who around the same time also displaced the Oddawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people from Manitoulin Island. The latter three tribes formed the Council of Three Fires, which also relocated to Michilimakinac and formed alliances with the Wyandot and other tribes.

One of the threads that I am weaving derives from David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s account of

As the crow flies, it is around 200 kilometers from Michilimakinac, where Kandiaronk’s Wyandot people settled in 1671, when he was around twenty years old, to Tehkummah on Manitoulin Island where Isabel Paterson was born 215 years later. It gets even cozier because the Wyandot had been displaced from the south shore of Georgian Bay by the Iroquois Five Nations, who around the same time also displaced the Oddawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people from Manitoulin Island. The latter three tribes formed the Council of Three Fires, which also relocated to Michilimakinac and formed alliances with the Wyandot and other tribes.One of the threads that I am weaving derives from David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s account of how Kandiaronk’s (or Kondiaronk’s) criticisms of European customs became the

The Elixir of Commerce

McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy: being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica: together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M’Vickar. New York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.

Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture. Addressed to the working people in that manufacture, and to the poor in general. Manchester. 1780. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.Wennerlind, Carl. “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” History of Political Economy,

The Moral Philosophers’ Stone: A Compleat History of ‘A Certain Quantity of Labour to be Performed’

Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as “the lump of labor.” To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th-century political economist of the proposition that “…there is a certain quantity of work to be done; and this quantity, generally speaking, does not admit of being much extended, merely on the temptation of labour being offered at a cheaper rate…”

The author was the Scottish church leader, Thomas Chalmers, whose neglected 1808 treatise

The Road to SerfRanddom

I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — “Why the worst get on top.” Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary?

Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a collective. Harold Rosenberg coined a fine phrase for such collectives: “the herd of independent minds.” Whether we call it capitalism or free enterprise, the individualist’s Utopia meets Hayek’s definition of collectivism: “The ‘social goal,’ or ‘common purpose,’ for which society is to be organized is

I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — "Why the worst get on top." Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary?Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a collective. Harold Rosenberg coined a fine phrase for such collectives: "the herd of independent minds." Whether we call it capitalism or free enterprise, the individualist’s Utopia meets Hayek’s definition of collectivism: "The ‘social goal,’ or ‘common purpose,’ for which society is to be organized is usually vaguely described as the ‘common good,’ the ‘general welfare,’

McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy : being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica : together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M’Vickar. New-York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture. Addressed to the working people in that manufacture, and to the poor in general. Manchester. 1780. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.Wennerlind, Carl. "Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England." History of Political Economy, Volume 35, Annual Supplement, 2003, pp. 234-261.Dorning

Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as "the lump of labor." To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th century political economist of the proposition that "…there is a certain quantity of work to be done; and this quantity, generally speaking, does not admit of being much extended, merely on the temptation of labour being offered at a cheaper rate…" The author was the Scottish church leader, Thomas Chalmers, whose neglected 1808 treatise on "the Extent and Stability of Natural Resources" has been described by A. M. C. Waterman as a "missing link" between T. R. Malthus and

The Most Evil Rant in Aynkind’s History

n previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that “critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant.” 

In the latter post, I stuck to the source that Guelzo cited in his published writings. There is much speculation that Guelzo’s Kant to critical race theory pipeline owes its inspiration to Ayn Rand’s attacks on Kant and I would like to present evidence that supports that thesis here.

Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, aka Alice O’Connor, aka Ayn Rand once called Immanuel Kant

In previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that "critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant." In the latter post, I stuck to source that Guelzo cited in his published writings. There is much speculation that Guelzo’s Kant to critical race theory pipeline owes its inspiration to Ayn Rand’s attacks on Kant and I would like to present evidence that supports that thesis here.Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, aka Alice O’Connor, aka Ayn Rand once called Immanuel Kant "the most evil man in mankind’s history." The claim appeared in a "brief summary" in the

I. Kant, even

[embedded content]
The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and “every dictatorship in-between”:

But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that’s really because critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had

[embedded content]The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and "every dictatorship in between":But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that’s really because critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There

Keisha Russell Must be Censured for her Plagiarized Senate Testimony

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. — Voltaire

Keisha Russell is a propagandist for the “First Liberty Institute” who they grace with the title of “counsel.” It looks from her resume that the counsel she provides consists of appearing on right-wing cable news and doing speaking engagements. Her bio at First Liberty doesn’t mention any litigation experience and emphasizes her “commentary.”

Today Russell appeared before the Senate confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson and read a script that included a section copied almost verbatim from a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen. Thiessen is a “conservative” columnist with

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. — VoltaireKeisha Russell is a propagandist for the "First Liberty Institute" who they grace with the title of "counsel." It looks from her resume that the counsel she provides consists of appearing on right-wing cable news and doing speaking engagements. Her bio at First Liberty doesn’t mention any litigation experience and emphasizes her "commentary."Today Russell appeared before the Senate confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson and read a script that included a section copied almost verbatim from a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen. Thiessen is a "conservative" columnist with the Washington Post, which is to say he is a megaphone for whatever the current right-wing talking points happen to

Org-Dimensional Man

In 1959, Harold Rosenberg wrote the essay “The Orgamerican Phantasy,” published in The Tradition of the New. Rosenberg’s essay criticized the “post-radical” self-absorption of several of the same authors — William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard — that Herbert Marcuse would subsequently praise in the Introduction to One-Dimensional Man for the “vital importance” of their work. In Vance Packard and American Social Criticism, Daniel Horowitz discussed Rosenberg’s attack on Packard. Curiously, though, I can find no discussion that connects Rosenberg’s criticism of Packard et al. to Marcuse’s admitted admiration of and reliance on their work.

Tellingly, all of the authors discussed by Rosenberg in his essay cited

I reread the first 50-pages of One-Dimensional Man and the 9-page introduction with Rosenberg’s critique of Mills, Packard, Riesman, Spectorsky and Whyte in mind. That is a fair sample given that Marcuse repeats his basic thesis ad nauseum in various "negative" formulations. Rosenberg’s essay almost qualifies as a critique of Marcuse’s book even though it wasn’t to be published for another five years. The essay was also published as "America’s Post-Radical Critics," a less inscrutable title than "The Orgamerican Phantasy." The two qualifications I would offer to my claim is that Rosenberg never mentioned the underlying Veblenism of his targets and merely alluded to Weber by way of referring to Whyte’s nostalgia for the "Protestant Ethic Person." The gap left by absence of a critique of