class warfare

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“Independent” analysis; class warfare (think tanks)

February 2, 2016 by William Eaton

A follow-up to a previous discussion of how experts, and the media that aids and abets them, and the class interests that pay these experts’ salaries—they’re in the mask-making business. A January 26 New York Times story reported that “according to an independent analysis” the proposed trade pact between North American countries, the United States in particular, and Pacific rim nations “would increase incomes, exports and growth in the United States . . . and would not cost overall […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: academia, Barack Obama, capitalism, class warfare, corporations, journalism, New York Times, Paul Krugman, trade pact, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Inequality, Experts, Krugman, Masks

January 19, 2016 by William Eaton

By William Eaton . . . the intellectuals of the time . . . went on playing with ideas que no tenían más función que la de mascaras—that served only as masks. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude)[1] At a few moments in his recent, fruitful discussion of class warfare (“Challenging the Oligarchy,” New York Review of Books), the economist Paul Krugman presents a vision—not a pretty vision—of the role of academic experts. Krugman’s […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: academia, Brecht, class warfare, climate change, Emerson, global warming, Kant, Paul Krugman, Quaker meeting

Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity

December 6, 2015 by Ed Mooney

The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the crystal clear framing here in Zeteo of centuries of suffering attributable to brutal class warfare — if faced unblinkingly, all this can induce paralysis. Then we learn, within days, that three are murdered in Colorado Springs, and fourteen in San Bernadino. Slow-burning or explosive, the catastrophes seem to go on and on. Sad to say, if there’s a tropism […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, crime, Marx, massacres, philosophy, solidarity

Paris, Terrorism, Religion, Justice

November 14, 2015 by William Eaton

The recent documentary about the Black Panthers called attention, among other things, to that group’s ten-point platform, which included such demands as “We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings” and “We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.” The Panthers were not a terrorist group; they engaged in demonstrations and political theater that at times included unconcealed weapons. They wanted revolution, but—like many Sixties leftwing groups in the US, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, justice, Paris, religion, terrorism, Third World War, working class

The American Splitting Experiment

January 24, 2015 by William Eaton

In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein splits Americans of that recent period into two “tribes.” One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders. The other tribe “found another lesson to be self-evident: never […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: American Dream, American history, class warfare, Declaration of Independence, History, Lewis Mumford, money, politics

US History, Short not Sweet

August 31, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] From Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court: No country on earth grew faster than the United States during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1900 the nation’s population swelled from 31 to 75 million, . . . The number of farms grew from two million to six million, and the development of machines like combines, reapers, and harvesters turned barren land into “amber waves of grain”. . . . It […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: American history, class warfare, farmers, law, slavery

Sutra as Power Play

May 10, 2012 by William Eaton

Sutra as Power Play By William Eaton A review of The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the Tun-Huang Manuscript translated by Philip B. Yampolsky and Readings of the Platform Sutra, edited by Morten Schlutter and Stephen F. Teiser (both from Columbia University Press, 2012) {click for pdf} As a result of the Platform Sutra, Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch (638-713 CE), has come to be regarded as one the founders of the school of Chinese Chan Buddhism, […]

Categories: Review • Tags: class warfare, sutra, Zen