Shop Till You Drop

When everything is commodified. Karl Marx on markets:"It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man other than naked self-interst and callous cash payment." He never saw the nexus between woman and woman fighting over the sale rack at Pennys. ( your killin me!)Here is Edward Bellamy :"According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all it's tendencies.It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization."

I'll take exception to this point, or characterization of "low grade". I spent a short time as a purveyor of Morrocan leather goods ( my distant youth) and had the opportunity to learn the art of bargaining in the medinas of Fez and Tangiers and Marrakesh. This involved hours spent sitting on rugs in small open stalls smoking kief and drinking mint tea supplied by the mechants with whom I was dealing. According to custom, this process of exchange was at the heart of social relations and engendered respect as well as fair marketing in a civilized yet adversarial contest.We spent a great deal of time over small differences in price but got to know one another and arrived at something upon which we could agree. How different from buying a spatula at Wall Mart where the price is what the sticker says, the human contact is a possible glance from the checker and the whole process taking the least possible amount of time because time is now the most valuable "commodity" we own. You judge which is the "low grade "civilization.

Anyone familiar with my politics knows I am no fan of markets but we need an allocation process which returns this concept of human contact within exchange, where we are involved with the commodity, not as the commodity.

Couple more things, people arguing that a troop drawdown will enbolden the insurgency have to explain how we ever get out, short of some sort of mythical "total victory". At some eventual point the troops will be drawn down. Will it be some unannounced mass exodus in the middle of the night?

Mark Levine gives a great analysis of the strategy of chaos or what Wolfowitz, one of the masterminds behind The War ( we don't really have a name for it anymore) and now head of the World Bank ( isn't that reassuring) called the "arc of instability". The wonderful strategery here was to wreak "creative destruction" ( so far so good) then bring forth from the ashes a global model, like Phoenix rising. "Iraq could do for neo-liberalism in the Middle East what Chile did for it in Latin America." (oops) Ive written about capitalisms promotion of "weak states" and their tendency to devolve into failed ones.De-stabilization has historically been a prime directive from our State Department and goal of intelligence agencies. I leave with this quote from Debord : To this list of the triumphs of power we should add, however, one result which has proved negative; once the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically."