Happy Labor Day, everybody!

[thedabara-cds.livejournal.com]

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

-- "Ezra Pound's Proposition" by Robert Haas

Maybe I'm overthinking, but...

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

From the first cartoon....

"Free Trade: The freedom to do as U.S. Corporations Demand"

I think that in these days when things like Burger King's fleeing to Canada are common, we can stop calling them "U.S. Corporations".

To continue to do so is to misinterpret their interplay and political effect. They are, as they were constructed purposefully to be, self interested systems without any moral compass other than expediency, much less patriotic feeling. The U.S. may have been pioneers in creating such ungrateful children, but they are now children of the world.

The pejorative compound construction "U.S. Corporations" is politically powerful in a 60's hippie kind of way, that sees all authority as one big, globular mass of "the man" but I chafe against such cultural inertia.

To reflexively say "U.S. Corporations" in that pejorative compound, like "Damn Yankee" is to subconsciously conjoin U.S. interests with the interests of largely transnational Corporations... So that even in your criticism, you have bounded yourself within a corporate Overton window that's hard to overcome, even when its effects are made so clear as in the second cartoon by the same author.

Re: Maybe I'm overthinking, but...

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Really good point. They have no allegiance to anything but their bottom line.

Re: Maybe I'm overthinking, but...

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Although maybe it's worth calling the USA the "Corporations' US".

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I'm just surprised they only moved to Canada. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement)

[mudryikot.livejournal.com]

I though "damnyankee" is a term for those above Mason-Dixon line used by those who live below the said line

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

It is... and I'm making an analogy between the "single-word-i-ness" of the one (damnyankee) and the other (U.S. Corporations). Just as "damn" and "yankee" can seem inseparable in the mind of a southerner, U.S. and Corporation can seem inseparable in the mind of critics of corporate influence on U.S. Policy.