Shitty tomatoes, cont.

The salmonella outbreak has finally been solved. The outbreak originated — as suspected — from the Third World backwaters of . . . Florida.

And Mexico, but don’t think I didn’t enjoy pointing out the Florida part. The reichwing asshole growers down there have had their way too long, and now their product is for shit.

Wholesome food is a thing of the past. It will take Obama’s Dept. of Agriculture years to clean up Bush’s shitty mess. And the right will whine at every step of re-regulation, because they seem to enjoy catching the Hershey squirts now and then.

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[Masonic/RIAA item dividers today — in copyright we trust!]

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Five billion “sold.”

And I’ve only stolen about 600GB worth. 

[sigh]

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I like to think of the backlash against the Russert week-long wake as overdue, but I’m surprised atsome of the folks who’ve decided enough is enough. Reaction to media isn’t just the province of media wonks anymore.

CP’s Blog of the Year winner on Robson on Russert

Charlie, the ad man, on the Coleman commercial

Deborah Howell on Broder and Woodward being ethical violators

Ken Silverstein on Broder and Woodward being ethical violators

What happened to Al Giordano

Michael Savage: salmonella-infected on-air hate (from the America for some, not all crowd)

 

In other continued stories:

The Dells are still open, just a little different

More on the political nature of this year’s Northrup jazz calendar

Steny Hoyer

Renters winning

Charlie Crist rumored to be a renter

Scott Horton interviews Sibel Edmonds and Luke Ryland

J. Robert Flores latest Bushie to be investigated

Colby King advices Barack on DC insiders

Michele Bachmann confuses caribou with Caribou

Another great Garnett story

This deep into the Bush administration, all stories are continued, and many linger because they’ve been deferred too long. We’re going to need some CSI historians to figure out all their bastardly crimes.

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Send baking soda to Bush via the mail and get four years in prison. But if you send anthrax to Congress and the media, you get to live free and die of old age.

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A radical view of how the world economy was altered by the Days of Rage from Slavoj Zizek. Your hard reading assignment for the weekend.

Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process — which, named after auto maker Henry Ford, enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command — and developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public welfare, or worrying about ecology.

In this way, capitalism usurped the left’s rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic and administrative.

The anti-capitalist protests of the ’60s supplemented the traditional critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we “wear masks” and suffer sexual and other oppressions.

The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ‘68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism and “really existing” socialism. This new libertarian spirit is epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

What survived of the sexual liberation of the ’60s was the tolerant hedonism readily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. Today, sexual enjoyment is not only permitted, it is ordained — individuals feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The drive to radical forms of enjoyment (through sexual experiments and drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when “the spirit of ‘68” had exhausted its political potential. 

That’s a sample, but it does get a bit more turgid, as in Red Army Faction and “Real” with a capital R.

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