The Party of Wall Street Meets Its Nemesis
David Harvey

The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.

"David Graeber on Debt, Deficit and Catastrophe"
Jay Kernis, CNN

Answering today’s [July 5, 2011] OFF-SET questions is David Graeber, who teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value,” “Lost People,” and “Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire.”

David Graeber studied 5,000 years of debt: real dirty secret is that if the deficit ever completely went away, it would cause a major catastrophe.

His new book is entitled “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and in it, Graeber indeed examines the historical significance of debt, the struggle between rich and poor, and the moral implications inherent in our ideas about credit and debt.

The U.S. Treasury Department last Friday reiterated its Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling, and urged Congress "to avoid the catastrophic economic and market consequences of a default crisis by raising the statutory debt limit in a timely manner.” The White House wants a deal by July 22. If the debt ceiling isn't raised, the Treasury would not be able to pay nearly half of the 80 million payments it needs to make every month, according to an estimate by budget experts at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Q.: How did the United States get into this situation?

A: Because the Republicans are engaged in one of the most extraordinary campaigns of political recklessness in recent memory.

Anthropologist Graeber Turns Radical Side Loose in Zuccotti Park Protest
Drake Bennett

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist -- among the brightest, some argue, of his generation -- who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests this year.

The Revolutionary Intervention in the Crisis of Modernism:
Democratic Autonomy, Turkey, and the Kurdish Movement
Cengiz Baysoy, Otonom

Both the Turkish state and the left have been in deadlock in terms of understanding the point the Kurdish political movement has come up to. The state and the modernist left both have difficulty making sense of a national political movement which criticizes and refuses the paradigm of “nation state.”

The traditional point of view of the modernist left on the issue is as follows: “The right of nations to self-determination is the right to political borders and independence against imperialism, i.e. the right to a nation state. Furthermore, unless this right has an anti-imperialist character, it is impossible to be progressive.”

The left considers the Kurdish political movement from this political point of view, and tries to take this movement under the political dominion of this paradigm. It seems that the modernist left is incapable of making sense of the Kurdish political movement other than this way, whereas the Kurdish political movement thinks and speaks very differently from this political paradigm.