Day: June 23, 2020

Rapper Lil Baby’s new single begins to address “The Bigger Picture”

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Rapper Lil Baby’s new single begins to address “The Bigger Picture”

“The Bigger Picture” is significant and stands out because it strongly rejects the idea employed by identity politics that there is an unbridgeable gap between blacks and whites, it begins to form a critique of capitalism and it shows the development of a popular artist beginning to take the times and his art seriously.

However, the song’s suggestion that voting is the answer to all the great problems is extremely weak. First of all, it comes in the midst of enormous, multi-racial protests whose objective logic clearly indicates that popular struggle against all the existing institutions is where the way forward lies. Second, the call to “Vote” is most often in entertainment industry circles at the moment virtual short-hand for “Vote Democratic” or “Vote for Anyone but Trump.” It is no accident that Lil Baby recently announced he is working with Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms—who has openly defended the police after the recent Atlanta police killing of Rayshard Brooks—to put together a police reform plan “for Atlanta to the whole world.”

[2018] War, censorship, and the invention of “fake news”

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

War, censorship, and the invention of “fake news”

When most people think of the term “fake news,” they think of the headlines in supermarket tabloids about alien invasions and two-headed grandmothers giving birth to quintuplets. But when the New York Times and the leading US intelligence agencies use the term, they mean something entirely different: reporting that cuts across the efforts of the state to promote war and political viewpoints that challenge the establishment.

Social democrats helped usher in fascism in Germany. They’re doing it again in America.

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

There are a lot of parallels between modern America and Germany during the leadup to the Nazi era: growing racism and xenophobia, economic decline, deteriorating democratic institutions, an obsession with militarism, violent political polarization. But the defining factor that the two countries share in their descent into fascism is a decision by each country’s liberals to participate in the campaign to repress the revolutionaries.

The operation by Weimar Germany’s majority Social Democratic government to crush the communist-led revolt of 1919 showed just how far social democrats can go when the bourgeois system they align with is threatened; they sent in paramilitary forces to assassinate the leaders of the Spartacus League, including the communist Rosa Luxemburg. This prevented Germany from becoming socialist (which would have stopped it from becoming fascist), and kept the opposition to the fascists incurably divided throughout the decade leading up to when Hitler came to power.

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Social democrats helped usher in fascism in Germany. They’re doing it again in America.

Huawei: A Case Study of When Profit Sharing Works

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Huawei: A Case Study of When Profit Sharing Works

One example that’s less well known in the West is Chinese telecom giant Huawei, a private company owned by its employees. Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, today it employs about 170,000 staff, including more than 40,000 non-Chinese (75% of employees outside China are local hires), and serves more than 3 billion customers worldwide. It is the only Chinese company that receives more sales revenue from markets outside China (67%) than from inside it. (Editor’s note: It’s worth noting that the U.S. isn’t one of those markets. Some U.S. lawmakers consider the company a security threat. For its part, Huawei’s internal policy is to use U.S. law as the guiding law in their international business.)