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| Thomas Ricento |
I enjoy reading Ricento's book. With it, I've been able to place many ideas that I've had into more rounded associations with what I have seen taking place but have not thought about until now. Notably, within academia and the political sphere, his writings have made me aware of what communitarianism is and why it seems to be being implemented within U.S. colleges as policy. Unfortunately, for most of what is within chapters one through four I have yet to encounter the statement "Since corporate control of Western governments represents a modern day form of fascism, governmental policy is always to be classed as a form of colonialism, and any and all laws created are imposed for the profit of corporations. Therefore, any so-called social justice regulations shall be used to further suppress the populace into serving corporate interests." Although the text never goes so far as stating the obvious, it may be easily surmised by the honest and factual information put forth. Taking my point as a premise, it leaves moot any arguments from such authors as Kymlicka about group rights or individual rights because anything provided by the government is a guarantee to gradually take away all rights of those subject to the law in favor of corporate "rights." Corporations do not and cannot have morality because they are not an individual! Let me be brief here because more of what I have to say may be made clearer after first looking into the cross-textual connections between this week's readings.
Gloria Anzaldua (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
Anzaldua presents the theme of corporate colonialism when she mentions "U.S. colonizing companies" (32). Now that corporations are global all nation-states are but enforcement arms of borderless parasitic colonizing entities. This is the real world and not some academic fantasy land that we live in. It is past the time that all of the people should come together to address the threat. The end of corporate colonization may occur in either of two ways. The one end is the entire consumption of all peoples and resources into one corporate entity that eventually consumes itself. The other is some change brings about an end to the horrors now being inflicted on people by the global corporate elitists' systematic colonization. Anzaldua writes the article as a communitarian piece with identity politics as a theme when she speaks of the white conquest of the Americas and how her ancestors were mistreated by the whites. She fails to talk about how in the past whites were enslaved and abused by other whites, vaporized masses of fellow whites in ovens, and built the most complex society in history. The act of mistreatment is subordinate to greed and should it work to the benefit of greed then people everywhere would be lining up to subject themselves to slavery as they very much do.
Further verification that Borderlands may be classified within the identity politics genre is in the second chapter where the author speaks of boys being told to beat their wives, the use of the terms "other," "half and half" and homophobia: all things that most people don't really care about; things that have little or nothing to do with the ongoing corporate colonization taking place today; much as it took place when the author speaks of the exploitation of the indigenous populace in the first chapter. Something seems to be missing to me and that is the circumvention by the elite to use the educational system to deflect the injustices of global corporate colonialism by way of communitarianism/identity politics such that the actual cultural tyranny they inflict is transferred from them to racial or identity groups within their subservient populaces: through the establishment of racism, the myth of homophobia, and sexism; all of which are fabricated to rise within an existing homogenized and highly contemporary society. To me the implementation of communitarian ideology by academia already proved it on the path of other communist ideologies such as Stalinism and Maoism through its social justice efforts to shut down free speech via political correctness and censorship, violent political aligned protests, and the tearing down of statues, the re-writing of history and all such things that lead to the stamping out the only source of morality, the individual. Inevitably this leads to a cultural revolution and the mass murder of tens of millions of people, none of whom are likely to be members of the elite ruling class.
Outside of the sentimentalities of individual concerns imbued into the prose of Anzaldua, Ricento states the global corporate fact that "[o]nly the countries that invest massively in education and research can appropriate the foreign technologies necessary to catch up with the rich countries" (39). NAFTA minimized the effectiveness of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico allowing U.S. (and now globally owned corporations that had once been U.S. based) corporations to do what was necessary for the establishment of autonomous Mexican corporate operations. With the achievements of NAFTA complete and with the multinationals influence over the nation-state government of Mexico, the wall can go back up like a quartering off of a prison cell block for easier multinational divide and conquer control. This time the wall seems to be more to prevent capital flight as recently implemented through various means in China rather than to have anything to do with immigration: it is being built to keep U.S. citizens or Mexican citizens from fleeing with their wealth during any future economic uncertainty. Multinational corporations and the elite class that owns them are global and not restricted by inconveniences of nation-state borders. They are the new masters of a global slave-based economy established by way of modern colonization methods: control the nation-state governments; turn the populace against one another. And, if that doesn't work, then create terrorists, Islamify the EU and as a last resort turn their countries into rubble: as in the Mid East.
So it is that I'm mystified by the value academics place on English or language as it relates to social justice or if whether or not English should be the preferred lingua franca because of this or that. The value of these concerns when compared to the "bull within the china closet," the one that such issues are subservient to, is very small. It is as if they are completely unaware, although here I presume that being able to write what I have, that Rincento is equally if not more aware than I and cannot write such things in an academic book. He comes out and says that "[t]he agendas and policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, for example, are determined largely by self-interested governments of the original G-7 countries, which are greatly influenced by the largest banks and corporations, all of which seek to maximize their self-interest when it comes to investment and trade policies" (38). What he does not say is that those banks print money and give that money to other banks and lend it to corporations at zero percent interest rates. Or that they can buy corporate bonds like the ECB, or government bonds and stock ETFs or like the Swiss National Bank become the largest stockholder of Facebook, or as in the United States purchase so many mortgage-backed-securities that they become the largest mortgage holders in America. Corporations are now in the process of taking title to all assets in the Western world by printing up money out of thin air for their owners. So, this is my mystification. Academics are supported by student debt, loans that come from a government under the control of corporations. They fail to see that this debt removes an entire generation from the purchase the real property that the corporations are currently taking title to. How can it be that academics write about justice, language rights, democracy, and participation in communitarian ideology, or concern themselves with whether or not English is going to provide some upward mobility when they are participating in, benefiting from and therefore complicit in the greatest inhumane colonialization by an elite class?
I can't say enough about how much I appreciate having to read Rincento's book for an assignment. I've recommended it to my brother, an English professor at LAVC, and to all of my Facebook friends. I especially liked learning about the key words and terms such as liberalism, neoliberalism, social justice, identity politics, language rights, the conceptions, and misconceptions that the author's hold about democracy, capitalism, mixed-economies, nation-states, communitarianism, code-mixing and so on. I fell in love with the book when Rincento stated that the elements of Van Parijs's argument cannot find "common ground and common purpose in a world in which everything has been, or will soon be, commodified, owned, and priced, with the owners increasingly controlling decisions about economic inputs and outputs on a global scale in the service of their own economic interests" (33).
Gloria Anzaldua (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Anzaldua presents the theme of corporate colonialism when she mentions "U.S. colonizing companies" (32). Now that corporations are global all nation-states are but enforcement arms of borderless parasitic colonizing entities. This is the real world and not some academic fantasy land that we live in. It is past the time that all of the people should come together to address the threat. The end of corporate colonization may occur in either of two ways. The one end is the entire consumption of all peoples and resources into one corporate entity that eventually consumes itself. The other is some change brings about an end to the horrors now being inflicted on people by the global corporate elitists' systematic colonization. Anzaldua writes the article as a communitarian piece with identity politics as a theme when she speaks of the white conquest of the Americas and how her ancestors were mistreated by the whites. She fails to talk about how in the past whites were enslaved and abused by other whites, vaporized masses of fellow whites in ovens, and built the most complex society in history. The act of mistreatment is subordinate to greed and should it work to the benefit of greed then people everywhere would be lining up to subject themselves to slavery as they very much do.
Further verification that Borderlands may be classified within the identity politics genre is in the second chapter where the author speaks of boys being told to beat their wives, the use of the terms "other," "half and half" and homophobia: all things that most people don't really care about; things that have little or nothing to do with the ongoing corporate colonization taking place today; much as it took place when the author speaks of the exploitation of the indigenous populace in the first chapter. Something seems to be missing to me and that is the circumvention by the elite to use the educational system to deflect the injustices of global corporate colonialism by way of communitarianism/identity politics such that the actual cultural tyranny they inflict is transferred from them to racial or identity groups within their subservient populaces: through the establishment of racism, the myth of homophobia, and sexism; all of which are fabricated to rise within an existing homogenized and highly contemporary society. To me the implementation of communitarian ideology by academia already proved it on the path of other communist ideologies such as Stalinism and Maoism through its social justice efforts to shut down free speech via political correctness and censorship, violent political aligned protests, and the tearing down of statues, the re-writing of history and all such things that lead to the stamping out the only source of morality, the individual. Inevitably this leads to a cultural revolution and the mass murder of tens of millions of people, none of whom are likely to be members of the elite ruling class.
Outside of the sentimentalities of individual concerns imbued into the prose of Anzaldua, Ricento states the global corporate fact that "[o]nly the countries that invest massively in education and research can appropriate the foreign technologies necessary to catch up with the rich countries" (39). NAFTA minimized the effectiveness of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico allowing U.S. (and now globally owned corporations that had once been U.S. based) corporations to do what was necessary for the establishment of autonomous Mexican corporate operations. With the achievements of NAFTA complete and with the multinationals influence over the nation-state government of Mexico, the wall can go back up like a quartering off of a prison cell block for easier multinational divide and conquer control. This time the wall seems to be more to prevent capital flight as recently implemented through various means in China rather than to have anything to do with immigration: it is being built to keep U.S. citizens or Mexican citizens from fleeing with their wealth during any future economic uncertainty. Multinational corporations and the elite class that owns them are global and not restricted by inconveniences of nation-state borders. They are the new masters of a global slave-based economy established by way of modern colonization methods: control the nation-state governments; turn the populace against one another. And, if that doesn't work, then create terrorists, Islamify the EU and as a last resort turn their countries into rubble: as in the Mid East.
So it is that I'm mystified by the value academics place on English or language as it relates to social justice or if whether or not English should be the preferred lingua franca because of this or that. The value of these concerns when compared to the "bull within the china closet," the one that such issues are subservient to, is very small. It is as if they are completely unaware, although here I presume that being able to write what I have, that Rincento is equally if not more aware than I and cannot write such things in an academic book. He comes out and says that "[t]he agendas and policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, for example, are determined largely by self-interested governments of the original G-7 countries, which are greatly influenced by the largest banks and corporations, all of which seek to maximize their self-interest when it comes to investment and trade policies" (38). What he does not say is that those banks print money and give that money to other banks and lend it to corporations at zero percent interest rates. Or that they can buy corporate bonds like the ECB, or government bonds and stock ETFs or like the Swiss National Bank become the largest stockholder of Facebook, or as in the United States purchase so many mortgage-backed-securities that they become the largest mortgage holders in America. Corporations are now in the process of taking title to all assets in the Western world by printing up money out of thin air for their owners. So, this is my mystification. Academics are supported by student debt, loans that come from a government under the control of corporations. They fail to see that this debt removes an entire generation from the purchase the real property that the corporations are currently taking title to. How can it be that academics write about justice, language rights, democracy, and participation in communitarian ideology, or concern themselves with whether or not English is going to provide some upward mobility when they are participating in, benefiting from and therefore complicit in the greatest inhumane colonialization by an elite class?
I can't say enough about how much I appreciate having to read Rincento's book for an assignment. I've recommended it to my brother, an English professor at LAVC, and to all of my Facebook friends. I especially liked learning about the key words and terms such as liberalism, neoliberalism, social justice, identity politics, language rights, the conceptions, and misconceptions that the author's hold about democracy, capitalism, mixed-economies, nation-states, communitarianism, code-mixing and so on. I fell in love with the book when Rincento stated that the elements of Van Parijs's argument cannot find "common ground and common purpose in a world in which everything has been, or will soon be, commodified, owned, and priced, with the owners increasingly controlling decisions about economic inputs and outputs on a global scale in the service of their own economic interests" (33).
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