"If you would have served our country better you would not be a disabled veteran living off Social Security while the rest of us honest Americans work our ass off. Too bad; you should have died."

Well... Sandy Is The Largest Hurricane To Ever Form In The The Atlantic Basin (10/30/2012)

Hurricane Sandy is officially listed as the largest hurricane to have formed in the Atlantic Basin, according to the National Hurricane Center, as it reached 1,000 miles in diameter.

!Technical Alert

Blackout Conditions at Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! broadcast under extremely limited power today as we, and much of New York City, are without electricity after Superstorm Sandy pounded the East Coast. Click on the segments below to see our in depth look at this historic extreme weather, the damage it caused to nuclear reactors on the East Coast, and the role of climate change.

When the great empires in Rome and India collapsed, the resulting creation of a checkerboard of small kingdoms and republics saw the gradual decline in standing armies and cities, as well as the settlement of the lower classes through various hierarchical caste systems, the retreat of gold and silver to the temples and the abolition of slavery. Although hard currency was no longer used in everyday life, its use as a unit of account and credit continued in medieval Europe, against popular claims among economists that the Middle Ages somehow saw the economy "revert to barter". In fact, it was during the Middle Ages that more sophisticated financial institutions like promissory notes and paper money (in China, where the empire managed to survive the collapse observed elsewhere), letters of credit and cheques (in the Islamic world) developed and spread. According to Graeber, it was the Islamic "western" tradition of free market and commerce outside of governmental intervention that inspired the original formulation of Adam Smith, whose writing seems to repeat ipsis litteris the words of Persian scholars like Al-Tusi and Al-Ghazali.

It took the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade and the massive amounts of gold and silver extracted from the Americas - most of which ended up in the far East, specially China - to see the reemergence of the bullion economy and large scale military violence. All of which, according to Graeber, directly inter-wined with the earlier expansion of the Italian mercantile city-states as centers of finance that defied the church ban on usury and led to the age of the great capitalist empires that endured and prospered for the next 500 years. As the new continent opened new possibilities for gain, it also created a new area for adventurous militarism backed by debts that required the economic exploitation of the Amerindian and, later, West African populations. As it did, cities again flourished in the European continent and capitalism advanced to encompass larger areas of the globe when European trade companies and military outposts disrupted local markets and pushed for colonial monopolies.

This age would have come to an end with the abandonment of the gold standard by the U.S. government in 1971 and a return to credit money, opening up uncertainties and possibilities yet unclear as the dollar stands as the world currency largely based in its capacity to multiply itself through debts and deficits as long as the United States maintains its status as the world only military power and client states are eager to pay seignorage for its government bonds. By comparing the evolution of debt in our times to other historical eras and different societies, the author suggests that modern debt crises are not the inevitable product of history and may be changed.

Maybe what we're seeing is a reversal or at least a slowing down of the monetization and commodification of social relations

Maybe not so much reversal or slowing down as bypassing or superseding. The monetization and commodification are still going on at a break neck pace.  Pay with cash at the local box store and watch the teenager at the register struggle to count out your change.  Or wave your iDroid at the register and walk through almost without slowing down.

The growth of social media in some sense recreates the agora and the village square literally on a global scale, bypassing all that.  For you and I to even have this conversation would have been all but impossible a generation ago.

networks of providing services for free to others in the expectation that someone will also provide to you

The very definition of the open source movement.  Geeks Hackers People from every corner of the globe collaborating very nearly in real time to create something that rivals the very best efforts of Apple and Microsoft, motivated by nothing more than the shared sense of discovery and creation. And FOSS has been a model for any number of similar networks for every purpose under the sun.

Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?