c/david-graeber
Lectures, interviews, and talks by David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything.
…extraction. And it's really clear in the US, because people don't realize the degree to which the democratic election of 2008, Obama, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, was entirely due to the youth vote. The youth vote tripled over four…
…youth vote. The youth vote tripled over four years. Three times as many young people were voting. Then after, they actually saw what Obama was like, who fell by half, and that's why the Republicans won. If you look at the kind of things that young…
…the religious in the state is precisely civic symbolism, so the pronouns of treatment are this ritualistic. The text brings, for example, Obama, who has several degrees of formality. You can call him Barack, if you are a friend of him. You can call him…
…example, Obama, who has several degrees of formality. You can call him Barack, if you are a friend of him. You can call him Mr. Obama. if he is a person with whom you have a certain reserve, but when he is the president of the United States and you…
…of force. But he also said if Syria shows signs of noncompliance, the Security Council will examine the situation. The Obama administration has approved new rules that extend minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers. The rules give…
…employment. I mean, they'll say this. My favorite example was, I dug it up and I was, aha, smoking gun, an interview of Obama where he was talking about health care reform, and he said, everybody says single payer will be more efficient, and, you know,…
…like this will happen. But the question is, why doesn't anybody do anything about it? Why doesn't, you know, why does Obama say, yes, we need to keep those jobs? because it's politically convenient. But there's also a moral dimension. People actually feel…
…not like there's a secret cabal. There's a totally public cabal. But... And they do discuss stuff like this. And people like Obama do say, well, we can't create a more efficient system because it will create unemployment. So these things are matters of…
…after 2011, you have the victory, even if you don't like these people from the point of being an anarchist, the victory of Obama is not the victory of Richard Nixon. Obama's way to the right of Richard Nixon. Well, yeah. In the context of, yes,…
…power. What is sort of the traditional sort of socialist dynamics? What is that state generally about sort of, you know, Obama, the president, whatever, versus, you know, the radicals, whether they're kind of second to the government or the radicals, or…
…us, this Taliban fighter, he sort of grinned when I said I was American. He said, ah, yes, we'll send a blood message to Obama. What did you think was going to happen? That first afternoon, I thought there was a chance we would be killed. It's a very…
…convinced that they will succeed against the United States. And one of the things that surprised me was that they hate President Obama far more than they hate President Biden. George W. Bush, because he has increased the number of drone strikes in the…
…I actually had one Taliban commander, again, they gave me these newspapers. There was a picture of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama dancing together at an inaugural ball. This Taliban commander spit on the picture. That's the level of hatred. But that says…
…state. But... They held back on using it that systematically. They used it as much as they felt they had to under Obama. They certainly were incredibly brutal to the Occupy people, and that story really hasn't been told. But now they're just going crazy…
…of anyone who's living in the system, who's still attached to this system that we live in. That shows the reality. Because Obama was very... He's like the... Who's going to deal crack? or something, that's what pops into my mind. A sexy guy who's…
…I remember one of the most telling quotes I got, it was almost like a smoking gun in this regard, it was from Obama. It was right before he became president, actually. He was talking about health care reform. He says, oh, you know, everybody says single…
…represented by hundreds of thousands marching like they did in 1886. We have to turn back the clock on Mr. Romney, on Mr. Obama, on the Congress, on Mario Cuomo, on Bloomberg. And the 99 percent has to get their share. AMY GOODMAN. Well, to talk more…
…jump on this. And to push it in a direction, it's not clear whether they really thought that we would end up backing Obama, for example. They taught me words that night. But to push us in a sort of more legislative direction, which completely failed.…
…fully supported on the top political top of the system where the people are supposed to be the left. I got a quote from Obama actually. It was like a smoking gun because when I say that the government wants these jobs to exist, the powerful people want…
…exist, the powerful people want these jobs to exist, people say, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. But actually I found a quote where Obama says it flat out. He says, oh, everybody says single payer would be so much more efficient. And sure, it will be…
…least it's changed with the conversation. And I was amused that in the newspaper this morning there was some item that either Obama was proposing a law or was signing a law that said that people should not trade with any government which suppresses…
…answer to that question, but I did read an article in the Washington Post a couple of days ago saying that President Obama has raised more money from Wall Street and the financial community for his re-election than all of the Republicans combined. So if…
…again, and then the money can be recouped. This has always worked in the past. And so how do you think President Obama is dealing with this? I think President Obama really bought into the dominant ideology, which is essentially Republican. Finally, he has…
…This has always worked in the past. And so how do you think President Obama is dealing with this? I think President Obama really bought into the dominant ideology, which is essentially Republican. Finally, he has to wage an election campaign, so he has to…
…is the proper impossibility, I think. That is where... Yeah, visionary. I mean, the idea of visionary politics. I always thought Obama was, to me, represented the ultimate death of visionary politics, because you think if he managed to get elected, by…
…really. And we broke that. And suddenly, inequality was all anybody can talk about. I think our greatest victory came when Obama gave a speech about inequality, which nobody cared about before we were there. And the Republicans responded. And both Republican…
…these movements, FDR and LBJ would never have achieved as much as they did. The same holds true for today. President Obama has disappointed and will continue to disappoint those demonstrating downtown and across the country. But OWS is critical to the…
…essentially, they are the representatives of that giant mountain of administrators. That is their core base. I even caught a quote from Obama where he pretty much admitted it, where he said, you know, well, people ask me why we don't have a single-payer…
…party, you know, they are the electoral base of people like Clinton, people like Macron, people... like Tony Blair had been, people like Obama. Corbyn was not at all like that. He's this person who had been a complete rebel against his own party for his…