The US government is planting what is probably a phony story about Russia trying to hack our election computers. They quote numbers of hack attempts against certain computers without giving you context. They don’t tell you that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers all over the world probing every computer they can find on the internet to see if they can break in. My own irrelevant web site is probably attacked thousands of times a day. I have protection for that web site that tells me about it if I should ask. Otherwise it just keeps itself occupied in fending off these probes.

What shocks the US, purportedly, is that Russia would interfere in our politics, as if the US is not doing that all over the world itself.

Doesn’t anybody remember Victoria Nuland?

From Consortium News we have the article The Mess that Nuland Made.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

Now you may wonder what Victoria Nuland has to do with Hillary Clinton. Well Consortium News has the article The War Risk of Hillary Clinton.

The outstanding example is Victoria Nuland – Clinton’s spokesperson at State and now Assistant Secretary of State for Europe – who has aggressively spearheaded the anti-Russian crusade. Previously, she had been principal deputy foreign policy advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney.

OK, so maybe the average citizen doesn’t have time to read and remember all these events. Surely yjr corporate news media that has covered these stories must have some memory of what they have reported. Why do they never think the back story is relevant? How can they report with a straight face the war propaganda and distraction from real problems that the administration and Hillary Clinton are engaged in?

Jacobin Magazine has the article Four Futures.

A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?

There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.

This is the kind of research, thinking, and discussion that I was looking for in my previous posts Gift Economy and The Most Important Political Question That Nobody is Asking.

My previous post, The Most Important Political Question That Nobody is Asking, got me to thinking about societies that are not based on competing for resources. The revelations about how Christopher Columbus committed genocide when he came across such a society was, no doubt, part of what got me thinking along these lines.

I started to wonder if anthropologists have studied these societies with a mind to exactly this difference, competing for resources and not having to compete for resources.

A Google search on anthropology charitable societies brought me to the Wikipedia article Gift economy.

The nature of gift economies forms the subject of a foundational debate in anthropology. Anthropological research into gift economies began with Bronisław Malinowski’s description of the Kula ring in the Trobriand Islands during World War I. The Kula trade appeared to be gift-like since Trobrianders would travel great distances over dangerous seas to give what were considered valuable objects without any guarantee of a return. Malinowski’s debate with the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss quickly established the complexity of “gift exchange” and introduced a series of technical terms such as reciprocity, inalienable possessions, and prestation to distinguish between the different forms of exchange.

I don’t have time right now to do further research or even read the Wikipedia article, but I think I am on to something. We could learn how to adapt to the situation that is creeping up on us. That situation is the time when automation allows all of society’s needs for good and services to be fulfilled without the need for anybody’s labor.

I think I looked for the wrong entry point in my research. The Wikipedia article Post-scarcity economy is more of what I want to research.

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.