Political powers and the business people empowered by them “grab land” — this is hardly news. Tapping natural resources in any part of the world is a matter of fact. Developing and exploiting mineral resources requires land rights, on which claims are laid. The cultivation of crops in regions privileged by nature characterizes the modern form of agriculture practiced and propagated by North American and European multinationals. Running plantations requires a sufficient supply of water and extensive land, roads, and ports at one’s disposal. The transportation of liquid and gaseous energy resources to the centers of capitalism, which uses and markets them, requires a global system of pipelines, for which entire states are defined and treated as transit territories. “Land grabbing” takes place all the time for all these cross-border politico-economic needs. And as a further rule, money is paid whenever land under foreign dominion is acquired — proof of a ‘fair deal.’ The current “battle over the Arctic” and over sea beds that have a rich potential in natural resources but no owners also shows that intentions to annex territory politically are not dying out at all — they still belong to the national rights that states both claim and deny each other.

The citizens of “God’s own country” have elected the president. Once again the election campaign was, as befits the largest and most powerful of the free democracies, exemplary. This is not so much because of the perfect manner in which the candidates demonstrated how much this highlight of the people’s democratic sovereignty is a matter of the financial power the respective parties are able to muster for their propaganda productions.

Pope Benedict XVI has resigned — a surprising step. This announcement seems to have completely clogged up the daily newspapers and talk shows. The retired pontiff has caused reports of bombs and civil wars to be sent to the back burners — and certainly not only in Catholic media or countries.

Having fought two unproductive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and being in a disastrous economic condition amid the financial and the sovereign debt crises, America seeks to restore and re-assert its global leadership role. For this purpose and in this sense, the Obama administration has proclaimed the 21st century as “America’s Pacific century.”

Five years after the crash of the housing market in the United States, the crisis has become somewhat permanent. Experts see in the conditions of this sector of the national economy either the worst crisis since the Great Depression or, when prices and sales figures temporarily rise again a bit, the famous light at the end of the tunnel. All the same, Fed chairman Bernanke’s summary of the devastation that the mortgage crisis has caused homeowners, the financial world, and the U.S. economy in general is sustained by his concern for how long the downturn will continue or whether land is at last again in sight. He is also quite clear about the social and human costs of the crisis, namely, the growing number of those who are homeless or about to join them.

What is a people? According to what modern legislators have laid down as binding in practice, a people is nothing more than the totality of a country’s inhabitants whom a state power defines as its members. Regardless of the natural and social differences and antagonisms between them, these members form a political collective by virtue of being subordinate to one and the same state authority. Being obligated to the same rule and its agenda is the common cause they stand up for as a people.

In our articles on the financial crisis and the concept of finance capital, we have written down a few basic determinations of the extensive business that finance capital undertakes beyond providing agriculture and industry with loan capital. We ourselves sorted out in our own minds, and challenged our readers with insights like the following: that the securities trade brings about a unique sort and magnitude of growth (that always but only gets called a “bubble” when something goes wrong); that, in the process, finance capital gains manifold responsibilities in the “real economy,” but its profits are not paid out of surplus value; that its economic position is the basis for its extraordinary power to decide with its own successes and failures the weal and woe of all the interests and efforts that make up the charm of the market economy, etc. The fact of the matter is that the finance trade accumulates securitized, tradable legal claims to proceeds that could never possibly be paid out of the production of surplus value — from which it obviously follows that this is not what securities are all about. It is also a fact that the widespread devaluation of such claims places the entire money economy in danger, which is therefore averted with massive guarantees of value by the political authorities on their own account, which even calls their own guarantee power into question — an all-too-obvious indication that these peculiar objects of value are not actually uncovered and “ultimately” no more than empty claims, but rather the “core” of wealth in a market economy, which cannot be allowed to suffer a “meltdown” (as experts like to express it using terms from an ultimate ‘maximal credible accident’ in the nuclear industry). Finally, it is also a fact that, since the beginning of the crisis, economic experts have been bombarding the public with information about the design of securities, and assessments of the significance and dangers of repeatedly repackaging them, which doesn’t explain anything . So we have concluded that we should counter all this useless information with an explanation of the political economy of the financial sector.

Noam Chomsky is a rare bird indeed. On the one hand, he is an established intellectual, a member of the respected academic elite; on the other hand, he is a world-famous, radical leftist critic — especially of the U.S. On the one hand, he is a professed anarchist and socialist whose critical views lie far outside the mainstream, having nothing to do with the typically constructive proposals usually offered to business and the state. On the other hand, he insists that his anarchist and “libertarian socialist” views are anything but extreme, but rather merely express the natural desire of all mankind: the desire for freedom. Chomsky regards himself as part of an intellectual tradition that is as humanistic as Europe and as American as apple pie, a tradition that includes intellectual luminaries such as Humboldt, Schelling, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jefferson, J.J. Rousseau or Michael Bakunin. For Chomsky, regardless of the theoretical and practical disputes between these thinkers, as ardent advocates of freedom they agree on the most important point of all: “‘Man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting being…’ [whose] true end [consists in] the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity.”

In Mesopotamia, irregular militias have managed to become a regional power factor and proclaimed an “Islamic state.” They wage their war in order to consolidate their existence and extend their reach. In the West, the new power, which rules over parts of Syria and Iraq, is perceived exclusively by the bloodthirsty ways they enforce their rule: mass executions of overpowered enemies, soldiers and civilians alike; brutal expulsion of ethnic groups with the wrong beliefs or wrong loyalty; but especially by the demonstrative beheading of people the jihadists consider to be representatives of the West. The Islamic state and its objectives are fully subsumed under these barbaric practices — and because they admit no justification, no good reason for it, politicians and public opinion in the West deny the unwelcome upstart absolutely any political motive and purpose. President Obama grants “neither religion nor state!” to the ravages of these warriors. They are the pure evil that wants nothing more than the destruction of the good: violence for the sake of violence, murder for the sake of murder. The Islamic state is declared to be an enemy of mankind that must be destroyed in order to save civilization. All violence against it is legitimate and the help of all countries is due.

If all the leading authorities assert that they at least are not doing anything racist, and everyone agrees that racism is not right: why then is it so persistent?