How did you manage to conclude Mastercard somehow wants the appearance of being "outside of the state and its modes of governing", given its explicit decision to act from the state's accusation that Wikileaks broke the law (the state's mode of governing)?

I'm also having trouble being surprised by the content of Wikileaks' gleeful release this morning of the State Department lobbied on behalf of U.S. companies doing business in Russia. Isn't every country's embassy explicitly meant to do such things?

Describing the WTO protesters as "the multitude" in opposition to "capital" is laughable.

@2, most of the Wikileaks stuff isn't that surprising or shocking -- diplomats are in the business of saying one thing and meaning another, after all -- that's what diplomacy means. What's more interesting is some of the horrifying things that we do that have been revealed, like the Texan private contractor in Afghanistan who bought drugs and little boys as young as eight for warlords to have sex with: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/…

@4, holy shit! Now THAT is the kind of thing to remind us what this is all about. I adore Wikileaks' ability to force journalists to report full-throatedly what all the layers of caution kept under wraps so long. What a blast of light!

We don't live in a post-industrial society, and most likely never will. All that's happened is that industry has been off shored to the third world, to people who are still doing very industrial things all the time. It's not Capital vs. "General Intellect", it's still Capital vs. Labor, only labor in this country has been hollowed out, leaving intellectually oriented jobs as a rare strong suit, albeit one that's pretty small with relation to the country as a whole.

intellectual labor, which is basically what most labor is in 21 century postindustrial societies:

What the fuck is this bullshit?

It's not the information from Wikileaks that is revealing (or shocking). It's the reaction to that information. That reaction tells you all you need to know about how your government REALLY views the democracy.

And the future of this so-called democracy does not look so bright.

#5 Yeah. You are 100% correct.

Hillary Clinton should be fired for this, I feel even more shame being an American. Let me get this strait, you took my tax dollars, and you used them to put Visa and Mastercard above all their competition? If someone big doesn't get fired for this, we have no democracy.

#1 blithely chimed in: "You can at least expect Capital to behave rationally."
Is that an excuse for horrible behavior? That it's rational? Stealing all your property and enslaving your family for my own benefit and greed is perfectly rational, but not acceptable.
For sociopaths whose only metric is money, it's easy to put all their faith in capitalism over democracy. Our political system is so far degraded by the influence of money, from the cost of campaigns to having capital as the major gatekeeper of who is able to govern, that it's little wonder that the machine of democracy has been co-opted to serve the machine of capital.

@9 - My guess is that no one will get fired for this. We have a 'democracy' - but it is one in which the corporations (treated as people) greatly outweigh the real people (humans).

@9: nobody will be fired for this. If anything, they'll be praised for ensuring American supremacy abroad. God, reading the news is so damn depressing sometimes.