Slinging Babylon

The Fall of Man

2011-08-02T21:43:00.001-07:00

"One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken." -Leo Tolstoy

The essence of modern society is humanity's disciplining of nature. In contrast to prior epochs, the emergence of capitalist millenialism enabled the eradication of environmental constraints on production. The cutting down of forests, draining and dredging of waterways, elimination of inefficient species, construction of vast road networks, and separation of people from the land were all necessary for enclosure. Not merely satisfied with increasing the output of its menage, humanity developed a system of exchange dependent upon constantly increasing rates of domestication. The galactic expansion of the market economy has raised living standards for many, generated a cornucopia of inexpensive consumer products, and even led to an outbreak of obesity. Science has awoke from its ecclesiastical slumber to categorize and refine mankind's understanding of nature, so as to further the species' engrossment of God's Kingdom. Yet this material utopia is founded on an impious discrepancy, that eternal economic growth is possible in a world of fixed resources. It was in search of this vain fallacy that mankind erected the monsters of the 20th Century, whose ghosts will haunt the earth long after we are gone.

While the capitalist world-system was initially powered by the wind, water, domesticated animals, and human exertion, the utilization of carbon-based fuels greatly intensified the power of the market. Wielding coal initially, and then petroleum, decreased distance and augmented productive capacity. The sheer number of mass migrants throughout the globe in the 19th Century, the emergence of electric looms, the discovery of tourism, and speed in which Euro-American states divvied up Africa and Asia would have been unthinkable without steam power. Even the last slave island, Cuba, constructed railroads and steam mills to process and transport sugar beyond the Caribbean. Burning coal not only led to new, more energy intensive forms of production, like with the Bessemer process, but new ways of human life. Harvesting electricity liberated humanity from its subjugation to the night, but also paved the way for the myriad conveniences which make living more enjoyable. Because of its sheer energy density, processing oil into a fungible commodity merely exacerbated the process already set in motion by its geological counterpart. Every aspect of contemporary existence, from basic movement, to the construction of space, to the importation of chachkas from China, and even simply growing food, is structured on easy access to petroleum.

Modernity's fundamental weakness, and our adherence to its mode of production, is the reliance on cheap, abundant fossil fuels. No other source offers the same energy return on investment. However, its narcotic embrace is doubly catastrophic. Even the most optimistic prognosticators believe that there is, at best, a few hundred years left of coal reserves. As for petrol an oft-maligned consensus has emerged that humanity has achieved a peak extraction rate, and that barrels of crude will henceforth be furnished on a downward curve. Despite using a wide array of technologies to find and mine new petroleum reserves, collection has held steady for a half-decade. Moreover, the most fecund oil fields are petering out, albeit at rates unknown. The Saudis are having difficulty with Ghawar's precedence, and it is no coincidence that the stability of the Mexican state coincides with the output from Cantarell. The gods of oil mining have contemplated erecting wells above underwater salt layers and the Arctic Circle, and are busy pumping fresh water into tar sands. Moreover the pollution consonant to the utilization of fossil fuels damages the physical environment and, if burned forever, is species suicidal. When Macondo blew it felt like the earth was bleeding, its reddish slick covering all in the sheen of progress. Yet, Royal Dutch Shell orchestrates little ones in Nigeria every few weeks or so. Given that human beings, and the ecology on which they depend on, have evolved to live in a certain climate, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for two hundred years, exemplified by the bubbling of methane clathrates, portends to make earth uninhabitable for its most intelligent species. Those born on the wrong side of Hubbert's Peak can be comforted that fossil fuels sources will be emptied, eventually.

Not so long ago, nuclear power was touted as the definitive energy source of the future. Reactors were fixed to power grids across the planet, the military went nuclear, and Ford planned to market the Nucleon. What was foreseen but unspoken, at the time, were the consequences of harvesting suns in order to boil water. From the very outset storing spent fuel, whose radioactivity lasts longer than any human civilization has ever existed, has posed a particular quandary with no solution. The final industry, uranium mining, poisoned groundwater, and its tailings perhaps provided a consummate insult to North America's original inhabitants. As the domestic progenitor in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, containing radioactivity in live reactors has been the industry's most urgent problem. Any release of radiation, or meltdown of the reactor core, would not simply kill those in the immediate vicinity and create unwanted publicity, but would leave the surrounding area uninhabitable. The Soviets, in their infinite wisdom, concluded that their graphite reactors would never reach criticality, and therefore did not construct containment vessels around these reactor cores. Possibly the greatest horror unleashed by Chernobyl was the defeat of this arrogance, that the world's most advanced countries had constructed their livelihoods on poisonous fuels, which could only be disciplined for so long. The meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi demonstrated that what happened at Pripyat was not an isolated incident, but likely a portent of things to come. Given TEPCO's corruption, the regulatory capture of the Japanese state, and the brilliance of constructing twenty nuclear reactors atop the world's most seismically active locale, if it was not the tsunami it would have been something else. Irrespective of the lies of the Japanese government and global media blackouts, three reactor cores have melted through containment, the land surrounding Fukishima is carcinogenic for the foreseeable future, TEPCO has released untold gallons of radioactive water into the sea, and the defunct reactors are spewing radioactive hot particles across towards North America. And everyday Tokyo residents get faint wind of the metallic taste of radiation, harrowing like the clink of Cisplatin vials.

While modernity has furnished material comfort to most who have touched its grasp, prosperity is not a moral consideration. For over two hundred years humanity has used the earth as a dumping ground for industrial waste, and the recent increase of environmental catastrophes implies that the process is speeding up. Even with this knowledge, the priests of capitalism continue with their salvation of economic growth, regardless of cost. Full-blown apocaloids, in their view there is no alternative to a billion internal combustion engines, strip-mining mountains, or having the state protect a "private" industry that would never be able to find insurance on the private market. For our age is one of catastrophe, where bull markets will depend solely on the price of light sweet crude, species will die at an accelerating rate, and the government will no longer be able to afford maintaining live nuclear reactors. And the emigration from eastern Honshu has only begun. Amidst financial crisis, the European Union cannot even come up with the billion Euros necessary to retrofit the 'sarcophagus' over Chernobyl, which was never built to last two decades in the first place. If Maggie Thatcher famously proclaimed there is no alternative, it was uttered dogmatically, and its adherents will pursue their Counter-Reformation until the very end.

The Predatory State

2011-06-16T16:39:00.001-07:00

"Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretense of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
— Jean-Paul Marat

Classical Western political theorists, be they Hobbes, Rousseau, Voltaire, or Jefferson, assume that unitary power is a social given. The differences between such thinkers, and among their historical interpretations, emanates from their shared understanding as to the embodiment of national authority and for whom state power is executed. Political theory views government as contractual in nature, whereby individuals exchange autonomy for protection under a hierarchical authority. Conservative political thought negatively considers this relation, that people should simply be glad they are allowed to live. In Liberal parlance, the concept of citizen implies that political subjects should be accorded positive benefits emanating from their consent to be governed. The emergence of nationalism, particularly in Europe and the Americas, was by the 19th Century generally Liberal and afforded democratic rights to persons considered to be citizens. By the 20th Century the strength of labor parties, cyclical economic crises, and the fear of communism led to state-mandated social insurance for the masses. If the latter transformed the laboring citizen into a comfortable and secure member of the middle class, then the demise of the Liberal state consequently transformed the nature of political relations. Whereas neoliberalism relegated citizens to the mercy of the "free market," its political function is the restriction and perpetuation of exchange values. Under this contemporary regime people, uncitizens or legal persons, are simply objects from which to extract resources, to strip mine unto their graves.

The longue durée of Liberal nationalism, primarily due to the limited historical development of capitalist relations, was typified by the developmental nation-state. Developmental in this sense refers to the function of government as quintessentially protectionist, where the limitations of citizenship coincided with the bordering of economic flows. Navigation Acts, tariff schedules, and customs duties served to financially favor domestically-produced commodities over imported goods. This discrimination naturally decreased the cost of goods produced within national borders, providing the means of capital accumulation within the world-system. Contrary to neoclassical economics, this was how agrarian societies transformed into specialized, urban-industrial complexes. As the bourgeois mode of production built upon itself over time, the role of the state became ever more interventionist. From holding a monopoly over currency, to subsidizing canals, roads, and railroads, to issuing grants for post-secondary education and research, government acted as a reverse sink for modern economic development. By the fin de siècle of the 19th Century, the increase of state power furthered wealth creation by artificial redistribution. The vast array of worker protections enshrined into law not only shielded the bourgeoisie from revolt, but ushered in the era of consumerism when war rationing was not in effect. Thus the strengthening of political society simultaneously liberated the costs of business and insured the purpose of capital itself.

While the developmental state reached its zenith during the Second World War, in the form of Keynesian-Speerian unlimited demand economies, the postwar order portended its demise. The victors' creation of the United Nations ushered, for the first time, a global bureaucracy that could enforce contractual Liberalism the world over. Though beyond the public eye, the economic arrangements hashed out amidst the ruins of Europe and Asia authored the structural limits of the developmental arrangement. The Bretton Woods programme, controlled by Euro-American capital, created a stable financial environment necessary for resurrecting the industrial heartlands of Japan and Europe. By creating a supra-national credit market, it fashioned a template for ordered capital flows across heretofore tightly regulated boundaries. That the IMF and World Bank credited reindustrialization in the 'Free World,' above and outside of the scope of Liberal nationalist tenets, augured a new era of productive relations. If Bretton Woods defended Western Civilization by funding the welfare state via (neo) colonialist dependency, by subjecting member states to the dictates of a transcontinental arbitrageurs it founded the conditions for a truly boundless system of accumulation. The contemporary global playground for the transnational corporate overlords is a direct, systemic consequence of this Liberal transformation. Though the welfare state reached its height until the 1973 OPEC embargo, its evident decay was only a matter of time.

Contrary to common conception, neoliberalism is not simply a return to the laissez-faire dogma of the 19th Century. More than simply an economic approach, neoliberalism upends political relations to the detriment of a supposed social contract. In contemporary society, a citizen is a juridical entity from whom rights are extracted rather than protected. In fashioning class apartheid, the political system necessitates a strata who controls and aggregates the flow of power ever upward, while composing and enforcing a universally applicable body of laws. The beauty of neoliberalism, for the oligarchs who direct it, is the privilege to execute this living contradiction with impunity. After all, the contractual foundations for the current world system emanated from, and were erected above, the legal principles of Liberal nationalism. Debt is the fundamental mechanism of this subjugation, for it ostensibly projects a legitimate public/private obligation. However, debt in this day an age is a weapon to enforce obedience, where fake economic growth is temporarily financed for permanent servility. In an era where economic policy is simply centrally-directed enclosure of the hard-fought public commons, neoliberalism instills political subsidence to the point where citizens are on a parallel legal plane to that of uncitizens. And the 'market' unto which it serves, that pagan force to which we sacrifice body and soul, is governed by tranches of regulated rackets underwritten by public largess. The SEC went after Bernie Madoff not because he operated a Ponzi Scheme, but because the wrong people lost money.

The financialization of everyday life, that reduction to complete alienation narrowly critiqued by so many, is the material side of a vulturine politics. The extant body of law is a confusing, opaque verbiage that entraps anyone in criminality at the slightest mistake or slip-up. The return of the prison industry, so essential to the debasement of blacks after Reconstruction, provides opportunity for the outsourced working class. Narcotics, the most profitable enterprise of them all, is so pervasive that drug dealers don't realize they work for the government. The inevitable austerity, the fiscal discipline signifying permanent crisis, is demanded by the shadow banking system to repay loans only politicians asked them to make. After all, the contemporary capital flight out of Greece would be no different if the Nazis had been victorious. And the debts, whatever they may be, can never be discharged. For neoliberalism is a living violation, a calculated imposition of a permanent burden that is the basis for human bondage. It is, one can say, the verification of Hobbes' commonwealth. For if government can be reduced to a generalized protection racket, then the question is for whom.

Eat The Rich

2011-05-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

"Capital
If fails us now
Come, let us
Seize the time" -Jon King

Though many observers have previously claimed their era to be such, the current iteration of the capitalist world-system is likely to be its last. Premised on marginalizing the laborer to the greatest possible degree, in its present form capitalism has more or less succeeded in foisting its means of production across the globe. The divergence from prior global integrations is that industrial production is not relegated to certain areas of the world, ie the "West," but moves to whatever spaces that offer requisite subsidies and wage controls. The bourgeois mode of production, then, has succeeded in tearing down all political obstacles to its rule, and either circumvented, incorporated, or subdued prior forms of social existence. Indicative of the current state of things, wealth has never been so concentrated, nor have so many people on earth have been relegated to penury, at any prior epoch of human history. Such derivative social alienation is manifested in the dominant expressions of surplus value that are inherently false, from corporate-structured investment vehicles to neoclassical economic theory to the material value of fiat currency. This speciousness belies the fact that the bourgeoisie, as a class, is existentially parasitical, and requisitely profits from its antisocial relations because, to obtain timeless acquisitive growth, it has no choice. If capital is simply transmogrified dead labor, than our entire society is based on a glorified death cult.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes the bourgeoisie's complete alienation than their contemporary transformation of the capitalist mode of production. Prior to the 1970's, corporate capitalism consisted of harnessing the manufacture and distribution of real, material goods. A long-standing truce between managerial capital and labor, together with cheap fossil fuel prices, led to the wealthiest societies in human history. However with the colonized natives getting uppity at the petrol beneath their feet, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in manufacturing, and the emergence of new technologies in communications and control, the bourgeoisie reconfigured the system of accumulation in order to sustain the essential need for growth. Ever since Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard so that the United States government to pay for obliterating Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos, money, that store of value whose circulation is an end in itself to capital, lost its connection to any tangible relation of value. Rather currency, and the capital invested in it, became a confidence game dependent on the manipulation of interest rates and the bourgeoisie's ability to fire sale everything. Divorced from material reality, this "new economy," structured on debt, premised on nothing, is the triumph of exchange values over use values.

The transcendence of finance over production meant an economy structured on securitized rent-seeking behavior. The erosion of banking regulation, combined with Federal subsidies, necessitated the concentration of a financial sector whose main object was the extraction of various fees and bonuses. The advent of de-industrialization heralded capital's essence as destructive, concentrating the surplus capital extracted from leveraged buyouts into ever larger pools. In return for destroying the industrial working class, the bourgeoise offered debt as a means to sustain living standards for the masses. Debt, in this instance, was both a financial obligation and a tool of class warfare, for interest payments and inflation outstripped the declining value of real wages. Patterns of Wall Street-machinated cycles of boom and bust in rated papyrus substituted real economic growth. The cocaine-fueled Reagan Era, the Dot-Com bubble, the greatest real estate swindle in history (prices never go down you know), and the present overcapitalization of near-worthless IPO's have all simply been swindles to transfer more wealth to the investment banks. The economic collapses that follow every debt fueled boom, it should be pointed out, are not necessarily detrimental for this cabal of parasitical capitalists. As a wise man one observed, with crisis comes opportunity. Indeed the process whereby one percent of the population possesses a quarter of the country's wealth, or less than one percent owns half the stock market, is as destructive as any NATO bombing campaign. One merely needs to glance at the living ruins along the Ohio to see the consequences.

The bourgeoisie's panacea of market fundamentalism is the social philosophy of the New Economy. Given that the "markets" are really the protected investments of the ownership class, what this really means in the retreat of the state from any function besides plutocracy. Parasitical capitalism, therefore, is free to issue infinite debt across the globe in order to print profits. The total amount of outstanding derivatives worldwide, mainly issued by notables like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, and Barclay's, is something like 900 trillion dollars. The NYSE is regulated by supercomputers of the major investment banks, who set price levels so that said financial institutions don't post a single loss in a quarter. Like Detroit Red observed, any gambler who doesn't take a hit isn't lucky. It just means the game is rigged. Not a single banker has been indicted for ruining the lives of millions of people, but a former Goldman employee has been imprisoned for stealing their software. Fraud, which is the essence of post-industrial economic growth, is taken so seriously that the Federal Reserve gave these worthless institutions sixteen trillion dollars, and debt imprisonment has returned for their fucked solution. In this era of massive structured violence and dislocation, hedge fund managers such as Larry Fink advise that the "markets" desire totalitarian governments, as if they don't have them already. Is this your homework, Larry?

For a class that is no longer parvenu, no longer becoming, consumption legitimizes the social function of accumulation while eliding the fact that such materialized surplus value is premised on increasing global immiseration. The bourgeoisie, famous for destroying all barriers that stood in the way of its acquisitive machine, necessarily erected new boundaries in order to isolate itself from the labor it exploits. Islands have been bought as exclusive destinations, neighborhoods have been colonized and neutralized, walls lined with paramilitaries are raised, an entire culture has been manufactured to propagandize appropriative phenomenology, and limousines, helicopters, and Learjets ensure that the monied don't have to mingle with the canaille. Conspicuous consumption such as million-dollar weddings connote belonging, while Laura Blankfein loses her shit because she has to shop with "those people" in the Hamptons. Yet, like the most expensive house in the world being erected over a Mumbai slum, despite the illusion of consummation the bourgeoisie cannot escape its own existential contradictions, for a few may be in, but most of us are out. They have, after all, taken the means of production from us, and dangled cheap exchange values in their stead. Fuck them, let them lose their souls.

La Politique de Doublure

2011-04-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

"Black man singing
In the heat of the night
Broken dreams
Just fly away" -The Selecter

From the Revolution of 1843/1844 until it was invaded by the Marines, Haitian politics was dominated by La Politique de Doublure. Fundamentally a discourse of denial, the Politics of Understudy was premised on the idea that the Haitian state was colorblind. In actuality Haiti was, by 1820, governed by a light-skinned endogenous elite concentrated in Port-au-Prince. This so-called mulâtre caste, the vast majority not half white but in the very least not completely noir, instituted a coloured dictatorship and controlled the Haitian mercantile economy after Jean-Pierre Boyer reunited the country. Mulâtre political hegemony was problematic not only because of that caste's self-proclaimed republican ethos, but also due to Haiti's national ideology of racial egalitarianism. Indeed, the manner in which the coloured elite meandered around their official prejudice was to appoint ignorant, obsequious dark-skinned political figureheads. Occasionally such appointees, like Faustin-Élie Soulouque, bit that hand that fed them, but they would ultimately fall victim to the nation's constant political tribulations. The point is that in a nation-state which emanated from abolition and universal liberty, an elite originating from the colonial planter class controlled the country based on merit, Franco-Republican universalism, and racial equality.

The American occupation of Haiti irrevocably destroyed the operating dynamics of La Politique de Doublure. If on the one hand the Yanquis reestablished the political dictatorship of the light-skinned elite, their development plans undermined such quaint and reactionary racial designs. For the invaders' explicit cultivation of an urban noiriste 'middle class' meant that the prior discourse of mulâtre domination, that of expertise, education, and culture, could no longer justify excluding the darker skinned from power. Therefore 19th Century political terms were no longer relevant when the Marines finally left the island. Instead national dignity was popularly connoted with black conquest of the state machinery. If Dumarsais Estimé represented noirism allied with the traditional power structure, that of Francois Duvalier was a totalizing racialism irrevocably hostile to the political authority of the lighter-skinned. Having spent much time in the provinces, Duvalier skillfully manipulated the superstitions and un-cosmopolitanism of the rural majority to garner popular support for his totalitarian project to eviscerate the enemies of the nation. Once in power, Duvalier, Clement Barbot, and their cronies killed far more noirs than milats in the Casernes Dessalines, as such predatory politics sees people as antagonistic. For Duvalierism had no aims outside of monopolizing state power, so the programme of father and son was fundamentally reactionary. By every measure life for the average Haitian became much worse under its heroic 'black' President. Francois' alliance with the United States, and Jean-Claude's marriage to Michèle Bennett, demonstrates that political collectivism ultimately degenerates into a nepotistic caricature of itself, ultimately allying with its former enemies. If anything Duvalierism alludes to the liberatory limitations of racial nationalisms like noirism.

Though on the surface quintessentially distinct, Haiti's similarity with the United States in such matters actually prefaces the latter by a couple decades. The Civil Rights Movement, itself ultimately undermined by such linguistic appeals to American liberalism, was a prolonged struggle to overturn entrenched white supremacy. The defeat of Nazi Germany, like the occupation of Haiti, weakened the hegemonic legitimacy of the United States' eugenics-inspired racial dictatorship simultaneous to black Americans' organized, mass resistance of such politics. Given that the Executive Branch, however, successfully suppressed the more radical manifestations of the Movement, and that Federal statutes largely satisfied white consciences, desegregation was left as a formality for the nation as a whole. Rather by the Nixon administration a concoction of initiatives were created to resurrect segregation under the guise of equality under the law. What has metamorphosed into the War on Terrorism from the War on Drugs, or whatever, was implicitly designed to target the United States' non-white populace. Structural, finance-driven unemployment and underemployment, lack of equitable and affordable housing, informal redlining, police occupation, and drug prohibition have all ground down black Americans over generations. Few are the families who don't have someone in prison, or can't vote, or work minimum wage, or isn't six feet under. If the Civil Rights Movement gave blacks a seat at the counter, the overarching political and often violent response points to the intractability of race under American imperialism.

Since opportunity is the term often used to describe the equality enshrined by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the long-term tangible gains have been political more than extending to civil society. The economic desiccation of much of black America occurred part and parcel with the rise of an American Politics of Understudy, whereby select integration into dominant institutions is interpreted as the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement. For in an era of formal equality, structural prejudice is masked by those who project the chimera of individual advancement. The important thing to dissect about this phenomenon is that such individuals are chosen less for what they look like, but whose interests they represent. Al Sharpton would not be on television so much if he wasn't a snitch for the FBI, and neither would Melissa Harris-Perry were she not a Democratic apologist. If some say that neoliberalism is class stratification moreso than that of color, the division is among as well as between categorized peoples. It is striking that Condi Rice should somehow exemplify the social egalitarianism of the GOP, or that Black Reagan SuperJesus represents the transcendence of race, while they gleefully jail black people and murder brown people. If anything, so-called postracism opportunistically demonstrates the extant coldness of America's white power structure.

Milat pov se neg, eg rich se milat.

Towards A Reinterpretation of American History

2010-06-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

"We cannot deny that a comparable moral outrage is occurring at this moment, that political collectives proclaim themselves champions of human rights and the rule of law and then deny these to a whole list of enemy exceptions, as if humanity itself were the monopoly of their own privileged members- their war a just war, their terrorist acts a moral duty, their death and destruction legitimated by reason, or progress, or the divine." -Susan Buck-Morss

A hegemonic narrative exists within American history that neatly situates the United States within the geographic confines of its representative states. According to this view, what became the United States originated from the thirteen crown and proprietary colonies of the First British Empire, and then teleologically expanded westward across North America until it comprised fifty states. This perspective is not only false but obfuscatory, for Euro-America's swath was never limited by its political boundaries. Moreover, the argument that the United States has been politically invariable throughout the centuries belies critical changes to its constitution. In particular the Federal Government's transformation from a polity encompassed by its states to one defined by bureaucratic reach irrevocably transformed the existential fabric of its inhabitants. The subsumption of the nation-state within the empire has meant a polity defined by the permanent domination of others, its structural violence permeating down to the fabric of everyday life. For every ideology that has justified American power implicitly argues for the farming of bones to the ends of the earth.

The aftermath of the Civil War generated a prolonged crisis of order in the United States. Not only was the former Confederacy primarily occupied by white troops to enforce the liberty of ex-slaves, but the secondary industrialization of the Northern economy was attracting alien immigrants from beyond northwest Europe. The Union's victory forever ensconced the sovereignty of bourgeoisie over the plantocracy, and ushered in a unified ruling class for first time. The last vestiges of indigenous autonomy were being systematically eliminated, and a nascent suffragist movement challenged the confines of political masculinity. As the modern industrial corporation demolished smaller townships for the metropolis, violent labor militancy portended a social correlative to capitalist economic cycles. Because the United States was no longer what it was, and so many WASPs were voraciously nostalgic for the way things should be, empire became a solution for a place seemingly out of control. The concentration of power in the Federal Government would enshrine the corporate mode of production, provide external areas of surplus extraction, regulate the flow of peoples within and without the American sphere, establish the primacy of the military, and generate the solution to the problem of white supremacy after the Civil War. The advent of Jim Crow, after all, coincided with the foreign as the site of national reunion. If the turn towards empire necessarily implied a permanent war for resources and control, the imperial transformation of the United States nevertheless generated an answer for what America was.

The advent of the so-called Progressive Era, traditionally known for the emergence of political capitalism, also meant the recrudescence of empire within the nation-state. At the fin de siècle of the 19th Century, a variety metropolitan initiatives were set in place to police the foreign. Chinese were juridically barred from entering the "homeland," the BOI placed subversive persons under surveillance, and the Department of Commerce and Labor enforced the Mexican border. Such measures were complementary to the colonial expansion of Federal authority. Beginning formally in 1898 with victory over the Spanish Empire in the the Caribbean and Philippines, the United States incorporated territories beyond the scope of capital representation. Such spaces were not only governed by fiat, but the colonial enterprise imposed Anglo-Saxonism internationally. One only needs to ponder the disparate trajectories of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the former being brought into the empire and gaining statehood only after Sanford B. Dole overthrew the Kingdom. It is instructive that the legal justifications for empire in this era stemmed from rehashings of the self-proclaimed Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States was obligated to protect the Americas from Europe by resubjugating them. Indeed, Wilsonian "self-determination" becomes clarified in light of the occupation of Haiti, where in the name of civilization and democracy the Marines landed to wipe out German commercial influence. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the greatest liberal of them all, authored the occupation constitution from the War Department, while the invaders installed a mulâtre dictatorship to appease their taste. People forget, but without the United States there never would have been a Duvalier.

The Second World War, a war between empires but never anti-imperial, allowed the Federal government to exert itself in truly global proportions. The incorporation of former Japanese dominions, along with inheriting the mantle as the West, ushered in the contemporary permutation of the United States. Rather than disarm as in all previous wars, the changes installed in the 1890's expanded and became even more embedded in the political order. The rise of the Defense Department, transforming the OSS into an entrenched apparatus, and Truman's declaration of war on wrongly-aligned peoples were all symptoms of the need to dominate the inhabitants of defeated empires. Military Keynesianism emerged as the centrally-planned solution to the ghost of the Depression, infinite profit from infinite waste for maximum influence. The Cold War itself, really a half-century long police action within separate spheres of influence, became a self-generating logic of rule. The Global Communist Conspiracy was an excuse to stifle heterodoxy and enforce allegiance to the "Free World." The independent nationalist struggles against Yanqui imperialism, whether Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, et al., testified more to the desire for autonomy rather than any intrinsic affinity for Khrushchovite revisionism. The fact that the agglomerated United States resorted to myriad practices of corruption, torture, economic warfare, narcotics pushing, aerial assault, weapons trafficking, assassination, propaganda, and invasion to enforce freedom and democracy elucidated the macabre, intrinsic mechanisms of empire.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not, of course, lead to the dismantling of the hundred-year imperium. Instead the governing elites viewed it as an opportunity to establish American hegemony throughout the globe, to shove neoliberal dogma down people's throats, and riddle the map with military bases. They invented a war to carry out indefinitely against innocents who happen to live near petroleum reserves. The alliances, justifications, and methods used in the so-called War on Terror are symptomatic of the cynicism and nihilism of the imperial ruling class. For instance the Saudi monarchy, probably the vilest regime on the planet, operates as an American protectorate via a clandestine agreement with the Treasury Department. In return for modernizing the Kingdom, petrodollars are recycled back to the metropole, ensuring the dollar's relevance as the world reserve currency. In this milieu concepts such as human rights mean little when they become political justifications for bombing recalcitrant potentates. After a century of empire there is little the United States can offer the world except for weapons, failed ideas, and increasingly debased currency. All the world's heroin could never drown out the number of bombs dropped, farmland ruined, and lives destroyed. The ineluctability of empire manifests itself in teenagers constructing breeder reactors in their backyard, the dioxin that flows through the veins of veterans, and CIA Agents emptying their clips on the streets of Saigon. Given the nature of contemporary power relations, our mundane is existence is founded upon the most subtle forms of murder, whose constitutive violence bares its teeth ever so often to the detriment of foundational myths.

True Love Don't Speak Its Own Name

2010-05-01T15:12:00.001-07:00

"Every man is evil, yes
Every man's a liar
An unashamed with a wicked tongue
Sing in the black soul choir." -David Eugene Edwards

The advent of so-called modernity, synonymous with the creation and expansion of the West, is the predominance of institutional relations over personal ones. Identity has become inseparable from alienation, for salient loyalties are premised upon abstractions. The forces that control our lives are seemingly Copernican in their scope, directing their orbits like the invisible pull of gravity. The definitive mechanisms of the modern have ultimately conscripted humanity against itself. For the driving force of what has become the present is the construction of a worldwide system governed by the desire for ever-increasing power. Therefore individuals are conscripted into a society whereby social relations are irrevocably corrupted by the non-negotiable needs of a distant hierarchy. Betrayed by a system created by itself, after five hundred years humanity stands at the precipice, slouching towards oblivion.

The modern emerged from the demise of the 14th Century world-system, the last where Europe was peripheral. The ascendancy of first the Mediterranean, then Northern European states was a consequence of the disruption of traditional trading patterns by force in lieu of goods. It was not an accident that the arrival of Europeans, whether French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, or Danish, coincided with the decline of local cultures. Instead Europeans either substituted socio-economic relations centered in Europe, or completely replaced indigenous people by colonization. Mercantile capitalism, after all, was founded upon the rest of the earth producing goods for Europe. No place demonstrated this idea more than the Caribbean, where the slave plantation system was erected upon islands depopulated of Arawaks and Tainos. Race, that modern idea, was generated by the need to grind down bodies upon the altar of modern productive organization. If today the difference between bondage and wage labor is less discrete, neoliberalism has made this essential alienation universal.

What drives the modern, the concentration of productive surplus into fewer and fewer hands, is premised upon fictions. The corporation, after all, is nothing but the legitimation of an abstraction enlivened and protected by the state. If the first companies were subsidized investment pools to profit from the East India or African trade, today's shareholder fronts aim to relegate every aspect of life to the demands of capital. Financial companies, which are really just legal ponzi schemes run for their boards' bonuses, inflict massive debts so as to force individuals to work for declining wages. Entire economies are governed by the premise that consumption generates wealth. Since fiat currency has no intrinsic worth, it's value is nothing more than a confidence game. In order to revitalize blighted neighborhoods, government-sponsored real estate replaces the commoners for the banality of the investor class and multinational retail corporations. Ostensibly to increase yields, agribusiness patents life, monopolizes the seed market, causes mass suicides, and sues farmers who refuse to cooperate with such monoculture. Most of the food that people eat nowadays is not even real. What is incontrovertible is that in a world of declining resources, ecological catastrophe is necessary for economic growth.

The modern requisites of power have disrupted social relations to the point of negation. The myriad laws, regulations, and desires which have come to govern daily life have eroded the bonds between people. A person's private worth is not intrinsic in of itself, but is determined by exchange values. In the public sphere one's security can be shattered by possessing an eighth, being subjected to a lawsuit, or coming under surveillance. Such pressures inevitably wear down trust, so that systemic values overwhelm personal relations. Something is terribly awry when pre-nups have become the norm, no one picks up their own dogshit, the television tells people what it likes, and coworkers forswear fired employees. Indeed, we cannot offer each other salvation because modernity demands mutual alienation. For to recognize commonality contradicts the basic logic of governing institutions, that the wishes of the few outweigh the needs of the many. One should understand, then, that irrespective of mentality there is no escape from motion of the system, that its present totality corrupts whatever it is we need from each other. Because there is no innocence, just degrees of complicity.

It is fitting that the hetero-normative demonstration of romance is a pair of diamonds, in the very least. The diamond trade is, after all, run by cartels who restrict its supply so as to maintain high prices. Moreover, such companies were responsible for the advent of Apartheid, and still traffic in minerals from war zones. This Victorian ideal highlights the commodification of relationships, as well as the degree of exploitation necessary for such values. For all of us, in one way or another, fill up our cars with gasoline laced with blood, or fill up landfills with needless consumption. It is no wonder, then, that people smoke joints dipped in embalming fluid, scores are settled in front of parents, the screams from the kitchen last for years, and innocent children are tortured in Gitmo. Not to denigrate the bond between two people, but it is like love on a slave ship, that's sinking.

A Lost Generation

2010-03-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Genocide's when
The only hope for the young
Is to join the army
Or slowly die
Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue
The last roads left of the American Dream."
-Jello Biafra

Throughout the modern era, there have been many so-called "Lost Generations." The legions of walking wounded after the American Civil War, the jaded Europeans who managed to survive the First World War, and the remnants of a defeated colonial army from Southeast Asia all embodied the betrayal of the present. Similarly an entire generation of people from from the post-industrial G-20 comprise another such Lost Generation, for their existence is burdened by the nihilism of their predecessors. Born in a period of economic stagnation, aging demographics, burgeoning police states, and environmental catastrophe, the future for such people seems nothing but an unmitigated nightmare. Given that every generation imagines itself living an existential crisis, materiality gives this disillusion unprecedented power.

For the current generation too young to find sustainable employment, the present exists as a lived tragedy. Mind-fucked since birth, they have been raised on the virtues of docile consumerism and unthinking obedience to authority. Given the lack of parental involvement in their childhood due to the necessity of bi-gendered wage labor, the television was their chief childhood companion. Their education consisted of nothing but a series of serious examinations meant to endlessly categorize their existence in order to obtain the proper credential. Unlike their predecessors, the contemporary crop of youngsters had to incur immense amounts of debt so as to graduate with the necessary certificate to demonstrate their employability. Also unlike their forefathers, they have had to sign a lien on their existence to the few state-sponsored banking cartels in order to assure themselves a decent, dignified living, let alone purchase a domicile. Which is to say nothing of retirement, for the unspoken reality which everyone knows is that we will never retire: they will simply work until they no longer can do so, and then likely perish if their class status is poor. In the current scheme of things, the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomer generation are confined to the hopelessness of the alienating publicly-funded plantation society that is neoliberalism.

It is no wonder then, that those born into the supposed "End of History" are so cynical, dejected, anxious, and often border on nihilism. A generation born without health care, we attend schools that resemble prisons, are fed curriculum comprised of nothing but self-serving deceit and discipline, and are ultimately abandoned to toil for minimum wage. So many of us are homeless, drop out of school, understand the pain of divorce, know friends who have died before their 18th birthday, have minimal family ties, and can barely survive month-to-month, let alone plan for the future. Force-fed Fluoxetine before adolescence, life for many of the young'uns is nothing but a daze, a series of endless shuffling relationships relegated to the pursuit of personal interest. Victims of Reaganomics phasing, so many choose to map deserts in search of some adventure and undergraduate tutition. Some look to marriage and children as an escape from the abyss, while others lose themselves in serial monogamy of a daily nature. Incomprehensible to the older folk, we tattoo tears at the corners of our eyes, become alcoholics in our teens, and turn to junkie status in order to mitigate the pain. Intrinsically without respect because there is none, it is a generation that would gladly push contraband than wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. This is, after all, the fate that has been constructed for us.

On the one hand it is unfair to lay the onus of systemic crisis on an entire generation of people. The current socio-economic-political-systemic crisis is a product of centuries of capitalist development and the elders are simply trying to make their way as best as they can. On the other, the fact that the Baby Boomers will be the last generation to benefit from the last vestiges of the New Deal means they are politically compromised. Their language, that of pensions, Social Security, Medicare, prescription drugs, COLA, Democrats and Republicans, is indecipherable to us. It is quite audacious to expect an entire generation of people to pay for social welfare programs in which they will never receive a dime, for that which is not universal is by definition oppressive. Indeed, the Baby Boomers preach unending obedience to the nation-state during its decline precisely because they benefit from it. They have foisted an unpayable debt upon their children and grandchildren, have taken the means of production from us, and expect to be paid as a consequence. In pursuit of their retirement they have allied themselves with finance capital, who run the pensions funds that profit from declining wages, ecological devastation, and BP stock. Running national economic policy as if experiencing a permanent acid flashback, the 'Boomers inflict Afghanistan upon their progeny since it seems they cannot forget Vietnam. They are a generation that builds thirty prisons for every university, outlaws drugs they enjoyed as youths, and wonders why the young people have no respect anymore. Really, our anger should be the least of their concern.

If all civilizations die by their founding myths, then the contemporary Lost Generation will only find their way by rejecting the present. In this case it means the slow, inevitable decay in being subservient to the American Dream. Undergraduate students punching a cop at a UC Regents meeting is just the beginning. For there is, in fact, no reason why anyone under forty should pay any taxes whatsoever, except that they have no choice. Increasing public-private repression in order to extract the necessary rents to pay for legacy payments will inevitably led to penury, exhaustion, refusal, and resistance. For the current bunch of youth is a generation whose unenviable task is negation. Because America eats its young, raw like sashimi.

We will not sail in their jail parade.

Marx Rolls In His Grave

2010-02-15T01:11:00.001-08:00

"Socialism will be free or it will not be, at all." -Mikhail Bakunin

For the last century and a half, bureaucratic socialism has dominated political opposition to bourgeois society. Originating in the factionalism of the French Revolution, statist socialism seeks to regulate social relations through planned, centralized management. The most original exponent of bureaucratic socialism was none other than Karl Marx, the principal theorist of the capitalist world economy in the 19th Century. What Marx and his partner and benefactor Frederich Engels termed Communism was the conquest of the state machinery by the working class, whereby the representatives of the proletariat would implement policy to facilitate an economically classless society. The metamorphosis of the bourgeois state into the worker's state would, over time as the theory went, lead to the gradual disappearance of centralized government. While Communism was always transnationally focused, as it based its analysis on the various flows of capitalist production, the conflict between its attachment to the state and its affinity for the proletariat would ultimately doom its efficacy as a transformative project. Indeed, the factionalism that emerged in the First International foretold the problems with such a teleology, as the conditions of global proletariat today are little different from the first publishing of the Communist Manifesto.

It is instructive to recall that anti-capitalism did not originate with Marx and Engels. It emerged from the commune, or the local village and town organizations of Revolutionary France. If the French Revolution was the first anti-capitalist revolution, then the commune was the popular political correlative to the struggle against the Bourbon Monarchy. The starving masses who burned manorial records in the countryside and forced the King and the "“Autrichienne” to the Tuileries did not do so for some abstract, centralized nation-state. Rather, the bulk of the Third Estate aimed to eliminate the aristocracy in order to devolve their entrenched power, so as to take care of their own needs. The demise of the monarchy, in fact, allowed for the formidable emergence of the Parisian sections parallel to the Jacobins' secular republicanism. Whereas Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their party saw greater centralization as their revolutionary task, the largely anonymous citizens of the sections strove to uphold the authority of the local assemblies. Thus the primary domestic function of the Jacobins was to crush the power of the sections, as this begun once the Republic's armies seemed secure against the combined monarchies. The Reign of Terror, after all, killed far more sans-culottes than nobility, expressing Robespierre's aim of finding a middle ground between the two. For the French Revolution was over long before Thermidor, those responsible for the sacking of the Bastille either guillotined or disillusioned back into their hovels. If the Jacobins were later heralded as the forerunners of working class revolution, it is largely due to suppressing their ostensible comrades for the party.

Upon publishing the Communist Manifesto, the scientific socialists led by Marx organized various working-class parties across Europe, and especially that specter of the latter 19th Century, the International Workingmen's Association. Originally an alliance of various working class groups from the Continent, after moving to Switzerland the International became riven by factionalism, first between Prounhonists and collectivists, and then between the allies of Marx and the followers of Bakunin. The divide can be seen to have roughly followed geographic lines, where the socialists from the more advanced industrial countries tended to follow Marx, while those from Russia, Italy, and France positioned themselves against the collectivists. The long running feud between the statist and libertarian branches of socialism came to the fore after the fall of the Paris Commune, where the question of power irrevocably split the movement. Bakunin labeled Marx an authoritarian, and presaged that the revolutionary vanguard would transform into a ruling elite as oppressive as their predecessors. The scientific socialists packed up and went to Manhattan, where the organization soon disbanded. Ironically, Marx's account of the Paris Commune betrayed his own programme, for in praising that insurrection the Civil War in France foresaw the Commune as the triumph of proletarian revolution.

The fall of the Second International from the nationalism of the Great War evinced the great contradiction unleashed by Marx's political theory. Whereas Marx envisioned that proletarian revolution would originate in the center of the capitalist world system, during the 20th Century Communism was utilized as a programme of industrial development in the Third World. The first and most important instance of this was Russia, where Bolshevism instituted a dictatorship of the proletariat over a nation of peasants. In the absence of a native bourgeoisie, the political class became the locus of capital accumulation as well as the center of industrial planning. While Lenin, after conducting a purge bloodier than his Jacobin predecessors, wavered on the hegemony of the Party in the NEP, Stalin had no such qualms as to the meaning of revolutionary vanguardism. Ironically borrowing much from Trotsky, the forced collectivization of all property by the state ushered into the most rapid, and oppressive, instance of industrial development up to that period. While concentration camps, mass executions, secret police, and starvation rations for the masses were concomitant to the revolutionary vanguard's seizure of power, Stalin's reign of terror cannot be separated from his Five Year Plans, and were essential to concentrating even greater power in the national bureaucracy. Because it offered a developmental model divergent from the West, the USSR's political example was later emulated by China, Vietnam, Cuba, and other independence struggles across the globe. The transformation of Marxism into an ideology of state planning therefore turned his theory of working-class revolution into one of capitalist development.

The fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites demonstrated the economic, but not political, weakness of the revolutionary vanguardism. It should be no surprise how easily ex-KGB agents become Presidents in contemporary Russia, or how the leaders of post-Soviet industry emerged from the nomenklatura. In fact, privatized Bolshevism has become the prominent economic model around the world, the pearl of hedge funds and lauded by neoliberal pundits. Perhaps no greater demonstration of this is China, with its totalitarian national security state, public-private industrial/ real estate investment ventures, undervalued currency, and a migrant domestic labor force of at least 50 million people. While it is difficult to believe that Marx envisioned proletarian revolution to mean the dictatorial disciplining of the working class by the state, especially in the name of consumerism, the failure of scientific socialism can be reduced to its fetishism of the nation-state. As the proletariat has never been larger than today, and the bourgeoisie enmeshed in its greatest crisis in three generations, Marx's philosophical critique of capitalism is still quite relevant. Its modern political importance, however, must be scrubbed from the dustbin of history.

In the Time of the Valkyries

2010-01-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

"Who's gonna wear the number when time ends?-its world slaughter
Fuck it I'm out to survive, raising my son and daughter
Extorting your crib, like I'm alive here in Comstock
And force kids' bigs bleed thick, with extra ribs
That's why we're shooting cops, big dollar Democratic donor
Cruise missiles, the stench of hot flesh becomes aroma
Shelter fate, we dipped in war paint, secret handshakes
Three on the meat hook watch 'em elevate, we off to airbase
My book case is god, leaving you all scarred
Tour plans pullin' your card, it seems odd
Like street vans playin' the war knowns blow up to Kabstan
'Fucking makis, they're fornicating with goats'
San Salvador style's how we're slitting their throats
It only takes half a second to discover my quotes
Something holy like this B'nai Brith fatigue shit
Abraham's plan, Maccabi fam, don't get vicked." -Goretex

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st Century, the largest political entity that the world has ever seen is immersed in a self-created existential crisis. Fashioned as a sovereign entity amidst an imperial hemisphere, the United States in fact never sloughed off the spirit of the colonizer. If one takes an honest look at the constitution, there is a reason why there is very little room for popular influence and no space for imperial management. Yet currently the political class purveys legalized extortion in the name of the people, the Executive has veto power over much of the globe, and the economy in a real sense only exists as a consequence of state largesse. As a result, in over two centuries whatever the United States has become cannot be said to function in the manner envisioned by its first progenitors. This is not meant to evince an essentialized notion of politics, but rather that there are one can say basic principles harking back to the beginning of civilization that determine the fate of political systems. When an entity premised on independent sovereignty becomes a global empire then it is not governed by law, regardless of who dons blacks robes, but is commanded by arbitrary power. Laws in place do not have any efficacy, and merely exist to rhetorically justify the continued authority of the ruling elite. Currently one can say that the United States is not governed in any rational social sense, but nihilistically operates from base desires of venality, depravity, terror, institutionalized murder, and is fundamentally corrupt. Like the Weimar Constitution under the National Socialists, the operation of the state independent of and contrary to its articulated constitution is a premonition of totalitarianism.

If much of the American Constitution is dedicated to economic development, its 21st Century incarnation is premised on the opposite. Controlled by international economic cartels, the so-called economy is modeled on permanent class warfare and ideologically justified through cheap consumerism. Corporations are eternal persons, a legal fiction whose "rights" supersede that of the living. Whatever laws that exist to regulate business effectively benefit their run-around public subsidy, and if the politicians can't be bought off there is always India and China. For the average worker, 10 clams an hour minus thirty year's worth of inflation divided by accelerating costs of living equals a big fat pile of shit. As health care for the young is privatized, and decreasingly connected with employment, a good percentage of Americans cannot afford a trip to the doctor. In this "free market" economy, drug and insurance companies kill more people each year than Al Qaida likely ever will. Because, bitches, Americans have owners, and they gotta pay their existence tax to the rentiers. The greatest of all being the conglomerated government-bankster nexus, typically known as Wall Street but extending so far beyond it. Comprising less than ten highly concentrated and leveraged institutions, financial capital has machinated systemic capital flight out of the United States, and through its various "fees" profits from imposing penury. The recent real estate boom, after all, was nothing merely more than a conjoined Fed-Wall Street shakedown using easy money to inflate property values, coax easily persuaded Americans to buy houses they could not afford and lending companies to originate loans they knew the borrowers could never pay back. The purpose was to run the economy like a casino, using derivative products as various odds-making tools, though no one ever really understood how they worked. Then when housing inevitably crashed, because home prices always go up, the government stepped in and saved the privileged few trading houses while the less favored ones were allowed to fail. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their houses, their health insurance, and where states and cities are bankrupt, the purveyors of international finance receive record-setting taxpayer-funded bonuses while flipping off Bernie Sanders. But you know, as Larry Summers understood from his time at CitiGroup, you gotta save the big banks because otherwise the economy will collapse. Or has it already.

What is termed politics has become nothing more than theatrics, pretty images covering up the ever progressing horror. Policy is what is bought, and marketing schemes as substituted for ideas. When the self-proclaimed gods of Wall Street were on the verge of losing everything, their man in the White House effectively held a gun to Congress' head, and told them to blink. And the former head of the New York Fed, who "forgot" to file taxes for a few years yet heads the Treasury, dissimulates in front of Congressmen as to what he is actually doing, knowing that the firms he works for line the pockets of those questioning him. One can imagine, in Goldman-Sachs occult board meetings, cult leader Lloyd Blankfein beginning the festivities by drinking a chalice filled with Iranian blood. Then, after counting his millions and realizing its a few short of eight figures, calls up the White House and counsels an invasion of Afghanistan, in order to skim off the opium trade, while on the other line Jamie Dimon sniffs lines of blow off copies of Glass-Steagall. The White House Chief of staff picks up the phone, nods, and continues the gun-running operation to the Middle East begun by his father. The President, the love-child of the CIA, American intelligentsia, and the banking industry, is really just happy to be there, and will dance to whatever tune karaoked by the most entrenched lobbies. Thus fixing the economy means consolidating Wall Street, Health Insurance Reform means subsidizing privatized health care, and being the peace candidate means shipping troops off to Afghanistan and bombing Yemen. Under the guidance of Summers, Robert Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke, the President thinks solutions to increasing American misery are a melange of aphorisms written by New York Times editorialists. Ingenuity, innovation, and a record budget deficit will do little to offset the controlled demolition of the economy. Somewhere in the Federal Reserve, Bernanke is consulting flawed models of the Great Depression, then sends trillions of electronic dollars through various Maiden Lanes to well-connected New York trading firms, who use their access to manipulate financial markets with the connivance of the their supposed regulators. And over five hundred banks are expected to fail in 2010.

While close to one-fifth of the population is unemployed, most of the states are in the red, Los Angeles will be bankrupt by August, and the mere interest on the Federal debt will soon approach ten percent of GDP, the Democratic President managed to pass the largest defense budget in history. Officially totaling a trillion dollars, straight-up haha money, it is clear that Obama flipped his bird to all his Nation-reading, Prius driving, bleeding heart supporters. Change means retaining Bush the Younger's Defense Secretary, expanding the number of American military bases toward 800, instigating another coup in Central America, continuing the occupation of Iraq, and vote-rigging for Hamid Karzai. The Nobel Peace Laureate approved billions for the manufacture of nouveaux nuclear weapons, and lied by conflating the Taliban with Al Qaida in order to justify his "Good War." The least he could do is investigate if any un-persons in the vast international American gulag are still on CIA payroll. No one has said anything about Bandar Bush, who has been missing since December, and his little threat to Tony Blair to call off the BAE corruption investigation or more 7/7's would be unleashed on London. But thirty thousand GI's have to be sent, along with a larger number of profiteering contractors, in order to protect oil pipelines, surround Iran, and control poppy supplies so Wall Street can collect their yearly bonuses. While playing Sudoku with nuclear launch codes and laughing on the phone with Bibi, the President and his advisers likely watch short-circuit tapes of forced sodomy in Bagram. For this never-ending imperial war necessitates above all the final evisceration of constitutional protections in order to protect the purveyors of state violence. Citizenship in fact no longer exists, for if some Executive official arbitrarily declares a human being a terrorist, they will have their nationality stripped, be arrested for no reason, tortured because some replicants get off from it, and imprisoned indefinitely. Such barbarism reverberates in the gang rape of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers, where she and her family were executed so as to destroy the evidence. How nice that spreading freedom and democracy means implementing 9-11 everyday for seven years on innocent people, and the Air Force carpet bombs on behalf the Saudis. Such is the mescaline-induced pathos of empire.

The continued desiccation of the homeland is merely the domestic expression of empire. The vast majority of people cling to antiquated political identities in order to make sense of an increasingly insane world. Thus so-called Progressives who in the face of systemic corruption desperately scream 'vote or die' are so many zombies begging to be doused with liquid nitrogen. So-called conservatives, on the other hand, are seduced by Sun Myung Moon style 'tea parties,' and rally behind a mentally retarded leader. Imperial America has arbitraged politics where economics is a variegated mass of public-private looting. The Drug War has unleashed an expansive police state on the underclass, where public authorities systematically fuck with the poor in order to send them upstate or enforce their low standard of living. Rampart police, after all, were on the pay of drug dealers, and resold narcotics previously confiscated in the name of the law. The privatized domestic gulag would not be as profitable if drugs were legal, but this corroborates the historical trend of increasingly imprisoning those who don't enlist. Meanwhile the bovine masses are kept in submission through meager unemployment benefits, fast food supplied by animal death camps, anti-depressants dispensed like candy, GMO-infested corn syrup, and circuses in poor taste. Such is the reality of a land impoverished by debt, where people have no options, and professional narcs watch their every move. For if every empire ultimately collapses, the ruling class, displaying their fangs ever slowly, always turn on their supposed compatriots first.

The Demise of Liberalism

2009-12-16T21:28:00.001-08:00

"If everybody in the 'hood
Had a PhD
You say 'now doctor flip that burger'
Hella good for me." -The Coup

American liberalism has always deviated from classical liberalism, which emerged in the late 18th Century and developed a critique of entrenched, concentrated power based on the intrinsic rights of man. On the contrary, liberalism in the United States is derived from a positivist notion of the state, whereby social problems are mitigated through the expansion of role of the central government. American liberalism inherits the progressive notion of the United States since the its colonial origins, whereby the United States embodies a messianic civilizational mission bent to irrevocably transform the world for good. Inherent structural problems of the American polity, whether in terms of race, class, gender, or ecology, are regulated by an always bigger and better government in order to ensure the smooth functionality of the state-corporate nexus. The underlying philosophy of American liberalism, then, seeks not to solve problems and inequalities inherent to American society, but to gloss over structural problems through state mitigation. Ideologically justified as progress, such maneuvering incorporates the most conservative aspects of negation into the power structure, and by doing so articulates a narrative of inclusion while leaving the superstructure fundamentally unchanged. Perhaps nothing encapsulates American liberalism more than the hallowed 1960's, where the juridical gains of the Civil Rights Movement, combined with massive public spending in Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, became the hallmark of American social democracy. And yet as a consequence of this apogee, Johnson chose guns over butter, the liberal intelligentsia transformed into neoconservatives, and American corporations abandoned their denizen working class for the sweatshops of Central America and East Asia under the guise of liberal progress.

Modern American liberalism emerged out of the crisis of the 1890's, the first political conflict under a unified Federal political system. As the transition between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, the 1890's challenged the laissez-faire consensus established after the demise of Reconstruction. Systemic economic crisis, the inflationist movement inaugurated by the Populists, massive and violent labor unrest, the legalization of women's suffrage in the Western states, and large scale immigration from Southern Europe and Asia stimulated a search for order amidst politico-economic tremors. The political consensus that emerged between reformers, businessmen, and politicians centered around an expanded role of state regulation in the United States. In tandem with Federal regulation of commerce, which few note was advocated by many forward thinking corporate elites, an expanded Executive would also control the unruly elements in American society much more effectively than individual states or private power ever could. Thus in tandem with the creation of the FDA was the FBI, the ICC had oversight over goods in a similar way the INS had over people. Perhaps nothing demonstrated this merger between state and corporate power more than the Federal Reserve, a private "public" institution whose major shareholders were the leading banks, and who determined national monetary policy. And no one was more progressive in this liberal conception of the nation-state than Woodrow Wilson, a fervent white supremacist who hoodwinked his constituents in order to fight World War I for American investments in the Triple Entente, and who invaded Caribbean countries countless times under the guise of liberal empire and the white man's burden.

The height of American liberalism was the period between the Great Depression and the Vietnam War, presided by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. The Great Depression proved once and for all, until the emergence of Reaganism, that corporate capitalism was a fundamentally irrational economic system, and could not regulate itself. In stepped Roosevelt, a descendant of Dutch patroons who saved corporate capitalism from itself, though Conservatives never forgave his salvation of their fortunes and plotted coups against the four term President. It was Roosevelt's modification of Keynesianism which saved the United States from economic collapse and possible revolution, through the erected of a vast bureaucratic apparatus and associated state spending which kept people fed. Roosevelt's economic populism generated the political shift which makes up American liberalism, composed of ethic working and middle classes, black Americans, and wayward left-leaning idealists, the illusions of which continue to this day. The use of state spending to moderately redistribute wealth generated the vaunted American middle class, which though declining today propelled the liberal consensus of the mid-20th Century. The benefits of this kind of liberalism did not, of course, alter the fundamental racial, gendered, or class stratification in American society, but did fashion a more palatable industrial society. While it was the Second World War that really ended the Great Depression, faith in an expanded state as a solution to social problems lasted until the 1960's, when the costs of empire, combined with challenges from both the marginalized and the well-connected ended this apex of American liberalism.

Since the glorious catastrophe that was the 1968 Democratic Convention, American liberalism has transformed from a moderately equalitarian ideology into one which protects social privilege. The social gains of the 1960's never extended beyond their juridical incorporation, and one could argue petered out as they vied amongst one another for access to power or dissipated from internal schisms. More importantly, the passing of civil rights, gender, and other non-discriminatory legislation corroborated the liberal idea of an ever-expansive incorporation of people into the public sphere, giving currency to the idea that the American nationalism has always been a universalist project. Yet, this merely expanded the coalition that supported the Democratic Party, where the emergence of identity politics allowed the true power brokers to implement divide and rule among idealized members who envisioned politics as as an all-or-nothing exercise stemming from personal identification. This squabbling, a consequence of state co-optation of social movements, glossed over the rightward direction of the Donkeys with the increased formulation of policy around elite desires. Affirmative Action, after all, was never a demand of the Civil Rights or Black Power movement, but an idea that emanated from the managerial class to incorporate the racially marginalized without implementing alternations to the socio-economic fabric. The fact that this exacerbated racial tensions between the middle and lower class was merely an added bonus. Perhaps more salient was the fact that the material basis behind the Liberal coalition was eroding at the very same moment when it reached its political zenith with the Oil Crisis, the dropping of Breton Woods, stagflation, the economic emergence of East Asia, and the implementation of so-called globalization. Supported, of course, by the Democratic politburo.

The de-industrialization of the United States, a policy couched under the myth of free trade but really intended to bolster Wall Street and multi-national profits, signaled the end of Liberalism as a popular movement. A party cannot stand for a fairer, more rational industrial society if there is no industry to speak of. The hollowed out cities along the Ohio, the great farm crisis of the 1980's, and the tacit utilization of undocumented servile labor point to the adoption of the "free market" rather than the state as the ideological guarantor of social equality. The fact that economic flows are regulated by corporate cartels did not detract from the rationalization that an ever-expansive marketplace would exemplify progress. Hence the substitution of privatization for state regulation as the central premise of Liberal politics. While a cursory study of economics would point to a discernible increase in inequality as a consequence of the destruction of productive capacity, Liberalism glossed over such expansive stratification with the salve of competition. The message inculcated to children since Elementary school, that the American Dream was only fulfilled through a college education, spawned a generation-spanning contest to obtain the requisite marks to attend the most prestigious schools just as this form of entitlement became increasingly expensive. In the absence of a producer class, the obvious result was that wages for undergraduates declined while available jobs shriveled up. A fundamental consequence of contemporary Liberalism, then, is the creation of a vast disillusioned underclass who have no access to capital and no prospect of success outside of, if they are fortunate, Section 8 and EBT cards. Those unable to successfully compete in the marketplace are left either the choice of being a prisoner or mercenary, which maybe explains why there is always enough money for the police and the Pentagon, but little else. This is to say nothing of the alienated Liberal intelligentsia, most of whom run NGO's in the failed hopes of competing with captive industry in lobbying Washington to enact their fantasies, and who earn their large salaries off the exploitation of armies of young, idealistic, and naive panhandlers working at below minimum wage.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, two representatives of American Liberalism have been selected President, William Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton is noted for fast-tracking NAFTA, firebombing Waco, expanding the death penalty, vastly penalizing those on welfare, and bombing Kosovo. In just a year in Office, Obama, whose Presidency is already a failure, has bailed out the financial terrorists on Wall Street to the tune of ten trillion dollars, expanded the War on the Globe to Yemen, escalated the occupation of Afghanistan, horrendously nationalized the ponzi-scheme real estate bubble, done absolutely nothing about the corroding real economy, increased Federal debt to untold heights, and is in the process of ripping off impoverished Americans to the benefit of private medical insurance and drug companies. Thus by 2010, American Liberalism has fundamentally coalesced with its conservative counterpart, where an expansive state is used to subsidize an inefficient and costly private economy, and socialize the losses. Despite its supporters, and for some reason there are many, American Liberalism is nothing more than a justification of elite privilege at the expense of disenfranchised citizens. The Democratic Party, after all, has done nothing to counteract the looting of the American economy, the rise of prison labor, black site torture prisons, or the neo-colonial expansion of the American Empire. And for those who argue that the Democrats are a lesser evil, they are also the party which still blames Nader for their failure to defend Gore's legitimate victory, and which did nothing to combat obvious disenfranchisement in Ohio in 2004. It is, moreover, the same organization that ran Lieberman as Vice President a decade a go, when for some reason he was not thought of as a laughable shill for AIPAC and insurance companies. The fundamental flaw in such logic is the idea that state power is inherently good, which is a categorical error. Only people operate under the spectrum of morality, though distant, concentrated power rewards certain pathological characteristics. And the bleeding heart masses who supported the second coming of Martin Luther King, Jr. were just chumps who voted for the third term of the Bush Administration, suckers.

The Future Is Now

2009-11-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

"There's many pints of blood upon
The hands that rule the earth
But for every body dragged out
Another one is birthed
And the children have the world worn dead
I hope they use it well
And I wish their elders all the best
And I hope they burn, in hell." -The Mob

During the decade or so when the Fed-inspired, debt fueled asset bubble spurred the optimism of the middle and upper classes which it temporarily enriched, optimism about the future knew no bounds. So-called futurists, the accredited equivalent of fortune tellers, foretold of a utopic bounty defined by technological progress. Namely that research investment provided by the state-capitalist nexus would solve the inexorable problems of the late 20th Century. Technology in and of itself would fuel carbon neutrality, lead to full employment, and end poverty. There would be flying cars, robots in every house, plasma screens on every wall, sub-orbital flight, cold fusion, and bio-engineered post-scarcity. Investment in the generation of increased human knowledge would thus resolve the contradictions endemic to late capitalism. However, the faith of futurists and lay practitioners in the promise of technology rests in the machinations of the people who wield such applied scientific power. If the present is any indication, it will likely be more of the same.

When the Federal government comes to default on its debt obligations, the fissures generated by neoliberalism fracture the United States as a political entity. This default triggers a worldwide run on the dollar, whose value had already fallen after it ceased being the world's reserve currency. Gold soars to a million dollars an ounce, the New York Stock Exchange falls to 600, and its takes a wheelbarrow of greenbacks to buy a Whopper. Sudden, massive inflation generates a flight to commodities, popularly manifested in the looting of stores throughout the country for comestibles and a variety of previously inexpensive luxury items. A majority of the states, already unable to independently fund themselves and thus dependent on the influx of Federal Reserve Notes for their budgets, choose to slough off the union in order to free themselves from the debt. This irredentism, not unlike what happened in Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union, leaves the general government with a swath of land from the DC Metro area to the Appalachians, and extending up the Northeast corridor. Thus an imperial crisis, characterized by the loss of Western Iraq, the fall of the Saudi monarchy, and the Mexican rejection of NAFTA, metamorphosed into a civil war, with the Federal government attempting to reverse its losses.

The greatest depression begun with the demise of major Euro-American financial houses in 2007 regularizes social trends that emerged prior to its manifestation. The systematization of twenty percent U-6 unemployment, combined with the elimination of jobless benefits in 2013, led to a sharp polarization of American society. As lost jobs never came back, and the numbers of jobless increased, the millions comprising this underclass scoured the country for work. The ever-decreasing propertied class stood aghast as the dirty, disheveled penniless begged on the streets, and occasionally rioted. The wealthy who remained in the United States retreated to their private, secluded enclaves, whose entrances were patrolled by Xe paramilitary units, clandestinely funded through the defense budget. As wages had immeasurably fallen, and in order to maintain some semblance of an economy, government and private enterprise increasingly resorted to prison labor. The conversion of prisons to labor camps was merely an extension of previous pracitces on the part of private penitentiaries, but the scale was immeasurably greater. Under the pretext of the 13th Amendment, a good percentage of the starving masses were rounded up, declared to have forfeited their citizenship under the Third Patriot act, and condemned to the gulags for the remainder of their lives. Such permanent inmates were implanted with biochips to monitor their whereabouts, and a special branch of Homeland Security was set up to guard the vast prison camps.

The collapse of the capitalist world system triggered a renewed war on the ghettos. The urban underclass, already on the margins of society before the tribulations, further retreated into an illicit, informal economy in order to survive. The attempted infiltration of local police forces, and subsequent resistance by the amalgam of gangs who ruled such marginalized territory, triggered a guerrilla war between government and so-called insurgent forces. Ostensibly to wipe out the ever-increasing narcotics trade, which some believed garnered profits for clandestine government agents in collusion with nascent imperial officials, large swaths of urban areas were declared free fire zones. The conglomerated syndicates were outlawed as terrorists, captured members were sent to the prison camps, and the systematic torture of suspected leaders by the Guantanamo School of Medicine was an open secret. Some brave foreign investigative journalists discovered white phosphorous residue among some wreckage, and people living closest to the five-mile barrier experienced weird, unknown sickness. Drones incessantly flew over cities, explosions were heard every so often, and despite their lesser power the clans were never subdued. As they were forced to move underground, amidst the rubble the dissemination of neo-communist ideas found resonance among what was left of civil society, even the children of state officials. The war on internal terrorism enabled excuses for the final suspension of the U.S. Constitution, until the war was ostensibly over, though it was unclear when it would ever be. Synthetic androids, first introduced in the Tajik crisis and who had no affinity with former citizens, became a common police presence in the safer neighborhoods.

As the 21st Century wore on, climate change brought on by ever-increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere became a larger problem than economic dysfunction. The seas along the equator gradually turned to acid, coral reefs disappeared along with the marine life that depended on them, and the tropical forests, which traditionally consumed carbon dioxide, went up in flames over the decades. A plastic film the size of Australia covered the surface of the Pacific Ocean, and many fish dinners were ruined by customers biting into milk tops. The vast Himalayan glaciers had slowly melted, cutting off the water supply to most of East Asia, creating massive migratory patterns westwards, and destroying those countries' attempts at Western-style development. Due to climate change and resource mismanagement the Colorado River dried up, Las Vegas was abandoned, and the large-scale evacuation of Southern California remade the region into a series of isolated villages amidst decaying exurbia. The divarication of temperatures between the North Atlantic and rest of the world brought fears of a renewed ice age. Oilfields in the Arabian Peninusla, Angola, and Mexico dried up, eradicating the fuel for globalization, and forcing those economies that did survive to locally rearticulate themselves. Some Northern European states managed to shelter their populations via ecological utopias that utilized regional, renewable energy sources, water recycling, organic farming, and compost waste management. Though fortunate to avoid the massive crop failures in North America due to genetically engineered crop conformity, such North Sea isolates faced massive problems with immigration and unstable weather patterns.

In 2024 the first woman was selected First President, and then immediately signed an Executive Order outlawing abortion. The U.S. Constitution, though non-binding, was pared down into ten articles into order to better correlate with the ten commandments. The genetic engineering utilized to properly regulate population growth became, due the wishes of the free populace, a newer form of eugenics. The internet, which in its fifth itineration became the feed, became a hegemonic pay-to-play repository of all knowledge. Books that Google was unable to scan before it was shut down turned to dust in abandoned libraries, and new music was manufactured through random computer permutations. Television, which became known as live feed, was four thousand channels of non-stop sports, reruns, huckster preachers/newspeople/demagogues, "reality"/consumption channels, and porno. Through infrared surveillance cameras, v-chips implanted at birth, satellite surveillance, psychosomatic drugs, and sophisticated clairvoyant crime technology, the free aristocracy kept the rest of the population at bay. New selections were held every six years, ritualized by an oft-failed invasion of some recalcitrant potentate. But, the state-corporate-martial elite prospered in their own way, so life was said to be good. And the pilot of a research vessel from Persei-Omicron 8, in its first examination of the quadrant in four thousand years, took one look at earth and sighed:"The future, the future, so much like the past."

God Is An American

2009-08-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat. " -Richard Hofstadter

In the secular religion that is America, the democratic process where citizens are eligible to vote is sacrosanct, and no one has benefited more from this than the white caste. The idea of the United States as a herrenvolk democracy was a process begun at the turn of the 19th Century, and has only begun to recede in the last forty years or so. Indeed, the idea of civic equality was intrinsic to the shared possession of white skin, but this was always a limited conception of egalitarianism. For the United States was never racially uniform in any region of its domain, and attempts to imagine American heritage as lily white are pure fantasy. Yet, it is this idea of American as intrinsically white that undergirds a largely conservative notion of American politics, that benefits of citizenship should be particular to those who have benefited from historical privilege. It is largely due to this legacy of structural racism that the United States is culturally suspicious, its popular consciousness historically myopic, and the political culture so perverse.

A common trope in the understanding of the American Revolution, and the unfolding of the antecedent century, is the notion of democratic nationalism. The transformation of British North America into a sovereign nation-state is understood through the prism of Paul Revere and whitewashed militias, the correlation of ideology with action, and the veneration of the Constitution as some kind of holy scripture. The champion of American democracy is understood to be none other than Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy yet indebted planter whose rapid rise was a consequence of his affiliation with the Virginia elite. The political movement headed by Jefferson used democratic rhetoric to argue for a small centralized government, and in turn a larger role for state governments controlled by local elites. Democracy in this sense was parochial, fearing a larger state because of how it might impact entrenched local privileges, and not out of any understanding of universal rights. For American democracy has always been confounded with that of race, where whiteness has been construed with citizenship, and those of a darker complexion forced to suffer for caste-based suffrage.

Integral to this template was the conceptualization of yeoman farmers as representative of the American polity. The virtue of western expansion, the yeoman ideal was to civilize the Mississippi Valley through enclosure and small, independent family farms. Such engines of capitalism would bolster a decentralized, expansive nation state in what Jefferson termed an 'empire of liberty.' The economic sector of agriculture was posited as the foundation of value rather than a factor of production, like labor. Though a large percentage of the rural population, the understanding of yeoman farms as a dominant institution is curious observation coming from the scribe of the planter class. For wherever slavery was allowed the expand the plantation became the dominant economic unit, and yeoman farmers were supplemental to such agrarian labor camps. Indeed, the worship of the yeoman ideal became a paragon of American political thought precisely because it justified the continuance of plantation society. For self-sufficiency was never a desired goal, but a means to accumulate capital to buy slaves, in the hope of becoming a great planter one day. Thus the dream of most white Americans was to work in order to eventually not work, marry the bosses daughter, and become part of the ruling class in addition to the ruling caste. The idea of a level and equitable society in the mist of social stratification is hallmark of American exceptionalism.

Indeed, the 'middle class' consensus that has dominated American politics was born out of this social understanding. Implicit in this ostensibly democratic, status-quo morass is that that government works for the white male majority at the expense of everyone else. The social equality brought about by race enabled social cohesion in an extremely stratified society, and connected the worldviews between citizens of all classes. White Americans as a whole benefited from the expansion of slavery, Indian removal, the Mexican-American War, the rise of the corporation, racially stratified industrialization, segregation, a litany of imperial adventures, and suburbanization. The seemingly timeless cultural values which emanated from rural America provided the foundation for the American Dream, where the material benefits accrued from American power legitimized a white idyll where nothing every really happens. Non-whites in particular are excluded from this fantasy, and its timelessness enshrines a rather conservative worldview. The urban crucible is spurned, secularism ridiculed, the second amendment the most important, women are thought to be domestic creatures, abortion is the greatest crime on earth, and 'hard work' is a popular analysis of social problems. This particular brand of American conservatism is suspicious of government not for any ethical principles, but on the belief that the state might change society one way or the other, and bring strangeness onto the land. Fundamentally irrational, this conservatarianism makes sense because in the United States, no one ever has to apologize for anything.

After the United States defeated the Axis in World War II, one Southerner supposedly said that the Nazis had ruined everything for them. While not completely true, this yearning for the 'good old days' is as anachronistic as it is narrowly sectional. For those who encounter the United States and who are not white, there were never any 'good old days,' but quite the opposite. The 1950's ideal that empowers so much of American ideology, of the suburban subdivision, the tract home, corporate job, two car garage, wife in the kitchen and kids going to college, the blacks across the railroad tracks, and no one ever fucked ever, was a product of change as much as the 1960's. This yearning for the past that can no longer be the present enshrines white privilege as natural, and the needs of other people as the mark of entitlement. Distrusting difference, this brand of American exceptionalism exemplifies cognitive dissonance, and epitomizes American cultural isolation for the rest of the world. For anything that contradicts this ideal is dangerous, and so gay people have to be ashamed of their sexuality, teenagers are prosecuted for exchanging licentious text messages, and the ACLU is considered to be a communist organization. Because this irrationality is fundamentally based on a claim to power, and phenomena that criticize and deviate from white masculinity detract from its authenticity. After all, Nixon's 'Southern Strategy,' Reagan's popularity, and the appeal of Clinton and Bush the Younger were successful because they rested on white-dominated, 'common sense' nationalism. And the irony is that the vast majority of its practitioners fail to realize that in the grand scheme of things they really are just simps, fodder for international corporations who destroy their living standards, state-supported financiers who extort their tax money to pay their bonuses, and the generals who wish to send them off to Bactria. But you know, Buy Gold!, because when Jesus comes back to earth again you can use it for fertilizer, and it is a tasty snack.

Beyond The Pale

2009-01-09T14:51:00.001-08:00

"On silver mount zion
All buried in ruins
We was dancing the hora
Until we vomited blood
Spinning like crazy
Shoshana was jonesing
The towers had fallen
And the wind called out
My grandfather's name." -Efrim

The story of Jewish assimilation in the United States is a veritable parable of the American Dream. Largely coming from the vast expanse of Ashekenazi Jews in Eastern Europe, Jews in the United States have accomplished what it means to become American, namely citizenship, acculturation while maintaining some cultural deritus of an ethnically differentiated past, and possessing a lot of shit. Long before Asians became the "model minority," Jews represented a collective Horatio Alger, where a non-Christian people can show up on the shores of the United States half-starved and in rags, and as a result of hard work, four generations later their descendants work for Goldman Sachs or head the Defense Department. Along their journey in becoming white, American Jews have not merely been fortunate of circumstance, but in their quest for power have shed that fundamental thing that has defined their two thousand year travail, namely ethics.

Contrary to the popular imagination, Jews did not first come into the United States through Ellis Island. The first Jews in the Americas were Sephardim, the refugees from Catholic Spain who expressed their liminal identity in the burgeoning Atlantic World. Some of the first sugar planters in Demerrara were exiled Sephardim, and graves marked in Hebrew line some of the oldest cemeteries in Bridgetown. In the Southern province of Saint Domingue, Jews with ties to merchant houses in Lyon and Marseilles established indigo plantations, and utilized their familial network to concoct a transatlantic economic connection. Due to the dearth of white women, these planters often intermarried with their slave women, whose progeny became the largest free coloured population in the Americas, and whose struggle for racial equality eventually brought down the colonial apparatus. The oldest synagogue in the United States is in Manhattan, but the dispersion of congregations throughout the Atlantic coast testifies to their integration into colonial society. For those who think that Jewishness reflexively connotes some oppositional alterity, Judah P. Benjamin was the Treasurer of the Confederate States of America.

The common understanding of Jewish migration to the United States was consonant with the industrialization of the United States. In the latter 19th Century was was perceived to be hordes of Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to perform cheap labor in factories, homes, and on the streets. These Ashkenazim were different from earlier Jewish migrants to the United States not merely in their place of origin, but in their class status, language, and customs. The Jews from the Pale and Eastern Europe mainly settled in the large, rapidly expanding metropoli like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. They were excluded from the dominant Ango-American culture, congregated in tenements, and were categorized in the racial ideology of the time as among the lowest orders of Europeans. Emanating from a place where revolutions were common place, these Jews brought with them alien ideas that were considered to be alien and dangerous to the American social order. The Ashkenazim often had experience in the Bundt, tended to be socialists, and were often active in communist and anarchist circles, as well as the burgeoning labor unions. Millions of Jewish immigrants, then, had ideas and practices that fashioned them as antithetical to the American character.

Prior to the Second World War, American institutional and cultural life was set up to exclude non-Anglo-Saxons from elite positions. This included Jewish Americans, who could not attend Ivy League schools, and had to set up their own summer retreats in the Catskills. It was in the wake of the Second World War, partly as a result of service in the Armed Forces, as well as a response to Nazism, that whiteness became homogenized to include the children and grandchildren of non Anglo-Saxon immigrants. This process involved the GI Bill, gaining employment in the managerial class, and moving into the suburbs. There Jewish men could beat their children, nail their housewives, utter racial epithets, and holler at blond girls in peace. Like the rest of their brethren, the culture that emerged from this reclusion would be largely conformist and self-congratulatory, because American Jews had "made it." It is this social mobility, in light of the 1960's, that would be foundational for American Jews to reverse their commitment to Liberalism.

Despite a few miscreants who, in the 60's and after continued to critique mainstream society, the Jewish establishment has since the Second World War served American power. This has emerged in two different but interrelated permutations, the Holocaust Industry and Zionism. The Holocaust industry is in many ways a moralization of American empire, in that it asserts that what the Germans did to Eastern European Jews was not merely unique or unprecedented, but was the worst thing that can and will ever happen, ever. It plays on American Jewish guilty by connecting them with their pre-World War II counterparts, and in fashioning the Holocaust as uniquely exceptional attempts to portray the event as uniquely Jewish. This also serves to maintain a conception of Jewish distinctiveness from the rest of white America, paints the place of the United States in the world in a positive, liberatory light, and justifies American intervention. It is for this reason why there is a Holocaust Museum on the Mall, but there is no monument to American slavery or the genocide of the indigenous, precisely because the United States did not do it. It is impossible to count how many movies have been main about the Holocaust, but those on Jim Crow, American death squads, or Native Americans are few and far between, simply because they unearth difficult images.

Zionism is in many ways a profoundly ironic movement, both for reasons of history and identity. In an ideology that states Jews only belong in one seaside strip of real estate in the entire world, Zionism implies that Jews, in fact, don't belong in the United States at all. Yet the United States is a place where Jews have, as a whole, experienced the least discrimination and largely assimilated into the dominant culture. In resurrecting five thousand years of history out of its context, it schizophrenically plays on American Jews' need to maintain a sense of exceptionalism. For in its worship of two flags, Zionism claims to be American in acting for Israel, but this is problematic if not false. The history of the Yishuv also eerily parallels that of the United States, in that white settlers from across the sea expelled the natives in order to fashion their own racial state. A corollary to this is the construction of Israel as some Jewish utopia, when it has some of the worst social indicators in the Western World and is run by psychopaths. This, if anything, demonstrates the whiteness of American Jews, in their unending justifications for ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism, belong in the United States.

This is to say nothing of common refrains in institutionalized American Jewish culture, in its racism (particularly of the Ayrabs), paranoia, vanity, anti-intellectualism, conformism, bootlicking, and classism. It has, after all, become "Anti-Semetic" to criticize not merely various Israeli policies, but to even question the various prominent American Jewish sages. So today we have such esteemed intellectuals like Chuck Krauthammer and David Frum proffering negrophobic explanations for the decline of the United States, Thomas Friedman offering trite, idiotic wisdom in the pages of the New York Times, Abraham Foxman slandering Desmond Tutu because the latter dared to compare Apartheid with the Occupied Territories, and Alan Dershowitz conducting his own Red Scare and constructing his own justificatory philosophy of torture. I for one yearn for the days when American Jews ran Mother Earth and fought in the Lincoln Brigades. For the basis of Jewish identity should be diasporic, conscious of its universalism yet dynamic with the societies in which Jews live all over the world. Any ethical worldview should not based on off of some Westphalian nation-state which the CIA itself predicted would fail in two decades, nor by the dictates of senile Rebbes who run over West Indians in Crown Heights. For one Jewish tradition is the pursuit of a better lived existence, but this necessitates being a part of the world, not apart from it.

Shit-Heap Gloria of the New Town Planning

2008-12-31T13:51:00.001-08:00

"Beverly Hills, Century City
Everything's so nice and pretty
All the people look the same
Don't they know they're so damn lame" -Circle Jerks

Los Angeles is known throughout the globe as a city of paradise. A place of perfect weather nestled between the San Gabriel mountains and the Pacific Ocean, where everyone can make it big and achieve the American dream. You can shop on Rodeo, lunch in Hollywood, get a tan in Santa Monica, party it up on the Sunset Strip, and do coke at some after-party in the dark recesses of a Downtown loft. Everyone drives luxury cars, everyone looks like a model, everyone finds success in Hollywood, and everyone lives in a suburban home in the nation's second largest city. The air is clean, palm trees line every street, the traffic is manageable, people are nice, the Lakers are the only thing that matters, and life is easy. Los Angeles is a projected vision of what success in American is supposed to be, namely rich, cool, hip, light skinned, and fabulous. With its relentless attempts to reinvent itself, in tandem with its obsession with what have you done for me lately, the dominant mentality of Los Angeles can be said to be ahistorical.

Founded in 1781 by a Spanish governor, in a little over two hundred years Los Angeles has metamorphosed from a frontier backwater into one of the worlds largest cities. It has in fact experienced the hands of three empires, that of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, not to mention the Republic of California. Due to its arid geography, for a century the puebla was relegated to being a small port surrounded by expansive ranchos that mainly raised cattle. It small port to the south of Malibu was one of its few entropots to the outside world. After the Conquest of Mexico, the rancheros were gradually altered into industrial groves by the increasingly white landowning elite. In the last decades of the 19th Century, however, boosters not originally of California unleashed a campaign to change the Southland forever. Namely, they promoted Los Angeles as a climactic paradise distinct from Eastern cities. Combined with the discovery of petroleum and the connection to transcontinental railroad lines, Los Angeles grew at a frenetic pace in the early twentieth century. Growth was so rapid that the urban population outgrew the local water supply, always a problem in Southern California. So, under the orchestration of William Mulholland the Department of Water and Power constructed a number of aqueducts to bring in water from Northern California. Due to exclusion in the East, the migration of the largely Jewish movie studios to Los Angeles in the 1920's capped off the erection of what is contemporarily understood to be Los Angeles.

The erection of the Hollywood complex until the end of the Second World War can be seen as the heyday of densely urban Los Angeles. Centered on Downtown, the metropolitan area had not yet reached the sea, development was primarily centered on density, and much of the surrounding area was still primarily agricultural, including the San Fernando Valley. The Red Car was an efficient system of privatized mass transportation, there was a fair amount of racial integration in non-elite neighborhoods, and the major industries, meaning movie studies and aerospace, were unionized. It is hard to believe now but Hollywood Boulevard became the center of the local book trade, and the growing Communist party was a locus for worker agitation and civil rights work during the Depression years. Which is not to say that everything was perfect, as the ghetto of Little Tokyo was liquidated during the War and the Chinese were still relegated to Chinatown. Yet, the city was the industrial center of Southern California, and its economy only grew with the influx of Federal money during the War.

One can say that the apex of the City of Angels' centrally focused urbanism was mainly a product of the austerity of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Meaning that faced with a destruction of capital during the 30's, and the government's siphoning of it during the War, there was little financial opportunity for the city to decrease its density. The end of the conflict liberated the developers to conquer space, namely to construct the apparent limitless expanse of suburbs to the West, South, and East, as well as conquer the San Fernando Valley. This was a coalescence of corporate and white, middle class mentalities, for the latter chose to leave the city, and the former orchestrated its denouement. The reduction of slums surrounding Downtown, the construction of the first freeway into Glendale, and the utilization of holding companies by GM and Goodyear to buy up and dismantle the red car generated a feed back system to prioritize the suburbs over the city. Per local decorum and Federal guidelines, only whites were allowed to leave the confines of the city, for redlining, housing covenants, and loan restrictions allowed only white Angelinos to buy houses, making them by extension a part of the ruling race. Never mind that in a region prone to drought, the added pools and lawns of single family homes merely exacerbated water problems. The single family home became the signifier of insider status in the city, what some argue to be the greatest misallocation of resources in world history, but ultimately leaving the darker ones to to rot as the residual surplus army of labor.

The post-war white flight that generated the idea of Los Angeles as a white idyll was soon compromised by the inequalities it generated and global economic restructuring. The spacial racism was resisted by latinos, Asians, and blacks, who by the 1960's generated their own movement for equality. The Watts Riots, the Blowouts and the Brown Berets signaled the injustice of the system, and the consequent white reaction. The dissipated individual plots of interest created by suburban sprawl hardened class divisions, and those with property retreated from the postwar Liberal consensus. Simply put, the massive state expenditures that generated suburban prosperity in the first place were seen by their recipients to only benefit those in the suburbs. The tax revolts, the radicalism of the state Republican Party, and Prop 13, can be seen a symptomatic of this mentality. Also, the deindustrialiation of local industries at the time when they were finally being racial integrated meant that the correlation of race and class at the periphery became exacerbated by the Reagan presidency. Indeed, as Los Angeles became ever more dense, and as no more infrastructure was built, the city increasingly became unlivable.

The policies of the last half-century have made Los Angeles what it is today, namely a sprawling suburban metropolis trying to reinvent itself as a dense, urban city, With ten million people and no more room to expand, city authorities and so-called developers have little choice. This of course means corrupt and ineffective politicians, incompetent mayors, greedy millionaires/billionaires, and nimbyite homeowners attempting to reach a consensus on something they have little concrete ideas about. City Council members, after all, get paid a quarter of a million dollars a year to do fucking nothing while the mayor is more interested in publicity and screwing reporters than anything. While there are close to a hundred thousand homeless in Los Angeles, the city gives subsidies to billionaires to create alienating faux Times Squares rather than constructing organic urban communities. And the "new urbanism" touted by city leaders is actually for the little people, who suffer increased density without any improvement in infrastructure, and the city elite live in their hillside homes. Much of what has been slated for urban renewal, after all, are the swaths of apartment ghettos formerly abandoned by lighter skinned people, who would like to move back to the city without being inconvenienced by the poor. The class war that is gentrification, buttressed by servile labor, has been slowed by the current crisis in capitalism, but the reshaping of the city in the interest of the bourgeois has not ceased. Indeed, the reurbanization of the City of Angels, spurned on by speculation and rampant corruption, is haphazard, chaotic, inefficient, and championed by those who care for no one but themselves and their bottom line. Maybe Los Angeles will indeed one day become liveable, or maybe it will end up like in so many Hollywood movies, burned to the ground by mother nature or those who want some space to breathe.

In Praise of Difficult People

2008-12-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

"I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car
They're probably drinkin' coffee and smoking big cigars
Well I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free
But those people keep a movin'
And that's what tortures me." -Johnny Cash

Life, for the average person, is a series of repetitive actions compartmentalized into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years. Days melt into years, lifetimes seem uniform, and though meanings are specific, the reason is imposed on the individual. Man is, after all, a social animal, and the division of time in such a manner is historically contingent. We have no control as to when we are born, and what we do with our time on earth is mitigated by the extent to which we can act. A codified amalgam of our predecessors, history merely acts as a guide to explain the present. That it seems few people understand it nowadays means that even less comprehend the background of their existence. At any rate, people are born into social systems that direct their lives, and their futures are largely fixed by the place into which they are born. A Roman slave was going to die a slave, a serf was going to spend his life poorly tilling the soil, a member of the English gentry would supervise his tenants and enjoy many balls, a woman has for most of the recorded past been confined to the home, and whoever was born into the industrial working class would do just that for most of their lives. Despite seemingly incremental change over the centuries, the trajectory of a life lived seemed fixed, a repetition defined by the legacy of predecessors.

The idea of existence as a reified thing independent of human activity is a rather curious conception. The conservative notion that the way things are is the way they always have been is simultaneously incorrect and obfuscatory. As human beings are the sole organisms able to alter the physical environment, it should be a given that they can modify or create their own societies as well. As our binding ideals are socially constructed over time, the essentializing legacy of the past acts to limit the extent of action. Namely, tradition is utilized to inhibit atypical behavior, and keep individuals bound to social mores. What has always been is often an excuse to keep things the way they are, and to stifle innovation and challenges to the status quo. For the fabric of our lives is in reality a power struggle to the extent that people are born into social structures that expect certain outputs from them. For example, who we work for, what we think, what we consume, and who we socialize with all reflect our social position, the bulk of which is learned and inherited. Traditional centers of power like the church, government, racism, patriarchy, and corporations operate through ideologies that necessitate conformity and inflict costs upon deviant individuals. One can argue that such institutions in many ways define themselves off of the actions of discrepant people. Given that people have so much invested in the status quo, it is a wonder, even a testament to the human spirit, that some misbehave.

It has been the difficult ones, those who for their own reasons could not be completely socialized, who have in their own way shaped our present milieu. Those who came to serve the needs of entrenched power have been idolized, but countless silenced individuals are the ones who developed a historical legacy against totalization. Women in the Dark Ages who resisted male authority were burned as witches, the Anabaptists were violently suppressed by the Catholic church, and the descendants of Marranos exist in Spain today. Cuahtemoc led the ill-fated resistance against the Spanish in Tenochtitlan, intransigent slaves in Sao Tome hastened the decline of sugar production there, and the Roanoake colony was destroyed by the Croatan. It was half-starved women who forced the Capets to the Tuilleries, an eccentric one-legged patroon who foresaw the dangers of the "slave power," and a proto-anarcho-feminist couple happily lived unmarried in the 18th Century. The final destruction of the Second Empire fell to the Parisian masses, a rag-tag band of coloured guerillas paved the way for Cuban independence in the 1880's, and thousands of American workers were brutally suppressed by the state and allied mercenaries in the latter decades of the 19th Century. It was a bunch of anarcho-syndicalists who first pillaged Spanish fascists, a bunch of obscure men who began the anti-colonialist movement after the European Civil War, trans-Siberian peasants who threw back the Nazis, and bored, alienated housewives who instigated the second wave of American feminism. Though responding to their own specific contexts, the sum of their patrimony is an imperfect and contradictory so-called modernity.

So this is for the seemingly forgotten ones, the anti-heroes who have been nearly erased from our memories but who occasionally resurface out of necessity. Even today, they manifest themselves in the punks banned from playing in the UK, the queer who comes out to his or her parents, the kid in the projects spitting rhymes on the project stoop, Beurs burning cars in Parisian suburbs, Afghani women organizing against the Americans and the Taliban, the ascendancy of Evo Morales, squatters in foreclosed domiciles, the Chicago sitdown strike, those who hawk RU-486, and whomever refuses to be shipped overseas. For, in some ways, the detritus of the past has yet to decompose.

Dreams aren't free, motherfucker.

Settle The Score

2008-11-30T22:20:00.000-08:00

"Mother Mary don't pack two ceramic laser-sited nines
Jesus don't possess nuclear tactical satellites
Jehova don't move with an RPG sitting on his shoulder
And Allah don't launch missiles hovering in killer helicopter rotors." -Bigg Jus

The American national ideology, the cultural locutions that bond those in the fifty North American states (excluding Puerto Rico and Guam) is premised upon that the United States is a democracy. Supposedly in a democracy the government is representative of the will of the people, but this thesis depends on the transparency of state institutions. In the United States, the development of an entrenched self-actualizing state interest implies that the responsiveness of the government to the people's will is diminished. This does not necessary correlate that the people of a certain country are inherently benevolent, or whatever, but one can discern that such a concentration of power directs the energies of the state. The so-called Progressive Era heralded the emergence of what is termed political capitalism, or the nexus of state and corporate interests to each other, mutually reinforcing the authority of each. Elections may alter the various emphasis of the articulations of power, but do not in themselves signify deviations from patterns of rule. Perhaps the greatest example of this is what is termed "defense," but is really a vast, interconnected network of imperial management.

The defense establishment of the United States government is unique in the world, particularly in its scope, size, and cost. Establishment in this sense refers to the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the State Department, and should also include the FBI and ATF, as their scope extends beyond the territory of United States.The "on-budget" costs of the various defense agencies run to around eight hundred billion dollars a year. However, if one includes the various "off-budget" costs of the military-intelligence complex, they run to well over a trillion dollars a year. These costs include the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, various CIA operations, and much of what goes on in the NSA. It should be noted that prior to the current economic downturn in the world-system, the running Federal deficit was a consequence of providing for "defense." What a trillion dollars pays for these days is the genocidal destruction of one foreign country, the adrenachrome-conceived invasion of another, enough weapons systems to blow up the world a hundred-fold, hundreds of briefcases filled with hard currency to buy people off, a satellite-fueled international and domestic spy network, bribes for citizen-soldiers, and never-ending failed weapons projects. Such operations are solely run by the Executive branch, but one would be foolhardy to think they are under the jurisdiction of the President. The imperial system that exists has evolved for nearly three-quarters of a century, operates independent of whomever is in office, and cannot be voted on. It has, in fact, become the government, and is partially the reason why Representatives vote on bills they never read. Because, in a sense, it doesn't really matter.

The current defense complex emerged out of the American Victory in World War II. As a part of defeating the Axis, the United States became a militarized society, where social life was centralized by the state. This involved a corporatist structure, meaning the cooperation between corporations and the state for the purpose of orderly wartime production. In this environment, and in addition to the emergence of the Department of Defense, was the creation of the Office of Strategic Services. Exclusively beholden to the Executive, during the war the latter agency was involved in fomenting resistance behind enemy lines. Yet it had no qualms, by the end of the war, in co-opting Nazi war criminals as agents, or in recruiting Japanese scientists who conducted human experiments on Koreans and Chinese. As state power, above all, seeks to justify itself, the defense establishment viewed the Second World War to be a stepping stone to a larger imperial war, that against the Soviet Union. The Cold War, then, was a conflict between two rival empires, with the earth as the grand chessboard. The CIA, which was the permanent successor to the OSS, was entrusted with fashioning client regimes and undercover operations deemed to dirty to official sanction. It was not uncoincidental that often such activities correlated with insuring American corporate interests, for where many Marxists blind their analysis is in the distinction between state power and corporate capital. They are in fact more unitary than separate, for they use each other for their own ends, for the benefit of the whole.

The past sixty-odd years have been an unending war on the planet, by the United States against real and perceived enemies against its rule. The Cold War was less of a direct conflict between superpowers, but a justification for imperial pacification within respective spheres of influence. For the defense establishment, this involved covert operations as soon as the war ended. Little is discussed about the army of former Nazis operating behind Soviet lines, supplied and funded by the CIA. The United States sided with former fascists in Italy and Greece, aiding and abetting a counterinsurgency against communist partizans in the latter. Support for the generals in the latter was the direct justification for Truman's doctrine, where the small-minded President by accident from Missouri declared war on people who would not submit. The CIA, in 1948, pushed so much money into the Italian election that the popular indigenous Communist party was defeated. In the war for controlling the Korean peninsula, the American military dropped so many bombs that nothing was literally left standing in the northern part of the country. The strategic hamlets, mass executions, and furnishing of dictators was also a run-up to the Vietnam war. MacArthur threatening to irradiate the entire Asian continent was not a novel or idle threat. In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected President of Iran, simply because he wanted to nationalize the British-American petroleum consortium. The Agency threw its support behind the Shah, who soon became known for the rapacity of his secret police, as well as his obsession with big and shiny things. In a similar vein, the CIA overthrew President Arbenz in Guatemala, simply because his labor policies would cut into the profits of United Fruit. The fifties, which are thought of as the glory days of American Empire, also included supporting French colonialists against Vietnamese nationalists, and igniting a dirty war against Cuba. All of these actions were justified as halting communism, and most of the targets had nothing to do with the Soviet Union.

The decade and half after World War II was merely a run-up for the horror show that was the 1960's, not coincidentally corresponding to massive resistance in the global South. The Bay of Pigs invasion, launched from the CIA's station in Guatemala, was nothing more than a covert war against a national independence movement. The failure of the mercenaries testified to the popularity of Castro and the arrogance of the United States, and ultimately Kennedy losing his head. Southeast Asia was the focus of American energy after the mid-sixties, with the Agency concocting its counter-insurgency network long before the first Marines waded on shore. The support of Diem, along with a low intensity war against the peaceful tactics of the NLF, led to the foretold beginning of a long irregular struggle. It was in this context that the CIA established its operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, fighting against the Pathet Lao and nationalist forces in Cambodia. American bombers destroyed supposedly one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of Jars, and forced much of the Laotian population to literally live underground. As much of the funds necessary for such operations needed to be secret and "off-budget," the CIA instituted its infamous drug-running operation, slinging heroin from Thailand into the rest of Southeast Asia. Air America transported drugs as well as mercenaries, and when the GIs showed up they could get vials of pure heroin for a dollar on military bases. The inevitable collapse of Diem, which came in the form of being double-crossed by Kennedy, led to a second test of the Domino theory. The Vietnam War was never a "mistake," as some liberals conceive it, but a fundamental reassertion of the American imperium. It of course left a country completely devastated, with millions dead, large swaths of the country burned and covered in defoliants, bombs littering the fields, and a society destroyed. If the Vietnamese were not killed, they were placed in concentration camps or worked for the Americans, with the women often as prostitutes. Internal to the American occupation, the CIA ran a counterinsurgency ring that liquidated fifty thousand Vietnamese. In Indonesia in 1965, the CIA assisted Sukarno's overthrow, and gave Suharto lists of suspected communists to purge. Over one million people were slaughtered as a result. In Uruguay, the Agency enacted a large-scale torture operation against the Tupamaros, a creative left-wing urban guerrilla outfit in Urugay. In 1964 the CIA spent more money against Allende than was domestically spent in the Nixon-Kennedy election. Primarily because he desired free milk in schools, he was overthrown by Pinochet, with direct support from the United States, in 1973. The CIA was also involved in Patrice Lumumba's assassination in 1961, and installed the sociopath Mobutu Sese Seko as head of Zaire until his death. The United States did support South Africa and its quest for human rights in this period, as well as Israel's preemptive strike against its Arab neighbors. In fact, Israel is the sole country to attack the United States and be rewarded for it, as their bombing of the USS Liberty was meant to hedge their bets in case they were losing to Egypt. This event was so secret that even Robert MacNamara, the former head of Ford who planned the Vietnam War and loved to confess his sins, refused to discuss it. All of this had nothing to do with "security," and everything to do with implementing order.

Since a group of well organized and wretched Vietnamese nationalists defeated the military juggernaut that is the United States, precisely because it has no ideology besides dominance, the extant story of the United States with the rest of the world has largely been an attempt to eviscerate this past. Instead of accept its place in the world, the offensive apparatus which governs the American state has striven to define itself apart from it. Thus the "Human Rights" president Carter sent aid to Somoza as his government was collapsing to the Sandinistas, and began the organization of the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. Reagan, whose campaign was explicitly premised on overcoming the "Vietnam syndrome," fully completed this vision based on American exceptionalism. Thus the Cowboy president, really a former actor whose strings were pulled by Conservative Washington insiders, instituted the first 'War on Terror' and a decade of almost unending horror. The invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Tripoli, the Agency's assistance in the war against the indigenous of the Guatemalan Highlands, the use of Noriega as a drug/money laundering conduit, the death squads instituted in El Salvador, the use of Marines on the side of Israel in their Lebanon invasion, the attempted coup in Iran, the United States' support of the Khmer Rouge via its ally in China, and the proxy war in Angola meant to stabilize the dying Apartheid regime to the southeast were are part of an attempt to reassert American hegemony and the oppression that comes with it. Correlative of this was the various types of dirty tricks and dark methods to fund such a vision, including using Afghani opium to raise money for weapons to arm the CIA's holy warriors, as well Iran-Contra. In the latter, the United States secretly used Israel as a proxy to sell arms to the Ayatollahs, the money from which would then be given to America's own mercenaries the Contras. The Contras, after all, were composed of ex-Somozists who merely wanted to overthrow the popular Sandinista government, and were successful through a decades long war in destroying the social base of that movement, along with Nicaragua itself. The United States played such a large part in that war that Honduras was nicknamed "USS Honduras," and the Defense establishment exhausted every possible means to assure "victory." Thus the CIA, explicitly subverting Congressional orders, became the licit cocaine trafficker in the hemisphere. People forget that neither cocaine, the chemicals needed to cut it, nor assault rifles are made in the ghetto. Yet Ricky Ross became a millionaire overnight, selling crack in South Central and beyond that originated in US air bases. I mean when you have Oliver North running a psy-ops operation in the White House basement and the former head of the CIA as Vice President, what else can you expect, right? In this light the invasion of Panama and first war against Saddam were merely warning shots across the bow, to keep upstarts in check.

The fall of the Soviet Union, of course, did nothing to check the concentration and scope of the veritable shadow government that siphons off the resources of the earth. The American establishment, after all, viewed it as a vindication of their behavior, and a chance to expand the empire. The complete destruction of Somalia, the bombing and predictable instigation of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the recolonization of Iraq, and the unending war in Afghanistan are all a testament to this never-ending reach for more power, loot, influence, and obedience. Under the guise of either human rights, democracy, or fighting terror, its is really nothing more than a base desire, the sought after subjugation of others which goes beyond race, class, and gender in this ignoble attempt to dominate others. In this sense, the American government is nothing but a gigantic mafia don, who wages war against rival families over territory and economic access. And the various anonymous faces who interlope between defense contractors, investment partnerships like the Carlyle group, the Council on Foreign Relations, obfuscatory think-tanks, and the interlocking military-intelligence agencies, materialize the public-private bureaucracy which really establishes governmental policy. They comprise, one can say, a conspiracy that articulates state action to their own narrow, self-defined conceptions of national interest. The material result of this is the systemic infliction of poverty, the erection of a global gulag, the institutionalization of torture, and the circulation of alpha particles through the atmosphere. Thus the coroner's report said Gary Webb committed suicide, yet he had two bullet holes in his head. And the war on Cuba has, in fact, never ended. For American relations with the planet comprises an extensive list of premeditated crimes, social destabilization, and atrocities. Because, the essence of American history is Luca Brasi holding a gun to Les Halley's head, telling him to sign the contract for Johnny Fontaine.

I Dreamt I Were A Bulldozer

2008-11-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

"This town is your town and this town is my town
From the derelict slums that are dirty and grey
To the house on the hill in the private estate
The places nice kids would never go
To the places no-one else has the right to go
Was this land made for you and me?" -Steve Lake

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Painted nice and yellow
With black parallel stripes
Because I'm an ill kind of fellow

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Making tracks through the Pentagon Mall
After turning swords into ploughshares
I'd do the Soulja Boy on the Capitol Lawn

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
With my u-blade extended
I'd catch banksters in their executive dives
Their fall from grace my function

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Barreling through the White House
Finding Dick Cheney in the Lincoln Bedroom
Jerking off to Amy Winehouse

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Digging tunnels under the Philadelphi route
Vrooming through Judea and Samaria
Knocking down walls all the way to the Green Zone

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Knocking over so many big box centers
Emptying space from empty lives
And then erect CBGBs

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Ripping up Gitmo
Letting the prisoners in the orange jumpsuits run wild
And then I'd go for the embargo

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Mowing over pro-life protesters
Who shoot doctors
So the path to Planned Parenthood would be unmolested

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Defenestrating the Hamptons
And I would carry so much champagne and gold
All the way to Harlem

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Leaving freeways in my tracks
Plunging beneath the concrete
Digging subway tunnels without slack

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
With big boom-boxes above my tires
And the volume up to max
So everyone could hear my ire

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
With my blade I'd baptize Jerry Falwell
So that fake Christians
Can live in their own hell

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Pounding into the border
Because people forget
That Mexico was once California

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Running amok in San Quentin
So that the State of Cali
Would stop lethal injections

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Fueled by High Life not petrol
And I'd knock over oil derricks
And let the good times roll

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Digging up cow shit from factory farms
So it wouldn't go into the Mississippi
And rectify ecological harm

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Breaking through Abercrombie and Fitch
So that those who profit from sweatshop labor
Could realize that payback's a bitch

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Pounding on Nixon's grave
Because those who continue to drop bombs on cities
Want to bury Watergate

I dreamed I was a bulldozer
Turning Los Alamos into rubble
So the scientists who created nuclear weapons
Could feel the radiation to their bones

I dreamt I were a bulldozer
Tearing up landfills
And turn them into compost bins
To frustrate the seemingly inevitable

It's your world too.

The End Of Life As We Know It

2008-10-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

"If I do not burn
If you do not burn
If we do not burn
How will darkness come to light?" -Nazim Hikmet

The current so-called financial crisis, which is in reality a breakdown of the current configuration of the capitalist world system, can be seen as the end of an era. For the past three decades or so, neoliberalism has the been the economic system that has defined the globe. In the United States and much of the world, neoliberalism has been the application of "free market" doctrine to almost every facet of life. Utilizing the false conception that innumerable individual actions govern economic life, in actuality neoliberalism has meant the utter domination of multinational corporations over the world economy. In the real world, this means socialism for the rich and market fundamentalism for the rest of us. Economic deregulation has resulted in vast increases in the disparities of wealth, the dismemberment of social programs, rampant political corruption, increased costs of living, and privatization of state assets. In a geopolitical sense, the advent of neoliberalism has meant the essential looting of the wealth of the people of the United States over the last thirty some-odd years. Who but multi-national corporations would benefit from the deindustrialization of the United States? Indeed, the destruction of Bretton Woods, which John Maynard Keynes erected to limit potentially destructive capital flows in the first place, meant the uncontrolled movement of capital around the globe. While this may be beneficial for the managerial and investor class, for the people in the United States it meant that corporations could destroy the means of production in their country for higher profits. The result has been massive enrichment of the top ten percent, while American society as a whole has experienced a long-term decline. Inner-cities look like war zones, infrastructure is crumbling, and the main thing the United States exports besides weapons is Treasury bills.

One of the guiding myths of the last thirty years has been the revelatory behavior of management. Those who were members of corporate boards, who proffered various misinterpretations of Adam Smith, who were not in the top ten percent but believed they really had a stake in the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrials, and who intentionally let the investor class run rampant all believed in the infallability of the free market running itself. Which in real terms means those with money concocting various schemes to make themselves even richer. Internal to the financial sector this meant creating horrendously risky financial instruments, and for automobile companies this correlated with focusing on their finance divisions and churning out SUV's and light trucks. On a more popular level, the careers the middle class aspired to were often managerial in nature. Whether one wanted to be a psychologist, a financial analyst, a real estate agent, or work in the entertainment industry, such employment is basically coordinative and not productive in a material sense. This generated the unique situation where the children of unionized auto workers found employment on Wall Street and endeavored to destroy the domestic auto industry. This behavior is certainly beneficial for short term profit, but as a form of parasitic capitalism it merely generates decay. This obsession with the managerial class has resulted in the economy of United States being nothing but a hollowed-out shell. A correlative of this is the university system as a whole, particularly the Ivy League, inculcating a culture of entitlement and reproducing privilege. For those who are not blue-bloods, post-secondary education is a stepping-stone into management. Thus, what is largely taught in the university system is the knowledge needed to effectively coordinate the needs of economic cartels. This creates as a byproduct subservience to the dictates of management, exhortations to elitism, and an overall lack of critical thinking. It should be noted that those who generated the current financial mess and those who rule generally come from the same schools, and think along the same lines. Indeed, our present problems in the very least reveal that management has failed, and their proposed solutions will likely be just as successful.

The ramifications of this systemic crisis are, however, somewhat deeper than a resuscitation of the supposedly smooth normal functioning of the economy. The political economy of the United States has, ever since the Great Depression, been patterned on a liberal interpretation of Keynesian "pump-priming." Which is, whenever there is a downturn in the market, the state intervenes to pick up slack demand. During the New Deal this involved the creation of so many alphabetical agencies and the implementation of public works projects to facilitate employment and develop infrastructure. After the Second World War this state facilitation of demand was transmogrified into the Pentagon system, where the Federal Government, though military contracts and the like, coordinates the development of various kinds of waste to facilitate capital accumulation. What the state-corporate elite fail to take into consideration, however, is that with the planned deindustrialization of the United States, the flow of tax dollars to fund such a system of imperial dominance has declined. Reaganism is a multifaceted phenomenon, but one of its defining features is the use of structural budget deficits to fund the American military. (It should be understood that the Democrats are in line with such thinking, but the Clintonoids in their balanced budgets differed merely in the rate of fiscal decline.) One should note the deviation of this from Keynes' original idea of merely to keep society from collapsing during a depression, but also that such a philosophy endangers social stability itself. The imposition of unpayable debt used for war toys on future generations, as well as its steady increase over the last two decades, particularly with the invasion of Iraq, is probably the greatest indictment of the current system one can find. Moreover, as wages and living standards have declined the civilian use of debt has markedly increased to grow levels of consumption. As profits are contingent on increased consumption and thus economic expansion, the collapse of credit markets, or the issuance of more debt, has put the entire economic system in jeopardy. Thus, the heart of the matter is not really the proper methods of Federal economic stimulation, but that the economy of the United States, no matter how many dollars are printed, is not even viable in the first place.

The basis of American economic growth over the last thirty years or so has been through consumption. As factories have been off-shored overseas mainly via so-called free trade agreements, the United States has become the consumption center of the world. Indeed, the United States has about five percent of the world's population, yet consumes around one third of global productive output. China has, for instance, overtaken the United States in consumption of fossil fuels, but it has four times the population of the United States, and much of this energy is used for crack-industrialization implemented by the PRC. As a result, Americans are consuming more products as their ability to purchase them declines over time, hence increased debt. Moreover, sheer demographic, geopolitical, and environmental constraints imply that such consumption levels are patently unsustainable, and it is a rather odd phenomenon that Americans are becoming more obese while most of the world starves. Overconsumption in of itself produces a variety of social and psychological, one can say, pathologies which are signifiers of social decline. People shooting up a toy store to obtain discounted merchandise is one such example. If anything, structural overconsumption implies that the current configuration of capitalism is premised on the production of massive amounts of waste, and the flooding of such deritus is what has got us where we are in the first place. The deleveraging of the global economy now taking place means that Americans will have to get used to consuming a lot less, and one can question whether that is not necessarily a bad thing.

In Great Depression, the New York Stock Exchange lost nearly ninety percent of its value, many midwestern states lost a good chunk of their population, unemployment hovered around twenty five percent, and factories shut down, not to reopen for nearly a decade. As the United States was the largest industrial power in the world at that time, the Federal government could afford to unleash a massive public works program to mitigate social unrest and provide a public economic stimulus. Contrary to much historical misinterpretation, this domestic policy did not bring the United States out of the depression. In this light, it is difficult to see how exactly Federal spending would mediate the problems resulting from current articulation of the United States within the capitalist world-system. Deficit spending on top of massive public debt for what, exactly? Roads, bridges, broadband, schools- in a word, infrastructure. No doubt the United States is in dire need of such spending, and this is fine if there is demand for people and goods to circulate. Yet, in economic contractions the demand for such services declines, and to be honest, another trillion or two is not enough to offset the massive destruction of wealth, and its correlative demand destruction, that is currently ongoing. Additionally, such a program will, as a whole, struggle in job creation and offering any kind of economic stability to the majority of Americans. When most of the states are on the verge of bankruptcy, when Congress debates the virtues of destroying one the last vestiges of Americas industrial base yet hands over the Treasury to the financial sector, when the job losses per month reaches in the millions, when unemployment runs out, when supermarkets have no food on their shelves, and when suburban enclaves become ghost towns, by then any Federal action will be too little, too late. This phenomenon is merely the culmination of a failed economic regime.

The contemporary structural crisis will be very bad for most Americans, but economic contraction is not without its own opportunities. Perhaps the cemetery seas will once again spring with life, collapsed fisheries will resurge, and forests will regrow. Maybe the decline of fossil fuel consumption will slow down the warming of the earth, so glaciers may not slide into the sea so fast, and coral will not calcify so quickly. Perhaps the singing of birds will drown out the humming of diesel engines, and those in the cities can once again see the stars at night. Possibly the economic influence of the First World will decline on that of the global South, and the latter can develop economies more attuned to their actual needs. Perhaps the current financial crisis will lead to an abatement of American imperialism, and someone who might have been uselessly killed will live. Maybe economic declension will lead to a rearticulation of values, where a life sacrificed for the mere pursuit of wealth will not be seen as an asset. Possibly a new kind of economics can emerge, one that takes into account the real costs of things, like environmental and human degradation into the product. Maybe people will see each other more as human beings and less as articles of commerce. Perhaps Americans will wise up and realize that their entire conception of their existence was a facade, and do something about it. For the engine of our economy has run out of petrol, the gas stations are empty, and there is no more oil to be had in the ground.

Steady Rollin'

2008-10-14T11:04:00.001-07:00

"I came from this city a victim of peace
But I've grown far too filthy to attend to the feast
So I'll take to the hills to live savage and free
I don't need nobody, nobody needs me."-Two Gallants

Over the past nine months or so, I have been on the road to accomplish a somewhat significant endeavor. After one completes their oral exams in a doctorate program, one not only receives the opportunity to pay over a hundred dollars for a meaningless C. Phil degree, but one is also set free to compile the data which will supposedly corroborate the arguments defended in the first place. In order to complete this process I set out on a long journey on the east coast of the United States, moving from south to north in order to offset the worst weather patterns. Consequently I spent much time in various places at various times in various climes, from Columbia to Charleston, Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., New York to Boston. Or if one wanted to be more specific, Rosewood to West Philadelphia (not that University City marketing scheme), Crown Heights to Silver Spring, Revere to Charlottesville, Richmond to Rochester. For most of a year I lived out of three bags, my backpack, a large duffel, and a suitcase. I sent rent deposits to people I never met, dragged my luggage through locales I had never been to, and lived with strangers who would, by the time I departed, cease to be foreign to me.

Admittedly, when I first arrived in Columbia I second guessed myself as to what exactly I had gotten myself into. As I flew Continental my plane was of course late, and combined with the fact that I was last flight in did not help matters much. Moreover, the airline somehow lost my suitcase, and it took me a few hours to find a person to notify the airline where to deliver my bags. And of course, the taxi I did track down was driven by, for lack of a better term, a dude who was complete and utter white trash, and thus reinforced my stereotypes of the South. The fact that he chainsmoked and had no idea where he was going though, I doubt he ever left Columbia, did not help matters. "So, yer uh goin' to Waccamaw huh?" As I was in the cab for close to an hour, I did not reach my domicile until nearly two in the morning. Thankfully, my awesome roommate was not too upset, and as I quickly learned by perusing her bookshelf, not all Southerners were rednecks.

Contrary to the snide remarks of the woman from Birmingham on the plane, Columbia was quite cold, I saw the emergence of spring in DC, the sweltering of summer in New York, and felt the onset of fall in Boston. I was in Columbia for the Democratic Primary, and learned that McCain won the Republican nomination at the Blind Tiger in Charleston, to the acclamation of its crowd, I might add. The latter admittedly freaked me out, for I was not used to a bar filled with dudes wearing blue suit jackets, checkered polo shirts, khakis, and boating shoes alongside women trying to sniff out old money. When snow closed down the roads, I walked to the subway stop in Philadelphia in my vans. I watched UCLA lose in the Final Four for third consecutive year at the Ugly Mug, and viewed the fireworks on July 4th from the Mall. I attended the 160th anniversary of the first Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Unfortunately, I left Brooklyn the very day the West Indian parade was set to pass on Eastern Parkway. I witnessed the stock market crash from my roommate's flat screen in a northern Boston suburb.

The first and only time I ate at a Waffle House, I had eggs, potatoes, toast, cheese grits, pancakes, orange juice, and I gave the bacon to my roommate. I thought I was going to die of diabetes afterwards. One night in Philly I went out with a friend I met in my hostel to a bar downtown, which played some melange of punk-house. The drink special was Yuengling (which is an awesome beer) and a shot of Jim Beam for three dollars. Afterwards we went to Geno's, where I had cheese fries and watched some Italian couple yell at each other for five minutes. I also noticed the "Only Speak English" on the restaurant's window. Later that night I happened to run into the go-go dancer from the bar at a friend of a friend's house. I did not get back until five in the morning that night, and I researched that same day. I saw Saul Williams at the 9:30 Club, A Silver Mt. Zion at the Black Cat, Educated Consumers in two different states and one dependency, and forty thousand people sing along to Illmatic at Jones Beach. I was fortunate to have box seats for a DC United soccer game. I never really understood El-P until I rode the 4 train at two in the morning. I took the Maid of the Mist into Niagara Falls, played miniature golf on Governor's Island in pouring rain, walked sixty blocks in Manhattan one night, and drove through the Shenandoah valley. While on the tour of Bull Run, I was annoyed at the huge statue to Stonewall Jackson, for the French would not have a statue of Rommel on the beaches of Normandy. For the hell of it I walked from Harvard Yard to Boylston Street, and I always got lost in downtown Boston because the streets seemed to mess with my head.

I will miss drinking Guinness and watching English football on Sunday mornings, along with getting Americanos and red velvet cupcakes at Adriana's on my morning walk to the archives. The Green Line cafe in West Philly is a gem, and I passed many an hour in both its old and new location. Kudu is a good coffee house in Charleston, and Five Loaves is a nice place to dine there. Whenever I missed the bus to the National Archives, which was often since it only came once an hour, I bided my time at the Starbucks at PG Plaza. Probably the best Indian food in Philadelphia that I had, and I partook a decent amount of it, was across the street from Penn. I will not miss being yelled at by some Hipster chick in Williamsburg for being too loud at a show, and neither will I be upset at not having to deal with whatever is in the DC which gives me horrible allergies. I had to see a dentist to find out that the pain in my toothache resulted from grinding my teeth due to the cold, and when I had an ingrown toenail removed I bled through my sock on the way to researching. Also, the pizza at the Kosher places on Kingston Avenue are quite terrible. The most white trash supermarket I have ever been in is the Red Lion in Charlottesville, and I felt ashamed when the woman who served breakfast at my hotel in Richmond treated me like a slavemaster. I never understood how the guy who sold counterfeit sunglasses outside of the Schomburg for three dollars a pair made ends meet. Both the Lebovitchers and Mormons tried to convert me at the same day, and I always enjoyed the theological discussions I had with my Barbadian Mormon landlords in Crown Heights. From the train I saw what look to be the bombed-out carcass of the Baltimore ghettos, but perhaps the greatest condemnation of our society is the rotting corpse of upstate New York, which fosters nothing but alienation and xenophobia. I bought Starbucks in Manhattan countless times just to take a piss, and I always enjoyed having Sunday Brunch at Ziggy's on Henry Street (the farmer's omelette is to die for). I had vegetarian chili at Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street. When I first showed up at the house in Revere, there was a former pornstar in the pool (it wasn't hard to figure out), and it was nice smoking doobies of an inferior quality with my Irish-Catholic landlord. I also spilled a large Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee on the T once, which by the way is not as good as it is reputed to be.

Perhaps the craziest things I witnessed was when I was in Boston, a consequence of sheer randomness. The first night I was in New England, after I had gone to check out the city center, I came back and noticed blood all over the steps to the house I was staying at. When I entered I saw my landlord clutching the side of his hand, his eyes glazed. "My friend fucking stabbed me. I should've hit him first, when I had the chance." Um, what? There was blood all over the bathroom floor, and he refused to go to the hospital. He had been drinking, and after a few minutes watching tv he asked if I was hungry. I said I had already eaten, but I would tag along with him. As he had imbibed quite a few beers, I inquired who was going to drive. "Ahh buddy, you are." Um, what? Given the keys to a Mercedes convertible, by someone who I had just met earlier that day, I drove to a bar on Revere Beach while my roommate held his hand in a towel. He had some drinks, he bought me a few, eventually stopped bleeding, and then I drove to a faux-El Torito where I proceeded to protect a married airline stewardess from the drunken advances of my new friend. One night, while walking back from the T, I saw my landlord's girlfriend drive up to the house, run out of the car,scamper into the house, and begin screaming. After a few minutes my landlord calmly walked out and drove away in his convertible. telling me "she's fucking nuts." Satisfied, the girlfriend sauntered out a few minutes later and drove away in her SUV. Another night, I was watching something on tv when my landlord's friend Paul stormed in. "Tawmmy! You facking fack! You drunk! You've got problems!" I told him that my landlord was upstairs sleeping. "He's not fawkin sleeping!" Well, he wasn't now. Paul then sat on the couch, complaining that my landlord had "gotten worse," ranting about how his stepfather from Charlestown was in the mob but is now in jail, bragging that he hadn't drank in months but was obviously on some kind of substance at the time. He was sweating profusely and his eyes were glazed over and distant. Then he turned to me, "you seem like a nice trusting guy. I am no coward. You think I'm not tough? Punch me in the face! I'm ready." Um, what? I spent five minutes trying to convince him that I did not, in fact, have any desire to punch him in the face, and was glad he was not on the couch the following morning.

Living out of your suitcase, having a place to stay but not a home, moving around all the time, meeting new people but few friends, being away from all the people you know for a very long time, eventually grinds on existence. Eventually one kind of becomes numb to the surroundings, and tries to focus on the task at hand. Fear of free time can be a strange thing indeed, a product of being alone all the time. Yet I learned that not all people are bad, that one can trust those you have never met, and that sacrifice can foment its own reward. And I returned to a city with more traffic, is more expensive, and has more homeless than before I left. All this for a goal that is distant and probably anticlimactic. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

And in spite of it all I still miss the City.

Breakdown Systematic

2008-09-24T16:15:00.001-07:00

"Businessmen, they drink my wine,
Plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth." -Bob Dylan

In late September 2008, the great bull market that has made a relatively small amount of people so very rich collapsed. The stock market, the volume of which some says measures the health of the economy, plummeted. Falling 300 points some days, 700 points others, maybe rallying a little bit, the troughs were nevertheless deeper then the peaks, the message clear. Bear Stears went bankrupt, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized by the Federal government, AIG became an arm of American policy, and Lehman Brothers closed its doors. The capitalist world-system, the great free market that professors, business school graduates, and government had all lionized as the greatest and only possible economic form, was contracting, seemingly irrevocably. The reaction among the superclass and their paid scribes was a case study in the collapse of ideology. With the demise of immense fortunes apparently ensuing out of control, the calls for Federal intervention in the markets were deafening. The government had to do SOMETHING to stabilize the markets, to prop up banks, to ensure the flow of credit, to prevent a complete loss of confidence which would precipitate economic collapse.

It was convenient for the scions of Wall Street that the former head of Goldman Sachs, one Henry Paulson, was Secretary of the Treasury. Paulson contrived a government bailout of the market to preserve liquidity, or the flow of money on hand, and to ensure that the economy kept functioning. The amount Paulson asked for, with the connivance of Ben Bernake, the head of the Federal Reserve, was 700 billion dollars. That number was reached not by any analysis of potential losses or an understanding of outstanding corporate debt, but with a belief that a "really big number was needed" by the Treasury Department to hand out as it saw fit. The result was an odd coalition of mainstream Democrats, moderate Republicans, and President Bush supporting the bailout, while conservative Republicans, sensing the opposition of their constituency, suddenly realized fiscal conservatism along with a few left-wing Democrats. Barack Obama supported the idea, while John McCain flew into Washington, lost his mind, and then went back on the campaign trail. For a few days it did seem like things were falling apart, but the most telling moment was when Paulson and Bernake were sitting before the House Subcommittee and Barney Frank urged the two heads of government finance to convince the average American, who could still consume and receive a paycheck, why this bailout was needed. Perhaps nothing was a clearing indication of how things really work in America, and that for the affluent politicians are a cheap and very efficient form of investment.

In order to elucidate what I believe to be the complete cynicism, cronysim, classism, and corruption behind government subsidy of the rich, I offer the following imaginary dialogue.
Me: (Knocks on Paulson's door). Hey.
Paulson: Oh, hello, good to see you again.
Me: Uh, yeah um...listen. I have a problem.
Paulson: Oh yes? What is it?
Me: I have no more money.
Paulson: You have no more money? I thought you personally guaranteed positive margins in the long run.
Me: Well, um, the problem is that the loans I took out for grad school, to complete my degree, well I never really did much of that. Ordinarily, if I didn't leverage myself for a post-undergraduate degree, I could just do the minimum and pay the fees. But the problem is that instead of going to class, I spent the last two years in Vegas gambling, boozing, and philandering with hookers, so my bank account is broke and no one will lend me money.
Paulson: Oh my, I see, that is a problem.
Me: (Eyes a bottle of liquor in the cabinet) Hey, is that scotch?
Paulson: Yes, single malt.
Me: (Grabs a coffee mug off Paulson's desk, goes over to the cabinet and pours a drink) You see, Mr. Secretary, the way I see it, there are three things in life. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. I am a known known, my debt and whether I will pay it back in a known unknown, but if I become insolvent, that will be an unknown unknown. (Sits back down and sips booze) My inability to deleverage myself could have a ripple effect on the entire economy that could bring it down to who knows what depths. Which is why I have a plan.
Paulson: A plan? Really. Do tell.
Me: Well, the way I see it, I need an ready influx of cash to pay off my debts and to survive in this crazy economy. So my idea is that I sell you my debt of 50 grand for $100,000 in Treasury notes. That way I would just be a known known, and you can take the known unknown of my debt and pawn it off to some investors, which would gain money due to the interest on the debt. I see it as a win win situation.
Paulson: So you want me to buy your debt at twice the price, and move that risk on to the Federal government, and turn it into a form a investment that might have no value at all?
Me: (Takes out a little packet of white powder from coat pocket, stuff a bit into my nose with a pinky) Yes. (sniffs) I think, you know, in this investment climate something must be done to protect the financial solvency of essential financial actors. I believe I am too big to fail, you know.
Paulson: Is that Panama Red? You know when I was in business school we had some really good shit in our coke party's, and the women were so easy....
Me: Listen, I don't really know where the Tutankamen comes from, a freaking mule could have died on their way from Columbia and I wouldn't really care. I'm not that interested in hearing about your bald ass's glory days, either. I just need the money.
Paulson: Oh yes, so sorry. Let me get Bernake in here.
(Bernake comes in, Paulson explains the situation).
Bernake: As the Fed Chairman who is responsible for regulating the money supply, I have talked it over with Treasury Secretary Paulson. We have agreed that your problems present dire circumstances for the economy, and we have come up with a plan whereby we would buy up your "toxic assets" for $150,000 as a necessary measure. This, we believe, is the only way America can go forward and avoid a deep recession, if not a depression. While the economic effects may be dire in the short run, in the long run it will be better for everyone.
Me: Yeah, whatever man. Just cut me a check. (wipes away a little blood from my nose) So uh, you two gentleman know of any good call girls in Washington?

The entire premise of the bailout reveals the basic assumptions governing the cognition of the ruling class. It should be pointed out that what caused the collapse of the international markets was not, as some conservative pundits attest, the doling out of subprime loans largely to people of color whose credit rating was specious. The subprime market comprised no more than 6-8 percent of outstanding loans. The reason for the market meltdown was due to the workings of the financial lending houses themselves. In order to generate increasing returns on investments, financial firms created new financial tools as means to increase profits from debt. The most notorious of these is the derivative, which used complex mathematical proofs to break up individual loans into very small pieces, combine them with other like-packaged debt, and sell them to investors around the world. Such packaged debt was circulated at ever greater amounts, so that the debt from loans themselves became overcaptialized. To top it all off, companies like Lehman Brothers utilized what are called credit-default swaps, which were guarantees on the return of investment from derivatives. Monikered differently they are insurance, but being titled a credit default swap hides it from being regulated as insurance is. It should be noted that such specious investment practices were corroborated by both political parties, as financial deregulation of this kind first began under the last years of the Clinton Presidency, and Phil Gramm himself pushed the bill through as the "Financial Modernization Act." No one knows exactly how much money is tied up in derivatives, some say about 40 trillion, others say more, but even low estimates of such securitized debt are staggering. And the bailout itself just pours money on those companies still standing from this financial mess, essentially rewarding the progenitors of financial doomsday with government money. And don't worry, much of its has already been spent on CEO packages and the like. If anything this proves that markets cannot regulate themselves, that CEO's are not rational actors, and that the actions of investors and corporations should be not be worshiped.

The basic problem surrounding this greatest crisis since the Great Depression, are conceptions governing the function and mechanism of economics. Contrary to what we are often told, wealth is not generated from circulating commodities but from production. When you don't produce anything, you have to expend wealth to obtain goods. As deindustrialization has largely sent the means of production in the United States elsewhere, the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) has functioned as a means of false capital generation. I say false, because instead of wealth generation it actually acts as a form of private taxation, causing individuals to pay various kinds of rent in order to function. This is a particularly oppressive form of capital accumulation, as it does nothing but compels people to work more to meet increased costs of living. Moreover, the basic form of growth in this economic model is the housing market, where speculation in this sector leads to increased consumption and keeps the economy growing. In order for this to happen housing prices have to increased ad infinitum, and when the hell as this ever happened? To me, it is beyond comprehension that someone like Allen Greenspan, who not long ago was considered a "saint," could have ever believed that housing markets could never contract. What do they teach at Ivy League business schools? How to find the best day spa? Anyways, the FIRE sector is posited as a method to go around the capital flight that accompanies deindustrialization, by recirculating foreign capital into the United States and offsetting the fall of the dollar. As the market has crashed, so too will the basic structure of the American economy, though few have realized it.

It boggles my mind that people like Larry Kudlow could say that he talked to Alexander Hamilton in his sleep and that the latter would have approved the bailout. You know, I could go on about how Jean-Paul Marat might think of such policies, but then I would be labeled a sociopath. Anyways, Kudlow's comments merely illustrate the utter baseness that makes up the contemporary bourgeois mind. To Hamilton, capital accumulation was a means to and end and not an end in itself. Such a process was intended to strengthen the state and generate a higher standard of living, not endenger economic crises and destroy public credit. Hamilton after all wrote: "Credit is an intire thing. Every part of it has the nicest sympathy with every other part; wound one limb, and the whole tree shrinks and decays. The security of each creditor is inseparable from the security of all creditors." Do tell, Mr. Kudlow, how is the public credit? The United States government has just added a trillion dollars to its outstanding debt, a good deal of it worthless paper. The total cost is at least 5 grand per person. Personally, I would like my 5 thousand dollars back. Throwing money at a sinking economy is not going to solve the problem, it will at best offset the crisis for another day. People forget that money is merely a symbol, a reflection of wealth backed up by public trust. When that trust is gone, so is the value of money. If the market cannot settle itself, as its scions said it always would, then let us do away with it and move onto something more efficient and less costly. For this public subsidy for private profit business is awfully costly, and its excesses are being brought upon future generations by people who cannot even account for their own actions. Those who said there was never money for health care or education or even Social Security are a bunch of fucking liars. These are the same people who effectively ordered their easily bought politicians to hand over the treasury, who cannot bear their own risk they created. People who should be bent over the scaffold, waiting for Dr. Guillotin to pull the rope.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Life As Tragedy

2008-09-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

"Where do the dreams of babies go?
'Cause you know they're all so good
And they're also gone so fast." -Chan Marshall

A paradigm in vogue in much of the social sciences is that reality is a constructed phenomenon. Given that social relations are merely constructs, or are governed by paradigms that are the physical expression of ideas created by humans, many scholars turned to individuality as the basis of explanation. Society, then, is merely a collection of individuals and its larger organization is the consequence of a myriad of choices acting in a congealed unity. Choice is the operative word, for identity and the path of the individual is merely the result of conscious action. Agency is also a popular term, denoting that every person has some impact on their life and that of others. Everyone has agency, everyone is important, and thus everyone has some kind of conscious, positive impact on each other's lives. Such thinking, while important on a small scale, cannot comprehend the facets of life over which people have no control.

In ancient Greece, tragedy was one of the most popular forms of theater. Offering its audience pleasure based on the climax of human suffering, tragedy explained the limitations of life in a world ruled by the gods. In contrast to romance, which makes suffering merely a price to be paid for a promise of future emancipation, tragedy offers no compensation for suffering. A protagonist cannot reverse the abyss to which his actions have led him, his appeals to deities to reverse his fate falls on deaf ears, and there is no one to assure him (or her) that their suffering will not be in vain. Tragedy is remorseless, and the redeeming insight either comes too late or at a price of endless suffering. As the gates of hell stand open and damnation is apparent, the protagonist cannot evade responsibility. Thus Oedipus gouges his eyes out, Faust is robbed from his moment of true happiness, Hamlet causes the death of everyone he loves, and Zarathustra can never shake his isolation. Tragedy, then, is inescapable.

The bulk of modern life is premised on choice. We choose our schools, decide our career paths, and select our mates. We decide where to live, who to associate with, and who to shun. We stress over what commodities to buy, where to purchase them, and ponder if that decision was the correct one. We choose to have children, how many, and how to raise them. We select how to use up our free time, whether it is to travel, waste time watching television, or revel in some form of celebrated debauchery. We choose which political party to belong to, select our leaders in elections, and console ourselves in the necessity of our participation. We, then, are civilized, because our society allows, is even defined by, the extent of individual discretion. Little thought is given to things we have little control over, for such fleeting ruminations diminish our self-conceptions. Tragedy is defined if not by the absence of choice, than the unintended and inescapable consequences of our actions. If a characteristic of modernity is the exacerbation of individual choice, then tragedy is its dark underbelly, rearing its ugly head when human action decays into collective egotism.

If our society worships the ideal of individual initiative, much of my life has been defined by things over which I had no control. I have watched both my grandfathers descend into dementia, become physically helpless, and watched their caskets lowered into the grounds. I have witnessed my mother needlessly suffer for a decade, and my father defeatedly wallow in the depths of depression. I have seen mothers betray their sons, and fathers beat their daughters. My understanding of the family is defined as much by selfishness as the unity of shared descent. I have learned that collective ethnicity is not a substitute for tribalism, elitism, and cruelty. I have seen my best friend become a Nazi, and many others become little more than memories. I know that love can turn into mistrust, become some kind of depraved antipathy, and eventually die. I understand that most people's lives become static at a certain point, and that they do not change. Often ignorance and fear govern people's lives, causing them to despise what they do not want to know. I realize that much of experience stems from living through pain, and that the best way to actualize life is to find a way to deal with it.

What are considered to be the most important events or turning points in the human past, are themselves tragic. The Pentateuch, and the basis of three monotheistic religions and much of Western civilization, would not exist with the enslavement of Jews in Egypt. People forget that Christianity was the slave religion of the Roman Empire, and that it in turn became an oppressive doctrine when it was co-opted by Constantine. The Sephardim were expelled from Spain the same year that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, enacting two very different kinds of diasporas. European colonization would have been more difficult had not their diseased wiped out much of the indigenous population, and that convoyed avarice meant that soon after the survivors were numbered amongst the dead. Moctezuma, after allowing the Spanish to imprison him and overthrow his dynasty, was stoned to death by his own subjects. The Africans who traversed the Middle Passage were first captured by fellow Africans. Much of history is men doing terrible things to each other, closing off more benevolent paths simply to satisfy some base disposition. Ultimately, tragedy is Louverture staring into Napoleon's fleet at Samana Bay, the Kronsdadt sailors glaring into Trotsky's guns, the Spanish Communists storming the Barcelona telephone exchange as Franco's troops tightened their vise, and the people of Hiroshima glimpsing the lone American bomber in the sky.

Today, as much as we like to revel in our individuality, we in fact live in tragic times. Society is slowly crumbling because in our own narcissism we forget that man is fundamentally a social animal. People gladly give up liberties some gave their lives for, simply for a semblance of security. We live amongst increasing inflation, stagnant wages, and various manifestations of the glass ceiling. The economic basis of our existence is crumbling, and the manifest corruption of what is termed politics prevents any serious examination of the causes as well as meaningful solutions. People continue to think they can get rich, while wealth in increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few. Those who have money continuously aim to spend it on mere foibles, while most of the earth's population barely has enough to eat, let alone is able to obtain an education. What is considered justice is merely a euphemism for state repression and the construction of more prisons. The decline in feminism is due, in part, to women proffering patriarchal values. The Civil Rights movement and Feminism have been co-opted into merely a justification for neoliberal oppression. In order to stave off environment destruction we need to seriously invest in public infrastructure, but the government is actually broke because of the biggest war crimes of the century. Children are born into a world where, for the sake of economic growth, more and more carbon is spewed into the atmosphere, causing methane to bubble to the surface, where once the tipping point is reached most life on earth will perish.

The Politics of Space

2008-08-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

"All the warning lights have started to flash in unison: the mercury soars, skies darken, dams creak, faults strain, and politicians wave rockets. Then despite an epic drought, suburbanites are gripped by the death wish to water their lawns." -Mike Davis

Once, on a bus ride up the Carmel Mountains, I had a realization as to the particularities of distance. Just a few miles from the sea, hills jutted up to define the easternmost coastal plain of the Mediterranean, forming one of the mountain ranges that define the Jordan Valley. On my way to partake in an "authentic" Druze dinner with IDF soldiers in tow, I wonder why I can't get a similar meal from Palestinians in the Galilee. Well, its was more pondering than questioning, as Israelis, like the British before them, always implemented a "divide and rule" philosophy amongst their colonized populations. Either the Druze who I was going to visit descended from those who sided with the Yishuv, which is possible since they are the few Arabs who allowed in the IDF, or the geography of their residence rendered them fortunate in 1948. As I was younger the one thing I wanted to buy while in the Holy Land was a nargileh pipe, which isn't in my possession any more. Before shopping I was tutored by a soldier to say "anachah" when arguing the price with a Druze shopkeeper. Since the Middle East isn't as inundated with the dictates of a fixed market price, such a thing was considered to be proper. I did eventually buy a very nice one that revolves for around 160 shekels, and the Israeli dude I was with said it was a fair price. Walking in the Druze village I realized I was in some kind of ghetto, as it looked poorer and the people seemed alien with regard to what I had seen of the rest of the country. While eating homemade pita and hummus I wondered how much money my sponsors paid the family, and what percentage of it comprised their weekly income. Riding down the mountains as the sun set over the Mediterranean, it hit me how far away the West Bank seemed, no matter that it was less than a dozen miles away. It seemed as distant as Iraq was from the United States.

The human partition of physical space, though it can seem natural, is not. The places we live in, the people we interact with, where we can go, all reflect the dynamics of power that we were born into and which we all, in our own way, replicate. The function of space is to imply social position, where exactly one lies amidst the miasma of race, class, gender and state power. In spite of the sheer randomness of it all the allocation of physical space is a result of a certain kind of planning, and an implementation of a specific kind of order. The habitations that we live in (or don't), the neighborhoods we people, the stores that we shop, the schools we attend, the bars we frequent, the places where we work, and the means with which we get there all symbolize our place in the world. Physicality and personhood feed off each other to form experiential identity, to the point where people from the suburbs from different cities are more alike than their brethren from the ghetto a few miles from their home.

A prime example of late Georgian architecture, Monticello is one of the premier plantation houses in the East Coast. Mixing nostalgia for Greco-Roman themes, the traditional red brick of the masters of Virginia, and Enlightenment accents, Monticello is a testament to the imagination of the third President of the United States. Guests entering through the eastern portico will at first notice a weather vane showing the direction of the wind, and then the hand-wound giant clock, always reminding those within its sight whose time it is. Upon entering the mansion through the glass doors one is struck by the accoutrements of the lobby. Strewn around the walls are artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition, objects of goodwill from indigenous tribes who Jefferson desired to trade with, and eventually displace. Straight ahead are two gigantic maps of two continents that border the Atlantic, North America and Africa. As they date from the early 19th Century, they depict known continental borders but little of what lies beyond the coastal regions of either landmass. As one goes to the sitting room for some tea the refreshments appear through a revolving door in the wall, the purveyors of such refreshment unseen. After a little conversation guests would stroll in the garden, taking in the pond and walking along the raised platforms. What few guests realized, if they pondered about it at all, was that the plantation house literally rested above the domestic slave quarters, where slaves cooked, cleaned, stored the wine, and often invisibly doted on those inside the house. If guests chose not to stare at the edge of the Appalachians they would overlook Mulberry Row, the lined collection of slave quarters whose appearance and function were quite different from the main house. For Monticello was uniquely designed to hide the social structure on which it was built, to shield the eye from slavery though it could not function without it.

The advent of suburbanization is one of the most profound examples of political space in the deepest sense. Until the end of the Second World War, my ancestors were urban denizens, providing the hard labor on which the United States was built. The ending of the war, however, posed a real problem, as there was not enough housing for returning soldiers and, to top it off, they were breeding like rabbits. To solve this problem and to made good on its promise to American soldiers, the government passed the G.I. bill. This bill not only paid for college for servicemen, but also provided low-interest loans so they could afford to buy a house. My grandfather, for example, was able to move his family out a Brooklyn project and into a single family house in Westbury. Still working at CBS Studios in Manhattan, he took the Long Island Railroad, funded by local government, everyday to his job and back. As only men served in the war, the GI Bill only applied to them, and only they received the employment benefits for such government aid. Returning GI's, in fact, replaced women factory workers, so that women either became suburban domestic housewives, or did traditional female labor like being a nurse or secretary. Women might have been the heads of castles in Levittown, but men were still masters of the domain. Suburbanization was also implicitly racialized, as only white servicemen received FHA loans, leaving the cities for the darker inhabitants. An instance of spatial whiteness, suburbanization generated a generalized whiteness where before Jews, Italians, Poles, and Irish all lived in separate neighborhoods. Cities which before were defined by their core came to resemble donuts where those on the outside lived in the hole, a reflection of the comfortable ones on the periphery.

Slum clearance has been a characteristic of bourgeois civilization since the 19th Century. Few people remember that Paris used to be the home of radical working class culture, the origins of the Sans-Culottes, the sections whose fighters stormed the Tuileries, and the first example, in 1871, of successful working class revolution. Yet the Germans who surrounded Paris let the French Republican army through to attack the city, and as a result of their victory close to 100,000 communards were slaughtered. The Commune's demise meant the fulfillment of Hausmann's reconfiguration of Paris, where the crowded, close-knit sections that were the origins of the barricades were replaced by broad, manicured streets that made up arrondisements. The police and national guard coincidentally had easier access to move about the city, and this physical reorganization provided the basis for contemporary understanding of Paris as the "City of Love." Gentrification, in its own way, is a modern form of slum clearance that seeks to retake social space from the predominantly white and wealthy. In Manhattan, for example, the influx of capital, and this increased rents, has meant that SoHO has transformed from an artist colony into a more urban version of South Coast Plaza. Similarly the expansion of Columbia University and the ringing of Central Park with million dollar condos results in the squeezing out of blacks and Hispanics in Harlem, who were never given the chance to own their own homes in the first place. The question is not simply cultural, or as one commercial realtor told me that the blacks prefer fried chicken over wine bars. For the wine bars are symbolic of a new residential regime, injecting in money to make it profitable for the owners of rent-controlled buildings to sell. As the City of New York is essentially the Dictatorship of Manhattan (I think only two subway lines don't go through the island), one can rest assured that this philosophy is spreading throughout the Five Boroughs. If you can imagine it, probably in my lifetime Malcom X Boulevard will be cleared of poor blacks. Thus it is somewhat understandable when I first got off at 125th street, and the child of some white dude was running amok on the side walk, that some black woman on a stroller turned to the father and told him to get the fuck downtown where he belongs.

Perhaps the greatest organization of spacial disparity is that of colonialism. Under such a regime lines are created that splits two world in two, that created a physical terrain where certain practices are accepted while others are not. For Colon and his intellectual descendants, the Americas operated as a carte blanche where Europeans could perform any action in order to get rich. Thus Colon could order the enslavement of the Arawaks, make them work for gold until they died of overwork, and ordered those who resisted his rule to be exterminated. The Portuguese could switch from trading gold with the Africans to trading for Africans, and then develop Brazil as a slave colony. The Dutch could fuel their empire by pirating the Spanish and imposing their cartels on the East Indies. In a similar vein, the British could open the Chinese market by going to war with them to force them to import opium, just like the United States helped fund their covert operations in Cambodia and Laos by selling cheap opium to American GI's in Vietnam. Colonialism operates by the mindset of "beyond the line," where practices that are accepted on the outside would never be proper inside such regimes. Europeans enslaved others while the practice died out on the continent, they didn't destroy each other wholesale just to prove a point, and they implemented debt-service on their former colonies while their domestic populations became fat, comfortable, and lazy. If the best a person can do in life is to work in a sweatshop in the Marianas or have U.S. Marines knock down their door, such a fate is merely a reflection of the spatiality into which they were born.

Note: My subway stop is not on the map.

Seraphim Revolver Spinning Oblivion

2008-08-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

"War is always the first desire of a powerful government that wants to become more powerful." -Maximilien de Robespierre

In the midst of the ever-extending political campaign season, in which Americans can, one day every four years, ratify pre-determined selections, the machinations of the American empire are unending. The "democratic" dictator of Georgia called Russia's bluff, and with promises of American backing by the Secretary of State, witnessed Russian troops beat back his army to protect Georgian residents with Russian passports. Funded by the United States, armed by Israel, Saakashvili is an ally of the United States because in working to extend American political, martial, and economic influence he does what he is told. At the same time Pakistan's President resigned in lieu of being overthrown, and the two potential candidates are busy negotiating with the American Ambassador to state their qualifications for the job. In these kinds of relationships the divide between foreign governments and the State Department is rather weak, so one can say that instead of Musharaff stepping down as Dictator of Pakistan, he merely resigned his position within the State Department. Imperialism, despite the strength of the metropole, needs a native group of servants to run things, and the colonial class it nurtures is always culturally closer to their masters than the people they sprung from.

As empire is fundamentally an expression of power, the network of alliances it sustains in order to assert control is mindboggling and ever-shifting. In the Seventies, for example, the United States gave military and financial assistance to the Kurds as a bulwark against pan-Arabism, then wholeheartedly supported Saddam Hussein who butchered and gassed them, gave Turkey the weapons used to slaughter them in 1990's, and is now the staunchest supporter of what is a de-facto independent state in northern Iraq. Kurdistan, at the same time, will never declare itself to be independent as long as the United States is allied with Turkey, who has fought a low-intensity war since the American occupation of Iraq in order to stem Kurdish recidivism. If Kurdistan were to declare itself independent, then the Kurds in eastern Turkey would declare their independence along with the Iraqi Kurds, where upon Turkey would send its army into Iraq for real, and the United States would have to choose. Given that American troops occupy a supposedly sovereign Iraq, the result would be of the utmost importance to American dominance in the Middle East. One of the problems of imperialism is managing the forces one has unleashed in order effectively ensure the empire runs smoothly.

The question of war, or of declared armed conflict between independent states, is a relative proposition in imperial relations. Empire, despite its gleaming veneer, is always premised on the use of force in establishing order. What is considered to be normative, or rather when there is no organized native opposition to empire, is still intrinsically violent. Thus the Surge in Iraq is said to be working but Baghdad is still being ethnically cleansed, Colombia is a strong ally but American-paid goons still murder union organizers, and Haiti has a stable government but people still starve in the streets of Port-au-Prince. If imperialism is not premised on permanent "hot" war per-se, then constant and consistent state-directed violence should be considered as its modus vivendi. Stability, then, is merely the efficacious direction of violence in order to ensure the proper outcome for the purveyors of empire. State-directed violence against others is always seen as liberatory or just, while violence conveyed against what are seen as imperial interests are filtered as acts of insurgency, illegality, and terrorism. When Saddam Hussein started a war against Iran he was showered with weapons and money, but when he invaded Kuwait the United States sent in the jackals. For the average person in this world there is no difference between the two actions, but the disparity is immense for the American empire. Many a political science paper has been written to codify and define the distinction.

The impetus to maintain and extend influence and power crosses all boundaries and demolishes all restraint in order to do so. The Mujahadeen, who in the Eighties Reagan called freedom fighters, were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghani tribal chief who the CIA made into the most powerful man in Afghanistan. It didn't bother anyone that he threw acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil, that Peshawar soon became one of the leading exporters of heroin in the world, that the CIA didn't know where all of their M-16's and Surface-to-Air missiles went, or that Hekmatyar was a good friend of Osama Bin Ladin. All that mattered at the time that Hekmatyar was opposed to the Communist government in Kabul, who aside from disputes with the Kremlin, wanted to educate women, and build schools and hospitals. Don't let history be whitewashed like an Aaron Sorkin film, the CIA nor the Mujahadeen did not defeat the Soviets to develop the country, and when the United States double-crossed the Taliban it was merely another excuse to drop cluster bombs that resembled food packets. In the grand scheme of things the difference is minute, as forgotten thousands died in order to send a message. Which was merely a reaction to the message sent to the American government by its former assets. Regardless of whether higher-ups were in on it, the obsession which deviates from the larger phenomenon, it is true that former (or current) CIA-trained operatives flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center. No one ever wondered how, with their record, they were able to enter the country in the first place, let alone learn how to fly planes in Florida. In any case it revealed what is really meant by spreading democracy and freedom is this world. There is, in fact, little difference between the corrupt version of pure hatred spewed by Al-Qaida and the ruling ideology of the Saudi royal family, let alone the power-hungry warlords running the ISI, scheming to get their grips on Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The only real diversion between them is the latter groups choose to work with American intervention, while the former see its removal as the necessary to establish a new Caliphate. The enemies of enemies who are friends of friends make strange bedfellows indeed.

The constant shifting of alliances, the shuffling of pieces on a chessboard, is part of the great game to master the dwindling resources of the earth. Petroleum, natural gas, coltan, clean water. For military powers like China, Russia, the United States, and in its own way the EU, corruption, instability, and state violence need to be implemented in order to gain material and influence. It is, in a sense, state capitalism laid bare, a head under a boot, money transfigured from blood. A main difference, though, is while the Chinese preach pure authoritarianism, the Russians nouveaux pseudo-fascism, and the Europeans liberal democracy, the American government is run by and gains its legitimacy from a large voting block who truly believe in the necessity of the Apocalypse. Where Christianity is not the golden rule but following the path laid out in Revelations to start the Second Coming. Not that is it the basis of American empire, but it turns astonishment into clarity when the United States chooses to not go along with the chemical weapons treaty, the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, the Geneva Conventions, or develops biological weapons in Fort Dietrich and give them to allies. When the United States chooses not to spend the paltry sum needed to keep ex-Soviet nuclear scientists employed, and leave them to the global underground weapons trade for employment. It cannot be merely a coincidence that the United States is allied with military groups on its International Terrorist list in Eastern Iraq, its Harri allies in Lebanon allow Salafi operatives into the country, only to double-cross them later and demolish a Palestinian refugee camp in the process, or that the United States is using fake nuclear weapons as an excuse to go to war while the hundreds that Israel possesses is neither monitored by the Non-Proliferation Treaty nor seen as problematic in regional diplomatic relations. People forget that Golda Meir almost nuked Cairo in the '73 War, and no one seems to consider that the American war against Iran, which has already begun via U.S. Special Forces and the Treasury Department, will eviscerate the already faltering American economy, possibly lead to nuclear exchange, and murder millions of people. Ever seeking out the latest enemy, foreign policy has become nothing more than institutionalized sadism.

In terms of imperial management, the difference between realism and neo-conservatism is merely the projection of strength. Where so-called realism seeks diplomacy as more efficient method of war, neo-conservatism sees war as the only acceptable form of diplomacy. As the latter has essentially been Washington's modus-vivendi for the last thirty years, it should be assumed that is what the people who run this country want, forever. In a country where the government pays for billboards that advertise one out of four business don't open after a terrorist attack, to always be prepared for the next one, spitting fear without ever locating the source. Where nameless remnants of scarred bodies, all of whom had some relative, guarantee reactive violence. Where the cabal who call the shots resurrect Continuity of Government, a relic of the Cold War, to implement dictatorship whenever planes fall out of sky again. Where the last eight years have eroded the efficacy of every branch except the executive, where the legal justifications for autocracy have already been implemented. Where bankers in London, New York, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Berlin lend money to a government that bleeds red, and no one knows who or what it flows to. Where the American ruling class, aware of its self-imposed economic decay, will stop at nothing to ensure its supremacy, and have declared it as such. Where the contradictions unleashed by subsections of various agencies hidden from any public scrutiny will play themselves out in unimagined horror, where a life of simple peace and real security will be naught.

The greatest gift we can give the world is the devolution of American power.

Harder Than You Think

2008-07-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

"Kerry lost
Colin Powell doin the town
Ashcroft's assed off
The shit is even getting more foul
Network, of elected delegates
Are all derelicts
Look how shiesty Kerrick get
Damn it's all relevant
It's never how they tell it is
So I gotta get my shit straight
And handle my biz
The next time I have to go vote, I might go
Plus I heard there's a lot of jobs
And lot of fine ass hoes, in Ohio" -Akir

The 1960's were an epochal period in American history, particularly with regard to fundamental change in established ruling beliefs. The Civil Rights and Feminist movements, which were somewhat interrelated, made it so that the state could not be explicitly particularist in the expression of rule. Meaning, that both Civil Rights and Feminism ushered in an era where politics could not be explicitly exclusive, where formerly oppressed groups had claims requiring redress in order to fulfill liberty and equality, the proclaimed ideals of the Republic. Indeed, it is within the framework of American nationalism that both movements became part of the dominant ruling ideology. With the Civil Rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of 1965 purportedly made the government colorblind once and for all, in that de jure segregation in the United States became illegal. Similarly with Second-wave Feminism, Title IX correlated Federal funding with sexual equality in university programs, college admissions fully opened up to women, abortion became legalized, and women were able have occupations besides teachers, nurses, and domestics. Thus the grassroots work and determination of millions of people became enshrined in legalism and the discourse of equality of opportunity.

Though instrumental in establishing fundamental change, the Civil Rights and Feminist movements faltered in their inability to systematically inculcate their ideals beyond the scope of American liberalism. Less oppressive laws and access to education made a better life for some, but historically-developed structures of power still existed which dampered the effect of both movements. Desegregation, for example, did not really create equality in education when all the white children either switched districts or went to private school. For women, equality of opportunity still does not mean equality of pay, and religious-affiliated health care centers can easily skirt access to abortion. As the momentum of the 1960's petered out, those frustrated with the stilted nature of change devolved into identity politics, where if a certain cause did not fit a particular individual concern than its relevance would be moot. This resulted in the fracturing of the generalized cultural revolt that was the 1960's, and combined with the integration of many movement leaders and followers into the Democratic Party, meant the denoument of any effective resistance against the onslaught of Reaganite reaction.

The 2008 Democratic primary is labeled historic because, if either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama win the party nomination, than it would be the first time that either a woman or a black person would become President of the United States. (Note: This is still an if. Never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to lose an election.) The primary has unleashed an outpouring of immense support for both candidates by their respective partisans. Clinton supporters see her as a proper corrective to the George W. Bush Administration, a vindication of feminism, and the proof that women can wield power as well as men. Those who back Obama view him as the representative of 400 years of struggle against entrenched racism, a sharp change from Clintonian party domination, and a more optimistic choice that can reverse the worrisome decline of American prestige. Both candidates, though not necessarily intentionally, garner legitimacy from memories of the 1960's, and both candidates offer compromised versions of that era at best.

Hillary Clinton did not set out to be the first feminist President of the United States. Believing herself to be somewhat entitled to the Party's nomination, she campaigned as a centrist who offered a less reactionary program to right the deviation that is the Bush presidency. Clinton's platform, in fact, is nothing more than a rehashing of the program of her husband. Though there is much lip service to Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Health Care and the like, Clinton admits that she would do little to overturn the basic policy decisions of the George W. Bush Administration. Much of Clinton's justification for her candidacy rests on her claims of experience, which, compared to Obama's, are serving one more Senatorial term and being the wife of the President for eight years. The latter ironically is not a very feminist claim, and if experience is merely a correlative to having more skeletons in one's closet than one can question how positive that is as well. When faced with Obama's success Clinton, who claims to supports human rights, unleashed a coded racist campaign in the South against both Muslims and Blacks. It was convenient to Clinton's image that whenever the campaign would utilize racist politics similar to Nixon's Southern strategy, the blame would fall to one of the brain trust like Geraldine Ferraro. Combined with rather insanely aggressive foreign policy statements, Clinton's candidacy represents more of the same rather than anything else. What is surprising is the extent to which Clinton supporters, especially white women, irrationally project their grievances on someone who doesn't represent them. Someone who was one the Wal-Mart Board of Directors and is proud of the Democratic Party's rightward turn resembles Margaret Thatcher more than anything else.

Barack Obama is argued to be representative of greater change in American politics than the other Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Imbued with the liberal legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, Obama is hailed as a supposed example that America has moved beyond racism. Imbued with the optimism that a united America is a better America, Obama's campaign is merely nothing more than a marketing scheme which proffers nothing more than empty elecitoneering. It is important to understand that Obama's racial background is much different from the majority of American blacks, and Obama is not black like Frederick Douglass, W.E. BuBois, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver. Obama did not emerge from the depths of slavery and segregation, and his mixed-race background was used as a way to enter into local politics. Those who naively look to Obama as a saint conveniently forget that he built up a constituency among Arab and Black supporters in Chicago, only to turn his back upon them when he became a Senator. It is significant that Obama distanced himself from his church and then resigned from it once the so-called Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, but Obama has been able to chimerically pitch himself into whatever he needs to get elected, even if it means to downplay and deny his blackness. It is a profound commentary on the state of race relations in this country that electability is correlated with whiteness, and though Obama has to do it in order to become President, one should not forget that it is his choice. He in fact takes blacks for granted, giving them lectures on how to behave while pitching a theme of colorblindness when it is obvious this country is not. His supporters should not forget as well that for all the talk of change Obama is part of the extablishment, that he took money from Tony Rezko, that he lies and gets away with it, and that he does not deign to change much of anything. Unlike Clinton he was not in the Senate to vote for the Iraq War, but he did vote to legalize the expansion of domestic surveillance. The point is that Obama stands for a more rational and efficient American empire, and that means that innocent people both here and abroad will die because of it.

When looking at political candidates, one should examine their policies more than their personal lives. I don't really care what Hillary Clinton thought when her husband was being fellated by interns, or that Obama did coke in Chicago and may have sucked some guy off in the back of a limo, that is their personal business. The fact of the matter is that voters are being swindled, that their suffrage will alter the status quo when it will merely result in minor tweaking. The United States has major structural problems, and it is obvious that both parties are ideologically incapable of confronting them. Instead, the legacy of the 1960's is being resurrected to legitimate campaigns that have been reduced to a politics of symbolism. Feminists desire a female President who if in power will act like any other male predecessor, and Obama supporters will elect a mixed-race man who has already turned his back on the darker aspect of his heritage. People who view politics as an article of faith have already drank the kool-aid, but they can't blame Jim Jones for spiking it. The lasting significance of this election is that the 1960's movements failed in enacting lasting structural change, and that paradoxically the progenitors of said movements will use their memory to destroy what is left of them.

Motherfucker=Redeemer

2008-07-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

"The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin 'realities.'" -Frederich Nietzsche

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proffered the oft-referenced master-slave dialectic as a demonstration of human relations. The dialectic is set up as battle to the death between two embodied consciousnesses, both wanted to assert themselves and be recognized by their opposite. Yet, one aware being is willing to risk its life to gain recognition, while the other is unwilling. As a consequence, the conscious being who is willing to risk their life for power becomes the lord, and the one who refused becomes the slave. Devastated by defeat, the bondsman humbly submits to labor for the lord. In the process of the formation of lord and bondsman the matrix of dependence shifts, however. The lord is tied to the world of consumption by obtaining control over the bondsman's labor. But the bondsman, through labor, molds the world and sees itself in its work. The process of lordship and bondage makes the lord stagnant and dependent on the slave, while the later transforms the world. It is telling that Hegel, like many philosophers of modernity, never brought the master/slave dialectic to is conclusion. The slave, though conscious of his impact of himself and his importance, never again confronts the master. Thus Hegel could never envision the world without some form of servitude.

In our age, the consciousness of consent rests on the idea that there is no better present. Entire industries are dedicated to reciting the glories of the state of things, that the world exists how it is because it is inherently good. Movies, columnists, magazines, textbooks, radio shows, and online commentators may point out particular faults of our nexus, but never question it. For many people have an immense stake in the current regime of things, and quite a bit of resources are expended in ensuring that the constructed machine runs smoothly. If one deigns to ponder the amount of money spent on the military budget or advertising, for example, the sums become not only exorbitant but demonstrative. If currency is a certain kind of power, then the size of the pile of exchanged bills represent an attempt to substantiate a specific kind of reality. The police, military, judiciary system, multinational business interests, and media conglomerates all project their desire for the present, which collectively is their utopia.

The physical expression of the currently constituted ruling project is, in its most obvious form, quite alluring. Luxurious flats, new-model suburban homes, various kinds of shopping malls, safe neighborhoods, sparkling vacations, glitzy news, bipartisan politics, and Hollywood escape encompass the modalities of rule. Life is easy, predicable, routine, untroubled, comfortable, and secure. Those who benefit from the state of things believe they have always been the way they are, and will do anything to keep it that way. For despite every attempt to hide it, the mental and physical comforts of our so-called modern world have always been based on a certain interplay of lordship and bondage. In the domains of the wealthy, its obverse is only discernable in the live-in maid and the gardener. Yet the vastness of wealth and ease could not exist without its opposite, an immense amount of discomfort and poverty for the variegated people who have nothing to offer but their bodies. The enticement of advertised existence glosses over the presence of the people who physically solder its girders, and whose degraded state testifies to its failure. For this they are cursed, hated, despised, and persecuted.

Indeed, those who rule expend a great amount of resources and energy to keep the dispossessed in their place. As our health care system is market driven, those who can pay get the best care, while those who cannot receive worse care, are the subject of medical experimentation, and die sooner. Though few discuss it, there is a two-tiered education system, where those relegated to public schools get enough education to learn basic skills and the American Dream, the lack of opportunity and direction makes the latter a Janus-faced tease. The police are the local public force used to implement social control, to protect private property, enforce the seemingly fair but quite skewed legal system, and use random acts of violence to keep the dark and propertyless in their place. Those who are left to work for inferior wages or live at the margins of the economy inevitably end up in the prison system, where they become the justification for a burgeoning public-private industry, work as contract slave labor, and have their civil rights nullified once they are released. The Pentagon system itself, through military intervention, artificially induced inflation, weapons peddling, and the support of a colonial class creates a beneficial investment climate for the super class, and is also the source of immigrant labor to the United States, which deflates wages and provides super-exploitive labor for corporate subcontractors. The glitzy advertisement that is the dream of those who own and purvey is premised on systematically making people poor, powerless, and hopeless.

Yet the people over whom the vultures hover are the ones who can redeem the world. Those who live in shanty towns over garbage dumps, pick through trash to find something to eat, never drive a car, wear donated clothes, and labor in the most horrendous jobs just to send their children to school provide the counterpoint to the sheen of modernity. They hold parties in their tenements to pay the rent, hire coyotes to get them across the border, attend churches where American history is cursed, block roads with burnt tires in order to protest government policies, and have their buildings demolished to make way for condominiums. They are the slaves who jumped into the ocean rather than cross the Atlantic, the Roanoake Indians who refused to feed the English settlers, steelworkers who were shot at by Pinkertons, the women who jumped to their death in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and the Vietnamese who dug underground tunnels to escape the pounding of American B-52's. Their struggle is not just against poverty, but against the limitless depths of hopelessness. Born into a life of ceaseless struggle, in its hardship they have found something that we, the beneficiaries of their suffering cannot really understand. More than simply affirming life itself, it is also an implicit rejection of the values that we hold dear and fashion our lives upon. The entire edifice of modernity is built upon a shallow foundation, and when it does crumble those who are despised and seemingly invisible will complete the dialectic.

Some hearts are true.

Tuned Mass Damper

2008-06-27T11:57:00.000-07:00

"Binge and purge
We live in thirty second blurbs
And if consumers stopped existing
We'd forget how to use words
Just fucking eat each other
'Till the next ice age occurs
Or at the Source awards scratching our heads like
'What happened?'" -El-P

I, and the majority of the people that I know, are children of the Eighties. We grew up watching Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and Thundercats. Our parents bought us toys from Gemco and Fedco, the former was bought out by Target and the latter is now out of business. Mrs. Gooches was the big health food store that our parents shopped at, long before Trader Joe's and Whole Foods opened up stores all over the world. We were the first kids to wear Reebok Pumps, and I can remember when Swatches were all the rage. Los Angeles had two professional football teams and the Dodgers won a World Series, never mind a playoff game. We were not the first youngsters to grow up with MTV, but I distinctly recall watching the third season of the Real World when I was thirteen or so, and grunge music was not passe. We also emerged in this world during eight years of Reagan, crack cocaine and the War on Drugs, the invasions of Panama and Grenada, the Persian Gulf War, and the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember staying late one night watching CNN as Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow in a last attempt to save a crumbling empire.

Our generation, half of whom are 18 and under, has the privilege of being the children of the baby-boomer generation. Some of our parents, then, fought against the restrictive conformism of the 50's which defined their childhood. Despite the ease of life to which it is ascribed, the 50's were a decade of white flight, segregation, political paranoia, ideological witch-hunts, homophobia, rampant patriarchy, and battered dreams. It can sometimes be difficult to imagine that our parents might have played a part in the Civil Rights, Anti-War, and Second-Wave Feminist movements. My mother, for example, was one of the first female pharmacy students in her state after she was not accepted to any veterinary schools due to her sex. Others did not oppose the post-war consensus but nevertheless were caught in the political turmoils of that decade. For instance my father was drafted and ended up serving a year in Vietnam. No one who grew up in that era grew up isolated from larger events around them, for everyone knew someone who was drafted, saw Kennedy get his brains blown out, watched the ghettos burn, and witnessed the vicious state repression that was the 1968 Democratic Convention. It seems, given what happened afterwards, that the baby-boomers consciously and unconsciously raised their children with the chaos of the 60's in the shadows of their minds.

My generation has been socialized in this world under a morass of contradictions. Amidst deindustrialization we are immerse in endless wealth, an expansive economy but increasing job insecurity, more television channels but less things to watch, more money in education but crumbling schools, richer people but increasing poverty, the demise of de jure racism and an intensity of de facto racism, expanding suburbs and inner-city gentrification, liberal sexual equality and increased womens oppression, increased divorce rates and the exacerbation of religious fundamentalism. In the face of an increasingly uncertain world, my generation has been raised as if they were in a bubble. Most of us grew up in the suburbs with little interaction to the surrounding environs, the bulk of our lives taken up with shopping trips to the mall and after-school television. We approach life not in terms of how we interact with the macrocosm, but how we can shelter ourselves from it.

Fundamentally sheltered, we live isolating lives. Groundless and devoid of perspective, we bounce around existence like a pinball in a machine. We socialize among friends who are really acquaintances, and who wouldn't give a flying fuck if you ended up dead or not. We idolize leisure time, which is spent wasting time instead of cultivating ourselves. Enmeshing ourselves in some television show, playing video games, reading US Weekly, engaging in stilting conversation where identity is relegated to brand names all serve to erode the most precious resource of all. Jaded, with bloodshot eyes and a lazerface we turn to the night as a proxy to stifle our boredom. Jacked up on booze and any other substance that will make us forget, we put on night-vision goggles which identifies copulating partners who have similar negligible levels of self-esteem. We talk shit about virgins but pony up with sluts, male and female. Selfish if anything, we see people as objects to be used rather than respected. Friends are connections, parents are economic stimuli, lovers are fuck buddies, wives are status-reinforcers, and children are an attempt to generate cause in a meaningless existence. Life is a game, or better yet a scheme, to simply better our lives at the expense of everyone else. We think we are players bending the rules, when actually we are the ones being played. Since we stand for nothing, we really do fall for anything, even if that means selling your soul simply to get paid.

My generation goes to college not to learn, but simply to get a degree to obtain a cushy job to make money. Lazy but with a feeling of entitlement, we always seek out the easiest way possible. We would rather be told to do something than to figure it out ourselves. The extent of our idealism relegated to the number on our paycheck, we gleefully confine ourselves in the various ghettos into which we are socialized. Our religion is consumption and the dollar is our god. With little understanding of anything, we take for granted the conditions of existence as if they were permanent, and then become hysterical when things inevitably change. Raised on propaganda, we blithely accept a reality handed down to us instead of fashioning our own truths. Shallow-minded and short-sighted, we are cultivated to be manipulated by the powers that be. Told that the various meaningless choices we have is the extent of our freedom, we imbibe it as the extent of our existence. As the politicians, corporations, lawyers, preachers, and bosses are all scheming to fuck with our lives, we either identify with our masters or don't really care. As things have visibly gotten much worse, in our apathy we continue on as if nothing has changed.

It is a historical irony that the children of the children of the cultural revolution that was the 1960's should as a whole be the inverse of their parents. Maybe because of their defeat, or because of the heartbreak that comes with any fundamental change, our parents strove to raise us in material comfort but with little understanding as to the consequences of our existence. Given the declining remnants of a social welfare state, this was quite possible. My generation, however, is fundamentally unprepared for the challenges that lay ahead of us. Our adulthood will not be like that of our parents, in that the social stability that they took for granted will gradually fall by the wayside. In an age of endless war, increasing state repression, the application of the unitary executive theory, the collapse of the dollar, bank failures, government bankruptcy, rising unemployment, lack of a productive base, unceasing devotion to private property, environmental degradation, increased energy costs, exacerbation of racial antagonisms, and further repression against women, we are faced with looming structural change, and harder choices than our parents had to made. Our apathy, ignorance, arrogance, myopia, and corruption all make us yearn for easy answers rather than hard questions. However, as my generation begins to bring children into this world, we have a responsibility to make it a better place, because they, like us, did not ask to be here.

We have to get real.

God Bless Our Dead Marines

2008-06-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

"The war is over now
Except for the souls
Held prisoner in Niggertown." -Allen Ginsberg

As the dust settled from planes flying into buildings, and a President regained his ability to speak in order to muster the greatest military machine on earth, you decided to heed his call. You joined the Armed Forces, believing it was your duty to honorably serve your country. You went through basic training, wasted away on some base, and then lo and behold you were shipped out to Iraq. You wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, because he had weapons of mass destruction, or that he gave weapons to Al-Qaida, or was it to spread democracy? One easily forgets such things. In the terrible fury that is war, you easily sliced through Saddam's overhyped troops, reveled in the flattening of tanks, and were amazed by the flash of bombs exploding over cities. War was glorious, a cake-walk, a way to spread American benevolence to people who had long suffered. But, if the war was geared to spread freedom, than what about the looting that American troops allowed to happen? The protection of the Iraqi Oil and Interior Ministries? The occupation of the Green Zone and Saddam's palaces, just like the British? The construction of checkpoints? The failure and corruption of reconstruction? The utter collapse of public services? The slow, but steady, enmity that Iraqis harbored towards people who came to visit but decided to stay?

Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, what you signed up for was not what you imagined it to be? Because, and we should be honest, you did sign up. There was no draft like in our parent's generation, where either you had to either shoot VC or flee to Canada. In fact there were a variety of incentives for you to do so, including money for school. So, being paid to be a soldier, isn't that kind of like being a mercenary? And sure, times are tough, particularly if you are some podunk town, but living in the United States, your economic position is greater than the vast majority of the globe, and especially those who will see the tip of your gun. So let us not pretend that your patriotism isn't tempered by greenbacks. And don't you find it ironic that the martial service you provide perpetuates the very economic conditions that propelled you to sign the dotted line in the first place? Did you ever consider the cost of war? As a publicly-funded mercenary, did you every wonder why there are so many other mercenaries in Iraq, who are paid a lot more than you and aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions? Are they there to protect you, or is it the other way around?

When you arrived in the Middle East, you must have realized that proclaimed reasons for your presence were hollow at best. If you had studied a bit of history, or maybe asked some questions, you would have figured out that no army ever invades another country simply to spread some contrived notion of goodness. There are motives and interests behind such a massive and expensive armament of which you are a part of, and it most likely has little to do with self-serving philosophical justifications. For in the name of freedom, spreading democracy, and various manifestations of national security, you invaded a harmless country and implemented some of the worst crimes of the 21st Century. It is you who shoots families at checkpoints, rapes teenagers, levels houses, ethnically cleanses neighborhoods, and demolishes cities. You are the basest level of the chain of command, the the pawn which kings harmlessly sacrifice to accomplish their goal. Your role as the invasion force is the physical justification to perpetuate their murderous decisions. And due to an accident of birth, you happen to do such things in the name of the country in which I inhabit. It is because of what you do that I helplessly cry with my head bowed, for the crimes to which I am associated.

Do not summarily assume, that I have automatically have no sympathy for your plight. I have seen many of you around Walter Reed, horribly scarred and missing limbs, trying to reconstitute some semblance of a normal life. I truly do feel sorry for you, since the government took from you what cannot be replaced, your body and your innocence. But let us be frank, you cannot fully plead ignorance to the personal costs of an imperial war. It is not a state secret that virtually every soldier who fought in the first Gulf War is now on disability, or that whatever disorder they picked up overseas is often transmitted to their children. It is rather common knowledge that the negligence at Walter Reed was preceded by the tens of thousands who were victims of medical malfeasance during the Vietnam and First Gulf Wars. Moreover, the training you receive in the military is predominately geared towards the implementation of war, not the civilian economy. Thus, the staggering amount of veteran poverty and homelessness is neither unprecedented nor unsurprising, unless one blindly imbibes what one is told. In the very least, are eligible for underfunded health benefits and state assistance. To put things in perspective no one cares if the Hajis die or not, but your plight is much more visible. Such is the cost of fighting for the truest lie.

The truth can be harsh, but it is the metaphysical medium to begin to rectify past wrongs. And what you do, at the very basic level, is neither good nor protective in any way. Wars of aggression lead to reactive violence, and occupations slowly but surely drain the national economy. You provide the patriotic cover for the cabal of good old boys, unprincipled draft dodgers, and corporate cronies who use you to extend their global dominance. You suffer the horrors of war for people who think such ventures are merely a game. But your patriotism makes you blind, for your continued participation gives power to leaders who have already sold you out, and has juridically eroded the state to which you give your life to. Why you did not mutiny when the government let New Orleans starve, one can never know. But your persistence in occupying other countries is symptomatic of generational crisis, where we irrationally cling to meanings that have lost their substance, and have faith in things that no longer resonate in our hearts. I want you to leave and never come back, to never release daisy cutters, drop cluster bombs, or torture people randomly picked up in the streets. But I know you don't see things the same way, and that you will always choose nationalism over humanity. For despite protestations to the contrary, you have undertaken a selfish decision that will forever destroy the land and people you have sworn to protect. It will be you, whenever the Executive Order is signed, that will break into where I am sleeping, bloody my head with the butt of your rifle, and drag me to whatever hell the General Government has built.

In your disenchantment lays our deliverance.

Disposable Party People

2008-05-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

"First there was Greek civilization
Then came the Renaissance
Ours is the age of the Ass." -Jean-Luc Goddard

When I am in Los Angeles, I happen to reside in what I call the slums of Santa Monica, which happens to be a posh area for SaMo yuppies and Palisades rich bitches/assholes. I also coincidentally live next to the most exclusive and expensive Italian restaurant in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I am told that people such as Tom Hanks, Steven Speilberg, Pamela Anderson, and the Governator are frequent patrons of the place. My apartment building was even quickly featured in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I have seen Adrien Brody ride off in his Ducati from my balcony, and I say what's up to Luke Wilson when I encounter his jogging. As a result, whenever I deign to buy a popsicle from the overpriced liquor store on the corner, or go for a run on the beach, I usually maneuver around overdressed hordes waiting in line to eat overhyped cuisine. Valets rule the streets, and I have had more than one car accident because of them. The most surreal moment was when I was hanging out on my friend's balcony, watching the restaurant owner on top of his roof. He was throwing eggs at the Paparrazi across the street as Paris Hilton was rumored to be inside.

In the Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen argued that economics was driven by social tribalism. Since the division of labor in prehistoric times, groups of higher status eschewed manual labor for war and consumption, while those on the lower rung cultivated crops and produced goods. This division of labor emanated from conquest, where the conquering groups exacted tribute from the vanquished as the price of rule. Veblen termed the superior group the leisure class, since they did very little work but maintained their status through the ritualization of leisure. Though elite groups preserved order through the monopoly of violence, coercion was also indirectly created with the creation of symbols which codified and legitimated the ruling elite. Prior to modern times hunting and warfare were traditionally the activities of the nobility, and similarly sugar was first used in Europe by elites not as a sweetener, but as symbol of status to make hardened desserts. Veblen characterized the economic mentality of social elites as irrational in that such activity is geared towards the maximization of pleasure. Moreover, the leisure class viewed women as a thing captured in a time of war, and thus viewed females as a subjugated object on which men spent their fortunes. Veblen viewed the modern bourgeois as emblematic of the new leisure class, for they produce nothing yet shift baubles around the globe in order to turn a profit. The aegis of human society, then, is that there has always been a sector of people who utilize symbols of power to feed off the lower classes.

In Los Angeles, and in the United States by extension, there a kind of cult of the celebrity. The concept of celebrity first arose with the rise of film studios, where various stars would be marketed in order to get people to buy movie tickets. At the time actors were owned by studios, and they would in effect live the lives of pseudo-royalty in order to generate an idea of glamor. Actors and actresses were followed by gossip magazines, manufactured contemporary standards of beauty, and lived a life a luxury that few people would ever realize. Film, in effect, generated a social sector on whom people projected their fantasies onto. The emergence of such a leisure class created entire industries of status enhancement products, such as cosmetics and designer fashion. Movie stars were treated like dignitaries, followed around the world by the media and, as artists, expected to offer their opinions on important matters of the day. Except that "movie stars" are not like individual artists, people who have to think things through in order to coherently convey them onto a physical medium. Actors and actresses for the most part are more like tools, guided to express in a certain manner. Moreover, one can say that there is little organic about them since their image is manufactured by the movie companies that purvey them. As the only real requirement is memorizing their lines, movie stars are judged more on their "look" than anything else. The irrationality of such a mentality is further expressed when movie stars fall from public grace through age or unpopularity, and those within and below the leisure class lament the inevitable decline of corrupt people.

Growing up in Los Angeles, one notices how mimicking the aesthetics of the elite is a pervasive characteristic of daily life. A city renowned for its plasticity, the utter obsession with the manufactured leisure class defines its cultural artificiality. The local paper has more serious coverage in the Entertainment section than on the front page, tabloids outsell any other magazines, and people relish in how connected they are to the technologies of programmed entertainment. A city that has the most plastic surgeons per capita on the planet, and a local governing class that would rather give tax breaks to billionaires to construct a "so unreal it is real" downtown than build an effective metro system. This kind of mentality filters down into ordinary people so that the idea of putting on good appearances makes up for internal vacuity. If people don't look "right" they have to pay bouncers to get into bourgeois clubs, so they can pay $10 beers to maybe dance with "hot" girls. Often the preferred measure of socialization is bottle service, where a group pays upwards of $300 per bottle of champagne to attract the proper company. This type of behavior mimics the endless obsession with living in the proper zip code, constantly monitoring one's home value, making sure your kids are in the "right" preschool, shopping at the appropriate stores, and keeping up with the latest diet fads. Spending such an exorbitant amount of money simply to live is irrational, but it makes sense if people are mainly concerned about their image. Though men and women often find their reflective selves in the various status-reinforcing venues, it is quite sad to see someone obviously over-the-hill person attempting to find love in the wrong place.

A somewhat recent, though not unprecedented phenomenon, is that of the Hipster. Essentially a 21st century reincarnation of hippie lifestylism, Hipsters have fashioned their enclaves from Silverlake to Williamsburg. Hipsters are predominantly white, middle class, have college degrees, come from some nowhere midwest town, and eschew work. They have the life-cycle of vampires, and congregate in soon-to-be-former working class areas. Whatever knowledge they learned through their drug-induced haze that was post-secondary school is utilized to fashion their concept of rebellious but conventional selves. They take complex concepts and simplify them to justify social elitism. Hipsters often justify their obsession with male (and female) thinness as battling sexism, when in reality it extends the traditional obsession with the female body onto that of men as well. They often defend their lifestyle with some post-modernist nonsense like any action merely strengthens the systems, or a system will exist whether or not they do anything about it. I am sorry to interrupt you doing a line of coke off of your anorexic fuck-buddy's ass, but not all systems are the same. (If I ever hear this again from someone I cannot promise I will not choke them.) Hipsters whine about Republicans and Bush as if it is subversive to be a Democrat like your parents, yet effectively do nothing about the worsening situation in the United States except drink Pabst and smoke Marlboros. Though seemingly against the grain, Hipsters utilize conformity to establish a group mentality. They have a shared understanding of edgy but ironic humor, wear the same kinds of clothes, obsess about particular music until too many people learn about it, shop at similar boutiques, and drink at hipster bars. This somewhat-countercultural conhesiveness is inherently artificial, and they will tire of their gentrifying ways when real life calls, leaving behind black lungs, thousands of dollars wasted on fashion and white powder, and families kicked out of their homes. Living off the largess of their parents, Hipsters will become bored of their lifestyle when the irony of "rebelling" in conformity wears off and will eventually get a graduate degree in psychology or some other inane, yet lucrative, subject. They are, in a sense, Yuppies in training.

Stop being a commodity.

Banana Split Republic

2008-05-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face." -George Orwell

As is was originally conceived, the United States government was created under the premise of liberal theory. Not how liberalism is construed in the 21st Century, but how it was understood in terms of limiting arbitrary state power. With the experience of distant British Parliamentary rule in mind, the various elites of the Thirteen Colonies created a tripartite system of government, so that no branch of the concentrated government could decimate the rest. With the understanding that distant, alienated political power naturally corrupts (though corruption had its own particular definition), the successful separatists believed that a divided government would constrain the rot. An additional aspect of liberal theory was the idea of natural rights, or that there were certain characteristics inherent in people that the government was bound to respect. If the citizens pledged their allegiance to a government, then the state, in its recognition of them, supposedly operated within a constrained scope of influence. Synonymous with the idea that citizens controlled their government, was the understanding that power stems from process, and the destruction of routine is the gateway to demise.

In its first century of existence, the American government, for its white citizens at least, was quite limited. The 1890's were the first fundamental crisis of established American political consensus. The Civil War was a demonstration that was no unitary consensus prior to its commencement, but its aftermath left the Republican party triumphant. Ruling for forty years with a policy of antislavery, the gold standard, high tariffs, and government support of homesteads and railroads, the Republican party was the laissez-faire capitalist party par excellence. Yet by the 1890's many of its tenets were undermined by the prolonged depression, incessant labor strife, and massive immigration which cut into the ideals of traditional Americanism. Progressivism arose as a response to this economic and intellectual crisis, which proscribed increased state intervention to alleviate the problems of what was perceived to be a declining America. At the Federal level, the only branch that could pursue regulation was the executive, since only the Executive could establish agencies to enforce laws. As regulation is essentially state-mandated control, Progressivism aimed to generate a new kind of society through the enforcement of legislation. The attempt to mold dark immigrant hordes into white people, the desire to constrain the excesses of rampant economic exploitation and uncertainty, the aim to stamp out political machines through the professionalization of local politics, and the urge to control other parts of the globe had their origins through a desire for order. The Progressive ideal emanated from women operating settlement houses, to anxious corporate heads, muckraking journalists, and reformist labor leaders. Progress, to them, meant injecting the Federal government into facts of life where it had not been before.

It was war, however, which made the executive branch the dominant presence in the Federal government. The 20th Century saw the slow, but steady extension of the state through the twin specters of war and capitalism. During the First World War, as a result of large scale resistance against Wilson's duplicity, the Federal government transformed itself into a permanent police state. The First Amendment was effectively ban for the duration of the war, as hundreds of people were jailed under the Alien and Sedition Laws. The government also gave itself the powers to survey the mails and ban various publications from using the post office. Moreover, it was under the guise of so-called un-Americanism during the War for Democracy that the FBI was created and legitimated. The FBI not merely conducted surveillance, but broke into homes and arrested anyone who was deemed a threat to the state. They also deported immigrants simply because of their beliefs and associations. For example, both Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with hundreds of others, were arrested, put on a boat, and deported to Russia. The simultaneous assault on the labor movement devastated it so much that there was in effect no movement to speak of until the 1930's. The war created a climate where those who controlled the state could expand it to police the boundaries of American nationalism.

If the First World War generated a permanent Federal police force, the Second World War led to the establishment of a permanent war economy. Prior to it, the United States military demobilized after every war, and its peacetime force minimal. The economic value of World War II, however, proved to be a cure for the inability of the New Deal to resuscitate the domestic economy during the Great Depression. The demand for war material stimulated the influx of corporate heads, government planners, and military leaders to Washington. At this time the War Department was remonikered the Department of Defense, and the Pentagon was constructed. The result was the invention of a planned economy, whose ultimate aim the permanent regulation of capitalism through war production. It is not often remembered that the United States defeated the Axis powers not through its manpower, but with its ability to produce war material on a virtually limitless scale. It was during the Second World War that the Untied States became the dominant world power, simply because it expanded its manufacturing base while those around the globe were destroyed. The physical residue being the various armaments left on the scarred battlefields and destroyed cities in Europe and Asia, the war forever eliminated anxieties about government intervention in the economy, and established an elite consensus on the need to keep a world-wide military liminal.

With the creation of the military-industrial complex, the governing decisions effectively fell to the Executive Branch. The extent and kind of government contracts, development of weapons systems, and management of the fruits of American victory could not be handled by Congress. Moreover, the Second World War itself engendered extra-legal departments that would not go away in peacetime. In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which made wartime government permanent. Both the Army and Navy were merged and managed by the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council was established, and the CIA was enshrined. Roosevelt established the OSS during the war to sabotage Nazi Germany, but afterwards it renamed itself the CIA and constructed its secret base in Langley. Essentially a department of dirty tricks where the President could maintain plausible deniability, the CIA quickly hired former SS henchmen as agents after Hitler's collapse, and carried on a secret war behind Soviet lines for nearly a decade. Indeed, covert operations continued long before the CIA was created, as the United States was busy in Greece and Italy protecting fascist warlords against indigenous communist partisans. The National Security Act simply gave more power to the President to manage the economy and carry out foreign interventions, all in the name of security. It is quite poignant that in one of the greatest times of peace for the United States, the Federal government chose to militarize itself in the name of combating insecurity.

The conflict that emerged out of the disconnect between the two major imperial systems, the United States and the Soviet Union, was not inevitable. The doctrine that came to enshrine American action, national security, was effective simply because it justified everything and anything in the name of protecting the state. Housing ten thousand nuclear weapons, the domino theory, conducting open-air testing in Micronesia, inventing Mutually Assured Destruction, the space program, and McCarthyism were all undertaken in the name of anti-Communism. The very idea itself led to the government being in a state of constant crisis for fear of being overtaken, which in turn meant the Executive was expanded to better manage domestic and international affairs. As state decisions became more concentrated, those in control, deluded by their power, became more paranoid and more aggressive. The overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, the CIA engineered coup against Mossadegh, operation Northwoods, the counter-revolutionary war against Cuba that continues to this day, and the gradual invasion of Vietnam are all examples of a bureaucracy that is unaccountable and effectively isolated from any restraint. Isolated incidences of the actual relationship between the American government and the outside world, like the Kennedy assassination, are obfuscated and covered up by the political class, while Americans feign surprise and outrage.

In the 21st Century, as the United States government carries out its self-proclaimed war against the earth, it should not be a mystery as to how we got to where we are. There is theory in political science that states that interact with each other come to behave like one another, and the century-old practice of supporting military dictatorships around the world has steadily shaped American political culture. As the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer, the response by elites has been to increase spending on defense, internal police, and private security services. Under a government that by its own definition is out of control, the justification of political violence by others has legitimized near-dictatorial powers in the Presidency. The first and second Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act give the president virtually unlimited powers in a time of war, and even the ability to take away American citizenship if one is merely declared to be a terrorist. Given the experience of the Afghan and Iraq war, a terrorist is merely how the Federal government defines it, and the narrow-minded bloodthirsty elites who run this country do not merely have their ears to the outside. Given that domestic spying is occurring that makes COINTELPRO look like child's play, it seems like we are counting down the days when the War on Terror becomes internal. As military contractors increasingly line up to loot the public treasury, one should not be surprised if Gitmo concentration camps and black-site torture centers become domestic.

Life and Debt

2007-01-25T23:26:00.000-08:00

"Payed the price my whole life, my attitude's a receipt
Easily learnin' life's ills that are so hard to teach
When I was crazy young I had ton's of fun
Nowadays life's a bitch or a son of one
Maybe to get this money I just really don't have the knack
Maybe I'm on borrowed time that I can't pay back" -Prime

As a graduate student who is neither funded by my department nor is a trust fund baby, I have had to support myself through school. Over the years this has not merely necessitated me to work in the form of teaching, which I have enjoyed, but have also had to take out student loans in order to make ends meet in Los Angeles. In this respect I consider myself lucky in this I never attended an overpriced and overhyped private university for undergrad, and am thus not indebted for my BA. It should be pointed out, however, that it was not always the case that one had to incur personal debt in order to receive a college education. My parents generation, for example, had virtually their entire education paid for if they attended a public university. I think my father paid something like $65 a quarter to attend UCLA back in the day. Now it is up to 40 c-notes, and rising. The increasing personal cost of education is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon in American society and much of the world, in the rise of debt as a seemingly permanent, intransigent aspect of nations and the people who live in them.

Debt in of itself is not necessarily a terrible thing, when managed properly. After the U.S. Constitution was implemented, one of the first proposals by Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, was the Bill of Assumption. In this project the Bank of the United States would assume all of the wartime debts incurred by the various colonies during the American War, and consolidate them as national debt with the backing of the Dollar. Since only the U.S. Treasury could print money, it meant that any investor in American treasury bills would be guaranteed their investment at a regulated interest rate. The point from Hamilton's perspective and was misunderstood by his domestic opponents, was to stimulate foreign investment in the United States, which would steer the Early Republic away from the deritus of a colonial economy into a more national one. According to Hamilton's idea, the state would properly direct investment and help steal technology in order to develop the American economy along the lines of Great Britain, which at that time meant early industrialization. A corollary was the limitation of western expansion and directing people into cities to stimulate urban growth. Hamilton was unsuccessful partly because the source of funding receded when the French conquered Netherlands, recalcitrance in Congress to the extent of his plans, and the political opposition of the Jeffersonians, yeoman, and their white urban allies. Yet, a lasting aspect of Hamilton's program was to turn a burden, ie debt, into something productive.

The fact of debt being a burden not simply financially, but on the entirety of one's existence is characteristic of what is termed the Third World. Before the marking off of the planet into "developing" and "developed" countries, independent Haiti became the world's first intrinsically impoverished country. After two decades of isolation imposed by its former colonial powers, Jean-Pierre Boyer, the gens de coleur President of Haiti agreed to an indemnity with France. In return for France's guarantee to recognize Haiti and not invade it again, Boyer acquiesced to a 125 million livre indemnity to France, as compensation for lost French property during the war of independence. Since Haiti had (and has) virtually no infrastructure and few export crops besides coffee and wood, the debt incurred by Boyer created a cycle of debt that plagues the hemisphere's poorest nation to this day. The Haitian government, in fact, had to take out more loans to refinance its debt, which over the course of nearly two centuries had led to its sovereignty being controlled by foreigners, unless the Haitian masses get bad ideas, and then the Marines invade or a coup is carried out.

What is collectively understood as the Third World did not exist prior to the 20th Century. Popular unrest against colonialism combined with the bankruptcy of colonial powers led to decolonization after the Second World War. National independence led to its own problems, however, as new states not only had to deal with the systematic capital flight that was characteristic of colonialism and the internal mess that was left by their former colonizers, but also with the dilemma of how to construct an economy. In came the United States, which after the Second World War became the dominant financial and military power over the globe. Over the first two and a half decades of global rule, the United States, mostly through the IMF, created a system of debt service where newly independent countries would take out loans to "develop" themselves, mostly though constructing infrastructure, such as roads and dams. Such infused capital, however, merely opened up the Third World to increased outside investment, and did little to dispel their entrenched poverty. Moreover, as the debt of states did not abate, and the oil crisis of the 1970's cut off access to credit, the kind of financial assistance available to the non-"developed" world changed. Instead of loans merely for capital project, foreign debt from the West came with strings attached. What is known as structural adjustment is merely the imposition of foreign demands on various debtor states in order to receive more credit. Thus investors, particularly the United States, would force governments to cut public spending on things like education and health care, privatize nationally held industries, and direct where exactly the money should be spent. The result, unsurprisingly, has been increased debt throughout the Third World, the collapse of local economies, and national resources increasingly controlled by foreign creditors. It is imperialism in another vein.

As I write this, the national debt of the United States is $9,369,491,048,596. Or, that every person born in the United States already owes the Federal Government fifty thousand dollars. As the American GDP is close to $14 trillion, and the Federal debt steadily increasing, within two decades the national debt will be the equivalent to the purchasing power of all the people resident in the United States. At that point, whatever debt the United States government has, and has taken out in our name, will be unpayable. The dollar, which we fundamentally base our existence on, will be worthless, and the economic basis of our social lives will collapse. The consumer economy that we grew up with and take for granted will be nonexistent. Ordinarily, any person or corporation who takes out loans, never pays them back, and then incurs more debt will have their credit cut off at some point. But, given that the United States is the largest military power on earth, and is the financial hub of the corporate sector, it is able in effect to dictate credit from its dominions. For instance, part of the unofficial American agreement to open up its markets to China, was that the latter had to buy up Federal bonds in order to artificially fund the American consumer market. Most of the kingdoms in the Middle East and East Asian governments purchase American bonds in order to obtain commercial access to the United States. The result is that property in the United States is increasingly foreign owned, and for all intensive purposes the United States is a Third World Country with the residual wealth of a century and a half of industrialization slowly being drained to ensure global military dominance, and line the pockets of the domestic corporate-military elite. The bulk of the current debt as it stands, is the consequence of Reagan and his cronies using the Treasury Department as their personal credit card, charging for drug running, failed weapons programs, covert operations, and foreign invasions. In destroying the national economy for their own private gain, the elites who run this country have demonstrated that they do not, in fact, care one iota about you.

In America, as the vast majority of the people in this country have no savings, and take out personal debt to fund their education, buy cars and homes, and fill up their closets with faded possessions, we stand at a threshold. We spend wealth we don't have on objects imported from abroad, furnishing profits to multinational corporations as the domestic economy decays. The great sucking sound is coming from us, as deindustrialization has meant that the lifestyles we choose to live depend on leverage that is not ours. With no productive base, the United States cannot simply revert to Keynesianism to stimulate demand. The idea of of people paying for loaves of bread with wagonloads of money, like in Germany during the Great Depression, is just the beginning. If the American economy does not collapse, it will only be because of the American government's ability to blackmail foreign nations to furnish more credit. The United States is not like Rome, for Rome did not have chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and military bases that span the globe. If our social life is dependent on shoving ICBM's down other people's throats, than what have we become?

Man-Machine

2007-01-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

"Nothing dulls the mind and soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine." -Rudolf Rocker

The birth of the modern world is heralded as the emergence of a new man. From the darkness that was the Middle Ages, modern man (and woman) is endowed with enlightenment, reason, and an urge to further the human condition. With the emergence of concepts such as human rights, individualism, liberalism, humanism, and democracy, to name a few, modernity is often thought to be an epoch that is overwhelmingly positive, where through the emergence of a new society humanity is triumphally able to further itself. This new person, with insight into themselves and the world around them, has been the arbiter of Western domination for the past 500 years or so.

If modernity is defined by the self-actualized person, it is also the function of another kind of paragon. Parallel with the idea of the liberal individual is the birth of the apparatus, of organizations that are hierarchical in nature. Hierarchy in this sense is the formation of order through the gradations of power, where the "bottom" does the bidding of those at the "top." The dissemination of certain kinds of knowledge, of rank, routine, discipline, protocol, and formality is necessary in order for these kinds of organizations to properly function. As Europe grew and expanded, such apparati gained influence and became more complex, interlocking more people into their web. Over the course of many centuries, such kinds of human institutions have grown slowly but surely, so that today they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, though it may not always seem like it.

While the Middle Ages were dominated the Catholic Church, the various tribal princes who controlled the various parts of Europe were subject to political control from the Vatican. It is difficult to recall now, but the Catholic Church was the largest landowner in Europe, controlled numerous armies and had military alliances with its princes, and strove as much as it could to force its various principalities to be in line with the Church. One of the major breaks that led to today was Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church, which did not lead to a secular government but led to the division between secular and religious forms of governance, which was later enshrined by the American and French Revolution. The break with the Church led to internal schisms within England itself, particularly between the Crown and the nobles and pre-bourgeois that made up Parliament, which created the conditions that led to the English Civil War. As England became entrenched with near constant internal and external strife over the next two hundred years, it developed the first modern state, with limited representative government, a state-directed banking system, and the most efficient means of tax collection in Europe. The emergence of this kind of bureaucracy meant that England could fight wars in India, Cuba, and the German Principalities simultaneously while conscripting its populace to fund such ventures, which were directed by the Privy Council, Military Chief of Staff, and various wealthy bankers. Parallel with the growth of the state was the rise of English nationalism, which engendered insider affinity without putting into question the obvious discrepancies of English society. As a result, England formed a political culture that tolerated the expansion of the state, which by the 20th Century came to dictate the majority of human relations, and which is a source of great social alienation. Though the United States was founded against the political principles that the English government ruled by, namely non-representation and the centralization of elite power, by the 20th Century it had not only replicated the supposed sins of its father, but had dramatically exceeded it both in size and scope of control. From Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church, came the sovereignty of the local monarch, which expanded as political power usually does, with its underhanded dealings, conniving courtesans, and unprincipled bootlickers, into the largest and most influential bureaucracy on earth.

From the destruction of the Roman Empire, Europe was besieged by near ceaseless military conflict. As the seat of Caesar moved eastward, German warlords moved southwest, pillaging the remnants of Empire and forming their own kingdoms. The various kings, princes, dukes, queens, princesses, cardinals, and popes waged bloody struggles on the continent for more land, wealth, power, and ecclesiastical sanction. The result was the birth of a culture of warfare that was unheard of throughout the rest of the world. Europeans created social practices of officially sanctioned violence that were unique in their technical application of churning out bodies. From plated armor, pikes, and crossbows to flintlocks, bayonets, and dragoons. It was Europeans, after all, who turned a Chinese formula for fireworks into the chemical compound of gunpowder, changing forever the nature of military conflict and giving Europe the technology for global rule. As the warlord states consolidated into monarchies, and particularly became richer after 1492, rules expanded their military capabilities to extend and consolidate their domains. The fortune that Spain extracted from Potosi was wasted in the wars of the counter-reformation, and it is easy to forget that Germany lost a third of its population during the Thirty Years War. With imperial competition and incessant continental conflict came the need for larger armies, and as the military expanded so did the bureaucratic necessity of outfitting such forces. The growth of the English state came with the need to fortify its possessions and outfit the world's largest Navy. The Prussian Junkers, who politically dominated the Second Reich, became infamous in their ability to maintain their armed forces with ruthless, mechanistic efficiency. The Age of Revolution, however, greatly expanded the scope of socially accepted militarism. The American Revolution sanctified soldiery as a mark of citizenship, while the French Revolution by means of necessity introduced the the idea of total war. The Levee en Masse, wage and price controls, and the Committee of Public Safety generated a national culture based on the participation and sacrifice of all French men and women in fighting against the European monarchs. Napoleon distorted such martial nationalism to transform France into his empire, but he extended such ideas into the rest of Europe. While relatively peaceful on the continent, the 19th Century saw the dramatic expansion of European armies, and the relentless competition that ensued resulted in the First World War. It was not until the Second World War, however, that the military was not merely seen as a means of defense of the state, but also as the driving motor of the capitalist economy. American industrialists and bureaucrats knew that it was not Roosevelt's New Deal that reinvigorated the American economy after the Great Depression, but the wartime expansion of production that seemed infinite. The victory of the United States in the war resulted in the expansion of peace-time military capability, and the institution of a permanent war economy. What Eisenhower referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex in his farewell speech, referred to the utilization of the military as the means to generate continuous economic growth. The rise of the Pentagon system meant untold mounts of money and research girded towards the production of waste, to generate new consumer products and expand the reach of American military capability. The Second World War, of course, unleashed a monster that reaches into every American home, instinctively seeks out new threats to justify itself, and contains the capability to destroy all life on earth.

As the progenitors of the United States labored to establish their city on a hill, a profound economic change occurred in the land they originated from. Rich landowners and some entrepreneurial peasants worked over generations to increase the agricultural output of England's fields. Through methods such as selective breeding and crop rotation, agricultural production outstripped the simple demands of serfs, and soon a market for farm products spread beyond villages to encompass the entire island. The rise of the market meant that some peasants became quite wealthy, and they soon bought up the traditional common land as well as that of their neighbors. As peasant farmers turned into agricultural proprietors, their former neighbors became either wage workers, tenant farmers, or moved to emerging cities like London. The rise of the English empire resulted in merchants creating a domestic market for tropical goods, and an enclosure enveloped the countryside and developed the ability to feed more people, the emerging cities swelled with people. Agricultural specialization necessitated a means to produce other needed goods like clothing on a grand scale, and Parliament's permanent embargo of the Indian calico trade engendered a necessary stimulus. If 1776 is popularly known as the outbreak of the American Revolution, it is also the agreed upon date of the Industrial Revolution. Yet the first modern means of produced was not done in factories but through outwork in houses, where women and children would sew fabric up to 16 hours a day to procure enough pence to buy tea, sugar, and maybe a little milk and met. As merchants, distributors, and suppliers grew richer they consolidated their capital under one roof, to centralize their production facilities as well as to control their workers. From outwork workers were regimented into assembly lines, with foremen ensuring that workers maintained their pace of work, all while the owner watched from his office. If textiles were consonant with the emergence of industrial capitalism, than railroads birthed the corporation. No longer the enterprises of single men or families, corporations pooled capital from various investors together under a legally protected entity, and used increased funds to turn out more capital intensive products and increase their market share. Given handouts by the government, the various railroad companies competed with each other for passengers and rail lines, and the early railroads were rather inefficient and lost much money. If anything, the rise of the corporation revealed again that the nature of capital is to combine itself, to expand into ever increasing accumulations of wealth and to protect itself from competition. It is difficult to remember that the 19th Century was not a stable time economically, and in the United States there was a severe depression every twenty years. The Age of Monopoly was also the era of bureaucratization, as corporations increased their staff in order to deal with the expansion of space and time in their business dealings. Entrepreneurial activity in fact became quite limited as the small-time owner could not compete with massive companies, and businessmen became mere cogs in a vast corporate machine. Progressivism, which arose in reaction to the social excesses of uncontrolled corporate exploitation, reified the corporate ideal in ushering in the state to limit the size of corporations, in order to guard against monopoly. By the end of the Twentieth Century, the corporation became so dominant that its various manifestations in a few dozen industries control the entire global economy, as it seeks to infiltrate any and ever part of people's live in order to expand its influence and market share.

Modern man is hailed as being self-actualized, independent, liberal, and the physical embodiment of personal freedom. At the same time that she (and he) has generated these phenomenological traits, modern man has also created vast and hierarchical institutions which work to limit the values which the modern person supposedly represents. The military, government bureaucracy, and the business corporation have grown to astronomical proportions over the last quarter millenia, to the point where it is almost impossible to act independently of their influence. Such institutions, via their own internal logic, have a vested interest in minimizing personal autonomy and political democracy. Their reach is so great, that one has to question if our ideas are our own, or merely extensions of what we are inured to believe. They do nothing if not strive to regiment, stagnate, and control our lives. The job of a company man, government bureaucrat, and squaddy is to follow orders, and nothing else. The recompense is normally some form of material renumeration, but at the cost of dignity, respect, personal authority, and often morality. It should be no wonder that so many people are resigned to the life that is given to them, to seek the various drugs allowed to us, material gratification, or wilt away in defeated depression as ways to cope with their existence. For all the objects we have, for all the lofty ideals we espouse, we as modern human beings have become nothing more but cogs in a gigantic machine, a system that maintains its power by crushing souls, material and otherwise. For the system needs servants for it to run, fodder for the workhouse and targets for the gun.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

2007-01-16T23:10:00.000-08:00

"Color hate defined the place of black life as below that of white life." -Richard Wright

Sometimes, on the weekends, I would hang out with a bunch of older guys to watch sports on television. Since I don't have an electron box, it is quite convenient to walk across the street with a twelve pack of High Life in my arm, slide into a chair, and listen to post midlife-crisis single bachelors revel in their glory years, and yell at each other over small interpersonal differences to massage their egos. Since I live by the beach, it is generally assumed though common sense and unofficial redlining that people who live acote de la plage are white. Not to mention that the dudes with whom I trade alcohol for television viewing have lived in the same apartment building for upwards of two decades. As a result, much of their views on race are rather unrefined, meaning their their language isn't as coded as when the subject of race usually comes up in the post-Civil Rights era. So there is one guy, whose parents were Jewish but grew up in a Catholic orphanage, who incessantly spews invectives against blacks, Latinos, and interestingly Jews, and who usually tries to change any topic of conversation of why he harbors certain prejudices against certain groups. It is also interesting that when he moved to Los Angeles he, like many Jews in the entertainment business, changed his last name to make it sound less ethnic. There is another guy, who as an independent contractor used to work in Central Los Angeles south of the 10 Freeway. Often blaming racial inequality on the lack initiative of blacks and Latinos, he once recounted the story when as soon as he heard the Rodney King verdict in 1992, he got the hell out of his office by Florence and Normandy and retreated to his house in the suburbs. If he would have stayed a little longer, he, with a hint of both loathing and relief, might have ended up like Reginald Denny.

Race has been an integral aspect of what has emerged as the United States ever since its founding ever since the emergence of the American colonies. While the connection between state policy and institutionalized racism is well understood, much needs to be said with regard the dynamics of race on a personal level. It should be remembered that in the United States, for the most part prior to the 20th Century, state institutions were never as centralized as in Europe. As a result, the social patterns that emerged in this country emanated from the so-called democratic, organic social ideals of ordinary people. One can point to Virginia, New York, and South Carolina where the ruling classes deliberately imposed racist praxis to foster wealth creation. However, the burden of the maintenance and reproduction of racist societies does not simply rest with the machinations of social elites, but with ordinary whites who, in their own way, benefited from their color.

One of the pernicious residuals of Jefferson is the correlation of a white skin with American nationality. A promoter of small government, local institutions, and the extension of agriculture, it has often been left unsaid that his programme was explicitly genocidal, since it required the land that the various indigenous tribes lived and hunted on. The only way that Native Americans could be assimilated into the national body was by whitening them out, by sexual intermixing them only with whites so that in generations they would be left without blot or mixture. As for blacks, Jefferson thought they were biologically inferior to whites, and could never be assimilated into the American national body. Noted by many biographers as an abolitionist, Jefferson's solution to slavery was to remove blacks entirely out of the country one freed, either to their "home" in Africa or to the more torrid regions of the West Indies. Jefferson's importance lies in his intellecutalization of popular racial beliefs, of both the illegitimacy and antipathy of non-whites as the Republic was fashioned. As states need to categorize in order to understand, the Democratic-Republican Jefferson and his followers diagnosed blacks and Indians as un-American.

American culture, then, is founded on racial nationalism that stems to preserve and extend what is deemed white at the expense of all others. This racial culture is founded on physiological similarity, anti-intellectualism, "common sense" consensus, sexual policing, material privilege, and hatred of the other. As the white American population expanded with immigration, various peoples earned their place in society in fashioning their whiteness. The French colons from Saint Domingue had little problem integrating into the emerging South, as some directly brought their slaves over, and as victims of slave revolution often had little else than their skin color to assimilate. The Irish and Germans began coming over in the 1830's, and while the Germans settled on Midwestern land away from the cities and South, the Irish were the "black" working class of seaboard city slums. They earned their whiteness in their hatred of blacks, by attacking them on the street during festivals, and by practicing social exclusion. The Irish led the New York City draft riots, which emerged from the Bowery in fear that the slaves, after emancipation, would move north and crowd them out of employment. As unions emerged with the development of industrial capitalism, blacks were generally excluded from membership as they were not on the same social level to be considered fellow laborers. After the Civil War, Poles, Slavs, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Latvians, and other peasants from Eastern and Southern Europe crowded into urban slums looking for work. Such immigrants were considered to be a "darker" white, and given menial occupations to suit their racial status. Though Ford attempted to assimilate them into a homogenous "American," immigration restriction after the First World War led to the stabilization of whiteness. It was not until the aftermath of the World War II that such lesser whites became grouped into a larger singular whiteness, in their move to the suburbs, with the GI Bill, and a host of other white entitlement programs. All this advancement occurred at the expense of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, who served in the Second World War but did not receive such social benefits. Indeed, the Japanese, because of their racial identity, had to prove their loyalty to the United States by fighting in Europe at the same time they were sent to concentration camps. In the course of immigration to the United States, assimilation into the national body is not so much the result of hard work and determination, but stems much more so from the ability of Anglo-Saxons to perceive immigrants and their descendants as phenotypically similar to them.

Though whiteness has not remained unchanged, the boundaries of its culture have remained relatively stable. In the United States, and all Protestant European colonies for that matter, is the idea of monodescent, or that one drop of non-white blood taints the makeup of the whole. Though there is a visual understanding of lighter skinned versus darker non-whites, the fact of the matter is that regardless of their skin color they still remain non-white. This principle of discrimination serves to completely isolate those of the European descent from the rest of the American population. Thus race in American is marked by distance from whites, rather than say in Latin America, which is read via one's closeness to them. It is the former which is the basis of the exclusiveness of American nationalism, and in many ways has been the substance that has driven American development to the present day. The ability for a worker to see eye-to-eye with his boss, a hillbilly yeoman to be on equal status with the planter, an electronic plantation drone to have more in common with the CEO than the janitor, or some minimum wage Wal-Mart employee who sees eye-to-eye with the President is in many instances determined by racial affinity. Regardless of other factors, the presence of whiteness means legitimacy, acceptance, and physical affinity.

If all of this sounds insane, it is because it is. Yet, race has its own logic which has determined American social relationships and resultant conflicts for four hundred years.Whiteness is in many ways responsible for a lack of class consciousness, but it has moreover created differences which shouldn't exist. There is no objective reason why one should dislike a person of a different color, except if you want to exercise power over them. Which is why whiteness has been used as a mechanism simultaneously unite and divide at the same time. Whiteness physically manifests itself as a specter, historically constructed so that the person it embodies does not necessarily control its meaning, regardless of personality. The flipside of this, is the unending humiliation and oppression of non-whites regardless of what they do, for any action is merely a reification of their race. Which is why, when I am standing on the Metro riding my own business, and a black woman is giving me a cold stare, making spitting noises at me, and confidently showing an opened notebook of illegible writing to other black passengers around her, I harbor no hard feelings. She wasn't born that way.

Beneath The Masks

2007-01-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

"In the mountains of Chiapas, death was a part of daily life. It was as common as rain or sunshine. People here coexist with death, death of their own, especially the little ones. Paradoxically, death begins to shed its tragic cloak, Death becomes a daily fact. It loses its sacredness. You see it as someone you sit down with at the table, like an old acquaintance. You don't lose you fear of death, but you become familiar with it. It becomes your equal. Death, which is so close, so near, so possible, is less terrifying for us than for others. So, going out and fighting and perhaps meetingdeath is not as terrible as it seems. For us, at least. In fact, what surprises and amazes us is life itself. The hope of a better life. Going out to fight and to die finding out you're not dead, but alive. And, unintentionally, you realize you are walking on the edge of the border between death and life. You're walking on the edge of the border between them." -Subcommandante Marcos

Walking around San Cristobal de Las Casas, one is struck by the number of churches in the rather quaint colonial city nestled in the mountains. By my recollection, there were at least seven churches near the zocalo, including, of course,the church across from the municipality. Wandering away from the city center, one can stumble into a statue of Bartolome de las Casas, who the city is named after. Las Casas, it should be recalled, was a Dominican friar who moved the King of Spain to stop the genocide of the indigenous Americans, and substitute their labor with that of African slaves. Thus San Cristobal symbolized all that the Spanish did for the surrounding natives, that they gave the indigenous the privilege to live and work for the Spanish, and the accoutrements of Christian civilization. In the Colonial and Early National period, the various castas roamed the cobbled streets of San Cristobal and reveled in the benefits and miseries of their society, based on their proximity to the descendants of the colons. Today it is the tourists on whom the indigenous peddle cigarettes, candy, junk food, and cultural wares.

On January 1, 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation announced its existence to the world through a self-proclaimed revolution against the Mexican government. The EZLN claimed that the Mexican government, particularly with its political and economic orientation with regard to the United States, had violated its owned constitutionality. Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, born out of the Mexican Revolution, guaranteed indigenous peoples the right to an ejido, or communally held land. As the state sector shrank since the 1982 financial crisis, the economy became more privatized and the ejido, symbolic of native cultural identity, shrank to market force. But the 1994 attempted revolution was in particularly a response to NAFTA, which in practice would place an indigenous farmer on the same competitive level as an American corporation. It was no coincidence that the Zapatistas rose on January 1, 1994, as it was the day that NAFTA came into effect, and which they called "a death sentence."

Chiapas, like most of Latin America, is a part of the Mexican state but is vastly different from what is traditionally thought to be Mexico. Chiapas is heavily indigenous, who are descended from the ancient Maya and speak a variety of Mayan dialects, which often are unintelligible from each other. Ruggedly mountainous, the geography of Chiapas enables the development of an autonomism that in many ways is absent in the more parts of Mexico. Conquered by the Spanish in the early 16th Century, Chiapas was administered as a part of the Kingdom of Guatemala, primarily due to its location. Geographically and culturally closer to the peoples of Central America, Chiapas was in many ways an afterthought in the Spanish imperial design. Unlike Peru and Mexica-Tenochtitlan, Chiapas was devoid of the mineral resources that the Spanish desired to exploit. As such, it was one of the "lesser" encomienda given to the least connected conquistadores. The indigenous had to pay tribute under the encomienda, and then provide forced labor through the repartimiento with the latter's decline, but Chiapas remained a relatively untouched part of the Spanish empire, and tremendously poor.

With the conquest, the Spanish demanded the indigenous' conversion to Christianity. Though baptized in the Catholic Church, the Spanish could not control what the indigenous actually interpreted Christianity to be. Whatever the Spanish wanted them to think, what the descendants of the Maya actually thought was determined by the outbreak of the Caste War in 1869. Imagining a native child to be the reincarnation of Christ, the indigenous believed that the coming of the new millennium meant the undoing of colonial society. They rose against their now Mexican rulers, convinced that their Christ would destroy the colons and return their society to the way it was before the Spanish came. Fanning out from Chamula, the indigenous indiscriminately killed the non-indigenous they encountered. Before being suppressed by the Mexican army, the Mayan descendants very nearly succeeded in capturing San Cristobal de Las Casas. Though ruthlessly put down by the Spanish, the Chamula rebellion was a crude manifestation of the desire to rid themselves of the historical development that kept them impoverished, ignorant, and considered them culturally inferior.

The Mexican Revolution, a manifestation against the autocracy and corruption of post-Independence Mexico, did not undue the social fabric of Chiapas. Zapata, General of the South and inspired by Ricardo Flores Magon, fought in the name of the poor, downtrodden, the indigenous, and the forgotten. He was instrumental in having Article 27 placed in the Mexican constitution before he was assassinated. It is his in memory that the Zapatistas fought against the Mexican government, for in many ways Zapata represented a break from the past: a forceful assertion of the rights of the indigenous which was recognized by the government. Zapata symbolized an alternative ideal of Mexican nationalism, one that not merely gave credence to the indigenous past but ultimately strove to protect their way of life.

Zapata, though from Morelos, obviously provided a precedent for the Zapatista movement. With the failure of the left-wing urban guerillas in the 1960's and 1970's, some withdrew to the mountains to organize the rural poor as the basis of national liberation. What emerged in Chiapas was a melding of ideals representative democracy, indigenism, anarchism, feminism, and vanguardism. A product of this interaction of ideas, the Zapatistas were virtually unknown until the early 1990's, training in the Lacandon jungle and organizing their communities. The upcoming passage of NAFTA, to them, signaled a time to act, to demonstrate to the world that Mexico was not simply a nation of corrupt politicans who lined up to sell out their country. For if NAFTA would not directly lead to the further destruction of the indigenous, it would in the very least engender the destruction of the rural, largely indigenous peasantry. The resulting need to leave their land and migrate to cities would, from the native perspective, lead to cultural genocide and merely finish the process that the Spanish had started five hundred years earlier.

If the military uprising was doomed to failure, it would in the very least place domestic and international pressure on the Mexican government to deal with the demands of the Zapatisas. For the sudden capture of San Cristobal and the surrounding area up to Ocosingo tarnished the neoliberal triumphalism of the Clinton Administration and the then ruling elite of the PRI. The EZLN, though beaten back into the mountains by the Mexican Army which brandished American weapons, triumphed in the realm of ideas over the Mexican government. The 1994 uprising forced the Mexican government to negotiate the San Andres Accords with the EZLN in 1996, which, by asserting indigenous rights to the land and natural resources of Chiapas, in some ways overturned basic understandings of NAFTA. Nevertheless, the Mexican government soon turned its back on the San Andres Accords, and stove to further militarize Chiapas. Placing Chiapas under a state of siege led to violence and massacres, and public opposition and the eventual demilitarization of the conflict cause the Army to pull back. Today, amidst the PRI, PAN, and PRD, the Zapatisas act as the conscience of Mexico, pointing out that as neoliberalism deepens its hold on the country, much of the population, particularly the indigenous, are left out and uprooted. Their alternative, so far, has not been heeded.

A Failed Ideology

2006-12-28T18:23:00.000-08:00

"I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even
less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds." -Eric Hobsbawm

I remember, walking amongst the decayed and hollowed out bunks of Auschwitz, in a freezing Polish December, the sheer expanse of that concentration camp. Barracks spanned the horizon in either direction, as far as I could see until they melted away into the grey mist. I wandered about for a few hours, trying to take it all in, but it did not take me long to realize that I could not. The fact that over a million people, mainly Jews, were executed in a variety of ways, simply because of the circumstance of their birth is difficult to comprehend, and one of the great tragedies of human history. Standing over one of the destroyed crematoria, my group leader discussed the resistance of Jews to their fate, and in a convoluted way that if Israel existed in 1941 the Holocaust might have been averted. The Holocaust, according to her, justified Israel with its ability to protect Jews from persecution. That idea, I knew, was disturbing, and it was also a lie.

Zionism, in its general expression, attempts to protect Jews from their historically experienced persecution. In attempting to fashion an nation state outside of Europe, Zionism mimicked the actions of those whose nationalism increasingly turned against Jews. Like the heads of colonial states, be it the German Kaiser or the British Prime Minister, the Zionist movement implicitly acted according to the assumptions of late 19th Century nationalist politics. Which were, that colonialism was a mechanism to mitigate national conflict, and that Jews constituted a people who did not belong in Europe, or that they would not find representation within constituted nation-states, as they were a separate people. As a result, the Zionist movement operated in a tacit agreement with European anti-Semites, and they maneuvered within colonial competition to find a home for themselves. The Zionist movement was fortunate that Britain and Germany were competing for the remnants of the dissolving Ottoman Empire, or they would have attempted to build their state in Zimbabwe.

In fashioning the Jewish state, the Zionist movement replicated social patterns that were common in French Algeria or Afrikaner South Africa. They lived in their own sections of towns, worked in Jewish only business, founded Jewish only labor unions that extracted better working conditions, and created utopian socialist colonies that depended on Palestinians for seasonal labor. Thus, early Zionist settlement mimicked the social relations of settler colonialist societies, but with a somewhat more romantically escapist ideal. For, if Jews were to escape from Europe, they did not leave their ideas and prejudices on the continent. The European basis of racism and exclusion which hardened in the late 19th Century the Zionists transferred to the western shores of Asia as well.

The nationalist concepts of insider/outsider status drove the expansion of the Zionist settlement into the present-day state of Israel. European prejudice stimulated increased immigration in the early part of the 20th Century, but not enough to remotely displace the Palestinian populations. If Lord Balfour, an anti-Semite, gave official imperial recognition of the Zionist project, its material legitimacy was less than stellar. 1945 Jews owned about 8 percent of land in contemporary Palestine, compared to the 50 percent that was given in 1948 by the UN. It was the Second World War, for three important reasons, that drove the Zionist movement into international legitimacy symbolized by independence. The first was the Holocaust, which once and for all demonstrated the extent of European barbarity and hatred towards the Jews, and convinced many that Jews would only find peace outside of Europe. The second was the illegal, according to Britain, mass migration of Jews from their destitute conditions in the former camps to Palestine, and the international sympathy with which it was accorded. The third was the fighting experience of many of the newer immigrants, who brought to Palestine military tactics and elan that they used while fighting the partisans against the Nazis. It was these conditions that allowed for the triumph and acceptance, by Europe and the United States, of Israel after the collapse of the 1947 UN plan.

The emergence of Israel as presently conceived, though understandable, did not result in a utopia for the Jews who lived there. It its acceptance of European racism, Zionism projected a similar hierarchical system among Jews in Israel. Ashkenazi Jews, who ran the Labour Party, represented the dominant racial ideal in Israel. Below them were the Mizrahim, or Arab Jews, who by the 1970's became so disaffected with their situation that they caused the decline of the Labour Party. Living in the industrial towns or in overcrowded apartment buildings with lesser employment opportunities, combined with anxiety about their Arab cultural roots, stimulated a hostility to the vision of the founders. The Ethiopian Jews, as newer immigrants, the lower rung of the Jewish hierarchy, as they are the least acculturated, come to the country poorer, and are the darkest of the bunch. The fact that the most of them live in slums little better from Arabs in Israel attests to the racist nature of the society, and that Zionism is not a model for any kind of equality. Moreover, the collapse of the Kibbutzim means that Israel will once and for all shed its myth of socialist ideals and be seen for the aggressive capitalist society for what it is. Israel, for an industrialized society, has one of the highest rates of wealth disparity and highest rates of unemployment. Moreover, much of its economy is run by 19 ruling families who dominate its financial sector and heavily influence its political system. The fact that nationalism is a means by which Jews exploit each other, merely for the purpose of individual wealth accumulation, is a little spoken of fact that cuts into the ideal of national unity based on a similarly experienced past.

The Yom Kippur War fundamentally transformed Israeli politics, particularly domestically. If Israel could forge a racial state with international legitimacy after 1945, then the Yom Kippur war effectively destroyed the legal basis for its founding ideology. The colonization of the West Bank and Gaza strip, symbolic of its ideal as the Sparta of the Middle East, created a problem which the Independence War, in expelling much of the Palestinian population, had elided. In controlling lands that were completely Palestinian, Israel had to choose between changing into a racial democracy or exporting its racial regime into the Territories. Characteristic of conquering armies, it chose the latter, which has led to the permanent military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza up until this day. In choosing to remain a racial dictatorship, the political elite erected a policy of settlement that resembled American western expansion and the Afrikaner Trek, which also flagrantly violated international law that was erected after the Second World War. The two internal consequences of such a policy was a permanent state of war and the increasing religiosity of Israeli Jews. It was only after the 1967 War that Jewish fundamentalism became a national force, both as a justification for a Jewish state and as a recruiting base for the physical settlement of the territories. For Jews in the Diaspora, the voracious fundamentalism of practicing Jews in Israel has led to a characterization of non-Orthodox, liberal practitioners as "less than" Jews. Jewish fundamentalism is also a hotbed of male chauvanism rising antipathy towards homosexuals, and the stoning of cars that drive in Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Though the IDF had universal conscription since the establishment of Israel, the Yom Kippur War meant that its primary missioned changed from mere defense to colonial policing. The road blocks, closures, bombings, expropriation of property, bulldozing of homes, and destruction of olive groves all serve to protect the settlers and cower the Palestinians into accepting their inferior position, and hopefully emigrating. The result has been the permanent militarization of Israel, to the extent that the IDF has become the dominant force in Israeli politics, and a national culture that glorifies military violence as the arbiter of national identity.

The defensive nature of Zionism with regards to Europe has caused it to be aggressive towards Arabs, and in many ways towards Jews in Israel itself. By intrinsically accepting European anti-Semitic thought, the Zionist movement has fashioned a similar mentality in the Middle East. The search for national power has not solved the historical problems experienced by Jews, but has simply exported them into a different location. As a state that operates in many ways according to its own self interest, Israel does not act in the interest of Jews as a whole, but rather the dominant sectors of Israeli society. There is no problem, then, in exaggerating anti-Semitism throughout the world in order to stimulate migration to Israel. Zionism also operates in an international contradictions, since it is dependent on the support of American and British Jews to support its policies. As its source of migrants are dwindling in the face of a rising Palestinian population, Israel has to look at the United States and Britain for migrants at a time when anti-Semitism in both places are at historic lows. Moreover, the political and economic situation has stimulated Jewish migration outside of Israel, which in its own way is a physical manifestation of the failure of Zionism. Thus, over time Israel will either have to transform itself in a racial democracy or exacerbate its current political calculus into outright apartheid internal and external to is defined boundaries. As the latter is the evident choice, it should be no surprise that Israeli culture has become increasingly isolated, aggressive, fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and racist. The search for state power has led to a bunker mentality that is at odds with the bulk of Jewish history. For, if Jews have historically been oppressed, they have also in the past exhibited a cosmopolitanism that has enriched the societies in which they lives. Isolating themselves behind concrete walls and bunkers has led to a deviation from such a critical tradition, and the cultural brilliance which has resulted from Jewish interaction with the outside world is practically non-existent. As Zionism is in a recurrent state of crisis, it should not be seen as any kind of liberatory ideology, but rather as one of the last remnants of colonialism that was seemingly eclipsed in the 20th Century.

With regard to the Holocaust, there is nothing that could have averted it, except for the speedy conquest of the Allied armies. The idea of transporting six million Jews from all over Europe to Palestine would have been difficult without the war, and such migration would have gone against the immigration policies of the British government at the time. There really was no power that could defeat Nazism in 1941, not to mention fight a war to save Jews from a fate that no one outside of the Nazi party even dreamed of. It should also be noted that Zionism accepts the basic premises as Nazism vis-a-vis Europe, and that it is wielded in compromise, not challenge. Racism, after all, must be fought, not disengaged from, and the abuse of a human tragedy to justify aggressive national policy should not be seen in a positive light.

American Pravda

2006-12-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

"Any dictator would admire the obedience and uniformity of the US media." -Noam Chomsky

In the former Soviet Union, Pravda was the official organ of the Communist Party. As such, Pravda disseminated news that reflected the the kind of information and interpretation the nomenklatura wanted to convey. In essence, Pravda represented the ruling ideology of the Stalinist state, the worldview that the highest bureaucrats imposed upon their subjects. While the United States is not officially a one party dictatorship, and has a market system that is supposed to provide competition and alternatives, the dominant media system that undergirds popular consciousness mirrors that of an authoritarian regime.

Around the time of Vietnam War, there were about fifty major media outlets that disseminated information throughout the United States. Mainly rather local media companies, such sources of information and analysis harbored their own reporters and editorial staffs. It is true that prior to media deregulation there were only three television stations, ABC, NBC, and CBS. Yet, television was not as pervasive as it is in our lives today, and media ownership as a whole, which by and large determines content, was relatively unconcentrated. Though there is a romantic idealism of the American media in the 1950's-1960's, particularly with regard to the coverage of Vietnam prior to 1968, the sources of information were relatively diverse.

From the fifty major media outlets that existed around midcentury, today a grand total of six media companies control the content and programming that broadcasts information and analysis to the American consciousness. The media industry is run by what are essentially cartels who own a vast array of different types of media, in order to both expand their market share and to provide a variety of platforms for their various products. Thus Viacom owns Paramount, CBS, and cable channels like MTV, Comedy Central, and Bravo. Disney owns ESPN, the Disney Channel, and ABC. Murdoch's News Corporation owns Fox, Fox News, FX, USA Today, a host of other papers, and possibly eventually the Wall Street Journal. Clearchannel owns most free radio stations nationwide as well as thousands of billboards. The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Company out of Chicago. The point is that through massive mergers and the liberalization of FCC guidelines, which allow a company to own more than one media asset in a given market, the control of the media has become more centralized. As a result, individual companies have become more and more powerful with regard their ability to determine the substance of the American consciousness.

The media industry is not a monopoly, but monopoly in a way would be an anathema to their bottom line since it implies a public interest. Concentration of media ownership implies an unspoken cooperation between such companies, for they can rest content with their market share and rake in advertising dollars. Changes in the types of media available have not really hurt media corporations, it has just led to their visible expansion in buying out smaller, newer media companies. In fact, media companies are increasing profitable as efforts to increase their bottom line have become the modus vivendi of major shareholders over the last few years. And the correlation between media concentration and increasing profits has coincidentally led to the rising reliance on the state. It was the changes in Federal law that allowed media concentration into something like a cartel, and the allegiance of the state is necessary for the continuance of narrow mass media outlets.

The consequence is that media companies grovel to state interests wherever necessary. Domestic media coverage really is little more than repetition of the company line with regard to the desires of Executive. Major media coverage of the Second Iraq War from September 2002 unto today has deviated little from being in lock step with the Bush Administration. The United States has continued to make progress despite the deterioration of civil society and the physical destruction of the Iraqi people. And criticisms outside of accepted doctrine, which is either the United States is making a benevolent mistake or is simply acting wonderfully in the name of the Iraqi people, is belittled or unheard. Effective debate about policy issues is nonexistent in mainstream media, particularly television. A cursory viewing of the O'Reilly Factor or the Capital Gang on Sunday mornings merely elucidates the fact that the dominant perspective is either conservative or really conservative, and anything outside of this spectrum is considered batshit crazy. Nothing really demonstrates the synergy between media cartels and the government more than the use of military officials as political commentators. Becoming something of a pundit has become a popular form of retirement for former generals, and since generals are trained to direct wars there should be little surprise as to the substance of their analysis. The fact that Oliver North, a disgraced war criminal, is a successful talk show host should point out the absurdity of seeing dominant media as independent from the state.

Of course, if Americans stopped paying attention to the popular media cartels, the industry would inevitably collapse. Since media is driven by advertising revenue, if people stopped watching, buying newspapers, going to movies, or logging onto sites then their primary source of income would dissipate. For this to happen Americans would have to give up probably the major source of leisure in their lives, the substance that allows them to retreat from reality. If Marx famously wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, than contemporaneously media should be considered in the same vein. If one really pays attention, then the vast majority of the content fed to us should be considered little more than fantasy. Most people will never be rich, the economy is getting worse, the war is not exhibiting "progress," the people on the screen are not like you nor do they give a shit about you, the substance of relationships do not mirror what you see on television, and happy endings are few and far between in people's lives. The media, in fact, helps us all escape from the dregs of existence, and in providing a shared experience points out that most of what we do in its context is probably meaningless. For if the network was shut down, people would most likely realize that the reality posited by the media is not real, and that the people who broadcast programming do not do so in their interest.

Hate Because You Have To

2006-12-17T00:03:00.000-08:00

"What do we have in common with this nation of executioners? The difference between its cruelty and our patient moderation, its color and ours, the great seas that separate us, our avenging climate, all tell us plainly that they are not our brothers, that they never will be, and that if they find refuge among us, they will plot again to trouble and divide us." -Jean-Jacques Dessalines, 1804

From March to April of 1804, the Haitian army undertook a campaign of extermination against the remaining French people in the former colony. Being that Haiti emerged after a dozen years of revolution, civil war, and colonial invasion, women and children comprised the bulk of what was left of the French population. Dessalines, the self-proclaimed Emperor of Haiti, had vacillated in his orders of ethnic cleansing. The last French forces evacuated what was then Saint Domingue in November 1803, meaning that Dessalines' waited four months to fire the last shots of the Haitian war of decolonization. Nevertheless, three months after it declared itself independent of France, the Haitian army systematically eliminated the last vestiges of the physical French presence. In Haut du Cap and Port au Prince laid the open pits where the French met their fate.

At the outset the murder of mostly seemingly innocent women and children seems particularly barbaric. Such a defeated and defenseless people posed no threat to the new Haitian state. Nor could they have been accused of fighting against the Haitian army during war for independence. This calculated decision, however, should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as the tail end of a process where any vestige of whiteness would be viewed as threatening. The war for Haitian Independence was, after all, an extremely brutal war in a land of nearly uninterrupted revolutionary conflict. It was not only about imperial control, but also concerned the future of slavery and thus whether whites or those descended from Africa would control the former pearl of the Antilles.

In February of 1802, the French fleet under General Leclerc invaded Saint Domingue with an initial force of twelve thousand seasoned Napoleonic soldiers. Within a few months both Cap Francais and Port au Prince were burned to the ground, and Toussaint Louverture and the black generals under his command had surrendered to the French. While Leclerc arrested Louverture soon after his surrender and shipped him off to die in the Jura mountains, Louverture's former lieutenants were integrated into the French occupation. Thus both Christophe and Dessalines used their forces in counterinsurgency operations against the popular resistance that emerged after the French invasion. The black masses, after all, were leery of any government headed by whites and the presence of thousand of foreign troops in their country. Despite Leclerc's claims to the contrary, it seemed to the Dominguan freedmen that the French ultimately aimed to reinstate slavery.

Leclerc, in his desire to maintain French dominance, declared that all persons not in the French army should be disarmed. The right of cultivateurs to possess weapons was essential to success of the French wars for emancipation against the Spanish and British from 1793 to 1797. Or rather in many respects the freedom that emerged in Saint Domingue stemmed from the armed violence of the ex-slaves themselves. Disarmament, then, represented a symbolic precursor to re-enslavement, particularly since it was undertaken by the same black generals who led the initial fight against slavery. Moreover, the former white officers who had been a part of Louverture's general staff melted back into the French occupation force, in effect casting their lot against freed men and women. The black masses viewed this gathering of forces with immense reprehension, and became the vanguards for liberty after Louverture's surrender. The small bands of fighters in the mountains, decayed cane fields, and coffee orchards, led by such men lost to history as Sans-Souci and Toussaint Brave, led a guerrilla war against the French occupation. The war against the French occupation was a declaration by the ex-slaves that they would rather perish than suffer being placed back in chains.

The finals years of French rule in Saint Domingue were probably the bloodiest that the colony had experienced. In the countryside the occupation forces attempted to pacify the guerrillas, with the effect that entire bands of fighters and their families were eliminated. French forces, too, were picked off by crafty black fighters who would vanish into the mountains after getting a kill. The demographics of the conflict and the general alignment of the colonized versus the colonizers meant that the violence itself degenerated into a race war. The French were loath to distinguish combatants versus noncombatants given the fact that they were all well, black. Moreover, the French occupation expressed a culture of racial degeneracy. Vicious dogs were imported from Cuba to track down blacks and tear them to pieces. The French constructed a small coliseum in Le Cap, where Napoleon's sister was a frequent guest, so black captives could face off against lions, and of course be ripped to shreds. Captured officers and soldiers would be given autos da fe in the middle of towns, where the colons would watch bemusedly as the ex-slaves were tortured to death. In short, the French occupation re-enshrined the culture of slavery even before it was reinstated in the French West Indies. It was this racial violence that led many black and gens de couleur officers to defect even before the French legalized slavery in their possessions after the capture of Guadeloupe. The latter pronouncement, of course, ensured the defeat of French control over Saint Domingue. Dessaline's betrayal of the French, combined with his alliance with the people of color in the South, meant that all the sons and daughters of Africa would in fact sow the seeds of hell before they became again the objects of men.

The destruction of the white French population should be seen in the larger context of a war for freedom and independence. It was because of the creole betrayal that they had to in fact, pay. The French, who were at first the slaveholders and then the re-enslavers, created the milieu within in which the Haitian masses were forced to act. If the French only communicated with blacks through violence, then all they understood was violence. It was due to the French attempt at re-enslavement that the word blanc in kreyol meant the term foreigner in Haiti. Which isn't to say that the Haitians did not differentiate among whites, something which the French were unable to do among the colonized. Polish soldiers sent over by Napoleon refused to fight the ex-slaves, and thus were considered to be Haitian citizens. The Americans at this time were also considered to be "les bonnes blancs" since they helped supply the black armies. Nevertheless, any white French presence in Haiti gave the French justification to reinvade their former colony. The immediate years after evacuation wree filled with French threats to invade Haiti. The French, after all, refused to recognize Haiti until 1825, and the English, despite their prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade, gave the French the authority to repopulate Haiti upon reconquest. Which is to say that, despite haughty rhetoric, European humanistic claims rested on a fundamentally different plane once non-Europeans became the object of concern. Or that the fate of the French colons was ultimately the result of their own actions, that they nestled in the bed they had made themselves.

A Mighty Burden

2006-12-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure." -James Baldwin

From the top down, American history seems like the impregnable march of progress of a people across a continent. The apparent amount of social mobility, wealth accumulation, and acceptance of immigrants who populated the continent is rather striking. The United States emerged from being an afterthought of the British Empire into the world's leading power by the middle of the 20th Century. In the process it became the world's first democracy, harbored the world's first feminist movement, abolished slavery, and became the place where any man can achieve economic success. The United States, then, is an exceptional land unfettered by old-world anachronisms, a place devoid of social fetters.

The mythology of American exceptionalism has a malevolent side that is often regarded with the clarity of opthamalia. The entire concept of America is a project that emanated from Europe and was enacted to primarily benefit Europeans. From Colon's incantation of Hispaniola as his own private fiefdom, to the mafia-style rule of Pizarro and Almagro in Peru, to the plantation schemes of the Hakluyts, the Americas have been seen as a tabula rasa with which Europeans can do as they wish. The consequence of such ideas for non-Europeans in the Americas was the depopulation of the natives and the emergence of racial slavery. Be it the Pequot War to expand the Puritan Kingdom of Heaven in Massachusetts, Bacon's Rebellion to ensure yeoman unfettered access to the Virginia Piedmont, or British expeditions against Trelawny Maroons in Jamaica's cockpit country, Europeans subjugated peoples to establish an order that first and foremost enshrined social and economic privileges to light skinned peoples from the triangular landmass that juts out from Asia. Freed from the restrictions of European society, colonial America was a land of unparalleled wealth, opportunity, and degradation for its time.

The American Revolution was a political break from Great Britain, but it had the potential to be a radical break from the confines of its past. While Jefferson blamed the legacy of slavery and Indian removal on the British, the United States had the opportunity to forestall the march of land-hungry settlers across the Appalachians and manumit all the slaves within its realm. Such a decision would have given the new nation the moral capital with which to justify both its independence and uniqueness among the countries of its time. Instead Americans, particularly the politicians and ideologues associated with the emergent Republican party, fashioned a politics around white landownership. Though gradual abolition was enacted slowly above the Mason-Dixon line, slavery in the United States quickly spread to the new states below the Ohio River. As such large-holdings and small-holdings carved up the Mississippi Valley, the indigenous who lived there were either decimated or forced across the Mississippi to live there in "perpetuity." The prosperity of export-oriented American farmers was made on the wilderness through which Indians traversed and from the labor that black slaves toiled for their white masters.

The sectional rise of the North in the first half of the 19th Century did not fully deviate from that part of the United States patterned on colonial political economy, the South. Through Jefferson's embargoes and the erection of tariffs which protected the United States from capital flight, an economy based on wage labor and industrialization dominated the Northeast. Though the basis of the economy was rather new, the pattern of social relations was in many ways similar to that of the more maligned Southern states. Blacks, if emancipated, labored in the worst occupations, lived in the grimiest slums, and lived with the incessant popular racism of whites. Immigrants from England, France, Ireland, and Germany sought work in urban workshops or bought cheap land in the Great Valley across the Appalachians. Immigrants who labored in occupations similar to blacks constructed a popular culture that denigrated the sons and daughters of Africa in order to claim their tenuous Americanness. In the far off land of California recently arrived Chinese men were first used for domestic labor in the mining camps, then either died or were forgotten blasting railroad tracks through the Sierras. A few years before, the United States defeated Mexico in a war to seize a third of their country, and failed to uphold its promise to treat former Mexicans as American citizens. The expansion of the American wage-based economy, then, depended upon the same racial calculus as the section dependent on the plantation complex.

The destruction of the South in the Civil War eliminated chatted slavery within the American republic. The end of slavery did not mean social equality for freedmen, just the imposition of incessant poverty and the maintenance of white supremacy. Segregation emerged ever so slowly until the economic dislocation of the 1890's cause the New South to codify its new order of industrial race relations. Lynchings, rape, prisons, and the doctrine of separate but equal served to keep blacks in their place until 1965. At the same time the United States proceeded to confine the remnants of semi-sedentary indigenous to reservations, where they would be forced into Indian schools and practice private property in order to kill the Indian but save the man. The Black Hills promised to the Sioux, for instance, had gold in it and so the process continued. The Republican victory in the Civil War ensured the dominance of industrial corporations, and the expansion of industry pulled in poor immigrants from predominantly Eastern and Southern Europe. While these new immigrants were subjected to a racial regime that excluded them from the privileges of Anglo society, their descendants became the primary beneficiaries of the suburbanization-driven welfare state after the Second World War.

In the 21st Century, economic change is quite rapid, but much of American social order is very similar to that of the colonial era. Though segregation is Federally illegal, the presence of racism is still very with us. The vast amounts of wealth that the United States is known for furnishing upon its residents is based on the racial ordering of society. Darker people live in the ghetto, receive the worst education, suffered the institutionalized violence of police brutality, and provide the excuse for the prison industrial complex. Profits endemic to neoliberalism could not be created without undocumented labor, a surplus population that is forced to work for minimum wage, or a transnational complex of factories that span the darker regions of the globe to benefit multinational corporations. Capitalism is not merely a system of class relations, but it dependent upon a social order that consigns the harshest forms of labor to a specific, servile caste. Economic equality is an object that is desirable for a more just and sustainable society. Ignoring the detritus of race and its historical importance will merely perpetuate assumptions that have engendered centuries of suffering and incalculable human loss. I am not sure if whiteness as a marker of power can simply be claimed to lose its meaning if the descendants of Europeans deem it so, but racial equality, particularly a serious and systematic elimination of racial privilege is necessary in order for there to be some semblance of a progressive society. Humanity must be seen beyond the mark of color, and the burden lies with those who resemble the profiteers who first disembarked from their stinking, wooden ships of sail.

Endgame

2006-12-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

"The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoise there is--there can be--nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism." -Aime Cesaire

Though it is often proclaimed otherwise, imperialism is not instituted for the sake of the conquered. Rome was not constructed for the benefit of the Gauls, Spain did not grab the Americas to elevate the indigenous, and France did not take Algeria merely to enlighten the natives with civilization. The current incarnation of the American imperial project, spanning the entire globe, and, if the foresight of state planners is to be taken seriously, beyond earth, is no exception. Despite remonstrances to honor, glory, patriotism, the troops, etc., American influence is spread first and foremost to benefit the United States. By United States, I mean the nexus of bureaucratic, corporate, and military elites who conspire to use the benefits of power for themselves. In the name of the people over which it governs, the United States strives to extract booty and obedience at all costs.

The justifications for the second Iraq war have been many and without substance. From stopping weapons of mass destruction, to bringing the fight to Al-Qaida, to spreading democracy to heathen savages, to restoring order to the chaos which America started in the first place, these justifications merely obscure the dark truth. Which is, for the sake of increased power at home, imperial stability abroad, and the wealth and control that all that oil offered, the United States plucked the "ripe fruit" that was Iraq. The truth behind the reasons becomes evident when one looks at how angry and repetulant Cheney and the other warmongers become when satraps don't follow orders. It turns out that the Iraqi parliament under occupation opposes passing the oil law that the United States wrote. Oil, which is seen by Iraqis as a national resource and is currently controlled by what's left of the Iraqi state, would be fully privatized to American corporations under the law written by the United States. Such a move is too much even for Iraqi puppets, but given the ceaseless violence and social decay driven by American malevolence, demonstates what the United States is really after.

Though it isn't mentioned much, the social destruction of Somalia is reaching a level that surpasses the more publicized ethnic war in Sudan. Last year's Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, under orders and with assistance from Washington, has unleashed massive dislocation from Mogadishu to surrounding countries. The Islamic Courts were far from perfect, but they did generate a measure of stability in one of the most dangerous cities on earth. The Ethiopian invasion did nothing more than level many sections of the city, needlessly killed civilians, created hundreds of thousands of refugees, and reinforced the power of the clannish warlords who had been running Mogadishu and its environs like their own private fiefdoms. The reason behind the American backed invasion was that of disobedience. The Islamic Courts, though not the most liberally enlightened leaders, were against the United States' war on terror, and thus had to be eliminated. In an area like northeast Africa, which is a site of increasing American involvement, human lives mean little as a cost of dependence.

The United States currently has over 700 military bases around the globe. As the bulk of the American armed forces is stationed overseas, there is little discussion as to why American troops are stationed say, in Turkmenistan. The power of the American government has fortunately been increased by two events with which the United States happened to be connected: World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. With the former, the United States was able to expand its hold beyond Latin American and Pacific Islands, while with the latter the United States became the sole "hyperpower" on earth. As the cop of the world, the United States was able to dictate terms of control to weaker countries, like crack-privatization in Eastern Europe for example. However, the apex of American global empire was actually quite short-lived, from 1991 to 2001. The attacks against the Pentagon and World Trade Center ignited a strategic shift within American foreign policy circles, that from merely ensuring influence from local rulers to asserting American dominance through the American military. Hinged on the dominance of American military technology and financial power, this project of imperial reform was unleashed on Iraq in 2003 and may spread to Iran in the near future. It has, however, failed.

The honeymoon of American imperialism occurred at a time when its structural power was weakening. Deindustrialization meant that the domestic forces of production which traditionally propelled American wealth would be harnessed in other countries. Corporations may increase profits, but the domestic rates of growth necessary to sustain increased military budgets would be nonexistent. Moveover, the American establishment viewed the Federal Budget as a credit card to be paid for by future generations. The material consequences of this is that the United States incurs untold of amounts of debt to primarily pay for the military budget. The majority of this debt, and the overall value of the American dollar, is in the hands of foreigners. The fact that the Federal Reserve can print money does not mean that it can control the increasing debt-related inflation through the money supply. In fact, if American markets crashed, as they may very well do so in light of the ever-weakening American economy, foreign-held American reserves would simply be released, whose ramifications are unknown. On the international side, expansive American dominance rested on little besides military dominance, and its weakness was always in the minds of the conquered. The United States paid little attention to increased democratic movements in Latin America, which eventually brought Chavez to power, in the 1990's. Nationalist Islamic resistance, typified by Iran and Hezbollah, withstood American-backed invasions from the 1980's through the present day. Moreover, the rise of the EU, China, and Northeast Asia as areas of economic power portended to the fact that the American empire, deviod of substance except for greenbacks and guns, stood on a house of cards.

The issue is not if the American empire will fall, but when. All empires, built on the quasi-religious concept of hierarchical power, self-destruct because they are erected upon principles which destroy the basis of effective human existence. Nothing propels empires but the lust for greed, hatred, and control. Which is to say that the desiccation of American imperialism will be bloody, brutal, and barbaric. The United States will try to maintain its position at all costs, and it will leave little behind besides edificial destruction, radiation, and unmarked graves. Americans will care very little, if at all, until the costs of imperialism directly affect them. After all, we are enclosed in a culture that teaches us to ape our rulers, to engage in licentious consumption and drown our sorrows in the variety of drugs open to us. Devoid of any conscience, we gladly close our eyes to the sufferings of others as long as banal pleasures denude us. Ensconsed in ignorance, most Americans will have little understanding as to what is happening. Which will end up being, for the sake of the ruling class, a debt-ridden land with decayed human and material infrastructure. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.