Dec 30, 2016

Poet's Nook: "no expectations" by Rumi




A spirit that lives in this world
And does not wear the shirt of love,
Such an existence is a deep disgrace.

Be foolish in love,
Because love is all there is.

There is no way into presence
Except through a love exchange.

If someone asks, But what is love?
Answer, Dissolving the will.

True freedom comes to those
Who have escaped the questions
Of freewill and fate.

Love is an emperor.
The two worlds play across him.
He barely notices their tumbling game.

Love and lover live in eternity.
Other desires are substitutes
For that way of being.

How long to you lay embracing a corpse?
Love rather the soul, which cannot be held.

Anything born in the spring dies in the fall,
But love is not seasonal.

With wine pressed from grapes,
Expect a hangover.

But this love path has no expectations.
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount.  Travel lighter.
Wings will be given.

Be clear like a mirror
Reflecting nothing.

Be clean of pictures and the worry 
That comes with images.

Gaze into what is not ashamed
Or afraid of any truth.

Contain all human faces in your own
Without any judgement of them.

Be pure emptiness.
What us inside that? You ask.
Silence is all I can say.

Lovers have some secrets
That they keep.


~ Rumi from  Bridge to the Soul
Translation by Coleman Barks

Dec 26, 2016

In the Time of Trump, All We Have Is Each Other by Chris Hedges



This Christmas I mourn the long, slow death of our democracy that led to the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. I fear the euphoria of those who have embraced the atavistic lust for violence and bigotry stoked by him. These nativist forces, part of the continuum of white vigilante violence directed against people of color and radical dissidents throughout American history, are once again being groomed as instruments of mass intimidation and perhaps terror. I know that our civil and political institutions, poisoned by neoliberalism and captured by the corporate state, have neither the will nor the ability to protect us. We are on our own. It won’t be pleasant.
A week ago in New York I spoke with Ellen Schrecker, the country’s foremost historian of McCarthyism and the author of “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & The Universities” and “The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University.”
“What am I seeing?” she asked about the nation’s political and cultural condition. “Am I seeing a replay of the McCarthy era? To a large extent some of the parallels are stunning. You can look at a figure like [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy, who symbolized a much broader repressive movement. I would say Trump plays the same role today for what really is a right-wing reactionary movement that has taken over the American government.”
“There are a number of fairly superficial comparisons we can make,” Schrecker went on. “I think both McCarthy and Trump are somewhat abhorrent characters—perhaps there’s a little sociopath involved there. McCarthy was a genius at working the press. He understood how to get himself on the front pages. He knew the deadlines that specific reporters had. He knew how to feed them stories. I think the parallels there are pretty obvious. Trump is a genius with regard to the media.”
The Wisconsin senator was, as Trump is now, very opportunistic, she said. McCarthy, a Democrat before he became a Republican, “was just a little bit late” in exploiting the Red Scare, Schrecker said, latching on to it in 1950, “by which time the Un-American Activities Committeehad been hounding Hollywood.”
Trump and his Christian fascist minions, sooner than most of us expect, will seek to shut down the small spaces left for free expression. Dissent will become difficult and sometimes dangerous. There will be an overt campaign of discrimination and hate crimes directed against a host of internal enemies, including undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans and dissidents. The Christian right will be given a license to roll back women’s rights, insert their magical thinkinginto school curriculums and terrorize Muslims and the GBLT community. The Trump administration will hand our Christian jihadists a platform to champion a repugnant religious chauvinism that fuses the symbols and language of the Christian religion with American capitalism, imperialism and white supremacy. 
Repressive measures, I expect, will be implemented swiftly. Speed blinds a captive population to what is happening. Already anemic democratic traditions and institutions, including the legal system, the two major political parties and the press, will crumble under the assault. Trump will use the familiar tools that make possible the authoritarian state: mass incarceration, militarized police, crippling of the judicial system, demonization of opponents real and imagined, and obliteration of privacy and civil liberties, all foolishly promoted by the political elites on behalf of corporate power.
Schrecker said the rise of Trump has been in the making for four decades. Corporations funded and established institutions to close the cultural, social and political openings made in the 1960s, especially in universities, the press, labor and the arts. These corporate forces turned government into a destructive power. America was pillaged and cannibalized for profit. We now live in a deindustrialized wasteland. This scorched-earth assault created fertile ground for a demagogue.
The late Lewis Powell, a general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and later a Supreme Court justice, in 1971 wrote an eight-page memooutlining a campaign to counter what the document’s title described as an “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The memo established the Business Roundtable, which generated huge monetary resources and political clout to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell report listed methods that corporations could use to silence those in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals” who were hostile to corporate interests.
Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes. He proposed that ideological assaults against government regulation and environmental protection be directed at a mass audience. He advocated placing corporate-friendly academics and neoliberal economists in universities and banishing from the public sphere those who challenged unfettered corporate power—especially Ralph Nader, whom Powell cited by name. Organizations were to be formed to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. Pro-corporate judges were to be placed on the bench.
Academics were to be controlled by pressure from right-wing watch lists, co-opted university administrators and wealthy donors. Under the prolonged assault the universities, like the press, eventually became compliant, banal and monochromatic.
“He spelled out a need for an alternative to academic knowledge,” Schrecker said of Powell. “He felt the academy had been undermined by the left. He wanted to establish an alternative source of expertise. What you’re getting in the 1970s is the development of things like the American Enterprise Institute [in existence since 1938] , The Heritage Foundation, a whole bunch of think tanks on the right who people in the media can go to and get expertise. But it’s politically motivated.”
“It was unbelievably successful,” she said of the campaign. “It’s pretty bad. What we’re seeing today is an assault on knowledge. What came out of this are the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s which created a set of stereotypes of professors as deconstructionist, raging feminists who hate men, cross-dressers, and, worse, who are out of touch with reality.”
The ideological attack was accompanied by corporate campaigns to defund public schools and universities, along with public broadcasting and the arts. The humanities were eviscerated. Vocational training, including the expansion of the study of finance and economics in universities, replaced disciplines that provided students with cultural and historical literacy, that allowed them to step outside of themselves to feel and express empathy for the other. Students were no longer taught how to think, but what to think. Civic education died. A grotesque kind of illiteracy—one exemplified by Trump—was celebrated. Success became solely about amassing wealth. The cult of the self, the essence of corporatism, became paramount.
Schrecker said that during the McCarthy era most of the Red baiting, blacklisting and censorship emanated from the government, especially J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover and McCarthy, along with Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, left ruined lives and reputations in the wake of their vicious inquisitions. They effectively shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Cohn, who was a prosecutor in the espionage case that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenbergto the electric chair, was later Trump’s lawyerand close friend for 13 years. Cohn was disbarred in 1986, shortly before his death, for what a court called unethical, unprofessional and “particularly reprehensible” conduct.
“There are … many more private entities” involved in today’s anti-democratic campaign, Schrecker said. “It’s a bit of everything. That’s why it’s so dangerous. It’s not just Trump. Trump is clearly about to become very powerful. Nonetheless, there have been these forces, the climate deniers, the oil people, all of them are coming together at this particular point in time.”
We must begin again. Any hope for a restoration of civil society will come from small, local groups and community organizations. They will begin with the mundane tasks of holding back the expansion of charter schools, enforcing environmental regulations, building farmers markets, fighting for the minimum wage, giving sanctuary to undocumented workers, protesting hate crimes and electing people to local offices who will seek to mitigate the excesses of the state.
“We have to reconstitute a civil society,” Schrecker said. “Intermediary institutions like the academy and the media have been hollowed out. Certainly, journalism is on life support. We have to resuscitate organizations and institutions that have atrophied.”
“There is an attack on the American mind,” she said. “A lot of what we’re seeing with Trump is the product of 40 years of dumbing down.”
A crisis is traditionally used by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to put a country in lockdown. An economic meltdown, a large domestic terrorist attack, widespread devastation from climate change or the orchestrated escalation of hostilities with another country, perhaps Iran or China, will see Trump and his rogue generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists plunge the United States into dystopia.
War is the usual vehicle that demagogues use to justify internal repression and wield unchallenged power. If the federal government expands our wars to create new enemies, even local resistance will be impermissible. All dissent will be criminalized. Institutions, fearful and weak, will carry out purges of those few who speak out. Most of society, intimidated by a war psychosis, will be compliant to avoid being targeted. Resistance will often be tantamount to suicide.
The late Rev. Daniel Berrigandeclared in a 2008 conversationwith me that the American empire was in irrevocable decline. He said that in the face of this dissolution we must hold fast to the non-historical values of compassion, simplicity, love and justice. The rise and fall of civilizations, he noted, is part of the cyclical nature of history.
“The tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others,” he said. “We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”
We must not become preoccupied with the short-term effects of resistance. Failure is inevitable for many of us. Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.

There Will Be No Miracles Here: Casey Gerald's Gospel of Doubt


Let's dig deeper and challenge long-held notions about ourselves and the world. This is our gift to ourselves as we go forth into another year....

How You Change People

. .




This is exactly what we all need right now in our dark, hostile world....Yeah, one can argue that the presentation leans too much on the personal and wishful thinking and not enough on political, social, historical and cultural dynamics that give shape to our lives and societies, but fundamentally speaking, there are some simple truths here to think about.

Dec 19, 2016

War Culture, Militarism and Racist Violence Under Trump by Henry A. Giroux



When history repeats itself with a vengeance, it generally signals a crisis of memory, historical consciousness and civic literacy. The ghosts of the past disappear in a comforting somnolence and a deadening market-driven culture of consumption, privatization and individualization. As a mode of moral witnessing, memory withers, lost in forms of historical and social amnesia that usher in the dark clouds of authoritarianism, albeit in updated forms.
Albert Camus understood this as well as anyone, and viewed fascism as a deadly virus that could reappear in new forms. For Camus, the disease of fascism could only be fought with the antibody of consciousness—embracing the past as a way of protecting the present and the future against the damage now forgotten. The words that appear in the concluding paragraph of The Plague are as relevant today as they were when they were written. Camus writes:
[As] he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
With Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, the scourge of authoritarianism has returned not only in the toxic language of hate, humiliation and bigotry, but also in the emergence of a culture of war and violence that looms over society like a plague.
War has been redefined in the age of global capitalism: it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society. As Ulrich Beck observes, “the distinctions between war and peace, military and police, war and crime, internal and external security” have collapsed. As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief and death, American culture has been transformed into a culture of war.
War culture reaches far beyond the machineries that enable the United States to ring the world with its military bases, produce vast stockpiles of weapons, deploy thousands of troops all over the globe and retain the shameful title of “the world’s preeminent exporter of arms, with more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market controlled by the United States,” as reported by Denver Nicks.
War culture provides the educational platforms that include those cultural apparatuses, institutions, beliefs and policies with the capacity to produce the discourses, spectacles of violence, cultures of fear, military values, hypermasculine ideologies and militarized policies that give war machines their legitimacy, converting them into symbols of national identity, if not honored ideals. Under such circumstances, the national security state replaces any viable notion of social security and the common good. As a militarized culture is dragged into the center of political life, fear feeds a discourse of bigotry, insecurity and mistrust, adding more and more individuals and groups to the register of repression, disposability and social death.
Violent lawlessness no longer registers ethical and moral concerns, and increasingly has become normalized. How else to explain Trump’s comment, without irony or remorse, during a campaign rally in Iowa that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters”? Ruthlessness, narcissism and bullying are the organizing principles of Trump’s belief that only winning matters and that everything is permitted to further his own self-interests. These are the values that underlie his call for “law and order,” which is more properly understood as a call for the lawlessness of the police state. Another register of lawlessness is evident in the presence of a ruthless market-driven corporate culture marked by an economic and political system mostly controlled by the ruling financial elite. This is a mode of corporate lawlessness that hoards wealth, income and power through the mechanisms of a national security state, mass surveillance, the arming of local police forces, a permanent war economy and an expansive militarized foreign policy.
Trump’s recent appointments of neoliberal elites, such as Steven Mnuchin, a long-time hedge fund manager and investment banker, to be his treasury secretary and Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, to head the Commerce Department make clear that he intends to allow the managers of big banks, hedge funds and other major financial institutions to run the economy. This is an upgraded version of neoliberalism which, as Cornel West points out, serves to “reinforce corporate interests, big bank interest, and to keep track of those of who are cast as peoples of color, women, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, and so forth…. So, this is one of the most frightening moments in the history of this very fragile empire and fragile republic.”
Military Mania
Trump’s appointment of warmongering, right-wing military personnel to top government posts and his ongoing rhetoric suggesting the need for a vast expansion of the military-industrial complex signal a further intensification of America’s war culture, one that inspired an article to be published in Forbeswith the headline: “For The Defence Industry, Trump’s Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again.” William D. Hartung makes the latter point clearby citing a speech Trump gave in Philadelphia before the election in which he called for
tens of thousands of additional troops, a Navy of 350 ships, a significantly larger Air Force, an anti-missile, space-based Star Wars-style program of Reaganesque proportions, and an acceleration of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion “modernization” program for the nuclear arsenal…. [all of which] could add more than $900 billion to the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade.
Evidence for an updated and expansive war culture is also visible in Trump’s willingness to consider a mob of racist neoconservatives for inclusion in his administration—picks, such as John Bolton and James Woolsey, both of whom believe that“Islam and the Arab world are the enemy of Western civilization” and are strong advocates of a war with Iran. He has welcomed disgraced military leaders, such as David H. Petraeus, former four-star Army general and director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he has appointed as secretary of defense retired United States Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis who opposed closing Guantánamo, along with Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran. Mattis was brusquely fired by the Obama administration as the Central Command boss.
Meanwhile, in a particularly worrisome appointment, Trump has chosen retired Gen. Michael Flynn to become his National Security Advisor. Flynn was fired for abusive behavior, has been accused of mishandling classified information, and is a firm supporterof Trump’s pro-torture policies. The New York Times reportedthat Flynn, who will occupy “one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy…. believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem ... describing it as a political ideology, not a religion.” In other words, Flynn believes that 1.3 billion Muslims are the enemy of Western civilization. He has also claimed “that Sharia, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States” (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”
Trump’s love of the military suggests that he will expand rather than cut back on America’s infatuation with its wars, and will do nothing to alter a dishonorable foreign policy standard that has propelled the US into a permanent war status for the larger part of the 21st century. As Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, since the latter part of 2001 this has resulted in “something like 370,000 combatants and noncombatants [being] killed in the various theaters of operations where U.S. forces have been active.” This is how democracy ends.
Landscapes of a War Culture
As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, the veneration of war in the United States has now reached a dangerous endpoint and has become the foundation of politics itself. This is especially true as Americans entered into one of the most appalling and threatening periods of the 21st century. They write:
War has passed from the final element of the sequences of power—lethal force as a last resort—to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself…. In order for war to occupy this fundamental social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function: war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life.
The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the deployment and celebration of violence abroad and at home. At a policy level, an arms industry fuels violence abroad while domestically, a toxic gun culture contributes to the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral and punishing state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the US.The section on “End the War on Black People” in the “Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice” outlines this in detail. There can be little doubt that a racist repressive state apparatus will be expanded with Trump’s choice of Jeff Sessions for attorney general. Sessions was once denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s on the grounds that he was a racist. He supports capital punishment and is poised to intensify the racist expansion of the criminal justice system. As John Kiriakou makes clear, quoting the nonprofit news organization, The Marshall Project:
Things will likely change quickly under Sessions. The new attorney general “helped block broader drug sentencing reform in the Senate this year despite wide bipartisan support, saying it would release ‘violent felons’ into the street.” He will also be tasked with carrying out the new president’s policies on private prisons…. Just weeks before the election, Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, hired two former Sessions aides to lobby in favor of outsourcing federal corrections to private contractors.
Since the Nixon era, a hyper-punitive political culture has served to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, and to fuel the racist system of mass incarceration. As Angela Davis argues in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, the persistent killing of Black youth testifies to a long history of domestic terrorism representing “an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contem­porary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.” The historical backdrop to the current killing of Black youth, men and women must be coupled with the shameful truththat “11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year.” Rebecca Gordon points outthat the United States is home to only 4 percent of the global population and yet it holds 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Moreover, 70 percent of these prisoners are people of color. These figures testify not only to the emergence of a police state, but also to a justice system that has a long legacy of being driven by racism.
Under such circumstances, important distinctions between war and civil society collapse as the police function as soldiers, cities are transformed into combat zones, shared responsibilities are replaced by shared fears and public safety is defined increasingly as a police matter. Neoliberal society has ceded any vestige of democratic ideals to a social formation saturated with fear, suspicion and violence. The line has become blurred between real acts of violence and mythical appeals to violence as cleansing and restorative, as is evident in Trump’s emotional appeal to his audiences’ rage and fear. Dystopian violence is now legitimated at the highest level of politics, both in its use as a spectacle and as a policy of terror initiated most specifically in the murderous rampage of drone warfare. Politics is now an extension of the culture of war, and violence is a generative force in the production of everyday life.
Normalizing Violence
The normalization of violence in US society is not only about how it is lived and endured, but also about how it becomes the connective tissue for holding different modes of governance, policies, ideologies and practices together. All of these come to resemble military activities. And it is precisely such activities that serve to legitimate the war on terror, the use of mass surveillance, the weaponizing of knowledge and the merging of a war culture and warfare state. As Jonathan Simon has detailed in his book, Governing through Crime, in the aftermath of the transition from the welfare state in the 1960s to the current warfare state, the appeal to fear on many political fronts became paramount in order to legitimate a carceral state that increasingly governed through what can be termed the war on crime, especially affecting marginalized citizens.
Violence, however grotesque, has been relegated to the most powerful force mediating human relations and used to address pressing social problems. Violence is a habitual response by the state in almost every dilemma. Police violence is only one register of the landscape of everyday violence. The hidden structure of violence is not always on full display in the killing of Black people. It can also be found in a range of largely invisible sites of brutality that include debtor’s prisons for children, racist juvenile courts, schools modeled after prisons, a systemic debt-machine and municipal governments that function as extortion factories and inflict misery and penury upon the poor.
The registers of militarization produce armed knowledge through university research funded by the military-industrial-Pentagon complex. Meanwhile, a growing culture of political purity houses a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.” Empathy for others only extends as far as recognizing those who mirror the self. Politics has collapsed into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse in which boundaries collapse and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive democracy. This was made clear in Trump’s repeated use of language in the service of violence at his pre-election rallies.
Intolerable Violence in a Militarized Culture of Everyday Life
Intolerable violence has become normalized. Uncritical support for a militarized culture now finds expression in a range of everyday events extending from the nightly news reports and the simulated violence of screen culture, to sports events. One often-overlooked egregious instance is evident in numerous military ceremonies that have become central to sports events, a number of which are paid for by the Pentagon. For example, Eyder Peralta, a reporter for NPR, pointed outthat a recent Senate report indicates that in the past few years, “the Pentagon spent $6.8 million to pay for patriotic displays during the games of professional sports teams.”
Intolerable violence is also elevated to an everyday occurrence and legitimated in less evident ways through what Michael Schwalbe has called instances of “micro militarism,” which he defines as “pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces.” Such instances are low-key advertisements for militarism that, while largely unnoticed, saturate the culture with militaristic values that celebrate war as the primary organizing principle of society and a general condition of the social order.
This is the small change of militarism. Think, for example, of the ATM receipts that post a “Support the Troops” message under the customer’s bank balance. We encounter such messages when checkout clerks at gas stations and supermarkets ask for donations to “support our troops.” Such messages function as military recruiting advertisements on the side of buses, cabs and billboards. Higher education institutions sponsor ads for graduate programs with pop-up images on their websites, such as “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” As Schwalbe argues, inherent in all of these messages is the idea that freedom and democracy are dependent upon the use of military force, state violence, and military service, the essence of which is “obedience, not courageous independence.”
These “small cultural spaces”—when combined with various sites of militarism, ranging from public schools and sports events to popular cultural and policy-making institutions—normalize war and violence. In this way, they make it more difficult for the American public to question the merging of war and politics and the pathologizing of politics by a culture of violence. One consequence is that democratic idealism is replaced by the ethos of militarism, and violence becomes the axiom by which everyday problems are both defined and mediated. Accordingly, the dominance of war-like values “expands from the margins of society to become a powerful process by which civil society ... organizes itself,” and coincides with what Catherine Lutz describesas “the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”
Trump’s rhetoric in support of violence and discrimination threatens to further the transformation of the police into SWAT teams and the endless practice of arresting students for trivial behaviors in schools, subjecting Black people to fines for breaking rules that are petty and punitive and criminalizing Black people through policies of racial profiling that constitute practices of state harassment and violence. Aggressive policing is the underside of white supremacy because it is largely used in the service of whites against Blacks who have committed no crimes. And with racists, such as Jeff Sessions and Stephen Bannon holding top positions in the Trump administration, fantasies of America being transformed into a white public sphere will be at the center of politics.
War culture is legitimated ideologically by collapsing public issues into private concerns. This is a powerful pedagogical tool that functions to depoliticize people by decoupling social problems from the violence inherent in the structural, affective and pedagogical dimensions of neoliberalism. Capitalism is about both winning at all costs and privileging what Zygmunt Bauman calls a “society of individual performance and a culture of sink-or-swim individualism.”
This mode of individualized politics functions as a weapon of fear that trades off conditions of precarity in order to amplify the personal anxieties, uncertainties and misery produced through life-draining austerity measures and the destruction of the bonds of sociality and solidarity. Abandoned to their own resources, individuals turn to what Jennifer Silva describes in her book Coming Up Short as a “mood economy” in which they “turn to emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation.”
At the same time, it redefines the pathologies of poverty, patriarchy, structural racism, police violence, homophobia and massive inequities in income and power as personal pathologies and shortcomings to be overcome by support groups, safe spaces and other reforms that sometimes ignore the need to fight for what Robin D. G. Kelley calls “models of social and economic justice.”
Toward a Comprehensive Politics
Any attempt to resist and restructure the intensification of a war culture with its white supremacist, ultra-nationalist underside in the US necessitates a new language for politics. Such a discourse must be historical, relational and as comprehensive as it is radical. Historically, the call for a comprehensive view of oppression, violence and politics can be found in the connections that Martin Luther King, Jr. drew near the end of his life, particularly in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” King made it clear that the United States uses “massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted,” and that such violence could not be clearly addressed if limited to an analysis of single issues, such as the Vietnam War. On the contrary, he argued that the war at home was an inextricable part of the war abroad and that matters of militarism, racism, poverty and materialism mutually informed each other and cut across a variety of sites. For instance, he understood that poverty at home could not be abstracted from the money allotted to wars abroad and a death-dealing militarism. Nor could the racism at home be removed from those “others” the United States demonized and objectified abroad, revealing in their mutual connection a racism that drove both domestic and foreign policy. For King, “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” had to be resisted both through a revolution of values and a broad-based nonviolent movement at home aimed at a radical restructuring of American society. One ethical referent for King’s notion of a radical restructuring was his moral and political abhorrence of the killing of millions of children—at home and abroad—by a war culture and its ruthless machineries of militarism and violence.
Michelle Alexander has also argued that one thing we can learn from King is the need to connect the dots among diverse forms of oppression. A broader view of oppression allows us to see the underlying ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the US. For instance, Alexander raises questions about the connection between “drones abroad and the War on Drugs at home.” In addition, she argues for modes of political inquiry that connect a variety of oppressive practices enacted in order to accumulate capital—such as the workings of a corrupt financial industry and Wall Street bankers, on the one hand, and the moving of jobs overseas, the foreclosing of homes, the increase in private prisons and the caging of immigrants, on the other.
Similarly, Alexander calls for “connecting the dots between the NSA spying on millions of Americans, the labeling of mosques as ‘terrorist organizations,’ and the spy programs of the 1960s and 70s—specifically the FBI and COINTELPRO programs that placed civil rights advocates under constant surveillance, infiltrated civil rights organizations and assassinated racial justice leaders.” More recently, we have seen the call for such connections emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and a range of other grassroots movements whose politics go far beyond an agenda limited to single issues, such as the curbing of anti-Black violence. This type of comprehensive politics is exemplified in the policy document, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” created by the Movement for Black Lives(M4BL), a coalition of over 60 organizations.
Angela Davis has for years been calling for progressives to build links to other struggles and has talked about how what has happened in Ferguson must be related to what is happening in Palestine. This type of connective politics might raise questions about what the US immigration policies and the racist discourses that inform them have in common with what is going on in authoritarian countries, such as Hungary.
Another example is illustrated when Davis asks what happens to communities when the police who are supposed to serve and protect them are treated like soldiers who are trained to shoot and kill? How might such analyses bring various struggles for social and economic justice together across national boundaries? In her book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis argues that such connections have to “be made in the context of struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world [including] structural connections.” Davis embraces what she calls the larger context, and this is clearly exemplified in her commentary about prisons. She writes:
We can’t only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail? That means we need to think about health care issues, and especially mental health care issues. We have to figure out how to abolish homelessness.
We need a new political vocabulary for capturing the scope and interconnections that comprise the matrix of permanent war and violence that shape a variety of experiences and spheres in American society, all of which will expand under the Trump presidency. While the current focus on police killings, gun violence, mass shootings and acts of individual bloodshed are important to analyze, it is crucial not to treat these events as isolated categories. By doing so we lose a broader understanding of the ways in which American society is being held hostage to often invisible but formative modes of intolerable violence that are distributed across a range of sites on a daily basis. This is especially true as Americans enter into a historical moment in which the highest reaches of government will be run by a group of officials who support a president who has condoned torture, wants to increase the numbers of and power of the police, views Black neighborhoods as manifestations of a criminal culture, staffs his cabinet with racists, militarists and misogynists, and views violence as a legitimate tool for dealing with dissent. Noam Chomsky is right in calling Trump, his generals, and the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in the world.”
Intolerable violence is most visible when it attracts the attention of mainstream media and conforms to the production of what Brad Evans and I have discussed as the spectacle of violence, that is, violence that is put on public display in order to shock and entertain rather than inform. However, such violence is just the tip of the iceberg and is dependent upon a foundation of lawlessness that takes place through a range of experiences, representations and spaces that make up daily life across a variety of sites and public spaces. Those spaces of lawlessness are on the rise, and the ominous shadow of authoritarianism is at our doorstep. Nevertheless, such forces cannot be allowed to cancel out the future and promises of a radical democracy.
Militant Hope and the Politics of Resistance
The first step in any form of collective resistance is to recognize the seriousness of the political, social and economic threat that a Trump administration poses to the United States’ fragile democracy. Secondly, while American society may be slipping away into the shadows of authoritarianism, it is imperative to think politics anew in order to wage more formidable struggles in the name of economic and social justice.
All societies contain sites of resistance, and progressives with structural power need desperately to join with those who have been written out of the script of democracy to rethink politics, find a new beginning and develop a vision that is on the side of justice and democracy. Hope in the abstract is not enough. We need a form of militant hope and practice that engages with the forces of authoritarianism on the educational and political fronts so as to become a foundation for what might be called hope in action—that is, a new force of collective resistance and a vehicle for anger transformed into collective struggle, a principle for making despair unconvincing and struggle possible.
Education must become central to any politics of resistance because it is fundamental to how subjectivities are produced, desire is constructed and behavior takes place. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, was right in insisting that subjectivity is both the material of politics and the platform where the struggle over consciousness and resistance takes place. Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, was right in arguing that at the heart of political struggle is a war of position, a struggle in which matters of education, persuasion, language and consciousness are fundamental to creating the formative culture that makes radical change possible. This is a struggle in which inner worlds are made and remade not only under the weight of economic structures but also through the pedagogical mediums of belief, moments of recognition and identification.
While we may be entering a period of counterrevolutionary change, it must be remembered that such historical moments are sometimes as hopeful as they are dangerous. Hope at the moment resides in struggling to reclaim the radical imagination and bringing together an array of single-issue movements, while working to build an expansive, broad-based social movement for both symbolic and structural change. Central to such a task is the need to build alternative public spaces that offer fresh educational opportunities to create a new language for political struggle along with new modes of solidarity. At stake here is the need for progressives to make education central to politics itself in order to disrupt the force of a predatory public pedagogy. We must disrupt the “common sense” that is produced in mainstream cultural apparatuses and that serves as glue for the rise of right-wing populism. This is not merely a call for a third political party. Any vision for this movement must reject the false notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. Democratic socialism is once again moving a generation of young people. We need to accelerate this movement for a radical democracy before it is too late.

‘Fake News’ in America: Homegrown, and Far From New by Chris Hedges


The media landscape in America is dominated by “fake news.” It has been for decades. This fake news does not emanate from the Kremlin. It is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that is skillfully designed and managed by public relations agencies, publicists and communications departments on behalf of individuals, government and corporations to manipulate public opinion. This propaganda industry stages pseudo-events to shape our perception of reality. The public is so awash in these lies, delivered 24 hours a day through electronic devices and print, that viewers and readers can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction.
Donald Trump and the racist-conspiracy theorists, generals and billionaires around him inherited and exploited this condition, just as they have inherited and will exploit the destruction of civil liberties and collapse of democratic institutions. Trump did not create this political, moral and intellectual vacuum. It created him. It created a world where fact is interchangeable with opinion, where celebrities have huge megaphones simply because they are celebrities, where information must be entertaining and where we can all believe what we want to believe regardless of truth. A demagogue like Trump is what you get when you turn culture and the press into burlesque. 
Journalists long ago gave up trying to describe an objective world or give a voice to ordinary men and women. They became conditioned to cater to corporate demands. News personalities, who often make millions of dollars a year, became courtiers. They peddle gossip. They promote consumerism and imperialism. They chatter endlessly about polls, strategies, presentation and tactics or play guessing games about upcoming presidential appointments. They fill news holes with trivial, emotionally driven stories that make us feel good about ourselves. They are incapable of genuine reporting. They rely on professional propagandists to frame all discussion and debate.
There are established journalists who have spent their entire careers repackaging press releases or attending official briefings or press conferences—I knew several when I was with The New York Times. They work as stenographers to the powerful. Many such reporters are highly esteemed in the profession.
The corporations that own media outlets, unlike the old newspaper empires, view news as simply another revenue stream. Revenue streams compete inside a corporation. When the news division does not make what is seen as enough profit, the ax comes down. Content is irrelevant. The courtiers in the press, beholden to their corporate overlords, cling ferociously to their privileged and well-compensated perches. Because they slavishly serve the interests of corporate power, they are hated by America’s workers, whom they have rendered invisible. They deserve the hate they get.
Most of the sections of a newspaper—“life style,” travel, real estate and fashion, among others—are designed to appeal to the “1 percent.” They are bait for advertising. Only about 15 percent of any newspaper is devoted to news. If you were to remove from that 15 percent the content provided by the public relations industry inside and outside government, news falls to single digits. For broadcast and cable news, the figure for real, independently reported news would hover close to zero.
The object of fake news is to shape public opinion by creating fictional personalities and emotional responses that overwhelm reality. Hillary Clinton, contrary to how she often was portrayed during the recent presidential campaign, never fought on behalf of women and children—she was an advocate for the destruction of a welfare system in which 70 percent of the recipients were children. She is a tool of the big banks, Wall Street and the war industry. Pseudo-events were created to maintain the fiction of her concern for women and children, her compassion and her connections to ordinary people. Trump never has been a great businessman. He has a long history of bankruptcies and shady business practices. But he played the fictional role of a titan of finance on his reality television show, “The Apprentice.”
“The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses,” Daniel Boorstin writes in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.”
Reality is consciously deformed to easily digestible sound bites and narratives. Those involved in public relations, political campaigns and government stay relentlessly on message. They do not deviate from the simple sound bite or cliché they are instructed to repeat. It is a species of continuous baby talk. And it dominates the news and talk shows on the airwaves.
“The refinements of reason and shading of emotion cannot reach a considerable public,” Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, noted cynically.
The rapid-fire, abbreviated format of television precludes complexities and nuance. Television is about good and evil, black and white, hero and villain. It makes us confuse induced emotions with knowledge. It reinforces the mythic narrative of American virtue and goodness. It pays homage through carefully selected “experts” and “specialists” to the power elites and the reigning ideology. It shuts out, discredits or ridicules all who dissent.
Is the Democratic establishment so clueless it believes its party lost the presidential election because of the leaked John Podesta emails and FBI Director James Comey’s decision, shortly before the vote, to send a letter to Congress related to Clinton’s private email server? Can’t the Democratic leadership see that the root cause of the defeat was that it abandoned workers in order to promote corporate interests? Doesn’t it understand that although its lies and propaganda worked for three decades, Democrats eventually lost credibility among those they had betrayed?
The Democratic establishment’s outrage over the email leak to the website WikiLeaks ignores the fact that such disclosure of damaging information is a tactic routinely used by the U.S. government and other governments, including Russia’s, to discredit individuals and entities. It is a staple of press coverage. No one, even within the Democratic Party, has made a convincing case that the Podesta emails were fabricated. These emails are real. They cannot be labeled fake news. 
As a foreign correspondent, I was routinely given leaked, sometimes classified, information by various groups or governments seeking to damage certain targets. The national intelligence agency of Israel, the Mossad, told me about a small airport owned by the Iranian government outside of Hamburg, Germany. I went to the airport and wrote an investigative piece that found that, as the Israelis had correctly informed me, Iran was using it to break down nuclear equipment, ship it to Poland, reassemble it and send it on transport planes to Iran. The airport was shut down after my exposé.
In another instance, the U.S. government gave me documents showing that an important member of the Cypriot parliament and his law firm were laundering money for the Russian mafia. My story crippled the law firm’s legitimate business and prompted the politician to sue The New York Times and me. Times lawyers chose not to challenge the suit in a Cypriot court, saying they could not get a fair trial there. They told me that, to avoid arrest, I should not visit Cyprus again.
I could fill several columns with examples like these.
Governments do not leak because they care about democracy or a free press; they leak because it is in their interest to bring down someone or something. In most cases, because the reporter verifies the leaked information, the news is not fake. It is when the reporter does not verify the information—as was the case when The New York Times uncritically reported the Bush administration’s false charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—that he or she becomes part of the vast fake news industry.
Fake news is now being used in an attempt to paint independent news sites, including Truthdig, and independent journalists as witting or unwitting agents of Russia. Elites of the Republican and Democratic parties are using fake news in an attempt to paint Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin and invalidate the election. No persuasive evidence for such accusations has been made public. But the fake news has become the battering ram in the latest round of Red baiting.
In a Dec. 7 letter to Truthdig, a lawyer for The Washington Post, which printed an article Nov. 24 about allegations that Truthdig and some 200 other websites had been tools of Russian propaganda, said that the article’s author, Craig Timberg, knows the identity of the anonymous accusers at PropOrNot, a group that made the charges. [Editor’s note: The lawyer wrote, in part, concerning the Nov. 24 story and PropOrNot, “The description in the Article was based on substantial reporting by Mr. Timberg, including numerous interviews, background checks of specific individuals involved in the group (whose identities were known to Timberg, contrary to your speculation). …”] The Post says it has to protect PropOrNot’s anonymity. It passed along a false accusation without evidence. The victims in this case cannot respond adequately because the accusers are anonymous. Those who are smeared are told that they should appeal to PropOrNot to get their names removed from the group’s “blacklist.” The circular reasoning gives credibility to anonymous groups that draw up blacklists and fake news as well as to the lies they disseminate. 
The 20th century’s cultural and social transformation, E.P. Thompson wrote in his essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” has turned out to be much more than the embrace of an economic system or the celebration of patriotism. It is, he pointed out, part of a revolutionary reinterpretation of reality. It marks the ascendancy of mass culture and the destruction of genuine culture and genuine intellectual life.
Richard Sennett, in his book “The Fall of the Public Man,” identified the rise of mass culture as one of the prime forces behind what he termed a new “collective personality … generated by a common fantasy.” And the century’s great propagandists would not only agree but would add that those who can manipulate and shape those fantasies determine the directions taken by the “collective personality.”
This huge internal pressure, hidden from public view, makes the production of good journalism and good scholarship very, very difficult. Those reporters and academics who care about the truth and don’t back down are subjected to subtle and at times overt coercion and often are purged from institutions. 
Images, which are how most people now ingest information, are especially prone to being made into fake news. Language, as the cultural critic Neil Postman wrote, “makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or a listener is deprived of what was said before and after.” Images do not have a context. They are “visible in a different way.” Images, especially when they are delivered in long, rapid-fire segments, dismember and distort reality. The condition “recreates the world in a series of idiosyncratic events.”
Michael Herr, who covered the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, observed that the images of the war presented in photographs and on television, unlike the printed word, obscured the brutality of the conflict. “Television and news were always said to have ended the war,” Herr said. “I thought the opposite. These images were always seen in another context—sandwiched in between commercials, so that they became a blancmange in the public mind. I think if anything, the blancmange coverage prolonged the war.”
A populace divorced from print and bombarded by discordant and random images is robbed of the vocabulary as well as the historical and cultural context to articulate reality.  Illusion is truth. A whirlwind of emotionally driven cant feeds our historical amnesia.
The internet has accelerated this process. It, along with cable news shows, has divided the country into antagonistic clans. Members of a clan watch the same images and listen to the same narratives, creating a collective “reality.” Fake news abounds in these virtual slums. Dialogue is shut down. Hatred of opposing clans fosters a herd mentality. Those who express empathy for “the enemy” are denounced by their fellow travelers for their supposed impurity. This is as true on the left as it is on the right. These clans and herds, fed a steady diet of emotionally driven fake news, gave rise to Trump.
Trump is adept at communicating through image, sound bites and spectacle. Fake news, which already dominates print and television reporting, will define the media under his administration. Those who call out the mendacity of fake news will be vilified and banished. The corporate state created this monstrous propaganda machine and bequeathed it to Trump. He will use it.

Dec 18, 2016

Musings


Extinction is the End Game



Civilizations are living organisms striving to survive and develop through predictable stages of birth, growth, maturation, decline and death. An often overlooked factor in the success or failure of civilizations are cultural memes—the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors passed down from generation to generation. Cultural memes are a much more significant driver of human evolution than genetic evolution. Entire civilizations have been weeded out when their belief system proved maladaptive to a changing environment. 
One such cultural meme holding sway over today’s governments, institutions, and society is our economic system of capitalism. The pillars of capitalism represent a belief system so ingrained in today’s culture that they form a sort of cargo cult amongst its adherents. Cargo cults are any of the various Melanesian religious groups which focused on obtaining material wealth(manufactured Western goods that came on cargo ships) through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices. Today the term “cargo cult” is used to describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve superficial imitation of a process or system in order to fabricate a successful outcome without even the basic understanding of its mechanism.
The tenets of capitalism are ritually followed in the proclaimed belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, i.e. so-called improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy. Centuries of unbridled capitalism have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it does not lift all boats. A new study finds that half of Americans are “shut off from economic growth”. The rules of the game are so stacked against the masses that this week a professor said “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” Capitalism’s imperative for expansion, growing profit levels, and efficiency has ultimately dehumanized our culture. Not even when our basic life support systems are being torn asunder do the vast majority question the path we are on. We are all a captive audience to the system and those few dissident voices are snuffed out under the wheels of “progress”.
Truth be told, the corporate elite have long written off all those people living hand to mouth. Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary said, unlike workers, machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.” Massive global unemployment resulting from the automation revolution has not yet been addressed by governments. Roughly half of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation and two-thirds in the developing countries. This is all coming at a time when humans are fast destroying the ecosystems underpinning the very foundation upon which human civilization has developed over thousands of years. Mass migration of climate refugees will only further destabilize governments, stoke ethnic and cultural tensions, and give rise to fascist political movements. No conspiracy is needed to exterminate the “useless eaters”, just allow mother nature to take its course and climate change will be killing billions by mid century. Those in military planning know this and periodically express their fear of what is coming, but business-as-usual rolls on.
Capitalism’s constant impetus to shift costs, risks, and burdens off industry and onto the environment and society carries on under the guise of “being more competitive”. It’s a way of externalizing costs to maximize profit and if these costs were truly taken into account, none of the world’s top industries would be profitable(Interestingly, the link to this study has been scrubbed from the internet). It’s the height of magical thinking to put so much faith in some mystical “invisible hand of the free market” to solve existential threats such as an ever-widening wealth gap and the wholesale destruction of planetary life-support systems. There is no benevolent “invisible hand” turning individual self-interest into the common good. The primary mandate of capitalism is to protect and grow capital. The “invisible hand” is just a bunch of people scrambling to make as much money as possible, not caring or oblivious to those they hurt in the process. Fuck the invisible hand of the market. The invisible hand of mother nature will punish those who squander Earth’s rich but finite resources.
It’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’ worst nightmares. A key glacier in the Antarctic that holds back 10 feet of sea level rise was just described as breaking apart from the inside out. In other grim news, the long feared carbon bomb has now been quantified and is projected to release the emissions equivalent of an industrial country like the U.S. in the next few decades, prompting researchers to say that “climate change may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.” Biodiversity loss is another critical threshold we have breeched: “New research shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied.” A new study also reveals that the planet’s tallest animal is facing extinction after its numbers have plummeted in recent years, with the ominous warning that “many species are slipping away before we can even describe them.” Forests are being wiped out by armies of invasive insects. Because of a rapidly changing climate and the vast scale of the problem, the idea that reforestation will somehow save us is a pipe dream. Those forests won’t stay healthy enough to serve as carbon sinks and besides, seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation in order to reduce the planet’s atmospheric CO2 level down to 350ppm.
Note that the Permian Mass extinction is estimated to have happened anywhere over the course of 200,000 years to 15 million years. The current 6th mass extinction is happening orders of magnitude faster due to a multitude of factors including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution, poaching, etc., making this current disaster very unique in Earth’s history:
The team of geologists and biologists say that our current extinction crisis is unique in Earth’s history due to four characteristics: the spread of non-native species around the world; a single species (us) taking over a significant percentage of the world’s primary production; human actions increasingly directing evolution; and the rise of something called the technosphere. – Link
Perhaps the fate of humans was written in stone once we stood upright and developed tools. To a large degree, modern technology has been an expression of the energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels we discovered and are not willingly giving up anytime soon. Once fossil fuels ignited the Industrial Revolution and the Haber–Bosch process unleashed the human population bomb, nothing could stop the deadly carbon consumption feedback loop, not even decades of scientific warnings.
From a throwback to our primate ancestors, modern humans have been hard-wired to ignore threats that are not immediate or local; global ecological overshoot(of which climate is just one aspect) is imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans and represents the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine our reasoning and response:
Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us, including ‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block day-to-day comprehension of what accelerating human activities represent—whether it is human population, the number of dammed rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car emissions in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy refers to slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that people get used to without comment, while landscape amnesia describes forgetting how different the landscape looked 20–50 years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).
In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond calls global warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend concealed by wide up and down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He likens the denial of climate change impacts by leading politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and his contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who] had similar difficulties recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi (in Central and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier’ (2005: 425). – link
We evolved to react to imminent dangers, not slow-rolling and seemingly invisible catastrophes as an unintended consequence of our cushy lifestyle. From lofty corporate boardrooms to the filthy streets of skid row, the mass of humanity is following the same biological script of overshoot and collapse seen in every organism from bacteria to reindeer herds. Fossil fuels only enabled the destruction to multiply a million-fold, culminating in one final and spectacular explosion of human activity that will leave the planet nearly barren for eons.
Open-ended growth appears to be inherent in nature, all the way from the DNA to the arthropods to mammals, including humans. Open-ended growth is the psychology of a cancer cell. I am not sure I know of a species which has learnt how to limit its own growth. Unfortunately species which transcend their environmental resources can hardly survive – the final arbiter of the climate impasse will be nature itself. ~ Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University
The beauty and wonder of this planet is being trashed by a naked ape whose cleverness in tool-building has far outstripped his ability to handle it in any restrained or judicious manner. Nature’s rich book of life is being pancaked into a cheap, crumpled comic book.
Add in the development of mass consumerism, planned obsolescence, and the hypnosis of corporate-sponsored TV and you have a passive, malleable population happily marching towards the slaughterhouse. It’s fitting, then, that the masses would be swindled by a megalomaniac bankruptcy artist who dabbled in Reality TV. Every one of Trump’s cabinet picks is a big middle finger in the faces of those who fell for his pseudo-populist rhetoric: billionaires, Wall Street sharks, Goldman Sachs alumni, and hardcore laissez-faire capitalists chomping at the bit to deregulate, monetize, and privatize every last bit of what remains. The allure of capitalism has always been that you’re just one lucky break away from becoming one of those fat cats, if only someone would give you a chance. A prescient observation by Ugo Bardi from earlier this year:
Trump is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact…capitalizing on this breakdown by…playing on the attempt of the white (former) middle class to maintain at least some of its previous prosperity and privileges. Trump is…an unavoidable consequence of resource depletion. – Link
The bottom line is that a swing towards authoritarianism happens when resources become scarce. Climate change is simply a symptom of humans overshooting the planet’s carrying capacity. Free market ideologues are nearly always climate ‘skeptics’ because acknowledging the reality of human-induced climate change would be an admission that industry must be curtailed or controlled. Left-leaning people nearly always accept the science because it goes along with their criticisms of capitalism which externalizes social and environmental costs for the benefit of just a few at the top of the economic hierarchy. Thus we see parasitic Trump surrounding himself with right-wing, climate denying, fossil fuel corporatists and insiders who will be doing everything in their power to dismantle health and environmental regulations including privatizing social services which are barriers to capitalist expansion.
To be blunt, our chance of developing a sustainable culture passed us by a long time ago. People will try to adapt until they cannot, and myths will be created to explain away harsh realities. A dystopic future in all its horrific glory has arrived: baked-in biospheric collapse, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of techno-capitalism, a dysfunctional political system unable to come to terms with root causes, and the cognitive dissonance of the masses blind to the bigger picture. Our numbers are not a safeguard from extinction.
~~by XRAYMIKE79

Technocapitalism: Bitcoin, Mars, and Dystopia w/Loretta Napoleoni

  We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other i...