Margins

How thin, the veil between critical thinking and the total system.

One false step, one missed shot, one mangled interview and you spiral down into the brokenness of the United Status of Chimerica. The morbid symptoms of imperial collapse are multiplying -- plutocrats who prattled endlessly about market discipline while indulging in the biggest, most irresponsible credit bubble in recorded history, health insurers whose business model is to deny health care to the sick, elites who prattle endlessly about freedom while building the biggest prison-system of all time, the savaging of education and social services while trillions are pissed away on failed neocolonial wars. These days, you can feel the geopolitical riptide carrying an entire society out to sea.

But that's not a reason to despair, but a reason to fight for the things which give us life. Those things can be as complex as Adorno's message in a bottle, or as simple as the sight of a child laboriously hand-copying its first written word. They are the things which are cast off, excluded, dismissed -- the things at the margins. They shimmer, just out of reach of the prison-house of neoliberalism, their surfaces edged with the faintest shadow of what could be.

I can hear it in the best transnational hip hop.

I can see it in the best transnational video.

I can feel it in the best transnational videogames.

The heartbeat of the Resistance.

Metrics of Decline

Occasionally I get comments from readers who express surprise at my gloominess about the US. Surely this place isn't melting down completely... is it?

Here's a chart showing just one metric of imperial decline, the implosion of the US machine-tools industry (data from the ever-reliable folks at Gardner Publications):

Region or Country	2001 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World	2010 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World
BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China)	8.9%	32.4%
Europe (EU plus Switzerland)	48.7%	31.0%
East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan)	14.0%	30.4%
US	7.9%	3.1%

(Side-note: the magnitude of the US decline is matched only by the slide of that other former superpower trashed by market fundamentalism, Britain, whose share of machine-tools production dropped from 2.3% in 2001 to 0.7% in 2010).

It doesn't have to be this way. If the US spent $1 trillion every year on education and green jobs instead of neocolonial war and drone strikes on Afghan wedding processions, 90% of our social and economic problems would go away within a decade.

America has a choice: military-colonial ruination, or eco-democratic rebirth.