Twenty years.
Twenty years of working harder and harder for less and less.
Twenty years of going into debt for jobs which don't exist.
Twenty years of seeing my society become nastier, crueler, more polarized.
Twenty years of watching the Empire wage monstrous neocolonial wars.
Twenty years of watching the richest 1% steal our jobs, our money, our future.
Twenty years of living in less than 10K a year.
Twenty years of living on one meal a day.
Twenty years of brokenness.
Twenty years of neoliberal hell.
* * * * * *
As a wage-slave, I don't have the funds to be in NY to help the Resistance. But at least I can type these words. And testify to the anger. The terrible, terrible anger which I first experienced in 2003. It would well up suddenly, explosively. It was new to me, something alien to my extremely privileged and reasonably happy childhood (supportive family, good schools, good books, good neighborhoods). I was always polite, shy, geeky. But this anger was like nothing I'd ever felt before. This wasn't geek frustration at a technology not working properly. It was an absolute, terrifying, all-devouring rage.
Heiner Müller wrote about that rage, in words I translated long ago, without fully comprehending them.
Rage at the lies. Rage at the deceit. Rage at the stupidity of a society being driven off the rails by plutocratic thieves who produce nothing but lies, invest in nothing but theft, do nothing but steal.
The words
form the shape
of a fist:
ya basta
NO MORE
The battle begins.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Berlin Curbstomps Neoliberalism
Berlin, home of travel-prone nanobears and sky-pirates.
As some famous person said, somewhere, yarrrrrrr!
As some famous person said, somewhere, yarrrrrrr!
Final Watch
Anton Gorodetsky welcomes back Gesar to the Moscow Night Watch (video clip here).
(Mystified? Read Sergei Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" novels -- everything you need to know about where Bearzilla came from, and where it's headed).
In other news, the BRICS are cooking up a little surprise for neoliberalism. You have been warned!
(Mystified? Read Sergei Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" novels -- everything you need to know about where Bearzilla came from, and where it's headed).
In other news, the BRICS are cooking up a little surprise for neoliberalism. You have been warned!
Friday, September 2, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The US: Last Prisonhouse of Orientalism
One of the most striking effects of the Arab Spring has been the media-intensive demolition of the three most prevalent tropes of First World Orientalism. The first is the trope of the docile comprador elite, incarnated by Tunisia's Ben Ali. The second is the trope of the US-bankrolled military leader, epitomized by Egypt's Mubarak. And the third is the occasionally spiteful (but ultimately acquiescent to neoliberal capital) dictator-plutocrat, immemorialized by Libya's Qaddafi.
All three went down in flaming wreckage. The first barely escaped an arrest order by hopping on a plane, the second is in jail, and the third is being hunted down like the low-rent gangster he always was. While the fall of the tyrants has been predictably electrifying on the Middle Eastern region -- several other countries are now in revolutionary ferment -- one of the most intriguing and paradoxical effects of the Arab Spring has been its transformation of the American political unconscious.
This political unconscious did not watch the Arab Spring with joy. Strange as it may sound, it watched with a trepidation tinged with sorrow. Not sorrow for the fallen dictators, but for the fall of the US Empire.
There are good reasons for this. For one thing, the US has been a society in crisis since the 1980s. Faced with the structural decline of its military-industrial empire in the face of overseas competitors, US elites chose a strategy of aggressive speculation and imperial revanchism called neoliberalism. As the decades passed, the scope of neoliberalism's speculation and revanchism kept increasing, and became flagrantly self-destructive.
Neoliberalism was afflicted with a reverse Midas touch: everything it touched eventually blew up in its own face, only with compound interest. 1980s union-busting turned into 1990s deindustrialization and eventually 2000s economic suicide. Likewise, the $400 billion S&L debacle was followed by the $1 trillion dotcom bubble and bust, and finally the $14 trillion (yes, it really was this big, see Nomi Prins for the gory details) securitization and housing bubble, whose implosion nearly melted the world economy. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua turned into regional wars and IMF structural adjustment campaigns in the 1990s, and finally full-scale invasions of Central Asia in the early 2000s.
Adding to the crisis, the US Empire lost its most useful counterplayer, the USSR, in 1991. Ever since then, US elites have been casting about for a substitute for the fiction of the Soviet colossus in order to legitimate their rule. Muslim-bashing and the Terror War were final, desperate attempts to resuscitating the moldering corpses of the Communist boogeyman and the Cold War, and now the Arab Spring has obliterated even these pathetic excuses.
What the Arab Spring symbolizes, above all, is the popular rebellion against neoliberal plutocracy. The message to American citizens is clear: if you don't want plutocrats to despoil your country, you'll have to protest like a Tunisian, walk like an Egyptian, and fight like a Libyan.
All three went down in flaming wreckage. The first barely escaped an arrest order by hopping on a plane, the second is in jail, and the third is being hunted down like the low-rent gangster he always was. While the fall of the tyrants has been predictably electrifying on the Middle Eastern region -- several other countries are now in revolutionary ferment -- one of the most intriguing and paradoxical effects of the Arab Spring has been its transformation of the American political unconscious.
This political unconscious did not watch the Arab Spring with joy. Strange as it may sound, it watched with a trepidation tinged with sorrow. Not sorrow for the fallen dictators, but for the fall of the US Empire.
There are good reasons for this. For one thing, the US has been a society in crisis since the 1980s. Faced with the structural decline of its military-industrial empire in the face of overseas competitors, US elites chose a strategy of aggressive speculation and imperial revanchism called neoliberalism. As the decades passed, the scope of neoliberalism's speculation and revanchism kept increasing, and became flagrantly self-destructive.
Neoliberalism was afflicted with a reverse Midas touch: everything it touched eventually blew up in its own face, only with compound interest. 1980s union-busting turned into 1990s deindustrialization and eventually 2000s economic suicide. Likewise, the $400 billion S&L debacle was followed by the $1 trillion dotcom bubble and bust, and finally the $14 trillion (yes, it really was this big, see Nomi Prins for the gory details) securitization and housing bubble, whose implosion nearly melted the world economy. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua turned into regional wars and IMF structural adjustment campaigns in the 1990s, and finally full-scale invasions of Central Asia in the early 2000s.
Adding to the crisis, the US Empire lost its most useful counterplayer, the USSR, in 1991. Ever since then, US elites have been casting about for a substitute for the fiction of the Soviet colossus in order to legitimate their rule. Muslim-bashing and the Terror War were final, desperate attempts to resuscitating the moldering corpses of the Communist boogeyman and the Cold War, and now the Arab Spring has obliterated even these pathetic excuses.
What the Arab Spring symbolizes, above all, is the popular rebellion against neoliberal plutocracy. The message to American citizens is clear: if you don't want plutocrats to despoil your country, you'll have to protest like a Tunisian, walk like an Egyptian, and fight like a Libyan.
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