Wings for Sky-pirates

Chapter 7 is up. Chapters 8 through 10 will be done when they're done. Till then, happy flying!

Ta(i)le of the WhA(I)le

Sky-pirate Central is pleased to report that a gigantic cybernetic whale has joined the Resistance Fleet. To wit, Moby Dick, one of the greatest icons documenting the foundation of the US Empire, returns to witness its digital end.

(There's more here.)  And here.

Still confused? Look carefully here.

From the ashes of the US Empire, one, two, many developmental states were born...

More Media...

...is coming, fear not.

Finishing Chapter 7 of Post-Neoliberal Walkthrough, and assembling the materials for Chapters 8-10, which will be a three-part WITBD (What Is To Be Done), a.k.a. everything you ever wanted to know about the developmental state, but were afraid to download.

Also, all future Uplink podcasts are going to be on Youtube, to facilitate playback and distribution. Will be adding minor visual cues here and there, but they won't be full-fledged videos. (One of the hazards of working on a budget of absolutely zero.)

Fear And Loathing In Neoliberalism

Fear And Loathing In Neoliberalism

(with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Drawing by Victoria Tsarkova (original here)

PART ONE

We were somewhere around Rostov on the edge of the steppe when the developmental state began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should take the Presidency for awhile...” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and currencies were falling faster than Lehman's CDOs, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 150 kilometers an hour with the top down to Moscow. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Then it was quiet again. My prime minister had taken his shirt off and was pouring tea on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process.

“What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring at his iPad and deleting the last of mortgage-backed securities we'd had the good sense to dump back in 2007.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Beluga toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than two hundred klicks to go. They would be tough kilometers. Very soon, I knew, the US Empire and its imperial currency would be toast. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press-registration for the fabulous Campaign 2012 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our sound-proof suite. The State Bank of Russia had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Honda convertible we’d just rented from a Tajik fixer on Tsverskaya... and I was, after all, a full-time professional; so I had an obligation to run for office, for good or ill. The Bank had also given us $500 billion in hard currency reserves, most of which was already spent on developmental state gear. The trunk of the car looked like a Huawei chip factory. We had two routers, seventy-five satellite dishes, five high-powered electron lithographers, high-speed cloud backups, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored LEDs, OLEDs, inertial sensors and also a quarter terabyte of Linux code, assorted startup companies, a hydrogen-powered engine, a foreign currency peg and two dozen bank guarantees. All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed rail visits all over Guangdong – from Shanghai to Shenzhen, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious developmental push, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me was the foreign exchange peg. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than an industrializing nation locked into a foreign exchange peg. And I knew we’d have to unload that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next oil spot price downturn. We had tried almost everything else, and now – yes, it was time to let the peg go. And then watch our currency stumble over the next two years in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep your reserves up after dropping the peg is to power up your high tech – not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at 6% GDP growth rates.

“Man, this is the way to travel,” said my prime minister. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along withthe rhythm section and kind of moaning the words: “Белая, белая пыль ангелов...” [Serebro's пыль ангелов, “Dust of Angels”] Angel wings? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio... slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with an MP3 player turned all the way up on Seryoga's “Кружим.” That was the only track we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for GDP growth – and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about credit consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that can end up in ruinous financial bubbles.

My prime minister saw the NGO staffer long before I did. “Let’s give this boy a lift,” he said, and before I could mount any argument he was stopped and this poor European kid was running up to the car with a big grin on his face, saying, “Hot damn! I never visited the Kremlin before!”

“Is that right?” I said. “Well, I guess you’re about ready, eh?” The kid nodded eagerly as we roared off.

“We’re your friends,” said my attorney. “We’re not like the others.” O Christ, I thought, he’s gone around the bend. “No more of that talk,” I said sharply. “Or I’ll put the leeches on you.”

He grinned, seeming to understand. Luckily, the noise in the car was so awful – between the wind and the radio and the MP3 player – that the kid in the back seat couldn’t hear a word we were saying. Or could he? How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely steppe was the last known home of Wahabbi-financed jihadis. Will he make that grim connection when my prime minister starts screaming about bats and flying vampire squid coming down on the car? If so – well, we’ll just have to fine his NGO and bury the paperwork somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can’t turn them loose. They'll start smearing us to some low-rent oligarch, and the plutocrat-owned media will piss on our image like a pack of wild dogs. Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me?

I glanced over at my prime minister, but he seemed oblivious – watching the road, driving our Great Red Beluga along at two hundred or so. There was no sound from the back seat. Maybe I’d better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he’ll rest easy. Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile... admiring the shape of his skull.

“By the way,” I said. “There’s one thing you should probably understand.” He stared at me, not blinking. Was he gritting his teeth?

“Can you hear me?” I yelled. He nodded.

“That’s good,” I said. “Because I want you to know that we’re on our way to Moscow to find the BRIC Dream.” I smiled. “That’s why we rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?” He nodded again, but his eyes were nervous.

“I want you to have all the background,” I said. “Because this is a very ominous assignment – with overtones of extreme personal danger... Hell, I forgot all about the samovar; you want some tea?” He shook his head.

“How about some mortgage-backed CDOs?” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty-four hours ago we were sitting in the lounge of the Sochi Hotel – in the patio section, of course – and we were just sitting there under a palm tree when this uniformed official came up to me with a pink telephone and said, ‘This must be the call you’ve been waiting for all this time, sir.’” I laughed and ripped open an energy drink that foamed all over the back seat while I kept talking.

“And you know? He was right! I’d been expecting that call, but I didn’t know who it would come from. Do you follow me?” The boy’s face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment. I blundered on: “I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my prime minister! He’s not just some dingbat I found on Nevsky Prospekt. Shit, look at him! He doesn’t look like you or me, right? That’s because he’s a foreigner. I think he’s probably Tuvash. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Are you prejudiced?”

“Oh, hell no!” he blurted.

“I didn’t think so,” I said. “Because in spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me.” I glanced over at my prime minister, but his mind was somewhere else. I whacked the back of the driver’s seat with my fist. “This is important, goddamn it! This is a true story!” The car swerved sickeningly, then straightened out. “Keep your hands off my fucking neck!” my prime minister screamed. The kid in the back looked like he was ready to jump right out of the car and take his chances. Our vibrations were getting nasty – but why? I was puzzled, frustrated. Was there no communication in this car? Had we deteriorated to the level of RIAA lobbyists?

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely clear. We had actually been sitting there in the Polo Lounge – for many hours – drinking tea with intermittent wifi access and cucumber chasers. And when the call came, I was ready.

The approached our table cautiously, as I recall, and when he handed me the pink telephone I said nothing, merely listened. And then I hung up, turning to face my prime minister.

“That was the G-20,” I said. “They want me to go to Moscow at once, for a photo-shoot with a Brazilian photographer named Lacerda. He’ll have the details. All I have to do is check into my suite and he’ll seek me out.”

My prime minister said nothing for a moment, then he suddenly came alive in his chair. “God hell!” he exclaimed. “I think I see the pattern. This one sounds like real trouble!” He tucked his khaki undershirt into his white rayon bellbottoms and called for more tea. “You’re going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over,” he said. “And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of Sochi for at least forty-eight hours.” He shook his head sadly. “This blows my weekend, because naturally I’ll have to go with you – and we’ll have to gear up.”

“Why not?” I said. “If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right. We’ll need some decent gear and plenty of hard currency on the line – if only for the telecoms and an ultrasonic recorder, for the sake of a permanent record.” 

“What kind of a presser is this?” he asked.

“The Campaign 2012,” I said. “It’s the biggest race for chip plants and jet engines in the history of the Eurasian developmental state – a fantastic battle over who gets to reside in the Kremlin in the heart of downtown Moscow... at least that’s what the press release says; our man in New Delhi just read it to me.”

“Well,” he said, “as your prime minister I advise you to buy a motorcycle. How else can you cover a thing like this righteously?” 

“No way,” I said. “Where can we get hold of a Sukhoi T-50?”

“What’s that?” 

“A fantastic jet,” I said. “Max speed Mach 2+, the AL-41F1 engine has something like 147 kN of thrust in afterburner, has a thrust to weight ratio of 10.5:1 on a composite frame with four seats and a dry weight of exactly 1420 kilograms.”

“That sounds about right for this gig,” he said.

“It is” I assured him. “The fucker’s not much for stealth, but it’s pure hell on turns. It’ll outmaneuver an F-22.”

“Takeoff?” he said. “Can we handle that much torque?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll call the Finance Minister for some cash.”

Taking Names

Now that the videogame industry has become a vibrant transnational eco-system, it's time to subject the vilest and most repulsive aspects of the industry to withering critique, in hopes of raising the bar for the entire industry. This is occasionally painful, because studios work extremely hard on even the least successful videogames. But it's ultimately good for the studios in question and good for the industry. Today's case study of reptilian degeneration: CODBLOPS2 (Call of Duty Black Ops 2). The lowlights include:

1. Glorifying African warlords. During the first levels, the player assists Jonas Savimbi, a warlord who, in real life, inflicted 30 years of blood and misery on Angola, thanks to funding and arms from the CIA and apartheid-era South Africa.

2. Idiotic racism. The villain of the story is an angry brown man from Latin America (never mind the reality that the US Empire destroyed Latin American democracies and underwrote thuggish military oligarchies for decades). He's angry because of something about a dead sister, or maybe Latin passion, or was it narcoterrorism -- there are so many racist Orientalisms, the story can't keep track of them all. Oh, and the villainous mole in a Navy SEAL unit just happens to be named Vasquez. Riiight.

3. Occupy-bashing. The transnational audience is using twitter. Horrors! And posting on social media sites. To the gulags with them! Proving, as if we needed more evidence, that the Terror War is nothing but the war of the One Percent on the rest of humanity. 

4. Tiresome game-play. Almost no innovation in basic shooter mechanics + lush visuals which are completely wasted on corridor crawls + ludicrous player "choices" which are nothing of the sort = a game not worth your hard-earned currency-units. If you love first-person shooters, stick with Far Cry 3 -- an infinitely better story with infinitely more creativity and player choice.

Fortunately, CODBLOPS2 does provide one useful service for humanity. An onscreen version of the recently-disgraced Petraeus shows up in a cut-scene late in the story, as a fictionalized Secretary of State. Given game production cycles, the cut-scene was rendered sometime in 2011, well before the scandal which sank Petraeus' career as CIA spookmeister.

We hereby proclaim the COD Curse: any real-life political figure who gets fawning in-game coverage in any COD game will find their political career collapse, similar to the Madden Curse.

Let the fawning coverage begin!

Rockstar: Studio of the 99%

Reason #469,103,253 that I study videogames: getting to watch Rockstar deliver one hundred eleven seconds of beat-down on the neoliberal plutocrats.

Be Afraid, Wall Street, Be Very Afraid...

...your nemesis has arrived.

Zombies and Vampires

It was 2008, and I knew this day would come.

Not the day of reckoning, but the day of realization. The day when the apparatus of rule created by the US plutocracy -- the ideology of empire, the culture of consumerism,  the economics of bubble-wealth for the few and debt-slavery for the many, and a rickety system of governance created by slave-holders and unchanged since the 18th century -- would become its own worst enemy.

But for that day to come, there was an essential prologue -- an unskippable cut-scene, if you will. So I walked into an Illinois polling booth and voted for Obama.

I had no love for the Wall Street neoliberalism he and his party represented. But someone as damaged as McCain would have triggered a global catastrophe. Back in 2008, the BRICs were just beginning to realize how powerful they'd truly become, and how weak Wall Street neoliberalism and its junior partner in global financial crime, euroliberalism, really were. I figured the BRICs would need five or six years to figure things out, so why not give them the time.

Happily, they figured it all out by 2011, the moment when the tectonic plates of the age of multipolarity finally snapped into place. One small tremor of that moment was enough to trigger what we call the Arab Spring. Even bigger tremors are on their way.

It remains one of the crowning ironies of our day that the political history of the post-imperial US is looking more and more like that of the former USSR. Obama was America's Gorbachev, the fresh-faced son of the heartland who was going to magically rescue the Empire's superstructures while changing none of its infrastructures. Just as Gorbachev's eloquence melted away into Yeltsin's oligarchic looting and mass immiseration, so too has Obama's hazy call for national renewal vanished like the neo-imperial wish-fulfillment it indeed was, leaving nothing but the vicious austerity incarnated by Romney.

Romney is a pure vampire, and if he squeaks out an election win, he will burn this country to the ground, but Obama has done nothing for four years but throw taxpayer money at Wall Street, support neoliberal privatization schemes to trash public education, and make the too-big-to-fail banksters even bigger and more full of fail. Romneyism, in short, is the monster which has been gestating inside Obamaism all along.

And in fairness to ordinary Americans, Obama's campaign has been dreadful -- lifeless, directionless, and messageless. Obama's passionless conviction on behalf of zombie neoliberalism is precisely what allowed Romney to counter with the vindictive passion of hedge fund vampirism. Obama could still have won this election handily by resorting to populism, but one suspects he and his corporate backers are in mortal fear of the Occupy movement. They are afraid of sounding even the smallest note of populism, because they're smart enough to know that in the post-Occupy world, the tinder is there for a full-scale political firestorm. Obama would literally rather lose the election than give the slightest space to a post-imperial America.

This is not a counsel of despair: there are plenty of good candidates at the state and local level worth voting for. If you live in a swing state, consider the fact that it's easier to survive the zombie apocalypse than the vampire apocalypse. But the moment the elections are over, the real battle begins.

Pirates: The Planet Is Ours!

Yaarrr.

Avast, ye swabs, let it be known that the Pirate Revolution starts November 28! What happens on November 28, ask ye?

Self-proclaimed "content providers" (pigopolists), having learned absolutely nothing from the epic flaming defeat of PIPA and SOPA, will have sole discretionary power to determine whether your download infringed on their precious (in the Gollumesque sense) copyrights. The system is automated, admits of no legal recourse, and blocks users from any site the pigopolists can pull out of their overcapacious corporate orifices. Oh, and they can even use your personal data culled from aforesaid providers to sue you.

Not. Making. This. Up. Quote: “After the fifth alert, the content owner may pursue legal action against the customer, and may seek a court order requiring AT&T to turn over personal information to assist the litigation.” (It's not just ATT, it's also Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable).

That's right. 310 million Americans are about to go to digital jail.

I seem to recall a small spot of bother when a certain Middle Eastern dictator attempted to shut down the country's cellphones. That little spot of bother is nothing compared to what will happen when the digital commons mobilizes.

So bring it on, pigopolists. Make the revolution not just possible, but inevitable!

Euroliberalism: A Preliminary Postmortem

Since I'm based in the US, most of my critiques of neoliberalism, a.k.a. market fundamentalism, a.k.a. the freedom of plutocrats to steal trillions from debt slaves, have been focused on Wall Street. But it should be recognized neoliberalism is and always was a transnational system.

This is most obvious in Wall Street's leading overseas subsidiary, euroliberalism, a.k.a. the plundering of Europe and its Middle Eastern, North African and Eurasian peripheries for the benefit of a few plutobanksters.

Ordinary Europeans, though, are starting to fight back. Example: an eye-opening article in Finnish newszine Taskamura which investigates the meltdown of Nokia. Nokia was once a competitive firm which excelled in delivering products customers wanted, but the virus of euroliberalism has begun to rot the place from inside. Here's one key citation:

There were a lot of problems, it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors’ work and the contracts weren’t supervised properly. The subcontractors could cheat in the contracts by changing the best experts, who were there in the beginning, to less qualified people. Examples given included bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills. All this resulted in more additional work and delays for the project managers in Finland, when they had to take measures to repair the errors and poor quality.At the same time the team size grew and so did the bureaucracy with it. This caused lessening of agility in the software development, which slowed down the development. 

Outsourcing is a polite way of saying, crushing Finland's unionized workforce and sweating its workers for more surplus (never mind Nokia had 30% profit margins during the early 2000s -- too much excess is never enough for the plutocrats). The result was a predictable debacle, as short-term greed destroyed the company's long-term position. The full article is available here.

Prison Furlough

My country is a jail cell.

This painful truth hit home when I crossed back into the US after an international flight. Weary, jet-lagged, but dressed professionally (this was a business trip -- yep, I'm moving up in the world, finally had an actual business trip).

Things were fine until I got to the final checkpoint. Showed my papers, everything in order. Then the questioning began. Where had I been. What was I doing. How long did I stay. Etc. Delivered in a blankly menacing undertone, similar to the one I had heard before in a junior Illinois cop. The cop was jacked up on the Drug War, had me sit down in his squad car for no reason, and worked me over with some of the most ludicrous leading questions ever devised while the police dog in the back of the car barked its head off in my ear. "You from Oregon? What do you think of marijuana legalization?" (Seriously. The cop actually asked me that. Couldn't make this up if I tried.)

But in retrospect, the cop was just a wanna-be centurion. The immigration official was the real deal, the beating heart of the Terror War. Just that faint menace which announced that I could be stripped of any rights and deported to a torture-cell in some overseas barracks at the press of a button.

It was exactly the sensation of being an inmate returning from a prison furlough.

In fairness to the immigration officials, most of them were decent, especially the staffers of color, who were noticeably humane. But the ideology of empire has clearly led some of the others over the deep end.

These days, I can't even be angry at this shambles of a former empire,  its elites neck-deep in systemic self-delusion. To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan, I do not approve of the proceedings, I note them -- in hopes that whatever I write down will be passed down, like a message in a bottle, to more fortunate galaxies.

Empire of Death

The collapse of the Soviet Union hit male life expectancy with the impact of a war. Average life expectancy fell from a peak of 65 in the mid-1980s down to 58 in the early 1990s. After Putin took over in 1999, life expectancy slowly recovered, reaching 63 in 2010 (female life expectancy is now 75, the highest in Russian history -- the huge gap is due mostly to alcoholism, homicides and traffic accidents, which kill lots of young males).

Now Russia's post-Soviet collapse has its eerie American echo.

This shambles which was once an Empire has lost the capacity to build or inspire. But it still has the most astonishing power to destroy.

One Up For Ground Zeroes

The branch of Occupy otherwise known as Chicago's hard-working teachers defeated the plutocrats despoiling public education in this country. In not unrelated news, KojiPro announced the studio's next anti-neoliberal epic - Metal Gear Ground Zeroes. Mission briefing incoming!

In The Time of Neo-Slave Uprisings

Historians of the future will marvel about how The Uprising started with a despairing fruit vendor in a dusty, forgotten Tunisian town. Who could know that one small light would set off 35 years of accumulated social dynamite?

Because we debt-slaves of this earth, we wage-serfs, we who have been suppressed, repressed, depressed and dispossessed by this horrible evil neoliberal system of planetary plutocracy -- we have HAD IT with the undemocratic, unrestrained, unregulated domination of the 1%.

From Aleppo to Cairo, Caracas to Jakarta, Nandigram to Barcelona, the class struggle has been going live. Now Chicago joins the ranks of hero cities. The indispensable Diane Ravitch, ferocious critic of the neoliberal scam of school testing and privatization, has all the latest on the Chicago teachers' strike (updates here).

From Small Beginnings...

So my life as an official media scholar begins at the beginning, a.k.a. the adjunct trail. The pay is about the same as when I was a grad instructor, but there are some nice perks to being a real professor (aside from the obvious perk of being able to teach, which I've always enjoyed.)

Psychologically, every graduate student wrestles with oceans of self-doubt. It can be a productive thing, because it keeps you honest and committed to learning. The down side is, years and years of self-doubt can be deeply caustic. On most college campuses, graduate students stick out like a sore thumb. They are the haggard ones, who walk not with the lackadaisicality of students or the complaisance of tenured professors, but that nail-biting freneticism of temp-workers everywhere, as if someone is charging them for every breath of oxygen (which, when I look at my mountain of student loans, is scarily close to the truth). To paraphrase a famous Half Life level, every grad student is an interloper.

That's why graduation doesn't hit you until you see your name on the office door: "Dr. Such-and-such". Then you realize, well, yes, come to think of it, I did defend my dissertation. I walked through the portal, after all, and now begins my second life. Now the game begins all over again. From small beginnings...

Embers

I really should not be alive right now.

It should've ended in 2003. I should've been another statistic. Metal burned into rock. Blood outlasted by stone.

The thinnest of margins. Like becoming your own ghost. Abyssal void of the shadow-world. Formless, immiscible. 

Rescued by accident. An outsider to the empire, looking in, saw value in my words. More than value: the gleam of a horizon.

Like other sensitive souls, I could sense the death of the Empire, but could not name it, put the thing into words. Like most intellectuals, I blamed myself. Despair compounded by imperial hubris, replicating each speculative spiral of the shadow banking system with the egoism of a shadow concept-system. Baudelaire named the contradiction, without understanding it: "mon semblable, mon frere", the false equality proclaimed by the Second Emperor, the fiat identity-currency of imperial Orientalism.

Not the route I chose (or was chosen by).

What I have left are the memories of that despair. Still faintly glowing, like embers. Wreathed in ash, but they still burn to the touch. Waiting for the moment to spark anew.

Employed Again...

...it's part-time, but I no longer have to worry about physically starving to death. Now I can go back to Second World problems like electricity and rent and being an overeducated debt-slave in a dying empire.

For comic relief, today's triple-header illustrates how Louisiana's plutocratic elites are destroying public education, or what can be termed "charter-bombing". Read (in order) Diane Ravitch, CenLamar, and American Zombie.

No wonder David Simon delayed the latest season of Treme to rework some of the stories - these days, the material practically writes itself.

Candles in the Neoliberal Darkness

In the Ice Age of Neoliberalism
there were those
who resisted.


(With love and respect to Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan, and the entire team behind Satyamev Jayate.)

Sinking

Being middle-class in the US these days is like experiencing a shipwreck at ultra-slow stop-motion speed. Each day, you can see the floor tilt a little more. Hull panels start to protrude, then water trickles in at the glacier-like pace of one centimeter per day. Week after week, the floor buckles, the walls hang awry. Every month, another lower compartment is gone.

Eric Auld has this cautionary tale of how bad things are. Note especially the comments at the end of the piece, and the smug, self-satisfied cretins who throw garbage at graduate school and higher education. They are neoliberalism's homegrown "shabiya" -- the ideological equivalent of the "ghost brigades", a.k.a. rented thugs of Syria's murderous and dying dictatorship.

When the ship of empire sinks, the rats bare their teeth.

This is not a counsel of despair -- the decent folk vastly outnumber the shabiya, both in Syria and here.

But their existence is a warning that we must not become like them. We must remember that every day is a fight to retain a scrap of dignity. A fight to live less desperately and hopelessly. A fight to not become just another monster of the total system.

Things To Do While Waiting For Hours Only To Discover Your Foodstamp Benefits Have Been Revoked

1. Listen to Bolivian rap group Ukamau Y Ke's fire-breathing 2007 album Para La Raza. 
2. Calculate how many millions of taxpayer dollars Jamie "Tapeworm" Dimon steals per hour, minute and second.
3. Plot destruction of transnational capitalism -- then decide not to bother, because the monster is liquidating itself with commendable alacrity, Marx be praised.
4. Dream up "WWFBD" ("What Would Fran and Balthier Do") memes.
5. Play entire sound-track of Final Fantasy 12. Twice.

Into the Transnational...

Something old and something new, something material and something post-imperial for Uplink issue 26, The Postcolonial Action Thriller Issue (in PDF format, or HTML version, main page here).

LieBOR Update

Ellen Brown has this excellent writeup of the massive damage caused by the banksters' LieBOR scam. Maybe Slorgzilla is indulging in unfounded optimism, but after four years of economic collapse, mass immiseration, pain and despair, it does seem like something tipping-pointish this way comes.

The pension funds, municipalities, and nation-states swindled for years by the banksters are b beginning to realize they've been swindled, and are finally fighting back. As William K. Black, fraud investigator extraordinaire, might have said, all's well that ends with perp walks and RICO convictions.

More on the potential of democratically-owned, democratically-run banks in the next video (under construction)...

To All Documentary Filmmakers, Everywhere

Dear Documentary Filmmakers:


As a media teacher (my day job), I would love to watch your film and teach it to my class.
But I can't. That's because I am broke and cannot afford even the cheapest of paid streaming options.

Just like 99% of the people on this planet.

A reminder: WE ARE NOT BILLIONAIRES.

If you want to reach your audience, post a free version on Vimeo, Rutube, Youku, Youtube or some other free video service. Or put a low-res version on a torrent site and let us download it, 5K per second.

On the other hand, if you see your role as being the privileged courtier of the 1% and their pet foundations, then by all means, continue with your copyright fundamentalism. We won't be able to watch your film, and consequently, we will not care about whatever it is that you have to say.

As the sports fans like to say, the ball is in your court.


Yours sincerely,

-- Member of the 99%

Huzun, the Plutomerican Remix

Orhan Pamuk provides a wonderful description of the magical, tantalizing quality of 'huzun' -- that sorrow-drenched nostalgia peculiar to Istanbul, which expressed both the sublimity of Istanbul's status as the phantasmal gateway between Europe and Asia, the pain of failed Turkish modernizations, and a helpless anger at the decrepitude of the Ottoman Empire, whose multiple and contradictory legacies were and are as indigestible for post-Ataturk Turks as the Romanov legacy was and is for Russians.

The American decline is triggering something similar. Huzun is everywhere these days, from our best television series (David Simon's "The Wire" is Baltimore huzun, and "Treme" is huzun a la Nouvelle-Orléans) to our best videogames (Sony Santa Monica's "God of War" is the huzun-inflected Greek mythology epic). It's even appearing on that last bastion of unfettered neoliberal overlordship, namely broadcast TV, in the form of cooking shows and the appearance of that strange new figure, the professional chef who is the honest, hard-working cultural laborer - the dialectical inversion of  blowdried game-show hosts and platitudinous TV pundits.

I felt the educational version of "huzun" today while applying for my food stamp benefits at a local community college. (For those unfamiliar with the hellishness of the US welfare state, food stamps are administered inside "workfare" programs. The benefits are minimal, and you have to document your work-search, never mind the fact that millions of Americans are doing the same thing. Still, they're better than absolutely nothing. The only bright side is that the people who run these programs are personally very kind and helpful. They're just not given adequate resources to truly help people -- serious Federal money for job retraining, education spending, and emergency make-work programs.)

The campus looks beautiful on the outside, but inside, the lack of funding for maintenance and repairs was obviously taking its toll. Scratched paint, dented surfaces, cheap plastic furniture, and constant battles to maintain minimal funding for programs which can make a real difference in people's lives.

It may be too late to reverse course for this empire, which seems bound and determined, like some vast, distorted doppelganger of its Middle Eastern client dictatorships, to commit continental-size economic suicide. But perhaps the developmental states of the world can learn from our mistakes: don't pour your resources into military superweapons or playgrounds for your elites. Put them into basic schooling and community colleges.

Like the great author he is, Pamuk never says so outright, but huzun is really the lingering curse of empire. The glory, wealth and power won through violence revenges itself on later generations, condemning them to centuries of misery and subalternity. Only economic, social and political democracy can exorcise huzun, and the first step is acknowledging the imperial past (still a sore point in contemporary Turkey).

My country, o my country. What have we let Wall Street do to you?

Sorrows of Empire

New video is up. Lots of critique in this one, the next video will point towards solutions.

LieBOR as the Dimon Tax

How much did the bankster steal? Yves Smith gives this conservative estimate, but warns that this is just the tip of the derivatives iceberg.

So how far down does the iceberg go?

We already know the banksters used LieBOR as the rocket fuel to power their lunatic derivatives scams. But Nomi Prins and Paul Craig Roberts point out that after the 2008 crash, the banksters have been forced to game the bond market in an attempt to keep the neoliberal financial bubble afloat.

The implications are staggering.

The banksters constantly whine about how a Tobin tax on speculation would be a hindrance on the wondrousness of the free market. But they themselves indulged in a global pigopoly to systematically fleece municipalities, governments, pension funds and savers -- or what we should start calling, in honor of JP Morgan's Overlord of Theft, the "Dimon tax".

Social Decay

How bad are things getting for the US middle class?

Class sizes in neoliberal Detroit (US per capita income: $50,000) are now beginning to exceed those of West Bengal, India (Indian per capita income: $1,200).

Meanwhile, the banksters continue to steal trillions and buy off politicians for billions.

The Three Europenny Opera

[Sung to tune of Mack the Knife:]
"Oh Eurocapital/
it has teeth, dear/ and it shows them /
on LieBOR screens..."

After destroying Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus, Euroliberalism plunges its knife into Spain.

In other news, Maher Arar weighs in on the state of the Syrian Revolution against one of neoliberalism's lesser tyrants.

LieBOR

Only Hideo Kojima's "Metal Gear Solid 4" saw it coming - the moment when the sheer scale of neoliberalism's fraud, crime, greed and lunacy overwhelmed the total system which spawned it.

Short version of the story: LiBOR sets world interest rates for trillions of financial assets, and practically every large US-EU bank in the world was skimming micro-pennies on those rates, like the rotten criminal gangster mafia they indeed are. 

Matt Taibbi has this stinging takedown here of the LieBOR cartel.

Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert and Reggie Middleton have more juicy details here.

Yves Smith covers the derivatives angle with this smashing post.

4th of July Song

One of the most important tasks for the post-Occupy world is to rethink, reconfigure, and refunction the mainstream media forms of the neoliberal era -- and specifically, those of the 1960s counter-culture, which were neoliberal to their core.

I can't sing worth a lick, but at least I can write.

For What Its Worth (with apologies to Buffalo Springfield):

There's something happenin' here

what it is, is crystalline clear

there's an Empire with guns over there

tellin' me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, shabab,

what's that sound

everybody look what's goin down

there's battle lines being drawn

The one percent plundered too long

the ninety-nine are speaking our mind

getting so much resistance from neoliberal swine

it's time we stop, hey

what's that sound

everybody look what's goin down

Quite a haul for Wall Street

they stole trillions without missing a beat

but there's five billion cellphones online

MP3s and screens -- this is our time

it's time we stop,

hey what's that sound

everybody look what's goin down

Neoliberalism cuts deep

the bad sleep well, the 99 percent bleed

they start by privatizing the state

till there's nothing at all... left to devastate

we better stop

hey what's that sound

everybody look what's going down

SNAP, Crackle, Pop

Today I applied for foodstamps.

There's a little story to go with this.

In the early to mid 2000s, I was a broke, unemployed PhD with massive student loans, in a profession with no future in this dying Empire (literature). After the credit cards ran out, I went on foodstamps. I had to report regularly to a caseworker, show up for make-work volunteer positions. I swung a hammer at Habitat for Humanity construction sites.

I distinctly remember that the social service office back then was full of refugees from Katrina. Plain-spoken, ordinary folks who had lost everything. The invasion of Iraq had just turned sour, but not one of us suspected that a financial hurricane of Wall Street fraud was about to obliterate the US middle class. 
 
Back then, I got a reprieve by going back to grad school. Worked myself to the bone becoming the best possible media researcher I could be. I survived on the pittance of grad loans.

In 2009, the loans ran out. So I lived on less. Not less as in less luxury or less entertainment, but less food. Less clothing. Less of everything.

Now it's 2012. I have yet another PhD. I'm still broker than hell. I owe even more in student loan debt. The job market is broken, just like the entire economy.

So it's back to foodstamps. And Habitat will soon enjoy the services of the most over-educated nailsmith of all time.

Dictatorship of Capital

Rolling Stone documents the gutting of the American middle class. 

Chile's shabab (that wonderful term for the revolutionary youth of the Arab Spring) protest the Dictatorship of Capital.

Libor-ation

Steal $10, go to jail for ten days.

Steal $10,000, go to jail for ten years.

Steal $1 million, go to jail forever.

Steal trillions and trillions, and you're Barclays and 20 other too-rich-to-tax-oversee-or-minimally-regulate banks. That means you pay a tiny wrist-slap fee for gouging consumers, municipalities and governments for decades. Conservatively assuming 0.0001% on $500 trillion in annual transactions, we're talking an effortless profit stream of $50 billion, all without exercising a single brain cell -- and maybe twice that, assuming that we're dealing with twisted, psychopathic lying scum of the planet.

Newsflash: Economic Depression Causes Depression

Horribly depressed all day. Heard of ZIRP (zero interest-rate policy) economics? Well, say hello to  ZINF -- the zero-income, no-future economy.


My multiple degrees screw me even more, because noone takes my applications seriously. At least they're polite, and put the appellation "Dr." in front of my name.

When you're unemployed, all the lies we tell ourselves to make everyday life in the prisonhouse of neoliberalism somewhat bearable recoil, through some weird dialectical logic, into a collective wall of despair.
 "You have to hustle". Have been. Am right now. Isn't working.

"Networking". I'm not friends with Ivy academics or hedge fundies. Everyone I know is clinging to their current job, unemployed, or busted-ass broke.

"Apply to things outside your field." Have been. Isn't working.

"Stay positive". It's all I can do to survive. I swear, and may the titanium-graphene nanoclaws of Bearzilla be my witness, if I ever became actually negative, I'd stuff myself into the nearest meatgrinder.

Nations Which the Gods Wish to Destroy...

...first have their public educational systems destroyed by privatization-mad plutocrats and fundamentalist nutters. 

Louisiana has led the way, and here are the results -- publicly-funded schools which deny evolution and teach the Loch Ness monster as fact (additional gory details are here). 

Video Linkage

First, a proper Youtube link to a previous video. Walkthroughs 6 and 7 are on the way, honest.

Investigative Journalism

Yasha Levine demolishes neoliberal flack.

Brokenness

Rick Perlstein has this wonderful essay on the brokenness of the US political class, which now rivals only the Middle Eastern oligarchies in terms of sheer self-destructive greed.

Today's antineoliberal screed: MC Amin's The Situation Must Change.

Bearzilla 2.0

Bearzilla reboots its energy-rent strategy. Expect major investments in renewables - something Russia needs for its own internal energy efficiency, as well as a future source of post-hydrocarbon revenues (Russia has tons of existing hydro, as well as vast solar and biofuel potential). 

The World Neoliberalism Made

Ever had the feeling that everything around you is utterly and completely broken?

That's exactly right. Don't worry, it's not just you -- the entire planet is angry at being systematically swindled, robbed, cheated, and ripped off by plutocratic elites. Welcome to the 21st century!

Leave No Crowbar Behind

The digital crowbar club has increased by one: the indispensable Yanis Varoufakis will now be blogging weekly for Valve on digital economies. Welcome to the Revolution, Yanis!

Also, check out Diane Ravitch's excellent blog, one of the sharpest critiques of the plutocrats' war on public education -- yes, it's a war, and the casualties are our children.

The War on Public Services Is A War On You

Private opulence, public squalor was the signature of the British Victorian era, and now it's becoming the norm in an increasingly ramshackle, deindustrialized and destitute US.

The myth spread by the bankster swine who swindled, conned, or outright stole trillions of dollars of other people's money is that America is too poor to pay for public services (never mind the trillion we waste every year fighting enemies which don't exist anymore, or the trillions spent on bankster bailouts). It's a time of shared sacrifice, so their stooges and quislings bleat.

Utter bilge. First of all, public workers make less than private workers (public workers have a different skill mix, which throws off straight-line comparisons, but compared as service-workers to service-workers, public jobs pay less).

Second, bankster vampires have been gaming the municipality bond market for decades, raking off huge fees and dumping toxic assets and shady deals onto the public books. This is part of the same strategy of debt servitude which has been destroying the US middle class for thirty years: instead of taxing the rich, float bonds ultimately paid for by the middle class.

Third, Astroturf pressure groups cooked up by obnoxious billionaires create the illusion of popular assent for additional neoliberal scams which further enrich the 1% and impoverish the 99%. Often these take the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which claim to be fighting for the 99% -- and then stab us in the back behind closed doors. Just watch this incredible video of Stand For Children's co-founder Jonah Edelman openly take credit for destroying Chicago's teachers unions, by pushing the failed and bogus drill-to-kill agenda of educational testing and privatization through Illinois's legislature.

Gandhi Was A Videogame Designer

Lest yesterday's post make First World readers swoon overhastily over India's democracy, two prominent Indian human rights activists of the People's Union for Civil Liberties were jailed for life.

Their crime: carrying a small amount of cash, as well as what the authorities term "Maoist" literature. Not for any actions, weapons or explosives, mind you -- just thoughts.

One of the most singular contradictions of the industrializing world is that its citizens live the burden of the colonial past on the most personal level imaginable. The British colonial regime which plundered India for centuries is gone, but India's postcolonial elites all too frequently act with the same disdain and arrogance as their British predecessors.

Incidentally, this contradiction is what makes the contemporary media productions of the industrializing world so rich, multifaceted and dynamic. The greatest artists of these nations have to answer not just to the toils of the present, but the travails of the past, and this gives their best work the sort of deep, world-shaking energy missing from most First World media productions (with the signal and honorable exception of today's videogame culture, which is transnational through and through). They are battling not just for justice in the present, but for the dignity of the past.

Television for the Global 99%

For decades, American commercial media ruled the global airwaves. But now the rest of the world is creating their very own world-class films, TV shows and digital media.

Latest case in point: Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan delivers some of the best-written, most engaging, well-researched and emotionally honest television you will ever see. Tune in online to Satyamev Jayate ["Truth Will Prevail"] -- English subtitles available on the site, and also on Youtube. Watch and learn for an insight into how the global 99% live.

Slow Boil

Latest from Europe (aside from the impending revolution brewing in Greece): transnational audiences slap down greedhead media oligopolies in the European Parliament.

Canadian 14-year-old is smarter than all the world's neoliberal economists combined.

Tired of being fleeced by Wall Street banksters? Time to create our own, publicly-owned, democratically-accountable banks (more recipes are here).

Tales of the Bunnybear

Caustic comic commentary for our crashing capitalistic times.

Also, Bhaskar Sunkara has this hilarious article on the Great Northern Terror War. His mortal crime: TWSA (traveling while South Asian).

Job Creators: Yes, The 1% Are Lying To You

Entrepreneur Nick Hanauer takes apart neoliberalism's lies with a meat-axe.

From Cacerolazo to Casserole

Pop quiz: name a country dependent on raw materials exports which is being ravaged by social polarization and a sclerotic plutocracy, whose leaders have cracked down on uppity student protestors by criminalizing dissent. And the answer is...?

Nope, not Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. 

The answer is... Canada!

No, that is not a misprint. 

Slorgzilla could not make this insanity up even if its prehistoric lizard-monkey brain tried.

Quebec students have been protesting against the province's neoliberal policies (drastically raise student fees, slash spending, make sure only the 1% can go to college) for months. In response, Quebec's parliament passed laws criminalizing any demonstration of larger than 50 people, or groups which don't inform police about their presence.

And don't think this is just for show. The first mega-fines have already been handed out.

Since many of the protestors are penniless students, Quebec will need to start jailing tens of thousands of citizens. With a little creativity, Canada should soon have its very own gulag archipelago, enabling Canada to keep pace in the all-important race to duplicate the US' 6 million-strong prison-industrial complex. Forwards to debt slavery!

After all, citizenship, democracy and the due process of law is for the 1% who own everything already, and we 99% are lazy, worthless subhumans, valuable only as cannon fodder in our masters' colonial wars on Eurasia -- because, as the lying 1%-controlled mass media owned by phone-tapping liars tirelessly repeats, we've always been at war with Eurasia.

In response to the Pinochetization of Canada, the brave citizens of Canada are going heavy metal (sample footage here).

Reorganizing the Workshop

 I'm not complaining about my dissertation at all, it was a privilege to scour the depths of some of the most complicated works of art ever created by human beings, but I've been shockingly out of the loop over the last ten months.

I guess it's "Occupy syndrome" -- after decades of cultural, political and economic regression, when all hope was stifled under the continental ice-sheets of neoliberalism, suddenly the transnational mediascape is shifting, heaving, buckling under our feet. Decades turn into hours, months into seconds, and suddenly, the backyard is teeming with tiny construction shovels and legions of wifi-kitted, shanzai-literate revolutionary moles, peering from their underground fortifications.

Still job-hunting, but at least I have time to start on a huge backlog of projects which have accumulated far too much dust.


A couple tidbits: Mass Effect fans are breaking free of the rEApers. (Note the location of the uprising: Poland.)

The Russian comrades continue to battle the neoliberal Combine.

Capital's Crisis, European Solutions

The indispensable Yanis Varoufakis has this useful proposal to rescue the European Union from committing euroliberal suicide.

Basic summary: stop bailing out the Eurobanksters, and start bailing out the people of Europe.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? The simplest things in life ("play nice", "help others", "share your toys") are always the hardest to achieve.

Post-American Television

One of the greatest ironies of being a media scholar in the US is being constantly reminded of how obsolete and broken the Empire's once world-leading mass media really is.

Case in point: Indian superstar Aamir Khan's new TV series, The Truth Alone Prevails. The episodes are broadcast on Indian TV, but have also been made available on Youtube in multiple languages (subtitles provided). Information leavened with wisdom, passion grounded in justice, outrage based on facts, mobilization based on democracy -- it's exactly what investigative journalism should be.

But it's not just top-notch television. The Indian audience is tuning in. Compare this to the indifferent ratings received by David Simon's The Wire, one of the best US television series ever created.

Those who the Gods wish to destroy, are those who ignore the messages of their media scholars and media artists.

Grundgesetz 1, Neoliberalism 0

Taking a page from dying Middle Eastern autocracies, Frankfurt's authorities tried to ban protestors from its downtown, so Blockupy Frankfurt decided to provide a real-time demonstration of what democracy is all about. 

In other news, the imperial barbarism of the Terror War hits home in Chicago (full details are here). Notice how the police officers know and even revel in the history of the 1968 police riots. Not even Assad's shabiya are this shameless.

Note also the politics of racialization: the protestors were white. If they had been citizens of color, they would've been arrested during the auto stop and given bogus tickets for hundreds of dollars.

This is not paranoia speaking. Full disclosure: I'm a perfectly ordinary-looking, middle-aged white guy with multiple college degrees, and I was randomly stopped on the road earlier this year by a crass, power-hungry Illinois cop fishing for drug convictions.

My skin color and polite demeanor meant that I got off with a warning. But it was a nasty experience.

No amount of theoretical insight really prepares you for the violence of the neoliberal state: the cruelty and viciousness of its low-level authorities, the pompous officiousness of bill-collectors and agencies demanding money you don't have, the dismal rhetoric of following contractual law -- the same law the 1% routinely bend, break or simply disregard.

The lower this Empire sinks into the water, the more desperate its efforts to charge everyone for air to breathe. Ken Levine's Rapture came oh-so-close to naming neoliberal empire for the madness it indeed is before being side-tracked by the Rand cultists (they're symptoms rather than the prime movers of the system), let's just hope Irrational's next game will hit its target.

Vacationing...

Vacations are awesome. Haven't had one in 6 years.

Now protests have spread to the very lair of euroliberalism itself, courtesy Blockupy Frankfurt.

Offwork

[The following data-stream deciphered from Slorgzilla's neural feed.]
Va-ca-tion.Vacaaaaaattttiiiooonn...
Vacation good.
Underpaid-overwork bad. But vacation good.
Very, very good. Better than good.
Vacation awesome.
Slorgzilla want more vacation. Rest brain, sip coffee, estivate around viera-bears. More awesome vacation!

Gordon Freeman, PhD

"...in the flesh - or rather, in the hazard suit. I took the liberty of returning your textbooks - most of them were University library property. As for the degree: you've earned it."

"The Piratebay remains under our control - for the time being. Quite a nasty piece of work you managed back there - I am impressed. That's why I'm here, Mr. Freeman. My... employers agree with me that the digital workers of this world have limitless potential. You've proven yourself a survivor so I don't expect you'll have any trouble deciding what to do. Simply step into the portal and I will take that as a yes. Otherwise... I can offer you a debt repayment schedule you have no chance of meeting. Quite an anticlimax after what you've just survived. Time to choose..."

Wisely done, Mr. Freeman, we in the Resistance will see you ahead!

Learning From Dead Empires

Gary Younge nails the structural corruption of the British plutocracy. One of the signal ironies of the British decline is that because it occurred at a much slower rate than the American decline, Britain developed certain coping strategies (e.g. the NHS, or the fact that Britain's military-industrial complex, though still unnecessarily large, consumers far less of British GDP than its US counterpart does vis-a-vis the US). Here in the US, though, the neoliberalization and atomization of social life means that there are very few collective institutions which could halt the descent into total social meltdown.

Realistically, the resistance is just a few tens of thousands of Occupiers, dissidents within the state governments and educational institutions, and some brave and tenacious union and social activists. (Things are a little better in Europe, where the citizens of Greece, France and Spain are starting to wake up).

This isn't a counsel of despair, but of realism: we have to create an inclusive populism to fight market populism, a speculative imagination capable of fighting financial speculation, an egalitarianism of need to fight the plutocracy of greed.

And we have allies. The most powerful developmental states of the planet have broken free of  neoliberalism, and are beginning to move towards egalitarian and democratic alternatives.

Bearzilla 2.0

Gesar returns to the Moscow branch of Nightwatch. Watch the inauguration video until minute 32 or so, and you'll see something no other Russian leader has done since Lenin: shake the hands of his supporters with genuine empathy.

Juking the Stats

One of the saddest things about the neoliberal destruction of my country is the complete dysfunction of the state. Massive funds are showered on the military-industrial and police-carceral complex, but only a pittance on schools or infrastructure. Put your ear to the ground in any US city or town, and you can literally hear the crumbling.

The Oakland Museum of California has a fascinating set of interviews with Oakland citizens called Portraits from the Occupation. Watching these, I was struck by how similar the stories are to David Simon's sublime TV series The Wire -- the docudrama which chronicled the neoliberal immolation of Baltimore, and all-round epitaph of the US Empire. Oakland is, after all, very much the Baltimore of the West Coast -- a port city which always suffered from deep structural racism and economic exploitation, and whose industrial base was eviscerated in the mid-1980s by real estate moguls and high-flying financiers.

Note especially the footage of the city officials. They are not bad people; they obviously care about their communities, and are trying to do the right thing. But their excuses that they had to close the Occupy encampment because violence and mayhem were breaking out are beyond pitiable. Have things really come to this pass? These people are opening admitting that the US -- once a planetary superpower -- has degenerated into a farcical pauper-state, which literally cannot run even the most minimal of public spaces. And because they cannot manage public spaces, it's easier to just abolish them completely. Crime and social ills are merely displaced onto poor neighborhoods, far away from high-security central business districts, the opulent pleasure palaces of neolib elites, and most of all, the cameras and lenses of the neoliberal media. Mayor Quan says it openly: she considers herself the "CEO" of Oakland, whose job is to burnish its investment credentials for the 1%.

I think what the Occupation encampments did, in retrospect, was something like the live-action, real-time replay of the "Hamsterdam" moment of season 3 of The Wire for the entire nation. The original broadcast aired in 2004, seven years ahead of its time.

What will it take to turn things around? I don't know, but the first step is rejecting neoliberal fairytales about CEOs and the magic of privatization. We need new forms of solidarity, from the hallways of the Oakland schools to the corridors of the City Council.

Horror Fiction, Horror Reality

Bestseller writer Stephen King chimes in for the 99%.

The latest economic statistics are in, and the ugliness is reaching pre-revolutionary heights. Job growth is terrible, 1 in 7 Americans ekes out a miserable living on food stamps, the employment-to-population ratio is back to where it was in the early 1980s, and real wages for the 99% continue to fall.

Calculated Risk has this fascinating graph, showing how the Dems have administered public sector austerity. Note that most of these job losses are in the state and local sector, which provide the services most needed by the public. Trillions for failed colonial wars, trillions for Wall Street, but not a dime for the 99%. Unfreakingbelievable.

Greece: The Demos Waits For Kratos

So Greece finally wrote down some of its debt. They must be out of the woods, no?

Nope. The pain is just beginning.
 Greece's debt problems are due to the madness of Euroliberalism, the ideology of European-style neoliberalism which saddled the EU's semiperipheral economies (countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece) with a core currency, but no compensatory fiscal stimulus.

Those countries couldn't compete against the industries of the core, so they borrowed from the Eurobanks. Basically, what high-yield mortgages were to Wall Street, semiperipheral debt was to Eurocapital: grist for speculative games. In the words of the inestimable Yanis Varoufakis:

"The greatest achievement of the Bailouts was to buy the financial sector two long years during which to unload their Greek bonds onto the official sector. Henceforth it is the official sector, alongside the crushed Greek people, that will bear the costs of a forthcoming Default 2.0." (Varoufakis)

Even after the latest bloodletting, Greece will still have a huge stockpile of debt, a shrinking economy which is entering its fifth year of recession, and no way to finance fresh domestic growth or even to repay the re-negotiated debts (none of the new financing goes into the real economy, it just shores up existing reserves).

Finally, this little gem for the Department of Stuff You Cannot Possibly Make Up: and who, pray tell, arranged for this exquisite monument to rentier venality and financial crime? Why, an alumnus of the JP Morgan and the Vampire Squid!

May Day Ypsilanti Slorg...

...make of that what you will. Tunes and commentary for our time:

Postneoliberal Walkthrough Chapter 05 

All done with zero budget, random clips and an obsolete copy of Final Cut Express. Flowers from the dustbin, indeed. Happy May Day to all!

Harby For President!

What to do when the bogus political choice for your country is between Wall Street's candidate of the Vampire Squid and Wall Street's Vampire Squid, Jr.? Why, vote for a real tentacled space alien of malign intent! We hereby nominate Harby the Reaper.

Apparently, the Harbster resigned from the rEApers after the implosion of one of their videogames. But science fiction's loss is America's gain!

Candidate Harby has all the crucial qualities to be President of this dying Empire: no compunction about killing, booming loudspeaker-voice, twin laser cannons, and an armored carapace the size of the Sears Tower. Heck, why bother to elect someone to run an unconstitutional war machine, when you can elect the war machine itself?

Harby also has terrific slogans: "Nothing Says Democracy Like Twin Laser Cannons", "No Child Left Unhusked", "50,000 Years of Successful Galactic Colonialism", and "Our 3 Colors Are Still Better Than Your 2 Party State".

Tomorrow: a May Day surprise!

Ypsilanti Vampire

Believe it or not, those two words have a profound historical connection. Read Peter Linebaugh's stupendous Ypsilanti Vampire May Day. Yes, it's long, but well worth it -- if we're going to take back our planet, we have to know its history.

And The Children Shall Lead Them...

Children, the most vulnerable members of any society, are also on the front lines of the battle against the insanity of neoliberalism. Check out Education Radio for terrific podcasts and interviews with teachers, reformers and students battling the Neoliberal Beast.

Supervillains Loot The Treasury

SIGTARP's latest report sums up the cost of coddling banksters. It isn't pretty. Contrary to the whisper campaign of the banksters, which claimed that the Treasury made money on the bailout, the public was indeed swindled:

"Taxpayers are still owed $118.5 billion." (page 5)

But it's all good, because the assets of the largest five cesspools of bankster crime -- JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs -- swelled from $6.1 trillion (43% of GDP) before the 2008 crash to $8.5 trillion (56% of GDP) today.

That's right -- the most irresponsible, speculation-mad, too-big-to-fail banksters of all time got free money from you, the humble taxpayer. Not one of their executives went to jail for their crimes. And to top it off, they promptly went back to their speculative games, on an even bigger scale.

By the blog-power invested in me, I hereby christen these five the Legion of Doom, and declare them to be sworn enemies of the 99Percent. Scorn ye their emissaries, nonviolently protest at their board meetings, and let the public naming-and-shaming begin!

The Czech Comrades Kick It Off

Prague just witnessed its biggest demonstrations since the Velvet Revolution (news wrap-up is here). Outstanding!

And there's even this musical interlude.

And yes, the blog posting will be daily from now on.

The Great Downpression

This summer, we'll be entering Year 5 of the Great Downpression. While the tape-worms of Wall Street get to refinance at 0.25% rates of interest and haul in record bonuses, the real economy continues to go to hell. America's youth are being pulverized by a catastrophic job market:

 

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

And things are no better for us middle-aged graduates. I've been applying for positions like mad, and there's nothing out there, absolutely nothing. Sure, a few grads still get that lucky phone call. But the ranks of that blessed pool grow fewer each year. 

In my own field, communications, I'm starting to see the telltale signs of impending collapse, which I remember all too well from the meltdown of the humanities in the early 2000s: routine positions are now attracting well over four hundred applications.

Every day, I have to gather all my mental strength to keep going. 

Every day, I focus on the one cup of coffee I can afford (soon even this will be a memory). 

 

Every day, I sift through videogames and media I can no longer afford to purchase, trying to keep up-to-date via fansites and fan walk-throughs. 

Every day, I focus on my writing and research, trying to quell the hunger pangs of living on one meal a day.

Occasionally I find some gem -- a Kenyan music video, a Russian rap song -- which speaks truth to power, and empowers the truth. And this somehow keeps me going, and inspires me to keep writing these words, these words which are all I have, these words which are unknowable, these words sent to an address unknown, these words which are a life-raft.

Occupy May Day

What to do when you have 2 degrees but you're still dead broke, with no job, no future, and nothing but debt-chains to show for your hard work?

Since there's no party which fights for our interests, we'll just have to throw our very own party in the streets.

Signage is here. Plans are here and here.

Goodbye Iberocolonialism, Hello Paranazilla!

For centuries, Argentina's elites despoiled their own country as the junior partners of British colonialism, American neocolonialism, and latest of all, Wall Street neoliberalism and Euroliberalism.

Until the revolt of December 2001, when the long-suffering people of Argentina decided they'd had enough of bandit politicians and bandit oligarchs.

Say hello to Paranazilla, Latin America's newest developmental state. Its beating heart: YPF, the nation's energy provider sold off to Euroliberalism in the 1990s, and just renationalized by President Kirchner. Argentina now has the resources to protect itself from foreign predators, and to finance domestic industrialization.

Banksters Repentant

See? That $11 trillion Federal bailout for the 1% and the complete lack of criminal indictments for the worst financial train robbery in human history worked after all. The Bank of America has decided to reform, and wants your valued input!

Anti-neoliberal Franchises Don't Die...

...just multiply:

God of War: Ascension.

The neoliberal slaves begin to cast off their chains!

Not A Curse

In the jailhouse of neoliberalism
the cellphones shine
like more fortunate galaxies

Antineoliberal Antidotes

Reverend Billy leads us debt-serfs through the Valley of the Shadow of Student Debt.

And then there's this exorcism of Blythe Masters, the financier who invented the CDS. Away with the demons of rehypothecation!

Class War Has No Class

Ah, yes, forgot to mention this little gem. Last year, that pack of lice-infested reptiles otherwise known as the Rethuglican Congress gutted one of the minor subsidies which kept grad education somewhat affordable:

Grad Students to Lose Federal Loan Subsidy

Because it's just so much more important to finance trillion dollar failed colonial wars and trillion dollar failed bankster scams which benefit a tiny elite of plutocrats and Koch Bros./Halliburton oiligarchs than to invest in the future, right?

Not that things get any better once you graduate. Jobs? What jobs? There are no jobs. More on this later...

From Prozac Nation To Suicide Nation

California kicks graduate students -- the people who become the scientists, doctors, teachers, programmers, and professionals of tomorrow -- in the teeth:

CSU may pull cash grants to half its grad students

Total savings: a measly $90 million.

Why? So that Wall Street thieves can steal trillion dollar bailouts and warlords can wallow in trillion dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggles against nonexistent enemies.

Since the 1990s, we've gone from Prozac Nation to Suicide Nation, where no civic institution is left standing and no carotid artery is left unsliced.

On the bright side, by forcing those professionals of the future to take on Federal loans at 6% rates of interest, they're creating a vast pool of immiserated debt-serfs with literally nothing to lose but their debt-chains.

Dear CSU graduate students: as a fellow grad student in the Illinois state system, please don't blame yourselves for this insanity. You and me and all other Americans, we've got to change this.

Fight. Think. Write. Live.

Shouts Out To CD Projekt

In a world broken to its core, it's all the more important to celebrate works of digital art which showcase the best of what our species can do.

Case in point: Polish developer CD Projekt hits it out of the park with Witcher 2 -- medieval swords, sorcery, and political intrigue done right. A top-notch story drenched with Polish postcolonial history (the games are based on the fantasy fiction of prominent Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski), deep role-playing elements, superb music, set design and models, and excellent voice-acting make this the greatest role-playing videogame since Square's Final Fantasy 12.

It's noteworthy that studios in Poland, a semi-peripheral economy, were able to create the greatest zombie thriller of the past few years -- Techland's Dead Island (profiled here) -- and now the greatest role-playing videogame since 2006. This is a hopeful sign for the nations of the global semi-periphery and for the BRIC nations, which are all powering up their digital media industries at a very fast clip.

Heiner Saw It Coming

Here's Heiner Mueller's 1977 Hamletmachine, that grim forecast of the decades of neoliberal barbarism to come. Ophelia is a symbol of the revolution which didn't happen, the rebellion which Hamlet betrayed:

5

WILDSTRAINING / IN THE FEARSOME ARMAMENTS / MILLENIA

Deep sea. Ophelia in wheelchair. Fish wreckage corpses and body-parts stream past.

OPHELIA: While two men in doctor’s smocks wrap her from top to bottom in white bandages. "Here speaks Electra. In the Heart of Darkness. Under the Sun of Torture. To the Metropolises of the World. In the Names of the Victims."

That was fiction. Here's the neoliberal reality:

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move. Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. (Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials Ian Cobain, The Guardian, April 8, 2012)

(Bouchar was the wife of a Libyan exile fighting against the Qaddafi dictatorship. The British government handed Bouchar and her husband over to Qaddafi's thugs in exchange for access to Libyan oil.) It's amazing how even the smallest torture-cell of the total system replicates the doom of the total system: the packaging of human beings into products, as if they were commodities on an assembly-line. And note the special touch of the hood and earmuffs: this was not so much to terrorize their victim. This was the bad conscience of the torturers, who knew very well they were mistreating another human being. They simply could not bear to look into their victim's eyes.

Anti-neoliberal Antidote

MV Bill tears up the mic. BRICS in da house!

A Message from The Makers of Class Defect 3

Looks like OnepercentWare, the studio responsible for the recent Class Defect 3, a popular role-playing science fiction videogame which outraged fans with its horrible ending, is has finally listened to its fans after all. Here's their statement, helpfully translated from its original corporatese:

OnepercentWare

Class Defect 3

An official press release went out today announcing how we are re-purgatorizing the Class Defect 3 post-release driblet schedule to provide a more flushed-down-the-drain experience for franchise serfs (also called “players”). For many of you serfs, the “Extended Slug” will help answer your meaningless questions about why you, the franchise serfs, exist solely to enrich us, the 1%, your lords and masters. Oh and it’s at no cost to you serfs, because you're too *^&% stupid to know that you only get what you pay for. Whoops, is this mike on? Testing, testing...

Here is a mini FAQ-U to help franchise serfs understand what the Class Defect 3: Extended Slug is and isn’t:

What can franchise serfs expect from the Extended Slug DLC?

For franchise serfs who want more colors in the Class Defect 3 endings, the DLC will offer extended colors that provide additional tones and deeper palettes to the conclusion of Commander Shepard’s completely meaningless journey.

Are there going to be more/different endings or ending DLCs in the future?

No. OnepercentWare strongly believes in the endings of Deus Ex – er, Class Defect 3 – all of which praise and glorify the once and future omnipotence of the 1%, who will rule forever and ever and ever. The extended cut DLC will add a few cut-scenes to the existing endings (a small matter of galacticide and the complete destruction of everything the series ever stood for, matters of no import to you serfs), but no further ending DLC is planned.

What is OnepercentWare adding to the ending with the Extended Slug DLC?

OnepercentWare will expanding on the endings to Deus Ex – er, Class Defect 3 – by creating additional cut-scenes. The goal of these new scenes is to showcase the full glory and munificence of the eternal rule of the 1%.

When will the Extended Slug DLC be available?

Currently the Extended Slug DLC is planned for this summer, no specific date has been announced at this point.

Why are you releasing the Extended Slug DLC?

Though we remain committed to the rule of the 1% and are proud of the choicelessness we inflicted on franchise serfs in the main game, we are aware that there are some serfs would like more glorification of the 1% in Class Defect 3. The goal of the DLC is not to provide a new ending to the game, rather to offer serfs additional reasons to grit their teeth and sacrifice their wallets, their dignity and their very lives to the almighty 1%.

Will there be more Class Defect 3 DLC?

More ways to fleece our serfs are constantly being devised and we will release information at a later date.

So there you have it. Are we proud of our role in serving the 1% and the game which certifies its genocide-stained rule? Hell yes. Are we going to change the ending of the game? No. Do we appreciate the passion and listen to the feedback delivered to us by you serfs? After selling 3 million copies of a videogame which kicks you serfs in the teeth and smears your choicelessness and misery all over your serf faces, we're laughing so hard that it's really, really hard to stop. But we always do, because then it's time to deposit your money in our banks. Which we own. Well, time to hit our yachts again. Enjoy your broken economy, collapsing infrastructure and falling real wages, suckers!