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!