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.