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.