Saturday, November 26, 2016

And Now the Race Begins...

The Sands of Time are running faster and faster in the hourglass of empire. First posts have become last posts, choices have become destinies, unplanned entrances have become untoward exit strategies. Who has better teeth / radical blood or the stone of repression. Karl Kraus wrote long ago about how every screaming headline portended doom. Now every twitter feed radiates catastrophe. The forces of destruction are being unleashed on the people least prepared for it: the Americans, former beneficiaries of empire, but now with nothing to show for it but unpayable debts, shrinking real wages and a predatory national (in)security state which is about to turn its full repressive force on... itself. Welcome to game-show fascism, where every contestant is a loser. You're fired, America -- you've all been fired.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Lists


Timothy Snyder wrote this post on twenty steps to take to prepare for the rule of the Despot: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.david.snyder/posts/1206636702716110. (You know things are grim when Yale professors are openly joining the barricades.)


12 Rules for the American Resistance


1. No free citizen owes any politician one iota of automatic respect for anything, ever. The government serves the people, the people do not serve the government. If you worship a politician, you are a slave, not a citizen.

2. Democracy means one person, one vote. But the incoming leader lost the popular ballot by an astounding 2.5 million votes (http://cookpolitical.com/story/10174). We don't have an elected president, we have a crowned monarch selected by the Electoral College -- an institution designed by slavers. Our Senate elections are grossly undemocratic (Wyoming's 600,000 citizens get two senators, and California's 38 million get two). Elections to the House of Representatives have been horribly gerrymandered to benefit both parties. Our entire electoral system of electoral democracy is broken and needs fixing.

3. The enemy is not a person. The enemy is the plutocracy. For the past forty years, plutocrats have been razing the US economy to the ground. Their strategy: loot the country, then whip up hatred against the poorest and weakest of us. Here's how they looted the country's income:

Here's how they looted the country's wealth:

(Charts courtesy Emmanuel Saez: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2015.pdf).

4. At some point over the next four years, a false flag operation will happen and the Despot will try to tear up our remaining civil liberties. Be prepared, not scared.

5. Books expand the mind and feed the soul. Read Jacobin, Theodor Adorno's classic Minima Moralia, Audre Lorde's autobiography Zami, and Orhan Pamuk's denunciation of Turko-imperialism, Snow.

6. The corporate media are lying thieves who just want to sell you ads. Stop paying for their lies and start paying for an internet connection to the citizen journalists seeking the truth. Start with the fine folks at the OCCRP and Belling the Cat. Follow the twitter feeds of William Gibson (https://twitter.com/GreatDismal) and Sarah Kendzior. (https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior).

7. Join a union (Change to Win  and AFL-CIO).

8. Go to rallies and demonstrations. Meet and greet people there. These are your friends, your allies, your fellow citizens who are planting the seeds of a better world.

9. Resist the plutocracy by taking ownership of public spaces. Run over a pothole? Report it. Is your local park run-down? Call the town council and get them to fix it. Mediocre school? Meet the teachers, students and school board and help improve it. Get involved in local elections, town and city councils, and school boards. 

10. Play and learn from videogames: Square's Final Fantasy 12, Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4, Stig Asmussen's God of War 3, Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa 1 and 2, and CD Projekt Red's The Witcher 3 are all complex, beautiful, sometimes heart-breaking but always redemptive explorations of history and anti-imperial resistance.

11. To the 30% of Americans who still have middle-class jobs: stop wasting your money on useless gadgets and start donating to the ACLU, the EFF and the many other fine groups fighting for the freedom of all and against the binge looting of the few.

12. Make sure you have your passport ready. Stay in touch with the forces of freedom all across the world, especially those located in countries which have struggled against kleptocratic regimes, oligarchies and autocracies. Our struggles and their struggles are one. Onwards to the Ameri-maidan!

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Tools of Resistance

Three resources for today:

1. Dave Zirin's brilliant and scathing interview with Dr. Harry Edwards, who has sound advice on how to navigate the unfolding political nightmare (https://soundcloud.com/edgeofsports/hedwards2).

2. Second, it is crucial to understand the mind of the Enemy (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747). Note how Bannon doesn't give a damn about democracy or voters, it's pure worship of monarchy and empire, and note the paltry stimulus: $1 trillion in infrastructure spread out over a bunch of years is chump change in an economy with $81 trillion of assets (Federal Reserve data). What this means is that sometime next year, the economy will tank, the remnants of the middle class will lose their last scraps of imperial privilege (bye-bye health insurance, bye bye public education, bye bye food stamps) and the Far Right will turn to the rabid repression of dissent.

3. Excellent article from Les Leopold about how the plutocracy is destroying the heartland (http://commondreams.org/views/2016/11/16/winning-back-working-class-time-reckoning-progressives). It's time to fight back.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Resisting the Despot

I'm no fan of the Clinton dynasty or its dismal neoliberal politics. But something needs to be said not just today, but re-said every single day for the next four years.

The American people voted by a margin of 1.4 million (http://cookpolitical.com/story/10174) for Clinton and not the Despot. (Note this margin is going to increase, since votes are still being counted.)

The margin of the Clinton victory is now around 1.1% of the vote.

More than a million Americans have been disenfranchised by an 18th century electoral system designed to safeguard the rule of slave-owners.

When you vote for your mayor or governor, is your vote thrown out because you just happen to live in a specific neighborhood? Of course not.

What's shameful is that this is the second time this has happened in 16 years. George W. Bush became President in 2000, despite losing the popular vote.

Now it's happened again.

In the year 2016, suffrage -- THE RIGHT TO VOTE -- has become a radical political demand.

But wait, there's more. The awfulness of the Electoral College is just the tip of the iceberg.
 The American political system is completely and utterly broken.

Our Senate elections are horribly undemocratic, because California's 38.8 million citizens get two senators, while Wyoming's 0.6 million citizens also get two Senators. That's right, the residents of Wyoming have 64 times the senatorial influence as Californians.

Our elections for Congressional Representatives are deeply undemocratic, due to the sleazy gerrymandering of districts (they're carved up to benefit each party) as well as a first-past-the-post system of elections which makes third, fourth and fifth parties impossible.

And the entire process is dominated by $6.4 billion in campaign spending by plutocrats, a river of cash spent on giant media monopolies whose business model is selling ads instead of telling the truth.

If you ever wondered why the Despot (because he didn't win the election) hates Mexicans so much and wants to build a giant wall, it's not really about race. It's because Mexico, like nearly all other modern democracies, has a reasonably sane system of electoral votes and proportional representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_the_Union).

It's not a wall to keep out people. It's a wall to keep out the very idea of democracy.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Heart of The American Darkness

I knew this day would come.

The day of the Shadow.

I felt it, ever so long ago, in that inexplicable and almost unthinkable way that picayune events in our daily life anticipate world-shaking catastrophes to come. One day, you will be able to read about my own personal discovery of the Shadow -- but the time for that is not yet.

On November 8, the Shadow came to America -- the Shadow that feeds on torment, on cruelty, on misery and violence. It is the Shadow which carved an empire out of the dungeons of the slave-castles and the prison-ships of the Middle Passage, which turned the Caribbean islands into a gigantic engine to convert cheap human blood into profitable sugar, and which transformed the broken bodies of those who picked cotton and who rolled tobacco into an ocean of annuities. It is the Shadow that rolled across an entire continent, which built a world-spanning military-industrial complex, and which neoliberalized the world after its own liberal image.

It is the Shadow of America's imperial capitalism. Yet its appearance in 2016 heralds no imperial rebirth, but only its own wanton self-destruction. No second American century slouches beastlike towards Bethlehem, but only the zombified parody of its former glory. Glenn Greenwald nailed this contradiction in his wonderful election postmortem, which describes in devastating detail how the Clinton machine, that hellspawn of neoliberal think-tankery and Wall Street crookery, opened the gates of revanchist hell. The forces of this revanchism are unable to produce anything new. Instead, they will commit fearsome violence on the electorate that gave them power. With typical perspicacity, the videogame artists saw it first: Id Software's famous third-person shooter, Doom, warned us of what was to come all the way back in 1993.

But that is a discussion for another day, or more precisely, for the book I'm writing on videogame culture.

Today, I want to talk about the Resistance to the Shadow.

It is a small thing. Infinitely small, infinitely precious. It is the sliver of non-identity we carry around with us, often unknowingly. It is the nugget of conscience which quivers in the direction of freedom like an iron filing in a magnetic field. Against this nugget, the flint of consciousness strikes sparks.

Theory is the light kindled by these sparks. Through it, we see further than the Shadow. We see that the American Shadow, seemingly all-engulfing, is but one among others. There is the Shadow of Putinism, that failed petro-colonial reboot of the collapsed core of the Soviet empire; there is the Shadow of Brexit, that xenophobic unraveling of the no-longer-United  Kingdom; there is the Shadow of Ottomanism, which has destroyed Turkey's fragile democracy; there is the Shadow of Minotaurism, which has destroyed Greece and now threatens all of Europe with perdition; there is the far smaller but no less deadly Shadow of the Daesh, the warlordists, and the Assadists of Syria -- the Assadaeshists. Shadows all, ravening towards destruction.

But the light of theory, the labor of collective cognition, allows us to see even further. The light of this small thing, Resistance, hums with unquenchable power. In it shines the power of the stars: eye-dazzling, steadfast, radiant. Through it we see the Resistances battling the Shadows. We see the activists and peacemakers, the healers and poets, the authors and remixers, the digital artists and fan communities. Against the American gangsterism, there is the scorching satire of Fallout 4, which accurately predicted not the atomic catastrophes which never happened, but the catastrophic revanchisms of 2016 which did. Against the geopolitical closure of euroliberal Minotaurism and Eastern European ordo-liberalism, there is the magnificent open world revolution of The Witcher 3. Against the Shadow of the Assadaeshists, there is the light of Rojava; against the Shadow of Putinism, the light called the Maidan.

For every Shadow, a Resistance. For every Resistance, a constellation of stars. And as the Shadows begin to congeal into a single monster, so too must the very constellations unite. Against the One Shadow, there can be only One Resistance. In the gloom of prehistory, the light of the stars shall guide us towards the first, faint glimmer of the Sun.