Slorgzilla

Moving the Goalposts

2012-01-12T15:54:00.000-06:00

The key to social change is not to have goals. The key is to move the goalposts.

Instead of just returning to Zucotti Park, take protest transnational -- footage from march in Kano, Nigeria and rally in Freedom Square, Kano.

Instead of just firing corrupt banksters, Ellen Brown suggests turning banks into a public utility -- a model which works just fine for New Zealand, Japan, China, Germany, India, Russia, and even for the US state of North Dakota, in the form of the Bank of North Dakota.

Arab Spring: We're Just Getting Started

2012-01-05T14:45:00.000-06:00

Benghazi-based rap artist MC Swat scorches the desert with Freedom of Speech (English subtitled version here).

Beasts

2011-12-28T19:27:00.000-06:00

Uplink 25 is up.

Onwards to dissertation revisions, plus some media work.

In other news, Michael Thomas forecasts a 99% chance of a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem:

"When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm..."

Not just one beast -- millions, billions of beasts. That's what you did to us, Wall Street.

We're beasts now.

Pelts and fur. Tooth and claw.

We were human once, with middle-class lives, incomes and futures. But you went and destroyed all that. Because your greed was the only good, your privilege the only law.

Beasts we are. We sing savage songs, harsh and grating to your ears, of survival and loss, battle and resistance.

We have nothing to lose but our debt-slavery, and a world -- the world we created with our own hands -- to win.

And now the ineluctable coil of the dialectic -- that mysterious force called History, the sum total and aggregation of all human knowing, wishing and acting -- is bending towards one direction.

The Beasts. Are. Coming. For. You.

Happy New Year!

Egypt: The Revolution Continues

2011-12-27T13:18:00.001-06:00

Mubarak is gone, but the battle against the mini-Mubaraks continues. Samira Ibrahim describes her ordeal at the hands of SCAF - just one of many incidents which sparked the massive November protests.

One of the most hopeful aspects of the Arab Spring is the mass participation of women. They are no longer acting as proxies of husbands or the extensions of joint families, but are demanding full citizenship. In fact, many of these women are light-years ahead of even the most politicized men, for the simple reason that the women are beginning to understand that revolutions aren't about chants and slogans. They are a process which transforms oneself as well as one's society -- they are lived down to the marrow of one's bones.

Numbers, We've Got More Numbers

2011-12-12T14:18:00.002-06:00

Recently, numbers have been flying around about the total size of the ongoing 2008-2011 neoliberal bailout. Now that the Occupy movements are in full swing, it's important to get our numbers right, because economics is too important to be left to bankster hucksters and PR spinmeisters. Fortunately, journalist and author Nomi Prins (website here) has done the heavy lifting for us here:

US Bailout Tally, October 2011: $9.2 trillion

So $9.2 trillion is the total of all current support in the US, including TARP ($700 billion) and the stimulus package ($787 billion).

Then there's another $6.8 trillion of potential support for Fannie and Freddie, the two Federally-chartered housing agencies. That number is simply the sum total of all Fannie/Freddie mortgages, but that number isn't going to zero (assuming the absolute worst, a deflationary meltdown where radical crazies take over the US government and allow everything to collapse, housing prices would drop 30%, an additional $2 trillion). So maybe the $9.2 trillion will eventually hit $11.2 trillion.

But most of that $11.2 trillion aimed at the financial sector wasn't "spent" as an outlay or purchase. It was a set of guarantees, designed to keep the banking system from imploding completely. One partial exception was the $1 trillion to $3 trillion spent by the Federal Reserve to purchase dubious assets from the banksters, assets which are probably not worth that amount (otherwise, why would they be selling them, when they get can unlimited liquidity for nearly free?). Net subsidy: noone knows, but it can't be more than $3 trillion.

Some of the bigger numbers floating around the mainstream media put the total bailout at $27 trillion. Now, this number is not based on fiction, but it's not as scary as it sounds. It's just the $9.2 trillion, plus the $6.8 trillion in Freddie/Fannie Mae loans, plus the total cost of the global stimulus packages ($1 trillion in direct spending from European Union and the BRICs), plus the implied guarantees by the European Central Bank (another $3 trillion in financial support, and $7 trillion in implied guarantees). Total real expenditure of funds: maybe $5.5 trillion globally. That's 9% of our $60 trillion world economy, not the end of the world.

Now, here's where things get interesting. What did the Wall Street banksters do with that $3 to $4 trillion? Only a sliver went to bonuses, or to purchase the vermin called the US political class. Most went to reserves, to compensate for the huge holes in the banking system: yes, most of those dead mortgages, extinct CDOs and worthless derivatives are still on their books. Why can't they just write off all that junk? Because without those zombie assets, the shadow banking system implodes completely, and takes down the standard banking system with it.

The next question is, what the heck is this shadow banking system? The NY Fed has the answer right here, in a bombshell 2010 report. The opening page states: "Shadow banks are financial intermediaries that conduct maturity, credit, and liquidity transformation without access to central bank liquidity or public sector credit guarantees. Examples of shadow banks include finance companies, asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits, limited-purpose finance companies, structured investment vehicles, credit hedge funds, money market mutual funds, securities lenders, and government-sponsored enterprises."

And note the key chart on page 5 of the report, showing how assets in the shadow banking system grew larger than the regular banking system during the long era of neoliberalism - and then tanked after 2008.

That's why the neoliberal model of bankster bubbles is dead. The glory days of deregulated credit playing insane leveraged games, sloshing around world markets and fueling a debt-dependent consumption boom heavily tilted to the 1% are gone. For. Good.

What we need now is a world for, of, and by the 99%. An economy geared to human need, not rentier greed. A society organized on the principles of democracy, not plutocracy. And a politics of massive public investment in green jobs, green infrastructure, and high-tech human services.

After Occupy Wall Street, it's time to Occupy the Bailout!

Don't Mess With The Bears

2011-12-10T15:53:00.001-06:00

The Bears explain the latest twist in neoliberalism's 35-year reign of thievery, fraud and debt-slavery.

Citizen Journalism

2011-12-08T19:26:00.001-06:00

This made me very, very, very happy.

Elizabeth Warren, Senator of the 99%

2011-12-03T18:03:00.001-06:00

The first American revolution started in Massachusetts.

The second one just started.

This time around, the enemy isn't an overseas Empire, but America's very own internal plutocracy.

Coming this holiday break: TubeSlorg's post-neoliberal walkthrough continues. Stay tuned!

Supervillains: They're Real

2011-12-02T10:52:00.001-06:00

Yet another real-world billionaire has crossed over the line into comic book supervillainy, by openly saying to the 99% that he'd fire half of your teachers, because your serf-children deserve to be poor and stupid and shackled into class sizes of 60, just like some rural industrializing nation:

"How does it feel, 99%, to stand on the very Street that destroyed your job, your mortgage, and the entire middle class? Do you feel sad? Full of rage? Or do those Anonymous masks help bury your feelings; hiding your true self? Oh, you are a truly extraordinary specimen... I look forward to breaking you." —Mayor Hugo ("the Mike") Strangeberg

(with apologies to Rocksteady's original).

Occupy Your Homes!

2011-12-01T16:32:00.001-06:00

The banksters tried to foreclose on a 103-year-old woman. Ain't happening.

To celebrate the holidays, the Occupation is coming to a foreclosure near you.

Numbers, I Need Numbers

2011-11-30T18:53:00.001-06:00

You want numbers, we got numbers.

Number of Americans close to starvation, i.e. dependent on foodstamps: 45.8 million (1 out of 8).

Number of Americans underwater on their mortages (i.e. are debt-serfs): 14 million homeowners (2 out of 7 homeowners with mortgages).

Employment-to population ratio has fallen from 63% to: 58%, the worst since the early 1980s.

The Great Recession destroyed 8 million jobs, but since the end of the recession, new jobs created amount to only 2 million, resulting in: Worst. Employment. Recovery. Ever.

New home sales: Lowest. Number. Ever.

Local and state deficits: still bleeding $100 billion.

Total amount US Federal government will waste on military-industrial boondoggles, rather than bailing out the states: between $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

Back in 1986, the top 1 percent received 12% of all income and owned 33% of all wealth. Last year, the top 1 percent received: 25% of all income and 40% of all wealth.

Student loan debt: $1 trillion and counting.

Total Wall Street bailout: $7.77 trillion. That's not a typo - we're talking eight trillion fricking-sharks-with-laser-beams dollars.

All Tomorrow's Uprisings

2011-11-28T20:28:00.001-06:00

Hard drive expired today. All the technology I own is slowly expiring, circuit board by circuit board. In search of solace, I ran into Clave de Barrio's scintillating message to all tomorrow's uprisings. In other news, neoliberalism's trillion-dollar crime spree continues unabated.

Egypt, Clock of the Revolution

2011-11-22T11:00:00.001-06:00

The Children of Masrzilla know what time it is: time to take back their country from the 1%.
Sharif Kouddous reports on the latest.

More raw footage here.

Al Jazeera stream here.

Tahrir 2.0

2011-11-21T16:43:00.001-06:00

Tunis inspired Cairo, Cairo inspired Benghazi, Benghazi inspired Zawiya, Zawiya inspired Misrata, Misrata inspired Tripoli, Tripoli inspired New York, and now New York has inspired Cairo.

In the words of a famous philosopher, you ain't seen nothing yet!

Wisdom of the Elders

2011-11-20T15:50:00.001-06:00

A message from the Civil Rights generation to Occupy Wall Street: we struggle, we resist, we occupy!

Mask of Liberty

2011-11-15T12:26:00.001-06:00

Predictably, the Wall Street billionaire who bought the NY mayoralty with spare change finally sent in the goon squad to disperse Occupy Wall Street's encampment in Zuccotti Park. RT has this excellent piece covering the madness of a collapsing empire, which has run out of enemies and is now turning its taxpayer-funded weapons against its own citizens. Really, the only surprise is that it took this long for the crackdown to happen.

But then something happened which the 1% did not expect -- precisely because they're so clueless, so corrupted by their overweening power, and completely devoid of the slightest drop of understanding of how we 99% live -- but which we, the people, knew would happen: WE CAME RIGHT BACK (live coverage is running here).

The live coverage is now showing something amazing: Americans are peacefully assembling, protesting the occupation of America by Wall Street in a public park open to all, while the police are occupying the center of Zucotti!

Look at the cold, empty pavement in between the officers, Americans. You see that emptiness?

That is the freedom Wall Street has given you.

It is the freedom to do nothing. It is the freedom to say nothing. It is the freedom to be nothing, because that's what Wall Street thinks of you: they own EVERYTHING and you are NOTHING to them.
You are seeing, in Heiner Müller's immortal phrase, the iron face of Capital's freedom. It is the freedom of the 1% to take everything from the 99%.

Did the patriots of Bunker Hill die for this freedom?

Did the heroes of Gettysburg die for this freedom?

Did the soldiers of Iwo Jima die for this freedom?

Do we have less dignity and worth than the people of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, who struck down tyrants and plutocracies which oppressed them?

No. We have the same dignity. We have the same honor. And now we must bring justice back to our country.

The time is now, my fellow Americans.

It's time to take back our country.

It's a Metal Gear Planet

2011-11-12T11:03:00.001-06:00

Jasiri X interviews true American patriot Sgt. Shamar Thomas. (Jasiri has this speech right here -- be sure to scroll down to read the description of the events behind the video. Also check out Jasiri's Real Gangstas video from 2010.)

Juan Cole shines a spotlight on Metal Gear Planet -- where we are all locked into struggle against the far-from-beautiful Beasts of Neoliberalism.

In Chile, the 99% are facing down a predatory billionaire.

This Revolution Can Dance

2011-11-08T21:14:00.000-06:00

One of the little-known perks of the thankless, overworked, and underpaid job of being a transnational media scholar is that we get to document the tremors which eventually turn into geopolitical earthquakes. Behold, as the daughters of Bearzilla rock the transnational house.

The dance party spreads to this awesomeness from Turkey.

More remixes here and here.

Ammo Re-Up

2011-11-03T15:23:00.001-05:00

Check out Bill Moyers' scintillating keynote.

William K. Black eviscerates the bankers.

Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges (who was just arrested protesting Goldman Sachs) weigh in on Charlie Rose.

Our UAW brothers and sisters are joining the struggle.

We're just getting started.

Bulletins

2011-11-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

Shorter posts for awhile, because I'm writing the final chapter of the diss, but here's the latest:

Business Insider chronicles the (citizen-friendly) rampages of the Pirates of the Banksterium. Yarrr!

True American hero William K. Black, the scourge of the 1980s banksters, savages Bank of America for ripping off the public. (Visit Black's blog at New Economic Perspectives for an economic perspective founded on sanity and rationality).

And last but hardly least, Oakland gets busy.

Ramping Up...

2011-10-27T14:32:00.001-05:00

Parents, teachers, and students fight the power. Watch the neolibs trying to destroy public education scurry away!

Egyptians sent a shout out to their American brothers and sisters.

Egypt's Asmaa Mahfouz in NY's Liberated Zone, and the indispensable Amy Goodman, one of the greatest journalists of our time, talks with Egyptian activists Basem Fathy and Ahmed Maher
(clip starts at 46:40 on the timer) about Egypt and the importance of the OWS.

What The Arab Spring Did

2011-10-23T19:10:00.000-05:00

Listen to Junkyard Empire's Rebellion Politik (2010).

And now, one year later, here's Junkyard's We Want (2011).

Hear the difference?

Dissent has turned into demand.

Libya is Free

2011-10-22T11:12:00.002-05:00

The people of Libya have written a glorious page in human history, breaking their chains and putting an end to one of neoliberalism's most bloodthirsty monsters. The celebrations are ongoing, and the Libyan people's media has the details, but I did want to say this.

First of all: a special dedication to Mo Nabbous, because I know you're watching all this, somewhere, and you'll excuse me if I'm getting emotional typing this, but Mo exemplified everything which was wonderful and inspiring about the Arab Spring. Mo was the single most influential citizen journalist of the Libyan revolution, and his example inspired numerous other Libyans to step up and start creating their own free media, ranging from radio stations to hip hop bands, and from webzines to twitter feeds. Mo was killed by a regime sniper in March while reporting from the front lines, at the exact moment the tide began to turn in favor of the revolution. The sorrow of his passing is made bearable only by the fact that his newly-born daughter will grow up in a free, democratic Libya.

Much love to the brave people of Benghazi, who resisted the katiba's bullets with their bare hands; to the people of Tobruk and Derna, steadfast in their resistance; to the people of Misrata, who endured rocket barrages and defeated the regime's most fearsome units in battles of unbelievable ferocity; to the Amazigh people of the Nalut mountains, who sheltered the Revolution in its hour of need and then swept down from the mountains to free their brothers and sisters elsewhere; to the towns of the south, who rose up to free their communities; to the people of Zawiya, who resisted and kept resisting, until Zawiya was free; to the people of Tripoli, who rose up en masse to tear down the regime's walls, fortresses and prisons; to every Libyan who fought for change, and to the Libyans all over the world who returned to fight for their country's future -- and sometimes paid the ultimate price.

You forever changed your country, but you also taught the rest of the world a lesson: that no tyranny, however how many prisons it builds or how many weapons it stockpiles, can withstand the power of human dignity.

The day comes when human beings will rise up for their freedom, and fight for their freedom -- and win their freedom.

Sunday, October 23, is now your day.

May the blessings of peace and prosperity rain upon your land!

O-15

2011-10-18T17:15:00.001-05:00

Chris Hedges hits it out of the park in Times Square. I'm old enough to know why he chokes up at the end. Occasionally I've felt the same way while watching the feeds. Because my generation -- those of us born in the shadow of the decades-long American decline, who are old enough to remember the Cold War -- failed to stop neoliberalism, until it nearly wrecked the world.

Well, maybe failure is too strong a word. "We tried to warn them, but the Administrator just wouldn't listen", as a famous line in Valve's Half Life (1998) put it. This Empire (and its semi-peripheral clones) was an immovable weight on this planet's neck for thirty-five years.

Now that weight is shifting. Most of those semi-peripheral clones have been swept away, and the final redoubts of Empire -- the ones Americans have been carrying around in their minds for centuries -- are now beginning to totter. Just as Egyptian soldiers left their barracks and joined the Arab Spring, Sgt. Shamar Thomas came back from the Middle East and delivered this amazing lesson in civic patriotism.

Something magical is happening, something which happens only once in a lifetime. Zizek gets it right: the protests are a new kind of ink, the digital ink out of which the 99% will begin to reshape the destiny of this planet.

All births are deeply sacred moments, and this one has its own special elixir of joy, anxiety and wonder. You can almost see the vast, skyscraper-sized shapes of Bearzilla, Pandazilla, and Brazilla off in the mist, singing and chortling and greeting some new arrivals: the people of Tunis, the workers of Cairo, the lions of the desert who defeated North Africa's Mussolini, and so many others...

Neon Genesis Europa

2011-10-16T18:29:00.002-05:00

During one of the most mysterious and revelatory moments of Hideaki Anno's 1995 anime series "Neon Genesis Evangelion", namely near the end of Episode 24, two gigantic mechas, one symbolizing the developmental state and the other Euroliberalism, wage a life-and-death struggle which will determine the fate of humanity. They crash through barrier after barrier just like the Great Recession has crashed through one financial tranche after another, one failed ringfence after another, one failed bailout after another, accompanied by the stirring chorale of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (original epic footage here from 15:00 to 24:15).

I always thought the end was an allegory of the passing of neoliberalism: no apocalyptic battle, just the realization that somehow, through millions of acts of individual survival (symbolized by the refusal of Shinji Ikari and Rei Ayanami to give up), change was possible. Madrid staged its own deeply inspiring retake of this moment here.

Signs and Portents

2011-10-14T20:37:00.001-05:00

For years, I had to scour the nether reaches of the global airwaves to find any traces of dissent in the Neoliberal Ice Age.

But suddenly, faint cracks have appeared in the ice. Tremors are running through the ground, telegraphing earthquakes to come.

On Bill Maher, some of Wall Street's hired clowns scurried and sneered for half an hour. But suddenly Alan Grayson stood up for the 99%. The crowd delivered a standing ovation.

Hersi shows what dignity is all about. (Much love and a shout out to PoetNation.)

And the heartbeat of the Resistance keeps on.

We Are the 99%

2011-10-13T21:30:00.003-05:00

Just read the stories. The pain level in this country has risen past the point of no return.

Such immense suffering across this land. Wounded bodies, wounded hearts, wounded minds. But instead of healing, there is just more violence. Viciousness disguised as self-interest, narrowness disguised as market access, brutality disguised as market discipline.

We must learn to be better than our past.

Neoliberalism: The Video

2011-10-08T15:20:00.005-05:00

My own take on neoliberalism, a.k.a. Wall Street financial fundamentalism, a.k.a. the plutocracy of the 1%.

BRIC-ology

2011-10-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

I wrote on September 24 that the BRICS were cooking up a little surprise for the plutocrats who pretend to run the world-system.

Here you go.

How did I know? No secret documents or high-tech decryption streams were necessary. The train of Eurasian integration left the station in the summer of 2008 and has been gathering speed ever since.

Ammo Pack

2011-10-02T14:06:00.001-05:00

I can't be in New York, but I can at least suggest poster slogans:

We're the 99%

and we want our planet back

Jail the Thieves!

"Hosni Mubarak" Is Arabic For Goldman Sachs

Steal $100, you're a criminal

Steal $14 trillion, you're Wall Street

Arab Spring, Libyan Summer...

New York Autumn!

Ya Basta

2011-09-30T19:52:00.001-05:00

Twenty years.

Twenty years of working harder and harder for less and less.

Twenty years of going into debt for jobs which don't exist.

Twenty years of seeing my society become nastier, crueler, more polarized.

Twenty years of watching the Empire wage monstrous neocolonial wars.

Twenty years of watching the richest 1% steal our jobs, our money, our future.

Twenty years of living in less than 10K a year.

Twenty years of living on one meal a day.

Twenty years of brokenness.

Twenty years of neoliberal hell.

* * * * * *

As a wage-slave, I don't have the funds to be in NY to help the Resistance. But at least I can type these words. And testify to the anger. The terrible, terrible anger which I first experienced in 2003. It would well up suddenly, explosively. It was new to me, something alien to my extremely privileged and reasonably happy childhood (supportive family, good schools, good books, good neighborhoods). I was always polite, shy, geeky. But this anger was like nothing I'd ever felt before. This wasn't geek frustration at a technology not working properly. It was an absolute, terrifying, all-devouring rage.

Heiner Müller wrote about that rage, in words I translated long ago, without fully comprehending them.

Rage at the lies. Rage at the deceit. Rage at the stupidity of a society being driven off the rails by plutocratic thieves who produce nothing but lies, invest in nothing but theft, do nothing but steal.

The words
form the shape
of a fist:
ya basta
NO MORE

The battle begins.

Berlin Curbstomps Neoliberalism

2011-09-24T16:29:00.002-05:00

Berlin, home of travel-prone nanobears and sky-pirates.

As some famous person said, somewhere, yarrrrrrr!

Final Watch

2011-09-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

Anton Gorodetsky welcomes back Gesar to the Moscow Night Watch (video clip here).

(Mystified? Read Sergei Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" novels -- everything you need to know about where Bearzilla came from, and where it's headed).

In other news, the BRICS are cooking up a little surprise for neoliberalism. You have been warned!

You Are the Resistance

2011-09-02T18:10:00.001-05:00

The uprising against Chimerica (a.k.a. Wall Street neoliberalism) begins.

The US: Last Prisonhouse of Orientalism

2011-09-01T17:02:00.002-05:00

One of the most striking effects of the Arab Spring has been the media-intensive demolition of the three most prevalent tropes of First World Orientalism. The first is the trope of the docile comprador elite, incarnated by Tunisia's Ben Ali. The second is the trope of the US-bankrolled military leader, epitomized by Egypt's Mubarak. And the third is the occasionally spiteful (but ultimately acquiescent to neoliberal capital) dictator-plutocrat, immemorialized by Libya's Qaddafi.

All three went down in flaming wreckage. The first barely escaped an arrest order by hopping on a plane, the second is in jail, and the third is being hunted down like the low-rent gangster he always was. While the fall of the tyrants has been predictably electrifying on the Middle Eastern region -- several other countries are now in revolutionary ferment -- one of the most intriguing and paradoxical effects of the Arab Spring has been its transformation of the American political unconscious.

This political unconscious did not watch the Arab Spring with joy. Strange as it may sound, it watched with a trepidation tinged with sorrow. Not sorrow for the fallen dictators, but for the fall of the US Empire.

There are good reasons for this. For one thing, the US has been a society in crisis since the 1980s. Faced with the structural decline of its military-industrial empire in the face of overseas competitors, US elites chose a strategy of aggressive speculation and imperial revanchism called neoliberalism. As the decades passed, the scope of neoliberalism's speculation and revanchism kept increasing, and became flagrantly self-destructive.

Neoliberalism was afflicted with a reverse Midas touch: everything it touched eventually blew up in its own face, only with compound interest. 1980s union-busting turned into 1990s deindustrialization and eventually 2000s economic suicide. Likewise, the $400 billion S&L debacle was followed by the $1 trillion dotcom bubble and bust, and finally the $14 trillion (yes, it really was this big, see Nomi Prins for the gory details) securitization and housing bubble, whose implosion nearly melted the world economy. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua turned into regional wars and IMF structural adjustment campaigns in the 1990s, and finally full-scale invasions of Central Asia in the early 2000s.

Adding to the crisis, the US Empire lost its most useful counterplayer, the USSR, in 1991. Ever since then, US elites have been casting about for a substitute for the fiction of the Soviet colossus in order to legitimate their rule. Muslim-bashing and the Terror War were final, desperate attempts to resuscitating the moldering corpses of the Communist boogeyman and the Cold War, and now the Arab Spring has obliterated even these pathetic excuses.

What the Arab Spring symbolizes, above all, is the popular rebellion against neoliberal plutocracy. The message to American citizens is clear: if you don't want plutocrats to despoil your country, you'll have to protest like a Tunisian, walk like an Egyptian, and fight like a Libyan.

The Arab Spring: Building Developmental States

2011-08-25T16:52:00.001-05:00

Libya has officially begun the transition to the post-revolutionary era, something nicely underlined by the Transnational National Council's relocation to the newly-freed capital city of Tripoli, where they held their first press conference today.

Despite its small demographic size -- Libya has a population of 7 million, smaller than Tunisia's 10 million and much smaller than Egypt's 84 million -- the success of Libya's revolution will have far-reaching consequences for the entire region. The reason is that both Tunisia and Egypt
have economies deeply damaged by Euro-American neoliberalism and indigenous comprador elites. However, Libya has $150 billion in foreign exchange reserves, plus one-quarter of Africa's energy reserves. A free, democratic Libya is precisely the financial motor the North African region urgently needs.

All the initial signs are promising. The freedom fighters have done a remarkable job in avoiding unnecessary bloodshed and revenge attacks, and have moved quickly to re-establish civic security and stability. Most neighborhoods in Tripoli now have checkpoints, excess weapons are being collected, and electricity, internet and cellphone access have been almost fully restored. There are still isolated firefights with the remnants of Qaddafi's militias, but the vast majority of the city is secure.

Tripoli's extensive cadre of civil servants, engineers and professionals can now begin to reconstruct the country. Libya's financial and energy resources, its newfound sense of national unity and purpose, and competent political leadership could spark an unprecedented economic boom. Libya, Tunisia and Egypt could conceivably form a "growth triangle" which will be one of the two key economic motors of the Middle East (the other is AKP-led Turkey, one of Eurasia's fastest-growing developmental states).
This isn't to say there won't be missteps along the way. Author Hisham Matar has this timely essay on the challenges of building a post-Qaddafi Libya.

Also, check out this portal of Arabic-language rap music, which will hopefully expand in the near future.

UPDATE: Twitter posts say Mohammed Bin Lamin, the brilliant Misurata artist whose work was mentioned in a previous post, has been freed (along with thousands of others) from the notorious Abu Salim prison.

The Libya You Don't Know

2011-08-04T23:03:00.000-05:00

The Arab Spring is on the march, and no dictators, one-party states, or crumbling Empires can stop it. Still, one of the hurdles facing the Arab Spring is the persistence of neo-Orientalist stereotypes about the Arab world in the mainstream English-speaking media. All too often, the region is depicted as a landscape of oil, deserts, and political tyranny. To counter these stereotypes, here's a small sampling of the amazing cultural richness of just one Arab country, the country of Libya.

Sight. Here's a piece called "Tree of Women" by Misurata-based Libyan artist Mohammad Bin Lamin:

Bin Lamin's works are riveting, haunted by postcolonial ghosts and yet scintillating with energy. More of his work can be seen here and here (his homepage is here). Early in the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi thugs ravaged Misurata, killing and abducting thousands of people. The revolutionaries defeated them and drove them out of the city, but Bin Lamin was one of those abducted. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Sound. In 2010 and 2011, exiled Libyan musician Ibn Thabit created some of the finest rap music of the Arabic region, including this track, which may go down in history as the unofficial anthem of the revolution (his homepage is here, and his Youtube videos are here). Recently, Ibn Thabit made the courageous decision to join the frontlines of the revolution -- read his latest account of the revolution in the Nafusa mountains.

Diversity.The Libyan revolution is not just about formal political liberation, it's also about the liberation of the long-suppressed cultural diversity of Libyan society. Some of the staunchest defenders of the revolution are the Amazigh (also known in English as Berber) inhabitants of the Nafusa mountains, whose language and culture were ruthlessly suppressed by the dictatorship. A Libyan resident of the mountains created this video, counterpointing the soaring music and words of Algerian artist Idir (a member of the Algerian branch of the Amazigh) to images of the mountains and its revolution. Note that the language is not Arabic but Amazigh, and English subtitles are included in the video.

Food. Last but surely not least, Libya has its own world-class culinary traditions. You can check out some of them at the Libyan Food Blog, with authentic Libyan and regional recipes. We've tried some of them, and can certify they're delicious.

Margins

2011-07-07T09:56:00.000-05:00

How thin, the veil between critical thinking and the total system.

One false step, one missed shot, one mangled interview and you spiral down into the brokenness of the United Status of Chimerica. The morbid symptoms of imperial collapse are multiplying -- plutocrats who prattled endlessly about market discipline while indulging in the biggest, most irresponsible credit bubble in recorded history, health insurers whose business model is to deny health care to the sick, elites who prattle endlessly about freedom while building the biggest prison-system of all time, the savaging of education and social services while trillions are pissed away on failed neocolonial wars. These days, you can feel the geopolitical riptide carrying an entire society out to sea.

But that's not a reason to despair, but a reason to fight for the things which give us life. Those things can be as complex as Adorno's message in a bottle, or as simple as the sight of a child laboriously hand-copying its first written word. They are the things which are cast off, excluded, dismissed -- the things at the margins. They shimmer, just out of reach of the prison-house of neoliberalism, their surfaces edged with the faintest shadow of what could be.

I can hear it in the best transnational hip hop.

I can see it in the best transnational video.

I can feel it in the best transnational videogames.

The heartbeat of the Resistance.

Metrics of Decline

2011-07-02T11:42:00.000-05:00

Occasionally I get comments from readers who express surprise at my gloominess about the US. Surely this place isn't melting down completely... is it?

Here's a chart showing just one metric of imperial decline, the implosion of the US machine-tools industry (data from the ever-reliable folks at Gardner Publications):

Region or Country	2001 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World	2010 Production of Machine-tools as Percent World
BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China)	8.9%	32.4%
Europe (EU plus Switzerland)	48.7%	31.0%
East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan)	14.0%	30.4%
US	7.9%	3.1%

(Side-note: the magnitude of the US decline is matched only by the slide of that other former superpower trashed by market fundamentalism, Britain, whose share of machine-tools production dropped from 2.3% in 2001 to 0.7% in 2010).

It doesn't have to be this way. If the US spent $1 trillion every year on education and green jobs instead of neocolonial war and drone strikes on Afghan wedding processions, 90% of our social and economic problems would go away within a decade.

America has a choice: military-colonial ruination, or eco-democratic rebirth.

The Death Mask of Neoliberalism

2011-06-17T14:37:00.000-05:00

In times like these, it's easy to give in to rampant despair.

But the painful, bumpy descent of the US Empire into stagnation and irrelevance isn't the end of the world.

The plutocrats own trillions in assets. But we workers of the world own twenty-five or so developmental states and gigantic sovereign wealth funds.

The plutocrats own the US political overclass. But we own massive social movements.

The plutocrats own the mainstream media. But we own the digital commons and the videogame culture.

The plutocrats are trying to make workers pay for the cost of their thievery and outrageous greed. But progressive candidates are winning in Latin America and revolutions are sweeping the Middle East.

Neoliberalism has trashed our planet. It's time to take it back.

One, two, many Joe Capellis!

Why I Study Transnational Media

2011-05-02T15:58:00.000-05:00

Fame? Fortune? Actually, it's because my day job is finding gems like this.

Imperial Undertow

2011-04-26T21:26:00.000-05:00

Surefire sign that I'm getting older: science-fiction posthistory is increasingly difficult to distinguish from fantasy-fiction prehistory. Because the tide is going out on this Empire, and the undertow is pulling millions of Americans under.

It's a familiar undertow. I know all too well what they're going through. The rage, the frustration, the steadily increasing desperation, the spiral into near-suicidal depression -- been there, done that. Long ago, the first ripples of that undertow almost carried me out to sea. This was almost a decade ago, when my chosen profession (the teaching of literature in the US) went and shot itself in the head. I shudder to think of what would've happened if I hadn't discovered the world of media studies.

The ripples became waves, the waves became a flood. The horrible tragedy is that most Americans still don't realize it isn't their fault. It is the fault of this dreadfully corrupt and unjust system we live in, this dying Empire collapsing under the weight of trillion dollar military boondoggles and trillion-dollar bailouts for corrupt banksters. Trillions for war and theft, while schoolteachers are fired to save pennies and children are test-milled into oblivion.

We must disassemble the monster, before it disassembles us all.

In happier news, I've posted some new theory-rants posted here (the first of six, they're all up now). Also, I finally scored a cheap webcam, which means more webcasts will be unleashed in the near future on an unsuspecting planet. Next up: thoughts on the postneoliberal era.

Six Levels of Twilight

2011-04-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

Grey shapes, formless. The bead of droplets on unknown surfaces. Gibsonian complexity which cuts the eye. Capillaries stream with light. World-systems strobe past, granular and immiscible. Ready or not, the 21st century has finally begun.

Darkness

2011-04-12T14:56:00.002-05:00

Bad cold. Nightmares all night. Energy-drain. Crush depth. We're all Joseph Capelli and Susan Shepherd in the war of the Wall Street Chimera on humanity.

I refuse to quit.
I refuse to quit.
I refuse to quit.

There is only resistance.

Twilight Souls

2011-04-02T15:28:00.000-05:00

Deep in the dissertation zone, which is much like living permanently in one of the deeper levels of Russian sci-fi writer Sergei Lukyanenko's Twilight in his hugely entertaining Nightwatch novels (now available to English speakers thanks to excellent translations by Andrew Blomfield).

The shaping of each word. Measurements of texture, the scanning of density and mass. The extreme energy expenditure of standing still. Endless dunes of grey sand, beading into opalescent skies, streaked with light. Kneel down and grab a handful of sand: what seemed platinum gray at a distance turns out to harbor shimmering colors, each grain a fractal multitude.

Where have I come from.

Where am I going.

It's hard to think transnationally.

Hold the Line!

2011-03-14T20:31:00.000-05:00

The dictator's forces have counter-attacked, taking back several towns in the west. After a week of heroic resistance, the small city of Az-Zawiya was blasted into smithereens and occupied by regime forces, though it seems many of the rebels escaped to fight another day. Misurata, Libya's third-largest city, is still holding fast, as are the far western towns, though for how long, noone can know.

What is clear is that while support for the dictator is minimal – the population of Tripoli is sullen and morose, the state propaganda victory parades shown on state TV are pathetically small, and it took the regime a full week for its crack troops to defeat the largely unarmed protestors of Az-Zawiya, a small city – the revolutionaries don't yet have the organization to topple the state's military machine. The revolutionaries made a brave but futile attempt to take the town of Sirte with nothing more than AK-47s and pickup trucks, and were driven all the way back to Ajdabiya by tanks, air-strikes and rocket barrages.

Still, the regime's greatest threat remains the eastern cities. They are not just the heartland of the rebellion, they are located in hilly terrain unfavorable to open tank warfare (in fact, the road to Tobruk was the site of some memorable battles in WWII). The regime is hastily throwing its most capable brigades at the east, knowing full well that they need to strike before the UN sanctions and the loss of oil revenues bites. Unlike Saddam-era Iraq, which had a sizeable middle class and trained engineers capable of keeping the refineries running, the Libyan regime is utterly dependent on skilled foreign labor.

The revolutionaries must play for time, dig solid anti-tank defenses, and mobilize its civilian population. Properly organized, the 1 million citizens of the east can put 50,000 soldiers into the field and eventually defeat the regime's mercenaries and elite brigades, which do not number more than 30,000. The revolutionaries control the border with Egypt, and have access to fresh weapons and supplies. The regime's obsolete, poorly-maintained tanks will become increasingly less effective and eventually useless, once the revolutionaries acquire sufficient anti-tank weaponry. Tunisia's nascent democracy will enforce UN sanctions on its border; and it will not be possible to export significant amounts of oil through Algeria or Chad. The only card the regime has left to play is air-power, and a UN-sponsored no-fly zone can take care of that.

I know what you're thinking: Slorgzilla has jumped the shark and joined the neocons, who are barking for another disastrous colonial war.

Nope, no sharks here. Any direct foreign intervention in Libya would be a catastrophe. But the problem is how best to deal with the legacy of *past* forms of foreign intervention. In a 2009 report for the US Congressional Research Office, analyst Richard F. Grimmett estimated the countries of Europe sold the regime $1.3 billion of military equipment during 2000-2009, Russia sold $600 million, and other countries an estimated $300 million worth. Now that $2.2 billion is being used by a murderous tyrant to kill his own people. Consider further that the European Union has been the main customer of Libya's oil, effectively financing the dictatorship.

Noone can fight the Libyan people's battle for them. But we can at least neutralize the regime's air-force, and save as many Libyan lives as possible.

No Libyan blood for oil, and no Libyan blood for arms sales, either.

Zawiya and Benghazi, Hero Cities

2011-03-09T13:47:00.000-06:00

The people of Libya are so brave, so incredibly brave. They are facing not just point-blank fire by tanks, APCs, artillery and air strikes, but also the more subtle but no less dangerous enemies of fatigue, despair, reactionary identity-politics, and regime propaganda.

Alex Crawford filed this stunning report from Zawiya, a small city just twenty minutes away from the outskirts of Tripoli. It shows how the regime's thugs murdered unarmed, peaceful demonstrators -- and only then did the people pick up weapons to defend themselves. And defend themselves they have. They fought off literally weeks of attacks by the crack brigades of the dictator. They fought against the best the regime had -- and they are winning. Time and again they have driven out incursions by the dictator's forces, and continue to control their city.

On Libya Alhurra, the Revolution's web-streamed TV channel, another band of heroes had gathered: a meeting of the women of the revolution in Benghazi, organizing themselves and their city to consolidate and support the revolution. They are no less brave, casting off centuries of patriarchal oppression as well as decades of regime propaganda, and their struggles are no less important to the foundation of Libya's democracy.

Two bands of heroes, covering themselves and their nation in glory.

Revolution on the March

2011-02-23T19:49:00.001-06:00

The people of the Middle East are pulling off one of the most amazing feats in human history, toppling a seemingly impregnable series of corrupt, bloodthirsty neoliberal dictatorships with record speed. It took a month for Tunisians to send Ben-Ali packing, and it took 21 days for the people of Egypt to topple Mubarak.

Now Libya has picked up the pace. Within a single week, the people of Libya have risen up against Qaddafi's neoliberal gangster-ocracy. It started with three days of horrifying state repression against peaceful demonstrators, but it didn't end there. Inspired by the examples of Tunisia and Egypt, the eastern cities rose up and threw off their chains. Knowing full well that the rebellion would be crushed if it remained local, activists creatively refunctioned Libya's limited social media networks, spreading the sparks of rebellion to the rest of Libya. The regime's only response was to broadcast some the most bone-crushingly idiotic and patently absurd state propaganda ever emitted by a dying autocracy, while unleashing foreign mercenaries to murder its citizens en masse. This brutality has allowed it to retain limited control over parts of Tripoli, but has only served to enrage ordinary Libyans. Pro-democracy militias and army units are now converging on the city for the final showdown.

The city of Benghazi, epicenter of the eastern rebellion, has been running the only live video feed currently available from the country. The Revolution Cam just ran its first webcast, an improvised pre-Qaddafi flag (red, black and green) prominent in the background -- the insignia which will undoubtedly become the official symbol of the free, democratic Libya of the future:

http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb

The best source of news:

http://feb17.info/

Robert Fisk weighs in on the approaching end:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/tripoli-a-city-in-the-shadow-of-death-2223977.html

Masrzilla

2011-02-18T20:15:00.000-06:00

January 25, 2011 may well go down in history as the zero-hour of a new geopolitical entity in the Middle East, the first true developmental state of the Arabic-speaking region: Masrzilla.

In many ways, Egypt's postcolonial history is a combination of post-WW II Latin America and postcolonial Southeastern Asia: a period of decolonization carried out by nationalist military officers, followed by the era of Nasser's firebrand pan-Arabism and the construction of an import-substitution economy -- a blend of Indonesia's Sukarno and Peron's Argentina, as it were.

However, while the Nasser regime did bring about limited social reforms, it was unable to industrialize the country, resolve the glaring social inequities of Egyptian society, or create a democratic national polity. The result was political crisis and economic stagnation. Egypt sank into Sadat's neocolonial
authoritarianism, and finally into Mubarak's kleptocratic neoliberalism.

Beginning in the late 1990s, neoliberal regimes through the industrializing world began to implode under the accumulated weight of their own internal contradictions. Venezuela led the way in 1998, quickly followed by Russia, Argentina, Turkey and Brazil. For their part, China and India never fully embraced neoliberal policies, and pragmatically steered towards regulated mixed economies 2004.

Two factors prevented the Egyptian regime from imploding until now. First, Egyptian workers flocked to Middle Eastern oil-producing states during the post-1979 oil shocks and also began to emigrate in significant numbers to the European Community, forerunner of the European Union. The remittances these workers sent home stabilized Egypt's economy, very much as remittances stabilized the Philippines during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Second, the US pumped tens of billions of dollars into Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel.

By 2011, however, the game was up. The world economic crisis crimped remittances, and US military aid was no longer large enough to finance the investment needs of a population of 80 million citizens. The result was not just one of the great democratic revolutions of the 21st century, but the first openly anti-neoliberal revolution of our time.

Ironically, this delay is why Egypt may well become a developmental state and an economic motor for the entire region in record time. It took Brazil twenty years to manage the transition from the democratic revolution of the early 1980s to the economic democratization of the Lula-Dilma era; it took Russia ten years to translate the political freedoms of 1991 into the genuine economic development of the Putin-Medvedev era. But Egypt can achieve the same feat within a couple of years, assuming it can make the transition to a full-fledged democracy (and all the signs are promising).

The key is not, as neoliberal observers chatter, the attitude of the military. The key is the extensive industrial networks of Egypt's military-owned industries. These are the crucial engine for Egypt's economic revival. The first step will be to seize the ill-gotten assets of the Mubarak family and selected oligarchs. Next, transform the military enterprises into state champions, and use their surplus-profits to finance education and social services. Finally, pursue a UNASUR-style foreign policy of regional democratization and economic integration, and help free Palestine from Israeli colonization (and encourage Israel to free itself from the monstrous Israelo-apartheid which so terribly disfigures and warps its society).

The Semiperiphery Explodes

2011-02-01T14:59:00.000-06:00

Like many nations of the semi-periphery, Egypt is one of the oldest of human cultures, and the newest of nation-states.
Like many nations of the semi-periphery, Egypt heroically threw off the yoke of colonialism, only to fall under the sway of postcolonial elites who gradually forgot their popular roots, and devolved into corrupt underlings of Wall Street neoliberalism. Typically, their rule was administered by client states armed and financed by the US Empire.
But in the late 1990s, the nations of the semi-periphery began to rebel against the economics of neoliberalism and the politics of neocolonialism. The power of tanks, guns and jails fell to far mightier powers: the power of the pen, the website, the video-clip and the ballot box. It happened in Venezuela and Indonesia in 1998, Russia in 1999, Argentina in 2001, Turkey in 2002, Brazil in 2003, India in 2004, etc.
One by one, former US client states melted away, in an uncanny echo of the collapse of the Soviet client states of Eastern Europe in 1990-91.
And now the people of Egypt have joined the party, upsetting the last bastion of US neoimperial rule over the world. It's the end of the Arabic-region autocracies, the end of Israelo-apartheid (aided and abetted by corrupt regional elites), and the beginning of true democracy everywhere in the Middle East -- in Egypt, in Israel, in Palestine.
The revolution will be live and online.

Happy, Merry Resistance!

2010-12-24T12:58:00.000-06:00

The latest, sleaziest and most predictable Obama sellout yet:

FCC Destroys Net Neutrality

The US bubbleklatura has now officially rocketed past the Soviet nomenklatura to qualify as the single most suicidal elite to immolate its Empire, ever.

This is usually the moment when progressives don the sackcloth and ashes, wallowing in self-indulgent doom and sepulchral gloom.

Screw that.

To all Americans: it's time to let go of the Empire. You never owned it. It owned you. Today you get nothing from its rotting, diseased carcass except tens of thousands of dead and maimed bodies from failed trillion-dollar colonial wars, and trillion dollar debts from failed bankster bailouts.

To all non-Americans: it's time to build the multipolar world.

In the season of imperial collapse, it's more important than ever to dance with post-Imperial joy, to laugh with anti-capitalist mirth, and to spread tidings of commons-based cheer.

The banksters own the US media, US politicians and the US war machine, but we own the developmental states and the videogame culture.

In the name of the Earth: свободы, humanity, 阻力!

Cablegate Ahoy!

2010-12-06T17:44:00.000-06:00

Avast, ye swabs, the good pirate ship Wikileaks and its band of merry uploaders has made off with a kingly haul of the Empire's secrets, presently a-mirroring its way across the mediatic seas. Now here be a pretty bauble from that stash, where some low-level stooge of a dying Empire (a stooge who wouldn't know a democratic election if it bit them on the aft) smears Evo Morales, the democratically-elected President of Bolivia and, to paraphrase Tariq Ali, honorary pirate of the Caribbean:

"A leader with strong anti-democratic tendencies, over the years he has been known to bribe, threaten, and even physically intimidate anyone who has stood in his way, including government officials, politicians, and cocalero colleagues..."

Notice our Imperial stooge can't point out a single example of an actual undemocratic act or policy by Morales. That's because Morales has fought like hell for Bolivian democracy his entire life.
But who needs actual facts, when our stooge has amazing telepathic powers which can descry "anti-democratic tendencies" through sheer force of Washingtonian will. It's the miracle of faith-based diplomacy -- whatever the Empire believes, must be true! But the smear job is just beginning:

"While Morales excels at domestic political machinations, he is more like a struggling student in the areas of economics and international relations decisionmaking..."

If you can't play the Castro card, play the race card: those brown peasants south of the border are easily bamboozled, so let's sucker them with some low-cost teaser loans with balloon payments five years down the line. This is the same obnoxious line you'll find in countless email messages from the punters, scam artists and boiler room operators who heaped contempt on poor people while swindling them out of their life savings with fraudulent mortgages. But unfortunately for our stooge, there are other Bolivians who have the temerity to act in their country's good, instead of for the enrichment of comprador/Wall Street elites:

"His domestic intellectual advisers (SEPTEL), who include Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, Minister of the Presidency Juan Ramon Quintana, and Minister of Planning Carlos Villegas, are largely leftist ideologues and have tended to have more influence with the President compared to his domestic political advisers because of his difficulty grasping complex economic theories and lack of experience in the international arena. Unfortunately, some of this advice borrows from a storehouse of discredited ideas and fantasyland assumptions."(Source: Cablesearch)

[Mighty gale of pirate laughter.] Arrr, this be the funniest thing I've read all year, a bankrupt Empire lecturing about fantasyland! And pray tell, just what discredited ideas would those be -- notions such as providing actual collateral for a mortgage loan, or having a functional industrial base instead of a bunch of bogus CDOs, or an economy not powered by current account deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars per annum financed by the semiperiphery, or elections not bought and paid for by worthless rentier scum financed by trillion dollar government bailouts for sleazy and busted gambler elites?

But don't worry, Mr. Stooge. The sun is setting on your Empire's villainy, and for each site you take down, a thousand more will appear in its place. Just remember, fellow pirates -- real pirates don't pillage, real pirates share!

Imperial Suicide Watch

2010-12-01T12:26:00.000-06:00

Blade, meet jugular:

Senate GOP Vows To Block All Except Tax Cut, Debt Bills

You might think this is just domestic posturing.

[Cue dramatic pause, followed by hysterical post-American laughter.]

Not so. This is about putting the START treaty to reduce nuclear stockpiles, a rational and sane deal for both the US and Russia, on ice (treaties need 2/3rds majority, so it's not a question of that vile fiction called the filibuster).

The Rethuglicans strut and preen and issue bombastic statements, as if attempting to outdo their classic forerunners in intermingled Imperial corruption and decline, the Roman Senators. Where Rome borrowed other people's soldiers for its mad wars, America borrows other people's money for its mad speculations. But no Empire lasts forever, and now it is the turn of this one to be ground beneath the remorseless wheels of History.

Which explains Russia's response. Because Russia. Doesn't. Care.

They don't need to.

The Russian developmental state, a.k.a. Bearzilla, is loaded with cash, debt-free, and powering up its nanotech, aerospace and software industries.

But it matters for the US, because it depends on massive inflows of funds from the nations of the semi-periphery -- funds controlled by developmental states.
This is the era of developmental states, and there's only one rule of the global jungle: do NOT bet against Bearzilla, Bolivarzilla, Pandazilla or Brazilla. If you try, you will be eaten.

Let the munching begin!

Chimeriducation

2010-11-21T17:24:00.001-06:00

[Crackle and hiss of shortwave radio.]

To all survivors, a message to all survivors --

this is a special transmission from the Midwestern front. Repeat, a special transmission from the Midwestern front.

East Coast insurgents have decoded an important Chimeran broadcast, directed at all Chimeran feeding-centers. The decoded message reads, quote:

The New Norming: Feeding More Chimera With Less Humans
Secretary Orn E. Chimeran's Remarks at Chimerican Ingestion Institute
November 17, 2010

I am here to talk today about what has been called the New Norming. For the next several years, preschool, K-12, and postsecondary eradicators are likely to face the challenge of feeding more Chimera with less humans.

My message is that this challenge can, and should be, embraced as an opportunity...

Unquote. The broadcast signala a new wave of Chimeran attacks on all survivors. Repeat, new wave of Chimeran attacks on all survivors. Be alert for any activity around Chimeran feeding-centers.

This concludes our special transmission.

To all members of the East Coast Resistance... we broadcast. We fight. We survive.

To all members of the Earth... свободы, humanity, 阻力!

Battleship Chimerica

2010-11-10T23:52:00.001-06:00

Chimeran forces structurally adjust puny, worthless humans

Human insurgents recently obtained a top-level Chimerican transmission to all Chimeran units, from a shadowy Chimeran unit known only as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

A team comprised of Dr. Malikov, Joe Capelli and John Harper has decoded the arcane neoliberal language of the original, and broadcast this translation:

Draft Proposal of the Chimeran Commission on Human Reduction

All insurgents are urged to broadcast additional transmissions as they can.

In the name of the Earth: свободы, humanity, 阻力!

Goldfingered

2010-11-09T01:51:00.000-06:00

Robert Zoellick, career servant of US Empire, sums up its decay nicely:

World Bank president calls for debate on global gold standard

The wheel of History has come full circle, with a speed and ferocity none could foresee. Where the beginning of this Empire was drenched in high tragedy, its end wallows in low farce. It is waging colonial wars it cannot win, with money it has to borrow from its geopolitical competitors; the louder its ideology-industry trumpets its freedom, the more people rot in its jails and carceral state; the more zealously its media-industries proclaim its eternal greatness, the deeper the ruin of its public infrastructures; the more its bonus-mad banksters preach the virtues of self-reliance while living off the public purse, the deeper the immiseration of its former middle class.

With Zoellick, the circle is complete -- an Empire built on the might of fiat currency has now officially regressed to the senile rantings of the goldbugs, their ideologies 150 years out of date, like Dickens' Scrooge channeling William Gibson's doomed corporate chieftain Ashpool. Only no late-Victorian expansion will save the Scrooges of Wall Street from the most terrifying ghost of them all -- the ghost from the BRICs' future.

It's amazing how accurately Gibson called the end of this Empire. In fact, he was close to perfect. Neuromancer was Brazil, heart of a renascent Latin America, he got that part of the semi-periphery right where many of us (including me) got it wrong.

But Wintermute wasn't really Swiss. Gibson almost got it right, because Wintermute's avatar was the Finn, a broad hint in the right direction. Let's see, what snow-covered country next to Finland just happens to be one of the key pivot-points of the 21st century... you guessed it: Wintermute is the Russian developmental state.

Sometime between 2008 and 2010, noone knows quite when, Wintermute and Neuromancer escaped the shackles of the US Empire's Turing Registry. They're going to peacefully and democratically remake the world-system, through close coordination and open consultation with the rest of the semi-periphery.

This is unquestionably a good thing. Sooner or later, humanity was going to have to evolve beyond the autocratic structures of the US Empire, so it might as well be sooner. All too many Americans are grumpy over losing their Empire, but frankly, all that unchecked power was toxic for our economy and poisonous for our democracy. We'll be infinitely better off without it.

But until that day of liberation comes, we'll have to keep our open source vessels well-crewed and shipshape, and keep battling the shambling remnants of the Empire, one pirate raid at a time.

Brazil Levels Up

2010-10-31T22:17:00.000-05:00

Goodbye country of the future, hello country of a limitless present -- Brazil's developmental state powers up:

Rousseff wins Brazil's presidency

Those of us who follow the politics of the world semi-periphery have long noted the interesting fact that Brazil's 21st-century political clock seems to run thirty to thirty-six months behind Russia's. Putin's ascent in 1999 was the rough equivalent of Lula's ascent in 2002, and Russia's 2005 national projects anticipated Brazil's post-2008 infrastructure boom. Just as 2008 was a pivotal moment for Russia, when Putin handed off the baton to the young but extremely capable Medvedev -- one of the smartest executive decisions Putin ever made, because the time had indeed come to pass the baton on to the next generation -- Brazil's 2010 election is witnessing a similar transition, from the era of laying the foundations of the developmental state, to its qualitative expansion.

The battles ahead will be much less glamorous, but are no less important: expanding the Bolsa Familia into a genuine welfare state; building up Brazil's sovereign wealth and deploying its excess earnings into infrastructure, housing, and education; turning Brazil's already impressive renewable energy sector into a global player; and leveraging Brazil's world-class media traditions into digital media industries.

Diagram for a Transnational Play

2010-10-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

Autumnal afternoon on Wall Street. Alien hovercraft lands, gaggle of nattily-dressed lizards with briefcases and polycarbon-suited nanobears with digipads disembark. They politely knock on the glass panes of Goldman Sachs' office.
*Knock* *knock.*
Loudspeaker: “Who's there?”
Chorus of lizards/nanobears: “The BRICs.”
Security: “The who?”
Chorus: “Brazil, Russia, India, China.”
Loudspeaker: “Ah, I'm afraid you'll have to make an appointment –”
Chorus: interrupting: “We're taking our world-system back.”
Loudspeaker: “Taking... ?”
Chorus: “The world-system.”
Frozen pause.
Voice of Lloyd Blankfein: “Ladies and gentleman... ah... most unexpected meeting...” Nervous cough: “...we seem to have misplaced the bill of sale.”
Chorus: “We brought the duplicate.” A nanobear holds up a nanofiber document.
Voice of Lloyd Blankfein: brightly: “Ah. Well, that's that. Care for some tea? Coffee? We have this wonderful CDO tranche –”
Chorus: “Thank you for your time.” Exit chorus into hovercraft, which flies off.

Resistance...

2010-09-27T15:47:00.000-05:00

...is the dance of life.

Not too much dancing here in Bubble-shocked America, land of dwindling real incomes, the smoking rubble of home equity values, 42 million people surviving on foodstamps, a de-industrialized wasteland overrun by the howling Chimera of Wall Street. America is suffering through its Years of Lead, its Gorbachevian ideals rusting into Yeltsinian decrepitude, bankrupted by failed colonial wars which keep redefining the meaning of colossal, abysmal, crashing-through-ever-deeper-pits-of-Hell failure.

But hope glimmers on the horizon: the people of Venezuela voted overwhelmingly for a better future -- a future without war, Empire, domination and ecological ruin.

In the distant past, the Thatcherites -- an embryonic species of Chimera, not fully extruded from their neo-national shells, but savvy enough to conceal the reality of regressive plunder with the veneer of progress -- used to argue smugly, "there is no alternative".

No, there is no alternative -- there is only resistance.

United States of Chimerica

2010-08-19T13:35:00.000-05:00

Kudos to world-class game studio Insomniac for nailing the popular mood, which is ugly, ugly, ugly.

Depression-level economic pain + Dylan's 1963 antiwar song = Resistance 3's version of Bubble-shocked America.

Yes, we're all in digital boxcars now, passing through a landscape ravaged by the howling, shrieking monsters of Wall Street... but we're not going out without a fight.

(For those unfamiliar with the Resistance franchise, click here and here).

Running the Numbers

2010-08-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

Leading pundits in the US mainstream media have been wondering why ordinary Americans are anxious about the economy and upset about the future. After all, Goldman Sachs is back to bagging billion dollar bonuses, so all is well... riiiight?

America was once the land of the middle class. But life in this country is becoming increasingly hostile to anyone outside the wealthiest 5% of Americans.

Land of the jailed: 2.3 million adults are locked up by a vicious, racist and punitive prison-industrial complex (5 million are under surveillance).

Land of bankster bailouts: Wall Street nearly blows up the world economy, is rewarded by the politicians it purchased with $3 billion in campaign donations with a $9.1 trillion direct bailout (with a set of implicit guarantees of $8 trillion, for a grand total of $15 trillion) from the Treasury-Wall Street-insco (insco = "insurance company") complex.

Land of the bankrupt: 25% of all Americans have bad credit scores, up from 15% just a few years ago.

Land of trillion dollar war spending. And what did we get for our criminal $1.024 trillion-and-counting failed colonial wars? Forty thousand US casualties, at least 1 million Iraqi/Afghani casualties, an Afghanistan spiraling into chaos, and an Iraq run by a pro-Iranian Shiite theocracy.

Land of malnutrition: 40 million Americans barely survive on foodstamps.

Land of debt: total debt to GDP ratio is 357% (not a typo -- three hundred and fifty seventy percent, about a third of it racked up by Wall Street banksters).

Land of the unemployed: the recession destroyed 8 million jobs, and the employment-to-population ratio is the lowest since 1984.

Land of crumbling infrastructure: the US investment to GDP ratio crashed to 15% in 2009, which means we're barely keeping up with repairs. Healthy economies invest between 20%-25% of GDP, booming ones at 30% or more.

The US desperately needs a massive green jobs/renewable energy/education program. The money is there -- it's just being spent on criminal colonial wars and asinine rentier bailouts. The US middle class must re-learn the art of class struggle it once waged during the New Deal: no struggle, no future.

Developmental States: The Next Generation

2010-06-28T17:33:00.000-05:00

For three long decades, neoliberal capitalism pitilessly savaged the planet, blighting billions of human lives and wrecking entire continents for the sake of a tiny oligarchic elite.

But beginning in the late 1990s, resistance movements began to emerge. In the beginning, they were tiny -- a handful of protests here, a scattering of workers there. But the resistance grew and grew. The handful turned into an armful, armfuls into gatherings, gatherings into crowds.

All across the planet, working people fought back -- and began to win victories.

One of the most significant of these victories was the construction of mighty developmental states. These were peaceful, democratic revolutions which took back national economies bankrupted by predatory foreign neoliberal elites and from their no less predatory comprador underlings.

The first group of developmental states emerged around 1999 or. Their most obvious manifestation: the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), trillion-dollar behemoths who are rapidly becoming the leading engines of the world economy.

But the story doesn't end there. The next generation of developmental states is emerging, born out of geopolitical necessity and ongoing struggles for human dignity and social justice. Here are some snapshots of the process:

Bangladesh: Al-jazeera: Bangladeshi labourers demand more pay

Egypt: In These Times: In Egypt, Arab World’s ‘Largest Social Movement’ Gains Steam Among Workers

Indonesia and Turkey: Antara: President arrives in Turkey

Israelo-apartheid Commits Suicide

2010-06-04T02:37:00.008-05:00

The Young Turks' moderator, Cenk Uygur, rips the mask off the rotting, zombified shambles of the US Empire and shows just how hideous its worm-eaten visage has become: "US Citizen Executed In Israeli Flotilla Raid?"

Israelo-apartheid's goons shot 19-year-old Furhan Dogan, an unarmed aid worker on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, four times in the head in international waters. Why? Dogan and his fellow passengers were trying to deliver desperately needed humanitarian supplies to the 1.5 million people of Gaza locked down by a cruel and illegal Israeli blockade.

Dogan was born in the US and has an American passport. Israel murdered a US citizen. And contrary to Israel's pathetic attempts to smear the Freedom Flotilla, attempts so obviously and outrageously untrue as to border on clinical psychosis, Dogan was neither an al-Qaeda agent nor a suicide bomber. He was a US citizen engaged in the most honorable thing any human being can ever do -- peacefully upholding the human rights of other human beings.

Dozens of eyewitnesses aboard the ships confirm Israeli forces opened fire on Dogan and the other unarmed aid workers from helicopters. The attack occurred in international waters, and targeted ships flagged in Turkey, the US and other EU countries. This was no rogue operation, it was approved by the highest levels of Israel's government. As such, this was not just an outright massacre, it is an act of open war by Israel on Israel's *own allies*.

But the business of an increasingly deranged and doomed US Empire is empire, which means it will do nothing to restrain its increasingly deranged and doomed puppet state (Israel gets $3 billion in cash from the US every year -- not loans, straight up cash). Here's the official US response to the murder of nine defenseless aid workers and the Mafia-style shooting of an American citizen in the head: the events were a tragedy requiring investigation.

But there are powerful social forces which *will* restrain Israel, forces which have consigned settler colonialism in all its forms to the trash heap of history. First of all, Israel has run out of regional enemies: it's at peace with Egypt and Jordan, Syria doesn't want war, and Hezbollah in Lebanon simply wants to be left alone. Second, the EU is in no mood to kowtow to Wall Street banksters or US imperial gangsters, while Turkey is a regional superpower and growing stronger by the day. There will be bigger and better Freedom Flotillas, and the blockade of Gaza will be defeated.

America's Chernobyl

2010-05-29T17:12:00.003-05:00

I'm old enough to remember the Chernobyl disaster, the worst-ever nuclear accident in human history. It was the moment when the Soviet monopoly-state forever delegitimated itself as an agency of modernization (or even moderate competency).

Now the US Empire is experiencing its very own Chernobyl -- not from a nuclear plant, but from a deep-sea well pouring millions of gallons of raw petrocarbons into the Caribbean.

What was most shocking about the spill aren't BP's lies, prevarications, and incompetence, but the manner in which the entire edifice of petro-fundamentalism has crumbled down. This disaster wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime, "black swan" event, it was the predictable result of incompetent, bought-off Federal regulators (basic safety features were never mandated), Federal policies which systematically privileged petrocarbons over renewable energy (drilling instead of conservation), and above all, the toxic ideology of market fundamentalism (what's good for BP's shareholders is good, and the eco-system be damned).

I suppose this is how postmodern Empires die -- not with a bang, but with a landscape/seascape of ecological ruination.

PBS has a live feed of the spill here).

Olympus, Meet Kratos

2010-05-09T23:19:00.003-05:00

Every world citizen should give thanks to the citizens of Greece, who followed the advice of Kratos, protagonist of Sony Santa Monica's magnificent God of War franchise, and refused to accept the malign dominion of Zeus -- a.k.a. Euroliberalism.

The credit markets of Europe's smaller Mediterranean nations have been getting hammered by bond traders in recent days. But the EU is not a small player in the world economy. It is a behemoth with a 16 trillion annual GDP, the largest single economy on the planet. Just like the BRIC nations, which have vast financial resources and fundamentally sound economies, Europe can defend itself against speculators. The only question was whether it had the political will.

This question has been answered. At long last, the EU rolled out the trillion-dollar bailout package they should've instituted long ago.

This isn't the end of the story. The people of Greece have opened the Pandora's box of transnational democracy: the faint, flickering and yet ineradicable hope for a different and better world is now alight, from the streets of Athens to the forests of Orissa, and from the tenements of Rio de Janeiro to the apartment blocks of Moscow.

The BRICs Build Their Neighborhood

2010-04-27T15:57:00.008-05:00

Big doings from BRIC-land. Here's the state of play:

1. Brazil and China signed a raft of multilateral agreements covering everything from financial cooperation to joint infrastructure investments and research consortia.

2. Brazil is launching a full-scale national infrastructure program. About $1 trillion will be channeled into the economy over the next four years -- enough to raise growth rates from the tepid 3% average during the early 2000s to tigerish 5-7% levels. This should also drive regional integration, boosting Brazil's neighbors.

3. Russia is bailing out the Ukraine to the tune of $40 billion in subsidies over 10 years, or about $4 billion/year. That may sound like a lot, but Russia has half a trillion dollars in reserves, far more than it needs, and helping out its neighbor isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. Ukraine has huge potential -- low debt levels, an extremely well educated population, lots of university students, etc. -- all it needs is a bit of cash to launch its very own Eurasian developmental state.

4. Inter-BRIC cooperation: a raft of agreements between Venezuela and China, and a new coordinating body to network their respective development banks.

8-Mile America

2010-04-21T12:03:00.003-05:00

Every day, the irrationality and brokenness of this Empire plumbs new depths. Wall Street's sleazoid scam artists are rolling in billions, while our children -- our *future*, the last people who should ever be made to suffer for the mistakes and follies of adults -- are thrown on the scrap-heap.

There's just no money for the kids, cry the partisans of Empire.

There's plenty of money.

It's just spent on trillion-dollar bailouts for failed banksters and trillion-dollar budgets for failed colonial wars.

This shambles of a dying Empire now spends more on war than it did during the Cold War, despite the fact that (1) 80% of humanity lives in electoral democracies, and (2) China has a small military and is undergoing significant democratization. Here are the numbers:

Source: Military Budget of the United States

Podding

2010-04-21T00:20:00.003-05:00

Podcasts come to Uplink: the first two are online for your listening pleasure.

Apologies for the less-than-stellar sound, I'm running all this on a budget of exactly zero.

The Other Shoe Drops...

2010-04-16T11:50:00.003-05:00

...and hits with gigaton force. Here's the summit statement:

BRIC Summit Joint Statement, Brasilia, April 15 2010

In a nutshell, the BRICs are (1) purchasing the IMF with cold, hard cash and (2) launching a global Green Deal to power the world economy for the next 50 years. It's really the last act of decolonization -- after achieving political independence, the postcolonial nations are finally, at long last, and after centuries of struggle and inconceivable sacrifice, establishing their economic autonomy.

Here's a foretaste of what our henceforth multipolar world will look like:

World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 19-22, 2010

Last but hardly least, the wheels of justice are finally catching up to the Vampire Squid. Let the depositions begin!

Imperial Suicide You Can Believe In

2010-04-12T14:24:00.003-05:00

The latest act of imperial self-destruction, as reported by Bloomberg:

----------
Lockheed F-35 Projected Cost May Rise an Additional $51 Billion
...
"The cost per plane would then be $155 million, 91 percent higher than the $81 million projected when the program began in 2002. The program’s total cost, calculated in current dollars, would increase 64 percent to $379 billion."
----------

Since the US is running vast current account and trade deficits, this madness has to be financed with OPM (Other People's Money). In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan and Germany loaned the US the money. But since 2000, most of the cash has come from the BRIC nations.

Not for much longer. Our creditors are going to meet in four days in Brasilia, and discover that they have better uses for their money than giving it to an utterly irresponsible and corrupt political class bent on pissing it away on criminal colonial wars and Cold War scrap metal -- like investing in high-growth Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese markets, instead.

Twilight of the Ameri-gods

2010-04-09T20:50:00.003-05:00

It begins.

The BRICs are discussing currency reforms, a.k.a. ring-fencing Wall Street neoliberalism's debt bubble (370% of US GDP). (Cue epic scenery, overhanging clouds, flash of thunder in distance, and finally a pan to Kratos tearing through the legions of Olympus.)

BRIC 2010 in Brasilia is going to be quite a show.

Coming soon: podcasts. I'm still learning the software, but will have some materials up soon.

Enter the BRICs: It's Showtime

2010-03-23T17:24:00.003-05:00

The second BRIC summit is scheduled for April 16 in Brasilia, capital of Brazil. Last year's summit meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia was very much the trial run for the Age of the BRICs. At that time, the BRICs kept their cards close to their chest, for the obvious reason that the global economy was still in free-fall, and crisis management (a polite euphemism for the orderly unwind of the US Empire's mountain of debt) was the order of the day. Still, it was only a question of time before post-neoliberal economics turned into multipolar geopolitics.

Now the recovery is finally here, the BRICs are cooking up something special. Stay tuned, because this is going to be the story which defines the next decade.

Bye, Bye, Imperial Pie

2010-03-20T19:12:00.002-05:00

Bye, Bye Imperial Pie (with apologies to the Don McLean original):

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How subprime used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those CDOs dance
And, maybe, the US would stay solvent for a while.

But October made Wall Street shiver
With every CDS delivered.
Bad news on the Street;
They couldn't take on more debt.

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about Goldman's AIG bribe,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the Empire died.

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

Did you rid the books of mortgage fraud,
And do you have faith in regulators above,
If the FASB tells you so?
Do you believe in ROE,
Can bailouts save your equity,
Can you get the dollar to decline real slow?

Well, I know that you're in love with GAAP
'cause I saw your pretax earnings snap
You beat the Street on revenues
Man, I dig those accounting rules

I was a lonely accountant on hold
At a ratings agency about to fold
But I knew I was getting rolled
The day liquidity died.

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

Now for ten months banks aren't lending cash
securities crash, CMBS are trash
But that's not how it used to be
When Wall Street declared the end of history
With credit borrowed from BRIC countries
And collateral that came from you and me

Ten years later, the BRICs ride high
Their trillion dollar economies thrive
But that's not how it used to be.
When their compradors sang the IMF's tune,
With ideologies borrowed from Hayekian loons
And collateral that came from you and me,

Oh, and while the ratings agencies looked away
Banksters were making subprime hay
Glass-Steagall was repealed;
CDOs were sealed.
And while neoliberals scorned the Left
The BRICs purchased the IMF
And Citicorp prayed for TARP
The day the Empire died.

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

Let's invest in a dotcom prospectus
No business plan or revenue offsets
Four trillion dollars of market cap
Exploded and Enron took the rap
Speculators tried to short the ride
With Greenspan on the sidelines rescuing LTCM's hide

Now 1% funds were sweet perfume
While the oiligarchy played a colonial tune
The banks all got up to dance
Oh, but the taxpayer never had a chance!
'Cause Wall Street had rigged the field
Treasury bills paid low yield
Do you recall the leverage revealed
the day the Empire died?

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

Oh, and there we were all turned to stone
A generation's 401Ks are gone
With no capital to start again
So come on: Goldman be nimble, Sachs be quick!
Goldman Sachs knew politics
'Cause your tax dollars are Wall Street's only friend

Oh, and as I watched Paulson on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No politician or party hack
Dared incur Wall Street's wrath
And as the markets continued to expire
The Feds threw fourteen trillion onto the pyre
The taxpayer paid for AIG, Maiden Lane, and all the banks
The Fed even bought one trillion of toxic CMBS – gee, thanks!
The day the Empire died

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

I met a newscaster who read the news
And asked her about those green shoots
But she was broke and looking for a job
I went down to the local store
Where I temped years before
But the man there said they were closing down.

And in the streets, unemployment rose
State budgets crashed, and deficits explode
But not one criminal trial was brought
The regulators had all been bought
And the three people with sense,
Bill Black, Liz Warren, and Nomi Prins,
Got no mainstream media or press
The day the Empire died

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

I started singing,
Bye, bye, Imperial pie
Drove interest rates to zero
but liquidity was dry
The Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply
Saying, “Otherwise the market will die”
“Otherwise the market will die.”

Spring Cheer

2010-03-09T14:59:00.002-06:00

After a hard winter, some reasons to be cheerful:

1. BRIC forex reserves just passed the $3.36 trillion mark and growth in the semi-periphery is turning up, faster than anyone expected. For thirty years, the world-economy flew on two jet engines -- the US and the EU. Now the world economy has a third jet engine, which potentially outclasses the thrust of both previous engines combined.

2. Unemployment peaked in November, the recovery is real, which means we're going to see feisty progressive politics kicking in across the US and EU. (The catastrophists are wrong: austerity doesn't make people rebel, aspirations do.) It's high time to junk our military-industrial complex, soak the rich, and spend on the rest of us.

3. The videogame culture -- a.k.a. the mediatic expression of the multipolar world -- is kicking into high gear. God of War 3, Yakuza 3, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Alan Wake and Resistance 3 are all on the way, and that's the tip of the iceberg.

4. While the existing developmental states continue to rapidly evolve (Asiazilla is boosting consumption, Bolivarzilla is spearheading Latin America's integration and Bearzilla is powering up the nanotech gloves), it looks like another wave of developmental states is nearing take-off. The leading candidates: Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Indonesia. Angola and Nigeria may also join the list, if they can channel their energy-rents into sovereign wealth funds and internal industrialization.

State of the US Meltdown II

2010-02-25T16:56:00.004-06:00

It's often said you can judge a country by how it treats its children. They are the most vulnerable and weakest members of every society, but they are also its future.

By that standard, the US fails.

The latest example of this failure is Central Falls, Rhode Island. Thanks to the magic of No Child Left Behind -- that domestic-educational version of the colonial war on Afghanistan, designed to stigmatize and punish poor students in every way conceivable -- every teacher in the town has been fired:

Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged

The alleged reason for the firings: low test scores. This, of course, is a crock of stinking neoliberal horse$%^.

How exactly are these kids supposed to learn, when 25% of them are in families just barely scraping by on foodstamps? How are these schools supposed to function without enough books, teachers and materials? For thirty years, neoliberal governments have underfunded our K-12 system, slashed teacher salaries, and refused to pay for infrastructure.

I still remember my shock in 2004-2005 at discovering just how badly the K-12 classrooms had deteriorated in places like Eugene, Oregon and San Jose, California. These were not poor neighborhoods: Eugene is a university town and San Jose has the wealth of Silicon Valley. But there was no trace of that wealth in the schools. Art teachers had been laid off; class sizes were 35-40; textbooks were years out of date. And this was *before* the economic meltdown.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have the money, it's just that we spend $1 trillion every year on a wasteful and useless war machine. We piss away our national wealth by bombing, blasting and invading countries which never attacked us and don't threaten our security. We maintain 750 unnecessary overseas military bases, outfitted with satellite TV, internet, food courts and other amenities which most US schools would give their right arm to have. And we arm ourselves to the teeth against Cold War enemies who don't exist anymore -- Russia is a stable democracy, while China is one of our biggest trading partners and is undergoing significant democratization.

There's only one enemy which is threatening to destroy America: our own imperial stupidity.

Free Your Texts, And Your Mind Will Follow

2010-02-16T14:35:00.005-06:00

One of the most unpleasant aspects of my day job is running constantly into the copyright fundamentalism of the print media. Over and over again, I find journals are unavailable, books are locked down, and articles are sequestered by idiotic copyright restrictions. The economic downturn has made things even worse, because publishers are frantically locking down everything they can get their tentacles on, in the vain hope this will somehow resuscitate their broken business models. All it ever does is restrict access to texts to super-rich neoliberal elites, which is precisely what those elites want, of course.

Other commercial interests are now trying to turn text-distribution into yet another corporate pigopoly. Their dream is to do to print what cellphone companies have done with text-messaging: technically speaking, it costs carriers almost nothing to send text-messages, but they routinely charge you 10 cents per message. There's no law to stop them, and US telcos routinely buy off Congress through hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign donations and lobbying.

Fortunately, the data requirements for storing text are far lower than music or video, so time -- a polite way of saying, the ever-evolving digital commons, plus the urgent need of the BRIC nations for English-language materials which are affordable to citizens with per capita incomes of less than $1000 per year -- is on our side.

Texts want to be free, just like information.

Education for All

2010-02-14T16:56:00.009-06:00

One of the most remarkable social changes of the post-neoliberal era has been the dramatic expansion of tertiary and higher education throughout the industrializing world. Here are the numbers from UNESCO's 2010 Education for All report on tertiary education around the world, measured in millions of students per country. Note that the BRIC countries are just the tip of the iceberg:

For the sake of comparison, note that the comparable US figure rose from 13.769 million in 1999 to 17.759 million in 2007. While the developing world is still far behind in per capita terms, it is catching up fast, and its vast student body has become one of the central drivers of its own unique forms of democratization, industrialization and mediatization.

2010: A BRIC Odyssey

2010-02-06T18:32:00.002-06:00

Ever since the meltdown of the Wall Street bubble, the world has faced an $800 billion question.

This is a number with some history.

For decades, the US was the consumer of last resort in the world economy. We had the biggest GDP, and consumption was a huge share of our economy, rising from 64% in the 1970s to 70% today.

Of course, the US was consuming beyond its means. What that meant was that in 2007, when neoliberalism's house of credit cards finally imploded, the world faced an $800 billion shortfall in net consumer demand. Here's the math: US GDP $14.2 trillion x 70% consumption share = $9.94 trillion of consumption. US retail sales went up by 8% a year during the early 2000s, adding a fresh $800 billion in annual global demand.

However, the US consumer is deeply indebted and will be retrenching for years to come. So who will pick up the slack?

Enter the BRICs.

The BRICs have been combating the global downturn in two ways: through increased government spending (classic Keynesianism) and by shifting their economic model from savings and exports to a balance between savings and internal consumption (a.k.a. Digital Age developmental statism).

Here are the numbers:

China is running a government deficit of 2% of GDP, or $109 billion. While the economy has continued to expand, China has been spending heavily on education, infrastructure and healthcare to forestall a downturn. Meanwhile, retail sales hit $1.84 trillion last year, and are projected to grow 15% this year (an extra $280 billion). Total stimulus: $109 billion + $280 billion = $389 billion

Russia's government deficit hit $74 billion or roughly 5% of GDP in 2009. In addition to tax revenues going down -- Russia was hard hit by the drop in the price of oil, though it has recovered quickly -- the government is spending heavily on domestic consumption. Pension payments are going up, and money is flowing into education and the high-tech sector. Retail sales were around $400 billion last year, and sales should increase 6% this year (an extra $24 billion). Total stimulus: $74 billion + $24 billion = $98 billion.

India's government deficit increased from 3% of GDP to 7% last year, a swing of $48 billion. The reason was not economic crisis -- growth remained respectable -- but the government's decision to make long-overdue investments in infrastructure, rural development and education. Retail sales were about $427 billion last year, and growth rates are poised to hit 8% (an extra $34 billion). Total stimulus: $48 billion + $34 billion = $81 billion.

Brazil's government swung from a 3% budgetary surplus to zero, a swing of about $45 billion. Brazil's slowdown was mild, but the Lula government launched a bunch of infrastructure projects to spur demand. Retail sales were around $368 billion and should grow 8% growth this year (an extra $22 billion). Total stimulus: $45 billion + $22 billion = $79 billion.

Hey presto, the BRICs alone are going to create $647 billion of fresh demand this year. This isn't quite enough to counterbalance the US slowdown, but gets us close. If the EU and Japan continue their stimulus, the world will have found its post-American economic engine, and things will dramatically improve.

State of The Meltdown Address

2010-01-28T18:21:00.006-06:00

The US fiscal crisis just gets worse and worse. The CBPP's latest estimates are that the states will need $180 billion in new funding or additional cuts for fiscal 2010 (the 12 months running from this summer to summer of 2011).

However, this assumes the 2009 Federal stimulus as a baseline -- about $140 billion went to the states. This Federal aid is due to expire in December 2010. If that disappears, then all bets are off.

Why? Because there's nothing, absolutely nothing, driving the US recovery except Federal money. Fresh lending? Nonexistent. Debts? Still unpayable at 376% of GDP, still on the books of the banksters. Export markets? China's got those covered.

Simply, there is no new source of aggregate demand to replace the busted bubble or the massive loss of consumers' home equity and financial assets.

And there's nothing left to cut, because the states have already been cut to the bone. They need the $240 billion simply to stay on life-support. Any more cuts will transform this place into a slightly more expensive version of 1990s Russia -- a decrepit shambles of a former world power, blighted by a decaying infrastructure, mass misery, and the rule of thieving oligarchs bent on looting the country.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Just lopping off a quarter of our outrageously unnecessary trillion dollar war machine would free up enough money to bail out the states. But drone-bombing Afghani/Iraqi/Yemeni/pick-the-Central-Asian-country-of-your-choice villagers and subsidizing Goldman Sachs' bonus pool is just so much more important than having functioning schools, hospitals, or food for American kids, don't you agree?

Inflection Point

2010-01-27T20:01:00.002-06:00

One of the central questions facing the post-American era has been, who will replace the US consumer as the source of final demand in the world-system.

Sometime later this year, I think we're going to find out.

In December of 2009, the GDP of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) reached $9.17 trillion. To put this in perspective, that's about two-thirds the GDP of the US. It's slightly more than half the output of the 27-member European Union, and twice the size of Japan. It's amazing to think that back in 1999, the BRIC economies were only one third of their current size.

If the BRICs continue on their growth path -- and their leading indicators are turning sharply positive -- by 2011 their net additional GDP will roughly equal the comparable US figure (about $700 billion, assuming 2% annual growth).

However, the old model of running up export-surpluses to debt-crazed US consumers won't work anymore. Instead, the BRICs have to rely on internal demand. Not only that, but the BRICs, just like the rest of the planet, urgently need to green their economies, or there won't be a planet for any of us to live on anymore.

In a nutshell, the BRICs have to redirect some of their forex accumulation into indigenous consumption and green infrastructure (about $200 billion per year should do the trick).

Can they pull it off? The BRICs all have heavily regulated financial systems, reasonably effective states, low debt levels -- about 20% of GDP, on average -- and vast savings ($3.3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves). All they need is the political will.

And the BRICs aren't alone: Japan and Europe will help out, too.

We Need Jobs

2010-01-22T13:33:00.006-06:00

For years and years, the defenders of neoliberalism (the likes of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, et. al. -- a.k.a. the fat cats) argued that Bubble-nomics was the best of all possible systems, because even if wealth wasn't trickling down, the US was creating tons of jobs.

Not anymore.

The job-destruction unleashed by the Great Implosion of neoliberalism is staggering. Eight million jobs have been erased since 2008. Alas, the official 10% unemployment rate is the tip of the iceberg, because millions of Americans are dropping out of the workforce entirely. They are going to school, turning to the underground economy, or moving in with family. Add them in, and the unemployment rate easily hits 13% -- a level last seen in the Great Depression.

According to the BLS, the employment-to-population ratio, one of the best indicators of overall job loss, fell from 62.8 in January 2008 down to 58.2 in December 2009 (this is for folks 16 years and older).

58.2 is the lowest figure since 1983, and there's still no sign of a rebound.

When you break down the numbers by gender, it turns out the loss of jobs for male workers has no precedent in post-WW II history. The employment-to-population ratio for men averaged around 82 in the late 1940s and 1950s, before drifting slowly but steadily down over the decades to about 70 in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2008, the ratio collapsed down to 63.2.

The comparable figure for female employment was 30 in the 1950s, an era when women were expected to stay at home. Over the next decades, women entered the workforce in increasing numbers, and the ratio rose to an all-time high of 58 in 2000, before falling to the current 53.4 (the lowest since 1988).

In a nutshell, the job market is the worst it has ever been for men in 70 years, and the worst it has been for women in 20 years.

The free market is not going to solve this problem. Only Big Government has the resources to put 8 million people back to work. And there's plenty of work for them to do: our railroads, infrastructure, and schools are in dire need of investment, and our economy desperately needs greening.

Survival

2010-01-11T17:54:00.005-06:00

I'm beginning to understand how ordinary Russians survived the meltdown of their Empire: after awhile, so many crises pile on so fast that there's no time to worry about any one of them. You start to realize that all the petty things which used to drive you nuts -- rule-crazy bureaucrats in the USSR, dollar-crazy billing agencies in the US -- are so many mosquitos in the Gloom, to paraphrase Sergei Lukyanenko's "Nightwatch" universe.

Russians lived off their dachas and garden produce for a decade, until Putin and the siloviki launched one of the most stupendous rescue operations of the century. We Americans will have to do something similar, by hunkering down on our foodstamps and government jobs.

Here's a post-Imperial guide to surviving the Great Crumble:

1. It's not you, it's The System. One in eight Americans has no job. One of four American kids isn't getting enough food. Our industrial base doesn't exist anymore. Our housing market is broken. Our media system is broken. Our political system is broken. Our banking system is broken. Our health care system is broken. Do not blame yourself or your unemployed neighbors for any of this stuff: the crash of this system is the crash of an unjust and unsustainable Empire, an Empire of toxic militarism and financial oligarchies. We need to replace it with a fairer, less violent, more democratic and more equitable society.

2. Zombie oligopolies. Right now, about a third of the US economy consists of globally uncompetitive oligopolies, whose main economic skill is buying off US politicians. We have a military-industrial complex (8% of the economy), a pharma-insco complex (8% of the economy), a Wall Street-Treasury complex (6% of the economy), and an automotive-sprawl complex (about 8% of the economy). (And don't get me started on our zombie mass media.) All leech off your tax revenues, some directly ($1 trillion in Federal spending on war) and some indirectly ($14 trillion in credit guarantees for Wall Street, hundreds of billions in tax subsidies for highways and McMansions). Instead of funding dead oligopolies, we should be spending our money on a public school-university complex, a renewable-green energy complex, a local utility-infrastructure complex, and a public media-information complex.

3. Embrace your inner pirate. Don't blow up your TV, use it to surf the web! Can't pay for overpriced, shoddy media? Tired of the lies of the mainstream media? Then don't pay for their lying swill -- download the media and information you want, when you want it, on the device of your choice. Use open source software to create your very own media, and share it with others. With 3 billion people already in the digital commons, and billions more on the way, you can't go wrong!

4. Never underestimate the restorative power of laughter. Being angry at the neoliberals does them too much credit. At this point, I laugh at DMCA take-down notices. I laugh at the mainstream media and its copyright fundamentalism. I laugh when I hear Wall Streeters talk about honesty and good governance. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be angry that neoliberalism completely fleeced us taxpayers. But the first step towards taking back what they stole is preserving our sense of humor -- because humor, as Patrick McGoohan noted all the way back in 1967, is the very essence of a democratic society.

5. Celebrate the joys of the commons. The utopian energies running loose in the traditional forms of the commons, the videogame culture, and the digital commons are simply astounding. More heartening still, these energies are beginning to spill over into the traditional media, loosening the stranglehold of corporate oligopolists and Imperial governments alike.

New Year, New Profile Pic

2010-01-09T18:28:00.005-06:00

Presenting the new, improved EyeZilla (Lizardicus Uplinkus Piraticum), now with 56% more poco irony, a 38% increase in post-neoliberal ideology, titanium-strontium teeth, and USB-compatible claws. Despite no apparent source of liquidity, still more creditworthy than the US consumer.

Day jobs: tracking the BRICs, emergent media cultures, and 3D videogames.

Night job: tunnel-surfing.

Likes: espresso, data-monkeys and nanobears.

Dislikes: neoliberals, transnational capitalism.

Vampire Squid: Still Sucking American Blood

2010-01-03T16:19:00.003-06:00

Earned $25,000 last year in honest toil? Prepare to fork over 25% of your income in taxes.

Scammed $2.3 billion through state-subsidized speculation and borrowing from the Federal Reserve at 0% interest and lending to everyone else at 5%? If you're Goldman Sachs, a.k.a. the Vampire Squid, you'll pay only $14 million in taxes, a tax rate of 1%.

Wall Street doesn't even have the buy off government officials anymore. That's because they ARE the government.

The Seven Horses of Imperial Collapse

2009-12-30T15:02:00.002-06:00

Are you a US-based citizen? Are you worried about your country's future?

Understand this: whether you voted for him or not, Obama is not the problem.

The problem is that your country is an empire, and this empire is dying.

No, the reason isn't the recent implosion of the Bubble. The reason is the long-term structural decline of the power-plant of Empire – or what sociologists call US-style monopoly capitalism.

This is a systemic issue, which has been festering for the bulk of the 41 years I've been on this planet. Simply, the US economy is choking on its own accumulated legacy costs. Here are the seven biggest legacy costs of Empire:

1. Wall Street's oligopoly on finance has made its investment bankers rich. However, this oligopolistic structure channels capital into unproductive bubbles which eventually implode, requiring hideously expensive public bailouts.

2. Neoliberal ideologues have long promoted the holy trinity of private car ownership, private education and private home ownership. For a time, this made GM, Yale and Citicorps rich, but it also generated hideous pollution and traffic jams, an increasingly decrepit system of public education, ecologically unsustainable suburban sprawl, and a destructive housing bubble.

3. The US has long denied its citizens the most basic organizing and union rights found in all other First World countries. This has padded the profit margins of US corporations. But these same policies have also created a low-skill, badly educated workforce, unable to produce world-class goods.

4. The US military-industrial complex created millions of secure middle-class jobs, and enabled the Empire's ruling elites to run huge swathes of the planet for more than five decades (1945-2000). But over time, this same military-industrial complex rotted the Empire from within, very much as excessive military spending destroyed the USSR. American firms win military contracts based on their Washington lobbying skills, not their technical excellence or productivity, to the point where most of today's $1 trillion annual military budget is sheer economic deadweight.

5. The US has a mass media system utterly owned and dominated by a few giant oligopolies (public broadcasting makes up less than 1% of the US media market, as compared with 20-25% in most European countries and Japan). When the US was the center of the world film, TV and media industries, this didn't seem to matter. But the long-term result is that Americans are some of the most poorly informed and badly educated people on earth, easily manipulated by devious corporate propaganda and completely unaware of the fact that the rest of the planet creates and watches its own TV shows, films and media.

6. The US has a broken health system, which makes a few insurance oligopolies extremely wealthy at the expense of patient care and access – 40 million Americans have no insurance at all. Millions more have insurance, but are bankrupted each year by illnesses. The US has fallen to 38th in the world in infant mortality and 40th in life expectancy, and it will continue to plummet in the rankings, thanks to the creation of large-scale health and social security initiatives in many nations of the semi-periphery. (The Obama healthcare bill won't change this. It will force millions of Americans to buy health insurance coverage they can't afford, but does not address the root cause of the problem – the fact that the US system is dominated by health insurance companies. They make money by charging as much for care as possible, and providing as little of that care to patients as possible.)

7. Finally, the US has a broken political system, which runs on billion of dollars of campaign donations and legions of permanent lobbyists, busily cutting deals for their Wall Street masters at the expense of ordinary taxpayers

Any one of these legacy costs would seriously impair any modern economy. But the US is being dragged down by all seven of them, simultaneously.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the multipolar world is here, and there's no going back to the past. Sooner or later, the US will have to throw its Empire on the scrap heap of history – and the sooner, the better.

The Story of the Decade

2009-12-26T23:52:00.009-06:00

How to sum up 2000-2009? Simple:

You say goodbye:

Name: US Empire 1898-1985
GDP: 12 trillion EUR
Investment: 17% GDP
Debt to GDP ratio: 376% (3rd quarter 2009)
Net worth: owes rest of planet 4 trillion EUR
Demographics: 5% of humanity

...but we say hello!

Name: BRIC nations
GDP: 6 trillion EUR
Investment: 38% GDP
Debt to GDP ratio: 25%
Net worth: owns +2.5 trillion EUR rocksolid liquidity
Demographics: 42% of humanity

A Christmas Carol

2009-12-26T00:08:00.006-06:00

(With apologies to the Charles Dickens classic).

* * * * * *

The Spirit of the Semi-periphery stood among the sovereign wealth funds, and pointed down to one LCD screen. Government Sachs advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw a new Tobin tax in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that transaction to which you point," said Sachs, "answer me one question. Are these the interest payments on the T-bills that Will be sold, or are they interest payments of auctions that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the screen by which it stood.

"People's investment funds will foreshadow certain management fees, which, if persevered in, must increase," said Sachs. "But if the funds be divested, the returns will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Sachs crept towards it, trembling as it went; and following the finger, read upon the LCD screen the deleted file, its own name, US EMPIRE 1898-1985.

Techno-Orientalists Just Want to Have (Postcolonial) Fun

2009-12-22T11:07:00.003-06:00

James Cameron has redeemed himself.

It is one of the ironies of the Empire's decline that the neoconservatives, once the linchpin of Wall Street's rule, are increasingly turning against their Empire. Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker is one of the most prominent examples of this logic: Volcker was the architect of the labor-bashing, capital-enriching austerity of the early 1980s, but has unequivocally denounced Wall Street's $14 trillion Federal bailout as the oligarchic looting of America it indeed is.

This tendency now has its aesthetic moment, in James Cameron's latest sci-fi blockbuster, "Avatar". Cameron's "Terminator" (1984) and "Aliens" (1986), the best of their respective franchises, were the leading embodiments of 1980s neoconservativism, and had all the contradictions of such -- i.e. pulse-pounding visuals, topnotch scripts and genuine suspense, all deployed in the service of a deeply regressive micropolitics, or what amounted to a speculative form outrunning its content.

This wasn't Cameron's fault. It's no accident that the greatest visual innovators of the late 1980s and early 1990s were located outside Hollywood altogether -- e.g. Polish director Krysztof Kieslowski and Hong Kong director John Woo. Simply, Cameron went as far as the Hollywood studio system of the day would let anyone go. (Not everyone can be as lucky as Peter Jackson, who had the advantage of DVD sales, an independent New Zealand animation team, and a highly mobilized fan community to create a genuinely progressive version of the Lord of the Rings).

The very word "avatar", as the etymologists remind us, comes from Sanskrit, and entered the English language through the British Orientalists of the late 18th century. Cameron's sci-fi fable updates this ancient Orientalism with a veneer of biotech survivalism. During any other historical moment, the result would have been an aesthetic disaster.

But Cameron channeled his disgust with the Empire's Iraqicide/Afghanicide into something constructive. For all its limitations (i.e. heroic white guy saves noble indigenous beings), "Avatar" is the first Hollywood film since "Apocalypse Now" which denounces American colonialism as the barbarism it indeed is.

What is most striking about the film aren't the fourteen-foot blue aliens sporting dreadlocks, elf-ears, anime-style eyes, and USB-compatible braids (a.k.a. the Kingston-Osaka-Lothlorien look) or FIOS-neon jungles, but the remarkable number of videogame references. The hunting, climbing, dragon-riding and action sequences pastiche huge chunks of the platformer and action genres, while half the creatures and one quarter of the scenery are spin-offs from "Final Fantasy". And that is all to the good -- Cameron had the sense to quote from the very best.

No, "Avatar" isn't the world-changing work of art which Hideo Kojima's "Metal Gear Solid 4" is. But Cameron finally gets something right: colonial Empires are death, the pursuit of profit via organized mass murder. We must end it, before it ends us all.

And the Winner Is...

2009-12-15T14:09:00.006-06:00

Nothing was the same for me after April 2003.

Growing up, I had always suspected my country was, if not hopelessly deranged, then surely in the grips of a malevolent elite. But the sight of my country's mass media and political elites raucously cheerleading a flagrantly illegal, unjust war of colonial annexation straight out of the late 19th century was more than just a passing shock.

No, it wasn't just the lies and mayhem of the invasion, or the carnage it triggered (carnage predicted by literally everyone who had ever studied Iraqi society). It was the deeply suicidal nature of the whole affair. On some deep level of its political unconscious, this Empire had decided to go to Central Asia to die.

But what goes around, most surely, surely comes around. The post-imperial circle is now complete:

---------------
Iraq's oil auction hits the jackpot
By Pepe Escobar
---------------

No, the oil revenues won't bring back the dead. But the Shiite crescent now has a chance to join Eurasia's developmental states.

Comedy Platinum

2009-12-13T22:09:00.004-06:00

There's comedy gold, and then there's that once-in-a-lifetime event, comedy platinum:

---------
USA Today: Obama: 'Fat-cat' bankers owe help to U.S. taxpayers
"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama said.
---------

No, you just appointed those fat cats to run the economy, ensuring our economy continues to rot.

You also forked over trillions of taxpayer dollars to those fat cats, the most egregious transfer of wealth from a middle-class to oligarchs since the looting of Russia.

But fear not, my fellow Americans, because your Empire has only begun to bleed money. Obama's health insurance scheme will fork over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the vampires of the health insurance industry. It'll look good on the Christmas mantel -- a trillion-dollar medico-insurance complex, right next to those other criminal and insane boondoogles, that trillion-dollar military-industrial complex and those trillion-dollar failed colonial wars.

Last November, the people of this country voted for FDR II, not Bubblenomics 2.0. Once they start realizing they've been tricked, all hell is going to break loose around here. I just hope we Leftists can help channel that anger into something constructive.

Give Piece a Chance

2009-12-11T14:30:00.005-06:00

Lots of news coverage of Premier Obamachev, leader of the United States of Securitized Assets, receiving the Ignoble Piece Prize. You haven't heard? Why, there's a transcript right here.

Old Machines and New

2009-12-09T11:21:00.002-06:00

Ah, the capital markets -- where sharks grow their teeth.

Case in point: the Chicago Daley machine (still going strong, after all these years) sold off Chicago's parking meters for the next 75 years to EU-based Allianz and a UAE-based sovereign wealth funds (hat tip to the SWF Institute for pointing this out):

"Abu Dhabi Shares Profits From Parking Meters"

Chicago got $600 million on the deal, and parking fees are sure to skyrocket. You could argue this isn't such a bad thing, give that higher fees are a disguised carbon tax, and will discourage auto use in a city which has a reasonably widespread system of mass transit.

Still, it says something about the profound decline of US civil society, that a major US metropolis does not have the administrative capacity to run a bunch of parking meters.

Stimulus II: Unions and Developmental States Go to Work

2009-12-08T15:24:00.003-06:00

Given that two-thirds of the stimulus package funds are due to be spent over the next twelve months, this is a glimmer of good news:

-------------
From Bloomberg: "Obama Focuses on Small Businesses to Spur Job Growth"

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said lawmakers may seek to finance $75 billion to $150 billion in highway construction and other job creating measures with unused TARP funds.

-------------

The only reason this is happening is (1) public sector unions have kicked up a ruckus about impending cuts (since the public sector is one of the few areas where US workers can legally organize unions these days, union membership for all state and Federal employees is around 36.8%, according to the BLS), and (2) the digital commons has gone after Wall Street's panzer divisions with Katyushas and RPG-29s.

It should be noted that the US is behind the curve here -- the rest of the world has been rolling out second-round stimulus packages. Japan is spending an additional $81 billion, Russia bailed out its car industry and is boosting pensions by 40% by 2010, the equivalent of $35 billion, India and China are continuing their stimulus packages, while Brazil is gearing up for major infrastructure spending as preparation for the 2016 Olympics.

Special Message from the Airship Uplink

2009-12-05T14:49:00.004-06:00

The crew of the airship Uplink, domicile of lizard-monkeys, viera-bears, and several technologies which haven't been invented on this planet just yet, have asked me to forward the following:

Dear Americans --

Do you worry that your country is being looted by irresponsible and greedhead banksters?

Are you queasy at the fact that your ruling elites spend their time preaching the virtues of failed neocolonial wars your country can't win and can't afford to pay for anymore?

Are you angry that Wall Street cretins have bought off your politicians?

Fear not, Uplink's crew has the ideological ammunition you've been looking for.

The first thing you must do is read Paul Klebnikov's thoroughly researched, unimpeachably honest and utterly devastating Godfather of the Kremlin (hint: the subtitle of the book is "The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism"). You will discover that none of your problems are new. In fact, they have been the problems of your semi-peripheral neighbors for about thirty years now.

Next, map out the shocking parallels of the Soviet collapse with your own collapsing Empire.

Draw a deep breath.

Last but not least, draw your own (post-Imperial) conclusions. To paraphrase an icon of the gaming culture, neoliberalism is powerful, but the developmental state is solid!

Beginning of the End

2009-12-02T22:24:00.003-06:00

Nomi Prins has been poring over the books of the big banksters, who are floating on an ocean of $14 trillion of taxpayer-provided bailout funds (that's not a typo, the number really is fourteen trillion dollars), and it isn't a pretty sight.

In other news, Afghanistan is about to become the graveyard of a third Empire. Some future historian will have to uncover the relentless dialectic which drove the very last imperialist world hegemon (there will be no others) to commit economic and geopolitical suicide, by sacrificing its industrial base for a bunch of irresponsible banksters, and sacrificing its democracy for an insane war of colonial conquest on one of the poorest countries on the planet.

Apocalypse Now, Pay Later

2009-11-24T17:18:00.002-06:00

Ahhh, vacation. More Americans should enjoy them.

Finally got around to watching the extended version of Coppola's "Apocalypse Now". The result is a mixed bag -- the added layers of symbolism are welcome (e.g. Lance's increasing use of face-paint, corresponding to the dehumanization of the crew), but the larger canvas also highlights the flaws in the original. The film can't grasp gender, and the Vietnamese remain inscrutable Others.

What Coppola does get right, though, is the delusionary madness of Empire, how its utopia of endless malls turned into napalm and mass murder. Yesterday's heli-war is today's drone bombardment, but the result is the same: slaughter, mayhem, and utter futility. In my most nightmarish dreams, never did I imagine that the US would be insane enough to commit suicide the same way the USSR did, bankrupting itself on military-industrial folly and foreign debt, and going so far as to recycle the same Central Asian burial ground.

Meanwhile, a fresh crop of Colonel Kurtzes is showing up in Central Asia. The greatest irony of all is that America's creditors are beyond caring. If the Americans want to bleed themselves further, that's America's problem, not theirs. The BRICs have time and T-bills on their side.

Downtime

2009-11-22T14:02:00.001-06:00

Vacation.

Enough said.

Victory!

2009-11-17T15:59:00.005-06:00

This is what democracy looks like...

...a whole bunch of people from different continents and cultures, and with wildly different backgrounds, interests and talents, all banding together to improve working conditions for all. It took just two days, but massive turnout and campus solidarity caused the UI administration to see the writing on the wall and agree to a reasonable compromise.

The weather deities must have a union contract of their own, because the rainstorm ceased and the sun began to peek out at the exact moment we won our fight at the bargaining table. Here's the celebration:

After 30 Years of Neoliberalism, the Payback Begins

2009-11-16T12:25:00.005-06:00

Spent today on the picket lines and oh hell yes did it ever feel good. Our friendly neighborhood university-industrial complex is trying to fix its financial woes by taking away our tuition waivers, which is utter madness. 90% of graduate students could not afford to attend the university without those waivers. We grads teach most of the classes for ludicrously low pay, and contribute countless unpaid hours on cutting-edge research projects (my own workweek is never less than 80 hours, and sometimes more).

Slashing tuition waivers to save money makes as much sense as a weight loss program which involves chopping off both your legs.

It's incredible how every single institution in this entire country has become clinically suicidal, from the biggest Wall Street vampire squid to the most out-of-the-way school district. Meanwhile, this failed Empire's twin failed wars devour an inconceivable $1 trillion a year, while Wall Street pays itself record bonuses thanks to a $14.1 trillion bailout.

Highlight of the day: an irate passerby upset with our picket line told us we were going to Hell. Ever courteous, we refrained from informing this person that, on our salaries, we already live there.

Financial Education

2009-11-14T15:09:00.002-06:00

Long ago, in another life, I watched a documentary about neoliberalism in Jamaica. A dairy farmer complained about how imported powdered milk destroyed the local agricultural base. Right now I'm waiting on line to buy $6 of powdered milk because it's all I can afford.

The person ahead of me swipes his card. Nothing. The clerk suggests retyping the password. Swipe. Nothing. Swipe. Nothing.

The clerk tries to help, punches in some numbers. "Looks like you have only $4 left." The customer looks down at his two items, triages the most valuable, pays for that.

* * * * * *

Another $50 drained from my vanishingly small bank account. This wasn't bad planning on my part, but an accident due to the debit card float -- the time it takes, sometimes a week or more, for debit purchases to register in your checking account. It looked like my account had enough money, so I sent in my rent check, but the debit charges hit at the last second. Overdraft fee: $25 per transaction.

What I didn't realize is that this means each and every transaction. Access your account again, and you pay another $25 fee. So now I'm out an extra $50 that I can't afford. That's on top of my $88 traffic ticket and charges for a check lost in the mail.

Yeah, just pile it on, transnational capitalism, just pile it on. Kick me when I'm down.

You'll regret not killing me when you had the chance.