Tales of the Bunnybear

Caustic comic commentary for our crashing capitalistic times.

Also, Bhaskar Sunkara has this hilarious article on the Great Northern Terror War. His mortal crime: TWSA (traveling while South Asian).

Job Creators: Yes, The 1% Are Lying To You

Entrepreneur Nick Hanauer takes apart neoliberalism's lies with a meat-axe.

From Cacerolazo to Casserole

Pop quiz: name a country dependent on raw materials exports which is being ravaged by social polarization and a sclerotic plutocracy, whose leaders have cracked down on uppity student protestors by criminalizing dissent. And the answer is...?

Nope, not Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. 

The answer is... Canada!

No, that is not a misprint. 

Slorgzilla could not make this insanity up even if its prehistoric lizard-monkey brain tried.

Quebec students have been protesting against the province's neoliberal policies (drastically raise student fees, slash spending, make sure only the 1% can go to college) for months. In response, Quebec's parliament passed laws criminalizing any demonstration of larger than 50 people, or groups which don't inform police about their presence.

And don't think this is just for show. The first mega-fines have already been handed out.

Since many of the protestors are penniless students, Quebec will need to start jailing tens of thousands of citizens. With a little creativity, Canada should soon have its very own gulag archipelago, enabling Canada to keep pace in the all-important race to duplicate the US' 6 million-strong prison-industrial complex. Forwards to debt slavery!

After all, citizenship, democracy and the due process of law is for the 1% who own everything already, and we 99% are lazy, worthless subhumans, valuable only as cannon fodder in our masters' colonial wars on Eurasia -- because, as the lying 1%-controlled mass media owned by phone-tapping liars tirelessly repeats, we've always been at war with Eurasia.

In response to the Pinochetization of Canada, the brave citizens of Canada are going heavy metal (sample footage here).

Reorganizing the Workshop

 I'm not complaining about my dissertation at all, it was a privilege to scour the depths of some of the most complicated works of art ever created by human beings, but I've been shockingly out of the loop over the last ten months.

I guess it's "Occupy syndrome" -- after decades of cultural, political and economic regression, when all hope was stifled under the continental ice-sheets of neoliberalism, suddenly the transnational mediascape is shifting, heaving, buckling under our feet. Decades turn into hours, months into seconds, and suddenly, the backyard is teeming with tiny construction shovels and legions of wifi-kitted, shanzai-literate revolutionary moles, peering from their underground fortifications.

Still job-hunting, but at least I have time to start on a huge backlog of projects which have accumulated far too much dust.


A couple tidbits: Mass Effect fans are breaking free of the rEApers. (Note the location of the uprising: Poland.)

The Russian comrades continue to battle the neoliberal Combine.

Capital's Crisis, European Solutions

The indispensable Yanis Varoufakis has this useful proposal to rescue the European Union from committing euroliberal suicide.

Basic summary: stop bailing out the Eurobanksters, and start bailing out the people of Europe.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? The simplest things in life ("play nice", "help others", "share your toys") are always the hardest to achieve.

Post-American Television

One of the greatest ironies of being a media scholar in the US is being constantly reminded of how obsolete and broken the Empire's once world-leading mass media really is.

Case in point: Indian superstar Aamir Khan's new TV series, The Truth Alone Prevails. The episodes are broadcast on Indian TV, but have also been made available on Youtube in multiple languages (subtitles provided). Information leavened with wisdom, passion grounded in justice, outrage based on facts, mobilization based on democracy -- it's exactly what investigative journalism should be.

But it's not just top-notch television. The Indian audience is tuning in. Compare this to the indifferent ratings received by David Simon's The Wire, one of the best US television series ever created.

Those who the Gods wish to destroy, are those who ignore the messages of their media scholars and media artists.

Grundgesetz 1, Neoliberalism 0

Taking a page from dying Middle Eastern autocracies, Frankfurt's authorities tried to ban protestors from its downtown, so Blockupy Frankfurt decided to provide a real-time demonstration of what democracy is all about. 

In other news, the imperial barbarism of the Terror War hits home in Chicago (full details are here). Notice how the police officers know and even revel in the history of the 1968 police riots. Not even Assad's shabiya are this shameless.

Note also the politics of racialization: the protestors were white. If they had been citizens of color, they would've been arrested during the auto stop and given bogus tickets for hundreds of dollars.

This is not paranoia speaking. Full disclosure: I'm a perfectly ordinary-looking, middle-aged white guy with multiple college degrees, and I was randomly stopped on the road earlier this year by a crass, power-hungry Illinois cop fishing for drug convictions.

My skin color and polite demeanor meant that I got off with a warning. But it was a nasty experience.

No amount of theoretical insight really prepares you for the violence of the neoliberal state: the cruelty and viciousness of its low-level authorities, the pompous officiousness of bill-collectors and agencies demanding money you don't have, the dismal rhetoric of following contractual law -- the same law the 1% routinely bend, break or simply disregard.

The lower this Empire sinks into the water, the more desperate its efforts to charge everyone for air to breathe. Ken Levine's Rapture came oh-so-close to naming neoliberal empire for the madness it indeed is before being side-tracked by the Rand cultists (they're symptoms rather than the prime movers of the system), let's just hope Irrational's next game will hit its target.