From Bolivarzilla to Kleptopia

Reuters has this scathing investigation of the rubble of Venezuela's energy-rent populism, a sad tale of how Venezuela's elites sabotaged Chavez' goal of national development.

It's worth emphasizing that the Chinese companies aren't to blame for the disaster. Rather, elites milked grifted state contracts and bribed officials to look the other way. The Chavez and Maduro governments promised development for all, but delivered the privatization of state energy-rents on behalf of the wealthiest few.

The fundamental lesson progressives and citizens should take to heart is this: the strategy of "sowing the oil" is broken. "Sowing the oil" has worked in only one nation: Norway, which was already a wealthy industrialized nation to begin with. It has failed everywhere else. In retrospect, "sowing the oil" was the final chapter of the oil nationalizations of the late 20th century. These latter were supposed to bring modernization, but produced nothing but massive corruption, broken economies, and despotic petro-colonialisms everywhere from Iran and Iraq to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

The entire planet needs to abolish energy-rent capitalism and replace it with a green energy commons -- green electrons from solar, wind and storage, green mobility from batteries, and green buildings for the world's cities. This is especially important for the countries of Africa and South Asia, which are going through their rural-to-urban demographic transitions and will benefit the most from the green energy revolution.

When Corporations Kill

Airframes which were faulty, because profit.

FAA regulators who wouldn't regulate, because profit.

Safety designers who weren't allowed to design, because profit.

Airline pilots who were never told crucial information, because profit.

A mission-critical system relying on ONE SINGLE SENSOR, because profit.

Until there were hundreds of dead people.

Darryl Campbell delivers an devastating expose of Boeing's crimes-for-profits for The Verge.

May Day

A slightly-belated May Day-themed video from indie Youtuber Super Bunnyhop, all about class struggle in the field of interactive media:

Land of Lakes

Anand Malligavad and a group of fellow citizens are on a mission to restore the threatened wetlands of Bengaluru (Bangalore), one lake at a time:

The Lake Revivers do more than just clean up polluted waterways. They work closely with local residential and farming communities to rebuild each lake as an eco-system. After landscaping each lake back into existence, volunteers and neighbors plant diverse trees and shrubs to restore the lake's natural biodiversity, and help farmers to install tube-wells -- each lake helps to recharge the water table, enabling farmers to grow bigger crops. It's an amazingly successful project, and a timely reminder of India's astounding potential. (Note that if you'd like to contribute, donations are accepted here).

Lorelai

The latest horror videogame masterpiece from Rem Michalski is here. As the Viera would say, mark ye well these pixels of glory:

If any of you fellow proletarians have any loose change, get it now on Steam. To paraphrase the best line of Metro: Exodus, if we audiences don't support our greatest artists, who will?

Sony Santa Monica: Industry Class Act

Good studios thank you for being a fan. Great studios acknowledge their debts to the entire fan community for their creativity, their caring, and their sharing:

Gender And The Fight Against Revanchism

Michael Weiss has delivered the best single take-down of Assange, that criminal fraudster, serial data-grifter and appalling human being, whose sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy was just one long dodge to avoid appearing in court on charges of sexual assault (the Reporters Committee has the details of Assange's US indictment, which may or may not come to pass -- the short version is, he's no journalist, he's just plain scum).

It is striking how all of the post-2014 revanchisms, from the authoritarian kleptocracy burning down my own country, the United States, to the thugocracies looting Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all the way to bags of sleaze like Assange, all share one characteristic: they all hate women.

This is no accident. I'd argue misogyny is to contemporary revanchism what anti-Semitism was to the 1930s Fascisms -- the wholly fictitious Other blamed for the dysfunction and misery of a broken economy, rather than the plutocrats who broke the economy in the first place. 

While the revanchisms are terrifying, their failure to gain even the slightest traction among young people all across the world speaks volumes about the depth and scope of today's nascent anti-capitalist resistance. In fact, women such as Sarah Kendzior, AOC and Greta Thunberg have stepped up to lead when we Big Men of the 20th Century Left -- I'm old enough to merit a heaping dose of self-criticism here -- did nothing but deliver tiresome four-hour talks about obscure plenums and make ghastly attempts to pretend some horrible postcolonial despotisms were somehow not the genocidal state capitalisms they indeed were from the very beginning. 

The age of the Big Men is over. And now we know that Karl Marx was more right than he could ever know, because we either end capitalism and create a peaceful, fair, and egalitarian world-commons, or else we go extinct. 

I will do what I can to write the critical analyses and histories the world needs to point itself in the direction of Green Life instead of Carbon Death: star-charts to navigate the storm-tossed seas of Exponential World.