Abandoning the Ship of Fools: Postmodernist and Wildist Responses to Civilization

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jeriah Bowser

Once upon a time there was a people who lived with the Sea; living in connection, intimacy, and harmony with their aquatic environment for a very long time. Then one day a dangerous and powerful man had a bold idea. He thought that if he could build a Ship to sail over the Sea, he might find a better world to live in, a Paradise. He had a hard time convincing others that this Paradise was something to pursue, however, so in order to accomplish this he had to enslave lots of other sea-people to make the voyage possible. The sea-people, under threat of violence and death, built a large ship out of dead plant and animal people, stocked the ship with supplies, and took their place at the oars of the slave-galley. This great Ship then sailed away from the sea-people’s ancestral homeland and headed into the great unknown. After a long time at sea, the slaves forgot they were slaves. As they adapted to their new life of labor and hardship aboard the Ship, they forgot what life was like as sea-people and began identifying with the Ship and its mission. As they forgot how to live on their own away from the Ship, their survival and happiness became inextricably bound up with the Ship and the Captain, until they no longer saw themselves as slaves at all, but as willing participants onboard this fantastic adventure. Their language, culture, rituals, and mythology transformed to reflect their new way of life. They now worshipped the Captain and Paradise Gods as they saw themselves fundamentally separated from the Sea and its ways. The Captain created laws and morals with which to guide correct behavior aboard the Ship. They created rituals for themselves which gave them context for their roles on the Ship and gave meaning to their lives of labor and struggle. They lost all contact with their former ways of being and understanding the world. They were truly unanchored in the world; the Ship being their only reference point for Truth and Deception, Meaning and Nihilism, Beauty and Ugliness, Community and Individuality, Pleasure and Suffering, Sacredness and Profanity.

After a while, some of the slaves felt uncomfortable with what they perceived as unjust treatment aboard the Ship. They were tired of being beaten and starved and worked to death and wanted a better life. But instead of abandoning the Ship, they simply asked for more participation. The slaves had forgotten what life was like before the voyage, they couldn’t imagine living without the Ship and the Captain. They had begun identifying with the Ship and its mission so much that they wanted an equal role in participating.They were tired of just rowing and thought that the Navigator’s job might be fun, along with some of the other jobs on board the Ship that were usually reserved for the Captain’s friends. When this discontent reached a certain point, there would be mutinies where the slaves would demand equal access to the Ship, they demanded equal rights. The Captain, being a shrewd man, would listen to their requests and grant them greater access to the Ship. He even let some of the slaves take the wheel for a few minutes on special occasions; it was always a great spectacle when a slave would be called up from the galleys to the captain’s chair for a few minutes, turning the wheel this way and that, grinning idiotically as a rush of power, purpose, and meaning rushed through the slave until their turn was up and they were sent back down to the galleys. The hope of getting a turn at the wheel inspired much enthusiasm and loyalty to the project. Of course, no-one, not even the Captain perhaps, knew that the wheel had been broken for a long time now – it was merely a symbol. Even if the wheel did work, the Ocean current the Ship was now in was much too strong to break out of with a mere wheel turn. The Ship was now caught in a force much larger than itself, it had started on a voyage which it now had no control over.

One day, a few of the more clever slaves got together and started whispering to each other about some things that seemed strange about the whole affair. They couldn’t really put their finger on exactly what was wrong, they just felt that… something was wrong, so they began poking around and investigating. Some of these clever slaves had access to navigation equipment and, after much calculation, discovered that not only was the wheel broken, but the Ship was caught in a huge ocean current that was going in a giant circle and heading nowhere which meant that… there was no Paradise. This was very troubling news. Another member shared that he had discovered a mask with the Captain’s face on it – it seemed that the all-powerful Captain was a mere puppet. Was he in hiding? Was he still alive? Who had killed him? Was he ever real? These were even more troubling discoveries. A few others gained access to the forbidden areas of the Ship: the secret rooms and cellars where the Ships records were stored. As they began exploring the dark and musty belly of the Ship, they discovered that the Ship itself was starting to sink – water was slowly leaking in through the rotting hull and pulling the Great Ship down. Terrified and angry at having been lied to, they decided to try and jettison from the Ship as quickly as possible. They tore apart a section of a storeroom and, using the lumber and tools from the Ship, made a small dinghy together. They launched their dinghy one dark and stormy night, and spent a long time celebrating and high-fiving each other, full of self-congratulatory exhilaration at having escaped the fate of the other slaves. What they didn’t yet realize, however, was that they were caught in the same current as the Mother-Ship. They were headed for the same fate, they had no bearings in the great Sea, no ability to change their course even if they did know where they were, and their dinghy (having been made of the same tools and materials as the Mother-Ship) was already starting to rot and leak.
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The mythology of the Ship of Fools is very old, it is first attributed to Plato, a 4th century BCE Greek philosopher. He used the Ship as an analogy for the fragility and irrationality of a democratic society, as only a strong Captain (a rigidly Rational and authoritarian political system) could maintain order and keep the Ship on course. Some have translated Plato’s metaphor (as well as the remainder of the Republic) as a work of psychology a well, as we mustn’t allow the chaos of our irrational desires and whims (the passengers) distract us or drown out the one voice of Reason (the Captain) in our heads. ^{^[1]} Various philosophers and writers have since used this metaphor as a literary device and point of philosophical inquiry. Michel Foucault, a 20th century French postmodernist, used the story as a reference point in his book, “Madness and Civilization,” where he explored the history of the social construction of mental illness. In Foucault’s book, he talks about the mythological and historical legacy of the legend and discovered that there were indeed floating insane asylums – the “Narrenschiffs” – which carried those deemed insane from port to port in Europe, particularly in Germany, in the early 15th century. These floating asylums were eventually retired in favor of prison-like insane asylums, which eventually became our mental hospitals.^{^[2]} Sebastian Brant, a late-fifteenth century German theologian, used the mythology of the Ship of Fools as a satirical device as he mocked politicians, academics, and various prophets of Modernism during his time.^{^[3]} Ted Kaczynski used the Ship of Fools as a metaphor for industrial capitalism in order to critique the role that leftism/reformism plays in distracting and co-opting dissent, and his essay on the topic is considered to be Ted’s most coherent and accessible work.^{^[4]} In Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s landmark 1947 book, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” they explore this myth by working from Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.” Horkheimer and Adorno portray the epic story of Odysseus as a metaphor for humanity’s journey away from wildness and into civilization. ^{^[5]}

Since my first introduction to this myth, I felt that it was heavy with archetypal symbolism which begged to be explored. I searched for an explanation which would satisfy my curiosity, but found none that sufficed. It looks like this task has fallen to me.

The Ocean is steeped in archetypal symbolism, most of it revolving around the theme of wildness, as it is the largest and most inaccessible wilderness on our planet. Jung described the Ocean as the very embodiment of the unconscious, with our consciousness a tiny island in the midst of it. ^{^[6]} While every corner of land on our planet has been thoroughly mapped, every animal or plant we come across has been catalogued and placed on an evolutionary tree, and every “resource” depleted for human consumption, the Ocean still remains vast, mysterious, and elusive from the greedy hands of Science and Progress. The Sea still holds its own against those who would colonize it, although it is slowly being killed despite its resistance. As such, the Ocean holds great symbolism as our unconscious shadow side, our repressed hidden instincts and urges, the dark and dangerous animal that lies in us all.

In my retelling of the Ship of Fools, the Ocean also represents our ancestral homeland, as (according to evolutionary biologists) mammals came from the Ocean and I believe a part of us still recognizes that. I feel it when I stand on a beach and find myself staring out into the vast wild ancestral homeland of my species. I also made the Ocean our home because having a land-destination brings up to possibility of a destination and a potential rescue, it dangles the carrot of Paradise out in front of the Ship. No, there is no land, no destination, no possibility of a safe landing, there will be no survivors washing ashore. There is just more Ocean everywhere you look, more wildness, there is no escaping it. This also brings up the point that there never was a destination in the first place, just an inevitable return and release to wildness.

The Ship is an excellent metaphor for Civilization, as it is the great technological project that carries us to Paradise. Although I found scant mentions of ships in Jungian symbolism (not that I am an authority on Jung), the few mentions of it I did find present the Ship as the Animus (male quality) to the Anima (feminine quality) of the Sea. Therefore, ships refer to the Ego-consciousness and masculine energy, as these man-made floating islands rise above and ride on top of the vast feminine unconscious that is the Sea.^{^[7]} Trying my hand at depth psychology, I find that it also represents Technology, as a Ship is a piece of advanced technology which requires division of labor, slavery, private property, objectification, and anthropocentrism to exist. The presence of a slave-galley requires all of those ideas to become systemic and normalized, as well as the ever-present but invisible social violence of civilization which keeps the slaves rowing. A ship is made of dead trees, tar, rope, metal hardware, cloth sails, etc. It is a floating human container made of tree corpses, a vessel built out of and predicated on death. This technological vessel of death allows us to float a few feet above the reality of wildness, allowing us to act like the Ocean isn’t there while we go about our business aboard the floating Machine. It is literally a manufactured barrier between us and the cold, dark, mysterious reality of the Ocean. But no Ship is infinite. No matter what materials they are made out of, they will eventually succumb to the law of return: wood will eventually rot, metal will eventually rust, and fiberglass will eventually break down. The thin barrier between us and wildness will eventually erode; our model of infinite growth on a finite planet will have to face reality sooner or later.

The cultural transition of the slaves into willing participants represents the process of domestication. This is also known as trauma-bonding, colonization, or the Stockholm syndrome. When an animal becomes totally dependent on their domesticators for survival, approval, meaning, and validation, we begin to identify with our oppressors, releasing our hatred/resistance towards them and accepting their needs, beliefs, and desires as our own. ^{^[8]} This takes place on many levels, and when a culture has become domesticated enough we will begin adapting our language, symbols, mythology, and rituals to correspond to our new reality. The old ways of understanding the world no longer make sense in a new world of separation, trauma, and domination. Mythology is a means of situating oneself within a community, a way of deriving meaning from a seemingly chaotic and uncontrollable reality. Ritual is a way of initiating one into and reaffirming cultural mythology. In the civilized world, our rituals reflect our mythology perfectly: we participate in self-destructive, dangerous, and meaningless rites of passage such as gang initiations, getting drunk, graduating high school, getting our driver’s license, or having sex, and our initiation societies are those which inculcate us further into Empire: academia, military, business, and street gangs invite us in, given us our identities, give us a role within a community, and use us until they are done with us and they find another young person desperate for meaning and purpose in their life. Aboard the Ship, we completely lose our bearings to reality as we are swept away into the future. All of our symbols reflect those of the Ship: we understand ourselves and the world around us only through the medium of Ship language and culture. We forget that another way of being in the world ever existed or even could exist.

The Captain represents God, Morality, Modernism, Science, and Objective Truth. The Captain is whatever or whomever currently holds Truth and Power. Of course, there actually is no Captain, nor was there ever, but that doesn’t stop everyone onboard from emphatically believing in his existence and striving to live their lives in ways that are acceptable to the Great Captain. His presence in this story is important for two reasons. One, it is important to realize that domestication is never a voluntary activity. That is, it is always done through oppression, violence, and Trauma. The slaves did not join this Ship voluntarily, they were forced into it – civilization is predicated on violent domination and slavery. Two, the Captain represents the ever-present specter of Morality/Truth/Power within civilized cultures. The Captain may have never existed, or he may have died a long time ago. It makes no difference to domesticated people, for once he has colonized us we reserve a special place for Him in our heads: He is always watching, and any infraction of His rules brings swift judgment from above in the form of conscience/guilt.

The slave revolts that take place aboard the Ship are the central focus of Kaczynski’s version of the story, as he was focused on exposing leftism/reformism as ultimately futile within the larger context of the Ship’s course. Conversations on “rights” or “equality” always take place within the larger context of civilization. “Granting Rights” is a legal term, it uses the language of Power, it means granting a person or a living thing a privileged position within the hierarchical structure of Power; it does not mean destroying the power structure. The critics of Wildism will point out that this itself is a privileged position: we must not care about the injustices of oppressed groups of people in order to take such a dismissive stand. This entirely misses the point. Do I want cops to be able to kill black people whenever they want? Do I want men to able to assault women whenever they want? Of course not. Leftism acts as a co-opting tool, it obfuscates power by playing with symbols. Police brutality in the US did not end with “racial equality,” because equality in this context means giving people with darker skin equal access to systems of oppressive power. I don’t want white cops killing anybody and I don’t want black cops killing anybody. I don’t want men assaulting anybody and I don’t want women assaulting anybody. I don’t want Latino lawyers or women presidents, I don’t think giving historically oppressed people an opportunity to share in oppression is progress at all… but of course it is Progress. Leftism serves as a safety-valve for cultural resistance. When the pressure gets a bit high, oppressed cultures can let off steam by participating in symbolic protests or fighting for equality, so long as they don’t actually challenge the dominant narrative, as long as they never question or challenge Civilization or Progress. Now, that doesn’t mean that resistance is always leftist/reformist, it just means that resistance to domination/oppression/domestication often gets subverted into some bullshit political agenda that challenges nothing and changes nothing.

The instances of slaves taking the wheel is of course a metaphor for the political system in general, as the entire puppet show is a complete distraction and has no bearing on the course of the Ship. The wheel has been broken for a long time, and even if a group of people genuinely tried to fix the wheel and steer the Ship somewhere else, they would find themselves trapped in the Ocean current. We are caught up in forces way beyond our comprehension or control. Civilization is experiencing massive overshoot, and the planet simply cannot continue supporting this way of being. But the wheel still sits there, tempting us to try and do something, fix something, if we can just be creative and committed enough… but even this great symbol of Hope and Progress will go down with the Ship.

The clever slaves represent the postmodernists – those who, having investigated the Ship and its Captain, have figured out that we have been duped, and are therefore trying to escape by jettisoning from the Mother-Ship. A noble effort, for sure, but ultimately doomed because they never looked past the Ship itself to see what lies beneath. Their survival craft is built with the same materials as the Mother-Ship, the postmodernists have not let go of any of the pillars of civilization but have instead tried to re-imagine them through language games and attempts at subjective Truth. Except for a thoroughly consistent rejection of Power and Objective Truth, the rest of the pillars of civilization remain present throughout much postmodern work: Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Progress, Atomization, Dualism, Hierarchy… the gang’s all here, sometimes questioned but never examined to their origins and then rejected. The postmodernists went all the way to the cellar of the Ship, but they stopped at the hull. They never tried to look past the thin barrier of death that lay between them and wildness, they never questioned what was on the other side, they simply took the Ship as an unfortunate but necessary reality and tried to rebuild a new Ship from some spare materials. Those clever slaves found themselves again stranded in the middle of nowhere in a rotting and leaking dinghy, this time without even the reassuring lies of Objective Truth to comfort them. They are truly a sorry lot. With no cultural mythology, context, or ritual to guide them, without connection, they are aimlessly and meaninglessly floating next to the Mother-Ship, caught in a current of impending destruction, in an Ocean of terrifying wildness.

Postmodernism has failed to provide meaning or connection primarily because it begins its search for meaning within the confines of civilization. Any course or book on Western philosophy begins with the Ancient Greeks: the Pre-Socratics. They call this period of time “Premodernism” and proceed from there, accepting the words and thoughts of these thoroughly domesticated humans as somehow representing our origins as humans. Postmodernism accepts radical disconnection/domestication/Trauma as a given, fast-forwards 8000 years, and then wonders why we are so disconnected/domesticated/Traumatized today.

Postmodernists ask a lot of really good questions; they relentlessly critique and question Power and Objective Truth, and they understand that Modernism has failed us miserably. However, they offer nothing better! In fact, one could make the argument that telling a thoroughly domesticated/traumatized person that Truth is subjective is almost a cruel joke; without context for understanding subjective experience, without connection, subjective Truth is terrifying and overwhelming. It is no favor to tell a civilized person that their entire framework for understanding reality is false, you leave them stranded on a leaky dinghy in the Ocean, with no context for how to find meaning in the universe, no guidance for situating themselves within their human and biotic communities, no advice for restoring connection and returning to wildness.

To return to the Ship metaphor, what other option is there? What are the anti-modernists, the anarcho-primitivists, the rewilders, and Wildists doing? Well, we are either actively sabotaging the Ship by attempting to burn it down and drilling holes in the hull, or we are literally jumping Ship – actively seeking a return to wildness and embracing the dark icy chill of the unknown. We know that the wheel of political change is a joke, there is no Paradise, the Captain is a lying sadistic tyrant (who doesn’t actually exist), the postmodernist dinghy is doomed to failure, and to stay aboard the Ship is to go down with it… so we are done with the whole thing. This does not mean that we will escape any of the consequences of civilization or that we will somehow survive the impending collapse of the Ship and the rise of Wildness, it simply means that we are done rowing and believing in the Ship, in Paradise, in the Captain, or in any false hope of rescue. Like the postmodernists, we emphatically reject any notion of Objective Truth, but our rejection is grounded in the context of relationship and connection. Our growing connection to the wildness both inside and outside of us orients us as we abandon Ship, as we allow the great terrifying, wild mystery of the Ocean consume us, destroy us, heal us, and take us home.

Notes

^{^[1]} “Republic: Book Six” – Plato

^{^[2]} “Madness and Civilization” – Michel Foucault (1964)

^{^[3]} “Ship of Fools” – Sebastian Brant (1494)

^{^[4]} http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-of-fools

^{^[5]} “Dialectic of Enlightenment” – Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (1944)

^{^[6]} “The Portable Jung” – C.G. Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell (1976)

^{^[7]} “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” – C.G. Jung (1981)

^{^[8]} Frantz Fanon has explored this phenomenon of trauma-bonding, or colonization, exhaustively.I cannot more highly recommend his works for those interested in exploring the impacts of domestication on humans.

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy… But I knew it wasn’t a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head… The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Don’t believe me?

Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself. The landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

The Executive Branch: Whether it’s the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy, executive orders and specious legal justifications. Rest assured that no matter who wins this next presidential election, very little will change. The policies of the American police state will continue.

The Legislative Branch: It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 86 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

Shadow Government: America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He or she will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. In the latest move to insulate police from charges of misconduct, Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation to keep police officers’ names secret, ostensibly creating secret police forces.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

That brings me to the final and most important factor in bringing about America’s shift into authoritarianism: “we the people.” We are the government. Thus, if the government has become a tyrannical agency, it is because we have allowed it to happen, either through our inaction or our blind trust.

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who’s in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of the presidential candidates, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today. What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state. In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

Rent Strikes: ‘together we can defeat the housing market’

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Matt Broomfield

Source: RoarMag.org

As they revive a long-dormant form of protest, rent strikers in London and San Francisco must learn lessons from the great strikes of the 20th century.

When you can no longer afford to pay your rent, only one course of action remains: stop paying it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tenants are militating against the unbearable pressure of the housing market via the only locus of power available to them — going on rent strike.

Midtown Apartments, San Francisco

Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments.

But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

LaCrosby’s treatment is symptomatic of the way Midtown is being used as an asset to be stripped for cash, says long-time resident and Save Midtown organizer Jay Majitov. “This community is being displaced by the greed and avarice of property pimps preying on the weak and the disenfranchised,” he explains. Many of Majitov’s neighbors moved into Midtown after being socially cleansed from other areas of San Francisco in the 1960s, on what they understood was a rent-to-buy agreement.

But though Midtown paid off its collective mortgage in 2007, the city reneged on its agreement to hand the building over to the tenants. Instead, Midtowners were hit with a threefold increase in rent, far outstripping the maximum increase set by San Francisco rent controls. Appalled by this betrayal of trust, the tenants of 65 Midtown apartments have been withholding their rent increase since August 2015.

University College London

On the face of it, LaCrosby’s working-class neighbors in Midtown have little in common with the primarily middle-class, primarily white students of University College London. But the price of UCL accommodation has risen by 56 percent in the last six years, and the university extracts £16 million annually in pure profit from their residences. The halls remain shabby, cramped and infested with cockroaches.

As a result, around 150 students are currently striking for a 40 percent rent decrease. “UCL call residents in halls customers, not students,” says David Dahlborn of UCL, Cut The Rent (UCL-CTR). “It’s sheer exploitation.”

There have been rumblings about wider rent strikes across the British left for months, while US activists in Portland and elsewhere are now looking to copy Midtown’s example. Yet until a couple of years ago, no one was talking about rent strikes at all.

The problem(s) with rent strikes

Once a cornerstone of tenants’ rights activism, since the 1980s the rent strike has largely been absent from the arsenal of the left. The most famous rent strike in history occurred in 1915, when the fear of a Bolshevik insurrection forced the UK government to appease strikers in Glasgow by introducing rent controls. As the Communist threat faded after the second Red Scare, so too did the need to form housing policy with one eye on the Kremlin, and the government’s attitude toward rent strikers hardened accordingly.

Given that many rent strikes occurred in mutual relation with industrial strikes, their decline in popularity can partially be ascribed to the decimation of workers’ right to strike by Thatcher and her successors. The UK now loses a tenth as many days to industrial action as it did in the 1980s, and “strike” has become a politically toxic term. (UCL-CTR advise their activists to avoid the word altogether when door-knocking.) The fragmentation of the left and the castration of the trade unions have left Britain without left-wing superstructures capable of amplifying wildcat rent strikes into a broader social movement.

There are also delocalized issues inherent in the mode of protest. The vulnerable people who stand to gain the most from a reduction in rent are also those most imperiled by eviction: working-class people, people of color, single mothers and the disabled, often living in social housing. According to Jay Majitov, many Midtowners will be forced out of state or onto the street if their strike is broken. There is no legal protection for rent strikers in the UK or the USA.

Recrimination can be brutal: after the arrest of rent strikers in Kings’ Cross in 1960, crowds of protesters were baton-charged and violently dispersed by mounted police. Mary Barbour and her army of Glaswegian housewives were forced to fight off heavy-handed bailiffs with wet clothes, rotten food and flour-bombs. Barbour would stomp round the tenements whirling a football rattle to summon her troops as the “factor” moved in.

Midtown property managers Mercy Housing have kept up an aggressive campaign of intimidation, towing residents’ cars for minor infractions and muscling into pensioners’ homes. “They came in as an occupying force, a colonizer. There’s no regard for cultural sensitivity or the long-term tenants,” says Majitov. Tenants have been told they face eviction if their grandchildren visit more than twice a week, or if they hold barbecues on their own property. “I’m sorry, man, but barbecues are what we do,” Majitov adds.

Making rent strikes work

An industrial striker does no work and so loses her pay, but rent strikers actually save money while they agitate, as astronomic rents stop crippling working people and start depreciating from the profits of housing companies. The more unbearable the financial burden on the renters, the keener the loss suddenly felt by the landlord, in an efficacious reversal of power dynamics.

Last year, UCL-CTR organized students from UCL and SOAS in a successful strike, securing £400,000 compensation after the university conceded it had left students in unlivable conditions among cockroaches, rats and incessant building works. London’s first genuine rent strike for 40 years only involved 50 students, but each individual striker made a tangible, measurable impact on the university’s finances. Glasgow 1915 and UCL-SOAS 2015 are century-spanning testaments to the fact that a well-executed rent strike can be devastatingly effective.

Historically, successful mass rent strikes have benefited from a united left providing the infrastructure to exponentially increase the strike’s effect across multiple homes and into the industrial sphere, rather than leaving isolated strikers at the mercy of the bailiffs. A New York strike in 1907 relied on the backing of a strong, active Socialist Party, and the Glasgow strikes would not have succeeded without union support.

As noted above, the male-dominated superstructures traditionally capable of supporting mass direct action have diminished in size and power. If they want to achieve this vital escalation, 21^st century rent strikers must look to alternative, grassroots networks of activists.

Alternate support networks

Most successful rent strikes have been led by women. The distinction between rent strikes and industrial strikes should not be collapsed into a crude dichotomy between the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere. In 1907, 16-year-old Pauline Newman led strikes which secured rent reductions for 2000 New York families. She worked till 9pm in a textile factory before campaigning all night in the slums of Manhattan. Working-class women have always worked formally in the marketplace, as well as informally (and unpaid) in the home.

But Newman, the “East Side Joan of Arc”, was supported by housewives who spent the day going from tenement to tenement urging other families to join the strike. Working-class shop-floor networks intermeshed with female-dominated domestic networks. The Glasgow rent strike was sparked by landlords seeking to cow women into submission while their husbands were away fighting in the war. Again, Mary Barbour and her army rapidly spread information through the slums whenever the factor descended, militating via a social infrastructure which their landlords grossly underestimated.

Half of all British housing benefit recipients are single women. The average female flat-sharer in London earns £4236 less than her male counterpart, and twice as many women as men spend over half their salary on rent. Women have a disproportionate stake in the housing crisis, and male politicians continue to underestimate their ability to organize and resist. Though not a rent strike per se, the success of the Focus E15 mothers in resisting eviction attempts by Newham Council illustrates the continued power of localized, female, working-class support networks.

Interlocking working-class communities and communities of color have proven similarly capable of disseminating information and resistance. Rent strikers in 1930s Peckham relied on a rolling guard of unemployed laborers to defend their homes while successfully agitating for an improvement in living conditions. Majitov repeatedly emphasizes the importance of working-class solidarity in Midtown: “We don’t build apps, we don’t code. We drive buses and we deliver mail. And if this working-class community of color hadn’t stood together we would have been out a long time ago. ”

African-American Jean King (another woman) secured rent controls in St Louis after a year-long strike in 1969, while Majitov proudly notes that Save Midtown has the support of civil rights luminary Andrew Young, who successfully organized a rent strike alongside Martin Luther King in 1960s Chicago. Just like in Glasgow in 1907, Save Midtown have appointed tenant organizers with responsibility for contacting strikers across the development, and they are now reaching out to other African-American communities being abused by Mercy to launch a nationwide class action against the housing company.

The university bubble

A rent strike is a very different proposition for students, who are typically more privileged than the general population — a state of affairs maintained by the inaccessible rent conditions UCL-CTR are striking against. Many students have family homes to return to, and this can be leveraged against universities.

David Dahlborn explains: “When nothing had happened by the end of summer 2015, the international students who were on strike said ‘well, fuck it, I’m going home’. The university realized they couldn’t really send bailiffs to Mexico.” UCL capitulated soon after. Again, rent strikes reverse a power dynamic familiar to anyone who has tried to secure the return of a deposit from a suddenly evanescent landlord.

Students can also leverage the disjuncture between the public face of the academic university and its profit-making operations. “They say they’re concerned with education,” says UCL striker Aleksandra Tomaszewska. “But they’ve cut funding and bursaries while raising rent and tuition fees.”

Where housing companies are not hugely concerned with positive public relations, university authorities are at pains to emphasize that they provide a caring, nurturing environment. It would be a PR disaster for UCL to forcibly evict white, well-spoken, middle-class students. As with much student activism, student rent strikers can trade on their privilege to enjoy a much greater degree of security than their counterparts in council housing.

Universities constitute a ready-made network for the expansion of a strike. A successful rent strike at Sussex University in 1972-3 rapidly spread to 23 other universities. UCL-CTR is sharing advice and materials with student activists from SOAS, Imperial and Goldsmiths, as they seek to expand the current rent strike across the capital.

“Anyone could do it,” says Dahlborn, who repeatedly emphasizes the lateral organization of UCL-CTR. “Everybody on the strike is a potential organizer.” Students have more free time than workers; they have access to condensed bodies of left-leaning tenants paying vastly excessive rent; and they are keyed in to networks of information exchange between these bodies.

Rent strikes for the 21^st century

Paradigms established by 20^th century rent strikers could be instructive for those on the radical left wrangling about their relationship with Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Newman and Barbour instigated their strikes alone, but willingly worked alongside hierarchical, party-rooted structures to replicate these actions on a wider scale.

But as Dahlborn argues, a successful general rent strike must ultimately emerge from coordinated grassroots action, as multiple localized organizations “replicate and generalize” tactics that have worked well elsewhere. An emphasis on the dispersal of power underpins much recent left-wing strategizing, and rent strikes can operate particularly effectively through decentralized, lateral organization.

“Together we are powerful, and united we can defeat the market,” Dahlborn says. The unity he describes is not monolithic but dispersed, varied and multiple. Strikes should be generated through grassroots networks, not mandated by top-down frameworks.

Networks of university activists provide one such structure. London’s Radical Housing Network, which unites housing co-ops, community action groups and union representatives, is another. (This organization could also facilitate liaison between university students and working-class activists).

Roger Hallam’s concept of “Conditional Commitment” involves assuring potential strikers that a strike will only go ahead once a certain number of other tenants have committed to the action. Successfully implemented by UCL-CTRE, this system of collective responsibility would function well in enabling dispersed networks of rent strikers to operate in unison.

Industrial strikes expose the gulf between the evaluated worth of employees’ labor and the evaluated worth of the products they manufacture. The fact that a rent strike is even tenable as a concept illustrates the fact that tenants, like workers, are treated as profit-making organs.

Historically, the establishment has therefore reacted ferociously to rent strikes, which expose the cruelty of market logic. A general rent strike called by a hypothetical national tenants’ union would likely meet with overwhelming opposition. But it would be much more difficult for the establishment to defeat a network of localized, coordinated strikes breaking out on university campuses and council estates across the country.

A Phony Victim, and a Lot of Real Ones

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Justin Kelly’s cinematic doppelgänger: Fancy Lad from the film “Cabin Boy”

By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

In a recent open letter to the mayor (Julia Carrie Wong, “San Francisco tech worker: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff-raff,’“ The Guardian, Feb. 17), entitled tech bro Justin Keller whined that the sight of homeless people ruins his enjoyment of the local atmosphere in San Francisco. And when his family comes to visit, it just brings everybody down. Keller, owner of the Commando.io startup, added

I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it…. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.

But a closer look at the history of class privilege and ethnic cleansing in San Francisco suggests that “free market reality” isn’t as obvious as Keller makes it out to be.

About three days after reading about Keller’s traumatic encounters with the homeless (I can’t help thinking of “Cabin Boy” Chris Elliott — the Fancy Lad in a powdered wig — screaming in terror as a rabbit runs across his path), I learned of some other people in San Francisco with problems of their own.

Back in the ’60s, under the “Civic Redevelopment” program — San Francisco’s version of Urban Renewal — over 100 city blocks of black residential neighborhoods, businesses and churches deemed “slum areas” were bulldozed and their residents forcibly relocated. Under the cumulative effect of such Urban Renewal policies, in the ’60s and ’70s, the black population of San Francisco declined from 13.4% to less than 6% of the total. In 1968 the Midtown Park Apartments were opened to house residents “relocated” from one of the demolished neighborhoods, the Fillmore-Western Addition (“Petition — #BlackHomesMatter: Stop the displacement of long-term San Francisco residents at Midtown” Change.org).

Today, Midtown is a close-knit working-class community of long-time Black residents as well as immigrants from all over the world, including fixed-income seniors, disabled veterans, and children. Some tenants have lived at Midtown for over 40 years.

Despite decades of promises to convert the apartments to cooperative ownership by the residents, the city is once again collaborating with local real estate interests to rack rent the tenants, drive them out, and — ahem — “redevelop” the property.

Midtown residents have been working for decades towards the co-operative ownership of their homes and even paid off the mortgage for the Midtown property. Despite repeated promises from the City of San Francisco that Midtown residents would be eventual owners of their homes, two days before Christmas Eve in 2013, the City terminated the lease with the tenant’s association and without warning awarded it to Mercy Housing, a national Catholic affordable housing nonprofit. Since then, Mercy has raised the rent on many tenants (some up to 300%), implemented restrictive and discriminatory new rules, and has put forth plans to eventually demolish the entire Midtown property. Mercy Housing has also begun a program of harassing tenants – targeting seniors and tenants with low English literacy, cutting locks to enter apartments illegally and other tactics meant to intimidate tenants from fighting back.

The residents of 65 of the apartments have declared a tenant strike and are withholding rent in protest.

I guess that’s pretty small potatoes compared to the horror of having Mumsy and Daddy see a homeless person on their way to the grand tour of your new luxury condo.

Keller makes it clear, by the way, that his own idea of a “free market society” is fully compatible with such ethnic cleansing by the government. In his meltdown over the injustice of sensitive people like himself having to look at homeless people, he made positive reference to “street sweeps” by local government as a positive example:

I don’t have a magic solution … It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can.

So we live in the kind of “free market society” where local government, working on behalf of local real estate interests, can ethnically cleanse 100 city blocks of their inhabitants, in the process reducing the city’s black population by more than half, and then send uniformed thugs to drive people off the streets by the thousands for the crime of being homeless in public.

More generally, just about any city government is nothing but a showcase property of the local real estate interests, and its central function is to serve what Harvey Molotch called the “urban growth machine” by driving up real estate prices. And most of the many billions of dollars of wealth in Silicon Valley — with which tech bros like Keller are driving rents into the stratosphere — result from a business model centered on state-enforced “intellectual property” monopolies.

But it’s not as though these things are some kind of departure from the “free market” ideal, or that there has ever been a “free market society” at any point in history. Right-wing libertarians celebrate the 19th century Gilded Age as some kind of near laissez-faire utopia. But it never even remotely approached such a thing.

The so-called “laissez-faire” Gilded Age was heir to four centuries of land enclosure and other nullifications of customary peasant tenure rights in the land, mass enslavement, and the colonization and robbery of half the planet. Capitalism never emerged from a “free market”; it was a direct outgrowth of the “bastard feudalism” of the late Middle Ages, in which a major segment of the old landed classes reinvented themselves as agrarian capitalists and, in alliance with absolute monarchies and large mercantile interests, converted their own countries into prison societies and then forcibly conquered most of the world. The so-called “lassez-faire” 19th century was built directly atop the structure of inequality and concentrated property resulting from these centuries of robbery.

And the political centerpiece of the Gilded Age was the Great Betrayal of 1877, in which Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in return for the electoral votes of the southern states, despite his having a minority of the popular vote. This was a devil’s bargain in which the agrarian capitalists of the former Confederacy were allowed to institute a regional system of Apartheid, in return for giving industrial capitalists uncontested control the American state. Once this control was secured, the national government immediately began imposing a top-down corporate transformation of the economic system, and using the full power of the federal government to suppress the workers’ and farmers’ movements.

This groundwork having been established, the twentieth century saw an alliance between large corporations and the American state so massive that the very distinction between “public” and “private” ceased to have meaning. The tech industry itself was a direct outgrowth of the corporate state, as even a cursory overview of the role of the military-industrial complex in creating the cybernetic revolution and building the Internet backbone should tell you.

So no, Justin — this is not a “free market society,” and you and your ilk did not earn your wealth. As Ann Richards said of George Bush, “you were born on third base and thought you hit a triple.” But I like even better a saying of Martin Luther King Jr’s: “When you see a turtle sitting on a fencepost, you know he had help getting up there.”

If there’s anybody in the tech industry pushing for something resembling a genuine “free market society,” it’s not the venture capitalists and start-ups. It’s the people trying to free information work from the legacy of its origins in the bureaucracy of a total war state, and rebuild it on the basis of horizontalism, self-organization and p2p, rather than allowing it to fall under the control of new corporate bureaucracies through government-enforced “intellectual property” enclosure; the drivers unionizing Uber and Lyft; the people jailbreaking proprietary apps or developing open-source, cooperative versions of them; the hackers doing their best to destroy proprietary information culture; and the people organizing freelancers’ unions, cooperative temp agencies and other cost- and income-pooling platforms for precarious labor. If a “free market society” actually means anything, it also encompasses the struggles of the people rendered homeless by government collusion with capital, for the right to exist in public spaces. And above all, it includes the people displaced from their homes by brutal ethnic cleansing schemes, who are fighting to maintain occupancy of apartments of which they, by any acceptable moral standard, are the rightful owners.

So to tie this all up, let’s break the power of the real estate interests and tech monopolies in alliance with local government. I call on everyone reading this to support the Midtown rent strikers, to express unconditional solidarity for their resistance to eviction, and to unconditionally condemn local government, law enforcement, and the real estate interests that stand to benefit from this robbery. Force the city government to honor its promises and immediately transfer ownership to the residents of Midtown Park Apartment. At the very least, sign the petition in support of them and circulate the story of this injustice as widely as possible.

The 1% Versus the 99%: Realignment, Repression or Revolution

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Wealth Inequality Is Putting the US on Course for a Showdown

By Klaus Marre

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

The richest 20 Americans now own as much wealth as the country’s poorest 152 million people combined.

That is just one of the findings of noted inequality scholar and author Chuck Collins’s most recent report, “Billionaire Bonanza, The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us.”

In a wide-ranging interview, which will be available in its entirety as a podcast tomorrow, Collins likened the current situation to the “Gilded Age,” the time just before the turn of the 20^th century, when there was a similar accumulation of wealth at the top and political power was concentrated in the hands of a few rich men.

And Americans are slowly realizing that the extreme accumulation of wealth at the very top is hurting their own prospects. But grassroots efforts to redress economic inequality must contend with the political power that comes with great wealth.

This is an unstable situation. With pressure building for change but potent forces stacked against it, there are only three options, Collins told WhoWhatWhy: “Realignment, revolution or repression.”

Rules Rigged, and the Rich Get Richer

Back in the Gilded Age, the country managed to convert the pressure that was building from the bottom up into meaningful changes that resulted in a realignment of political power and the rise of the middle class. Those gains, however, are now being reversed. In fact, a new report found that, for the first time in decades, the middle class no longer constitute s the economic majority in the United States.

The shift toward increasing inequality began in the 1970s. At that time, Collins says (and research shows), “we stopped being an economy in which most people grew together” and instead became a “society that is dramatically pulled apart.”

Wages have now been stagnant for three decades and the median wealth of Americans has actually declined since 1990. At the same time, the rich have gotten richer. A lot richer.

Like the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the economic crisis of 2008 has been a wake-up call for the country. Polls historically have shown that people are indifferent to great wealth as long as they feel the rules are fair and that they at least have the option of moving up the ladder. But for many, the latest crash is changing that perception.

“In the economic meltdown of 2008, people realized the rules are rigged, that the big financial industry people … are tipping the scale in their favor,” Collins said. This has led to a perception that upward mobility in America is stalled — a perception supported by statistical data.

Collins believes that this sentiment has helped boost the candidacies of presidential hopefuls as diverse as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

The collapsing middle class, including groups like recent college students whose prospects are blighted by crushing debt burdens, represents an “angry and mobilized constituency.” These are the people whose dissatisfactions are articulated by populists like Trump.

At the other end of the spectrum, the success of self-avowed “democratic socialist” Sanders shows how fluid the situation is. Collins pointed out that the Vermont senator has been saying the same things for 30 years — but only now are they resonating with a larger proportion of the electorate.

Collins pointed out that Sanders is the only major candidate who does not need a billionaire bankrolling his primary campaign to do well in the polls.

One bloc of voters who can cause a tectonic shift in the near future are millennials, many of whom are resentful of the obstacles they face in pursuing the American dream while paying off their college loans. With 40 million households shouldering a burden of $1.2 trillion in college debt, Collins believes that if this segment of the population were to organize, they could force significant change.

“Otherwise, the machinery of inequality will just keep chugging along as it currently is and it will get more concentrated,” Collins said. In any case, all of the ingredients are there for a major political realignment.

“We’re headed for a showdown.”

[audio http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Chuck%20Collins%20WWW%20Final.mp3 ]

http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Chuck%20Collins%20WWW%20Final.mp3

Colonialism and Imperialism: Two Most Deadly Forms of Terrorism

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Vltchek

Source: Dissident Voice

Terrorism has many forms and many faces, but the most terrible of them is cold cruelty.

We are asked to believe that terrorists consist of dirty lunatics, running around with bombs, machine guns and explosive belts. That’s how we are told to imagine them.

Many of them are bearded; almost all are “foreign looking”, non-white, non-Western. In summary they are wife beaters, child rapists and Greek and Roman statue destroyers.

Actually, during the Cold War, there were some white looking “terrorists” – the left-wingers belonging to several revolutionary cells, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. But only now we are learning that the terrorist acts attributed to them were actually committed by the Empire, by several European right-wing governments and intelligence services. You remember, the NATO countries were blowing up those trains inside the tunnels, or bombing entire train stations…

It “had to be done”, in order to discredit the Left, just to make sure that people would not become so irresponsible as to vote for the Communists or true Socialists.

There were also several Latin American ‘terror’ groups – the revolutionary movements fighting for freedom and against oppression, mainly against Western colonialism. They had to be contained, liquidated, and if they held power, overthrown.

But terrorists became really popular in the West only after the Soviet Union and the Communist Block were destroyed through thousands of economic, military and propaganda means, and the West suddenly felt too exposed, so alone without anyone to fight. Somehow it felt that it needed to justify its monstrous oppressive acts in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

It needed a new “mighty”, really mighty, enemy to rationalize its astronomical military and intelligence budgets. It was not good enough to face a few hundred ‘freaks’ somewhere inside the Colombian jungle or in Northern Ireland or Corsica. There had to be something really huge, something matching that ‘evil’ Soviet “threat”.

Oh how missed that threat was, suddenly! Just a threat of course; not the danger of egalitarian and internationalist ideals…

And so the West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. Islam is big and mighty enough, to scare the shit out of the middle class housewives in some Western suburb! And on top of that, it had to be contained anyway, as it was essentially too socialist and too peaceful.

At that time in history, all great secular and socialist leaders of Muslim countries, (like in Iran, Indonesia and Egypt), were overthrown by the West, their legacy spat on, or they were simply banned.

But that was not enough for the West!

In order to make Islam a worthy enemy, the Empire had to first radicalize and pervert countless Muslim movements and organizations, then create the new ones, consequently training, arming and financing them, so they could really look frightening enough.

There is of course one more important reason why “terrorism”, particularly Muslim “terrorism”, is so essential for the survival of Western doctrines, exceptionalism and global dictatorship: it justifies the West’s notion of absolute cultural and moral superiority.

This is how it works:

For centuries, the West has been behaving like a mad bloodthirsty monster. Despite the self-glorifying propaganda being spread by Western media outlets all over the world, it was becoming common knowledge that the Empire was raping, murdering and plundering in virtually all corners of the Globe. A few more decades and the world would see the West exclusively as a sinister and toxic disease. Such a scenario had to be prevented by all means!

And so the ideologues and propagandists of the Empire came up with a new and brilliant formula: Let’s create something that looks and behaves even worse than we do, and then we could trumpet that we are still actually the most reasonable and tolerant culture on earth!

And let’s make a real pirouette: let’s fight our own creation – let’s fight it in the name of freedom and democracy!”

This is how the new generation; the new breed of “terrorist” was born. And it lives! It is alive and well! It is multiplying like Capek’s Salamanders.

*****Western terrorism is not really discussed, although its most extreme and violent forms are battering the world relentlessly and have for a long time, with hundreds of millions of victims piling up everywhere.

Even the legionnaires and gladiators of the Empire, like the Mujaheddin, Al-Qaida, or ISIS, can never come close to the savagery that has been demonstrated time and again by their British, French, Belgian, German or US masters. Of course they are trying very hard to match their gurus and bread-givers, but they are just not capable of their violence and brutality.

It takes “Western culture” to butcher some 10 million people in just one single geographic area, in almost one go!

*****So what is real terrorism, and how could ISIS and others follow its lead? They say that ISIS is decapitating their victims. Bad enough. But who is their teacher?

For centuries, the empires of Europe were murdering, torturing, raping and mutilating people on all continents of the world. Those who were not doing so directly, were “investing” into colonialist expeditions, or sending its people to join genocidal battalions.

King Leopold II and his cohorts managed to exterminate around 10 million people of Western and Central Africa, in what is now known as the Congo. He was hunting people down like animals, forcing them to work on his rubber plantations. If he thought that they were not filling up his coffers fast enough, he did not hesitate to chop off their hands, or burn entire village populations inside their huts, alive.

10 million victims vanished. 10 million! And it did not take place in some distant past, in the “dark ages”, but in the 20th century, under the rule of so-called constitutional monarchy, and self-proclaimed democracy. How does it compare with the terrorism that is ruling over the territories occupied by ISIS? Let’s compare numbers and brutality level!

And the Democratic Republic of Congo has, since 1995, lost again close to 10 million people in a horrid orgy of terror, unleashed by the West’s proxies, Rwanda and Uganda (see the trailer to my film “Rwanda Gambit”).

Germans performed holocausts in South-Western Africa, in what is now Namibia. The Herero tribe was exterminated, or at least close to 90% of it was. People were first kicked out from their land and from their homes, and driven into the desert. If they survived, the German pre-Nazi expeditions followed, using bullets and other forms of mass killing. Medical experiments on humans were performed, to prove the superiority of the Germanic nation and the white race.

These were just innocent civilians; people whose only crime was that they were not white, and were sitting on land occupied and violated by the Europeans.

The Taliban never came close to this, or even ISIS!

To this day, the Namibian government is demanding the return of countless heads severed from its people: heads that were cut off and then sent to the University of Freiburg and several hospitals in Berlin, for medical experiments.

Just imagine, ISIS chopping thousands of European heads, in order to perform medical experiments aiming to demonstrate the superiority of the Arab race. It would be absolutely unthinkable!

Local people were terrorized in virtually all colonies grabbed by Europe, something that I have described in detail in my latest 840-page book “Exposing Lies of the Empire”.

What about the Brits and their famines, which they were using as population control and intimidation tactics in India! In Bengal at least 5 million died in 1943 alone, 5.5 million in 1876-78, 5 million in 1896-97, to name just a few terrorist acts committed by the British Empire against a defenseless population forced to live under its horrid and oppressive terrorist regime!

What I have mentioned above are just 3 short chapters from the long history of Western terrorism. An entire encyclopedia could be compiled on the topic.

But all this sits far from Western consciousness. European and North American masses prefer not to know anything about the past and the present. As far as they are concerned, they rule the world because they are free, bright and hard working. Not because for centuries their countries have plundered and murdered, and above all terrorized the world forcing it into submission.

The elites know everything, of course. And the more they know, the more they put that knowledge to work.

Terrorist trade and experience are passed on from Western masters to their new Muslim recruits.

The Mujahideen, Al-Qaida, ISIS – on closer examination, their tactics of intimidation and terrorization are not original at all. They are built on imperialist and colonialist practices of the West.

News about this, or even about the terror that has been inflicted on the Planet by the West, is meticulously censored. You would never see them on the programs broadcast by the BBC, or read about them in mainstream newspapers and magazines.

On the other hand, the violence and ruthlessness of the client terrorist organizations are constantly highlighted. They are covered in their tiniest detail, repeated, and “analyzed”.

Everybody is furious, horrified! The UN is “deeply concerned”, Western governments are “outraged”, and the Western public “has had enough – it does not want immigrants from those terrible countries that are breeding terrorism and violence”.

The West “simply has to get involved”. And here comes the War on Terror.

It is a war against the West’s own Frankenstein. It is a war that is never meant to be won. Because if it is won, god forbid, there would have to be peace, and peace means cutting defense budgets and also dealing with the real problems of our Planet.

Peace would mean the West looking at its own past. It would mean thinking about justice and rearranging the entire power structures of the Planet. And that can never be allowed.

And so the West is “playing” war games; it is “fighting” its own recruits (or pretending to fight them), while innocent people are dying.

No part of the world, except the West, would be able to invent and unleash something so vile and barbaric as ISIS or Al-Nusra!

Look closer at the strategy of these group-implants: it has no roots in Muslim culture whatsoever. But it is fully inspired by the Western philosophy of colonialist terrorism: “If you don’t fully embrace our dogmas and religion, then we will cut off your head, slash your throat, rape your entire family or burn your village or city to the ground. We will destroy your grand cultural heritage as we did in South America 500 years ago, and in so many other places.”

And so on and so on! It would really require great discipline not to see the connections!

*****In 2006 I was visiting my friend, a former President of Indonesia, and a great progressive Muslim leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, (known in Indonesia as “Gus Dur”). Our meeting was held at the headquarters of his massive Muslim body Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). At that time the NU was the biggest Muslim organization in the world.

We were discussing capitalism and how it was destroying and corrupting Indonesia. Gus Dur was a “closet socialist”, and that was one of the main reasons why the servile pro-Western Indonesian “elites” and the military deposed him out of the Presidency in 2001.

When we touched on the topic of “terrorism”, he suddenly declared in his typically soft, hardly audible voice: “I know who blew up the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. It was done by our own intelligence services, in order to justify the increase in their budget, as well as aid that they have been receiving from abroad.”

Of course, the Indonesian army, intelligence services and police consist of a special breed of humans. For several decades, since 1965, they have been brutally terrorizing their own population, when the pro-Western coup toppled the progressive President Sukarno and brought to power a fascist military clique, backed by the predominantly Christian business gang. This terror took between 2-3 million lives in Indonesia itself, as well as in East Timor and (until now) in occupied and thoroughly plundered Papua.

3 genocides in only 5 decades!

The Indonesian coup was one of the greatest terrorist acts in the history of mankind. The rivers were clogged with corpses and changed their color to red.

Why? So that capitalism would survive and Western mining companies could have their booty, at the expense of a completely ruined Indonesian nation. So the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) would not be able to win elections, democratically.

But in the West, those 1965 intensive massacres planned by the Empire were never described as “terrorism”. Blowing up a hotel or a pub always is however, especially if they are frequented by Western clientele.

Now Indonesia has its own groups of “terrorists”. They returned from Afghanistan where they fought on behalf of the West against the Soviet Union. They are returning from the Middle East now. The recent attacks in Jakarta could be just a foreplay, a well-planned beginning of something much bigger, maybe an opening of the new “front” of toy soldiers of the Empire in Southeast Asia.

For the West and its planners – the more chaos the better.

Had Abdurrahman Wahid been allowed to stay as the President of Indonesia, there would, most likely, have been no terrorism. His country would have undergone socialist reforms, instituted social justice, rehabilitated Communists and embraced secularism.

In socially balanced societies, terrorism does not thrive.

That would be unacceptable to the Empire. That would mean – back to Sukarno’s day! The most populous Muslim nation on earth cannot be allowed to go its own way, to aim for socialism, and to annihilate terrorist cells.

It has to be at the edge. It has to be ready to be used as a pawn. It has to be scared and scary! And so it is.

*****The games the West is playing are complex and elaborate. They are murky and nihilist. They are so destructive and brutal that even the sharpest analysts are often questioning their own eyes and judgments: “Could all this be really happening?”

The brief answer is: “Yes it can. Yes it is, for many long decades and centuries.”

Historically, terrorism is a native Western weapon. It was utilized freely by people like Lloyd George, a British PM, who refused to sign the agreement banning aerial bombardment of civilians, using unshakeable British logic: “We reserve the right to bomb those niggers.” Or Winston Churchill who was in favor of gassing the ‘lower grade’ of races, like Kurds and Arabs.

That is why, when some outsider, a country like Russia, gets involved, launching its genuine war against terrorist groups, the entire West is consumed by panic. Russia is spoiling their entire game! It is ruining a beautifully crafted neo-colonialist equilibrium.

Just look how lovely everything is: after killing hundreds of millions all over the Globe, the West is now standing as the self-proclaimed champion of human rights and freedom. It is still terrorizing the world, plundering it, fully controlling it – but it is being accepted as the supreme leader, a benevolent advisor, and the only trustworthy part of the world.

And almost nobody is laughing.

Because everyone is scared!

Its brutal legions in the Middle East and Africa are destabilizing entire countries, their origins are easily traceable, but almost no one is daring to do such tracing. Some of those who have tried – died.

The more frightening these invented, manufactured and implanted terrorist monsters, the more beautiful the West looks. It is all gimmicks. It has roots in advertisement, and in hundreds of years of propaganda apparatus.

The West then pretends to fight those deep forces of darkness. It uses powerful, “righteous” language, which has clear bases in Christian fundamentalist dogma.

An entire mythology is unleashed; it feels like Wagner’s “Ring”.

The terrorists represent evil, not the enormous expenditure from the coffers of the US State Department, the European Union and NATO. They are more evil than the Devil himself!

And the West, riding on the white horse, slightly pissed on wine but always in good humor, is portrayed as both a victim and the main adversary of those satanic terrorist groups.

It is one incredible show. It is one terrible farce. Look underneath the horseman’s mask: look at those exposed teeth; that deadly grin! Look at his red eyes, full of greed, lust and cruelty.

And let us never forget: colonialism and imperialism are two most deadly forms of terrorism. And these are still the two main weapons of that horseman who is choking the world!

André Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker, and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest book is Exposing Lies of the Empire. He also wrote, with Noam Chomsky, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter. Read other articles by Andre.

The US economy has not recovered and will not recover

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Intrepid Report

The US economy died when middle class jobs were offshored and when the financial system was deregulated.

Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.

However, jobs offshoring also offshored US GDP and consumer purchasing power. Despite promises of a “New Economy” and better jobs, the replacement jobs have been increasingly part-time, lowly-paid jobs in domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses and bartenders.

The offshoring of US manufacturing and professional service jobs to Asia stopped the growth of consumer demand in the US, decimated the middle class, and left insufficient employment for college graduates to be able to service their student loans. The ladders of upward mobility that had made the United States an “opportunity society” were taken down in the interest of higher short-term profits.

Without growth in consumer incomes to drive the economy, the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan substituted the growth in consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in consumer income. Under the Greenspan regime, Americans’ stagnant and declining incomes were augmented with the ability to spend on credit. One source of this credit was the rise in housing prices that the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy made possible. Consumers could refinance their now higher-valued home at lower interest rates and take out the “equity” and spend it.

The debt expansion, tied heavily to housing mortgages, came to a halt when the fraud perpetrated by a deregulated financial system crashed the real estate and stock markets. The bailout of the guilty imposed further costs on the very people that the guilty had victimized.

Under Fed Chairman Bernanke, the economy was kept going with Quantitative Easing, a massive increase in the money supply in order to bail out the “banks too big to fail.” Liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve found its way into stock and bond prices and made those invested in these financial instruments richer. Corporate executives helped to boost the stock market by using the companies’ profits and by taking out loans in order to buy back the companies’ stocks, thus further expanding debt.

Those few benefitting from inflated financial asset prices produced by Quantitative Easing and buy-backs are a much smaller percentage of the population than was affected by the Greenspan consumer credit expansion. A relatively few rich people are an insufficient number to drive the economy.

The Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy was designed to support the balance sheets of the mega-banks and denied Americans interest income on their savings. This policy decreased the incomes of retirees and forced the elderly to reduce their consumption and/or draw down their savings more rapidly, leaving no safety net for heirs.

Using the smoke and mirrors of under-reported inflation and unemployment, the US government kept alive the appearance of economic recovery. Foreigners fooled by the deception continue to support the US dollar by holding US financial instruments.

The official inflation measures were “reformed” during the Clinton era in order to dramatically understate inflation. The measures do this in two ways. One way is to discard from the weighted basket of goods that comprises the inflation index those goods whose price rises. In their place, inferior lower-priced goods are substituted.

For example, if the price of New York strip steak rises, round steak is substituted in its place. The former official inflation index measured the cost of a constant standard of living. The “reformed” index measures the cost of a falling standard of living.

The other way the “reformed” measure of inflation understates the cost of living is to discard price rises as “quality improvements.” It is true that quality improvements can result in higher prices. However, it is still a price rise for the consumer as the former product is no longer available. Moreover, not all price rises are quality improvements; yet many prices rises that are not can be misinterpreted as “quality improvements.”

These two “reforms” resulted in no reported inflation and a halt to cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. The fall in Social Security real incomes also negatively impacted aggregate consumer demand.

The rigged understatement of inflation deceived people into believing that the US economy was in recovery. The lower the measure of inflation, the higher is real GDP when nominal GDP is deflated by the inflation measure. By understating inflation, the US government has overstated GDP growth.

What I have written is easily ascertained and proven; yet the financial press does not question the propaganda that sustains the psychology that the US economy is sound. This carefully cultivated psychology keeps the rest of the world invested in dollars, thus sustaining the House of Cards.

John Maynard Keynes understood that the Great Depression was the product of an insufficiency of consumer demand to take off the shelves the goods produced by industry. The post-WW II macroeconomic policy focused on maintaining the adequacy of aggregate demand in order to avoid high unemployment. The supply-side policy of President Reagan successfully corrected a defect in Keynesian macroeconomic policy and kept the US economy functioning without the “stagflation” from worsening “Philips Curve” trade-offs between inflation and employment. In the 21st century, jobs offshoring has depleted consumer demand’s ability to maintain US full employment.

The unemployment measure that the presstitute press reports is meaningless as it counts no discouraged workers, and discouraged workers are a huge part of American unemployment. The reported unemployment rate is about 5%, which is the U-3 measure that does not count as unemployed workers who are too discouraged to continue searching for jobs.

The US government has a second official unemployment measure, U-6, that counts workers discouraged for less than one-year. This official rate of unemployment is 10%.

When long term (more than one year) discouraged workers are included in the measure of unemployment, as once was done, the US unemployment rate is 23%. (See John Williams, shadowstats.com)

Fiscal and monetary stimulus can pull the unemployed back to work if jobs for them still exist domestically. But if the jobs have been sent offshore, monetary and fiscal policy cannot work.

What jobs offshoring does is to give away US GDP to the countries to which US corporations move the jobs. In other words, with the jobs go American careers, consumer purchasing power and the tax base of state, local, and federal governments. There are only a few American winners, and they are the shareholders of the companies that offshored the jobs and the executives of the companies who receive multi-million dollar “performance bonuses” for raising profits by lowering labor costs. And, of course, the economists, who get grants, speaking engagements, and corporate board memberships for shilling for the offshoring policy that worsens the distribution of income and wealth. An economy run for a few only benefits the few, and the few, no matter how large their incomes, cannot consume enough to keep the economy growing.

In the 21st century US economic policy has destroyed the ability of real aggregate demand in the US to increase. Economists will deny this, because they are shills for globalism and jobs offshoring. They misrepresent jobs offshoring as free trade and, as in their ideology, free trade benefits everyone, claim that America is benefitting from jobs offshoring. Yet, they cannot show any evidence whatsoever of these alleged benefits. (See my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West.)

As an economist, it is a mystery to me how any economist can think that a population that does not produce the larger part of the goods that it consumes can afford to purchase the goods that it consumes. Where does the income come from to pay for imports when imports are swollen by the products of offshored production?

We were told that the income would come from better-paid replacement jobs provided by the “New Economy,” but neither the payroll jobs reports nor the US Labor Department’s projections of future jobs show any sign of this mythical “New Economy.”

There is no “New Economy.” The “New Economy” is like the neoconservatives promise that the Iraq war would be a six-week “cake walk” paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, not a $3 trillion dollar expense to American taxpayers (according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and a war that has lasted the entirety of the 21st century to date, and is getting more dangerous.

The American “New Economy” is the American Third World economy in which the only jobs created are low productivity, low paid nontradable domestic service jobs incapable of producing export earnings with which to pay for the goods and services produced offshore for US consumption.

The massive debt arising from Washington’s endless wars for neoconservative hegemony now threaten Social Security and the entirety of the social safety net. The presstitute media are blaming not the policy that has devastated Americans, but, instead, the Americans who have been devastated by the policy.

Earlier this month I posted readers’ reports on the dismal job situation in Ohio, Southern Illinois, and Texas. In the March issue of Chronicles, Wayne Allensworth describes America’s declining rural towns and once great industrial cities as consequences of “globalizing capitalism.” A thin layer of very rich people rule over those “who have been left behind”—a shrinking middle class and a growing underclass. According to a poll last autumn, 53 percent of Americans say that they feel like strangers in their own country.

Most certainly these Americans have no political representation. As Republicans and Democrats work to raise the retirement age in order to reduce Social Security outlays, Princeton University experts report that the mortality rates for the white working class are rising. The US government will not be happy until no one lives long enough to collect Social Security.

The United States government has abandoned everyone except the rich.

In the opening sentence of this article, I said that the two murderers of the American economy were jobs offshoring and financial deregulation. Deregulation greatly enhanced the ability of the large banks to financialize the economy. Financialization is the diversion of income streams into debt service. When debt service absorbs a large amount of the available income, the economy experiences debt deflation. The service of debt leaves too little income for purchases of goods and services and prices fall.

Michael Hudson, whom I recently wrote about, is the expert on financialization. His book, Killing the Host, which I recommended to you, tells the complete story. Briefly, financialization is the process by which creditors capitalize an economy’s economic surplus into interest payments to themselves. Perhaps an example would be a corporation that goes into debt in order to buy back its shares. The corporation achieves a temporary boost in its share prices at the cost of years of interest payments that drain the corporation of profits and deflate its share price.

Michael Hudson stresses the conversion of the rental value of real estate into mortgage payments. He emphasizes that classical economists wanted to base taxation not on production, but on economic rent. Economic rent is value due to location or to a monopoly position. For example, beachfront property has a higher price because of location. The difference in value between beachfront and non-beachfront property is economic rent, not a produced value. An unregulated monopoly can charge a price for a service that is higher than the price that would bring that service unto the market.

The proposal to tax economic rent does not mean taxing you on the rent that you pay your landlord or taxing your landlord on the rent that you pay him such that he ceases to provide the housing. By economic rent Hudson means, for example, the rise in land values due to public infrastructure projects such as roads and subway systems. The rise in the value of land opened by a new road and housing and in commercial space along a new subway line is not due to any action of the property owners. This rise in value could be taxed in order to pay for the project instead of taxing the income of the population in general. Instead, the rise in land values raises appraisals and the amount that creditors are willing to lend on the property. New purchasers and existing owners can borrow more on the property, and the larger mortgages divert the increased land valuation into interest payments to creditors. Lenders end up as the major beneficiaries of public projects that raise real estate prices.

Similarly, unless the economy is financialized to such an extent that mortgage debt can no longer be serviced, when central banks lower interest rates property values rise, and this rise can be capitalized into a larger mortgage.

Another example would be property tax reductions and legislation such as California’s Proposition 13 that freeze in whole or part the property tax base. The rise in real estate values that escape taxation are capitalized into larger mortgages. New buyers do not benefit. The beneficiaries are the lenders who capture the rise in real estate prices in interest payments.

Taxing economic rent would prevent the financial system from capitalizing the rent into debt instruments that pay interest to the financial sector. Considering the amount of rents available to be taxed, taxing rents would free production from income and sales taxation, thus lowering consumer prices and freeing labor and productive capital from taxation.

With so much of land rent already capitalized into debt instruments shifting the tax burden to economic rent would be challenging. Nevertheless, Hudson’s analysis shows that financialization, not wage suppression, is the main instrument of exploitation and takes place via the financial system’s conversion of income streams into interest payments on debt.

I remember when mortgage service was restricted to one-quarter of household income. Today mortgage service can eat up half of household income. This extraordinary growth crowds out the production of goods and services as less of household income is available for other purchases.

Michael Hudson and I bring a total indictment of the neoliberal economics profession, “junk economists” as Hudson calls them.

From Shanghai to San Francisco, the rent is too damn high

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jerome Roos

Source: RoarMag.org

Capitalism is a strange beast. Though incredibly resilient in the face of systemic crises and remarkably adaptive to ever-changing conditions, it never truly overcomes its structural contradictions. As the Marxist geographer David Harvey often points out, it merely displaces them in space and time.

The global financial crisis of 2008-’09 has been no exception in this regard. In fact, the very response to that calamity has already laid the foundations for the next big crisis. And just like its immediate predecessor, it looks like this one will be centered, at least in part, on a massive speculative housing bubble.

Officials and investors may still be turning a blind eye, but the warning signs are flashing red everywhere. From Shanghai to San Francisco, from London to L.A., a wave of real-estate speculation is washing over the world, gentrifying popular neighborhoods, pushing housing prices and rents to historically unprecedented highs, and forcing low-income tenants out of their increasingly unaffordable homes. The result is widespread social displacement and deepening discontent.

Unlike the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-’08, which was centered on the complex packaging of risky loans to low-income households across the U.S., the new housing crisis is a product of real-estate speculation in the world’s major metropolitan areas. Take London, which according to the Financial Times finds itself confronted with “its biggest housing challenge since the Victorian era.” Residential property prices in the British capital have risen 44 percent since 2008, and are now well above their pre-crisis highs.

According to an analysis by the UK charity Shelter, there are currently only 43 homes in Greater London that could still be considered affordable to the average first-time buyer, pushing everyone but the richest of the rich into the rental market, where landlords are known to exact more than a pound of flesh in return for a roof and running water. In the majority of London boroughs, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now over £1,000 per month. On average, Londoners spend about 60 percent of their income on rent.

A similar picture has emerged in New York, where property prices — in the words of the BBC — “have gone turbo-ballistic, as global capital in search of a safe haven has rocketed in.” The average monthly rent in Manhattan now exceeds $3,800, even as half of New York’s urban population lives near or below the poverty line. As a gubernatorial candidate for New York once aptly pointed out, “the rent is too damn high.”

Again, the unsurprising result has been widespread social displacement. Al Jazeera recently reported that “evictions [in New York] have reached epidemic proportions and created a new homeless crisis born out of an affordable housing shortage.” Other major cities like Boston and Los Angeles are not doing much better, as gentrification proceeds apace from coast to coast. Today, even the downtown area of derelict Detroit is rapidly gentrifying, while much of the city still languishes in a state of post-industrial decline.

It is San Francisco, however, that has emerged in recent years as the most paradigmatic case of unbridled gentrification. With median monthly rent hitting $3,530, the city has become the most expensive in the U.S. Desperate to get rid of old tenants who still enjoy rent controls and attract high-income professionals from the tech industry in their place, landlords have gone on an eviction spree: in the past five years, the eviction rate has soared more than 50 percent. Immigrant and working class neighborhoods like the Mission have been reduced to multi-million dollar playgrounds for the “bohemian bourgeois”, complete with snazzy coffee places and expensive vegan restaurants.

The urban sociologist Saskia Sassen has encapsulated the nature of this violent process in strikingly succinct terms: the social reality of financialized capitalism, she argues in her book Expulsions, is all about “systemic complexity producing simple brutality.” And as usual, those feeling the brunt of this brutality are the urban poor and marginalized communities, especially immigrants and people of color, who — along with artists and precarious youths — are increasingly being displaced from city centers towards the periphery.

It is not just cities in the advanced capitalist countries that have been undergoing this turbulent process of urban stratification: the major metropolitan areas of the Global South are firing on all cylinders as well — with the notable difference being that the bubble in emerging markets already appears to be in the process of popping, raising fears of a new international financial crisis centered on China, Brazil and Turkey, among others.

In China’s biggest cities, property prices shot up 60 percent between 2008 and 2014, with residential prices in Shanghai and Beijing rapidly closing in on those of London, Paris and New York. According the consultancy firm McKinsey, some$9 trillion — almost half of China’s total debt, excluding financial sector debt — “is directly or indirectly tied to real estate.” Price increases have exceeded the rise in income by 30 percent in Shanghai and by 80 percent in Beijing.

Other major cities that have been experiencing similar real-estate booms include São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where residential property prices in the most-desired neighborhoods doubled between 2008 and 2013, and Istanbul, along with the other big cities of Turkey, where a credit-fueled construction boom has accounted for 30 percent of GDP in the period since Erdogan’s AKP came to power on the heels of a previous financial crisis in 2002. Since 2007, property prices in Turkey have shot up 36 percent.

To be sure, the local specificities vary from place to place. In London, the housing crisis has been fueled at least in part by massive capital inflows from wealthy elites in countries like China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, as well as the municipality’s failure to build adequate housing for the large influx of new inhabitants. In Barcelona, by contrast, it has been driven primarily by the tourism industry, while in San Francisco it is largely driven by the tech industry. In Rio, the process has been intensified by preparations for the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, while widespread cronyism and corruption have been an important catalyst for the construction boom in Istanbul.

Yet for all differences between them, the gentrification processes and housing crises in each of these global cities share two crucial commonalities: first in their causes, and second in their consequences.

In terms of the underlying causes, the new housing crisis should be seen as a direct outcome of the response to the previous crisis, which was based on massive bank bailouts and central banks opening the floodgates of cheap credit. With the notable exception of the ECB, which only embarked on quantitative easing earlier this year, the world’s largest central banks dropped interest rates to historic lows, kept them there for years on end, and pumped trillions of dollars of fresh liquidity into the global financial system, effectively subsidizing private investors out of bankruptcy.

This unlimited flow of free money (for the 1% only, of course) produced a tide of surplus capital that had to be absorbed somewhere. With “secular stagnation” taking hold across the developed world, investors were still wary to direct this surplus towards the productive economy, where profit margins remained relatively low. And so, in their insatiable quest for yield, they turned to speculative investment in various asset classes instead: stocks, bonds — and, once again, real-estate. The profits were phenomenal. By 2012-’13, the resulting speculative boom had led U.S. corporate profits back to a new all-time high.

But now that the first signs of overheating have become apparent, we can already begin to identify the second crucial commonality between today’s urban housing crises; a commonality that sets the current crisis apart from the last one: in almost all of the major world cities today, ordinary citizens are already actively mobilizing and fighting back against processes of gentrification, dispossession and displacement, building innovative social movements and powerful political platforms in the process.

From urban insurrections to defend the last-remaining green space of Istanbul or the favelas and public transport system of Rio, to the local direct action of anti-gentrification activists targeting Google buses in the San Francisco Bay Area and reclaiming housing projects in London, it is already clear that the next major crisis, unlike the last one, will not go uncontested.

Of all the urban struggles that have ignited across the globe in recent years, the radically democratic municipal platforms of Spain are undoubtedly among the most advanced and the most promising. With the left-wing anti-eviction activist Ada Colau now holding the mayoralty of Barcelona, an important sign is being sent to the landlords, gentrifiers and real-estate speculators of the world: even in the deepest crises, there will be a limit to your capacity to evict us from our homes and destroy our cities — and that limit, ultimately, is us.

Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @JeromeRoos.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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