Politicians Exploit School Shooting While Ignoring Bombing Victims

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Ron Paul

Following the recent Oregon school shooting, many politicians rushed to the microphones to call for new gun control laws. President Obama even called on gun control supporters to “politicize” the shooting, while some members of Congress worked to establish a special commission on gun violence.

The reaction to the shooting stands in stark contrast to the reaction to the US military’s bombing of an Afghanistan hospital run by the international humanitarian (and Nobel Peace Prize winning) group Doctors Without Borders.

Our Nobel Peace Prize winning president did apologize to his fellow Nobel laureate for the bombing. However, President Obama has not “politicized” this tragedy by using it to justify ending military involvement in Afghanistan. No one in Congress is pushing for a special commission to examine the human costs of US militarism, and the mainstream media has largely ignored Doctors Without Borders’ accusation that the bombing constitutes a war crime.

The reason for the different reactions to these two events is that politicians prefer to focus on events they can “politicize” to increase government power. In contrast, politicians ignore incidents that raise uncomfortable questions about US foreign policy.

If the political and media elites were really interested in preventing future mass shootings, they would repeal the federal “gun-free” schools law, for example. By letting shooters know that their intended victims are defenseless, the gun-free schools law turns schoolchildren into easy targets.

Even some who oppose gun control are using the shooting to justify expanding federal power instead of trying to repeal unconstitutional laws. Some opponents of new gun control laws say Congress should expand the federal role in identifying, tracking, and treating those with “mental health problems.” This ignores the fact that many shooters were using psychotropic drugs prescribed by a mental health professional when they committed the horrible acts. Furthermore, creating a system to identify and track anyone with a “mental health problem” could deny respect for individuals’ Second Amendment and other rights because they perhaps once sought counseling for depression while going through a divorce or coping with a loved one’s passing.

While our political and media elites are eager to debate how much liberty people must sacrifice for safety, they are desperate to avoid debating the morality of our foreign policy. To admit that the US military sometimes commits immoral acts is to admit that the US government is not an unalloyed force for good. Even many proponents of our recent wars support using the US military for “humanitarian” purposes. Thus they are as reluctant as the neoconservatives to question the fundamental goodness of US foreign policy.

Anyone who raises constitutional or moral objections to the US use of drones, bombs, indefinite detention, and torture risks being attacked as anti-American and soft on terrorism. The smear of “terrorist apologist” is also hurled at those who dare suggest that it is our interventionist foreign policy, not a hatred of freedom, that causes people in other countries to dislike the United States. Which is a more logical explanation for why someone would resent America — a family member killed in a drone attack launched by the US military or rage over our abundance of liberty?

The disparate reactions to the Oregon school shooting and the Afghanistan hospital bombing shows the political class is unwilling and unable to acknowledge that the US government cannot run the world, run our lives, or run the economy. Clearly, politicians will never stop expanding government and give us back our lost liberties unless and until the people demand it.

Why Hillary Won the Debate (Even though She Didn’t)

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Leupp

Source: Dissident Voice

CNN and Facebook co-sponsored last week’s Democratic presidential frontrunners’ “debate.” After the event, CNN conducted a poll. “Who won the debate?” it asked. The result: 83% Bernie Sanders; 12% Hillary Clinton.

Facebook also took a poll. “Who do you think won?” Over 79% responded, “Bernie Sanders.”

The CNN editors’ take? “CLINTON’S CONFIDANT SWEEP.”

Slate conducted a poll. “Who won the presidential debate?” asked the magazine. 75% of respondents said Bernie Sanders; 18% gave it to Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton won,” reported Slate “senior writer” Josh Vorhees exuberantly. “She just needed to be solid in the debate. Instead, she was spectacular.”

Spectacular! with 18% of Slate’s own polling numbers. Go figure.

“Who do you think won?” asked Time Magazine. The response? Bernie Sanders: 70%, Hillary Clinton 16%.

The Time headline: “CLINTON IN CONTROL.”

Are you disgusted yet? This goes far beyond distortion, and far beyond the tampering with facts that characterized Soviet-style reporting in Izvestia and Pravda in the decade before the USSR collapsed. This is in-your-face rejection of empirical reality, to say nothing of an insult to the viewers polled. The entire mainstream news media is complicit.

Imagine if the “free” press—free to publish whatever its corporate editors want, including even the truth, at their discretion—had sought to spin this story differently.

“POLLS SHOW BIG WIN FOR SANDERS,” CNN might have proclaimed, between commercials.

“A great night for Sanders,” Slate might have announced.

“SANDERS TROUNCES CLINTON,” Time might have acknowledged.

But no, and this is par for the course. The TV cable news anchors took ages to concede that, well, yes, maybe Jed Bush—despite his solid RNC support and Wall Street’s firm endorsement—is not the inevitable GOP candidate. They’ve had to acknowledge that (for whatever reasons) Donald Trump’s actually striking a much deeper chord than warmonger Dubya’s little brother among likely voters.

But they’re stubbornly refusing to recognize some things they don’t want to see—things that don’t follow their script.

They don’t understand that people in their twenties who constitute the 75-year-old Sanders’ support base have no problem with “socialism” but rather have lots of problems with Wall Street. These “millenials” are even—horrors!—increasingly inclined to question the national god of capitalism itself. It has fewer positive connotations to them than it did for their parents who grew up during the Cold War and were subjected to its particular brainwashing agenda.

That’s the sort of brainwashing that allows Trump, a demagogue preying on the most abjectly ignorant to tell cheering crowds that he calls Sanders “a ‘socialist, slash, communist,’ okay? ‘Cause that’s what he is!”

‘Cause that’s what he is! Sanders is a communist. End of story. End of rational thought.

I myself am not a Sanders supporter. He’s nowhere nearly left enough for me. But then I’m not a supporter of the whole bogus, skewed, money-driven two-party electoral system itself, which seems designed to hoodwink people, channel their energies into itself, and then produce disillusionment soon after the election, as the elected official reneges on promises and proved to be anything other than a harbinger of “change.” The system is wired to then hoodwink people again, re-channel their energies (again back into itself), bouncing people back and forth between two hopelessly corrupt parties that are really two factions of a single corporate party.

The system tells us, “If you don’t vote, you have nothing to say” and reduces political involvement to endorsing one of its (safe) choices. It excludes from the debate stage even the discussion of needed radical change. The electoral process is designed to keep you out of the street (where history is really made) and lead you into a box, like a confessional booth or a porno video cubicle, a private space in which you’re touched by something greater than yourself and leave with a sense of gratification. You were a good citizen. You exercised your precious right to VOTE and did your part!

Casting that ballot in private is supposed to make you feel good about yourself, as a participant in the state. It’s supposed to make you think that, since you actually participated in the construction of the existing polity, when you talk about what it does, you can accept personal responsibility for its crimes.

For example, you might say: “We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq.” In doing so you implicitly include yourself—despite your disagreement—among those who actually did the vicious deed. I prefer to say, “Leave me out of that ‘we,’ since I had nothing to do with it. I fought against it, tooth and nail, attending every anti-war demonstration I could and railing against it to all who would listen.”

“Well, our government did it,” you might correct yourself. “We voted for it.” But I will reply I didn’t; I stayed at home on election day, 2000. It’s like I was invited to a party that day, and disliking all who’d be there, I politely declined to attend.

When you vote, you vote not so much for a person as for the system itself, validating it and the rules surrounding the procedure. Casting the ballot is the state’s highest ritual, the individual’s most intimate connection with the state. It makes you feel one with it. It’s rather like taking the Holy Communion at mass. You’re swallowing something, and making a statement of faith: I believe in this system!

This (corporate) system you vote for, every time you vote at all, commands the (corporate) media to such an extent that it can do what we see in the reportage cited above. It can turn reality on its head and get away with it, whether it’s shaping public opinion about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. successes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Syrian “moderates” gaining against Assad, or victory in a farcical televised debate.

Whatever you think about Sanders, is it not outrageous that the mass media can obscure his plain victory in that exercise as a triumph for Hillary Clinton? Even a “spectacular” win? Isn’t it clear that she was pronounced the victor not because she actually won out over Sanders but because powerful people steering the “free” press needed her to do so?

As PR/disinformation master Karl Rove once put it (and this should be repeated as often as we repeat that wonderful quote from the imprisoned Goebbels at Nuremberg about using fear to build mass support for war): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

It’s not a sentiment unique to Republicans. Recall how, during the 2012 Democratic national convention, the crowd clearly voted down the inclusion of a line supporting Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of Israel in its platform. The change required a two-thirds majority of the vote, according to party rules. At least half the delegates voted against it.

Still, the convention chairman to the outrage of many present announced (after some hushed consultation) that the “Ayes” carried the day. So much for democracy at the “Democratic” Party’s convention.

The mainstream press, by and large, wants Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for president. Wall Street’s leading candidates are Jeb Bush and Clinton; both are beloved of big money and either one will do. Sanders (even though in office he would likely buckle to their will, the same way Greece’s “socialist” Alexis Tsipras buckled to the IMF and European Central Bank) is anathema to Wall Street. And the connections between Wall Street, the Washington power elite, and the press are—to use the Chinese expression—as close as lips and teeth.

Finance capital rules the world and will do so until the “millions and millions” Bernie keeps talking about find some way to effectively challenge it.

Thus Sanders could not win the debate, even though he did. And Hillary was destined to win the debate, even though she didn’t. Get it? And isn’t it great you have the right to vote for her?

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.

The New American Order

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Reid Mukai

1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of “We the People”

By Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch.com

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests. (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper. A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election. He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present. Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.” It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires, a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice. So the early primaries — this year mainly a Republican affair — are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat. By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion, a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop. It also represented the lowest midterm voter turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below — and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc. Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted. An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications. If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought. But it didn’t happen in some third-world state. It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which — even if it wasn’t the first time such a thing had ever occurred — should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation only occurred after 9/11. Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country. Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization. The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporations doing KP and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting. Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture, drone strikes, and — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of contract employees like Edward Snowden — intelligence gathering and spying. You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy. And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall. In 2014, Americans expressing a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%. (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.) The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%. All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself. Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing? Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing. They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well. House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president’s Iranian nuclear negotiations and the letter signed by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this. They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason!”) or, as Jon Stewart didon “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy. It is, in fact, neither. It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state. The Republican Party — its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats — seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security. As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state. A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like. While it has launched an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight. Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment. But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon — the creation of a de facto fourth branch of government — gets remarkably little attention. In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own. Its growth has been phenomenal. Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians. The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies and outfits is staggering. Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame. That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor. As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state. In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China). Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones. Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that “mimics a cellphone tower.” This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to “the homeland,” is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders to its police forces. And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization, and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives. Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan announced a major reorganization of the CIA meant to break down the classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage. At about the same time, according to the New York Times, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure. And keep in mind that, in a structure that has fought hard to keep what it’s doing cloaked in secrecy, there is so much more that we don’t know. Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence, a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them. In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes. Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military. It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious draftees of the Vietnam-era. In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs. Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of — to use Fraser’s word — “acquiescence.” Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be. In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual. Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design. Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion. In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention. Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.

Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World(Haymarket Books).

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one. Doing it would have been inconceivable without him. Tom]

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Prisons Without Walls: We’re All Inmates in the American Police State

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation wants him to think, feel and act. . . . To him the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.”—Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World Revisited

“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving.

“As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” writes former prison employee Marlon Brock, “it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system were being implemented outside those walls.” In fact, if Brock is right, then we “free worlders” do live in a prison—albeit, one without visible walls.

In federal prisons, cameras are everywhere in order to maintain “security” and keep track of the prisoners. Likewise, the “free world” is populated with video surveillance and tracking devices. From surveillance cameras in stores and street corners to license plate readers (with the ability to log some 1,800 license plates per hour) on police cars, our movements are being tracked virtually everywhere. With this increasing use of iris scanners and facial recognition software—which drones are equipped with—there would seem to be nowhere to hide.

Detection and confiscation of weapons (or whatever the warden deems “dangerous”) in prison is routine. The inmates must be disarmed. Pat downs, checkpoints, and random searches are second nature in ferreting out contraband.

Sound familiar?

Metal detectors are now in virtually all government buildings. There are the TSA scanning devices and metal detectors we all have to go through in airports. Police road blocks and checkpoints are used to perform warrantless searches for contraband. Those searched at road blocks can be searched for contraband regardless of their objections—just like in prison. And there are federal road blocks on American roads in the southwestern United States. Many of them are permanent and located up to 100 miles from the border.

Stop and frisk searches are taking place daily across the country. Some of them even involve anal and/or vaginal searches. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has approved strip searches even if you are arrested for a misdemeanor—such as a traffic stop. Just like a prison inmate.

Prison officials open, search and read every piece of mail sent to inmates. This is true of those who reside outside prison walls, as well. In fact, “the United States Postal Service uses a ‘Mail Isolation Control and Tracking Program’ to create a permanent record of who is corresponding with each other via snail mail.” Believe it or not, each piece of physical mail received by the Postal Service is photographed and stored in a database. Approximately 160 billion pieces of mail sent out by average Americans are recorded each year and the police and other government agents have access to this information.

Prison officials also monitor outgoing phone calls made by inmates. This is similar to what the NSA, the telecommunication corporation, and various government agencies do continually to American citizens. The NSA also downloads our text messages, emails, Facebook posts, and so on while watching everything we do.

Then there are the crowd control tactics: helmets, face shields, batons, knee guards, tear gas, wedge formations, half steps, full steps, pinning tactics, armored vehicles, and assault weapons. Most of these phrases are associated with prison crowd control because they were perfected by prisons.

Finally, when a prison has its daily operations disturbed, often times it results in a lockdown. What we saw with the “free world” lockdowns following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the melees in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, mirror a federal prison lockdown.

These are just some of the similarities between the worlds inhabited by locked-up inmates and those of us who roam about in the so-called “free world.”

Is there any real difference?

To those of us who see the prison that’s being erected around us, it’s a bit easier to realize what’s coming up ahead, and it’s not pretty. However, and this must be emphasized, what most Americans perceive as life in the United States of America is a far cry from reality. Real agendas and real power are always hidden.

As Author Frantz Fanon notes, “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

This state of denial and rejection of reality is the essential plot of John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live, where a group of down-and-out homeless men discover that people have been, in effect, so hypnotized by media distractions that they do not see their prison environment and the real nature of those who control them—that is, an oligarchic elite.

Caught up in subliminal messages such as “obey” and “conform,” among others, beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards, and the like, people are unaware of the elite controlling their lives. As such, they exist, as media analyst Marshall McLuhan once wrote, in “prisons without walls.” And of course, any resistance is met with police aggression.

A key moment in the film occurs when John Nada, a homeless drifter, notices something strange about people hanging about a church near the homeless settlement where he lives. Nada decides to investigate. Entering the church, he sees graffiti on a door: They live, We sleep. Nada overhears two men, obviously resisters, talking about “robbing banks” and “manufacturing Hoffman lenses until we’re blue in the face.” Moments later, one of the resisters catches Nada fumbling in the church and tells him “it’s the revolution.” When Nada nervously backs off, the resister assures him, “You’ll be back.”

Rummaging through a box, Nada discovers a handful of cheap-looking sunglasses, referred to earlier as Hoffman lenses. Grabbing a pair and exiting the church, he starts walking down a busy urban street.

Sliding the sunglasses on his face, Nada is shocked to see a society bombarded and controlled on every side by subliminal messages beamed at them from every direction. Billboards are transformed into authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is replaced with the words “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

What’s even more disturbing than the hidden messages, however, are the ghoulish-looking creatures—the elite—who appear human until viewed them through the lens of truth.

This is the subtle message of They Live, an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state. These things are in plain sight, but from the time we are born until the time we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our good. The truth, far different, is that those who rule us don’t really see us as human beings with dignity and worth. They see us as if “we’re livestock.”

It’s only once Nada’s eyes have been opened that he is able to see the truth: “Maybe they’ve always been with us,” he says. “Maybe they love it—seeing us hate each other, watching us kill each other, feeding on our own cold f**in’ hearts.” Nada, disillusioned and fed up with the lies and distortions, is finally ready to fight back. “I got news for them. Gonna be hell to pay. Cause I ain’t daddy’s little boy no more.”

What about you?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the warning signs have been cautioning us for decades. Oblivious to what lies ahead, most have ignored the obvious. We’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

As Rod Serling warned:

All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance. Then we become the grave diggers.

The message: stay alert.

Take the warning signs seriously. And take action because the paths to destruction are well disguised by those in control.

This is the lesson of history.

The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By James Petras

Source: Dissident Voice

About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea. In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours. With the longest work day, US workers score lower on the ‘living well’ scale than most western European workers. Moreover, despite those long workdays US employees receive the shortest paid holidays or vacation time (one to two weeks compared to the average of five weeks in Western Europe). US employees pay for the costliest health plans and their children face the highest university fees among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In class terms, US employees face the greatest jump in income inequalities over the past decade, the longest period of wage and salary decline or stagnation (1970 to 2014) and the greatest collapse of private sector union membership, from 30% in 1950 down to 8% in 2014.

On the other hand, profits, as a percentage of national income, have increased significantly. The share of income and profits going to the financial sector, especially the banks and investment houses, has increased at a faster rate than any other sector of the US economy.

There are two polar opposite trends: Employees working longer hours, with costlier services and declining living standards while finance capitalists enjoy rapidly rising profits and incomes.

Paradoxically, these trends are not directly based on greater ‘workplace exploitation’ in the US.

The historic employee-finance capitalist polarization is the direct result of the grand success of the trillion dollar financial swindles, the tax payer-funded trillion dollar Federal bailouts of the crooked bankers, and the illegal bank manipulation of interest rates. These uncorrected and unpunished crimes have driven up the costs of living and producing for employees and their employers.

Financial ‘rents’ (the bankers and brokers are ‘rentiers’ in this economy) drive up the costs of production for non-financial capital (manufacturing). Non-financial capitalists resort to reducing wages, cutting benefits and extending working hours for their employees, in order to maintain their own profits.

In other words, pervasive, enduring and systematic large-scale financial criminality is a major reason why US employees are working longer and receiving less – the ‘trickle down’ effect of mega-swindles committed by finance capital.

Mega-Swindles, Leading Banks and Complicit State Regulators

Mega-swindles, involving trillions of dollars, are routine practices involving the top fifty banks, trading houses, currency speculators, management fund firms and foreign exchange traders.

These ‘white collar’ crimes have hurt hundreds of millions of investors and credit-card holders, millions of mortgage debtors, thousands of pension funds and most industrial and service firms that depend on bank credit to meet payrolls, to finance capital expansion and technological upgrades and raw materials.

Big banks, which have been ‘convicted and fined’ for mega-swindles, include Citi Bank, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, JP Morgan, Barclay, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank and forty other ‘leading’ financial institutions.

The mega-swindlers have repeatedly engaged in a great variety of misdeeds, including accounting fraud, insider trading, fraudulent issue of mortgage based securities and the laundering of hundreds of billions of illegal dollars for Colombian, Mexican, African and Asian drug and human traffickers.

They have rigged the London Interbank Official Rate (LIBOR), which serves as the global interest benchmark to which hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts are tied. By raising LIBOR, the financial swindlers have defrauded hundreds of millions of mortgage and credit-card holders, student loan recipients and pensions.

Bloomberg News (5/20/2015) reported on an ongoing swindle involving the manipulation of the multi-trillion-dollar International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) fix, a global interest rate benchmark used by banks, corporate treasurers and money managers to determine borrowing costs and to value much of the $381 trillion of outstanding interest rate swaps.

The Financial Times (5/23/15, p. 10) reported how the top seven banks engaged in manipulating fraudulent information to their clients, practiced illegal insider trading to profit in the foreign exchange market (forex), whose daily average turnover volume for 2013 exceeded $5 trillion dollars.

These seven convicted banks ended up paying less than $10 billion in fines, which is less than 0.05% of their daily turnover. No banker or high executive ever went to jail, despite undermining the security of millions of retail investors, pensioners and thousands of companies.

The Direct Impact of Financial Swindles on Declining Living Standards

Each and every major financial swindle has had a perverse ripple effect throughout the entire economy. This is especially the case where the negative consequences have spread downward through local banks, local manufacturing and service industries to employees, students and the self-employed.

The most obvious example of the downward ripple effect was the so-called ‘sub-prime mortgage’ swindle. Big banks deliberately sold worthless, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligation (CDO) to smaller banks, pension funds and local investors, which eventually foreclosed on overpriced houses causing low income mortgage holders to lose their down payments (amounting to most of their savings).

While the effects of the swindle spread outward and downward, the US Treasury propped up the mega-swindlers with a trillion-dollar bailout in working people’s tax money. They anointed their mega-give-away as the bail out for ‘banks that are just too big to fail”! They transferred funds from the public treasury for social services to the swindlers.

In effect, the banks profited from their widely exposed crimes while US employees lost their jobs, homes, savings and social services. As the US Treasury pumped trillions of dollars into the coffers of the criminal banks (especially on Wall Street), the builders, major construction companies and manufacturers faced an unprecedented credit squeeze and laid off millions of workers, and reduced wages and increased the hours of un-paid work.

Service employees in consumer industries were hit hard as wages and salaries declined or remained frozen. The costs of the FOREX, LIBOR and ISDA fix swindles’ fell heavily on big business, which passed the pain onto labor: cutting pension and health coverage, hiring millions of ‘contingent or temp’ workers at minimum wages with no benefits.

The bank bailouts forced the Treasury to shift funds from ‘job-creating’ social programs and national infrastructure investment to the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector with its highly concentrated income structure.

As a result of the increasing concentration of wealth among the financial swindlers, inequalities in income grew; wages and salaries were frozen or reduced and manufacturers outsourced production, resulting in declines in production.

Employees, suffering from the loss of income brought on by the mega-swindles, found that they were working longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. Productivity suffered. With the total breakdown of the ‘capitalist rules of the game’, investors lost confidence and trust in the system. Mega-swindles eroded ‘confidence’ between investors and traders, and made a mockery of any link between performance at work and rewards. This severed the nexus between highly motivated workers, engaged in ‘hard work, long hours’ and rising living standards, and between investment and productivity.

As a result, profits in the finance sector grew while the domestic economy floundered and living standards stagnated.

Financial Impunity: Regulatees Controlling the Regulators

Despite the proliferation of mega-swindles and their pervasive ripple effects throughout the economy and society, none of the dozens of federal or state regulatory agencies intervened to stop the swindle before it undermined the domestic economy. No CEO or banker was ever arrested for their part in the swindle of trillions. The regulators only reacted after trillions had ‘disappeared’ and swindles were ‘a done deal’. The impunity of the swindlers in planning and executing the pillage of hundreds of millions of employees, taxpayers and mortgage holders was because the federal and state regulatory agencies are populated by ‘regulatory administrators’ who came from or aspired to join the financial sector they were tasked with ‘regulating’.

Most of the high officials appointed to lead the regulatory agencies had been selected by the ‘Lords of Wall Street, Frankfurt, the City of London or Zurich.’ Appointees are chosen on the basis of their willingness to enable financial swindles. It therefore came as no surprise on May 28 2015 when US President Obama approved the appointment of Andrew Donahue, Managing Director and Associate General Council for the repeatedly felonious, mega-swindling banking house of Goldman Sachs to be the ‘Chief of Staff’ of the Security and Exchange Commission. His career has been typical of the Washington-Wall Street ‘Revolving Door’.

Only after fraud and swindles evoked the nationwide public fury of mortgage holders, investors and finance companies did the regulators ‘investigate’ the crimes and even then not a single major banker was jailed, not a single major bank was closed down.

There were a few low-level bond traders and bank employees who were fired or jailed as scapegoats. The banks paid puny (for them) fines, which they passed on to their customers. Despite pledges to ‘mend their ways’ the bankers concocted new schemes with their windfalls of billions of Federal ‘bailout’ money while the regulators looked on or polished their CV’s for the next pass through the ‘revolving door’.

Every top official in Treasury, Commerce and Trade, and every regulator in the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) who ‘retired to the private sector’ has ended up working for the same mega-criminal banks and finance houses they had investigated, regulated and ‘slapped on the wrist’.

As one banker, who insists on anonymity, told me: ‘The most successful swindlers are those who investigated financial transgressions’.

Conclusion

Mega-swindles define the nature of contemporary capitalism. The profits and power of financial capital is not the outcome of ‘market forces’. They are the result of a system of criminal behavior that pillages the Treasury, exploits the producers and consumers, evicts homeowners and robs taxpayers.

The mega swindlers represent much less than 1% of the class structure. Yet they hold over 40% of personal wealth in this country and control over 80% of capital liquidity.

They grow inexorably rich and richer, even as the rest of the economy wallows in crisis and stagnation. Their swindles send powerful ripples across the national economy, which ultimately freeze or reduce the income of the skilled (middle class) employees and undermine the living conditions for poor working-class whites, and especially under and unemployed Afro-American and Latino American young workers.

Efforts to ‘moralize’ capital have failed repeatedly since the regulators are controlled by those they claim to ‘regulate’.

The rare arrest and prosecution of any among the current tribe of mega-swindlers would only results in their being replaced by new swindlers. The problem is systemic and requires deep structural changes.

The only answer is to build a political movement independent of the two party system, willing to nationalize the banks and to pass legislation outlawing derivatives, forex trading and other unnatural parasitic speculative activities.

James Petras is author of Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier (with Henry Veltmeyer) and The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East. Read other articles by James, or visit James’s website.

Catching Up With the Unabomber. When Does the End Justify the Means?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Brian Whitney

Source: Disinfo.com

The Unabomber, known as Ted Kaczynski, was not a fan of technology. To expose the world to his anti-technology philosophy, from the years 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23, before he was eventually caught and sent to prison. He remains there today. At one time, he was possibly the most famous criminal in the world.

He said of technology’s role:

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

In his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski argued that while his bombings were “a bit” extreme, they were quite necessary to attract attention to the loss of human freedom caused by modern technology. His book Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber” breaks all of his philosophies down for those of us that just know him through corporate news stations.

Was the Unabomber crazy, or just so sane he was blowing our minds?

I talked to David Skrbina, confidant of Kaczynski, and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. Skrbina wrote the intro to Technological Slavery.

Can you tell me a bit about how you and Kaczynski began to communicate? Are you still in touch with him today?

Back in 2003, I began work on a new course at the University of Michigan: ‘Philosophy of Technology.’ Surprisingly, such a course had never been offered before, at any of our campuses. I wanted to remedy that deficiency.

I then began to pull together recent and relevant material for the course, focusing on critical approaches to technology. These, to me, were more insightful and more interesting, and were notably under-analyzed among current philosophers of technology. Most of them are either neutral toward modern technology, or positively embrace it, or accept its presence resignedly. As I found out, very few philosophers of the past four decades adopted anything like a critical stance. This, for me, was highly revealing.

Anyway, I was well aware of Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Industrial society and its future,” which was published in late 1995 at the height of the Unabomber mania. I was very impressed with its analysis, even though most of the ideas were not new to me (many were reiterations of arguments by Jacques Ellul, for example—see his 1964 book The Technological Society). But the manifesto was clear and concise, and made a compelling argument.

After Kaczynski was arrested in 1996, and after a year-long trial process, he was stashed away in a super-max prison in Colorado. The media then decided that, in essence, the story was over. Case closed. No need to cover Kaczynski or his troubling ideas ever again.

By 2003, I suspected he was still actively researching and writing, but I had heard nothing of substance about him in years. So I decided to write to him personally, hoping to get some follow-up material that might be useful in my new course. Fortunately, he replied. That began a long string of letters, all on the problem of technology. To date, I’ve received something over 100 letters from him.

Most of the letters occurred in the few years prior to, and just after, the publication of Technological Slavery. Several of his more important and detailed replies to me were included in that book—about 100 pages worth.

We’ve had less occasion to communicate in the past couple years. My most recent letter from him was in late 2014.

You have said that his ideas “threaten to undermine the power structure of our technological order. And since the system’s defenders are unable to defeat the ideas, they choose to attack the man who wrote them.” Can you expand on that?

The present military and economic power of the US government, and governments everywhere, rests on advanced technology. Governments, by their very nature, function to manipulate and coerce people—both their own citizens, and any other non-citizens whom they declare to be of interest. Governments have a monopoly on force, and this force is manifest through technological structures and systems.

Therefore, all governments—and in fact anyone who would seek to exert power in the world—must embrace modern technology. American government, at all levels, is deeply pro-tech. So too are our corporations, universities, and other organized institutions. Technology is literally their life-blood. They couldn’t oppose it in any substantial way without committing virtual suicide.

So when a Ted Kaczynski comes along and reminds everyone of the inherent and potentially catastrophic problems involved with modern technology, “the system” doesn’t want you to hear it. It will do everything possible to distort or censor such discussion. As you may recall, during the final years of the Unabomber episode, there was very little—astonishingly little—discussion of the actual ideas of the manifesto. Now and then, little passages would be quoted in the newspapers, but that was it; no follow-up, no discussion, no analysis.

Basically, the system’s defenders had no counterarguments. The data, empirical observation, and common sense all were on the side of Kaczynski. There was no rational case to be made against him.

The only option for the defenders was an ad hominem attack: to portray Kaczynski as a sick murderer, a crazed loner, and so on. That was the only way to ‘discredit’ his ideas. Of course, as we know, the ad hominem tactic is a logical fallacy. Kaczynski’s personal situation, his mental state, or even his extreme actions, have precisely zero bearing on the strength of his arguments.

The system’s biggest fear was—and still is—that people will believe that he was right. People might begin, in ways small or large, to withdraw from, or to undermine, the technological basis of society. This cuts to the heart of the system. It poses a fundamental threat, to which the system has few options, apart from on-going propaganda efforts, or brute force.

What do you think of the fact that when our government, or any figure in authority such as a police officer, kills in the name of the established belief system, it is thought of as just. But when a guy like Kaczynski kills in the name of his belief system, he is thought of as a deranged psychopath?

As I mentioned, governmental authorities have a monopoly on force. Whenever they use it, it is, almost by definition, ‘right.’ Granted, police can be convicted of ‘excessive force.’ But such cases, as we know, are very rare. And militaries can never be so convicted.

At best, if the public is truly appalled by some lethal action of our police or military, they may vote in a more ‘pacifist’ administration. But even that rarely works. People were disgusted by the war-monger George W. Bush, and so they voted in the “anti-war” Obama. Ironically, he continued on with much the same killing. And through foreign aid and UN votes, Obama continues to support and defend murderous regimes around the world. So much for pacifism.

Let’s keep in mind: Kaczynski killed three people. This was tragic and regrettable, but still, it was just three people. American police kill that many citizens every other day, on average. The same with Obama’s drone operators. Technology kills many times that number, every day—even every hour. Let’s keep things in perspective.

Kaczynski killed in order to gain the notoriety necessary to get the manifesto into the public eye. And it worked. When it was published, the Washington Post sold something like 1.2 million copies that day—still a record. He devised a plan, executed it, and thereby caused millions of people to contemplate the problem of technology in a way they never had before.

Does the end justify the means? It’s too early to tell. If Kaczynski’s actions ultimately have some effect on averting technological disaster, there will be no doubt: his actions were justified. They may yet save millions of lives, not to mention much of the natural world. Time will tell.

You recently wrote a book, The Metaphysics of Technology. Can you tell us a little about that?

Sure. In thinking about the problem of technology, it struck me that there was very little philosophical analysis about what, exactly, technology is. We’ve had many action plans, ranging from tepid and mild (think Sherry Turkle), to Bill Joy’s thesis of “relinquishment” of key technologies, to Kaczynski’s total revolution. But if we don’t really understand what we’re dealing with, our actions are likely to be misguided and ineffectual. In short, we need a true metaphysics of technology.

On my view, technology advances with a tremendous, autonomous power. Humans are the implementers of this power, but we can’t really guide it and we certainly can’t stop it. In effect, it functions as a law of nature. It advances with an evolutionary force, and that’s why we are heading toward disaster.

I see technology much as the ancient Greeks did—as a combination of two potent entities, Technê and Logos (hence ‘techno-logy’). For them, these were quasi-divine forces. Logos was the guiding intelligence behind all order in the universe. Technê was the process by which all things—manmade and otherwise—came into being. These were not mere mythology; they were rational conclusions regarding the operation of the cosmos.

Like the Greeks, I argue that technê is a universal process. All order in the universe is a form of technê. Hence my coining of the term ‘Pantechnikon’—the universe as an orderly construction, manifesting a kind of intelligence, or Logos. Our modern, human technology is on a continuum with all order in the universe. (Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has argued for precisely the same point, incidentally; see his 2006 book Epic of Evolution.)

The net effect of all this is not good news for us. Technology is like a wave moving through the Earth, and the universe. For a long while, we were at the peak of that wave. Now we’re on the downside. Technology is rapidly heading toward true autonomy. Our opportunity to slow or redirect it is rapidly vanishing. If technology achieves true autonomy—we can take Kurzweil’s singularity date of 2045 as a rough guide—then it’s game over for us. We will likely either become more or less enslaved, or else wiped out. And then technology will continue on its merry way without us.

This is not mere speculation on my part, incidentally. Within the past year, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all come out with related concerns. They don’t understand the metaphysics behind it, but they’re seeing the same trend.

How has your experience communicating with Kaczynski changed you as a person and as a philosopher?

As a philosopher, not that much. Kaczynski generally avoids philosophy and metaphysics, preferring practical issues. In a sense, we are operating on different planes, even as we are working on the same problem.

As a person, I have a greater understanding of the basis for the ‘extreme’ actions that he took. It’s not often in life that you get a chance to communicate with someone with such a total commitment to their cause. It’s impressive.

Also, the media treatment of his whole case has been enlightening. When his book, Technological Slavery, came out in 2010, I expected that there would be at least some media coverage. But there was none. The most famous “American terrorist” publishes a complete book from a super-max prison—and it’s not news? Seriously? Compare this topic to the garbage shown on our national evening news programs, and it’s a joke. NPR, 60 Minutes, Wired magazine, etc.—all decided it wasn’t newsworthy. Very telling.

One last thing: Expect to hear from Kaczynski again soon. His second book is nearing completion. The provisional title is “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.” But don’t look for it on your evening news.

Things are not as simplistic as you think.

Buy Technological Slavery, by Ted Kaczynski, and The Metaphysics of Technology by David Skrbina. Kaczynski does not profit from his book.

Brian Whitney’s latest book is Raping the Gods.

Related articles: Ted and the CIA Part 1 & 2 by David Kaczynski

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-1/271/

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-2/285/

Saturday Matinee: The Fuck-It Point

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Synopsis by Savage Revival:

A film about civilization, why we should bring it down and why most civilized people don’t.

[THE FUCK-IT POINT]
‘When you have had enough. When you decide to take matters into your own hands and don’t care what’s going to happen to you. When you know that from now on you will resist with whatever tactic you think is most effective.’

Now Streaming: The Plague Years

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By A. S. Hamrah

Source: The Baffler

When things are very American, they are as American as apple pie. Except violence. H. Rap Brown said violence “is as American as cherry pie,” not apple pie. Brown’s maxim makes us see violence as red and gelatinous, spooned from a can.

But for Brown, in 1967, American violence was white. Explicitly casting himself as an outsider, Brown said in his cherry pie speech that “violence is a part of America’s culture” and that Americans taught violence to black people. He explained that violence is a necessary form of self-protection in a society where white people set fire to Bowery bums for fun, and where they shoot strangers from the towers of college campuses for no reason—this was less than a year after Charles Whitman had killed eleven people that way at the University of Texas in Austin, the first mass shooting of its kind in U.S. history. Brown compared these deadly acts of violence to the war in Vietnam; president Lyndon B. Johnson, too, was burning people alive. He said the president’s wife was more his enemy than the people of Vietnam were, and that he’d rather kill her than them.

Brown, who was then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and who would soon become the Black Panther Party’s minister of justice, delivered a version of this speech, or rant, to about four hundred people in Cambridge, Maryland. When it was over, the police went looking for him and arrested him for inciting a riot. Brown’s story afterward is eventful and complicated, but this is an essay about zombie movies. Suffice it to say, Brown knows about violence. Fifty years after that speech, having changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, he’s spending life in prison for killing a cop.

The same day Brown was giving his speech in Maryland, George A. Romero, a director of industrial films, was north of Pittsburgh in a small Pennsylvania town called Evans City. Romero was shooting his first feature film, a low-budget horror movie in black and white called Night of the Living Dead. Released in October 1968, the first modern zombie movie tells the story of a black man trying to defend himself and others from a sudden plague of lumbering corpses who feed on the living. At the film’s end, he is unceremoniously shot and killed by cops who assume he is a zombie trying to kill them. The cops quickly dispose of his body, dumping it in a fire with a heap of the undead, as a posse moves on to hunt more zombies.

Regional gore films were nothing new in themselves; a number had appeared earlier in the 1960s. Night of the Living Dead, with its shambling, open-mouthed gut-munchers dressed in business suits and housecoats, might have seemed merely gross or oddly funny in a context other than the America of 1968. But Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated six months before its release. The news on TV, which most people still saw in black and white, consisted largely of urban riots and war reports from Vietnam. The My Lai Massacre had occurred the month before King was shot.

Romero’s film, seen in the United States the year it came out, had more in common with Rome Open City than it did with a drive-in horror movie made for teens—it was close to a work of neorealism. And it was unfunny and dire, much like John Cassavetes’s Faces, released the same year, whose laughing drunks stopped laughing when they paused to look in the mirror. Romero was a revisionist director of horror in the same way that Peckinpah and Altman were in their career-making genres, the western and the war movie.

Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white antiwar documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror films Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townsfolk. Romero drove home this central point—that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind—by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.

Mainstream film reviewers, including Roger Ebert, were shocked and disgusted by Night of the Living Dead. They discouraged people from seeing it, but Romero’s images proved to be indelible. The film’s reputation grew. In 1978 Romero made the film’s first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, this time in color. Today, if there’s one thing every American knows, it’s that zombies can only be killed with a shot to the head. This is common knowledge, cultural literacy, a kind of historical fact, like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. American-flag bumper stickers assert that “these colors don’t run,” but one of them does. It runs like crazy through American life, through American movies, and now TV, like a faucet left on.

Dead Reckonings

The Huffington Post has had a Zombie Apocalypse header since 2011, under which the editors file newsy blog posts chronicling our continuing fascination with zombie pop culture, alongside any nonfiction news story horrible enough to relate to zombies or cannibalism. The infamous Miami face-eater attack of May 2012, which the media gleefully heralded as the start of a “real” zombie apocalypse, contributed to America’s sense that it could happen here, provided we wished for it hard enough. Reading through the Zombie Apocalypse posts, one gets a growing sense that we want the big, self-devouring reckoning to happen because it is the one disaster we are truly mentally prepared for. It won’t be the total letdown of the Ebola scare.

The face-eating incident was initially linked to bath salts: ground-up mineral crystals everyone hoped would become the new homemade drug of choice for America’s scariest users. It turned out the perpetrator, although naked, was only high on marijuana. He was black, killed by the police as he gouged out his homeless victim’s eyes and chewed his face on a causeway over Biscayne Bay. The incident was captured on surveillance video. Here in the golden age of user-generated content, the zombie movies self-generate—much like zombies themselves. The bridge backdrop of this all-too-real zombie vignette neatly summed up both the crumbling condition of America’s infrastructure and our more generalized state of neoliberal collapse.

The zombie apocalypse, our favorite apocalypse, seems to unite the right and left. It combines the apocalypse brought about by climate change and the subsequent competition for scant resources with the one loosed by secret government experiments gone awry. Better still, both of these scenarios, as we’re typically shown in graphic detail, will necessitate increased gun-toting and firearms expertise.

More than that, the fast-approaching zombie parousia allows us to indulge our fantasies of a third apocalypse, one that only the most clueless don’t embrace: the consumerist Day of Judgment, in which we will all be punished for being fat and lazy and living by remote control, going through our daily routines questioning nothing as the world falls apart and we continue shopping. Supermarkets and shopping carts, malls and food warehouses all figure prominently in the iconography of the post–Night of the Living Dead zombie movie, reminding us that even in our quotidian consumerist daze, we are one step away from looting and cannibalism, the last two items on everyone’s bucket list.

Still, despite its galvanizing power to place all of humanity on the same side of the cosmic battlefront, the zombie apocalypse, like all ideological constructs, nonetheless manages to cleave the world into two camps. One camp gets it and the other doesn’t. One is aware the apocalypse is under way, and the other is blithely oblivious to the world around it.

To confuse matters further, people move in and out of both camps, becoming inert, zombified creatures when obliviousness suits their mood. People blocking our progress on the street as they natter into their hands-free earsets stare straight ahead, refusing to admit that other people exist. At least they don’t bite us as we flatten ourselves against walls to pass them without contact. A paradox of the ubiquity of zombie-themed pop culture is how there are surely next to no people left who have not enjoyed a zombie movie, TV show, book, or videogame, yet there are more and more people shuffling around like extras in a zombie film, moving their mouths and making gnawing sounds.

The smartphone-based zombification of street life is a strange testament to Romero’s original insight, which becomes more pronounced as the wealth gap widens. The disenfranchised look ever more zombie-fied to the rich, who in turn all look the same and act the same as they take over whole neighborhoods and wall themselves up in condo towers. This, indeed, is exactly what happens in Romero’s fourth zombie movie, 2005’s Land of the Dead, which predicted things as consequential as what happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and as minor as the rise of food trucks.

The Zombie Apocalypse is also a parable of the Protestant work ethic, come to reap vengeance at the end of days. It assures us that only very resourceful, tough-minded people will be able to hack it when the dead come back to life. If the rest had really wanted to survive—if they deserved to survive—they would have spent a little less time on the sofa. But here, too, the simple and obvious moral takes a perverse turn: the best anti-zombie combatants should be the ones who’ve watched the most zombie movies, yet by the very logic of our consumer-baiting zombie fables, they won’t be physically capable of survival because all they did was watch TV.

Selective Service

What these couch potatoes will need, inarguably, is the protection of a strong leader, one who hasn’t spent his life in the vain and sodden leisure pursuits that they’ve inertly embraced—Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, for instance. Why such a person would want to help them is a question they don’t ask. With this search for an ultimate hero, the zombie genre has veered into the escapism of savior lust, leaving Romero’s unflinching, subversive neorealism behind. In Night of the Living Dead, a witless humanity is condemned by its own herd mentality and racism. In latter-day zombie fictions, a quasi-fascist social order is required, uniting us regardless of race, creed, or color.

The predicament of the characters (and the actors) in all the nouveau zombie movies relates to this passive consumerism. Both the characters and the actors in new zombie movies have to act like zombie films don’t already exist, even though the existence of Romero’s films is what permits the existence of the film they are in. Somehow, the characters pull their savvy out of thin air. They must pretend that they have never heard of zombies, even as they immediately and naturally know what to do once their own particular Zombie Apocalypse gets under way.

This paradox underscores the fantasy aspect of the twenty-first-century zombie infatuation, in which a fixed set of roles is available for cosplay in a repeatable drama that already took place somewhere else. The difference between Romero’s films and the new zombie movies is that the more time that passes since 1968, the more Romero’s films don’t seem like they were designed as entertainment—even as they are endlessly exploited by the zombie-themed cultural productions that copy them, and even as they remain entertaining. The new zombie films cannibalize Romero’s films in an attempt to remake them ideologically, so that we will stop looking for meaning in them and just accept the inevitable.

The Primal Hordes

A primal fantasy of the Zombie Apocalypse is that when the shit hits the fan, we will be able to kill our own children or parents. We won’t have a choice. The decision to get rid of the generation impeding us will have been made for us by the zombie plague, absolving us of responsibility. We are, after all, killing somebody who is already dead and who, in his or her current state, is a threat to our continued existence.

Against the generalized dystopian entertainment landscape that followed the economic collapse of 2008, the Zombie Apocalypse made more sense than ever. But YA action-drama dropped it in favor of promoting teen heroes who were stronger than their nice-but-loserish sad sack parents. This is the uplifting generational affirmation that imbues Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games franchise and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy.

YA comedy, on the other hand, did not ignore zombie movies. Instead, it domesticated the Zombie Apocalypse, making it friendly. Nonthreatening zom-coms showed young viewers how the opposite sex was really not that scary, that being in a couple was still the most important thing, and that dystopias gave nerds an unprecedented chance to prove they could get the girl or boy. Dystopia, it turns out, is really a best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario for starry-eyed-kids-with-a-disease, or so we learn from zom-coms like Warm Bodies and Life After Beth.

The latest iteration of this trend, which sets a zombie heroine in a marginally less dystopian world that mirrors our tentative economic comeback, is the CW TV show iZombie. The series is a brain-eating entertainment for tweens in which they learn you can be okay and have a chill job even if you’re a living corpse who’s just trying to figure things out. When a zombie gets her own tween-empowerment show on The CW, it’s a good indication that zombies don’t carry the stern, unbekannt stigmas they used to. Zombies, much like corpses in TV commercials, are used as grotesque comic relief in things like animated Adult Swim shows. Such is the diminished status of the zombie; it is now a signifier that can be plugged in anywhere. To paraphrase the undead philosopher of capitalism’s own walking-dead demise: first time cannibalism, second time farce.

Reality Bites

The way zombie movies progress, with isolated groups splitting into factions and various elimination rounds as contestants disappear, suggests that Night of the Living Dead is also a secret source of reality TV. It makes sense, then, that 2009’s Zombieland, one of the first YA dystopian zombie entertainments, was penned by screenwriters who created The Joe Schmo Show and I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!

Zombieland’s protagonist, a college-age dude played by Jesse Eisenberg, is a bundle of phobias, an OCD-style follower of rules who finds himself in a Zombie Apocalypse after an unexpected date with a hot girl out of his league (Amber Heard) goes wrong. Mentored by Woody Harrelson, who more or less reprised this same role in the Hunger Games movies, Eisenberg’s millennial character undergoes a reality-TV-scripted makeover. In expiation for his pusillanimity in the opening reel, he winds up rescuing a tough girl (Emma Stone) who also would have been out of his league in the pre-Apocalypse scheme of dating. Zombieland presents Eisenberg as gutless and Stone as ruthless, but she’s the one who ends up a hostage, and he becomes her hero. In fact, one of his rules, “Don’t be a hero,” changes on screen to “Be a hero,” as we once again learn that millennials really do have what it takes to kill zombies. Earlier in the film, Eisenberg accidentally shoots and kills a non-zombie Bill Murray, playing himself, showing that millennials can also, regretfully, take out Baby Boomers, including the cool ones who aren’t undead.

Edgar Wright’s 2004 Shaun of the Dead, the first movie zom-com, was a more intelligent version of this same storyline. An English comedy from the “Isn’t it cute how much we suck?” school, Wright’s film acquiesced to the coupling-up plot rom-coms require, but not without first presenting the routine, pointless daily life of its protagonist (Simon Pegg) as pre-zombified. Shaun of the Dead will likely remain the only sweet little comedy in which the protagonist kills his mother, a scene the film has the guts to play without flinching. The joke of Wright’s film is that it takes something as brutal as a zombie apocalypse to wake us from our stupor and to show us how good we had it all along. By the film’s end, Pegg and his girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) are in exactly the same place they were when the film started, but now at least they live together. A cover of the Buzzcocks’ song “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” jangles over the credits, providing a zombified dose of circa-1979 irony.

Wright and Pegg’s goofy rethinking of the zombie movie proved how firmly zombies are entrenched in our consciousness, and how easy they are to manipulate for comedic effect. The same month Shaun of the Dead came out, a Hollywood remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released. It, too, cleaned up at the box office. This new Dawn of the Dead seemed like it was made by one of the nerds in the American zom-coms, a jerk desperate to prove he’s bad-ass. (The director now makes superhero movies.) Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” accompanies the opening credits, setting a high bar for artistic achievement the ensuing film does not come near to clearing. Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” plays at the end—its placement there as repulsive as anything else in the film.

As all nouveau zombie films must, the remake starts in the suburbs, where a couple is watching American Idol in bed, underscoring the genre’s newfound connection to reality TV. The film’s CGI effects, which at the time injected a souped-up faux energy into the onscreen mayhem, dated instantly. They’re now the kind of off-the-rack effects featured in Weird Al videos when someone gets hit by a car.

The main point of this new Dawn of the Dead is that after the Zombie Apocalypse, people will spend their time barking orders at each other and calling each other “asshole.” The film nods in the direction of loving the military and the police, and totally sanitizes Romero’s use of a shopping mall as a site of consumerist critique. Like many films of the 2000s, it postulates that living in a mall wouldn’t be a Hobbesian dystopia at all; it would be rad. If the remake had been made five years later, maybe it would have had to grapple with the “dead malls” that began to adorn the American landscape with greater frequency after the economy collapsed. Instead, the mall serving as the film’s principal backdrop is spotless and fun. The remake’s island-set, sequel-ready false happy ending makes one long for the denouement of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games—a longing more unimaginable than any real-life wish-fulfillment fantasy about the Zombie Apocalypse actually coming to pass.

The American Way of Death

Fanboys liked the Dawn of the Dead remake and, inexplicably, so did many critics. Manohla Dargis, then at the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the film was “the best proof in ages that cannibalizing old material sometimes works fiendishly well,” a punny sentiment she might well walk back today.

The next year, when George A. Romero released his first new zombie film in twenty years, it did not fare as well in the suddenly crowded marketplace of the undead. While Land of the Dead (2005) is fittingly seen as something of a masterpiece now, on its initial release it puzzled genre fans, who had gotten used to the sort of “fast zombies” that were first featured in the nihilistic-with-a-happy-ending British movie 28 Days Later (2002). Romero’s new film was as trenchant as his others, but many fans weren’t having it.

IMDb user reviews provide a record of their immediate reactions. “This movie was terrible!” one wrote the month Land of the Dead premiered. “The storyline—can’t use the word plot as that would give it too much credit—was tedious! Some say it was a great perspective on class? Are you kidding me!!!” Less then a year into George W. Bush’s second term, Romero was archly depicting a society much different from the one he’d shown in Night of the Living Dead. This new society—today’s—was more class-riven, more opportunistic, more cynical. And Romero, even while moving in the direction of Hawksian classicism, was exposing these failings with radical acuity. His dark fable of two Americas at war over the control of the resources necessary to survive was concise, imaginative, and well constructed. Few at the time wanted to consider the film’s style, which seemed out of date compared to the Dawn of the Dead remake. Fewer still wanted to grapple with its implications.

Ten years later, it is clear that no American genre film from that period digests and exposes the Bush era more skillfully than Land of the Dead. Romero’s film was uncomfortably ahead of its time, and like his other zombie work, it hasn’t dated; it speaks of 2015 as much as 2005. Tightly controlled scenes avoid the pointlessness and repetition of the nouveau zombie films, limning class struggle in unexpected ways. Zombies, slowly coming to consciousness, use the tools of the trades from which they’ve been recently dispossessed to shatter the glass of fortified condos. A zombie pumps gas through the windshield of a limo. The rich commit suicide, only to come back to life as zombies and feed on their children. America, as the original-zombie-era Funkadelic LP taught us, eats its young.

As zombie fantasies go, these scenes are much richer than the random, unsatisfying mayhem of the nouveau zombie films. Romero, unlike his counterparts, does not shy away from race. He shows African Americans pushing back against the injustices and indignities of a militarized police state, thereby completing a circle that began with Duane Jones’s performance in Night of the Living Dead.

Walking Tall

For the latest generation of zombie enthusiasts, the zombie genre means just one thing: AMC’s massively popular cable series The Walking Dead. The show is so much better than any of the recent non-Romero zombie movies that it’s among the leading exhibits in the case against the cineplex. The show’s politics and implications are widely discussed, and The Walking Dead has engendered national debate about all sorts of ethical issues, including something Romero’s films raised only in the negative: America’s future. But the first problem The Walking Dead solved was how to make its own debates about these things interesting: whenever scenes get too talky, a “walker” sidles up and has to be dispatched in the time-honored fashion. At its core, the zombie drama is like playing “You’re it!” The show could be called Game of Tag.

The Walking Dead debuted in 2010, emerging from a period in U.S. history when, all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a junked, collapsed, post-American environment. New dystopian dramas, especially the YA ones, reflected this chastened reality. The Walking Dead looked at first like it might become just another placeholding entry in this cavalcade of glumness, much like TNT’sSpielberg-produced, families vs. aliens sci-fi show Falling Skies. Zombies were maybe the most dated way possible to dramatize our newly trashed world.

It was The Walking Dead’s dated qualities, however, that saved it from becoming cable TV’s Hunger Games. The show’s grunge aesthetic and majority-adult cast situated it elsewhere. And if that particular elsewhere felt like the past as much as the future, that was part of what made the show work for premium cable’s Gen X audience. Greg Nicotero, a makeup man who worked under Romero, is one of the show’s producers. His presence indicated the people behind the show took the genre seriously, unlike anyone else in Hollywood who had touched it.

Television works by imitating success, by zombifying proven formulas through a process called mimetic isomorphism. When television producers saw The Walking Dead’s ratings beating broadcast-network ratings—a first for cable drama—they took notice and began spawning. Copies of copies like Resurrection, The Last Ship, The Leftovers, and 12 Monkeys showed that plague is contagious, but it doesn’t have to be zombie plague. Meanwhile, The Walking Dead continues its success, and AMC will debut a companion series this summer, unimaginatively called Fear the Walking Dead.

If the worst zombie movies unselfconsciously imitate higher-gloss broadcast-network reality trash like Survivor, The Walking Dead succeeds by staying closer to the lowest grade of cable-network reality TV. The world of The Walking Dead is closer to Hoarders than it is to Big Brother. Hoarders presents an America engulfed in mounds of trash that its psychologically damaged possessors can’t part with. Mounds of Big Gulp cups and greeting cards and heaps of car parts and instruction manuals overwhelm their homes, spilling into their yards. Shows like Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, and American Pickers present an America of valueless junk that maybe somebody can make a buck on—if only by televising it for our own lurid delectation. These shows are the opposite of pre-collapse valuation shows like Antiques Roadshow, in which the junk people had lying around proved to be worth more than they had imagined. The detritus of Hoarders is worthless, the kind of trash that will blow around everywhere after the Zombie Apocalypse.

Hoarders vs. Horde

In his recent book 24/7, an analysis of the end of sleep and our twenty-four-hour consumption-and-work cycle, Jonathan Crary writes that “part of the modernized world we inhabit is the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering it causes. . . . The act of witnessing and its monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster.” Zombies, not quite awake but never asleep, are the living-dead reminders of this condition, stumbling through our fictions. When they are not transformed by the wishful thinking of ideology into our pals, they retain this status.

Celebrated everywhere, zombies are the opposite of celebrities, who swoop into our disaster areas like gods from Olympus to rescue us from the calamities that also allow them to flourish. Zombies, far from being elevated, descend into utter undistinguishable anonymity and degradation, which is why they can be destroyed in good conscience. Brad Pitt, one of the producers of ABC’s Resurrection, also starred in World War Z, the most expensive zombie movie ever made. The last line of that odious movie—the first neoliberal zombie movie—is “Our war has just begun.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean to the audience, these fables of the plague years drive home just who the zombies are supposed to be—and who, when the plague hits, will helicopter out holding the machine guns. Col. Kurtz’s faithful devotee from Apocalypse Now, Dennis Hopper, the counterculture hero who became a Republican golf nut, plays the leader of the remaining 1 percent in Land of the Dead. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he says when he’s faced with the choice between his money and our lives.

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