What Lies Beyond Capitalism and Socialism?

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power.

As longtime readers know, my work aims to 1) explain why the status quo — the socio-economic-political system we inhabit — is unsustainable, divisive, and doomed to collapse under its own weight and 2) sketch out an alternative Mode of Production/way of living that is sustainable, consumes far less resources while providing for the needs of the human populace — not just for our material daily bread but for positive social roles, purpose, hope, meaning and opportunity, needs that are by and large ignored or marginalized in the current system.

One cognitive/emotional roadblock I encounter is the nearly universal assumption that there are only two systems: the State (government) or the Market (free trade/ free enterprise). This divide plays out politically as the Right (capitalism, favoring markets) and the Left (socialism, favoring the state). Everything from Communism to Libertarianism can be placed on this spectrum.

But what if the State and the Market are the sources of our unsustainability? What if they are intrinsically incapable of fixing what’s broken?

The roadblock here is adherents to one camp or the other are emotionally attached to their ideological choice, to the point that these ideological attachments have a quasi-religious character.

Believers in the market as the solution to virtually any problem refuse to accept any limits on the market’s efficacy, and believers in greater state power/control refuse to accept any limits on the state’s efficacy.

I often feel like I’ve been transported back to the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s.

I’ve written numerous books that (in part) cover the inherent limits of markets and the state, so I’ll keep this brief. Markets are based on two premises: 1) profits are the key motivator of human activity and 2) whatever is scarce can be replaced by something that is abundant (for example, when we’ve wiped out all the wild Bluefin tuna, we can substitute farmed catfish.)

But what about work that creates value but isn’t profitable? This simply doesn’t compute in the market mentality. Neither does the fact that wiping out the wild fisheries disrupts an ecosystem that is essentially impossible to value in terms that markets understand: in a market, the supply and the demand in this moment set the price and thus the value of everything.

But ecosystems simply cannot be valued by the price set in the moment by current supply and demand.

As for the state, its ontological imperative is to concentrate power, and since wealth is power, this means concentrating political and financial power. Once bureaucracies have concentrated power, insiders focus on securing budgets and benefits, and limiting transparency and accountability, as these endanger the insiders’ power, security and perquisites.

Both of these systems share a single quasi-religious ideology: a belief that endless economic growth is an intrinsic good, for it is the ultimate foundation of all human prosperity. In other words, we can only prosper and become more secure if we’re consuming more of everything: resources, credit, energy, and so on.

The second shared ideological faith is that centralizing wealth and power are not just inevitable but good. In other words, Left and Right share a single quasi-religious belief that centralization is not just inevitable but positive; the only difference is in who should hold the concentrated wealth/power, private owners or the state.

This ideology assumes a winner take most structure of winners and losers, with the winnings being concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the Winners. Thus rising inequality and divisiveness are assumed to be the natural state of any economy.

This ideology underpins the entire status quo spectrum. The “growth at any cost is good” part of the single ideology underpinning the status quo is captured by the 1960 Soviet-era film Letter Never Sent; in its haunting, surreal final scene, a character envisions a grand wilderness untouched by human hands transformed into an industrial wasteland of belching chimneys and sprawling factories. This was not a nightmare–this was the Soviet dream, and indeed, the dream of the “growth at any cost is good” West.

Simply put, the status quo of markets and states is incapable of DeGrowth, i.e. consuming less of everything, including credit, “money”, profits, taxes—everything that fuels both the state and the market. As I have taken pains to explain, it doesn’t matter if a factory is owned by private owners or the state: the mandate of capital is to grow. If capital doesn’t grow, the resulting losses will sink the enterprise—including the state itself.

What lies beyond “growth at any cost” capitalism and socialism? My answer is the self-funded community economy, a system that is self-funded (i.e. no need for a central bank or Treasury) with a digital currency that is created and distributed for the sole purpose of funding work that addresses scarcities in local communities.

I outline this system in my book A Radiocally Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Rather than concentrate power in the hands of state insiders, this system distributes power to communities are participants. Rather than concentrate the power to create currency for the benefit of banks and the state, this system distributes the power to create currency for the sole benefit of those working on behalf of the community, on projects prioritized by the community.

This community economy recognizes that some work is valuable but not profitable. The profit-driven market will never do this work, and the central state is (to use Peter Drucker’s term) the wrong unit size to ascertain each community’s needs and scarcities.

Clearly, we need a socio-economic-political system that has the structure to not just grasp the necessity of DeGrowth and positive social roles (work benefiting the greater community) but to embrace these goals as its raison d’etre (reason to exist).

Human activity is largely guided by incentives, both chemical incentives in our brains and incentives presented by the society/economy we inhabit. In the current system, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and wasting resources / destroying ecosystems are incentivized if the activity is profitable to some enterprise or deemed necessary by the state.

In the current system, the state incentivizes protecting its wealth and power and the security/benefits of its insiders, and markets incentivize maximizing profits by any means available.

As I have explained many times in the blog and my books, we inhabit a state-cartel economy: the most profitable form of enterprise is the quasi-monopoly or cartel that limits supply and competition in order to extract the maximum profit from its customers.

Monopolies (or quasi-monopolies such as Google, which holds a majority share of global search revenues, excluding China) and cartels quickly amass profits which they then use to secure protection of their cartel from the state via lobbying, campaign contributions, etc. The elites controlling the state benefit from this arrangement, and so the system inevitably becomes a state-cartel system dominated by the state and private sector cartels and incentives that benefit the wealth and power of these institutions.

Once we understand the inevitability of this marriage of state and cartel, we understand socialism and capitalism–the State and Markets–are the yin and yang of one system. Reformers may recognize some of the inherent limits of the state and the market, but they believe these problems can be solved by tweaking policies–in systems-speak, modifying the parameters of the existing subsystems of lawmaking, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and so on.

But as Donella Meadows explained in her classic paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System tweaking the parameters doesn’t actually change the system. For that, we must add a new feedback loop.

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power, increase inequality and divisiveness and the permanent expansion of consumption and credit. That this path leads to implosion / collapse does not compute because the status quo is constructed on the fundamental assumption that permanent growth/expansion of consumption, credit, wealth and state power is not just possible but necessary.

As many of us have labored to show, the financial system has been pushed to unprecedented extremes to maintain the illusion that rapid growth of consumption and credit can be maintained essentially forever.

We need an alternative system that’s built on sustainable incentives and feedback loops so we have a new blueprint to follow as the current arrangement unravels in the next decade or two.

Security and prosperity are worthy goals, but the means to achieve them, as well as the definition of security / prosperity, must be reworked from the ground up. We need to include positive social roles and meaningful work as essential components of security/prosperity.

My conception of a Third / Community Economy does not replace either the state or the free-enterprise market; rather, it does what neither of the existing structures can do. It adds opportunity, purpose, positive social roles and earned income for those left out of the state/cartel/market economy.

Why the West cannot stomach Russians

Posted on April 13, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Vltchek

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’.

Fairy tales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the subconsciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact, the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”

The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”

Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.

Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.

And, above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.

Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians are falling to its own, unique category.

*****

Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.

To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.

Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.

They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.

When confronted, when attacked, they fight.

They rarely strike first, almost never invade.

But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.

In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

*****

It gets much worse than that.

Russia has this terrible habit… not only does it defend itself and its people, but it also fights for the others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.

It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.

The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.

Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West, and especially Europe, never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.

That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.

The excesses of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and others’ monstrous cruelties.

Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed with. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.

The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.

*****

It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.

What followed could be easily described as genocide.

The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.

Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.

It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.

Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?

Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.

Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?

Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.

Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.

I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…

Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

*****

But that nightmare did not last long.

And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.

Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!

Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.

And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks of the Western empire.

A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.

President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.

Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.

That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

*****

There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the West. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.

This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.

It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.

Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.

Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.

The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.

Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.

Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”

The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.

*****

In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.

Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.

Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!

In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want, to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.

They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.

It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.

Many victims are too scared to speak.

Russia is not.

It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.

Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about the Russian armor.

There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.

Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.

And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

Posted on April 3, 2018 by Reid Mukai

The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State

By Umair Haque

Source: Information Clearing House

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene? Well, probably because those kids have given up on life — and their elders have given up on them. Or maybe you’re right — and it’s not that simple. Still, what do the kids who aren’t killing each other do? Well, a lot of them are busy killing themselves.

So there is of course also an “opioid epidemic”. We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America — especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy. So the “opioid epidemic” — mass self-medication with the hardest of hard drugs — is again a social pathology of collapse: unique to American life. It is not quite captured in the numbers, but only through comparison — and when we see it in global perspective, we get a sense of just how singularly troubled American life really is.

Why would people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world? They must be living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives, in which there is little healthcare, so they have to self-medicate the terror away. But what is so desperate about them? Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.

Now, you might say — “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die — not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture.

How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Yet those once poor countries are making great strides. Costa Ricans now have higher life expectancy than Americans — because they have public healthcare. American life expectancy is falling, unlike nearly anywhere else in the world, save the UK — because it doesn’t.

And that is my last pathology: it is one of the soul, not one of the limbs, like the others above. Americans appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.

So my last pathology is a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

Perhaps that sounds strong to you. Is it?

Now that I’ve given you a few examples — there are many more — of the social pathologies of collapse, let me share with you the three points that they raise for me.

These social pathologies are something like strange and gruesome new strains of disease infecting the body social. America has always been a pioneer — only today, it is host not just to problems not just rarely seen in healthy societies — it is pioneering novel social pathologies have never been seen in the modern world outside present-day America, period. What does that tell us?

American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.

Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.

But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

The political logic of the junk food revolution

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Jonathan Cook

Source: TruePublica

Here is an article on food whose political implications are really worth considering. We already know that people in western societies, particularly the US and UK, are eating far too much junk food, and that this leads to an epidemic of obesity, heart disease and cancer.

But the latest research not only reveals the extent that “ultra-processed” foods have come to dominate our diets in Europe – now comprising more than half of what Britons eat, for example – but raises the question of what effects the consumption of this much junk food will have on our behaviours.

The nutritionists here are reluctant to offer even well-informed speculation, which always seems to be the case with publicly funded scientists until things have moved beyond a critical point. Think of smoking and climate change: we usually learn much later that the corporations’ own pet-scientists had done the research decades earlier proving or predicting exactly what was coming.

But there are hints from the nutritionists to the Guardian of what might be going on:

“People are missing out not only on vitamins and minerals but also bioactive compounds found in natural foods such as phytoestrogens and fibre.“

And then you get salt and starch and sugar and fat and all these additives. We are consuming every day an amount of new substances that are these flavours and colours and emulsifiers and we don’t have any idea as to what will be the problem of these items,” [Professor Carlos Monteiro from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, who led the research team] said. …

Other cumulative effects of eating these industrially-made substances are not yet known. “The honest answer is we don’t know what is going on,” said Monteiro.’

Here is an educated guess, based in part on experience and in part on the economic and political logic of our current junk food revolution. (Those of us who eat these industrial substances rarely enough that they do not dominate our diets still have a sense of what happens to us on the occasions we do.)

These lab-created, nutritionally empty substances that our bodies have not evolved to digest not only make us physically sick, but emotionally and mentally sick too: addicted, depressed, lazy, sluggish, docile and anxious.

In fact, a mess of emotions that transforms us into the perfect consumers, buying more of this cheap, harmful “food”. That boosts both the profits of food and other corporations and the electoral fortunes of crowd-pleasing, money-grubbing, vacuous politicians who wish to serve those corporations.

That is how an advanced capitalist system – premised on a psychopathic drive by the strongest to maximise profits by exploiting the weakest – will naturally evolve. It needs to make us as dependent, as passive and docile, as possible.

Time To Make Life Hard For The Rich

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Hamilton Nolan

Source: Splinter

It is time for polite, respectable, rational people to start saying what has become painfully obvious: It is time to stop respecting the rich, and start stealing from them. In earnest.

Inequality is eating America alive. It has been growing for decades. To say that “the American dream is dead” is no longer a poetic exaggeration—it is an accurate description of 40 years of wage stagnation and declining economic mobility that has produced a generation that cannot expect to live better than their parents did. Not because of devastating war or plague, but because of a very specific set of rules governing a very specific economic system that encourages the accumulation of great wealth among a tiny portion of the population, to the detriment of the vast majority of people. Our political and business leaders have chosen to embrace a system that favors capital over labor. A system in which the more you already have, the more you make, and the less you have, the harder it is to build wealth. It is a system designed to increase inequality. It is functioning exactly as designed. And now, it is about to get worse.

How long are people supposed to tolerate being smacked in the face? By the rich? Who already have more than enough? It is not as though the fact that inequality is a crisis is a fact that snuck up on anyone. Economists have seen the trend for decades, and the general public has been well aware of it since at least the financial crisis. Obama called it “the defining challenge of our time.” Thomas Piketty became a rock star by writing a very dry book about it. It’s not an underground thing. It is well known and well understood by the people in control of the institutions with the power to change it. The response to this dire situation by the Republican Party, which a wholly owned subsidiary of the American capital-holding class, has been to pass a tax bill that will horribly exacerbate economic inequality in this country. It is a considered decision to make a bad situation worse. It is a deliberate choice—during a time when the rich already have too much—to take from the poor in order to give the rich (including members of Congress and the President) more. That is not a metaphor. That is the reality. That is what the Republican party is about to accomplish on behalf of the donor class, calling it “middle class tax relief” in the face of mathematical proof to the contrary. Even to my cynical ass, the sheer fuck you-ness of this action towards the majority of the country is breathtaking. This is not just a failure to solve a severe problem; it is the expenditure of vast amounts of political capital to make the severe problem worse so that a tiny handful of people will get wealthier than anyone needs to be.

Ideally, in a democracy, elected leaders reflecting the interests of the people would pass taxes and regulations to reverse the growing inequality here. For that to happen, we would need to end gerrymandering and reform campaign finance and probably abolish the Senate and the Electoral College, and that’s just for starters. It is not imminent, in other words. Our broken political system, which is designed to reward money with political power, is actually moving in the opposite direction of a solution. Who is suffering because of this? Most Americans. Certainly the bottom 50% are acutely suffering—money that would have been in their paychecks has been instead funneled upwards into the pockets of the rich. Every desperate family that has found themselves coming up short for rent or food or medicine, every American who has downgraded her dreams and aspirations because they became financially implausible, has been directly harmed by the political and economic class war perpetuated by the rich, even if they cannot see the perpetrators with their own eyes. I think that people have been more than patient in the face of this slow-moving crisis. In 2009, when the markets crashed and millions were laid off, nobody rioted and kidnapped the financiers and burned their homes. The outcome of that lack of direct action is the situation we find ourselves in today.

Violence against people is morally wrong and a bad way to solve problems. But capital is different. One thing that would help to create the political environment conducive to solving the inequality problem would be to make the cost of accumulating all that capital too high to be worth it. In other words, to create a downside to being too rich. I have personally stood in a room full of hedge fund titans and billionaire investors warning one another explicitly that inequality must be addressed lest the U.S. become a place like Latin America, where rich people are forced to live behind walls, surrounded by armed guards, because of the very real risks from the rage of the poor. Rich people in this country do not want to live like that. If they see that they must stop being so greedy in order to enjoy their own freedom, they will stop being so greedy. Those conditions have to be created by people who want justice.

Our situation is absurd. Not since the Gilded Age has it been more clear that a few people have too much. Furthermore, the people with too much are investing in political clout to give themselves more. It’s just wrong. If the government won’t help, we have to help ourselves. Sticking up a billionaire on the street for $100 is not going to do it. But one can imagine other ways that angry Americans might express their dissatisfaction with our current division of wealth: A large-scale online attack against the holdings of the very rich; yachts sunk in harbors; unoccupied vacation homes in the Hamptons mysteriously burned to the ground. Sotheby’s auctions swarmed by vandals, Art Basel attacked by spraypaint-wielding mobs, protests on the doorsteps of right-wing think tanks, venomous words directed at millionaires as they dine in fancy restaurants. People have a right to life and safety, but property does not. A life spent screwing the little people so that you can acquire lots of stuff loses its allure when you know that all that stuff will be smashed to pieces by angry little people. It is not hard to put together a list of those who should be targeted—Forbes publishes it every year. Likewise, public campaign finance records give us a pretty good idea of exactly who is funding the politicians who are perpetuating this economic war on behalf of the rich.

It is nice to imagine a grand, well-targeted computer hack that would neatly transfer billions of dollars out of the accounts of, say, the Walton family and into a charity account that would disburse the money to the poor in untraceable ways. That seems far-fetched. Realistically, what people can do now is to start thinking about ways to make it uncomfortable to be too rich. Socially uncomfortable and otherwise. When the accumulation of great wealth ceases to be a praiseworthy endeavor and instead becomes viewed as a sick, greedy pastime whose only reward is the hatred of your fellow citizens and the inability to live comfortably without fear of your excessive property being destroyed, rich people will rethink their goals. Until then, inequality will keep rising, and everything, for most people, will continue to slowly, slowly get worse.

Slaves and Bulldozers, Plutocrats and Widgets

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Kristine Mattis

Source: CounterPunch

There is not an industrial company on earth, not an institution of any kind – not mine, not yours, not anyone’s – that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth. But not by our civilization’s definition. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry and in the eyes of many, a kind of modern-day hero.

— Ray Anderson, (1934-2011) CEO of Interface, Inc.

We are living a collective illusion known as the civilized world. We feign concern for our horrendous conditions of poverty, socioeconomic inequality, deteriorating public health, and severe environmental degradation (to which climate change is merely one factor), but everything we do belies that distress. These issues comprise the largest risks to the survival of the human species, as well as the most significant amoral atrocities on the planet. Both individually and as a species, our health, safety, and ability the live a decent, dignified life have always been imperiled by these predicaments. Yet, we continue along with complete cognitive dissonance in that the crux of our lives – our jobs, our consumer culture – all contribute to, perpetuate, and exacerbate the unsustainable and morally reprehensible conditions of our existence. But while we are all marginally responsible for the multitude of calamities befalling us, the one group who bears the brunt of the blame for our social and ecological decay is the wealthy.

Have you looked around and seen just what humanity has done to our stunning Earth? We’ve bulldozed the beauty for bucks. Far too much of what was once a glorious paradise is now a complete disaster of unfathomable proportions. A disaster wholly of our own making. In America, and in most places around the world, from the moment we are born we are preparing for a future career, and more specifically, for the lifelong goal of making money. But on the whole, most of the jobs we do end up being more detrimental than beneficial to society and the environment. We characterize work through measures of productivity, but producing more and more unnecessary, meaningless, and often useless products compromises our physical environment, which in turn, compromises the health of humans, other beings, and our entire planetary ecosystem.

So many of the things that form the basis of our civilization should not, and perhaps cannot, exist in a just and sustainable world. Items like arms and artillery, synthetic chemicals, concentrated animal feeding operations, plastic, smartphones and other electronic gadgetrydo not feed a sustainable and equitable world but create more needless havoc. The irony, though, is that the very people who run the systems that incessantly construct and promulgate these harmful, redundant, or unnecessary products are the richest and most successful people on earth.

We define success in our society almost exclusively in terms of wealth, with its attendant power and sometimes, fame. Rich people are the recipients of adulation and reverence for nothing more than their accumulation of wealth and material products. We like to think that riches come by way of great intellect, talent, skill, and a strong work ethic, but in reality, monetary success is more a matter of inherited socioeconomic status, ambition, and determination, rather than ability and aptitude. Most of all, to achieve wealth means to have a myopic resolve, not only to look away from how the sausage is made, but to not care how the sausage is made.

The wealthy in our society then become the people with the most power and influence. While ironically, they are the people least deserving of our respect. They are the exact people whom we should look upon with the utmost skepticism and even disdain. They should not be in the position to make decisions about our collective lives and the workings of our society, because their financial success is completely antithetical to societal justice and sustainability.

It doesn’t take great acumen or diligence to make a lot of money; it takes a narrow-minded, insular, immoral, sometimes psychopathic view of life, in which personal pleasure and profit are the primary variables. It’s quite easy to do well financially and find personal satisfaction if the exploitation of humans, other animals, and the entire biosphere is left outside of the realm of your career consciousness. As Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet admitted,“For 21 yearsI never gave a thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the earth in the making of our products.” He built his fortune without consideration to the effects of his enterprise until someone brought the deleterious consequences to his attention.

We like to believe the cream rises to the top, but the truth is that the top is actually full of scum. We have seen in recent weeks, if we did not know already, that entertainment, politics, and indeed, all of the wealthiest industries are cesspools of moral depravity, especially at the apex.

There may be some exceptions, but scum is the rule. Some might call these people ambitious, some might call them razor-focused, others would call them sociopathic. It takes a careful regimen of willful ignorance and/or denial to not consider all the harms that directly and indirectly result from avenues toward career achievements in the process of our normal lives – harms such as exploitation of labor, torture of animals, and toxic contamination and of food, water, and natural resources.

Material success requires rape and pillage, figuratively and literally. Donald Trump bragged that when you have the kind of wealth he has, you can treat women as objects and just “grab ’em by the pussy.” You can also exploit resources, exploit labor, befoul the environment, and endanger public health with few or no consequences. On a purely moral basis, only scum could have the hubris to consider others as mere playthings for their own enjoyment, to feel superior enough to warrant their extreme wealth which they did not earn but stole from the commons, and to believe that they deserve obscene riches when the majority of others do not even have basic life necessities.

How often have you heard the phrases “not that there is anything wrong with being rich,” or “I don’t begrudge him his wealth”? Wealth should be considered reprehensible. Wealth has always been in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many, and one’s access to it has always been almost wholly correlated with one’s socioeconomic status at birth. Yet we rationalize this immoral situation and pretend that the proverbial “pie,” of which we all need a slice, is infinite in size and that wealth is accessible to anyone. We assume that being rich is not only acceptable but aspirational. It is neither in a just and sustainable world.

On a finite planet every excess dollar, every excess material good, every extra home, car, garment, trinket, piece of food, or beverage that one person possesses essentially correlates to an item that another person does not have. When we normalize one person having more than he/she needs in a world where billions have far less than the bare minimum required to meet their basic needs, then we are obliged to rethink our morality. When a simple handbag can cost between $12K and $300K and we as a society see nothing wrong with that kind of excess in the face of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease, we are not only completely socially corrupt, we are spelling our own doom. Poverty only exists because excessive wealth exists and neither is compatible with a sustainable and humane civilization.

To achieve a sustainable world, we must relinquish our use of non-renewable resources, we must utilize renewable resources at a level in which they have the time and ability to replenish, and we must leave no waste that is not regenerative. To achieve an equitable world, we must relinquish our greed and desire for opulence, excess, and disproportionate influence. In fact, sustainability is also a function of equity. However, our current society is predicated on the antithesis of all such requirements.

Wealthy people gain their successes because they have tunnel vision. They are singularly focused on themselves, their careers, and/or on money. They do not take into consideration the externalities involved in their actions. They pay little mind to the exploitation involved in their pursuits. Ethics never supersedes ambition. Therefore, these are the exact people who should not be in charge of making policies for the benefit of society and should not be in charge of civic ventures. To be able to be so wealthy without shame, guilt, or acknowledgement that your own wealth impedes the lives of others is to be either ignorant or indifferent. We are facing global ecological and economic collapse. Who made this happen? The wealthiest people of the world. If you are rich you do not have the solution. You are the problem.

The world is run on slave labor, indentured servitude, animal and natural resource exploitation, and endless generation of waste and contamination. Material success comes with adopting a shortsighted view of the world – closing yourself off to your own connection to global anthropogenic climate change, toxification, and inequality.

So many of the wealthy who consider themselves socially and environmentally aware perceive no connection between their own wealth accumulation and the causes they claim to champion. Instead of curtailing their materialism, they rationalize it. Instead of acknowledging that their consumerism intensifies global resource extraction, they produce more products (often erroneously labeled “green”) to sustain their riches. When the wealthy are not hawking products for their for-profit activities, they have the audacity to solicit for charitable organizations that are only necessitated by the economic system that produces poverty and environmental devastation in the wake of their extravagant wealth. They ask donations from the majority of citizens who are barely making ends meet, when they themselves could surrender probably 90% of their accumulated wealth and not notice a marked change in their material status whatsoever. The elites who are not in denial about the problems we face want scientific and technological solutions – solutions that they can throw their money at and have others solve so they do not have to think about their own contribution to the problems.

But there are no silver bullets to end inequality and environmental destruction, while continuing with business as usual in civilized society. Science cannot save us. Scientific research itself relies on the same unsustainable production, consumption, use of resources, and waste as every other industry.

Technology mavens always tout the great social or biological service that their new technology will provide. Their innovations comes under the guise of helping the world, but the majority of the time, their creations are frivolous and do not do much more than use natural resources, create waste, and earn them exorbitant profit. At the university where I earned my doctoral degree there is a masters program in biotechnology and there’s a reason why their curriculum extends beyond just science, containing at least two required business courses. Of course, business is fundamental to their instruction because the principle purpose of our education, of our careers, is profit.

All of the harmful products and practices in our civilization – military arms, sweatshops, low wages, pesticides, plastics, throw-away items, excess of products, animal cruelty, overuse of medicine and surgery – only exist to increase revenue for the rich. None are fair or just or equitable or sustainable. Our societal justification of the above items just marks our collective delusion. These products and practices persist in the name of profit, and we rationalize their continuation just as we rationalize extravagant wealth.

When Senator Bernie Sanders was on TV decrying President Barack Obama’s half-million dollar speaking engagements on Wall Street, the anchors of the program said to him, “Wouldn’t you do it if you could?” Bernie replied, “I wouldn’t be asked.” Rather, he should have explained that anyone with integrity would not accept money they do not need for some sort of quid pro quo from a destructive and corrupt institution. The hosts of the show surmised that everyone would jump at the opportunity to earn money if they had the chance. It is precisely that sort of mindset that enables these broadcasters to inhabit their influential positions on a national television program and to earn millions of dollars. They demonstrate what unethical opportunists they, and most of the rich, actually are. Their lack of ethics is internalized and taken for granted by not only them, but most of the rest of our society. They are more than willing to be bought at whatever price for whatever service. “Just doing my job” does not serve as an excuse for immorality.

Nevertheless, there are people who have chosen lives based on conviction rather than money. Former Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and Seattle City Council member Kashama Sawant chose to earn the local average income for their official positions and donate the remainder of their salaries toward social justice work. Biologist and writer Sandra Steingraber donated a portion of her $100K Heinz Award prize toward the fight against hydraulic fracturing (fracking) rather than spend it on personal treats. Likewise, teacher Jesse Hagopian donated his $100K settlement for being unjustly attacked with pepper-spray by Seattle police toward social justice action. Not everyone is looking to cash in, and not everyone is seeking the next, biggest profit-making endeavor.

Living with integrity and simplicity is difficult. People do not choose to live this way because their personal sacrifice will change the world. They do so because it is the right thing to do. They do so because having too much means others don’t have enough. They do so because living by example allows others who care to see that a life of wealth and consumerism augments inequality and unsustainability; it is not the only way to live and need not be. They live this way because only by walking the walk rather than talking the talk will we ever start to achieve justice and sustainability to help preserve the future of our species.

In recent years there have been waves and wave of protests throughout the country and the world in response to myriad societal maladies. The best protest we can do in America now is to reject the bourgeois life – reject excessive wealth and the material components that come with it, reject profligate consumption, reject consumerism, reject wasteful holidays, reject wasteful trinkets, reject all that is incompatible with what we purport to champion. For example, retired talk-show host David Letterman appears sincere in his dedication toward helping combat climate change, while at the same time, he remains co-owner of an auto racing team. In the world in which we currently live, auto racing is completely incongruent with climate change mitigation. We can’t pretend to value matters like justice and sustainability unless the way we live upholds those values. We can’t decouple our livelihoods from our lives.

The rich tend to ensconce themselves in their well-manicured communities, shop with abandon, and disregard the abject poverty, environmental degradation, and injustices all around them. They are in the process of spending small portions of their vast fortunes building survival bunkers to withstand either the revolutionary upheaval that may soon come as a result of immeasurable socioeconomic inequality, or the catastrophic ecological collapse that may result from reckless resource extraction and expenditure. How misguided or cynical are they to not realize that by renouncing their extreme wealth, they would need no such provisions and could play a large part in salvaging our civilization?

Need I even explain how the current tax scam pending on Capitol Hill will serve to enhance all of the socioeconomic, environmental, and public health calamities that are arising ever more rapidly and in quick succession? Need I elaborate on how our escalating climate-related weather catastrophes only reach the cataclysmic proportions they do because of the wealth disparities involved and because of the high-risk industrial components therein, that exist mainly to enrich the elite? Would these natural disasters be so disastrous if more people had the economic resilience that they deserve and if society took more precaution against the hazards of multibillion-dollar industries that manufacture products of questionable value while generating tremendous wealth to a select few?

We live n a time of unprecedented social disarray, ecological disrepair, public health decay, and moral depravity. Nearly every aspect of the way we live in modern industrial societies is completely unsustainable. Even if we were to transition to 100% solar energy tomorrow throughout the planet, the worst effects of climate change might be averted, but the plastic pollution that permeates the most far-reaching depths of the oceans would still remain, the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that harm our own health and the health of the entire global ecosystem remain. Not only do they remain, but they continue to be produced, not out of necessity, but for the financial profit of the privileged few. The production of, consumption of, and waste stream from our global industrial society continues unabated. This is the system that forms the foundation of all of our lives in the civilized world, and this is the system that bestows excessive wealth to some while leaving others fighting for survival.

While it is indeed the system of capitalism that generates and sustains our societal injustice and ecological degradation, the system is comprised of people – people who could abdicate their fictional obligation to happiness via indefinitely-increasing earnings, people who can choose better, Without a preponderance of such people, no countervailing just and sustainable system can ever compete.

In 1964, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano interviewed the famous Argentinean hero of the Cuban revolution Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In the midst of a comprehensive conversation, Che stated to Galeano, ” I don’t want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller.” To be sure, if we are remotely interested in a sustainable and equitable world, the attainment of wealth must be transformed from admirable to contemptible. With regard to the multitude of obstacles we face, Ralph Nader once wrote “only the super-rich can save us.” He’s right. They can save us by not existing.

Human Anxiety in Late-Stage Capitalism

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Phil Rockstroh

Source: Consortium News

A number of recent press articles, including an over 8,000-word feature piece in The New York Times have asked, to quote the Times’ headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”

Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late-stage capitalist culture evokes classic fight-or-flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The word panic has its derivation in reference to Pan, the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a fight-or-flight response.

If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch.

Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are “losers” who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parents’ homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness, then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread.

Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations.

No Real Remedies

What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery.

As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”

In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalize odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one such groupthink example: homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation.

Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege.

What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny that simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the over-class can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape.

It comes down to this, societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious over-class, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle, e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two-legged toxic waste dump.

Trump, No Aberration

How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact that the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late-stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war.

Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal basis, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness.

A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost.

In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tombified carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade … its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire.

As liberals new BFFL (Best Friend for Life) George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning.”

In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of U.S. culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, was complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem.

The Great Unspoken

Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 cinematic barnburner “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power.

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.” — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance

When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The effect of these excursions on people was often profound … the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamor, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality … the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) maneuvers directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level, i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated.

The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted … High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche … There is so far to fall.

Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clintons’, et.al. and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money.

Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soul-scape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us.

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By C.J. Hopkins

Source: The Unz Review

Back in October of 2016, I wrote a somewhat divisive essay in which I suggested that political dissent is being systematically pathologized. In fact, this process has been ongoing for decades, but it has been significantly accelerated since the Brexit referendum and the Rise of Trump (or, rather, the Fall of Hillary Clinton, as it was Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for eight more years of corporatocracy with a sugar coating of identity politics, and not their enthusiasm for Trump, that mostly put the clown in office.)

In the twelve months since I wrote that piece, we have been subjected to a concerted campaign of corporate media propaganda for which there is no historical precedent. Virtually every major organ of the Western media apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate and enforce conformity. The gist of this propaganda campaign is that “Western democracy” is under attack by a confederacy of Russians and white supremacists, as well as “the terrorists” and other “extremists” it’s been under attack by for the last sixteen years.

I’ve been writing about this campaign for a year now, so I’m not going to rehash all the details. Suffice to say we’ve gone from Russian operatives hacking the American elections to “Russia-linked” persons “apparently” setting up “illegitimate” Facebook accounts, “likely operated out of Russia,” and publishing ads that are “indistinguishable from legitimate political speech” on the Internet. This is what the corporate media is presenting as evidence of “an unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy,” a handful of political ads on Facebook. In addition to the Russian hacker propaganda, since August, we have also been treated to relentless white supremacist hysteria and daily reminders from the corporate media that “white nationalism is destroying the West.” The negligible American neo-Nazi subculture has been blown up into a biblical Behemoth inexorably slouching its way towards the White House to officially launch the Trumpian Reich.

At the same time, government and corporate entities have been aggressively restricting (and in many cases eliminating) fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to due process under the law. The justification for this curtailment of rights (which started in earnest in 2001, following the September 11 attacks) is protecting the public from the threat of “terrorism,” which apparently shows no signs of abating. As of now, the United States has been in a State of Emergency for over sixteen years. The UK is in a virtual State of Emergency. France is now in the process of enshrining its permanent State of Emergency into law. Draconian counter-terrorism measures have been implemented throughout the EU. Not just the notorious American police but police throughout the West have been militarized. Every other day we learn of some new emergency security measuredesigned to keep us safe from “the terrorists,” the “lone wolf shooters,” and other “extremists.”

Conveniently, since the Brexit referendum and unexpected election of Trump (which is when the capitalist ruling classes first recognized that they had a widespread nationalist backlash on their hands), the definition of “terrorism” (or, more broadly, “extremism”) has been expanded to include not just Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever we’re calling “the terrorists” these days, but anyone else the ruling classes decide they need to label “extremists.” The FBI has designated Black Lives Matter “Black Identity Extremists.” The FBI and the DHS have designated Antifa “domestic terrorists.” Hosting corporations have shut down several white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, along with their access to online fundraising. Google is algorithmically burying leftist news and opinion sources such as Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, and Truthout, among others. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have teamed up to cleanse the Internet of “extremist content,” “hate speech,” and whatever else they arbitrarily decide is inappropriate. YouTube, with assistance from the ADL (which deems pro-Palestinian activists and other critics of Israel “extremists”) is censoring “extremist” and “controversial” videos, in an effort to “fight terrorist content online.” Facebook is also collaborating with Israel to thwart “extremism,” “incitement of violence,” and whatever else Israel decides is “inflammatory.” In the UK, simply reading “terrorist content” is punishable by fifteen years in prison. Over three thousand people were arrested last year for publishing “offensive” and “menacing” material.

Whatever your opinion of these organizations and “extremist” persons is beside the point. I’m not a big fan of neo-Nazis, personally, but neither am I a fan of Antifa. I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories, or a lot of the nonsense one finds on the Internet, but I consume a fair amount of alternative media, and I publish in CounterPunch, The Unz Review, ColdType, and other non-corporate journals. I consider myself a leftist, basically, but my political essays are often reposted by right-wing and, yes, even pro-Russia blogs. I get mail from former Sanders supporters, Trump supporters, anarchists, socialists, former 1960s radicals, anti-Semites, and other human beings, some of whom I passionately agree with, others of whom I passionately disagree with. As far as I can tell from the emails, none of these readers voted for Clinton, or Macron, or supported the TPP, or the debt-enslavement and looting of Greece, or the ongoing restructuring of the Greater Middle East (and all the lovely knock-on effects that has brought us), or believe that Trump is a Russian operative, or that Obama is Martin Luther Jesus-on-a-stick. What they share, despite their opposing views, is a general awareness that the locus of power in our post-Cold War age is primarily corporate, or global capitalist, and neoliberal in nature. They also recognize that they are being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign designed to lump them all together (again, despite their opposing views) into an intentionally vague and undefinable category comprising anyone and everyone, everywhere, opposing the hegemony of global capitalism, and its non-ideological ideology (the nature of which I’ll get into in a moment).

As I wrote in that essay a year ago, “a line is being drawn in the ideological sand.” This line cuts across both Left and Right, dividing what the capitalist ruling classes designate “normal” from what they label “extremist.” The traditional ideologicalparadigm, Left versus Right, is disappearing (except as a kind of minstrel show), and is being replaced, or overwritten, by a pathological paradigm based upon the concept of “extremism.”

* * *

Although the term has been around since the Fifth Century BC, the concept of “extremism” as we know it today developed in the late Twentieth Century and has come into vogue in the last three decades. During the Cold War, the preferred exonymics were “subversive,” “radical,” or just plain old “communist,” all of which terms referred to an actual ideological adversary. In the early 1990s, as the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, and globalized Western capitalism became the unrivaled global-hegemonic ideological system that it is today, a new concept was needed to represent the official enemy and its ideology. The concept of “extremism” does that perfectly, as it connotes, not an external enemy with a definable ideological goal, but rather, a deviation from the norm. The nature of the deviation (e.g., right-wing, left-wing, faith-based, and so on) is secondary, almost incidental. The deviation itself is the point. The “terrorist,” the “extremist,” the “white supremacist,” the “religious fanatic,” the “violent anarchist” … these figures are not rational actors whose ideas we need to intellectually engage with in order to debate or debunk. They are pathological deviations, mutant cells within the body of “normality,” which we need to identify and eliminate, not for ideological reasons, but purely in order to maintain “security.”

A truly global-hegemonic system like contemporary global capitalism (the first of this kind in human history), technically, has no ideology. “Normality” is its ideology … an ideology which erases itself and substitutes the concept of what’s “normal,” or, in other words, “just the way it is.” The specific characteristics of “normality,” although not quite arbitrary, are ever-changing. In the West, for example, thirty years ago, smoking was normal. Now, it’s abnormal. Being gay was abnormal. Now, it’s normal. Being transgender is becoming normal, although we’re still in the early stages of the process. Racism has become abnormal. Body hair is currently abnormal. Walking down the street in a semi-fugue state robotically thumbing the screen of a smartphone that you just finished thumbing a minute ago is “normal.” Capitalism has no qualms with these constant revisions to what is considered normal, because none of them are threats to capitalism. On the contrary, as far as values are concerned, the more flexible and commodifiable the better.

See, despite what intersectionalists will tell you, capitalism has no interest in racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, or any other despotic values (though it has no problem working with these values when they serve its broader strategic purposes). Capitalism is an economic system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear … no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of value.

Yes, we all want there to be other values, and we pretend there are, but there aren’t, not really. Although we’re free to enjoy parochial subcultures based on alternative values (i.e., religious bodies, the arts, and so on), these subcultures operate within capitalist society, and ultimately conform to its rules. In the arts, for example, works are either commercial products, like any other commodity, or they are subsidized by what could be called “the simulated aristocracy,” the ivy league-educated leisure classes (and lower class artists aspiring thereto) who need to pretend that they still have “culture” in order to feel superior to the masses. In the latter case, this feeling of superiority is the upscale product being sold. In the former, it is entertainment, distraction from the depressing realities of living, not in a society at all, but in a marketplace with no real human values. (In the absence of any real cultural values, there is no qualitative difference between Gerhard Richter and Adam Sandler, for example. They’re both successful capitalist artists. They’re just selling their products in different markets.)

The fact that it has no human values is the evil genius of global capitalist society. Unlike the despotic societies it replaced, it has no allegiance to any cultural identities, or traditions, or anything other than money. It can accommodate any form of government, as long as it plays ball with global capitalism. Thus, the window dressing of “normality” is markedly different from country to country, but the essence of “normality” remains the same. Even in countries with state religions (like Iran) or state ideologies (like China), the governments play by the rules of global capitalism like everyone else. If they don’t, they can expect to receive a visit from global capitalism’s Regime Change Department (i.e., the US military and its assorted partners).

Which is why, despite the “Russiagate” hysteria the media have been barraging us with, the West is not going to war with Russia. Nor are we going to war with China. Russia and China are developed countries, whose economies are entirely dependent on global capitalism, as are Western economies. The economies of every developed nation on the planet are inextricably linked. This is the nature of the global hegemony I’ve been referring to throughout this essay. Not American hegemony, but global capitalist hegemony. Systemic, supranational hegemony (which I like to prefer “the Corporatocracy,” as it sounds more poetic and less post-structural).

…

We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures societies according to its values. None of these insurgencies will be successful.

Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.

This won’t happen right away, of course. Things are liable to get ugly first (as if they weren’t ugly enough already), but probably not in the way we’re expecting, or being trained to expect by the corporate media. Look, I’ll give you a dollar if it turns out I’m wrong, and the Russians, terrorists, white supremacists, and other “extremists” do bring down “democracy” and launch their Islamic, white supremacist, Russo-Nazi Reich, or whatever, but from where I sit it looks pretty clear … tomorrow belongs to the Corporatocracy.

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