Oil and Money – Lessons Learned

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Reid Mukai

This is a concluding post for an excellent 7 part long-form series featured on the Hipcrime Vocab blog. While this serves as an adequate synopsis of what was covered, I highly recommend the series for it’s depth and scope starting with the introduction.

Source: Hipcrime Vocab

The first thing I learned is that I bit off more than I could chew, lol. I was intending a simple book review, and it turned into a lot more than I intended to write. I also learned how difficult and thankless a task blogging can be. I’m glad at least a few of you chimed in to let me know you enjoyed it.

One major thing I learned (which I already sort-of knew) is how much real resources have to do with the economy, and economic history, despite economists’ insistence that land, labor and capital are all that matter. In fact, real resources appear to be the MAJOR driver of our economic fortunes. Even Forbes magazine had to admit: The Recessions of 1973,1980,1991,2001,2008 Were Caused By High Oil Prices. Energy doesn’t matter, huh?

I was really taken aback at how recent this all is. I was somewhat aware the historic problem with oil was that there was too much of the stuff. Eric Roston, in The Carbon Age, writes, “Gasoline was a throwaway by product of kerosene refining until the early 1900s, used sometimes in solvents or as fuel for stoves. In 1892, two cents a gallon was a decent price. For another thirty years, apothecaries were the makeshift filling stations.”

But I had no idea just how much of a glut there was and how people thought it would last forever. That it was so cheap we needed the Texas Railroad Commission to hold back production so that the prices would be high enough. I mean, this substance contains the equivalent of ten to eleven years of human labor (1750 Kilowatt hours of human labor), for crying out loud! And it is a non-renewable resource! I was amazed at how far we went in coming up with new uses for the stuff, to the point destroying perfectly good and workable infrastructure just so we could use more of it. Can anything be more insane?

The long boom was driven by the exploitation of oil as a resource. This led to the dominance of the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). All of the knock-on effects of the ICE were behind the post-war boom. I mean, you could write a book about all the economic development caused by cars and trucks. In fact, truck driver/delivery is still the most common job in most states to this day! The ability to deliver goods cheaply anywhere had so many knock-on effects, from the creation of whole new cities to the rise of big-box retailers. Let’s not forget that everything in that big-box retailer is made from plastic which is made from petroleum feedstocks. Kunstler calls the suburbs the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It’s easy to see how that’s true.

I didn’t know that it was only as late as 1959 that petroleum overtook coal to be more than 50 percent of our energy use. I didn’t know that coal only became the world’s predominant energy source after 1900. Before that, we were still essentially in a wood/biofuel economy. As I wrote before, that’s pretty recent – less than three generations.

We think of the 19th century as the era of coal, but as the distinguished Canadian energy economist Vaclav Smil has pointed out, coal only reached 5% of world energy supply in 1840, and it didn’t get to 50% until about 1900.

The modern oil industry began in 1859, but it took more than a century for oil to eclipse coal as the world’s No. 1 source. “The most important historical lesson,” Dr. Smil says, is that “energy resources require extended periods of development.”

The Power Revolutions (WSJ)

Peak oil ideas made it sound like oil (specifically petroleum) was the only resource that matters to the economy, so that once oil production stops growing, the economy will collapse. That’s clearly not the case (oil is 36 percent of the world’s energy). There are lots of other fuels in the mix. However, things like fracking, tar sands, and offshore drilling clearly mean that cheap, easy-to-get oil is on the wane. Oil is cheap now because of fracking – not the tight oil itself, but rather because the fear of it is keeping prices low by the Saudis. That will change. I’m always amazed at the people who run out and buy SUVs the minute the oil price goes down. Do they expect it to be cheap forever or do they expect to drive their car for only a year? It’s also cheap because our economy is in the crapper.

Forget who the candidates are and all the campaigning and the billions of dollars spent– If oil prices are high, the economy is in recession, and the incumbent party will lose power. You can pretty much predict any presidential election by this fact alone. Two-thousand is the only one that sort-of breaks the mold, and that was such a bizarre election between the hanging chads, the voting fraud and the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s not just the economy driven by energy prices – it’s the political world too. Everything else is just meaningless fluff.

At the end of the day, whether a president presides over a good economy or a bad economy is almost entirely down to oil prices.

The other thing that strikes you is the “Groundhog Day” nature of the situation. Oil prices get high, we get worried about the environment, and there’s a great boom in alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental impacts, worries about the economy and supply chains, and so forth. Then oil prices go down and we forget all about alternative energy and all the inherent problems with relying on a finite resource. All the progress toward getting off of oil stagnates, and people assume oil will be cheap forever. Then they get high again, and suddenly it all becomes important again, and we have to go back to square one (compare the EV-1 to Tesla, for example. Heck, Edison built an electric car!). Charles Mann had a great line along the lines of “The human propensity to see flukes of good fortune as never coming to an end,” or something like that.

Given the manipulation of oil prices, it’s hard to see natural economic factors as ever being able to do the right thing when it comes to energy. When prices get high, new supply comes online and alternatives are pursued. But then oil prices crush the economy, demand falls more in line with supply, the price falls, and the initiatives are halted. It feels like the invisible hand is attached to an idiot. Maybe this time we’ll finally get serious.

Prices are temporary conditions. Peak oil is permanent.

The drug dealer analogy of us being addicted to oil is shopworn, but it is just so accurate. It was only once we were addicted to the product that they could jack up the price, and then we HAD to pay what they demanded. But like a drug that devastates the lives of its users, when you hit rock-bottom you try to get on the twelve-step program and get your life back. Then, the dealers will lower the price to keep you addicted, and the cycle begins again. Plus, every dealer wants to be your dealer, so they need to be just a little bit cheaper than the next guy. Barring that, they will bind together with the other dealers to keep the price high and protect their “turf.” The economics of drug dealing and oil are eerily similar. I wonder if anyone’s formally studied this.

In the past each new energy source was added on to the previous ones. Now we are talking about substitution – a totally different ballgame. That is, new energy sources will replace old. That’s substitution, not expansion.

Cheap oil combined with the opening up of China drove globalization. There is no way we could build the largest moving structures ever built to transport goods if we didn’t have a fuel source cheap enough to make it worthwhile. A single ship can move 19,000 containers, enough to move 300 million tablet computers.

That oil played a role in foreign policy shouldn’t be a surprise, but looking at exactly how it led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the civil war in Syria, the removal of Qaddafi, the propping up or removing of dictators, and the positioning of armies around the globe was still eye-opening. So much foreign policy is dictated by access to oil. So much…

I was actually unaware of the Eurodollar and how I caused the fall of Bretton Woods. As Smith illustrates, going back to the gold standard is practically impossible (sorry libertarians). I was unaware of the role that Petrodollar recycling played in the Latin American debt crisis. I was aware of how the Petrodollars funded terrorism. I’m sure readers of Dmitry Orlov were familiar with the role oil and grain prices played in the fall of the Soviet Union. Again, this made Reagan look like a genius.

What I really wanted to describe is how the oil price crisis came about and how it led directly to the rise of Neoliberalism. I also wanted to show how Jimmy Carter’s “failure” and Ronald Reagan’s “success” was based mostly on oil prices. Some people would take issue with that, but it’s hard to separate one from the other. Is it 100 percent? Maybe not, but what percentage was oil prices? Seventy? Fifty? Twenty-five? Surely it played a role.

The problem is that it made Neoliberalism look like a success. People came to believe that unions were evil, and tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and speculation were the magic keys to prosperity. But throughout the Neoliberal reign, oil prices were either stable or crashing. When that wasn’t the case, as in 2007-2008, the system came apart. The rise of China also made Neoliberalism appear to work. But it was smoke and mirrors – cheap uneducated labor, overinvestment, state-controlled enterprises, artificially cheap currencies, entire cities built with no people in them, etc. It was a Potemkin’s village on the scale of a nation. Globalization is a Ponzi scheme.

But now Neoliberalism is literally tearing the world apart. Some major reasons:

1.) Turning the speculators loose. The oil price rise and the food price rise seem to be mainly problems of market speculations (i.e. greed and fear, always the real movers of markets, not supply and demand). This has, in turn, led to political turmoil as we saw in the Arab Spring. If speculation continues to cause price rises for essentials like food, fuel and water to pad the fortunes of speculators, expect more chaos and collapse. Even in the U.S., the actions of Enron and “Kenny-boy” lay caused serious harm to economies, not expansion. And we spent enough on the bailouts to give every unemployed person a job and every homeless person a home, with billions left over. Is this how economies should be run?

2.) The suppression of worker wages has caused massive hardship around the world. The abandonment of full employment as a policy goal has led to a worldwide unemployment crisis that is destabilizing the world. Unemployed people have nothing to lose. People with nothing to lose tend to revolt (see above). The gutting of social services and welfare safety nets has also led to poverty and desperation all around the world. It calls into question the ability of capitalism to deliver broad increases in living standards everywhere. We are clearly not seeing that. We’ve been in reverse for some time. Shouldn’t an economic system make us ALL richer, rather than provide winners and losers? If it can’t, what kind of system is it?

3.) Globalism spreads not only the wealth around, but the poverty too. Some countries, notably Western Europe, have attempted to defend their citizens, while others like the United States, did nothing to insulate its workers from third-world wages and working conditions (and even encouraged them). Rising living standards in China and India are one thing, but falling living standards in formerly wealthy countries make the rich capitalists richer, but cause anger and consternation which is easily exploited by the unscrupulous and power-hungry. This is also destabilizing. Just look at all the anger in the U.S. today searching for a scapegoat.

4.) Austerity and the straitjacketing of governments has led to wealthy, industrialized countries “undeveloping.” The United States is a nation of private affluence and public squalor, with one-third of its children living in poverty, entire cities abandoned and crumbling, urban areas too expensive for median income workers, the infrastructure of a banana republic, poor access to education and healthcare, pockets of poverty, ghettoes, etc. Greece is being gutted as an example to the West. This is leading to rise of right-wing parties in Europe, again redolent of the run-up to the Second World War.

5.) The faith in Markets to solve all problems is especially disastrous with an ongoing environmental crisis. Instead of rationing or capping, instead we get easily gamed “cap and trade” markets to reduce emissions. Nature is just “natural capital,” and every drop of water, tree leaf, and grain of sand must be assigned an owner and a price. In other words, all of nature must be subsumed into the market, because markets are the only way we can solve our problems! This is a Neoliberal idea. Look at how the United States responded to the crisis in the seventies by contrast.

6.) Debt crises have caused massive hardship around the world. As I learned, Mexico’s reputation as a haven for poverty, prostitution, drug gangs, etc. was only after the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. That, in turn, led the massive influx of Latin American refugees into the United States turning America into a Latin country overnight. Prior to 1979, places like Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Libya were stable, secular, relatively prosperous places (See this. And this). Now look at them. Yes, they had dictators and human rights violations. But compare it to today. Latin America has fared somewhat better, largely by finding a way to reject or bypass Neoliberalism. Africa has not fared well, either. Note that you only heard about collapse and famine after the 1980’s (remember Ethiopia?). Yes, Africa was poor before then, but it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Not any more.

7.) People from these wrecked countries are heading to the Western industrialized countries in massive waves of migration–Latin America for the United States and Canada, and the Middle East and Africa for the European Union. This has driven down wages and caused the rise of nativist parties. Everyone is heading for the lifeboats as more and more countries become failed states. There is simply not enough room for all. But rebuilding these countries would mean abandoning the Neoliberal paradigm, forgoing debt and putting into place quasi-socialist policies. Then again, the rich can always retreat to floating offshore islands (and eventually space colonies).

It’s clear that much of the money that has not been collected by governments has gone not only into speculation as opposed to productive activity, but in purchasing political representation. This has led to democracies devolving into oligarchies and a mistrust of democracy in general. The buying of politicians and the media blocks any attempts to deal with collapsing systems. We’ve seen ever greater instability and ever greater bubbles under Neoliberalism now that government has been “contained” and workers have been “disciplined.”

The answer to our problems should be clear: abandon Neoliberalism and return to the mixed economy. Stop hamstringing governments. End speculation. Tax the rich. Close offshore tax shelters. Raise tariffs. Defend domestic industries. Write down the debts. Pursue full employment policies such as a job guarantee, reduced working hours and an basic income guarantee. Distribute essential social services through the government, and let the market handle non-necessities. Regulate to deal with externalities. Impose limits on natural resource extraction. Decarbonize energy.

All of this used to be common-sense. Now it beyond the pale.

The problem is, it’s a ratchet effect. We cannot go back, because TPTB will not allow it. And since the 1970s, they learned they had to not only control the government, but the information we imbibe day after day, otherwise we would instruct our government to do something the powerful may not want. Instead, we had to be convinced that Neoliberalism is the only valid economy – hence the think tanks, talk radio, publishing mills, Fox news, etc. Any sense of common purpose or solidarity is evil “socialism.” As we learned, even “liberal” news sources are fully dedicated to defending this paradigm at all costs, even at the cost of credibility. And the funding of the political classes by the wealthy will ensure that anything that threatens the fortunes of the oligarchs will be a non-starter, even if people do see past the media rhetoric.

The change in economics swallowed the hope of the sixties. How much does it have to do with Neoliberalism, and how much with oil prices? A lot of commenters say, “Hey, the oil is gone, we just need to learn to be peasants.” They point out that American wages stopped growing in 1973, around the time domestic oil production peaked in the U.S. But I think that’s simplistic. American wages stopped growing, not everyone else’s–not what we’d expect in an energy descent scenario. Rather, I think it was the wealth transfer of the seventies, and the politics it engendered, that was the primary culprit. The oil shock opened the door for globalized Neoliberalism, and that is the primary cause of our misfortune. By using oil as an excuse to be politically passive, we remove any chance at creating an economy that works better for all and play into the hands of the powerful.

I think old economy Steve puts it best. Or shall we say, “mixed economy” Steve:

LEVIATHAN: The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lauren Carroll Harris

Source: Adbusters

Within contemporary Russian film, it seems there is an ability to make the grandest statements from the smallest stories. From the insides of tiny flats, dying towns and treeless bays, directors like Andrey Zvyagintsev are able to tell big morality tales of corruption, futility, class and superstition that are at once national and universal in their scope and ambition. Zvyaginstev’s latest film, Leviathan, offers the newest iteration of these massive themes.

Our ‘Job’, Kolya, is a hotheaded everyman, whose house and land are to be seized, razed and developed by the corrupt major. His old lawyer friend from Moscow, Dmitri, must resort to blackmail to defend him, his second wife Lilya looks on despairingly, and his son Roma is busy learning how to drink in the ruins of a nearby church. Our protagonist is never idealized, nor is his gut reaction – to fight – rendered noble, it is merely taken for granted that he is on the edge of a last chance cliff. This is a story of one man against a terrible system and his fate is sealed from the start. It follows that even Leviathan’s portrayals of beautiful things are heavy with doom: the whale carcass in the film’s poster is the film’s strongest visual statement of political futility.

In all these contemporary Russian films I’ve seen – Zvyaginstev’s third film Elena, last year’s The Fool – concepts of social justice are dismissed as naive. The protagonists inch closer to their foregone conclusions blindly, the humor is black and the philosophical currency is fatalism. As in last year’s Two Days, One Night, there is humanity in the fightback, but unlike that film, Leviathan and its cohort underline the tragedy and futility of the fightback. The tides, the courts, the politicians, the priests – all carry on, undeterred. The end of history may have arrived, but not in post-Soviet Russian cinema, where it is accepted that history merely repeats, and repeats and repeats. What if there’s no march of progress? What if the world is growing flatter? Those questions at Leviathan’s heart are threatening for their antithetical stance to one of capitalism’s most inherent and foundational myths: that progress and growth is happening and will always happen. But what I found the most demoralizing thing about Leviathan is that it forestalls the march of progress because its only vision of post-capitalist political change is backwards – towards Stalinism. In that respect, the film is emblematic of the world’s lack of political imagination of visualizing alternatives to the current neoliberal ways of doing and thinking – in that way it is complementary with capitalism’s ‘end of history’ narrative.

In this respect, Leviathan’s global success – it is perhaps the most critically lauded foreign art-house film of 2015 so far – may speak to the way in which it tells Westerners what they already know and want to hear about Russia. It illuminates the truths about that post-socialist country that those in the West look down upon with the assurance of someone from a self-declared ‘democracy’ and reinforces Russia as blackly enigmatic. Never mind the continued use of torture in the USA, or the flagrant assaults on the human rights of asylum seekers in Australia: to foreign viewers, the idea of Russia as a black-hole for human rights is a seductive myth that distracts from their own societies’ hypocrisies.

Perhaps the most despairing storytelling technique in Leviathan is the visual concealment of key plot points. The film’s grimmest, most violent moments – Lilya’s affair with Dmitri, their altercation in the wilderness, Kolya’s retaliative attack, Dmitri’s beating at the hands of the mayor’s thugs – none of these are shown, just the moments leading up to them and following them. There’s something distinctly anti-Hollywood in Zvyaginstev’s withholding and something more violent. What we imagine is far more brutal, far more sinister and the present state of everything is both unimaginable and bitterly accepted. If Leviathan is a masterpiece, and by all critical consensus it is, it’s a masterpiece of political pessimism. The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia.

—Lauren Carroll Harris is a PhD Candidate and Sydney based writer.

Towards a Critical Public Pedagogy of Predatory Anthropocene

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Michael B. McDonald

Source: The Hampton Institute

In 2015, a group of scientists published ” The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration “. They showed that rising consumption and increasing rates of impact on Earth Systems began after the Second World War. It was the expansion of economic activity charged by increasing resource use that created new technologies that expanded rates of consumption. This was a celebrated new socio-economic phase called the Great Acceleration that was supposed to lead to full employment and a bright future for all. It was also the beginning of a next phase of world capitalism accelerated by increasing urbanization. By 2008 humanity officially entered a new urban phase where 50% of the earth’s population lives in urban spaces. More cities will be built in the next thirty years than in all previous human history. Earth System scientists have shown that all of these changes are having unprecedented impacts on the Earth. Human life is changing the Earth, they call it anthropocene.

But the Great Acceleration did not lead to full employment nor a bright future. In fact, it has led to massive inequality created by a very small percentage of people controlling a staggering amount of wealth. In 2010, OECD countries had 18% of the earth’s population but accounted for 74% of GDP. But only .1% controlled this vast wealth through a system that I call predatory anthropocene.

The system of predatory anthropocene can be found in changes to the global economy and a fundamental shift in the way the economy works through its transformation of subjective, social and environmental ecologies, what Felix Guattari called the Three Ecologies. One aspect of this change has been called semiocapitalism, the blending of imagination, ideas, language and capital. Semiocapitalism works by capturing evolutionary life. Belonging, for instance, is now produced by the consumption of psycho-social products that gain economic value in consumption and are financed by increasing debt. The GDP of the United States is now 70% consumption.

Making community through mass consumption is eroding the anthropological basis upon which human life is built. We need a language for this. Perhaps we need to recognize that the communicative and biological systems of the human species have habitats. The biosphere sustains biological life while the ethnosphere sustains communicational life. The biosphere is quite well known but the ethnosphere less so. Wade Davis suggests that the ethnosphere is a global quilt of local cultures, a band of cultural life functioning in tandem with the biosphere for the creation, organization, and expression of human communicational life.[1] The ethnosphere is a collection of languages, ideas, and dreams. It is the anthropological rituals that have accompanied human evolution, has organized social reproduction, it is the institution of language [2] in all its complexity, but is also beyond language.[3] When people talk about humanity in general, they mean the biosphere and ethnosphere, the cultures of the world in their physical, expressive, subjective dimensions. But now ethnosphere complexity is reduced by global commodities, unique cultures consumed by Hollywood-hegemony, human imagination consumed by consumer products, dreams being replaced by corporate produced and globalized desires. A single system is producing hegemony in ways that no single system was ever before capable. It is necessary for us to see that our species is under threat by a monster system that we have created, a monsterous, cancerous, predatory system poisoning the Earth. Henry Giroux has argued that:

What makes American society distinct in the present historical moment are a culture and social order that have not only lost their moral bearings but produce levels of symbolic and real violence whose visibility and existence set a new standard for cruelty, humiliation, and mechanizations of a mad war machine, all of which serves the interest of the political and corporate walking dead-the new avatars of death and cruelty-that plunder the social order and wreak ecological devastation. We now live in a world overrun with flesh-eating zombies, parasites who have a ravenous appetite for global destruction and civic catastrophe. (2014, xi-xii)[4]

Because I follow Guattari’s cybernetic view I am less certain than Giroux appears to be, that is it possible to tell zombies from non-zombies in a period where a) agribusiness replaces agriculture and transforms all aspects of domestic life that b) creates stretches of suburbs that wipe out, without social discussion, the farmland that has laid the foundation of human flourishing, c) as mounting debt continues without slowing and without discourse in the public sphere, as d) waves of fellow humans are dislocated everyday due to military, economic, and environmental calamities. And none of this is news, we watch all of it studiously, staring at our displays unmoved by the misery and pain we see on the faces, and hear in the cries of fellow humans. Too many of us escape our responsibilities to confront this pain by fleeing to walled-in communities whose walls are maintained, not by bricks but by the capacity to carry the mortgage debt (that machinically contributes to predatory anthropocene) in the hopes of living in relative safety while the poor (who can not access debt) are left in decaying city centers. But as foreclosures swept across America after the housing bubble burst, suburban safety was shown to be precarious. It is important for us to take notice of the fact that we know all of this and collectively do very little to change it. We sign petitions on Facebook, but we still shop at malls that we built on farmland and we clearly have little access to empathy. And I am not saying this to be critical of you. I am truly stuck. After many years of being inspired by Adbusters and semio-politics and culture jamming I’m not sure what the next step is. I feel free space disappearing. I’m looking for options.

This difficulty of expressing empathy tells us something about hegemony under semiocapitalism. We now know that empathy is not something we develop, but something that we shut down. Vittorio Gallese in ” The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism” has shown that for us to “know that another human being is suffering or rejoicing, is looking for food or shelter, is about to attack or kiss us, we do not need verbal language” (Virno 2008: 175) we only need the activation of what Gallese called mirror neurons a “class of premotor neurons [that] was discovered in the macaque monkey brain that discharged not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions” (Gallese: 522). Experiments successfully illustrated that mirror neurons were also in the human brain “positioned in the ventral part of the inferior frontal lobe, consisting of two areas, 44 and 45, both of which belong to the Broca region” (Virno: 177). Mirror neurons allow us to experience what we see. When we see someone doing something that we’ve never done, our brain reacts as if we are doing it, what Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” This means that empathy is not something that we need to develop it is something that is functioning in our brains whether we like it or not. But as Paulo Virno points out, humans are clearly adept at seeing other humans as not-humans in order to override “embodied simulation”. We are constantly unmoved watching violent death in both fiction and non-fiction, and constantly enacting laws to restrict sexuality and eroticism in the social sphere. In this context there is little doubt that a public pedagogy of human negation is taking place that values violence and negates the erotic energy that produces new human life! What this means is that “every naturalist thinker must acknowledge one given fact: the human animal is capable of not recognizing another human animal as being on of its own kind.” How does this public pedagogy of negation occur? Virno argues that verbal language, “distinguishes itself from other communicative codes, as well as from cognitive prelinguistic performance, because it is able to negate any type of semantic content.”(176). Through language we are able to negate others as not-human, shutting down the empathy that is produced by mirror neurons. But all is not lost as Paulo Freire points out, pedagogies of dehumanization can be countered through critical pedagogy. That we might learn to negate dehumanization is our hope, to dissolve the oppressor-oppressed binary through the creation of new anti-predatorial segnifications. Virno suggests that while language introduced human-negation into communication it also provides us the technology to negate-negation. In this way critical pedagogy is the negation-of-negation. But only when it is used in this way. I make one amendment to Virno’s suggestion, that it is necessary to go beyond the notion of linguistic negation to identify the ways that negation is in the production of subjectivity, not just in the linguistic negation but in complex existential negations that occur within complex machinic semiotics. It is necessary to see the ways that the production of aesthetic systems produces collective subjectivities that produce We’ness as well as Other’ness.

Cultural technologies produce cultural workers who reproduce subjectivity-producing systems that produce subjects who reduce the ethnosphere and pollute the biosphere. Theodore Adorno was right to be concerned about the culture industry just as Walter Benjamin saw with clear sight the dangers of the absorption of aesthetics into politics. They both saw that the industrialization of the satisfaction of desire, what we might call affective-capitalism, has significant socio-political-economic impacts. There is a real danger when anthropological rituals developed for the social life are replaced by capitalist products. The production and satisfaction of desire on the marketplace is a constantly undermining of love of the local, a replacement of belonging with having the same mass manufactured private property, the replacement of environmentally-embedded anthropological bonds with capital resource consuming exchange. The production of subjectivity is consumed by the factory, negating living, thus extending the contractions of capitalism beyond the factory into all aspects of live time. Giroux has called this a “new kind of authoritarianism that does not speak in the jingoistic discourse of empowerment, exceptionalism, or nationalism. Instead, it defines itself in the language of cruelty, suffering, and fear, and it does so with a sneer and an unbridled disdain for those considered disposable. Neoliberal society mimics the search for purity we have seen in other totalitarian societies” (2014, xvii). And it does so through the production of subjectivity, in the distribution of social subjection and the institution of machinic enslavement. Together these form the contents of the public pedagogy of culture industry, the negation of lived time that blocks access to mirror neurons, limits our ability to negate the negations of the neoliberal culture industry, thus limiting our ability to resist through the production life affirming social machines, liberatory and collectively produced social subjectivations and life affirming machinic enslavements.
I, Terminator

Some people however, are arguing that the changes I call predatory anthropocene are a step forward for humanity. Luciano Floridi, for instance, imagines a new humanity as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs) active in “sharing with biological agents and engineered artifacts, a global environment ultimately made of information” (2011,9). Collectively these inforgs produce an infosphere that either replaces or contributes to the ethnosphere. But Floridi does not account for political economy and therefore misses that his dreams of the infosphere are enslaved by the algorithms of capitalism.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi however, shows that inforgs are not liberated informational workers but are ‘cognitariate’ (exploited proletarians of information) controlled by the automatisms of machinic enslavements, no longer disciplined but under subjectively captured within the new means of control. Machinic enslavement is not discipline, but it is none-the-less controlling. No longer is there a need for an authority to hover over your shoulder to keep you in line. Machinic enslavement works to lead you into accepting the circuits of capture and control embedded cybernetically in modes of production, exchange and consumption. In the machinic enslavement of predatory anthropocene your only value is through economic consumption, and control is located in your desire to fulfill your consumptive role. Desire (libidinal, economic, social) is no longer a location of liberation, but a mechanism of discipline. This is power within predatory anthropocene.

Floridi’s infosphere and its cognitarians are colonizers machinically enslaving dreams and desires. Their colonization does not in fact produce the infosphere but instead a nightmarish mechanosphere. The mechanosphere converts the anthropological ethnosphere into capitalist products, cognitive capitalism “produces and domesticates the living on a scale never before seen” (Boutang 2011, 48). Felix Guattari and Franco Berardi “emphasize that entire circuits and overlapping and communicating assemblages integrate cognitive labor and the capitalistic exploitation of its content”[5] in a model they call semiocapitalism, that captures “the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value”( Berardi 2009, 21). Our language is being transformed into capitalist value, our words, dreams, desires and subjectivities are lost to the mechanosphere, “the authoritarian disimagination machine that affirms everyone as a consumer and reduces freedoms to unchecked self-interest while reproducing subjects who are willingly complicit with the plundering of the environment, resources, and public goods by the financial elite” (Giroux 2014, xxi).

Predatory anthropocene not only massively increases earth system impacts but creates massive inequality. In early 2015 year Oxfam released Working for the Few a terrifying document that shows, “Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population” and that, “The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world,” and that this already extreme economic disparity is getting worse.

But we do not tell stories of predatory anthropocene to our children. Instead we tell myths of consumption, stories of gleeful elves happily working in non-unionized factories making toys for unproblematically good children, all the while supported by a covert group of elf spies that complicit parents move around their house for weeks. This is the childhood public pedagogy of predatory anthropocene where domestic life is machinically enslaved to global capitalism, domesticated to surveillance-of-consumption, young lives converted to effective consumer-citizens. Perhaps it’s time to start telling our children the very true story of predatory anthropocene, the killer system that we have created and released into our world but refuse to name, refuse to accept, and spend a great deal of money and words denying. There is no sense denying predatory anthropocene, we need to talk of the monster that is killing our planet, we need to develop a critical pedagogy of predatory anthropocene, to learn to negate the negation.

Notes

[1] Davis, Wade. (2007). Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. Vancouver, BC: Douglas &McIntyre Ltd.

[2] Virno, Paolo. (2008). Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles, California: Semiotext(e)Foreign Agents Series.

[3] Here I am thinking about post Spinozist philsophers that argue for a semiotics beyond language signification and even beyond logocentric significations and include Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Maurizio Lazzarato, Rosi Braidotti. Most compelling is the Deleuze and Guatarri suggestion that Lazzarato has picked up on in Signs and Machines and Governing by Debt that there is a machinic order as well as a logocentric order. My argument here is that predatory anthropocene functions through a machinic order that is little impacted by traditional semiotics, by political sloganeering, or even by radical critique. That there must be a politics of doing, or dropping out of predatory anthropocene in the way that Franco ‘Bifo’ Berrardi suggests in After the Future.

[4] Giroux, Henry (2014). Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism New York: Peter Lang Press.

[5] Genosko, Gary. 2012. Remodeling Communication: From WWII to WWW. Toronto, Can: University of Toronto Press. (pg. 150)

“Breaking the Fear Factor”: Opposing War, Financial Fraud and State Terrorism, Dismantling Propaganda

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Koenig

Source: Global Research

We are living in a (western) world dominated by neoliberal dictators, criminals and crooks. And many of us, impregnated with the human idiocy, as so well described by Andre Vltcheck (The West Spreads Intellectual Idiocy) are every day deeper and deeper immersed into fear – fear of action, fear of what’s next – fear of losing our comfort zone. The western propaganda machine paid for by the corporate and financial oligarchy through the presstitute media is constantly indoctrinating the little we have left of our free-thinking brains.

Fear is everywhere. People who are afraid can easily be manipulated. People who are afraid obey. The system needs people who don’t resist. Renegades are potential drone targets. The Big Constant that pervades our western world with ambitions to also infiltrate Asia – is terrorism. Man-made terrorism – or better – elite-made terrorism; George Orwell would have called it Big Brother-made terrorism; terrorism with a particular purpose: spreading fear and submission.

On Friday, 21 August 2015, on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, according to the New York Times, “a heavily armed gunman opened fire aboard a packed high-speed train, traveling from Amsterdam to Paris [….] wounding several passengers before he was tackled and subdued” by two American military servicemen (on leave), who were helped by a third American. According to French officials, they “averted a mass killing.”- The gunman was armed with an automatic pistol, an AK47 and a knife (NYT annotation: AK47 is Al Qaeda’s preferred weapon). The Americans were coincidentally and suitably near to subdue the shooting 26 year-old Moroccan, a convenient Arab, who was taken into custody when the train stopped in Arras, France, just beyond the French-Belgian border. No doubt, he will be squeezed for confession. He may try to escape – and then may be shot death. Amen.

The French anti-terrorist unit took immediately charge of the investigation. The unit is known to work in utmost secrecy. Whatever news comes out of it is most likely ‘cooked’ to suit the system.

The NYT proclaims that the three Americans saved the train from a massacre. Nobody was killed. Just one of the American heroes was injured. Hollande thanked Obama for the brave Americans’ exemplary behavior and for preventing a train carnage. Propaganda all over. In America we trust – is dogma number one; dogma number two is – there is no save place on earth.

Fear everywhere, but America is there to help. Danger lingers at every corner. A terrorist may be just next door. Just give yourself up to Big Brother and he won’t let you down.

The first step towards sub-doing fear is asking yourself: Who invented and fabricated terrorism in the first place? In countries and entire regions ravaged by Washington incited wars and conflicts, terrorism is the expression of hopelessness, of wrath – of fighting back, when there is nothing left to lose. Look at the Middle East. A battlefield of nations destroyed by years of war – people living in ruins, in miserable squalor; some escape – and become the endless and EU loathed stream of refugees. According to the UN High Commissioner, there are more than 50 million refugees worldwide.

People take-up arms in self-defense. The west calls them terrorists. A term popularized by the media. A term that instills fear. – Imagine a world where the Judeo-Christian aggressors would suddenly see the light and stop spreading wars and conflicts and subjugating the world – peace would break out and settle in – terrorism, one of the key reasons for fear, would have no purpose to persist – fear would die, trust and solidarity would grow. The empires worst enemy: solidarity, friendship, and trust among people.

All wars and conflicts are multi-purpose. They boost the elite-dominated war industry; in the US more than 50% of GDP; they help dominate and subjugate people, exploit their resources, and are trailblazing a path towards Full Spectrum Dominance – world hegemony. They also help one of the ‘elite’s’ key objective – depopulating the world, so the elite may live longer with the ever scarcer resources of our gradually depleted planet. Reducing world population is a key objective of the Bilderberg Society – voiced by Henry Kissinger already in the 1960s. Recently I overheard one buddy telling another: I hate wars; but the only good thing about wars is – they reduce world population.

That is the horrendous level of immorality and greed to which humanity has sunk. – We the over-fed west may not get enough in an ‘overpopulated world’ (sic), therefore let’s reduce the human stock by killing off the under-people.

According to FAO – the UN Food and Agriculture Organization – with the current available agricultural technology Mother Earth could aliment at least 12 billion people, almost double of today’s world population. Fear and greed decimate our rational thinking. The me-me-me of abject western consumerism – and the fear of losing it – overwhelms our innate sense of human solidarity.

Remember the infamous Christmas Day 2009 ‘underwear bomber’ on a Northwest Airliner approaching Detroit wanting to detonate a plastic bomb sewed into his undies? He was suitably identified as a Nigerian Al Qaeda fighter and also conveniently and par hazard filmed by a passenger in the back row — This was such an amateurish attempt to spread fear, that after a short while even the media didn’t want to lose their ‘credibility’ (sic) and shut up.

Is there ever a thought among the fearful that such terrorists might be ‘planted’ by those who are served by the fear they cause?

A former CIA official recently admitted that virtually all so-called terror acts in the US and most of those in other parts of the world since (and including – added by me) 9/11 are false flags. With every false flag, the system can tighten its grip on the population under the pretext of ‘protection and security’. The populace literally asks for it – please protect us, please come to our houses, put them upside down and see whether there are terrorists hiding in our closets… that’s how the Boston people reacted after the April 2013 false-flag Marathon bombing.

Since 9/11 US citizens have lost more than 90% of their civil rights; first through the Patriot Act, then by subsequent extensions of police ‘protective measures’. Most US citizens are not even aware of the power they gave up to the police which has now the authority to invade people’s homes at will, without search warrant or explanation and then find anything justifying the arrest and indefinite confinement without trial of an inconvenient person. The ‘suspects’ are mostly Muslims. These days it’s easy selling to the brainwashed western world a Muslim as a criminal or terrorist.

Yet, the Boston Marathon false flag was of such low grade that anybody with a little bit of reason left, could recognize that the bombs were detonated by special forces with the mere purpose of implanting the notion that even a relatively progressive thinking university town like Boston is in danger of terrorism. Therefore let’s control the people, let’s not this ‘intellectual Boston crowd’ choose its own ways, abandoning the sinking ship. All sheep must be kept together in false solidarity, of course.

The two Chechnyan brothers were pre-identified, they had no clue what may eventually happen to them. They conveniently had a police record, maybe fabricated, to also hurt Russia, hitting two flies with the same stone. The Chechnyan ‘malfeasance’ could easily be sold to the public. One of the two alleged suspects was killed – and silenced – in an artificially created ‘shootout’. The other one is in solidarity confinement and is not allowed to talk, not even in court – condemned to die – soon to be silenced too.

Public events henceforth project fear. – People, please stand up against police and state-sponsored violence and terrorism! – Analyze for yourselves! Don’t believe the lies spread by the mainstream media. Yes, it takes a little effort, seeking out the truth and reading the news on internet – Global Research, Information Clearing House, Sputnik News, VNN, RT, TeleSUR, PressTV, CounterPunch, New Easter Outlook, The Saker – and many more – but it is one of the few chances you have to see the light and stand up for your rights – and get rid of fear.

The Boston false flag bombing, was followed by a similar horror event in Paris, in January this year. The Hebdo Charlie and related supermarket assault killed 17 people. It was opportunely planned at a notoriously anti-Muslim cartoon magazine, executed by CIA-Mossad forces in full connivance with the French secret service

(see http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-charlie-the-shock-doctrine-par-excellence/5424960).

Two plus one ‘suspects’ with previous police records, were pre-identified. One of them ‘forgets or loses’ casually his ID in the get-away car – the only link the police has to the ‘terrorists’ – they find two, kill them at sight – so they won’t talk anymore. – The third related alleged assassin of a Jewish supermarket at the outskirts of Paris awaited the same fate: death by a police barrage of bullets. A blurred amateur video (maybe by now taken off internet) shows how a hand-cuffed individual is thrown before the wolves outside of the supermarket, to be riddled mercilessly with bullets. Nobody to talk. The truth remains ugly propaganda – propaganda for the system – a system that prevails over and feeds on terrorism. Millions of people, dulled by the event, walked the streets of European cities, solemnly parading placards lettered with “I am Charlie” — millions of people submitted – and still do – to a miserable lie – spreading and perpetuating fear.

Hollande had a justification to tighten the grip around France and within Paris – police everywhere, reducing civil liberties just a tad more – orders from the Washington masters. Being a nominal ‘socialist’ (sic), the emperor doesn’t quite trust him – as he may resent having been forced by the White House to abrogate his country’s lucrative sale of two Mistral type amphibious assault ships to Russia. To dampen any lingering sympathy for Russian President Putin, Hollande had to be reined in; and the spineless French leader (sic) did indeed cave in.

Fear is everywhere. European politicians are all afraid they may be in the crosshairs of the CIA or Pentagon or other US mercenary hit men if they don’t behave. A couple of days ago it was reported that Hollande is now also planning preventive drone assassinations, mimicking his brother-in-crime, Peace Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama. Imagine! – How far can you sink to lick – ehhh – the naked toes of the naked emperor. How far has our western civilization sunk in only the last 30 years – the onset of neoliberalism!

Fear commands everyone – almost. Fear is the public enemy number One – but it can be overcome – with courage, an open mind and foremost an awakened consciousness.

People feel reasonably happy. They feel protected. They gladly trade their civil rights for police and military protection. Terrorism is horrible and it is so unpredictable. It lurks everywhere. And nobody dares to question these bloody fabricated horror events. Nobody dares ask: what motivates the terrorists? How come their number has increased exponentially in the last 15 years? Terror sows more terror. Fear disseminates more fear. More fear facilitates more oppression and manipulation of people – and eventually more terrorism.

Take the massive flood of refugees engulfing Europe. The EU laments the ‘refugee crisis; seemingly not realizing that they helped making it. The Eurocrats cannot deal with the overwhelming influx of refugees. They use the bought media to make people afraid of them. The refugees come from these Arab countries the west is fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’. They are dark-skinned, poor and no-good. They steal our jobs, food and women. The human touch and solidarity of westerners has been annihilated long ago – by the neoliberal doctrine – that knows no mercy, only profit and power. Western powers don’t want these poor homeless beggars within their frontiers. What to do with them? They are a costly nuisance. Most of them are Muslims anyway. There is no space for them.

Would it ever occur to one of those high-flying, arrogant never elected Maastricht politicians to ask ‘why is this onslaught of refugees increasing by the day?’ – They may find the answer in front of their nose, in case they still have some left-over ticking brains. We, Europeans, in full complicity with war-mongering hegemonic Washington have helped destroy their countries, their economies, their jobs, torn apart their families, killed their children, have bombed their very homes to ashes – now they come to seek help from us. These poor people have no choice but asking their hangmen for a bit of mercy, for some crumbs of bread, for some rudimentary shelter. The raped seeks alms from the rapist. It’s the Stockholm syndrome. – Its fear from dying. Maybe the criminals who almost killed them have some humanity left, a bit of mercy – please.

What makes them tick – these criminal hegemonic politicians? Why are they so inhumanly selfish, greedy and violent? The public at large is afraid to even ask. Asking could produce answers that may derange one’s comfort zone. Better don’t ask and follow the rules. Let fear continue to rule.

The NYT also reports, “Stock prices around the world continued to plunge on Friday, threatening to end one of the longest bull runs in the history of the United States stock market.” Fear of losing money is spread. Such ‘market’ fluctuations, as most of us know, have little to do with ‘markets’, be it share or money markets. Money is fabricated by a mouse-click of a bank dishing out debt. Markets are manipulated by banks and political powers for monetary profit and political gains – and to sow fear – fear that something horrendously drastic may happen, may affect our fragile economy – and may foremost affect our stolen well-being. Yes, stolen. Our western riches have been stolen during hundreds of years of abject, murderous colonization of the southern hemisphere. And we continue colonizing them with our modern weapon – MONEY. When banks spread fear, it is to steal the money, pension funds, social systems from us, their faithful clients. Stealing from abroad is not enough.

Rather than fearfully shutting up – wake up! Dare stand up fellow citizen – against the white collar onslaught of fraud and exploitation, against corruption of our elitist neoliberal system! Get rid of those deceiving politicians – the scum of greed and power. Expose them. Neutralize them.

The US as well as the European Commission just enacted laws, allowing banks, effective immediately – to ‘rescue’ themselves by so-called ‘bail-ins’ – meaning, a bank that has overstretched and over-speculated itself into bankruptcy may literally save itself by stealing the money from its depositors and shareholders. – Why does such an edict – not really a law because those who designed the rule are unelected Eurocrats – not prompt an immediate run on the banks? – Why does nobody even protest? – Because people don’t know? Maybe. But Fear – sheer fear from being punished for ‘disobedience’ – is a better explanation.

Instead, our fear makes us trust that such ‘bail-ins’ will always happen to others. We so easily forget what happened only two years ago, in March 2013 to the people of Cyprus, when their deposits were decimated by the infamous ‘haircut’, administered by the highly indebted Cypriot banks, by order of the BCE, with full complicity of the Cypriot elites, who first transferred their fortunes abroad. It was like a trial run. How much would the populace swallow without (too much) protesting? – It worked. The rule is now institutionalized – and nobody says beep. – For fear that worse may follow? – Or for sheer comfort of not moving our butts.

The famous late Howard Zinn said civil disobedience is our – as in ‘we the people’ – strongest weapon against corporate and state injustice and abuse. Today’s version of this wisdom might be for the 99.99% of us, the people, to organize and infiltrate the reigning criminal system and breaking it down from within. Much like did and do the State Department funded Washington-based thinktanks (sic) – initiating the deadly and destructive ‘Arab Spring’, intruding and subverting the European Parliament with bought proxies and fake NGOs – and what they attempt to do in Russia and China, albeit unsuccessfully.

—

Back to the NYT article on the plunge of the US stock exchange. Finger-pointing of the guilty is of the order. The fear factor has to be substantiated and enhanced by fault of an ‘outsider’ – in this case China – which according to the NYT has ‘unexpectedly’ devalued its currency, a sign of a troubled economy and a bleak outlook for the economy of other large ‘developing countries’.

Let’s fear the Evil East. – No good may come from the east. The NYT has of course no explanation of truth. Namely that the Chinese Yuan had been artificially over-valued under pressure of the US, and kept within a 2% band of fluctuation by the Chinese authorities. This was also in line with China’s huge dollar reserves, some 1.6 trillion dollars. Relaxation of the fluctuation – letting the rate slide naturally to an expected 3% margin, would not only make China more competitive, but might enhance the currency’s international standing to eventually becoming a new currency in the IMF’s basket constituting the SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights. The SDR is an international virtual money that may be lent to countries which so desire, hence, better balancing the currency exchange risk of the loan. The current SDR basket is composed of only four ‘world’ currencies; the US dollar, the British Pound, the Euro and the Japanese Yen.

If the Yuan can keep its own by floating against other major currencies, chances are it may be admitted by the west-dominated IMF as the fifth currency to the SDR basket, thereby opening the door for the Chinese Yuan to become a major official world reserve currency. Washington may not like it, but may have little choice preventing the currency of the world’s strongest economy to become an officially admitted reserve currency.

—

Fear may also be the main reason for the Greek Tsipras Government 180 degree U-turn after the 62% NO vote on July 5 – No to austerity, No to more strangulation by the infamous troika – European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Not Germany, not the troika, are Greece’s strongest enemies; fear is. The Syriza government was pressured, blackmailed, coerced – and possibly even corrupted – into accepting an even more nefarious austerity package than the one against which Greeks voted with an overwhelming NO. If indeed enacted, the new debt commitment of € 86 billion will drive Greece’s debt to GDP ratio way above 200 % – and not one euro will flow into Greece’s economy, her social system, fighting unemployment, bringing back public hospitals, schools, water and electricity.

The Syriza Tsipras Government has committed an illegal act against Greece’s own Constitution which puts the people above parliament and above the executive – as a true democracy should. Tsipras’ anti-democratic act could be undone any time by a simple decision of the Supreme Court. According to international standards, Greece’s accumulated debt is fully illegal and could be erased by a mouse click, the same way it was created. Any contract – in this case debt – concluded under duress, coercion, corruption and / or blackmail does not stand up before an international court of law. This must have been known to the Tsipras government. Yet, Tsipras and his inner circle went to Brussels to ‘negotiate’ ignoring this chance. Instead they sold out their country to the banksters, let themselves be humiliated, ridiculed in the face of their own people, let alone the rest of the world.

Fear was most likely the engine for Tsipras’ behavior. Many of his Syriza colleagues left the government coalition. Ministers who didn’t agree with his politics were fired. He preferred succumbing to fear – fear of the potential wrath that might emanate from the corrupt and criminal EU; from greedy Germany whose neoliberalism is rapidly taking on the colors of Nazism. – German supremacy over Europe – again? – Maybe there were death-threats involved, who knows. It is common practice when power and resources are at stake.

However, a true leader has no fear. He or she stands tall with the moral and ethical obligation to defend the interests of the people who elected him or her. As did Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Cristina Kirchner, Lula, Dilma Rousseff and many more.

Traveling recently all over Greece fear was visible everywhere. When asked, why their inaction in the face of this shameful treason of their PM – no protests, the streets remained calm – the answer was almost uniformly – we are afraid. Afraid of what? Of the police; they shoot at us with rubber bullets, with water cannons – and we don’t know when the military will intervene.

In Delphi, the very town where democracy was born some 2,500 years ago, a shop owner confessed, democracy is dead, not only in Greece – but in Europe, in the world. With this backdrop, a new military takeover was according to him not far-fetched. The Tsipras betrayal was a boon for the rightwing, the Nazi-like ‘Golden Dawn’ – a perfect backing for a new military regime.

After the 1967 US-supported so-called Coup of the Colonels, Greece suffered seven years of a most repressive right wing military dictatorship, where full obedience was of the order, where people disappeared, where the communist party was forbidden and communists were prosecuted and killed, where anything resembling left-wing literature was censured, during which miniskirts, pop-music, long hair, the peace sign and the like were prohibited. This repressive regime has deeply marked the Greek population. They are afraid it may return. They are aware of their country’s vulnerability due to its importance for Washington, hosting the southern-most strategic NATO base. Any deviation of the Washington made and EC imposed rule may bring back the military horror – reminiscent of Costa Cavras’ 1969 extraordinary docudrama “Z”.

Now, the Tsipras Government has resigned – for fear of the domestic consequences of its actions? – A new interim government is to be prepared before the announced 20 September election. Will the radical break-away Syriza faction, the new Unity Party, be able to form a viable coalition and gather the necessary trust to win the coming September elections?

Will Greece after all be able to break the paralyzing streak of fear?

Will Greece set the new standard of fearlessness for the rest of Europe to follow? – Will Greece dare to go the only practical way – exit the unviable euro – go back to her drachma and revamp their economy with public banking for the benefit of the Greek people? – I trust Greece will dare take back her sovereignty, breaking the all-permeating Fear Factor and become a flagship of courage for Europe and for the world.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance .

American Politics: A House of Mirrors

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: Land Destroyer

A house of mirrors is an immersive, highly distorted and intentionally confusing version of reality. Those walking its corridors are sometimes amused and sometimes frightened by the disorienting experience, but luckily for them, it is only temporary. There is an exit, and they will walk through it, back to reality.

But what if one existed their entire lives in such a distorted reality and knew of no exits? Would they convince themselves that these distorted images reflected back at them were in fact reality no matter how unnatural they appeared? Could they convince themselves to enjoy and even embrace this distorted reality?

One ponders such questions when looking from the outside-in on American politics. It too is a house of mirrors reflecting back a reality entirely distorted. Also like a house of mirrors, American politics have been intentionally constructed this way, to confuse, disorient and even frighten the American people when necessary to exercise mass persuasion over them. The final result is perpetual impunity granted to the powers that truly be, hiding behind the powers that allegedly were “elected,” and powers whose authority only exists in this house of mirrors and no further.

New Leaders, Old Wars

Consider US President George Bush Sr. He launched the inaugural war of what he himself called a “New World Order.” Operation Desert Storm included multiple nations comprising of nearly a million soldiers who swept from the map one of the largest conventional armies (4th largest) in the world. Bush Sr., however, paused just ahead of sweeping the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. His successor, US President William Jefferson Clinton would keep Iraq subdued with periodic bombing campaigns and the imposition of both crippling sanctions and no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq.

Clinton would serve 8 years in office and lock horns with Russia in Serbia in a proto-Ukraine-style conflict. In 2000, we should remember that George Bush Jr. ran on a platform opposed to global interventionism. For those trapped in the house of mirrors, this distortion of reality seemed very convincing. For those who understood the hegemonic mission of America’s special interests, those that transcend elections and political parties, they knew Bush Sr.’s desires for a “New World” endured and would manifest themselves in a yet revealed, muscular foreign policy that only needed the right impetus to be justified in the eyes of the American people.

Conveniently, the events of September 11, 2001 delivered just that. So began the 8 year “War on Terror.” So sick of wars were Americans at the end of those 8 years, that anyone promising to end them would likely win the 2008 elections. And so Barack Obama did and thus became “US President.” However, not only did the wars not end, and not only were they in fact expanded, new wars were begun. In fact, these new wars were all the planned wars Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. never got around to fighting.

Yet, no matter how unnatural this distorted reflection appeared in the American politics house of mirrors, those trapped perpetually within its mirrored walls found it perfectly acceptable for a Democratic president to continue Republican wars and start new wars the Republicans could only have dreamed of starting but couldn’t because of left-wing anti-war movements now silent because “their guy” was in office.

Hillary = Obama = Bush Jr. = Clinton = Bush Sr.

With Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she is running for office in 2016 with President Obama’s full endorsement, those infected with neo-liberalism and wandering the corridors of this house of mirrors see yet another distorted, ghoulish image staring back, but one they are yet again ready to embrace.

Here is a woman who as US Secretary of State laughed and mocked the Libyan people upon hearing their leader had been murdered by terrorists in what constituted by all accounts a war crime. Before that, she played an active role in selling the war upon Libya in 2011 to the American left (as the American right had already desired such a war for years and needed no convincing). By 2016 we may have yet another Clinton in office, and a Clinton fully dedicated to carrying on the wars of both the Democrats and Republicans that came before her.

To say this is continuity of agenda is a bit of an understatement. American foreign policy has been so singular in purpose and focus for the past several decades that it is clear that behind the distortions of this house of mirrors, something singular and very nasty has been there the entire time. Who or what could it be?

The Real President of the United States Lives on Wall Street, not Pennsylvania Avenue

How about we look at the people who pay for the political campaigns to put these various spokesmen and women-in-chiefs into office in the first place? Or the immense interests driving lobbying efforts that target and control both sides of the political aisle in American politics? A single Fortune 100 corporation has enough money to buy out every relevant politician on Capital Hill and still finish up the fiscal year bloated with billions in profits. And what happens when these interests converge across various think-tanks they themselves have set up and created to generate the singular foreign and domestic policies we see carried forward from presidency to presidency, from congressional session to session?

We see complete control exerted over American politics as well as across the media, allegedly charged to serve as watchdogs and a check and balance, but instead turned into an echo chamber and instrument of mass persuasion by those who have clearly consolidated the summation of American politics in their pockets.

While policy might be debated over by these special interests, and groups moved in one direction or another to exert influence against competing special interests among this exclusive club, one thing is for sure, the American voter is the last voice considered in this process.

Since the American voter is incapable of seeing that they are in fact in a house of mirrors to begin with, and think they are “outside” in reality making real decisions, their decisions are completely irrelevant to those who really do live outside in reality and are actually making real decisions.

We must understand that for special interests that collectively control trillions of dollars in assets, profits and infrastructure all over the planet, the last thing they are willing to do is allow for the existence of a system that might actually put into power a form of authority above their own, that would set policy predicated upon the interests of the people, rather than their own. They have the money, the power and the ability to ensure policy is set to suit them, and them alone, and they clearly have done just that.

This is why US troops are still in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars are still being waged either directly or indirectly against Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Russia and destabilization targeting China and other targets of Washington and Wall Street’s special interests continues unabated, albeit distorted within the house of mirrors, regardless of who is president.

So Americans may think they are voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and those infected with neo-liberalism the world over may think another enlightened champion of their progressive cause has taken the reins of the free world, but they might as well have voted for another Bush. The reality is, that as along as Americans and those who look to America from abroad for leadership dwell in this house of mirrors, the special interests that intentionally built this carnival called “democracy” will have their way back in actual reality.

Instead of fumbling through another four years trapped inside this carnival attraction, let’s find the exits. Let’s leave this house of mirrors and breathe a breath of fresh air. Are we really going to listen to another round of campaign promises, holding our breath hoping that this time they mean it? Or will we begin divesting from this system and building our own, one that might actually truly represent us this time, far from the mirrored walls that held us for so long?

The Poverty Machine: Student Debt, Class Society, and Securing Bonded Labor

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Jeremy Brunger

Source: The Hampton Institute

At the dawn of the 20^th century, very few American students attended high school, as the demands of the heavy-industrial and the agricultural economies of that period were ill-suited to an extended education beyond the family sphere. In the middle of the 20^th century, most Americans who either aspired to or had to work entered the full-time workforce immediately after high school, for such a postwar economy featured plenty of growth and comparably fair wage-compensation for the average worker. As the economy became more complex in its labor needs, its extending length of education complemented these requirements. The transformation of the agricultural economy into the technological economy after World War II, in turn, transformed the university, once the commune of the well-to-do, into a center for job training, an adjunct to industry, and one which continued to increase in enrollment as the technological necessities of an increasingly complex economy required further education. What was once the realm of the study of Christian religion, the Rennaissance humanists, and the Aufklärung became, for most students, the study of the technical labor necessary to produce and reproduce the new forms of capitalism and scientific production coming into existence. The growth of the American middle class became co-incident with the growth of the education industries which had hardly existed a century previous, when the middle class itself had hardly existed in any recognizable form. Where there was study, there was hope for economic success-the maxim “if a man falls in a field he is redeemed in a library” comes to mind-and the institution of the university became as integral to living well in the United States as the ownership of property and the propagation of the nuclear family.

However, in the 21^st century, although attendance of university courses is at an all-time high as the millennial generation achieves the highest historical rate on record of college attendance, that same generation is forecast to experience a decline in standards of living comparative to their forebears. Not only this qualitative fact, but also the quantitative method of that attendance is worthy of critical analysis-for the funding of undergraduate and graduate educations comes largely from the borrowing of money from lenders with the Federal government playing its role as intermediary. As the declining middle class cannot pay for its children’s higher educations, it looks to the loan system to cover the ever-increasing costs of reproducing its standards of living over time. But such loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and with the already saturated labor markets of the majority of the professions that could hope to pay off those loans, the economic situation comes to look much different: rather than the state intent on spreading enlightenment to the masses, the state appears to be securitizing a labor force that will simply have to perform whatever jobs are available, perhaps for decades on end, in order to pay off those loans.

That is, the students will have to do so if they want to qualify for home mortgages and otherwise live free from debt, which historically has always loomed over the subaltern and the serf alike. The parallels between the indebted student and the historical bond-laborer are strong enough to warrant comparison. One trend that especially deserves critical analysis is the outreach of the market to cover students from low-income backgrounds and whether or not such outreach is democratic-a Rawlsian lifting of the boats-or if it is merely predatory in nature and outcome. For, if the state and its lenders are merely financing higher education in order to secure a labor force that will not practice in the professions for which it trained but rather any job available by fiat of the debt-load, then a new reckoning is due of the state of affairs between the working-class young and their educations, the relationship between the state and the private sector, and the ongoing presence of class determinism in the free world.
Debt Corvee

According to The Institute for College Access and Success, statistics for the average student debt load from 2014 suggest that 71% of all students graduating from four-year colleges had student loan debt and the average level of this debt for public colleges was about $25,550, about $5000 higher than 2008. At the for-profit colleges the level was even higher, with students graduating with about $40,000 in debt. Most of this debt is mediated by government loan programs-about 80%-with the rest being covered by private lenders without mediation. The average student debt has increased, since 1993, about three-fold; given the rising cost of living and institutional funding in general, an increase in cost is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is how steep that increase in cost is. The cost of the aspirant apparatus of education increases beyond the market value of the professions on offer when viewed sociologically-the combination of public funding and private ambition allows tuition rates to soar even as student returns on investment plummet.

It appears the days when middle-class parents, a status declining in real terms since the 1970’s, directly financed their children’s college educations are largely over. While this may appear to be beneficial to the working class, in that the gatekeeping apparatus for entry into the professions-the colleges and universities-are more easily accessible than ever before, the debt that falls on the students is that much more of a burden. Students “who received Pell Grants, most of whom had family incomes under $40,000, were much more likely to borrow and to borrow more” than their more middle class peers, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. The debt load is thus geared to the children of the working class and the working poor who, no doubt seeking a better future for themselves, expend large sums of money-often more than a year’s wages, and sometimes two years’ worth-in accessing the portals of higher education. Given that student loans mediated by the government cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, students often have no choice but to live with that debt load for years and years if not forever: they have an education which cannot be repossessed, but they are also forced to work in professions for which they did not train in order to pay off that initial investment. This situation comes to resemble the historical institution of corvee labor, or other forms of debt-labor, in that the young, in being promised a better future, must nevertheless work for others as bonded servants in order to pay off their contracts. This is especially true for graduates in the non-scientific disciplines, as a Bachelor’s degree in a field other than business or the sciences becomes a mere shibboleth for entry into work that is not at the very bottom of the labor market, and even those “safe degrees” harbor little real safety for the student at the whim of capital. Having a Master’s degree in economics, the social science that ended The Great Depression, is yet no guarantee against waiting tables for tips for an indefinite period. The same can be said of the other disciplines.

The historical practice of corvee labor has much in common with the emergence of the indebted student. Corvee was a form of near-slavery, often linked to the military, that indentured laborers to a contract with an owner; nominally, the contract was entered into freely by the laborer, was guaranteed by the state, and was therefore not legally slavery, but due to the conditions of existence the laborer otherwise faced, the contract’s foundations were more reminiscent of the Hobbesian outlook than the Lockean. It was often the only viable option available for the children of the poor, and so, faced with hunger or hard labor, they chose labor on contract with the state. The structural difference between this practice and the practice of loaning to students are small, in that the state was involved in corvee as much as it is involved in student lending-for the student who may seek jobs after graduation is still in the economic red even as the student receives compensation for work. Corvee’s goals were to fill up a floating labor pool; the side effect, whether designed or accidental, of student lending winds up much the same. A student who accrued $30,000 in debt studying philosophy is likely to wind up working in the lower sectors of the labor market, unless they go back to school for a different or a higher degree-and so, in terms of base economics, their impersonal labor has been securitized by the public sector in favor of the private sector. Unless, that is, that student winds up working for the state in some other capacity than what they expected when they entered into their field of study, in which case the state has merely financed its own labor pool: and plenty of state jobs, like those in the sector of public secondary education, offer debt-manumission in reward for practicing in those fields for a period of several years. As such, the claim that only for-profit colleges are to blame for high student debt is false, for public universities contribute massively to rates of student debt and possess internal incentives for producing indebted students who might seek to dissolve their debt through public service.

The same may be said to apply to a pre-medical student who decides it is not prudent to enter into the “megaloans” required for medical school-at which point that student is already indebted for the undergraduate education and so, like the student of philosophy, winds up working for any institution that is hiring. This aleatory materialism may not have been intended by the state-the rhetoric behind opening access to higher education to as many people as possible was couched in democracy and enlightenment, to which every “Dream Big” sign on college campuses will attest-but its practical effects come to much the same result as corvee labor. The ideological state apparatus metamophoses into the financial state apparatus, yet focuses on the same people-the students, who, now indebted, represent a securitized labor force for private and public sectors alike. Most internships available to the graduate are unpaid internships-a relatively new development since the 1990s-thus leaving workng-class graduates desperate for income only non-professional career avenues. As the only broad field of economic growth under the last two presidential terms has occured in the service sector, educated working-class students can expect to enter the same service sectors in which their parents worked. Most interestingly, the etymological root of the word “service” stems from the word “serf.”
The Graeberian Insight

According to Dr. David Graeber’s 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years, the centralizing state has employed debt as its apparatus of growth for centuries. Debt, for Graeber, informs the very epistemology of Western people-we think in terms of credit and debit, of libertas and indebtedness, of squaring up our moral accounts. Debt is thus an all-pervasive category in how the Western world works, whether in the ancient world or in the contemporary 21^st century. Graeber’s insight is useful beyond his idealist prescriptions for “everyday communism” and his moral philosophy, for the latent commodification of the ideals of democracy-education among them-is still a very real phenomenon. Education may have its necessary infrastructural costs, but it need not be a commodity traded between lenders, or traded between speculators, with unwitting students-especially students from non-professional backgrounds-used as its financial pawns. Given that the actually-existing professions cannot absorb these students, and that the state serves as mediator between lenders financing their educations, the surplus labor which the students provide can only be absorbed by sectors they did not intend on entering: the various service sectors, the only growing sectors in the economy, the only employers broadly willing to accept non-professionals.

Graeber writes that “presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalism-or anyway, financial capitalism-simply explodes. Because if there’s no end to it, there’s absolutely no reason not to generate credit-that is, future money-infinitely. Recent events would certainly seem to confirm this. The period leading up to [the financial crisis of] 2008 was one in which many began to believe that capitalism really was going to be around forever; at the very least, no one seemed any longer to be able to imagine an alternative. The immediate effect was a series of increasingly reckless bubbles that brought the whole apparatus crashing down” (360). Given that higher education has become an industry like any other, subject to the same laws of capital and labor, it also suffers the same proneness to instability endemic to any other capitalist endeavor. Consider the recent closure of Sweet Briar College, the glut of PhDs, or the models of infinite growth to which larger universities seem to adhere. The universities are awash in internal commentary that they are swiftly becoming corporatized, going from the internally-administed grove of academe to an organ of capital’s interest-just look at any critical article on The Chronicle of Higher Education, especially those written by educators and researchers already secure in their tenure, such as Terry Eagleton’s 2015 article “The Slow Death of the University.” With such extension of the sphere of capital and its models of development into academia, academia comes to suffer the same risks as capital, along with its students-or, according to the corporatized university, its customers.

The social form of capitalism, in synthesizing Louis Althusser’s social theory of economic reproduction and Graeber’s theory of debt, thus reproduces itself not only through relations of the commodity-form but also through relations of debt (Althusser 47). Capital has a tendency to perform its name-to capitalize, to penetrate into vulnerable markets-and what market is more vulnerable than youth? From ancient Greece to Africa it was not uncustomary for families to lend their children to the market in the form of pawnship or peonage, or in the early modern Western world with indentured servitude, according to the Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition; and with corvee, the state guaranteed the trade-and within the structures of contemporary student lending these kinds of practices appear to have survived into the 21^st century even in the liberal West (174, 229-30). The millennial cohort, massive as it is and funded into debt by the state, represents not a boon for the professions but a huge and exploitable labor pool for the industries.
The Re-proletarianization of Youth

In world-systems theory, as understood by the scholar Immanuel Wallerstein in his book Historical Capitalism, the spread of capitalist social relations produces two key processional phenomena: embourgeoisement and proletarianization. These historical processes act in tandem, as some become bourgeois through the labor of those who become proletarianized, and others, more unfortunate, reverse that process. Such a process, now that the university systems have co-opted the capitalist mode of financing, has been enacted in large swathes of the student population. In seeking embourgeoisement and standards of living that have been viable for only a very few for decades, many students actually become proletarianized-and perhaps moreso than had they not attended higher education with the help of the lending system in the first place. Now that higher education is a thoroughly penetrated market for historical capitalism, many of its students become proletarians as surely as if they had went to work in the nearest factory-only it is not the lonely capitalist who profits but rather the university institutions and the state. The funding models of higher education depend on a floating student body, just how labor-intensive industry depends on a floating labor pool; both groups of people come to resemble each other more and more in terms of base material economy in relation to overall American wealth.

The trappings of economic success-a diploma, the social capital of calling oneself educated-only signify the sort of well-being to which people aspire. Those trappings do not guarantee it. Indeed, even many of the teaching scholars who profess at America’s universities still have debt from their undergraduate years well into their careers that prevent them from attaining the truly middle class lifestyles their students expect to earn. The academic phenomenology of the indebted teacher becomes the capitalist yoke of the indebted student who, upon graduation, in all likelihood does not even know the definition of “liberal capitalism.” It is odd, given America’s general strain of individualism, that it has become a normative part of life to amass such large amounts of debt-that the insistence on neoliberal economics binds the citizenry that much more powerfully by debt-relations than by individualism. Such a process is bound to produce discontent not in isolated outliers but in a whole cohort of the population.

The cornerstone of proletarianization is that one expects, in resignation, to work for low wages in industry-any industry, at that. The structural similarity between the historical proletariat and the new student proletariat is profound enough to warrant its assertion; even if standards of living have increased for the working class since Karl Marx’s 19^th century by vast leaps and bounds, the group of people graduating from universities with mortgage-sized loans fit into the same category of social utility as that historical proletariat. An indebted youth cohort is very good for capitalist endeavor-businesses, having already offloaded job-training responsibilities to the colleges, can expect an incoming workforce that is more desperate for employment because of the debt-burden-and it is very good for the state, since so many students attend public universities. Given that universities, once homesick spaces of learning and temporary poverty, have become profiteering enterprises of not only education but also entertainment akin to theme parks, they produce permanent poverty under the current administrative model of offering high loans to undergraduates.

Consider the critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s observations, in “The Culture Industry” section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, on “the original affinity between business and entertainment” which “reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society’s apologia” (115). Even the studious and earnest student plays today and pays tomorrow in the contemporary university-the hardships of education are passed onto not the undergraduate of today but the graduate of tomorrow. The right to proletarian entertainment is not the “jazz-machines” of Adorno’s era, but the sites of higher education which only since the 1980s welcomes proletarians on their credit. Through a Kantian education that is supposed to free them from external determination, the young have become mere objects of financial speculation, as well as objects of exploitable and undifferentiated labor. The parallels in labor, in relation to the social totality, suggests that the average student body upon graduation becomes the reproduced proletarian body due to debt peonage, which has always been the chief exploitable force and method in industrial society.

In contrast, the medieval institution of journeymanship, by which a student learns gradually more and more from a teacher-worker, was not a relationship of bondage so much as a relationship of tutorship, but despite the modern university’s medieval roots in these practices, the emergence of student debt of such magnitude renders null those benign roots. The indebted student is, as a rule of thumb with its exceptions, rendered by the system of higher education the indebted servant to capital. Working-class 18 year olds ought not be the victims of financial speculation instruments wielded from above, nor should the narrative of enlightenment reproduce inequal relations of capitalism on their shoulders. Beyond this, it is perhaps symptomatic of general living conditions that so many working-class students are attending higher education in the first place-that being poor in a world-historically dynamic economy is that much more intolerable than in the past.

The most worrying facet of this indebting process is the public insistence that students from low-income families attend university on credit. Born into poverty, they can expect to continue enduring it even upon graduation, even if they amass the scholarships and grants that are geared to supporting them. Given the statistics on debt provided by The Institute for College Access and Success, this low-income cohort is the most vulnerable to predatory lending, and so becomes the most indebted relative to their wealthier peers. The class determinism inherent to this shifting of capital from private business to the educational sector all too often makes poor teenagers into poor students into poor working adults. The kinds of jobs these students were taught never to do, by their parents who worked those very jobs in order to keep food on the table, are the only kinds of jobs available to the majority of indebted students upon graduation. While standing debts that pose no possibility of discharge in bankrupty might be good for the speculators of the macro-economy, it represents a monumental burden for individuals and especially those individuals who compose the working class. The pedagogical theorist Henry Giroux suggests in his 2014 book Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education that the funding mechanisms for American universities are abrasively neoliberal, in that they are extended to students only in the interest of maximum returns on investment-and not only does the funding mechanism support inequality, but also the class interests vested in university research that favors the wealthy over the interests of the poor: the aspirant young become as grist for the capitalist mill by the very institutions they were taught to trust since birth.

The sociology of student debt suggests that indebted working-class students will live in, in relation to society at large, the same socioeconomic position as their parents despite their higher educational attainments. According to findings in the economist Dr. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not increase,” and neither did “the intergenerational correlation of education and earned incomes, which measures the reproduction of the skill hierarchy over time” that “shows no trend toward greater [social] mobility over the long run” (484). The cycle of sociological immiseration thus continues unabated, no matter how loud the college yells of freedom and democracy resound, for someone-most likely not the student-profits off the exploited student body. The social utility of higher education transforms, under capitalism, into the private utility of the capitalist; the social affectation of education-as-commodity transforms into the relations between master and bondsman in the new feudalism. Cultures are changed not by the beliefs of the old but by the beliefs of the young. Where the forces of conservatism-not necessarily undesirable in themselves provided they are matched with creativity-over-reach their purview is in the debt-relations extended to the young, who alone amongst the age groups offer history an American future.

Youth is a time for creative experiment and creative destruction, for healthy questioning of the decadent status quo, for sane inquiry into our insane history; it is not a time to be enslaved to financial circumstance, the time clock, or the manager with delusions of grandeur. Such inexuscable waste now doubtless bears future repercussions. Education has always had its costs, and any prosperous society has paid them-but to what result? Creating a vast age group that, in coming to political and economic consciousness, despises the institutions that led it into servitude is not only damaging to the quality of life the students themselves experience. It is also damaging to the self-serving patriotism that conservative forces depend on, for student debt loads only foster distrust of hallowed institutions. “Mistreat the young,” the old adage goes, “and doom the old.” Not only this, but it is also destructive to middle-class capitalism itself, for a generation that pays student debt is a generation that does not buy homes-a high mark of complaint given that so many American cities are falling into infrastructural decay and personal poverty. The populist imperative to preserve a future worth living in need not clash with the profit motive, provided speculators find means other than the young to achieve their profits. The theory of higher education-its opening of access to a more democratic cross-cut of the classes-ought to inform its more predatory practices which, under the debt-relation, only reproduces poverty.

A Victorian patriarch despite himself, Marx despised the immiseration of proletarians most of all because their subordinate positions rendered them incapable of independence, as though by virtue of their servitude they became adult children permanently. Similar in his criticism was that the chief goal of the working class is self-abolition, that is, the working class’s aspiration is to no longer be working class. In seeking to escape the mire of poverty amidst splendor-for America remains the wealthiest country on the planet-working-class students all too often dig themselves deeper into the poverty trap, however adorned with diplomas its ever-heightening walls become. The only way out of the poverty trap for most of them is to become the very thing they were taught not to become by their parents and their professors: bonded servants, or, as the economist Frederic Lordon calls them, “willing slaves of capital,” in his book of the same name.

It is not that state involvement in higher education is destructive to the common weal. Far from it-higher education is definitely an institution best left to public administration, for it is a valuable aspect of the commons and its democratic purview. The attendance of higher education may represent one area where the erosion of the commons, at first appearance, has not progressed. But the erosion of the commons occurs where capital privatizes public utility, whether or not it happens in land-grant universities or in private colleges. Where the danger lies is in the inter-relationships between the state and funding models that target the poor for the benefit of the wealthy, thereby fostering uneven development and the reproduction of the conditions of poverty for the working class. Were the attendance of university by the poor and the children of the poor not incumbent upon credit, and therefore upon their probable future immiseration, higher education in America would actually function in harmonious accordance with its original raison d’etre: the humane enlightenment of society no matter the class situations its members may have happened to inherit in the lottery of birth.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford UP, 2002.

Althusser, Louis. “The Reproduction of the Conditions of Production.” On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Verso, 2014.

Eagleton, Terry. “The Slow Death of the University.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2015.

Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Harmarket, 2014.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House, 2012.

Klein, Martin. “Pawnship.” Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition. Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Lordon, Frederic. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso, 2014.

Piketty, Thomas. “Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Do Educational Institutions Foster Social Mobility?” Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard UP, 2014.

TICAS. “Quick Facts About Student Debt, March 2014. ” The Institute for College Access and Success. 2014.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism. Verso, 2011.

Neoliberalism Is Changing Our World Without Our Even Noticing

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Wendy Brown charts the ‘stealth revolution’ that’s transforming every aspect of society — and now has democracy in its sights.

By Hans Rollmann

Source: PopMatters

‘Neoliberalism’ is a much confused and maligned term these days. Progressive activists deploy it derisively as a general sort of derogatory label; learned professors write articles on the topic without really saying anything more penetrating. It’s as over-used an idiom as globalization (or as capitalism and socialism were 70 years ago). Even Anti-Flag take up the subject in their 2012 track “The Neoliberal Anthem”: “Strap in and watch the world decay!” they proclaim. Blunt, but not inaccurate.

Yet for all its confounded usages, what exactly does it signify?

In a 2013 review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books that is more useful – if less straightforward – than Anti-Flag, Michael W. Clune described neoliberalism as “an economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government.” (”What Was Neoliberalism?”, 26 February 2013)

But it’s much more than that. Now, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist Wendy Brown contributes a truly useful text on an over-wrought topic, and one which focuses not only on the economic manifestations of neoliberalism, but on its broader effects on our political and social thinking. “Neoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct,’ and a ‘scheme of valuation,’” she writes. It’s a mode of thinking, and the manner in which it emerges can be infinitely varied. We must be alert to neoliberalism’s “inconstancy and plasticity”, she warns, and its ability to reconfigure itself in new guises. Neoliberalism “takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms. It is globally ubiquitous, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself in space and over time.” It’s a slippery beast, in other words – hard to define and even harder to see when it’s happening.

Brown’s work is an important and vital contribution at this time insofar as it takes aim at the beating heart of neoliberalism: its insinuation in the very institutions and identities which were hitherto used to limit its spread; institutions which, it was once hoped, would sustain deeper and more profound values implicit to democratic society and human sociality.

Brown is less interested than other scholars in the grim economics of neoliberalism: what she focuses on is its implicit threat to democracy. She opens her book by charting the emergence and contestation between ‘homo politicus’ and ‘homo oeconomicus’; between the human who uses politics to shape their world, and the human who is driven by self-interest and sees the world as always already shaped by economics. French philosopher Michel Foucault discussed this dichotomy in his 1978-79 College de France lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics, and Brown analyzes what Foucault saw – and failed to see – about this early emergence of neoliberal rationality.

In a superb if lamentably short section on gender she also discusses the question: “Does homo economicus have a gender? Does human capital? Is there a femina domestica invisibly striating or supplementing these figures…?” Her point is that “liberalism’s old gender problem is intensified by neoliberalism”, or that neoliberalism impacts women with particular vehemence.

Having discussed Foucault’s early charting of neoliberal political rationality, and expanded on his ideas in light of neoliberalism’s trajectory in the past 30 years, Brown analyzes some modern examples of neoliberalism’s diverse expressions. She looks at how it has insinuated itself in governance – in the notion of building consensus, rather than appreciating contestation; in the depoliticization of government; in the valorization of benchmarking and best practices. All of these deliver destructive blows against democratic political will, against the notion that humans can determine their own destiny and ought to shape their own reality. Instead of making their own decisions, governments appoint ‘external consultants’ to tell them what they should be doing; instead of inventing new ideas and ways of doing things, governments survey ‘best practices’ and see what everyone else is doing. It represents, in many ways, the triumph of mediocrity.

Neoliberal rationality infects law and legal reason, as well. Brown offers an in-depth analysis of the Citizens United case, which protected the right of corporations and the wealthy to dominate democratic elections in the US with their overwhelming power of capital. She also offers one of the best and most thorough analyses of how neoliberal rationality is destroying higher education: the post-WWII dream of an educated and equal society has been twisted into an economistic view, which holds that universities exist only to enhance capital; and that the purpose of an education is not to become better able to contribute to the broader political community, but rather to enhance one’s own ability to generate further capital.

Brown’s book is theoretical yet accessible; it’s an important and vital interjection which reveals and casts bare the neoliberal rationality that increasingly governs our world.

Dismantling Neoliberal Rationality

There’s an implicit warning in Brown’s text, which she addresses briefly but is worth some additional reflection. Audre Lorde famously cautioned against using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, and increasingly this is precisely the direction in which efforts to limit the ravages of neoliberal thinking have turned, using economistic arguments in an effort to preserve institutions and principles that are premised on other-than-economistic values. Some examples serve to illustrate this.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, public-private partnerships (P3’s) emerged as a neoliberal strategy transferring control and responsibility for public infrastructure – roads, bridges, hospitals, schools – into private hands. The basic argument held that the private sector, not beholden to political interests but rather to principles of efficiency and maximization of cost and utility, would prove more efficient custodians of public infrastructure. This neoliberal argument piggybacked nicely onto the drive to lower taxes. In an environment where lower taxes resulted in reduced state budgets, maximizing cost and efficiency would ensure public dollars stretched as far as possible.

This argument was received sympathetically by a public which had been worked up (by conservative pundits and politicians) into a collective sense of outrage over personal tax obligations and a sense of diminishing consumer power. It struck an affective chord, even though it was not based on any solid research. Yet P3’s became a dominant and accepted approach to building and maintaining public infrastructure and services.

In the past decade, efforts to fight back against public-private partnerships have achieved some limited success and have taken as their point of departure the fact that these partnerships are in fact not very efficient or effective. The private sector, it turns out, is often even more inefficient and ineffective than the public sector, given that it is driven by values such as greed and profit as opposed to public accountability. Analyses of several P3 projects have revealed massive cost over-runs, invariably subsidized by taxpayers to a cost far in excess of what it would have cost the state to produce the infrastructure on its own. (”The Problem with Public-Private Partnerships”, by Toby Sanger and Corina Crawley, CCPA, 1 April 2009) Contractual stipulations often guarantee corporate profits at public expense, requiring the state to assume all the risk, using public funds to rescue projects when private partners fail or walk away, and in some cases even using public funds to top-up corporate profits that fail to meet agreed-upon projections. (”Ontario Auditor breaks new ground with review of public private partnerships methodology”, by Keith Reynolds, Policy Note, 5 January 2015)

All this is true, and revealing the truly ineffective and inefficient nature of P3s has been critical to turning them back in many cases. However, there’s a problem with this. These campaigns against P3s adopt the same economistic principles as were used to promote the notion of P3s in the first place: namely, that efficiency, cost maximization and capital enhancement ought to be the driving principles of the demos, or public state. The implicit argument is that P3s are wrong not because they transfer public ownership into private hands, but because they do so inefficiently and at the expense of the taxpayer. Granted, there is often a reference to P3s being ‘unaccountable’ to the public, but this is rarely interrogated or explored as deeply as it should be. In fact, it ought to lie at the core of public resistance to P3s. Public-private partnerships are wrong simply because the state ought never to allow public goods to fall under private control, even if it might save more money. Economization ought never to hold sway over the values, principles and political power of the public.

Similarly, neoliberal logic has infected other efforts to fight back against neoliberal initiatives. Labour unions – a common target of neoliberalism—are increasingly defended on the basis that they benefit the economy (through ensuring consistent and safe workplace practices as well as strong wages to bolster consumer spending in the community), rather than on the simpler basis that workers deserve the right to control their working conditions. Efforts to reduce tuition fees for out-of-province/state or international students are often predicated on the notion that their economic contribution to the local economy exceeds the value of their fiscal contribution to the university through tuition fees. Nowhere – or rarely – is the argument presented that post-secondary ought to be a public good and universal right in and of itself.

The danger, in other words, is that efforts to resist neoliberalism are increasingly being expressed in such a way that they serve to entrench and legitimize neoliberal values – economization, efficiency, capital enhancement—rather than questioning or challenging the desirability and social and political consequences of those values in the first place.

Brown acknowledges the urgency of the problem. It’s quite possible, she observes, for neoliberal economic policy to be paused or reversed but for “the deleterious effects of neoliberal reason on democracy” to survive, undermining the potential for substantive, entrenched change. Without tackling neoliberal reason, neoliberal economics and governance will inevitably emerge again. It is the ongoing sense of surrender to the inevitability of economics; of the bottom line; of finance as key determiner of what is politically possible, that dooms the political potential of democracy. Although only emerging at the end of the book, this is one of the key lessons it offers: that efforts to resist or reverse the ravages of neoliberal economics are fatally flawed when “NGOs, nonprofits, schools, neighborhood organizations, and even social movements that understand themselves as opposing neoliberal economic policies may nonetheless be organized by neoliberal rationality.”

Fascism’s Forbidden Face

Brown comes close to a forbidden truth in closing. She notes, with great delicacy and hesitation, the similarities between neoliberal rationality and fascism. “This is not to say that neoliberalism is fascism or that we live in fascist times,” comes the inevitable caveat. But what if it is an emerging form of fascism?

One of the troubling trends that’s emerged in recent decades and needs to be challenged more forcefully is the notion that it’s intellectually taboo, inaccurate or excessive to call something ‘fascist’, or to draw analogies to fascist states like Nazi Germany. An example of this taboo is ‘Godwin’s Law’ – the notion that referring to Hitler (or by extension, fascism broadly) destroys the credibility of your argument. It’s a trendy term, but intellectually dangerous. The fact is, fascism was – and is – very real, and the notion that no one should talk about fascism as seriously emerging in the present day is very much a product of our neoliberal era.

In fact we do need to talk about it. The skepticism with which the term ‘fascism’ is treated; the dismissal of arguments which make reference to Nazis, all collaborate in erasing and masking the very real resemblances that exist between historical fascism and contemporary forms of governance like neoliberalism. In its demand for self-sacrifice to the heartless whole – a demand iterated, for instance, in the sacrifice of millions of homeowners and mortgage defaulters in order to save the banks during the subprime mortgage crisis – neoliberal rationality resembles the demand for citizen self-sacrifice that characterized fascism.

George Orwell (in his remarkable book review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf) warned against underrating the emotional appeal of fascism. While socialism and even capitalism offered a vision of the good life – fewer working-hours, health and education, leisure and pleasure – people appear inevitably lured by the attraction of struggle and self-sacrifice. “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” he wrote. The same could easily be said of neoliberalism: people have a remarkable knack of voting for economic tough-guys who promise to make life harder on individuals and communities in order to ‘save the economy’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Brown’s book is essential reading not only for academics but for anyone concerned with our collective political future, and with the defense of democratic politics. Her book ends on a grim note: “Despair” is the title of its final section. Brown has eloquently elucidated the problem, and made a profound contribution to understanding the complex nature of neoliberal rationality and its threat to democracy.

So what is the solution? Brown doesn’t have one, but notes there is no alternative but to keep struggling to find an alternative. We have reached a state of “civilizational despair”, she writes; modernism is dead and with it the hope and belief that we can create a better world. How do we counter this despair, and re-inject hope and alternatives into the world? Such a task “is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?”

Hans Rollmann is a writer and editor based in Eastern Canada. He’s a columnist, writer and opinions editor with the online news magazine TheIndependent.ca as well as editor of Landwash, a journal of literary and creative arts published out of Newfoundland and Labrador. His work has appeared in a range of other publications both print and online, from Briarpatch Magazine to Feral Feminisms. In addition to a background in radio-broadcasting, union organizing and archaeology, he’s currently completing a PhD in Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies in Toronto. He can be reached by email at hansnf@gmail.com or @hansnf on Twitter.

Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Henry A. Giroux

Source: Counterpunch

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

— Giorgio Agamben

George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor minorities and any vestige of the social contract. Free market policies, values, and practices with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly militarized—or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. Citizenship is now subsumed by the national security state and a cult of secrecy, organized and reinforced by the constant mobilization of fear and insecurity designed to produce a form of ethical tranquilization and a paralyzing level of social infantilism.

Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which “violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma,” legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics.[1] Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a war on terrorism “that represents the negation of politics—since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one’s side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent.”[2] Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.

In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists’ attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar. Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state, violated civil liberties, and developed new antiterrorist laws, such as the USA PATRIOT ACT. It imposed a state of emergency that

justified a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.[3]

Under the burgeoning of what James Risen has called the “homeland security-industrial complex,” state secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate owned security industries—especially those providing drones– who benefited the most from the war on terror.[4] This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, any democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a pretext for American exceptionalism and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested rightly that under the so war on terrorism, the political landscape is changing and that “we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated—or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft.”[5]

The war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA torturers, create a “kill list”, expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to indiscriminately kill civilians—all in the name of fighting terrorists. Obama expanded the reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as foreign location, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget—close to a trillion dollars–while “turning to lawless violence….translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq,” including an attempt “to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.”[6] Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school.

Under the regime of neoliberalism with its war-like view of competition, its celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any notion of unity has been contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the other now privileged as an enemy combatant, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of gated communities. With the merging of militarism, the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.[7]

The war on terror has come home as poor neighborhoods are transformed into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army. The most lethal expressions of racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by the police.[8] As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one index of how state terrorism and lawlessness have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of Americans support torture, even though they know “it is totally ineffective as a means of intelligence gathering,” but also by the American public’s growing appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.[9] It should come as no surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a “bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldn’t have.”[10] Guns provide political theater for the new political extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to maximize the pleasure of violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, “There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence,”[11] one “that dissolves politics into pathology.”[12]

Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy. This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of political and theoretical helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider public’s acceptance of foreign and domestic violence.

The current extremists dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go to war with Iran, bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American empire through its over bloated war machine to any country that questions the use of American power. One glaring example can be found in the constant and under analyzed televised images and stories of homegrown terrorists threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers.

Other examples can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Also missing is a history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States.

Capitalizing on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and grieving public for revenge, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up language of war, patriotism, and retaliation. Similarly, conservative talking-heads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the fires of “patriotism” by calling upon the United States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton, writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists that all attempts by the Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”[13]

In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play in a truly “unified” rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.[14]

At stake here is the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence.

Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of September 11 within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and war. Nostalgia is now used to justify and fuel a politics of in-security, fear, precarity, and demonization. The dominant media no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media supported Bush’s fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and others.[15]

Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy. Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical agents on the American population. The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize a host of anti-democratic practices at home-including “a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press,”[16] and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by American foreign policy should not be allowed “to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a college.”[17]

This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned America’s policies in the Middle East and the government’s support of the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians. Language itself has become militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme violence that now floods Hollywood films and the violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such asAmerican Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam.[18] Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following,Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble what could be construed as a spiritual release. Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and legitimate a carnival of cruelty. The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism “into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered.”[19]

The extreme visibility of violence in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in American society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most important practice for mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence has become the DNA of war making in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out,

Warmaking can quickly become associated with “war fever,” the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one’s nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad–and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.[20]

The war on terror is the new normal. Its adoration and intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach into every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that as Thom Hartman points out is “bigger—that the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya,” and a number of other countries.[21] At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women.

Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the “sinister abode of danger, death and infection” and fueled the collective rush to “patriotism on the cheap”, it has also buttressed a “fear economy” and refigured the meaning of politics itself.[22] Defined as “the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown,”[23] the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the defense department, and the anti-terrorist-security sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods for the hysterical war mongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as “the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions.”[24] But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: “breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers’ rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.”[25]

Fear and repression reproduce rather than address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism. Instead of mobilizing fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obama’s policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation. American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war.

The commanding institutions of American life have lost their sense of public mission, just as leadership at all levels of government is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. The United States is now governed by an economic and social orthodoxy informed by the dictates of religious and political extremists. Reform efforts that include the established political parties have resulted in nothing but regression, a form of accommodation that serves to normalized the new authoritarianism and its war on terrorism. Politics has to be thought anew and must be informed by powerful vision matched by durable organizations that include young people, unions, workers, diverse social movements, artists, and others. In part, this means reawakening the radical imagination so as to address the intensifying crisis of history and agency, and engage the ethical grammars of human suffering. To fight the neoliberal counter-revolution, workers, young people, unions, artists, intellectuals, and social movements need to create new public spaces along with a new language for enabling the American public to relate the self to public life, social responsibility, and the demands of global citizenship.

The left in the United States is too fractured and needs to develop a more comprehensive understanding of politics, oppression, and struggles as well as a discourse that arises to the level of ethical assessment and accountability. Against the new authoritarianism, progressives of all stripes need an inspiring and energizing politics that embraces coalition building, rejects the notion that capitalism equals democracy, and challenges the stolid vocabulary of embodied incapacity stripped of any sense of risk, hope, and possibility. If the struggle against the war on terrorism, militarization, and neoliberalization is to have any chance of success, it is crucial for a loyal and dedicated left to embrace a commitment to understanding the educative nature of politics, economic and social justice, and the need to build a sustainable political formation outside of the established parties.[26]

The United States is in a new historical conjuncture and as difficult as it is to admit, it is a conjuncture that shares more with the legacies of totalitarianism than with America’s often misguided understanding of democracy. Under the merging of the surveillance state, warfare state, and the harsh regime of neoliberalism, we are witnessing the death of the old system of social welfare supports and the emergence of a new society marked by the heavy hand of the national security state, the depoliticization of the American public, extreme inequities in wealth, power, income, and a new politics and mode of governance now firmly controlled by the major corporations, banks, and financial elite. This is a politics in which there is no room for democracy, and no room for reformism. The time has come to name the current historical moment as representative of the “dark times” Hannah Arendt warned us against and to begin to rethink politics anew through social movements in which the promise of a radical democracy can be reimagined in the midst of determined and systemic collective struggles. The war on terrorism has morphed into a new form of authoritarianism and its real enemy is no longer limited to potential terrorists, but includes democracy itself.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

Notes.

[1] Chris Hedges, “America’s ‘Death Instinct’ Spreads Misery Across the World,” AlterNet, (September 30, 2014). Online:

http://www.alternet.org/world/americas-death-instinct-spreads-misery-across-world

[2] Tzvetan Todorov, Torture and the War on Terror, Translated by Gila Walker with photographs by Ryan Lobo, (Chicago, IL: Seagull Books, 2009), pp. 2-3.

[3] See, for instance, Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Phillipe Sands, Torture Team (London: Penguin, 2009). On the torture of children, see Michael Haas, George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes(Westport: Praeger, 2009). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010).

[4] James Risen, Pay at Any Price (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

[5] Agamben cited in Malcolm Bull, “States don’t Really Mind Their Citizens Dying: They Just don’t Like anyone Else to Kill Them,” London Review of Books (December 16, 20054), p. 3.

[6] Ajamu Baraka, “Obama’s Legacy: Permanent War and Liberal Accommodation,” Counterpunch (February 18, 2015). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/18/obamas-legacy-permanent-war-and-liberal-accommodation/

[7]Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan, 2014) and Nick Turse , The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives(New York: Metropolitan, 2009).

[8] Henry A. Giroux, “State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner – Expanded Version,”Truthout (December 2014). Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27832-state-terrorism-and-racist-violence-in-the-age-of-disposability-from-emmett-till-to-eric-garner

[9] Jeffrey St. Clair, “When Torturers Walk,” Counterpunch (March 20-22, 2015), Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/20/when-torturers-walk/

[10] David A. Fahrenthold, ““In the hunt to be the 2016 GOP pick, top contenders agree on 1 thing: Guns,” The Washington Post (March 28, 2015). Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-presidential-hopefuls-sticking-to-their-guns/2015/03/28/b2ef4a1c-d3c4-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html

[11] Rustom Bharacuha, “Around Adohya: Aberrations, Enigmas, and Moments of Violence,” Third Text (Autumn 1993), p. 45.

[12] Sontag cited in in Carol Becker, “The Art of Testimony,” Sculpture(March 1997), p. 28

[13] John R. Bolton, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” New York Times (March 26, 2015). Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0

[14] There are many valuable sources that document this history. Some exemplary texts include: A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); Gordon Thomas, Journey Into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (New York: Bantam, 1989); Danner, Torture and Truth; Jennifer K. Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

[15] Jamie Tarabay, “Obama and leakers: Who are the eight charged under the Espionage Act?” Aljazeerra (December 5, 3013). Online:http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/5/obama-and-leakerswhoaretheeightchargedunderespionageact.html

[16] Eric Alterman, “Patriot Games,” The Nation (October 29, 2001), p. 10.

[17] Cited in the National Public Radio/Kaiser Family foundation/Kennedy School of Government Civil Liberties Poll. Available on line at wsiwyg:5http://www.npr.org/news…civillibertiespll/011130.poll.html (November 30, 2001), p. 3

[18] See, Henry A. Giroux, “Celluloid Heroism and Manufactured Stupidity in the Age of Empire,” Counterpunch (February 12, 2015). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/12/celluloid-heroism-and-manufactured-stupidity-in-the-age-of-empire/

[19] Franco Bifo Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody (New York, Autonomedia, 2009), p. 52

[20] Robert Jay Lifton, “American Apocalypse,” The Nation (December 22, 2003), pp. 12, 14.

[21] Tom Engelhardt, “Walking Back the American Twenty-First Century,” TomDispatch (February 17, 2015). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175957

[22] Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York,” New Left Review 12 (November/December 2001), p. 44

[23] Ibid. Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York,” Ibid., p. 45.

[24] Don Hazen, “Fear Dominates Politics, Media and Human Existence in America—and it is Getting Worse,” Alternet (March 1, 2015). Online:http://www.alternet.org/fear-america/fear-dominates-politics-media-and-human-existence-america-and-its-getting-worse

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. See, for instance, Adolph Reed Jr., “Nothing Left,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2014), pp. 28-36; Stanley Aronowitz, “Democrats in Disarray: This Donkey Can’t Save Our Asses,” The Indypendent, Issue #202. (December 16, 2014) Online:

https://www.indypendent.org/2014/12/16/democrats-disarray-donkey-can%E2%80%99t-save-our-asses

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After the Crash

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Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

Towards a Critical Public Pedagogy of Predatory Anthropocene