Showing posts with label Apocalypse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apocalypse. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Starbucks, Her Majesty’s Government And An Apocalypse
There’s a theory Roman Emperors who declared themselves Gods, or God-appointed, did not do so simply because they were arrogant but instead as a power grab aimed at the religious establishment. In practical terms it appears to have been a way of getting access to the huge booty sacrificed to ‘Gods’ after each harvest. Her Majesty’s Government has much in common with them. Those subjected to Her rule must sacrifice their time and money to a Monarch who also claims authority directly from a God[2]. Curiously though, in the so-called Modern world, loyal subjects will defend to their death her right to be Queen.
“England expects that every man will do his duty” – Admiral Horatio Nelson
No sense of duty makes me happy about money I’ve earned by adding value to other people’s lives being stolen off me and fed directly into the pockets of a “Royal Family”, one of the richest in the world. It feels to me the precise opposite of a morally virtuous act to help fund Her Government as it purchases bullets and bombs to murder people in countries I’ve never even heard of. Furthermore, I’m at a loss as to how it benefits our nation to bail out a banking system which takes money off those who need to give to people who don’t.
The list of reasons I despise taxation goes on and on, I can’t be the only Brit’ who is absolutely sick of it, yet oddly you rarely hear this point of view on our state funded broadcast media. It’s all, ‘pay your taxes and love your Queen’. This is why I run in the opposite direction and specifically drink in Starbucks whenever possible. It’s a little taste of the dream of a free country which I hope will one day exist in the real world[3]. I’m aware this is laughable as a ’revolutionary act’ but take solace in the fact it’s co-incidentally aligned with the European iconography of the coffee shop. Recalling the spirit of revolution which energised people in 17th and 18th Century seems like a dangerous but worthwhile idea right now. It was this zeitgeist that formed the ideas I love which were then written into the American constitution. Those ideas are still radical and will one day be adhered to.
This is why I’m a proud ‘Coffee Shop Revolutionary’:
An individual [...] who speculates on the utopia that “could be” following radical societal, governmental, and cultural change without actually taking action to do initiate it. These coffee shop revolutionaries are comparable to “Armchair Generals” and “Armchair Politician’s”.
It’s why I make a point of writing specific pieces, such as this one, in coffee shops. I fuel myself with the absurd belief there’s power in synchronicity and, as the internet’s realities unfold, I now genuinely feel the revolutionary era is coming round again. Currently the battle takes place between ideas, the new Gods of our time.
Citizens of Ancient Rome who believed in the Gods probably liked making sacrifices to their divine Emperor, nowadays they identify as “patriotic” or “left wing” so are of a similar mind set. That’s unlikely to be a controversial statement on this site as regards patriotic fervour but the “left wing” boil usually needs a little lancing. Currently, those who subscribe to it usually see taxation as a way of redistributing wealth and making the world a fairer place. The theory goes something like this: rich people earn too much money so the more you earn the more you should pay in tax. The reality is: truly rich people do not need to earn money and their status increases if others earn less. Income tax, concerned only with incoming wealth, is therefore helpful if you and your family are rich and wish only to preserve your position.[4] Stopping people from making and saving money is good, from the establishment’s perspective, because it increases reliance on the charity of Her Majesty’s Government and reduces the number of new rich and powerful people they may be required to do deals with[5].
Previously I didn’t understand this and allowed myself to be led by the ”left wing” ideas of other people. I would likely have been one of the many loyal subjects who, practically on command, furiously protested outside Starbucks. The break for much of my generation came thanks to Tony Blair’s warmongering in Iraq, which I did protest against. On that day its estimated more than a million of us were reduced to begging in the streets of London. Our collective plea was encouraged by the belief a “left wing” Government would never allow Her Majesty’s army to be unleashed into foreign lands for anything less than a good solid reason. The contrast between Blair’s response and that of private company Starbuck’s is telling; one lot cared about what people thought of them and the other did not.
When the millions or more people who protested in London were so comprehensively ignored by those in the business of Government it cracked my belief in the notion of left wing or right wing politics forever. The Gods were dead and we had killed them. The man who stood before us in television interviews, with blood on his hands, who I’d voted for because I thought he was “left wing” and must therefore be “good”, was exposed for what he was: not a leader but a follower, a middle manager type who does as he has been told. He was, to use the Nuremburg defence, “just following orders” as have many politicians and managers had before him. He ignored the voters who went to protest in London because his real bosses had spoken so that was that.
Don’t misunderstand me here, I am not advocating some mad controversial conspiracy theory, I am arguing only that the establishment in the UK controls the bureaucracies which farm our taxes. The undisputed head of the state in this country is Her Majesty The Queen and Her Government can co-operate with either left wing or right wing orthodoxy very easily. One of the things that initially attracted me to “the left wing” was that, from a distance, it appeared to be anti-establishment so I wrongly assumed it would be opposed to inherited Monarchy. Realising you’re wrong is important in life and my surprise at the fact the (“left wing”) Labour party were so keen to kneel before our “God-appointed” Queen is a good example of how a Leary/Wilson reality tunnel works. By necessity your conscious mind ignores more information than it absorbs and, throughout your life, your brain learns what information is useful and what is ‘irrelevant’. This process builds a unique “reality tunnel” through which you filter ‘important’ information.
Once someone’s beliefs are firmly re-enforced it’s incredible what they can then either notice or ignore. The longer your reality tunnel has been in place the more rigid it becomes so, for example, if you think there’s a God and you’ve managed to shift your subconscious to fit that belief it’ll start to seem like the evidence is all around you because anything that flatly speaks to the contrary will be ignored. This is what happens with tax slaves, monarchists and anyone who believes any one thing for too long. That’s why it’s important to be wrong, it stops your mind from calcifying.
My left wing reality tunnel was as solid as a rock in my early teens so when my younger self first heard Labour supported the UK’s hereditary Monarchy, I was forced to ignore something because it didn’t fit my worldview. Being wrong and realising I’d been lied to and misled by these “left wing” puppets was hugely liberating because it suddenly allowed loads of new information in.
By the 90′s politics was an industry concerned only with compromise and “being realistic”. In academic circles this attitude was referred to as “realpolitik”, an ideology popular on both sides of the Atlantic which concerns itself only with the practicalities of power and the deals you have to make to get it. The end consequence of this was that the academic industry helped the business of Government recruit people who wanted only power as an end in itself. These characters now bleed through onto the main political stage, schooled in how to be the perfect middle manager and looking like the smooth salesmen they’ve inevitably become. The US’s Barack Obama is so obviously in this mould that to compare him to the UK’s Tony Blair is almost a cliche.
Another cliche in the UK is that politicians “have no real power”. Yet at the same time we have a “symbolic” Queen who rarely gets criticised in the state funded broadcast media (the BBC), has a standing army all swearing loyalty directly to her and has her already eyewateringly huge financial assets bolstered by our taxation system. She gets final say on all the laws passed by her parliament, has every politician swear an oath of loyalty to her and has a police force who appear to have problems arresting friends of hers whom she has knighted, such as Britain’s most active serial pedophile Sir Jimmy Savile, who during his lifetime never felt the force of the law for his crimes.
When I’m in a particularly bad mood I put two and two together with the above and it seems obvious that we’re lied to when we’re told The Queen and Her Family have a role which is only symbolic. I’m sure it’s not as simplistic as this but it can feel like democracy in the UK has evolved into a system whereby the establishment turns to the nation, who they seem to view as farmers do their cattle, and say “who among the herd is most popular?”
“This one, he’s called Tony Blair”
“Great, send him our way…”
From that point onwards the most popular member of the herd is then told what the farmer plans to do with the cattle, how they will be branded, which ones are getting slaughtered at the market and so on. Loaded with this terrible news it is then their duty to pass on these orders, put a good spin on it with their “spin doctors” and convince the sheep to do as they’re told when the sheepdogs come to see them.
To say it honestly feels like all we do in the UK is vote in middle managers who then relate the establishment’s agenda back to us is only a clue you’re paying attention to the various policies they suggest and have noticed the agenda changes not. They toyed with a politics style version of The X Factor in this country at one point, there was of course no need because that’s what we already have. The Prime Minister’s song has been written and all the notes of it ever do is continue Her Majesty’s Government in the same direction. Few people can tell the difference between the two parties here now, the situation used to look very bleak.
After a long period of intense despair about the above worldview I heard of an old concept buried deep within the 60′s subculture that has filled me with hope. The revolution in the head, the only kind of revolution that is effective. This is more likely now than ever before if you combine our right to free speech with the fact each of us has access to a global communications system. The world’s Governments are no longer in the same position, we are now more powerful collectively than ever before and ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Thus the truly revolutionary path becomes: sort yourself out, communicate with others and change for the better becomes inevitable.
I’m serious when I claim my status as a proud “coffee shop” revolutionary, I can’t stress how crucial the idea is becoming to my belief system, a revolution of any kind is useless unless it involves people changing the way in which they think. That’s why American foreign policy fails (in terms of its stated aim) to spread democracy and instead we end up with Presidents blabbering on about winning “hearts and minds” as their soldiers drown in the ensuing bloodbath. In a similar vein this is also why violent revolutions tend to leave behind dictators who have the unenviable task of trying to indoctrinate everyone into accepting their particular reality tunnel as the only possible point of view.
This brings us to the crucial difference between education and indoctrination. The former teaches you how to think where the latter tells you what to think. For example, indoctrination is practiced most obviously in mathematics when it comes to learning your times tables, you memorise them by saying them over and over again. You only stop once they are part of your reality tunnel and 6×6 appears to so obviously be 36 that you can stop thinking about it. It’s apt that many people do not appreciate the difference between this and an education which also teaches you how to think and why we believe 6×6 is 36. You can often spot beliefs enforced by indoctrination rather than education if, when you ask someone why they think something, they get annoyed or irritated rather than give you a reasoned answer. Rote learning clearly supports a number of our society’s establishment-serving points of view but the ability to think clearly supports us and will inevitably improve society. The establishment do not want an educated public capable of self actualisation. They want idiots as slaves, not adults. The net allows for everyone to try different ideas out and learn which suits their needs and nation best. The most important tool you require to use it efficiently with is the ability to think for yourself.
In that sense perhaps ours will be the first generation to take part in the long predicted apocalypse of old. The word itself means revealing and the establishment fears it as an ‘end of the world’ style event and from their point of view that’s a fair analysis. Once information is entirely liberated, ’the revealing’ is complete and the hierarchies of the old world face us there’s a number of uncomfortable questions they will be required to answer. Spiritual systems act as metaphors for the human experience, the apocalypse is no different. Most religions speak of this “new age” I’m on about here as one of harmony and love but few see it as a time of universal forgiveness. Most religions put a period of retribution ahead of the apocalypse. It is this the establishment are afraid of. They believe this stuff. My advice to them is drop the act now, while you still can.
With that I finish my rant, wonder if it will ever make for a good piece of fiction, nail the last of my coffee, pull myself out of the matrix, switch off my “free” wifi and return to the “real” world.
Nick Margerrison, coffee shop revolutionary.
[1] Full story here:
Starbucks UK’s Kris Engkov – “We are going to do what’s required beyond the law”
Good example of the “ethical” angle Her Majesty’s Broadcaster is required to give the issue: Is tax avoidance moral?
[2] The so-called divine right of kings is in fact the legal underpinning of our Monarch.
If you are British and have never looked into this it might be hard for you to swallow this reality because your reaction is likely to be, “it’s only a symbol, it doesn’t mean anything, etc”.
If you are American you have every right to piss yourself laughing. Honestly, it will be good for your British cousins. If you are respectful, like you might be as regards the eccentric customs of some ancient tribe, British people will think it proves you’re jealous of our monarchy and use your politeness as justification for this nonsense.
In a sense it is a bit like an ancient custom but think FGM rather than worshipping the trees or whatever.
[3] I love the idea of America. “There’s something great about America“.
[4] Pisser eh? They’re lying to you. The left wing has a function, it increases funding and power. The right wing has a function, it reinforces gains made by the left. Your function is to question both.
[5] I use the word “rich” in its original sense. Think modern versions of nobility and people who hold court in the King’s presence. Not wealthy peasants arguing over scraps that have fallen from the table.
Starbucks, Her Majesty’s Government And An Apocalypse
Starbucks, Her Majesty’s Government And An Apocalypse
There’s a theory Roman Emperors who declared themselves Gods, or God-appointed, did not do so simply because they were arrogant but instead as a power grab aimed at the religious establishment. In practical terms it appears to have been a way of getting access to the huge booty sacrificed to ‘Gods’ after each harvest. Her Majesty’s Government has much in common with them. Those subjected to Her rule must sacrifice their time and money to a Monarch who also claims authority directly from a God[2]. Curiously though, in the so-called Modern world, loyal subjects will defend to their death her right to be Queen.
“England expects that every man will do his duty” – Admiral Horatio Nelson
No sense of duty makes me happy about money I’ve earned by adding value to other people’s lives being stolen off me and fed directly into the pockets of a “Royal Family”, one of the richest in the world. It feels to me the precise opposite of a morally virtuous act to help fund Her Government as it purchases bullets and bombs to murder people in countries I’ve never even heard of. Furthermore, I’m at a loss as to how it benefits our nation to bail out a banking system which takes money off those who need to give to people who don’t.
The list of reasons I despise taxation goes on and on, I can’t be the only Brit’ who is absolutely sick of it, yet oddly you rarely hear this point of view on our state funded broadcast media. It’s all, ‘pay your taxes and love your Queen’. This is why I run in the opposite direction and specifically drink in Starbucks whenever possible. It’s a little taste of the dream of a free country which I hope will one day exist in the real world[3]. I’m aware this is laughable as a ’revolutionary act’ but take solace in the fact it’s co-incidentally aligned with the European iconography of the coffee shop. Recalling the spirit of revolution which energised people in 17th and 18th Century seems like a dangerous but worthwhile idea right now. It was this zeitgeist that formed the ideas I love which were then written into the American constitution. Those ideas are still radical and will one day be adhered to.
This is why I’m a proud ‘Coffee Shop Revolutionary’:
An individual [...] who speculates on the utopia that “could be” following radical societal, governmental, and cultural change without actually taking action to do initiate it. These coffee shop revolutionaries are comparable to “Armchair Generals” and “Armchair Politician’s”.
It’s why I make a point of writing specific pieces, such as this one, in coffee shops. I fuel myself with the absurd belief there’s power in synchronicity and, as the internet’s realities unfold, I now genuinely feel the revolutionary era is coming round again. Currently the battle takes place between ideas, the new Gods of our time.
Citizens of Ancient Rome who believed in the Gods probably liked making sacrifices to their divine Emperor, nowadays they identify as “patriotic” or “left wing” so are of a similar mind set. That’s unlikely to be a controversial statement on this site as regards patriotic fervour but the “left wing” boil usually needs a little lancing. Currently, those who subscribe to it usually see taxation as a way of redistributing wealth and making the world a fairer place. The theory goes something like this: rich people earn too much money so the more you earn the more you should pay in tax. The reality is: truly rich people do not need to earn money and their status increases if others earn less. Income tax, concerned only with incoming wealth, is therefore helpful if you and your family are rich and wish only to preserve your position.[4] Stopping people from making and saving money is good, from the establishment’s perspective, because it increases reliance on the charity of Her Majesty’s Government and reduces the number of new rich and powerful people they may be required to do deals with[5].
Previously I didn’t understand this and allowed myself to be led by the ”left wing” ideas of other people. I would likely have been one of the many loyal subjects who, practically on command, furiously protested outside Starbucks. The break for much of my generation came thanks to Tony Blair’s warmongering in Iraq, which I did protest against. On that day its estimated more than a million of us were reduced to begging in the streets of London. Our collective plea was encouraged by the belief a “left wing” Government would never allow Her Majesty’s army to be unleashed into foreign lands for anything less than a good solid reason. The contrast between Blair’s response and that of private company Starbuck’s is telling; one lot cared about what people thought of them and the other did not.
When the millions or more people who protested in London were so comprehensively ignored by those in the business of Government it cracked my belief in the notion of left wing or right wing politics forever. The Gods were dead and we had killed them. The man who stood before us in television interviews, with blood on his hands, who I’d voted for because I thought he was “left wing” and must therefore be “good”, was exposed for what he was: not a leader but a follower, a middle manager type who does as he has been told. He was, to use the Nuremburg defence, “just following orders” as have many politicians and managers had before him. He ignored the voters who went to protest in London because his real bosses had spoken so that was that.
Don’t misunderstand me here, I am not advocating some mad controversial conspiracy theory, I am arguing only that the establishment in the UK controls the bureaucracies which farm our taxes. The undisputed head of the state in this country is Her Majesty The Queen and Her Government can co-operate with either left wing or right wing orthodoxy very easily. One of the things that initially attracted me to “the left wing” was that, from a distance, it appeared to be anti-establishment so I wrongly assumed it would be opposed to inherited Monarchy. Realising you’re wrong is important in life and my surprise at the fact the (“left wing”) Labour party were so keen to kneel before our “God-appointed” Queen is a good example of how a Leary/Wilson reality tunnel works. By necessity your conscious mind ignores more information than it absorbs and, throughout your life, your brain learns what information is useful and what is ‘irrelevant’. This process builds a unique “reality tunnel” through which you filter ‘important’ information.
Once someone’s beliefs are firmly re-enforced it’s incredible what they can then either notice or ignore. The longer your reality tunnel has been in place the more rigid it becomes so, for example, if you think there’s a God and you’ve managed to shift your subconscious to fit that belief it’ll start to seem like the evidence is all around you because anything that flatly speaks to the contrary will be ignored. This is what happens with tax slaves, monarchists and anyone who believes any one thing for too long. That’s why it’s important to be wrong, it stops your mind from calcifying.
My left wing reality tunnel was as solid as a rock in my early teens so when my younger self first heard Labour supported the UK’s hereditary Monarchy, I was forced to ignore something because it didn’t fit my worldview. Being wrong and realising I’d been lied to and misled by these “left wing” puppets was hugely liberating because it suddenly allowed loads of new information in.
By the 90′s politics was an industry concerned only with compromise and “being realistic”. In academic circles this attitude was referred to as “realpolitik”, an ideology popular on both sides of the Atlantic which concerns itself only with the practicalities of power and the deals you have to make to get it. The end consequence of this was that the academic industry helped the business of Government recruit people who wanted only power as an end in itself. These characters now bleed through onto the main political stage, schooled in how to be the perfect middle manager and looking like the smooth salesmen they’ve inevitably become. The US’s Barack Obama is so obviously in this mould that to compare him to the UK’s Tony Blair is almost a cliche.
Another cliche in the UK is that politicians “have no real power”. Yet at the same time we have a “symbolic” Queen who rarely gets criticised in the state funded broadcast media (the BBC), has a standing army all swearing loyalty directly to her and has her already eyewateringly huge financial assets bolstered by our taxation system. She gets final say on all the laws passed by her parliament, has every politician swear an oath of loyalty to her and has a police force who appear to have problems arresting friends of hers whom she has knighted, such as Britain’s most active serial pedophile Sir Jimmy Savile, who during his lifetime never felt the force of the law for his crimes.
When I’m in a particularly bad mood I put two and two together with the above and it seems obvious that we’re lied to when we’re told The Queen and Her Family have a role which is only symbolic. I’m sure it’s not as simplistic as this but it can feel like democracy in the UK has evolved into a system whereby the establishment turns to the nation, who they seem to view as farmers do their cattle, and say “who among the herd is most popular?”
“This one, he’s called Tony Blair”
“Great, send him our way…”
From that point onwards the most popular member of the herd is then told what the farmer plans to do with the cattle, how they will be branded, which ones are getting slaughtered at the market and so on. Loaded with this terrible news it is then their duty to pass on these orders, put a good spin on it with their “spin doctors” and convince the sheep to do as they’re told when the sheepdogs come to see them.
To say it honestly feels like all we do in the UK is vote in middle managers who then relate the establishment’s agenda back to us is only a clue you’re paying attention to the various policies they suggest and have noticed the agenda changes not. They toyed with a politics style version of The X Factor in this country at one point, there was of course no need because that’s what we already have. The Prime Minister’s song has been written and all the notes of it ever do is continue Her Majesty’s Government in the same direction. Few people can tell the difference between the two parties here now, the situation used to look very bleak.
After a long period of intense despair about the above worldview I heard of an old concept buried deep within the 60′s subculture that has filled me with hope. The revolution in the head, the only kind of revolution that is effective. This is more likely now than ever before if you combine our right to free speech with the fact each of us has access to a global communications system. The world’s Governments are no longer in the same position, we are now more powerful collectively than ever before and ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Thus the truly revolutionary path becomes: sort yourself out, communicate with others and change for the better becomes inevitable.
I’m serious when I claim my status as a proud “coffee shop” revolutionary, I can’t stress how crucial the idea is becoming to my belief system, a revolution of any kind is useless unless it involves people changing the way in which they think. That’s why American foreign policy fails (in terms of its stated aim) to spread democracy and instead we end up with Presidents blabbering on about winning “hearts and minds” as their soldiers drown in the ensuing bloodbath. In a similar vein this is also why violent revolutions tend to leave behind dictators who have the unenviable task of trying to indoctrinate everyone into accepting their particular reality tunnel as the only possible point of view.
This brings us to the crucial difference between education and indoctrination. The former teaches you how to think where the latter tells you what to think. For example, indoctrination is practiced most obviously in mathematics when it comes to learning your times tables, you memorise them by saying them over and over again. You only stop once they are part of your reality tunnel and 6×6 appears to so obviously be 36 that you can stop thinking about it. It’s apt that many people do not appreciate the difference between this and an education which also teaches you how to think and why we believe 6×6 is 36. You can often spot beliefs enforced by indoctrination rather than education if, when you ask someone why they think something, they get annoyed or irritated rather than give you a reasoned answer. Rote learning clearly supports a number of our society’s establishment-serving points of view but the ability to think clearly supports us and will inevitably improve society. The establishment do not want an educated public capable of self actualisation. They want idiots as slaves, not adults. The net allows for everyone to try different ideas out and learn which suits their needs and nation best. The most important tool you require to use it efficiently with is the ability to think for yourself.
In that sense perhaps ours will be the first generation to take part in the long predicted apocalypse of old. The word itself means revealing and the establishment fears it as an ‘end of the world’ style event and from their point of view that’s a fair analysis. Once information is entirely liberated, ’the revealing’ is complete and the hierarchies of the old world face us there’s a number of uncomfortable questions they will be required to answer. Spiritual systems act as metaphors for the human experience, the apocalypse is no different. Most religions speak of this “new age” I’m on about here as one of harmony and love but few see it as a time of universal forgiveness. Most religions put a period of retribution ahead of the apocalypse. It is this the establishment are afraid of. They believe this stuff. My advice to them is drop the act now, while you still can.
With that I finish my rant, wonder if it will ever make for a good piece of fiction, nail the last of my coffee, pull myself out of the matrix, switch off my “free” wifi and return to the “real” world.
Nick Margerrison, coffee shop revolutionary.
[1] Full story here:
Starbucks UK’s Kris Engkov – “We are going to do what’s required beyond the law”
Good example of the “ethical” angle Her Majesty’s Broadcaster is required to give the issue: Is tax avoidance moral?
[2] The so-called divine right of kings is in fact the legal underpinning of our Monarch.
If you are British and have never looked into this it might be hard for you to swallow this reality because your reaction is likely to be, “it’s only a symbol, it doesn’t mean anything, etc”.
If you are American you have every right to piss yourself laughing. Honestly, it will be good for your British cousins. If you are respectful, like you might be as regards the eccentric customs of some ancient tribe, British people will think it proves you’re jealous of our monarchy and use your politeness as justification for this nonsense.
In a sense it is a bit like an ancient custom but think FGM rather than worshipping the trees or whatever.
[3] I love the idea of America. “There’s something great about America“.
[4] Pisser eh? They’re lying to you. The left wing has a function, it increases funding and power. The right wing has a function, it reinforces gains made by the left. Your function is to question both.
[5] I use the word “rich” in its original sense. Think modern versions of nobility and people who hold court in the King’s presence. Not wealthy peasants arguing over scraps that have fallen from the table.
The post Starbucks, Her Majesty’s Government And An Apocalypse appeared first on disinformation.
Starbucks, Her Majesty’s Government And An Apocalypse
Friday, August 16, 2013
This September May Be New York City"s Voting Apocalypse
On Tuesday, Bill de Blasio became the latest frontrunner in New York City’s mayoral election, a race which has seen several major shifts in polling. Whoever emerges victorious in the first round of the Democratic primary next month, almost all of the polling indicates he or she will be headed to a runoff against the second place finisher three weeks later. This might be a problem.
The Big Apple’s recent history of elections have included legal battles, chaotic lines at the polls, and vote counts that seem to never end. Adding to those headaches next month are the return of the city’s aging lever-pull voting machines and the possibility of a close finish for that number two spot, opening the door for a nightmare scenario where the results are still in dispute as the date of the final runoff approaches.
“I can’t even think about that, the concept is too stressful,” one mayoral campaign staffer, who asked not to be named, said after TPM asked about how the potential Election Day chaos could complicate the tightly scheduled race.
New York City law requires a runoff to be held if no candidate earns at least 40 percent of the vote in the mayoral primaries. Since the Republicans are polling far behind in hypothetical general election match-ups, the Democratic primary on Sept. 10 is the main event in the mayoral campaign. Though polls have been divided on which of the Democrats will be the frontrunner, they have universally indicated that no candidate will reach the 40 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff, and that the battle for the final slot in that round two race could be a tight one.
“The second position — that is what everyone’s going to be focused on: Who’s going to be number two? Who’s going to be in the runoff?” Tish James, a Brooklyn councilwoman and candidate for public advocate, explained to TPM on the phone Monday.
However, close races have proven to be extremely difficult in New York’s last few elections. In 2010, in order to comply with federal law, the city switched from lever machines that had been in use since the 1960’s to electronic voting devices. Since then, multiple close local races have ended in court after the New York City Board of Elections engaged in lengthy vote counts marked by dramatically shifting totals and allegations of voter fraud. In November, President Barack Obama received about 80 percent of the votes in New York City, but even that clear landslide proved difficult to tabulate for the BOE, which announced in July that it had lost 1,600 votes cast in the presidential race and needed to amend its totals nearly eight months later.
A long, disputed vote count would have a big effect in the mayoral election because there are only three weeks between the primary and the runoff on Oct. 1. Any delay in identifying a winner would make campaigning extremely complicated. All of the leading Democrats are participating in New York’s public campaign financing system. This means they are subject to spending caps and reliant on public funds that the city’s Campaign Finance Board will give to the two candidates who qualify for the runoff. Because of this, the candidates can’t afford to get bogged down in lengthy vote counts and legal disputes in the vein of the 2000 presidential recount in Florida.
The New York City Board of Elections tried to avoid Election Day drama this year by getting approval from Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to temporarily take the old lever machines out of retirement for this race. However, James said, not everyone is convinced taking the electronic machines out of the equation will be enough to ensure a smooth ride on the road to City Hall.
James said she is worried the lever machines, which have spent the past few years under plastic sheets in warehouses won’t be in working order in time for the election. She also said some of the spare parts necessary to fix broken machines are no longer being manufactured.
“There’s a concern with regard to whether or not they have all of the parts that are necessary to put these machines back into circulation,” James said.
Even before they were put into storage, James said there were issues with the lever machines, particularly in minority communities.
“Historically, the machines in communities of color have broken down,” said James. “In fact, in Central Brooklyn, Bed Stuy, when I worked there, I used to walk around with a screw driver and when we couldn’t get someone from the Board of Elections to come and repair machines, we would take matters into our own hands. And I became an expert at it. … I’ve worked on these machines with a screwdriver, with a hammer, and sometimes a good kick.”
Broken down machines would force voters to cast handwritten affidavit ballots. An uptick in affidavit ballots could lead to the same slow, disputed hand counts that occurred in races that featured the electronic machines.
Sarah Steiner, an election lawyer and incoming chair of the New York City Bar Association’s election law committee, said she believes “a lot of problems will be rectified by the use of the lever voting machines” even though they have been out of work for a few years.
“There are a lot of people who know how to use the lever machines. … The lever machines, they’re workhorses,” Steiner said. “The counts are reliable, what you see is what you get on the back of the machine. … I do think that they have mechanics for those machines, they have probably more machines than they need and can cannibalize them for parts. I think they’re probably in less bad shape than a lot of people fear. … At least I hope so.”
Though she said she has “more faith” in the lever machines than the electronic ones, Steiner cautioned she didn’t want to “overstate” her confidence in them.
BOE Spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez told TPM the concerns were unfounded and the lever machines will be an improvement on the electronic models.
“The board is confident that, using these lever machines, we will be able to conduct the primary elections and the potential runoff,” said Vazquez.
Vazquez also said concerns about the condition of the lever machines were unfounded and that “only about 18” of the original pool of approximately 7,000 machines were found to be unusable when they were taken out of storage.
“Even before the Legislature passed the bill that allowed us to use the lever machines, they were doing preventative maintenance,” Vazquez said. “The manner in which they were stored since their last use really — I mean for the most part, all of the levers were in very good shape.”
Jumaane Williams, a councilman who represents the 45th District in Brooklyn, also believes the lever machines are better than electronic voting. He described them as an imperfect “best-of-the-worst” solution. However, Williams said he’s still “very worried” New York will see a repeat of last November’s presidential election, where disorganization and confused workers at polling places led to massive lines that turned some voters away.
“I’m very concerned … we could have chaos that we saw in the presidential election,” said Williams. “It was mass confusion and what added to the mass confusion is that everybody didn’t have the same set of instructions. Some people thought that they couldn’t have people taking affidavits, some people thought that they could have people taking affidavits. Some people weren’t in the voter files then you had long, long, long huge tremendous lines.”
Insiders expect about 700,000 to 800,000 people to vote in this year’s mayoral election. That’s about a third of the amount that participated in the presidential race, but Williams said he’s still “concerned about the board’s ability to handle that.” And, in a smaller, more closely-contested race, lines discouraging voters from heading to the polls could have a real impact on the result.
According to Vazquez, the BOE has distributed an “information notice” to voters informing them of where to go once they reach the polls. She said she expects this to help “speed up the lines” and prevent a “bottleneck” on Election Day.
Both Steiner and James were also concerned about the board’s ability to oversee an election without major glitches. They also described the agency as underfunded and inherently dysfunctional. The BOE is structured as a bipartisan agency with two commissioners for each borough appointed by leaders of the two major parties. James said this system and insufficient funding has resulted in the board being “mismanaged” and overly reliant on temporary employees.
“This has become a patronage agency unfortunately and we’ve not professionalized it with the type of with individuals who have the expertise and the know-how to manage an election in the 21st century,” said James.
Steiner said the required bipartisanship at the BOE makes operations unwieldy because it requires “two people doing everything that gets done.” She also echoed James’ argument that the city and state do not give the agency enough funding to be effective.
“The Board of Elections, they’ve been vilified,” said Steiner. “The fact is that we should be strengthening the Board of Elections. We should be making it into an agency that can actually efficiently run an election instead of forcing it to work with temporary employees and way behind-the-curve technology.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long been a harsh critic of the BOE and has argued the agency has received “plenty of money” from the city. The city spent about $ 95 million to make the switch from the lever machines to the electronic models.
“They are basically immobilized. They don’t have anybody running it. They’re polarized,” Bloomberg said after the BOE announced it’s delayed presidential vote count. “And the Board of Elections should not be just people in two parties, it should be everybody.”
Vazquez said the structure of the BOE is “dictated by election law.” She also pointed out the agency has “oversight” from the City Council. However, Vazquez conceded the staffing situation at the BOE is not ideal.
“Unfortunately the board is consistently put in a position in which we had to supplement staff with temporary workers seeing as though our permanent head count for a citywide agency with over 4.6 mill voters is only 351 full-time permanent staff members,” said Vazquez.
Mayoral Election Day drama would require a veritable perfect storm of extremely tight margins combining with the counting woes at the BOE. It may be unlikely, but the potential for problems is enough to put fear in some members of New York’s political class. Other than switching to the lever machines, Williams said he “doesn’t know what else they could possibly do” in the short term to ensure there are no serious issues on Election Day.
“We’re in a bad situation right now. … I feel bad for people who have serious, hotly-contested races,” Williams said. “We’ve just got to pray.”
Photo via Shutterstock / Sebastian Kaulitzki
Hunter Walker Hunter Walker is a national affairs reporter for TPM. He came to the site in 2013 from the New York Observer. He has also written for New York Magazine, Gawker, the Village Voice, Forbes, The Daily, and Deadspin. He can be reached at hunter(at)talkingpointsmemo.com
This September May Be New York City"s Voting Apocalypse
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
How Unchecked Capitalism Has Brought the World to the Brink of Apocalypse -- and What We Must Do Now
The following is an excerpt fromWe Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out, in print at Amazon.com and on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013):
The first step in dealing with a difficult situation is to muster the courage to face it honestly, to assess the actual depth and severity of a problem and identify the systems from which the problem emerges. The existing social, economic, and political systems produce a distribution of wealth and well-being that is inconsistent with moral principles, as the ecological capital of the planet is drawn down faster than it can regenerate. The systems that structure almost all human societies produce profoundly unjust and fundamentally unsustainable results. We have both a moral obligation and practical reasons to work for justice and sustainability.
We need first to imagine, and then begin to create, alternative systems that will reduce inequality and slow, and we hope eventually reverse, the human assault on the ecosphere. To work toward those goals, individuals can (and should) make changes in their personal lives to consume less; corporations can (and should) be subject to greater regulation; and the most corrupt political leaders can (and should) be turned out of office. But those limited efforts, while noble and important in the short term, are inadequate to address the problems if no systemic and structural changes are made.
That sounds difficult because it will be, and glib slogans can’t change that fact. A longstanding cliché of progressive politics — organizers’ task is to “make it easy for people to do the right thing” — is inadequate in these circumstances. Given the depth of the dysfunction, it will not be easy to do the right thing. It will, in fact, be very hard, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise. At this point in history, anything that is easy and can be achieved quickly is almost certainly insufficient and likely irrelevant in the long run. Attempting to persuade people that large-scale social change will come easily is not only insulting to their intelligence but is guaranteed to fail. If organizers can persuade people to join a movement based on promises of victories that won’t disrupt privileged lives — victories that cannot be achieved — the backlash is likely worse than the status quo.
There’s one simple reason that serious change cannot be easy: We are the first species in the history of the planet that is going to have to will itself to practice restraint across the board, especially in our use of energy. Like other carbon-based creatures, we evolved to pursue energy-rich carbon, not constrain ourselves. Going against that basic fact of nature will not be easy.
Modern humans — animals like us, with our brain capacity — have been on the planet about 200,000 years, which means that we’ve lived within the hierarchical systems launched by agriculture for only about 5 percent of human history. We are living today in a world defined by systems in which we did not evolve as a species and to which we are still struggling to adapt. What today we take to be normal ways of organizing human societies — nation-states with capitalist economies — are recent developments, radically different than how we lived for 95 percent of our evolutionary history. We evolved in small gatherer-hunter groups, band-level societies that were basically egalitarian. Research on human social networks suggest that there is a limit on the “natural” size of a human social group of about 150 members, which is determined by our cognitive capacity. This has been called “Dunbar’s number” (after anthropologist Robin Dunbar) — the number of individuals with whom any one of us can maintain stable relationships. In that world, we pursed that energy-rich carbon without the knowledge or technology that makes that same pursuit so dangerous today.
So we are, as Wes Jackson puts it, “a species out of context.” We are living in a world that is in many ways dramatically out of sync with the kind of animals we are. If we are to create systems and structures that will make possible an ongoing human presence on the planet, we have to understand our evolutionary history and adapt our institutions to reflect our essentially local existence — people live, after all, not on “the planet” but in a specific place, as part of an ecosystem — on a scale and with a scope that we are capable of managing. But we also have to acknowledge that we are inextricably connected to others around the world because of more recent history. As a result of the centuries of imperialism that have advantaged some and disadvantaged others, we are all morally connected, as well as literally connected by modern transportation and communication technology. The task is not to go backward to some imagined Eden, but to understand our history to create a more just and sustainable future.
This means we have to recognize that the biological processes that govern the larger living world, along with our own evolutionary history, impose limits on human societies. Either we start shaping our world to reflect those limits so that we can control to some degree the dramatic changes coming, or we will be reacting to changes that can’t be controlled. That isn’t an easy task; as James Howard Kunstler points out, “the only thing that complex societies have not been able to do is contract, to become smaller and less complex, and to do it in a programmatic way that reduces the pain of transition.” Though history suggests that “people do what they can until they can’t,” it’s still imperative that we face the challenge:
Our longer-term destination is a society run at much lower levels of available energy, with much lower populations, and a time-out from the kinds of progressive innovation that so many have taken for granted their whole lives. It was an illusory result of a certain sequencing in the exploitation of resources in the planet earth that we have now pretty much run through. We have an awful lot to contend with in this reset of human activities.
If there is to be a decent future, we have to give up on the imperial fantasy of endless power, the capitalist fantasy of endless growth, the technological fantasy of endless comfort. Those systems have long been celebrated as the engines of unprecedented wealth, albeit for a limited segment of the world’s population. Instead of celebrating, we should mourn the world that these systems have created and search for something better. Systems that celebrate domination are death cults, not the basis for societies striving for justice and sustainability.
Our task can be stated simply: We seek justice, the simple plea for decent lives for all, and sustainability, a balance in which human social systems can thrive within the larger living world. Justice and sustainability have a common economics, politics, ethics, and theology behind them — rooted in a rejection of concentrated power and hierarchy — but there is no cookbook we can pull off the shelf with a recipe for success. We can articulate principles, identify rough guidelines, and search for specific solutions to immediate problems.
On justice: Our philosophical and theological systems all acknowledge the inherent dignity of all human beings. We say that we believe that all people are equal, though we accept conditions in the world in which all people cannot live with dignity, where any claim of equality is a farce. In that case we understand the principles but do not live accordingly.
On sustainability: There is less consensus on the philosophy and theology on which we ground a concern for sustainability. Is it purely pragmatic? Do we need to conserve the world to sustain ourselves? Should we have some more expansive concern about the non-human living world? Do other living things have a claim on us? There are no simple or obvious answers. We may have some general reverence for all life, but most of us value the lives of our children, our friends, and other humans more than we value the lives of other animals. But even with a lack of clarity about how to value various forms of life, we have to understand that we are part of that larger living world and that we should be careful about how we carve it up into categories.
For example, we should be careful not to value the pristine and ignore the human-built. We should not value the part of a forest that is untouched by human hands more than the part that has been cleared for human shelter. It is seductive to label wilderness as sacred and development as profane. Instead we should learn to see all the world — the last stands of old-growth redwoods in northern California and the most burned-out block of the South Bronx — as sacred ground. Until we do that, we have little hope of saving the former from destruction or restoring the latter to health. At its core, sustainability is about the acknowledgment of interdependence: the interdependence of people on each other, of people and other animals, of all living species and the non-living earth. We must see the interdependence of the redwoods and the South Bronx.
Again, no one has a blueprint for creating a just and sustainable society, but here is a list of a few basic assumptions and assertions that make justice and sustainability imaginable: (1) nature is not something humans have a right, divine or natural, to subdue and exploit; (2) for most of human beings’ evolutionary history, our social systems encouraged the solidarity and cooperation required for survival, and our social systems today should foster those same values, (3) systems that place profit above other values inevitably cause problems they cannot solve; (4) solutions must be holistic, linking the always interdependent parts of a system, such as producers and consumers; (5) technology is not automatically beneficial and must be scrutinized before being used; and, perhaps most importantly, (6) humans have the moral and intellectual capacity to make choices that will preserve rather than destroy the larger living world.
That human capacity to choose wisely does not guarantee we always will. The ease with which intellectuals can be co-opted is a reminder of that.
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How Unchecked Capitalism Has Brought the World to the Brink of Apocalypse -- and What We Must Do Now
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
The 4 Plagues: Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse
Every day, thousands, probably millions of people ask their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues similar and increasingly familiar questions: What has happened to our country? How did we get here? Isn’t it scary? Can anything be done about it?
There is an abundance of evidence that there are forces tearing apart the U.S. economy and society, causing increasing levels of fear, anxiety and trauma for large numbers of people. Many people are mystified as to the specific causes of their fears, with a mass media system that constantly broadcasts propaganda about how great America is and a new digital media system that may be exacerbating the problems for a society under immense and unprecedented duress.
There is the added problem that the theories and the means of social change we are familiar with, and to which we still turn, are not remotely up to the task we face, and have mostly proven to be inadequate. Virtually every problem we face has gotten worse over the past 40 years, and heavily sped up since 9/11 and the economic crash of 2007.
In an environment of confusion and despair, it can be helpful to name the beast—essentially to understand the forces at play, how they operate, and why they feel both intractable and overwhelming. So, what follows is a kind of Users" Guide To What Is Freaking Us Out.”
What Has Happened to Us?
So the big question is: what is the “it” that has happened to us? Depending on your vantage point and the myriad problems in front of us, “it” can be any number of causes and factors.
For many, it is the disappearance of the sense of a democracy many thought was embedded in U.S society. Sure, we’ve always been ruled by elites. But we are in a new era where we feel crushed by the overwhelming dominance of corporations and big institutions that treat people like commodities, getting away with degrading people’s dignities while pocketing large profits. This is especially true of banks, which are now so big they are beyond the reach of the legal system for fear that the global economy will be adversely affected.
Many people feel they have no control over the direction of the country because their vote doesn’t matter—incumbents with the most money mostly get elected. Many voters feel trapped by the lack of options because of pro-corporate stances of both Republicans and Democrats, and then there is another beast—the rabid right-wing.Our legislators are bought by campaign contributions and seem incapable of constructive action. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, and the fact that legally corporations are often treated like persons, is beyond most people’s comprehension.
Economic Disaster For Many
For others, the anxiety producing “it” is directly connected to personal economic loss, of homes, jobs, personal wealth, or increased debt, all which has contributed to a massive erosion of financial security.
The statistics are quite shocking. The poor are suffering—more than 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty level, which is $ 23,201 for a family of four. That"s $ 5,800 per person; but a far larger group of 138 million people (nearly 40% of American households)—many of whom had considered themselves part of the middle class—are living paycheck to paycheck. And, according to a Pew Foundation survey, “nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 month revealing a painful level of deprivation and family trauma despite the U.S. being the richest country in the world. Our level of deprivation is closer to that in Indonesia or Greece rather than Britain or Canada.”
Especially for Those About to Retire … Or Thought They Were
Furthermore, financial security for the future, often referred as the “American Dream,” is increasingly out of reach for many millions. This is especially true for those approaching retirement—a goal that has been undermined, even destroyed, by the economic crash of 2007, which robbed so many of what small wealth they had. Over the long run, a major culprit has been the replacement of pensions by the grossly inadequate 401K model, which is forcing millions of Americans to keep on working, or find marginal jobs to help pay the bills as they age, or in some cases fall into poverty, living only on a meager Social Security stipend.
As Joshua Holland recently noted, this trend “has been an integral part of what Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker called the great risk-shift, in which the burden of paying for education, healthcare and retirement has increasingly shifted from corporations and the government onto the backs of individuals and families.”
Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research writes, “The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $ 5 a day.” She adds, “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $ 30,000 in their retirement accounts.”
But the situation is far from great for recent college graduates, many of whom are being crushed under student loan debt, while facing a competitive and often exploitative job market, where all too often an unpaid internship is an essential way to advance in a career. This is the first generation since the Great Depression that will make less money and have fewer resources than their parents. Perhaps because of dealing with all the stress, this generation has a prescription pill epidemic on their hands, which may be leading to a significant increase in suicides in their demographic.
Take Your Pick
This first summary just touches on some of the economic problems. The list of concerns and anxieties goes on and on—here are some of the most prominent, but any reader will be able to add her own to the list:
• The lack of an adequate response to the looming climate crisis.
• Mass incarceration, in which 2.3 million Americans, a huge number of them African American and Latino, are behind bars.
• The huge and still expanding security state, as police forces militarize, even in small cities and towns.
• A high level of unemployment at 7.5 %, considerably beyond what historically has been acceptable. And as Andrew Ross points out in the San Francisco Chronicle, “12.2 million Americans are classified as ‘not in the labor force’ because they"re considered ‘discouraged.” When you add in the discouraged and the reluctant part-timers (7.2 million people) the unemployment rate jumps first to 9%, then to 13.9%.
• The continued prevalence of violence against women, often fueled by alcohol, and by the culture of rape in the U.S. military.
• The war on poor students as testing dominates the move toward privatizing public elementary and secondary education via charter schools; and in public schools, kids are increasingly treated as criminals.
• The assault on journalists, civil liberties and whistleblowers by a Democratic president, who campaigned quite differently than he is governing.
• The return of many wounded and psychological damaged soldiers from our two wars, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers are suffering from PTSD, and often lacking in supportive services to help them cope.
• The still-unchallenged power of the NRA, as many states are passing more lax gun laws, or making sure there are no gun control laws at all, despite the popular will, and the overwhelming data documenting the number of people killed by guns.
The list of disasters adds up to a very dark picture; the future looks bleak for tens of millions of people, a fact that has produced an epidemic of fear and anxiety. And finding our way out is a huge challenge, in part because the safety net keeps getting shredded, and the guidebooks we have used to challenge oppressive power are not capable of leading the way.
Many critics have been content to attribute the current state of affairs to a particularly virulent brand of casino capitalism practiced in the U.S. and gaining dominance globally. Sure, this is true. But it is not sufficient to simply chalk up our predicament to capitalism, because there are many forms of the capitalist economic system that don’t produce the dire results we have here in the U.S.
The problem is the special brand of American capitalism, with its thousands of interlocking parts feeding on each other, that ends up controlling and exploiting a majority of Americans. It is important to deconstruct how this happens in a digestible way.
The Symptoms Are All Around Us
A strong case can be made that collectively we are traumatized as a society, though perhaps reluctant to admit it. A constant barrage of stress, anxiety, intrusion, incarceration, and a generalized drumbeat of fear from the media and we have the mess we are in. Increasingly, despair leads to addiction, violence and even suicide, especially for people hardest hit by job loss.
Newly released and striking figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, up from 13.7 to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2010 more people in the U.S. died from suicide than from car crashes—a statistic that alone seems to stand as troubling testament to desperate times. As the New York Times notes, the CDC and other experts believe the suicide figures to be on the low side.
Another striking symptom is high levels of stress that lead to drug use, abuse and addiction. Research concludes that stress can render people susceptible to serious illness, and that chronic stress can play a role in the progression of cancer. It is hard to believe, but 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older, which is well over 30 million people, are currently taking antidepressants despite the danger of suicide for some users.
And a stunning 23 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are now taking antidepressants according to a major study by the CDC.
And that is before you consider alcohol abuse and the fact that the majority of violence toward women is fueled by alcohol.
A Useful Blueprint
Given the malaise that many are grappling with, the increasing feelings of desperation can feel confusing, overwhelming and crazy-making. Where do we start? How do we understand what is happening so that what we learn can help us take action and improve our outlook? What steps can we take to protect ourselves, to shift the momentum?
A first step is to try to get clear about the nature of how all these forces are coming together to make us so stressed out, and perhaps collectively on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As AlterNet’s executive editor, I have personally been engaged for many years in all the issues and developments described above, publishing much of the best writing on every topic. I too have felt overwhelmed by the tsunami crashing over us. After all the years publishing many thousands of articles, what is happening today feels fundamentally unprecedented—the combination of spiritual malaise and social collapse, an abundance of cruelty and callousness.
Recently I found a way of better understanding the forces that are at play, which I want to share in case it can be helpful. Basically, in this analysis there are four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating. These are privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament.
Actually, according to most accounts, the four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, respectively. So, they’re not exactly analogous, but you get the idea: it’s about very bad stuff that is coming.
The four “plagues” are very potent. With financializationwe are confronting a new hyper form of capitalism, underway for years, but especially apparent with the crash of 2007. Author David Graeber describes the financialization of capitalism in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian as “… casino capitalism, speculation… they are making money out of thin air. … It is based on getting everyone in debt.”
Graeber adds that the profits of Wall Street are increasingly based on finance, not commerce, which means “…they go into your bank account and take your money.” Extracted by the finance sector are mortgages, credit card debt, loan debt, all the fees and penalties you are not noticing. Graeber estimates the finance sector is at or near 20 percent of the economy.
Privatization is pervasive in our culture, tearing the moorings away from democratic ideals and the commons—the common ground that has held many communities together for centuries. Schools, highways, parks, many things we hold dear are being taken away from public stewardship. Perhaps the privatization of water, where the huge multinational Nestle is leading the way globally, is the most daunting. In his thorough analysis of Nestle, the world’s largest food company and the most profitable corporation in the world according to the Global Fortune 500, Andrew Gavin Marshall writes that Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.
The signs ofmilitarization are increasingly visible in the nation’s police forces, especially with drug raids, as well as the escalated capture of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the point where far more immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than during George W. Bush’s tenure. There is also now a massive private prison operation mainly to handle those immigrants arrested.
The U.S. is still by far the world’s largest arms dealer, and we have military bases in 63 countries, and all across the U.S. as well, with nearly 1,140,000 soldiers in uniform.
The militarization of America was on graphic display in the over-reactions in response to the Boston bombing. The entire city of Boston was shut down and a kind of martial law declared as millions were told to stay indoors and lock up. Public events were canceled, transportation in and out of the city ceased, people were stranded at the airport—and all because a wide array of police forces were searching for a wounded 19-year-old on foot. The horrible bombing with its horrendous death and destruction traumatized many. But it is likely that the overwhelming police response—local police, ATF, FBI, DEA, etc.—traumatized the population even more. The military model of “lockdown” has become the default response to many disturbances. The use of SWAT teams all over the U.S. has increased dramatically, as the military has supplied local police forces with a wide array of super-powerful weaponry, often far beyond what is needed.
Cornell West Speaks
In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.
I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk.” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.
Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow
More than 2 million people in jail has resulted in what author and lawyer Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow,” in her book of the same name. Despite the civil rights movement, theoretical progress on racism, and even an African-American president, more people of color are in jail than were ever slaves; more people are jailed in the U.S. than in any other place in the world. As Alexander writes: “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”
According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of the world’s prisoners.
Millions in jail is part of a strategy of mass incarceration fueled by the highly funded and militarized war on drug users, which is primarily aimed at the poor and people of color. The racist caste of the criminal justice system is overwhelming: African Americans, incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, now constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Mass incarceration accomplished in the 21st century what slavery accomplished more than 150 years ago: the oppression and disenfranchisement of a whole generation of black men.
So, looking through the lens of these four plagues provides me with a useful handle on what is happening to our country, and to the globe. They help explain trends and shifts that are destroying the middle class, exacerbating poverty, keeping millions in jail, and traumatizing many millions more. Most of it can be attributed to one or more of the plagues, and often all four.
Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues
But I don’t want to stop here. To best understand the plagues, there are several cross-cutting fundamentals of U.S. capitalism which fuel the oppressive nature of the plagues and help us understand how they interact.
1. Follow the money: For every unfair, exploitative and destructive force going on in America—and there are so many—some corporations or groups of people are profiting. Not only are they making a lot of money, they have also very likely built a powerful infrastructure to ensure the security of their cash flow using a potent array of tools to protect their interests. These are lobbyists, PR agents, campaign contributions, trade associations to agitate for their interests, and with overarching powerful giant entities like the chamber of commerce to provide the protective umbrella.
2. When following the money, it is often the case that the system picks on the weakest. Long ago, someone figured out that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to paradoxically target those who don’t have much.Or use powerless people as scapegoats to leverage access to large pots of money. One example is state lotteries, about which AlterNet’s Steve Rosenfeld explains: “What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it.” State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $ 13,000 a year. They siphon $ 50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold.
Another example is that the privatization of the public school system is on the backs of poor kids, with the discredited fantasy that schools will be improved when people make money off of them. “Rent to own,” “payday loans” and many other tactics of capitalism all exploit poor people.
3. The best way to maximize profits and make radical changes in policies is to take advantage of crises. We all know what happened after the horrible death and destruction of 9/11. Our government, the Bush administration, orchestrated the most gigantic overreaction in history, turning a criminal case to the ongoing “war on terror,” which has transformed most of our lives in many negative ways.
The aftermath of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, also created the most extraordinary secret government in the history of humankind. The Washington Post, in an unprecedented investigation that took two years, discovered a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is a system incredibly massive –1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”
Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine has helped us understand that when crises erupt, those in power will use the opportunity to increase power in extreme and undemocratic ways, in what is now called “Disaster Capitalism.” For example, as Kristen Rawls reports, after the massive impact of Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in New Orleans’ Parish were replaced by charter schools.
What to Do—The Challenges Ahead
How do we fight these massive interlocking forces that often seem impossible to slow down, let alone stop and change? Well, there is good news and bad news.
The first answer is, we don’t stop the machine, at least now, because we can’t, not at this moment in history, anyway. At the present, there is no large-scale, coordinated, funded plan, across issue lines to organize a mass movement capable of putting a dent in the juggernaut; and there are some major problems on the social change organizing front to be sure.
The Occupy movement was a great moment, and a popular response to financialization and militarization. But then we saw the surveillance state in action as police power along with the titans of big finance crushed the dissent. Certainly Occupy generated, at least for a time, a new level of discourse on economic fairness and exploitation. But it is already a memory, and the system of the “four plagues” grinds on as the wealth gap increases every week.
On the other hand, no one could have predicted Occupy. Is there another upheaval waiting to explode?
Nevertheless, there is a lot of good news on the activism front. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write, “Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.”
A couple of examples, according to Zeese and Flowers, include a growing series of protests called “the ‘Moral Monday’ demonstrations in North Carolina ….challenging the systemic corruption, undermining of democracy and misdirection of a state government that puts human needs second to corporate profits—which they have dubbed ‘Robin Hood in Reverse.’”
There was a recent victory for Seattle teachers and students that resulted from their citywide protests against standardized testing. The school district announced that testing in the high schools would not occur next year. The teachers said they will keep protesting until the tests are banned from lower grades as well.”
There are dozens of examples like this. Hopefully momentum will build, although the obstacles are formidable and the forces of repression ready to step in at any moment.
Still, being realistic, the challenges of building resistance, finding ways to reform and change the “system” is hugely daunting. Many thinkers argue that our version of exploitative capitalism is doomed, and will someday fall apart. The only problem is, those thinkers have no idea how to bring down capitalism, or even change the system, beyond critiquing it. The number of people and books that bewail the system are many, but the path to solutions, almost nil. Meanwhile, more people suffer every day.
I am personally frustrated, that some of our biggest thinkers and experts are not investing much of their brain power or political capital in the bigger picture of strategy and tactics—the battles to gaining more political clout to confront the power centers. The ability to build to a point where millions of people are in the streets is currently not on the horizon. So there is much work to be done in that regard. An assessment of the possibilities to change, and a range of the options is beyond the scope of this article, but will be forthcoming.
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