Wrapup on the Summer

Karl Marx sliding puzzle game » sliding block puzzles

Of course, it isn't over yet, but I think we've got the picture: there hasn't been a summer this tumultuous since the 1970's, and there are signs that civil unrest (as well as a number of civil wars still raging) will easily continue into the fall and through the wintertime into next year.

People are refusing, in their multitudes, to sit down and shut up while their lives are being turned upside down (that is, when they don't lose their lives), and what little they've had is being sucked up into the maw of Matt Taibbi's Vampire Squid that actually rules us.

Dylan Ratigan's "Extractive" Rant the other day incoherently encapsulates the fright and the frustration so many middle level "left-behinds" feel.



"Extractive" has become the new "Uncertainty." Extracting wealth is the current economic principle at the Top, "takings" as it were. I suppose "looting" would be an understatement for what The Gods Who Walk Among Us® are doing to the rest of us -- and to one another.

So when we see young people looting stores for cell phones and sneakers in Britain, burning down their neighborhoods in the process, what we're seeing is a minor-league street-side version of what the Highest of the High and the Mighty have been up to for quite a while now, on a titanic scale, globally, "extracting" -- or shall we say "looting" -- all the wealth that they can pillage from entire nations, one by one and in batches, while we look on in horror, just as Decent Brits looked on in horror at the riots and the wilding young in the streets.

Some of them even made the connection between behavio[u]r at the Top of the Heap and what the Young were doing in the streets. Some of the young were even able to make that connection. "It's all the same, man, innit?" The "takings" might be on a different scale -- and what is looted is certainly different -- but the destruction and despair left in the wake of the pillage, the fear and dread injected into the hearts of individuals and communities (and entire nations), the sense of widespread powerlessness and the inability or unwillingness of Authority to intervene appropriately on behalf of the People, all are the same.

In the United States, despite protest demonstrations in numbers we haven't seen in quite a long time, nothing like The UK Riots have yet emerged. They might, and because they might, many people are on edge. But in the United States the Austerity Program is still being debated in the marble halls of our Government Palaces, only so much of it has yet been instituted, and in most cases, the immediate effects have been mitigated through various means in order to keep the People calm in the face of what is to be done to them. So far, it has mostly worked.

In the meantime, though, the Highest of the High and the Mighty have been busy sucking out every bit of wealth they can find in an "extractive" frenzy the like of which I don't think we have ever seen. We see it in the Wall Street gyrations, where every Up and every Down provides yet more profit opportunities, we see it in massive commodity price run ups due to speculation, we see it in endless wage cuts and price increases, constantly high unemployment, ridiculous and ravenous bank policies, endless foreclosures and plans to essentially give the homes away to investors "if they promise to rent them out," and on and on and on and on.

There is no attempt to hide any of it, nor really is there any effort to sugar-coat it. It is what it is. We are being robbed blind, right out in the open, with the full on and very active complicity of Our Public Servants, who only seem capable of serving their constituents at the feed trough and not the Public at all.

We've watched this go on for years, and I for one am fed up with it. And yet, so far, the only popular unrest over what's been happening has focused either on protesting political actions by captive governments (the Austerity fetish in Europe, for example, or the mass protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere), or in Riots -- which aren't so much popular as they are focused expressions of rage and opportunism.

And all of a sudden, Marxist theory -- and actual Marxists (!) -- are being trotted out to explain what's going on. Well of course! Marx was right. Yes! His trenchant analysis of Capitalism is as true today as it was 150 years ago, and we are living through yet another of the inevitable Crises of Capitalism that are basically built in to the economic system and cannot be entirely escaped from so long as the system is in place. (Not that any other System known to man doesn't have its own set of built-in crises.)

"We're all Marxists now!" Well, in an inverted sense, yes, even the Kochs are Marxists. They and their ilk know that Marx was right and they are all about taking advantage of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Capitalist system. And they know how to squeeze its teats on behalf of themselves.

And it is hugely frustrating for so many of us in the Lesser 99% to know full well what is wrong and what to do about it and to see just the opposite being enacted by Our Rulers, repeating and compounding the same mistakes over and over, making things worse for the many, better and better for the few, and expressing such amazement that this is happening.


Being right too soon doesn't do you any good at all.
http://libcom.org/library/1844-manuscripts-karl-marx

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At least there have only been a few sharks and missing white women in the news this summer. So there is that.

Sterling Newberry on the UK Riots and the irrelevancy of the left

Sterling has a lot to say about what's been going on in Britain and what it means for the rest of us. This is just a snippet:

The current left is irrelevant, precisely because its first gesture, is to join with the powerful, in condemning it. It shows that the leadership of the current left is, in fact, on the side of oppression, so long as their own place in that oppression is more reasonable. One can see this from larger issues, but this shows that it is a deeply rooted, deeply seated moral identification with power and the profits of pillaging the world and slapping down the poor. To tell the poor that they should wait for the wheels of law to turn is to insult their intelligence. Anyone with any intelligence knows that the law does not work: the police sell information to Rupert Murdoch, and beat people for filming the police beating people, and only an editor has faced the dock, none of the principals will. No one from the bank meltdown has gone to jail. Or ever will. Only people who are comfortable in their place, can say that it is a moral imperative to wait on a legal system which is manifestly corrupt beyond all redemption. Where the courts are criminals, there is no justice.

The riots are not, of course, some great sign of immediately coming hope. Riots and insurrection are common through history, and most come to an ignominious end. Even large rebellions, such as the insurrection against the British East India Company, or the Boxer Rebellion, are put to an end. The best most insurrections can hope for, is to tie their oppressing state in knots, forcing it to spend ever escalating amounts on unaffordable and unattainable security. Al-Qaeda's goal was to do this to the West, and it seems to have worked: the west now spends a trillion dollars a year on wars and security that it cannot afford, but will not stop.

The moral hollowness of the left, however, is my topic here, because it is the key and final failure. We should expect those who hold the gates of commerce to want to extract vast tolls from their control of them. We should expect princes born to wealth to suck the riches of the world into their playgrounds in Dubai. This is their nature. However, the corruption of the left is not of its nature, and it is proof that the present discourse, the present economy, the present society, is going to burn, in a much larger magnification of London burning. The problem is that the present left is a conservative force, which is dedicated to keeping their part of the profits of privilege. They are not the oppressed, but functionaries in the more global extraction of wealth, and they merely want a better deal from the very corporations that they have erected. Lower debit card fees and better protections against their insurance companies. No windmills that might hurt their property values.

In short, a moral void which, none the less, passes moral judgments.

Ouch. That'll leave a mark.

Is Somebody Getting Very Rich From All The Tumult In The Streets, Too?

The Market Plunge on the news of the Standard and Poor's downgrade of US Government debt was of course obviously a short selling bonanza for those who were properly set up to profit from the Plunge. The notion of deliberate market manipulation to produce said Bonanza is hardly far-fetched. The Gods Who Walk Among Us wanted another injection of cash-dollars to momentarily sate their insatiable financial demands, and so they "manufactured" another Crisis Bubble, and we were once again on that E-Ticket Roller Coaster Ride with no way to get off.

The Crisis -- repeated over and over again -- is the New Bubble Economy, a game only played at the top.

Which of course brings me to a consideration of the tumult in the streets all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and from time to time the United States (in muted form), tumult that has devolved into civil war in more than one state experiencing street protests and battles between the People and Authority. Are these Crises, too, aspects of the New Bubble Economy? Is somebody getting rich off them?

I don't have an answer. I don't think this aspect of Tumult, Popular OUTRAGE!!!™, has been explored in the literature, and I doubt that anyone participating in the demonstrations, civil disturbances, riots, and civil wars that are wracking so much of the West and Middle East are counting the shekels involved, if they are counting much of anything at all -- apart from the dead and injured or the number of useless cell-phones they can cart away from the shops.

But the Money? Could there be Money, indeed handsome profits, involved in the uproars?

Why not?

Some of this tumult is similar to, if not modeled on, the protests and demonstrations, the riots and civil disturbances of the '60's, and while in those days it was all very horrifying to the Silent Majority, especially the riots in the Ghettos (it's hard to imagine just how much fear those riots inspired in the white suburbs), there were plenty of people making money off of them, off of the Student Movements that were underlying much of the tumult, and off of the security measures necessary to protect the White Women from the Rampaging Hippies and Negroes. Fear of Nuclear Annihilation was nothing compared to fear of Hippies and Negroes. Of course the drug dealers ("God Damn the Pusher Man!") were making out like bandits. Which some of them were.

Commercialization of the Movements of the Era was taken for granted and was criticized in lengthy screeds published in obscure periodicals like Ramparts and The Realist.

The Death of the Hippie was famously celebrated in the Haight in October, 1967, in part due to the hyper commercialization of the Summer of Love.

Of course one of the most famous activists of the era, Jerry Rubin, famously became a multi-level marketer and toured the country with Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman presenting a staged debate between "Yippie versus Yuppie."

But that kind of commercialization of a Movement -- which most of us at the time took for granted, even if it was criticized intellectually as more evidence of the oppression of the system -- is quite a different thing from the kind of money that is possibly being made from all the tumult in the streets these days.

From a cultural and political standpoint, what's going on now is on a different plane. Those raising a ruckus now are no longer motivated by their belief that they could make a better world. Instead, in Europe and America at any rate, they're trying to hold on to what little they have before it is taken away by a handful of hyper-rich and not very bright economic predators.

That's a key difference, in my view, and the transformation happened before our eyes in Seattle at the WTO conference in 1999. It seems so long ago now. Though I wasn't in Seattle for the WTO protests themselves, I was on the phone with people who were there while the action in the streets was taking place. They could recognize right away that there were provocateurs among the crowds who were trying to precipitate violence among the protestors and who were committing most, if not all, of the acts of vandalism that were used as the pretext for the excessive police crackdown on the protests. This was obvious to people who were there at the time, and it has been pointed out many times that many protest actions are peppered with undercover police and provocateurs as a matter of course. Exposing them has become a protest action sport.

The heavy-handed repression of the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999 became the model for such actions, and we see it repeated over and over again. Protestors get injured and sometimes die in these events. It has become an almost ritualized process, though, with heavily armed paramilitary police on one side, masked Black Bloc Anarchists (who may or may not be provocateurs) on the other, and the masses in between. The police and the Black Blocs are the ones who get the attention. What the protestors are agitated about is almost never discussed.

The repression, however, is. It is discussed and widely celebrated.

But are these events set up to make money for speculators?

The mind boggles at the thought.

I'm not going to get into it too much more because I don't have enough information, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

More on the London Riots

Overnight, the unrest spread affecting Enfield, Walthamstow and Waltham Forest in north London and Brixton in the south of the city.

Yesterday, I was more focused on the reaction among the good white burghers of Britain, and how very race-based so much of the commentary was as a relatively small but significant portion of Tottenham was left in ruins by the mischief and uncivilized behavio[u]r of the "Africans" who inhabit the place.

At that time, it wasn't all that difficult to see why the peaceful protest over the incendiary police shooting of a well-known and apparently well-liked member of the community would turn ugly. A police shooting of a citizen is very rare in Britain -- unlike the case in the United States -- and according to reports, and the complaints of the citizens of Tottenham, the police chose to turn their backs on the people most directly affected and simply clammed up about what happened and why. They offered no explanation, no consideration for the community, and when asked to be more forthcoming, they refused to speak to the people protesting their high-handedness.

Then, when the people protested what they regarded as an official insult, the police formed a cordon around the police station in Tottenham, and at least according to reports, either shoved or beat a 16 year old girl who refused to be pushed around by Authority.

All that is what it is, but Ian Welsh puts an Austerity context to the civil unrest in Britain that should have some resonance in the United States.

The Conservative austerity measures are destroying the possibility of a future for a generation of young people. There is this weird idea amongst English elites, which I encountered in person during my London visit, that the problem in England is their welfare culture. In other words,after a financial crisis virtually entirely caused by the rich, the response has been to slash spending on the poor and middle class to pay for bailouts for the rich, who, by any sane reading of the crisis, caused the disaster.

Yes. Well. That should be obvious, but for some reason it is not, and it has to be repeated over and over and over again just to be heard at all. The response to the economic crisis throughout the West is almost universally to further exacerbate the problem by slashing programs and services for the least fortunate, while simultaneously providing greater and greater amounts of money and benefits to the already hyper-rich the very people who caused the financial collapse in the first place.

Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives. This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.

Surprise!

The question will be -- as it already has been in so much of the world -- what mix of repression and accommodation will be necessary to staunch the riots and rebellions and smooth the path for ever greater looting by the Overclass.

That's what's being tested in London even as we speak...

Welcome to Our Brave New World.