The Last Manifesto You'll Ever Need

The Manifesto of the Party for Peace and Nuclear Annihilation
By Our Deathless Leader and Minister of Disinformation
Andrew Dobbs

Humans and Peace
Humans are born as individuals, but live in interlocking and outwardly expanding spheres of collectivity. Whenever a group of individuals come together to form a new collective entity—whether it be two forming a marriage or millions forming a “society”—three things must be agreed upon by all if the unit is to remain cohesive.

The first is a symbolic structure: some sort of language and the broader communication contexts language occurs in. Without this the various individuals are unable to exchange ideas and rather than invest limited resources like time and energy in the frustration of babbling incoherently at one another they will quickly part their separate ways.

The next is an ethic: a shared set of standards for behavior and benchmarks for resolutions of disputes. If there is no common ethic for the group, certain individuals will quickly feel violated by or appalled at the behavior of others. Their natural impulse would be to break away and without an established framework for assuaging their hurt sensibilities or compensating their losses they will do exactly this.

Finally, any group of individuals seeking to form a collective entity must develop an economy: a process by which the limited resources available to the group are distributed among its individual members with their unlimited respective desires. A collection of individuals without a set economy cannot effectively use any of its resources. Some will hoard them, others give them away, others trade and barter, etc. A group possessing resources but employing no common economy is indistinguishable from a group with no resources at all and a group with no resources will quickly starve to death, die from exposure or each go their separate ways in search of better fortunes.

From these three fundamental agreements among (or perhaps impositions upon) the members of any group arises a group identity. The symbolic structure is used to create shared narratives and from this an aesthetic, a literary canon and culture among other things. These frequently are employed to defend, explain and expand upon the ethic, which compels the creation of religious practices—or at least some related collection of rituals and teachings. The production and promotion of all of this requires an orderly accumulation and distribution of resources, which leads to the creation of a social hierarchy or at minimum some sort of division of labor, which is to be defended as a just and ethical order and so on. The process is not a conscious one, and any talk of “social contracts” arising out of a “state of nature” is nonsense. Any group that lacks a language, an ethic or economy isn’t a group for very long and any group that is one for long develops a constellation of narratives and shared ideas that create a group identity that subsumes each individual in varying degrees.

Still, how does any group come to develop a common language, ethic or economy? That is to say, how can a multitude of unique individuals come to share such important ideas in common? It is hard enough getting a small group of people to decide upon which restaurant to eat at or movie to see, let alone getting 300 million (with begrudging or ineffectively hostile reservations among a small few) to decide on English, secularized Judeo-Christianity and liberal capitalism. Whose standards get to be the standard for everyone?

To start, we should note that any random distribution of a given value will—when charted out—form a sort of bell curve. There are a small number of outliers at each end of things and a nice meaty bulge of values in the middle. Charting out IQ across the population will show a small number of mentally handicapped people, a similarly small number of geniuses and a whole bunch of Deal or No Deal fans. The 20th century gave us game theory which gives us a mathematical way of describing human interactions, and helped us to understand that the idea “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” isn’t just sage old advice, it is mathematically among the most stable strategies for a society. Now we also know that the strategy is not adopted by all, or perhaps even most. And while it is the stated ethic for our society (group of individuals), it could be argued that we have some other, contradictory ethic entirely: look out for you and yours, get what you can and fuck everybody else, competing self-interest, etc. Still, it seems that this value is one that is more or less pre-programmed into social animals. Richard Dawkins in his seminal work The Selfish Gene suggests that altruism and self-sacrifice in the animal kingdom is determined by genetics and that certain strategies are more likely to survive than others. All this to say that ethical behavior is a randomly assigned value like IQ or height. There are a small number of truly wicked individuals, a small number of saintly heroes and a broad mainstream who are largely decent or slightly threatening but not generally noteworthy for their ethics or lack thereof.

So any random grouping of people is going to be a mix of some baddies, some good guys and a milquetoast crowd of those prepared to be swayed. To maintain this group, however, requires the development of a common ethic. The vast majority will be unable to remain in the good graces of the group and will face repercussions that only the heroic few could stand if the ethic of that elite ethical class is established as the standard all are held accountable to. Either the ethical standard has to be lowered or the group will dissolve. The middling many are distinguished by their very unexceptional-ness, and thus any ethic composed on their behalf will be amorphous, ill-defined and as a result impossible to adjudicate. It will be only a notch above no ethic at all and over time it will surely become just that—the group will soon be forced to break up. Ultimately only an ethic of the lowest common denominator can be agreed upon by and be reasonably expected to hold up among all. The result is either an ethic of such pathetically low expectations that even the most faithful adherence still wouldn’t make the person very good at all (“Don’t kill people—unless you have a good reason--or rape them—and “rape” is usually open to interpretation. Only lie if you feel like you really have to”) or an ethic which is actually evil by the natural standard of the Golden Rule (“Seek your own self interest and compete against other selfish individuals” or “Do What Feels Good”). For this reason only individuals can be regarded as moral agents: societies, communities and other collective entities are defined by their least moral elements—sociopaths and other moral cripples.

Of course there are groups of individuals which come together for the sole purpose of combining those heroic few into fronts for the promotion of the highest good. But ultimately these groups themselves contribute to the lowering of ethical standards for society. To begin, any such group defines its group identity in terms of its righteousness, and thus all who are NOT in the group must be defined by some sort of deficit in righteousness. Such groups are fundamentally oriented towards demonization of the “other” as they must either demand a superhuman level of ethical achievement from the other which can never be met (and in so doing confirm their suspicions about the other’s immorality and subhumanity) or write off the ethical failures of the other as insignificant, thus contradicting their own group ethic and either turning them into hypocrites (and thus the highly moral are now immoral) or causing the group to disband altogether. Groups of the exceptionally ethical are then left to either talk amongst themselves, puttering at the edges of society with no impact whatsoever among the larger groups in which they exist or to fail spectacularly in their attempts to change these larger groups and in so doing lose their own status as the highly ethical. The heroic few can never define the true ethic of any society (or other group), setting an ethical floor just above or in the thick of the beastly few is the only stable strategy. The stated ethic of a society—the story they tell themselves—is going to point to those heroes as its foundation, but this stated ethic is only a story. The truth is less polite to talk about.
A similar process occurs with the language of a society. While there are a few who speak only gibberish and are unable to effectively communicate and a few who are erudite and well-spoken, most use language like sailors using a whore—in a mechanical and sloppy way to efficiently meet the purpose at hand. The common tongue and shared canon of stories and narratives available to the group is determined by the least educated and worldly of the group. A company trying to sell something to everybody—toilet paper or something akin—would do better alluding to “Little Red Riding Hood” than The Brothers Karamazov. They would be advised to tar their competitors as “stingy with the sheets” as opposed to “niggardly with their napkins.” As for the economy, it is not the members which determine it, but the fetishized resources—just as the ethic or language available to the greatest number determines that commanded of all, the economy favorable to the bulk of the concentrated resources is set up over all. Those with the greatest stake in the distribution of the resources are those who possess the most already. As a result the economy is dictated by those who have the most. This is taken for granted in our current climate where economic policy is to be explicitly “pro-business” and any other view is considered heretical or insane out of hand.

I have taken the ethic of a group as my jumping off point for explaining the process by which groups determine these basic uniting features for themselves because the maintenance of the group ethic creates a peculiar situation. Each of these uniting features is in constant flux: what is ethical at one time (wifely submission, for example) is deemed unethical at others, what is unethical (ending a dysfunctional and abusive marriage in divorce) becomes ethical over time. The same is true for language (read a 18th century novel, or imagine an 18th century reader picking up Thomas Pynchon) and economy (Marx made his name talking about this). Furthermore, as we have said there is a class of individuals who always fail or refuse to meet the standards imposed on all. This is especially true of the ethical standards as there is the stated ethic and the true ethic, and they are rarely the same. For the largest of groups—society—there comes a time in most when it becomes clear that the maintenance of the group ethic and handling of disputes over ethical behavior and its alleged breaches is a full-time job. Societies then make a fateful decision to outsource their determination of the ethic, its enforcement and interpretation to a central, distinguished class of individuals: the state.

But it is impossible to keep the state’s portfolio limited to regulation of the group ethic. For one, all behavior can be judged on its ethical standing and the actions of the economy are all human behaviors. The result is that as time passes the state will begin to assert control not only over the ethic of the society, but over its economy as well. Now any institution which determines the behaviors of individuals and oversees the production, distribution and consumption of resources in that same society is to become among the dominant narrators within such. Even its most mundane proclamations have significant impact on the language of the society; its jargon becomes the jargon of all. And the publication or broadcasting of words is both an act—a unit of behavior—and the distribution of a limited resource (either airtime or bandwidth or ink on paper) and thus a function of the economy. Any institution called upon first to regulate the behavior of individuals in a society and then to regulate the circulation of their resources of survival will ultimately seek and likely gain the power to regulate the symbolic structure of that society. Such a state—which controls the behaviors, economy and language of a society—is called totalitarian. And any society—the largest of groups of individuals—which adopts a state will end up with a totalitarian framework which ultimately regulates the ethics, speech and economies of all the smaller groups beneath it. Groups which were established or emerged to allow individuals to achieve some common goals for their respective aggrandizement give rise to a structure which destroys these individuals wholesale.

The alternatives to this scenario are grim. The idea of there only being atomized individuals with no groups formed whatsoever is of course absurd. To begin, if each individual—the only unit capable of moral action, the only not functionally immoral or on the way there—were to abstain from relationships with any other individual(s), the species would go extinct in a single generation and it’d be a pretty unhappy time until then. Human interaction is a fundamental need of our species, not only for the process of procreation but because we are a social animal. Even if humans grouped together in atomized mini-societies free of states and dedicated to nonviolent interaction it would take only one group with a different, forceful ethic to lay waste to all the passive others or force them each to adopt violence and centralized authority for themselves. Only individuals can be moral, but the continued survival of each individual is dependent on the development of structures which are compelled towards gross immorality. Each individual can only be happy if free to follow his or her own prerogatives, and can only be happy if he or she is a part of groups which ultimately will smash the capacity for individual freedom. Thus humans are fundamentally incompatible with notions of peace.

War is the Health of the State
It becomes clear right away to those individuals called upon to serve as the state that their job is impossible without the use of force—without access to legitimate uses of violence—and so the society that has conceived of a need for the state grants the right of violence to its new government. It follows upon this that if everybody else can use violence as they see fit the state is unlikely to survive or its services will be rendered irrelevant. So the state claims a monopoly on violence. This is how the Max Weber, the father of sociology and hardly a bomb-thrower, defined the state: any institution which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
The implications of this are that every act of the state is an act of violence. Even the nice and helpful things the state does—paying old people’s salary, feeding pregnant women, rebuilding disaster areas—are financed with tax money. If one does not pay one’s taxes, the state is likely to fine you. If you refuse to pay the fine, they’ll put a lien on your property. If you sell the property under the table to someone, or rack up enough new back taxes and liens they’ll come to arrest you. If you resist the arrest they’ll kick your ass. If you fight back hard enough, they’ll kill you. Liberal states are distinguished by their ability to hide the violence behind many layers of bureaucratic and legalistic bullshit. They issue a regulation, which if disobeyed will go ignored for some time, then a warning will be issued, then fines levied and so on down the same line until fatal violence is at long last used to compel obedience. Authoritarian and totalitarian systems dispense with the niceties and use violence more quickly and openly. Our legal and ethical traditions recognize that the threat of violence—even an oblique one—to compel behavior is itself an act of violence. The state is the only actor that is allowed to use violence and everything it does is backed up by this threat or financed by people’s healthy respect for it.

From time to time the pent up violence of the state must be unleashed in a war. Two or more violence monopolies disagree and seek to compel one another to submit or some armed and organized internal aspirant to the violence monopoly makes a move and immediately the state must round up its resources and focus its effort on deflecting the exceptional violence of its opponent and responding with even more intense displays of such violence of their own. This exceptional violence serves as a motive for the state to expand the capacity for violence in the future, that is, to enhance its own powers. The broad precarity of life that results not only from combat but also from the rationing of resources towards the war effort provides a means by which to pull this over on the people. They are ruled by fear and thus distracted from the constant vigilance necessary to keep the state from gobbling up their power as individuals: the state has new opportunities for the expansion of its powers. And the emotional patriotism inspired by the dread of dying in vain and hope of serving some cause higher than oneself gives the state the motive to foist this over on the people. War provides the means, motive and opportunity to pull over the crime of state expansion. This was the argument of turn of the century U.S. essayist Randolph Bourne when he said “War is the Health of the State.” Even in the liberal, self-righteous United States this is true. Wars in this country have justified dispossession of war opponents of their land and property (the Revolutionary War), the suspension of habeas corpus (the Civil War), the jailing of dissidents (World War I), the internment of minority groups into concentration camps (World War II), the development of a private army for the president’s personal disposal called the CIA (the Cold War), the assassination of radical activists and surveillance of political opposition (Vietnam) and the construction of secret prisons and application of torture to detainees (the so-called War on Terror). Add to this rationing, nationalization of various industries, strike-busting, draft conscription for the armed services and compulsory air raid practices among a host of other infringements upon the individual and one sees that as long as there are states there is a strong incentive for periodic or even continued wars.

Why Nations Want Nuclear Weapons
When the US developed the atomic bomb in World War II, Dwight David Eisenhower—not anyone’s idea of a hippie—pleaded with President Truman to not use the thing. His reasoning was that war was already awful enough and it didn’t need new technology that would make it infinitely more unbearable. Truman of course ignored him and in so doing introduced the world to its cause of death.

We have established that as humans form societies, states become inevitable. We have further shown that states are not only incapable of moral behavior, that they are only capable of violence and will over time seek expansion of their powers through the practice of ongoing warfare. The ultimate limit of this expansion is a totalitarian state where individuals are eliminated as meaningful actors and as such the world becomes devoid of morality. As all these things are true so is it true that all states should seek out nuclear weapons—tools capable now of ending all human civilization and snuffing out more or less all life on the planet.

For one, the state is conditioned by survival pressures to seek out such capacities for violence. What, materially, is the state? There are all those ugly buildings and all that cheap office furniture, but they would be ruins without individuals to run them. It is a set of ideas and symbols (or a series of sets of ideas and symbols) shared by the inhabitants of a society, passed on and gradually changed over time. It is information that is affected by the rules of Darwinian evolution: it descends, it is modified and there is a struggle for survival in the face of pretenders to its place—from street gangs to foreign occupiers and everybody in between. The state is foundationally defined by its access and use of legitimate violence—this forms a powerful environmental pressure within the state as to what policies it prioritizes and which it decides to adopt in the first place. Those policies which expand the state’s capacity for violence are favored, and they result in the state having greater chances of survival over its rivals.

Any external rivals to a state are immediately dispatched with in the worries and bad dreams of a nuclear state. A state with nuclear weapons is absolutely invasion-proof. They could be the victims of a first strike from a more sophisticated nuclear power, but that state will never be overthrown by invasion. They will be undisturbed by their external enemies as long as they live, which by the historic standards of war means that they never have to lose a war. Furthermore it makes the dissolution of that state very bad news among all the other nations of the world—not least its enemies. They are likely to judge the maintenance of that state (bad as it may be) preferable to the seizure of power by some revolutionary movement or coup d’etat and to do all that is in their power to keep even their enemies in power. These upheavals happen nonetheless—look at the Soviet Union—but all the nations of the world, even their enemies, must rally round to insure that some component of the old regime faithfully takes up the reins. The booze-besotted party hack Yeltsin and the KGB spook Putin gained easy legitimacy because the world feared any chaos that might let the old USSR’s nuclear stockpile fall into “the wrong hands.” Nuclear states are warmasters, seemingly capable of impunity so far as they don’t cross some other nuclear power and able to draw on deep wells of support in the face of civil war.

All of this means that nuclear states—regardless of their pettiness, ineptitude or even grosser than normal moral deformity—get to hunker down at the grown up table of global society-building. The legal and diplomatic framework of the globe is the new ethic-setting work of our day as societies are rapidly being transcended by “the planet.” To ignore a nuclear state when drawing up this standard for group identity is to invite petulant display of power. The demands and whims of states like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the seasonal oscillation between flustered parliamentarians and military dictators in Pakistan are of signal importance in what will someday be the history of the world. States in this position are more powerful than could have ever been imagined by the institution’s pioneers.

Definitionally violent institutions have to seek nukes. The power to be perpetual victors in war and big kids on the big stage results from the successful achievement of this goal, and this success or lack thereof is perhaps the primary determinant of global political importance. We worry so much about which states and other violence trusts get their hands on nukes because we fear some “irrational” force getting hold of them. Iran comes to mind in this regard—people are terrified that the Ayatollahs are psychotic wackos waiting to plunge the world into the abyss. But the fact that this regime has stayed in power in such a diverse and significant country for nearly three decades suggests that their kooky superstitious rhetoric is just for show: these sumbitches govern and are no more irrational than the blatherers within our own country’s civic faith or sense of patriotism. In fact, knowing now how the selection pressures within the state work and the advantages to be gained by possessing the tools of global democide the most irrational thing a state can do is to NOT seek nuclear weapons.

It is therefore our position that states which do not seek nuclear weapons are forbidden from possessing them.

Most states that don’t seek out nukes have not enough money to meet its basic obligations and build a bomb at the same time. Most of the rest of the abstainers are conveniently protected by some other nuclear power. It was all well and good for West Germany to foreswear the bomb, what with the US willing to use its bombs to keep the Germans only real external threat—the Soviet Union—out of the country. Why pay for the things when your friends will use theirs on your behalf if need be? As soon as scientists discovered the opportunity for tremendous energy release with atomic reactions it became inevitable that the nuclear bomb would be invented and that every state with any sense would find a way to get one for themselves. Ever since then the boss has been the one with the most bombs to his name.

Peace and Nuclear Annihilation
Nuclear weapons are the tools of instantaneous genocide. Perhaps democide is a more precise term, but as a nuke would be launched against a particular nation, I suppose it would meet the definition of genocide. Plus genocide is a scarier word than democide. Nukes represent the stockpiling of future genocidal acts—exemplary cases of mass, indiscriminate slaughter of all ages, genders, combatant status, ability and morality unlucky enough to be in a particular place at a specific time. Any ethic proclaimed in the context of these machines is at best completely absurd. At this extreme of ethical possibilities the societies which set out these morals belies them with their potential to slink beneath any meaningful standards of human behavior at the push of a button. At worst any ethic put forward is a craven manipulation on the part of sociopathic institutions hoping to hide their wickedness in a flurry of nostrums. These societies embrace their lack of principle and put forward a stated ethic only to stave off their eventual unraveling. Of course, each of our nuclear states and the states that crowd around them hoping for their protection and benevolence exist somewhere on this continuum and it fluctuates over time. But nuclear weapons make any idea of a coherent ethic impossible in these societies.
So humanity is now faced with a test—an ethical challenge that must be met. If we choose to keep our nuclear weapons we deserve the very destruction they promise. For one our ethic-rein societies are doomed to eventually crack up under the strains of competing ethics all bumping heads with no real way to adjudicate their usefulness or humanity. The nukes will not disappear; they are bound to end up in the hands of the most ruthless and manic among the competitors. For another the only possibility for maintaining a free future or space for individual—and thus legitimately moral—expression and development depends on the rolling back of the ethic of unrestrained violence that underlies the nuclear world administration. If nukes are maintained they ought to be immediately eliminated through simultaneous detonation.

Getting rid of the nukes in any other way is perhaps an even worse proposition. It would require a global enforcement of a standard ethic, that is to say the creation of a worldwide superstate encompassing all peoples, all individuals on the planet. It would require a centralized authority powerful enough to roll back the force of a state armed with these hellish weapons, or even of several such states. No other force could compel these states to give up this power. Just the establishment of the global ethic itself would (we have seen) give rise to a state programmed to seek continual expansions of its authority. Our understanding of the human potential for peace—rooted on a group identity derived from the least ethical, least literate and greediest among us—further alerts us to the impossibility of removing nuclear weapons from this planet without a coincident increase in misery and repression of individuality. We are faced with a choice between devastation and slavery—being vaporized on our feet or ordered around on our knees. This stress within our global system is palpable, the bouncing back and forth between the poles of eratic violence and moralizing authoritarianism defines the ebb and flow of our current international system. The rise of millennial death cults like al qaeda and their (at the moment) more tepid evangelical Christian cousins in the US embody this very spectrum of desperation. At one moment they are toppling buildings or bombing abortion clinics, the next they are hailing strong families and masculine restraint. This concentrated reflection of a broader global pathology only heightens the likelihood of nuclear annihilation.

As has been said, human beings are simply not cut out for peace. We are compelled by our very hope for survival and our propensity towards socialization to build collective entities among ourselves as individuals. Each individual is differentially enabled to maintain an ethical lifestyle and each has an ethic of his or her own, constantly in flux. In order to hold a group together the ethical prowess of the weakest members must ultimately define the ethic for all. In order to enforce this ethic and carry out its dictates states arise among us. These states are defined by their access to violence, and thus they are rewarded when they act violently—especially in the orgiastic explosion of violence that typifies war. Nuclear weapons make their possessing states capable of magisterial levels of violence and secure them as both warmasters and primary parties in the emerging global state. Simply ridding the world of these weapons is not so easily achieved. One must either submit all the peoples of the world to a distant global state capable of even greater violence than even the nuclear powers or one must support the immediate detonation of all nuclear weapons. This would in fact wipe out the human race, and thus society, and thus the state, and thus war. It would be Peace and Nuclear Annihilation.

Joining the Party for Peace and Nuclear Annihilation
Membership in any political party—including this one—or the pursuit of such is grounds for immediate expulsion from the Party for Peace and Nuclear Annihilation. The Party opposes ALL political parties on principle.

DUCK AND COVER, MOTHERFUCKER!!

In any Time, the Good Times. Enjoy Responsibly.

I've taken up smoking a pipe. A new pipe. More to the point, I've grown a beard.

It is a pesant beard, gone cosmo intellectual. Think Zizek. I've decided to adopt a "hip professorial anarchist" aesthetic to go along with it. Smoking pipe tobacco is a part of it. I'm still hitting the Kool Milds pretty hard, but I'm trying to replace my ritual smokes (after meals, dope, getting in the car to drive, presumably sex, and getting the movies started) with a spot of the Black Cavendish.

I’m a projectionist. I’m a hip, professorial anarchist projectionist in the North Dallas burbs. Ascetic too. I’m a hip professorial anarchist ascetic/projectionist in the North Dallas burbs. Neo-Feudalist, no?

Back to the subject at hand—I’m watching the Colbert Report and he’s got Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations on as his guest. I wanted to watch it, seeing as I’m interested in watching the face of the cospiracist bugaboo in action. Colbert’s first “question” actually revolved around the “rap” on CFR: Illuminati, masons, the whole bit. He says that they “toy” with the nations of the world like “well, toys,” like pieces on a chess board. What say ye, Haass—the question more or less went.

And then Haass says “Well, it’s not just nations. It’s banks, corporations, terrorist organizations, everything.”

I jump up, pissed off at this guy. I’m appalled by his ineptitude. This vid is going to live in conspiracist infamy (except that the official online version looks to be fucked up, only Haass’s response is shown—this too is sure to get their peckers all veiny) . Colbert asks “Hey, are y’all really a superpowerful cult secretly running the world in the interest of creating a one world Nazi superstate?” and he says “yes, but it’s so much more complicated a job than you might think!” Buying the premise. CFR admits to running world.

It opened my eyes to something. One of the reasons that conspiracy theories form around these groups is because the people running them share in the conspiracist delusion. The conspiracists see these groups as carrying out a nefarious, secret plan with perfect efficacy (save for blowing the Colbert interview), and the CFR does too.

They are both wrong, of course. The world, the “economy,” history, politics—everything—are all far to complicated and we are all too temporary for it to be viewed in those kinds of terms. Lee losing his cigars before Antietam, flocks of geese almost setting off nukes, Vasily Arkhipov risking it all for everyone who ever lives now and after—these things can’t be controlled or predicted. It’s just the Tao, foiling the silly plots of men.

I’m still chewing all this over, letting the brain smack some bubbles and figure out what it all means.

One thing is for sure: the beard and pipe are keepers. Next up: sweaters.

More of the Same You Can Believe In *Update*

So let's do a quick rundown of the Obama appointments I can remember off the top of my head:

Hildog, State
Timothy Geithner, Treasury
Eric Holder, AG
Janet Napolitano, Securing the Homeland
Bill Richardson, Commerce
Bobby Gates, undisputed Defense champion of the world
Larry Summers, Council of Economic Whatevers Chair
Rahm Emmanuel, Chiefin' the Staff

So let's see here. One of these people IS a Clinton. Two of them served in the Clinton cabinet. Two of them were appointed US Attorneys by Clinton. One of them was appointed to the Fed by him, another was on his staff. The only non-Clinton alum is in the Bush Cabinet. Am I the only person compelled to ask: how is this change?

The message of Obama's campaign was that wispy, indistinct word change. Clearly people wanted a change from Bush, but the resolution we could gather from the primary season was that people wanted a changed Democratic Party as well. The neoliberal, triangulating, poll smoking and nihilistic pandering of the Clinton years was rejected and the public sought out someone with some sort of progressive vision rooted in leftish principles. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but there were plenty of options for people to choose from if they wanted Clintinismo to come back--not just Clinton herself but Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and a whole host of others offered this. Obama seemed to be selling a different set of goods and the public bought them.

Now, however, he puts into power some of the key architects and acolytes of the "pro-business" Democracy offered up by Clinton (Summers, Geithner), the man behind the Elian debacle who served in the same department that massacred the Branch Davidians (Holder), as well as frothing at the mouth Zionists and liberal internationalist true believers (Emmanuel, HRC, Richardson). Just about the only bright spot is perhaps Janet Napolitano. It is an open secret in Arizona that she is a gay woman and if she comes out she'll be the first openly gay person to serve in the US Cabinet. There are questions as to whether her one-time client Anita Hill's shocking presumption in standing up for herself in the face of a man bully might give Napolitano's confirmation some trouble. If the Anita Hill flare-up is still an issue then Iran-Contra--in which Robert Gates was involved--should be too and the traitor Gates should be rejected for renomination. But it is the word on the street that he is "widely respected on both sides of the aisle." I'm reminded of George Carlin's observation that whenever he hears of an effort or proposal receiving bipartisan support he knows that an even more excpetional level of evil than normal is going down. Obama rose to prominence with his purity in regards to the Iraq War. Now he has chosen to keep the military in the hands of one of its handmaidens. Change indeed.

Obama has been the president-elect for three weeks now and in that time he has done absolutely nothing to indicate that he will chart a course different in any meaningful way from the Clinton era, a time which was not much different (IMHO) than the Bush eras that bookended it. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but the sources of the agitation among the American people are a neoliberal economic framework, a liberal internationalist/neoconservative foreign policy (they differ primarily in their targets, not in their inanity or destructiveness) and government that says one thing and does another. Obama is keeping in tune with each of these perogatives and the weepy orgiastics of his disciples are quickly being made to look even more pathetic than before.

*Update*
Susan Rice is expected to be his UN Ambassador. From Wikipedia:

Rice served in the Clinton administration in various capacities: At the National Security Council from 1993 to 1997, as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping from 1993 to 1995 and as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs from 1995 to 1997. In 1997, she became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, serving in that capacity until Clinton left office on January 20, 2001.

So, um, ditto with what I said above.

Not Fit for the Inauguration

In high school I once fancied myself a poet. That lasted until I went back and read the verse I'd composed and realized how truly awful it was. It is perhaps a teenage smart kid rite of passage to try one's hand at poetry, and I failed. That being said I've been reading some Auden recently and last night I put together a piece I feel like putting up. Here goes:

Hope
Change and
Unity
Yes We Can!
For the first time in forever it seems
the button lies under a blackish hand.

Expectations rise to a fevered pitch
The fabric torn mended with a skinny stitch.

Nooses
Rumors
Slanders and
hushed fears abound
What in herd instinct we lost
In a new fangled shepherd is supposed to be found.

Absolute power is expected not to corrupt.
A new day dawns, its dusk feared to be abrupt.

War
Law and
Order
New boss same as old
Heat without light from fatted rubbing hands
Grabbing at goodies to stave away the cold.

Follow the money defined our just past age.
A forgetful ethic blinds each televised sage.

Barack
Hussein
Obama
A fearsome name indeed.
At the trough of power poisoned by conceit
the lowing public is called to feed.

Where great hope is gathered festers the rot of resent.
The bleeding past and gasping future give way to a tripping present.

Palin Puts It In Some Haters' Faces

Since it became clear that Obama would be president, even several weeks before the election, I have been saying that he'll most likely be a two-termer because I doubt that Mitt Romney could beat him and I've been more or less confident that Romney would be the 2012 GOP nominee. You see, the Republicans don't do mystery when it comes to their nominating process. Sure, the media and even GOP politicians themselves act like there is some kind of real contest, but at the end of the day the GOP crowns its heir apparant. McCain, Bush (who had all the money and the family name), Dole (it was finally his turn), etc. Not since 1964 has there been any mystery and that year there was no real crown prince for the party. Romney was second in line this year, he was pretty much every party faction's second choice and he made the money guys who run the party very very happy. QED: Romney for Pres 2012.

Now I'm not so sure. If you didn't see this scene from earlier this week then you really should. It points out how terribly the McCain camp really did manage Palin. She takes questions and is not only poised and sharp, she looks like the GOP boss. The only thing bad about it is my own vile governor Rick Perry grinning like the asshole he is right next to her and playing handler over the Killa from Wasilla.

What I'm getting at is that Palin, by virtue of the VP slot that I think many assumed would go Romney's way and by virtue of her capacity for "history making" (among other assets) is perhaps now the bona fide next in line for the GOP. And if that is the case Obama (who is likely to face a series of headaches, some resistant to any attempts at treatment from the White House) has his work cut out for him.

Oh, and I know what you're thinking and I absolutely agree: why in Christ's name are we already talking about 2012? Probably the same reason Vegas is already taking bets on NEXT year's Series. It's what we do...

The Dark Side of the Obama Victory

Anyone who doensn't keep up with the Southern Poverty Law Center's blog Hatewatch is doing themselves a disfavor. The Alabama-based nonprofit has built up a large budget over the years by suing hate groups that kill or injure people and using the winnings to shut down the organizations and fund their own. It is brilliant. Their magazine Intelligence Report will keep you abreast with what our nation's fascist underground is up to at any given time. Plus, you gotta love non-state surrveillance of the bad guys. It belies arguments that we HAVE TO HAVE cops.

Upon Obama's victory they made some important observations following up on recent intelligence they've published:

In all the euphoria after the election of Barack Obama, it is tempting to see the era of overt racism in the United States as past, a dead letter that has no relevance in a country that has finally overcome its ugly history. But sadly, that would be a mistake. Obama’s election reflects the fact that the country has made enormous progress in the area of race relations and is likely to propel it to even greater heights. But progress is never a straight line. There is always the danger of a backlash.

Even before the campaign was over, racial rage, clearly driven by fear of a black man in the White House, began to break out around the country. Effigies of Obama appeared hanging from nooses on university campuses. Angry supporters of John McCain and Sarah Palin shouted “Kill him!” at a campaign rally and even screamed “nigger” at a black cameraman, telling him, “Sit down, boy!” The head of the Hillsborough County, Fla., Republican Party sent an E-mail warning members of “the threat” of “carloads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes.” A reporter who has covered every presidential election since 1980 told me he had never seen such fury. Similar scenes were reported nationwide.

Naturally, the rage also engulfed the radical right. Thom Robb, an Arkansas Klan leader, described for a reporter the “race war” he sees developing “between our people, who I see as the rightful owners and leaders of this great country, and their people, the blacks.” In Tennessee, two neo-Nazi skinheads went further, allegedly planning to murder black schoolchildren, shoot and behead other African Americans, and assassinate Obama. They were arrested two weeks before the election.

(...)

“Historically, when times get tough in our nation, that’s how movements like ours gain a foothold,” Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group with 73 chapters in 34 states, told USA Today. “When the economy suffers, people are looking for answers. … We are the answer for white people.”

Unfortunately, Schoep is right. And the economic meltdown set in motion by the subprime crisis is not the only reason. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of perfect storm brewing of factors favoring the growth of hate and hate groups.

(...)

David Duke, the former Klan leader and convicted felon who is the closest thing the radical right has to an intellectual leader these days, believes this could all work to his benefit. In an essay this summer, the neo-Nazi ideologue argued that an Obama victory would serve as a “visual aid” to white Americans, provoking a backlash that Duke believes will “result in a dramatic increase in our ranks.”

An observation the group has yet to make is a parallel to the early and mid 90s. You will remember (if you have an historical memory longer than the last news cycle, almost unheard of in our postmodern dystopia) that in 1992 the right and far right raised questions about Bill Clinton's patriotism, suggesting that his Rhodes Scholar-era trip to the Soviet Union was actually based on his recruitment to the KGB. I suppose they were all proven right when Clinton transitioned the country to Marxist-Leninism, eh comrades, eh? They also painted him as a hippie flower child leftist who would take away everyone's guns, throw open the prison doors and outlaw straight sex. They worked themselves up into a lather.

The right wing ignored what actually happened--Clinton did all of the things Reagan and Bush wanted to do but could never get away with: ending welfare, gutting our financial regulatory apparatus, passing the Effective Death Penalty Act, etc. They ignored it and further stoked their fevered followers until right wing true believers across the country were organizing militias, stockpiling arms and preparing for partisan warfare. The climax of this inanity was the tragedy of Oklahoma City when 168 people were killed by men who believed they were doing the righteous work of liberty--a belief fertilized by Clinton hate and the right wing media circus that shat it out.

Now we have a Black man with a funny name on his way to the White House, and for months the right wing has suggested that he is a "secret Muslim" dedicated to the most dangerous political interpretations of that faith. They also believe him to be a Marxist, a traitor and an election theif (all the malarkey about ACORN suggests this). All this to say that the rhetoric surrounding Obama makes that against Clinton seem rather tepid. Add his race to the mix, and the far right will have even hotter flames firing than those that led to OKC in 1995.

Finally, many of the retrogrades who went away for 10-15 years in the aftermath of that conglagration for criminal conspiracy, weapons violations and other such charges are getting out of prison. They are leaving their cages more bitter, more organized and with internet communications that have proven to be invaluable to terrorist and revolutionary organizations around the globe.

All this to say, we are entering a dangerous time. Clinton only made things worse by massacring the Branch Davidians, creating gun-toting martyrs and a casus belli for the far right. Obama is unlikely to be presented with an opportunity for such a crime, and I frankly believe that his temperament would make such a repeat less likely. But the elevation of a Black man to the White House could be enough in its own right. I fear that Oklahoma City will be seen at the end of Obama's years in office as only the first in a series of spectacular tin-pot fascist crimes. Here's hoping the SPLC and I are both way off base.

On Rahm Emmanuel for Chief of Staff

It'd be nice to think that the fascist Jerome Corsi and his ilk would finally be shamed into silence by Emmanuel's appointment, but I'm sure we'll be hearing right wing conspiracy theories about Obama's treasonous support for Islamism for some time (four to eight years, at the very least).

But it is ominous that no one seems to be questioning the appointment to so powerful a position of a man who fought in a foreign country's military (the IDF) and who has long been suspected of being an agent for a foreign country's intelligence service (Mossad). Is this because the media consider Israel little more than the 51st state? Any hope that a president who once honored Rashid Khalidi and who was acquainted with the legendary Edward Said might introduce a more reasonable policy towards Israel/Palestine seems to have been dashed for the moment.

But seriously... if Emmanuel were a Latin American (as opposed to a Jewish person) who had fought in, say, the Venezuelan military and who was suspected with cause of having been an intelligence asset of the DISIP (the Venezuelan intelligence agency) how much would we be hearing about this? Chances are he wouldn't have even been elected to Congress. And--unlike Israel--Venezuela has never bombed a US Naval ship and up until Chavez's recent buddying up with FARC goons they have never invaded neighboring countries, they are not in gross and persistent violation of fundamental international law and they are not flagrant violators of international arms treaties (though admittedly Israel is not a NPT signatory, their aggression is among the root causes of the dreaded Iranian nuclear program).

In a reasonable world such a development would mean that the US Zionist crowd would shut up about mythical liberal, media or national bias against Israel. I mean, the most powerful job in the White House outside of the president himself is held by a citizen, veteran and rumored spy for the country and nobody objects. But I'm sure they'll keep up their victimization act--and along with Christians, conservatives and other gluttons for dominance they'll continue reaping tremendous rewards.

Sorry!

I haven't posted much lately. I think I'm going to start putting up quick one-off speculations to fill out the time between my rambling essays. I am also considering a switch to another host... I don't like having to put up an entire 3,000 word (or more) post without being able to put the body behind a quote. Also, it'd be nice to have more graphic elements, etc. Either way, get ready for changes!

Pornography and the Death of American Liberty

This essay is a bit rough. I could make my argument better. I may revise it considerably later, I might not. But here's something to chew on one way or the other.

-AD

“If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country—and you would be very foolish not to be right now—then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.”
--Andrea Dworkin, 1983

There is an assumption that American men of a certain age—young—are natural consumers of pornography. It is so natural as to need not be said, and those of us with an acquired aversion to the medium are considered to be strange, gay or lying. Tell a group of men that you find a group of young men that you find porn to be repulsive, oppressive, wrong or dangerous and they will immediately question your sincerity. It is to our time what Scripture was to a previous: a literature of deep cultural significance calling for daily study and engagement. Its hallmarks and vernacular are normalized in the broader culture, so that jaded New Yorkers and giddy tourists to the cultural capital of our country stroll unphased through Times Square where a massive image advertising the rarely viewed television program Gossip Girl features a conventionally good-looking man and woman at the peak of coitus alongside the internet age abbreviation OMFG: “Oh My Fucking God.” Giuliani got rid of the peepshows, but mainstream media have kept the porn flying high on Broadway.

Video and then the internet have made porn something everyone can consume, not solely the dirty old men of yesteryear sneaking into unsanitary cinemas. As this has happened the US has taken an extreme tilt to the Right, two seemingly unrelated and distinct phenomena. It is my position that this tilt represents the clattering end of the US’ democratic charade and that our pornography culture is a vital part of the emergence of populist autocracy—in short, fascism. Fascism thrives in a culture of heightened masculinity and pornography creates just the kind of male sexual identity necessary for its taking root. It is undeniable that pornography has materially reworked American culture, and the result is the emergence of a politic of conquest, domination and possession—one that denies even the tepid liberal lip service to self-determination, liberty and individual independence. The line from porn to Abu Ghraib (where tortured prisoners were pornographed by soldiers in positions of sexual humiliation) is a bright one and the implications domestically are grave.

Few writers have captured the amorphous essence of fascism like the Italian witness Umberto Eco, whose 14 points of Ur-Fascism form the single best distillation of the movement’s fundamentals. A consistent theme of his analysis is fascism’s passionate exultation of the masculine and damnation of the feminine. Point twelve states “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies… disdain for women…).” Fascist movements demean their enemies as women—assuming the title an insult—and embrace the prima facie benefits of manliness. Robert Jensen, a contemporary critic of pornography, notes that this manliness and masculinity generally are defined by a will to conquer: real men seek to control situations and express superiority in all relationships. Masculinity is defined by dominance and thus it should surprise no one that emphatic and publicly masculine political systems would be ones that seek to dominate all—whether they be the brutalized citizenry of manly fascist states or the unlucky inhabitants of lands they seek to subdue in the name of their superiority.

Selling campaigns costly in wealth, blood and energy to a populace necessitates an acclimation to the ethic of possession; it thrives in cultures where rapaciousness and ravishing are eroticized. Imperialism—a system that pursues the taking and bleeding dry of unwilling peoples under the guise of giving them what they really want deep down—is nothing more than a political movement of rape writ large. Fascism is a movement that could only come out of and which celebrates a domineering definition of masculine identity, and central to this identity and the cultural groundwork of fascism is rape culture. Imperial populism is fascism is the natural political organization of a rape culture.

Pornography is the propaganda of rape culture, as it posits sexuality as a possessive venture. This message is both textual and contextual. The text (or rather photos and films) portrays women begging for sexual humiliation and possession. Women are fucked in painful, uncomfortable, degrading and violent ways and always hungry for more. They are littered with bodily fluids to emphasize their dirtiness and ownership. They are “cunts,” “sluts,” and “whores” who are merely the titillating objects of sexual conquest for men cast primarily for their phallic supremacy. The very categorization of the medium into “softcore” and “hardcore” gives an idea of its prerogatives. Hardcore porn (also known as “the good stuff”) is distinguished by showing penetration footage—porn reduces sex to an act of aggression (“banging,” “pounding”) by men as opposed to a more meaningful connection. Hardcore is also distinguished by “money shots”—scenes of the men evacuating their semen onto the women’s bodies (rarely inside them)—blatant messages of sexual domination of men over women. The message of pornography is self-evident: women are for fucking and he who fucks rules. Their orifices are used as places for branding, and the owners are always hyper-masculine (read: big dicked) men. The sexual possession of women is a cultural assumption that finds the purest distillation of its propagation in pornography.

Contextually, pornography is the physical act of possessing women’s sexuality. Pornography is cheap prostitution, its ubiquitousness means that men can be assured access to women’s sexuality at all times. It is called “speech,” but the images are the empirical documentation of the degradation and ownership of real women. Engaging in the pornographic conversation amounts to the purchase of an act of sexual domination over a real woman’s body. This body is laid out in ways that reduce it to a collection of body parts, and this objectification means that the use of pornography is an act of sexual conquest for the user. The protection of men’s “right” to pornography is a bald-faced assertion that men have a right to sexual access to women. This assertion is the basic philosophy of rape culture, and a society that seeks to protect a literature of sexual possession at any cost is one that can be defined simply as a rape culture.

In the contemporary United States pornography is thoroughly mainstream. A $13 billion a year business, pornography can be found at almost every newsstand and bookstore, every video store and cable package, in virtually every airport, hotel room or gas station, and in every home with internet access. It is sent to us unsolicited in our email, its aesthetic towers over us on thousands of billboards. On the show Friends Joey and Chandler—characters a more quaint literature would label “heroes”—celebrate when they find they are receiving free porn on their cable. The Hollywood teen hit The Girl Next Door is about a boy who falls for a porn star in his neighborhood. All this to say pornography is undeniably a part of our mainstream culture. It even acts as the school age American boy’s primer on female sexuality. Long before most boys have so much as kissed a girl they are consumers of pornography, a state so common as to give rise to cutesy nostalgia for the “innocent” days of hiding a Hustler under the mattress. The first lesson in female sexuality American boys receive is the first law of patriarchy: men have a right of sexual access to women. This is repackaged for public consumption as “men think with their dicks,” female flesh being a constant necessity for a healthy man, human distinction between bodies unwelcome distractions in the hunt. Pornography initiates American men in this mindset, and the result is prostitution[*], rape and incest. When exposure to this literature is a right of passage for adolescent and “tween” boys, it tills the earth for the thriving adoption of masculine politics and from thence follows fascism.

Fascism, it can be argued, is the natural resting place of liberalism. Liberalism and its attendant capitalist economic organization serve as environmental conditions which select for greater and greater concentrations of power. At the basis of its political arrangement is that power over all should be granted to an allegedly representative few, and that the pursuit of greater power among these few should be “harnessed” for its progressive energy, kept in check by separations of power and the paper protection of constitutions. At the economic basis, it frankly endorses accumulation, competition and class privilege for the wealthy. Over time these bases will mean that fewer and fewer will hold political and economic authority. Political proposals that expand the ranks of the powerful may occasionally prevail, but those that empower the tiny elite who decide whether the power ought to be contracted or expanded are obviously selected for. Among those elite the limitations of constitutions only go so far as those same elite are willing to recognize, and as time goes by various branches of the state come under the control of various shrewd or capable personalities which vault those branches over their supposedly coequal fellows. And while or whether this evolution of political autocracy goes on, capitalism redistributes wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Each firm is a miniature tyranny—hierarchical structures of authority unaccountable to the individuals ruled over. Under liberalism money is power and ultimately the monied interests bend political structures to the wills of their private autocracies. No conscious or measured effort is needed on anyone’s part—the fundamental inertia of liberalism leans toward fascistic systems.

This meltdown is happening right now in the United States. Under the Bush Administration we have had ludicrous advances in executive power and open contempt for what recently passed as assumptions rooted in the constitution. The president may now ignore the laws he or she signs at his or her leisure. The president may identify anyone as an enemy combatant and have them imprisoned secretly, tortured, denied a jury trial and executed. He or she may also work with private (that is to say, autocratic) telecommunications companies to listen in on anyone’s telephone or internet conversations with impunity. Much of the military’s heavy lifting is now done by private mercenary armies unbound by law, loyal first to political benefactors and outside of meaningful civilian oversight. The danger of this development is perversely reduced as Bush (like Clinton before him) has argued that he can start wars with the formal military without congressional approval, and he has. All this has occurred alongside cooperative GOP congresses, a complacent Democrat congress and courts the Administration has run around or ignored. His popularity has sunk, but the bright liberal hope for replacing him—Barack Obama—has declined to delineate any executive overreaches he would repudiate. He further extols a rhetoric wherein our greatest political terror is not creeping fascism, but rather political division. He says he will replace conflict with “Unity,” a feat only capable of being accomplished by a tyrant. Christopher Hitchens, among others, has noted that division is the natural outcome of a system that allows dissent and encourages debate. Unity can only be achieved by eliminating these freedoms and so Obama at best represents a hydra of naïve politics which cynically refuse to embrace liberal restoration. At worst he will deepen the downgrade.

And where is the outrage? Bush hating is a hot new national pastime, but the fervor is markedly reserved. Its nature is an unsophisticated one, as it declines to turn its critical eye towards neither the ravages of Clinton’s time in office nor the promise of Obama’s. All meaningful dissent to the decline of America’s already paltry freedoms are outside the mainstream. If we are a culture dedicated to freedom, how can this be? Many will just assert the stupidity of the masses, a convenient position in an increasingly authoritarian state. But these same masses drive the world’s most powerful economy, generate the globe’s dominant popular and high culture and populate its most fearsome military. It makes more sense to recognize that this culture gives only lip service to freedom, while placing its energy in rape. Pornography keeps us jaded to human suffering. It keeps us lusting after dominance. It teaches us that freedom extends only as far as a tumescent cock, and that masculine values cast off their waste onto the feminine. It is also the core of our contemporary American culture—it makes more money (the way liberals keep score) than the US’ celebrated film industry and our music industry combined. These industries look to porn for artistic inspiration. A culture so oriented cannot denounce tyranny while keeping a straight face; it can at best attack efficacy and image while keeping silent about the emergence of a domineering, aggressive, dehumanizing and swaggering elite tossing their excretions into the eyes of the girly. American liberty’s evaporation is a bipartisan affair borne of the same impulse that hustled to protect porn and turn it into a household product.

If this essay is to have a lesson, it is this: the dissident struggle against liberalism’s long awaited collapse into fascism, against capitalism’s expropriation of billions of human lives and against imperialism’s shrinking the globe to a sandbox for brutal elites to entertain themselves in is not solely a political struggle. It is a fight against a culture that sees people as things and sees the degradation and ownership of these things as arousing to the point of climax. This culture is deepened by the mainstreaming of pornography, and a nation that accepts, protects and celebrates pornography cannot assume its continued liberty. The enemy is as distant as Wall Street and as close as your Download file. The problem is as rarefied as Capitol Hill and as vulgar as a basic cable Girls Gone Wild commercial. To pursue justice without condemning and battling the $13 billion pimps of the pornography industry is to break off a weed rather than pulling up its roots. We have left this battle to rightward forces that simply seek to replace pornography’s sense of men possessing women with a clerical one. Their quarrel can hardly be with brutality (look at their holy books), but rather with explicit sexuality. The revival of a radical opposition to porn is absolutely vital if we are to have any hope of smashing the fascist scourge before it devours the world—once again—in a tragic conflagration.

This fight will be harder than ever before, but the difficulty arises from the source of its necessity: pornography’s iron grasp on our culture. If we must destroy all the culture to root out the porn, so be it. The vicious sensibilities of our declining age deem destruction as (as Bakunin would have it) a beautiful creative act. Specifics will arise after discussion and experiment, and we must recognize that the time for internal bickering is over amidst universal distress. Only we who refuse to be owned can break this fascist creeping, and we will only be worthy the honor if we break its backbone of pornographic rape culture.

[*] I realize that prostitution (the world’s oldest profession) existed long before pornography, but perhaps it is a further sign of pornography’s spot in our culture that it has replaced the wretched institution as American boys’ first exposure to women bought for a price.

Light Out Chronicles: Asheville, NC

I tried hitching out to Asheville, but made the mistake of picking a highway still well into Knoxville, and indeed in the "bad" part of town--a police officer had recently been shot by three burglars ("black boys" a local felt compelled to add) very near where my thumb hung aching for more than two hours. Nobody was taking the chance. I opted instead to cross the street, grab local public transit and get back to the Old City. Let Greyhound get me there.

The ride was short, comfortable, friendly and awe-inspiring. Those foothills were the foreplay for the torrid heat of the Smoky Mountains. Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina are a kingdom ruled by stately mountains--smaller than the Alps, Himalayas or Rockies only because they are much older. For a mountain lover the ride through the Smokies is a discourse with the elders of one's beloved class. No reading got done, as the only thing capable of prying my attention from the ineffable scenery was the enlightening conversation of one R---- --an Anglo-French exchange student in Montreal, on her own trans-US romp. We hit it off even before learning we'd both made plans to stay at the same hostel. She was sharp as a razor and with a continental wit that threatens to devastate the weak-minded. Add in a healthy dose of beauty and I nearly fell for her, perhaps I would have if I thought she'd ever stoop to my level. A new friend is better than a temporary lover any day however, and now I know someone in Toulouse.

I'm writing this at an all night coffee shop in Times Square (so you know it is corporate, take a wild guess...) because I'm almost out of money. Paid lodging is an impossible luxury at this point. But I had the cash when I got to Asheville and Bon Paul and Sharky's is worth every dime and then some. Low cost but entirely comfortable, it is run by a laid back and kind-souled staff that live in the old house now let out to travelers from across the world. Hostels engender great deals of friend-making to begin with, but at least this Memorial Day weekend crowd was exceptional. I get the idea that the business itself deserves the credit, and the mountain view from the back patio would pay for itself even without all the warm community. If I'm gushing it is only because Bon Paul and Sharky's is that special. I would say I'm not nearly being kind enough.

After two days there I connected with my first CouchSurfing.com hosts--the friends of what is informally called the "Foti House" in South Asheville. I had made plans to sniff out the rads in Asheville (about as difficult as finding a Mormon in Provo) by checking out the local Earth First! meeting and the Critical Mass bike ride. Neither was necessary as the Foti House is a community of anarchists, revolutionary in its very existence. Its official owner, D----, is an anti-civ Zerzanite with a quiet streak, but his vision has come together with that of his housemates to create a model in collective decision making and sustainable living. Much of their food is rescued from the garbage--either through a spot of dumpster diving or from housemate C----'s health food store job. This is supplemented by a large and growing organic garden made luscious by a solid composting program. Rainwater reclamation is in its early stages but improving, and all the sinks drain to buckets powered by a graywater ditch. This graywater system was my biggest consciousness-raiser as seeing your wastewater and being individually responsible for its disposal demands an unfamiliar level of conservation. You learn to wash dishes, hands and teeth and to shave with very little water. It shames one for the gushing sinkfulls of the past. The house itself is in desperate need of renovations, and with a skilled group of committed partners they are ongoing. E-----, A-----, V-----, A-----, B-----, Z-----, R----- and the others I've already mentioned put the lie to idea that egalitarian and sensible living rooted in human interactions are pipe dreams. The place is a haven and a weapon, it represents a hidden future springing from the lost lessons of our past.

Most of the Foti House crew are also involved in Asheville's best (and methinks only) collectively-owned and operated coffee shop/radical bookstore--Firestorm Cafe. A bit difficult to find, it is worth the hunt (I've forgotten the address) and located in Asheville's spectacular downtown. I was shocked to learn only about 72,000 people live in Asheville, as there is a thriving nightlife and art scene that create a bustling city center. I encountered a great deal of success with my Nobody for President tracts, as there was constant foot traffic. My best spot was right near Malaprops Books--a model independent bookstore. If one is into shopping and not so much into corporate chains Asheville is the spot. Like Knoxville it is largely unbranded--a Subway was as corporate as it got downtown, aside from major commercial banks. Street musicians play everywhere and it is small enough that I walked everywhere (with one gratuitous bus ride, just to see how it went--well). It was so impressive I immediately considered relocating there, if I were not at the beginning of this adventure I would have and when it is over I very well may.

Three or four nights at the Foti House gave way to my last stretch, staying at an elegant apartment Northeast of Downtown with veteran couch surfing hosts C----, B----- and P-----. C----- had had particular success with the couch surfing experiment, as he had commenced a romance with the intoxicating J----- --an artist from Philadelphia--shortly before my arrival. C----'s very apartment was home to Grace Kelly for some months when she once made a film in Asheville. J----- continued the tradition of gentle-souled and unspeakably beautiful women of sublime talent haunting that place. His porch hosts a burgeoning container garden and another mountain view that puts an exclamation point on every sunset.

Asheville represents the culmination of many of this country's greatest themes--natural beauty, kind yet rebellious people, optimism and warm community. It is quite possibly the US' best kept secret and I almost hate to spill the beans. good thing no one really reads this blog. Its bouquet lingers in my nose, and it smells like home. Barring the discovery of somewhere even more exceptionally beautiful, kind, insurgent, engaging and easy after camp, I think I'll flip the Texas flag upside down and make North Carolina my home. No promises, but Asheville struck me like a conversion experience. Only Greyhound's refusal to refund the discounted ticket I had purchased to Maine kept me from lounging there for several more days or weeks.

But refuse they did and so the road stretched forward again--could my recurring dreams come true? Could the World's Capital City be ahead? New York City can destroy you, but I need more calluses on my naivete. Asheville fades as fate comes into view...

Towards an Educational Revolution

There is an excellent chance that you are reading this anarchist nonsense within fifteen miles of a university. Show me a US anarchist, revolutionary or anticapitalist distant from any institution of higher learning, and I will show you a lonely person. Radical communities tend to be huddled around colleges--Austin, Madison, Olympia, Eugene, Berkeley, Boulder and Tucson jump to mind--and radical community centers (bookstores, coffeeshops, etc.) are frequently filled with grad students arguing over Gramsci or paraphrasing Chomsky. Demonstrations against the wars or for other broadly leftist causes bring out young college activists, aging first generation hippies and few else. This analysis will be attacked, but it is impossible to deny that your typical protest is likely to have a far higher education level than the public at large. Right wing propagandists such as David Horowitz or D'nesh D'souza use these facts to suggest that the left controls academia, while endemic corporatization and militarization of virtually all academic research departments puts these retrogrades in a ridiculous light.

It would be far more accurate to suggest that academia controls the left. It is my contention that this is perhaps the most central source of the thorough irrelevance of revolutionary movements in contemporary America. The place of higher education in society, its relationship to individuals and its relationship with revolutionary movements all point to its being a system of control unacceptable for those opposed to authority in all its forms.

Colleges and universities serve two vital functions in upholding systems of authority and control across US society. The first is as a source of authoritarian credentials: a degree serves as a "seal of approval" that grants exclusive access to elite systems. Degrees have no relationship to academic achievement at a societal level, rather they show that the holder had access to tens of thousands of dollars at some point. Whether they worked, borrowed, got money from family, charity or the government is unimportant--all indicate an indebtedness to systems of authority (employers, banks, parents, philanthropy, the state) that marks the holder as sympathetic to the status quo. Academics are less of a selection factor for colleges than wealth: wealthy elites from prestigious schools all go to college, regardless of academic performance in high school. On the other hand, poor and marginalized people from degraded high schools are demanded good grades, only academic elites from these schools go on to seek degrees. When they all get to college they will be repeatedly told that their major is not really that important--employers just want to know they got a degree in something. That the something is so irrelevant belies the fact that the content of one's education is not what counts--after all, a chronic class cutter with a 2.1 has just as much a degree as the valedictorian. What counts is a piece of paper signed by powerful figures in an institution of power to be used as a passkey to future bosses.

The university's second purpose is less discussed: it serves as a source of free labor for powerful interests. Unpaid internships have emerged as a second level of authoritarian weeding out, as the employment opportunties promised with one's degree are dried up without an history of interning. Students who cannot afford to work for free are thus put in a similar spot as those who couldn't afford college in the first place--indeed America's service industry and temp agencies are chock-full of degree holders, many turned away from better jobs because they lack internship slave service to corporate employers. For the public-minded student liberal and conservative political institutions--think tanks, campaigns, consultants and reformist activist causes--scour colleges and universities for well-off interns to develop into the pundits, lawmakers, hacks and do-gooders of tomorrow. As working community involvement in the political process dries up amid repeated betrayals and almost literal anemia, colleges and universities provide greater shares of the grunt-level legwork of electoral politics. Like their corporate patrons they rely on higher education to develop future rulers on the cheap.

Aside from its place in society, academia has an oppressive impact on human individuals. Most immediately this comes in the form of debt. The prospect of a $100,000 or more commitment is an enormous burden for almost every college family. As education costs have soared financial aid sources have become more and more ineffective at financing higher education for millions. The result is that all but the wealthiest students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt. This effectively limits the choices available to college graduates; even if their degree weren't solely an authoritarian credential, it would be a sort of secular fatwa: submit or be crushed. Acclimated for borrow-and-spend financial ethics, college students are a chief market for credit card companies. Using "free" t-shirts, trips or other trinkets as a lure they snooker naive students into taking on even more debt--they are often given access to students by the academic institutions themselves. The oppression of commercial debt needs to explanation to any adult, but the debt culture of higher education takes a dark turn when a credit crisis strikes. Universities are now debt-financed and as credit becomes tighter, so will access to a college education.

Colleges and universities are also typically dehumanizing. The schools where most university students get their degrees (state schools) exist on too large a scale to treat their participants as humans--a school with 30,000 students, 20,000 staff and 3,000 faculty and tens of thousands of alumni must thus necessarily be oppressive. Few institutions feature quite the jungle of bureaucracy the typical college offers. Rigid rules written by cranky committees of institutional climbers create narrow paths for college students. The grade system, professor/student dichotomy and pedagogical style are also more fit for robots than human individuals. The problems with each of these are well-discussed elsewhere, but melting down the infinitely varied and complex process of learning to a four tone scale or paying money to have an authority figure talk at you are necessarily oppressive. They both discourage or at best fail to recognize individual distinction aside from exceptional adherence to or abstention from the approved path. Administration sees students as numbers, faculty see them as potential acolytes, students see one another as competitors or sexual objects if they aren't drinking buddies. The culture of higher education is one not fit for individual humans.

Higher education's place in elite society as a vital organ for its continued survival and its function as a devourer of human dignity should mark it as a special target for elimination by self-described revolutionary movements. Instead it is their only real bastion of respect in the contemporary US. This is a primary legacy of the revolutionary moment in the 1960s. The two most noted organizations of this time (as I see it) were the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. The former were smashed by state force, but the second formed the basis for a dramatic shift in the left. Prior to the 1960s revolutionary movements were closely associated with working communities: anarchists, communists and socialists were centered in labor unions (the Pullman Union, IWW, CIO, Western Federation of Miners), urban slums or farming centers (Kansas and Oklahoma were both notorious for their radicals). The SDS marked the first time that the US left found itself most comfortable and powerful in such elite contexts. Coincident with this shift came the rise of the "New Left," a broad school distinguished by skepticism of old dogmas--Marxism, syndicalism, etc.--and an application of postmodern and existentialist thought to left concerns. As valuable as many insights of the New Left proved to be, its main bequeath was a left dialog riddled with jargon, steeped in obscurantist rhetoric and completely inaccessible to the uneducated, unsophisticated or uninitiated (and hardly more discernible to much of the rest). As the SDS moved revolutionary action away from oppressed communities, the New Left divorced revolutionary thought from the discourse of these same working communities.

This has made US revolutionaries both marginalized and useless. By ensuring that one bust be in or near a college (read: with money) to hear or understand revolutionary messages, it has made the left paternalistic--far more than it was even before the 60s. College kids seeking to "save the world" come off to oppressed people as paternalistic adventurers, giving demagogues and reactionaries a strategic place to demonize revolutionary movements from. Lacking space for real change as they remain distant from oppressed groups and not able to perceive the stakes of stagnation because of their privilege, college activism remains comfortably trapped in the absolutely ineffective political tools of 60s activism: big marches, sit-ins, production of serially failing rags and so on. In fact the most effective tools of 60s action--occupations, property sabotage and humorous spectacle--are largely jettisoned by campus radicals. They are replaced with wholly unjustified faith in technological innovations like cell phones and the internet still largely outside the budget of the poor (or of too low a quality to be useful in those communities).

This marginalization is a function of the movements' uselessness. The hope in technologies differentially available in terms of class is only one source of distance from dispossessed people. To begin, campus organizations necessarily exclude the uneducated. Unlettered laborers and illiterate farmers have overthrown more governments and fought more revolutionary battles than the educated weekend warriors. But even if college activists open their organizations to the community at large the preference for educated types can be intimidating for those who may not read well or write much more than their name--let alone those who can't speak English. Also, the selection pressures for college are racially biased: quality of one's high school, functionality of one's family (according to White norms), test scores and essays along with access to financing. There are two results of this: campus revolutionary organizations (and as a result the left generally) are overwhelmingly White or Asian and those that aren't tend to be tied down to liberal identity politics. Poor communities of color have no use for one and know all too well the dreadfulness of the other. Even if the college address of these organizations didn't discourage poor people from getting involved, the foreign culture or patronization of college activism probably would.

Finally, the elitism and bourgeois obsession with pragmatism among college students leads the campus left into the worst left elements. Authoritarian parties like the Workers World Party (behind International ANSWER), the Maoist RCP (World Can't Wait), the Trotskyist intrigues of the ISO or colonialist perspectives of the Greens all ensure that a great deal of left energy in its academic ghetto is wasted on anachronistic institutions of repression. This tendency towards the party left both marginalizes and renders ineffective the left simultaneously.

There is, as you can guess, a quick solution to this problem--leftists and revolutionaries should drop out of college or resign their faculty positions. Universities are as elite as any corporation, as hierarchical as the military and at least as necessary for the survival of capitalism as organized religion. Yet dissidents who would never work for a multinational, enlist or confess in any church hurry to defend their place in academia. Their most frequent claim is that they have more "freedom" to do their activism work because of an academic job. But this freedom is obtained at the price of oppression for their students, and this freedom renders that same activism far less effective. Better to struggle and suffer in a less prestigious, lower paying, more rigorous line of work and have less time for activism than to have hours and hours to spend rebelling as a well-paid, well-rested elite.

This solution is highly unlikely to happen, and perhaps it is arrogant or unrealistic to ask people to quit the jobs they've trained their whole lives for. Another path is for university-based revolutionaries to focus on destroying the higher education system as we know it, replacing it with institutions that would be revolutionary centers of inclusion. Imagine if instead of places where people with appropriate prior education paid thousands of dollars a semester to take a limited number of required classes where they were lectured in pursuit of a degree universities were places where anybody of any age or education paid small fees to use libraries, laboratories, tutors, researchers or other resources to educate themselves and then become teachers in their own right. Instead of exclusive, they would be inclusive. Instead of expensive, they would be affordable for virtually anyone. Instead of narrow and dictated they would have infinite variety. And instead of being about having those authoritarian credentials they would be about learning, growing and sharing our unique knowledge in order to create stronger, smarter and more beautiful communties. Dropping out is a viable solution (one taken by this author); a quick solution. A revolution in pedagogy would be a generational struggle, but could provide the foundation for a broader revolution in society. Where the anarcho-syndicalists saw productive power as the jumping off point for a revolution in an industrial society, perhaps "anarcho-pedagogialists" will use educational power as the springboard. It is at least worth trying.

It cannot be denied that higher education is a system of control, that universities are centers of oppression and that the students and faculties of our colleges are invested in the destruction of human freedom--not the least their own. What to do about this situation is vital for the future of the left, and the solutions could provide new venues for global upheaval of power relations. Please use email and comments to discuss the implications and inspirations you may come upon. Direct action solutions offer a multitude of options, one of them may save our lives.

Light Out Chronicles: Knoxville, TN

It is my favorite time of day--mid-evening, when the sun comes at everything sideways and the shadows stretch tall. We are cutting through the north of Austin, the less interesting half, but the last half of home I will see for months. You stack up enough months and you'll be talking years--could it be years before I see it again? The truth is, I have no idea, no way of knowing. Freedom costs you your capacity to prognosticate--if I go where I want, I won't be here again til I need to be. Life being what it is (temporary) I suppose there is an outside chance I'll never see these Live Oak choked, lazily rolling vistas ever again. But god what a curse that what be. it is like the last embrace of a lover, the last time lips touch before you're just occasional fuckbuddies or strangers. Welcome but painful, a symbol of an ongoing love that has nonetheless changed. That's what the first 30 minutes of a 22 hour ride on Greyhound are like.

Out of Dallas, usually the end of my line--this is where my family is and I once was. But the emotions came in Austin, now the magnitude of this sardine can experience is growing on me. The discomfort fails to really phase me, however, I end up having a good time. G----, a recently homeless guy from Virginia; K---- and A---- conjoined young lovers from Boulder (unimpressed by the merely majestic scale of the Smoky Mountains' foothills); K---- and J---- from London, UK coming stateside with cheap dollars and tickets to Dollywood; R---- the oil worker from Detroit going home from 10 long months in Ft. Stockton, TX: i made friends. Only 80 pages were taken out of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Riding Greyhound is a lesson in the flattening of the US landscape. When in Sulpher Springs or Benton you get to see corporate trucks identical save that in one they have Big 12 ballcaps, the other SEC. The bus stations in Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville are surrounded by the temples of corporate capitalism's last hurrahs--branded arenas and new high rise developments. High rise condos springing up in Little Rock show that the reach of the New Urbanist scourge knows no bounds. In between you have terraced farms in Arkansas and those majestic foothills. Tennessee offers as much natural beauty as anywhere I've yet seen, the foliage a chaos of species packing the landscape to create a lush texture like nowhere else. When the hills start rolling and valleys plunge away from the interstate, it is almost too much to bear. The South Texans among us were clamoring with camera phones and gushing over the view. Into this green and seductive terrain sprouts Knoxville.

There are a couple of quick ways to describe Knoxville--K-Town to friends. One is that it is a negative image of Austin: where Austin is a big city trying to be a small town, Knoxville is a small town trying to be a big city. Its downtown features a signature park--Market Square--full of public art garbage nobody minds getting rained, hailed or sat upon. It is walkable and you could see all the sights in a weekend. People still smile here, and it has got to be the least branded city I have seen. The only corporate eateries in Downtown or the adjacent Old City are an Arbies, a Marble Slab and a Subway. The only other corporate outlet of any sort I saw was a Regal cinema (its logo is downplayed on the facade of a classic movie house). No McDonald's, no Starbucks (check out Coffee and Chocolate or Old City Java), no Gap, Diesel, Express or other corporate shopping. I'm told that during the school year the place is lousy with frat guys and "sorostitutes." But I'm here the week after the other UT let out for summer so only the interns at law offices and banks are afoot. All this to say Knoxville--regardless of its ambitions--exists on a human scale.

The other way of seeing it is as very similar to Cambridge, MA 86 the self-important yankees sub laid back rednecks. It is old--founded in 1792--and it promises a great deal of stimulation. Still, it lacks a Boston over the river, offering the Smoky Mountains instead. It is a city where cars are gratuitous yet public transit paltry (though probably pretty good for its size). There are a few radicals afoot--the woman at the historical center told me that Knoxville turned out in the early 70s to protest Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. If you need any proof that there is a vein of cool running through K-Town note that it is probably the only place in a five state spread that would turn out against the war mongering Billy Graham. One of the alt weeklies has contact info for the local Critical Mass and the Green Party, as well as anti-Bush op ed screeds. It also, in a refreshing exception from its cohorts around the country, has no ads for prostituted women. There are actually two alt weeklies: the Knoxville Voice and Metro Pulse, neither offer women for rent in their back pages.

My last day in town I finally connected with the local underground. At the Southeast end of Market Square sits a Tennessee-style BBQ joint called Guss' with a "Peace In Iraq Now" sign out front. I went in, got the pork sandwich special and talked with the man behind the counter. He pointed me towards Yarnell Perkins, a local activist and writer with a group called Pledge to Impeach. The group is working to organize a general strike for East Tennessee, to be called off when President Bush resigns, the War in Iraq ends, etc. You could criticize them I suppose, and Yarnell is a left liberal type enamored of Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party. But still it was nice to connect with the lefties in town.

That same morning I sat in the aforementioned Coffee and Chocolate where I struck up a conversation with D----, who agreed with me 100% when it came to my radically bleak economic forecasts. His agreement was nice for a season, but when it came out that he was a mutual fund manager it turned terrifying. He is the sort I expect to say I'm crazy when I predict Great Depression style financial collapse. His agreement was unexpected and worrying. He made up for it though, as I was attempting to figure out where my next stop would be and he said some magic words.

"You been to Asheville yet?"

The answer was no, but per his advice it won't be soon. Keep heading east, north will come soon enough. Knoxville could only house me for a few days, Asheville here I come.

PS--Also check out Woodward Books, where I spent two hours before my bus out of town talking to one of the owners about politics. A great spot for rare and used books, not very big but comfy!

The Backwards Read I: Gitmo War Crimes File and Second Generation Agrofuels

It is my practice to read newspapers from back to front--you get to the meaty buried stories first and leave the headlines for a light and fluffy dessert. Yesterday's New York Times was a perfect example of this policy's effectiveness. All the way back on page A17, next to a piece about pet cloning (how cyberpunk is that?) the Gray Lady reports that "FBI Agents Created a War Crimes File" of abuses at Guantanamo bay.

In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

I suppose it is a feature of these dark times that we are left to rely on J. Edgar Hoover's handiwork for protection from state oppression. Especially telling is the fact that US military interrogators worked with Chinese investigators in Gitmo to torture Chinese Muslims. No word if the PRC guys were put off that Soviet-style sleep deprivation tactics were used in their Sino-American Clandestine Torture Summit rather than Maoist techniques. The media have been known to put China's human rights contempt in the front of their coverage, but US collaboration in and notetaking on the same is seventeenth page news.

The big eye-opener here is that the FBI agents in Guantanamo weren't hippie peaceniks hoping to bring an end to the War, they were criminal investigators accumulating evidence of serious crimes. In the end, the Times reports:

The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.

Radical environmentalists seem to be seen as a more serious threat than US officials torturing in the name of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.

Finally, the article demonstrates the cynical destruction of the English language for totalitarian purposes:

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.

The military's distinction between "torture" and "degrading and abusive" interrogation tactics begs the question: what is torture if not degrading and abusive interrogation? It seems that the government is committed to making the word torture meaningless, and thus it would be impossible for the US to torture--as impossible as it would be for them to ballywonk or zurk or any other word without meaningful definition. Alternately, they might redefine it as "something the US doesn't do." By definition we don't torture so sleep deprivation (the central torture tactic in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's terrifying expose of Stalinism), waterboarding (a primary tool of the Spanish Inquistion) or sexual humiliation (a favorite of Saddam Hussein) are only torture when others do them. This is the classic rationale of doublethink and the DoD's innocent quote demonstrates the depth of commitment to repression in our national state.

Moving forward, page A6 has a fascinating critical look at "second generation" agrofuels. This article--like almost everybody else--calls them "biofuels," but activists in the global South have taken to calling them agrofuels. All fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--are made of biological materials, agrofuels can be distinguished by the fact they are produced from agricultural products rather than drilled or mined for. Second generation agrofuels are produced from reeds and grasses as opposed to staple crops such as corn, palm and sugar. The global famine caused in part by Western liberalism's posthaste embrace of agrofuels is leading Western energy firms to consider shifting to plants such as giant reed and jatropha--non-food crops. The only hitch in their giddy up is that:

Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.

Hard to believe plants sold by their advocates as easy to grow in vast quantities anywhere might be weeds, no? It is still unclear how many desperate straw grasps from global capitalism we will endure before we recognize that the problem isn't that there isn't enough fuel or not clean enough fuel, but overconsumption. These grasps cost human lives: thousands certainly in the current famine (exceptional hunger in a world where thousands starve to death every day to begin with) and more if disastrous predictions about invasive species' threat to food supplies in poor countries were to come true. They cost lives, but they pay profits for capitalists convinced that the eternal economic growth is possible or desirable. Having ignored warnings about the first generation agrofuels' threat to food costs, they don't want to hear the expert predictions on second-generation products.

“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”

To this industry figures such as EuropaBio's Willy De Greef have this black comfort:

Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group... said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.

Inevitably? As in guaranteed to take place? I am curious what De Greef's source of such confidence might be. Unforseen, ignored or covered up threats to human life have arisen from every new energy innovation, and capitalism's pursuit of ever greater wealth explodes these threats with its consumption culture. The rapacious burning of wood, coal, petroleum and the first generation of agrofuels have all resulted in ecological crises that have killed multitudes of people. Now the "secretary general" of the newest energy concern lets us know this time will be different. We'll be waiting with baited breath.

This article ends with a scent of a solution, at least one of its dimensions.

That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.

A global resistance is called for, anything less is simply insufficient. Blessedly, we live in the first moment of human history wherein such a coordination is possible. We in the US also live in this era's great global power and have an opportunity to decapitate the beast of world corporate capitalism. But as we tarry the US wanes, our torture-buddies in China begin their ascent replacing liberal capitalism with command capitalism, borders become increasingly anachronistic and people die. Good thing the revolution starts in September!