Death Agony of Capitalism

U.N. Security Council just voted 10-0 to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. Why all the urgency of military action in Libya compared to, say, Egypt? Clearly, the former country's vast oil reserves played more than a supporting role in the full-scale mobilization of the American media to finally "deal with Qaddafi", who they never really trusted. The aging dictator's future is even more uncertain than before now, with a multinational (read: U.S.-dominated) bombing raid set to begin within a few hours.

At the same time the Japanese earthquake has laid bare the short-sighted thinking of the country's elites who placed dozens of nuclear power plants near the planet's biggest fault line. The ongoing destruction of the planet, the shocking realization that the apocalyptic Gulf oil spill of 2010 seems long forgotten, the crisis of capitalism squeezing working people everywhere...

I could go on. Things are bad. Mass revolutionary parties in every country are an urgent necessity.

Talking Heads

Just saw Paul Wolfowitz and John Negroponte (first U.S. ambassador to Iraq, post-invasion) on CNN analyzing the Egyptian situation after Mubarak refused to step down today. Shook my head at the fact that they're still on television spouting their hypocritical blather, and furthermore treated as experts after the utter failure of the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policy. Corporate power looks after its own.

The BBC's caption, on the other hand, summed up the real situation nicely: "Stunned protesters shout 'Leave, leave.' "

Tucson Aftermath, or: Nothing New Under the Sun

I've been paying minimal attention to the fallout of the Tucson shootings, because the whole thing is frankly too depressing. First and foremost is the heinous nature of the act itself - another lunatic with a grudge decides to lash out against the world with a violent shooting rampage that kills many innocents, including a 9-year-old girl. Obviously the crime and the victims should be our main focus. But the reaction of the American media, political hacks and assorted interest groups has been as predictable as you might think - all but ensuring that a similar massacre happens again a few years down the road.

Immediately after the shooting we witnessed an orgy of reflexive ass-covering by pundits and politicians, all of whom vehemently denied the idea that the increasingly violent imagery of right-wing American political culture - suffused as it is with talk of "Second Amendment solutions", or Sarah Palin's admonishment, "don't retreat - RELOAD!" (coupled with a map featuring gun crosshairs over Democratic congressional districts), or the shot Democratic Congresswoman's opponent staging an M16 shooting event in January 2010 to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office" - could have anything whatsoever to do with the shooting. Ridiculous, I know.

Essentially, the most depressing thing about this whole affair, other than the tragic deaths of Jared Lee Loughner's victims, is the steadfast refusal of the entire media-political establishment to learn anything from it. The bomb-throwers of the right-wing noise machine blamed liberals, as they always do and must do if they're going to follow their established business model. President Obama, typically, gave an intellectually bankrupt speech absolving the right of any responsibility for the massacre and taking pot shots at the left for "pointing fingers and assigning blame". The NRA and its minions in Congress maintained that the tragedy would in no way alter its refusal to consider even the most minimal gun control legislation. In short, everyone in any position of power or influence acted exactly as they always do, as they're paid to do - and as a result, nothing will change. Sooner or later, another massacre will occur and the same process will repeat itself all over again. The only way to stop gun violence, according to the right, is to make sure more people have access to guns.

Fun fact: had Congress not allowed the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons to expire in 2004, Loughner would only have been able to carry a 10-round clip. Instead, he was able to rattle off at least 20 rounds from a 30-round clip before someone managed to stop him, thereby killing more people than he otherwise might have. As always, political cowardice within the halls of power costs real human lives outside.

Merry Christmas!

My holiday album of 2010...although it actually came out last year.

Musical Musings

As I sat with my roommate's cat Freddie tonight listening to George Frideric Handel, I began to wonder whether Freddie also got anything out of Handel's moving artistic work. Surely, if new parents habitually play classical music to stimulate their infants' minds, the melodic power of this genre, in particular, has something to offer the perceptive non-human as well. If nothing else, the novelty of hearing music - as opposed to nothing - means that ex-stray Freddie probably enjoys it to some degree.

Does he enjoy music as much as or more than me? I can't see that. As a cat, he can never really know what truly goes into making it. Based on Marx's labour theory of value, the value of an object - in this case, a beautiful piece of music - consists of the sheer amount of labour-power that goes into producing it. We all get the use-value (the irresistible journey of emotional states that a powerful piece of music can take you on), but from a Marxist perspective, the value of Handel's music is the amount of work that went into creation.

Apparently crime rates in public places go down when they play classical music on loudspeakers. There must be some significance to that.

A Light in the Dark

Three cheers for Julian Assange and Wikileaks!

To borrow some Lord of the Rings terminology, Wikileaks has become the Phial of Galadriel - bestowed upon Frodo Baggins in the latter chapters of Fellowship of the Ring and referred to in the film adaptation as "the light of Eärendil, our most beloved star. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out." Certainly that phrase applies well to our current media environment, saturated as it is by the somber (note: cynical) analysis of "official sources". Whether from the government, military or business, news in our era has been suffocated by the prevalence of trained media spokespersons, and it is their dominion over the airwaves that has rendered official discourse so disgustingly bland, homogenous and friendly to the powerful.

Glenn Greenwald, as you might expect, has already done a stellar job of analyzing the Wikileaks fallout in terms of the media's stunning degeneration into faithful courtiers to the elite. Any notion of the adversarial American press corps exists now only in the minds of those well-compensated pundits that saturate the airwaves. Unbelievably, the same talking heads, notable mainly for their sheer sycophancy, continue to visualize themselves as hard-boiled journalists asking the hard questions. I suppose it's the only way they can live with themselves when they join U.S. political officials in calling for the assassination of that "treasonous" Australian Julian Assange, now officially the new Osama bin Laden.

The fact is that if these media organizations were actually doing their jobs (in the old-fashioned concept of serving the public interest), we wouldn't need Wikileaks. But because of the abdication of responsibility by these traditional news sources in favour of serving as corporate propaganda outlets, the task of informing the public has fallen to this outside organization, now an international pariah. Julian Assange is hated by the political class because he tells the truth, but he is hated by the media because he exposes their power-worshiping nature. As Chris Hedges repeatedly emphasized in Death of the Liberal Class, what the political-media establishment - but especially those pundits who consider themselves "liberal" - fears most is being exposed as the handmaidens to power/corporate whores they have become.

Julian Assange deserves our respect for tossing a wrench into the imperial machinery. It's worth noting Sen. Mitch McConnell's description of Assange as a "high-tech terrorist". If there was ever any doubt, let Miss McConnell declare for the record: a terrorist is indeed defined merely as anyone who opposes U.S. government policy. But hey! Clearly they need these strict measures if we're ever going to spread Freedom and Democracy.

UPDATE: On a related note, another reminder of why I don't watch Jon Stewart anymore.

Rob Ford and the Efficacy of Mass Protest

Toronto's new mayor took the oath of office yesterday. I was originally going to attend some inaugural anti-Ford protests, but in the end decided not to. The main reason was likely going to bed too late the night before and opting to sleep in. But the deeper reason was that my reading of Death of the Liberal Class had left me feeling momentarily skeptical about the effectiveness of mass protest as a means of fighting bourgeois policies.

40-50 years ago, the protest as a form of mass resistance was still able to send a chill down the spine of the elite. They remembered the agitation of workers in the 1930s and feared the power of a mobilized working class. We saw the effect of mass protest in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam. But the elites learned from their experience during the counterculture, and in the decades that followed, as media ownership was concentrated more and more in the hands of a few vast conglomerates, the corporate interests that owned the press learned that it was relatively easy to ignore or ridicule popular movements if they interfered with elite goals. The worldwide 2002 protests against the impending invasion of Iraq were the largest organized protest in human history, yet failed to prevent the Bush administration's rush to war. The election of Barack Obama largely neutralized the American anti-war movement, although as casualties continue to mount in Afghanistan a more concerted push from below may take shape again.

Chris Hedges' pessimistic take on protest should not be mistaken for a disinclination to use it. Rather, his glass half-empty view is predicated on a sober, honest assessment of working class strength today and is part of a larger argument advocating resistance for its own sake. Nevertheless, it was the more superficial version of this lesson that I used to justify my decision to sleep through Rob Ford's inauguration.

Ultimately, this protest in particular was a great example of protest for its own sake, because there was literally no chance it was going to affect anything on this day - other than, of course, further raising public awareness of Ford's reactionary nature. But it was never as if the new mayor was going to see people protesting what for him was the high point of his career and immediately decide to renounce the new office.

I'm all for new subway lines, and while critics of his idea to literally sweep the homeless off the street in winter have some merit in describing the tactic as "fascistic", preventing Toronto's homeless from freezing to death on sewer grates does have its merits, no? But in my view, the main danger from Ford has always been severe cuts to social services under the guise of Stopping The Gravy Train - that, and the assumption that as a right-wing faux-populist he would more ruthlessly execute the agenda of Big Business than any of his competitors. Right now Ford is still a lively, bubbling novelty, a living caricature as good for entertainment value as anything. Time will tell exactly how concerned we should be, but regardless of who holds the mayor's seat, our immediate task and central focus is organizing the workers, the poor and unemployed of Toronto to fight for their own interests.