Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Excerpted from one of Wombaticus' many great posts at: http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/ ... e_to_hell/

Today we’re going to look at a little-known spot in Chile. Villa Baveria is the more recent moniker—but we’ll refer to by the name it used to be known as, which is Colonia Dignidad. I’ve had a number of readers express disgust and shock about our previous article on “The Finders,” and I would urge them not to read this at all. Colonia Dignidad was essentially a non-stop, decades-long version of the most brutal horror film ever made—and that’s probably an understatement.

Say Hello to Paul Schafer




Paul Shafer, like most German teenagers in the 30s and 40s, was a member of Hitler Youth. This is rather unexceptional, after all the current pope, Josef Ratzinger, was also a member of that prestigious organization, and he turned out just fine.

Shafer got medical training and spent WWII as a doctor for the Luftwaffe. After the war, he became a Baptist preacher and established several charitable organizations and orphanages under the name of his company, the Private Social Mission. In 1959, he was charged with molesting children in his care and he fled the country, apparently with over 70 loyal followers.

At this precise point, things get rather curious. Shafer not only fled the country, he left the continent and wound up in Chile with 70 square acres of land. How this happened is a matter of some dispute, but it’s clear that the ODESSA “rat lines” were involved, at least to some extent, in getting him out of the country and set up in Chile. (If you’re unfamiliar with ODESSA or Operation Paperclip, we will be addressing them shortly here on Brainsturbator.)

In the first of many soul-crushingly ugly twists, Shafer left Germany with dozens of the same german children he’d been charged with molesting—their parents were told the kids were going on a “mission” and would be only be gone a short while. Needless to say, those kids never saw Europe again.

Colonia Dignidad was formally founded in 1961, and by 2003 it was one of the world’s richest communes, at least according to an AP wire article published that year:

“Its timber products, baked goods and sausage, renowned for their quality, are sold nationwide. Its 65-bed hospital provides the region’s best health care. One of the commune’s elderly German hausfraus seems friendly enough, offering a traveler some apple juice for the road.”

Like a Neverending Vacation




Colonia Dignidad has to be the most ironic name since “The War on Drugs.” Shafer laid down some unthinkably weird and repressive rules, starting with a ban on sex. To enforce this, he kept the residents segregated by gender. Everyone had to work for food each day—generally for 12 to 14 hours, during which time nobody could speak.

Shafer titled himself ”Permanent Uncle,” and the members of his commune were in no position to argue. Most of them spoke only German and had nowhere to turn for thousands of miles.

In a relatively short time, Colonia Dignidad became a powerful state inside the state. Surrounded by the high-voltage barbed wire and “protected” by the latest surveillance technology and specially trained German Shepard dogs, it became almost entirely self-sufficient. It managed to produce enough food to feed its members and to sell its excess production in the stores of Santiago and elsewhere. It had its own power-plant, airport (big enough to accommodate Hercules transport planes), fleet of cars, busses, trucks and agricultural vehicles; a school, hospital and recording/broadcasting studio...

Shafer exhaulted discipline above all things, proclaiming it the purest form of spirituality. Consequently, anyone who couldn’t measure up to his standards of discipline was beaten, tortured and drugged into submission.

...About that “Ban on Sex”

It will come as no surprise to learn that Paul Shafer himself didn’t abide by his own rules—unfortunately, Shafer’s concept of sex was “raping and torturing young boys.” Decades later, Shafer would be sued by the families of 11 children for brutal sexual abuse, and would be formally charged with molesting 26 boys. However, two Chilean journalists, Claudio Salinas and Hans Stange, have done a detailed study and concluded “the young victims could number in the thousands, including not only the sons and daughters of the German immigrants living in the commune, but also the children of local Chilean farming families who attended the Colonia Dignidad agricultural school.” Remember, this was ongoing for decades.

Stange was perfectly clear: “...it was known since 1964 that the members of the commune were being subjected to torture; it was known since 1977 that political prisoners were tortured there; and the child abuse was known about since the 1970s. The state has always known about the human rights violations occurring there.”

A Very Useful Monster




The reader could certainly be forgiven for asking why a psychotic pedophile Nazi was allowed to run a militarized compound in the middle of Chile. The answer is depressingly simple: he wasn’t a problem like David Koresh, he was a valuable asset like Oliver North. Having a camp full of brainwashed and terrified followers surrounded by gun turrets and electrified razor wire made Colonia Dignidad one of the primary torture camps for Chile’s US-supported dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

I would be very curious to know about the backgrounds of Shafer’s associates. When he was finally tried for human rights abuses and sex crimes, he was charged along with over 20 accomplices. There were an awful lot of employess at Dachau, Auchwitz, and Buchenwald. Also consider the following quote from Chile activist Adriana Borquez:

Right after the coup, the Chilean military didn’t know how to torture. Prisoners would die very quickly. Germans in the colony knew how to keep a person alive for several days or weeks while putting him or her through the most terrible agony and humiliation.

The Bigger Picture



Of course, the entire nation of Chile, and indeed the entire continent of South America, was basically one big, live-action Heironymous Bosch painting during the 60s and 70s. This was almost entirely financed by United States taxpayers who had no idea it was happening. Of course, US taxpayers usually have no idea what’s happening anyway, so I suppose there’s nothing new there.

The problem, of course, was Communism. Henry Kissinger, surely the least deserving living human on Earth today, was hard at work engineering the overthrow of democratically elected leaders all over South America—so that the US could install dictators who would keep the people in line. When asked about human rights abuses in Chile, he had this to say:

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

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[American Dream]

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/vicman160911.html

Víctor Jara
by Victor Nieto




"In this beautiful garden,
to 'dinosaurs' and 'reactionaries,'
the revolutionary youth said:
Enough already." -- Víctor Jara



Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela. His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi. Cf. Víctor Jara, "Móvil Oil Special" (1969).

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

DEPICTS EXTREME VIOLENCE

[American Dream]

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Liberation Theology

[American Dream]

Editor’s Note: Leonardo Boff is a noted South American liberation theologian.


Is the Crisis of Capitalism Terminal?

Leonardo Boff*


I believe the present crisis of capitalism is more than cyclical and structural. It is terminal. Are we seeing the end of the genius of capitalism, of always being able to adapt to any circumstance? I am aware that only few other people maintain this thesis. Two things, however, bring me to this conclusion.

The first is the following: the crisis is terminal because we all, but in particular capitalism, have exceeded the limits of the Earth. We have occupied and depredated the whole planet, destroying her subtle equilibrium and exhausting her goods and services, to the point that she alone can no longer replenish all that has been removed.

Already by mid XIX century, Karl Marx prophetically wrote that this tendency of capital would destroy the twin sources of its wealth and reproduction: nature and labor. That is what is happening now.

Especially in the last century, Nature was stressed as never before, including the 15 great disasters she experienced throughout her four billion year history. The verifiable, extreme, phenomena in every region, and the changes in the climate that tend towards ever increasing global warming, support Marx’s thesis. How can capitalism continue without Nature? It has reached an insurmountable limit.

Capitalism reduces, or eliminates, labor. There are great laborless inventions. A programmed and robotic production apparatus produces more and better, almost without labor. The direct consequence of this is structural unemployment.

Millions of people will never join the labor market, not even as a reserve army. Instead of depending on labor, capital is learning to do without it. Unemployment in Spain approaches 20% of the general population, and 40% of youth. In Portugal, it is 12% of the population, and 30% among the young. This results in a grave social crisis, like that which Greece is undergoing at this very moment. All of society is sacrificed in the name of an economy that is not designed to take care of human needs, but to pay the debts to the banks and the financial system. Marx is right: exploited labor is no longer the source of its wealth. The machine is.

The second reason is linked to the humanitarian crisis that capitalism is creating.

Before, it was limited to the peripheral countries. Now it is global, and it has reached the central countries. The economic question cannot be resolved by dismantling society. The victims, connected by new venues of communication, resist, revolt and threaten the present order. Ever more people, especially the young, reject the perverse capitalist political economic logic: the dictatorship of finance that, through the market, subjugates the States to its interests, and the profitability of speculative capital, that circulates from one stock market to another, reaping profits without producing anything at all, except more money for the stockholders.

Capital itself created the poison that could kill it: by demanding that its workers have ever greater technical training, to create accelerated growth and greater competitiveness, it unintentionally nurtured people who think. They are slowly learning the perversity of the system, that all but skins people alive in the name of pure material accumulation, and shows its heartlessness by demanding greater and greater efficiency, to the point of profoundly stressing the workers, pushing them to desperation, and in some cases, even to suicide, as has occurred in several countries, including Brazil.

The streets of several European and Arab countries, the “indignants” who fill the squares of Spain and Greece, are an expression of a rebellion against the current political system, controlled by the markets and the logic of capital. The young Spaniards shout: «it is not a crisis, it is theft.» The thieves are comfortably housed on Wall Street, in the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and in the Central European Bank. In other words, they are the high priests of the exploitative global capital.

As the crisis worsens, the multitudes who can no longer tolerate the consequences of the super exploitation of their lives and of the life of the Earth, will grow; and will revolt against the economic system that is in agony, not because it is old, but because of the strength of the poison and the contradictions it has created, punishing Mother Earth and afflicting the lives of her sons and daughters. (ALAI)



*Leonardo Boff, Theologian Earthcharter Commission. http://leonardoboff.com/
(Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas, EE.UU.

[American Dream]

Mike Davis
by Lucy Raven
BOMB 104/Summer 2008


Border fence near Tijuana/San Diego, 2008.
All photos: Lucy Raven.

On my flight to San Diego to meet Mike Davis I was assigned a seat between two big guys right around my age, work buddies en route to Reno to change every lightbulb at every Kmart in Nevada—from the old GE’s to the new energy-saving bulbs. They said it was the most satisfying job they’d ever had: you unscrew a bulb, you put in a new one, it lights up. You get paid by the bulb. We drank Cokes, and I continued to make preparatory notes on the dog-eared pages of Davis’s recent and essential book Planet of Slums, a brilliant examination of the conditions of the world’s billion-plus slum-dwellers throughout the second half of the 20th century. On my lap was his latest, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, another indispensable history tracing the global development of grassroots urban terrorist tactics, often first learned at state-sponsored training courses in explosives. My rowmates wanted to know more about the books, so I gave them each one to look through for the remainder of the flight. They asked me what my job was; I said, “Right now, it’s going for a long drive with Mike Davis, and listening.” They turned back to the books, already engrossed. Each of us was waiting to be enlightened. I can only speak for my own post-flight experience (though I have no doubt theirs was indeed electric) as illuminating, guided throughout by Davis’s extraordinary and generous spirit of curiosity.




Border fence near Tijuana/San Diego, 2008.


Driving Through the Heart of Darkness (to a New Utopia) in San Diego County

Mike Davis Squatting has been one of the principal safety-valves of third-world urbanism for several generations but, increasingly, informal housing has been privatized, replaced by so-called “pirate urbanization.” Everywhere, including here, across the border in Tijuana, peripheral land is now a commodity, controlled by landowners, speculators, and politically connected individuals. Meanwhile, for former squatters often the most viable economic strategy is mini-landlordism: building a shack behind your shack and renting it to poorer newcomers.

Lucy Raven Are there basically no free extant spots to squat?

MD Squatting continues, but it’s been driven into the terrain that’s most vulnerable to disaster; the areas least convertible into real estate. In Tijuana, for instance, classical squatting—once the principal metabolism of housing in the city—is now confined to the edges of arroyos and streams, and, especially, on the higher slopes of hills, near the angle of repose, where it’s most hazardous to build. In wet years, entire neighborhoods are washed away. Indeed the “golden age” of squatting in Tijuana ended during the 1978 El Niño, when tens of thousands of people were flooded out of the Tijuana River plain. Their colonias were then reclaimed for today’s maquiladoras and industrial parks.

LR This is the river whose estuary comes out on the other side of the border with San Diego?

MD Yes, a wonderfully promiscuous stream that originates on the U.S. side, absconds to Baja, then crosses the border again to reach the Pacific.

LR I saw the sewage treatment plants down near the fence and was wondering if the U.S. government pays for that.

MD Yes. However insufficient to deal with a population of four million, San Diego/Tijuana is the most advanced example of a binational urban infrastructure—it has to be. During storms, Tijuana’s sewage ends up on the world-famous beach in front of San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. San Diego reciprocates by sending its air pollution as well as polluting industries to Mexico.

LR Driving south down Highway One I noticed a number of absurdly long, zigzagging fences that I guess were associated with the nearby houses up on the hills. To my surprise they seem to mimic the border fence in shape and form. It’s as if they were made to decorate the viewshed of the road. I couldn’t tell if their relationship to the border fence was mockery or a sort of perverted flattery.

MD Well, the double wall itself is a theatrical stage for Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressperson Duncan Hunter—the principal sponsors of “Operation Gatekeeper”—to boast about how zealously they’re controlling the border. But it has been the multiplication of Border Patrol personnel, not the East German or late-Roman architecture, that has made crossing so much more difficult. The steel-plated wall, in fact, ends abruptly when it runs into the rugged flanks of Otay Mountain just east of the industrial zone near the Tijuana Airport.

LR How is it that “the fence” is able to galvanize so much energy as a singular, iconic object, when most people might be surprised to find out what it actually looks like, and in that sense, is?

MD First of all, for its deliberate, Iron-Curtain-like brutalism. But it is also absurd since it seeks to divide what is utterly entangled and indivisible: the economies and futures of San Diego and Tijuana. As most Border Patrol agents will readily confess, the militarization of the 32nd parallel isn’t stopping the migration of labor northward, upon which depends the entire economy of southern California and the rest of the Sun Belt, but it has made crossing the border incomparably more expensive and dangerous. Paradoxically, it has dramatically increased the number of people taking up permanent residence al otro lado because it’s so hard to go back and forth. And it’s turned border crossing from a sort of artisan industry dominated by small entrepreneurs—coyotes—into an increasingly large-scale industry integrated and controlled by the super-violent narco cartels.

LR I bought a copy of Zeta, the alternative paper in Tijuana you recommended. It reported in full on the killings of the Rosarito Beach police officers who found the drug tunnel a few days ago and were found murdered the next day. The details of the story were shocking.

MD It used to be that either you saved up the money to pay for the services of coyote, or if you didn’t have enough money, you agreed to become an indentured laborer. One of the ways people paid off their debt was selling fruit on every freeway ramp in L.A. But you don’t see them anymore. As “Operation Gatekeeper” and the other high-profile campaigns to interdict labor migration have been put into place, the cost of entry has soared beyond anything that could ever be repaid in bags of oranges. Some of today’s migrants are thus vulnerable to becoming drug mules for the cartels and/or paying for their passage by a period of indenture in the underground economy.

At the same time, the silent massacre of immigrants—commemorated by the hundreds of poignant placards on the Mexican side of the border wall near the Tijuana Airport—continues in the freezing mountains and furnace deserts. Complacence about their deaths dehumanizes us all. During last Halloween’s firestorms, six migrants were burnt to death in the border mountains east of San Diego. This macabre event was the major human tragedy of the fires, yet our local news monopoly — the reactionary, Copley-owned Union-Tribune — only focused on the ‘”expense to taxpayers” of treating the badly burnt survivors.



Border fence near Tijuana/San Diego, 2008.

LR So who is ultimately keeping the gate and who benefits?

MD The border is both a growth industry in its own right and a sector of a vastly larger complex of automated oppression. Together with the D.C. Beltway, San Diego is the principal world center for the development of new technologies of surveillance, identification, data mining, cyber-warfare, and remote-controlled murder. The Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD provides a publically financed research hub for scores of secretive private firms, mostly in the University City area, including Science Applications International Corporation, the largest purveyors of software to the CIA and the DIA, and General Atomics, which manufactures the notorious Predator. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Border Patrol’s technology development branch is headquartered in downtown San Diego to take advantage of this cornucopia of Orwellian R&D.

The Border Patrol, of course, has long used the San Diego sector to experiment with stealth technology, beginning with the motion detectors and heat sensors that were first developed by the Pentagon in its futile crusade to seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. The fantasy now is a transcontinental “virtual border” of advanced sensors and video surveillance integrated in real time with a new communications system for the Border Patrol, patterned after Pentagon paradigms of “network-centric warfare” and “virtual battlespaces.” As proposed expenditures soar into the billions of dollars, the giant military-industrial carnivores have become hungry for shares in this border boom.

Although Boeing’s first iteration of a virtual border in the Arizona desert has been an almost comic disaster, we should not take too much solace. The War on Terror, the War against Drugs, and Border and Homeland Security are not only sloganistic synonyms—increasingly they finance and share the same platform of advanced and inherently totalitarian technologies. They also feather the same nests.

Blackwater, for instance, is exploring the future of privatized border policing with a presence in the San Diego area. With minimal oversight, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already contracted out some of the traditional Border Patrol functions, beginning with the privatization of detention and now of transportation (hundreds of thousands of annual detainees will now be transported back to Mexico by Wackenhut, Inc., the McDonalds of private corrections). Blackwater perceives that the core Border Patrol mission may be for sale and they have pressed relentlessly to open a training facility close to the border. Although backcountry San Diego voters last fall rebuked the firm’s plan to build a privatized version of the Border Patrol Academy in the little border hamlet of Potrero, Blackwater is now moving ahead to open a training center on Otay Mesa, a few hundred yards from the fence and just south of an overcrowded state prison and county jail.

LR How do the public sector and the public servants of San Diego function in the context all of these other, privatized operations?

MD San Diego not only supplies research and technology for the Bush-era hybrid of empire and homeland-security police state, but it also provides—together with nearby desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties—an extraordinary proving ground for their application and integration. These days there are approximately one quarter-million soldiers, sailors, and marines, either officially based or in training, in our Pentagon beaches and deserts. The border—now reinforced with National Guard and Coast Guard detachments as well as ICE and its friends—has become an integral part of this virtual (and real) warspace.

Since most tourists and non-military residents—I suppose beguiled by pandas and wet t-shirts—don’t even register the monumentality of these mega-bases and naval installations, they are unlikely to read the surrealistic fine print. For example, about 50 miles east of San Diego along the border is an obscure naval facility called La Posta Naval Reserve Base. In fact, it is “virtual Afghanistan” where Navy SEALs and probably the elite Marine recon guys train before they go to Afghanistan, because it so strikingly resembles that landscape. Forty or fifty miles northeast of La Posta, still in San Diego County, is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) facility at Warner Springs where SEALs try to survive in the mountains but are inevitably captured and brutally interrogated. You might have seen the SERE (Florida) sequence in G.I. Jane where Viggo Mortensen beats the shit out of Demi Moore. SERE training has been invoked in the defense of waterboarding and torture, since our commandos and pilots themselves undergo what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “The Question.”

Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the ’50s and early ’60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is summoning into being. On hot days I like to run at the harbor with a sea breeze in my face. Frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World–like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the flat back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the “marine-mammal weapons facility”—or whatever it is actually called—at Ballast Point. The dolphins, of course, are the advanced descendants of pioneering ancestors domesticated and weaponized in the ’70s. Together with some killer whales and a few sea lions, they are now a routine part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Sadaam’s harbor defenses during both Iraq wars. They are also rumored (most recently by the London Independent) to be efficient underwater assassins with a gunlike device attached to their friendly faces.

The military also operates its own versions of Disneyland. San Clemente Island, just over the horizon, west of the Encinitas surf shops and pickup bars, is one of the Pentagon’s most valuable assets. It’s about 25 miles long and has been bombarded, strafed, and invaded almost daily since the early Second World War. Recently they opened a 21-million-dollar American embassy on San Clemente: smaller than Madonna’s house, but still useful for practice by Marines and SEALs.

More well known perhaps are the stage-set versions of Fallujah and Sadr City. These “urban warfare simulators” include “Yodaville” at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just across the Arizona border, and the MGM-quality complexes at 29 Palms and Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, where Arab immigrants impersonate unruly natives and give young Marines and soldiers an extra jolt of Baudrillardian hyper-reality.



Border fence near Tijuana/San Diego, 2008.

Continues at: http://bombsite.com/issues/104/articles/3146

[American Dream]

http://www.anarchiststudies.org/node/287

World Class Carelessness, A Review of Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk by Sarah Lewison


We Buy Ugly Houses Too

Mid-century US urban development was notorious for breaking up communities inhabited by the poor and people of color. Frequently urban realignments were structured to make way for general civic projects like highways, but racism and class discrimination inevitably guided their specific placement. The State’s power of eminent domain made it feasible to condemn entire neighborhoods for the four-lane blacktop, a kind of public work that simplified new housing construction for a specific private sector. To serve consumers who might purchase suburban houses, a new kind of “public” was conjured, one that needed roads. The matter of which public benefits from urban development is a matter of perspective. It is a decision that should emerge from vigorous debates, but increasingly many cities simply rework their plans for the benefit of those with the most dough. The word, “public” then, effectively refers to a shrinking piece of the demographic pie. Since two decades, the use of strict cost-benefit analysis to structure city finance has seemingly excused governments and their private “partners” from any commitment to maintaining a heterogeneous urban fabric.

This responsibility was further relieved by Kelo v. New London, CT, a 2005 Supreme Court review of a city’s power to determine the best “public purpose” of land within its jurisdiction. The Court ruled that New London could take a home from a private owner and give it to a private developer to build a mall. Brazenly demonstrating that citizen rights are unequal in the face of speculative capital, the Court incidentally wiped away any remaining cultural sanctimony about middle class home ownership. And even before Kelo, Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority was condemning entire neighborhoods, often owner-occupied, so that friendly developers could spruce up Philly’s self-image as a city worthy of international investment.1 While Philly became “world-class,” displaced residents were forced to hotels, and finally to neighborhoods far from their original homes.2 Meanwhile, urban pioneers could purchase fresh condos built on the seized land with low interest loans, ten-year property tax break incentives, and private security ensuring the regenerated neighborhood’s safety. Such feats of engineered social stratification and their naturalization in the landscape are the core subject of Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, nineteen case studies of neoliberal rakishness edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk.

Dreamworlds probes the material and affective impact of the public sphere’s eclipse and of geographical dialectics: rural/urban/suburban, confined/exposed, rich/poor, global/local. These studies include gated enclaves in Hong Kong simulating 1950s Californian suburbs, the ultimate duty-free zone of Dubai, monastic retreats for work-weary high-rollers, urban centers in South America “normalized” for global capital through the violent extermination of the opposition, and Brazil’s scintillatingly unfair land distribution policies. In Beijing, expenditures on extravagant Olympic structures outstrip all prior Games budgets, and afterwards, facilities built partially with public money—on confiscated property—will be commercialized as private ventures. While examples like Philly produce a numbed standoff between the poor and middle classes, the studies in this lurid travelogue pick out social and economic divisions at the extremes. They illustrate the new regimes of architecture, infrastructure, visuality and fortification, shielding a fabulously wealthy minority from the three billion global citizens making less than two dollars a day.3 This book sets out to show how landscapes at the limits of social and economic division already look.

Construction as Warfare

The construction industries play a crucial role in creating these miracle islands of wealth. Contractors, importers, manufacturers and land speculators benefit exponentially from structural adjustments by absorbing incentives offered to both the public and private sphere for property improvement. In Dreamland, Timothy Mitchell explains how the IMF’s 1990 financial restructuring of Cairo helped elite family groups with networks bridging government and business direct obscene funds into pet projects. In a Kabul ruined by decades of occupation, corruption is even more transparent. Anthony Fontenot and Ajmal Maiwandi describe in Capital of Chaos how the weapons and cash provided by the US to warlords since 2001 have fueled speculative orgies. Flamboyant housing compounds are being constructed with these monies, subsidized further by a renewed post-Taliban opium trade. They are priced, not as homes for the multitudes of repatriating Afghani refugees, but to absorb the inflated lodging budgets of UN and NGO reconstruction workers. The authors write that in an atmosphere of land grabs, cronyism and ostentatious display, the rebuilding of Afghani social and material infrastructures is purely phantasmagoric, while “what is being constructed in Afghanistan is the construction industry itself.”4

World Class Fear

The goal for many cities is to become a global node for capital. To promote Johannesburg, speculators established a new business district in the ‘burbs, evacuating all investment from the old city core. Government elites, following World Bank advice, ransomed off infrastructure to multinationals, creating a new separation: rich from poor. As during apartheid, township residents lack employment, transportation, sanitation, water and electricity, while wealthy agents of capital go to lengths to avoid the violence roiling over from this poverty. In Kabul, public thoroughfares adjacent to the villas of the nouveau riches are blocked by armed patrols. In Managua, Nicaragua, another city seeking global investment, new roadways help the well-heeled travel unmolested between airport and upper class residential and commercial districts—distanced from the misery of the hoi polloi. Such ubiquitous divisions change only in scale and context. In the US, Don Mitchell writes about how the Richmond, Virginia housing authority asserted private policing power over a public way adjacent to public housing, winning a Supreme Court judgment that, as editorialized by the New York Times, “...gives the poor a right the rich have long had; to keep loiterers and potential criminals, out of their homes.” Mitchell writes that, contrary to the Times’ interpretation, such measures don’t protect people’s homes, but they do put an end to street life.5

Central to this book is the question of a future when such logics of social reproduction under neoliberalism become so totalizing as to seem normal. On this point, Davis and Monk contemplate the possibilities of future human solidarity. Essays like Rebecca Schoenkopf’s portrayal of the spoiled Orange County ultra-rich in their secluded gated community, and Monk’s “Hives and Swarms,” in which human life under global competition becomes no more than the administration of territories and tactics, offer little cheer. Nor is there any solace that we don’t inadvertently collude with these isolationist dreamworlds in a daily way, walking down the street, going to the mall. Davis and Monk’s hand as editors and compilers is most rewarding for producing an accumulating image of carelessness as global and insinuatingly powerful. Self-reflexively, Schoenkopf acknowledges the seductions of entitlement: “My own son has not yet reached the age when boys become dicks. Perhaps he will spit with contempt at me. Perhaps he will grow up to be an Orange County boy—his life’s goal so far is of owning a mansion, one in a gated town, perhaps, with his name inscribed on it in solid gold.” For young people, it must seem like there is no alternative, as the visual field offered by a landscape reconstructed for the benefit and convenience of the wealthiest eliminates alternate models for how resources might be distributed or even shared.

Destroy the Meter

Resisting these machinations of the mega-wealthy can seem futile. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) brought the problem of land expropriation to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but gains made in this court of appeal were diluted back in the corrupt atmosphere of Kabul. Patrick Bond writes about how the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) in Gauteng Province (Johannesburg) is internationally respected and emulated in their battle against metered electricity and water, but also beset by obstacles. APF’s work is dually practical: sharing techniques for dismantling meters, and organizational.

Under privatization, apartheid is absent only in name. Such struggles for access to basic resources, while highly local, must also be conducted at international levels, through pressure demanding that such essential resources are by definition not private. Describing that the successful global rationalization of the market “is a myth reproduced by excluding what they call externalities,” or consequences that might otherwise be called expenses, Timothy Mitchell writes that “…economic discourse works very hard to help format and reproduce the exclusions that make the economy possible.”6 These cases are starkly about material relations and responsibility. Although the French multinational Suez can profit from the installation of water meters in the huts of jobless people in Gauteng, the expense of a cholera epidemic will never appear on their balance sheet. Instead, this disaster will be naturalized, like the forces that created it. The care of the sick will be vested in an entity called the “public,” which has been holed up with a TV and phone voting for the next “American Idol.” Averting further devastations means both holding those profiting from the lives of others accountable for the relations their actions create, and also reaching out to those already anesthetized by social division.

Endnotes
1 George McCollough, Producer, All for the Taking, Video. 2006. This video was instrumental in supporting community education about Philadelphia Mayor Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the entity that concocted the land takings.
2 Personal conversation with Carolyn Thomas, Philadelphia homeowner.
3 Ignacio Ramonet, “The Politics of Hunger,” La Monde Diplomatique, November 1998. http://mondediplo.com/1998/11/01leader.
4 Fontenot and Maiwandi, “Capital of Chaos” in Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (New York: The New Press, 2007) p. 81.
5 Don Mitchell, “People like Hicks,” ibid. p. 215
6 Timothy Mitchell, Dreamland,” ibid. p. 31.

[American Dream]

Shantytown apocalypse

Ian Sansom
The Guardian, Friday 18 August 2006



Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
240pp, Verso, £15.99

Hear this word, writes Mike Davis, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy ... The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that lo, the day shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks.

In fact, he doesn't actually say that. That's Amos, the great Biblical prophet of doom. What Davis in fact says is: "In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million ... by 2015 there will be at least 550"; and "For 10,000 years urban societies have struggled against deadly accumulation of their own waste"; and "neoliberal capitalism since 1970 has multiplied Dickens's notorious slum of Tom-all-Alone's in Bleak House by exponential powers. Residents of slums, while only 6% of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2% of urbanites in the least-developed countries"; and "China ... added more city-dwellers in the 1980s than did of all Europe (including Russia) in the entire 19th century!"

The majority of the world's population live in poverty, oppressed, dispossessed and starving. But you knew that already. The great interest - indeed the morbid fascination - of Davis's book is that it seeks to identify exactly how and why the majority of the world's population is currently living in poverty, oppressed, dispossessed and starving; the poor may always be with us, but times change.

Davis opens his book with a flourish befitting of Dickens or Conrad, announcing: "Some time in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima's innumerable pueblos jóvenes." This imaginary but imminent event, he argues, shifting and swaying swiftly from vivid sketch to hyperbole, "will constitute a watershed in human history". "For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural"; there will soon be more people living in cities than in the country.

And this is bad news, because the cities that Davis examines and describes are not the rich, vibrant cultural centres beloved of Sunday-supplement dandies and middle-class flâneurs, but vast "peri-urban" developments, horizontal spreads of unplanned squats and shantytowns, unsightly dumps of humans and waste, where child labour is the norm, child prostitution is commonplace, gangs and paramilitaries rule and there is no access to clean water or sanitation, let alone to education or democratic institutions. As evidence, Davis points to Beirut's Quarantina, to Santa Cruz Meyehualco in Mexico City, to Russia's ex-socialist company towns, to Rio de Janeiro's favelas, and to Cairo's City of the Dead, "where one million people use Mameluke tombs as prefabricated housing components". He estimates that there are already some 200,000 such slums worldwide and argues that the slum is becoming the blueprint for cities of the future, which, "rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood."

According to Davis, this is largely due to the "neoliberal restructuring of Third World urban economies that has occurred since the late 1970s" - which is to say it's the fault of the World Bank and IMF, and also "middle-class hegemony", "petty landlordism", "soft imperialism", "elite homeowners" and NGOs which, he claims, are "captive to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent upon the international NGOs".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/19/shopping.society

[American Dream]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE20Aa01.html

The accumulation of the wretched

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

Reviewed by Pepe Escobar

SAO PAULO - Pentagon planners must have loved what happened in South America's premier hypercity in the past few days; as urban warfare goes, it was more illuminating than Baghdad or Gaza. The leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC, for Primeiro Comando da Capital) - a super-gang involved in drug and arms trafficking, kidnappings, bank robberies and extortion and controlling most of Sao Paulo's overcrowded and notoriously corrupt prisons - declared war against Brazil's wealthiest state.

From inside their prison cells, using US$150 mobile phones, they ordered motorcyclist "bin Ladens" - warriors indebted to the PCC, heavily armed with guns, shotguns, hand grenades, machine-guns and Molotov cocktails - to conduct a violent orgy: spraying police cars with bullets, hurling grenades at police stations, attacking officers in their homes and after-hours hangouts, torching dozens of buses (after passengers had been ordered off), and robbing banks. Almost 100 people were killed in three days. On Monday, the PCC managed single-handedly virtually to paralyze Sao Paulo, the third-largest of the world's hypercities (those with more than 19 million people).

The PCC leaders were demanding better jail conditions; and crucially - as this is soccer-mad Brazil - a few dozen television sets so inmates can follow the World Cup in Germany next month. Sooner or later, with better coordination, demonstrations of force like this one will inevitably spread to Rio de Janeiro's slums, also a drug-dealing beehive. Brazil's mega-cities are used to urban civil war. And the war has been on since at least the late 1970s. "Baghdad is here" has become a common mantra.

Mike Davis, one of the United States' premier urban theorists and analysts of urban hell, author of City of Quartz and Dead Cities, should have been watching Sao Paulo's civil war first-hand; this is everything the future predicted in his remarkable new book is all about, the slums of the world's mega-cities rebelling against the state. We're heading toward a world where "cities will account for virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050".

Already the combined populations of China, India and Brazil roughly equal that of Western Europe and North America. By 2025, Asia will have at least 10 hypercities, including Jakarta (24.9 million people), Dhaka (25 million), Karachi (26.5 million), Shanghai (27 million) and Mumbai (with a staggering 33 million). Davis also refers to the coming leviathan of the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region, a 450-kilometer-long axis between the two Brazilian mega-cities already encompassing 37 million people, even more than the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation (33 million).

Davis sees the future as a realist, not as an apocalyptic visionary: "This great dragon-like sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendancy of coastal East Asia, in turn, will surely promote a Tokyo-Shanghai 'world city' dipole to equal the New York-London axis in the control of global flows of capital and information."

But most of all, the dire consequences of the hypercity explosion will be inevitable: appalling inequality within and between cities and, as far as China is concerned, the terror gripping their urban experts - the unbridgeable gap between small inland cities and coastal hypercities. Nobody yet has examined in full the implications of China ceasing to be the predominantly rural society it has been for millennia.

What we already have in the early 21st century, in rich as well as poor countries, is a new paradigm coined by German architect and urban theorist Thomas Sieverts: the Zwischenstadt ("in-between city"). Referring to Indonesia, Davis points out the advanced rural/urban hybridization of "Jabotabek", the Greater Jakarta region. "Researchers call these novel land-use patterns desakotas ('city villages') and argue whether they are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new species of urbanism," he writes.

As Davis points out with glee, "Eighty percent of [Karl] Marx's industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the US." Most are ready to explode. This accumulation of the wretched has been enhanced by "policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank" that spawned "an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines". So this "over-urbanization" was driven "by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs".

This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a neo-liberal world order is shunting the future. Davis proves his point by quoting an array of United Nations data, from the 16.4% annual growth rate of Sao Paulo favelas (slums) in the 1990s to the 200,000 floaters (unregistered rural workers) who arrive annually in Beijing or the 500,000 who migrate annually to Delhi (of these, 80% end up in slums). Davis dedicates a whole chapter - "SAPing the Third World" - to examining the dire consequences of the dreaded, one-size-fits-all, IMF-imposed "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs).

Abandon all hope those who dream about the glamorously high-tech cities of the future. They will be largely constructed of "crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the urban 21st century squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay". To see it live, right now, one just has to drive by Kolkata, Mumbai, Manila, Jakarta, Cairo, Changing or Sao Paulo.

According to UN-HABITAT figures, most places with the world's largest percentages of slum-dwellers are in Asia: Afghanistan (98.5%) and Nepal (92%). Mumbai holds the dubious record of being the slum capital of the world - as many as 12 million squatters - followed by Mexico City and Dhaka and then Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Delhi.

Exclusion, of course, is the norm, as this correspondent, who has lived and worked in many a teeming, vast, messy hypercity in the developing world, can attest. Mumbai is a classic case, as Davis quotes research according to which the rich own 90% of the land, while the poor are overcrowded in the remaining 10%. "These polarized patterns of land use and population density recapitulate older logics of imperial control and racial dominance. Throughout the Third World, post-colonial cities have inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities ... despite the rhetoric of national liberation and social justice."

As far as exclusion is concerned, Davis could not but refer to the most Orwellian "urban beautification" program in Asia - the preparation for Visit Myanmar Year 1996 undertaken by the junta that rules Myanmar. "One and a half million residents - an incredible 16% of the total urban population - were removed from their homes ... and shipped out to hastily constructed bamboo-and-thatch huts in the urban periphery, now creepily renamed the 'New Fields', thus leading to Rangoon [Yangon] being transformed into 'a nightmare combination of a Buddhist tourist wonderland, a giant barracks and a graveyard'."

Another crucial process, the criminalization of the slum - as it happened, among other examples, in Rio and Jakarta - runs parallel to what Davis describes as the "explosive growth of exclusive, closed suburbs on the peripheries of Third World cities. Chinese urban designer Pu Miao has called this 'the most significant development in recent urban planning and design'."

Gated-community heaven - be it in Beijing or Sao Paulo, Bangkok or Manila, Bangalore or Cairo - is an "off world", and Davis is happy to borrow the terminology from the film Blade Runner. These replica southern Californias are also the epitome of an "architecture of fear", as Nigerian researcher Tunde Agbola, quoted by Davis, defines fortified lifestyle in Lagos. Davis correctly points out that its most extreme forms are "in large urban societies with the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela and the US".

It is indeed a "culture of the absurd" - as every upper-middle-class condo in Sao Paulo comes with armed guards, banks of closed-circuit-television cameras, electrified wiring connected with emergency alarms and sometimes connected to "armed response" security companies. Rich and poor, in this environment, rarely intersect. It's what some Brazilian writers call "the return to the medieval city". Gated-community heaven, as reached by the upwardly mobile in the developing world, elevates them, in Davis's words, into "fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, disembedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization's cyber-California floating in the digital ether". The whole thing also means the death of civil society as we know it.

All over the world, hundreds of millions survive by juggling within the so-called "informal sector". Davis agrees with an array of multinational researchers: the rise of the informal sector is a direct byproduct of neo-liberal policies. Some Brazilian sociologists, as Davis points out, call the process "passive proletarization". According to the UN, informal workers already constitute "two-thirds of the economically active population of the developing world".

In Latin America, the informal economy already supplies four out of five "new jobs". In the end Davis cannot but mock development aid bureaucrats and their air-conditioned utopian vision of slums as Strategic Low-income Urban Management Systems (SLUMS). There's nothing romantic about Varanasi, the "world capital of enslaved and exploited children", or the 200,000-plus rickshawallahs of Dhaka - "the unsung Lance Armstrongs of the Third World" earning about $1 for pedaling at least 60km every day.

Davis saves the best for last - the chapter titled "Down Vietnam Street". Reflecting reality in the streets of the world's hypercities, where the permanently redundant masses will never stand a chance of being included in socio-economic terms, he writes that "the late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place". The enterprising Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also reached the same conclusion, he notes, as a 2002 report stressed that already by the late 1990s "a staggering 1 billion workers representing one-third of the world's labor force, most of them in the South, were either unemployed or underemployed".

Davis remembers how the administration of US president John Kennedy "officially diagnosed Third World revolutions as 'diseases of modernization' and prescribed - in addition to Green Berets and B-52s - ambitious land reforms and housing programs". Everyone living in Latin America in the 1960s remembers the dreaded Alliance for Progress - advertised US-style as a sort of Marshall Plan that would "lift pan-American living standards to southern European, if not gringo, levels". The results were disastrous, just as the heavily advertised UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met. Davis quotes the UN's Human Development Report 2004, which warns that measuring by recent "progress", sub-Saharan Africa will not reach most of these goals "until well into the 22nd century".

So we're left with repression - the definitive neo-liberal paradigm, a literal "Great Wall" of high-tech border repression trying to suppress migration to rich countries - as in the conservative US vis-a-vis Mexico and Central America and the European Union vis-a-vis the Maghreb. Meanwhile, slum populations, according to UN-HABITAT, will keep growing at least by 25 million people a year.

Squattable land is eroding. So welcome to "the radical new face of inequality", as Davis put it, "a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of the countryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political life of the traditional city". This is the edge of the abyss, the new Babylon; and its inhabitants more than ever will include the young, dispossessed neo-terrorists who attacked Casablanca in May 2003 as well as the motorized "bin Ladens" attacking Sao Paulo police only a few days ago.

As much as he can't stand the IMF-World Bank "development" crowd, Davis's post-modern neo-realism has no time for "portentous post-Marxist speculations" like Toni Negri's "multitudes" acting in "rhizomatic spaces". This book is as much a scholarly effort - grounded in solid research ranging from urban-planning papers to the general media - as a cry of alarm. Davis presents the intractable problems but also sets the stage for finding solutions - the subject of his next book, to be written alongside Forrest Hylton, on the history and future of slum-based resistance to global capitalism. The only thing missing would be Davis himself spending more time in the developing world's hypercities and adding an element of reportage to his theoretical tour de force.

It may be an apocalyptic urban background that virtually no politicians, corporate types or think-tank "experts" ever visit - but this is real life, not virtual reality. As Davis correctly puts it, "the rulers' imagination ... seems to falter before the obvious implications of a world of cities without jobs". Thus the French elite's perplexity with the Paris banlieues on fire late last year, the US perplexity with the dispossessed becoming Salafi jihadis in the outskirts of Istanbul, Cairo, Karachi and Casablanca, the Brazilian authorities' impotence facing street gangs and narcotraficantes.

For the powers that be, the easiest way out is to demonize. Thus the "war on terror", the "war on drugs" and the obliteration of any serious and honest debate about the unspeakable daily violence of perpetual economic exclusion. Davis sums it all up thusly: "The categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets." And this is happening while virtually nobody in positions of political power is examining the terrifying geopolitical implications of a planet of slums.

So back to the standing order - to repress, repress, repress. Davis embarks on a short, brilliant analysis of the Pentagon's take on global urban poverty. He inevitably has to talk about MOUT - Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. As the journal of the Army War College declared, Davis quotes, "The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, highrise buildings and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world." The Santa Monica, California-based Rand Corporation - which helped to set strategy for the Vietnam War in the 1960s - has added a little more concept to MOUT.

Rand has concluded that the urbanization of world poverty has produced "the urbanization of insurgency"; insurgents are "following their followers into the cities, setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns". The Rand experts are obviously talking about Baghdad's Sadr City - one of the world's largest slums - where the young and the wretched join Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army to make life hell for the American occupier (no wonder Sadr City's squalid main boulevard is nicknamed "Vietnam Street").

But the Rand crowd could also be talking about the drug-infested slums of Sao Paulo, where "faculties" are prisons dominated by the PCC, monthly contributions by members - ranging from $25 to $250 - finance drug trafficking, prison exchange and attacks, and "bin Ladens" have either to fulfill their mission and pay their debt to the organization, scoring points with the criminal elite, or they become traitors to the "Party of Crime".

So this is the way the world ends: not with a whimper, but with bang after bang, the "homeland" cities of the world crouching in their defense against "forces of darkness", or the "axis of evil", or "terrorists", Islamic and otherwise, who threaten the "free world".

"Night after night, hornet-like helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts ... every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions." It's happening right now, over there in Baghdad and over here, in the vast, messy hypercity of Sao Paulo. Welcome to the (overcrowded) Dome of Hell - and this one is not digital, it's the real thing.

[Avalon]

I suppose this is an intersection of love/sex and money...

Not even her position as the world's most powerful woman has prevented German Chancellor Angela Merkel from becoming the victim of playboy premier Silvio Berlusconi's sexist language.

The gaffe-prone tycoon has been overheard referring to the German leader as an "unfuckable lard-arse", according to wiretaps reported by Italian newspapers. The offensive remark is the latest in a string of embarrassing revelations involving the 74-year-old Prime Minister, who three years ago caused a diplomatic incident by describing US President Barack Obama as "suntanned".

Investigators overheard the latest offending remarks during a wiretapped conversation between the premier and the man accused of supplying prostitutes to Mr Berlusconi's notorious parties in Rome and Sardinia. Italian newspapers have previously revealed salacious developments uncovered by investigating magistrates.

In the days before the taped conversation, German officials had been urging the Italian government to speed up its implementation of budget cuts.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/angela-merkel-undermined-by-outspoken-mps-2354986.html

[American Dream]

Here's a relevant quote by Slavoj Žižek, from his essay Berlusconi in Tehran:

...Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think.

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

Alain Badiou has proposed a distinction between two types (or rather levels) of corruption in democracy: the first, empirical corruption, is what we usually understand by the term, but the second pertains to the form of democracy per se, and the way it reduces politics to the negotiation of private interests. This distinction becomes visible in the (rare) case of an honest ‘democratic’ politician who, while fighting empirical corruption, nonetheless sustains the formal space of the other sort. (There is, of course, also the opposite case of the empirically corrupted politician who acts on behalf of the dictatorship of Virtue.)

‘If democracy means representation,’ Badiou writes in De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, ‘it is first of all the representation of the general system that bears its forms. In other words: electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy”. This is its underlying corruption.’[*] At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – mirrors, registers, measures – the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – instantiates – a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral – it privileges certain values and practices – and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.

This is not to say that democratic elections should be despised; the point is only to insist that they are not in themselves an indication of the true state of affairs; as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa. Take an unproblematic example: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the number two in the French Communist Party, admitted that if, at that point in time, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When De Gaulle refused to acknowledge France’s capitulation and continued to resist, he claimed that only he, and not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not, note, on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’). He was claiming to be speaking the truth even if it had no democratic legitimacy and was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. There can be democratic elections which enact a moment of truth: elections in which, against its sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic opinion; however, that such elections are so exceptional shows that they are not as such a medium of truth.

It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West. The change always takes place in accordance with a country’s values: Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell, and, in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy popular support (more than two-thirds of the electorate). No wonder they are personal friends: each of them has a habit of ‘spontaneous’ outbursts (which, in Putin’s case, are prepared in advance in conformity with the Russian ‘national character’). From time to time, Putin likes to use a dirty word or utter an obscene threat. When, a couple of years ago, a Western journalist asked him an awkward question about Chechnya, Putin snapped back that, if the man wasn’t yet circumcised, he was cordially invited to Moscow, where they have excellent surgeons who would cut a little more radically than usual.

Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time. It is arguably this combination which makes him unbeatable, at least in the near future: the remains of the Italian ‘left’ are now resigned to him as their fate. This is perhaps the saddest aspect of his reign: his democracy is a democracy of those who win by default, who rule through cynical demoralisation.

Berlusconi acts more and more shamelessly: not only ignoring or neutralising legal investigations into his private business interests, but behaving in such a way as to undermine his dignity as head of state. The dignity of classical politics stems from its elevation above the play of particular interests in civil society: politics is ‘alienated’ from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterise the bourgeois. Berlusconi has effectively abolished this alienation: in today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the bourgeois, who openly exploits it as a means to protect his own economic interest, and who parades his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show.

The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation.

The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state of emergency in the whole of Italy as a response to the illegal entry of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. At the beginning of August, it made a show of deploying 4000 armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities (train stations, commercial centres and so on.) A state of emergency was introduced without any great fuss: life was to go on as normal. Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries all around the world, where this or that form of emergency (against the terrorist threat, against immigrants) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?

What is the reality of this state of emergency? On 7 August 2007, a crew of seven Tunisian fishermen dropped anchor 30 miles south of the island of Lampedusa off Sicily. Awakened by screams, they saw a rubber boat crammed with starving people – 44 African migrants, as it turned out – on the point of sinking. The captain decided to bring them to the nearest port, at Lampedusa, where his entire crew was arrested. On 20 September, the fishermen went on trial in Sicily for the crime of ‘aiding and abetting illegal immigration’. If convicted, they would get between one and 15 years in jail. Everyone agreed that the real point of this absurd trial was to dissuade other boats from doing the same: no action was taken against other fishermen who, when they found themselves in similar situations, apparently beat the migrants away with sticks, leaving them to drown. What the incident demonstrates is that Agamben’s notion of homo sacer – the figure excluded from the civil order, who can be killed with impunity – is being realised not only in the US war on terror, but also in Europe, the supposed bastion of human rights and humanitarianism.

The formula of ‘reasonable anti-semitism’ was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a ‘moderate’ anti-semite:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-semitism is to organise a reasonable anti-semitism.

Our governments righteously reject populist racism as ‘unreasonable’ by our democratic standards, and instead endorse ‘reasonably’ racist protective measures. ‘We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and Eastern European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers,’ today’s Brasillachs, some of them social democrats, are telling us. ‘We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable, violent actions of the instinctual anti-immigrant is to organise reasonable anti-immigrant protection.’ A clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face.

[American Dream]

Looks appealing, right?

Hey- these colors might be found in Nature- somewhere....

But there's always troublemakers out there who don't like the corporations which are giving us jobs:

Food Dyes

Read CSPI's new report, "Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks," to learn more.

Commonly used food dyes, such as Yellow 5, Red 40, and six others, are made from petroleum and pose a “rainbow of risks.” Those risks include hyperactivity in children, cancer (in animal studies), and allergic reactions. In 2008, because of the problem of hyperactivity, the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to ban the use of these dyes. The British government and European Union have taken actions that are virtually ending the use of dyes throughout Europe.

Food dyes also serve to deceive consumers: they are often used to simulate the presence of healthful, colorful fruits and vegetables. But considering the adverse impact of these chemicals on children, and considering how easily they can be replaced with safe, natural ingredients, it's time to get rid of them altogether from the United States and Canada.



Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bars are made with natural colorings in Britain but contain food dyes in the United States.

CSPI has more of the nauseating details:

In Europe, regulators and industry have made considerable progress toward eliminating artificial dyes from food products, though American versions of the very same products continue to get their colors from synthetic dyes. For instance, the syrup in a strawberry sundae from a McDonald's in the U.K. gets its red color from strawberries; in the U.S., the red color comes from synthetic Red 40.

In the U.S., synthetic food dyes are common in brightly colored foods popular with children, including candies, soft drinks, breakfast cereals, and snack foods. Sometimes the sunny synthetic colors are designed to simulate fruits or vegetables, as in the case of a "Guacamole Dip" produced by Kraft, which gets its green color not from avocados but from Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Blue 1. The "artificially flavored blueberry bits" in Aunt Jemima Blueberry Waffles are blue thanks to Red 40 and Blue 2, not blueberries.

[American Dream]

"The Social-Democratic Illusion"

September 20, 2011

By Immanuel Wallerstein

Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-"wage-employed" groups, particularly children and seniors; and programs to minimize unemployment. Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be "reformed" and acquire a more human face.

The Social-Democrats were most powerful in western Europe, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (where they were called New Deal Democrats) - in short, in the wealthy countries of the world-system, those that constituted what might be called the pan-European world. They were so successful that their right-of-center opponents also endorsed the concept of the welfare state, trying merely to reduce its costs and extent. In the rest of the world, the states tried to jump onto this bandwagon by projects of national "development."

Social-democracy was a highly successful program during this period. It was sustained by two realities of the times: the incredible expansion of the world-economy, which created the resources that made the redistribution possible; and United States hegemony in the world-system, which ensured the relative stability of the world-system, and especially the absence of serious violence within this wealthy zone.

This rosy picture did not last. The two realities came to an end. The world-economy stopped expanding and entered into a long stagnation, in which we are still living; and the United States began its long, if slow, decline as a hegemonic power. Both new realities have accelerated considerably in the twenty-first century.

The new era beginning in the 1970s saw the end of the world centrist consensus on the virtues of the welfare state and state-managed "development." It was replaced by a new, more rightwing ideology, called variously neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus, which preached the merits of reliance on markets rather than on governments. This program was said to be based on a supposedly new reality of "globalization" to which "there was no alternative."

Implementing neo-liberal programs seemed to maintain rising levels of "growth" on stock markets but at the same time led to rising worldwide levels of indebtedness, unemployment, and lower real income levels for the vast majority of the world's populations. Nonetheless, the parties that had been the mainstays of the left-of-center social-democratic programs moved steadily to the right, eschewing or playing down support for the welfare state and accepting that the role of reformist governments had to be reduced considerably.

While the negative effects on the majority of the populations were felt even within the wealthy pan-European world, they were felt even more acutely in the rest of the world. What were their governments to do? They began to take advantage of the relative economic and geopolitical decline of the United States (and more widely of the pan-European world) by focusing on their own national "development." They used the power of their state apparatuses and their overall lower costs of production to become "emerging" nations. The more "left" their verbiage and even their political commitment, the more they were determined to "develop."

Will this work for them as it had once worked for the pan-European world in the post-1945 period? It is far from obvious that it can, despite the remarkable "growth" rates of some of these countries - particularly, the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) - in the last five to ten years. For there are some serious differences between the current state of the world-system and that of the immediate post-1945 period.

One, the real cost levels of production, despite neoliberal efforts to reduce them, are in fact now considerably higher than they were in the post-1945 period, and threaten the real possibilities of capital accumulation. This makes capitalism as a system less attractive to capitalists, the most perceptive of whom are searching for alternative ways to secure their privileges.

Two, the ability of the emerging nations to increase in the short run their acquisition of wealth has put a great strain on the availability of resources to provide their needs. It therefore has created an ever-growing race for land acquisition, water, food, and energy resources, which is not only leading to fierce struggles but is in turn also reducing the worldwide ability of capitalists to accumulate capital.

Three, the enormous expansion of capitalist production has created at last a serious strain on the world's ecology, such that the world has entered into a climate crisis, whose consequences threaten the quality of life throughout the world. It has also fostered a movement for reconsidering fundamentally the virtues of "growth" and "development" as economic objectives. This growing demand for a different "civilizational" perspective is what is being called in Latin America the movement for "buen vivir" (a liveable world).

Four, the demands of subordinate groups for a real degree of participation in the decision-making processes of the world has come to be directed not only at "capitalists" but also at the "left" governments that are promoting national "development."

Fifth, the combination of all these factors, plus the visible decline of the erstwhile hegemonic power, has created a climate of constant and radical fluctuations in both the world-economy and the geopolitical situation, which has had the result of paralyzing both the world's entrepreneurs and the world's governments. The degree of uncertainty - not only long-term but also the very short-term - has escalated markedly, and with it the real level of violence.

The social-democratic solution has become an illusion. The question is what will replace it for the vast majority of the world's populations.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-soci ... allerstein