Wrong On Libya

I perhaps should have begun posting about this last week, when it became clear Qaddafi wasn't going to fall on his own and was, in fact, pressing down on the rebels all the way to Benghazi. I "misunderestimated" (to use a Bushism) the strength of the rebel forces. (To my credit, at least, it turned out to be more a matter of firepower than a matter of will.)

Yet the U.S. and coalition airstikes - codenamed "Operation Odyssey Dawn" - will prove a Faustian deal. Even if Western boots remain planted on Western aircraft carriers, none of us are so naive as to think this is out of the kindness of anyone's hearts. It is always a ploy for markets, oil as much as imports (Libya is 10% reliant on China for its imported goods, and if the Obama administration is serious about reviving manufacturing, we'll need increase our export markets).

But the model of the Western imperialists is actually not to have to occupy countries if they don't have to (Bush was an anomaly in this sense). They want an ally in Northern Africa to moderate in case Tunisia and Egypt don't go in their favor.

Obama also has spoken about Qaddafi's violation of the Libyan people's "universal rights." I remind our readers that it wasn't all that long ago that China and the United States butted heads over this rather philosophical argument. (Chinese leaders think of this phrase as being code for "Western values" and insist that different peoples have different values ... kind of the forerunners in global postmodernism?)

So basically all the old-school imperialists are banding together and having a good ole fashion show of force, brandishing the sabres and sending a message to Iran and China and any other regime they don't agree with that universal rights aren't negotiable, that you have to respect your people's right to protest and their right to free speech.

Because universal rights apply to our geopolitical enemies first, our friends last, and ourselves.... You get the picture.

(And I'm not even going to touch the cost of this intervention in dollar terms. You shouldn't put a price on human freedom, in my opinion. Political rhetoric, however, will latch on to any excuse to slash living conditions....)

"Fire the rockets! ... and the teachers, and municipal employees, and construction workers, and...."

Do whatever you can, and don't stop there.

Sex trafficking is one of humanity's most atrocious practices and one that has expanded in new and awful ways with the rise of globalization, despite having absolutely no place in the 21st century or any other time or place.

If you are in the Twin Cities metro region, please consider coming to Demand Change Project 2011 in Saint Paul this May. You can buy tickets to their forums (at the downtown St. Paul Crowne Plaza Hotel) or attend a rally at the Capitol (for male-identifying allies) and/or block party (in support of women and sex trafficking survivors). This is a great opportunity to educate yourself and express solidarity with activists and survivors.

Please do not underestimate the value of this event, nor ignore the impact this monstrous practice has on your world and the value of life in general.

(Thanks to Eclectic Breakfast for bringing this to our attention!)

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" - MLK

Nuclear Power and/or Barbarism (with apologies to Evan Calder Williams)

Recently I was privy to an argument on Facebook, wherein my older hippy friend N.C. and my college-age Marxist friend A.S. found themselves at odds over the sustainability of nuclear energy. (Obviously I needn't explain to you the cause for the debate.) N.C. pointed out problems with nuclear power plant regardless of where you place them. (The funny thing about earthquakes, you can't really hold anyone at fault. lololol ... seriously, though.)

A.S. points out that there is a need right now to choose between coal and nuclear power, that coal power is one of the leading causes of global warming, and that radioactive damage is limited by comparison (leading, in his words, to the dichotomy of "barbarism or nuclear power"). Fair enough. But someday soon we ought to see nuclear energy as marginalized as possible. The effects of radiation are awful.

And A.S. made the good (or perhaps rather "popular") point that wind energy especially (but also solar?) has its own impact on the environment. Some of my critics especially like to talk about the dead birds that seem to crop up in the vicinity of wind plants. But I can tell you, as an employee at an office building with a lot of very large windows, birds run into shit all the time. It's much easier for animals and biomes to adapt and evolve around these kinds of edifices than it is for them to adapt to large doses of radiation, or even extra carbon dioxide in the air. The buddhist in me hates to sound heartless but if they can adapt to make chirps sound like car alarms, they can alter their migration patters over time....

Breaking Wind: Silent But Deadly

A third friend, A.R., a chemist, chimed in and spoke about the pace of advancement in green energy industries. With the way these developing technologies are funded, he informed me, it could be decades before they could have a notable effect on how we power our society.

Aha. It all comes back to the ca$$$h money (yeah, I went there).

Look at the federal tax subsidies for the dead-dinosaur energy industries: oil, gas, and coal. That is a lot of money thrown at a not-problem. And while I seem to be the last person in America who thinks the federal deficit is not really the most pressing issue in the country today (I've yet to see hard evidence that a. "we're broke" or b. it's going to cause economic catastrophe - the banks were at fault for the only thing like that recently), I think this is money poorly apportioned. We could do a helluva lot better than renewable wind power by 2030.

I think this is a disastrously shortsighted energy policy. Oil, for example, is not in fucking dire need of federal subsidies. Alternatives are.

Oil made a killing by the end of last year, and it was being traded at roughly 3/4ths what it's going for today. Gouging takes place not only at the pump but on the stock exchange floor, too. There's no law in place to translate those profits into green R&D. If the U.S. government had a pro-Earth agenda, it would nationalize the dinosaurs and force exactly that change. But, firmly in the grip of capitalist industries, neither the Democrats nor especially the Republicans would ever go that far, not without extreme pressure from workers and voters. Before the oilpocalypse, BP spent very little of its profits on renewable energy but made a mountain of that molehill through their sophisticated PR machine. A lot, perhaps, has been forgotten concerning the oily money siphoned to Congress and the White House via PACs, but there's no questioning the influence on policy.

If I'm against oil, and I'm against nuclear power, and if I acknowledge that the problem is both critical and that the financial policy is unlikely to change, then what? Several people, my above-mentioned friend and my own father included (hi dad!), insist that a fall in standard of living therefore follows. Without energy, or perhaps more accurately, due to a fall in energy productivity if wind and solar implementation is made, our "standard of living" will crash. Is that what I want?

In a word, perhaps - although it's curious to imagine how our standard of living would be affected. Perhaps we could stop prioritizing a wasteful and hollow consumerist lifestyle where what matters most to us is what we watch on TV and what kind of car we drive and what we can order from the fancy downtown restaurants and who said what on Facebook (irony points!). I don't know what other people envision when they think of a fall in "living standards" brought about by drastically decreased energy usage. Perhaps they imagine the apocalypse. I imagine something more like widespread inconvenience - for the wealthy, of course, poor people are pretty used to getting by with a "low" standard of living.

AKA, "barbarism." At least to the middle class.

That NYT article bothers me for similar reasons. Not least of which is the tone - equating a few moaning yuppies with imagined - cynically expected, demanded - environmentalist hypocrisy. Yuppies are environmentalists like they are human right's activists - in the abstract. They are yuppies first and environmentalists second. They want to do more than live comfortably - they want to live well, with the private schools and the minivans and the fancy dinner out on the town. No meal is too quaint for them, and sustainability be damned, but naturally sustainability and bike lanes and buses are "a good idea." Hybrids are a status symbol. Green chic has taken the place of radical chic, and the great wheel of capitalism turns again.

I can't help but think of consumers as the "hungry ghosts" of Eastern lore

So yes, I think we can and should take some kind of hit to our so-called "standard of living." I think we could do a lot better with a lot less and do less damage to the planet in the meantime. A great many policies could be solved if we took economic planning out of the hands of profit-hungry corporations and put it back in the hands of a scientifically educated population. I do not fear having to change my way of life; I fear only that we've gone the point of no return, that there is no realistic fix to our mangled education, transportation, and industrial systems, that any attempt to unseat Mammon will unleash violence and chaos and ultimately annihilate the good along with the bad in America.

But there's no way to tell without trying, and no reason to go on if we don't make the attempt. All we need is some focus and some direction and the willingness to sacrifice the "comforts" we know in our hearts are toxic for us anyway.

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ADDENDUM: A note of optimism. I admit, my favorite part is when America springs to life. To think, I've waited years for that, and everyone told me I was stupid for believing!

Invention vs. Intervention

I'm not speaking on any particular concrete basis today - I don't have any specific articles to back me up. But I did read on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today that "US sees stalemate in Libya." Yet I cannot accept that there will be anything so cut and dry as an East Libya/West Libya separation.

There are no superpowers to draw and uphold such lines now. This isn't the Cold War. Qaddafi has no imperial backer.

And he won't accept anything less than a reassertion of his power, and the annihilation of the rebel movement. If anything like a stalemate develops, even over the course of years, it will simply mean protracted bloodshed and victory to the side that develops new tactics. Even with superior firepower on the side of the tyrant, my money is on the rebels. Qaddafi has 1970s' tactics and some planes and helicopters and a heart of ice. But the rebels are honing their wits day after day.

The US is still trying to decide its angle. It still frets over the "character" of the rebellion. We know it will support a re-establishment of the monarchy (if its assessment of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are indicators). But blocked on the UN and so far unable to parse through international law, it looks like the world's police force may be sitting this one out, for the time being.

No easy parallels, not even a 38th.

And then they woke up.

Obviously the U.S. government was quite successful in importing state capitalism into Iraq, as evidenced by the outbursts of grieved protesters and their now-archetypal counterweights, the riot police. Nothing says quote-unquote-democracy like citizens confronting men in burly black armor.

How many homes go without electricity so these dudes can hide behind big plastic shields?

Ahh, the bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the rich, a lifetime of squalor and servitude for most everybody else.

Thank the maker we don't have anything like that here. Oh shit, wrong link. Ahh, nevermind ... what's much more interesting to note is that since Obama got elected, class struggle has been relatively low. Riot cops haven't been quite so necessary, not even at the immigration rights marches I've been to. Those waiters seem to be reserved for parties of 10,000 or more....

And they're curiously absent from the current protests in Madison, Wisconsin, which have occupied the state capitol and seen thousands of people come and go from all over the state and indeed all over the nation.

Solidarity is a curiously effective component of democracy, contrary to how absolute democracy is usually portrayed.

And no riot police (knock on wood). Police officers have been encouraged to sleep among the protesters. They guard doors but for the most part leave the crowds alone. There's been a few arrests, I hear, but despite Walker's swagger and bluster, no crackdown yet.

Today thousands of people are again rallying to Madison. As in Egypt and Tunisia and Iraq, Libya and Bahrain and Yemen, Jordan and Morocco and Algiers (apologies if I've left any of my cuzes out), "the people have lost their fear." There are still divisions and bitter feelings, as the disenfranchised public sector workers feel public unions should be dragged down to their level, rather than restored to the elevation they once enjoyed. (Why you would side with the rhetoric of the people who cheated and defiled you, I'll never understand....)

It's quite affirming to finally see the workers of the United States standing up for themselves. They've done their "patriotic duty" for years - bought products, taken pay cuts, let politicians handle politics. We've just kept our head down and done our job. "Git er done" was the slogan of the American worker and we were proud to do it for the red-white-and-blue. But the politicians kept pushing our buttons, kept looking for the line, kept on pushing down our standard of living while raising the expectations. They picked this fight, not us. It's just the unions who got fed up first this time around ...

... but there are a lot more of us with a bone to pick. March is just around the corner, and when the snow begins to melt (and the rivers begin to flood) the whole upper half of the country will rouse itself, crabby from hibernation. We will pack sand bags and hoist signs and on March 19th we will hold nation-wide anti-war marches against the continued occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. May 1st is May Day, a day for workers and new-agers (a solidarity I approve of). There are always immigrant rights marches then too. May 22nd is Harvey Milk Day, for LGBT rights and there's a lot yet to be done.

The left has been anything but sluggish these last 10 years - the media just hasn't been watching. Now that workers are really moving into action however we are beginning to hit the establishment where it hurts - the wallet. In closing I'm reminded of a few lines of lyrics and prose I feel really speak to this sudden worker's empowerment.

The first is a song, by Suicidal Tendencies:
"And I go 'wait, what are you talking about, WE decided? MY best interests? How do you know what MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say? I'M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities? So how can you say I'M crazy?'"
- "Institutionalized"

And the second is a bit of a quote from one of the best movies of all time: Fight Club.

"We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

Workers of the world, unite :)

There is no substitution for a people's revolution.

The United States and the "international community" (read: global state capitalists) are attempting to hijack Libya's revolution, in a sense. To poor effect. The imperialist powers are scrambling to make their voices heard now that madman Muammar Qaddafi met his people's democratic demands with extreme violence and repression.

The problem? Once again: too fucking little, too fucking late.

(Not to mention the fact that this total arsewipe has no interest in playing by any rules but his own and their treatment of him sounds like dialogue from a work of absurdist theater. "The United States, France and other Western powers are trying to remove Libya from the 47-member Human Rights Council." Really? What the blue fuck was Qaddafi doing on there in the first place??)

Libya is a complicated situation in that Qaddafi does not represent Western neo-colonial interests, but is instead a fossil of the anti-colonial movements that swept the "third world" after the rise of the Soviet Union. He is, of course, no less a despot, and so his half-baked claims to Marxism are about as laughable as his allegations that Al Qaeda drugged his rebelling population, or that Wikileaks is a CIA conspiracy to overthrow the enemies of the United States (you know, enemies like Hosni Mubarak....).

So history, as history so often does, is cleaning house, deposing the archaic despots of the Middle East with little regard to their allegiances. It is a "combined and uneven" housecleaning, of course, one that has so far spared the monarchs in favor of the pretenders to democracy. But "Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — neither a king nor a president" (sez NYT, accurately), responds in his own idiosyncratic way, ie, mowing down demonstrators with machine guns and hiring mercenaries to plug the holes left by defectors to his regime.

The Obama administration gained an unfavorable reputation during the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Bahraini uprisings. O didn't have much to say about Tunisia until Bin Ali fled. He stood on the sidelines with Mubarak and let his administration make conflicting assessments; Biden and Clinton painted the Egyptian despot as a stable ally, for example. That was egg on the admin's face almost as soon as the words were out of their mouths.

Granted the response to Libya, where Qaddafi has long operated as a gadfly to the West and attempted to woo African and Middle Eastern radicals for decades, might have required a little more consideration. How and when do you intervene when an antagonistic nutcase turns on his own people? The Obama administration seemed to want to find straight historical precedents ("it's like Somalia, or wait, we don't want this to be like Rwanda ... or can it be more like Kosovo....) when they ought to have been thinking a little more dialectically (what are the historical forces in play in Libya and the region and how do they interact).

For example, I think few of the instances where the United States has been involved in the last century showcase such bravery, determination, and agency on the part of the population involved. The mistake is in how anti-Qaddafi forces have been characterized.

These are not helpless demonstrators. These are not Kuwaitis clamoring for outside aid. As far as I know, no forces inside Libya have yet called on the "international community" for help. Some of Qaddafi's strongmen have defected and are training the rebels - and effectively. The rebels are seizing government weapons caches and pushing back the Colonel's forces.

They are creating a provisional government in Benghazi.

This isn't a humanitarian crisis for the United Nations to intervene in. This isn't even a civil war with two sides bogged down and exchanging blows. This is a revolution, the beginning of a whole new order.

not so bored now, are ya, asshole?

Sending Hilary Clinton to Geneva for international talks will end up being a waste of federal money. By the time the talks wind down, Qaddafi will be swinging from a lamp post (Allah willing). For Chrissake! Compared to the capacity of working people and activists to coordinate these actions in a democratic and nearly real-time manner through social media, international talks are like watching a brontosaurus wake up from a nap.

The best thing the "international community" can do is freeze Qaddafi's assets. By the time they've done anything else, they'll be dealing with a whole new government. Who are you going to impose a no-fly zone on then, huh? Yeah. S'what I thought.

Wake up and smell the incense, guys. The cutting edge of democratic change in the world has done a radical shift and the West is in danger of getting left behind. Without an urgent reassessment, the capitalist democracies are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like Qaddafi - not any time soon, but too soon for comfort.

The support of democracy ought to be a geopolitical strategy.

Of course all this underlines how antiquated our whole political system has become, not just our foreign policy paradigm (which is still influenced by Cold Warriors, sadly). To address the necessary changes in our domestic structure is a task for another day.

Permanent Revolution in the NYT and Egypt

The New York Times webpage is adapting to the protests in the Middle East. This is the beautiful thing about the internets: it adapts format. Newpapers can't give you a live feed of people's tweets, especially not as they engage in revolution. (Plus it gets me around the corporate blackout of Twitter! How utterly kind of them.)

But since that page is in movement and in all likelihood will be gone in a few months, I'll add something more substantial....

Egyptian activists have advanced their demands (partway down the page). Among their more routine call for the release of detainees, the end of the emergency law (which bears some striking similarities to certain U.S. legislation?), restructuring ministries and generally sweeping out the old guard, is a certain new phrase, an invention so radical that they need to explain it.

"- Forming a new technocratic government."

(Disclaimer: as a former table-top roleplaying game nerd, I have a particular soft spot for this phrase, a sort of hipster irony and nostalgia. So sue me!)

"Technocratic government: is a specialized government which doesn’t belong to any party. This government is used in the case of political differences."

Emphasis my own. Russians everywhere are amazed as Lenin spins somersaults in his tomb.

Is it naive of them to think they can end party politics? Perhaps. But there is something very appealing in the image of a country governed out of the makeshift volunteeropolis of Tahrir Square. A country where nuance and dialogue is the order of the day, where tweets and facebook groups coordinate the work of society and provides both jobs and compensation. The government is the people, pouring in and out of Tahrir like a fluid neural network, and the issues of the day are resolved in real-time, collaborative conversation.

Something that would take a lot of work. A lot of electing committees and discussing issues in a logical and civilized manner. A way fraught with challenges like any other system, but finally realizing both democracy and technology and advancing our lives in new ways....

"Our revolution and struggle will continue until we achieve all our demands.

The revolution is not finished yet… April 6 Youth announce that there will be another demonstration on Friday the 25th and a sit-in in Tahrir Square on Friday until the implementation of our demands."

The embryo of the future, a people's technocracy