It’s thirty years of consumer orgasm and vocational thinking, educating to push away anything good and deep and critically thought out, those great books and thoughts that distract one from making money, hand over fist, or struggling trying to do something in the social services.
Universe in the back seat of the station wagon
I do this quite a lot – looking at those American towns I call home or still have connections with and try to make universal tie-ins to the larger world, certainly connections that overlay here, say, Portland, to the universal Amerika, fed through the lens of American Capitalism Gone Hard Fascist Right.
No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.
What is Fascism? Recently Chris Hedges wrote of an imperialist US that is infected by “the virus of fascism, wrapped in the American flag, held aloft by the Christian cross and buttressed by white supremacy.” Hedges was not using the term fascism as it would be used by a political theorist or historian. It is common to use “fascism” to indicate a more general and imprecise fascistic tendency.
Danelly Estupiñan, a powerful Afro-Colombian human rights activist and personal friend of mine, is now facing a mortal threat from the fanatical criminals aligned with powerful economic interests who are committed to keeping Black people subjugated in the port city of Buenaventura and throughout Colombia.
An activist and member of the Black Communities Process (PCN), Danelly joins a long list of women, labor and youth activists who are facing death or have been murdered for daring to organize Afro-Colombians to defend their dignity.
Running around for that continental breakfast, in old Paris, a bizarre follies bergere of people shouting at the SWAT-Legionnaires teams, holding hands and placards defining some climate change demands lite, and the legions of illegitimate world leaders (sic) prancing and all the convulsing media from those mighty first worlders staging and all the NGOs and their followers making money off of “activism” and “on-line” organizing (sic) and getting a trip to Paris, to boot.
November 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.
It sometimes happens in the middle of a dark night, when I don’t expect it, when I think that I am sound asleep but am not, or when perhaps I really am but not completely. I don’t know. All that I witnessed and overheard, all that I thought I forgot but couldn’t, all that I tried so desperately to forget comes back, first in spasms, then in full force.
Over the past 15 years the US has been engaged in a series of wars, which has led many writers to refer to the ‘rise of militarism’ – the growth of an empire, built primarily by and for the projection of military power – and only secondarily to advance economic imperialism.
The rise of a military-based empire, however, does not preclude the emergence of competing, conflicting, and convergent power configurations within the imperial state. These factions of the Washington elite define the objectives and targets of imperialist warfare, often on their own terms.
Recently there was a chalk picture drawn on a particular sidewalk in Greenwich Village—a colorful image of Hillary Clinton. Her face was upturned, much like Obama’s starry gaze in 2008. Her cosmetic upgrades this summer—dutifully rendered in finely contoured jowls—returned to her cheeks a faint glow of youth. Her shut-lipped grin, a poor man’s Mona Lisa, gave her face a humble cast, almost grandmotherly in its saintliness. The picture got its point across: here was someone we could believe in.
