News Briefs: St. Patrick's 2024
some reading recommendations and thoughts on the news
This third cycle of chemo has been the hardest by far, and I’ve been pretty sick these past few weeks. Still, I’m doing my best to keep writing. Today’s newsletter is a format that I might be using more often: sharing a quality article for anyone who wants a good reading recommendation, then sharing something from the movement archives, an older text from the anarchist movement that I think is still relevant to revisit today, and then the news digest, links and brief descriptions of current events, especially those that relate to past newsletters.
Let’s start with the quality reading: in a thoughtful, personal piece that encompasses the history of the art form and its current resonance and discord, Austin McCoy shares with us about the “the many educations of rap” in “It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop,” from The Baffler.
And one from the movement archives: “Secrets and Lies,” is a much needed examination of the psychological impact of secrecy and security, and how easily necessary forms of caution can damage us if we don’t take care. When we enter into struggle with the State, to dodge the police state we have to hide the truth, to live a double life. But if this leads us to compartmentalization, to hypocrisy, to self-repression, then we’ve already started replicating aspects of statist society.
This links to a beautiful edition from Ungrateful Hyenas Distro, but the original text was published in the insurrectionary magazine 325, issue no. 7, in October 2009.
Anyone with a movement distro? Print out a few copies and make sure we remember some of the hard lessons from past experiences with clandestinity.
And third, it being March 17 and all: I found “Colonialism and Ireland,” published in The Irish Times, to be a useful article, and the book is probably well worth a read. It’s hard, though, to come across “the Republic” and “national self-determination” still being used uncritically as sensible goals, as though all the tragedies and self-betrayal of the 20th century never happened…
So, for anyone tired of reading, watch Michael Collins and then The Wind That Shakes the Barley and contemplate how the two brutally opposite movies are about the same episode in Irish history.
Now for the news digest:
First up, a few articles that add some more substance to “Geopolitics for 2024.” At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, “people paid to identify and manage global risks” overwhelmingly see an increased risk for “global catastrophe” in the next ten years, and getting even worse in the long term. One-third predicted the global situation would become catastrophic in just the next two years. The primary threats: the spread of disinformation (1) threatening to push the crisis of democracy over the edge, with populist rightwing governments threatening the alliances and financial consensus that had been in place since WWII; ecosystem collapse; shortages of natural resources; and a grim economic outlook that combines rising inequality, deepening poverty, rising prices, and few economic opportunities for investment to create the kind of growth (2) that would reverse any of the former trends.
A couple notes:
1) mainstream institutions that systematically lie and misinform about everything, wringing their hands about disinformation is clearly hypocritical. To translate, what they mean is that the media and other powerful institutions that once were in consensus about certain economic, political, and historical dogmas are no longer able to contain populist conspiracy theories and reactionary positions that push even farther to the right, aided by the rise of social media.
2) we can make a useful distinction between productive growth, which is an increase in income based on increases of production, buying, and selling, which usually also means an increase in jobs and a tiny portion of the wealth trickling downwards… and financial growth, an increase in income based in an increase in lending and interest collection, in financial activities that basically amount to gambling, in increasing profit margin by increasing prices or firing workers, or hostile acquisitions in which companies are essentially taken over, ransacked, and sold for parts.
“Geopolitics for 2024”
(Also a little note, I should have named the South China Sea alongside or even before Taiwan as the place where China is most likely to be drawn into open military conflict that would undermine its ability to help engineer the next world system, or to successfully impose a framework of big state sovereignty that allows it to kick the contradictions farther down the road.)
Keep in mind this idea of investing in a company in order to gut it.
But first: the Exxon Mobil chief executive is saying that consumers are to blame for the growth in fossil fuels, while meanwhile documents from the company reveal that the whole campaign for a “carbon tax” that part of the mainstream environmental movement championed was actually an idea authored by the oil industry to buy them time. Remember that they became aware of the scientific certainty of global warming in the ‘60s. (The article says Exxon was aware of it since the ‘70s, when they covered up one of their own studies, but in The Solutions Are Already Here I go into the more detailed history of the cover-up.)
Meanwhile, major banks are abandoning the poster project for reforming capitalism: ESG, which is a commitment by investors that their investments will take into account the environmental, social, and governmental impacts of their projects, and not just the profitability.
An interesting link here, billionaires have been funding secretive groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability that have been lobbying politicians and corporations to abandon or prohibit ESG investing, to protect policies that make it harder to vote and easier for far Right politicians to get elected, to increase fossil fuel investments, and to gut public sector jobs and vital services like Medicaid.
In other words, many of the wealthiest people and institutions on the planet have started treating the US like a hostile acquisition, a large company that they are betting against, that they are investing in in order to gut and sell for parts. To put it another way, those with an insane levels of wealth are looking all over the world, they see a few opportunities for productive investment but not enough to absorb all the money they have to invest. When they look at the US, they see much better prospects at making short-term profit. What they don’t see is much opportunity for long-term profit in the US.
An interesting connection is the one between billionaires and the far Right. Millionaires, billionaires, and even most far Right politicians don’t give a shit for Jesus or abortion or any of that. They don’t have souls, they’re banking on Hell being a fiction, and they know they can get their abortions whether it’s legal or not. What the extreme Right voting bloc provides them, however, is a minority large enough to provide a feasible path to electoral victory, given enough gerrymandering, voter suppression, xenophobic media coverage, and social media conspiracy theories. They tie their economic agenda (which allows short-term profits from fossil fuel investment, price-cutting in production standards, stripping social services) to a conservative social agenda to get the votes.
The conclusion we should all draw from this: both the evangelicals and the billionaires are hungering for the Rapture. Evangelicals actually believe in the Second Coming and they think it’s they’re holy duty to destroy the earth and murder Palestinians so Jesus comes back. And billionaires certainly believe in short-term profit, they believe in their luxurious doomsday bunkers, and they believe they are entitled to survive all the misery they have created.
We can be as idiotic as the evangelicals and billionaires, or we can engage in critical thinking, think things through to their logical conclusions, and understand that those who rule us are a threat to our very survival, they have no legitimacy, and they have long ago burned through their last second chance. They will never deserve our trust, and we will never be safe as long as they exist.*
Finally, some news on the cops.
Don’t read these if you’re subscribing to this newsletter. They’re all atrocious and violent stories about how evil the cops are. Send them to any friends or relatives who need a little extra convincing.
The National Guard are sexually assaulting migrant women and children in asylum centers. The mainstream article tries to give the impression early on that two guardsmen are to blame, burying deeper in the article the fact that the problem is much more systematic.
One of the standard terms that the Border Patrol use to refer to migrants makes a joke of the sound produced when they smash a club or heavy flashlight into a migrant’s skull. Not only do border pigs systematically beat immigrants, they take pleasure in it.
No surprise here: Los Angeles police are still murdering unarmed people all the time. They disproportionately stop and kill Black and trans people. This article gives special attention to people experiencing mental health crises, another group especially endangered by the police. Who is still naïve enough to trust in reforms? People in LA have been demanding an end to police violence since the riots in ‘92, and it was also a major goal of the civil rights movement in the decades before that. The only end to police violence is an end to the police.
The genre of this article is sensationalism posing as hard-hitting investigative journalism. What it really reveals, though, is not just one homicidal cop who probably kidnapped, murdered, and disappeared several men of color in Florida, but how the entire system supported him in what he was doing: this was a cop who got good performance reviews, who was popular in his department, and at one point in his career just stopped arresting people and presumably started disappearing them, and was able to keep working. It shows how normal racist attitudes are in police departments. And one thing that needs naming is how the mainstream media like CNN, and mainstream politicians in both parties, spread the distorted idea that the justice system is just a revolving door, that there’s no point arresting people because they just get released immediately and commit more crimes, which is the rhetoric this one cop used to turn from arresting people of color to disappearing them.
*Is this an ethical justification for killing all the rich? Actually, no, but I’ll get into that in a future newsletter.
I learn more useful stuff in the ten minutes of reading your essays than I would browsing the internet a month. Thank you Peter. Sending some good vibes your way.