In the Aggregate: A Neofeudalist Dystopia

Editor’s Note: as of now, In the Aggregate is a regular round-up feature here on NIDC, that showcases and expands on my social media analysis from around the web.

 

Making Lemonade

As in the case of all roiling disasters; I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m very enthusiastic about doing it.

After experiencing some technical difficulties yesterday morning, I came to two more or less simultaneous epiphanies. In immediate terms, I realized I no longer had an article to publish this week. Additionally, I realized that instead of just shitposting, I’ve been tossing a lot of solid analysis into the social media ether; where it would disappear into the temporal mists of our beloved timelines. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Right; so, most of this material originated on my blog, or one of the three social media services I use regularly. I’ve edited a lot of it, I’ve expanded on some of it, and I’ve added some new parts; “le website c’est moi.” As always, folks who click around on the links or images in this article will find a bunch of reference material and additional articles to read as well.

Let’s wade into the chum.

 

Twittering Classes

 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard just about enough out of the naval-gazing lanyards pushing “popularism” in the mainstream media discourse. After more than forty years of center right, neoliberal control of the Democratic Party, you don’t get to turn around and tell me its failures are because they’re too fucking woke. I’m not new, you muppets. Ultimately this whole discussion is about finding someone to blame for the failures of neoliberal ideology, without actually acknowledging those failures.

David Shor is a counter-culture rockstar in Democratic Party political circles precisely because he tells dead-eyed liberal zombies what they want to hear; which is always some variation on “we should crush the left and fuck over marginalized people.” That’s why bougie lanyard liberals love him. There will forever be a warm place in the establishment’s heart for the bold dissident who has the courage to shout from the rafters that “actually, the poor and victimized are the problem!” How else do you think a soulless cracker shitweasel like Matty Yglesias pays the rent?

 

Nina-Bytes

Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate Excoriate World Leaders for “Blah, Blah, Blah” Climate Failures

A little while ago, I realized that there now comes a point in every late summer on Turtle Island in which the west coast is literally on fire, while the east coast is being battered by severe hurricanes. Climate catastrophe is clearly not an oncoming event, so much as its already here and that should be pretty obvious to anyone reading stories about folks drowning in New York City basement apartments – at a minimum.

You can drone on at me about whether or not these young women’s activism is effective, or revolutionary, but at least they get to yell at some of the rat bastards that are helping kill us all. I’d like to yell at them too, wouldn’t you?

The fact is, there is no way out of climate catastrophe that involves keeping capitalism; it’s not technology, or even sums of money itself that’s stopping us from saving life on this planet – it’s the bald reality that our society doesn’t do *anything* unless it profits elite capital directly, and in the short term.

Frankly, I wish they’d drag Greta and Vanessa to Wall Street because those are the guys trying to murder the lot of us for a quick buck. Billionaire anarcho-capitalists are killing the planet in real time for pennies on the share, and those guys don’t work at the U.N. Obviously, these politicians are mostly just bellhops for capital.

 

State-level Republicans are making it easier to run over protesters

One of the key hallmarks of a nominal liberal democracy’s transformation into an overt fascist state, is the way public sector or state power will intertwine itself with reactionary paramilitaries; thereby sharing its monopoly on violence and intimidation with “the brownshirts” as it were.

Typically this arrangement will take one of three major forms. The state may act as a direct enforcement arm for the fascist agenda, as we saw in the assassination of Michael Reinohl. The state may also establish a quasi-legal enforcement arrangement with reactionary vigilantes, as we observed in the Mother Jones story about Bedford County, Virginia’s officially sanctioned militia. Finally of course, pro-fascist actors in the state can simply legalize vigilante enforcement of fascist norms, which is what we’re looking at here with these laws making it effectively legal to run down protesters with your car.

Of course Wingers will howl that the purpose of these laws are to protect innocent drivers accosted by protesters, but even a casual glance at the statistics demonstrates that’s a crock of bullsh*t. America doesn’t have a massive protesters-attacking-cars problem, but throughout our last major summer of protests, angry reactionaries have frequently slammed their cars into innocent people exercising their right of free assembly – there’s even a Wikipedia entry for the phenomenon.

As demonstrated (with citations) throughout this article, these laws are clearly both political in nature, and racialized in practice; these laws are being enacted in response to what amounts to a second American civil rights movement. Whenever you combine political power, with codified racialized suppression, and vigilante violence, you’re looking at the practice of fascism; whether those practicing it want to admit it or not.

The purpose behind enacting these laws could not be more clear. They exist to suppress mass protest and enforce white supremacy by enlisting reactionary vigilantes to enact potentially lethal violence as a form of mass intimidation.

This is the core of both the fascist project, and the reactionary terrorism it employs. This right here is what separates a fascist creep from simple reactionary thugs; the rubber stamp of legal sanction and legitimacy granted by the fusion of far right violence, with reactionary policy; in this case enacted by the GOP at the state level.

That in a nutshell, is what fascism looks like in practice.

 

The Pandora Papers

Over the next few weeks, you’re likely going to be hearing a lot about a series of global financial leaks called “the Pandora Papers” – and if the history of the Panama Papers, and the Paradise Papers is any indication, the reporting on this subject will be equal parts atrocious and complicit.

These leaks are a part of a gigantic (2.94 terabyte) data trove that exposes the secret offshore financial manipulations and tax evasions schemes of the uber wealthy; including individuals from over 200 countries and territories. Perhaps most importantly, these leaks include records of financial skullduggery from more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires; these aren’t just the machinations of the ruling classes, but also of their in-pocket muppets in what is very loosely defined as “public service.”

This project, from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, involved processing more than 11.9 million individual records, and represents the work of over 600 individual journalists, from roughly 150 separate news outlets around the world. In other words, this is the mother lode of dirt on rich guys and their schemes to accumulate and hide wealth, without having to return anything whatsoever to society.

Unfortunately, and despite the gravity of these leaks, this story will likely receive very little attention (long term) in for-profit Western media for two primary reasons.

The first reason is that due to the absolutely absurd way American tax law works to protect the wealthy from any form of taxation, there are very few Americans listed in these leaks because American billionaires already get to keep all their money; and as anyone who has ever worked in American media can tell you, the world ends for our news on the near shores of either ocean that surrounds Turtle Island.

The second reason is that despite the (rightful) moral outrage these leaks would produce in any person who actually understood them, the vast majority of financial activity depicted within is perfectly legal. Oh sure, there may be some question of ethics violations by the various political puppets who used offshoring and secret banking instruments to enrich themselves while on the public dime, but the reality is that rich people all over the globe have spent the past forty years making this type of bald faced corruption not only legal, but the expected reasonable behavior for the rich.

Of course, rigging the laws to make your wholly unethical behavior “strictly legal” is nothing new; I’m reminded of the time when Martin Luther King Jr told a captivated audience that “everything Hitler did in Germany, was legal.” Nor should it be particularly surprising that a media owned (and increasingly staffed) by the wealthy, would hand wave away corruption and malfeasance like this; it’s a big club, and you aren’t in it lads.

What’s surprising here more than anything, is the crassness with which the ruling classes will respond to this; shrugging their shoulders and in their best Joe Manchin asking “you got a problem?” And even worse is the realization, even before the news has grown cold, that at the end of the day they’re all going to get away with it.

 

World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting mighty damn tired of hearing excuses about why “we” can’t collectively come together to prevent climate catastrophe; and I’m especially getting tired of hearing it from bougie ruling class muppets who’re inarguably a massive part of the problem.

You can chant “we’re all on this Earth together” like a mantra if you want, but the numbers don’t lie. Rich people are overwhelmingly using more of our shared resources, and releasing more carbon than the entire labor class. Poor people and indigenous farmers aren’t killing the planet; seventy one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 come from just one hundred corporations. And we know who the owners and controllers of those corporations are! Hell one of the largest polluters on Earth is the United States military; does that sound like a “we” problem to you?

It’s overwhelmingly the capitalist class that’s causing the problem, and it’s the capitalist class whose lust for endless and immediate profits that’s preventing us from taking the steps necessary to save our planet, and with it potentially all life on Earth. The rich have already pillaged our collective future for filthy lucre, and now they (and their in pocket politicians) are refusing to pay for the ensuing fallout; a fallout that may well kill us all.

This is absolutely not a “we” crisis, and we sure as sh*t aren’t all in this together.

 

French child kidnap plot shows global sway of QAnon style

One of the most frustrating things about the vast majority of mainstream media reporting on QAnon is the liberal establishment’s general inability to accept the movement for what it is – a fascist conspiracy cult that has gone completely global. More specifically, it’s a globalized fascist conspiracy cult that works by blending all the other reactionary conspiracy theories into one, and then conveniently aligning believers with far right, objectively fascist politicians, parties, and political organizations. The fact is that while believers in the cult may not always perceive themselves as acting politically, the conductors marshalling the cult are explicitly political in nature.

Therefore, it does no good to approach QAnon as a grift, because it literally doesn’t matter if the freaks pushing these conspiracies into the mainstream are true believers or not. What matters is that they’re able to draw on a massive, preexisting undercurrent of people motivated by anger, reaction, and bugsh*t conspiracy writings, and then point those people at the enemies of the would-be fascist order. In some ways this makes QAnon almost something of a “rent-a-mob” organization, to be summoned and deployed by more organized fascists; both in politics and in the streets.

Of course, linking and empowering these folks has a cost, usually paid in crime, violence, and sometimes human lives, but generally it’s not the rich nazis paying it, so they don’t care. Indeed, one might argue that the blowback produced by the QAnon cult in and of itself works towards the fascist goal of destabilizing our faux liberal-democratic order, and creating the demand for a more authoritarian form of government. The chaos is a feature, not a bug.

 

As Americans Demand Tax Reforms, Analysis Finds Top 1% Hold More Wealth Than Whole Middle Class

Look, I hate to keep beating this same drum here, but there’s a reason I loathe rich people and it sure ain’t envy. In this Common Dreams article, Brett Wilkins talks about a recent Bloomberg report revealing that Americans in the top 1% have more wealth than the entire middle class; these are of course the same Americans funneling cash into dark money groups to stop moderate tax reforms in the U.S. as we speak. Even setting aside the somewhat arbitrary and politically disempowering way the “middle class” is defined here, the federal data shows that 1.3 million U.S. households (making 500K or more) now have more wealth than the 77.8 million families in the middle 60% of income tiers.

As the article details, the super-rich are currently beating the “middle class” (which includes plenty of affluent people as the maximum income rate for this definition is 141K a year) 27% to 26.6% in terms of national wealth share. This represents a stark departure some similar figures released as recently as 1990, when the super-rich controlled roughly 17% of national wealth, to the middle-classes 36%. Please keep in mind that while this economists definition of the middle class does include people making as little as 27K a year, it does not include anyone our society is prepared to call “poor.”

What I don’t think really comes across in this article however, is how absolutely unprecedented this situation is in the history of the Pig Empire. Everyone knows that the so-called Gilded Age was an era of vast inequity, robber barons, and open corruption by a complicit political class under the influence of monopoly power and its rivulets of cash. What most people don’t seem to realize however is that the levels of financial inequity and open corruption in our very own society have long surpassed anything from the Roaring Twenties.

Indeed, as I have posited elsewhere, we’re approaching a point where this level of inequity is fueling a new, and yet disturbingly familiar form of capitalism I’ve taken to calling “neofeudalism.” The rich have captured enough wealth and political influence to transform our whole society into a machine whose entire purpose is funneling even more wealth and power into their greedy fingers; even at the cost of all life on earth. Given that this is still capitalism, this wealth is obviously being taken from everyone beneath them on the socioeconomic ladder; as the numbers we just looked at demonstrate.

This fusion of money power and control of the state has now locked the whole of society into a parasitic relationship that resembles landed lords and serfs from the darkest ages of European feudalism, and there’s no indication the rich have plans to stop the machine anytime soon. The class war may not look any different on the ground, but the moneyed interests we’re battling against today are armed with more power and influence than ever before; which is allowing them to rig our governments to serve them, and snatch the wealth of a broader and broader swath of our society.

It’s a slaughter alright; but the fattest pigs are running the abattoir and everyone who isn’t with them, is next on the chopping block.

 

Threading Water

I don’t see what profit there is in tolerating the fantasies of Johnny-come-lately liberal pundits shouting from the hilltop that they “told” us the GOP had gone full fascist. I myself specifically predicted a coup attempt as early as 2017; while all you liberals were telling me “it’s not fascism because this isn’t Europe and there’s no funny little nazi uniforms.” Pundits can dunk on each other about who was first, but they’re all part of the problem too.

What the liberal establishment refuses to accept is that America has always embraced the same foundational principles this fascist movement is built on. Slavery, genocide, extraction, exploitation, rigid social hierarchies, virulent anti-communism, the national security state; these too are the legacies of American democracy and values. Just because the punditry refuses to acknowledge these truths, doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

You can’t have just “a little fascism.” The fascists are beating the liberal establishment because, foundationally, you want the same things; liberalism just places limits on the exploitation that the fascists inherently know are arbitrary. In the end, that’s why both reactionary crackers and affluent liberals hate socialism and fear social justice. No capitalist method of running society works without someone to marginalize and exploit; at any cost. We’ve been doing this dance for more than a hundred years, and every single time the “liberal” establishment eventually reaches a point where they empower the fascists, to take out the left and the underclasses, because gun to their heads; they’d prefer fascism to sharing.