The Todd Blog

A Demagogue Inside Your Head

Todd Curl — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:41:58 +0000

When your imagination has too much to say
When the chill of the night meets the sweat of the day
And you have trouble understanding what other people have to say
You’d better

Hang on to your emotions, hang on to your emotions

When a demagogue inside your head has taken charge
And by default what you say or do is criticized
And this litany of failures is recited a thousand times
You’d better

Hang on to your emotions, hang on to your emotions (Reed)

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Being that this is indeed Sunday, I thought it time for the resurrection of Sunday Lou, especially seeing as how original articles on my site have been few and far between the past two months. The tone of Lou’s song, Hang on to Your Emotions, from his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling (one of my personal favorites in his extensive catalog) is very fitting for my various frustrations and insecurities as of late. Of course, it is not my intent to turn this site into my personal forum for the occasional introspective and esoteric examination of my life, though there ultimately will be a bit of that, but by and large, constructive and pragmatic critique of our Imperialist State is what sparks my intellectual passions. Part of my frustration stems from so many recent assaults on our freedom and our common sense by the forces of said Imperialism. So for today, Sunday Lou will be a manifestation of my quips regarding recent political deeds and doings.

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Could it be you’ve never felt like that
That your mind’s a cage – inside the cage a cat
That spits and scratches all it can get at
And that’s you, and your emotions

Could it be you’ve never felt like that
Your mind’s a cage – inside the cage a rat
Rabidly trying to get it, you
And your emotions, you and your emotions

When your imagination has too much to say
When that facile voice inside your head says give your life away
You might think to ask – how it got that way
What books it has read – that make it that way
And where it got the right – to speak to anyone that way
You’d better

Hold on to your emotions, hold on to your emotions (Reed)

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The Sherrod Charade:

As anyone paying attention to the News Cycle knows, Shirley Sherrod lost her position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a snippet of a speech she gave — edited and released by Tea Party guru Andrew Breitbart — some time ago to members of the NAACP that made her appear to be insensitive to the plight of white farmers: A Racist!!

Considering many of my relatives make their living through farming (they happen to be white as well) and have to rely on the various subsidies through the USDA, I would be quite livid if they were denied fair treatment solely because of their race. Of course, this wasn’t entirely the case with Mrs. Sherrod as she would go on to explain in her speech — the part that mysteriously wasn’t released by Mr. Breitbart — that she realized that simply having blind disdain for a farmer simply because he was white made her no better than the white man who hates blacks simply because they are black. She overcame her irrational hate and actually befriended the farmer and his family and she became a better and more actualized person in the process.

This was a case study — through the personal story of Mrs. Sherrod — of the profound racial schisms that exist in this country and how every single person, regardless of skin color or ideology, is affected by our own misconceptions and lack of humanity and civility toward one another. The moral of the story was lost by the blind reaction of the propaganda and misinformation machine known as Mainstream Media (and yes, even so-called liberal outlets like MSNBC and others are included in that complex). Breitbart was justifiably vilified for doing what he does: distorting facts and reality to suit his ideological objectives. Fox News, as one can imagine, got in the act by doing what they do best and making the snippet of the speech headline material for their easily manipulated viewers. This in and of itself is nothing new nor newsworthy as most rational and objective individuals have long given up and bothering to care or even pay attentions to the crap that spews from Fox News and similar outlets of misinformation.

This whole incident was really a non-issue as anyone with a modicum of intelligence would dismiss the story all together or do some due diligence and find a copy of the entire speech and put it in its proper context to realize the poignancy of Mrs. Sherrod’s story. Of course, that would have been asking too much from Obama and his Cabinet as Shirley Sherrod was unceremoniously axed from her position because lord knows our first President of Color couldn’t bare being labeled a racist by an objective “News” organization like FOX.

It’s really surprising to me the blind reaction and ignorance by the Obama Administration as this was a golden opportunity to open up a deeper dialogue about race antagonism in this country. If anyone remembers way back to 2008 during the Primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, Obama, under fire for his relationship with Reverend Wright, gave an eloquent speech here in Pennsylvania relating his own personal experiences with being a man of color and his quest for finding his own racial identity and that relationship with the greater themes of a long history of racial antagonisms and schisms in this country. Rather than being a rational and pragmatic leader, Obama cowered to the reactionary elements of blind political divisiveness and further marginalized his own unique history to use Mrs. Sherrod’s speech — her whole speech — and personal story as a “teachable moment.”

In a speech shortly after the incident, Obama addressed the Sherrod firing and accepted some responsibility for his shortsightedness “saying the affair was a ‘bogus controversy based on selective and deceiving excerpts of a speech’ which ‘led to her forced resignation.’ Obama added, that ‘many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments including my own administration.’” (Wagner; Politics Daily)

Just taking some blame for the incident was more than I could have hoped for given the President’s previous patterns of eluding accountability for instances of ineptitude that he had direct influence of. Yet the fact that he added “…many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments…,” shows a complete lack of credibility and understanding of pragmatism and accountability. No one was responsible for Shirley Sherrod’s firing except Obama who failed to use common sense and have the many hundreds, if not thousands, of employees at his disposal to actually find the entire speech and realize what a great opportunity it was for not only his administration, but for exacerbating a greater dialogue about race in America; and also the best opportunity he will get to show just how hideous and underhanded his harshest critics actually are. All President Obama accomplished was to give undue credibility, power and influence to Mr. Breitbart and FOX “News.”

Considering the propaganda published and reported by the far right media, President Obama would have had to have fired himself about a hundred times by this point if he had given the ultra-right-media the same respect — in regard to himself — as he gave them in the Sherrod fiasco.

I am constantly shouting from the mountaintops that President Obama is merely the latest in a long line of Puppets who do the bidding for the myriad of large multinational Corporations that dictate our Democracy and Legislation for their Imperialist/Moneyed interests. But in the case of Mrs. Sherrod, President Obama proved himself to be less than merely a puppet of corporatism, but now a “leader” lacking common sense — and a modicum of intelligence — who will bow down to the reactionary ignorance of propaganda machines that themselves exist only to divide us and perpetuate the blind hatred and intolerance of individuals, like our President, who have a wealth of experience to share based on their diverse cultural backgrounds. Rather than just viewing President Obama as a tool for Imperialist interests, I now put him in the category of the common “Uncle Tom” who is willing to sell out his own unique cultural heritage as well as “We the People” for his Corporate Masters.

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Sing us away Lou:

When a night city’s breeze blows across the room
And a 5 am moon and sun start their swoon
You hear your lover’s breath
And not a moment too soon
You get to

Release all your emotions, you get to
Let go of your emotions, and now
Release all your emotions, you’d better
Let go of your emotions

Release, I wanna let go
I wanna release, now (Reed)

Alex Knight: The End of Capitalism, Part 2-A

Todd Curl — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:37:37 +0000

Alex Knight, a writer, teacher and social activist based in Philadelphia, recently asked me to republish the first two parts of an interview he did with Michael Carriere regarding his construct of what he calls The End of Capitalism. While it is not my desire to re-publish other works of original content by writers other than myself, I made an exception in this case as Alex Knight’s writings on the subject are not only articulate, concise and well-constructed, they are also of grave concern to me (and hopefully everyone) as the Imperialist and exploitative system of Capitalism/Corporatism has been plundering the natural and human resources of the earth for far too long. Mr. Knight’s words are needed more than ever right now, and so is our call to action to stand up to the moneyed interests that control our democratic process and alienate us from our own interests and each other. I re-published the first part of Alex’s interview on my other site, The Pigeon Post, which you can find here. So here is part two (a) of Alex Knight on The End of Capitalism:

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The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. This is the second part of a four-part interview.

Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits

MC: Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?

AK: This is such an important question, and it’s vital to think and talk about the crisis in this way, with a view toward history. It’s not immediately obvious why this crisis began and why, two years later, it’s not getting better. Making sense of this is challenging. Especially since knowledge of economics has become so enclosed within academic and professional channels where it’s off-limits to the majority of the population. Even progressive intellectuals, who aim to translate and explain the crisis to regular folks, too often fall into the trap of accepting elite explanations as the starting point and then injecting their politics around the edges. This is why there is such an abundance of essays and videos analyzing “credit default swaps”, “collateralized debt obligations,” etc., as if this crisis is about nothing more than greedy speculators overstepping their bounds.

On the contrary, the End of Capitalism Theory insists there are deeper explanations for why this crisis is so severe, widespread, and long-lasting. Here’s one explanation: The devastating quaking of the financial markets, and the lingering aftershocks we’re experiencing in layoffs and cut-backs, are manifestations of much larger tectonic shifts under the surface of the economy. This turmoil originates from deep instabilities within capitalism, the global economic system that dominates our planet. The dramatic crisis we are experiencing now is resulting from a massive underground collision between capitalism’s relentless need for growth on one side, and the world’s limited capacity to sustain that growth on the other.

These limits to growth, like the continental plates, are enormous, permanent qualities of the Earth – they cannot be ignored or simply moved out of the way. The limits to growth are both ecological, such as shortages of resources, and social, such as growing movements for change around the globe. As capitalism rams into these limiting forces, numerous crises (economic, energy, climate, food, water, political, etc.) erupt, and terrible destruction sweeps through society. This collision between capitalism and its limits will continue until capitalism itself collapses and is replaced by other ways of living.

The End of Capitalism Theory argues that capitalism will not be able to overcome these limits to growth, and therefore it is only a matter of time before we are living in a non-capitalist world. A paradigm shift towards a new society is underway. There’s a chance this new future could be even worse, but I hold tremendous hope in the capacity of human beings to invent a better life for themselves when given the chance. Part of my hope springs from the understanding that capitalism has caused terrible havoc all over the world through the violence it perpetrates against humanity and Mother Earth. The end of capitalism need not be a disaster. It can be a triumph. Or, perhaps, a sigh of relief.

Defining the Crisis

Rather than spend our time learning the language of Wall St. and trying to understand the economic crisis from the perspective of the bankers and capitalists, I think we can get much further if we take our own point of reference and then investigate below the surface to try to find the true origins of the crisis. This is what I call a common sense radical approach. Start from where we are, who we are, and what we know, because you don’t need to be an academic to understand the economy – you just need common sense. Then try to get to the root of the issue (radical coming from the Latin word for “root”). What is really going on under the surface? What is the core of the problem? If we can’t come up with a common sense radical explanation of the crisis, we’ll always be stuck within someone else’s dogma. This could be Wall St. dogma, Marxist dogma, Christian dogma, etc. So what is this crisis really about?

I assert that the current crisis is dramatically and profoundly different from any crisis previously faced by the global capitalist system. I see one basic reason for this: the system can no longer grow. Without growth, capitalism cannot function. Like a shark that must keep moving in order to breathe, a capitalist economy must keep growing in order to survive. Without the possibility, or probability, that investors will make a profit on their investments, they will not invest. No one invests if they expect to lose money or keep the same amount. If investors cease to invest, businesses cannot expand, jobs are lost, consumer spending declines, and loans stop coming, creating a cycle of bust. Crashing markets will continue to freefall until the government steps in with bailouts to artificially boost investment. But bailouts are only a temporary solution. If the markets cannot be “corrected” and get back on a growth trajectory, game over.

Financial analyst Nomi Prins has tallied the various loans, guarantees and giveaways that make up the Wall St. bailout to a total of $17 Trillion [PDF], a sum larger than the annual GDP of the United States. This is a staggeringly expensive life support system for the “too big to fail” banks. How much longer can the federal government essentially print dollars to keep the stock market afloat? The End of Capitalism Theory says, “not long.” In the long arch of history, we are at the tail end of the capitalist period. Whatever follows it, for better or worse, will need to be adapted to a smaller economy.

Capitalism and Enclosure

To understand the end of capitalism, we need to know where the system started. For 500 years, capitalism has spread like a cancer across the planet. It first spawned in Western Europe on the backs of the peasants and small farmers who were displaced by the “enclosures.” The enclosures were the forced privatization of land, literally the enclosing or fencing off of land that was previously shared or held in common. The state acted as enforcer of this process, violently expelling poor communities from their homes and the “commons,” or traditionally public land. The land was taken away from the small farmers so it could be exploited for large-scale agriculture and animal herding.

These enclosures had the effect (intended or not) of creating two new classes of people: 1. a small opportunist class of private landowners and businessmen who evolved into today’s capitalists, and 2. a large landless class of workers who were forced to toil for a wage in the new urban factories, because they had nowhere else to go.

At the very same moment, the European states carried out the enslavement of millions of Africans and the genocide of the indigenous nations of North and South America. Suddenly two “new” continents could be exploited, with slave labor, bringing tremendous wealth to the rising capitalist elites in Europe. This brutal violence against people of color was instrumental in the spread of capitalism across the planet. It was accompanied by a terrifying assault on women in the form of the witch hunts, which saw hundreds of thousands of women tortured and burned alive, according to Silvia Federici’s provocative and necessary book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

The book documents how the Church and state used the witch hunts to persecute sexually rebellious women, such as those having sex out of wedlock, committing adultery, abortion or infanticide. They also targeted women who held respected professions in peasant communities, such as that of midwife, healer, or fortune teller. Federici sees this as a broad attack on women that created a new kind of patriarchal order. She explains that by the time the witch hunts came to an end in the 17th century, women in capitalist society had largely become enclosed within the prescribed roles of mother pumping out new workers, or unpaid houseworker. These are exactly the female roles that the new system of capitalism required of women, argues Federici, because womens unpaid reproductive labor boosted capitalist profits just like the unpaid labor of the African slaves. Keeping women confined as housewives and mothers meant their labor was never valued, although this labor is necessary for the entire society to exist.

Women have pushed back against this paradigm and made dramatic gains in the past 50 years, especially in the Global North. But in the Global South the position of women has largely deteriorated as capitalism has penetrated.

A disturbing but necessary example is the Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and mutilated in the past decade. This mass rape is a weapon in the ongoing war between various guerrilla and state factions over minerals like coltan. Coltan is used in many of our electronic devices such as laptops and cell phones, making it highly valuable. The factions that export these minerals to the global market make a lot of money, which they can use to purchase weapons. Attacking women’s bodies has been one way to assert control over territory, as the shame of rape too often leads to the ostracizing of the women, thus breaking apart peasant communities. Once the village is displaced, their land becomes available for mining.

This appalling violence in the Congo is more than a throwback to the enclosures which first launched capitalism, for as Silvia Federici says, systemic violence “has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times” (pg. 13).

In other words, enclosure has been an ever-present feature of capitalism because the system cannot reproduce itself without constantly putting up walls to control and limit human possibility, as well as controlling the planet itself. To be blunt, people usually only submit to capitalism when they no longer have any option.

Federici’s work challenges many myths about capitalism, such as the conservative assertion that capitalism works best without state interference, as well as the vulgar Marxist assumption that capitalism was a progressive advance over pre-capitalist forms of life, on some linear march of history. On the contrary, Federici uses the example of the witch hunts to demonstrate that capitalism has always relied on state violence in order to attack not only women’s position in society, but all communal or non-capitalist forms of life. Although she makes it clear that not all pre-capitalist forms of life were idyllic or free of oppression, the ultimate lesson she draws is that capitalism is an enemy of life itself, and that its spread has been a dramatic setback for all of us, including the planet.