The Group of 20 Summit protests in Pittsburgh this past September were a threshold event. Not only were protesters detained and beaten by the police, but they were also subjected to new military-grade technologies that have pushed the boundaries of what kinds of actions are permissible for controlling large crowds of protesters, unruly or not.   This fact, however, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media for several reasons. First of all, the commercial media ignores stories it can’t spin into easy and familiar narratives of good and bad, right and wrong. The story of the G20 protests and the subsequent police brutality that took place during those protests does not match the facile optimism of political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. Instead, these corporate media outlets spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another alternative interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in Pittsburgh in 2009, New Orleans in 2005, and the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 all reveal the increasingly militant policies of the homeland security state since September 11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests and what they mean for the future of crowd control.

The policies of the new homeland security state reflect a consensus between law enforcement officials and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal weapons to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or the LRAD. This large sonic gun radiates short bursts of sound waves that are audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close creates a very loud and powerful noise that is capable of causing hearing loss and great levels of pain.  These LRAD devices have previously been used in Iraq for similar purposes. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 2005 off the coast of Somalia to fend off a group of pirates. The pirates left the ship alone despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. And now the use of the weapon domestically against non-violent crowds of American citizens is taking place, arguably not only a violation of their civil liberties but also a violation of basic human rights.

The device is meant to inflict “non-lethal injury.” In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military uses to torture enemy combatants in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Like the Taser gun, which has become so popular with local police departments, the LRAD is yet another law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate wide ranges of before unheard of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.

Equally problematic is the increase in the use of the riot act to criminalize the use of social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Local authorities in New York took major steps to circumscribing the effects of public protests in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by targeting the use of communications devices by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Tweeting the location of the police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently organizing. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated pictures of Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the 1968 Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.

These actions send a chilling message to potential political activists and every day citizen protesters, that public authority will use any means necessary to control individuals and crowds. This includes authorizing the use of violent new instruments of control. Each new tool reflects a unique technological breakthrough in the science of controlling human bodies efficiently. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward suffering. Each little compromise has required a denial that returns as a form of fear and anxiety in much of the American public. Not coincidently, the American public has reacted passively against these new technologies of immobilizing bodies. Anxiety paralyzes one’s ability to think clearly about the real movements in American politics.

These real movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that simulate natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and civil disturbances. A simulation video advertised on YouTube boasts that every block in New York has been digitally reproduced for that training. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized, methodical, and potentially dehumanizing approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, for instance protests are also classified as civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are, in turn, defined as man-made disasters. As a result, strategic responses to natural disasters and protest disasters are very similar. They involve suspending civil liberties for the purposes of protecting public order and private property. Crowds of the population are ‘managed,’ whether they have gathered to loot, commit violence, or just to protest.

They are also managed if they become displaced by climate catastrophes or economic incentives. In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR received a $385 million contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” that Oliver North spearheaded during the Reagan administration. The exercise imagined that 400,000 migrants from Mexico entered the US and became an uncontrollable population. The plan called for all 400,000 to be detained. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be responsible for storing them. As immigrants, they would not be subject to constitutional protection.

Like the KBR centers contracted in 2006, the camps would detain, house, and process bodies. The United States has powers to create domestic internment camps just as all other state governments do. The World War II Japanese internment camps provide evidence that the United States can detain tens of thousands of bodies after declaring an emergency.

In 1982, former FEMA head Louis Giuffrida drafted an executive order for continuity of government planning in the event of nation-wide insurgency of African-American militants. The order called for “martial law” and “suspension of the Constitution.” The REX-84 camps and the Japanese interment camps are large-scale precedents for Guantanamo Bay. State authority rests on emergency powers in all three cases. They are large-scale precedents for the 2,000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York Republican Convention.

Populations often express themselves through specific, collective identities. One such form of identity is crowds. Crowds are inherently unstable and very powerful. They thus make the state vulnerable. Protests and protesters acquire disproportionate power when they form crowds. Crowds can make demands that elections cannot. Crowds can use force that cannot be undone. Crowds can shift political sentiment for authority by exposing the erosion of power, by embarrassing authorities, or by being subjected to police brutality. Crowds can visually demonstrate the violence of the state against certain ideas. As crowds, they have the power to draw emotions and media to ideas and bodies possibly subject to censorship or derision.

The collective power of assembled bodies can overwhelm repellent police technologies, including lethal weapons. Crowds can overwhelm state forces through the sheer power of numbers. A crowd as organized and energized as an Ohio State Buckeye football crowd could easily occupy the state capitol building in Columbus. This is why crowd control was essential for the protection of President Obama in Pittsburgh. This is also why movements that encourage various kinds of crowds have successful records against state forces. An example might be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the Berlin Wall crowds in 1989.

In response to the power of these crowds, states can declare and enforce martial law. During martial law, executive authority resides under the direction of local civil authorities. This is the single most important aspect of understanding martial law. Elements of the military maintain “liaisons” with federal, state, and municipal authorities. The 2005 Department of Defense “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” explicitly refers to the military support the Pentagon may lend local police authorities. Since the executive who declares emergency powers is local, to understand martial law one must not focus on Presidential executive powers. The Homeland Security press release by the Secret Service during the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit described the participating security bodies as a combination of “local, state, and federal security,” along with “public safety and military partners.”

In the context of American constitutional law and Department of Defense policy, martial law emergency powers always reside with local civil authorities. Martial law is not about negotiating checks and balances of federal powers, however. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States and can be called into being wherever crowds form. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the Bush administration wanted her to declare martial law or “as close as we can get.” This exchange lays bare where the powers reside.

This is the case because presidential authority is legally limited. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act withdrew northern troops from the south by limiting the powers of the executive to command military troops within US borders. The president could nonetheless still declare a state of national emergency and declare nationwide martial law. Doing so, however, would draw a great deal of negative attention and media. Martial law powers are much more flexible—and thus more tactically useful—because they rely on local authorities. Department of Defense military forces, when used domestically, would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support. These Civil Support forces would engage “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order.” These unlawful assemblages—crowds—might be dispersed through the simple act of a local authority. Crowds trigger these authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.

In the last two decades many of the laws surrounding crowd control came to define the actual apparatuses of federal emergency powers. Crowd control laws are important because they address how security forces can interact with real bodies. This then clarifies the real expressions and fears that motivate state power.  The REX-84 exercise is an example of state policies that envisage large-scale responses to massive population control problems. It is no accident that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following September 11. Airport security grew. Bridge security grew. Vast detention centers opened in Afghanistan and Iraq. A special torture camp opened in Cuba. The CIA “black sites” prison system continued to expand.

These are all human rights crimes. In the United States, human rights and civil rights are two separate discourses. It may be effective to wind them together more. Since 9/11 civil liberties have come under intense assault. Political dissent in the United States has essentially been effectively criminalized, becoming in the eyes of the law just one more form of emergency that must be met with controlling force. Civil disturbance manuals used by the army claim that disturbances arise from “highly emotional social and economic issues,” where “economically deprived” residents are ready to release frustrations. This link between civil disturbance, economic conditions, and emergency powers received some surprising attention last October, when California representative Brad Sherman claimed some legislators were threatened with the specter of martial law unless the bailout bill passed.

It is here that crowds, the forces of crowd control, and our Constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These liberties conflict with policies about crowds and civil disturbance. Since crowds threaten public order because of their power, the response of security forces reverts back to policies and laws that govern civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are emergencies, and as such emergency powers are in effect. Defining protests as emergencies allows police conduct that should be understood as unacceptable violations of the constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly. When all protest and all mass spontaneous gatherings are seen as emergencies, then the ability to actually practice any reasonably effective form of mass political action becomes nearly impossible, limited only to police and city authorized marches and rallies.

The permanent state of emergency, like the permanent war on terror that the Bush Administration envisioned, is here, stretching from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what kinds of abuse a population will tolerate against its fellow humans and fellow citizens. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined and unpopular ideologies. It seems to make no difference whether one is a Muslim, a terrorist, an anarchist, a communist or just a protester—one’s body is inevitably subject to all kinds of forms of temporary state control. For radical Muslims this state control can last for years of indefinite detention; it can also include torture. For illegal immigrants it might last months and sometimes years. Judging by Pittsburgh and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, it can last for a few days against American citizens.

Sadly, it is hard to direct public attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law without punishment because they have acquired a patriotic armor. The same is true for American soldiers. The police and the military elicit intense forms of devotion from wide intersections of classes and ethnicities. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.

The fact is that under both the constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights citizens have the right to assembly. But peaceful assembly is also a human right. Any new security policy must reflect these rights. Crowd formation is inevitable. No government can ultimately control collected human bodies and organized crowds. Policies must reflect this reality. Crowds too control the terms of “consent” inherent in all representative government. Recognizing this will make it easier to evolve the political systems in new ecological and economic eras. Decaying political forms will erode in power. The corporate-funded two-party system relies on an infinite-growth economy that relies on fossil fuels for food and labor production. The post-petroleum era will require much more local forms of production. The groups that will dominate this era will form new kinds of crowds. They must to be allowed to emerge.

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In early January the BBC reported that Mohammad Bouazazi, a Tunisian college graduate who illegally sold fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, had died from his self-inflicted burns. He had set himself on fire by dousing his body with petrol when poli

ce confiscated his produce. He didn’t have the proper permits. Public protest had been rare in Tunisia before. When he died, the BBC reported that “a crowd estimated at 5,000 took part in his funeral.” The crowd chanted the same message together, out loud: “Farewell, Mohammad, we will

avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused

your death weep.”

As the crowd marched toward the governor’s office, a cordon of police blocked them, and opened fire. The police also shot at protestors in Menzel, another town, after members of the crowd lobbed Molotov cocktails at them. Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali reacted by condemning the demonstrations and appointed a new youth minister to help solve the rising unemployment problem. But first he tried to destroy the revolution by declaring a state of emergency, and authorizing the police to fire on the crowds. Al-Abidine resigned nine days later and left the country. Reuters reported that he fled because the crowds in Tunis “were not satisfied with his promise” to step down in 2014.

The revolution in Tunisia made visible decades of seething frustrations within its population. And while all local and national revolutions occur differently, they share many of the same qualities. To be successful, crowds require masses of bodies all emotionally invested with the same singular affective sensations. The intensity of experiencing emotions publically in a crowd drowns out the fear of death. The crowds share the same social emotions—the same affects—by relentlessly attaching those shared passions to symbols, bodies, and words. The affective experience of sharing one’s body with the crowd has the effect of framing the entire world in the present moment. This is what distinguishes the time of the crowd from the planning of the movement.

The intensity of the crowd excites the body to act without fear and it is this fearlessness that allows crowds to defy the police, and to walk towards gunfire. This is what makes the police useless, and when the police are useless, the state has no protection. Shared excitement in a crowd can be transmitted to others—what the Financial Times and others call “contagion.” This ex

citement is the ultimate weapon against the state. The final confrontation between state police and huge, emotionally excited crowds is a structural feature of radical political change. Crowds are the agents of revolution. They have radical political power.

The Tunisian opposition did not drive Ben Ali from power, despite years of resistance and organizing. Neither did Mohammad Bouazazi overthrow the Tunisian government. The BBC and others attribute that agency to the people, whom they simply call “crowds.” In a paradigm that can only imagine individuals, the vocabulary and analysis of crowds is under-theorized. But crowds are agents in themselves. They are physical assemblages wired to diffuse networks. They emerge from digital communications but their power is necessarily and entirely physical. This is because bodies must come together and act to assert radical political power. The movements that create crowds are well understood because one can trace documents, paper, Facebook pages. It is much harder to archive crowds. They are temporary organisms, and they have distributed intelligence. Perhaps each crowd has its own name, like a star. Perhaps the crowd at Mohammad Bouazazi’s funeral should be called “01092011-Garaat Bennour-Sidi Bouzid.”

Crowds speak together: “we will avenge you!” They move together in the same direction. They gather courage from those that died before them. Imagining the source of their common feeling excites them. Each act against them intensifies their feelings. It is not the time of dispassionate argument. It is not the time of voting and electoral manipulation. It is not the time of economic stability, of regular paychecks. It is not the time of comfort. It is the time of solidarity, the time of action. Crowds create the world for which they were waiting. They create their own sense of time, severing the past from the present, and connecting the present to the future. This is done by physically acting in ways that define the speech acts that end the past and call the future into the present. They do not transfer that power to another—to a president

, to a party, to an army. Crowds are their own armies.

These crowds might resemble the crowds at a rock concert or sports match. They all talk together. Their chants are like music; sometimes they sing. They react to symbols and rhetoric that collapse the complexity of events into simpler emotional signs. At an NFL game, it doesn’t matter how many times Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers has previously thrown a successful pass. Each time he accomplishes this it’s time to cheer, and nothing else matters except cheering. All the electronic screens in the stadium flash with stimulation. Green Bay fans know each other by their green shirts. They reinforce the intensity of victories and losses through physical proximity and the replication of the same sign: the Packers symbol, the cheesehead. They come to the stadium to be together, to share the common feelings, and to participate in an event. But political crowds aren’t mere spectators: they are themselves the participants.

Crowds represent the shadow public power in every state. They are everywhere, and everywhere their potential is political. Everywhere they must be managed. The Super Bowl goes to great lengths to associate its signs and symbols with those of the United States military. As with rock concerts and sports games, it is necessary to create and control crowds to win political elections. Elections necessitate the redistribution of crowd enthusiasm from democratic audiences into individuated tasks, like passing out leaflets or making phone calls. Voting is the ultimate way to channel the power of crowds. Voting summons crowds only to siphon them off, one by one. It transforms crowds back into individuals, who then transfer their power to representatives. These representatives then crowd together in highly organized political rituals, appropriating and consolidating that original power for themselves. Public opinion polls constantly measure shadow public power for how it feels. Lawyers and judges debate how “fair” trials can be when people “feel” bias toward events and persons. Emotional excitement is necessary to win campaigns and sometimes even court cases. But public emotions must be produced, managed, and measured constantly. They must be redirected. In this sense much of what we call politics is not “rational,” but highly affective.

And so the present wave of revolutionary insurgencies against Middle East despots has revealed a political truth for authoritarian states and democracies alike: crowds have radical power. They can overthrow governments. They are the visible force of radical social movements. They are the ever-present alternative to institutional politics. Radical political change is difficult w

ithout them. Crowds do not assemble to vote so that change can be institutionalized. This fact that crowds are a force in and of themselves explains, perhaps part of the failure of the Iraq War protests in 2003. Crowds cannot simply protest and go home. Crowds must understand that their power comes from their capacity to escalate and intensify their demands. The Iraq War crowds failed because ultimately the people participating could live with the war. Crowds only work when people decide they can’t live with the status quo.

Crowds emerge when authorities lose legitimacy. The Iraq War signaled the end of any legitimacy the George W. Bush administration may have had after 9-11, but it also showed that the United States is not a united state.  It is fragmented. Political parties depend on mobilizing broad sections of the population into narrow, winner-takes-all electoral victories. Americans don’t change this system because they make decisions everyday that suggest that they can live with it. They also believe, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the next regime will somehow be different.

Crowds can also drain legitimacy from authorities through their presence. The Madison crowds at the state capitol protesting Governor Walker’s union-busting bill, for instance, visibly demonstrated their opposition. These crowds made the law appear non-democratic even when it was passed through the use of “democratic” procedures. Crowds act on the legitimacy of their own authority. Their presence repeals the consent at the heart of representative or authoritarian government. They strip the law of its legitimacy by exposing the illegitimacy of state power. They create new social conditions. The law must follow the crowds, or else the state must disperse the crowds, arrest the crowds, fire on the crowds. Crowds strip away the consent of the governed. Govenor Walker’s smartest tactic was not calling the National Guard against the Madison crowds.

Crowds author revolutions, and revolutions usher in new states. Violence is the ultimate sign of this authorship. Violence is powerful and is inevitably managed by both sides. Nonviolent protest ultimately depends on the presence of crowds and state violence to succeed in its goals. Individual nonviolent protest is not nearly as effective as state violence directed against large crowds. To succeed, nonviolent crowds must go where they are not allowed. When they arrive at that point the police will

be forced to either confront them or let them pass. If the police turn on the crowd they will create martyrs and turn popular sympathies against state power.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham campaign in 1963 is a good example. In Birmingham in 1963 King arrived in the city to organize non-violent, direct action protests against the city’s segregation policies. King wanted to draw national attention. King said that the purpose of direct action was to “create a situation so crisis-packed that it opened the door to negotiation.” When the initial crowd didn’t strongly materialize and with the campaign in doubt, King invited young students to join a new march. To prepare the children, King’s contemporaries described how his speeches inspired the students by taking the fear out of the room. He made them unafraid to march.  They went to demonstrate and were hosed a

nd beaten. Media coverage of the event led television audiences to feel sympathy for the crowds. As national audiences “felt” the coverage, King immediately began to organize the March on Washington. The next year the Voting Rights Act was passed. The crowds in Birmingham and the crowds in Washington forced a crisis of legitimacy for the United States federal government.

Ultimately, all conflicts between states and crowds come down to a biopolitical confrontation: each ultimately manages life or death decisions. Governments must decide whether crowds are “the people” or whether they’re enemies of the state and crowds must decide whether or not overthrowing a regime is worth the sacrifice of their bodies and lives. Even in extreme totalitarian or authoritarian states, where freedoms are few, crowds can at least control their own bodies. They can decide to live or die.

They do not have the technological advantage. Before the Libyan rebels found weapons they were crowds who only had the power of their potential sacrifice. As in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, they had only their bodies to sacrifice. Dying in the crowd and for the crowd is not suicide, however. It is martyrdom. Martyrdom excites new crowds because it removes the fear of death – it manages it, displaces it, and produces shared feelings more powerful than the fear of death. In Iran, Neda Soltani became a martyr. In Tunisia it was Mohammad Bouazazi.

Even Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim had his own martyr. Ghonim was the Google programmer that briefly provided American television networks with a focus during their coverage. He networked with others before the revolution by creating a Facebook page for Khaled Said, who was a businessman killed last year by Egyptian police. Murdering someone to protect state interests is so outrageous that it inspires more crowds by intensifying the passions that allow them to come together.

During an interview with

Dream 2 television, Ghonim said, “I’m not a hero…the heroes, they’re the ones who were in the street, who took part in the demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, were beaten, arrested and exposed to danger.” He was then shown video of Egyptians dying in the crowds. He wept openly and left the studio. His tears inspired more Egyptians to enter the crowd. The significance of his tears is partly how they amplified the emotions of the Tahrir crowd at a crucial moment. They legitimized the actions of the crowd. The crowd transformed. Sometimes what matters isn’t that the crowd sustains the same emotion, but that it receives constant amplifications, stimulations, and sensations. Bodies must be excited.

The passions of life and death legitimize the right of the crowd. The radical power of the crowd operates through natural right. Right is co-extensi

ve with power. This power is the law; the crowd enforces its own law as it creates it. Its law is not text, but instead it is affective, rhetorical, and corporeal.

They are only social agents potentially capable of acting outside the law. Crowds are the weird mirror of the police. Yet the police act on behalf of the state. So the crowd is really the antipode of the state. They are inverse to one another, in dialectal tension. Crowds and authoritarian states both act on the margins of the law because they both actively create it. Crowds are criminal in the same way state authorities are criminal; because their right is co-extensive with their power, they create the law in real-time. Yet the state operates outside the law because it claims to be the law. It conducts its desires through discipline and physical force. Crowds produce political change in the state through jurisgenerative acts. Crowds depend on producing passions that nullify old laws and create conditions for new ones. By creating new passions they create public feelings that expose old laws for unjust ones.

The crowd is always marching toward state capitols and the police are always meeting them there. The crowd is the only social agent capable of threatening the body of the executive. Only the crowd can take over his office. The assassin is not a social agent. The crowd is powerful precisely because its agency is distributed. You can isolate individuals in a crowd, but you cannot put a crowd on trial. This is also why crowds are somewhat beyond and beside the control of the law.

In dictatorships, the despot makes the law of the land. In an authoritarian democracy such as the United States, the President can wield “executive power” over and beyond the Constitution and Congressional law. He seems only partly bound by the threat of judicial sanction. This threat contains the distant kernel of punitive justice. Bill Clinton testified for lying about an affair, but Bush did not even have to testify under oath for the 9-11 commission. Those surrounding the executive have paid fines, gone to jail, testified under oath. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was indicted for Iran-Contra but later was pardoned by George H.W. Bush. Ford pardoned Nixon before he could even be tried. Presidential pardons perform the radical power of the executive.

Digital networks and social media may allow for communication and organization, but American technology corporations are not responsible for dem

ocratic movements. They may provide mediums that help crowds communicate, but the companies themselves are not aligned with democracy. Google openly works with the NSA and the CIA. All the telecommunication companies, except the soon to be merged T-Mobile, work directly with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The US military actively creates fake Facebook accounts for multiple purposes, with Facebook’s implicit consent.

It is worth noting that the US government understands the radical potential of American crowds. In 2007 George W. Bush passed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, which activates the US military for any “incident” that overwhelms local or state police. The act specifically states that the military will be used to “suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such…a condition…so hinders the execution of the laws.” This act, of course, is an attempt to control crowds, not terrorism.

Bush also gave life to new “executive” powers that President Barack Obama has not yet rescinded. In Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20, Bush said that any “catastrophic emergency,” defined as “any incident” that resulted in a “disruption” to government function or the economy, could result in power solely residing in the executive.  This power presumably includes suspension of the Constitution and martial law. This “incident” could presumably include a general strike. These laws marshal the full force of state power against the radical power of crowds. It will be a fateful irony if the continued consolidation of American power into the office of the President, together with the consistent collaboration with non-democratic corporations, produced a dysfunctional American democracy that necessitated the intervention of the very crowds these laws so obviously fear.

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One of the first glimpses of The Social Network came in July, when an early trailer appeared on YouTube. It was a music video of sorts, featuring a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” over images of typical Facebook photos and status updates—the latter typed into the blank text box in faux ‘real time,’ as in the recent Google ads. The pictures were the standard utopian scenes of youthful recreation that mark the many related genres of online photos: all-too-perfect snapshots of daytrips, candid clips of backyard BBQs, careless grins showcasing the finest balance of composed spontaneity. We see anonymous smiling faces frozen in scenes resembling an Urban Outfitters fall catalogue, which is what Facebook photos have essentially become.

They pop on-screen and disappear the way you click through a friend’s party. Click, click, click, and entire chains of happy days blossom and fade in split seconds. What takes hours to plan, document, sort, and upload then provides your third-grade best-friend with less than twenty seconds of entertainment on their iPhone, 2000 miles away and twenty years later.

A cursor arrow clicks on “add friend” and “confirm friend,” while recent graduates smile, arms wrapped around each other. Then a moody profile shot appears, with a hand reaching toward the camera lens and covering it. This is the other genre of the social network: the solo pose of self-representation, as tired as a freshman year art project. It signals an interruption to the fun. Suddenly someone types on a friend’s wall, and reveals the burrowed longing nestled in the heart of Facebook users everywhere: where are you?

Instructively, the choir answers through the point-blank confession of Thom Yorke’s stripped down loner: “I want you to notice when I’m not around.” What was grunge pathology becomes a prescient analysis of the emotions fueling the dot-com boom still to come. One asks to know, one wants to show, and billions of dollars follow. Time, distance, and desire converge in new wires that no longer require real-time communication between the curious and lonely, such as a phone-call, but instead function like a mass email to everyone. Connecting everyone is Facebook—a corporation that, as founder Mark Zuckerburg exclaims mid-way through the film The Social Network, takes the entire experience of college and puts it online.

The Radiohead lyrics overlaying these otherwise ubiquitous images are beautiful and eerie. They stamp what is perhaps a central and controversial theme of the film: that Facebook is not a technology of communication and connection, but one that exists to exploit alienation and exclusion. Any brouhaha about the truthfulness of the film’s representation of Zuckerburg is completely beside the point. Alienation and exclusion are the subjects of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, and what appear again and again in the brilliant performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerburg as the film chronicles his years before and after Harvard earlier this decade.

The riveting opening scene is an awkwardly dark conversation about social status between Zuckerburg and his date, Erica (Rooney Mara). Zuckerburg wants to join the elite Harvard social clubs where the children of the rich and privileged mingle, party, have sex, and build the affective bonds that will connect their professional and social networks for the rest of their careers. Erica is incredulous and more than a little disturbed by Zuckerburg’s open and cynical ambition. Over the course of the discussion they break up, and Zuckerburg return to his dorm to humiliate her in a blog, and subsequently invent a “hot or not” Harvard website with the help of his only friend, Eduardo Saverin. The site crashes the server.

The desire that Zuckerburg first channeled into a hierarchy of hotness is the same that animates the arrows that click “add friend.” Behind the spectral glow of the screens and photos are the missing bodies that these images and updates represent and display. This desire has many gradations and circulates with different intentions. It flows and morphs far beyond the urge to peek through the binoculars at the neighbors. Facebook isn’t about looking at strangers. Weirdly, it’s about looking at your friends and family, and also the people you only kind of know. It provides intimacy where intimacy is desired.

This desire for intimacy doesn’t necessarily come from lonely people. It doesn’t expose an overflow of information. It reveals the infinite desires that bodies make. It connects a disconnected, insatiable generation. It reveals that we can never be connected enough, despite our protests that we are too visible.

Zuckerburg’s loneliness and isolation inadvertently produced a technology to distribute the infinite waves of desire that flow through all relationships. This is in part because users themselves extended the logic of college friend profiles and began using them to mediate all social relationships. This caused some weirdness a couple years ago, when recent graduates found friend requests from their parents, or from “friends” they made in dance class the summer after eighth grade.

Discussions about the flattening of the past, the meaning of “friendship,” or the impracticalities of contemporary privacy miss the essential point of Facebook’s expansion. The growth of this entire company was propelled almost entirely by the desires of people everywhere to connect to one another. The company’s sole task, as Zuckerbug realizes in the film, was merely to provide channels to define, categorize, and capture that desire. It didn’t need advertising or need to convince anyone to join, aside from a few recalcitrant and independently minded individuals.

No one had to sell anyone else on Facebook, or Myspace, or even Friendster. The purpose of social networks was and remains obvious. People need to connect because they feel disconnected. They’re alienated. They’re distant from the people they love and care about. We live in a culture and in an economy that demands we act in our own self-interests. At best, some of us are able to live with people we love. Many don’t, or can’t.

Facebook—like communication technology in general—reflects a need that goes beyond putting the experience of college online. In the film, Zuckerburg uses Facebook to make friends, even as it alienates him from the one or two he already has. Facebook, then, isn’t so much a technology of connection as it is a revelation about the fractured and mediated nature of contemporary friendship.

It’s not a sign we’re more connected than ever—not quite. It’s a sign our bodies have never been more isolated from the bodies we want to be with. At the same time, the bodies we want have never been so visible. Facebook has more in common with porn than one might think.  Not coincidently, Zuckerburg stumbled onto the idea only after he created a “hot or not” site that crashed the Harvard servers. And that site came only after he was dumped.

In the film, Zuckerburg wants to be inside the Harvard clubs, and he wants to be with the girl he offends in the opening scene. The other half of that desire, however, is the desire for status, since it’s also status that makes the otherwise undesirable desirable. Zuckerburg can’t rely on an athletic body, and he doesn’t have the charisma that is so valuable in a US social culture that more and more resembles US corporate culture, where who you know, how energetic you are, and how positive you seem has as much to do with your success as talent or hard work.

The most important function of the “status update” is that it literally signals a status update. One’s friends have become one’s fans. The psychology of celebrity has been democratized – it’s no accident that the site rose to fame alongside the success of reality television and Youtube. Facebook is the logical extension of MTV’s The Real World. It’s a site where status and desire intersect, and those intersections are also where the film engineers its plot.

Status and desire are inseparable and fickle—and profitable. And so it’s impossible to separate what’s creepy and desperate about Facebook from its utility as an instrument of self-production and self-promotion. As an instrument for self-production, Facebook primarily encourages users to promote themselves and their way of life. Its function is in that sense reproductive of status, of class life, and of the digital architecture that provides actual maps to the bars, apartments, houses, concerts, and restaurants that physically sustain and excite the body. It’s one giant “app” for friendship.

To the extent that friendship accompanies the rituals that nourish and pleasure the body, Facebook is the prosthetic skin that envelopes collective relationships. It’s become the digital skin of friendship that allows us to graze each other from afar, like a touch in the hall.

As such, the site is perhaps the ultimate product of the neo-liberal era of privatization and modern corporate power.  Facebook has privatized social communication, class status, and, at the extreme point of this logic, all the human relationships that use it. It’s done this by monetizing friendship itself. It has turned the last location without corporate branding into a space of corporate intervention. Facebook is the first corporation to capitalize on relationships between people, and not simply the relationship between people and products, or between people and celebrities that sell products.

Embedded too within the company’s 25 billion dollar value is also the free promotion of products, companies, and businesses that people can “like,” and thus promote for free. It’s a site that captures the entire ethereal chain of viral marketing and solidifies it. Facebook has digitized desire. It’s channeled affections into categories. It has discovered how to formalize relationships by setting up a system for their public legitimation: one is “in a relationship” or “engaged to,” or “married to.”

In addition to providing a space for individuals to upload their lives—to digitize their values and desires and turn them into usable information and media for other companies—Facebook has allowed consumers disconnected from the production, promotion, and even consumption of products to push those products for free.

People push for what they “like” as naturally as they push to promote themselves and their friends. This is the privatization of advertising, propelled by human desire, and thus inaugurates the creation of a new kind of consumer-producer. One has become the ad for oneself. In one’s pictures one can create an ad campaign for his or her own lifestyle. One links this lifestyle to products. In some sense, Facebook has become the marketplace for selling our lives to each other. This is how we reproduce ourselves: we make ourselves desirable, and we link our affections to sites that ultimately make money.

Mark Zuckerburg turned his desire to be intimately close to desirable bodies into a technology that allowed everyone to do the same. He made billions turning friendship into a brand. Using that technology, we made profiles that essentially function like brands. Our profiles link to businesses and ads and companies. This is the synergy of US-style capitalist democracy. We are all Mark Zuckerburgs.

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The rapid national organization of the Tea Party has become one of the most extraordinary developments in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a diverse movement or a confused one. In truth it is both, but only because it is a cover for more than one movement. What we may be witnessing is a momentary intersection of two nascent movements, a populist one and a fascist one. Which of these movements will prevail will depend on what happens to the US economy in the near future. The future power of the Tea Party will crystallize, disintegrate, or morph in direct relationship with the so-called “real” economy of “Main Street.” The economic recovery will have to feel real to ordinary US citizens to succeed. So far it hasn’t. If there is no real recovery on Main Street, if ordinary Americans do not begin to feel like things are getting better in ways that really matter to them; if its middle-class majority becomes convinced that liberal capitalism has permanently malfunctioned then it is quite possible that the fascist elements of the Tea Party will coalesce into more extreme forms of antagonism.. It appears we are at that threshold now.

 In a recent New Yorker, Ben McGrath implies the Tea Party is nothing more than a hodge-podge of paranoid, right-wing populists. Likewise, Jonathan Raban’s expose in The New York Review of Books describes the convention in Nashville as a “loose congeries of unlike minds” united only by a common “contempt” of Obama. Both articles observe that many of the members subscribed to a wide range of counter-narratives concerning American power, such as the “birther” insistence that Obama isn’t an American, or the “truther” insistence that there are serious holes in the story of the 9/11 commission. There are evangelical wings and libertarian advocates. And then there is the surprising fact that the Tea Party movement is so old, and the unsurprising fact that it is so white.

The Tea Party’s suspicion of Washington, Obama, and the liberal media, however, is justified. The current financial crisis has conclusively exposed the real ties between Wall Street and Washington. The resolute self-censorship of the mainstream media to investigate that relationship has severely degraded many people’s faith in corporate journalistic integrity. This goes not only for CNBC, which championed the financial insanity during the bubble, but also for liberal publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker. Both the Times and FOX News are equally as likely to derisively dismiss interpretations from the right or left that don’t fit their ideological lens as a form of conspiracy theory. The recent crisis has opened an enormous rift between information that appears to explain the world and the information in the mainstream media, which seems merely to describe it. The abject failure of the mainstream media to investigate the potential conflicts in the relationships of the power elite on Wall Street and in Washington continuously opens a vacuum that progressives and conservatives must fill with their own research.

As Ben McGrath and others have noted, the Tea Party does a lot of its own research. Liberals dismiss their ideas with the same group-think arrogance found in the Tea Party itself, but one must at least give the Tea Party some credit for originality. The recent explosion of so-called conspiracy theory is not the product of the Internet’s ability to provide cheap access to fringe thinking. It is due to the degraded ambitions and responsibilities of mainstream American journalism and its complicity within the tiers of power it follows. Mainstream journalism actively participates in the simultaneous silencing of alternative media and the promotion of bounded debates that exclude openings outside the political mainstream. The resentment of Tea Party members for this silencing parallels progressive resentments of the same institutions. This silencing is a form of corporate censorship, not unlike that which the Chinese regime uses to edit Google searches. The difference is that the Chinese government uses censorship to edit stories, suppress information, and punish journalists for publishing anywhere. In the US, one can publish one’s thoughts online, for free. They are just not honored by those in power, and thus only “believed” by a small circle of one’s readers. Censorship in the United States instead takes the form of active derision, humiliation, and snobbery towards individuals promoting alternative narratives about the world. The Tea Party exists because of this information vacuum, however, and not simply because gullible people are excited by novel accusations and wacky ideas. This vacuum also serves the purpose of matching information to the emotions of one’s life, which is a necessary link one must make in order to explain the world to oneself.

The self-censorship within the corporate mainstream media is all the more problematic because the narratives they’ve inherited from their own political wing—their White House—just aren’t selling. What David Brooks, David Axelrod, Timothy Geithner and the Times fail to understand is that Obama’s pragmatic ideology is not one of compromise, but a compromised ideology. Obama’s intellectual principles have traded originality for power. From the beginning of his 2008 presidency campaign, he defined himself by his slip-shod fidelity to being “smart” without being “ideological.” His refusal to address the real ideological underpinnings of his own worldview has thus turned into his greatest weakness. He has no organizing principle for the world, and that’s why he’s become the perfect cipher for the real tiers of American power working around him. The most insidious part of Obama’s presidency is his blindness to his own beliefs. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but his lack of originality—his failure to think outside the box—stems directly from the fact that he doesn’t believe he’s in a box to begin with.

His decisions have thus become a synthetic gumbo of liberal policy decisions without the benefit of a liberal ideology—no Great Society, no Works Progress Administration. Obama’s form of pragmatic liberalism denies itself as liberalism, and thus Obama and his supporters constantly claim the righteous high-ground of compromise; all they want, they say, is smart power. What they don’t realize is that the real ideological and economic foundations of liberalism are dead. The collapse of the US economy is not only the fault of the Republicans, but is equally the fault of Obama and Bill Clinton, and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. Democrats have used US power in past decades as a platform for neo-liberal free-market policies like NAFTA and deregulation, as well as neo-conservative foreign policy adventures like Iraq. For Obama, things working right means a surge in Afghanistan, business-as-usual bonanza bonuses for the banking barons, and no single-payer or even public option healthcare system. It shouldn’t continue to surprise progressives that Obama doesn’t seem passionate about gay marriage, troop withdrawals, or financial reform.

In the face of Obama’s ineffectual leadership, it’s not surprising that Scott Brown was able to pull independent votes in the Massachusetts special election. Obama was correct to surmise that the populist tides that carried him into office also carried Brown into his. This populist tide also fertilized the Tea Party. It exists because the past financial collapse has killed liberalism—itself a contradictory mish-mash of capitalist exploitation and partial government programs. It’s dead because the United States has recently either escaped or forestalled economic collapse, but many regions in the United States are still experiencing the full shock of that catastrophe. Entire communities are socially and economically dead. For all practical purposes, these regions are currently sitting on the edge of the extreme social decay that follows economic depression. They are merely surviving while financial markets cautiously resume the practices of lending, leverage, and bonuses that contributed to the origins of the crisis. The economy has not recovered so much as it’s been revived, but the corpse that’s talking on CNN still looks, to everyone, like Frankenstein’s monster.

The Federal Reserve, not the Treasury Department, electrified this monster back into existence. The Fed’s policies absorbed and soaked up the worst of the credit crisis through quantitative easing, money printing, and the trillions of dollars of toxic securities it purchased. Those actions make the bailout seem trite. They have received very little attention in the mainstream media, although organizations like GATA (Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) and websites like Zero Hedge have filed lawsuits and uncovered documents to pinpoint vast schemes of corruption, influence, and manipulation at the Fed now and in previous decades. The Fed serves as the lynchpin of liberalism because it creates money. By softening the effects of recessions through monetary expansion—that is, by creating credit bubbles—it reduces the possibilities for social revolt against the ruling elite. This is because middle-class wealth depends on an addiction to that credit and money. It thus prevents the social consequences of financial risk. Run by a cabal of banks, the Fed usurps the constitutional mandate for the Treasury to print money and instead prints it for the government, all the while controlling interest rates. During recessions and depressions it follows the Keynesian proscription to “spend” out of a recession. This is the world Obama wants to find pragmatic solutions to sustain.

The true litmus test of liberalism for a wobbly progressive is an opinion about the Fed, because a real liberal has either never questioned it or flat-out supports it. The failure of progressives to imagine a financial system post-liberalism is one of its main intellectual weakness, and thus one of the reasons for the continued success of the Tea Party. The Tea Party libertarian argument for free-markets without the Fed is not identical to the free markets proposed under the banner of neo-liberalism. The Tea Party’s argument against government spending includes a sustained critique of the Fed, embodied by Texas representative Ron Paul. This is one of the reasons why the Tea Party appeals so well to populist sentiment: it has actually persuaded working and un-employed Americans that another economic system is possible, even if that other system is a species of capitalism. But non-liberal capitalism is a de-centralized, utopian idea. It bears as much relation to contemporary financial capitalism as Chinese communism does to the Soviet kind.

This is where the Tea Party might one day intersect with the progressive green movement. Both movements could favor de-centralized economies that exchange commodities and non-fiat currency between local producers and consumers. Without the Fed’s cheap money, economies wouldn’t grow as fast. This slower growth would have great benefits ecologically. Thus the Tea Party and the greens may imagine similar alternatives to corporate globalization, in that neither imagines the enormous institutions necessary to support corporate forms of growth and support – primarily the state itself. There is thus a fascinating logic in the desire to shrink government, were it to actually work: since the state is the central agent of support for capitalist firms, there’s a chance a weak state might lead to weaker corporations. On the other hand, it might lead the way to ever more horrible forms of corporate control. This is the conversation that should be taking place right now between progressive greens and Tea Partiers. If they can find a consensus around environmental pollution, they might unite in their mutual opposition to mass industry, consumption by debt, and centralized economies run by corporate lobbyists. This conversation isn’t happening, of course. And so the points of commonality between the Tea Party and certain progressive and green skepticism around Obama and liberalism may never grow into an even wider populist tent.

This may also never happen because there are very real problems with the Tea Party. The common dissatisfaction with Obama always seems hung on phrases that suggest violence. There is more xenophobia than conspiracy theory in the birther vitriol. At the Nashville conference, important Republican demagogues such as Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin were crowd favorites. Their style of charismatic, cartoonish patriotism make them leading political figures in what could become a newly indigenous American fascism.

In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton notes that Italian and German fascist movements blossomed during the collapse of their respective liberal capitalist states, and that both national movements came to power explicitly on anti-communist and anti-socialist slogans. They directed popular enthusiasm into dictatorships against the left, and mobilized passions already inflamed by the collapse of those capitalist economies. Crowds formed in order to inflict and threaten violence against specific targets, and legitimated it by simultaneously victimizing themselves and claiming ‘chosen-people’ status. The movement worked as an “anti-political politics,” or a politics that sought to use democratic techniques and extra-legal violence to destroy enemies of the people. Noam Chomsky uses similar language to describe the fanatic anti-political, anti-government perspective of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

What distinguishes the Tea Party thus far from these earlier fascisms is its failure, thus far, to explicitly self-identify as a racist movement, or as a group itself victimized by an enemy.  The vague idea of liberals or big government isn’t concrete enough to stir violence against groups, only institutions—like the IRS or the Pentagon or any federal agency. The fact that it is a white movement with some racists within it doesn’t make it a racist movement—not yet. Instead, angry whites dominate the group without elevating their whiteness as a condition of belonging. If it is racist, then, it advocates a weird kind of white power that other races are free to join. It has also failed to identify another “identity” group it holds primarily responsible for its problems. They rally against Mexican immigration without explicitly expressing disgust with Mexicans themselves. Tea Partiers have an obvious problem with “radical Islam,” but they aren’t organizing violence against Muslim-Americans. Different parts of the Tea Party seem angry at different enemies, and they project onto Obama a synthetic caricature of their fears. Even stranger, the Tea Party’s appeal as a fascist party has been clarified by its avowed declaration that Obama is a totalitarian, socialist, communist, and finally fascist dictator. It appears at times to be the very movement it proclaims to organize against.

The Tea Party is not yet the dependable vehicle of any coherent fascist policy, then, even as the politicians associated with it channel its emotions into threats of violence. Tea Party candidate for Texas governor, Debra Medina, was reported not to advocate “bloodshed” herself but rather to invoke it as “inevitable” if the constitution isn’t properly defended. In a stunning admission, she also told Glen Beck that she believed there were “good questions” about the role the Bush administration may have played in 9/11, and that the American people had not “seen all the evidence.” Her candidacy attracted attention and positive coverage from readers and listeners of Alex Jones’ “Prison Planet” and “Infowars” websites and radio shows. His popularity has also recently reached new heights; he was interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera’s FOX news program after the media tried to link John Patrick Bedell, the so-called Pentagon shooter, with the 9-11 truth movement. Jones is the  leading American skeptic of the 9/11 commission and, whatever his excesses and paranoia about issues like global warming, he is perhaps the most interesting figure in alternative media for bridging progressive and Tea Party politics together. He is also the greatest beneficiary of the mainstream media’s descent into corporate censorship, for better or worse.

But at this stage of its ascension, the movement’s failure to find a sustainable target for its anger has weakened the Tea Party. It will need a common enemy for the fascist wing to succeed and grow. This enemy cannot be Obama indefinitely. Still, their abject hatred of him is the closest the country has seen to a lynch-mob mentality in decades. Forty years ago, this same aggression would have led to open violence against African-Americans, especially in the south.

The reason the Tea Party has become legitimate for many Americans is because there is real anger right now. No one has been punished for the credit crisis except the middle and working classes. There is no sense that our laws apply to people in power. The elite have made statements expressing open contempt for ordinary Americans. Obama has appeared as a scapegoat for the right because the justice system hasn’t articulated a case against the real criminals, and because he has participated in that failure. His decision not to investigate the previous administration over torture and war crimes reveals a moral weakness under the deceptive guise of his “pragmatic” ideology. He wants to unite Americans but not address the forces that are tearing them apart. The truth is that Americans are divided more than ever by class, and those that are exploited deserve to feel angry. Geithner and Obama claim to have made the hard decisions in rescuing the economy, but they did so by saving the very institutions responsible for destroying it. In consequence, Obama’s desire for bi-partisan unity is as fatal an intellectual idea as it is a strategic one. He wants the parents to stop fighting so that they can keep beating the kids, or else to beat them softer and then give them health care.

Obama has surged twice in Afghanistan in the name of “nation-building” at a time when US infrastructure is falling apart at home. He rapidly expanded US drone strikes and covert operations in Pakistan in total violation of international law. He endorsed both real and proxy involvement of the US military in Yemen and Somalia. Even more ominously, his war strategy in Afghanistan continued even after a scandalously dubious election there, and just as Afghanistan’s now illegitimate President Hamid Karzai’s brother was exposed as a prominent drug trafficker on the CIA payroll. Everyday stories break about the clandestine involvements of the intelligence services and military contractors, and war with Iran seems increasingly likely. In combination with the role of the Fed, it’s clear that the US presidency doesn’t actually have the power necessary to change the country. Strangely, at the moment when executive power has never appeared stronger, a fascist wing of a populist movement has emerged because there is actually a power vacuum in the democratic machinery of this country. Fascist sentiments arise when government isn’t working. And if it continues not to work, one way or another there will be blood.

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The Group of 20 (G-20) Summit protests in Pittsburgh this past September were a threshold event. Not only were protestors detained and beaten by the police, but they were also subjected to new military-grade technologies that have pushed the boundaries of what kinds of actions are permissible for controlling large crowds of protestors, unruly or not. This fact, however, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media for several reasons. First of all, the commercial media ignores stories it can’t spin into easy and familiar narratives of good and bad, right and wrong. The story of the G-20 protests and the subsequent police brutality that took place during those protests does not match the facile optimism of political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. Instead, the

se corporate media outlets spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another alternative interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in Pittsburgh in 2009, New Orleans in 2005, and the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 all reveal the increasingly militant policies of the homeland security state since September 11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests and what they mean for the future of crowd control.

The policies of the new homeland security state reflect a consensus between law enforcement officials and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal weapons to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or the LRAD. This large sonic gun radiates short bursts of sound waves that are audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close creates a very loud and powerful noise that is capable of causing hearing loss and great levels of pain. These LRAD devices have previously been used in Iraq for similar purposes. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 20

A protestor at the Group of 20 Meeting in Pittsburgh, September 24, 2009. The Police Vehicle seen here is equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD)

05 off the coast of Somalia to fend off a group of pirates. The pirates were repelled despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. And now the use of the weapon domestically against non-violent crowds of American citizens is taking place, arguably not only a violation of their civil liberties but also a violation of basic human rights.

The device is meant to inflict “non-lethal injury.” In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military uses to torture enemy combatants in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Like the Taser gun, which has become popular with local police departments, the LRAD is yet another law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate wide ranges of before unheard of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.

Equally problematic is the increase in the use of the 1968 Riot Act to criminalize the use of social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Local authorities in New York took major steps to circumscribing the effects of public protests in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by targeting the use of communications devices by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Tweeting the location of police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently organizing. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated pictures of Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.

These actions send a chilling message to potential political activists and everyday citizen protesters, that public authority will use any means necessary to control individuals and crowds. This includes authorizing the use of violent new instruments of control. Each new tool reflects a unique technological breakthrough in the science of controlling human bodies efficiently. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward the suffering of others. Each little compromise has required a denial that returns as a form of fear and anxiety in much of the American public. Not coincidently, the American public has reacted passively against these new technologies of immobilizing bodies. Anxiety paralyzes one’s ability to think clearly about the real movements in American politics.

These movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that construct scenarios of natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and civil disturbances. A simulation video advertised on YouTube boasts that every block in New York has been digitally reproduced for that training. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized, methodical, and potentially dehumanizing approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, for instance, protests are also classified as civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are, in turn, defined as man-made disasters. As a result, strategic responses to natural disasters and protest disasters are very similar. They involve suspending civil liberties for the purposes of protecting public order and private property. Crowds are “managed,” whether they have gathered to loot, commit violence, or just to protest.

They are also managed if they become displaced by climate catastrophes or economic incentives. In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR received a $385 million contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” that Oliver North spearheaded during the Reagan administration. The exercise imagined that 400,000 migrants from Mexico entered the US and became an uncontrollable population. The plan called for all 400,000 to be detained. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be responsible for storing them. As immigrants, they would not be subject to constitutional protection.

Like the KBR centers contracted in 2006, the camps would detain, house, and process bodies. The United States has powers to create domestic internment camps just as all other state governments do. The World War II Japanese internment camps provide evidence that the United States can detain tens of thousands of bodies after declaring an emergency.

In 1982, former FEMA head Louis Giuffrida drafted an executive order for continuity of government planning in the event of nation-wide insurgency of African-American militants. The order called for “martial law” and “suspension of the Constitution.” The REX-84 camps and the Japanese interment camps are large-scale precedents for Guantanamo Bay. State authority rests on emergency powers in all three cases. They are large-scale precedents for the 2,000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York Republican Convention.

Populations often express themselves through specific, collective identities. One such form of identity is crowds. Crowds are inherently unstable and very powerful. They thus make the state vulnerable. Protests and protesters acquire disproportionate power when they form crowds. Crowds can make demands that elections cannot. Crowds can use force that cannot be undone. Crowds can shift political sentiment for authority by exposing the erosion of power, by embarrassing authorities, or by being subjected to police brutality. Crowds can visually demonstrate the violence of the state against certain ideas. As crowds, they have the power to draw emotions and media to ideas and bodies possibly subject to censorship or derision.

The collective power of assembled bodies can overwhelm repellent police technologies, including lethal weapons. Crowds can overwhelm state forces through the sheer power of numbers. A group as organized and energized as an Ohio State Buckeye football crowd could easily occupy the state capitol building in Columbus. This is why crowd control was essential for the protection of President Barack Obama in Pittsburgh. This is also why movements that encourage various kinds of crowds have successful records against state forces. An example might be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the Berlin Wall crowds in 1989.

In response to the power of these crowds, states can declare and enforce martial law. During martial law, executive authority resides under the direction of local civil authorities. This is the single most important aspect of understanding martial law. Elements of the military maintain “liaisons” with federal, state, and municipal authorities. The 2005 Department of Defense “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” explicitly refers to the military support the Pentagon may lend local police authorities. Since the executive who declares emergency powers is local, to understand martial law one must not focus on Presidential executive powers. The Homeland Security press release by the Secret Service during the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit described the participating security bodies as a combination of “local, state, and federal security,” along with “public safety and military partners.”

In the context of American constitutional law and Department of Defense policy, martial law emergency powers always reside with local civil authorities. Martial law is not about negotiating checks and balances of federal powers, however. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States and can be called into being wherever crowds form. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco following Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the George W. Bush administration wanted her to declare martial law or “as close as we can get.” This exchange lays bare where the powers reside.

This is the case because presidential authority is legally limited. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act withdrew northern troops from the south by limiting the powers of the executive to command military troops within US borders. The president could nonetheless still declare a state of national emergency and declare nationwide martial law. Doing so, however, would draw a great deal of negative attention and media. Martial law powers are much more flexible—and thus more tactically useful—because they rely on local authorities. Department of Defense military forces, when used domestically, would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support, which would engage “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order.” These unlawful assemblages—crowds—might be dispersed through the simple act of a local authority. Crowds trigger these authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.

In the last two decades many of the laws surrounding crowd control came to define the actual apparatuses of federal emergency powers. Crowd control laws are important because they address how security forces can interact with real bodies. This then clarifies the real expressions and fears that motivate state power. The REX-84 exercise is an example of state policies that envisage large-scale responses to massive population control problems. It is no accident that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following September 11. Airport security grew. Bridge security grew. Vast detention centers opened in Afghanistan and Iraq. A special torture camp opened in Cuba. The CIA “black sites” prison system continued to expand.

These are all human rights crimes. In the United States, human rights and civil rights are two separate discourses. It may be effective to wind them together more. Since 9/11 civil liberties have come under intense assault. Political dissent in the United States has essentially been effectively criminalized, becoming in the eyes of the law just one more form of emergency that must be met with controlling force. Civil disturbance manuals used by the army claim that disturbances arise from “highly emotional social and economic issues,” where “economically deprived” residents are ready to release frustrations. This link between civil disturbance, economic conditions, and emergency powers received some surprising attention last October, when California representative Brad Sherman claimed some legislators were threatened with the specter of martial law unless the bailout bill passed.

It is here that crowds, the forces of crowd control, and our Constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These liberties conflict with policies about crowds and civil disturbance. Since crowds threaten public order because of their power, the response of security forces reverts back to policies and laws that govern civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are emergencies, and, as such, emergency powers are in effect. Defining protests as emergencies allows police conduct that should be understood as unacceptable violations of the constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly. When all protests and spontaneous mass gatherings are seen as emergencies, then the ability to actually practice any reasonably effective form of mass political action becomes nearly impossible, limited only to police and city authorized marches and rallies.

The permanent state of emergency, like the permanent war on terror that the Bush administration envisioned, is here, stretching from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what kinds of abuse a population will tolerate against its fellow humans and fellow citizens. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined and unpopular ideologies. It seems to make no difference whether one is a Muslim, a terrorist, an anarchist, a communist or just a protester—one’s body is inevitably subject to all kinds of forms of temporary state control. For radical Muslims this state control can last for years of indefinite detention; it can also include torture. For illegal immigrants it might last months and sometimes years. Judging by Pittsburgh and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, it can last for a few days against American citizens.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to direct public attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law without punishment because they have acquired a patriotic armor. The same is true for American soldiers. The police and the military elicit intense forms of devotion from wide intersections of classes and ethnicities. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.

The fact is that under both the American Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights citizens have the right to assembly. Any new security policy must reflect these rights. Crowd formation is inevitable. No government can ultimately control collected human bodies and organized crowds. Policies must reflect this reality. Crowds too control the terms of “consent” inherent in all representative government. Recognizing this will make it easier to evolve the political systems in new ecological and economic eras.

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The End of Food by Paul Roberts. Houghton Mifflin (2008)

Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann. Viking Press (2009)

As we move closer to the tipping point of climate change, where we’ll lose control of our ability to influence atmospheric conditions on Earth, it’s probably time to reevaluate how everyday habits got us here. As a polemic, it might be instructive to see those habits as different kinds of addiction. Until a few years ago, the idea t

hat we might measure our diet and consumption of consumer goods through the lens of addiction would have been laughable. After all, drugs like tobacco and alcohol were the obvious public enemies to most Americans health throughout the 20th century. It wasn’t until medical and public policy rest

ricted the enormously toxic epidemic of nicotine addiction to acceptable levels, for instance, that public health advocates, social scientists, and intellectual crusaders could turn their resources to other public illness industries that privileged shareholder wealth over common health. By specifically trying to harm human beings, these companies will become common targets that those seeking to reform the current capitalist system might focus on. This reform is necessary for the health of human beings specifically, not to mention the biosphere more broadly.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most recent group of industries to feel the spotlight from this network of activists and advocates has been the food industry. As Paul Roberts narrates in his fluid and indispensable book The End of Food, this turn toward food represents a far larger and far more ambitious campaign than the one mounted against the tobacco industry in the 1990s or the alcohol industry during the Prohibition era in the 1920s. A number of factors will influence any successful reform of the food industry, which is intricately interlinked with global trade markets and crucially supported by fantastic sums of federal spending, mostly in the form of farm subsidies. But more importantly, this urgent and widespread turn toward such a basic part of our daily life raises profound and disturbing questions about the role our everyday life plays in our health and our happiness. Eventually, these questions will conflict with our freedom to pursue the tasks that human beings have enjoyed since we began to store grain, create cities, manipulate symbols, and reinvent the chemical codes found in the biosphere in order to better suit our needs—and perhaps most perilously, better fit our desires. Our daily cravings for “tasty” f

ood—whether cheap protein, luscious fat, or year-round organic produce—have become habits responsible for helping to create, in the words of Kenyan palaeoanthropoligst Richard E. Leaky, the sixth planetary mass-extinction in the history of the Earth. To first understand and then possibly moderate these desir

es requires us to navigate their complex intersections with our culture, our economy, and our neurobiology—in short, we must restyle, reconfigure, and re-imagine every part of how we live. And we will not do this bec

ause of lifestyle choices, such as “going green.” We will do this because our very lives are at stake; the existential crisis of the species has arrived.

Thom Hartman’s Threshold also informs readers that the habits degrading life everywhere on Earth reflect horrific shortcomings in the stories we tell ourselves to justify our biocultures, or what we might call our cultures of living. The word bioculture calls attention to the way the common economic

and ideological patterns of global culture reflect the similar reproductive agendas stored in the evolution of the human brain. Even more specifically, it serves to contextualize the bodily practices of eating, sex, and laboring within the larger ecologies of chemicals and biomass that make all life possible. There have been vast transformations in human biocultures in the last 10,000 years, of course, but no transformation really sets a precedent for the purposeful evolution of the human relationship to the planetary ecosystem that’s now necessary, and necessary primarily because of attitudes that have basically served to reproduce the species for a thousand millennia.

In his attempt to narrate the biocultural patterns that produced our potential extinction, Thom Hartman first travels to what he calls a biological “edge” in the Darfur region of southern Sudan. He believes that in Darfur we can encounter a “threshold” that provides us a glimpse into the future of human conflict. In Darfur, the genocidal violence frames a constellation of “macro” issues that can serve as a microcosm of larger global stresses: peak oil, low water resources, excessive human population, and hot atmospheric conditions. This combination of resource scarcity, extreme temperature, and genocidal violence presages the conditions that will appear with more frequency and on greater scales as politically managed resources collapse under the weight of planetary ecocides. Along with the great loss of human life decaying in the desert, Hartman is also adamant about confronting the substantial loss of human knowledge deteriorating along with it in the sand. He likens the disappearance of indigenous knowledge in places like Darfur to the great rape of cultural memory that vanished during European colonization and within American slave economies. More than half of all the drugs we use in hospitals, Hartman reminds us, came from indigenous knowledge of plants.

Also like Roberts, Hartman is quick to frame the current industrial food regime as one of the most consequential experiments in all human history. Whereas Roberts so engagingly traces the interconnected agents that comprise that industry, Hartman makes his point by summarizing the effects of it. When Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was twenty-one inches. Today it’s six. In 1948, there was 158 milligrams of iron in the average 100 grams of spinach; when they stopped measuring it in 1973, that figure had dropped to 2.2 milligrams. He cites a recent article from Science on the oceanic collapse of fish ecosystems in order to explain that 29 percent of all fish species are in collapse—a term used when describing a species that has fell to 10 percent of its original population, and from which scientists do not usually observe a recovery. Of the sixty-four largest marine ecosystems across the planet, most were nearing collapse. Endangered commercial fish species alone include sea bass, Atlantic cod, king crab, Atlantic flounder, grouper, haddock, and halibut. He quotes president of the World Resources Institute Jonathan Lash, who in 2006 said, “in a single generation, we have essentially exhausted the wealth of the seas.”

He’s also very good on waste. Although he begins a chapter with an unexpectedly informative anecdote about German toilets and a short history of poop-worms, he’s even better on the pollution of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change. Since he summarizes the intersecting contributors to the planetary emergency quite well, let me give him ample space here to make his case:

We have four colliding ‘linear’ systems, all pushing against the ‘circle’ of our blue marble floating through space, planet Earth: human population exploding; increasing levels of fossilized carbon being consumed, with its waste (mostly CO2) put in our atmosphere; increasing numbers of food animals for all us humans producing unsustainable levels of waste that is also altering the environment; and an atmosphere absorbing all of this about to trip over into an unstable state, which could render life on the planet uninhabitable for us and most other complex life forms.

While his prose here seems somewhat unremarkable, no other writer I’ve come across better compresses and connects the separate lines of crisis into the tangled strand of our biocultural DNA better than Hartman.

Just as readers of The End of Food are certain to rethink any steady diet of beef and chicken, Hartman offers a lot of cultural explanations and solutions for the climate crisis. For one, he reports that if Americans cut their consumption of meat and dairy products by a fifth it would “have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world were to fall silent forever.” Going further, however, Hartman places a significant amount of blame on the economic and religious ideologies underpinning messianic beliefs in both the human dominance of the biosphere and the righteously privileged place of ‘free-market’ capitalism within it. He traces the degradation of government by the free market economy back to the American Revolution, and in particular President John Adams’ belief in the power of a small ruling elite where wealth and power can be concentrated. He follows the power of this political idea into the post-war Chicago school of capitalist economics that influenced former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s neoliberal faith in the perfection of unregulated economic markets. As he levels now-familiar numbers about the control of resources in the United States, where the top 1 percent of families hold 49 percent of the wealth, he alleges that acolytes of neoliberalism have staged a successful “coup” over the will of the American people, and it’s one that most Americans “don’t even know happened.”

Hartman is very good at locating the contemporary philosophical source of this coup in its free market mythology. The resurgence of this myth comes from the shared popularity between fiction readers and economic elites with the radically libertarian and objectivist ideas of Ayn Rand, who advocated the “virtues of selfishness” and with whom Alan Greenspan was a close friend. Anyone interested in neoliberalism, Glen Beck, and the Republican Party would be advised to read this chapter. Hartman challenges this myth by being blunt about the role of the federal government’s historic and contemporary subsidies, through the taxpayers, to authoritarian corporations. “When the corporate oligarchy reaches out to take over and merge itself with the powers and institutions of government,” he writes, “it becomes the very definition of Mussolini’s ‘fascism’: the merger of corporate and state interests.” This fascism is the force that preserves the strength of those institutions that organize our biocultural war against the biosphere, even as it claims only to be servicing life’s “growth.” Hartman sees this force as explicitly connected to older biocultures of religious patriarchy, and he believes the evolution of our global biocultures as necessitating a new planetary ethics of gender and human
reproduction.

Indeed, the transition from Threshold to The End of Food occurs at the nexus of fascist government, human reproduction, and oil consumption. Each of these systems are predicated on infinite growth, and each depends on the other to achieve it. The fascism of an infinitely expanding capitalism has replaced religiously mandated reproduction as the primary ideology justifying human dominance of the world, and has in turn constructed a food production system that has successfully supplied enough calories for ever more reproducing humans. A golden billion of these humans materially benefit from that fascism, even where it directly degrades life for the bottom two or three billion. Still, the exponential conversion of the planet’s inorganic and organic matter into edible plants and flesh has already become perhaps the single largest event on Earth since the meteor that killed the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. The system that makes this possible isn’t bigger than us; it is us. “The biggest driver of all these processes that are tearing our planet apart and putting all life at risk,” he writes, “is the increase in human biomass. There is roughly one trillion pounds of human flesh on the planet right now.” Hartman recruits a familiar graph of population numbers to illustrate where this trillion pounds came from, but he uses it with far more insight than most by linking it to our shrinking era of cheap oil. The growth in human population was a result of cheap oil, cheap fertilizer, cheap pesticides, and a food distribution system that “lets a person in Iowa have a lunch of Tilapia fish grown in ponds in China, lettuce and tomatoes grown in Mexico, wine imported from France, and a fruit cup of berries imported from Chile and strawberries from Nicaragua.” Since the human population relies so much on oil, he parenthetically points out that, “indirectly, most of us are actually eating oil.” Similarly, Michael Polan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we are always also eating corn; Roberts would argue that oil helps us to grow a lot of that corn.

And since most of the profits from this oil consumption-human reproduction nexus goes to elite private corporations, Hartman sees the best possible movement to regain control of the situation as one that radically renews our commitment to democracy. In this new democracy, the primary function of government would be to protect “the commons,” or what Hartman calls “the stuff we all share,” including the air, public places, and public institutions. In order to accomplish this, he pragmatically suggests that government revoke a law granting “corporate personhood,” which legitimized the legal right of corporations to shift control of common resources to privately held wealth. Corporate personhood stems from an 1886 US Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara v. Union Pacific Railroad. In that decision, court reporter and former railroad president J.C. Bancroft Davis added a note to the case claiming that Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite had said “corporations are persons,” and thus should be granted human rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—the one that, of all things, promised equal protection and due process under the law after slavery. For Hartman, the first legal step toward a real democratic system might begin by inserting the word “natural” before the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Given this logic, the key to understanding fascism in the United States isn’t to study the government, but to study the economy; and if one studies the economy, one must turn to the production of “superabundance” through the modern food system. The success and health of this system is the key to understanding the popularity of fascism in the United States. If you are what you eat, then eating in this system is a significant lever one pulls for either fascism or democracy, even though, quite perversely, the less choice one has about what one eats the more likely one is eating in a system built on a fascism of cheap oil. This is the case because, in effect, the cheaper one’s food the more likely the food is the product of authoritarian corporations that have used cheap methods of “just-in-time” production to get that cheap food to one’s home. This food comes from cheap oil, cheap labor, and cheap animal life. Furthermore, it has “externalized” the costs of waste like carbon dioxide out of the price one pays at the store. The price of this carbon pollution comes in addition to other forms of pollution: toxic water, increased mutations in human-animal diseases and viruses, and the destruction of vast ecosystems for the monoculture fields of corn, soybeans, and cattle. Consumers don’t pay for these costs in the price of a Coke, but they pay a price by breathing fouler air, by destroying diverse forms of life, and by paying higher medical costs for any number of visits and treatments for one’s bodily degradation from the consumption of the cheap food, or from the cancers that appear as human biofeedback within the toxic ecosystem.

This whole strange tangle of superabundance, corporate politics, and biosphere pollution is the brilliant story told by Paul Roberts in The End of Food. Roberts tells the story by identifying the agents that made the transportation, infrastructure, and the chemical and genetic redesign of fascist food possible. This “rationalized agriculture” developed at the end of the 19th century and arguably culminated in the last third of the 20th century. Instead of the comparatively inefficient small farms that drove human food consumption for most of our history, by the end of World War II “a vast network of commodity buyers and processors had arisen to convert grains, animals, and other farm products into inputs for the food industry.” By 1957, the Harvard economist Ray Goldberg was calling it “agribusiness.” Today it has become one of more powerful corporate sectors of economy; arguably, it’s as powerful as the oil and pharmaceutical companies. Food manufacturers generate $3.1 trillion in revenue a year. They do this by cutting costs at every step of the food production process. Wal-Mart accounts for 21 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States. Retailers like Wal-Mart subsidize the low cost of food by under-pricing its actual cost because they can make up that money through non-food items sold at its stores. Since 1985 Wal-Mart alone has drive down the price of food in the United States by 9.1 percent (it’s driven down wages 2.2 percent in the same period). Suppliers to those retailers like Wal-Mart ask for more value from farmers. Farmers respond by planting more profitable crops, cutting labor costs, and investing in new technology and fertilizers. This has the cyclical effect of producing ever more quantities of food at even cheaper cost, which causes small farms to fold against larger agribusiness farms. This consolidates the food industry even more into corporate hands, who must now market ever more food to ever more populations for ever cheaper costs. As agribusiness developed more efficient ways to produce calories, the amount available for an American to eat increased to about 4,000 calories by the year 2000. “For all the staggering output and perpetual oversupply,” Roberts explains, by the turn of the century “there were troubling signs that our capacity for such superabundance was limited.”

This superabundance was limited, in part, because the main drivers of food consumption and production weren’t necessarily “food” in conventional terms. Converting “real” food into more expensive food “products” requires adding “value” to make it more profitable. Companies must also market those cheap calories for consumption. In the United States, and ever more frequently in the developed world, this means literally getting people to eat more food products. US breakfast cereal companies alone spend $800 million a year in advertising.. Nestle has a research center in Lausanne, Switzerland where scientists “pore [sic] over sensory maps, sift through sales data, and dissemble competitors’ products.” Companies engineer food tastes according to demographics. They thicken and repair foods damaged during “manufacturing” through all kinds of flavors, and also by using techniques like hydrogenation, where they can “thicken and preserve vegetable oils by injecting them with hydrogen atoms.” Demand for grape flavor for sodas, gum, and candy “now exceeds the quantity of grape flavor produced naturally…by a factor of ten.” These techniques also changed meat production. After the explosive success of chicken nuggets in the 1980s, demand for chicken overall rose dramatically. American preference for white meat meant companies like Tyson and Perdue had to design bigger birds with bigger breasts. They also had to find cheap ways to generate and handle more birds. In 1980, poultry processing plants handled sixteen million birds a year. Today they handle two million birds a week. US chicken output has tripled to thirty-seven billion pounds a year.

Ninety percent of the grain Americans consume goes to feed cows and chickens. The grain to feed all those chickens—not to mention cows and other livestock—is a product of intensive farming and the critical application of chemicals, particularly nitrogen, into the soil. This has led to soil erosion and groundwater pollution. As oil becomes more expensive, so does nitrogen, which requires oil for its production. In the context of rising populations, it’s becoming unclear how even this current food system can continue, even without a catastrophic emergency like a food-borne illness outbreak. Roberts gives numerous examples of the ways these pressures fit together, and how they pose questions about “the sustainability of current food systems and practices, and, more specifically, about whether dramatic improvements in diet—and the spectacular rise in meat consumption in particular—that occurred during the last century can be maintained during the next.”

As companies expand into new food markets, like China and India, they are converting eaters there into those with tastes similar to those in the west. This contradicts how many the planet can really feed, particularly in terms of meat. According to the Earth Policy Institute, the average consumer can sustainably eat only twelve pounds of meat a year—not the 217 pounds consumed by the average American. The current global grain supplies would not otherwise be able to feed the 9.5 billion people projected to soon be on the planet. And today’s grain output is by no means assured. The World Bank claims that global erosion is so great that by 2050 the world may be trying to feed twice as many people with half as much soil. What’s worse is nitrogen: since 40 percent of the world’s population eats the calories produced by synthetic nitrogen, any disruption in the ability of oil markets to continually produce more nitrogen will lead to vast famines. Should countries begin making more nitrogen by using natural gas, those countries will turn to the two nations with the largest natural gas supplies: Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, the oil that allows the cheap production of, say, a can of Coke necessitates 2,200 calories of hydrocarbon energy from fossil fuels to make just 200 “real” calories of the stuff. The carbon emissions from that energy have already increased to 370 parts per million, and are on track to hit 550 ppm by 2050. Furthermore, every ton of grain we grow requires a thousand tons of water, and agriculture now accounts for three-quarters of all freshwater use. Unless there is a “silver bullet” breakthrough in the system, then the coming decade or two will revolve around unprecedented disruptions in the ability of the industry to feed the human population of earth.

For many viewers, one of the lasting impressions from Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film Super Size Me was the surprising spotlight it placed on the way the human brain is hardwired for sugars and fats. In The End of Food, Roberts writes about how the food industry succeeds in getting eaters to eat more because they have exploited both the brain’s desire for sweets and fats and because they relentlessly market food according to all kinds of human desires. It can’t be a coincidence, Roberts writes, that “food companies create…opportunities in environments specifically chosen for proconsumption demographics—in malls, in airports, and in poor neighborhoods.” They advertise snacks everywhere. They market food products as “me-time” indulgences. They put fast food in public schools. The human brain lacks the same chemistry for feeling “full” that it has for feeling hunger. As in Spurlock’s film, the brain craves the chemicals food releases for biological reasons, and these reasons have nothing to do with current bioculture.

What matters about this perspective is that it means we participate in the fascism of the corporate food industry against our best intentions because “rationalizing” agribusiness means attuning it to the irrationality, if you will, of our desires. Moreover, the production of an economy that values shareholder wealth above public health is successful both because the corporate manipulation of the political system is so effective, but also because it feels so good to eat this way in the short run. This means that in order to deal with the problem of food, as well as the problem of our entire bioculture, we have to deal with our brains and our habits. We are hardwired for addiction, and we are currently in denial about the larger effects of our addiction to eating.. The answer really can’t just be one of radical democracy, or changing the constitution, or going organic. We may have to use our biotechnological breakthroughs not on new crops or methods of production, but on ourselves. We may need to rewire our brains, because in order to deal with the consequences of our addictions, we can’t seem to quit on our own. Rather than have the planet shut itself down to stop us, let’s shut ourselves down first. We can do this not by killing ourselves, but by changing our bioculture: we need to fight the hardwire that made us fascists. We can do it by engineering ourselves for democracy and compassion, but we must also develop healthy bodies and healthy habits to match
our values.

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This review is an attempt to assess the latest work of Neko Case within a broader genealogy of mostly North American guitar songwriters. It imagines these songwriters as a collective voice cut into discrete consciousnesses, contributing to one long, dissonant narrative on the rolling American stone. For the sake of argument, then, Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone might stand as a statement of minor importance. It’s a fine album of creaky pianos and bright chords, tucked away in the middle of a continent in the first seasons after Bush, in the decades before the oil wars became water wars. It’s a minor classic of the early internet age. It can mean these things because the guitar was valuable protest software for the twentieth century brain, and an artist like Neko Case is one of the more urgent contemporary specialists still commanding its acoustic affect.
Neko Case writes classic songs. The trick to writing acoustic classics in particular seems crucially tied to a rhythm of hopeful melancholy endemic to all great songs, from John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” to Animal Collective’s “Flesh Canoe,” to Sera Cahoone’s “Baker Lake.” Because you can’t really dance to it, great acoustic songs have to make you walk, nod, or drive. If they make you cry, because the sentiment clicking inside you is indirectly expressed. The best pop music does this too at times, like the opening of Wilson Picket’s “If You Need Me”—“if you need me/ call me.” It’s understandable that in America poetically crafted emotions like despair and yearning are softly political, since so much commercial affect is meant to make you happy, meant to make you laugh, meant to make you want fun, meant to make you want sex, or meant to make you disgusted with yourself. The great indie songs of our moment are sensible to us because they come from the popular traditions of folk, grunge, and what’s known as “alt-country.” They hang together precisely because they are not “fun” the way Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” might be “fun” to “tweens.” This is, however, why indie fans secretly admire fun songs made by their favorite dissonant musicians. Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a prime example.

The roots of Neko Case go back a few generations. In the mid-twentieth century depths of post-war McCarthy commie hunts and black and white TV, the fecund seeds of Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash grew instantly rustic ballads of the post-cowboy: the humming tramp-rebel, hungover and earnestly anti-authoritarian. Guthrie, of course, is more widely known for protest songs than Cash. But Cash’s voice captured an edgier, sexier, and more intimately combustible 50s genesis of Salinger novels and Elvis Presley – popularly existential, somewhat wry, and on the edge of danger. For those so inclined to measure the implicit politics begotten by them, one has to start by emphasizing how they place history into the ordinary lives of the songs’ characters. In the blood of Cash’s song “The Long Black Veil” is a dishonest exchange between a man and the law, and honor falls on the man’s side. Indeed, one of the most celebrated recordings of this song happened at Fulsom Prison in 1967.

Cash can get even more straightforward. In “The Man in Black,” he sings “I wear black for the poor and beaten down / living in the hopeless hungry side of town.” What unites the middle-class exile and the “beaten down” is the destructive loneliness of an atomized life. The former has more choices than the latter, but both can potentially make money singing. Yet if the blues are about turning the hard life into art, then Cash and Guthrie songs are blues’ in-laws. All indie rock is a distant relative, too, because it attempts to produce that humming, emotional identification with a speaker left by herself to artfully moan. Some complaining is sexy.

In the ‘60s, the songs of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez arose to explain the uncomfortable but sprightly place where the personal became political. They sang in elegant, medieval voices about the tension of relationships built to decay in a culture that disposes its art into museums like stuffed birds in a natural history diorama. It’s no accident that their voices, like those of Neko Case, would turn to interrogate any contradictory desires for another space by winding new words through an old sound. Think of Mitchell’s “California,” or the way Baez’s early ‘60s stuff sounds like lost recordings from a stunning Renaissance peasant. In “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Baez sings, “whatever you wish to keep / you better grab it fast.” Compare this with Mitchell’s “River,” where she can say, “I wish I had a river so long / I would teach my feet to fly.” They are the arch forerunners of Neko Case because they signal desire as the only constant in a world where everything solid eventually melts.

Through the singular and exceptional figure of Bob Dylan, whose own early 1960s persona can be seen as an uncanny blend of Cash and Guthrie, the roots of the guitar-song in American popular music became a democratic source of catchy perspectives on the emotional tailwinds from larger economic and political shifts. John Lennon, too, has an Americaness filtered through his love and association with New York, passed to him through Dylan’s joint, made con-crete in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields. There is a living hand that carried “Imagine” into Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World,” and from there even the Indigo Girl’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” Dylan and Lennon together beget Neil Young, whose fingerprints are all over work like Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack, itself written for a film attempting to trace the mysterious protest behind a dude’s decision to permanently hit the woods. Neko Case is just off to the side of them, singing on a porch, watching a tornado spin close.

The movement ran away in the ‘90s. The romantic destruction that lurks behind the Into the Wild character Vedder channels in that soundtrack isn’t far from Pearl Jam’s somewhat forgotten ‘90s hit “Jeremy.” In fact, Vedder’s character from Into the Wild and his character Jeremy from Ten are close cousins of that psychofamily known as the deranged white American male, his thoughts bursting with suicide and homicide. Kurt Cobain isn’t quite the opposite of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, but more like their artistic great-uncle who shared their obsession with guns but not for the same purpose. There’s a reason, though, that Gus Van Sant made them two of the three subjects of his Elephant, Last Days, Gerry trilogy about ‘90s male madness. Schoolage guys have killer urges. Cobain couldn’t stop singing about high school adolescents, either on Bleach (an incessant chant of “no recess”) or in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

In the political spectrum of an alienated anger that characterized the psychotic extremes of the white middle-class ‘90s, Cobain’s shotgun suicide became the radical inversion of the Columbine shooting and Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. Grunge amplifies and distorts the affect of anger. It makes more sense as an anti-political emotion than any politics as such. In his critique of McVeigh, Noam Chomsky called that brand of thinking “anti-politics.” It bled out in the wake of NAFTA, and puked up a death groan for the absolute absence of practical revolutionary ideas exorcised by the culture wars. It’s the screaming, stupid: 1994 was the year of Cobain’s explosion, and the passing of NAFTA, and the Republican Revolution’s “Contract with America.” Not coincidently, Jon Krakauer’s original article about Into the Wild appeared the year before. In 2007, note the way Vedder positions the character of Christopher McCandless on “Society”: “I think I need to find a bigger place / because when you have more than you think / you need more space…Society / crazy indeed / I hope you’re not lonely / without me.” This voice of self-centered melancholy is the strength and weakness of this period. It’s the voice of the middle-class narcissist driven to death by the majoritarian strangeness of consumer culture, and is directly relevant for understanding our current group of indie guitar artists.

Earlier this decade is where a not insignificant split occurs in the tone and lyrics of the guitar-based transatlantic rock tradition. Though they’re both politically active, the difference between Eddie Vedder and, say, Thom Yorke of Radiohead isn’t just one of tone, but of practicality: Vedder is a far-left liberal who believes in voting and, once upon a time, fighting corporate monopolies like Ticketmaster. As Yorke sings on Kid A’s “Idioteque,” he counters that optimism from a bunker, laughing until his “head comes off,” the ship sinking: “ice age coming / throw him on the fire…we’re not scaremongering / this is really happening.” For Yorke, the problem isn’t reforming the system. For him, the system is the problem. This direction informed what paths new songwriters would follow. For the most part, the specific brand of 90s despair would transform from anti-politics to an excitable anxiety about the culture of climate change, resource wars, fear of terrorism, peak oil, and—until 2008—enormous wealth bubbles. As the music industry collapsed along with Lehman Brothers, the songs of Wilco and Neko Case were already popular downloads on college campuses. They were played with Vedder and Arcade Fire.

Among contemporary American singer-songwriter traditions, the old tradition of the folky political song has passed through its anti-political stage and found its way into another realm altogether: the odd and exciting genre that might be called “doomer” songs. Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed,” from the Wonder Boys soundtrack is perhaps one of the cornerstones of this genre.. Although the beat is basically a frisky blues trance, Dylan’s character culls together the best of the apocalyptic American beat-down bums that mumble stories all through his recent records. They sound like aged, aimless ex-ministers lurking around a Cormac McCarthy novel, prone to violence and out of weed. “People are crazy and times are strange,” he sings, “I’m locked in tight / I’m out of range. I used to care / but things have changed.” He goes on to catalogue a restless night of hot nightmares and last second desires: “if the Bible is right / the world will explode…feel like falling in love /with every woman I meet.” There is nothing like this newschool millennial angst, so prescient in its fanatical rapture, to mark those early Bush years when kids threw bubble-wealth parties as American war planes bombed Afghanistan. This is the Dylan that can hang with Radiohead’s Kid A and Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, which contains perhaps the ultimate “doomer” track of the decade, “Keep the Car Running.”

And then there is Neko Case. Neko Case says that the characters in her songs “live between the world and history, or memory, they kind of fall between the cracks.” Like Joni Mitchell, Case writes songs on Middle Cyclone that resemble her best work: torn-up lovers seeking spiritual solace in the morning cup of coffee, or from a speedy race up a country road in an old truck. Not unlike a doomer song, her characters are waiting for something big, but it’s a big gesture from a long-lost friend, or a weird sign from the woods. On the upbeat song “This Tornado Loves You,” she touches Guthrie and Arcade Fire at once: “I have waited with a glacier’s patience / smashed every transformer with every trailer / ‘til nothing was standing.” These lines come out of an apocalyptic ecology that forces grid-crash in the name of some dark heart’s desire. She is singing from the perspective of the tornado. It destroys lives as if it were sucking them to death as a necessary food: “I left them motherless, fatherless / their souls they hang inside-out their mouths / but it’s never enough/ I want you.”

For Neko Case, love can be perverse like this. The need for it hangs in the chest like the need for money. On the album’s calm title track, she says, “Can’t scrape together quite enough / to ride the bus to the outskirts / of the fact that I need love.” A piano trickles through the song like a xylophone under water. Her character is desperate, vulnerable, and full of terminal insight. “It was so clear to me / that it was almost invisible,” she croons. “I lie across the path waiting / just for a chance to be / a spider-web / trapped in your lashes / for that I would trade you / my empire for ashes / but I choke it back / how much I need love.” It’s a haunting song, but it makes you feel alive with longing. Her people are trapped by old desires for new bodies. As the only constant, desire becomes one’s best friend. On her earlier and magnificent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, her fans would instantly recognize the intense, sad recognition of its opening frame from “Hold On, Hold On”: “the most tender place in my heart / is for strangers.” This is a person addicted to the devil of unknown faces at parties, or in the street, and who claws through remote corners of foreign beds rummaging for him or herself in the dreams of post-laid sheets.

But Neko Case doesn’t write doomer music. She writes about the gorgeous nomads sipping the sensitive moments recovered from that ‘90s anger. Her voice soars; it’s awesome. Her music renovates old country houses. If music could go green, hers would. It plays in the holes of the continent where people grow vegetables in their garden and, like Michael Caine’s stoned activist in Children of Men, they laugh and smoke pot in the tiny sustainable corners of their rural quarantine.

The record is best heard in this long context, because it unleashes the wistful acoustic interplay of the pianos, the guitars, and her voice. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon record. It doesn’t have the impulsive charm of her previous work. It succeeds as an album and not as a collection of songs—there really aren’t “singles” on it. To the extent she drops images of birds, car alarms, and teenage marriage, her voices seem crossed with moody memories of old farm towns and the regretful sighs of lovers three times the age of their first engagements. It’s not nostalgia that animates the emotional dynamics of the record, but the sudden remembering of lost sex that burns in the mind: “you kept me wanting, wanting, wanting / like the wanting in the movies and the hymns.” In this way, her songs are about loss; they communicate a desire that remains zealously hungry as the body shuts down. They are as smooth as lullabies. They’re sewn together with riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on R.E.M.’s Out of Time. This record is a minor piece of perfection from maybe the most poetic and impressive of this decade’s songwriters.

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JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER

For many graduate students, becoming an academic means developing a set of personal beliefs about debt. My scholastic history is a history of debt and borrowing. During my suburban high school years northwest of Columbus, Ohio, my parents assured me that we could afford the very best college. My “hard work” would determine my future, not the cost of school. This sentiment, or belief, or dream, has basically informed how I make financial decisions to this day. It’s scarily close to the old Horatio Alger American dream. With hard work and a little luck, everything will work out. But as the economy recesses and depresses, I’ve seen my own life back through the prism of this attitude toward debt, which is something that didn’t exist on this scale in Ragged Dick.

Even though I had a part-time job at a CVS pharmacy all through high school, I didn’t understand money. Because of a lawsuit that propelled my family out of North Carolina and into Ohio, I became solidly middle-class and relatively privileged: I bought my own gas, but my parents got me a car—a 1977 two–door, baby blue Buick LeSabre. It got eight mpg at a time when I usually filled up the twenty-five gallon tank for less than twenty bucks. I had no sense that the economy had a history. I remember reading Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing my senior year. It follows around a drifter during the Great Depression. It at once strengthened my interest for dystopian moments and confused me. Was that America?

I applied early decision to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs at a time when the total cost of attending was rising several thousand dollars a year. I believe it cost, at the time, somewhere around $32,000. I got a limited financial aid package because I was from Ohio; to cover the rest, we took out private loans from Citibank. In today’s dollars, that’s about double the current cost of a four-year private college. I went to school during years of vast inflation, rising health care costs, and the increased necessity of a collage education.

I now understand that I got my undergraduate degree during a tech bubble that later collapsed, just as I’m getting my PhD during a housing and credit bubble that just popped. I also understand that my family’s Horatio Alger optimism—primarily rehearsed, in my mind, by my father—is part of a larger ideology of borrowing and credit. It’s as if my father’s optimism, buttressed by the discourse of the American Dream, grew to be the ideological bedrock of my ideas about debt. And I learned these ideas during the Clinton and Bush years, when shopping was a sport, when new malls were opening, and everyone was taking out loans.

Since my father was a college professor, we were able to borrow less from Citibank the next few years because of a “tuition exchange” program. I left Skidmore nonetheless several tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I had a BA in English. I wanted to take a year off before grad school, so I went back home to Ohio, and then went to New Jersey. This year was sort of the one that didn’t fit the narrative of progressive climbing that I replayed in my mind during moments of anxiety. That narrative was pure Alger: lower-middle class boy from Raleigh moves to Ohio when father wins lawsuit. Petulant hippy-punk moves to east coast liberal arts school seeking to write poetry and study literature. Over-confident English major goes to New York City for graduate study. That narrative had the peripheral, southern-accented dope transformed into the cosmopolitan, hipster doofus.

The in-between year after Skidmore is connected to the time I spent at CVS; they are the moments in my life when I’ve stepped outside my class bubble and worked at non-skilled jobs. In the fall of 2003, I worked on the I-71 highway south of Columbus, Ohio. I was a surveyor with a guy hired by a Columbus engineering firm that contracted out business with him. They were designing a new overpass bridge that connected the Columbus landfill with some local farms. On some of these local farms there were new suburban developments. There were mornings that the stink was so bad we had to breath out of our mouths.

I woke up at 6:30 am and had to be “on site” by 7:30. The drive took forty minutes. The guy had long hair, Dickeys pants, beige boots, and a baseball cap. He liked to listen to Howard Stern in the morning. When I arrived he’d be in his black Ford Explorer listening to his show on the radio. Usually I’d wait for about fifteen minutes for him to acknowledge me. Then he’d honk. This was the signal for me to join him. I’d crawl up into the passenger seat and we’d listen to the show until about 10:30. He kept his car running so the heat could stay on. It got really toasty in there. When it was time to work, he’d wake me up.

I did this through the winter. In January I moved to an exclusive, rich hamlet in New Vernon, New Jersey. I had a disabled friend from college who was living with his parents. In exchange for a bed and meals, my goal was to help my friend apply to jobs, find an apartment, and make professional contacts. For money, I’d perform odd jobs around the house and property. This included cleaning the bathrooms, the fridge, the walls, and organizing the attic. When the weather got warmer, I took down a deer fence, weeded the garden, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Once, I found myself cleaning the house toilets next to the Hispanic immigrant my friend’s mother hired to clean the house once a week.

It was around this time that my debt and financial insecurity started to make me afraid. I’m writing this piece half-way through my fifth year at the GC; I spent the first fours years of grad school trying to race through it as fast as possible. This had less to do with ambition than financial anxiety. The first year was the hardest. I lived alone on Steinway Street in Astoria in a lower-level basement apartment. It was a studio and I paid $860 a month for it. As an adjunct at Kingsborough Community College, I was only making $980 a month. It was a stupid decision. I justified it out of fear of living with a stranger, or perhaps my own inflated sense of self-value—I required space, I guess. My first year I was without aid from the Graduate Center. Citibank refused me a loan that my father co-signed on; in hindsight, this was the first time someone pricked my bubble. They said we had too much debt.

So I turned to the Mastercard that Chase gave me the previous year in New Jersey. I went to Ikea and bought a bunch of furniture that I thought would really do the place right. I furnished the living room and kitchen. I put everything on the Mastercard: food, tuition, drinks, airplane tickets—and gas. I brought my 1992 Toyota Corolla from Ohio because it made sense to drive to Kingsborough from Astoria (about an hour both ways, which was faster than the subway). I also kept my Ohio plates; I drive back to Ohio four or five times a year, even now. For some reason, I never wanted to get too comfortable with living in New York, and having a car was necessary anywhere else. And I am convinced I will end up anywhere else. At the same time, based on that studio apartment, I was clearly too comfortable here.

Those were the great months when the credit card debt wasn’t in the four digits yet. Eventually, my Mastercard payments got so high I stopped using it, and started taking out federal loans. I should have done that from the beginning. But I didn’t take out federal loans because student loans were something I did with my dad. When I decided to take them out on my own, I realized how I cultivated my own blindspot, how much I relied on my father, on his blessing, on his judgment.

Eventually, every part of the car’s body died. The doors didn’t work, the A/C didn’t work, the radio didn’t work, the defroster didn’t work, the windows didn’t work. I went home to Ohio and found a new car in the driveway, a 1999 Honda Civic, courtesy of my dad. I say this partially out of embarrassment. But he surprised me with it, it was in his driveway, he was writing his book on genocide, and we gave away the old one to charity. He told me it was an investment. I would drive back to Ohio more, for one. And I have. But these are, in part, rationalizations. I’m profligate like this: I want to move around very easily. I cut my commute from Astoria to Queens College from over an hour to 15 minutes.

As I read about the credit crisis, the public conversations about debt, spending, bankruptcy, bailouts, and budgets are somewhat uncanny. Over the past few months, I’m sometimes left reading the business pages wondering just where I fit into the psychology of credit and debt that has become the revised neo-liberal narrative of the United States during the past 30 years. Like the federal government, the futures markets, the subprime mortgage lenders and buyers, and the credit swappers, I too have borrowed dollars against future gains. Like everyone else in America, I’ve gambled enormous sums of money to finance a dream. And every time I hear about another job pulled off the market, I strategize about how long I can remain in the cocoon of this debt financed bubble. When I think about “glass ceilings,” I’ve always felt I was privileged enough to be on top of one. But lately, I think more and more about that ceiling cracking. I think about falling.

When I think about that fall, it occurs to me that I’ve been using this debt to, in part, fund a comfortable lifestyle. The debt-bubble I’m in, and that which I’ve been given, might be best understood through my car. The car has been the symbol and the vehicle of my debt-world. All this time, it’s not that I’ve been paying solely for my education; I’ve been borrowing for the lifestyle I had in Ohio, and the one I expect to have after I get a job. I’m scared to give it up, the way my body warms in Astoria, the quick trips to Brooklyn and Ohio, the dinners out, the organic broccoli, the books, the beer. I’m scared to leave New York; I’m scared to stay. I’m scared about not getting a job—it’s not that I can’t handle the sense of professional failure, should that occur. It’s that I’ve wagered so much money on a dream sustained by rehearsed ideological optimism. And sustained, I fear, by the very middle-class privileges that the American empire promotes as a birthright, and wages resource wars to protect. New York, not Washington, is the heart of that empire.

And I worry that I’m a New Yorker now—I’m worried, too, that I always was. 

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JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER

The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan (2008)

Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman (2008)

Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State by Andrew Gelman (2008)

Recent stories of America’s relatively abrupt fall from “exceptionalism” typically trace the corruption and incompetence of the executive branch. Much of this commentary focuses on the abuse of executive power during the administration of George W. Bush. The majority of it has come from journalists, pundits, or insiders near the White House (think Richard Clarke, Bob Woodward, or Frank Rich). In their narratives, the nation’s problems came from a relatively small group of political appointees that grossly abused the power locked into unelected positions of government: Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and so on. By this point, we’re probably too familiar with the awesome corruption, decadence, and ethical decay exposed within the military/industrial complex–the CIA, the NSA, the EPA, the Interior and Justice departments, the Pentagon, and so on.

This general mindset has been described as a warped institution of policies inaugurated during the Ronald Reagan years. Reagan’s quip about “government being the problem” seemed to address the perceived failures of the Great Society programs and gave political cover for neo-liberal deregulation and free market ideology. While channeling Reagan’s rhetoric of small government, Bush used the one-party Congress to cut taxes to large corporations, legalize torture, and cow a compliant judiciary branch to re-write the Constitution. In July, a federal court ruled that Ali al-Marri’s status as an “enemy combatant” was legal; the same ruling allows for the indefinite detention of any American citizen. With no checks and balances until 2006, the zero regulation of government, banks, and Wall Street sunk the nation into recession, criminality, insolvency, and panic. Enter Barack Obama and the Age of Redemption. Right?

Not so fast. In the past year, several contemporary historians, economists, and sociologists have begun searching for other explanations about the Bush years. How did Bush and his cronies get into power, anyway? Who put them there—and why? They examine the role played by American citizens in maintaining the health of their own democratic institutions. These books follow the general thrust of Thomas Frank’s widely read critique of red state America following Bush’s re-election in 2004,What’s the Matter with Kansas? Instead of limiting their focus to the seeming contradiction between red state cultural and economic interests, they ask much broader questions about the role of culture, information, religion, passion, emotion, and education for voters in the United States. These questions rightfully strike at the very heart of participatory politics and government by the people and they don’t begin or end with Bush. The biggest problem, these authors contend, is not lackluster voter turnout for midterm elections. Nor is it about the apathy or ignorance of those that sit out elections entirely. What keeps these writers awake at night are the people that do vote.

If you want to understand the problem with democracy, they argue, you’ve got to start with how voters make decisions. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan echoes Thomas Franks” central question: why do people vote against their economic interests? For Caplan, however, this question pertains to those voters who vote for protectionist trade policies. They don’t do this because they are ignorant. They’re “irrational.” They process information emotionally. They “tune out” information that upsets their beliefs. If democracy fails, it’s because it does what voters want. In short, voters want to feel good about voting. Their choices are irrational, and therefore democracy cannot behave rationally. This is his main argument against those folks who think democracy could be better if people were more educated. On this point, he seems to score.

You might contest that voters aren’t “disturbingly ignorant” or that the past few years are a “fragile, temporary condition,” but Caplan’s got numbers, facts, and studies to back him up. Some of these figures are from classic studies, and also appear in similar literature. In Just How Stupid Are We? for instance, another George Mason academic, historian Rick Shenkman, catalogues several of the same studies: Only 20 percent of U.S. citizens have passports; half of Americans don’t know how many senators each state has; half can’t name their congressman; only 40 percent can name all three branches of government; only 34 percent know that congress declares war; and 49 percent believe the president can suspend the constitution.

During the McCarthy hearings in 1952, only 19 percent of the population knew what the Foreign Service did. In 1986, only 30 percent of the population knew Roe v. Wade had to do with abortion. It goes on.

The effect of all this information could mean a few things. First, it appears that a majority of citizens have been ignorant of political events and the political process for a long time. Second, this knowledge implies that the education system is seriously flawed. Or, finally, it may be that people do, in fact, choose to vote based on emotions rather than reason. Since Caplan is an economist, he cares most of all about voters” ignorance of economics. If they could purge their basic biases about economic behavior, the political process would work better. This would happen because politicians could finally start implementing policies they know work for the long term, instead of trying to satisfy voter feelings about, say, jobs going overseas.

Voter sensitivity to protecting jobs is what Caplan calls antimarket bias. He also faults antiforeign bias (the public is scared of foreigners), make-work bias (the public believes more people working is good), and pessimistic bias (the public believes the economy is worse than it is). Antimarket bias is a core part of his critique and philosophy, though. At the end of his book, Caplan returns to it as he proposes that free-market economics be taught in schools. “People do not understand the “invisible hand” of the market, its ability to harmonize private greed and the public interest,” he writes. He believes the public doubts the ability for “profit-seeking business” to generate positive social effects. “They focus on the motives of business,” he writes, “and neglect the discipline imposed by competition.” Instead, voters should understand the benefits of comparative advantage, the danger of price controls, and the “long-run” benefits of labor-saving innovation. Indeed, Caplan prefers voters understand that jobs go overseas because “there are more remunerative ways to use domestic labor.” He doesn’t specify them, unfortunately.

It’s almost too easy to point toward the current economic crisis as a response to Caplan’s own “pro-market bias.” First, his old reference to the “invisible hand” refers to competition and greed among individuals. It does not refer to the combined, abstracted greed that powers a hundred-billion dollar company like, say, AIG or Lehman Brothers. Imagine that one of the figures the invisible hand tries to regulate is a single-income, black-female household in Cleveland. The other figure is a gigantic insurance company with thousands of employees all coordinating their activities to exercise the most exacting, overly clever, and seemingly sophisticated set of policies ever imagined to produce wealth. The invisible hand can probably nudge the grandmother fairly easily with a sub-prime contract: follow your greed and get this house re-financed. But the same invisible hand would probably get its fingers broken trying to stop AIG. What Caplan doesn’t account for is that gigantic corporations, like monopolies or trusts, are not equal to an individual. They have more power, more authority, more choices, more information, and thus their unchecked greed can do more damage. It’s not proportional. So when he criticizes voters who elect representatives that can express their antimarket bias, he neglects considering the way it might “balance” the greed he finds so productive.

Caplan might remember, too, the decline of union power during the neo-liberal era. If laid off workers can no longer organize, isn’t it logical to assume they might elect protectionists to office during times of economic crisis? In other words, they’re choosing to be “irrational” economists because they’re actually rational workers and consumers. Just because the milk and toys can be made cheaper in China, that doesn’t mean the labor-saving “innovation” of cheap Chinese labor is preferable. The milk and toys could have been made safer in the United States. Furthermore, without a social safety net voters anxious about jobs will never quit worrying about their next paycheck. So it’s no use telling them to worry about the benefits of free trade years down the road. If economists want more free-trade, they might ironically find it works better in a socialist state with more unemployment benefits, education, and health-care. Higher taxes for these benefits might translate into less anxiety about free-trade.

Less anxiety over these benefits might also lessen another of Caplan’s worries. He believes that voters are irrationally afraid of foreigners because they take jobs here and abroad. He desires they instead consider that “total output increases” when different places in the world concentrate on what they do best. “Imagine how much time it would take to grow your own food?” he asks. He rapturously cites the “The Law of Comparative Advantage,” which “shows that mutually beneficial trade is possible in every way.” As an example, Caplan offers a scenario where Americans should make cars and Mexicans should make wheat. Specialization increases production if each country focuses on producing what it does well. So when American wheat jobs go to Mexico, that’s a good thing.

But voters, Caplan says, often see lost jobs, lost wages, and wasted public services (think of those who argue against allowing illegal immigrants access to hospitals). I would again refer Caplan to reconsider the negative value attached to higher taxes in a socialist state. It would be harder for voters to resent the possibility of homelessness, unemployment, and getting sick if they understood their job loss didn’t translate into losing their lives. It’s hard to reconcile free-trade and pro-market policies with lower taxes and cuts in “liberal” social programs: ironically, it seems necessary to have more socialism if one wants to have more free-trade. This seems true unless one desires a standing reserve of poor, desperate, under-employed, sick, poorly housed, and angry people waiting around for the next job boom. These folks might, however, be the ones angry enough to fight wars.

If we know anything about American history, it’s that the anger of humiliated people can turn ugly fast. There is a vague sense of this for Caplan. He ties antiforeign bias to sentiments about foreigners who “look like us” and those that don’t (note the “us”). He then cites 1980s surveys that show the United States preferred Canada and England to Japan during a period of anti-Japan hysteria, even when trade deficits with Canada and England were higher at the time.

In Just How Stupid Are We? Shenkman notes that voter stupidity and angry racism move together. Furthermore, politicians exploit it. “Bush’s assertion after the 9/11 attack that our enemies hated us because we are free was mindless,” Shenkman asserts, “but people believed it. His claim that oil had nothing to do with our invasion of Iraq was downright comical—but a majority of people believed it.” The public also believed in the link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. And the public that believed this attached their anger to human bodies, not abstract policies. Shenkman recalls that the first turning in public opinion against Bush happened because of the Dubai port “scandal,” when an American port would have been leased to an Arab government. People didn’t trust Arabs. People aren’t outraged by hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian causalities, either. In his recent endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell cited the infamous video of the woman at the McCain rally wondering if Obama was Arab. It was a dangerous signal from Caplan’s “us” more than four years after Abu Ghraib.

Both Shenkman and Caplan also agree that voters rely less on information and reason and more on passion and myth. “Like the adherents of traditional religion,” Caplan writes, “many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet questions with pious hostility.” Shenkman traces the history of mass political participation with an eye toward these developments. When the “masses” got the vote in the 19th century, politicians had to dumb-down their tactics. They began using “fake imagery, slogans, songs, torchlight parades, and bombastic rhetoric.” Men were elected and came to power “on the back of a simplistic phrase designed to generate an emotional charge from the masses.” This is the connection between the real evangelicals who supported Bush and the “secular” evangelism of those who believe in Obama. Politics and religion trade on the fears of those that wish to be saved. Both Karl Rove and David Axelrod understand the need to create an emotional bond with people using a new public myth as a vehicle to power.

For Shenkman, the “limited capacity” of the general public has become so toxic because it has become a taboo subject. This limited capacity—this ignorance—might mean something different in light of Caplan’s thesis about how voters choose to be irrational. It suggests that the stupidity of racism might sometimes be indistinguishable from real stupidity. Shenkman believes the issue could be confronted by questioning the intelligence of the population. He suggests a sustained, popular critique of the entire sacred mythology surrounding the Constitution’s notion of “the people.” This critique is acceptable in private conservation, but not in public debate or in the media. It’s certainly not going to appear as a question in a debate, or in a post-debate wrap-up. The question about the people is always going to be: what do they think? But the question can never be: how intelligent are those that think it—and maybe even how racist? The fallacy of “our civic religion” is to treat all voters” opinions as equal. The reason the Constitution removes so much power from the people, Shenkman argues, is because the framers didn’t trust the people to make good decisions—they relied too much on their crazy emotions.

For Shenkman, the biggest myth broken in modern times was liberalism. The shocking right-wing rise of an evangelical Moral Majority and neo-liberal economic platform has angered liberals in the past three decades, and acutely so during the Bush term. What these movements displaced, however, was a progressive belief in a rights-based US society. Thus, the shock was about the conservative “reaction” to the Civil Rights Movement, “which laid bare the racist beliefs of thunderous majorities of white Southerners” (glancing at recent news reports, Ohio and Pennsylvania would have to count here as Southern, too). Furthermore, “one obvious factor in liberal decline was their embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement.” In other words, a string of neo-conservative and neo-liberal governments replaced a couple decades of Civil Rights administrations that acknowledged—and tried to address—the grave historical “inequality” of slavery and its legacies. Instead, the neo-liberal, neo-con era decided to instead focus on how to maintain wealth at the individual level. Instead of introducing policies that might correct the genocidal facts of American race relations, government instead imagined a world of free individuals and perfect markets. In a sense, this ideology was an attempt to erase history.

The language of neoconservatism and neo-liberalism is fascinating because of what it does not assume. Caplan’s book on economics doesn’t have the word “race” in the index, which isn’t to say he’s at fault. By contrast, however, what Shenkman exposes here is that the pro-America and pro-patriot feelings of the Republican Party derive some of their power from different degrees of white racism and feelings of white superiority. Obama’s candidacy has forced journalists and citizens to rediscover this passionate emotion, founded on a myth of white America, that some felt was safely buried in the past. Lurking behind stories of Sean Bell, Rodney King, and Amadou Diallo, it has re-emerged hot and angry at McCain-Palin rallies. Nixon’s “silent majority” have found their voice again.

When pundits talk about the confusion of the Republican Party and the fracturing of its Reagan coalition among defense-hawks, the rich, and evangelicals, they should begin honestly assessing another crack among the white base: do they hate Arabs or blacks? Their conflation of Obama as a Muslim and an Arab and a terrorist seems to clearly indicate this confusion. This might end up being another of Bush’s unwelcome legacies for the Republican Party. Too much of the base seems to understand the war on terror as a conflict that resembles a clash of civilizations between Christians and Muslims. By doing this, Bush has tenuously shifted the zeal of white American racists away from their long support of the institutionalized persecution of African-Americans, onto the backs of Muslim Americans. When he over-sold the myth of the terrorist as an Islamic extremist, he neglected to stoke the old code-words involving race. These are the words the McCain campaign invokes when it uses phrases like “the real America” in Virginia, an echo of former GOP candidate George Allen’s rant in which he uses the word “macaca.” The problem now for the Republican party is that Bush might have confused moderately racist Republicans enough that, after eight years, they don’t know who to hate.

In his study Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State, Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman surveys how the intense electoral divisions in the 2000 and 2004 elections corroborates the way race and religion worked together among lower-income voters when they voted Republican. It’s not what you would expect: his findings dispel some of the easier assumptions of those elections, and how poor whites vote. First, he found that in blue states the rich disproportionately support Democrats, although nationally the rich overwhelmingly support Republicans. Although the rich are slightly more socially liberal than the poor, they basically vote for their own economic interests (even in blue states). Conversely, most poor people in red states vote Democrat. Indeed, a strong majority of the poor voting along class lines in the red states are black. In the red states that vote Republican, income is a very strong predictor of voter choice. That is, the more wealthy a red state voter, the more likely they’ll vote Republican. Gelman argues that wealth matters more in red states; they essentially vote along class lines.

Perhaps surprisingly, religion and social issues are more important for rich voters than poor voters: “It is richer Americans in richer parts of the country, more than the poor and rural, who are voting based on ‘Gods, guns, and gays.’” After the last few weeks, can’t we add African-Americans back to this list? Gelman uses the statistical language of trends between the polar opposites of rich and poor, but it’s worth considering whether the social issues voters use to vote Republican reveal a gray zone of the Republican middle class. This middle class is living in the suburbs of America’s racist heartland: the South and the Midwest (Pennsylvania to Kansas). It’s not a stretch to imagine that significant white Republican swing-voters in the suburbs are basing their decisions, in part, upon race.

After all, even when accounting for their recent diversification, the suburbs remain especially segregated in the south and more so in the Midwest. Many Americans live in de facto apartheid neighborhoods—the legacy of white flight, which was the legacy of Jim Crow segregation, which was the legacy of slavery. If race is the reality of how class is lived, as Stuart Hall has argued similarly elsewhere, then suggesting red states vote along class lines is also to suggest red states also vote along racial lines, at least in part. There has always been that fourth, unnamed party of white supremacists among the Reagan coalition, and among the American population.

If voters are stupid and ignorant, perhaps the question to ask is not: how do we educate them, or, how do politicians exploit their stupidity? Perhaps the questions to ask are not about democracy in general, but about the United States. How much longer can the quiet, racist passions of the suburbs determine elections? How long will they vote based on the myth of a white America? And how do you change the emotions of racism? How will they stop believing a myth when the myth is their nation? 

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What does the success of the “genocide” Olympics mean for the future of US politics, and even for the election in November? At first glance, this may sound like a minor foreign policy issue. After all, didn’t George Bush basically agree with people like Steven Spielberg about the need to “honestly” criticize the Chinese regime? Isn’t it true that Spielberg was able to cut ties with a government that Bush didn’t have the luxury to spurn outright? In other words, isn’t it simply inevitable that “we” can’t “afford” to divest from China, politically or economically?

Remember, however, that the inevitability of America’s economic relationship with China comes as a result of very specific trade policies. These policies have become a full-blown economic integration, and the political consequences of this should give the average American serious pause.

The facts are everywhere. The US trade deficit with China runs about 117 billion dollars a year. For much of this decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) from the United States runs at least $3 billion a year. Much more importantly, China purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt during the Bush term. This was probably very helpful for the Congressional “emergency” spending used for Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, China is basically paying for the war on terror and China now has over $1.2 trillion of US-backed assets. This is the largest currency reserve in the world and createsserious leverage for China over Washington and New York.

More ominously, last year China announced it was starting a sovereign wealth fund, like the Abu Dhabi one that recently bailed out Citigroup. They then promptly handed $5 billion to Morgan Stanley. These ties between Wall Street and Beijing are moving in directions that most American politicians can’t publicly follow. Relations between New York and Beijing elites are similar to the US corporate involvement with Nazi Germany before World War II, when the Ford Motor Company and IBM worked closely with the Third Reich.

In the New York Times, Keith Bradsher has meticulously chronicled the way Wall Street hedge funds invested in and supported all those security cameras China installed for the Olympics. There are people working at Oppenheimer and Company right here in Manhattan who successfully profited off Chinese political repression. Those talking of divestment from China should start right here in lower Manhattan.

What’s scary is that US corporate investment in China is just getting started. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo work with the Chinese to censor internet searches, and profit handsomely. General Motors alone wants to invest three billion dollars in China. The Chinese embassy boasts about General Electric teaming up with China Life Insurance Group to “explore finance and other industries together.” General Electric is the sixth largest corporation in the world. This is the same General Electric that owns and runs NBC. NBC, of course, just made about a billion dollars on the Olympics. And the Olympics have helped to legitimate China’s rise.

The meaning of all this can’t be stated strongly enough. The US-China relationship is the most important issue, event, and story of our lives.

When we talk about the economy as a presidential issue, we are talking about China. The fact is that US corporate firms have already created a de facto American foreign policy towards China. The entanglement of US and Chinese investments, as with General Electric and China Life Insurance, means that US economic growth will become ever more dependent on Chinese consumers — not American ones.

It also means keeping the Beijing regime happy. Concessions made toward the Chinese regime must be made in order for the American economy to grow. This is the stubborn paradigm that girds the hypocritical calls for both John McCain and Barack Obama to propose “specific” policies about the economy. Newsflash: neither Obama nor McCain will ever make any major economic policy in the United States besides raising or lowering taxes. They cannot intervene in US growth globally other than, to, say, attempt to direct it more toward India.

The obvious problem with American economic integration with China is political. There is no need to rehearse China’s problematic role with Taiwan, Tibet, Sudan, or Zimbabwe here. These issues are no more important than China’s explicitly authoritarian police state, its one-party government, or its environmental policies. Just as it is impossible to separate China’s growth from Darfur, it’s impossible to separate US corporate complicity with China’s actions there or against Tibet. We have become economically dependent on a repressive state. US consumerism is now irrevocably inseparable from China. You can refuse to buy goods from businesses that deal with Sudan, but you simply cannot refuse to buy goods from businesses that deal with China. This is the “freedom” of the free market.

It may not be accidental that as US corporate integration with China has become more entangled in the last decade, since the US political system has come to resemble China’s more and more: the loss of legal rights, the rise of a surveillance culture, the enormous Homeland Security initiative, the old talk from Karl Rove of one-party Republican rule. Had the Rove plan worked, the American system would have become, in effect, much more like China’s.

There are reasons this isn’t discussed openly. The first has to do with the way we think about political categories like “foreign” and “domestic.” We put, for instance, the huge economic problems in Ohio and Michigan in a box called “domestic economy.”

Second, we can’t discuss many of the problems associated with China because it’s a gigantic ‘way of life’ issue. Just as our way of life depends now on carbon fuels from petro-states, our reliance on China for “growth,” cheap labor, cheap factories, cheap manufacturing, cheap pollution, and cheap sweatshops has basically kept the American standard of living artificially high. As with cigarettes, it took years to convince people that carbon emissions were dangerous. It would take a comparable paradigm shift to persuade folks that the freedom “deficit” in China is really tied to US corporate policies. People want to see the Nike swoosh in Beijing as a symbol of athletic power, and not as a symbol connected to Tibet and Darfur.

In a sense, the election in November will not decide the future of this issue. Instead, both Barack Obama and John McCain are trying to score points with voters in swing states like Ohio, where the credit and housing crises are the least of anyone’s problems. In states like Ohio and Michigan, jobs have been lost to China in the hundreds of thousands for decades now. US firms moved labor overseas because it was cheaper; this was a response, in part, to the success of labor organization in these regions, especially in manufacturing. In places like Flint and Youngstown, people have been dealing with the scary side of US-China integration for years. It’s more than ironic, then, that Ohio remains at the center of Democratic and Republican ad campaigns. Politically and economically, Youngstown is the canary in the coalmine of American life.

As more jobs leave, the interdependent problem of Chinese labor and American consumerism will grow. High fuel prices only compound the serious danger of falling living standards. Ask someone in Ohio and Michigan. What happens there isn’t because of any bubble or contagion. In that sense, what happens in Ohio is a leading indictor for the cultural, economic, and political possibilities for the rest of the nation. We can still think of it as a swing-vote state, but also as a microcosm of the larger potential future of the United States more generally.

To visualize this connection, picture first an abandoned manufacturing plant in Youngstown, one of the northern Ohio towns left behind when US firms began exporting manufacturing jobs. Imagine a building that looks as if it’s deeply compromised by structural decay: broken and battered windows, crumbling bricks, shuttered doors, an empty lot. John McCain stood in front of just such a place during the Republican primaries, where his message to blue-collar workers was, literally, “the jobs are not coming back.” These are the jobs that started leaving in the 1980s, and which were a prelude to the jostling over “outsourcing” that briefly became an issue in the 2004 Bush-Kerry campaigns.

These long-term structural changes reflect a consistent set of US policies which were initiated by the Reagan administration, intensified by the Clinton administration, and are now largely taken for granted here at end of Bush’s present term. You can find them on Barack Obama’s website. These policies are called “neo-liberal” because they reflect a shared set of assumptions about the self-correcting role of market economies, a notion popularized by Milton Friedman. In addition to justifying the vast transfer of wealth, jobs, and goods in the name of “efficient” and “global” capitalism, this philosophy did much to naturalize the negative effects and limited benefits of capitalism itself. It worked to repeal much of the power of government regulation, initiated during the New Deal-era, to contain and manage the serious recessions endemic to capitalism.

Neo-liberalism has returned us to a weird replay of the 19th century, where the “freedom” to purchase goods at a loss — for another’s profit — seems like perfect common sense and is widely promoted among all classes and groups. Unlike the 19th century, political alternatives like socialism, communism, and anarchism are taken seriously by only a few. In a classic Orwellian twist, the idea that profit might be re-routed back to the classes who “freely” decided to lose that money is today called “class warfare.” This new class warfare rehearses the arguments of those like Grover Norquist. His passion for tax cuts makes sense thus: we all deserve to have more of our own money. This isn’t old news. McCain is running his entire economic campaign on just these tax cuts.

But the real story involves both McCain and Obama. Importantly, the “freedom” of the free market is the “freedom” and “equality” of liberalism itself, both Republican and Democrat. It comes from the entanglement of the liberal political state with capitalism. At the center of this fiction are “equal” individuals who are “free” to spend their income on their own desires (houses, cars, etc). This money is then collected by banks offering interest bearing loans (for houses and cars). The enormous wealth gaps produced by this system are never accurately named by the most influential media outlets. Politicians like John Edwards arrive occasionally to channel some of the intense emotions of the millions who feel their lives have been damaged by this system. When politicians speak in populist modes, they often point fingers at special interests or campaign finance. These are scapegoats. It’s capitalism, stupid. The problem with democracy isn’t just unreasonably compounded by it. They are incompatible together. The myth of our freedom in this democracy is probably the most fundamental and basic structural lie in our everyday lives.

Corporations make public policy, and their surrogates now run the entire governments of New York City (Bloomberg) and New Jersey (Corzine), not to mention the office of the Vice President (Cheney). It is no longer appropriate to use the government to steer employment and intervene against corporate excess, as suggested in the once-influential work of John Maynard Keynes. The notion that the government might “manage” corporate and capitalist excess was once common sense in the post-war 20th century. By contrast, earlier this summer some House Republicans and Washington experts resisted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s idea of “bailing out” Bear Sterns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and troubled US firms because such actions were “socialist.”

This confused sentiment against ‘socialism’ is shocking: it ignores the billions of dollars in federal tax breaks for corporate firms, the billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for corporate firms, the billions of dollars of military contracts for corporate firms, and the billions of dollars corporate firms hide through tax shelters abroad. Between 1998-2005, tax shelters hid 2.2 trillion dollars of un-taxed business earnings. These billions of dollars given from the federal government to US business have always constituted a “socialism” as such, and sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘corporate welfare.’ This is also the hidden truth of the neo-liberal era: at no time was the ‘free’ market regulating itself.

The past 28 years of US economic policy has been a continuous transfer and redistribution of public wealth from the federal government back to corporate firms. This is also the lie of Grover Norquist and conservative advocates of low-taxes: to say the rich already pay ‘too much’ in taxes ignores the fact that many billions are re-routed back to the rich in the form of government contracts — this is, after all, the huge reason behind the prodigious growth of private military contracts in the Bush administration.

US free-market liberal capitalism has successfully normalized the idea that transferring wealth to private firms and individual tax-payers is the “right” way to spend money. The ways these attitudes seeped into everyday consciousness over the past 28 years, especially among liberal democrats like Barack Obama and his followers, is the most disturbing reality of our times. What’s more disturbing, perhaps, is that as the neo-liberal era has begun to implode today in the wake of the housing and credit crisis, political leaders cannot really imagine any new economic and political alternatives.

They can’t do this for two reasons. One, there are no serious economic advisors in either party that can think outside this system. They don’t understand anything other than the status quo of “globalization” as it’s been articulated. More importantly, the money and interests that filter US political culture simply cannot be purged through the system controlled by that money and those interests.

Two, the political system is so corrupt and delusional that any real change will have to take place outside of it. Historically, the groups that led real pragmatic change against institutional power came from anarchic networks: the Abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and, on the other side, the Ku Klux Klan. These groups operated outside the law. Lives were sacrificed and risked. The problem with democracy is simple, and the reason capitalism corrupts it so easily is simple: institutions themselves are corrupt. They channel power. They harden power. They preserve hierarchy. The structure of our everyday life is corporate.

The process of electing leaders is itself the problem: it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House if the position itself is corrupt. If real “change” is going to happen, it simply can’t happen inside the system. This is why Obama is not Martin Luther King, Jr.

The road between New York and Shanghai goes through Youngstown. Because of this, the future of the United States can’t be visualized in midtown Manhattan. The future arrived long ago in Ohio, and echoes more and more in China. And here’s what’s really interesting: the network that cuts the tie of the U.S.-China integration might not come from the United States. It might come from China. Keep your eye on both. 

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