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(04/11/18 9:45pm)
Here’s some unrequested food for thought: How would you feel if the United States and China decided in, say, 2021, to just go at it in a 20th-century style total war over some latter-day Franz Ferdinand incident? Or how about the scenario of joining Saudi Arabia and Israel in blowing Iran to bits? Sound fun? Or perhaps it’s soon time to patriotically defend American homeland security by turning Latvia into an open pit while doing battle with Vladimir Putin? This probably sounds ridiculous to you — sheer juvenile alarmism from someone without nearly enough degrees or Oscar nominations to permit such idle geopolitical speculation in public. And while that is an accurate indictment, I think that versions of these hypotheticals are more possible than is generally discussed today in our hyper-distractible, reality TV show of a country.
This is especially relevant now after the recent nominations of avowed warmongers Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and former UN Ambassador John “There is no UN” Bolton as national security advisor, two men who have dedicated their public careers to wholeheartedly advocating for bloodshed over diplomacy. Undisguised military aggression, almost for its own sake, could soon come back into vogue in a way not seen since the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. What is particularly worrisome is that all this is occurring simultaneously with the outward military expansion of China, and to a lesser extent Russia, raising the possibility of confrontation in one of the many far-flung places that the US has stationed its military.
Thus the quiet yet strategically monumental proclamation from the Pentagon earlier this year that “great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” as reported in the New York Times’ story “America First Bears a New Threat: Military Force” by David Sanger and Gardiner Harris last month. Why we would ever want to go back to great power competition is truly beyond me, given that it’s hardly been a century since the great powers of Europe obliterated each other for the sake of such manly “competition.” As security scholar Michael Klare pointed out in his piece “The New Long War” for Tomdispatch last week, if the world is to be split along three spheres of influence, as the Pentagon would now have it, we would be looking at a militarized zone thousands of miles long through some of the world’s most volatile regions. Under our new über-aggressive “leadership,” the potential for local conflicts to escalate in any of these border zones, like Syria or the South China Sea, could easily drag us into an unnecessary war, much as inter-Balkan squabbling nearly destroyed Europe a century ago. Great power competition is not great; it is what gave us the Cuban missile crisis, the Battle of the Somme, and the countless deadly proxy wars of the 20th century. It is a dangerous, idiotic and unproductive idea totally ill-suited to a world with nuclear weapons, a globalized economy and borderless ecological problems.
It is so ill-suited to our present moment that one cannot but think that its resurgence, with the accompanying jingoism, nostalgia and xenophobia, is somehow a psychological reaction to an increasingly unrecognizable and complicated world. Within the stunted emotional headspace of our president and his similarly minded circle, American exceptionalism cannot be dead when our military is still the exception in size. Without being too reductively Freudian, I might suggest that such a fixation on projecting power and “security” betrays the presence of a certain… insecurity. Pointing missiles at things and blowing up the occasional Syrian town will not solve unemployment, resource scarcity, institutional racism, climate change or any other of our real “wicked problems,” but it can give for some the illusion of control over chaos, that our “way of life” can and shall be protected from the enemy. I imagine a similar line of thought occurs among the Russian ruling class.
On another note, I find this strategic realignment pretty incredible given that the U.S. military is still currently engaged in numerous regional conflicts under the now tired pretense of fighting “terrorism,” squandering untold billions of resources and further disintegrating the Middle East and Africa. Are they actually saying that after almost 20 years of NSA surveillance, regime changes and drone strikes, shoddily justified as protecting Americans and the world from transparently evil terrorists and rogue states on the brink of success, our “War on Terror” is so easily reclassified as a secondary issue?
This just shows that “national security” is and always has been a thinly veiled euphemism for “excuse to keep a planetary military 70 years after WWII.” Mike Pompeo knows this well, having made his fortune selling aerospace parts to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon before a Koch-funded run for Congress in 2010. Far too many people have profited off of this state of affairs for too many years to agree to the proposition that international war should be relegated to the historical trash heap. John Bolton has as few friends and relatives in Damascus as he does in the Army rank and file; Beltway security professionals have as much to gain from this continued belligerence as those actually present for the conflicts have to lose.
Friends, the best time to oppose a war is before it is allowed to start. I have few illusions that people in the Pentagon actually care what you and I think about this stuff, but it is important that we not bury our heads in the sand and pretend that superpowers can’t fight wars anymore.
(12/07/17 12:09am)
In the previous month, two major tax-related developments have occurred to signal and hasten our society’s already speedy descent into oligarchy.
November saw the release of the 14.3 million Paradise Papers leak, an unbelievably damning who’s-who of tax evading corporations, billionaires, celebrities, and (big surprise) universities. Since this news has already fully dissipated into the dark void of news cycles past, it is convenient that our determined Republican “representatives’” in Congress have successfully resurfaced the issue by ramming through last Sunday’s egregious tax bill.
By my calculations, this should us give us at least another week-long window to publicly acknowledge the dramatic ascendancy of corporate power, before it’s inevitably cut off by, I don’t know, news that Trump is turning the EPA headquarters into a casino. (You heard it hear first.)
Jokes/clairvoyant predictions aside, what these two events really did was confirm in ugly detail the extent to which the world’s reigning companies and elite citizens have fallen from membership in any commonwealth, besides the tax-free one stitched together by their intrepid army of morally bankrupt lawyers, toadyish politicians and unending shell companies.
If we weren’t so numb to it, and so enthralled by the charms of these companies’ products and the celebrities that advertise them, there would probably be riots. The Papers showed us who these actors are and the clever tricks they’re pulling to privately benefit, but the tax bill shows that the bolder among them have grown weary of maintaining a civic façade.
We are entering a new phase of political consolidation, wherein corporate interests are secure enough in their control of the American government that they don’t really have to concoct psejudo-economic arguments anymore. Just look at the smirk on Mitch McConnell’s face when he announces that the tax plan will benefit mainly “regular working folks” (or something along those lines) — they know that their popular opposition is currently toothless, and their base is so riled up by whatever/whoever Sean Hannity is telling them to despise that they hardly analyze the details.
(I actually checked the Fox News website while writing this and the only front-page mention of the tax plan was an op-ed by McConnell in the bottom corner entitled “How Our Tax Plan Will Help You.”)
It is not simply the sheer injustice of it that is so concerning, even though the fact that people in poverty or undocumented immigrants are paying proportionally more in taxes than multibillion-dollar companies is patently horrendous. Nor is it, according to a 2016 Oxfam report, the $111 billion dollars the U.S. government loses in tax revenue every year to tax evasion, more than enough to cover all public college tuition, or any number of welfare programs; and this is marginal in the face of the nearly $1 trillion of lost revenue estimated to ultimately occur from the tax giveaway.
No, the greatest implication is the realization that the supposedly democratic and representative governments of the world are unwilling, and now possibly incapable, of controlling global business. It is, in effect, a slowly unfolding coup, a role reversal wherein the formerly indisputable master has become willing servant.
The crucial problem with this is that corporations are fundamentally undemocratic institutions. They are basically rigidly hierarchical constitutional monarchies, and as their power and influence swell beyond antiquated national borders, their actions and decisions become increasingly unaccountable to any sort of public interest.
For as insanely vicious as states have been in the history of the world, they are distinguished from corporations by their theoretical duty to protect and enhance the wellbeing of their citizens. Whether this actually happens is obviously subject to heated debate, but it is not structurally precluded.
However, the indivisible, primary reason for corporations to exist is to make a profit. This may be quite useful to those who are privy to the dividends of that profit, but unless it is subjected to an external, normative redistributive force, will never wholly benefit the society whose taxes and toil help to create the conditions for these corporations to exist.
Furthermore, unlike government social services, there is often no actual need for much of what these massive companies are built to provide; Coca-Cola provisions the entire world with soft drinks that are terribly unhealthy and environmentally destructive to produce or distribute, yet it is a supremely powerful political player and makes billions in revenue each year.
In other words, governments are ceding control to organizations that are largely inaccessible to public oversight, and are better suited to making and distributing piles of useless objects than administering the services necessary for fulfillment of basic needs. If the phrase ‘ceding control’ seems melodramatic, then why has there been a steady revolving door for regulators between Monsanto and the Department of Agriculture, Goldman Sachs and the Treasury, and now Exxon to the State Department?
The Paradise Papers and tax scam simply make the obvious, well, even more obvious: Our governments are blatantly corrupt, tax systems are a joke, and the poor are getting screwed so that more yachts can be sold.
Any political platform that does not see this incomprehensible injustice as the principal problem in our society is either missing the point, or more likely, has been co-opted into ensuring this paradigm continues.
Yet our lives, like our countries, have become so structured around corporate agendas that it is hard to see the current situation as the consumerist neo-aristocracy that it has become. How many more Pentagon, Panama, and Paradise Papers will it take before we get organized?
(11/01/17 10:11pm)
A sad day it is indeed when supposedly “liberal” publications like The New York Times and The Guardian are seen practically falling over each other singing praises of those bold Defenders of Democracy, the Senate’s newest Knights of Truth, Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. Seriously, if I sound mockingly hyperbolic (which, to be fair, I am), just read how the Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui described Flake’s recent Senate speech in her less-than-subtle front page piece entitled “Battle hymns of the Republicans: Trump civil war is just getting started:”
“It is time for our complicity and our accommodation for the unacceptable to end,” Flake said, in explosive remarks that were instantly labeled as a historic act of defiance. “There are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”
Similarly breathless praise was shown forth upon Flake’s fellow Republican ideologue, multimillionaire Tennessean Bob Corker, whose recent criticism of Supreme Idiot Donald Trump was described by The New York Times as “an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party.”
Historic act of defiance! Extraordinary rebuke! What a low bar we’ve set for such things. Yet in all fairness, one could be forgiven for agreeing with these laudatory words upon first glance; after all, the sight of a senator referring to the White House of a sitting president as an “adult day care” would have once been quite the spectacle, and admittedly felt pretty satisfying to read. But this blanketing coverage is hardly more than a vapid, TMZ-style play-by-play of a Twitter feud between two celebrities. What Flake and Corker are actually frustrated about is The Donald’s near-comical unwillingness and inability to play the Reaganesque role of President, something which even previous all-time foot-in-mouth champion and expert shoe-dodger George W. Bush managed to occasionally pass for (‘Mission Accomplished’ Top-Gunnery notwithstanding).
The reason that all these establishment Republicans like Flake and Corker ever went along with Trump’s stunning idiocy at all is because his attention-consuming theatrics take all the focus off of their party’s quieter dismantling of environmental and financial regulations, industry capture of agencies and other blatant giveaways to their corporate masters. Trump’s lack of any substantive policy knowledge or interest, however distasteful to Washington intelligentsia, is fairly inconsequential for the bureaucracy assembled by his party to finish the task of converting our state to little more than an enabler and enforcer of corporate greed. If Jeff Flake were somehow President instead, I have little doubt that he would have nominated oil industry mouthpiece Scott Pruitt for EPA chief just as readily.
Obviously Trump is eroding the office of President, and our culture more broadly. But these things were in decline long before that bloated orange embodiment of toxic masculinity decided, likely out of boredom, to chain the nation to his cart on the express lane of societal malaise. Yes, Trump has brought the aesthetics of the presidency to a Kid Rock shade of terrible, but sadly this unflattering representation of American politics more accurately reflects its internal moral rot than the poised, intellectual Obama. Why didn’t Republicans like Flake decry “the constant non-truth-telling...the debasement of our nation” (his words on Trump) when Bush’s cabal blatantly lied about WMDs in Iraq? Is this Republican tendency towards honesty also annulled every time a fossil-fueled lawmaker denies climate change? Was the office of President not eroded when it started to approve summary executions via drone strikes on American citizens without due process? The hypocrisy here is so outstanding that I’m struck with the horrifying possibility that they’ve begun to believe their own nonsense.
Thus the real root of Flake and Corker’s insubordination, and their subsequent positive press, comes not from any place of real dissent, but because the carefully cultivated veneer of stately legitimacy has been crudely ripped off by a man with the tact and taste of an 11-year-old. It’s almost grotesquely beautiful, if it weren’t so painful to watch. Now the capriciousness, the astounding corruption, warmongering, jingoism and plain old irresponsibility that has unfortunately characterized the last few decades of the declining American Empire is no longer festering, disguised, in the background. Instead, it’s exuberantly celebrated in every asinine tweet, unconsidered nuclear provocation, and embarrassingly public tit-for-tat that we see faithfully reproduced on screen and page, ad nauseum.
This is too much for most of us to handle, let alone pillars of the old order like The Times or Bob Corker. So instead we pretend that it’s just this one buffoon’s crusade on decency, rather than a reflection of the society that placed him on its own throne. Even so, it’s frankly pathetic to see publications that brand themselves as principled liberal opposition siding so readily with politicians as despicable in substance as Trump is in image. Perhaps once we rid ourselves of a perverse longing for the illusion of righteous governance to return, we can actually get to the work of achieving it.
(10/18/17 11:10pm)
There is an intoxicating and surprisingly tenacious myth in American politics, one seemingly oblivious to the distasteful reality that increasingly contradicts it. Nevertheless, it continues to waft happily down the hallways of banks, Congress, and indeed this college. Behold the golden calf of centrism, our lionization of some fictional, proverbial middle point from which great insight and brilliantly objective policies naturally come rushing forth. The great yet endangered achievement of the post-WWII consensus . . . flowery prose aside, it’s more than time to take aim at this most tempting target in our diseased political culture.
I’m personally astounded that in 2017, a time of profound ecological crisis, soaring income inequality and a resurgent wave of far-right nationalism, we at Middlebury apparently can only look for answers from two septuagenarian ex-politicians who both took retirement gigs at the very sorts of firms that profit off the above problems (more on this later). There’s plenty of common ground between former Representative Barney Frank and Governor John Sununu, participants in our college’s most recent “Critical” Conversation — it’s called capitalism. And while their approaches are different, they basically accept so many of its terms that “meeting in the middle” is a matter of inches, rather than miles.
This is the key problem with a centrist political philosophy — the center is a relative point. By limiting the scope of a debate to the ideas that can exist between mainstream neoliberalism (Frank) and hardline fiscal conservatism (Sununu), Middlebury is willfully omitting the large chorus of voices to the left who are proposing solutions to our various crises that don’t involve a nostalgic regression to the 20th century and its supposedly beautiful bipartisanship. When the accepted discourse is a conversation between those with an almost blind faith in the forces of capital and private power, and those who only want to cautiously manage it, it is unsurprising that so many Americans feel disenfranchised.
As I mentioned earlier, Frank and Sununu seem to have found some significant common ground in their post-political careers. According to the International Business Times (not exactly a left-wing outlet), Barney Frank is now a board member of Signature Bank, a $33 billion investment firm that was recently sued for its implication in a Ponzi scheme. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising of a move for someone who received around $1 million in campaign donations from the financial services sector, and penned a 2015 masterpiece in Politico entitled “Yes, I Took Bank Money, and it Made Me a Better Regulator” (or was that The Onion?). Sununu, that bastion of New Hampshire-style fiscal conservatism, managed to prematurely end his career as Bush the First’s chief of staff by using $615,000 in military jet travel to take him to golf courses, fundraisers, his Boston dentist, and most infamously/hilariously, a rare stamp auction in New York. However, according to his profile on Bloomberg, he’s seemed to make out fine in the corporate world, being variously a director of Anglo-Asian Mining PLC, Optima Bank & Trust Company and Hampton Financial, among others.
Today we are left with a governmental system that still externally conforms to the structure of left and right, liberal and conservative, blue and red. But these are hollow forms. In the past few decades their actual substance has become intensely conservative, such that the “liberals” have become deeply beholden to interests of their wealthy corporate donors, and the “conservatives” lead the way as a gruesome mix of unscrupulous businessmen and quasi-fascist media shills (both elements being embodied in our current President).
The defining political characteristic of modern liberals like Frank or Hillary Clinton is a general ethic of social liberalism and moderate economic interventionism, necessary in order to differentiate them from the radical conservatives whose free-market ideology and hyper-militaristic foreign policy they’ve now mostly adopted (Frank, for example, is an ardent supporter of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories). This has clearly been a poor electoral strategy for liberals, as the most recent elections show, because voters aren’t actually given a substantive choice on the fundamental structuring of our society.
I’m not arguing that we should expect anything else from these men, or even that their careers somehow totally ignored the public interest due to some slavish adherence to capitalist dogma. What I’m more annoyed about is that Middlebury, a supposedly “critical” institution of higher learning, subscribes to such a limited perspective on what can be discussed in politics. This completely ignores the large amounts of people who support more radical social democratic policies or combative corporate regulations that go far beyond Frank’s business-friendly, slap-on-the-wrist approach.
It’s time that we stop assuming modrn capitalism is the only viable way to structure our society, and start to openly assess it. There’s not enough room in this column today to fully explain why that is, but I guarantee you that this assessment won’t happen as long as we hold up the “common ground” of capital’s political surrogates as the entirety of the acceptable debate.
(10/04/17 11:17pm)
If you were conscious and used the internet between mid-2015 and the end of 2016, you might have noticed the presence of a particularly dank meme (well, several, let’s be real) in the form of a guy who probably hadn’t heard the term until it was applied to him.
I am, of course, referring to the unlikely political fortunes of the junior senator from Vermont, the brusquely-spoken old guy who for a brief moment somehow turned the majority of our supposedly egocentric millennial generation into enthusiastic critics of late-stage capitalism.
The near-simultaneous surges in support of leftist politicians like Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or the Podemos party in Spain further demonstrate that socialism is no longer a dirty word in electoral politics. In fact, it may ultimately be the only long-term alternative to the current wave of authoritarian populism currently sweeping the developed world.
Socialism is, however, very much a dirty word in most media outlets, if it’s even mentioned at all. Journalism that is totally configured for ad revenue and profit generation is journalism that will censor ideas hostile to its owners/shareholders. (It’s simple business sense.)
But unlike the disappointing real world, our mainstream newspaper will apparently publish incendiary left-wing diatribes that I imagine the editors of The Wall Street Journal would only see as fit to light their $500 cigars with (or whatever cartoonishly malevolent banker types do these days — 24 karat vapes, perhaps?).
This is why I’m proud to introduce Sharp Left, a bi-weekly series of my very own refreshing and exceedingly pithy hot takes on the accumulation of crises that the tabloid-esque dishrags of our decadent political culture refuse to acknowledge.
If this thought makes you uneasy, rest assured that this column will not feature articles like: “Seven Ways Bernie Can STILL Win, So Take That Hillary,” “Lenin Was Right All Along, but Mao was Righter,” or a reprinting of my 9th grade book report on the Communist Manifesto. (I got an A-.)
Instead, I’m interested in discussing the multitude of heterodox thoughts, actions and developments that I see as broadly comprising a new leftist political program, one founded on radical democracy, nonviolence and solidarity, and opposed to the deeply interconnected damages that continued faith in modern capitalism rains down everyday on our environment and billions of marginalized people.
More provocatively, I want to critically examine Middlebury’s role as an institution deeply situated within the prevailing discourse of neoliberal capitalism. Seeing as our school now bills itself as an outspoken proponent of free speech, it hopefully won’t mind me attempting to expose contradictions between their lovely stated goals and less rosy ideological realities, right?
At this point, I’m sure I’ve whet your appetite for the undergraduate-written socialist polemics you never knew you needed — unless you’re reading The Campus for the new conservative column, in which case you probably haven’t gotten this far anyway. Regardless, please grab a copy in two weeks to see if I can live up to my own hype, unlike, well, socialism (until now!).
(09/27/17 11:07pm)
I can hardly be the only person at Middlebury that has observed the unprecedented succession of extreme weather events, from the cataclysmic hurricanes in the Caribbean to the deadly floods in India and Sierra Leone, with a gnawing sense that the climate’s dreaded new normal is quickly arriving. I say gnawing, because anyone with a sufficient understanding of the problem knows that their daily lifestyle makes them complicit in it; indeed, as I boarded my carbon-spewing flight from wildfire-choked Oregon back to here, it was extremely apparent that even banal, seemingly apolitical acts of transit are inextricably linked to the greatest moral crisis of our age. In short, I am a hypocrite, and you probably are too.
Notice how simple, how natural it is to unleash personal value judgements around climate and sustainability, even self-deprecating ones. How can you claim to care about the planet when you don’t use LED light bulbs! Or an electric car? What, you don’t subsist on canned garden produce and solar hot water alone? When subjected to this kind of scrutiny, I suspect nearly all but the most dedicated and ascetically-minded come up short; in fact, to make oneself properly ‘sustainable’ to the extent necessary to reverse course on climate change is to embark on a daunting series of investments, changes to behavior, and general self-restraint, all within a society largely structured around the encouragement of ravenous consumption. When our collective, institutional misdirections are perceived as individual lapses in morality, it’s unsurprising that those sympathetic to environmental concerns feel guilty, and those unsympathetic or unknowledgable feel accused and attacked.
With this critique, I’m not trying to invalidate people’s individual contributions to sustainability as somehow pithy or useless. Nor am I trying to cast people attempting to live sustainably as judgmental. However, I think it is necessary that we not fall into the unproductive mindset that climate change can be solved on the individual level alone, that it is a problem stemming from individual choices, and that subsequent improvements in lifestyle alone will trickle up. For as long as we continue to structure our politics, career aspirations, technological solutions, and values on a faulty understanding of who and what is truly responsible, we will get nowhere.
I think it is first important to consider why exactly we see our personal lives as the arena in which the climate battle can be fought. The pronounced shift towards the glorification of the individual, so prevalent in modern Western society, one overbrimming with LinkedIn profiles and vainglorious celebrities, cannot be overlooked here. We humans have become increasingly atomized and alienated, both from the productive forces that provide our material needs and wants, and perhaps more importantly from the organizational capacity to direct society towards some preferred destination. This power has been deferred, as a matter of course, to private persons and organizations structured around the private creation and dissemination of profits. For the Middlebury student, it often seems that your best bet of ‘changing the world’ is getting a job that lets you do that (as if Gandhi had a 401k!). From that Randian morality comes not just ecocide, but also the cruel inefficiencies of America’s price-gouging health care system, or the nearly-universal corporate control of political parties and institutions made obvious in recent elections. The great irony is this pervasive myth of individual freedom, the ability to choose whatever, is an illusory one; sure, you can buy a can of Coke with your name on it, but it’s much harder to truly divest yourself from a climate-killing system. We, the economically fortunate, are given the opportunity to buy our way out of eco-guilt, through Teslas and solar panels, but this still leaves intact or even strengthens the overlapping networks of capital that has future trillions staked out on the extraction/production of oil, minerals, timber, beef, cars, etc. Thus we are forced to make do with the local and achievable, or the career; to assuage this guilt some found social enterprises, or become green lifestyle gurus, radical-minded journalists and academics, protest organizers, etc. In sum, we try to apply this fundamentally limited ethic of individual achievement, the crowning cultural innovation of capitalism, to solve its ultimate failure.
In order to really address the underlying causes of climate change, we must channel our individual guilt into condemnation of those forces that have arranged modern society so wastefully. Climate guilt, in the more judicial sense of the term, is far from equal. Last July, the UK’s Carbon Disclosure Project published a damning report showing that only 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988; naturally, oil companies like Exxon and Saudi Arabia’s Aramco topped the list. Garden and bike to work all you want, but these companies and their financial backers will stop at nothing to extract every drop of oil from the ground unless they are collectively, intentionally opposed. What is ecological is political, and vice versa. The main thing we should feel guilty about (I certainly do) is allowing ourselves to be continually strung along by these companies and their government representatives, instead of working actively to replace them. In future columns I will discuss more ideas for how and why this should occur (in a way that goes beyond regurgitating Bernie Sanders’ platform). The crowd campaigns and physical resistance against the companies that built the Dakota Access Pipeline was a good example of where to start, but we should strive to be more disruptive.
It is precisely those that are least responsible for carbon emissions, namely the poor and marginalized of the world, that are already suffering the most from its effects. And as long as global society is rooted in an individualized and private morality, rather than one of public solidarity and development, these people will never have the financial means to rebuild or relocate, let alone purchase a Tesla.
Tevan Goldberg is an environmental policy major from Astoria, Oregon.