There is an active, well-funded and continuous movement to maintain our trash productivity. Last year in California, there was an effort in the legislature by a number of environmental organizations, legislatures, and the governor (Schwarzenegger) to ban plastic bags state-wide. Ostensibly this ban exists in San Francisco, although you wouldn’t know it by the profligate use of plastic in this city. The legislative measure went down in flames at the last minute, thanks to extreme lobbying efforts on the part of plastics industry groups, notably the American Chemistry Council. Hopefully environmental groups will regird themselves and push this through in the future.

However: I like to keep my eye a bit ahead of the ball (which is why I suck at baseball). So, I’d like to suggest two laws that I think would do a lot to make our trash situation manageable (that is, virtually nonexistent).

1. Uniform Packaging law - This means that package design should be done with an eye towards recyclability. Packaging should be made of single materials that can be recycled as a unit - that is, nothing like the dreaded Tetra Paks, which, being made of paper laminated with polyethylene and lined with aluminum, are exceedingly difficult to recycle. Packaging should also be minimized - no triple-wrapping things in layers of plastic for no reason at all. I’ve always had a beef with the Japanese about this. Also, my books don’t need to be shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard when they arrive from Amazon.

2. Guaranteed Recycling law - This is the more draconian one, which specifies that any manufacturer has to provide means for recycling their product down to harmless components, either themselves or via a third-party service. This means everything - batteries, cellphones, egg cartons, bicycle frames, etc. The consumer will probably be made to bear the additional cost, but it would also mean that manufacturers will be forced to consider the decomposability of their products, and hopefully bring their design around to match.

This might seem like a heavy-handed way to deal with trash, but ultimately it’s the only reasonable way (other than, maybe, vaporizing it with a plasma torch) - we have to stop manufacturing things that are difficult to get rid of. In general, we need to think about who - and what - will bear the costs of our production, of our activity, not just until we get paid for our effort, but until the ends of existence.

It’s quite clear why S&P’s president feels this way; he wants to punt. In the boom time he was happy to rubber-stamp junk and collect his commissions on it; now that the obvious deficiency of his agency (viz., their complete lack of any accountability for their ratings) has come to light, and some people in Congress are proposing an accountability mechanism, suddenly, S&P ratings should only be considered “just one of many tools”.

He also says:

[O]ur criteria for rating a security [following post-recession corrections] as AAA (our highest designation) include consideration of what could happen to a security if the country faces an economic scenario on par with the Great Depression.

Bear in mind that this was written well over a year ago. Now, it’s arguable that S&P was spot-on for rating all of that crappy debt AAA, since as it turned out, it was backed by the U.S. government. The government took the hit on behalf of all of that shitty debt, and now that its debt situation looks precarious, S&P wants to downgrade THEIR rating. This is high irony - if they had just done their fucking job correctly in the first place, instead of being greedy banksters, there would have been no need for a downgrade of U.S. government debt. S&P screws the pooch twice - first by not doing the job a ratings agency should (actually rating debt correctly), and then pillories the government (and the entire world) for cleaning up after their mess. Die in a fire, S&P.

None of which is to say, of course, that we don’t deserve a downgrade. We’re like a Bantustan right now, except without the political cohesion.

So, keep an eye on US ally Bahrain, where evil king Hamad has just imported troops from surrounding dictatorships (UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) to shoot and kill the angry plebes. Sounds reasonable, right? Fortunately our government is right on top of things: they are carefully evacuating all non-essential personnel from the US military base in Bahrain, and Secretary of State Hillary “Why Isn’t This Evil Shrike Dead Already O Lord”^* Clinton took the vital step of urging “all sides” to remain calm - gun-wielding foreign soldiers AND unarmed civilian protesters. In fact, it seems like all of our government officials, all the way up to the big Cheese himself, are “deeply concerned”.

Some of you might be wondering: “Wait, what was that about a US military base in Bahrain?” Well, what about it? That doesn’t really affect our deep, deep concern. After all, why would that be relevant?

“The welfare of our personnel and their families is of the utmost importance. This Authorized Departure is being ordered to allow family members who have concerns about their safety to depart without incurring an undue burden. We remain committed to our long-standing partnership with Bahrain.”

^* I am told the story of how she acquired this nickname at Wellesley is hilarious and instructive.

I feel certain that the incident demands being condensed into some kind of aphorism, but I’m unable to really make it manifest. Something about loss, certainty, and action. The proper steps after a moment of loss are to act to overcome the deficiency. Even if it later turns out that the loss was temporary, or in this case illusory, decisively overcoming it is better than clinging to a protracted hope.

This is a petulant god:

Isaiah 1:11 “I am sick of your sacrifices,” says the LORD. “Don’t bring me any more burnt offerings! I don’t want the fat from your rams or other animals. I don’t want to see the blood from your offerings of bulls and rams and goats.

12 Why do you keep parading through my courts with your worthless sacrifices?

But he’s got good things planned for us:

Isaiah 2:4 The LORD will settle international disputes. All the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. All wars will stop, and military training will come to an end.

And sometimes he’s downright gooey:

Isaiah 54:10 For the mountains may depart and the hills disappear, but even then I will remain loyal to you. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,” says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

11 “O storm-battered city, troubled and desolate! I will rebuild you on a foundation of sapphires and make the walls of your houses from precious jewels.

This really makes me think of the game Black & White, a little gem from Lionhead Studios. In this game, you were a god. You controlled a small tribe of people, whom you had to encourage to build and develop their land, and to worship you. You also had to defend them from attack by encroaching gods, and to convert the other gods’ followers into yours. All with the help of your adorable giant creature pet (e.g. a monkey).

What a terrifying possibility! Is Isaiah’s God some kind of pan-dimensional adolescent, His face pock-marked with singularities, playing out an intricately constructed game, as detailed as is appropriate for His nearly limitless intelligence? Hopefully the game has transitioned into a different mode of play, because He’s doing pretty poorly according to his initial win condition. How long before He grows bored and hits reset to start a new game?

Obviously there’s plenty to disagree with, here (like, deflation is probably bad). Still, the egregious handouts to banks is worth highlighting.

The “high tech” industry is one of the few remaining robust American manufacturing sectors, and one of the only ones with a product that retails in the hundreds of millions of dollars. For a country starving to death thanks to oil imports (which constitute somewhere around 50% of the US trade imbalance) and non-existent manufacturing, a quick-fix tour peddling arms to unstable, nuclear-armed, war-prone regions of the world is clearly too good an opportunity to pass up.

The Times also points out that this is Obama doing his necessary kowtowing to prove to American business (i.e., the war industry) that, humbled by his defeat, he is fully prepared to be their lackey:

Still, one of Mr. Obama’s main audiences in many ways seemed to be America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness and pouring money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.

…“It’s unprecedented,” [Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric] said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”

Luckily the vicious skull-fucking and skin-melting will be reserved for our children's generation, along with the catastrophic drought and infrastructure collapse. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. You're doing the Lord's work.

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^* Thanks to Saheli for pointing out the excellent “War is Business”.

]]> http://rhinocrisy.org/2010/11/arms-seller-in-chief/feed/ http://rhinocrisy.org/2010/07/what-is-effective/ http://rhinocrisy.org/2010/07/what-is-effective/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:22:46 +0000 saurabh http://rhinocrisy.org/?p=1017 Some thoughts by my friend Jarl on the G20 protests in Toronto:

Some say that the the throwing of bricks through the windows of banks by the youthful “anarchists” allows the protest movement against the G20 to be divided. This is not true - there isn’t any such unified movement. At least not one that was apparent at the demonstration on Saturday. There was no single reason which could make sense of why all the different groups were at the demonstration. Tibetans for a Free Tibet, pro North-Korean Trotsky-ists, Labour Unionists, an Iranian communist group and its opposition in the form of the homegrown Bolshevik Tendencies communist group, some Vietnamese groups, Tamil support groups, an anti-seal hunting group, Indigenous rights groups, walked alongside many other groups that I didn’t register. And there were many people who came not as a part of any group but for any number of reasons. And we should not forget to include all the “crazies” that these demonstrations unleash. Why do they all come? We should not disavow any of them - yet. The most salient division which the demonstration manifested was, however, between the police and everyone else.

Did all the groups come to the demonstration because they wished to oppose the G20 summit? I doubt it. And all those who came because they opposed the summit - did they agree on what the summit was or why one should oppose it? Absolutely not. We should take the time to consider why all these different groups appear together in the space of a demonstration. The question of the “correctness” or “rightness” or “wrongness” of a particular group’s dogma is not apropos - in the context of this primary question. We should have a sort of speech or writing that accounts for this heterogeneous reality without criticizing it on the basis of the something which doesn’t exist - in this case the cohesion of a unified social movement. I have not yet produced such an account - here I simply want to pay attention to the heterogeneity of the experience and say “there was no unified social movement.” This should at least prevent a whole series of ill conceived criticisms. I am highly suspect of the desire to push away absurdity and strangeness in order to pursue an always already determined “correct” strategy. Especially since this pre-determined strategy has been a failure. We can learn something here of our present situation.

But it is, of course, not the youths who throw bricks who promote their own division into “violent anarchists” as against the rest of the “peaceful protesters”; it is the corporate media which separates out the “anarchists” and labels them “violent.” It doesn’t really matter what happens - the corporate mass media will always be on the look-out for any “anarchistic violence.” And if there is no “anarchistic violence” it will make it up. And if it can’t make it up it won’t report anything. It is not true that anarchists destroy the message of the so called peaceful protesters - without the anarchists there would not be any coverage at all. To think otherwise is to be grossly naive concerning the function of the corporate media.

These facts mean that it is hopeless to try to control the media. But it was a bad plan in the first place - always calculating how a message is to be received, etc… It is fundamentally hopeless because the plan to “control the message” agrees from the start that language is essentially an instrument to be manipulated for the sake of power. We lose the capacity to say and do what we mean - freely. Our speech loses its capacity to prophecy - to promise a better world. The prostrating of leftists to the structural demands of the media is a grotesque mistake. Besides, language exceeds our desire to control - and no matter what the corporate mass media attempts to do - there will always be an excess (in an image or a word) which doesn’t conform to their spin. The images of “anarchistic violence” trafficked by the corporate media contain within themselves the seeds of a radical criticism. (Obviously this would need to be demonstrated. It is true that whole university departments have been set up to articulate just this sort of criticism; but the excess of which I am speaking is available to anyone who has the desire.)

Acknowledging the hopelessness of the media situation should fill us with joy. We don’t have to speak or act in that ridiculous stupid way - we can say what we want with all the force of our desire. We want a better world; we want to destroy Capitalism. And acknowledging the limits of our power to control the media doesn’t stop us from attempting to fuck it up.

It has been said “the anarchists destroyed all our effective plans for change.” This is making the young demonstrators into scapegoats for our failures. We should acknowledge that we don’t have any good plans for change. The 20th century is a vast wreckage of our greatest hopes. Sartre supposedly said in the last century that Communism was the horizon of our times. This is absolutely not the case now. To pretend that we simply need more of the same after the fall of the USSR and the current Commu-Capitalism in China is patently absurd. And these last two examples are only emblems of a vaster disintegration - which is difficult to summarize here. The young people who smashed the windows of Starbucks live in this harsh world where very few, if any, organizations have anything vital to say regarding their present reality - or their desire to live better. And yet they still persist and resist - stupidly perhaps - but thank god for their stupidity. We need less of the hackneyed words of those who know exactly how to reproduce the situation of the last two hundred years and more youthful stupidity that puts bricks through the windows of banks. (By the way this is not to say that Marx or the revolutionary thought of the past is useless. I believe that we need our past more than ever - just that we need to be responsible for it. I think that there may be a revolutionary future for Marx - it may have much less to do with Marxism.)

By disavowing the youths who put bricks through bank windows we disavow something vital in ourselves. We destroy the possibility of a vital link between the past and present. And we abandon our youth. We should support the young people who want to destroy banks - we should explain to them how their desire relates to what people wanted in the past. We should show them how they are not alone. I imagine this is how they experience themselves - “we are alone” - there is no need to make this more real than it already is. Especially now when everyone wants put them in jail or just get rid of them. We need to interpret them in the best possible light. This could be our power - as adults who care. And in order to do so we need to recognize something in them in us. It is a grave error to abandon these young - to sacrifice them in order to prove the efficacy of our failures. At the very least we have a moral duty to support them.

Most of the criticism of these youthful “anarchists” confuses our past with the present - and condemns a vital revolutionary possibility. It imagines that the revolution is the purveyance of the adults who know. Has this every been the case? Now more than ever we should have some humility with respect to the power and the extent of our knowledge. For good and for ill. Because although it is true that the criticism of the youthful “anarchists” is often just an easy way to affirm what we always say and to blame them for our failures - it is also true that we fail to see the very real nascent possibilities for revolution that exist without our knowledge (maybe even against our knowledge.)

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