An Invigorating Vector of Intellectual Discovery

What's that? You create an environment of impunity (see: de Menezes, Jean) and then wonder why things like this happen? While it's certain that the officer responsible for this death didn't intend to kill an innocent bystander, his unprovoked actions are possible solely in a system that habitually turns a blind eye. Let's hope that for once the system of justice puts its full weight on him.

(h/t What in the Hell...)


And it's been fairly well-documented that middle class wages have been forcibly held down for the past 30 years, but even the Economist is noting it now. As they show, the average male worker now makes less than they did in 1978. To offset the imbalances resulting from increased productivity and stagnating wages, families have become reliant on a second income and upon debt. And while it would be wrong to blame the financial crisis solely on this rise in the necessity for debt (as some doctrinaire Marxists have done), it's clear that it played a massive role.

(h/t Global Guerrillas)


On top of that, a new article from Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke shows that in terms of the global (rather than American) economic slowdown, the current 'recession' is already worse than the Great Depression. As the following graphs show, the stock markets, industrial output, and world trade have all plummeted quicker than they did during the Great Depression. While the authors note that the policy response has been better, it's still not clear to many that the fundamental remaining problem (namely, the toxic assets the banks own that keeps them from lending money) will be solved by Geithner and Obama's bank plan. In fact, a number of experts are suggesting that it will only make things worse.

World Industrial Output:


World Stock Markets:


World Trade Volume:



Finally, not only is climate change proceeding quicker than scientists expected, but the Bonn negotiations for the upcoming Copenhagen treaty are having to face up to US impediments. To be sure, the Obama administration has at least moved beyond questioning the science of climate change, but there's still major questions over whether their proposed emissions targets (a return to 1990 levels by 2020) are sufficient, and whether more aggressive actions are even possible, considering they're subject to Senate ratification.


And all of this in a context where protests have become spectacle-ularly ineffective. As K-Punk rightly explains,

"Time to withdraw from the feelgood simulation of politics. Time to give up the gratification of displaying wounds inflicted by the police as signs of grace, evidence that we are on the side of the Good. Time to relinquish the easy jouissance of impotent acting-out. Time to face the fact that organising marches isn't the same as political organisation. Neoliberalism didn't protest to achieve its hegemony; it organised and co-ordinated. This is a moment of massive oppurtunity. Neoliberalism is finished, but it survives in an undead form because its assumptions and defaults still condition the political-economic landscape. Capitalist realism is far from dead, however - and it's surely clearly that it certainly won't be destroyed by an 'anti-capitalist' spectacular hysteria (indeed this form of anti-capitalism could be seen as an integral part of the capitalist realist system). It's time to think, not in order to finesse some grand philosophical system, but with the goal of identifying what new forms of organisation can succeed in these conditions. Time to give up on the romance of a politics of failure and plan to win."