…you make the best of what’s still around.
My stars, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I apologize for my absence, but there have been a great many things to attend to in the world of music-tech-policy-law. It’s been pretty much nonstop all summer, actually. But at least it keeps me distracted from all the gloom-and-doom.
Speaking of which, you’ve no doubt noticed that America is now officially an empire in decline. It’s not just me saying it, either (although if you check the record, I’ve been pretty consistent with this line since the late 1990s). Everyone from Christian Armageddonites to librul blog jockeys are weighing in on our nation’s waning.
One side sees it as a sign of Jesus’ imminent return and the other the logical result of three decades of laissez-faire tomfoolery, but the bottom line is eerily similar: America is well and fucked.
My favorite description comes from Glenn Greenwald of Salon, himself referring to a handful of other dire pronouncements:
It’s worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning: ”Back to Stone Age“ – which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.” Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?
Paul Krugman of the New York Times spread some cheer in today’s edition:
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
Awesome! At times like these, it’s always good to check in with men of science, who are less susceptible to sky-is-falling rhetoric. What say you, Stephen Hawking?
Get off the planet while the getting’s good:
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.
(Hint: he’s betting on ill).
Your last sentence describes a phenomenon that I’m keen to write about (not the libraries part). I am not currently in a position to do so for various reasons, but trust me when I say I have spent considerable mental capacity examining the relationship between a certain signals intel agency and a certain edge-of-network information service. Someday I’ll be ready to offer up an analysis.
Thank Mr. Bentham for his prescient revelations about the capabilities and intentions of those who devote myriad time, $ and resources to a panoptical future of high-tech militarization, surveillance and other authoritarian apparatuses… how else would the Rich protect their assets while the majority suffer the damaging economic/environmental consequences of hyper-consumption… Also, to get all Tinfoily, one must of course know that if market researchers are using the high-tech industries, then, well, you can’t even imagine the uses the police, FBI, CIA, NSA, InfraGard, et al have conjured up 
One swell read that periphrastically touches on some of this is Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”; you just have to bear with the arcane language…
Pretty damn ironic… it’s not like the country is bankrupt or anything– sure the deficit is high, GDP’s momentum is, well, could ‘regressive’ work as an apposite adjective… debt is fucking bananas for sure, and unemployment is well beyond 10% if we used pre-Clinton metrics to measure it… and so all these nondesirables aren’t psyched they’re out a job– hell, if this country actually invested in its infrastructure all those folks would gladly work, no doubt. And it’s not like, supra, “the country is bankrupt”; there is sooo much capital, so much $ in this country, it’s bonkers– coming out the ears… private business has so much they don’t know what to do with it all… and but so, there’s the irony: to disconnect private business from the US govt is deluded, in fact e.g. each and every corporation on the Fortune 100 list, at one point, received federal aid, subsidies, taken in w/ one hand, pocketed w/ the other… think about that in the context of this Roman conundrum… I-R-O-N-I-C.
Yeah, the fulcrums of the US economy are foundering alright, costing proles their livelihood, benefiting that fat little opulent corporate minority– the They class… oh yeah, not to mention the US is suffering complete political ataxia at the moment too, but ‘nother conversation to be had, ancillary no doubt, but still, whole other bag of worms. Perhaps we should’ve looked to Germany for examples… too late at this point, though. *A tangent*: At first I used to laugh when the right erroneously calumniated Obama as a Socialist… now I cringe over such fucking retarded GOPish stupidity and ignorance. Real Socialism, good ‘ol Euro Socialism (ahem, Germany) would actually be a beautiful thing here (of course after repealing [or reworking, at the least] corporate charters, state-by-state, which could be done… mechanism are there…). Germany, despite its latest woes, which, for the time being seems to be on the up’n'up actually: quarter-on-quarter growth, 2.2%, not bad, has been able to maintain a high-waged unionized economy that leads the world in exports… w/o jettisoning jobs overseas or creating a profligate trade deficit… or, as author-lawyer Thomas Geoghegan put it, “any trade deficit at all.” Germany, with its works council, the co-determined board, and “regional wage-setting institutions”– with a tripartite economic apparatus like that, a leveled economy where lowest-of-the-low workers still have a say, social democracy flourishes while American laissez-faire state capitalism (which isn’t bona fide capitalism in the least, American businesses would not exist were it not for incessant government intervention…) gobbles up what’s left of the country.
Too, it’s fucking sad when public libraries are wilting like dead flowers while the Pentagon funnels large sums of public money into private high-tech industries…