Pussy Riot Reappraised

Pussy Riot, the punk-rock/guerilla-protest collective, was in the business page yesterday, interviewed by the soft-spoken Jim Rutenberg for a piece titled "A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot." The member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, was in Miami for Art Basel, the annual jet set international art fair.

Based on her new video, “Make America Great Again,” Tolokonnikova has left her ski mask and her faux-punk behind and is now angling in a Madonna/Lady Gaga direction. She is trying to hit the jackpot in the United States.

It is easy to make fun of Pussy Riot, at least the solemn expressions of concern for the group's artistic freedom belched out by the USG/NGO nexus, but Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina did support Occupy Wall Street, visiting imprisoned Cecily McMillan on Rikers Island. Plus, Tolokonnikova publicly backed Bernie Sanders. So it is doubtful that Pussy Riot is a creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Rutenberg, a champion of internet censorship in the form of policing Fake News, steered the conversation towards the dangers of authoritarianism and the crisis of belief in objective truth.

But truth cannot break through if people never find it or believe it when they do. And the problem in Russia is the same one we’re seeing here, Ms. Tolokonnikova told me. “A lot of people are living really unwealthy lives so they have to work not one but two jobs, so they don’t have time to analyze and check facts, and you cannot blame them,” she said.

And, after so many years in which the “lift-all-boats” promises of globalization didn’t come to pass, she said, “they don’t trust bureaucrats, they don’t trust politicians, and they don’t really trust media.”

That’s why the top Russian propagandist Dmitry K. Kiselyov can assert that “objectivity is a myth” and, here in the United States, the paid CNN Trump-supporting contributor Scottie Nell Hughes can declare: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

When there is no truth, invasions are “liberations” and internment camps are “relocation centers.”

But, as Ms. Tolokonnikova said, “There is always a way if you really want to tell the truth.”

Doing so, for her, has come at a cost, even after prison. Informal Cossack security forces beat her and other Pussy Riot members as they prepared to perform in Sochi during the 2014 Olympics. That same year, a youth gang attacked her with trash and a green antiseptic chemical in Nizhny Novgorod, where she was protesting prison conditions. The men were clearly identifiable but, she said, police made no arrests.

Ms. Tolokonnikova has also co-founded a news site called Media Zona. She said it avoided opinion so that readers would accept it as a just-the-facts counter to disinformation.

“You are always in danger of being shut down,” she said. “But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.”

Her counsel for United States journalists: You better be, too.

I am not so sure about Media Zone. There appears to be a lot of stuff on Navalny's ongoing legal battles, but there is also a feature on the recent prison strike in the U.S.

What struck me was Tolokonnikova's critique of globalization to a newspaper, The New York Times, whose entire mission is to spread the gospel of globalization.

House of Saud Destabilizes Lebanon

While taking in the final Sunday of regular season NFL action I finally got around to reading Dahr Jamail's devastating summary piece on the current predictions of some climate scientists who see a massive dying coming our way in the not-to-distant future because of huge releases of trapped methane and carbon as the Arctic permafrost thaws.

The dystopia presented by Jamail is a world where the places food is now grown will no longer be able to support crops. Most people will die and those remaining will migrate north and south to the Arctic and Antarctica. It is a dire forecast but one that is grounded in science. The only way to avoid further warming is to have a reduction in growth, something antithetical to the global capitalist order. So get ready for dystopia.

What is being peddled by the capitalists is "technology will save us." A book that has been recommended to me, one which I recently checked out at the library and plan to get started on this weekend, is Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. It seems manifestly like snake oil to me, this idea that we can come up with a quick and dirty tech solution to global system failure brought on by a couple of centuries of industrial capitalism; but I'll report back once I read the book.

In any event, the Jamail piece has an impact on the way one looks at the world; it makes it hard to not look at the world as a Manichean. There are forces of dark and there are forces of light. The purveyors of darkness want to maintain the current corrupt capitalist world order with its extraction of wealth and plenty for the 1%. They are arrayed against the rest of us, who while currently benighted at least have a yearning (in various stages of consciousness) for a little peace and calm.

The United States as principal architect of our current doomed paradigm is the demiurge. But the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is stepping up its devilish activities to fill the void the shrinking hyperpower leaves as it pivots to Asia to confront China.

The latest installments in bloody Saudi skullduggery are in Lebanon. Anne Barnard, the Gray Lady's Beirut bureau chief, has a useful summary today, "Lebanon, Worried About Border, Fires on Syrian Helicopters in Its Airspace," of some of the recent spillover effects from the war in Syria. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recently announced that it has made a $3 billion purchase of the Lebanese Army:

On Sunday, the Lebanese president, Michel Suleiman, said the government had accepted a $3 billion aid package for the army from Saudi Arabia, an amount believed to be larger than the country’s defense budget. 

The move was welcomed by some as a way to strengthen the army, which is facing a growing array of threats from militants inside Lebanon. But it was viewed as provocative by supporters of Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, who saw it as a bid to reduce the group’s influence over the army. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, supports the Syrian government, while Saudi Arabia is one of the main financiers of the Syrian insurgency. 

Speculation arose Monday that the army’s new assertiveness against the Syrian airspace violation was at Saudi Arabia’s bidding in response to the aid package. Security officials said it was policy to respond to any violation of Lebanese territory. The army has also pursued and killed Syrian insurgents on Lebanese territory in recent weeks, according to the official National News Agency.

Couple this with a rocket fired Sunday, likely by Al Qaeda, into Israel from Lebanon (not to mention the series of terror bombings in Beirut) and the prodigious shadows of the sheikhs become visible. Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem yesterday had the story, "Rocket Fire From Lebanon Prompts Shelling by Israel":

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on Sunday, though those in recent years generally appear to have been the work of small militant groups in Lebanon rather than of Hezbollah. 

In August, four rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in two years. A militant group called the Brigades of Abdullah Azzam, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility. Israel responded to that attack by bombing what military officials here described as a “terrorist site” between the Lebanese cities of Beirut and Sidon. 

The Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said Sunday that Israel would not tolerate fire from Lebanese territory and would use more force if necessary. “I do not recommend that anyone test our patience and our determination to preserve the security of Israeli citizens,” he said in a statement. 

Notwithstanding the heightened tensions and harsh talk, an Israeli expert said that neither Israel nor Hezbollah, which is embroiled in the civil war in Syria, had an interest now in a full-blown confrontation on the Israeli-Lebanese front. 

Aviv Oreg, a former head of the Al Qaeda and Global Jihad desk in Israel’s military intelligence department, told reporters that some kind of radical Islamic “global jihad” organization was probably behind the rocket fire on Sunday and that the attackers might have been trying to provoke Israel into retaliating against Hezbollah, since jihadist groups and Hezbollah are fighting on opposite sides of the conflict in Syria.

Nonetheless Netanyahu, working seamlessly per usual with his Saudi allies, blamed Hezbollah of war crimes.

As the planet pitches toward a methane burp of "great dying," the Saudis are moving full speed ahead with a "smash and grab" of the Middle East.

U.S. Plans Preventive War Against China

Samir Amin's article, "China 2013," in March's Monthly Review is worth checking out. I think whether you're on the Left or the Right there is a tendency to automatically reject the Chinese state as a totalitarian capitalist monstrosity. Amin, while possibly a little too sanguine about the nature of China's leadership, provides some excellent perspective. Here's an example:

China entered globalization in the 1990s by the path of the accelerated development of manufactured exports possible for its productive system, giving first priority to exports whose rates of growth then surpassed those of the growth in GDP. The triumph of neoliberalism favored the success of this choice for fifteen years (from 1990 to 2005). The pursuit of this choice is questionable not only because of its political and social effects, but also because it is threatened by the implosion of neoliberal globalized capitalism, which began in 2007. The Chinese government appears to be aware of this and very early began to attempt a correction by giving greater importance to the internal market and to development of western China. 

To say, as one hears ad nauseam, that China’s success should be attributed to the abandonment of Maoism (whose “failure” was obvious), the opening to the outside, and the entry of foreign capital is quite simply idiotic. The Maoist construction put in place the foundations without which the opening would not have achieved its well-known success. A comparison with India, which has not made a comparable revolution, demonstrates this. To say that China’s success is mainly (even “completely”) attributable to the initiatives of foreign capital is no less idiotic. It is not multinational capital that built the Chinese industrial system and achieved the objectives of urbanization and the construction of infrastructure. The success is 90 percent attributable to the sovereign Chinese project. Certainly, the opening to foreign capital has fulfilled useful functions: it has increased the import of modern technologies. However, because of its partnership methods, China absorbed these technologies and has now mastered their development. There is nothing similar elsewhere, even in India or Brazil, a fortiori in Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, and other places. 

China’s integration into globalization has remained, moreover, partial and controlled (or at least controllable, if one wants to put it that way). China has remained outside of financial globalization. Its banking system is completely national and focused on the country’s internal credit market. Management of the yuan is still a matter for China’s sovereign decision making. The yuan is not subject to the vagaries of the flexible exchanges that financial globalization imposes. Beijing can say to Washington, “the yuan is our money and your problem,” just like Washington said to the Europeans in 1971, “the dollar is our money and your problem.” Moreover, China retains a large reserve for deployment in its public credit system. The public debt is negligible compared with the rates of indebtedness (considered intolerable) in the United States, Europe, Japan, and many of the countries in the South. China can thus increase the expansion of its public expenditures without serious danger of inflation.

An article by Mike Whitney on the Counterpunch web site this weekend, "China's Shadow Bankers and the Vampire Squid," raises doubts about the extent to which China "has remained outside financial globalization." Whitney says, "The industrial powerhouse has succumbed to the same problems as its trading partners in the West who were thrust into crisis by soaring real estate prices, reckless credit expansion, and an out-of-control shadow banking system." In China money is increasingly flowing into wealth management products (WMPs) because they pay out better than bank deposits. The problem is that these products are largely opaque, unregulated and tied to development projects that might not pan out, making it all sound a lot like our last bubble.

But we've been hearing about China being a bubble ready to burst for years now, and so far the PRC has managed to manage things. Today there was a story by David Barboza, "2 Chinese Cities Move to Cool Overheated Housing Market," showing that Chinese policymakers are far more active than our captured politicians ever proved to be:

In the nation’s capital, the Beijing municipal government said that unmarried individuals would now be allowed to purchase only one residence. The city also increased the minimum down payment for buyers of a second home and imposed a 20 percent capital gains tax on owners’ selling a residence.

In Shanghai, an identical capital gains tax was announced and took immediate effect, and city officials pledged to install and enforce other measures aimed at stabilizing housing prices. The stiffer capital gains taxes take the place of a 1 percent to 2 percent transaction tax that was previously assessed on the final price of the property being sold.

The announcements came weeks after China’s State Council, or cabinet, said the government would take stronger action to ensure that property prices do not continue to soar, fueling what many analysts believe is a real estate bubble that could seriously damage the economy and exacerbate social tensions between the rich and the poor.

Property prices in China have been rising sharply in the last year, with housing prices in many big cities up an average of 3.1 percent in February, according to a government survey. In many cities, the cost of buying a new home has doubled in the last five years.

In a country where investment options can be limited, property is considered a good store of value.

Returning to Amin's piece, one passage that caught my attention is the declaration that Washington has preventive war plans with China:

The objective of U.S. political strategy is military control of the planet, the only way that Washington can retain the advantages that give it hegemony. This objective is being pursued by means of the preventive wars in the Middle East, and in this sense these wars are the preliminary to the preventive (nuclear) war against China, cold-bloodedly envisaged by the North American establishment as possibly necessary “before it is too late.” Fomenting hostility to China is inseparable from this global strategy, which is manifest in the support shown for the slaveowners of Tibet and Sinkiang, the reinforcement of the U.S. naval presence in the China Sea, and the unstinting encouragement to Japan to build its military forces. The practitioners of China bashing contribute to keeping this hostility alive.

It's worth keeping this in mind as the "Pivot to Asia" commences and we send F-22s and B-2s to cow the North Koreans.

Boy vs. Girl

The battle of the sexes is real. It's war all the time. Nature red in tooth and claw. Animality on full display. No summum bonum here. Just the muddled huddle of who on top. As an evolving global capitalism continues to disintegrate traditional gender roles man-woman conflict will get worse.

But let's not forget -- please, let's try to remember -- as Omar Little says, "A man got to have a code."