Failed State

America’s New Dystopian Normal

March 16, 2022 Donald Earl Collins, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Failed State, Health Care

The United States has all but declared the COVID-19 pandemic over and done with. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advised 230 million Americans, 70 percent of the population, to no longer wear masks in most cases, including indoors. Cities, counties, and states across the US have lifted their mask mandates. Restaurants, shopping malls, movie theatres, and grocery stores have dropped mask and physical distancing requirements. Even school districts have gone mask-optional since the end of February. This is despite more than 55,000 Americans contracting the disease and nearly 2,000 dying from it and the complications it causes every day through early March. As the US approaches one million dead from COVID and 80 million sickened from this pathogen and its variants, it is clear that whiteness, capitalism, and narcissism have prolonged the pandemic, and horribly so.

How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce

November 23, 2021 Katey Lauer, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Despair, Failed State, Youth Activism

This question of what we do doesn’t exactly feel like it gets at the heaviness that’s in me, that’s in us. I’ve spent the last three years asking, in the face of enormous difficulty, “What do we do now?” and I’ve learned that coming up with a smart answer to that question may offer some high for a period of time, but it’s pretty clear it can’t sustain us. I think that’s because the significance of what we’re staring down doesn’t just beg questions about potential shifts in strategic emphasis, it also raises much deeper questions about what we do when hope is scarce. What do we do when it’s quite reasonable to believe that things will get harder? When we assume that more of our campaigns will fail? When the suffering around us keeps increasing?

2.4 Degrees Is A Disaster – But COP Won’t Stop It

November 13, 2021 Chris Saltmarsh, Tribune Magazine. Strategize! climate crisis, COP 26, Extreme weather, Failed State

Regardless of the outcome of COP26, one inevitability is that the rich and powerful celebrate whatever the conference produces as vital progress. Only a disaster on the level of COP15 in Copenhagen might put a stop to the self-congratulatory triumphalism. Already, though, most observing the negotiations with a critical eye are highlighting how inadequate their product will be. Ed Miliband has said we’re ‘miles from where we need to be’ and Greta Thunberg declared COP26 to be a ‘failure’. These condemnations are backed up by analysis from Climate Action Tracker (CAT), assessing governments’ short-term commitments for the next decade. Its study reveals that our trajectory coming out of COP26 would take us to a devastating 2.4oC warming by the end of this century.

Why The US Still Suffers From COVID

September 2, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! COVID-19, Failed State, Health Care, Joe Biden

Donald Trump was the convenient scapegoat for the first year of the Covid-19 crisis. Austerity, low wage work, housing insecurity, and the profit driven health care system were problematic issues before anyone heard the word Covid-19 or indeed before Trump’s presidency. Every failing of the United States already in existence came into sharp relief when the pandemic struck. Joe Biden has done nothing to alleviate these many crises. Temporary unemployment benefits end in September, and millions of people were denied these funds when republican state legislatures decreed that they wanted people back at work. The Supreme Court struck down the eviction moratorium and 90% of the funds allocated to pay for rent relief remain unspent. Millions of people face the prospect of becoming unhoused.

Increasing Desperation As The US Capitalist System Declines

April 24, 2021 Richard D. Wolff, Counterpunch. Educate! Capitalism, Economic crisis, Failed State, Finance and the Economy

Like all previous economic systems in recorded history, capitalism is on track to repeat the same three-step trip: birth, evolution, and death. The timing and other specifics of each system’s trip differ. Births and evolutions are commonly experienced as positive, celebrated for their progress and promise. The declines and deaths, however, are often denied and usually feel difficult and depressing. Notwithstanding endlessly glib political speeches about bright futures, U.S. capitalism has reached and passed its peak. Like the British Empire after World War I, the trip now is painful. Signs of decline accumulate. The last 40 years of slow economic growth have seen the top 10 percent take nearly all of it. The other 90 percent suffered constricted real wage growth that drove them to borrow massively (for homes, cars, credit cards, and college expenses).

Massive Protests In Beirut Over Rapidly Declining Living Conditions

April 5, 2021 People's Dispatch. Resist! Beirut, Economic crisis, Failed State

Scores of ordinary Lebanese citizens participated in a massive protest demonstration in the Lebanese capital, Beirut on Sunday, March 28, 2021 to express their disapproval and anger over the worsening socio-economic situation in the country. The situation has resulted in severe uncertainty about the future and extreme hardships in the lives of the common Lebanese people, a report by the Middle East Monitor stated yesterday. The demonstrations organized by the Lebanese Communist party also railed against the administrative vacuum existing in the country because of the dominant political parties not being able to reach an agreement on government formation. The interim government has been more or less powerless to make any significant governmental decisions towards improving the citizens’ lives and to rescue the failing economy.

Saving Ourselves: Autonomous Disaster Relief In Texas

March 13, 2021 It's Going Down. Create! Extreme weather, Failed State, Mutual Aid, Texas

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with participants in autonomous groups across Texas, including Cooperation Denton, Stop the Sweeps in Austin, Mutual Aid Houston, Houston Tenants Union, and North Texas Rural Resilience. The first in a two part series, this episode discusses the devastating storms which rocked Texas and the Southwest and the context that the “big freeze” happened within: from anti-Black police violence and attacks on the homeless community, to widespread neoliberal policies that left infrastructure and housing stock dilapidated and on the verge of collapse.

We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes

February 26, 2021 Anoa Changa, Scalawag Magazine. Organize! Failed State, Joe Biden, Mutual Aid, Southern Movement Assembly

As winter storms rocked Texas and others across the South last week, Southern organizers waited for no one to do what they do best: stepping up to make it happen. Volunteers signed up to phonebank for wellness checks, and mutual aid networks continue to expand their capacity to intervene where policy has failed. The government failures may continue to pile up while Southern communities are left to resolve multiple crises on their own, but people are building collective power across the South—people committed to making sure our communities not only survive, but thrive. Mutual aid—along with regional action and local policy change—is just one of the tactics central to the People's First 100 Days, a regional organizing campaign to grow Southern movement power.

If It Were A Narco Lab, It Would Be Working

February 17, 2021 John Perry, London Review of Books. Educate! Failed State, Honduras, Migration, US Regime Change

On the day he was inaugurated, Joe Biden halted the construction of Trump’s Mexican border wall. A few days earlier, 1500 miles to the south, a new ‘caravan’ of at least eight thousand Honduran migrants had set off northwards, partly in the hope that by the time they tried to cross into Texas, Biden’s promised softening of immigration policy might have taken effect. Obstacles left by Trump still stand in their way. Agreements he made with Honduras and Guatemala led to police attacking and dispersing the refugees. Scattered groups are still heading towards the Mexican frontier at Chiapas – according to one Trump-era official, ‘now our southern border’ – where they will face Mexican troops.

What Ever Happened To Class Struggle?

February 10, 2021 Bruce Gagnon, Space for Peace. Strategize! Class Struggle, Failed State, Impeachment, Trump

As the fight amongst the oligarchs heats up over Trump's 2nd impeachment, one must wonder what ever happened to the days when the poor and the working class were clear-eyed enough to see their real struggle was against the rich? Wall Street banksters, the weapons warlords, Hollywood moguls, oil barons, real estate developers and the like. Instead we see the Lumpenproletariat on their knees scratching and clawing each other - defending one side of the elite mobsters who are armed against the other in Washington's usual sideshow that distracts the nation from the ever present reality of capital accumulation.

The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

February 4, 2021 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance. Educate! Failed State, Martin Luther King Jr, Trade, US Empire

In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” He dismissed Susskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in “the reality-based community.” “We’re history’s actors,” the advisor told him, “…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international power and authority.

While America Was Sleeping

January 27, 2021 Alfred McCoy, Tom Dispatch. Educate! Failed State, Joe Biden, Trump, US Empire

After four years of Donald Trump’s fitful tenure, America is awakening from a long, troubled sleep to discover, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world it once knew has changed beyond all recognition. In that classic American tale by Washington Irving published in 1819, an amiable but shiftless farmer strolls out of his colonial village to go hunting in the Catskill Mountains. There he happens upon a group of mysterious men, drinks deep from their keg of liquor, and falls into a long sleep. He awakens to find that he’s grown a white beard down to his belly and his youth has withered into an unrecognizable old age.

What Happens January 6th, 20th And After?

January 5, 2021 Jack Rasmus, Z Net. Educate! Democrats, Failed State, Republicans, Trump

This past week’s events are a harbinger of worse to come on January 6th and 20th. Contrary to Democrat Party leaders, the political crisis will not end on January 6, 2021 when Congress confirms the electoral college vote; nor on January 20 when they say Trump will be removed from the White House. These two milestone dates will simply reveal how deep the crisis of America’s truncated, capitalist form of limited Democracy has become. And how likely it will continue and deepen into 2021 and beyond. January 6 and 20 is not the ‘endgame’ of the attack on Democracy by Trump and his radical right wing supporters. Those dates may mark the beginning of renewed attack on a new level and the commencement of a more dangerous period thereafter.

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