1. Philosophy is about generating new resources for being. This is what is meant by “philosophy is the generation of new concepts.” This is what is meant by “philosophy as an exercise in untimeliness.” Thus, philosophy is always – at some point – political.

2. Philosophy requires faith that doers can be thinkers as well. Otherwise, it has no point of application.

3. Philosophy that does not touch politics is either bad math or bad poetry.

4. Philosophy is not action.

5. When philosophy becomes action we call it revolution.

6. There are two kinds of philosophy. Political philosophy starts from the immediate conditions of oppression. Pure philosophy starts elsewhere.

7. The two kinds of philosophy are both philosophy.

8. The two kinds of philosophy might or might not meet in the middle. If they do not, it is not because either one is deficient to the other, but because the world is a complex and heterogeneous object in which different scales demand different methods of analysis.

9. The old philosophies of pure and timeless universal thought were necessary. Their deaths signal the first great maturation of conceptualization. The old philosophies were anti-philosophies. New philosophy must reject timelessness while avoiding indifference.

10. The current task is to exercise our freedom. Exercise requires the generation of new concepts, but also action. Exercise requires action, but action that rises above bare repetition. Either one in isolation is neurotic masturbation.

11. The current enemy is fear. A quantum leap in being, doing, and thinking is necessary for social existence to deepen.

12. The failure of current philosophy is due to two trends. One, the relentless application of moribund constructs in the anglo-American faction. Two, the failure of Continental philosophers to collectively bridge the gap between action and thought in their own lives. It is not enough to write; life must be lived as well.

13. The failure to live in the Continental tradition generates facetious speech susceptible to mockery. The failure to believe in the anglo-American tradition reinforces the fascism of inertia.

14. Scientists are doers whose deeds are useful. Artists are doers whose deeds are useless. Philosophers are neither.

15. Science and art progress by parallel tracks. It is in the nature of both to undergo paradigm shifts. Science is a practical community united by epistemological dogma. Art is an epistemological community united by practical dogma. Both praise and denigrate heretics before the orthodox. Both progress by killing their gods.

16. Philosophy advances in the worst cases by style. Stylized politics is fascism. Politicized style is consumerism. Style without politics is modern philosophy. Politics without style is the modern Left.

17. Politics is application.

18. The most developed ontologists are the mathematicians, but they remain dependent on counting. The first and last tasks of the philosophical ontologist are to give accounts of counting and to provide concepts for being beyond counting.

The challenge is to see the killings as reasonable and normal.

This injunction appears insensitive at best. That is because this article is not about people; it is about logics. It is my belief that if we are interested in people, we must first be interested in the systematic ways they come to understand the world and organize their lives. I term these systems ‘logics,’ and this article examines how logics are at work in our reaction to the UCSB killings.

Some may feel this is too much too soon, or insensitive to those who lost loved ones. To those who lost loved ones, I am truly sorry for your loss. Nothing can replace them, and I cannot imagine what it is like to be in that situation right now.

The vast majority of us will experience these events as media events. Not a firsthand experience of shock and terror, but instead a refracted experience of shock and terror and advertising. It is this experience that we will examine today.

Note 1. What is the mass media story doing?

We must at once be relentlessly concrete, almost to the level of stupidity. What is actually going on in the media story? There is a set of horrific events. They are reported on and appear senseless. The media story expands in an effort to reorient people so they can understand the situation (“we’ll keep you updated as the situation develops”).

This is the first level of what is going on. An exceptionally violent set of events challenges the stability of our everyday narratives. Our cognitive maps of the world suddenly seem incapable of telling us which way is up. In steps the media (in reality they stepped in beforehand – that’s how we were destabilized in the first place) to tell us our right from our left, so long as we keep watching, watching, watching…

Note 2. What is the media story made of?

What does the ‘story’ actually consist of? Concretely speaking it consists of three things. An idiosyncratic personal history of the killer. His associations with various groups (PUAhate, bodybuilding.com). And the fetish of his ‘digital trail’ (deleted forum posts! Youtube videos!).

These details serve to create a life-picture of the individual who pulled the trigger. This life-picture will bear the weight of being an explanatory vehicle for the actions. These acts of violence that are so hard to comprehend will be made digestible with a specific (and specifying) description of the killer. His motives, his psychology, his interiority. This is what will be produced as the reason why.

Foucault 101. The personnage (character) is invented in order to substantiate some locus for responsibility, an application point for discipline and punishment. Much like the construction of the author as the body responsible for heresy in the event of writings that contravened Church doctrine, the media personnage is also the juridical personnage. The party responsible, culpable, and subject to State violence in the name of justice.

Note 3. The visible and invisible stories

“Generating a secret medium and unique blindness. A seeing blindness” (Akira Lippit, “The Derrida that I Love”, 2005 Grey Room MIT).

“[What is invisible is] the singular body of the visible itself [not something missing, but what’s there], right on the visible—so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness” (Derrida,  Memoirs of the Blind, quoted in Lippit, “The Derrida that I Love”).

There is a secret interplay here, between the visible and the invisible. Caution! It is easy to think the invisible as the opposite (negative) of the visible. Instead, we must think both of them as positive forms of the image. Then we can ask, what secret (secreted) medium is at work in our media story?

To get a handle on this, we can ask, what is the media spectator blind to, in the sense that it is “right on the visible?” What is the positive condition of her media field that structures and conditions its existence in the first place? And when we get there, what will we find?

The visible is easy, so let’s start there. We identified it Note 2. It is the idiosyncratic personal history of the killer, his associations with various groups, and the fetish of his digital trail. It is his life-picture, what produces him as a specific (specified) personnage.

The invisible is the social logics responsible for producing the person who pulled the trigger. It is not the negative of the visible, but instead the specific conditions that allow for the existence of the visible in the first place. If you like, think of it as the cell culture that permitted the growth of the particular organism (specimen) the media is now busy dissecting.

Importantly, these social logics are themselves a type of invisible sustenance that structures and conditions the social field as a whole. Social logics are the systematic operators that construct our cognitive maps. They provide the grammars for our personal narratives: who we are, who others are, what our place in the world is, etc. By necessity, the map we use to navigate our world obscures its etiology. The subject is blind, and this blindness is what we call vision, understanding, orientation. It is a unique blindness, and it is the situation to which our mass media story attempts to return us.

Note 4. Blindness

The life-picture of the killer the media story produces is a distraction. It is the effect of a salvific operation, but what is being saved is not the spectator, but rather the social logics that structure the accepted universe in which the media (and by implication, the spectator) operates. These are none other than the dominant logics of our time and place (e.g. capital, patriarchy, race, pathologization of neurodiversity, etc.).

Some readers may object – “but the media is talking about his misogyny, his racism!” (But the importance sentence is not “he hates women.” It is, “our society is predicated on the control of women…”) Hold judgment for just a moment longer, and let us follow two lines of obfuscation produced by the dominant media story.

First we must consider the point of view of the narrative. It is relentlessly personal, about him. We should understand this positionally. Imagine, if you will, an array of sensors, probes and needles, hovering about the corpse of our killer, measuring, cutting, dissecting, pinning folds of skin back. This is what is happening. Interiority is being produced.

Interiority functions to localize the killings as an isolated point of aberration in an otherwise smoothly functioning social machine. It was this guy, this crazy guy, who went mental and started killing people. In this manner we are led to believe we are seeing a story about a deranged individual, consumed by hate. In reality, the story is about us, about our specific conditions for blindness (vision), and what moves must be made to hide from us the horror of our social logics: this news item is a feature, not a bug. This is what happens when the social machine operates as currently designed.

Second, in a perverse refraction, we will use his associations to paint a grade-school level social analysis of what could have made him so crazy. “Oh, it was his quest for an exaggerated masculinity. Oh, he was insane. Oh, he was a dork who didn’t fit in. Oh, he was depressed. Oh, he had no social skills with women.” [n1] For the mainstream media these apparently social factors serve to re-individualize the actions, to make them specific again.

This young man was bad with women. This young man was ill. This young man was incapable of fulfilling social interaction. There will be the idiots who applaud his actions, and those who rightly condemn them, and the ping pong punditry will dutifully parrot the so-called ‘debate,’ complete with superficial levels of nuance.

What is lost here is the need to insist on these actions as completely normal and reasonable. As inevitable outcomes of the social logics we use to construct our world. This is what is at stake in the critiques of capitalism, of patriarchy, of race, of all the dominant logics of our time. What is called for is not an empty promise to do better (be less sexist, be less racist, always an individual effort…), but the need to abandon reliance on ways of structuring our world that in turn create monsters. And what must be noted is that we are all those monsters. The monstrosity is what we call ‘society.’

Through these micro-stories blame will pass through a social logic and return to roost in the individual. It will be our center stage actor who was insufficient, obsessed, abnormal, different. As should be obvious, the presiding social logics are preserved at all costs. It was this man who was incapable of manhood, incapable of fitting in, of ‘passing’ for male. The focus is on the individual’s failure to fit, not on the social logic’s requirement to produce failures.

Thus the life-picture approach isolates the dominant social logics from critique in two ways. Structurally from the point of view, the events are localized to a specifically abnormal body – this crazy guy – in order to protect the social logics as a whole. Mechanically, the movement of emphasis, blame, and normality moves in a loop, from the individual –> social logic –> individual. This guy failed this social expectation and therefore took violent action.

Instead we should say, these social logics produce these internal frictions every day in a multitude of ways, which in some sad cases culminate in spectacularly obvious outbursts of violence. But the friction, the threat of failure, the promise of punishment if one does not comply, is there always. This is the condition of our existence. Life today is life under fear, and our failure to identify social logics as responsible is due in no small part to the fact that they lack a name and a face.

Note 5. Whiteface

It must be noted that the person who pulled the trigger is white. Thus, our quest to understand him will require relentless humanization. His life-story will be meticulously reconstructed (or, as all media events really are, constructed for the first time). We will likely hear from his family members, friends, see childhood photos, grapple with terms like ‘depression’ and ‘mental illness.’ We will be asked to identify.

Not so for people of color who pull triggers. For them, there are inferior social logics that already instruct us how to understand. Of course he killed all those people, we always knew blacks were dangerous. Of course he went on a shooting rampage, he was Chinese (no surprise given that the word ‘Chinese’ literally meant confused not too long ago in this country). Of course he killed those people, he was brown and Muslims hate us for our freedoms (note: not all brown people are Muslims, not all Muslims are brown). In the difference between our responses based on color we can unveil an ordering of social logics and the bodies they manage, a materially consequential hierarchy of discursively produced life.

Note 6. The digital fetish

We have now analyzed two of the three portions of the story: the killer’s idiosyncratic personal history, and his various associations. We now turn to the third, the “Internet footprint,” or “digital trail” fetish.

Reporters are falling over themselves to discover new forum posts, pick apart Youtube channel subscriptions, rehash social media, etc. In this flurry of activity a catalog must be produced, a handy guide for understanding what the various online communities the killer belonged to are about. A typology of sorts, even if only a lingering appositive after a title (“PUAhate, an anti-pickup artist forum…”).

With classification comes the possibility of specifying. With specification, the possibility of identifying. With identification, the possibility of predicting. With prediction, the possibility of preventing. Thought-crime is not the future, it is the present and this is its birth story.

As part of taking the point-of-view of the social machine we see the person who pulled the trigger as a dangerous abnormality that must be stopped. No more 9/11′s. In the name of security unlimited police state powers will be demanded to manage bodies, organize data-stories, and dispense State-ordained violence as justice.

Note 7. This is outsourcing

The social logics that produce dangerousness in the first place export their dangerousness onto individual bodies, in the case of the attendant logic of mass surveillance, and inferior groups in the case of subordinate social logics that organize the lives of the colored, poor, feminine, etc. The social logics actually responsible for the production of danger are of course the dominant ones, capital, patriarchy, etc. Yet their production of intense internal friction in the bodies of persons who cannot find a way to fit in are then used as precisely the reason for their amplification, not their destruction. The cycle reinforces itself as mass surveillance expands. Watch all the bodies, lest one falls out of line.

And again, the structural equation must be considered. Always ask – keep who safe? From whom? In our world, where over 50% of targets of police violence require mental health care, where one in four prisoners worldwide is in an American prison (the highest incarceration rate globally), where more blacks are imprisoned now than ever were enslaved, we must keep this crucial fact in mind. The subject is blind. The supposedly neutral call for safety (enveloped in the crisp, accent-free cadence of the anchorperson, whose speech always seems to comment on speech but never explicitly speak…) is never neutral. Where the naïve political theorist and nighttime talk-show host both see a lowest common denominator, a common ground for politics, we see only the articulations of a specifically frightened, paranoid subject. The product of specific social logics’ cartography.

Note 8. Freedom

It must be noted that this time of highest unfreedom, when the individual is always sacrificed for the continuity of the dominant social logics, corresponds with what the unthinking historians label as the era of greatest freedom in human history: liberal democratic market capitalism. You are free to be whatever you want, so long as your choices generate profit (social profit too, e.g. social standing) within these limits.

The possibility for self-expression is transformed into the potential for risk. Individuals present themselves not as opportunities for creative invention, but as risk factors to be managed, assessed and controlled in the administration of increasingly concentrated life.

Or, they present themselves as profit potentials. The formula of Hollywood reigns supreme, with minor variations within its two poles standing in for human evolution. Familiar, but different. So you think you can dance? America’s got talent!

Anything else and the mechanism lays itself bare, betrays itself and follows through on its promise. In this light, even the aberration of this killer can only be seen as part and parcel of the normal, routine functioning of our social machine. The killing is not just a tragedy, but a tragedy with a use. A cautionary tale about what happens to those who do not adjust (you will commit acts of horror, and become horrific yourself), and a self-preserving warning for those who are adjusted to encourage (‘help’) others to do the same. All together now, fall in line.

[n1] The simplistic mainstream media analysis should not be confused with the significant work being done by feminist bloggers, who rightly point out that the ready pathologization of mental illness (for which there appears to be little evidence) offers a scapegoat for a media incapable of seriously discussing violence against women.

Julian Rodríguez-Drix presents our extended feature, “Frackonomics: Economic Strategy for Fractivists.” In this strategy-based piece, Julian provides an in-depth analysis of the oil and gas market in order to provide activists with a roadmap for economics-based strategies. In addition to clearly explaining the industry and its economic incentives, Julian’s work should prove useful for coalition-building between environmental and other activists, particularly students, land owners, and animal rights activists.

This issue marks a transition for Occupy America from a bi-monthly release schedule to a monthly release. It is our hope that this adjustment allows us to continue providing high-quality, in-depth coverage while reaching new writers.

As always, thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

Lead image shows the Horai power station, Fukushima in 1975. Courtesy of National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Japan.

Emissions trading was elevated as the international policymaking community’s preferred mitigation solution by the passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a multilateral agreement ratified by 156 sovereign states and infamously ignored by the United States, then the world’s largest emitter.^[2] Seeking to accommodate corporate firms’ capital accumulation strategies, emissions trading policies issue commoditized credits to pollute (one credit allowing one legal ton of CO₂ emissions) capped on a nation-by-nation basis toward the overall goal of reducing emissions through decentralized redistribution of credits among actors with different propensities to pollute. While proponents perceive the market as a neutral means for resolving the tension between climate change’s global reach and the divisive state of global politics, further investigation reveals this supposed neutrality to be a sham.

Dodging Historical Responsibility

As a complex phenomenon with an inexorable historical context, one might expect solutions to global warming to deal with history frankly. Cap-and-trade approaches, however, do exactly the opposite. The Kyoto Protocol’s allotment of credits on a historical basis is most gracious toward those countries with the most significant historical responsibility for emissions, the United States and the countries of the European Union, which in 2007 accounted for more than half of the world’s cumulative CO₂ emissions with less than a sixth of its population.^[3]The prevalent system of “grandfathering,” where countries allocate the largest portions of their credit quotas to their most polluting industries, similarly reinforces embedded inequality but on the scale of individual domestic economies.^[4] Nations and industries with the greatest historical responsibility for emissions are, with emissions credits, perversely given the most freedom to continue polluting.

An institutionalized moral hazard framework for allocating carbon credits cannot change long-standing behaviors responsible for creating the climate crisis in the first place.

The Market Cannot Fix The Planet

Despite the fact that the Kyoto Protocol’s recourse to the market evades historical justice, proponents of carbon trading schemes are slow to realize the deeper, structural problems with the cap-and-trade approach. From the perspective of the biosphere it is expansion of the traditional economy itself that is the problem. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark note, “in a properly functioning capitalist economy savings are redirected into investment or new capital formation designed to expand the scale of the entire economy… it is such expansion that is the chief enemy of the environment.”^[5]

In other words, as firms save money (for example, by switching to greener technology that lowers fixed costs like electricity bills), they redirect that money into expanding the scale of their operations in order to make even more profit. Environmentalist Wes Jackson sums the point up sharply: “When the Wal-Marts of the world say they’re going to put in different lightbulbs… what are they going to do with savings? They’re going to open up another box store somewhere. It’s just nuts.”^[6] An economy based on carbon-intensive, production-based growth cannot cleanly transition away from this reliance by replicating its profit-maximizing market-based approach in carbon trading. Instead of addressing the core of the problem cap-and-trade schemes expand it.

Cap-And-Trade Is The New Bubble Economy

Industrial capitalism is not the only capitalism at play in cap-and-trade. In today’s heavily finance-based market systems, risky trading schemes analogous to those responsible for the global recession and subprime mortgage crisis are beginning to appear in carbon trading markets as well.^[7] Understanding how carbon credits are calculated is necessary to understanding how these markets evolved.

In theory cap-and-trade enables markets to efficiently allocate plots of land to their most economically productive uses, while building in the risk associated with greenhouse gas pollution. For example, a polluting firm might purchase a carbon credit to offset its emissions, and the credit may represent a tract of land in the Amazon to be kept clear of development in order to act as a carbon sink.

In order for these calculations to take place cap-and-trade first requires establishing baselines. The baseline process is essentially arbitrary. Setting a baseline requires measuring the projected change in emissions a climate-friendly project might accrue against the amount of emissions happening would the project not be implemented. While at first glance this process seems logical, the blind spots are significant. Since greenhouse gasses are a function of human activity, the baseline requires deciding on quantity and quality of human activity over time. Furthermore, since accurate measurements of carbon sequestration — a natural process for trees, akin to breathing — are difficult to produce, it is easy to be seduced by the market incentive to overvalue the amount of sequestration taking place. Since valuation schemes are not rigorously regulated, traders are free to manipulate conditions as they see fit, allowing polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gasses while doing little to abate global warming overall.^[8]

The picture gets more complicated with the introduction of the negative futures contract, where sellers of credits promise not to emit. In exchange for no effective change in behavior, a firm is able to offset its carbon emission on paper while not performing or causing any real offsets ecologically.

Like the relationship between collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and home mortgages, emissions credit prices are not aligned with any real underlying asset such as the health of the environment. Instead their prices are determined by market demand. Since the debt obligations are bundled in tranches to offset risk and regulatory oversight is absent, no real assets guarantee the debt. As both a trade in debt and a negative futures contract, the buyer-seller relationship of emissions trading is cemented by the seller’s appearance of not having emitted a set amount of carbon, which is then borrowed by the buyer to emit the same amount. In a vein similar to the collateralized debt obligation market preceding the 2008 financial crisis, this sweet but unsustainable arrangement foreshadows a massive risk of default, namely that the parameter of the emissions trading game, the health of the atmosphere, is not improving but instead deteriorating at a rapid pace. Emissions credits, while meant to insure buyers against overall rises in emissions, thus aggravate the destruction of the environment.

The cap-and-trade market is not a solution to the greenhouse gas problem. In fact, it is a Trojan horse, a magnification of the problem masquerading as a solution. Not only does it ignore the historical responsibility of the United States and Europe in creating the climate scenario we are now embroiled in, it also actively rewards and incentivizes increased pollution with risky trading structures that proved their volatility in the subprime mortgage crisis. Effective environmental solutions will need to look elsewhere.

The Economic Lay of the Land

Finding weak points in the industry’s business models requires an understanding of its economics. Fortunately for environmental and social justice activists, the natural gas industry faces a number of structural constraints. First, the extremely low price of gas keeps profits tight. Gas is currently around $3.5 per mmBtu^[3] and analysts expect gas to remain low for some time (in 2012 the low was only $1.9 compared to the 2005 high of $15). ⁴  The minimum price for ‘unconventional’ gas  to be profitable is $3 – $6, depending on the gas formation.^[5]

Second, the price of oil is relatively high and analysts predict it will stay high.^[6] The difference between oil and gas prices has pushed companies to shift focus to shale that produces oil or  “liquids” instead of just “dry” gas like methane.^[7]  Natural gas liquids (NGL) include ethane, propane, and butane, which are derived from “wet” gas and can substitute for some uses of petroleum, such as producing plastics.^[8] Companies are being forced to switch to drilling for oil and NGLs, which fetch higher prices, in order to survive.^[9]

Third, the gas industry is stuck in a vicious cycle of falling profits and overproduction. They produced record supply levels of gas which drove the price so low they were losing money to produce it.  However, they keep drilling and producing more gas because of requirements in investors’ contracts, leases that expire, and significant initial investments they don’t want to lose.^[10] There are over 1000 drilled Marcellus wells waiting to be connected to pipelines, guaranteeing additional supply and keeping prices low.^[11]  Companies’ value is based on their reserves and low prices mean those reserves are worth much less, which deeply cuts their profits and worth.^[12]

Finally, fracking is expensive and produces a diminishing rate of return. Drilling and fracking a single Marcellus shale gas well costs an average $3-$4 million dollars^[13] and as much as $7.6 million.[14] While fracking initially produces a large amount of gas production levels drop within months,^[15] requiring another round of fracking. All these factors conspire to make the economic outlook of the oil and gas industry tenuous at best.

The Natural Gas Players

In the face of these challenges the natural gas industry has developed survival strategies, but with careful analysis we can uncover vulnerabilities. Each type of gas industry player has different incentives and weak points, and the misalignment of these incentives presents opportunities for fractivists to intervene. Let’s take a closer look at how the types of businesses involved make a profit.

• Investors supply financing to all parts of the supply chain, but can shift their investments in order to reap the biggest profits.  Overall industry health is inconsequential to investors so long as they extract profit somewhere. Examples: Goldman Sachs, Jefferies[16]
• Operators^[17] contract and coordinate all production activities, buying leases to get acreage in target areas.  Operators use investment capital to find and produce gas and earn profit from selling it. Examples: Chesapeake, ExxonMobil, Anadarko, BP
• Drilling companies^[18] own fleets of drilling rigs and are contracted by Operators to drill wells.  Some are independent companies, others are subsidiaries of Operators or Service companies.  Examples: Helmerich & Payne (independent), Patterson-UTI (subsidiary of Universal Well Services, fracking service company), Nomac (subsidiary of Chesapeake)
• Service and Supply companies^[19] are contracted for fracking or other specialized operations, which are the most expensive part of production.  The price of gas or which Operator contracts them is irrelevant as long as there is demand for their specialized techniques.  Examples: Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes
• Midstream companies^[20] own and operate infrastructure (pipelines, compressors, storage facilities, processing plants) to transport gas/NGLs to market. They buy gas/NGLs at low prices from Operators and sell at higher prices to Consumers, charging for transport and storage. Operators and Utilities can have divisions that are Midstream companies. Examples: Williams, Enterprise Products, Dominion, TransCanada (owner of Keystone XL)
• Consumers are major buyers of natural gas and NGLs, including Utilities (gas and electric) and other industries including Chemical, Steel, and Fertilizer.  They want the price of gas to be low in order to keep their costs down and profits up.

How To Hit Them Where It Hurts

How can we use this knowledge of the natural gas industry to devise economically effective fractivism? Overall our strategy follows a simple guiding principle: shrink profit margins by increasing the costs of production and keeping demand low.

In response to the structural pressures of their industry and the sector-specific interests above, each class of the natural gas players has created business strategies to turn a profit. Each of these profit models presents an attack opportunity for fractivists.

They: Decrease Production To Maximize Cashflow and Increase Gas Prices

We: Increase Cost Of Production to Cut Into Profits, Cause Cashflow Problems

Operators that have sufficient cashflow, such as ExxonMobil, Chesapeake, and EQT, are pulling back on production with the hopes of causing gas prices to rise to more profitable levels.^[21] They either sit on existing leases waiting for market conditions to improve, sell leases to smaller operators, or let some leases expire rather than produce gas at a loss. Overall, the number of rigs in operation has dropped dramatically.^[22]

The industry has dug itself into a hole, and fractivists can help keep them there.  With current low prices, any increase in the cost of production cuts into the industry’s profits and pushes them further into unprofitability. There are a diversity of tactics that can be used to increase costs. Fracking is the most expensive part of production^[23] and requires timed deliveries of supplies (water, sand, chemicals) and equipment (pressure pumping).  Any disruption or increased expense in these long supply chains, whether from sabotage, civil disobedience, or additional regulations, will increase the cost of the service companies and impact multiple wells and companies. Passing legislation or local ordinances that require new environmental or economic impact assessments, fees or taxes, worker safety evaluations, or transportation/storage safety evaluations can disrupt operators’ cashflow. To maximize frustration, requirements should be passed at all levels of government: federal, state, municipal, and county. Contradictory or conflicting guidelines with different filing requirements can further increase the legal costs of doing business.

They: Shift To Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) To Increase Profit

We: Target New NGL Infrastructure

Operators have shifted focus to NGLs (derivatives of wet gas such as ethane, propane, and butane) in order to make profit from NGLs higher prices.  This has caused high production levels of NGLs and a similar round of oversupply and dropping prices.^[24]  Midstream companies are working to build new NGL infrastructure to handle this extra supply and deliver it to petrochemical consumers.  This requires new NGL pipelines such as the 1,230 mile ATEX (Appalachia-to-Texas) Express,^[25] new NGL storage facilities such as Inergy’s proposed LPG storage in New York,^[26] and the construction of specialized “ethane crackers” that turn ethane into ethylene, a petrochemical feedstock.^[27]  Shell is planning to build a $2 billion ethane cracker petrochemical facility in Pennsylvania,^[28] though the plans are not yet finalized.^[29]

New infrastructure offers opportunities for fractivists to disrupt industry plans and build alliances with other activists, such as those concerned with public health and toxins, economic justice activists, or landowners concerned about use of eminent domain. Fractivists can learn from the resistance of Texan land owners in the Tar Sands Blockade against Keystone XL^[30] who are upset about the use of eminent domain to enable foreign companies to seize Americans’ land for their own profit.^[31] In Canada, the indigenous Idle No More movement has had success in blockading rail lines and stopping transportation of propane.^[32]  In British Columbia, the Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation has blocked several proposed tar sands oil and fracked gas pipelines from crossing their unceded sovereign territory.^[33]

They: Develop New Markets to Increase Demand

We: Expose Their Greenwashing And Block Access to New Markets

The industry’s main strategy to deal with oversupply is to increase the demand to match. Overall the industry seeks to bolster demand by replacing coal with gas for electrical production, promoting compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles as environmentally friendly, exporting gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG),^[34] and selling NGL for plastic production and other petrochemical uses.  Blocking access to these markets with a broad diversity of tactics is a key priority for fractivist strategy.

The environmental costs of natural gas production have already been detailed as hugely detrimental elsewhere,^[35] but the industry is attempting to sell their technology as an environmentally friendly replacement for coal and gasoline, a technique known as “greenwashing.”^[36]  Exposing the industry’s greenwashing is important to win the PR war. Fractivists have already scored a major victory with “fracking” becoming a household word with negative connotations^[37] and the industry is explicitly trying to avoid the “F” word.^[38]  Fractivists need to use the word “frack” to expose the industry, set the framework, and develop strong partnerships with anti-coal, anti-diesel, and climate change activists to make sure that they don’t advocate natural gas as a “solution.”

They: Use Mergers, Partnerships, and Foreign Investment^[39] To Manage Cashflow

We: Target Investors With Public Pressure And Support Divestment

Smaller operators without large cash reserves are feeling the squeeze of market conditions. Even Chesapeake, one of the biggest producers, had to sell off $6.9 billion of pipeline and gas field assets to focus on oil and liquids.^[40] Domestic gas producers formed joint ventures with or were bought out by foreign companies such as StatOilHydro^[41] (Norway), Total^[42] (France), Sinopec^[43] (China), BHP Billiton^[44] (Australia), and others.  A total of $51 billion from overseas was invested in US oil and gas fields in 2011.^[45]  Investment firms like Jefferies, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs are essential to this reshuffling, not only providing financing but structuring the deals and creating requirements for production levels, which incidentally are what led to current levels of oversupply.^[46]

Targeting investors can take many forms.  Concern is growing that shale gas investment is the next bubble, with companies purposefully overstating the size of their reserves and productivity of their wells.^[47]  Fractivists have used the economic analysis of former investment banker turned public servant Deborah Rogers and others to expose this concern,^[48] which could be used to scare off risk-averse investors.  Public pressure campaigns against firms financing mountaintop removal^[49] have proven successful and provide an example for fractivists to learn from. Finally, divestment is a tactic successfully used in support of the South African anti-apartheid movement^[50] and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement,^[51] and is proposed as a tactic against fossil fuel companies.^[52]

Conclusion

The goal of the ideas presented here is to help create unity and focus to make our movement more successful: not by searching for a magic bullet but by weaving together many local struggles within a general strategic framework.  An overall framework that encompass a wide range of tactics, targets, and efforts is more likely to be successful than strategies that call for everyone to do one single thing. Like a healthy ecosystem, the more diverse and interconnected our movement is the stronger it will be.

This is not the first or last word on this subject, but an addition to ongoing conversations.  As market conditions change and as the industry tries to respond to the ongoing success of our global movement, we will have to adjust our efforts accordingly.  By maintaining an economic analysis of the industry and continuing strategies that target their weaknesses, I believe we have the power to go on the offensive and win. Together, we’ll protect the land, water, local economies, and communities that we love.

Resources: Industry documents

• Oil and Gas Investment Environment (Ralph Eads, Vice Chairman, Jefferies & Co)

http://www.jefferies.com/CMSFiles/Jefferies.com/files/Conferences/112812/Presentations/Ralph%20Eads%20-%20Oil%20%26%20Gas%20Investment%20Environment.pdf

• The US Energy Revolution: How Shale Energy Could Ignite the US Growth Engine (Goldman Sachs, Asset Management – Insight on Today’s Investment Issues, September 2012)

http://www.goldmansachs.com/gsam/docs/fundsgeneral/general_education/economic_and_market_perspectives/ps_us-energy-revolution-tpd.pdf

• Shale Fueling Chemicals Boom (Zacks Equity Research, January 2013)

http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/90793/shale-fueling-chemicals-boom

• Task Force on Ensuring Stable Natural Gas Markets (American Clean Skies Foundation)  Note: see last pages of report for list of industry participants and list of commissioned papers on the subject

http://www.cleanskies.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/63704_BPC_web.pdf

• Oil & Gas Financial Journal – Unconventional Resources

http://www.ogfj.com/unconventional.html

Resources: Activist Economics

• (Event) FRACKONOMICS – Debunking the financial myths of shale gas and embracing a green energy future.  Video of talks available at http://shaleshockmedia.org/2012/05/08/frackonomics/

• Energy Policy Forum – Deborah Rogers Shale Gas Economic Presentation (video)

http://energypolicyforum.org/2011/12/01/deborah-rogers-shale-gas-economic-presentation/

Julian Rodríguez-Drix

I am a fractivist from New York’s Marcellus Shale gasfields.  I am not an economist, but have spent years studying gas industry business news looking for strategic insight.  This article’s goal is to summarize some strategy ideas for fellow fractivists. 

Few of us stop to ask if this assumption is warranted. When facts arise that threaten this worldview we acknowledge them and move on. Democracy is imperfect, but it’s the best solution we’ve got. Errors happen, but reform can fix them.

Anything else, we say, is idealistic. Those who question the integrity of our systems as a whole are generally seen as outsiders or fringe elements, unable to appreciate the hard-nosed pragmatism that comes with an adult understanding of reality.

Is this really the case? In this issue we invite readers to ask what we have termed “the threshold question.” There are many different ways of stating it, but they all get at the same thing. “How big does a contradiction have to get before it stops being the exception and becomes the rule?” Or put another way, “How bad is bad enough?”

Some will undoubtedly cling to what they see as the pragmatic response, shunning the threshold question as too idealistic to be useful. To those of you considering such a response, I have a simple question. If your ideals aren’t worth fighting for, why bother believing in them?

In this issue we invite you to consider seriously whether the current state of affairs reflects your core values. And if it does not, we ask that you consider whether internal reforms will be sufficient to address your concerns or if more radical action is required.

My own article criticizes the profit-first construction of our economy and the complete capture of our government by financial elites. With a detailed analysis of how capitalism creates unemployment, I call for new coalitions between the far left and far right to reorient our society towards democratic justice.

Ralph Paone’s piece interrogates how the conditions of so-called “knowledge work” constrain our ability and desire to organize for social change. He calls for inventive experimentation in blockades, strategic mapping, and the redeployment of knowledge-based skills to reactivate the knowledge-classes in social struggle.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s extended feature offers a detailed analysis of the largely hidden American war machine and the extraordinary power to assassinate-at-will that President Obama has grabbed. With a private military and the power to kill without public oversight, it’s unclear what power this system leaves for the people.

We hope you find this issue engaging, and thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

(Lead image courtesy of Tom Page)

What Jobs Used To Be

In the post-World War II era American jobs were golden, comparatively speaking. Unions’ demands for higher wages and increased benefits were so successful that a single bread-winner (often a male) could support an entire family.^[1] Working conditions improved with overtime provisions and workplace safety regulations passing as a result of labor organizing^[2]. Overall a job was a ticket to steady income, promotion with time, and the means to support a family.

While this picture sounds good it is important to note that racial and gender discrimination were much higher, with women usually economically dependent on men due to wage discrimination and black Americans facing second-class citizenship with few protected civil rights, widespread segregation, and lynchings.^[3]

Along with high wages and benefits, corporate taxation was the highest in American history. As a result the rich/poor gap was at an all-time low, with economic growth being shared more evenly among the classes.^[4] These corporate taxes helped pay for a variety of social assistance programs including welfare, Medicare, and Social Security. By redistributing income the government provided a safety-net for the unemployed, the sick, and the elderly. Critically this safety net also helped the economy. Those who might otherwise not be economically productive could still contribute to the economic cycle by generating demand through consumption.

What Jobs Are Now

Things today are much worse for the American worker. Unemployment is at 8%, the highest since the Great Depression, with a record number of job-seekers remaining unemployed after 6 months.^[5] The rich/poor gap in America has returned to Great Depression levels, with the top 1% of Americans receiving over 20% of pre-tax income nationally, ranking America 93^rd in the world for income inequality behind the likes of China and Iran.^[6] Predictably social mobility (the likelihood of becoming richer than your parents) is at a historic low with the top 1% of Americans controlling 42% of the nation’s wealth, and the top 5% controlling nearly 70%.^[7]

The jobs that are created are overwhelmingly part-time and low-wage, with one-fourth of working Americans making less than two-thirds of the median national hourly wage.^[8] Between 1981 and 2008 the richest 10% took home on average 96% of income gains only to capture 100% of income gains between 1997-2008 with the wages of the bottom 90% declining.^[9]

The poignant story of Tyree Johnson draws these statistics into sharp focus. Johnson receives $8.25/hour, while the CEO of his employer McDonalds took home $8.75 million this year. Specific strategies are in place to ensure Johnson remains poor. He is transferred between locations, his wage-scale is restarted upon change of ownership to avoid promotion and raises, and he is unable to get a full 40 hours of work each week and thus does not qualify for full-time benefits.^[10] After working at McDonalds for 20 years Johnson still makes minimum wage.^[11]

At an all time high are third quarter corporate profits this year, reaching a record high of 11.1% of the U.S. economy.^[12] Since 1978 CEO pay has increased 27 times faster than worker pay, with outsourcing and the decline of organized labor paving the way for fatter executive bonuses.^[13]

Advanced tax dodging schemes continue to allow corporations to get away without paying their fair share, or in some cases paying any taxes at all. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt openly defended the practice, saying “It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”^[14] According to Citizens for Tax Justice’s “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-2010″ report, Boeing, DuPont, Capital One, and General Electric all paid a negative effective tax rate in 2010.^[15]

How Did We Get Here?

The specific historical reasons are complex and varied, but two large trends stand out. Both are consequences of the same structural flaw of our economy. The flaw has to do with how capitalism creates profit.

Used here, profit refers to “economic profit,” or the return on investment made by investing capital in a specific venture as opposed to any other venture.^[16] In other words, calculating economic profit helps someone decide where to invest their capital.

Profit happens when workers continue to work beyond the cost of their wages. For example, if a factory worker earns the cost of his wages in there hours, but works eight, five of those hours are “surplus value,” or profit for the factory owner. Viewed this way, surplus value is a tax the worker pays the capitalist for the right to have a job. The capitalist collects this tax simply by happening to own the means of production, like the machinery required for a factory to operate. Because the laborer cannot afford to start his own factory, he must pay the capitalist in the form of free work in order to have a job.

For a capitalist seeking to increase profits only two options are available: make workers work longer, or increase the productivity of labor. Union-based labor struggles established maximum working days with overtime laws and worker safety provisions in the United States. This led to the small rich/poor gap of the post-WWII era but also encouraged capitalists to find new ways to extract profit.

Automation provided a means for capitalists to increase worker productivity, thereby extracting the same amount of labor while employing fewer workers and keeping a larger share of production in the form of profit.

The agriculture industry provides a case-in-point example. Agriculture employed roughly 70% of American labor in 1840, 10% in 1950, and employs only 2% today.^[17] The manufacturing and service industries will soon follow suit as technological advancements in automation render much of labor irrelevant to the production process. Structurally capitalism attempts to eliminate the worker in order to maximize profits.

Labor, It’s What’s For Dinner

As it eliminates labor from production, capitalism then proceeds to extract profit directly from the fate of the unemployed:

1. High unemployment keeps wages low, since others can take the place of workers who would organize for higher demands. (Despite this key obstacle Black Friday strikes hit WalMart stores in 100 cities throughout 46 states this year.^[18])

2. Borders keep labor chained to its country of origin but allow goods to move freely to find the highest price. Companies exploit differences in purchasing power to buy labor cheap and sell their goods high. Borders create a literal stock market out of human bodies for corporate exploitation.

3. The booming prison and mass surveillance industries are worth approximately $8 billion yearly, with secondary industries like domestic arms sales, security systems, and media and advertising likely pushing the total much higher.^[19] Each of these industries depends on peddling a discourse of dangerousness that sensationalizes problems and rejects informed discussion about holistic solutions in favor of fear-based purchases and policy. America is roughly 5% of the global population, but one in four prisoners worldwide are American.^[20]

Of course one may object that without laborers drawing adequate wages demand cannot sustain the economy. This is why we saw a shift from redistributed income providing demand in the 1950′s-70′s to a debt-based financing model from the 1980′s onwards. This debt model imploded with the subprime mortgage crisis as home values plummeted and credit dried up, triggering a global recession through which we are still suffering today.^[21]

And of course, don’t forget the bailout. Crucially it is not the American worker who received substantial economic aid from her taxes, but instead the banks and hedge funds whose predatory lending practices and irresponsible loan repackaging precipitated the crisis in the first place.^[22]

Most Americans are aware of the $700 billion Troubled-Assets Relief Program (TARP) the Treasury Department dispensed to banks following the downturn. TARP already represented a kind of socialism in reverse, where profits remained private and losses were borne by the public. Without asking Congress and without telling the public, the Federal Reserve gave an additional $7.7 trillion to the banks.^[23]

That number is over half the yearly total economic output of the United States.

How To Move Forward

In the face of such overwhelming capture by financial elites it is difficult to continue calling the United States a democracy. Change through the existing two-party system is politically unimaginable as Democrats, traditionally viewed as the pro-union party, prepare to join Republicans in slashing Social Security.^[24]

Even if one of the parties were willing to do an about-face on 30 years of political history and defend effective corporate taxation to support the American Dream, it is unclear that such an economy would present a long-term solution to the structural bias capitalism displays for unemployment. While mixed economies can dampen some of capitalism’s excesses domestically, those problems almost always shift abroad as capital moves to seek the highest return on investment, in turn deflating the domestic economy it leaves.^[25]

Instead, those on the far left and far right must join together and build a new coalition that places people above profits. Communists, socialists, anarchists, queer/race/gender activists, libertarians, and those Christians who actually support ministering unto the poor all agree on the core value of self-determination, though they have differing ideas about what this freedom looks like and how to achieve it. Perhaps even more importantly, all these groups demand a basic value (liberty, the common good, or love) takes precedence above profit extraction, and this requires resistance against capitalism. Together this coalition could present a strong force for positive change in our nation.

While plotting a program for cooperation in advance remains unlikely, one thing is clear. Sustained dialogue across ideological enclaves will be necessary to invent a new language that abandons hardened dogmas in favor of practical steps to reorient our society and our economy towards justice.

The title of this article is a play on the uber-successful Clinton election catchphrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” Under President Clinton effective corporate taxation fell precipitously.

Lead image courtesy of Steven Damron.

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.

Historically, the cubicle has hardly been a site for radical political struggle.

Demands for revolutionary social change have grown either in places slightly removed from the demands of the economy (e.g. universities, art collectives) or places where people are violently exploited by their work (e.g. factories). Within these struggles, knowledge workers are generally viewed as at best irrelevant and at worst a hindrance for transformative action.^[2] However, as the American economy continues to shift towards this non-unionized, highly cerebral form of labor, we need to start taking the political potential (or lack thereof) of the knowledge worker seriously.

Knowledge Work Dissected

The basic rhythm of knowledge work is a rushing staccato. The worker’s attention is set on high-alert and made to process a variety of mentally stressful tasks throughout a given day. The scope of this problem is underlined by the emergence of entire economic theories of attention and self-help books with ominous titles, such as Death by Meeting and Boring Meetings Suck.^[3]  As Italian thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi laments, “everywhere, attention is under siege.”^[4]

(Nadine Fraczkowski via World of Photographers)

This scarcity of attention has serious consequences for how workers communicate and process information. A 2011 study from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London finds that the multi-tasking required by a typical knowledge worker job decreases worker IQ by an average of 10 points. Torn between different projects, mountains of email, and endless meetings, the knowledge worker comes to demand efficiency over provocation. This transformation is brilliantly encapsulated by Ian Parker’s writing on PowerPoint:

PowerPoint…is software you impose on other people…there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns—the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines on a slide.^[5]

Flying through work in a state of distraction, communicating with coworkers is like trying to talk to someone at a noisy bar. Brief, direct exchanges of information take the place of more thought-provoking and considered dialogue. One is barely able to keep all of the information flowing, much less step back to consider the broader context in which this information exists.

The Comfort Economy

Sweeter notes punctuate the maddening tempo of knowledge work; fancy nights out, a wider variety of entertainment options, spas, yoga and drugs. Just as knowledge workers must be ready-at-hand for any updates on their projects, diversions to ease their stress must be available On Demand. Savvy corporations are well aware of this need. In developing the Google Zurich office, the design firm, Camenzind Evolution, “applied ‘emotional comfort’, an approach to design that takes personalities and sensibilities into account. The research based design process was enhanced by a psychologist who analyzed the functional and emotional needs of the Zooglers (i.e. Googlers in Zurich).”^[6]

 (Stefan Camenzind of Camenzind Evolution via Office Snapshots)

 (Stefan Camenzind of Camenzind Evolution via Office Snapshots)

Confronted with diffuse sources of stress and anxiety, knowledge workers are taught to unplug through a plethora of comforts and conveniences. As former President George W. Bush put it in a 2006 speech on spurring economic growth, “go shopping more.”

Our obsession with comfort contributes to apathy and disdain towards those pursuing radical social change. Consider a common complaint about the occupations: ‘Isn’t there a quieter, less disruptive way for protestors to voice their concerns? One that doesn’t disrupt my life?’

Consumable Politics

The interplay of stress and comfort creates a closed circuit that keeps many knowledge workers operating in a space removed from broader socioeconomic struggle. The mental intensity of knowledge work reduces the capacity and desire for complex inter-personal communication, while also training workers to prefer simple, easy to consume bits of information. At the same time, a culture of comfort and consumption submit activism to the rule of maximum convenience. These two phenomena create a negative feedback loop that maintains a cycle of anxious consumption while lowering the capacity for questioning the economic and political structures that dominate society.

In this environment, politics is reduced to an act of consumption. Every couple of years, people are presented with a choice between two relatively similar candidates and asked to pick a side. Each party spends an excessive amount—an estimated $6 billion in the 2012 Presidential Election—to differentiate their candidate and ensure voters make the right decision.^[9] At the end of yearlong campaigns, people mark a ballot one way or another and go back to their normal lives.

In a society suffering from attention fatigue, even radical modes of political resistance are undermined. Strikes, union disputes and protests become objects of consumption. Struggle is consumed as a spectacle and then spit out for lacking coherence.^[10] Recall a popular critique of Occupy Wall Street: ‘What’s their goal?’ This line of criticism assumes politics comes as a ready-made brand to consume, wear, etc. Like an impatient boss who’s running late to a meeting, we demand protestors get to the point, with little empathy or willingness to get involved in the process.

However, the power of movements like Occupy lies in not in the message but the action. As Bifo summarizes, “the main stake of street actions is the reactivation of the body…bodily sensibility, blurred and stressed by precarity and competition, are finding new modes of expression, so that desire may begin flowing again.”^[11] The revolution “out there” is made a media spectacle in order to keep the knowledge worker “in here,” where it’s nice and cozy with plenty of work to be done. What possibility exists for disrupting complacency and alienation amongst knowledge workers?

 (Sandi Bachom)

 Class Consciousness is Not Enough

In other types of work class consciousness plays a key role in fighting oppressive structures. As with the recent Walmart strikes, workers bound together by shared experiences of exploitation unite as a class and begin acting in a collective manner, whether that means placing explicit demands on management or simply refusing to work.^[12]

This concept of class consciousness is utterly inadequate for addressing the situation of knowledge workers. Most knowledge economy jobs lack the infrastructure of collective communication and shared experience necessary for true class consciousness. Management structures are flat and decentralized. Teams often consist of less than ten people. This structure localizes frustrations and potential communication. Conflicts die in the capillaries of the organization without the larger organization or management being made aware.

More fundamentally, the focus on the individual worker stands in opposition to traditional models of class organization. Workers are hired not just based on a checklist of skills but a series of intangibles. This somewhat personality-based approach individualizes workplace struggle. What could be considered generalized problems with a forum of work—being over-worked, too many meetings, nasty clients, etc.—become personal challenges to overcome. Struggle is internalized.

Reactivating Political Potential

Resisting the cerebral modes of control facing knowledge workers starts by reclaiming mental space. As Micah White proclaims, “The future of activism is an insurrection of the mental environment–a movement that appropriates tactics reserved for physical battles and applies them to the battle to protect our mental environment.”^[13] While there is no program for this process, White’s proposal suggests a couple of areas for exploration.

For starters, we should think about placing mental blockades on both the attention-sapping technologies of knowledge work and the consumption of comfort. This could take the form of leaving work e-mail and computers at the job site instead of bringing them home. It might also mean instituting zero-spending days, as many May Day protestors practiced this past year. Creating separation from the negative feedback loop of attention fatigue and convenience is necessary to open mental space for new thinking to emerge.

Second, we should think about creating better strategic maps for the problems facing knowledge workers. Rather than looking at attention fatigue as a personal problem, we should consider these problems as shared structural aspects of knowledge work. Collective mapping of mental workspaces may help reveal generalized conditions that knowledge workers can organize around.

Finally, we should consider redeployment of our knowledge skills for justice-focused purposes. One extremely inspiring example of this is Occupy Design, a decentralized group of designers who organized in the fall of 2011 to provide an ever-growing, striking visual language for the 99%.

 (Occupy Design)

 Skill-based collectives like Occupy Design offer knowledge workers a way to utilize their knowledge in new context. They demonstrate the power of applying skills that may have been learned in work contexts to radical social struggle.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems faced by knowledge workers and further experimentation is undoubtedly necessary, each of these interventions holds the potential to begin breaking through complacency and activating knowledge workers towards building a better society.

Yet widespread anti-U.S. anger continues to surprise Americans.^[7] Election after election, the American voter is led to believe that U.S. militarism is a force for global good, benefiting foreigners as well as Americans. We are fed this message by politicians captured by a defense industry that annually boasts record-breaking profits and unprecedented sums spent on political lobbying.^[8] Both parties package military spending in the language of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The glaring logical inconsistency should be read at its face. U.S. military spending directly benefits only military contractors and the politicians whose reelection campaigns they fund. At home and abroad, the U.S.’s unrivaled militarism cripples entire societies. Recognizing this contradiction requires moving beyond domestic party politics and the mainstream media locked firmly in its shadow.

War, on the Ground

To wage war in modern times is to accept the premise that the men, women, and children of another country have intrinsically less valuable lives than those of our own. But this idea is too repellent to be sold directly. Today, the prevailing rhetoric underpinning American militarism is “counterterrorism.” Protecting our own, we are told, requires killing others. Thus, thousands of ordinary foreign citizens continue to be slaughtered and starved to benefit American military and economic interests. This logic of counterterrorism is as malignant as terrorism itself. More dangerously, it directly exacerbates the problem it purports to solve.

To recall a recent example we might consider the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq, universally condemned by international lawyers and human rights experts^[9] as an illegal war of aggression^[10] motivated primarily by geostrategic interests but cloaked in the standard language of freedom, security, and democracy. Historically, the U.S. happily funded Saddam Hussein’s genocide and chemical warfare in Kurdistan, in which he massacred thousands, and stopped only when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened oil-rich U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.^[11] Later we learned that in the course of the 2003 war buildup the White House knowingly lied about Iraqi WMDs, forging official documents to wage war under false pretenses.^[12],[13]

In the years since the invasion of Iraq over 120,000 civilians have died. These are the officially disclosed deaths, but further analysis of the Wikileaks “Iraq War Logs” may bump the figure past 132,000.^[14] Using only the conservative estimate, quick math shows that since March 19, 2003, an average of 33 civilians have died daily in occupied Iraq. All the while, America’s longest war (remember Afghanistan?) continues escalating, with civilian death tolls accelerating amid plummeting general health outcomes.^[15] Yet recent reports suggest the Afghan War may stretch well past the advertised withdrawal date of 2014: maybe 2017,^[16] maybe even 2024.^[17]

How should members of any society react to such catastrophic destruction experienced firsthand everyday for a decade? “Counterterrorism” as executed can never succeed in combating terrorism, but it has already provoked global hatred of America, perpetuating a state of permanent war propelled by select defense contractors.

Expanding our focus beyond the official war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan makes this picture clearer.

A Portrait of Global Empire

The U.S. military has undergone such stunning growth in the past fifty years that an accurate count of the number of U.S. bases globally is unavailable. Most credible estimates place the figure between 1,000 and 1,200.^[18] Overall U.S. military expenditures are similarly outsized, accounting for 46% of the world’s total military spending.^[19] In terms of GDP-proportional military allocations the U.S. is in illuminating company. At 4.06% (considering only basic Pentagon spending, a very narrow scope) we occupy a similar range as Angola, Syria, Chad, Oman, and Turkmenistan, edged out only by Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and North Korea.^[20] Just last year the U.S. tripled its global arms sales, cornering roughly 78% of the world market, followed next by Russia with a paltry 5.6%.^[21]

As disturbing as the readily available facts are, the war machine extends far deeper than these initial figures suggest. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) forces now conduct an average of seventy covert missions each day in 60% of the world’s countries, doubling their Bush-era presence in sixty countries to an undisclosed list of 120 or more under Obama.^[22] Established in 1987, SOCOM carries out the U.S. military’s most secret missions. In recent years it has snowballed into a full-fledged shadow paramilitary, described by outgoing SOCOM chief Eric Olson as “a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies.”^[23] Since 9/11, the SOCOM budget has quadrupled to $9.8 billion, and its number of personnel deployed abroad has also increased fourfold.^[24] While almost entirely opaque, SOCOM is highly sophisticated. “Black ops” troops conduct kill/capture campaigns across the Greater Middle East, while so-called “white” forces regularly conduct secret joint-training exercises with client militaries worldwide.

Especially disconcerting among the SOCOM spectrum are the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a clandestine sub-command tasked mainly with the tracking and killing of suspected terror suspects.^[25] Reporting directly to the President, JSOC effectively functions as the President’s private global army, maintaining an extrajudicial hit list that includes American citizens.^[26] John Nagl, a counterinsurgency advisor to ex-CIA director David Petraeus, has called it “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine,” completely outside of any democratic accountability.^[27]

Constant War, Everywhere

It is difficult to overstate the scope of the American military. What analysts have described as the U.S.’s “new ‘Scramble for Africa’” again underlines its true global reach.^[28] The U.S. has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in military infrastructure this past year across Africa. An average of 5,000 U.S. military and Department of Defense personnel are now deployed at any one time, monitoring drone wars as far as Mali and Somalia, while ground troops conduct operations in Uganda and Ethiopia.^[29]

The pattern on display in Africa — significant military action in undeclared conflict zones, underreported and virtually unknown to the American public — illustrates the shadowy paradigm under which U.S. militarism largely functions. The message of protecting freedom does not begin to square with the reality of multiple secret wars violating foreign countries’ sovereignty across continents.

In Iran, the push for military action continues building despite an overwhelming lack of evidence justifying intervention. Iranian civilians continue to suffer under crippling sanctions^[30] intended to dissuade their government from pursuing a nuclear weapons program that most credible sources — including the U.S.’s own official National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)^[31] — agree does not exist. The sanctions on Iranian civil society flagrantly violate U.N. prohibitions on torture and collective punishment. In addition to targeting civilians economically, the U.S. continues to expand its military presence in the region^[32] despite a sea of bases in the Gulf that already encircle the country.^[33]

Troublingly, the buildup augments an ongoing covert war led by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad that has been underway for years. Like SOCOM, the CIA in recent years has become yet another paramilitary arm of the U.S. government, waging war under false or totally absent pretexts. U.S. officials have openly stated^[34] that the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK), a cult terrorist organization, has worked alongside Mossad operatives to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists in shootings, car bombings and poisonings.^[35] Earlier this year, revelations were made that JSOC secretly trained MEK operatives in Nevada as early as 2005, while they were still officially listed as a terrorist organization.^[36] A Foreign Policy report shows how Israeli agents, supplied with CIA intelligence, have coordinated a number of mosque bombings and deadly explosions at nuclear facilities.^[37] And since 2009, a joint U.S.-Israel cyber warfare campaign has seen at least three virulent worms damage nuclear centrifuges.^[38]

It should come as no surprise that the hypocritical funding of terrorists in the name of counter-terrorism breeds distrust and resentment globally. The logical connection is obscured, however, by a mainstream American press that effectively keeps these details secret. Why, they reason, would we want to report on policy developments so uncontroversial in Washington? Thinking along these lines, the mainstream media has itself become complicit in the U.S.’s growing militarization, offering no third voice of reason outside of the captured parties.

Extrajudicial assassinations such as those authorized by the CIA showcase the tragic consequences of this tripartite silence. Once, George W. Bush’s policy of indefinitely detaining terror suspects without charges at Guantanamo Bay was controversial. But since his Democratic successor cemented and superseded this practice a suffocating mainstream silence has prevailed.

Pakistan is an official U.S. ally in the war on terror. Nonetheless, U.S. drones have killed over 3,000 Pakistanis from 2004-2012, of whom 600-800 were civilians, including 176 children.^[39] A recent collaborative study by Stanford and NYU’s law schools documents the severe social toll of drone strikes, noting a “breakdown in the region’s basic social engagements.”^[40] Afraid of the ever-present threat of a drone strike, people avoid congregating in groups of three or four. Parents fear sending their children to school. Ancient social gathering places like the jurga, community dispute resolution councils, are now largely avoided. Journalists and medical doctors will not go to the scene of an attack for six hours afterward, fearing a secondary drone strike known as a “double tap,” a second missile designed to eliminate those assisting victims. The U.S. government has in the past derided such assaults as heinous terrorist acts despite itself repeatedly targeting civilian mourners at victims’ funerals.^[41] Even more troublesome under international human rights law is the growing use of  “signature strikes,” which are carried out on unknown targets based on “patterns of life,” though these criteria remain opaque.

For years, the Department of Justice has refused to formally justify drone killings while publicly insisting they reduce the threat of terrorism.^[42] Testimony from actual terrorists and basic social science data suggest the polar opposite.^[43] The study notes only 2 percent of those killed by drones have been identified as high-value targets, meaning 98 percent are either low-level insurgents or civilians. Unsurprisingly, drones are immensely unpopular among the Pakistani people, with 97% of informed Pakistanis opposed. In fact, the U.S. remains the sole country in the world where a majority of people favor drone use.^[44]

War Abroad, Decay at Home

At home, our President’s institutionalization of drone killings into a “kill list” and then a “disposition matrix”^[45] has cemented executive paramilitarization at historic heights. Constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald summarizes the situation succinctly: “If you believe the President should have the power to order people, including U.S. citizens, executed with no due process and not even any checks or transparency, what power do you believe he shouldn’t have?”^[46]

The candidate that ran on a “sunshine” transparency policy has classified more documents than any other prior administration, while using the WWI-era Espionage Act to persecute more government whistleblowers than all other previous administrations combined. Simultaneously, his own officials leak information perceived as politically advantageous, making the expansive New York Times hagiography of the President and his “kill list” possible.^[47]

While seemingly unlimited funds are pumped into the American war machine and interest-free Federal Reserve loans to prop up swollen banks, an austerity-rotten economy continues to eat away at ordinary Americans’ lives. For the first time in U.S. history, white Americans’ lifespans have actually shortened,^[48] and overall U.S. life expectancy has plummeted to 49th in the world.^[49] Child poverty rankings place the U.S. 31^st out of 34 OECD countries,^[50] while for the first time since the Great Depression children can expect to be poorer than their parents, on average by 12%.^[51] More Americans now toil through low-wage jobs than in any other developed society.^[52]

Yet Obama’s drastic expansion of global war evokes remarkably little mainstream controversy, emphasizing the need to escape the bipartisan framework. If we are to reclaim our captured country and the world that it is in turn attempting to capture, we must join the global mainstream. Identifying the giant economic forces driving U.S. militarism — defense contractors, energy multinationals — and highlighting the odious activities they make possible is the first step. The next step is to hold our elected representatives individually accountable for their complicity in these crimes, withholding our support for a system that has proven itself incapable of doing so.

Politicians on the campaign trail like to posture and paint themselves as “tough on terror,” working to “keep America safe.” Destruction of societies at home and abroad does not do either of these things. Let’s accomplish this the right way. We can keep our communities, schools, and collective futures safe by standing together firmly against American militarism.

Lead image courtesy U.S. military. U.S Soldiers detonate firebombs in an Iraqi palm grove, Dec. 22, 2008. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Walter Pels, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.

I write our first extended feature exploring the pressing domestic issue of ballooning student debt and tuition costs, framing it within the context of the increasingly corporatized American nonprofit university. The piece also highlights a few current nodes of resistance.

Jonathan Lyle focuses this broader analysis on North Carolina’s public university students, currently mounting a vibrant campaign against the rising tide of austerity budgeting. An organizer himself with the North Carolina Student Power Union (NCSPU), Jonathan offers an insider’s viewpoint on the pitched academic struggles in his home state.

Our third piece, another extended feature by Bobo Bose-Kolanu, delves deep into the history and culture of students’ institutional opposition. Documenting the coercion and surveillance of student activists by the CIA, FBI, and other state actors with exceptional detail, Bobo paints a startling portrait of the U.S.’s covert repression of dissent. He reminds us yet again that the stakes of student activism are far from trivial.

I learned a lot in the course of compiling this issue, and we hope that you as a reader will too.

Warmly,

Prashanth