…a cornucopia of lamentations…

My personal favorite moment from the Glenn Beck show (despite the dated optimism):

Some obvious remarks by Ralph Nader, from an interview with Chris Hedges:

“They are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they have become right-wing,” Nader said of the commercial press. “They have become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is biased on. The coverage of O’Reilly and Beck and their fights is insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing, it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero. Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn’t Chris Hedges three times a year in the Op-Ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why is John Bolton constantly published in The Washington Post and The New York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute? Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed.”
[…]
“The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”

More prescient remarks from an interview with Eisler appearing in “Sovetskok Iskustvo”, quoted verbatim in Hanns Eisler’s 686 page FBI file:

After all it can be said without hesitation that everything platitudinous, hackneyed and vulgar found a niche for itself in Fascist production.

The degeneration to which the artistic youth of Germany is doomed was not escaped by the great artist Hindemith. His latest work, the symphony “Khudozknik Matiss” [Mathis der Maler] reveals in the author an epigonus [sic] composer who produces astoundingly weak pieces for a man like he is. Does this fact not serve as striking proof of that indisputable truth that Fascism is only capable of leading music, as well as any other art, to degradation!

The Fascists are earnestly endeavoring to find musical forms which they could give out for new ones present only in Fascist art. In this they strive to utilize the renowned “classical” heritage of the ancient Germans not restraining to add to this the mass compositions of revolutionary German composers. I am referring to the musical festivals on public squares (TING PLATZE) an attempted revival of ancient German games.

Incapable of creating something original Fascism also ruthlessly suppresses all experiments and withdraws further from contemporariness. We the revolutionary musicians, are not the only ones who make this assertion. Whenever mention is made of present-day German music, the musical experts only shake their head sympathetically¹.

Solidaritätslied, music by Hanns Eisler, lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.
From Hanns Eisler’s second HUAC testimony in September of 1947

This hearing is both sinister and ridiculous. This committee is not interested in any testimony I may give or in anything I can testify about. The only thing of any public importance about me is my standing as a composer. Although my reputation is international, I do not suppose that that fact makes my musical activities un-American. I would be delighted to spend as much time as this committee will allow to lecture on musical topics, the only matters which I am qualified to speak about. I could then discuss, for example, the development technique of Beethoven’s last sonatas and string quartets or analyze the art of the fugue. But I doubt that I have been called to further such cultural matters.

Clairvoyant remarks by Paul Mattick in 1934 from World-wide Fascism or World Revolution? :

Fascism in the general crisis is a situation of capitalist barbarism. Killing becomes a political science; robbery goes on as economy. Pauperization of the workers, as the only source for making possible profits, makes a passive proletariat necessary. To accomplish this, enough privileges must be given the killers.
The rebellion of the middle class is essentially not directed against capitalism, but against their own pauperization. Fascism makes use of all the energies of the middle class, and engages them in the interests of capitalism against the only revolutionary class – the proletariat.
In America, with the breakdown of the New Deal, it is considered a likelihood that the Roosevelt regime will become a fascist dictatorship; but this conclusion is not necessarily correct. Fascism is the best form of government in the permanent crisis for monopoly capital; but it is not an absolute necessity. A dictatorship of the capitalist class, themselves, is possible here where the middle class are relatively weak. Only when a condition exists where the workers are in a menacing condition, when the middle class becomes rebellious, when a really revolutionary situation lies before capitalism, then the ruling class will be forced to further the fascist tendencies.
[…]
The international character of the depression, the international character of the class struggle, will force the dictatorship of the ruing class all over the world. Fascism becomes a world menace. To escape this situation, nothing else is possible but that the workers overthrow capitalism with the world revolution. History has set the stage; – World Fascism or World Revolution – Barbarism or Communism¹.

Re: Alfred W. McCoy’s December 6 article on Salon.com, How America Will Collapse (By 2025):

I remember seeing an interview with Immanuel Wallerstein some time ago where he aptly described the practice of predicting the distant future as a kind of fantastic or creative-fiction based project. This would seem to me a very uncontroversial claim given what we are able to understand about the nature of reality, with it’s stark frictions, dynamical processes, brute facts, etc, all violently interrupting our near-pathological desire(s) to “explain” and “know” our world.

However, it seems equally uncontroversial to insist on fidelity to material facts and readily observable trends, and to draw conclusions thusly- put frankly, a sensible materialist stance. Alfred McCoy’s descriptions of 2025 may be entertaining in the sense of the aforementioned creative-fiction sense, but the overall message cannot be discarded as it is also thoroughly uncontroversial. America’s continued hegemony is so precarious , it’s behavior foreign and domestic so unsustainable, that to dispute what is so abundantly accessible to critique and analysis defies any sane position.

Moreover, a writer like Alfred McCoy is not some cred-lacking-try-hard with no intellectual backbone. His books, The Politics of Heroin, an exposé of CIA involvement in the global drug trade¹ (a fact that should also no longer elicit controversy), or A Question of Torture, an exposé of the CIA’s involvement in torture research in the past century (another fact that should not tolerate challenge), are simply not works of hackery. Despite the imaginativeness of his 2025 scenarios, can American imperial decline and collapse even be considered up for debate?

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be².

Some highlights from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Test Scorer in this month’s issue of Monthly Review:

Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies.
[…]
Scoring is particularly rushed when scorers are paid by piece-rate, as is the case when you are scoring from home, where a growing part of the industry’s work is done. At 30 to 70 cents per paper, depending on the test, the incentive, especially for a home worker, is to score as quickly as possible in order to earn any money: at 30 cents per paper, you have to score forty papers an hour to make $12 an hour, and test scoring requires a lot of mental breaks.
[…]
Even if the scoring were a more exact science, this would in no way make up for the atrocious effect on creativity wrought by the mania for standardized testing. This impact has now been documented. According to one study, creativity among U.S. children has been in decline since 1990, with a particularly severe drop among those currently between kindergarten and sixth grade. {footnote in original refers to this Newsweek article}
[…]
I remember reading, for twenty-three straight days, the responses of thousands of middle-schoolers to the question, “What is a goal of yours in life?” A plurality devoted several paragraphs to explain that their life’s goal was to talk less in class, listen to their teacher, and stop fooling around so much. It’s asking too much to hope for great literature on a standardized test. But, given that this is the process through which so many students are learning to write and to think, one would hope for more. These rote responses, in themselves, are a testament to the failure of our education system, its failure to actually connect with kids’ lives, to help them develop their humanity and their critical thinking skills, to do more than discipline them and prepare them to be obedient workers—or troops.¹

From the Democracy Now! broadcast on December 2nd, 2010:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the growing number of threats against Julian Assange. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said Assange should be, quote, “hunted down,” and a former campaign aide of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further in a recent interview on the Canadian Broadcasting, CBC.

TIM FLANAGAN: Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. You know, there’s no good coming of this.

AMY GOODMAN: That was University of Calgary professor Tim Flanagan, who served as the Conservative Party’s campaign manager in Canada’s general election in 2004 and 2006. Jennifer Robinson, as Julian Assange’s attorney, your response?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: These calls for his assassination are absolutely outrageous and, indeed, illegal. I think that the prosecuting authorities ought to consider prosecuting these individuals for incitement to violence. Obviously assassination is illegal, and we take these concerns very seriously. Now, the press around the fact that my client is in hiding to evade arrest is absolutely incorrect. And one can imagine that when you have very public officials making these sorts of serious calls for assassination, that one would be concerned for their personal safety. I also think that it raises genuine concerns when you have Sarah Palin making such allegations for the prospect of my client receiving any sort of due process in the U.S.¹