Defend Arizona Workers, Abolish the Police Unions

At times like these -- of austerity and broad attacks on workers, the poor and the excluded -- it must first be pointed out that the state revenue crisis is fake.  In Arizona, the justification for massive cuts and fee increases runs immediately up against the hard fact that while the right wing government is pleading poverty and cutting health and assistance programs for the poor, it is also busy slashing corporate taxes.  Famously, two out of three corporations in the Copper State pay no taxes and recurring proposals for a "flat tax" would shift the tax burden even further onto the poor and working class -- a group that already pays disproportionately more of their income than Arizona's rich.

It's in this context that a new series of anti-union bills have been introduced into the legislature.  Backed by the generally reactionary far right Goldwater Institute, these laws would remove basic rights of free association and self-defense from Arizona workers.  Among the deletions: automatic deductions and collective bargaining rights over pay and benefits.  And, unlike other states, such as Wisconsin, where similar legislation has been introduced, in Arizona police and fire departments are not excluded.  This comes in the context of an ongoing series of attacks on unions in Arizona.

In Arizona only six percent of workers are unionized, and this skews heavily towards public sector workers.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Arizona has one of the lowest percentage of unionized workers in the US, but even that small number is in decline, and last year many workers took the opportunity of the weakening of automatic deduction laws to leave unions that they felt had been poorly representing them, engaging in the classic 'dues strike'.  In Arizona, public sector unions have been increasingly seen by their members as functioning not to defend workers, but rather to manage the imposition of austerity in ways that don't rile up the rank and file.

And, of course, in any labor fight, conflicts with the police are never far off.  That's what makes these bills so interesting,  Given the important role of police as strikebreakers and the enforcers of capital's will, one tends to assume that almost certainly Arizona's right wing ideologues will have to pull a Wisconsin and create exceptions for the police and fire departments.  As we have recently seen in the case of Kyrsten Sinema's liberal candidacy for Congress, even so-called progressives in the state depend on the political support of the racist police unions.

Indeed, Synema recently accepted the endorsement of the worst police union in the state (although choosing is hard), the Professional Law Enforcement Association, famous for its vigorous advocacy for Arizona's anti-immigrant SB1070 law and unconscionable defense of Officer Richard Chrisman, who tortured, shot and killed unarmed Danny Rodriguez as well as his dog in his home on October 5, 2010.  Famously, PLEA President Mark Spencer not only helped bail Chrisman out with union funds, but also held a fund-raiser bbq for his defense.  But such it is with police unions.

Beyond that, if there is to be a fight that breaks out beyond the strict legislative boundaries enforced by the union bureaucracy and leadership, like perhaps a general strike, bosses and government officials will need the police to impose their class objectives.  Police, of course, are not just regular members of the working class.  They are paid to wage a never-ending war on poor people, folks of color in particular, and to maintain capitalist relations of property, wage labor and commodity production.

I've been reading Kristian Williams excellent book, "Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America" and he goes into quite a bit of depth about the history and reactionary tendencies of police unions that set them apart from and against other unions.  What strikes me as particularly relevant in the current situation is his analysis of the different ways that police union demands function versus the demands of other public sector workers.  Setting aside wage and benefit bargaining, the demands and lobbying of most public sector workers tends to involve benefits for the broader working class.  That is, teachers in the past have very often demand smaller class sizes, increased funding for free breakfast and lunch programs, and other social programs concomitant with their role.  For instance, the American Federation of Teachers in recent years joined the boycott of Arizona over SB1070.  These sorts of trends bear out amongst most other public sector unions.

However, this is not true when it comes to the police.  The results of police union bargaining tend much more strongly in the exact opposite direction.  Also, because of the often mutually beneficial relationship between police unions, the police bureaucracy, government and politicians, police negotiations and the lobbying that their organizations engage in tend to lead directly to increased budgets for weapons and equipment, expansion of police and jail facilities and other infrastructure to be used against the poor and marginalized populations.  So, while most public sector bargaining and lobbying can lead to increased services, police bargaining and lobbying leads to more murdered and imprisoned poor people, and the wrecked and ruined lives that go with it.  Beyond that, police union bureaucracy serves to protect cops from the consequences of their policing through its various internal discipline procedures.

So, if the legislature sticks to its ideology of right wing austerity and attacks on workers over the class pragmatism of privileging the police, there may be an opportunity to seriously weaken the police unions in Arizona, striking a blow for the working class and the poor and greatly opening up possibilities for further struggle.  To do this, workers will have to be brave enough to recognize their opposing interests to the police and to say, "Defend Arizona Workers, Abolish the Police Unions".

Lines will have to be drawn, but they won't be new lines.  In all likelihood this will mean contradicting the union bosses who will play, as is their habit, towards the racist, classist law and order line of safety and protection.  If we ever want to break out of this system of never-ending work, in which waged labor dominates our lives and we negotiate pitifully with the bosses for small glimpses of freedom and dignity, this will necessarily mean taking on the final defenders of work, the police.  Public sector workers may find it expedient in the short term to hide behind the boys in blue, but long term, given the fight that is coming, that strategy may come back to haunt them.

Our Lives Are Not Negotiable!

 

OUR    LIVES   ARE   NOT   NEGOTIABLE!

We are at the beginning of a great shift. We are in motion, all of us, experiencing new ideas, trying out new ways of living, organizing and relating to each other. The old ways of doing things, which have had the feeling of going through the motions for some time now, are finally fading away. Soon they will all be gone.

The truth is we have been tired of this world for some time. It isn't organized for our benefit, which makes sense because it isn't organized by us. It's organized by capitalists and bureaucrats, politicians and technicians. So-called “experts”. The institutions, all of them, have revealed themselves as servants of power, not broken but functioning normally as part of a giant profit- and power-driven machine. It hasn't changed, it's just easier to see it now.

American democracy isn't broken, we are witnessing the logical conclusions of its internal nature. Likewise with American capitalism. We don't need to “fix” it because it isn't broken. Neither was it ever meant to respond to us. In capitalism we produce and consume, but the profits go elsewhere. In democracy we validate capitalist domination over our lives. This is the normal functioning of the system.

This crisis goes beyond “corporate greed” or “getting corporate money out of politics”. It wasn't some character flaw that led to this calamity. And it isn't any particular mechanism by which elite power influences politics that is the problem. It's that elite power controls politics regardless. This is because we live in a dictatorship of money, of capital. Just like you can't get money out of capitalism, you can't get capitalist power out of government because government exists to perpetuate capitalist power.

This crisis goes deep. It's not just foreclosures, it's also the vacuous suburbs themselves. It's not just unemployment, it's the meaninglessness of our jobs. It's also being worked to death in an era of massive technological advancement. It's a system that moves so fast that we never get any time to slow down. We exist for the system, not the other way around. Meanwhile the system throws so many of us away, locking us in prisons, poverty or powerlessness. It eats up the Earth with an insatiable appetite, foisting the costs unto us.

It's a system determined to eat up everything in sight, invading and colonizing everywhere, including our minds and relationships to each other. Always accumulating at our expense, and backed up by the army and the police, it's a system that doles out petty privileges to some while it systematically attacks others, all the while keeping the lion's share for those at the top. And, as we have seen, if it wants to it can take those privileges away. The laws do not protect us so why should we respect them? In this system we have very little control over the fundamental questions of our lives. Picking between brands of ketchup isn't freedom. And neither is working in the ketchup factory. Nor studying at ketchup university.

At such an important point in our history, now is not the time to seek to restore normality. Now is no time to be conservative. Do not hold back! We must resist the temptation to try to return to the way the system functioned in the past. Not only isn't it possible, but it would be a betrayal of this amazing moment. And things weren't so great back then anyhow. Don't beg for reforms. Insist on your dreams. Think big. Look around you for inspiration of how things could be. Now is the moment to ask yourself how you would like the world to be, not what you would settle for. It can be different. It can be totally different.

DEMAND   EVERYTHING,  INSIST  ON  YOUR  DREAMS  AND  RESIST   THE  URGE   TO COMPROMISE  IN  THE  STRUGGLE!

Southeast Valley Libraries Are Burning Books

It may be a stretch in these internet times to remember back that far, but perhaps some people will recall a distant July 2009, when Amazon made the literary gaffe of all gaffes late one night by reaching virtually into Kindle users' libraries, located on machines these users had paid for, and deleted titles such as "1984" and "Animal Farm". This happened when Amazon found out that a third party that had claimed rights to the books in fact did not own them.  And so, with a mouse click from a remote location, buried deep within the bowels of the Amazon book tracking behemoth (do not be afraid that Amazon maintains a database on all your book purchases, citizen) -- and without a sense of irony -- the titles were deleted from users e-readers.

The deletion causes quite a controversy, with people justifiably citing censorship, invasion of privacy and even theft as causes for their outrage.  But another issue didn't come up at the time that definitely struck me as curious. It is one of the, perhaps few, redeeming qualities of the electron age that when I give you a copy of something I have on my computer, my copy doesn't go away.  Indeed, not only doesn't it go away, but the quality of your does not diminish.

Love at first sight.

Now, if we can sidestep the question of analog versus digital quality, not only isn't the grade of your copy reduced compared to mine, but when I share a copy with you, it costs me nearly nothing.  So close to nothing we would never think of keeping track between us.  And one thing I would never do would be to ask for it back from you.  I would never call you up and say, "Hey, man, are you done with those Propagandhi mp3's that I gave you?  I need 'em back."   When I give you a copy, thanks to the magic of electrons, we both have one now.  Perfect, right, because there are two of us?

And so this brings me to the just announced deal that Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler and Queen Creek libraries, through the Greater Phoenix Digital Library, a consortium of Valley libraries, have struck a deal with Amazon.com to allow for digital downloads to Kindle devices through the library system.  Even though books, music and other files have been available for other digital devices, Kindle users have had to pay for access.  This in itself is funny, because if I loan you a book from my library, the book works just fine whether you are reading it on the couch or on the toilet.  And, to keep with our digital theme, the music I gave you earlier works just fine on your computer, whatever kind you have.

Now, this deserves a little commentary before I move on to the final point.  Pretty much anyone who uses devices but does not represent a manufacturer of devices would notice that what is happening here (aside from a direct attack on the library as a public, physical institution, since library patrons can now download the files 24/7 from home with their library cards) is that form is dictating access to content.

At the height of the hysteria and crackdown (2003), people still supported file sharing overwhelmingly

So, let's step back a few more years, if we can.  When my friend gave me a VHS copy of  Star Wars, it didn't matter whether you had a Sony and I had some crappy American VCR.  Why the hell there needs to be a separate agreement for me to download Marie Gabriel's new book, "Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution" on two formats?  Especially since we know that it is mere proprietaries -- as in limiting access for profit -- that is at the root of the division? This is a library after all.  A library I have already paid for with taxes, if I may strike a right wing note for a moment.

But it gets worse!  The Republic reports, bafflingly, that there is a waiting list for Amazon titles.  A waiting list?!  Why?  The great thing about digital files is that you and I can both have them at the same time.  If for some unexplained reason I am waiting for that newest John Grisham book and so are you, why should I wait just because you were a few keystrokes faster than I am?  It defies logic.

Successfully deleted.

But here's what really makes no sense.  When you "borrow" a digital file from the "library" under this new deal, it self-destructs in 14 days, thus "freeing" it up to be available for the next person in line.  So, the library, dedicated to the spread of free knowledge and public access, is actively destroying books, serving as Amazon's willing executioner of information.  Information that wants to be free, with the only stumbling block being Amazon's desire to make a buck.

But make a buck how?  Well, aside from the licensing deal, it turns out that embedded in each "loaned" file for Kindle will be a link to Amazon where you can opt to purchase the book you got from the library via download.  Wait a minute.  I'm going to buy something I already have?  Naturally, the only way I'm going to do that is if Amazon and library conspire to destroy the copy of the book I already have!  Imagine that with a real book.  Back in the day, if I didn't return the book, maybe there were fines I had to pay, but at least the firemen didn't break into my house and, "Fahrenheit 451"-style, set fire to the book.  And yet that's what the library is doing now, electronically.

 Carson Daly is torn not just between styles of music, but also modes of media production and distribution

I think some people may remember in 2000 when Napster founder Shawn Fanning introduced Britney Spears ("singing a song that's older than she is") while sporting a Metallica shirt.  Metallica, of course, was busy suing Napster for file sharing.  After Carson Daly remarked, "Nice shirt", Fanning famously joked, "You like it?  Actually a friend of mine shared it with me.  I'm thinking about getting my own, though." 

Of course, it was nonsense, at least for a lot of people.  We might buy the shirt, but we weren't going to buy the album.  Not after what at that point was 20 years of what has become a 30 year stagnation or decline in wages.  Who could afford it?  Napster, and the programs that followed, were a godsend to those of us dedicated to music and yet scraping by.  And to the extent that it wasn't nonsense was only because enough of us were still prisoners to dial-up or other slow connections so that sometimes it was too much of a pain in the ass to download a whole album when you were relying on some other person you didn't know to do the same.  Many people can probably remember the phenomenon of setting up files to download while you were sleeping.  All problems that have been solved now.

The thing about electrons is that they are, setting aside the externalized cost to the environment, essentially free to the consumer, at least on the level of the individual file.  Costs are so low, access so easy, reproduction so simple and distribution so effortless that it reveals the contradictions within the capitalist organization of the economy.  And, it must be said, that it is capitalism itself that has set up this contradiction.  Through our own self-organization and desire to be free, we have leapt into it like prisoners facing a blasted hole in a prison wall.  We always wanted out, and now that we can, it is only the force of law that that can push us back in, because we can see the other side.


I'm not a technophiliac, but the most powerful lesson that the relatively new electron based production system reveals is the tenuousness with which commodity production clings to life.  We see it in the riot.  We see it in gifts between friends, in rides to the airport, in knit caps from mom and in our backyard gardens.  And we also see it in the files we share.  And, most importantly, we see the absurdities of the system in its attempts to corral, limit, prosecute and impose proprietary relations on escaped commodities that defy remuneration.  

A system that turns librarians into book burners.

Paradise Lost! Westgate City Center development thankfully collapses under a pile of bills.

  Too beautiful for this world!  All beauty fades eventually and every dream must end.  And stuff like that.

Rebekah L. Sanders over at the Arizona Republic reports that another bloated, gaudy consumer/workers paradise has lurched into bankruptcy and repossession.  This isn't the first one in Phoenix since the crisis began to get into trouble and it probably won't be the last considering where the economy is headed.  But if you've ever been there, you'll know that this place in particular is hilarious.

I used to deliver there for work and it was big on this artificial, corporatized "live, work and play" nonsense.  "I can see my loft from here," said the giant wall-sized youths on the signs, conveniently plastered over the windows of empty, dust-gathering chain stores. This place was a cheap corporate facsimile of a copy of a sketch of the old neighborhoods of old, just with everything that made those kinds of neighborhoods interesting and worth living in stripped out.

With the piped in easy listening mall music reaching up to the balconies of the "loft-style" apartments, surrounded as they are by one crap corporate chain after another and their zombie-like patrons most days, Cardinals fans eight days a year, and shitty arena rock douches on the other weekends, I often wondered just what kind of crap demographic they hoped to attract, and just how they intended to cut them down from the balconies before 10 AM business hours when they finally were overcome by the vacuousness of their surroundings and hanged themselves.

Good riddance.

Part of Glendale Westgate City Center repossessed by lender

The developer who launched Westgate City Center, the landmark sports-and-entertainment complex that helped transform Glendale, has officially lost ownership of the major part of the development.

The core of the Ellman Cos.' project, outside University of Phoenix Stadium and Jobing.com Arena,was repossessed Monday by the lender, iStar Financial, after it failed to sell at a foreclosure auction for a reserve price of $40 million.

The 33-acre property, which features restaurants, shops and an AMC movie theater along with Bellagio-like fountains and Times Square-style billboards, was designed as a suburban sports, entertainment and commercial hub to rival downtown Phoenix.

The remaining land owned by Ellman Cos., 95 acres of mostly parking lots slated for future development, is scheduled for foreclosure auction in November by lender Credit Suisse.

The auction is the latest blow to Glendale's prestigious sports district and another example of how the city has been shaken by the economic downturn.

The Phoenix Coyotes went through bankruptcy two years ago and still have no permanent owner. Now Westgate, at Loop 101 and Glendale Avenue, has been taken away from Steve Ellman, the city's development partner for more than a decade.

Westgate's opening in 2006 was like a launch party for the West Valley, with excitement brimming about the region's future as the flashy complex rose out of farm fields.

The Coyotes played next door, and the Arizona Cardinals had just moved in nearby.

Ellman, the chief executive of the company, called Westgate his favorite project.

At the time, a planning expert had cautioned the project was a gamble that relied on synergy between sports fans and shoppers.

...

 

Announcing the first issue of the new PCWC broadsheet, "The Crisis"

Governor Brewer lets out a mighty class war cry of sheer victorious glee after signing the corporate tax cut earlier this year.

So it is with the bad news that Arizona has fired more than 10,000 public school employees -- more than 6,000 of them teachers -- and the good news that one in every ten bosses who dies on the job is murdered, that we announce what we hope to be an ongoing agitational broadsheet aimed at regularly stoking the fires of opposition here in the Copper State, Phoenix in particular. We're calling it, simply enough, "The Crisis" and it is intended for hand to hand distribution in the city.

Since the last year's struggles against both the reactionary rightwing attack and the wishy-washy leftist recuperation, we have become more and more aware that no one in the state is addressing the increasingly perilous and precarious economic situation of so many workers and excluded people in Az. Lines at state social service agencies stretch for hours in the 110 degree heat, jobs have not come back, wages have fallen and the economic situation of more and more people every day seems to sit on a knife's edge.

The successful division of the working class created by the racist right has limited the ability of the class to find ways to fight back against the attack, as well as to envision new ways of organizing life that go beyond merely calling for increased intervention into poor and working class people's lives. In Arizona this is particularly an interesting question because there is such hostility to government solutions, even among the working class.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the obvious class assault that is the imposition of austerity. Vital services are disappearing. Take for instance the recent decision by the state to throw more than a hundred thousand poor and working class people off the state's health care plan.  Beyond that, people making more than $920 a month have been disqualified from eligibility, at the same time that the state weekly unemployment benefit pays out about 210 dollars a week. Given that payments in Arizona top out at $240 a week, that average means substantial numbers of unemployed people who once could count on health care while out of work no longer have it.

In addition, the state currently runs a budget surplus, largely made on the backs of the foreclosure crisis, as formerly working class folks ejected from their homes have lost the mortgage deduction, boosting income tax revenues. And never mind that the arguments for austerity coming from the political and business class were built on dire -- even catastrophic -- budget projections. Meanwhile, the state passed a corporate sales tax cut, further shifting the tax burden onto the poor and working class with a whopping $1.5 billion dollar giveaway to the rich over the next seven years.

At the same time, the legislature continues to contemplate a flat tax, which would cut taxes on the rich even more, with a resulting rise in tax payments at the bottom. And, if it couldn't get any worse, this summer the state rejected Federal money for unemployment extensions, potentially stranding thousands of unemployed Arizonans when their state benefits run out. With an unemployment rate of 9.6%, and an average length of unemployment steadily creeping up towards a year, that's guaranteed to leave some very marginalized people hanging.

As usual, we don't find these conditions depressing, we find them interesting and worthy of intervening in and experimenting with. Potential exists for some interesting organizing and possibly for a breech in normal politics. So, look for copies of the new broadsheet soon. Once more into the breach we go!

 

Blood Sport: A Brief Look at the Sometimes Violent Resistance to Public Funding of Sports Stadiums in Arizona

“I will say I’m sorry I shot you the day you stand before the court and admit what you did was an act of violence.”

Those were the uncompromising words Larry Naman, a 57 year-old homeless man with what up to that point had been a clean criminal history, said to County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox at his sentencing in July 1998. Angered over the political hi-jinx that led the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to approve a sales tax to fund the downtown Diamondbacks stadium on a 3-2 vote (Wilcox was the tie-breaker), Naman had almost a year previously walked into a public meeting and shot Wilcox in the ass with a .357 revolver.

With the return of the public financing debate now that the Phoenix Coyotes are up for sale, it's worth looking back at the contentious and sometimes violent history surrounding local capitalist's drive for publicly-subsidized profit. On more that one occasion Arizonans have taken violent action in response to both the blatant undemocratic process of capitalist development and the obvious hypocrisy of capitalists enriching themselves on the public dime.

Attacking the capitalist dictatorship

Following the shooting, Mary Rose Wilcox said she wasn't surprised it had happened, given the controversy of the vote, which itself had circumvented a previous public referendum, passed by a 2-1 margin, forbidding the raising of sales tax for the express purpose of building public sports facilities valued at over $3 million without a public vote. That law had passed as a result of public outrage following the city of Phoenix's massive subsidy of the Phoenix Suns stadium downtown, a facility the Suns shared with the Coyotes until they moved to Glendale to cohabitate with the Cardinals in what eventually became known as the University of Phoenix Stadium, itself built as another publicly-financed project.

The University of Phoenix project passed by county referendum with a narrow 52% approving. In the case of the Phoenix Suns arena, the city eventually swallowed almost 40 percent of the tab, and Maricopa County residents covered the vast majority of the funds for the Cardinals new West Valley home. The important fact to remember with regard to Naman is that, after the initial public outrage over the Suns stadium, and despite the successful referendum restricting public financing, nevertheless when major league baseball came touting an expansion team in 1994, the legislature deliberately transferred responsibility for the stadium's construction to the county and the city of Phoenix specifically in order to circumvent the law and the popular will.

Facing 21 years in prison at his sentencing, Naman, unrepentant, spoke for 40 minutes, denouncing the move to build the stadium. "I shot Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox to try to put a stop to the political dictatorship of Jerry Colangelo", he said, referring the Phoenix sports big shot and Diamondbacks owner. Colangelo had earned the public's ire by refusing to participate in ownership without a public subsidy. When interviewed by Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein for their book Public Dollars, Private Stadiums, Colangelo put it this way: "There was a tax on the books, the tax was going to expire, baseball was thinking about an expansion, and there was a window. There wasn't time to build a lot of public support and take it to a vote... Nor was I interested in going through that whole process [emphasis mine]." Speaking to reporters, Naman said he'd have shot Colangelo, too, "if I had seen him."

Twelve years later, this December, Naman walked free from prison, a model prisoner without even a single disciplinary mark against him. Wilcox remains unrepentant, although in 1999 she conceded that perhaps future expenditures ought to go up for a public vote. "I had hooked a very good jobs program to our stadium [proposal] — about 3,000 jobs and about 60 percent for a low-income and minority district like mine is," she said. Colangelo and his rich buddies got to feast at the public trough and we got some jobs hawking popcorn that costs more than the hourly wage of the seller.

Waste not, want not

On April 1st 2011, just a few months after Naman's release, and in the midst of capitalist crisis, police allege that an angry Mesa water treatment worker, 43-year-old Robert Olson, armed with a pistol, walked through the city's otherwise deserted Deerfield Wastewater Treatment Plant shutting down critical operating systems one after the other. If the sewage wasn't properly treated, methane gas could build up, potentially leading to a huge explosion at the massive facility. A few hours into his sabotage, after downing some margaritas and beers that he had brought with him, Olson called 911 and following a couple more hours of negotiations, he surrendered to police. He told the cops that by his actions he wanted to show the city that “employees had power.”

On the phone with the 911 operator, Olson said, “I am an operator at the Greenfield Water Reclamation Plant. I have basically taken the plant hostage." He lamented having to file for bankruptcy and a life where he felt like he had been walked all over without ever standing up for himself: "You've got the angel on one side and devil on one side I feel like the bad side is starting to take over. I have been a doormat most of my life, I've taken people's crap and never said anything." That's certainly a common enough feeling under capitalism's dictatorship, even in "good" times.

Now charged with terrorism, court documents begin to paint a picture of what may have motivated the accused civil servant in his late-night sabotage. Olson had transferred from the Avondale water treatment division on the west side of town three years ago in order to work closer to home and spend more time with his family. But not long after moving jobs, the pain of the economic crisis began to bite in Mesa. Determined to foist the cost of the crisis onto workers and the poor, city officials imposed first a pay cut and then a pay freeze on Mesa workers.

“Omigosh,” said neighbor McCaffery when questioned by the East Valley Tribune. “He’s a heckuva a nice guy. I knew he was struggling with his house that went into foreclosure and moved his family in with his in-laws, but I didn’t realize he was having other problems. He was such an easy-going guy, and didn’t have trouble with any of the neighbors. I can’t picture Rob doing anything like that. I hope he’s not in too much trouble.”

One can't help but notice the "welcome to the new normal" nature of that comment, where a foreclosure and moving in with your wife's family barely merit as serious problems in the current economy. But the tribune reports that health care costs began to take a toll as well. And while the pay cut, foreclosure, life at the in-laws' crowded house and health care premiums may have been problems Olson could deal with, the city's pending deal for a new spring training facility for the Chicago Cubs really stuck in his craw. On the day of Olson's protest against wage cuts, the Arizona Republic reported that the city's cost of the new Cubs training facility could run to $84 million.

A coyote is both a predator and a scavenger

Meanwhile on the other side of the Valley of the Sun, at the time of this writing the city of Glendale struggles to close a deal to keep the local pro hockey team, the Coyotes, in their gleaming, spaceship-like two hundred million dollar desert arena. The deal centers around a secretive 40 year-old investment fund manager, Matthew Hulsizer, who, if the sale goes through, will be outright gifted $100 million directly from the city's coffers (raised through bond sales), and then guaranteed a further $97 million in future revenue for agreeing to take over and operate the venue. Not bad for a sale valued at only $170 million! According to my math, that's a $27 million dollar profit just for existing!

Millionaire Matthew Hulsizer (center) watches a Coyotes game

After graduating from uber-expensive Amherst College (nearly 50 g's a year at current rates!), according to the Chicago Tribune, Hulsizer started off his career in what was once called the "the biggest securities firm no one had ever heard of," O'Connor & Associates. After working there for some years, he moved on to open with his wife their own investment firm called Peak6, which he started with capital provided by others, including the O'Connor brothers and "family". It pays to be where the money is.

And, starting in the 90's, as the economy increasingly financialized, the money likewise moved to firms like Peak6, "one stop shops" that would deal in all sorts of arcane financial instruments, including the infamous derivatives that triggered the financial crisis in 2008. But don't worry, Hulsizer has come through it all right. No foreclosures on his horizon. His lakeside mansion is as comfortable as ever. And with a guaranteed profit out the gate of $27 million on the deal, I think he's going to be very happy with his life going forward either way, even if those pesky conservatives at the Goldwater institute get their way and squash the deal.

For Hulsizer, owning a hockey team would be a dream come true, probably a lot like getting rich is a dream come true, too (assuming he wasn't born rich, as it seems he likely was). Secretive though he may be, Hulsizer has been quoted remarking about his love of the game and how he played hockey a bit himself. "I'm a hockey fan, a hockey coach and a hockey player and I would like to join the club," he told USA Today. The Business Insider writes that "[Hulsizer] actually played hockey at Division III Amherst College and is currently a registered USA Hockey coach in Winnetka, Illinois."

But how surprising is it for the dreams of the rich to come true? Hardly at all, naturally. Hockey is Hulsizer's hobby and his fortune accommodates him. And if not his fortune, then the public largess will take cover it. After all, for him merely having the wealth is good enough -- he need not actually spend it! But what about the rest of us? What about the Naman's and the Olson's out there? Foreclosed on, homeless, cut wages, hiked premiums, dislocated families, all as a result of the machinations and profiteering, often at the public trough, of folks like Hulsizer and Colangelo, and facilitated by politicians like Wilcox.

The sun sets on Arizona

In Arizona over the last several years, the main thrust of general working class resistance has emerged from the migrant/Latino community. It was they who boldly went out on general strike in 2006, long before the crisis began to nip at the picket fences of white suburbia. Most white people's homes were still accruing value month upon month at that point, but with wages still stuck in neutral for more than a decade, the white working and middle class unfortunately increasingly turned towards using the law to restrict the labor market in hopes of extracting wage increases or protection for themselves from capital's ravages.

Just this year, however, the Arizona capitalist class finally balked at further restrictions, indicating a split with its temporary alliance with the white working and middle class, the signs of which we recognize in the slashing of budgets across the board and the imposition of austerity even on the white middle class. Rising up through their political organ the Chamber of Commerce the capitalists vocally shut down a new bevy of anti-immigrant laws.

We can look back now and point to the utter failure of the strategy pursued in the last decade by the organized and mobilized section of the white working class. With what is probably well over a hundred thousand Mexican and other workers who feel similarly threatened by the reaction in Arizona having exited the state with their families since SB1070 passed (double digit decreases in enrollment at public schools are one indicator amongst many), the magic has not returned to the Arizona economy. The employment numbers are not predicted to return to "normal" until mid-decade. Wages, where they are not frozen, are decreasing across the board.

And the housing market remains stuck in the doldrums, not because Mexicans were building houses or taking jobs from whites, but because there were too many houses built in a bubble whose inflation as well as inevitable deflation benefited a small class at the top of the Arizona economy. Builders, developers and bankers received their bailouts and guarantees, but none of it accrued to the working class in any permanent way, as naturally it wouldn't without a militant working class in motion to demand it. So lacking that, millionaires like Hulsizer clean up while folks like us get the shaft.

To think in a time of massive advances for the capitalists and of retreat for the working class, that a strategy of defending white privilege over class solidarity would lead anywhere but to a hardening of already existing divisions that could then be further exploited by the capitalists was worse than naive, it was in fact the sad default class politics of the white working class playing out. This leaves us in a situation where the white working class in Arizona has isolated itself, even organized in opposition to the rest of the working class, believing that its cross-class alliance with the rich would protect it in the long run. Clearly it has not.

And now, as the chickens come home to roost for white working and middle class families in Arizona, as predictably they would, they now have nowhere to go to express their anger but into the arms of further reaction like the Tea Party on one hand or into isolated acts of violence and sabotage on the other. Even the professional mediators, bargainers and recuperators of the left offer nothing. That's a poor excuse indeed for the broad-based resistance that is necessary and might potentially give such acts a broader meaning beyond that which resonates only with the singular atoms, millions though they are, of screwed over Arizonans consuming its message as individuals in isolation. In circumstances of rising class struggle hopeless lone wolves become transformed into militants for their class as their opportunities for meaningful struggle multiply. These conditions not not apply today.

But with the crisis deepening and individuals feeling their backs increasingly against the wall, unless the white working class can wake up and betray its racist instincts by recognizing its common struggle with other people, we can probably expect more of the same isolated lashing out, which even if it can sometimes inspire with its fanatical rejection of compromise or dead-end bourgeois politicking, can never replace a working class movement determined to topple capitalism and the state.

What a way to make a living? Or, 20 percent unemployment is a good start.

I know I don't usually get all personal on here when I write -- I try to keep it strictly business, as they say -- but it's been a fucking shitty last couple of weeks at work for me. Partly because of that, I haven't really been inspired to start on any of the new writing projects I've got bouncing around in my head right now (I think Jon Riley may have a couple things in the works if we're lucky, though). So when the classic 90's photo series below came across my phone this afternoon as the boss clock ticked down towards quitting time, it couldn't have come at a better time.

I suppose the montage goes without explanation. We recognize it immediately. Both it's form and it's content. No détournement required on this one, Situs, thank you. The series perhaps comes at a relevant time as well, or perhaps emerges as a meek but important counter-point, as we watch the tens of thousands gather in Wisconsin in a rearguard action in defense of their right to organize against capital and to keep the few paltry crumbs that warrant the absurd label "Cadillac" these days, that alone speaking volumes about how far we have fallen since the capitalist counter-attack began in the late 70's, early 80's.

So, three years into economic collapse and now well into the austerity measures that we all knew were coming from the get go, the best we get is a zombified union movement, rising from the crypt to sell us out again, paired with Democratic recuperators so chickenshit over a fight that they flee the state. One keeps hoping for a break in the terrible dance between capital and it's mild-mannered gentle critics on the American Left. We scan the skies for any sign of an emerging fightback that defies the acceptable boundaries.

Of course, lurking behind the scenes is the terrible step-child of the labor movement -- the refusal of work. The human desire to be done with the whole mess that lives in the space between working and unemployment. That terrain denied us in reality for the most part as well as in the popular dialog that delineates the borders of polite discussion. Have you heard any of those party hacks or union negotiators utter one word about it? All out in defense of work!

But we know, we remember, that fleeting feeling, before cold capitalist reality sets in, when you almost cheer for a second after you get that pink slip. The feeling of buying your buddies a round at the bar with your last paycheck. Maybe tossing a brick through the boss's Mercedes window on the way out. You know us, we're the ones who don't apologize for being on unemployment. The ones who love it. When I was on unemployment it was one of the most productive and enjoyable times in my life. This is not to repeat CrimethInc's naive mantra from the last decade about poverty and doing it right. It's just to remember a time of freedom that appeared unexpectedly and to lament it's eventual loss.

I mean, I get it: let's by all means defend ourselves from the capitalist coup de grace. Maybe push them back, snap victory from the jaws of defeat. I'd fight, too, if they tried to cut my pay or take away the benefits I fought hard for. But, still, I can't help but think that the most radical thing that could be asked in the middle of the conflict is, "Do you like your job?" It's certainly never come up that I've heard of. And it's of course precisely the misery of work that is captured so clearly in the Al Bundy series below (Bundy being, along with Homer Simpson, the classic working class hero/foil/numbskull all rolled into one), revealing at the same time, I think, the sheer poverty of the struggle taking place now in Wisconsin. Surely, somewhere, someone camping in that square tonight is thinking, I hope this thing at least goes through Tuesday so I can get an extra day off out of this.

In an age that is increasingly looking like it will be defined by permanent unemployment for so many who thought themselves previously immune (i.e., white, middle class), will the issue finally get forced on the agenda? Or will it further feed the already blazing anti-immigrant mania? I heard today a story on NPR alleging that what migrants remain in Arizona are having an easier time getting work than citizens. True or not, that's the kind of thought that creeps behind the eyeballs of white workers even in good times. One shivers, thinking of it's power now to rally the reactionaries. And how about the government workers? Will endemic unemployment continue to be turned on those few who still manage to hang onto to decent pay and benefits packages, a class eating itself before the lustily leering eyes of the capitalist pornographers. Enter the Tea Party again, stage right.

That said, will ten or twenty percent unemployment ever seem like a good start rather than a social ill to be remedied with stimulus and austerity? Some of us remember Paul LaFargue's "Right to Be Lazy" and Ivan Illich's "Right to Useful Unemployment". And of course that party pooper Bob Black. Or hell, even the Smith's singable "I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm miserable now"! Or, I suppose, "Take This Job and Shove It" is reaching back just as far, expressing without fear that good ol' American desire not just to shirk work but to be done with the whole mess entirely. To wipe it off on your jeans and drive off in your F150, flippin' the bird. It seems like so much of this has been co-opted by the modern day concept of the entrepreneur, having polluted so much of what might otherwise pass for resistance in times of class struggle's low ebb. Even our musicians and sports heroes are not untouched. Not escapte artists -- entrepreneurs! Venture capitalists. Self-employed. Such a tragedy.

Perhaps I've said this before, but one of the things that Italian immigrants said about America when they came over in the 19th and 20th centuries (most to return home some years later) was that to them this was the land of bosses and clocks. That interminable clock on the factory wall, always ticking. Enforcing capital's narrative one unbearably painful second at a time. Coming from peasant villages and towns, they had no concept of the time card or the regimented work day.

Here's another thing I may have said before: when I worked at the post office the clock was divided into 100 segments per hour. Not sixty. Taking our fifteen minute breaks, we had to think in 36-second increments. We called them clicks. Naturally, you clocked in early, at 41 clicks, because if you hit 42 you were late. Like the laundromat near my house that offers washes at 99 cents but only lets you put money on your "laundry convenience card" in one dollar increments, there was no way to hit 15 minutes on the dot on those clocks. Always over or under. Those seconds were just plain stolen from you right before you eyes. Every day. Sure, you'd get a shop steward there with you when you got written up, defending your rights but doing nothing about the abominable 100 click clock. Looking at that damn timepiece every day, it often struck me how much I would have traded a million shop stewards for just one sturdy baseball bat almost any day. Of course, when the layoffs came, I was convinced. Naturally I had just rented a new apartment.

Of course now, thanks to the satellites hooked into our cell phones, the boss's clock stares at us all day, everywhere, working or not. All the clocks say the same thing now, for everyone. The discipline of capitalism consumes everything eventually, but most of all time, as I think perhaps Marx wrote a bit about once or twice.

So, as you can perhaps guess, after six years of letting us keep track of our own hours, with a decent amount of flexibility, my work started making us log in and out. Not on a time clock, yet, but in a book. Write down the exact time you show up but don't let it be before seven. No work before seven, we are told. Linger around, waiting, if you're early. Here's what actually happens: my co-workers sign in as if it's seven and begin their day at 6:57 or 6:58 anyhow, giving two or three minutes of their lives to the boss for free every day. And, although it seems illogical, ours is work that we'd just as soon have over, and sitting there staring at it, waiting for the clock doesn't help anyone, not even you. You just get done later.

Of course, not me. I'm coming in late. I don't give my time up for free. So, anyway, this little montage has been making its way across the tubes today and I figured since I didn't have anything else, I may as well write a little bit about it and post it up in the hopes that others out there may appreciate it the way that I did, and to maybe give a little context about why I did. It always strikes me that, along with the scratching record and the ticking clock, the sound of the end of day whistle at the factory still sticks with us in this society, even though they have been purged from most people's lives almost entirely. Maybe it harkens back to a certain analog universality, an experience we all shared and still do, even if now it has been digitized and internalized.

Anyhow, quittin' time!

Union of Arsonists: The flammable estates of the rich and the class war fires of liberation

Who says the local news is all crap these days? News Channel 3, always a shimmering example of journalistic excellence, has been kind enough to give us rich-hating anti-capitalists more kindling for the bonfires this week by offering up a guided tour of two of the most expensive homes (estates?) in the Valley.

In the photo gallery below we tour two of the most exclusive (and expensive) properties currently on the market in metro Phoenix. An eight bedroom, 12,000 square foot abode nestled on 40 acres in Paradise Valley and a 25,000 square foot villa with a bargain price of $24.9 million.

Get a look while you can at the wealth of the rich parasites that enjoy the good life while those of us down here suffer foreclosure, precarity, unwanted unemployment, soaring health care costs and repossessions, along with all manner of other humiliations from which the rich are immune. With Arizona now scoring the second highest rate of poverty in the country, it's more enraging than ever to see such opulence on open display.

Enjoy the tour. Take it all in. The 20 car garage. The acres of green grass. The huge master bedroom. Maybe make a few notes on your brief foray into the foyers of the rich and spoiled:

5 acre estate with 35,000 sq.ft.under roof & 25,000 sq.ft. ac/heated. Flooring of 6 ft. marble slabs from Italy, library with $350,000 Pierre Lange mahogany cabinetry, $1,200,000 Avia high tech security & sound equipment, a 13 seat mahogany theatre w/true movie projection & D-box chairs that move with the movie action. 2 swimming pools and 20 car garage including a $400,000 ''show garage''

I was told by someone who would know the other day that the rich and powerful in the Valley often complain that their possessions regularly get pilfered by the many workers required to maintain their irresponsible and exploitative lifestyles. Presumably the quick-handed disappear them when the owner is sunning by his Olympic-sized pool. Or perhaps they return in the summer when those with the money are safely chilling in their beach houses far from Phoenix's scorching weather. If you have more than one home, you can't be in all of them at once. That's a risk you take being rich, I suppose.

Which reminds me, did they ever catch those Paradise Valley "rock burglars"? Last I heard they had successfully managed over 300 break-ins resulting in more than ten million dollars worth of crap that rich people have being re-appropriated from the undeserving dresser drawers of the Valley's spoiled rich. It's nice to know that they get robbed, though, isn't it? Coming in through the master bedroom window, broken with a rock (hence the "rock burglars" name), is apparently the way to go according to the newspapers. There's no security system at that end of the house usually, it seems. Again, that's straight out of the papers. Hopefully it creeps those rich bastards out knowing the proles have rifled through their intimates.

Of course, getting a job working for rich people seems to work just as well as a means of procuring their stuff. Or, if you can hold your nose that long, even just getting to know them works. That was the case for antique thief Matthew Walker, who pleaded guilty this week to acquiring many of the prized possessions of the wealthy in his area simply by hanging around them so much. This guy managed to take prized heirlooms and other items passed down, like their illegitimate wealth, from one generation of rich scum to the next. Good for him. Caught now, unfortunately, but it's still more evidence that the rich are far from secure in their persons and items. When the cops came to his house and matched a stolen serial number to the 52 inch tv mounted on the wall, Walker claimed it was a set up. Nice. Fuck their tv and fuck the cops.

Those who say the luxuries enjoyed by the rich are the just reward for a life of hard work are off their rockers. One doesn't have a hard time imagining that they have never walked a thousand miles to stand on a street corner, ducking la poli-migra, and cleaning pools or mowing lawns in the blistering sun. Or tried to hold a job (which they hate anyway) while on work release from one of Sheriff Joe's gulags, suffering after work the routine indignity of waiting in line at gunpoint to sleep in the summer heat in his outdoor jail, all because Phoenix doesn't have a decent public transportation system.

Maybe they have never slaved away for nine or ten hours in a windowless call center, fielding pointless calls or following shitty leads in hopes of making the rent this month. Or maybe they've never spent ten hours in the cab of a truck passing the endless hours and miles bringing consumer goods they can't afford to the bars and restaurants of the wealthy and their even more spoiled children.

If hard work was the key to success under capitalism, the women fishing coins off dead bodies for twelve hours a day at the mouth of the Ganges River would rule the planet. Or those guys who dismantle the beached ships in Asia. They'd be everyone's boss. And don't forget those kids who rummage through the piles of the West's discarded computers for toxic metals. We'd be cleaning their Ferraris if hard work made the world go around.


Make no mistake, this is not a defense of work. Nor the alleged nobility of the small-headed, broad-shouldered laborer portrayed by communist painters in grand Soviet murals. You know, the worker works, the Party thinks. No, for sure, my sympathies are with the slackers and the shirkers. With the folks who know what "it fell off the truck" means and don't say a word to the boss. And with the ones who clock their friends in and out so they can sleep off last night's party. Long live those who still defend the siesta, sadly long ago now a Southwest memory for most of us, dominated by the boss's time clock as we are. When I worked at the post office the time clock was divided up into one hundred segments per hour instead of sixty. Want to know crazy? Try calculating your 15 minute break in 36 second segments.

Take another example: Domino's worker Jamal Thomas. A trainee for an assistant manager position, he complained that he was jumped by hoodlums outside work one night and beaten. In true corporate form, his bosses accused him of violating security protocols during his beatdown because the front door was unlocked as it took place. Broken in the brawl, Thomas's jaw was wired shut and he couldn't eat solid food or talk for six weeks. He was fired. According to his family he turned bitter at this insult. Understandably so.

But, the police say, Thomas didn't take this affront laying down. Keeping his key and his dignity, Thomas visited various Domino's locations "in uniform claiming to be a member of a secret Domino's unit that measured employee satisfaction." He was scoping out targets. Oh, the irony! And what creativity -- although surely not of the kind his bosses could appreciate. Nope, dressing up and pretending to be an employee satisfaction monitor, visiting various locations and scouting the best targets, and then setting them to the torch -- using their own pizza boxes as kindling! -- that clearly is the kind of creativity that while inspired by Domino's, can never be contained by it.

And isn't that all our experience, in a way? Because no matter how much or how well you do a job like that, your only thanks is more of the same. An assistant manager position, with the small bump in pay and the freedom to play some solitaire from time to time in the office -- that's your prize in this system. No personal development. No chance to control the real substance of your life. No choice in what you make, where you make it, when and how. No control over what's done with it. And the cherry on top is that most of what we are forced to make is crap anyhow. "Time to make the donuts", as the old commercial used to say. Always time to make the donuts. Who wants control over it anyhow? Better to burn it down. Making pizzas at Domino's can never be a fulfilling vocation. In a time of mass layoffs, is it too much to ask for meaningful unemployment?

I can remember a conversation I had -- more like an argument -- with another class war anarchist who had mistaken me for an hardcore primitivist because of a pin I was wearing. Never bothering to see the Durruti pin on the other side, he proceeded to launch into me with a tirade about the dignity of work. How pleased were the janitors he was organizing, he said, when they had finished cleaning a room! What dignity in work! What pride! Bullshit! For most of us, the only dignity at work is ending the day with some intact.

There's a saying that goes like this: "That's an idea so ridiculous only an intellectual could believe it." Well, it's the same with the organizers of the working class. The bosses are right about us. We hate work, we hate our jobs and we hate them. They are right to distrust us. Pride in work as we know it is an idea so ridiculous only a union organizer could believe it because the truth of the workweek is something quite different. Biting your tongue, hiding in the bathroom, grabbing a smoke or pretending to be doing something are the most common activities at any modern job.

Working in a call center and get hung up on? Let it hang there for a few minutes. No need to rush. Just let that dial tone ring for a bit and grab back part of your life a few minutes at a time. That's the reality. Who would want to democratize most of this? Can you imagine the drudgery of the Slurpee committee meeting at the collectivized 7-11? Surely better just to put it to the torch and be done with all illusions. No thanks, budding union bureaucrats: the arsonist is a much better shop steward these days.

And there is no escape for most of us from the drudgery of work and the liberal way it wastes our time and energies. Landlords and grocery stores, mechanics and credit card companies can be strict masters and if you can't refuse work, the best you can do is try to get the most out of it you can, for your own ends. If that's not possible, may as well burn it down. Thomas caused more than a million dollars in damage. As a point of reference, take out the mythic Vail arsons and this guy's up there with the ELF on average and maybe rivals the black bloc rampages through any number of North American streets this year, not that there's anything wrong with them. Different strokes for different folks.

It is natural for us to hate hard work (i.e., compelled work), but for the defenders of the rich, as they always do, to say that it is only hard work that separates the family living out of their car from the millionaire on the mountain is obscene. Likewise the Dominoes assistant manager from the Paradise Valley mansion. Even most the rich don't believe it. The myth of mobility and hard work isn't meant for them. Commenting on why he collaborated with Oliver Stone on his most recent remake of his classic 80's Wall Street attack movie, Anthony Scaramucci, hedge fund director and founder of Skybridge Capital said, "[Oliver Stone] believes that the lower quartile of society is suffering in a megalomaniacal capitalist society — and you know, he's probably right on some of the stuff he's saying."

Which reminds me, there were two forklift drivers killed in the last two weeks in Phoenix. Crushed underneath them. This is something close to my heart, having occasion to drive a forklift at work with some regularity myself. Those things are fucking dangerous. But with the slashing of budgets and the paring of workforces, you can bet that the speedup that is work life under the new never-ending crisis is to blame. More work to be done with less workers means doing it faster, cutting corners, or not having proper assistance. Profits are up, payrolls are down, and more of us are six feet under every day. And trust me, crushed under a forklift is not a death that any of those rich bastards on the mountain will suffer, sadly.

But where are the funerals for these "heroes" of the new crisis capitalism? The people who against their will, against their health and against their human desire to be free, make this economy run, despite being largely locked out of its largess and surely denied its mansions and limos, except to clean and maintain them. Workers killed on the job for the most part are lucky to get a blurb that mentions their name in the paper if they meet their end on the clock. No funeral processions, no media helicopters hovering over cemeteries, no grieving husbands or wives. No plastic-featured anchorman breaking into our regular programming.

Not, that is, unless you are a cop worker or a soldier worker. Only the workers that protect the ruling class are worthy of mention or thanks in this country. The only exception perhaps comes from the pandering politicians in election year, hoping as they do that some of us will accept this bullshit title of "hard working American" in exchange for the acceptance of heightened social war on others, often of color, in other countries, migrants, prisoners, et cetera.

But when it comes to the cops and soldiers, we get treated to a fete fit for an angel! There is no investigation. Just how many complaints did that cop have against him? How many civilians did that soldier kill? Quite relevant and related questions these days as more and more of these fucked up veterans come back and join police forces. Once there, their violently short tempers set the tone for the rest of the force. And of course lacking entirely from public discussion when one of these killer-workers gets killed is a critical assessment of the role that cops and soldiers play in the maintenance of everyday order, itself a long, slow murder for most of us. All is forgiven and nothing is remembered when the sacrifice is for the State and Capital.

I know I'm not the only one who looks up at those houses on Camelback Mountain while driving to work and hopes for a landslide or a brushfire or, hell, a meteor strike to erase that whole disgusting scene from my view, likewise relinquishing the stranglehold they have on so many of us. Or maybe, more satisfying, for the fiery justice of a people no longer willing to be exploited, tagged, imprisoned, tracked, beaten, mocked, marginalized and pushed around just so some rich asshole can have a mountainside resort for a second or third home.

We all resist in our own small ways everyday, trying against the odds and against the reality of our no-vacation, low pay jobs, to carve out for ourselves a little bit of dignity and autonomy against a system determined to crush us or -- at best -- to throw us some crumbs if we agree to mind-numbing labor day in and day out. Assistant manager, indeed.

So thanks to Channel 3 for that kindling. Whenever I see those rich bastards and their gilded estates, it just fires me up even more. Sometimes not every article has to end with a grand philosophical point. Today I just felt like a good ol' rant was in order. Those mansions make me think of a day, hopefully not far off, when it will all explode and we'll look up to a long torchlit march up those hills and to the liberating fires of a new day, free at last from work and those who make us do it. Drinks on them in the rec rooms first, of course.

Swinging from the Tyburn Tree: the violent creation of the working class and the resistance it spawned.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's fantastic book, "The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" is one of my favorite books of all time. That book, when combined with Linebaugh's excellent "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century", offer two first-class and complimentary views on the violent imposition of capitalism on the English population and the rest of the then emerging colonial world. Naturally, people resisted this reorganization in all manner of ways.

Linebaugh's book in particular offers the reader not just a view of life before capitalism, but it also reveals the bloody battle that took place over the imposition of capitalist relations, centering on the hangings at the Tyburn gallows. On these gallows those poor in London, dispossessed of their commons and resisting or locked out of the new capitalist work regime, faced the grim, bloody justice of emerging capitalism, determined as it was to bring the English poor to heel before the new mode one way or another. Performed in public, before large crowds and en masse, the hangings amounted to mass state terrorism on the population. A warning of the most extreme kind: conform or die.

Itself often a point of violent contention, with mobs known to riot and rescue the judged from time to time, the hangings routinely involved those charged with stealing food and other minor offenses. The commodity form was just emerging and it was to be respected! This in an era of the mass dislocation of the enclosures gives a hint of the grand scale of the terror. Those lucky enough to escape the hanging tree suffered transportation to Europe's "New World" in bondage under harsh terms of indentured servitude. Thus it is from the resisting English working class, initially, that the colonial State got much of its settler masses.

In the "Many-Headed Hydra" Linebaugh and Rediker take time to point out as well, using the coastal Atlantic's sea-going working class as the example, the effects of the likewise emerging system of white supremacy. Sailors, a motley multi-racial bunch, routinely defied the new racial regulations of the day, bringing a working class wreck across racial lines to colonial society's elites, rioting and resisting their way from port to port. At the same time, these heterogeneous working class formations' contentions with colonial capitalism's racial forms and privileges also spurred the State to further regiment and formalize them. And as the settler State increasingly turned to chattel slavery kidnapped from Africa, the threat that faced the ruling English white elite in colonial America was always a tri-racial alliance of the emerging white working class, African slaves and indigenous tribes. It was this burning fuse that whiteness was constructed to douse. And it is this division that lives with us to this day.

Thinking of these early rebels from the capitalist and racialized order is important, because it shows us not only an alternate history, but it also a hint of what we had and how we lost it. Relationships which perhaps seem normal enough to us now, like work or policing, seem quite the opposite when we look back and realize the sheer violence that the State was willing to use to impose and defend what were then new and generally unwelcome institutions for the extraction of profit and the preservation of power and privilege.

Returning now to the sailors, there was one particular kind of sailor that terrorized the elite like no other. For hundreds of years, but peaking perhaps in the early 18th century, pirates stirred the fearful imaginations of blue-blooded American aristocrats like none other save perhaps the slave insurrections of the South. Indeed, when the Amistad ship, famous for its mutiny and flight out of bondage, first appeared on the North Carolina horizon it was described in no uncertain terms as a pirate ship. The comparison was apt, not least of all because of the infamously defiant multi-racial characteristics of the sailor class and, in particular, the pirate hordes that plagued corporate shipping.

Pirates themselves defied not just the racial regulations of their time, but also the system of work under capitalism. Seizing and plundering, electing their own leaders, dividing up the loot in egalitarian ways and living in the moment all defined the pirate existence on the open sea. This stood in sharp contrast to a system increasingly regulated by the clock and the turning of gears inside the dank, repressive factory. Naturally, aside from the general miserable conditions of life under capitalism, the prime recruiter for the pirate population was in fact the specific nature of life as a sailor. Life on a navy ship or merchant vessel was factory-like to the extreme. Many sailors served against their will and for little or no pay. It's easy to see how in these conditions questions of race and division can quickly fade away.

It's interesting to note that on the slave ships that navigated the Middle Passage with their stolen cargo, it wasn't uncommon for nets to stretch out from the ship out over the sea for some distance beyond the deck. Captured slaves it seems, would not infrequently attempt suicide by jumping into the sea when they had the opportunity, denying in essence the capitalist the value of their captured labor. In contemporary times, I'm reminded of the nets deployed around the FoxConn factories in China, meant to contain and nullify the wave of suicides afflicting the company and its workforce. Before the nets, many of those attempting self-liberation from Capital's undead grip took flight from the FoxConn factory roof itself, ending up a bloody mash on the sidewalk below. Capitalism lets nothing go without a fight, not even your own body.

So, its in this spirit that I post below two links to recent Marcus Rediker lectures both on piracy. The first, titled, "Black Pirates: The Curious Early History of the Amistad Rebellion" focuses on the framework of piracy as a way of looking at the Amistad rebellion. The second, "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean", was given in 2007 at the 2007 Bristol Radical History Week in the UK and goes over some of the history he uncovered while writing his book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age". Check them out. They're both well worth your time.





Watch "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean" at the Bristol Radical History Group's webpage. Note that Rediker's lecture begins at the Tyburn tree. Many pirates likewise met their end there.