Nina-Bytes: Murderpigs, Class War, and Abolition Over Reform

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Diversifying the Police Force Won’t End Police Violence

At this point, I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear that I am not a fan of ongoing efforts to "reform" policing; or for that matter, a so-called American justice system that grinds civil rights protesters and antifascists to paste, while letting nazi murderers walk with a pat on the head. As I discussed in a recent Quickshot Quotation, the plain truth is that most folks, particularly Americans, have no idea what the real role of policing is in our society. Indeed, a careful study of American history, such as that found in books like "Badges Without Borders" by Stuart Schrader, or "Our Enemies in Blue" by Kristian Williams, reveals that pretty much every prior round of "police reform" has only further empowered police to repress protestors, activists, and anyone who would harm the objectively fascist socioeconomic order in the United States. 

Unfortunately, and despite these objective truths, even some folks on the left continue to insist that cosmetic reform measures will make a measurable difference in the behavior of fascist murderpigs whose job is basically to conduct class warfare on behalf of capital. Today on Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to turn your attention to a November 17th, 2021 Op-Ed written by abolitionist Reina Sultan over on Truthout, to provide a concrete example of why this approach is doomed to failure. 

While the author's main focus is debunking the ridiculous notion that you can reform police by ensuring more brown faces are doing the actual racialized oppression, the fact is that virtually every argument she puts forward to do so, speaks to the larger misjudgment of the police's function that beleaguers most Americans. As Sultan notes, the funny thing about hiring more diverse police officers is at the end of the day, you're still hiring more police officers and those officers are still the enforcement arm of a brutal, white supremacist, openly neofeudalist socioeconomic order that currently dominates life throughout the Pig Empire. More importantly however, the author hits the nail on the head by noting you really can't "reform" a system that's working exactly as it was designed to function:

"Because policing and incarceration are inherently violent and racist institutions, prison-industrial complex abolitionists have been working to dismantle them in the hopes of creating a safer and more just world. Without the prison-industrial complex, abolitionists argue that we can divert resources to life-giving resources and services, rather than death-making institutions.

Prison-industrial complex reformers and preservationists generally argue that the system is “broken” — that it has problems that are ultimately solvable, but that maintaining its existence is imperative for public safety. The truth is that the prison-industrial complex is functioning exactly as it is meant to; its creation was never intended to provide justice, but instead it was born of the desire to maintain white supremacy and racial capitalism. When we reframe our understanding of the prison-industrial complex, it becomes clear that it is accomplishing its intended purpose."

 

Obviously, you don't really need me to tell you that American policing is out of control; anyone who tuned on the nightly news during the George Floyd protests knows that. I fear however that the real scope of the policing problem, and its role in the ongoing class war being conducted by billionaire supervillains against, well essentially the rest of us, is being lost in the noise. In the war against neofeudalist mass murderers, and an oncoming Pig Empire slide into overt fascism, violent reactionary murderpigs will be the machine's first and favorite response to anyone who doesn't want to go gently into that good night so Elon Musk can escape to Mars.

Not only is it impossible to reform police, but if we intended to dismantle capitalism and save all life on earth, abolishing them as quickly as possible is imperative; the survival of the species might just depend on it.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Rigged Games, Supervillains, and Neofeudalism

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

U.S. Billionaires Got 70% More Wealth Under COVID. They Didn’t Deserve Any of It.

A little over a week ago, I published a blog that briefly touched on the historically unprecedented levels of financial inequity in our society. In that post I theorized that this phenomenon was both a contributor to, and side effect from, our society's ongoing transition to a state of capitalism I, and others, have been calling neofeudalism. In this Jacobin article by Luke Savage, we get a glimpse of what that actually looks like in the context of an ongoing class war during a pandemic; and it's predictably infuriating. 

Using data from an Institute for Policy Studies report, Savage reports that the combined wealth of America's billionaires has risen by seventy percent during the pandemic. This includes the minting of a hundred and thirty one new billionaires; creating a situation where just under seven hundred and fifty people "now own almost 70 percent more wealth than half the country combined." Although Savage doesn't mention it, the report also notes that this comes during a pandemic when eighty-nine million people in the U.S. have lost their jobs. "We're all in this together" my shiny pink ass.

 

Although the numbers are staggering, it's tempting to write them off as pandemic profiteering. As Savage notes however, the real driving force behind this intense concentration of wealth during the pandemic is keystroke hot money injected into financial markets by central bankers. In other words; this is plutocratic disaster capitalism on steroids. As nearly everyone on the left predicted, the pandemic relief strategy of just giving rich people a bunch of money to buoy the stock markets, worked out well for rich people and not so much for the rest of us.

 

This pandemic windfall is of course on the heels of, and in addition to, the unprecedented transfer of wealth granted to America's rich by Donald Trump's barely-remembered tax cuts. Furthermore, all of this wealth concentration must be understood in the context of a lobbying fight against even moderate tax increases, that these same rich people are waging against Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act as we speak. Clearly, it's always a good time to be rich in America; which brings me to my larger point.

 

Unfortunately, explaining precisely how I think neofeudalist capitalism works is beyond the scope of this blog. I can however easily tell you what it looks like. And what it looks like is a society rigged so that no matter what happens, good or bad, the billionaires always win. It looks like a society where the political solution to every crisis, or even the absence of a crisis, is to give billionaires more public money. Most importantly, it looks like a society prepared to herd eight billion people off the ecological cliff so knock off supervillains like Jeff Bezos and Charles Koch can pocket unheard-of wealth for just a little while longer. 

 

I have seen the enemy, and he is Musk.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

In the Aggregate: A Neofeudalist Dystopia on NIDC

 

Editor’s Note: as of now, In the Aggregate is a regular round-up feature on NIDC, that showcases and expands on my social media analysis from around the web.

Gimme One With Everything

Whelp; in terms of my private war against arbitrary publishing deadlines, it's been a week of ups and downs so far.

Unfortunately, a frustrating tech fail yesterday morning left me without a mid-week essay to publish. Fortunately, I'm so extremely online I was able to make lemonade out of analysis I haven't shared on ninaillingworth.com yet. Combining original material, with most of my recent blogging, and polished highlights from all of my various social media feeds, this epic edition of In the Aggregate should feel like we're hanging out and watching the news together. Whether that cool, or a horrifying nightmare, is a question I'll leave to the historians. Check it out today on NIDC.

"What the liberal establishment refuses to accept is that America has always embraced the same foundational principles this fascist movement is built on. Slavery, genocide, extraction, exploitation, rigid social hierarchies, virulent anti-communism, the national security state; these too are the legacies of American democracy and values. Just because the punditry refuses to acknowledge these truths, doesn’t mean they aren’t real."

To read more over on ninaillingworth.com, click on the quotation block above, or the header below:

In the Aggregate: A Neofeudalist Dystopia 

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Class War, Inequity, and the Rise of Neofeudalism

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 11th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

As Americans Demand Tax Reforms, Analysis Finds Top 1% Hold More Wealth Than Whole Middle Class

Look, I hate to keep beating this same drum here, but there’s a reason I loathe rich people and it sure ain’t envy. In this Common Dreams article, Brett Wilkins talks about a recent Bloomberg report revealing that Americans in the top 1% have more wealth than the entire middle class; these are of course the same Americans funneling cash into dark money groups to stop moderate tax reforms in the U.S. as we speak. Even setting aside the somewhat arbitrary and politically disempowering way the “middle class” is defined here, the federal data shows that 1.3 million U.S. households (making 500K or more) now have more wealth than the 77.8 million families in the middle 60% of income tiers.

As the article details, the super-rich are currently beating the “middle class” (which includes plenty of affluent people as the maximum income rate for this definition is 141K a year) 27% to 26.6% in terms of national wealth share. This represents a stark departure some similar figures released as recently as 1990, when the super-rich controlled roughly 17% of national wealth, to the middle-classes 36%. Please keep in mind that while this economists definition of the middle class does include people making as little as 27K a year, it does not include anyone our society is prepared to call “poor.”

What I don’t think really comes across in this article however, is how absolutely unprecedented this situation is in the history of the Pig Empire. Everyone knows that the so-called Gilded Age was an era of vast inequity, robber barons, and open corruption by a complicit political class under the influence of monopoly power and its rivulets of cash. What most people don’t seem to realize however is that the levels of financial inequity and open corruption in our very own society have long surpassed anything from the Roaring Twenties.

Indeed, as I have posited elsewhere, we’re approaching a point where this level of inequity is fueling a new, and yet disturbingly familiar form of capitalism I’ve taken to calling “neofeudalism.” The rich have captured enough wealth and political influence to transform our whole society into a machine whose entire purpose is funneling even more wealth and power into their greedy fingers; even at the cost of all life on earth. Given that this is still capitalism, this wealth is obviously being taken from everyonebeneath them on the socioeconomic ladder; as the numbers we just looked at demonstrate.

This fusion of money power and control of the state has now locked the whole of society into a parasitic relationship that resembles landed lords and serfs from the darkest ages of European feudalism, and there’s no indication the rich have plans to stop the machine anytime soon. The class war may not look any different on the ground, but the moneyed interests we’re battling against today are armed with more power and influence than ever before; which is allowing them to rig our governments to serve them, and snatch the wealth of a broader and broader swath of our society.

It’s a slaughter alright; but the fattest pigs are running the abattoir and everyone who isn’t with them, is next on the chopping block.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Climate Crisis, Capitalism, and Culpability

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 5th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

I don't know about you, but I'm getting mighty damn tired of hearing excuses about why "we" can't collectively come together to prevent climate catastrophe; and I'm especially getting tired of hearing it from bougie ruling class muppets who're inarguably a massive part of the problem.

You can chant "we're all on this Earth together" like a mantra if you want, but the numbers don't lie. Rich people are overwhelmingly using more of our shared resources, and releasing more carbon than the entire labor class. Poor people and indigenous farmers aren't killing the planet; seventy one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 come from just one hundred corporations. And we know who the owners and controllers of those corporations are! Hell the one of the largest polluters on Earth is the United States military; does that sound like a "we" problem to you?

It's overwhelmingly the capitalist class that's causing the problem, and it's the capitalist class whose lust for endless and immediate profits that's preventing us from taking the steps necessary to save our planet, and with it potentially all life on Earth. The rich have already pillaged our collective future for filthy lucre, and now they (and their in pocket politicians) are refusing to pay for the ensuing fallout; a fallout that may well kill us all. 

This is absolutely not a "we" crisis, and we sure as sh*t aren't all in this together.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”