Fascist voter intimidation is a problem that will not go away by itself.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

― Jean-Paul Sartre

It brings me no joy to say that I think this Sartre quote will be important to keep in mind over the next few years. Even without the recent rise in open antisemitism from the right, I think the general idea is important to keep in mind, when dealing with the presence of a growing fascist movement in society. That “they don’t believe in words” bit applies to pretty much all of reality. Whether this is a deep belief, or just a worldview they adopt to justify what they want to do anyway, concepts like “truth” and “reality” are about who has the power to impose their will, not about any kind of verifiable fact. They’ll say otherwise, of course, just like they’ll lie about anything else, but it’s like with Trump – the absolute truth is whatever suits their goal in the given moment.

When it comes to elections, their goal is power. That’s not the same as saying that their goal is to win an election. They do want to win the election, of course, but only so they can use that power to make it harder for anyone else to win the next election. Ultimately, their only use for elections is to provide an appearance of legitimacy, while they feel they need it. If they feel that pretense is no longer necessary, they will shed it just as quickly as they’ve shed the pretense that they’re not racist, or not transphobic.

The same holds true for so many of their so-called beliefs, that unless you happen to know how to decipher their obscurantism and lies, you often have to infer their actual goals from the effects of their actions and the direction in which they seem to be heading. They may say that they’re OK with legal immigration, and that race has nothing to do with it, but at the same time, they’re lying about what constitutes legal vs illegal immigration. They may say that they care about law and order, but they ignore or actively seek to violate laws that go against the hierarchy they believe should exist. For fascists, that hierarchy means “us” at the top, and “them” at the bottom. It’s very, very similar to this famous Frank Wilhoit quote:

Conservatism Consists of Exactly One Proposition, to Wit: There Must Be In-Groups Whom the Law Protects but Does Not Bind, Alongside Out-Groups Whom the Law Binds but Does Not Protect.

When they say “law and order”, they’re talking about a self-serving definition of natural law, and natural order, from a Social Darwinian perspective. Anything is justifiable in defense of that version of law and order in particular. Imprisonment without trial, planting evidence, perjury, torture, murder, theft – anything is justifiable.

That’s why efforts to subvert democracy are on any list of characteristics of fascism. It’s not because fascist regimes in the past were authoritarian – though they were – it’s because fascism as an ideology views the concept of “fair play” as weakness. Victory and power are all that matter, hence the Nazi slogan of “Seig heil” – hail victory. That’s also why we should expect fascists to keep trying to scare people out of voting:

Consider this: Two armed individuals – dressed in tactical gear – were spotted at a ballot drop box in Mesa on Friday night, according to Maricopa County officials. The pair left the scene when the County Sheriff’s Office arrived.

“We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer said in a joint statement on Saturday.

There’s reason for concern, especially with candidates who have questioned the results of the 2020 election running as GOP nominees this year – including a full slate of them in Arizona, which became a hotspot of election denialism in the wake of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the state. And across the country, there’s concern about how some GOP-controlled county boards run by election deniers will oversee this year’s elections.

Read this report from CNN’s Kyung Lah. The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office has already referred to the US Department of Justice and Arizona Attorney General’s Office a separate report of voter intimidation:

The unidentified voter reported that they were approached and followed by a group of individuals when the voter was trying to drop off their ballot at an early voting drop box on Monday.

CNN on Thursday obtained from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office the report in which the voter detailed the alleged incident. It occurred, the voter wrote, around 6:40 p.m. at the Juvenile Justice Court drop box in Mesa, within Maricopa County.
The voter wrote that a “group of people” filmed, photographed and raised accusations against them as they attempted to return their early ballots.

The voter wrote that a “group of people” filmed, photographed and raised accusations against them as they attempted to return their early ballots.

See for yourself. “There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot dropbox filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the dropbox and accusing us of being a mule,” the voter said, adding that the group took photographs of them, their license plate and followed them out of the parking lot.

Part of the incident was captured on surveillance video, as seen here.

Arizona has referred six cases of voter intimidation to the Department of Justice, for its current primary, but this problem goes well beyond the long-standing U.S. tradition of voter intimidation by fascist vigilantes. Florida governor Ron Desantis has already shown that he’s willing to engage in human trafficking for a PR stunt, but he’s also arresting people for “voter fraud”, because they mistakenly believed they were allowed to vote. To be clear, they voted under their own names, and most of them did so after requesting and receiving explicit permission to do so from the Florida Department of Elections:

Of the 19 people arrested by DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security, 13 were Black and 12 were registered Democrats. Most had applied to register to vote under Amendment 4, a voter-approved 2018 ballot measure meant to restore voting rights for 1.4 million former felons. The stakes transcended Florida and criminal justice reform—a botched state voter purge of purported former felons played what one federal civil rights commissioner called an “outcome determinative” role in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Most of the applicants who were arrested were approved by the Florida Department of Elections, which sent their voter registration cards ahead of the 2020 elections. All were charged with third-degree felony voter fraud, a crime punishable by as many as five years behind bars and up to a $5,000 fine.

“The arrests are a grotesque abuse of power by Gov. DeSantis,” ACLU of Florida continued. “Although the governor and Legislature claimed that they passed S.B. 7066 in 2019 to ‘clarify’ Voting Restoration Amendment 4, in reality, the law created an unworkable pay-to-vote system that is intentionally difficult and complex to navigate.”

Bear in mind that in the United States, being arrested and charged with a felony can have devastating affects on your life. Even if you don’t miss work because the cops took you away, many places will still fire you for having been arrested. If you have a conviction on your record, your rights are already limited in most of the country, whether or not you have a conviction on your record. I say that because while a judge has thrown out the case, the disruption to these people’s lives is still very real, as is the message it sends. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re allowed to vote – you might get arrested for doing it anyway.

This will not end here. Remember – the only limit on what they will do, is what they think they can get away with, and they will never stop pushing that boundary. This is also not something that can be solved solely by voting. I really, really wish it was, but when you have a fascist party openly working to subvert democracy (Remember when the GOP candidate successfully sued to stop a recount?), it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to grab your muskets and rise up, but it does mean that you should be considering what it would look like to participate in organized resistance that goes beyond protesting authorities who’ve already shown they’re happy to attack and maim protesters and journalists. The momentum of our political and economic system is pushing us towards fascism, and the Democratic Party as it currently exists is neither willing nor able to actually change that. The leadership of the party all benefit from the system as it is, and many of them have done so for decades. Voting is still important, in my view. It can get small improvements, like Biden’s recent pardon for federal cannabis convictions, and while that’s not nearly enough, it’s still going to make a few thousand people’s lives a bit easier going forward.

But that’s not enough to change the momentum. The reality is that democracy requires more work than most people have been putting into it. That’s also largely because of systemic problems. Most people’s childhood education doesn’t include stuff about community organizing, how to run a union, or how to form an underground resistance against an authoritarian regime. Once we’re in the work force, a lot of people barely have time to get enough sleep, let alone do more work that doesn’t even come with a paycheck. And yet, somehow, we have to find a way to do more, or at least to do differently. We have to rediscover how to build, sustain, and wield collective power, and we have to figure out what it would look like to have actual self-governance in a modern society.

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Coverage of cops needs to change.

I am not a journalist. I write about news, but I’m pretty much always a secondary or tertiary source. All of that is to say that I’m not an expert in this field, so maybe I’m missing something obvious when I ask:  Why would so-called “news” organizations ever report police statements as fact?

The recent ubiquity of cameras has revealed something that was always there – police do not make our communities safer. They do not serve us. They serve themselves, and they serve the ruling class. In fact, through civil asset forfeiture, they play an increasingly large role in preventing class mobility – stealing from those who have little enough to begin with, apparently just because they can. If the United States was actually a free and just society, governed by and for the people, civil asset forfeiture would never have been made legal in the first place. If we had the kind of democratic power our leaders pretend we do, then I have to believe these laws would have been changed after John Oliver shined a big spotlight on them in 2014. Apparently the only state that’s actually made a meaningful change is apparently New Mexico.

Between 2000 and 2020, police stole at least $68 BILLION dollars from innocent people in the United States. Again, under the law, you do not have to be convicted of anything for the police to just take your property, and you have to hire an attorney on your own dime if you want to get it back. Might be hard to do if they’ve just stolen all your money, or your car, or your home.

More than that, cops lie constantly, and at this point it’s been so widely reported that I cannot believe anyone in the news industry is unaware. By the time we saw the cavalcade of lies from the Uvalde PD, nobody who had been paying even a little attention was surprised by their craven dishonesty.

When the subject of police violence comes up, I sometimes hear people say that even though cops do kill around three people per day. that’s not that many out of the hundreds of thousands of interactions every day. Even ignoring the less direct harm done by police theft and police dishonesty, the focus on killings often leads to us overlooking the non-lethal violence that police inflict on the communities that pay them:

>Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that since 2015, more than 400,000 people have been treated in emergency rooms because of a violent interaction with police or security guards. But there’s almost no nationwide data on the nature or circumstances of their injuries. Many of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies don’t tally or make public the number of people who need medical care after officers break their arms, bruise their faces, or shock them with Tasers.
Researchers point out that only a tiny portion of arrests involve force. But when police do use force, more than half of the incidents ended with a suspect or civilian getting hurt, according to a 2020 analysis. It’s unclear how serious the harm is. “We need better data on injury severity,” said Matthew Hickman, a professor at Seattle University and one of the study’s authors.
Most experts agree that injuries at the hands of cops remain underreported.

And, of course, that doesn’t even start talking about the prevalence of white supremacy in law enforcement.

I don’t think any of this is new to my readers at this point, or if it is maybe you’re new around here? Maybe I need to write about this more often. Obviously, I don’t think that the corporations who own most “news” coverage in the United States serve the public interest any more than the cops do. If you want more of a breakdown of the problems of crime reporting in the US, you can go here. The point of this post was to say that I think the tendency towards passive reporting, and police-friendly reporting continues to help cops get away with a level of abuse and criminality so extreme that I’ve had people deny its reality to my face “because they would have heard about it”.

They should have heard about it, but for all our media love sensationalism, they love protecting the rich and powerful far, far more. If they actually saw themselves as serving the interests of the public, this is what their reporting would look like (content warning for extreme grief):

Some More News: Mental Health and Mass Shootings

I always find it odd how resonant my head seems to be when it’s loaded up with snot. I’m grateful that this continues to manifest as a head cold, and I hope it stays that way. I don’t know if I have brain fog, but I’m certainly glad I decided not to try to do any real writing today.

Here’s Cody’s Showdy talking about mental health and mass shootings (and how the “mental health” line is a bigoted dodge that hurts everyone, especially those of us struggling with mental health problems. I also do not believe for a second that any of these powerful people – as ignorant and incurious as I think they are – actually think that “mental health” is the driver of mass shootings. They’re lying for the same reason they always lie – to prevent any kind of systemic change.

 

Tegan Tuesday: The Banality of Bigotry

This is a tale of heartbreak. A tale of death. A tale of perpetual life. A tale of political outreach and artistic expression. This is a mystery, as well. A famous work – a minimalist political artistic representation of grief – was briefly denied the chance to be either political or grief-inducing. While the situation has been corrected, the mystery has not been solved, and may never be. Even so, let us explore this saga.

For those who follow queer art and art news, this will probably not be your first introduction to minimalist Félix González-Torres, and his many “Untitled” works. His “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” (1991) is among his most famous and rightfully so. As I do not have the digital image rights to this work, please have a quick glance at this youtube video from the National Portrait Gallery.

As described in the video, it is an extremely simple installation of 175lbs of candy. This weight represents the ideal, healthy body weight of González-Torres’s partner, Ross, prior to his illness and death due to AIDS in 1991. As visitors are encouraged to pick a candy from the pile, the slow diminishing of ‘Ross’ represents both the disease devouring his body and the societal dismissal and diminishing of those afflicted. It’s an incredibly moving piece, made all the more so by the participation and complicity of the gallery patron. It’s far from the artist’s only AIDS related art, but it is probably his most famous. In 1996, González-Torres himself passed from AIDS at age 38.

I also cannot emphasize enough: this piece is incredibly well-known and so is the context. I’ve discussed it in classes, I’ve read articles and gushing accounts of its impact on personal lives for at least a decade, and I’ve certainly seen pictures of it all over the web.

Imagine my surprise when I came across this bombshell of a tweet yesterday:

Published on September 28th of this year, the tweet came out the same day as an equally inflammatory letter published in The Windy City Times (The Voice of Chicago’s Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans and Queer Community Since 1985).  Both the tweeter, Will Scullin, and the letter-writer, Zac Thriffiley, noticed that the signage for the Art Institute of Chicago’s installation of “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” had removed any and all mention of Ross, AIDS, death, memorial, or anything personal at all. There were many pointed comments on Twitter about the concept of the 175lbs referring to “the average body weight of an adult male,” and a few mentioning “ideal weight.”

I tromped all over the internet, trying to source reasons or explanations, only to discover that, hallelujah! The text had been changed yet again and now included Ross and his death as well as opening the door to more abstract interpretations.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions. Regardless of its physical shape, the label lists its ideal weight, likely corresponding to the average body weight of an adult male, or perhaps the ideal weight of the subject referred to in the title, Ross Laycock, the artist’s partner who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, as did Gonzalez-Torres in 1996. As visitors take candy, the configuration changes, linking the participatory action with loss—even though the work holds the potential for endless replenishment.

Problem solved, yes? Well, yes and no. The first change as well as the second were implemented with no fanfare, and according to some sources, this has been on-going since 2018. (Also, for all the wall text changed, the museum’s audio description remains unchanged from 2015)

Then the work was de-installed [in 2017], and when it was put back on display in the summer of 2018, it was accompanied by a wall label that made no mention of AIDS and focused solely on the work’s aesthetic value. (The accompanying audio focuses heavily on Laycock and the AIDS crisis and has gone unchanged since 2015, according to a museum spokesperson.)
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work is characterized by a sense of quiet elegy,” read the new label. “He possessed an uncanny ability to produce elegant and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials.” The text acknowledged that 175 pounds “corresponds to the average body weight of an adult male” but excluded any biographical information.

“Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” was taken down again in the summer of 2018 and reinstalled this July [2022], once more accompanied by the newer text that avoided any mention of AIDS. This time, visitors voiced their concern.

This, emphatically, does not make sense to me. Why would an incredibly famous AIDS-activism artwork be stripped of all of its context? One theory, put forth in both the article quote above and on twitter, lays the blame for this situation at the representative for the artist’s estate, David Zwirner of the Zwirner Gallery.

Well, sure, I’m always happy to think ill of the ‘men in suits’ who move the money in the art world, but I still couldn’t prove anything one way or the other, and I realized that I also had no real understanding of what could potentially be the motives from the institution side of the equation. Thankfully for me and my mystery, being in a performing arts department of a university means that I could find someone who knew.

A lovely hour-long discussion with the head of Art History at my school brought forth several revelations, if no clear answers. Firstly, the Zwirner Gallery is incredibly well-known in the art world, and there is absolutely no financial incentive or advantage to their demonstrating homophobia in 2022. Aside from museum directors, who are almost exclusively white, cis-het men, the art world is generally pretty queer. Whether it’s artists, collectors, buyers, curators, interns, patrons- many of the people in the art world just aren’t straight. The Zwirner Gallery would lose the representation of many of its artists as well as many lucrative sales or museum loans if this omission was known to come from them, so while this is possible that David Zwirner could have the influence on the wall plaque, it’s unlikely that he would have removed any mention of AIDS or of Ross.

It is also unlikely to have come from the board, or any donors of the Art Institute of Chicago. According to the professor I spoke with, the three areas of art that have censorship issues are: sex, body parts that are normally clothed, body fluids and scat. A pile of candies that is representative of the impact of AIDS hardly qualifies. It’s also unlikely to have censorship coming from the city government of Chicago in 2022. This isn’t Texas in the 1980s. Perhaps there are US galleries in communities that have such strict control over messaging that this work would be censored, but that isn’t the case here.

The likely reason for the signage change comes from one of two places, according to my source. If it’s a top-down decision, it likely comes from the family of the artist. González-Torres was Cuban-born and had strong family connections to the Cuban community in Florida. This community is often extremely conservative, extremely Catholic, and perhaps that someone in the family who is associated with the González-Torres Foundation is attempted to straight-wash the history of the artist. It is unusual that the gallery would bow to the whims of an estate on the verbiage of a wall plaque, but perhaps the visual rights could be held out of reach until such changes were made. It’s possible.

The other possibility? The poorly-received text was written by an intern, with very little oversight from a curator. Apparently writing the text for things like wall plaques is the museum version of grunt work that often gets fobbed off onto interns or Art History undergrads. This potential anonymous intern could equally have had an axe to grind about González-Torres’s representation as a gay artist who created art about AIDS (it seems unlikely that such an important thing would be changed “by accident”). And with the amount of work that is needed to put together exhibits and keep museums running, much of this grunt work is checked off as ‘done’ without much attention paid to the details by someone further up the food chain.

I guess the only way to discover the actual solution to this mystery is will be to watch González-Torres’s works in future exhibits. If the artist’s personal details continue to get lost from museum catalogs, then perhaps an outside influence like a family member is pulling some strings. If this remains a freak accident, it might very easily have been an intern’s barely-approved text getting printed. Either way, I am pleased that this story at least has a happy ending: the artist’s life details have been reunited with his art for future visitors to learn about this powerful and wonderful work. Who needs to solve mysteries anyway?

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Video: Some More News about the GOP’s recent foray into human trafficking

As you have no doubt heard, the Republican Party of the United States of America has taken to engaging in human trafficking for political stunts. They tricked Venezuelan asylum seekers into taking a flight to Martha’s Vineyard, without warning anyone there that they were about to need to take care of a bunch of refugees. This was apparently done under the belief that the people of that island would freak out at the presence of scary brown people, and their hypocrisy would be exposed. Mano Singham did a good breakdown of the history of this sort of tactic, most infamously the “freedom rides” during the Jim Crow era, so you should check that out, but you know I couldn’t resist posting the Some More News take on this story:

This follows on the theme of fascists seeing humans as disposable tools.

 

Reminder: Children are disposable tools to fascists. They don’t actually care about them.

As fascism rises around the world, we’re going to see a lot of bigotry and oppression justified in the name of “protecting children”. One of the worst offenders in the United States right now is Tucker Carlson. He’s a white supremacist and a fascist, and he’s also most watched “news” host on cable. I don’t believe that literally every attack from conservatives is projection, but it’s certainly their favorite tool, and I think this is no exception. Carlson is happy to engage in stochastic terrorism because of the left “sexualizing children” by teaching them about things like gender and consent, but he was also happy to insist repeatedly and over objections that when a teacher gave a lap dance to a child, no crime was committed:

Fascists see children as a means to an end. They’re a way to build and exert power. They’re props in the political theater. They’re worth murdering doctors to defend one day, and they’re lazy moochers for wanting food the next. The mere existence of gay or trans people is a threat to all children everywhere, but it’s fine to support people like Donald Trump or Josh Duggar.

The only boundary on their actions is what they think they can get away with, whether it’s lying about their concern for children, or engaging in human trafficking for political stunts, or overthrowing democracy and murdering people they disagree with. They will keep pushing farther until they are forcibly stopped. That’s why turning out to oppose them en masse is so important at this stage, and it’s why more organizing and networking are needed, so that communities can mobilize quickly to defend themselves and each other when a hospital or school is targeted.

Puerto Rico is demonstrating yet again that capitalism cannot solve climate change.

I wrote a few days ago about the total failure of Puerto Rico’s privatized power grid under Hurricane Fiona. As of seven hours before writing, half the island is still without power. In case it’s unclear to anyone, this – both the failure of privatization and the arrival of another hurricane – was entirely predictable. That’s what makes it all the worse that it seems as though most or all of the rebuilding from that disaster was done without any attempt to guard against the next hurricane. Many of you may have seen this already, but the most dramatic example from Hurricane Fiona is this bridge that was build shortly after Maria:

A temporary metal bridge in Puerto Rico, built in the wake of Hurricane Maria, was swept away in the rushing floodwaters of Hurricane Fiona.

The bridge, over the Guaonica River in Utuado, was destroyed Sunday, the same day Fiona made landfall on the island, officials said at a news conference.

It’s been five years, and they still just had a temporary bridge. Why didn’t they build something sturdier, or something that could be lifted out of the way of entirely predictable floodwaters? How much damage did that bridge do on its way downstream?

To me, this is emblematic of the Age of Endless Recovery. Puerto Rico had not rebuilt from Maria before Fiona hit, and what rebuilding they did do seems to have been dragged down by the same kind of greed and corruption that plagues all the rest of the United States. We know that storms are going to be getting stronger. We know that Puerto Rico is in dire need of resilient infrastructure, as is most of the rest of the world. If we valued human life and wellbeing above profit, then we would prioritize infrastructure that won’t be destroyed by entirely predictable weather events.

This is one of the many reasons why I think capitalism is incompatible with real climate action, or with the long-term survival of humanity. From the perspective of a construction corporation, there’s more profit to be made in building the same bridge every few years, than in building one bridge that can actually meet the demands of its location, and last for decades with maintenance. Obviously, this is not a problem limited to Puerto Rico, but remember the fundamental rule of climate catastrophe in our society – it hits those at the bottom first and hardest. While there are a myriad of communities in the United States and its colo- sorry, territories – Puerto Rico is both a laboratory for disaster capitalism, and for the shambling, undead horror that is Reaganomics. You know how conservatives of both parties always talk about lowering taxes to attract rich people “because of all the prosperity that brings”?

Puerto Rico has done wonderfully at attracting rich people, and I hope it’s clear to all of you that doing so has not helped the people of that island. The defining trait of a rich person is their selfishness, and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will spend a cent on something that doesn’t benefit them personally. They moved there for tax purposes, because they don’t care about things like infrastructure. It’s far better for them to just leave the island until the peasantry has managed to pull it back together, and then they’ll move back.

Capitalists do not care about climate change, or about the billions of lives that are at risk. Capitalism means that the capitalist class has total freedom, paid for by the rest of us. They have open borders. They can go anywhere they want whenever they want.

Our entire society has been designed to reward greed and ruthlessness, and this is the result. Obviously it’s good to provide material help to those in need if you’re able, but if we want the world to get better, we need to change how people interact with politics, and build the collective power we need to actually topple the hierarchy that’s currently driving us towards extinction.

Video: The Anti-Trans Disinformation Pipeline

I’ve been working on a couple posts about this general topic for a while now, and I’m hoping I’ll have them done soon. This is one of those topics where my own ignorance on the subject makes me wary of mistakes. It’s also one of those problems where the longer I take to finish a post, the more stuff I have to add in. The fascist effort to erase trans people from U.S. society is moving at a horrifying speed, and they are quite openly using stochastic terrorism as a weapon. Jessie’s work is always worth looking at, but I think this particular breakdown of how the right wing is creating and aiming outrage is important. They are trying to get people killed. They are trying to create a climate of terror, with the goal of either killing all trans people, or forcing them into hiding. This is not a drill, and while I think it is related to the 2022 midterms, I do not think it will go away without a very deliberate mass movement to crush this genocidal campaign.

What Evo Morales did for Bolivia

When I was a kid, and nobody knew what an asshole Scott Adams is, I loved reading Dilbert. I think part of it was that I spent a fair amount of time hanging out at the office where my dad worked, so office humor clicked with me. I’m bringing this up because as far as I know, a Dilbert strip was the first time I was made aware of the existence of Bolivia. Basically, Dogbert gets extremely rich, goes a little power-crazy, and “buys Bolivia”. In context, Bolivia was cast as poor and possibly backwards, like the fictional nation of Elbonia. Bolivia was a poor country, and that’s all there was to it.

I learned more as life went on, but it wasn’t until I heard Michael Brooks talking about Evo Morales on The Majority Report that I actually started learning anything about the country of Bolivia, rather than the comic strip stereotype. As with most South American countries, Bolivia has a large Native American population that has largely been kept out of power by the Europeans who made up the country’s government. It’s a story of colonialism, oppression, and genocide, and as with all such stories, the idea that Bolivia is “poor” was always a lie. The poverty experienced by the Bolivian people was in service to the enrichment of their rulers, and of capitalists on a global scale. Most recently, Bolivia has gained attention for its rich supply of lithium, and those watching events were quick to point at that the coup that removed Evo Morales from power in 2019 was likely tied to the decision to nationalize Bolivia’s lithium industry, and to focus on Bolivian manufacturing. That meant that rather than selling raw lithium on the international market, and then buying it back in products at a markup to enrich other people, Bolivia would make products in Bolivia, and sell those, thus keeping the profits from that industry within Bolivia. This would definitely cut into the profits of those people currently relying on cheap lithium to get rich off things like electric cars and house batteries, and so it wasn’t a stretch to assume that this coup, like many others around the world, was about preserving the wealth and power of the capitalist class. I think that this case is strengthened by evidence of ongoing efforts to prevent Morales’ MAS party from returning to power, following the bloody failure that was the brief Añez regime.

Edit: As was pointed out in the comments, it IS worth mentioning that Morales seeking a third term came after he had served two terms, and had championed a constitution limiting presidents to two terms.

I’m writing all of this as an introduction to a twitter thread I came across that I thought was worth sharing. Morales served as president of Bolivia from 2006 until the 2019 coup. At the time, I heard people saying that him being president for that long was “dictator behavior”, and evidence that the coup might be the sort of uprising we ought to support. I did not hear any clear answer as to why that wouldn’t also justify an uprising against Angela Merkel, who was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. When there’s controversy surrounding a politician, people find things to hate, and find excuses to justify their hatred. That can make it difficult to figure out what’s actually going on. At times like that, I find it useful to look not at the rhetoric and claims being made, but at the material circumstances. What effect did the governance of Morales and the MAS party have on the people of Bolivia?

The answer to such a question is always going to be complicated, but I think this is one of those times where it’s safe to say that Morales’ government did good things for his country. This thread is a decent look at why people support him, and the MAS party more broadly:

There’s this weird phenomenon, where if people have a bad feeling about a particular politician, any bad things at all will be justification enough to condemn them wholly. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I think it’s a destructive shortcut we take to avoid the work of learning more about the actual material situation in question. The system that the MAS party has started creating is not a utopia, but it seems to be a lot better than the hell-world capitalism has been creating.

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Video: Cody’s Showdy takes a look at the absolute horror show that is private prisons

The more you learn about the United States, present and past, the more you realize that calling it “the land of the free, and the home of the brave” is a sick joke. Nowhere is that more true than in the prison system. It’s basically an entire industry where the government pays corporations to imprison people, as the corporations pay politicians to come up with excuses to imprison people. How could this end any way other  than badly?

This may be cliché, but if you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.