And I shall sign off on that note.
]]>Too many of the people with power have no real connection to the country anymore, and multinational corporations certainly don’t have loyalty to anything but themselves. We have ‘free-traded’ that loyalty away.
Detroit may be the future of US urban areas, especially those that are dependent on personal vehicles, with the suburbs not far behind. Growing your own food may be the only way you can be sure of not being poisoned by corporate agriculture. I wish them well.
]]>Detroit may be an exception to the long hot summer thing. Government has pretty much ceased to exist in Detroit outside of a small part of the city core, so summers in Detroit are a busy time for young men and women as they clear abandoned houses to make room for community gardens (not to mention planting and caring for those community gardens), make whatever makeshift repairs they can make to the infrastructure to keep the water and sewer working, and otherwise live the libertarian dream. Thing is, they don’t exactly view it as a dream. More a dystopian nightmare where they’re working harder than Americans have had to work for decades just for survival, gone back to being peasant farmers squatting on unwanted land like some Latin American dictatorship dominated by latifundia. I don’t think there’s going to be riots in Detroit in the summertime. Everybody’s too tired.
]]>We definitely do not need a long, hot summer. Bad things happen during those periods, and things spiral out of control.
]]>I’m not as sure as you about the antipathy of Southerners about the Army being used domestically. I recall that when the Army was deployed into New Orleans post-Katrina, there was a lot of support for arming them to deal with the “savages” (a.k.a. African-Americans) who were supposedly running wild like some stereotype from KKK literature. Southerners may recall General Sherman and Little Rock, but they also loves them some keepin’ them darkies in their place, yo, and that’s Detroit — New Orleans North when you look at the demographics.
But the U.S. military isn’t going to go into Detroit this year, so why are the oligarchs trying to create riots in Detroit this year? Unless maybe they’re nervous about Obama, and want to create an incident that will embarrass or “discredit” him and cost him the November election, but given the clowns the Republicans are running against Obama this year I can’t think that the oligarchs are seriously displeased with Obama, otherwise they would have cut off his money and funded a real Republican candidate instead of the circus sideshow they instead funded. Plus once summer starts Detroit grows its own food — a large percentage of the vacant burned-down houses have been cleared and turned into community gardens — so the riots would have to happen in the next few months otherwise the food from the community gardens will ease things enough to keep the riots from happening, and if they happen in the next few months Obama has plenty of time to spin that around to “see what happens if you have Republicans in charge?”, so I can’t think this is the oligarchs’ plan. Unless they want the riots to happen, *then* blame it on Republicans, just to ensure that Obama gets re-elected by margins large enough to give him a mandate to push through the oligarchs’ plans, i.e., they’re playing a double-Machiavelli here…
But probably I’m overthinking this. Our oligarchs are, by and large, *dumb*. They mostly got their wealth by being winners of the lucky sperm club (i.e., inherited it), not through hard work and intelligence. Chances are they really *don’t* expect riots to happen if they cut off the supply of food to the majority of Detroit’s residents, they really *do* expect their beautiful police state to be able to lock up more and more people, despite the number of people *already* locked up being at historical highs not seen in even the most tyrannical police states of the past. In which case they’re going to be woefully surprised when the whole edifice starts collapsing… sadly, they’re like cockroaches, they’ll just scurry off somewhere else rather than be guest of honor at a necktie party. Sigh!
]]>Yes, there are a lot of Southerners in the military, and the South has a ‘thing’ about Federal troops being used for civil purposes. That is rather ingrained. They might go against ‘evil foreigners’, but I don’t see them ready to go against Americans. The National Guard is about as far as they can escalate.
I wouldn’t want to fight in an American city without air support. There are a hell of a lot of guns in most of them, and any action like that would set off the militias and survivalists. Things would escalate very quickly.
]]>But sometimes I think our oligarchs want that explosion, why is the GOP government of Michigan kicking people off of food stamps when children go to bed hungry? Sure, they’re heartless automatons who have no idea what it’s like to actually be hungry (except voluntarily on one of the fad diets they’re so fond of), but they must know that sooner or later things will boil over. Do they *want* this to happen, so that they can get rid of Posse Comitatus and have the Army do a Fallujah on Detroit? They’ve been upset about all those blacks in Detroit soiling their Aryan state ever since the blacks moved up during WW2 to work in the tank factories, is this their end game of a genocidal plan? Do they *really* think they’ll get their desired result? Yes, the Army is mostly Southern crackers now, but still. The *President* isn’t a Southern cracker, and the Army still obeys the President. I hope. Because if that’s not true, we’re *really* fucked.
Badtux the “Is it paranoia if it really could be true?” Penguin
]]>We can see it coming, but the ‘professional politicians’ don’t seem to understand how close to chaos things really are. Things were nearly this bad when there were events like the San Ysidro McDonalds massacre. Desperate people do terrible things, because they have no reason not to. Conditions force them outside of the society they thought they were part of, and then they were cut-off from it by economic circumstances. People snap, and it starts with individuals and grows.
While ‘officials’ are watching Kosher delis owned by Iranian Jews, or the Occupy movement, really dangerous people who already have the means in their homes and hiding places, are free to work themselves into a frenzy fueled by the statements of people running for political office.
The riots in Athens are minimal compared to what happened in Watts and other large American cities. If things don’t change we will see those times again.
]]>That reminds me of why FDR, a scion of a Republican family, a conservative governor of New York State, and a wealthy man himself, behaved in such a liberal manner when he became President. He looked at that exact same calculation and realized that if basic changes were not made, the nation was going to explode and blood was going to flow in the gutters.
Unfortunately I see no FDR’s in our current political system. The Republicans are venal and the Democrats are craven. Those who have the vision to see what must be done lack the courage, and those who have the courage, possess no more vision than a toddler clutching a precious to himself and shouting “Mine! Mine!”. Personally, I do not expect the current political system to be able to sustain itself for much longer, it can be sustained only with ever-increasing increments of force to the point where we have more people in prison both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of population than Stalin ever had in his gulags, and we’ve already surpassed the East German STASI for the number of criminal justice personnel (police, guards, probation officers, etc.) as a percentage of population. The rag is being squeezed tighter and tighter and the tighter it gets, the more desperate people get. It’s a slowly widening pool of gasoline in the middle of the body politic, and when a spark happens… bad things. VERY bad things.
And the only solution of the Republicans is to pour more gas onto the future bonfire, and the only solution of the Democrats is to retire to their fainting couches at the horror of it all. WASF.
– Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
]]>