2016 was shocking politically, economically, socially and culturally. We lost an enormous amount of thinkers and artists when we seem to need them the most.
I think 2017 has the potential however to be far worse than 2016 in three crucial areas.
Politics: The speed with which Trump has managed to generate fury and anger that has stretched into protests against him every weekend since his inauguration has changed everything. His ability to hear and manipulate the economic and cultural anger of the working poor is as terrifying as the conspiracy theory that we are watching a slow motion coup.
One of the few to pick Trump’s win, Michael Moore, has argued that we are witnessing one underway right now…
US in middle of coup by Donald Trump, Michael Moore warns
The US is in the middle of a coup and hasn’t realised, according to Michael Moore.
The filmmaker and journalist, who was one of the few famous people to publicly predict that Donald Trump would become President, has warned that the US state is being overthrown by Mr Trump and the people he has appointed to govern alongside him.
Linking to a New York Times piece about the role of senior advisor Steve Bannon, he posted on Twitter: “If you’re still trying to convince yourself that a 21st century coup is not underway, please, please snap out of it”.
…Trump has by-passed the normal political checks and balances which other nations and stakeholders use to anticipate how the President will respond, meaning that with Trump the possibility to misread him is incredibly high.
Trump directly impacts Putin, Israel, China, Europe and the entire Middle East, nothing politically can happen globally without Trump being mollified and praised for having the biggest Presidency ever.
The forces that pushed Brexit and Trump to a win, the angry domestic populations of the West under pressure from increased mass migration due to neoliberal globalisation, are looking for leadership and progressive movements either learn to harness that populism or face electoral impotency.
Progressives spent decades guarding against Orwell’s 1984 while forgetting Huxley’s hyper self gratification dystopia…
there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).
…consumer culture and hyper individualism has done more to erode solidarity than the collapse of the entire Soviet Union. It’s how affluent cultural elites in California, London and New York didn’t see Trump or Brexit coming.
Those in Western Democracy who have been left behind by the global free market intend to make their fury felt.
Economy: The global market has been waiting to burst and correct for some time, especially since nothing was fixed from the 2007/8 Global Financial Recession. Brexit, Trumpism, and the death of global neoliberalism are real contenders to cause the next global economic meltdown, but the problem is that there are so many contenders to be that catalyst.
China has told the planet they will step in if Trump walks away, but China’s own economy looks like it will implode.
Brexit could cause terrible economic pain in Britain at a time when trust in the Government, media and business has collapsed.
Meanwhile Europe looks like it could disintegrate economically at any moment.
Managing to get through the dark looming clouds of economic collapse in 2017 will take remarkable skill at a time when there is no remarkable skill.
Climate: The third way 2017 becomes worse than 2016 is from climate change. While we have a Prime Minister who barely believes in climate change, America is run by someone who thinks the entire claim is a Chinese hoax.
The World Economic Forum now places extreme weather events caused by climate change as the biggest threat to the global economy…
…we are seeing the worst case scenarios from the IPCC play out as the only scenarios now. It is obvious that we have breached environmental feedback loops that will only continue to heat the planet and that we must urgently start investing in cultural, economic and societal adaptation if we are going to survive the worst parts of the future climate we have become welded to.
That reality is missing from the current debate and as the inevitability of extreme weather events picks up pace in 2017 the ability to pretend it’s not happening can’t continue.
In 2017 there is much ready to explode.
Good to see you highlighting these three issues. These have been on our minds for some time now and guess what? No progress is being made.
We really are turning out to be the stupidest of species!
The Pleasant Truth will replace the inconvenient truth, thanks to Trump, his ally Bannon and others. Get ready though, for the next war in the Mid East, Iran is “on notice”, and we can only guess what that means. But the new Defence Secretary, a true haw, has already said it, he considers Iran the one and only true big state sponsor of terrorism.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/04/politics/mattis-iran-us-sanctions-missile/index.html
“a true hawk”, that was meant to read.
Iran has been in the firing line since the Iranians expelled the American-British puppet Shah Palavi in 1979 (installed by Britain and America after they deposed democratically-elected Mossadegh).
The Iranians endured many years of American-backed attacks by Iraq, and won.
Verbal assaults on Iran and veiled threats went into hyper-drive over a decade ago. And nothing happened.
America needs clowns to pronounce nations as evil in order to maintain support of the general populace for the military-industrial complex.
Expect no ‘real war’, just skirmishes to test weapon systems. America is no longer capable of fighting a ‘real war’. And the people at the top know it.
‘amount of thinkers’
Grammar, Martyn.
Amount for things uncountable, like air and water.
Number for things countable, like people, cats and dogs.
‘That reality is missing from the current debate and as the inevitability of extreme weather events picks up pace in 2017 the ability to pretend it’s not happening can’t continue.’
Since the entire culture of western capitalism is founded on fabrications, fraud and denial of reality (together with looting and polluting), we can expect fabrications, fraud and denial of reality (together with looting and polluting) to remain the foundations of policies in the foreseeable future.
I have little doubt that Bill English (along with the vast majority of MPs of all parties) will have no problem pretending everything is rosy when it’s not.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-31/a-climate-change-economist-sounds-the-alarm
Sell out is my least favourite thing to hear because people who call other people sell outs have no fucken idea what they are talking about.
When you’re a kid your goals in life are limited only by your imagination, not by mortgages or rent or others expectations. As a child, only your imagination fills your life ambition. But then you get older and reality steps in and those imaginations of lofty dreams get sidelined by the reality of mortgages or rent and bills/kids/commitments or a fear of failure gets in the way of perusing your passions. This is where most people surrender to reality and put away there dreams. As reality sets in, dreams become more and more distant.
This all hit me when I was 15 years old and living on my own and my girlfriend was pregnant and I had to get a job which sidelined all of my dreams. I remember vividly putting on my old school shoes that where to small for me, the bosses name was Mr Love and I convinced him I would be a hard working employee even though I was a teenager. It was a big deal for me when I got that job all the while being that broke the struggle is real and my dreams are sidelined but I made promises to my self every day that I would never give up my dreams and I’ll be a little closer to my dreams. This was when life was at its hardest for me and I really had to focus narrowly, I zero’d in on the one thing which was to relies all those promises I made to myself as a kid.
So began my 20 year transition from a teenage dad who washed dishes for a living to some one who has a strangle hold on my dreams. What does it take to go from a career of nothingness to a career of somethingness and that is the transition of hard work and busting your ass and believing in something that doesn’t exist and it’s this transition that people who use the term sell out love to ignore.
They love to pretend that it didn’t exist.
$5000 and I maxed out my credit card migrating to Australia so I could get a tiny bit closer to my dreams. When I got to Australia a co worker asked me if I could help him with his tax returns and he gave me $50 dollars for it and that got me one step closer to my dreams becoming reality. This is where the whole sell out thing becomes counterintuitive. At some point you go from being celebrated for realising your dreams, you go from being that to being some one who is simply a sell out.
I wonder what it would have been like for Quade Cooper to be called a sell out because He played for the Wallabies – https://youtu.be/iJDHkRn7z-M
I bet when Quade Cooper gets called a sell out he thinks of not the time he sold out Eden Park – https://youtu.be/FNGs8JeruBM
But I bet Quade Cooper thinks of the time he had to borrow money from his mom to buy some boots and play his first club game – https://youtu.be/ZgFCW4IQmDM
Sell out is a term invented by jealous quitters. Eminem said it best:
“Oh he’s to mainstream, but that’s what they do when they get jealous and confuse it” – https://youtu.be/XbGs_qK2PQA (explicit)
I have never been called a sell out until 20 years after I was that 15 year old dishwasher so I say this. If your a struggling musician who gets payed $20 bucks to play at the back of a cafe or artist who’s mom offers to put your art in the corner office or if you’re a youtuber who gets a $50 brand deal to promote comedy on Maori Television. Don’t be worried about being called a sell out. You’re just making your very first step towards the impossible dreams becoming reality.
And you should know that when you achieve success and you’re living all the way up here*** and those haters are still lobbing insults from that well of misery that they live in. You can look down in solace and look down on them safe in the knowledge that if they only had invested all that energy they invested calling you a sell out and instead elevate themselves, that maybe, just maybe, they’ll be up here*** with you.
If we could just castrate politicians’ egos and rid neo-liberalism from the world’s economies, the world’s climate would probably look after itself.
Actually, if you could just castrate male politicians it’d be a start, but then there’s the likes of Poto and TT (and her not-so-humble servant)to wonder what the fcuk to do about.
Oh yep, then there’s the likes of Paula Bennet. Maybe we could just buy her a spot on some celebrity make-over Kardashian type thing.
No …… it’s more complicated than I first thought ….. bugger!
That’s good. Perhaps we can now go to Plan B and use our own minds to think, to collaborate and co-operate and get this moving.
There have been years and whole forests of material made available by ‘thinkers and artists’. “So inspiring! So thought-provoking!” So nothing of the sort.
Look. Politicians are, by their natures, dedicated followers of fashion. They’re mainstreamers and behind the fair along with ‘most people’. They are not equipped to handle this level of novelty and complexity.
Donald Trump’s Faithful – all sound and fury signifying nothing. ‘Middle class’, as defined in America, still yearning and hankering after high-paid, low-quality jobs. Bring back the Happy Past. “Sad.”
Trump and Bannon leading the new Children’s Crusades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Crusade This will also end in tears and exploitation. Deaths and misery.
How do we start harvesting the gifts already offered – and start testing them here – to see what works? What makes the shifts in thinking and responses that lead to useful actions in the directions that look promising for all systems and species on this planet (not just the gormless humans)? We need to find out.
Let’s get the fabled Kiwi ingenuity out of mothballs and back to work. PDQ.
Simon Parkes of Connecting Consciousness UK tells the world what our Government has been doing in selling of land to the Elite!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AyiWYESJ3U
Without energy nothing happens.
With a declining energy supply less happens.
The numerous warnings provided by oil geologists for decades -all of them ignored by politicians- will manifest as collapse at some stage in the near future, perhaps commencing 2017.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the-world-economy-starts-coming-apart/
http://www.alternet.org/environment/economic-oil-crash-around-corner
So the real question, Bomber, is do you have a list? Who’s on it? And how are your going to check them off when civil order collapses?
When it comes to climate change, every year is worse than the previous one.
We may see some respite from the record breaking sequence of global temperatures, but only because the Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index has transitioned from El Nino to La Nina. This may temporarily mask the underlying trend, and no doubt embolden climate deniers, but the facts remain.
We are on a one-way ticket to mass extinction. And now, we have to endure the 45th POTUS for part of that journey.
BTW, where is Key? The MSM seem to know the McCaws every friggin’ move, but as for our “most popular PM”, not a squeak. Has he fallen into the same black hole Ede fell into?????
The scumbags who run the system have managed to kick the can down the road a lot longer than most analysts imagined possible but the fundamental flaws in the financial system and the economic system, together with the increasing poverty of the masses, are clearly going to cause an implosion fairly soon. And a lot of people -especially ordinary people who still have faith in the system- are going to lose most of what they have (or think they have).
When the collapse finally comes, you can be sure the scumbags at the top will not just protect their assets but will also seek to profit from collapse.
What will distinguish the coming collapse from all previous collapses will be the lack of resilience, lack of community, lack of skills and lack of resources of most ordinary folk, who are trapped in the increasingly dystopian matrix of screen-based urban life as poorly trained, poorly paid wage slaves.
The only good news is that water systems and sewage systems in NZ will hold together somewhat longer than many other countries (maybe into the 2030s), simply because of the relatively low population, relatively low population density and the hydro-electric system.
Expect the stampede to NZ to increase.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.nz/2017/02/which-assets-are-most-likely-to-survive.html
I think you have summed up the worst fears for 2017!
Lets hope that those citizens that have slightly more interest in their lives than their next car or size of TV can mobilise and fight for what is right.
I also hope that liberals stop pigeoning their fight into Identity politics which has so many blind spots and does not work with 21 century globalism of one world culture where money and power trumps race/gender/age to stop people uniting.
(on the theme of more thinkers and artists!)
A NZ artist that has some interesting ideas on power and values is Tao Wells.
He’s a person absolutely rejecting and commenting on the current system of work and neoliberalism.
He has videos like THE HAPPY BENE
http://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/tao-wells
http://www.circuit.org.nz/film/the-happy-bene
The “Major Natural Disasters” category is especially pertinent to NZ as we seem to be entering a geologically active phase of our natural history (which may actually be the default anyway).
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