Rocks

 

Rip and Tear

So there is a lot of incredible work being done coming to terms with the DOGE team's seizure of the US Treasury's payment system. This is a huge subject and very technical, and by necessity, highly speculative. For now I'll just be drawing off of two podcast episodes on the matter: Trash Future's "Worst Case Scenario" - specifically the interview section with Nathan Tankus on the second half of the episode - and War Nerd Radio's "Trump's Wrecking Crue." 

To point to just one of the many geopolitical events we could reference over the past couple of decades, this is giving off echoes of Brexit, but at a much larger scale, with a much more powerful nation. They are going after some of the US'  core governing apparatuses, and then are attempting to tear out their innards, just as they wanted to decouple one of the core political and economic links that the UK had with the EU. 

It does feel good temporarily to break the infernal machine, like smashing the computer that is freezing and spewing out errors, and otherwise wasting your time and energy. The audacity of it all is impressive in a way, but the audacity is made possible by an ignorance of how the payment systems work, and then by extension, an ignorance of the consequences of fooling with them and possibly breaking them. People like Trump can skip from failed business to failed business, and people like Elon Musk can seize Twitter and tear out its innards and trash it and continue on, because of the enormous surplus available to them. What happens when you fool with the core systems that backstop that surplus? 

The Trump Administration has admitted that there may be some pain. Oh buddy. Whose pain are we talking about now? The administration is perched atop a veritable active volcano, fooling around with its innards.

As WNR's Mark Ames and John Dolan discuss, this is very much a GOP thing, and an old one. And if you look at the United States' political development over the past century, you can see these patterns playing cyclically, over and over again, but with the wreckage and consequences growing each time. 

In the last couple of decades, we've seen that when the Democrats are in power, they sell out their constituents and lie and cheat to maintain power, but their robbery is done quietly and within the bounds of  a certain image; they like to feel good about themselves as "good people" of course. So the system is maintained as an extractive, power-concentrating enterprise, while maintaining increasingly elaborate images and rituals to both represent a positive self-image to those they are fooling, and to themselves. 

Of course, the mounting contradictions in the system accumulate and the pressure builds to an unbearable degree, so the Republicans ride the ensuing wave of discontent into power, smashing through the false image and laying waste to much of the machinery built up by the Democrats, opting instead to commit their robbery in the open with an added touch of expressive cruelty. But the smashing and openness is done without discipline or care, and robbery is robbery besides. 

And this is what is required when you systematically snuff out any sort of truly democratic message or movement: the only way out is through in an undisciplined and reckless manner. 

So it felt good to trash the computer, but what if the computer was your portal into the modern world, which demands its effective use? And what happens if you can't readily fix the thing, or for that matter, get a new one? In other words, the people familiar with the technical details understand the Treasury payment system to be an old, iterated, legacy system that is very complicated, which runs processes that could be disrupted and even broken, throwing into jeopardy anything connected to that payment system, which includes and is not limited to the armed services, the intelligence services, debt payments, bond markets, and the rest of the US and global economy in general. 

To just scratch the surface of what's at stake, we've already seen the spectacular fights over infrastructure and geography like the Suez and Panama Canals. Shipping suffers greatly if a significant amount of time is added to a route. The circuits of capital are travel along very tight schedules. Capital needs to move, and it needs to move fast, and it is moving fast, and any sort of disruption can cause all sorts of collisions and pileups. So what happens if the payment system at the heart of the current world order is disrupted or broken, before robust and stable alternatives can emerge? 

What this is also echoing for me is the fearful speculation and even abject terror concerning the geopolitics surrounding The Bomb. To hear the folks talk about the Treasury payment system and what could happen if it was derailed in some way - it is highly reminiscent of the feverish speculation surrounding what could happen if there was some sort of scare or political hang-up within the political power centers charged with governing nations' nuclear weaponry. The people who were in the know were telling us - and continue to tell us - how close we have come (and are) to nuclear war and what that would mean. 

Which is similar to what I'm starting to hear from the folks in the know about these payment systems and what could transpire after their possible failure. And the thing is about both of these discussions, the theory is quite true: given the parameters of these technologies and how the world works, and then what we know, a number of these nightmare scenarios could actually happen. That they haven't yet is somewhat of a miracle. 

But there is another voice in the back of my head. If these systems are that integral to our world system, and they are simultaneously so archaic and complex and brittle, and that losing them could bring everything to a grinding halt, well that ain't so good either, no matter if they are successfully shored up and protected or recklessly smashed to pieces. The writings and teachings of so many mystics and monks throughout history are whispering: what are you prepared to lose? What are you prepared to live without? 

Return of the Steppe

This is just something very general and nebulous I wanted to take note of, due in part to the sheer time scale and sweep of the process we are describing here. Something to keep an eye on anyway. I don't necessarily intend this to be a military analysis - though it very well could be - but I'll be using simplified military imagery to stand in for a very complex process - encompassing military, political, social, cultural, economic, ecological, and other kinds of processes - that has been going on for a very long time. 

So, the mounted horse archer was one of the great terrors of the ancient world, and by extension, the vast expanse of the steppe. Militarily, the horse archers were an existential threat to the slower armies of the settled societies, which would increasingly enclose themselves in more elaborate and extensive fortresses and walled cities to protect themselves from the strange and terrifying peoples that would suddenly emerge in the frontier lands. 

But such resource-intensive constructions typically had to expand, while simultaneously degrading where they settled, encroaching further into the steppe or into other settled societies, so there was an upper limit to their sustainability, which at the same time was set against the growing power of steppe peoples like the Huns and the Mongols, the latter of whom would incorporate specialists like Chinese engineers - and then later, Arab engineers - into their growing ranks to improve their siege capabilities and crack those tougher nuts. And later you had the Turks, coming in hot from the steppe, their DNA mixing with the Persian and Arab lands they conquered, becoming more settled themselves, incorporating engineers into their ranks to eventually develop wonders like that giant cannon that finally punched a hole in the Byzantine shell. 

This process of the settling of the nomadic peoples had its mirror image. Because the settled societies were growing in power too. They'd incorporate steppe peoples into their militaries for example, like the Romans did with the Goths, and increasingly adopt nomadic means and technologies like the horse archers and cavalry. And as the nomadic peoples came in from the steppes, with the settled societies rubbing off on them, and then them becoming more settled-like and powerful in turn, they would conquer the settled societies, or grow their own empires from within their decaying bosoms, like the Goths did with the Roman empire, reanimating those empires with the infused nomadic DNA.  

And these reanimated empires would arise with the newly acquired genius for movement that the nomadic peoples brought, and become ever more powerful, eventually taking and intermixing those instincts, traditions, techniques, and knowledge, with the deep, resource-intensive, and time-consuming development of firearms and naval and mercantile transportation and navigational technologies, this time going deep into the steppes and largely wiping out the steppe peoples as direct military threats. 

And victorious, the increasingly nomadic settled society spread to the ends of the earth, homogenizing wherever it could, replicating itself to sustain and expand itself. But then reaching the ends of its frontiers, it has begun simultaneously cooking itself, polluting itself, and cannibalizing itself. At least in the West, while in the East, a new cooperative, centralizing, and territorializing group of powers - with China at its core - is preparing to dig in, but which through its industrial and technological connectedness with the West, must respond to the West's increasing instability and chaos. 

And I suspect now, with the increasing immolation of these stationary and expensive infrastructures and technologies, that we'll eventually see an emergence of a more nomadic mode of settled-ness, as the settled world becomes increasingly unstable in the face of climate change, and we see the growth of a perpetual flow and circulation of refugees, and that the howling plains of the steppes may very well re-assert themselves in another form in the coming century. 

Houses Divided and Burning

Having been born in and then growing up in California - and regularly returning to it in the winter - I had felt the need to set aside various ongoing analyses and comment more thoroughly on the fires. The problem with that is that commenting on current events must be done quickly these days it seems, given the current pace of change and rapid emergence of notable events. And this was difficult to do amidst my travels back north and re-settling and such. The story of the LA fires is already growing cold, though the fires' aftermath and their manifold consequences will certainly smolder for some time, readying the next spark in a sea of multiplying tinder. The latest headlines for the fires have declared full containment, so maybe that is a good time as any to comment, albeit as a sort of retrospective at this point. 

Anyway, I'll start with some appropriate metaphorical images. Fire has been on my mind, so let's paint with that reliably vivid and illuminating imagery.  

A fire brings about a whole array of transformations, depending on what it comes into contact with, and different things burn differently. Fire can harden things and fuse them tighter together, just as it can break things down into their constituent elements, and it can set things free and set them into motion, and accelerate them and drive them outwards.

And dead and dried-out wood readily bursts into flame, sending heat and material outwards, transforming and breaking down into its constituent elements, while living green wood is not as readily given to complete immolation, though of course, proximate blazes will steadily dry out the green wood soon enough, prepping it as fuel. 

Before getting to Los Angeles, I want to work in a historical illustration to give a temporal dimension to the metaphorical imagery. In other words, the nature of both metaphorical and literal fire - and the environments those fires take root in - changes over time as the things to be burned (and the burning) change themselves. 

Metaphorically, the fires of the Punic Wars supercharged a young Rome that was ready to fight for its life, which it had been brought to the inch of. The character of this Rome was such that near death served as a profound catalyst to cohere and to struggle, but then through this process, its character was transformed just as profoundly. The vast wealth and land that opened up as spoils from Carthage were seized upon by a landowning aristocracy that had much of its land and even its own human stock devastated in the wars, and the entire economic and political structure of the early Republic was rapidly transformed, setting the stage for future civil wars and the eventual collapse of the Republic.   

By the time of the Crisis of the 3rd Century, the character of Rome - now the Roman Empire -  had changed dramatically, and this time as the fire was set to it, it responded quite differently, and transformed quite differently, as well. The empire had become a tinderbox, conveniently surrounded by its share of matches, such as the Germanic incursions to the west and north and the agitation of the Sassanid Persians to the east. 

The match this time seemed to have been set within the empire, over the course of the detonation of the Severan Dynasty, which itself was pretty chewed up by a series of assassinations and usurpations, culminating in the assassination of Severus Alexander, which occurred at a fragile time that was seized upon by the Germanic tribes and the Sassanids in successive incursions. 

Tracing back this disintegration of the political center, one can detect a militaristic and expansionary culture which relied on a muscular and resource-intensive military, which was simultaneously driven by a mercenary economic culture, in which generals and even emperors were increasingly assassinated for reasons of pay and bounty. And at a larger scale, the general population was struggling with multiple pandemics, population attrition due to constant warfare and then civil war, and then the resulting stunted food production resulting from those things, which of course feeds back into those other problems. 

This disintegration of a rotted center unleashed centrifugal forces - which we also saw in a tighter domestic form in the disintegration of the Republic - which pulled governing power in the various directions of regions under attack from opportunistic rivals, and these regions often went into rebellion and became temporarily independent military powers, seeking out the political center to gain control. The fragmentation of a larger empire set several transformations in motion, which would continue on into late antiquity and into the Middle Ages, such as localization of political and economic power and the greater incorporation of the Germanic tribes into Roman military and political institutions. 

Further on into its lifespan, the late Roman Empire experienced an acceleration of these transformative forces, which were already well underway for a century, when another fire was set to it in the course of the Gothic Wars. The Empire's advanced state of decline was readily apparent when that large group of Goth refugees - fleeing the Huns - appeared at its doorstep in 376. 

Part of the decision had to do with the emperor's desire for Gothic warriors: the huge group was let in and temporarily settled. At an earlier time, the Empire would have had the institutional competence to separate them into smaller groups, manage their weaponry, begin their assimilation, and then keep them fed and satisfied, none of which was done. Indicating broader social and political economic problems, the Romans interacting with them in a state capacity failed them logistically, and then interacting with them in a market capacity, ruthlessly exploited them, selling them dog meat in return for selling their family members off. 

Understandably, the large, angry, desperate, hungry, well-armed group rebelled, rampaging throughout the countryside, taking up whatever provisions they could as the Roman army, in an advanced state of decline, failed to take them down. This process accelerated the transformation of the empire into a series of Gothic states, as the rebelling Goths were settled into the Empire at greater number, and then plied with higher and higher civic and military positions and the related trappings and resources. 

Fast forward to today, and now the literal fires of Los Angeles have put the metaphorical fire to the feet of California's political economy, and by extension as we'll see, to the political economy of the US. And as we'll also see, this is the type of burning we see of materials in an advanced state of disintegration. 

To further sketch out this analysis, I want to shift to a description of the literal burning of material and the physical properties involved. The simple burning of wood and the release of that material into the immediate air is bad enough for human lungs. The burning of manufactured and oftentimes toxic materials is another thing altogether. To simply scratch at the surface, we are still learning about the complex interactions that car engine exhaust has with additional elements like sunlight over time, as it persists in the air, transforming, becoming ever more toxic to human tissue. 

Lead and asbestos were eventually banned - after much hand-wringing and foot-dragging - as direct building materials, but what was already built and existing stood silent, lying in wait for the fires to set them free, where they would not only directly enter human lungs but also descend into the land to eventually be taken up again. And that is setting aside all of the many toxic building materials that are still in regular use, or which have entered as innovative materials that the regulatory apparatus has yet to catch up with. 

These materials to be burnt and set free were only to mix with all of the background pollution already regularly in the air, coming into contact with a population already chewed up by that background pollution, living trapped within a basin composed of car-dominant urban sprawl.  This population was subsequently punched through with the Covid pandemic, the effects of which were worsened by the chronic pollution and poverty, which worsened in turn the effects of the fires. 

As a secondary knock-on effect of the struggle against the fires, the vast expanse of dried out hills above Los Angeles - and even into certain sections of suburbs in Los Angeles proper - were covered with Phos-Chek, a type of fire retardant now in regular use, with its recent formulation containing active ingredients like ammonium polyphosphate, a fertilizer used in this capacity for its fire-retardant qualities. Passing by on the freeway, one can make out the splotches of bright pink on the hillsides, indicating the substance. 

Safer than the older PFAS material perhaps, but a portion of the formula remains a mystery due to "trade secrets." Natch. Officials say the substance shouldn't be dropped near waterways, though time and gravity could be accomplishing that task anyway: what will happen to those fire-bitten hills under the subsequent rains, which erode and wash out the soils of burn areas, washing them down to waterways and rivers and eventually oceans? The most immediate worries have to do with the known effects of that type of fertilizer used in other modalities such as farming: namely, algal blooms and the destruction of soil and the spread of "invasive" species. So it goes.  

Retaining these images, let's move onto the social and relational effects of the fires. The environmental crisis of the LA fires, which can be situated into a wider nexus of climate crisis and human terraforming, has eaten into - or indeed, bitten huge chunks out of - the city's relations of political economy. 

The nature of the city of Los Angeles and its political economy can be seen as a microcosmic representation of that cluster of self-reinforcing, slow motion disasters that make up the living tissue of the Western world, and which drive the ongoing advancement of its disintegration: the automobile-dominated urban sprawl, financialization and inflation of private real estate and insurance bubbles (which helps to drive overdevelopment and sprawl in Southern California), the intensification of inequality and associated alienation and resent, the hollowing out of the state and public legitimacy, the diversion of public resources to policing and prisons as a result of these failures, and so on. 

We can briefly sketch out the manifold manifestations of these disasters. We can start with some of the most vulnerable segments of the population and then work our way up. Let's start with the prison system. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore described, modern prison systems are a way to spatially concentrate and manage the human conflict produced by the numerous grinding contradictions of capital. The spatial eating-away of human stock in the industrial sacrifice zones, where the waste products of industrial processes like oil extraction and petroleum refining, agricultural extraction, power generation, and so on damage human communities in an incomprehensible multitude of ways. 

To begin to scratch the surface, consider all of the childhood asthma and endocrine disruption, among other environmental maladies, which makes it more difficult for its sufferers to persist in one of the few institutions that provides any sort of concrete pathway of advancement to lower class people: the public education system. Combine that with the stresses of poverty, and you have this "eating-away" of educational engagement and attainment, or the daily processes of individual development that forge one into a suitable component of the dominant culture. 

And so what develops in its stead is that famed "school-to-prison" pipeline, replete with a growing industry to service that pipeline, which becomes a "constituent" in its own right. These developments all occur within a certain pre-existing policing culture, which as the stress grows, proceeds towards a greater domestic militarization, and as a result, a more generalized adversarial relationship of the state to its populace.

And what happens when these relations are literally set aflame? Materially the concrete prison walls - designed for keeping humans in - may resist literal fire, but something else happens entirely in the human relations as the fire is put to them. For one thing, you've created this category of person: the prisoner or the criminal, which can't simply be evacuated or moved around readily. So we've heard grim reports of the prisons sitting tight, retaining their inmates as the fires approached, creating profound feelings of horror and alienation not only among the prisoners, but also among all of their relations and individuals connected to them. We also know that prison labor has been used as an incredibly cheap form of firefighting, which is already a dangerous occupation. 

The evolution of the police state culture has also produced a greater collective response in the course of the emergency - which we saw prominently too with Katrina, which people have not forgotten - in which there is an instinctual protection of private property and suspicion of and brutalization of the general population in service to that instinct. And so you have constant hand-wringing about looting - another separate problem concerning inequality and economic desperation - and the restoration of order in the mainstream media coverage, and heavy police presence and quarantine of the burn zones. Of course this police culture pulls resources away from the primary modes of remediation and even firefighting, redirecting them to the swelling police departments. 

Los Angeles' social services and firefighting capacity have undergone a steady process of attrition over the past couple of decades, with the latter increasingly incorporated into private equity outfits, where those operations are simultaneously consolidated and hollowed out by their parasitic owners, a process that was greatly accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. So much so that operations like the construction of new fire engines has become simply too expensive and time consuming, with fire departments falling back on older engines that have fallen into increased disrepair, and so the fire response was much weaker than historical efforts, at the same time that the force, intensity, and sweep of the fires have grown stronger. 

Let's look at the damage to another sector: we have the housing crisis, which is another crisis connected to and produced in part by the ascendance of the conveniently acronym-ed FIRE sector. Here we have another set of pathologies that can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis and further. Since that crisis, the accelerating ascendance and concentration of power of the FIRE sector has produced multiple interrelating financial bubbles - whether growing or bursting - which have inflated assets, hollowed out governments and businesses, depressed wages, increased costs, and so on, so that growth of homelessness has accelerated among other effects.

With a squeezed housing supply and a growing population of unhoused people, what do we see when we light a fire to this sorry state of affairs? We can tackle the lower-end issues first: the Alta Dena fire in particular hit what was known as a working class neighborhood quite hard. This was one of the few remaining pockets of black wealth, the destruction of which puts enormous pressure on an existing fault-line that already has too much pressure on it. Further, a lot of the houses destroyed were occupied by young and first-time homeowners, and working class people, who were now set free and have to compete for limited housing stock which is growing ever more expensive.

Further, you have people thrown out of work, losing their remaining wealth and livelihoods in many cases, which grows the homeless population further and puts ever more pressure on social services and the housing market in general.    

Death Panel's stunning two-parter, titled "LA Burns But We Keep Us Safe" in the episode list, describes much of this, which makes for heavy-hearted listening. But to briefly touch on a bright spot: with the acceleration of these multiple bearing-down crises, we get mirrored acceleration of the development of the local networks of mutual aid, and their increasing autonomy and organization. 

With the disintegration of national and state governments, and the disintegration of large scale private organizations like corporations, and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described as the "organized abandonment" of the populace, there is emerging a growing refrain among local activists: "listen to nothing that they say; we are on our own." Accordingly, we are seeing a small renaissance in organization and vitality of local activist and mutual aid networks. There is a lot of incredible and inspiring work being done on the ground.     

Meanwhile as all of the destruction and desperation has proceeded on the ground from these fires, the Trump administration at a higher remove has been grabbing with both hands the spine of the body politic, looking to tear it out. We had increasing reports of ICE activity at the same time that people were being displaced by the fires. 

It seems to be a good time to antagonize the structural backbone of what is left of the real economy: all of the landscapers and gardeners and working class peoples in Alta Dena for example, who are on one end losing homes, livelihoods, and family members, and moving in with other family members and friends, circulating Covid and the other respiratory illnesses set increasingly free, and then on the other end, are being terrorized by the ICE deportation patrols making their rounds, all the while being exploited ever more intensely by increasing housing, insurance, and grocery prices, among other things. 

This is a large, resilient, and capable population employed in sectors like agriculture, landscaping, construction, hospitality and housekeeping, and countless other foundational industries, which are largely making the country go on a daily material basis. One wonders at the attempts to terrorize and root them out in this acute moment of crisis, simultaneously as the productive capacity and function of the country has been hollowed out and outsourced, with the remaining production largely handed over domestically to various immigrant populations.  

Finally, I want to look at higher-order FIRE sector-related damages. Beyond just the physical housing and human lives destroyed, we have the steady eating-away into the financial superstructure that governs virtually the entire West. The destructiveness of the fires has compromised the very basis of homeowner's insurance in many parts of the state, and with multiple environmental crises bearing down on the country and the world, collective insurance in general. In a series of excellent analyses, Yves Smith describes what this will look like. 

And the wealth bound up in the homes lost, and the insurance wealth representing these homes, is all hooked into the greater financial and economic system governing the world system. You punch a hole in that, and you compromise the very economic and ideological apparatus that makes the world system run. We already saw how the 2008 financial crisis boomeranged around the globe. 

But through that you also get further transformative activity opened up by the disintegration of an oppressive economic engine, through localization and simplification in the disintegrating hegemon, among other processes, and of course the transfer of more governing power to other interests such as China and the rest of the Global South. The problem though is all of that tends to happens a bit more chaotically and violently than desirable, in the middle of cascading crises that require concerted, collective coordination on a global scale. 

OK, let's take a deep breath and give it a moment. 

I could write post after post describing the structural forces at play here, which these cascading crises make visible, but this particular post is growing long, and I want to tie everything together here and wrap things up. 

First of all, what the hell is all this? Why am I raving on and on and trying to pack everything I can into this post? I'm exhausted, and I'm sure you are too. But wait a minute, the sweep and density of this piece is an attempt to illustrate everything at once, so as to make a higher-level point. 

The scale and force of the Los Angeles fires reveal much through their very destructiveness and sweep, as they touch so many sectors of society at so many different levels, not only regionally but eventually globally by their implication. And I'm afraid that we're going to see more and more spectacular events such as these: greater and greater flashes in the dark which reveal greater and greater wholes. 

More generally, the high-level point is this: at larger scales and greater timeframes, one has to take in a greater totality of larger and larger systems to really grasp these larger processes of destruction and transformation. Because global capital and the multitude of global societies that it flows through and reproduces is simultaneously a powerful regenerative and destructive process, and many of these destructive processes we are describing here are at the same time powerful productive processes that are perpetually reconfiguring and reconstituting capital. This is how one of the richest and most powerful human societies in history can destroy itself as it simultaneously fights to remain ever more itself.

We see that the process of the expansive production and reproduction of capital is simultaneously producing the heat and fire, and the increasing dynamism, chaos, instability, and kinetic energy, and also the destructive human structures that produce the kindling for its own pyre. It perpetually sets itself aflame to move, much like the combustion engine it is so in love with. A dangerous game. 

And we see - as we saw with the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire - that such an engine eventually shakes itself apart as it reproduces itself, unleashing powerful fires of transformation in the process, and if it survives those fires, it reconstitutes itself to fight on, growing coarser and more brittle over time, until it has shaken apart and self-immolated one too many times, and finally breaks down into something else entirely.