“The causes of the five previous mass extinctions are not fully understood, but the mass extinction taking place today is clearly being driven by Homo sapiens via an economic system that operates at the global level.The constant expansion of the capitalist system has pushed environmentaldegradation to the planetary level, as habitat destruction decimates the living conditions of species and as ecosystems are radically transformed. Human civilization, under capitalism, is engaged in a process of destroying the future, as “we suck our sustenance from the rest of nature in a way never before seen in the world, reducing its bounty as ours grows.”
“Eldredge points out that as humans moved beyond isolated ecosystems, to operate at the planetary level, our alienation from nature increased. We developed the illusion that we were not dependent upon the environment. Eldredge warns that the current global mass extinction is quite different from previous ones, in that the source of the extinction remains on the scene: humans destroying habitat for the sake of profit. Thus recovery of ecosystems is not possible so long as the same forces continue to act and change the world as has been the practice.”
“The rate of speciation is caught in a time conflict, as the current rate of extinction is faster than the rate of evolution. The mass extinction being orchestrated today is a unique historic event, given that it is being driven by anthropogenic forces that continue to operate. Since 1600, the extinction rate has been 50 to 100 times the average estimated rate of extinction during previous epochs, but the rate “is expected to rise to between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate.” Thus a radical change in the operations of human society and its interaction with nature is necessary to stop the ecological crisis that is taking place.”
“Humans must establish a form of social production that does not alienate people from nature and that interacts with nature in a manner that does not undermine the environment’s ability to regenerate.”
Thrashing, raging, pushing, and shoving, or what many would consider a complete breakdown of anything civilized. There was about a 60-feet long by 30-feet wide man-infested box around the ticket booth at los Estudiantes de Merida soccer game in Merida (capital city), Merida (state), Venezuela…last night, Wednesday, November 7th, 2012.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but after living in this country for a total of nine months, in 2007, 2009, and again now in 2012, you’d have to be a fool to at least not have an inkling into the operational ways of the culture…how shit gets done…or doesn’t.
Los Estudiantes de Merida were playing a team from Barinas, a nearby state. This is the Venezuelan professional soccer league. Merida has a beautiful stadium, easily worthy of an intra-South American contest between countries.
One of my good friends here, Pablo, who I met in 2009, is a recent Chemical Engineering graduate of la Universidad de Los Andes in Merida (Merida, the capital city, with a population of 200,000, is nestled in a valley in the Andes Mountains, and home to the second biggest university in Venezuela, hence the name of the soccer team, los Estudiantes, but the team has no relation to the university), and is planning to head out east to the Oriental tomorrow (Merida is western) to begin job-searching in this oil- and mineral-rich, lucrative region. And so it seemed an obvious decision to cop a bottle of rum, Pepsi, limes, and a bag of ice, and head to the big Wednesday night soccer game for our last hurrah until I see him in who knows how long.
Pablo, Alan (another good friend of mine), and I left my apartment where I am staying an hour or so before game time. We walked quickly. Our destination, 15 minutes away, was a stop along the city’s trolley bus line, which connects a large swath of this long, skinny, sloped city (the primary directions people use here are bajando and subiendo, going down or going up), and is a somewhat recent and large investment Merida has made in public transportation.
Mostly, I think the trolley bus line works okay, but because of the game there was a particularly long line, which meant a 25-minute wait just to get on one. Drinks were poured in line.
Again, we are dealing with mountain terrain here, so when we got off at the stadium stop, we had to walk up a rugged path to get to the road that leads to the stadium.
As we entered through the general, open-to-the-public gate that leads to the area where you buy tickets, I began to sense what we were in for. Many, many people come to these games without having bought their tickets yet; I’m one of them, and a line, or rather a blob, of maybe 90 feet extended out from the jail-like barred ticket windows, of which there were four or five (which for a game of this magnitude is woefully inadequate).
Pablo and I made our way to the through the trenches to get a good look at the war zone, which I began describing in the first paragraph. There had to have been around 75 or so rather brutish Venezuelan men pushing and shoving to their hearts content and inching their way towards the ticket windows, clamoring for the attention of the workers behind the bars: a mosh pit line of sorts. Everyone for themselves. Complete madness. And all I could think about was how did it come to this?
After a short rendezvous with the man-made frenzy, we said the heck with it. A few other friends of ours had caught up with us by now, and so, the five of us regrouped and plotted our next move…jokes the whole time from them to me about how “this is Venezuela, pana!”
It being Venezuela, we decided to just go to the entrance (there was only one) where they were taking tickets in hopes of sneaking in or bribing a ticket-taker.
It so happened that my friend Edilso, who was now with us, knew the main guy in charge of the entrance, and naturally moved for a bribe, which he seemed to be well on his way to accomplishing after we had gathered the cash, but the guy, possibly prompted by one of the various men just standing around in full Venezuelan military attire (many of whom had some powerful looking guns), had to run over to an office-type building that was connected to the ticket sales building.
Alan, slick as he is, had recognized one of the rag-tag ticket-takers on the far end, somebody he knew from a previous apartment he had lived in, and moseyed on through, leaving the rest of us still outside. Covertly, Alan went and asked this guy if the four of us could pass through. We had our in. Edilso, who had the money rolled into his palm, lead the pack, and gave the guy a quick “we’re the people that know Alan” gesture. We thought we were going to have to pay him, but we just walked right through and he never asked for the money!
We had also been concerned about not being allowed to carry in the rum, Pepsi, limes, and ice that we had, concerned enough to transfer them all into other, regular plastic containers before we had left, in hopes of some quality sneakage. Ha, we passed right through no questions asked.
So, there you have it folks: after avoiding the war zone, we had made it in without paying a single Bolivar and were fully loaded with booze. The game was a blast: we snuck down and got front row seats, downed the rum, and los Estudiantes de Merida won one to nothing with a header in the second half that had the place roaring….la vida venezolana….es una locura.
Crust Punk 101
A new friend of mine in Philadelphia, whose name is Wes, recently invited me to go to an underground crust punk (yes, you read that correctly) show in West Philly – a unique sect of sub-culture with fusions of mainstream rejection, radical politics, scavenger if not vagabond lifestyles, and varying degrees of heavy metal music, which I was previously unaware of. I obviously jumped at the opportunity.
Wes got into this style of music – and to a lesser extent this culture – when he was younger, and continued following it into adulthood. There are many in the crust punk community that fit the stereotypical mold better than he does, but I definitely see shades running through him, especially in the realms of trying to get by without working, his interest in and knowledge about bikes, and his radical Anarcho-primitivist (google it) tendencies.
You might say I have an inquisitive mind…if I was going to do this I needed some background info on everything crustie, so Wes came over before the show so we could discuss the topic at hand over a few beers.
Squatting in abandoned homes, adhering to a personal hygiene (or lack thereof) that would repulse suburban moms, getting by with little, exploiting the obscure niches that modern civilization spits out (doing things to survive that most “normal” people never even think about, much less consider doing), underground house concerts (literally, they are usually in the basement), dumpster diving, and a style of dress that entails the color black, sewed patches, and metal studs and spikes; these are some of the things, I learned, that embody crust punk culture.
What I found most intriguing is that, in general, the culture is inspired by a distinct and radical political consciousness, derived mostly from Anarchism. Many crust punks are strict vegetarians or vegans. They are anti-war and anti-military, and they are disgusted with the practice of vivisection (I implore you to google this). Lyrics in crust punk songs are largely devoted to these kind of very serious real life issues, which, as I see it, makes them way better than contemporary mindless hipster culture (but I digress)
We took off on bike to the cross streets near where the concert was located. That’s right, no exact address was given for this particular crust punk event: you have to go there and find it. This is apparently an attempt to keep it on the DL: an extra effort to thwart the police from busting it up. So here we are, biking around within a one-block radius of these cross streets trying to find the concert. We stopped for a sec to listen intently and could hear the faint but unmistakable sound of heavy metal playing!
We knew we were heading the right direction as the sound grew louder. We found ourselves outside of some type of industrial office building; this was definitely it. We tried to scout out our way in with no luck. After pounding on both the locked door and the garage door, we decided to give the street behind the building a try. On the other side of the block we could hear the music again, but we still couldn’t find the entrance. As we looked we happened upon a man cussing out a woman with kids on the front porch and telling her to get out of his house.
We tried the front of the building again. Score! In the meantime someone had put up a sign on the garage door that emphatically cut to the chase: “Call [the number].” Wes dialed it, explained himself, and next thing you know the garage door started going up.
We walked up the inclined indoor driveway and received a friendly greeting from our phone answerer. As we approached the top of the incline we became fully immersed in the all-encompassing loudness. Twenty-five or so crusties were standing in a semi-circle around the band, many shaking their heads to the music at an incredibly fast pace. Remember that type of multiple-choice question that asks you to select which of these things does not fit in with the rest? At this moment the correct answer would be me.
In the back there was a small table turned makeshift bar that had booze and mixers on it. Beer was going for the awesomely affordable rate of a dollar a can. I needed one and gladly tipped the guy a buck, which he seemed a bit surprised at.
I stood near the back. Wes was close by; he had run into an old friend. The music was blaringly loud and the lyrics were completely indecipherable, which firmly distinguished the crust punk genre from the politically and socially conscious hip-hop that I like listening to: as a rule to which there are exceptions, you can actually hear the words in my music! But to each his or her own…
One particularly crustie fellow – who was tatted and wearing an atrocious vest (and I write this with all due respect; I’m sure he would take that as a complement anyways) that exposed a generous portion of his body, and who had parts of his head shaved and other parts growing hair at length – began mosh pitting and bouncing around the semi-circle. Others followed suit. I braced myself for some action (I have been to a Rage Against the Machine concert). It was clear this guy had had one too many.
After a little while he stopped mosh pitting and resumed his rather violent and out of control style of dance that included aggressive foot stomps, his drink periodically splashing into the air, when all of a sudden, without any physical contact with anyone else, he slipped and bit the dust, exposing approximately a third of his big white butt crack.
It was at this moment that I officially completed the course: Crust Punk 101.
On Sunday, March 18th, 2012, my friend Ron Whyte (activist/journalist) and I caught up with Chris Hedges in a Starbucks after his keynote speech at Left Forum in New York. We spoke about violence, the environmental crisis and what is actually sustainable, and the possibilities of the Occupy movement.
On Sunday March 18th, Chris Hedges gave one of the four keynote speeches at the closing plenary of Left Forum in New York at Pace University. I took this video from where I was sitting. He was concise and to the point, and the audience was focused in. He addresses his controversial article and views on the Black Bloc tactic of protest.
I flew from President Obama’s inauguration in DC to Venezuela to study abroad for my final semester at Augsburg in January of 2009. I wrote this when I was down in Venezuela and had it published in the year’s final issue of Augsburg’s school newspaper, the Echo.
Dusty Hinz Calling Out Our Generation
Fellow professors, staff, students, and friends, I write this to you all as my final message to a community that has most certainly changed me as a person. I think most of us know it already, but if you will allow me the opportunity, I am going to try to put our current situation into words: massive corporations and mega banks – the bourgeoisie class of our society – have our country (and have had our country) at the throat, and as they suffocate us, this incredible power force has an unending amount of reaches into our public wallet in the name of catastrophic systemic risk. But if systemic risk simply refers to the risk that our current system – which has literally just dug its own grave – will collapse, should not we the people be rooting for this?
We see the destruction and injustice of our current system all over the United States and the world, as too often the incredible benefits of a few are owed to the exploitation and unnecessary hardship of so many others:
- Wal Mart moves into rural area, pays their workers as if they are less than human, and runs mom and pop out of business.
- The privatization of our prison system and the private mercenaries over seas.
- Massive agribusiness corporations that receive government subsidies as they simultaneously drive small farms out of business inside the US and out.
- The entire corporate mainstream media that sold us our beloved Iraq War.
- Slave labor in China and other countries that allow us to buy our precious cheap stuff.
- IMF and World Bank policies that trade debt relief for privatization and leave countries vulnerable to the volatile world market as they are forced to open their domestic markets to transnational corporations.
- The current economic crisis which is a result of deregulation, which is a result of the lobbying power of corporations and the financial dependency that our politicians have on these massive corporations and mega banks.
In our society there are three power sectors: corporations, government, and the people. Fascism, a concept that has many different characteristics, is when corporations and government merge. With the presence of the corporate-government revolving door (ex: Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, so many more) in this country, it is apparent that this problem has already arrived here. It is just that our corporations, as opposed to Hitler´s, are jacked up on steroids.
I write this to you because I truly believe that the defining challenge of our generation will be our fight against these corporate powers that be. I am sorry, but if you think it is all over just because we elected Obama, think again. True progressives were trapped in the locker room for the past eight years and the election of Obama has simply allowed us to get onto the field; WE HAVE NOT STARTED PLAYING THE GAME.
Our current system of international neoliberal capitalism is unsustainable and puts the well being of millions and millions at risk.
This is our future. I choose to fight.
