Campus Protests and the Debasement of the Dollar
Despite our domestic crisis students are protesting foreign affairs.
In the US, official inflation numbers are a joke. This Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator suggests that cumulative inflation since 2017 has amounted to about 27%. That's an outrageous figure, yet according to data compiled by the Chapwood Index, inflation in the largest 100 cities in the country has actually been averaging between 8.7% and 13.5% every year since 2017.
Legacy media's hand wringing about the cost of living crisis doesn't even come close to capturing the gravity of the situation. Nor do mainstream outlets ever mention the real causes of this crisis:
A conspiracy of greed has taken hold of nearly all big companies, resulting in endless price increases across the board.
Parasitic industries have inserted themselves into more and more areas, driving up costs.
Outlandish government spending has been rapidly debasing the American dollar.
The direct debasement of our currency is particularly egregious because it functions as a hidden tax on everyone who uses dollars. As an independent contractor, despite earning a relatively low income, my taxes are already absurdly high. But the debasement of the currency sends my true tax rate into the stratosphere. And millions of people are in a similar boat.
The government is stealing our money by diluting the value of that money. The corporate world is forcing us to pay more and more for basic necessities like food, housing, and medical care. If we had an actual free market, we could seek out more affordable alternative sources for these necessities. But we don't have a free market. We have a heavily manipulated market.
To be honest, I don't understand why there aren't riots in the streets over this. Maybe there would be if more people understood what was happening. As things stand, almost no one is even talking about this problem. It's nowhere in public discourse. This is sadly unsurprising because our news and social media are heavily censored.
For average people, the economy has gone haywire. Although the emerging crypto economy has the potential to improve the situation, regulators have been working tirelessly to prevent that from happening. Crypto promises financial disintermediation and our system favors parasitic middlemen. And big banks own both political parties.
My greatest fear here is that our insane economy is priming the masses for some drastic course of action, prescribed by the control regime, that will make everything worse. Pressure is building throughout society. The situation is unsustainable and change is inevitable. The regime that produced this situation surely plans to control this change. Will we go along with the program or try something else?
Campus Protests
Students and some of their teachers have been demonstrating on college campuses across the country. At Columbia University in New York, they're demanding that the school administration divest from every company that does business with Israel, and they're camping out in tents until their demands are met. Here in Minneapolis, campus protests included a surprisingly large percentage of protesters in masks. Are they still worried about COVID or are have the masks become some kind of activist fashion statement?
Student protests are in general unsurprising. Given how screwed up our society is, they should be happening constantly. But I don't recall seeing any major protests since 2020. And now suddenly pro-Palestinian protests have erupted at campuses nationwide. Of all the causes these students could be championing, why this one? And why now?
The dire plight of the Palestinian people is obviously concerning. Israel's decision to raze Gaza in response to the October 7 Hamas attack killed tens of thousands of civilians. Some say this placed Israel in violation of international law. According to Amnesty International, Israel is using American munitions to perpetrate war crimes in Gaza. Of course, Hamas has also been seen with American weapons.
The situation in Ukraine is no better. According to former CIA officer John Kiriakou, "the CIA and the State Department ... were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government." US and UK officials have been actively collaborating with Nazis there ever since. Western powers have sabotaged peace negotiations while sending enormous quantities of military aid to Ukraine. At this point, over 10k civilians have been killed and 14 million people have fled their homes.
Terrible things are happening in other parts of the world too. The war in Yemen killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here's a quote from a recent article about that:
The aerial bombardment of Yemen has caused a level of devastation reminiscent of Israel's current campaign in the Gaza Strip. ... Like Israel, the Gulf coalition has justified its bombings by claiming that seemingly civilian sites were being used for military purposes — claims that are very difficult to evaluate independently. ... The majority of weapons used by the Saudi coalition originate from the United States, the UK, and EU countries. The UK has deployed its own troops, who were embedded with Saudi forces accused of torture.
The nature of US involvement in each of these countries is deeply suspect. Financially, American interests profit from all three conflicts, with defense contractors and financiers leading the way. It's socially acceptable to support these atrocity profiteers by investing in their enterprises. From my perspective, the recent campus protests are attempting to assert that it's no longer acceptable to support the atrocity profiteers that do business with Israel.
That assertion seems reasonable enough. But I wonder where all the protesters were for Yemen's war. Working in news media, I can't help but notice that the news barely covered Yemen whereas Gaza got nonstop coverage, especially across independent media outlets. When AdBusters magazine published a photo of a ballerina on the iconic Wall Street bull, its call to action ignited Occupy Wall Street. This call to action was only effective because enough people were so fed up with the status quo that they were willing to take to the streets.
What we're seeing now are students so fed up with the status quo that they're willing to risk academic standing to make their support for the Palestinian people heard. Most of these students are strangely not protesting the war machine in general. And I have uncomfortable suspicions about their politics. But if their main demand is for their schools to pull investments from atrocity profiteers, I hope they succeed.
The Goal of Activism
Most people are under immense pressure in our society. The people at the top are always in cutthroat competition with each other to see who can extract the most value from our lives. The people at the bottom are getting squeezed from all sides and many can barely put food on the table. At this point in the US, 100k people die from drug overdoses every year and another 20k are murdered. Homeless encampments are everywhere and so are empty, overpriced condos.
The plight of the student is especially dystopian. Students are saddled with debt. Academia is ground zero for the culture wars. Future job prospects are as uncertain as everything else. These things surely produce in many the desire to act, to improve circumstances, if only on an unconscious level.
At the same time, colleges have become cultural minefields, so actually taking action is very risky. Unless that action is in line with the prevailing cultural order. From my perspective, supporting Palestinians is in line with the prevailing cultural order but goes against the prevailing political order. By demanding schools divest from Israel-linked companies, students are trying to impose the cultural upon the political.
This is always the goal of activism. Sometimes the target is government policy or action. Sometimes it's corporate policy or action, such as with the college protests. Demonstrators may say they're trying to change the system, but that's never what they're actually doing. They're never targeting the system itself, which is curious because the system itself is what produces most of our societal problems.
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