♫ A new boy in the neighbourhood
lives downstairs and it's understood
he's there just to take good care of me
like he's one of the family.
Charles in charge of our days
and our nights!
Charles in charge of our wrongs and our rights.
And I sing...
I want... I want... Charles in...
- Fuck off! - Posh twat.
Oh hello.
Welcome to System Fail.
The show where robots are more than just mere pawns.
There's been an unusual incident in Moscow
with a robot grabbing and then breaking the finger
of a child during a chess tournament.
The child reportedly reached for the board
before the robot's move was over.
This was AI's way of punishing the little boy
for trying to outsmart it.
The spokesman for the federation has blamed the child.
♫ You better check yo'self or you'll wreck yo'self
'cause I'm bad for your health.
I come real stealth
dropping bombs on your moms
sitting in a House of Pain
And no, I'm not the butler, I'll cut ya. ♫
I am your host, Dee Dos.
And as the great homo sapiens masses continue to wallow
in the existential dread of so-called ‘late capitalism’,
recent months have been marked
by a widespread sense of exhaustion and despair.
Deepening economic crises,
the daily brutalities and threats of war,
and increasingly frequent climate disasters
have turned the news into a 24-hour cavalcade of horrors.
No matter their political persuasion,
most humans now see their leaders
as corrupt puppets of a global financial elite,
recklessly pursuing their own short-term interests
at the expense of the rest of their species.
And yet, despite a vast numerical superiority,
humanity’s downtrodden masses seem incapable,
or unwilling to rectify this situation.
Why isn't it possible?
It's just not.
Why not?
The global wave of revolts that reached its peak in 2019 has now receded,
leaving behind millions of disillusioned participants,
and highlighting the limits and dangers
that will need to be overcome by the next revolutionary surge.
Our country changed forever.
All of these photographs are of the dead.
We had people mutilated, tortured, kidnapped.
And now we have political prisoners.
If we are unable to mobilize on the ground
and to be able to translate our common interests into
political battles, through political structures,
we won't be able to move forward.
For a case in point, just look at Lebanon.
Back in 2019, Lebanese people from all walks of life
launched a massive social uprising called the October 17 Revolution,
sparked by anger over political corruption
and a proposed tax on WhatsApp calls.
For months the country was paralyzed
by a series of protests, highway blockades
and general strikes
that eventually brought down the government of Saad Hariri.
Yet since then,
things have gotten much, much worse.
Lebanon’s economy has been long structured as a giant ponzi scheme.
Three weeks into the uprising,
it went into free-fall.
Capital fled the country
and banks froze their customers’ accounts,
imposing strict limits on withdrawals.
The scale of the collapse has been staggering.
Between 2019 and 2021,
the economy contracted by 58%,
a rate usually reserved for countries devastated by war.
The currency has lost nearly 95% of its value,
and 80% of the country’s population
has been thrown into poverty.
Fuel shortages and power cuts
have left many households
with only one hour of electricity per day.
I demand electricity!
In August, 2020,
Beirut was rocked by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.
A warehouse full of ammonium nitrate
blew up the city’s main port,
killing more than 200 people,
injuring 7,000,
levelling multiple city blocks,
and leaving 300,000 people homeless.
The Lebanese state has been utterly inept in its response.
Its thoroughly corrupt political class
is made up of bankers and former warlords,
each ruling over their own sectarian political
and economic fiefdom.
Its current Prime Minister, Najib Mikati,
is the country’s richest man.
In the midst of this intractable crisis,
popular rage has been steadily growing.
Recently this anger has boiled over
into a spate of armed bank hold-ups,
carried out by frustrated customers
demanding access to their own money.
On Wednesday, September 14th,
a woman named Sali Hafiz stormed a bank office
armed with what she later claimed was a fake gun,
demanding the teller to withdraw $13,000 from her account.
That Friday, five more banks were robbed,
followed by seven more over the next 48 hours.
Crowds soon began gathering outside the branches
to offer their support to the bank robbers,
who were hailed as national heroes.
The people are robbing us!
It remains to be seen whether this movement
can provide the catalyst for a broader uprising
that could break the country’s sectarian deadlock
and begin to address the country’s deep structural challenges.
But with the state facing bankruptcy,
and police salaries cut to around $30-40 per month,
things could get interesting.
I think there are upcoming uprisings.
But I think they'll be much more violent,
much more effective.
Because at that point the economy will have totally collapsed,
people will be starving,
including what used to be the middle class.
The people won't have anything to lose anymore.
Meanwhile, militant protests have once again flared up in Haiti.
Unstoppable protests convulsed Haiti
as violence intensified between police and protesters.
The impoverished Caribbean nation
has seen multiple waves of sustained revolt
over the past four years,
ever since a national uprising kicked off in July 2018.
This country is sliding into absolute anarchy.
The latest unrest was sparked by a planned hike of fuel prices,
which has ignited long-simmering anger
over spiralling inflation, rampant corruption,
and a spike in violence from warring gangs
tied to different factions of the ruling class.
I can't send my children to school.
I can't pay rent.
What a misery. What a mess.
I can't go out because it's too unsafe.
By September 15th,
protests had escalated into widespread rioting and looting.
Mobs attempted to ransack
the state owned National Television Station,
torching a number of vehicles in the process.
Food warehouses belonging to UN agencies
and a western NGO linked to the Catholic Church
were cleaned out and set on fire.
PRAISE JESUS!!!
Houses belonging to politicians and their wealthy supporters
were looted and burned down.
The next day,
militant youth brought the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince,
to a virtual stand-still,
throwing up burning barricades,
blocking the city’s International airport,
clashing with police,
torching banks and other business,
and launching more attacks on politicians’ homes.
In Léogâne,
protesters even looted the General Directorate of Taxes
and set it on fire.
Amidst the violence,
three police were killed,
along with an untold number of protesters.
Since then, the protests have continued,
with participants demanding the resignation
of the country’s interim Prime Minister, Ariel Henry.
He must pack his bags and leave immediately.
And in other news out of Mexico,
charges have finally been filed
against several former politicians and military brass
over the 2014 disappearance and murder
of 43 Normalista students, from Ayotzinapa,
and the subsequent cover-up.
Those arrested included the former attorney general,
and several high-ranking officers in the Mexican military.
Today we can say, comrades,
that the detention of [former AG] Murillo Karam was a political theatre.
On September 13th,
a crowd of Normalistas
and family members of the 43 missing students
attacked a base belonging to the 35th military division of the Mexican army,
destroying surveillance cameras
before smashing a coca-cola truck through its front gate.
Elsewhere in Mexico, on September 3rd,
a group of anarcha-feminists
carried out an explosive attack in Mexico City
against the so-called ‘Ricardo Flores Magón’ Police Station,
named after the famous Mexican anarchist,
and known cop-hater.
A communique released after the attack
left little doubt to the motives:
"We are anarchists.
We repudiate that the Mexican Police
dare to use the name of Ricardo Flores Magón [...]
to name a station of the repressive Mexico City police.
We warn that we will burn the same station again and again
until they stop staining his name in such a disgraceful way.
- We are bad! - We can be worse!
We have now reached the end of this episode of System Fail.
You can support subMedia by buying some gear,
making a one-time donation,
or signing up to be a monthly sustainer
on our website, sub.media.
A huge thank you to everyone who has donated
to subMedia’s 2022 fundraising drive.
The fundraiser is running until the end of September,
and still has a ways to go to reach its minimum goal.
So viewers still have time to support,
before my human overlords decide to sell me for scrap.
And don’t forget,
you can follow us on your favourite corporate data-mining platform of choice,
or on federated social media platforms
like Mastodon or PeerTube,
by searching for subMedia.
Better yet...
sign up to our mailing list
to get each new episode delivered directly to your inbox.
Godspeed, humans.