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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 4 years

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The New Nihilism

It feels increasingly difficult to tell the difference between—on one hand—being old, sick, and defeated, and—on the other hand—living in a time-&-place that is itself senile, tired, and defeated. Sometimes I think it’s just me—but then I find that some younger, healthier people seem to be undergoing similar sensations of ennui, despair, and impotent anger. Maybe it’s not just me.

A friend of mine attributed the turn to disillusion with “everything”, including old-fashioned radical/activist positions, to disappointment over the present political regime in the US, which was somehow expected to usher in a turn away from the reactionary decades since the 1980s, or even a “progress” toward some sort of democratic socialism. Although I myself didn’t share this optimism (I always assume that anyone who even wants to be President of the US must be a psychopathic murderer) I can see that “youth” suffered a powerful disillusionment at the utter failure of Liberalism to turn the tide against Capitalism Triumphalism. The disillusion gave rise to OCCUPY and the failure of OCCUPY led to a move toward sheer negation.

However I think this merely political analysis of the “new nothing” may be too two-dimensional to do justice to the extent to which all hope of “change” has died under Kognitive Kapital and the technopathocracy. Despite my remnant hippy flower- power sentiments I too feel this “terminal” condition (as Nietzsche called it), which I express by saying, only half-jokingly, that we have at last reached the Future, and that the truly horrible truth of the End of the World is that it doesn’t end.

One big J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick shopping mall from now till eternity, basically.

This IS the future—how do you like it so far? Life in the Ruins: not so bad for the bourgeoisie, the loyal servants of the One Percent. Air-conditioned ruins! No Ragnarok, no Rapture, no dramatic closure: just an endless re-run of reality TV cop shows. 2012 has come and gone, and we’re still in debt to some faceless bank, still chained to our screens.

Most people—in order to live at all—seem to need around themselves a penumbra of “illusion” (to quote Nietzsche again):—that the world is just rolling along as usual, some good days some bad, but in essence no different now than in 10000 BC or 1492 AD or next year. Some even need to believe in Progress, that the Future will solve all our problems, and even that life is much better for us now than for (say) people in the 5th century AD. We live longer thanx to Modern Science—of course our extra years are largely spent as “medical objects”—sick and worn out but kept ticking by Machines & Pills that spin huge profits for a few megacorporations & insurance companies. Nation of Struldbugs.

True, we’re suffocating in the mire generated by our rule of sick machines under the Numisphere of Money. At least ten times as much money now exists than it would take to buy the whole world—and yet species are vanishing space itself is vanishing, icecaps melting, air and water grown toxic, culture grown toxic, landscape sacrificed to fracking and megamalls, noise-fascism, etc, etc. But Science will cure all that ills that Science has created—in the Future (in the “long run”, when we’re all dead, as Lord Keynes put it); so meanwhile we’ll carry on consuming the world and shitting it out as waste—because it’s convenient & efficient & profitable to do so, and because we like it.

Well, this is all a bunch of whiney left-liberal cliches, no? Heard it before a million times. Yawn. How boring, how infantile, how useless. Even if it were all true... what can we do about it? If our Anointed Leaders can’t or won’t stop it, who will? God? Satan? The “People”?

All the fashionable “solutions” to the “crisis”, from electronic democracy to revolutionary violence, from locavorism to solar-powered dingbats, from financial market regulation to the General Strike—all of them, however ridiculous or sublime, depend on one preliminary radical change—a seismic shift in human consciousness. Without such a change all the hope of reform is futile. And if such a change were somehow to occur, no “reform” would be necessary. The world would simply change. The whales would be saved. War no more. And so on.

What force could (even in theory) bring about such a shift? Religion? In 6,000 years of organized religion matters have only gotten worse. Psychedelic drugs in the reservoirs? The Mayan calendar? Nostalgia? Terror?

If catastrophic disaster is now inevitable, perhaps the “Survivalist” scenario will ensue, and a few brave millions will create a green utopia in the smoking waste. But won’t Capitalism find a way to profit even from the End of the World? Some would claim that it’s doing so already. The true catastrophe may be the final apotheosis of commodity fetishism.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this paradise of power tools and back-up alarms is all we’ve got & all we’re going to get. Capitalism can deal with global warming—it can sell water-wings and disaster insurance. So it’s all over, let’s say—but we’ve still got television & Twitter. Childhood’s End—i.e. the child as ultimate consumer, eager for the brand. Terrorism or home shopping network—take yr pick (democracy means choice).

Since the death of the Historical Movement of the Social in 1989 (last gasp of the hideous “short” XXth century that started in 1914) the only “alternative” to Capitalist Neo-Liberal totalitarianism that seems to have emerged is religious neo-fascism. I understand why someone would want to be a violent fundamentalist bigot—I even sympathize—but just because I feel sorry for lepers doesn’t mean I want to be one.

When I attempt to retain some shreds of my former antipessimism I fantasize that History may not be over, that some sort of Populist Green Social Democracy might yet emerge to challenge the obscene smugness of “Money Interests”—something along the lines of 1970s Scandinavian monarcho-socialism—which in retrospect now looks the most humane form of the State ever to have emerged from the putrid suck-hole of Civilization. (Think of Amsterdam in its heyday.) Of course as an anarchist I’d still have to oppose it—but at least I’d have the luxury of believing that, in such a situation, anarchy might actually stand some chance of success. Even if such a movement were to emerge, however, we can rest damn-well assured it won’t happen in the USA. Or anywhere in the ghost-realm of dead Marxism, either. Maybe Scotland!

It would seem quite pointless to wait around for such a rebirth of the Social. Years ago many radicals gave up all hope of The Revolution, and the few who still adhere to it remind me of religious fanatics. It might be soothing to lapse into such doctrinaire revolutionism, just as it might be soothing to sink into mystical religion—but for me at least both options have lost their savor. Again, I sympathize with those true believers (although not so much when they lapse into authoritarian leftism or fascism)— nevertheless, frankly, I’m too depressed to embrace their Illusions.

If the End-Time scenario sketched above be considered actually true, what alternatives might exist besides suicidal despair? After much thought I’ve come up with three basic strategies.

1) Passive Escapism. Keep your head down, don’t make waves. Capitalism permits all sorts of “lifestyles” (I hate that word)—just pick one & try to enjoy it. You’re even allowed to live as a dirt farmer without electricity & infernal combustion, like a sort of secular Amish refusnik. Well, maybe not. But at least you could flirt with such a life. “Smoke Pot, Eat Chicken, Drink Tea,” as we used to say in the 60s in the Moorish Church of America, our psychedelic cult. Hope they don’t catch you. Fit yourself into some Permitted Category such as Neo-Hippy or even Anabaptist.

2) Active Escapism. In this scenario you attempt to create the optimal conditions for the emergence of Autonomous Zones, whether temporary, periodic or even (semi)permanent. In 1984 when I first coined the term Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)

I envisioned it as a complement to The Revolution—although I was already, to be truthful, tired of waiting for a moment that seemed to have failed in 1968. The TAZ would give a taste or premonition of real liberties: in effect you would attempt to live as if the Revolution had already occurred, so as not to die without ever having experienced “free freedom” (as Rimbaud called it, liberte libre). Create your own pirate utopia.

Of course the TAZ can be as brief & simple as a really good dinner party, but the true autonomist will want to maximize the potential for longer & deeper experiences of authentic lived life. Almost inevitably this will involve crime, so it’s necessary to think like a criminal, not a victim. A “Johnson” as Burroughs used to say—not a “mark”. How else can one live (and live well) without Work. Work, the curse of the thinking class. Wage slavery. If you’re lucky enough to be a successful artist, you can perhaps achieve relative autonomy without breaking any obvious laws (except the laws of good taste, perhaps). Or you could inherit a million. (More than a million would be a curse.) Forget revolutionary morality—the question is, can you afford your taste of freedom? For most of us, crime will be not only a pleasure but a necessity. The old anarcho-Illegalists showed the way: individual expropriation. Getting caught of course spoils the whole thing—but risk is an aspect of self-authenticity.

One scenario I’ve imagined for active Escapism would be to move to a remote rural area along with several hundred other libertarian socialists—enough to take over the local government (municipal or even county) and elect or control the sheriffs & judges, the parent/teacher association, volunteer fire department and even the water authority. Fund the venture with cultivation of illegal phantastice and carry on a discreet trade. Organize as a “Union of Egoists” for mutual benefit & ecstatic pleasures—perhaps under the guise of “communes” or even monasteries, who cares. Enjoy it as long as it lasts.

I know for a fact that this plan is being worked on in several places in America—but of course I’m not going to say where.

Another possible model for individual escapists might be the nomadic adventurer. Given that the whole world seems to be turning into a giant parking lot or social network, I don’t know if this option remains open, but I suspect that it might. The trick would be to travel in places where tourists don’t—if such places still exist—and to involve oneself in fascinating and dangerous situations. For example if I were young and healthy I’d’ve gone to France to take part in the TAZ that grew around resistance to the new airport—or to Greece—or Mexico—wherever the perverse spirit of rebellion crops up. The problem here is of course funding. (Sending back statues stuffed with hash is no longer a good idea.) How to pay for yr life of adventure? Love will find a way. It doesn’t matter so much if one agrees with the ideals of Tahrir Square or Zucotti Park—the point is just to be there.

3. Revenge. I call it Zarathustra’s Revenge because as Nietzsche said, revenge may be second rate but it’s not nothing. One might enjoy the satisfaction of terrifying the bastards for at least a few moments. Formerly I advocated “Poetic Terrorism” rather than actual violence, the idea being that art could be wielded as a weapon. Now I’ve rather come to doubt it. But perhaps weapons might be wielded as art. From the sledgehammer of the Luddites to the black bomb of the attentat, destruction could serve as a form of creativity, for its own sake, or for purely aesthetic reasons, without any illusions about revolution. Oscar Wilde meets the acte gratuit: a dandyism of despair.

What troubles me about this idea is that it seems impossible to distinguish here between the action of post-leftist anarcho-nihilists and the action of post-rightist neo-traditionalist reactionaries. For that matter, a bomb may as well be detonated by fundamentalist fanatics—what difference would it make to the victims or the “innocent bystanders”? Blowing up a nanotechnology lab—why shouldn’t this be the act of a desperate monarchist as easily as that of a Nietzschean anarchist?

In a recent book by Tiqqun (Theory of Bloom), it was fascinating to come suddenly across the constellation of Nietzsche, Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, et al. as examples of a sharp and just critique of the Bloom syndrome—i.e., of progress-as-illusion. Of course the “beyond left and right” position has two sides—one approaching from the left, the other from the right. The European New Right (Alain de Benoist & his gang) are big admirers of Guy Debord, for a similar reason (his critique, not his proposals).

The post-left can now appreciate Traditionalism as a reaction against modernity just as the neo-traditionalists can appreciate Situationism. But this doesn’t mean that post-anarchist anarchists are identical with post-fascism fascists!

I’m reminded of the situation in fin-de-siecle France that gave rise to the strange alliance between anarchists and monarchists; for example the Cerce Proudhon. This surreal conjunction came about for two reasons: a) both factions hated liberal democracy, and b) the monarchists had money. The marriage gave birth to weird progeny, such as Georges Sorel. And Mussolini famously began his career as an Individualist anarchist!

Another link between left & right could be analyzed as a kind of existentialism; once again Nietzsche is the founding parent here, I think. On the left there were thinkers like Gide or Camus. On the right, that illuminated villain Baron Julius Evola used to tell his little ultra-right groupuscules in Rome to attack the Modern World—even though the restoraton of tradition was a hopeless dream—if only as an act of magical self-creation. Being trumps essence. One must cherish no attachment to mere results. Surely Tiqqun’s advocacy of the “perfect Surrealist act” (firing a revolver at random into a crowd of “innocent by-standers”) partakes of this form of action-as-despair. (Incidentally I have to confess that this is the sort of thing that has always—to my regret—prevented my embracing Surrealism: it’s just too cruel. I don’t admire de Sade, either.)

Of course, as we know, the problem with the Traditionalists is that they were never traditional enough. They looked back at a lost civilization as their “goal” (religion, mysticism, monarchism, arts-&-crafts, etc.) whereas they should have realized that the real tradition is the “primordial anarchy” of the Stone Age, tribalism, hunting/gathering, animism—what I call the Neanderthal Liberation Front. Paul Goodman used the term “Neolithic Conservatism” to describe his brand of anarchism—but “Paleolithic Reaction” might be more appropriate!

The other major problem with the Traditionalist Right is that the entire emotional tone of the movement is rooted in self-repression. Here a rough Reichean analysis suffices to demonstrate that the authoritarian body reflects a damaged soul, and that only anarchy is compatible with real self-realization.

The European New Right that arose in the 90s still carries on its propaganda—and these chaps are not just vulgar nationalist chauvenist anti-semitic homophobic thugs—they’re intellectuals & artists. I think they’re evil, but that doesn’t mean I find them boring. Or even wrong on certain points. They also hate the nanotechnologists!

Although I attempted to set off a few bombs back in the 1960s (against the war in Vietnam) I’m glad, on the whole, that they failed to detonate (technology was never my metier). It saves me from wondering if I would’ve experienced “moral qualms”. Instead I chose the path of the propagandist and remained an activist in anarchist media from 1984 to about 2004. I collaborated with the Autonomedia publishing collective, the IWW, the John Henry Mackay Society (Left Stirnerites) and the old NYC Libertarian Book Club (founded by comrades of Emma Goldman, some of whom I knew, & who are now all dead). I had a radio show on WBAI (Pacifica) for 18 years. I lectured all over Europe and East Europe in the 90s. I had a very nice time, thank you. But anarchism seems even farther off now than it looked in 1984, or indeed in 1958, when I first became an anarchist by reading George Harriman’s Krazy Kat. Well, being an existentialist means you never have to say you’re sorry.

In the last few years in anarchist circles there’s appeared a trend “back” to Stirner/Nietzsche Individualism—because after all, who can take revolutionary anarcho-communism or syndicalism seriously anymore? Since I’ve adhered to this Individualist position for decades (although tempered by admiration for Charles Fourier and certain “spiritual anarchists” like Gustave Landauer) I naturally find this trend agreeable.

“Green anarchists” & AntiCivilization Neo-primitivists seem (some of them) to be moving toward a new pole of attraction, nihilism. Perhaps neo-nihilism would serve as a better label, since this tendency is not simply replicating the nihilism of the Russian narodniks or the French attentatists of circa 1890 to 1912, however much the new nihilists look to the old ones as precursors. I share their critique—in fact I think I’ve been mirroring it to a large extent in this essay: creative despair, let’s call it. What I do not understand however is their proposal—if any. “What is to be done?” was originally a nihilist slogan, after all, before Lenin appropriated it. I presume that my option #1, passive escape, would not suit the agenda. As for Active Escapism, to use the suffix “ism” implies some form not only of ideology but also some action. What is the logical outcome of this train of thought?

As an animist I experience the world (outside Civilization) as essentially sentient. The death of God means the rebirth of the gods, as Nietzsche implied in his last “mad” letters from Turin— the resurrection of the great god PAN—chaos, Eros, Gaia, & Old Night, as Hesiod put it—Ontological anarchy, Desire, Life itself, & the Darkness of revolt & negation—all seem to me as real as they need to be.

I still adhere to a certain kind of spiritual anarchism—but only as heresy and paganism, not as orthodoxy and monotheism. I have great respect for Dorothy Day—her writing influenced me in the 60s—and Ivan Illich, whom I knew personally—but in the end I cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance between anarchism and the Pope! Nevertheless I can believe in the re-paganaziation of monotheism. I hold to this pagan tradition because I sense the universe as alive, not as “dead matter.” As a life-long psychedelicist I have always thought that matter & spirit are identical, and that this fact alone legitimizes what Theory calls “desire”.

From this p.o.v. the phrase “revolution of everyday life” still seems to have some validity—if only in terms of the second proposal, Active Escapism or the TAZ. As for the third possibility— Zarathustra’s Revenge—this seems like a possible path for the new nihilism, at least from a philosophical perspective. But since I am unable personally to advocate it, I leave the question open.

But here—I think—is the point at which I both meet with & diverge from the new nihilism. I too seem to believe that Predatory Capitalism has won and that no revolution is possible in the classical sense of that term. But somehow I can’t bring myself to be “against everything.” Within the Temporary Autonomous Zone there still seems to persist the possibility of “authentic life,” if only for a moment—and if this position amounts to mere Escapism, then let us become Houdini. The new surge of interest in Individualism is obviously a response to the Death of the Social. But does the new nihilism imply the death even of the individual and the “union of egoists” or Nietzschean free spirits? On my good days, I like to think not.

No matter which of the three paths one takes (or others I can’t yet imagine) it seems to me that the essential thing is not to collapse into mere apathy. Depression we may have to accept, impotent rage we may have to accept, revolutionary pessimism we may have to accept. But as e.e. cummings (anarchist poet) said, there is some shit we will not take, lest we simply become the enemy by default. Can’t go on, must go on. Cultivate rosebuds, even selfish pleasures, as long as a few birds & flowers still remain. Even love may not be impossible...

#hakim bey #Nihilism #t.a.z.#anarchism

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bond-villains-are-winning · 4 years

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The problem isn’t that Trump, a bogus billionaire, hasn’t paid taxes for years on his imaginary profits.

The problem is that the actual Rich Scum and Mega-Corporations haven’t paid proportionate taxes for decades on a MASSIVE amount of the Nation’s Income.

Poor countries have rich people. Prosper countries have rich people.

The difference between a poor and a prosperous country is that in a prosperous country the Rich pay their portion of the taxes.

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The Rich aren’t paying taxes. Therefore OUR taxes have been used to militarize the police of small towns across the country. To the point where the police are more than half of civic budgets.

Militarized in preparation for the day when we might - just might - take to the streets to protest our taxes funding endless supplies of overpriced military equipment designed solely for offensive warfare.

Offensive Warfare spurred by false-flag ‘attacks’ supported by ‘secret reports’ inevitably leading to seizure of the fossil fuel energy resources of other countrIes.

Getting tired of our own children being used as cannon fodder in unending wars to ensure that the Rich of this country aren’t inconvenienced by - foreigners! - undercutting the high price of fossil fuels used in electrical plants.

Getting tired of being gouged for high energy prices essential to the wealth of the Rich and Corporations.

God forbid we shift to energy sources that provide no income to the Rich: wind, tides, water flow, solar, geothermal.

We’d have cleaner water and air. Less catastrophic climate change. But fewer billionaires!

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Because the Rich and Corporations just will not pay taxes we have had to turn the US into a poor country.

Because the few thousand people and entities with most of the income are not paying their proportion of taxes we have had to cut essentials. Cut so that our paltry taxes can be used for suppression here and abroad.

We have “had” no choice but to defund Education, Health and Social programs.

We’ve “had” no choice but to defer indefinitely/permanently infrastructure maintenance and upgrades for roads, parks, water supply, the power grid, public transportation.

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To keep us docile - scared of the personal cost of protesting - they have reversed our prosperity.

Overturned anti-trust legislation to reform the Trusts - cartels that control economic sectors - driving down wages while charging all the market will bear for goods and services.

Pocketing the difference as their “entrepreneurial compensation”.

Wages have stagnated for decades.

Poverty, homelessness and economic migration have been criminalized to forestall any ‘nothing-to-lose’ protests. Or, god forbid, unionizing!

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The problem isn’t Trumps taxes or the belief system of his supporters. They are a distraction.

They are being used as scapegoats for what is wrong with the US. Just as Obama and the Libertards were used as scapegoats for what a Conservative believed was wrong with the US.

Our bought-and-paid-for-by-Corporations Congress is always ‘unable’ to reach compromise on any Right-vs-Left cultural issues. Stalemate resulting in greater anger and frustration. But able to be passing 500-900 pro-corporation and tax loopholes-for-the-rich bills each year. Irrespective of which Party is in the majority.

As the two cultral sides engage in ever increasing street violence...

...The Rich pay less taxes.

Somehow - even as the prison population siphons off jobs like telemarketing at $0.45 an hour with no overtime or days off - the number of billionaires increases. It’s a mystery

But also, somehow, the taxes on billionaires only decrease. It’s a mystery.

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eleanorblue · 4 years

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The Best Day of the Worst Year

It was a gorgeous morning--the sky was crystal blue, it was unseasonably warm, there was little wind to speak of--and I wanted a donut.

We hadn't been leaving the apartment except for work all week, scuttling from home to lab like frightened mice. We’d stocked up on groceries the weekend before in order to minimize the amount of time we had to spend outside. Of course, we’d been spending much of our time inside ever since March, but now, our biggest fear wasn’t the virus. We were afraid of what everyone--the other nervous inhabitants of our city, the intimidating protesters from (mostly) out-of-town, the blank-faced National Guard members stationed around city hall--might do whenever the announcement came.

Earlier that week, I’d been walking home from work when a troop of motorcyclists sped past, revving their engines and shouting slogans. It was clear from the vile glads on their bikes and the twisted things they yelled why they were here. They didn’t say anything to ME specifically--they were just causing a ruckus--but I worried what their presence signified. I knew these people were capable of violence. Two gun-carrying men had already been arrested under suspicion of plotting some sort of attack.

But it was Saturday, and I always bought donuts on Saturdays, and nothing serious had actually happened all week. The marketplace was right across the street from the convention center--the epicenter of the protests and counterprotests and counter-counterprotests--but I figured I’d be in and out quickly and it wasn’t likely that anything would go down in broad daylight in the twenty minutes I’d be out.

(Besides...maybe I was a little curious to see the protests for myself.)

So off I went to the donut shop. The streets were fairly empty until I got to the protests, but the market was as busy as ever. As I stood in line, waiting to buy my donuts (I always get two donuts with vanilla frosting and sprinkles--yes, I am that boring), my phone vibrated in my pocket.

It went off again. And again. And again.

Then suddenly, there was a great roar from the crowd outside that made everyone in the market turn towards the windows. I’ve been in cheering crowds before--clapping in the audience after a musical, shouting in the bleachers at sporting events--but this cheer was different. This didn't sound like a bunch of voices cheering at the same together--it was a singular roar, as if everyone’s voices had merged together to become one.

I looked at my phone and nearly dropped it.

It was 11:30 am on November 7th. Philadelphia had just counted enough votes for the Associated Press to call Pennsylvania. Every major news outlet had just called the U.S. Presidential Election for Joe Biden.

And I was standing across the street from where those votes had been counted.

I ran outside.

There were two groups standing outside the convention center, separated by yellow tape and police officers. On the side closest to the convention center, there were around 50-100 Trump supporters. They stood silently, solemnly, holding their flags and banners.

The other side--made up of hundreds of people--was having a party. Cheering, whooping. Waving handmade signs and flags. Every few minutes, a chant would break out--“Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!” Or, “Biden won! Biden won! Biden won!”

Holy shit, I thought.

I took a couple of pictures and videos and sent them to my family. Then I started to feel antsy. Not much was happening, and the street was too crowded for my liking during a pandemic.

I decided to walk to Independence Hall--the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was only a few blocks away, and it seemed appropriate to go there the day Trump was voted out of power.

When I got there, I discovered that I was not the only person who had had that idea.

I crossed Arch Street and climbed up on a row of stone benches so I could better see. The streets were beginning to fill with excited Philadelphians, laughing and cheering. It looked like they were setting up for something--a temporary stage had been erected, and bright-shirted volunteers were scurrying around with pamphlets and clipboards. Someone started playing music.

I realized three things. One, there was absolutely no way I was going to hide inside--not on this gorgeous, electric, miraculous morning. Two, I needed to change--I was dressed for typical November weather, and it was hot. Three I was hungry. I’d forgotten about the donuts, after all.

I went home quickly, put on something lighter, and made myself a sandwich. Then I went back out and headed for my favorite park.

In the short time I’d been inside, the city had changed.

Cars honked and people screamed wildly out of their sunroofs, waving at pedestrians. People in their apartments cheered out of their windows, waving banners. I passed a woman in her forties walking down the street, just banging a pot with a spoon.

Someone was playing music in my favorite park as well, and little kids were dancing in a circle. I sat on a bench, ate my sandwich, and marveled.

I don’t have the words to describe how it felt to be in Philadelphia on that day. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. The atmosphere was jubilant, electric, euphoric. The near-unbearable tension, worry, and unease of the last week had been wiped away, and people sobbed with relief as they laughed with joy.

Biden won! Biden won! Biden won!

Suddenly, a loud cheer rose up from Locust Street. A crowd rounded the corner, waving Biden 2020 signs as they marched down the street. Everyone in the park--myself included--rushed to the stone walls to meet them.

They kept coming. And kept coming. And kept coming. Marching down the street, heading northeast.

It was a whole spontaneous parade.

“We’re heading to Independence Hall!” a man shouted. “Come on!”

I am a shy person. I’m pretty reserved in public. I rarely talk to people I don’t know. I’m not the kind of person who engages with random people on the street.

But I joined that parade.

More and more people joined us as we marched towards Independence Hall. Others stayed inside, calling out from their windows. I waved to them all. Church bells rang, cowbells clanged, and people whooped and screamed with joy.

It was a cacophony, and I hate cacophonies, but I loved this one.

Independence Park was MUCH more crowded than it had been an hour earlier. The green between Chestnut and Market was packed with people, and even the green between Market and Arch was pretty dense. I wove my way through the crowd until I found a space where I could stand without worrying about COVID.

The speeches had started. Organizers climbed on the makeshift stage and spoke about all the work that had gone into this election--campaigning for Biden, registering people to vote, and actually getting people to the poll. They talked about all the work that still needed to be done...and how that work was now possible.

After all, we were happy, but we weren’t stupid. We knew we were still living in a global pandemic with massive income inequality during rampant climate change. 74 million people apparently thought that Trump was the better choice, which was and is quite frightening. And we knew we still had three more months under Trump, and he was going to try to pull a bunch of BS to try and invalidate the election.

But for the first time in four years, there was HOPE. It might actually be possible to work to address the devastating inequalities that plague us. There was going to be an END to the constant barrage of assaults on our democracy and people. We’d have an administration that actually, like, listening to experts. An administration that believed in science. An administration that believed in...decency, in respect and courtesy and kindness.

Instead of constantly having to fight to protect the liberties we’d managed to scrape together, we could actually make progress.

The rest of the day blurs together in my memory. I spent it wandering around Center City, calling out to and cheering with random strangers. There was a dance party at City Hall, and I, Ella who has never danced in public ever before, bounced around to some teenage pop songs. There were parades up and down Broad Street, and I saw people dressed in inflatable T-Rex and Unicorn costumes. (I don’t really know why.) Someone handed me a pamphlet on reforming the prison system, and another person gave me a t-shirt with Dr. Fauci’s face. (Another person gave me a booklet on repenting for my sins before the end times--that was kind of strange.) Some clever person was blasting Hamilton songs at one of the parks.

The world turned upside down...

For the first time I’m thinking past tomorrow!

History is happening in Manhattan Philadelphia and we just happen to live in the greatest city in the world, the greatest city in the world!

When I finally came home that evening and crashed into bed, I could still hear the noise from outside. Cowbells, cheering, singing, laughing. It all melded into tone symphony of joy and relief, of celebration in the midst of misery, of light in the darkest hour.

It was the sound of people who could breathe again.

#ella rambles #under the cut because I am completely unable to be concise #election 2020

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empresscha · 4 years

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Political System of Egypt

Brief Background about Egypt’s Economical Problem

Egypt is a participant to transnational arbitration agreements, but its courts do not always acknowledge overseas judgments. Resolving of business-related disputes is very slow-going, with the time to settle a case to conclusion could average from three to five years. The government of Egypt remains to be unwilling to incorporate international arbitration clauses in commercial contracts and agreements, with the exclusion of the Petroleum Ministry. Other hindrances to augment trade and investment include extreme bureaucracy, a scarcity of skilled labour and restricted entry to credit, burdensome customs procedures, intellectual property affairs, corruption, and non-tariff trade blockades.

Problems Affecting the Business or Trade in Egypt

The Egyptian economy, which formerly manifested durability to the world-wide financial crisis, has undergone from the internal administrative crisis and insurgent uprising in 2011. However, the economy began to recuperate as of the years in 2016 and 2017 with development prognostication to have hit 5.6% in 2019 up from 5.3% last year. According to the revised International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts from 14th April 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gross domestic product (GDP) growth is anticipated to the decline to 2% in 2020 and will rise up to 2.8% on 2021, possibly due to the post-pandemic worldwide economic revival.

Current economic development and balance in Egypt has been generally powered by external factors which may be unmanageable. During the corresponding times, Egypt has fallen short to tackle unyielding social and economic threats, as claimed by a new paper from the Carnegie Endowment.

According to “The Political Economy of Reform in Egypt: Understanding the Role of Institutions” of Carnegie Middle East Center’s Sufyan Alissa, he learned that economic reforms, contemplated as a main concern by the Egyptian government has not been completely operative for basically three reasons: first, it lacks of public support; second, Egypt has failed to promote a competitive business environment; and lastly, the lack of vigorous and translucent institutions.

Carnegie Middle East Center’s Sufyan Alissa asserts that Egypt lacks the institutional ability to execute better-coordinated reform programs that address its socioeconomic realities, comprising prevalent poverty and unemployment, extreme inflation, and an elevating public liability. Reform is required to progress the efficacy of Egypt’s bureaucracy, increase the accountability and transparency of officials, and broaden political participation for Egyptian citizens.

Egypt has fallen short in generating a strong and vying environment for business progress. Despite the sections of many laws to establish the business environment, the government has not advanced an active enforcement process for these new laws, and little advancement has been crafted in the battle against corruption and fraud. Economic reform lacks popular backing in Egypt as reforms are understood to prompt more damages than good as preceding reforms have constantly failed to deal with socioeconomic problems. Moreover, future reforms are forecasted to increase the gap between the Egyptian rich and poor before the masses can feel the affirmative results.

Personal Recommendations on how their Problems Can Be Solved

I have comprehended that the majority of the exclusive sector and civil society is not included from the discussion over Egypt’s economic reform plans. I firmly believe that public involvement is vital for improving civil society institutions and encouraging an efficient role in planning and applying wide-ranging economic reforms. Every citizens of Egypt should be included and encouraged to be part of the economic reform plans.

Therefore, in my opinion that the given nature of the Egyptian state and the key players in the market and civil society, advancing the essential institutions and most important, making them operate properly within a short time seems unlikely. Thus, Egypt should make the choice: It’s either to commence in developing these institutions soon or to linger and fall behind. Forming these institutions is the accountability not only of the Egyptian state but also of the private sector and civil society.

Furthermore, Egypt is practicing an economic reform plan to be instituted as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund in 2016 worth US $16 billion over three years and now has one of the greatest growth rates in the region. Such program comprised the introduction of a floating exchange rate, which led the national currency to decrease substantially, furthering non-oil exports and restraining high level of imports along with huge cutbacks in grants (in 2019 for fuels and by 2020-2021 for electricity) and a moderate opening of the capital of some public-sector companies. Since the program was initiated, Egypt returned to the bond market and has been the highest supreme issuer in the African region.

Egypt’s government should proclaim monetary policies including directed cash transfer societal programs, a rise in pensions, subsidize initiatives for contractual workers, funding for medical professionals, lowering energy cost for the industrial sector, reinforcements for the tourism sector, and disbursement assistance for exporters.

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plainfile10-blog · 5 years

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The Ultimate Solution for Bigdata Analytics

One of many sources of Big Data is logs, and they are able to quickly get out of control with redundant or false alerts. Big data services are getting more popular due to emerging trends like the internet of things. Big Data companies are available in many unique shapes and flavors. The Execute phase is apparently the domain of larger players like multinational businesses. Finding whole new customer segments may lead to tremendous new price. Utica National Insurance Group uses predictive analytics to monitor continuously incoming credit reports that could assess the risk appetite based on a variety of present data rather than simply considering the credit score score alone. The Hidden Truth About Bigdata Analytics Exploratory data analysis needs to be interpreted carefully. Descriptive analyticsor data mining are at the base of the huge data value chain, but they are sometimes valuable for uncovering patterns that provide insight. Predictive analytics isn't a branch of conventional analytics like reporting or statistical analysis. Renewable energy another major grid component that may benefit from Big Data analytics. Data Science has existed for much longer than Big Data, but it was not until the development of information volumes reached contemporary levels that Data Science has turned into a required part of enterprise-level Data Management. It will need to deal with the huge amount of data and analyzing it in real-time becomes a huge challenge as data grows by the minute. The Fight Against Bigdata Analytics Elemento claims that because of all this technology, it is a bright future for being better able to comprehend and treat cancer. The best thing about this system is that we are able to prevent an impending failure that could cost a good deal. On the flip side, there are several poor which can be lent to, but at greater risk. There is continuing resistance to modify by key individuals and they'll need to be addressed, preferably by means of retraining and counseling. Therefore, there's a need of new reforms that are done on the grounds of what is necessary for the students and what has become the prior student's pattern all this isn't only the work of a researcher but this may be accomplished by means of an analyst in a brief time period with the assistance of the tools they have. There are occasions once you simply won't have the ability to watch for a report to run or a Hadoop job to finish. The Do's and Don'ts of Bigdata Analytics The only means to find this high accuracy was supposed to use machine-learning algorithms to combine expression amounts in a means that was nonlinear, states Elemento. All are varieties of information analysis. Predictive analytics permit the company to figure out the probabilities of delays. This proves the simple fact that the quantity of information created each and every day. The present release of Apache Storm is a sound option if you are interested in finding a stream processing framework. On account of the high cost of information acquisition and cleaning, it's well worth considering what you actually will need to source yourself. Numerous machines and parts work together to make the end product. With the arrival of internet, it has become simpler to gather desired information in a portion of seconds. Volume is a huge deal here, but the data velocity may be the largest challenge. Our great data training in Chennai will supply you hands-on experience to fulfill the demands of the industry requirements. This makes it rather important to possess the abilities and infrastructure to handle it intelligently. In the event the upstream and downstream technologies necessary to harness the ability of IoT isn't learnt and used, the greatest potential of IoT wouldn't be realized. Big Data tools also help airline service providers to raise their network connectivity according to the industry demand. Their rise will offer important last mile connectivity and be certain that electricity isn't overused or wasted through the ability of analytics. Hotels and restaurants are an essential part of the hospitality sector and are liable for offering a wide selection of big data analytics services to their clients and clients. Hospitality is, thus, a focus in many nations around the Earth, but it is of specific significance in countries where tourism is an important export market. Most of the main vendors on the market are actively focusing on enhancing their offerings to fulfill the continuing demand for advanced healthcare solutions. Tableau employs a very simple drag and drop interface that anybody can use. In the following article, we will attempt to present a strategy on the best way to develop an analytics system. So, the cloud providers have to be accessed which provides sufficient storage space together with the computing power. This means your users get the ideal data at the correct time. It must be noted however that most dashboard products are made for passive data viewing, in place of interactive action. The grade of the data ought to be checked as early as possible. Predictive Analytics, Big Data, and How to Make Them Work for You can be put into place by doing-it-yourself, utilizing a framework or an item. To predict downtime it might not be necessary to check at all the data but a sample might be sufficient. The opposing side of that, however, is they don't need to flip their own model without making sure the payment is likely to adhere to a different shipping basis. The school is also famous for its focus on business, which makes it a great choice for students that are also seeking to go into management. Fundamentals of Hadoop, challenges connected with it and why it's regarded as game changer by multiple verticals of the business is an important section which will raise the degree of your knowledge bucket.

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aaronlawson2183 · 6 years

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A Small New York Town Plans a Profitable, 100% Renewable Energy Future

A Small New York Town Plans a Profitable, 100% Renewable Energy Future A community choice program and a lack of natural gas are enabling Marbletown to achieve 100 percent renewable energy and tackle 100 percent renewable energy —while saving money.

by Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA

View over Marbletown from Shawungunk Ridge. Photo by Tom Konrad

With advances in technology, the pathways to 100 percent renewable energy are becoming clear. As a result, the central challenge has become less about how to get there, and more about how to pay for it.

The town of Marbletown, in New York’s Hudson River Valley, is finding that problem is solving itself.

Marbletown is a town of 5,500 people covering 55 square miles on the edges of the Catskills and Shawangunk Mountains, containing the hamlets of Stone Ridge and High Falls. The Town’s Environmental Conservation Commission (ECC) and Sustainable Hudson Valley recently conducted a planning effort for 100% clean energy (including not only electricity but buildings and transportation as well.) They discovered that, despite its small population, Marbletown has two advantages that most other municipalities around the country lack: a community-choice aggregation policy and a lack of natural gas.

These two features are enabling this New York town, where this author resides, to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity, while also saving money.

Potential savings in annual energy costs for Marbletown residents and businesses from conversion to 100% renewable electricity. Renewable electricity at reduced cost

Enabled by New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision initiative, Marbletown recently joined the Hudson Valley Community Power, a Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program. The CCA will take the place of the town’s electric utility, Central Hudson, as the default electricity provider in New York’s deregulated market. The CCA will procure generation for the town. Central Hudson will continue to provide electricity delivery, service and billing. Customers also have the opportunity to opt out of the program at any time, but they will likely have little incentive to do so.

By leveraging the power of group purchasing electricity, the CCA administrator and the town expect that it will be able to provide 100 percent renewable electricity at a reduced price compared to electricity supplied by Central Hudson. If it turns out that the CCA cannot obtain electricity on advantageous terms, the town can leave the CCA at no cost and no further obligation.

When the Marbletown CCA begins operating in early 2019, the vast majority of electricity used by the town’s residents will come from renewable energy resources, while lowering their costs.

Saving money with building electrification

Another thing going for Marbletown — though it may not appear to be the case at first — is its lack of access to natural gas. This lack of natural gas infrastructure enables Marbletown to cost-effectively leapfrog to all-electric buildings, in the same way many countries in Africa were able to leapfrog over the installation of costly telephone infrastructure when wireless phones became available.

Cold climate heat pumps and heat pump water heaters are the cellphones to natural gas’ landlines. The 2018 report The Economics of Electrifying Buildings from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) compared the life-cycle costs of cold climate air source heat pumps (ASHPs) with conventional heating with and without air conditioners in five cities: Oakland, Houston, Providence and Chicago in a number of scenarios.

Economic modeling of cold climate air source heat pumps by Rocky Mountain Institute.

They found that ASHPs were usually more cost effective than natural gas in new construction, and always more cost-effective than fuel oil or propane heat in the one city where those two fuels are used: Providence, RI.

I spoke to Mike Henchen, a manager with RMI’s electricity practice and one of the authors of the report, to find out how these economics would translate to Marbletown’s climate. He says that the two most important factors in translating the ASHP results from Providence to Marbletown are the somewhat colder climate and the differences in the prices of electricity and fuel oil.

RMI’s modeling found that, because of the colder climate in Chicago, the ASHPs studied are 15 percent less efficient at producing heat from electricity in Chicago than in Providence over the course of a typical winter.

According to the National Weather Service, Providence’s typical winter daily temperature ranges from 24 degrees F to 40 degrees F. For Chicago, that range runs from 15 to 32 degrees, while the typical range in Marbletown is 21 to 36 degrees. Hence, Marbletown’s climate is nearly midway between that of Providence and Chicago for the purpose of winter heating. Hence, we can expect that ASHPs will be around 7 percent less efficient for producing heat in Marbletown than in Providence.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, average retail electricity prices are 16.3 cents per kilowatt-hour in Rhode Island. In Marbletown, electricity currently costs about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour (not including expected savings from the CCA). The EIA number for New York state as a whole is 14.5 cents.

A spot check of heating oil prices in Rhode Island and the Lower Hudson Valley region of New York also finds that Marbletown heating oil prices are approximately 20 percent higher than those in Providence.

With electricity 20 percent cheaper in Marbletown than Providence, and fuel oil approximately 20 percent more expensive, these price differences will completely overwhelm the slight reduction in ASHP efficiency caused by Marbletown’s colder climate.

The cost savings from heating with an ASHP as compared to with fuel oil should be about 30 percent greater per unit of heat than in Providence, due to a combination of lower electricity prices and higher fuel oil costs. Where fuel-oil-to-electric conversions are cost-effective in Providence, in Marbletown they are compelling.

Electric vehicles

Unlike with heating, Marbletown has few advantages in the transition to electric transportation. As a rural town, most residents are completely car-dependent for their everyday needs. One advantage we do have is being located in the center of Ulster County. The county government has been a leader in the installation of EV charging stations at county facilities, and it makes these charging stations available for public use as well.

The town also used a state grant to install an EV charging station at the town’s community center. Marbletown is working with the neighboring town of Rosendale to install an EV charging station at our shared municipal offices, and they are helping two local nonprofits to install EV chargers on their premises.

New York state has a generous grant program for EV charging stations, but the program requires the use of networked commercial stations. In at least two instances, this has made the grants more trouble than they are worth, when the stations turned out to be incompatible with the limited local cell phone network.

Town leaders believe the state grant program could be much improved if it also provided much smaller grants for the installation of non-networked charging stations more suitable to rural areas. The current program is overly focused on high-speed charging along key transportation corridors to the neglect of Level 2 charging at destinations like workplaces and recreation areas, like hiking trails.

Seasonal mismatch

Another difficulty of transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy by converting heating loads to electricity is seasonal mismatch. Heating loads peak in the winter. At Marbletown’s 42° N latitude, the town gets only nine hours of daylight in midwinter, but 15 hours in midsummer. This, combined with a much lower sun angle, leads to solar installations producing only one-half to one-third as much energy in January as in July.

Lower solar production in winter, combined with higher winter electricity demand for heating, will eventually move New York’s peak electricity demand to winter from summer. Solving this problem of seasonal mismatch will be easiest if we start planning today by minimizing winter peak demand and looking for renewable electricity sources that have significant production during the coldest winter months.

Many possible solutions to seasonal mismatch will have to be addressed outside of Marbletown’s borders. The state is pursuing the deployment of 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind, and has significant hydropower resources. More hydropower is imported from Quebec.

Long-distance north-south high-voltage DC transmission projects, such as the proposed Atlantic Wind Connection, would not only enable the connection of large amounts of offshore wind power, but would also allow for the import of renewable electricity to New York in the critical winter heating season. In addition, the lines could export excess solar generation to areas with more significant cooling loads in the summer.

Local resources

Marbletown has no wind resources of interest to wind power developers. Other than solar, its local renewable energy resources are hydropower and biomass.

The town has numerous small streams and an existing run-of-river hydro plant, which it is looking at developing and upgrading with a local developer, Current Hydro. One small stream we are looking at dries up during most summers, but it has such a substantial drop that it forms a beautiful waterfall in the winter. The local property owners cannot see it from their houses, and they worry about trespassers falling and hurting themselves on the ice. Making this attractive nuisance safe by using the water for hydropower would be a great way to both solve a potential liability problem for the landowners, while also producing renewable electricity when it is needed for heating.

Many town residents currently save money by heating with wood stoves, rather than fuel oil. Encouraging the adoption of more efficient wood pellet stoves and advanced wood boilers can also reduce winter electricity use while lowering pollution from less efficient, older models. The state has generous incentives for the installation of advanced wood heating systems.

RMI’s Henchen suggests that the town can also “minimize the winter peak through weatherization.” Focusing on the best heating technologies can also greatly reduce the peak load. The best cold climate ASHPs will use one-third as much electricity over the course of the winter as electric resistance heating, and a little less than half as much on the coldest days, when they are least efficient and heating needs peak. By focusing on replacing resistance heating with more efficient technologies, winter heating loads can be reduced, leaving room for more fuel-oil-to-electric and propane-to-electric conversions.

Incidentally, Central Hudson just launched $750 instant rebates on two models of hybrid heat pump water heaters costing $1,299 without the rebate. The utility’s rebates on smart thermostats can also help shift heating and cooling loads away from peak hours. (The existing rebates on ASHPs are here.)

Next steps

Many policy recommendations for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy involve utility and incentive programs that are beyond the purview of a rural town of a few thousand people. But we are not entirely without policy levers. The town issues building permits, and has control over building and zoning codes, although changes in building codes require and exemption from the state.

The greatest limitations on what the town can do are the labor and expertise of its small number of employees. This limited capacity is augmented by volunteers on the town’s committees and commissions, the most relevant one in this case being the Environmental Conservation Commission (ECC), which I have led since 2014. The flip side of Marbletown’s small size is that a few volunteers like those on the ECC can have an outsized impact. My team and I have moved Marbletown from the middle of the environmental pack to a town that has drawing positive attention statewide.

Potential paths to 100 percent renewable energy considered by the Marbletown Environmental Conservation Commission as part of an energy planning effort in conjunction with Sustainable Hudson Valley.

Here are some of the steps the town has already taken to move the town towards 100 percent renewable energy.

Completed an inventory of energy use in the town with Sustainable Hudson Valley (PDF presentation).

Removal of approximately a third of the town’s streetlights, and the replacement of the remaining lights with LEDs.

A ban on hydraulic fracking.

Installation of EV charging stations (noted above).

Obtaining a $50,000 grant for the energy retrofit of the town’s community center.

Joined the Hudson Valley Community Power CCA.

An LED lighting retrofit at the Town Highway Department.

Participated in a Solarize campaign that resulted in 16 residential solar installations in the town and 30 additional installations in the other two participating towns and beyond.

Current and planned future projects include:

Connecting several local non-taxable organizations with a solar developer willing to lease their rooftops for community solar developments.

Working with a small hydropower developer to investigate upgrading the local utility-owned hydropower plant to increase its production, as well as to assess the viability of small hydropower installations where local streams cross town property and right-of-ways.

A (mostly symbolic) ban on natural-gas connections and pipelines in the town.

Modifying the cost of building permits to favor building efficiency and electrification, and to favor heat pumps over air conditioners that lack heating capability.

The adoption of New York’s stretch energy code when it is finalized.

Working with local solar installers build community solar on municipal property and local nonprofits, such as churches and emergency responders.

Encouraging local solar installers to include a 240-volt outlet for EV charging as part of solar installations.

Burdens create opportunities

Weaknesses can also be strengths. The high cost of heating with fuel oil and propane has long been a burden on Marbletown residents. Now, it is a strong incentive to switch to a more modern, much more economical, and much cleaner source of heat with cold climate ASHPs. Advances in electric vehicles are enabling similar savings in transportation.

These compelling economics are enhanced by strong support for clean energy by New York state and Ulster County.

All together, these developments are setting the town of Marbletown on a path to a prosperous, clean energy future.

The post A Small New York Town Plans a Profitable, 100% Renewable Energy Future appeared first on Alternative Energy Stocks.

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blackmccormack7-blog · 6 years

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40 (Actually) Artistic Instances.

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yisenbaoelectric · 2 years

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Yisenbao general-purpose motor

China small electrical motors exports will gradually release

First, China's high-efficiency motors harbor a hundred billion market

According to the understanding of capacitor motor supplier, but unfortunately, most of the IE3 motors produced in China are used for export.

As we all know, the industrial sector motor electricity consumption accounts for about 75% of the total industrial electricity consumption, so motor energy saving has become the key to industrial energy saving. With the double pressure of energy saving and environmental protection, energy-saving equipment represented by high-efficiency motor air conditioning fan motor has attracted much attention in the market.

High efficiency motor is a general-purpose standard motor with high efficiency, temperature resistance motor. High efficiency motor adopts new motor design, new technology and new materials to improve the output efficiency by reducing the loss of electromagnetic energy, heat and mechanical energy.

Yisenbao general-purpose motor has high efficiency and temperature resistance, with quality assurance. It is a good choice for enterprises.

China as early as 2008, the motor system energy saving included in one of the country's top ten energy-saving projects, and in 2009, the application of high-efficiency, super-efficient motors included in the people's project. And early last year, and the introduction of the "National Motor Energy Efficiency Improvement Plan", the plan mentioned that in 2015, China will achieve the upgrading of motor products, 50% of low-voltage three-phase cage asynchronous motor products, 40% of high-voltage motor products to meet the energy efficiency standard specifications for high-efficiency motors; the total promotion of high-efficiency motors 170 million kilowatts, the elimination of inefficient motors in use 160 million kilowatts, the implementation of energy-saving technology reform of motor systems 100 million kilowatts, the implementation of the elimination of motor efficient remanufacturing 20 million kilowatts.

Second, China's small electrical motors exports will gradually release

At present, Europe and the United States and other developed countries engaged in the production of traditional motor enterprises have become less and less, in this context, China's motor enterprises may become their importers. China's existing stock of high-efficiency motors produced by the motor is mainly sold to foreign countries. According to industry sources, the application ratio in China is currently only 23%25%.

China has gradually become a major motor manufacturing country and has mastered the production technology of high-efficiency and super-efficient energy-saving motors, but overall, the competitiveness of the motor manufacturing industry is still weak, with high motor usage and low energy efficiency levels. The energy efficiency use of electric motors, transformers and other power-consuming equipment, with large usage and wide application area, accounts for 64% of the electricity consumed by the whole society through electric motors every year, and the energy consumption of electric motors in the industrial field accounts for more than 70% of the total electricity consumption in the industrial field.

Yisenbao is a capacitor motor supplier,sell temperature resistance motor like small electrical motors general-purpose motor, It's the right choice for your business

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robertreich · 4 years

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Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers Lose

Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t. Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out. At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap. These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures -- under intense corporate lobbying -- have enacted laws making it harder to form unions. Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages. Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels. To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time.

In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages.

As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act.

In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry. Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance. Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors. -- The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay. -- The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions. -- High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market. If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition. This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile -- and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight. And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy. Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power. These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped.

They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story. The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high. Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!

And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company's safety issues. While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.

In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are. Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.

Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions. As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives.

Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.” Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize. All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage. All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.

That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment. The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains. So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages? For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment. Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent. Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system. Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies. Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing. This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.

#monopoly #antitrust #unions #wages #jobs and wages #video #videos

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xtruss · 3 years

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The Other Afghan Women

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

— By Anand Gopal | September 6, 2021 | The New Yorker

More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.Photograph by Stephen Dupont / Contact Press Images

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls’ education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. “I’ve never met a foreigner before,” she said shyly. “Well, a foreigner without a gun.”

Shakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. “Of course, we women knew electricity was fine,” she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. “Is it true?” she asked a friend who’d accompanied her to the safe house. “Could it be?”

Shakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour, passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.

The violence in the countryside continued to spread. Early one morning when Shakira was five, her aunt awakened her in a great hurry. The children were led by the adults of the village to a mountain cave, where they huddled for hours. At night, Shakira watched artillery streak the sky. When the family returned to Pan Killay, the wheat fields were charred, and crisscrossed with the tread marks of Soviet tanks. The cows had been mowed down with machine guns. Everywhere she looked, she saw neighbors—men she used to call “uncle”—lying bloodied. Her grandfather hadn’t hidden with her, and she couldn’t find him in the village. When she was older, she learned that he’d gone to a different cave, and had been caught and executed by the Soviets.

Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. “We would look for Russian helicopters,” she said. “It was like spotting strange birds.” Sometimes, those birds swooped low, the earth exploded, and the children rushed to the site to forage for iron, which could be sold for a good price. Occasionally she gathered metal shards so that she could build a doll house. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photograph of a plastic doll that exhibited the female form; her mother snatched it away, calling it inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks.

When she was eleven, she stopped going outside. Her world shrank to the three rooms of her house and the courtyard, where she learned to sew, bake bread in a tandoor, and milk cows. One day, passing jets rattled the house, and she took sanctuary in a closet. Underneath a pile of clothes, she discovered a child’s alphabet book that had belonged to her grandfather—the last person in the family to attend school. During the afternoons, while her parents napped, she began matching the Pashto words to pictures. She recalled, “I had a plan to teach myself a little every day.”

In 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the pounding of mortars outside the house’s mud walls. Competing mujahideen factions were now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pan Killay were lucrative targets: there were farmers to tax, rusted Soviet tanks to salvage, opium to export. Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, “We didn’t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.”

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents’ front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village “as if he were the President.” Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets’ defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado’s men went from door to door, demanding a “tax” and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family’s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she’d been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

By the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He’d recently married a young woman, Sana, who’d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called “the land where women have freedom”—but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.

Shakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado’s men surrounded her with guns. “Where’s your uncle?” one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house—followed by Sana’s spurned fiancé. “She’s the one!” he said. The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira’s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana’s husband turned himself in to Dado’s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman’s religious court and sentenced to death.

Not long afterward, the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders—who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding—issued a decree declaring that “women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.” Women were likewise banned from “walking gracefully or with pride.” Religious police began roaming the city’s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres.

Yet the new mujahideen government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war. At night in Pan Killay, Shakira heard gunfire and, sometimes, the shouts of men. In the morning, while tending the cows, she’d see neighbors carrying wrapped bodies. Her family gathered in the courtyard and discussed, in low voices, how they might escape. But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakira’s father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.

The family, penned between Amir Dado to the north and the Ninety-third Division to the south, was growing desperate. Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: “The Taliban are here!” She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. Shakira hadn’t ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students she’d seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen’s banner but quit after the Soviets’ withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as they’d descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dado’s positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. “He’s gone,” Shakira’s brother kept saying. “He really is.” The Taliban soon dissolved Dado’s religious court—freeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting execution—and eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.

When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.

Shakira recounted to me a newfound serenity: quiet mornings with steaming green tea and naan bread, summer evenings on the rooftop. Mothers and aunts and grandmothers began to discreetly inquire about her eligibility; in the village, marriage was a bond uniting two families. She was soon betrothed to a distant relative whose father had vanished, presumably at the hands of the Soviets. The first time she laid eyes on her fiancé was on their wedding day: he was sitting sheepishly, surrounded by women of the village, who were ribbing him about his plans for the wedding night. “Oh, he was a fool!” Shakira recalled, laughing. “He was so embarrassed, he tried to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back.”

Like many enterprising young men in the valley, he was employed in opium trafficking, and Shakira liked the glint of determination in his eyes. Yet she started to worry that grit alone might not be enough. As Taliban rule established itself, a conscription campaign was launched. Young men were taken to northern Afghanistan, to help fight against a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira watched a helicopter alight in a field and unload the bodies of fallen conscripts. Men in the valley began hiding in friends’ houses, moving from village to village, terrified of being called up. Impoverished tenant farmers were the most at risk—the rich could buy their way out of service. “This was the true injustice of the Taliban,” Shakira told me. She grew to loathe the sight of roving Taliban patrols.

In 2000, Helmand Province experienced punishing drought. The watermelon fields lay ruined, and the bloated corpses of draft animals littered the roads. In a flash of cruelty, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, chose that moment to ban opium cultivation. The valley’s economy collapsed. Pazaro recalled, “We had nothing to eat, the land gave us nothing, and our men couldn’t provide for our children. The children were crying, they were screaming, and we felt like we’d failed.” Shakira, who was pregnant, dipped squares of stale naan into green tea to feed her nieces and nephews. Her husband left for Pakistan, to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira was stricken by the thought that her baby would emerge lifeless, that her husband would never return, that she would be alone. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.

One day, an announcer on the radio said that there had been an attack in America. Suddenly, there was talk that soldiers from the richest country on earth were coming to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira’s heart stirred with hope.

One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she’d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.

The U.S. had swiftly toppled the Taliban following its invasion, installing in Kabul the government of Hamid Karzai. Dado, who had befriended American Special Forces, became the chief of intelligence for Helmand Province. One of his brothers was the governor of the Sangin district, and another brother became Sangin’s chief of police. In Helmand, the first year of the American occupation had been peaceful, and the fields once again burst with poppies. Shakira now had two small children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband had returned from Pakistan and found work ferrying bags of opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.” They were now patrolling together, and soon after the attack the joint operation searched Shakira’s village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers did not stay at her home long, but she could not get the sight of the rifle muzzles out of her mind. The next morning, she removed the rugs and scrubbed the boot marks away.

Shakira’s friends and neighbors were too terrified to speak out, but the United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was “far from being a Jeffersonian Democrat” his form of rough justice was “the time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.”

Shakira’s husband stopped leaving the house as Helmandis continued to be taken away on flimsy pretexts. A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guantánamo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. “We were so happy with the Americans,” he said later, at a military tribunal. “I didn’t know eventually I would come to Cuba.”

Nasrullah ultimately returned home, but some detainees never made it back. Abdul Wahid, of Gereshk, was arrested by the Ninety-third Division and beaten severely; he was delivered to U.S. custody and left in a cage, where he died. U.S. military personnel noted burns on his chest and stomach, and bruising to his hips and groin. According to a declassified investigation, Special Forces soldiers reported that Wahid’s wounds were consistent with “a normal interview/interrogation method” used by the Ninety-third Division. A sergeant stated that he “could provide photographs of prior detainees with similar injuries.” Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division—a violation of the Leahy Law, which bars American personnel from knowingly backing units that commit flagrant human-rights abuses.

In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A Ninety-third commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a “private-security company” under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the Division’s fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the Ninety-third’s leader engineered a hit that killed fifteen policemen, and then recovered the contract.) The remaining third of the Division, finding themselves subjected to extortion threats from their former colleagues, absconded with their weapons and joined the Taliban.

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

It was now 2005, four years after the American invasion, and Shakira had a third child on the way. Her domestic duties consumed her—“morning to night, I was working and sweating”—but when she paused from stoking the tandoor or pruning the peach trees she realized that she’d lost the sense of promise she’d once felt. Nearly every week, she heard of another young man being spirited away by the Americans or the militias. Her husband was unemployed, and recently he’d begun smoking opium. Their marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house, matching the village’s grim mood.

So when a Taliban convoy rolled into Pan Killay, with black-turbanned men hoisting tall white flags, she considered the visitors with interest, even forgiveness. This time, she thought, things might be different.

In 2006, the U.K. joined a growing contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to quell the rebellion in Sangin. Soon, Shakira recalled, “hell began.” The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on combat outposts, and set up roadblocks. On a hilltop in Pan Killay, the Americans commandeered a drug lord’s house, transforming it into a compound of sandbags and watchtowers and concertina wire. Before most battles, young Talibs visited houses, warning residents to leave immediately. Then the Taliban would launch their assault, the coalition would respond, and the earth would shudder.

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

Not since childhood had Shakira known anyone who’d died by air strike. She was now twenty-seven, and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she’d need to run for cover. One night, she awoke to a screeching noise so loud that she wondered if the house was being torn apart. Her husband was still snoring away, and she cursed him under her breath. She tiptoed to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles were passing by, trundling over scrap metal strewn out front. She roused the family. It was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She thrust the children into recessed windows—a desperate attempt to protect them in case a strike caused the roof to collapse—and covered them with heavy blankets.

Returning to the front yard, Shakira spotted one of the foreigners’ vehicles sitting motionless. A pair of antennas projected skyward. They’re going to kill us, she thought. She climbed onto the roof, and saw that the vehicle was empty: the soldiers had parked it and left on foot. She watched them march over the footbridge and disappear into the reeds.

A few fields away, the Taliban and the foreigners began firing. For hours, the family huddled indoors. The walls shook, and the children cried. Shakira brought out her cloth dolls, rocked Ahmed against her chest, and whispered stories. When the guns fell silent, around dawn, Shakira went out for another look. The vehicle remained there, unattended. She was shaking in anger. All year, roughly once a month, she had been subjected to this terror. The Taliban had launched the attack, but most of her rage was directed at the interlopers. Why did she, and her children, have to suffer?

A wild thought flashed through her head. She rushed into the house and spoke with her mother-in-law. The soldiers were still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law grabbed a jerrican of diesel fuel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the jerrican and understood, hurrying back with a second jug. Shakira’s mother-in-law doused a tire, then popped the hood and soaked the engine. Shakira struck a match, and dropped it onto the tire.

From the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze. Before long, they heard the whirring of a helicopter, approaching from the south. “It’s coming for us!” her mother-in-law shouted. Shakira’s brother-in-law, who was staying with them, frantically gathered the children, but Shakira knew that it was too late. If we’re going to die, let’s die at home, she thought.

They threw themselves into a shallow trench in the back yard, the adults on top of the children. The earth shook violently, then the helicopter flew off. When they emerged, Shakira saw that the foreigners had targeted the burning vehicle, so that none of its parts would fall into enemy hands.

The women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, “a hero.” But she had difficulty mustering any pride, only relief. “I was thinking that they would not come here anymore,” she said. “And we would have peace.”

In 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers. Britain’s forces were beleaguered—a third of its casualties in Afghanistan would occur in Sangin, leading some soldiers to dub the mission “Sangingrad.” Nilofar, now eight, could intuit the rhythms of wartime. She would ask Shakira, “When are we going to Auntie Farzana’s house?” Farzana lived in the desert.

But the chaos wasn’t always predictable: one afternoon, the foreigners again appeared before anyone could flee, and the family rushed into the back-yard trench. A few doors down, the wife and children of the late Abdul Salam did the same, but a mortar killed his fifteen-year-old daughter, Bor Jana.

Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

In this way, Shakira’s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. ��That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”

Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.

Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.

Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.

Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.

Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.

Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.

Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.” The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as “unfavorable,” with villagers warning that, if the coalition “did not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.”

In response, the coalition shifted to the hearts-and-minds strategy of counter-insurgency. But the foreigners’ efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. “They were coming by force, without getting permission from us,” Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. “They sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.” Marzia, a woman from Pan Killay, recalled, “The Taliban would fire a few shots, but the Americans would respond with mortars.” One mortar slammed into her mother-in-law’s house. She survived, Marzia said, but had since “lost control of herself”—always “shouting at things we can’t see, at ghosts.”

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

The Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control. The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds—leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only “rubble and dirt.” The Sangin market had been obliterated in this way. When Shakira first saw the ruined shops, she told her husband, “They left nothing for us.”

Still, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay. Shakira’s husband slaughtered a sheep to celebrate the end of the war, and the family discussed renovating the garden. Her mother-in-law spoke of the days before the Russians and the Americans, when families picnicked along the canal, men stretched out in the shade of peach trees, and women dozed on rooftops under the stars.

But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.

On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

The Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability. As the Afghan government crumbled this summer, I travelled through Helmand Province—the Emirate’s de-facto capital—to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.

I departed from Lashkar Gah, which remained under government control. At the outskirts stood a squat cement building with an Afghan-government flag—beyond this checkpoint, Kabul’s authority vanished. A pickup idled nearby; piled into the cargo bed were half a dozen members of the sangorian, a feared militia in the pay of the Afghan intelligence agency, which was backed by the C.I.A. Two of the fighters appeared no older than twelve.

I was with two locals in a beat-up Corolla, and we slipped past the checkpoint without notice. Soon, we were in a treeless horizon of baked earth, with virtually no road beneath us. We passed abandoned outposts of the Afghan Army and Police that had been built by the Americans and the Brits. Beyond them loomed a series of circular mud fortifications, with a lone Taliban sniper splayed on his stomach. White flags fluttered behind him, announcing the gateway to the Islamic Emirate.

The most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we’d left behind was the dearth of gunmen. In Afghanistan, I’d grown accustomed to kohl-eyed policemen in baggy trousers, militiamen in balaclavas, intelligence agents inspecting cars. Yet we rarely crossed a Taliban checkpoint, and when we did the fighters desultorily examined the car. “Everyone is afraid of the Taliban,” my driver said, laughing. “The checkpoints are in our hearts.”

If people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them. Here and there, groups of villagers sat under roadside trellises, sipping tea with Talibs. The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin. In the canal, boys were having swimming races; village men and Taliban were dipping their feet into the turquoise water. We passed green cropland and canopies of fruit trees. Groups of women walked along a market road, and two girls skipped in rumpled frocks.

We approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. The Taliban had launched an assault, and the thuds of artillery resounded across the plain. A stream of families, their donkeys laboring under the weight of giant bundles, were escaping what they said were air strikes. By the roadside, a woman in a powder-blue burqa stood with a wheelbarrow; inside was a wrapped body. Some Taliban were gathered on a hilltop, lowering a fallen comrade into a grave.

I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.

At the house of the Taliban district governor, a group of Talibs sat eating okra and naan, donated by the village. I asked them about their plans for when the war was over. Most said that they’d return to farming, or pursue religious education. I’d flown to Afghanistan from Iraq, a fact that impressed Hamid, a young commander. He said that he dreamed of seeing the Babylonian ruins, and asked, “Do you think, when this is over, they’ll give me a visa?”

It was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next. During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate. Politically minded Talibs who have lived abroad and maintain homes in Doha or Pakistan told me—perhaps with calculation—that they had a more cosmopolitan outlook than before. A scholar who’d spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, “There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn’t know about human rights, education, politics—we just took everything by power. But now we understand.” In the scholar’s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work “shoulder to shoulder” with men.

Yet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Taliban’s march to Kabul, a city he’d never seen. He guessed that he’d arrive there in mid-August.

On the most sensitive question in village life—women’s rights—men like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, “They haven’t changed at all.”

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

This grim calculus hovered over every conversation I had with villagers. In the hamlet of Yakh Chal, I came upon the ruins of an Afghan Army outpost that had recently been overrun by the Taliban. All that remained were mounds of scrap metal, cords, hot plates, gravel. The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell. Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that “even Kalashnikovs could fire on it.” But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. “There were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning,” another witness said. “Many small children.” According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.

Later, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, “I asked the crew why they did this, and they said, ‘We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion’ ”—a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans—“ ‘gave orders to kill them all.’ ” As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, “When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.” The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, “We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.”

General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army’s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

In the course of a few hours in 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son. Three years later, they killed the warlord himself—who by then had joined parliament—in a roadside blast. The orchestrator of the assassination hailed from Pan Killay. In one light, the attack is the mark of a fundamentalist insurgency battling an internationally recognized government; in another, a campaign of revenge by impoverished villagers against their former tormentor; or a salvo in a long-simmering tribal war; or a hit by a drug cartel against a rival enterprise. All these readings are probably true, simultaneously. What’s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.

It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August—just as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans’ frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life. “Bro, you’ve got to help me,” the helicopter pilot I’d spoken with earlier pleaded over the phone. At the time, he was fighting crowds to get within sight of the airport gate; when the wheels of the last U.S. aircraft pulled off the runway, he was left behind. His boss, Sami Sadat, reportedly escaped to the U.K.

Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War—and have now lost—are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. “I’ve worked too hard to get here,” she told me. “I studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life’s dream.” She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

The women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble—they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. “Women and men aren’t equal,” Shakira told me. “They are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn’t have.” More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. “Too much freedom is dangerous, because people won’t know the limits,” she said.

All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun—and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. “The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,” Pazaro told me. “As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.” I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. “It’s the culture in the village, not Islam,” he said. “The people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.” Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.

Though Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself. Through the decades of war, she continued to teach herself to read, and she is now working her way through a Pashto translation of the Quran, one sura at a time. “It gives me great comfort,” she said. She is teaching her youngest daughter the alphabet, and has a bold ambition: to gather her friends and demand that the men erect a girls’ school.

Even as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past. The village, she told me, has a cemetery that spreads across a few hilltops. There are no plaques, no flags, just piles of stones that glow red and pink in the evening sun. A pair of blank flagstones project from each grave, one marking the head, one the feet.

Shakira’s family visits every week, and she points to the mounds where her grandfather lies, where her cousins lie, because she doesn’t want her children to forget. They tie scarves on tree branches to attract blessings, and pray to those departed. They spend hours amid a sacred geography of stones, shrubs, and streams, and Shakira feels renewed.

Shortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban’s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself. She told me that she won’t mind the missing kitchen, or the gaping hole where the pantry once stood. Instead, she chooses to see a village in rebirth. Shakira is sure that a freshly paved road will soon run past the house, the macadam sizzling hot on summer days. The only birds in the sky will be the kind with feathers. Nilofar will be married, and her children will walk along the canal to school. The girls will have plastic dolls, with hair that they can brush. Shakira will own a machine that can wash clothes. Her husband will get clean, he will acknowledge his failings, he will tell his family that he loves them more than anything. They will visit Kabul, and stand in the shadow of giant glass buildings. “I have to believe,” she said. “Otherwise, what was it all for?” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the September 13, 2021, issue.

— Anand Gopal, the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” is writing a book on the Arab revolutions.

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