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MAY 18, 2012 12:55 AM

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The End of Holographic Politics As We Know It Masahide T. Kato

Masahide T. Kato is a scholar, instructor in the University of Hawaii system and the author of From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution and Popular Culture (SUNY Press).

Here he examines the notion of holographic politics and simulacra and the ways in which they function in the political: Dont support the phony; support the real. Tupac Amaru Shakur On April 15th, 2012, Tupac Shakur resurrected himself at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, and performed two songs with Snoop Dog. Or did he? As it turns out, it was Dr. Dre who genetically engineered the return of Shakur as a hologram, working closely with the Hollywood digital media companies. Dres association with Tupac goes back to the time when he was a cofounder of Death Row Records that bailed Tupac out of jail for 1.4 million dollars in 1995. Though Dre pulled himself out of Death Records shortly before the untimely death of Shakur, this holographic reunion of Snoop, Dre, and Pac was a reminiscence of the gangsta rap culture that Dre has projected as his public image since his days with N.W.A. The holographic representation of their reunion, therefore, is a perfect tribute not so much to Tupac Shakur as to Dr. Dres image commodity or his intellectual property rights, which lacks real life experience of being a gangsta or thug.

Upon viewing the holographic Tupac, I was reminded of Jean Baudrillards concept of simulacra. In his book entitled Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard analyzes the social construction of reality in the age of global capitalism where reality as such is taken over by the power of simulation. What I gleaned from Baudrillards work is that the relationship between our existence or being and our perception is increasingly destabilized by the corporate mediation of reality through manufactured imagery. Consequently, our experience of the reality becomes less autonomous or less sovereign in the sense that it is largely structured by the consumption of simulacra as a commodity.

During the first war on Iraq in 1991, Baudrillard stirred up a controversy by publishing three part short essays entitled the The Gulf War will not take place, The Gulf War is not taking place, and The Gulf War did not take place in Libration, a daily French newspaper. In the age of globalization, war as such gets detached from the realm of our experience as an event or truth. War has become an act of mindless observation. This was so both for those who observed the war at home through the mass medias representation of war as a surgical operation and those who actually participated in the war as a soldier. The latters perspective was captured in the film called Jarhead (2006) directed by ex-marine Sam Mendez. In this testimonial film of the Gulf War, there is no combat in a classic sense of the term. The combat is replaced by the massive aerial bombardment that incinerates all matters, organic or otherwise. The only trace of combat is the film (within a film), Apocalypse Now, which marines watch festively at the base immediately preceding their deployment to Kuwait. The dominance of simulacra in the age of globalization emanates from the heart of its engine, global economy. The impetus that drove the global financial market in the early 2000s and

landed on a catastrophic global meltdown in 2008 was the sub prime mortgage. The banks and mortgage companies aggressively marketed loans to those who couldnt normally afford homes. The massive debts with limited prospects of redemption were then bundled together as securities to be traded on the Wall Street and global financial markets. The toxic products have eventually induced a global financial haemorrhage in 2008. Just recently, one of the largest global banks, J. P. Morgan declared that it lost $2 billion in the first quarter for investing in the synthetic credit portfolios, a complex financial product based on the bond investment and default insurance.

Both sub prime mortgage and synthetic credit portfolio are essentially marketing debt. Similar to carbon trading, global financial institutions have been marketing hazards. Whereas carbon trading still has pollution as its substance, marketing debt doesnt have a substance until there is redemption: It is a pure simulacrum or theoretical existence, and hence, ontologically deficient. Even though the privatized central bank could pump up the currency to reconstitute an appearance of substance, the trillions dollars in bail out and the quantitative easing (i.e., debt monetization) have completely wiped out the last vestige of ontology and sovereignty from the global currency; the global currency has thus become holographic. While global financial institutions have been engaged in trading phantoms, millions have lost their jobs and homes and the manufacturing of actual goods and substances have moved to sweat shops and prisons. The factory-prison system in turn has decimated the basis of nature and sustenance economies. In the light of this catastrophe created by the global holographic economy, the rise of popular sovereignty in Europe, Middle East, and the US is not simply about the economic disparity but also about the demise of the real. How do you live in a hologram? How can you eat simulacra? Repulsed by the holographic Tupac, I was compelled to revisit his real life history as a second generation descendant of the Black Panther Party. There I bumped into a manifesto entitled Codes of the Thug Life which was written in 1992. It cautions how the thug life that can be the basis of autonomous economy and politics has become the very tool of auto-genocide: The thug life is a tool of the enemy as it exists today, it must change. Outside forces and methods whose interests are being served by the hustlers, the crews have no dignity, they have no honor and this must be corrected. A counsel must be called put a code to the thug life. We accept that the game will go on until our liberation. What we wont accept is that the game will destroy us from within before we get another chance and rebuild. We will not allow ourselves to be played by the covert operations, cointelpro, and law intensity warfare waged by the United States government.

Particularly towards the end of his life after his release from the prison, Shakur has taken on a more politically strategic path as his alias Makaveli (he named himself after Niccolo Machiavelli during his imprisonment) might suggest. In the above manifesto, Shakur is giving a new meaning to the thug life as an alternative to the polis. In lieu of the modern polis as a gated community for the 1%, the thug life posits a communal alternative for the ghetto masses. Tupacs Black Panther genealogy, real life experiences of poverty, street, and thug, and his artistic talent were all about to coalesce into a political platform to organize the downtrodden youth in the ghetto. Fred Hampton organized the gangs in Chicago into a revolutionary force until his assassination. Hip Hop transformed the gang rivalry in the Bronx into a sustainable force of creativity, artistic innovation, and conviviality. Accordingly, Tupac was about to launch an organizing effort to turn the ghetto existential condition into a positive force for social change with global outreach potential. Perhaps the time wasnt ripe yet for the politicization of the thug life in the middle of 1990s when a big wave of globalization started to engulf the world with the power of simulation. But now the global masses are getting mobilized for the real, for the global thug life. In that sense, the apparition of holographic Tupac in 2012 may be a sign that the simulated reality that had colonized our perception has come to its logical end. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994). , Les cibles de Baudrillard dans Libration, Libration, March 7th, 2007. http://www.liberation.fr/evenement/010195957-les-cibles-de-baudrillard-dans-liberation (accessed on May 12, 2012) Gil Kaufman, Exclusive: Tupac Coachella Hologram Source Explains How Rapper R Resurrected, MTV, April 16, 2012.http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1683173/tupachologram-coachella.jhtml (accessed on April 16th, 2012) Dawn Koepcki, et. al., JP Morgan Loses $2 Billion on Units Egregious Mistakes, B Bloomberg, May 11, 2012.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-11/jpmorgan-loses-2billion-as-mistakes-trounce-hedges.html (accessed on May 11th, 2012)

APRIL 12, 2012 11:38 PM

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Making Sense of the Ceded Lands: A Historical Assessment

This article was published in the Hawaii Independent during the US Supreme Court case regarding the ceded lands in 2009. Im posting it here because there is no link to it on the Independent website: A recent Honolulu Advertiser article stated that the States title to Hawaiis ceded lands was not in dispute in the current struggle over those lands. In her State of the State address, governor Linda Lingle said that the case was not over the States right to sell ceded lands, but over the title to such lands. Many assert that Hawaiians claim to the ceded lands is merely moral, not legal. Who is right? In this article I review the history of the ceded lands and make the case that, contrary to Lingles claim, Hawaiians have a legal claim to these lands.

The Ceded lands are the combined government and Crown (the monarchs private) lands originally divided during the Mhele of 1848. The word ceded is often put in quotes because the term means transferred, typically by treaty as there was no treaty of annexation, the very existence of ceded lands is questionable. These lands were taken by the government of the Republic of Hawaii (the formalized version of the overthrow-created Provisional Government), then transferred to the US government upon annexation. Many have pointed out that the State has never made in inventory of these lands, nor kept track of which were originally public and which private. Confiscation of the ceded lands by the US Federal government began immediately after annexation. On September 28, 1899, an executive order issued by President McKinley suspended any transactions pertaining to the public lands of Hawaii by the Republic of Hawaii. This was after annexation but before the Organic Act that created the territorial government. It was in response to a report recommending that the current sites of Schofield Barracks and Fort Shafter on the island of Oahu be obtained through condemnation procedures. Five such executive orders were issued between 1898 and 1900 securing land for military purposes, and, according to the dissenting report of the Native Hawaiians Study Commission, the military has made extensive use of Hawaiis public lands ever since. In 1900, the Organic Act, which contained the provision that ceded the lands to the territorial government and charged it with their maintenance and management. In 1921, just under 200,000 acres were carved out of these lands, creating the Hawaiian Home Lands trust. These were some of the poorest agricultural lands out of the ceded lands, as sugar growers and ranchers retained the prime public lands. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, these lands were again transferred to the newly created state government. The Federal government set aside 287, 078 acres of public lands, of which 60,000 acres were used by the military. An additional 28,000 acres were obtained in fee through purchase or condemnation. 117,000 acres were held under permits and licenses. 87,000 of these acres were retained by the military, while 30,000 of these acres were obtained through leases of $1 for each lease for 65 years. Upon statehood in 1959, the 5(f) provision in the Statehood Act named five purposes for the ceded lands, including the betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians. The proportion of revenue from these lands to be conveyed to Hawaiians was disputed in court for decades. Originally set at twenty percent, then struck down, negotiations are ongoing over a settlement for neglected payments to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Abuses of the ceded and Hawaiian Home Lands abounded. Included in this acreage is Mkua valley, used since World War II as a live fire military training area. The Hawaii state government has withdrawn 13,000 acres from the Hawaiian Homes trust through Governors Executive Orders (GEOs), primarily for game reserves, forest conservation, military, airports, and public services. Title to the ceded lands, however, is a more contentious issue. Supreme court cases in 1864 and 1910 made the private Crown lands look more like public lands, reinforcing the governments claim to them. As UH law professor Jon Van Dyke points out, however, in his book Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii, these lands have several potential breaks in the chain of title, which create a strong Hawaiian claim to these lands. Van Dyke recommends that they become the basis of a Hawaiian governing entity, presumably created by the Akaka bill. Then there is the issue of title to the Hawaiian Kingdom government lands, acquired from a government that President Grover Cleveland described as owing its existence to the armed intervention of the United States. In real estate law, it is never what you claim to own, but what the previous owner can prove they owned, that is the basis for determining title. This

seriously weakens the States claim, as the Federal government twice in 1893 and 1993 with the apology resolution denied the legitimacy of the Provisional Government, and by extension, the Republic of Hawaii, the source of its title. The State of Hawaii may in fact have eminent domain, the right to confiscate lands, but they arent claiming to have gained title through eminent domain. Unlike Britain and other countries, in US law, the government does not have any special rights as a land owner other than eminent domain, which, incidentally is not in the US constitution, but only asserted by the supreme court. Thus, the States assertion of title to the ceded lands is necessarily through their transfer from the Republic of Hawaii. A final note: in Hawaiian Kingdom land law (which essentially continued after the overthrow, otherwise Kamehameha Schools and the Big Five wouldnt own their land), the government did have special rights called dominium and all makainana were part of the government where land rights were concerned. These native tenant rights, at least theoretically, still exist today, and allow native Hawaiians to divide out the interest (or rights) and claim parcels out of government or private lands. They are not, as is commonly believed, gathering rights, but the right to a feesimple parcel of land. This means no one owns their land absolutely as all original land titles contain the provision ua koe ke kuleana o na kanaka reserving the rights of native tenants. So Lingle is right that this case is about title to ceded lands, she is wrong about who holds that title. The Hawaiian claim to the ceded lands is as much legal as it is moral.