The F-Bomb

Posted on November 1, 2024 by camelotkidd

I don’t know about you but I’m pretty fucking sick of the F-Bomb, you know–Fascism–the ultimate liberal pejorative.

This warning only applies to Trump and his MAGA supporters, but Team Blue, led by Biden and Harris spent the last year aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, where the US provided unprecedented political, financial, legal, military and public relations support and cover to save Israel from losing its edge as a client state for the American empire. The Biden-Harris administration has provided billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, which has used them to turn Gaza into a wasteland of rubble, sewage and corpses with hardly any health care or aid. The State Department has yet to take action on almost 500 reports it’s received claiming Israel used American weapons to cause excessive civilian harm in Gaza, according to The Washington Post on Wednesday. Is that not fascism?

The Biden Administration has been arming, training and supporting actual fascists–The Azov Regiment–while stoking a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Is that not fascism?

There’s the Censorship/Industrial/Complex that’s arisen since Trump’s election in 2016 to halt the free exchange of controversial ideas. Is that not fascism?

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the Democratic Party’s embrace of the deep state nexus of alphabet intelligence agencies, where since the Russia-gate, what the spooks have long done abroad with Color Revolutions now returns to sender. Is that not fascism?

Since the 2016 election there has been a loud narrative that Donald Trump represents a unique and imminent threat to continued health and even existence of the Republic, and that removing Trump from power is the overwhelming priority of all good-faith political advocacy to the exclusion of everything else. The Democrats have never recovered from the disruption in 2016 of their dream that history was about to end and their idea of the liberal ethos would eternally prevail. What’s ironic is that liberals were so busy shrieking their rage and hatred at Trump that they failed to do anything about the issues that brought him to power.  

Hence the fascism label. Moreover, a great many of the liberals who spend their time denouncing Trump as a fascist most loudly, have started insisting that free speech and other constitutional guarantees of civil rights are bad things that should be gotten rid of. Is that not the stirrings of fascism?

I know this is controversial but hear me out. What if what liberals are describing as fascism isn’t? What exercises liberals and what propelled Trump to the White House was MAGA (Make America Great Again). Liberals are certain that this is straight up racism, sexism and ultimately fascism, but for many Americans it’s all about economics. For many, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose.

Since Bill Clinton’s administration the US has hemorrhaged millions of good paying, unionized manufacturing jobs that provided Americans a middle-class lifestyle. Heterodox economist, Servaas Storm, explains the gritty details. “Labour markets were enthusiastically deregulated, with the explicit and generous approval of central banks and governments, to break the structural inflationary power of unions and to create a flexible reserve of surplus workers with no choice but to work in temporary low-wage jobs in what is now known as the ‘gig’ economy. Globalization and offshoring contributed to breaking the countervailing power of organized workers because they offered corporations (the threat of) an opt-out possibility that was not available to workers. Taken together, the change in macroeconomic policy regime produced a structurally low-inflation economy, based on ‘traumatized workers’ in precarious jobs, who could not plausibly fight for higher wages and more secure employment conditions, given their daily struggles and the systemic biases they are facing. The wellspring of cost-push inflation had been radically removed.

Stagnant wages and incomes for the 90% mean that income (and wealth) inequality rises and that aggregate household savings go up. Higher household savings reduce consumption demand, which holds up fixed business investment for the domestic market. In effect, aggregate demand growth stagnates, and pressures for demand-pull inflation evaporate. With inflation (and expected inflation) being low in structural terms, central banks lower the interest rate, in accordance with the recommendations based on the monetary policy rules proposed by establishment economics.

The low interest rates, in turn, fuel asset-price bubbles, creating wealth gains for the rich, and over-indebtedness for the bottom 90% of households, which use cheap credit to finance essential expenses on education, medical care and housing. This reinforces wealth and income inequalities, and pushes up asset prices even more, but this does not lead to higher economic growth and better jobs, because the richest 10% use their savings and wealth gains not for investments in the real economy, but to speculate in financial markets. The past two decades have made it abundantly clear that the gains made by the top 10% in financial markets do not trickle down to the real economy.”

It’s not like any of this was a mystery. Alan Greenspan gloated that American workers were too traumatized to ask for a raise. Greenspan called it the Traumatized Worker Syndrome, and said, the reason you’ve had this huge productivity gain without any wage increase is workers are afraid to go on strike, or even to complain about working conditions, because they’re just one paycheck away from homelessness. Since then, elite economists and their billionaire benefactors have celebrated the “new economy,” where there was “no alternative.”

Until Trump came along.

I know this remains controversial but what if MAGA is largely a yearning for economic security?

By the way, I’m not a Trump supporter. I find both parties to be odious, both flirting with fascism because of their billionaire backers attraction to fascism in order to protect their wealth. The case of Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, is illustrative. Anti-trust is one of the few bright spots of the Biden Administration and Khan has been relentless in opposing corporate concentration, earning her unending enmity from the billionaires who control the US economy. What’s particularly noteworthy is that billionaires from Team Blue, like Reid Hoffman, and billionaires from Team Red, like Elon Musk, together want her gone so they can continue pillaging. Talk about bi-partisanship.

Mussolini defined fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power.”

We are warned incessantly about the threat of Russia or China but the real danger comes from the oligarchs and corporations that have captured the US government. It matters not if a Republican or Democrat administration comes to power.

Anyway, don’t listen to me. Just vote harder.

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Market Mechanisms

Posted on October 25, 2024 by camelotkidd

I’m fascinated by ideas and ideologies and none have animated me quite like the ideology of neoliberalism with its mantra that there’s “no alternative.” This bold pronouncement, along with its twin, that “there is no society,” always seemed like a challenge, and I’ve spent the better part of my adult life seeking to understand neoliberalism’s history and trajectory.

In our present milieu neoliberalism is ubiquitous, with the idea that markets are self-correcting and that whatever markets do is right. Neoliberalism regards buying and selling in markets as the template for human relations and claims that market choices scale up to the social good. To ask Americans about it is to ask a fish about water, yet neoliberalism has a history and progenitors, who talked and wrote about it in a specific fashion.

Milton Friedman is one of those, and his 1970 article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled–A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, was an opening salvo of the neoliberal revolution that would transform economics, corporate law and social relations. Friedman warned that accepting “social responsibility” was equivalent to submitting to the inevitable tyranny of collectivism. The doctrine of “social responsibility…does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine.”

Did you catch that? Friedman is saying that to acknowledge any collective morality, or any responsibility besides profit was a “socialist” view because it subverted the “market mechanism,” which to Friedman was the only way in which to order the US and Western capitalist/democracies.

This is world in which we live and was the outcome of a “counterrevolution,” led by neoliberal intellectuals like Milton Friedman, through which capitalists and their affiliated ideologues seized control of the fiscal and monetary capacities of the state amidst the 1970s crisis. The result was less spending for workers and more spending for the wealthy that emerged as complementary pillars of a coherent policy paradigm for restoring the power of asset owners following the crisis. 

What you see is a strange mix of largess and austerity that defines neoliberalism and has reshaped class politics in the United States: massive deficit spending and low interest rates to drive up asset values, on the one hand, and ever-deeper cuts to social spending, on the other. Rather than diminishing the state neoliberalism repurposes the state for economic extraction, draining resources away from society as a whole and funneling them into the pockets of the billionaires. 

Neoliberalism is amorphous by design but Friedman articulates a world where there is no social only the market. Market mechanisms are to replace society and neoliberalism confers freedom to capital while relegating the rest of us to wage slavery. This is the logic of neoliberalism and it’s no wonder our country is so fucked up and Americans are so sick and unhappy.

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I read it on the Internet

Posted on October 18, 2024 by camelotkidd

We live in a media environment awash with sophisticated advertising, public-relations posing as news, and tribal propaganda. Back in the old days Americans got their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and while there was propaganda, Americans generally trusted the media. The rise of Google and their monopolization of advertising revenue has eviscerated local newspapers, while the rise of social media has produced a information dystopia.

Meanwhile, the US economy and infrastructure are in tatters, it’s fueling a proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian, threatening war with China over Taiwan, and actively supporting genocidal ethnic cleansing–killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of mainly children and women and trampling every precept of humanitarian and international law–on behalf of Israel, a violent settler-colonial project.  And in this catastrophic conjuncture, the U.S. political and media culture throws up Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, two of the most incompetent figures imaginable to vie for the presidency.

Americans have noticed.

Trust in politicians and the corporate media is at all time lows.

But don’t expect any changes. Ever since 2016 we’ve seen US empire managers publicly wringing their hands and fretting about the disadvantage they have in the information age because of the 1st Amendment which allow the enemies of liberal values–read Trump voters–to spread “propaganda” and “disinformation” to gullible Americans. And now the US government censors speech and propagandizes Americans to “manufacture consent.” But they also engage in “cognitive infiltration” to stymie the sharing of information on the internet that challenges the official story promulgated by the corporate media.

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a vibrant movement of “conspiracy theorists” developed on the Internet, arguing that the true facts had been quite different than the official story, with most of them suggesting heavy American government involvement in those momentous events. Back then, the Internet was far less channeled and regulated than it eventually became, and few effective means existed for the political establishment to shut down such troubling discussions.

Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to become a top Obama aide, shrewdly suggested that the activities of dissenters could best be undermined and disrupted by means of “cognitive infiltration.” Agents of the government or its close allies should join those online communities and promote a wide range of additional theories, often rather absurd ones, thereby stirring up internal conflicts, diverting the members into theoretical dead-ends, and heavily discrediting them with the broader American public.

The idea was that rather than attempting to refute conspiracy theories, the solution would be to infect them with wild claims and accusations to add confusion to the mix in order to misdirect them. The consequence would be that conspiracy theories would look so ridiculous that no one would believe them. What deep state managers such as Sunstein realized was that one of the most effective means of severely disrupting the investigation of a conspiracy has been to promote one or more closely-related but entirely fraudulent theories that are far more sweeping and “exciting,” and therefore draw enthusiasm from gullible conspiracy-activists.

The upshot was that as the 9/11 Truth movement began to gain traction around 2008, elements of our political establishment began a quiet but concerted effort to use such techniques of “cognitive infiltration” to sabotage and disrupt it. If it was was a deliberate attempt at organized manipulation then it succeeded brilliantly.

The ultimate result was to severely damage the credibility of all “conspiracy theorists.” Many Americans now believe that anything that reeks of a conspiracy theory–even relating to the JFK assassination or the Oklahoma bombing or 9-11–is cray-cray and those people and ideas are to be shunned.

As Ron Unz says in American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and “Cognitive Infiltration”: “Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in cognitive infiltration.”

Trump, Covid and the aftermath have brought increasingly strident call for censorship of “disinformation” and the creation of the “censorship industrial complex”, but cognitive infiltration remains an integral part of the elite toolkit. With the corporate media’s massive loss of credibility, combined with American’s low knowledge of history and politics, the information and narrative battle-space is a target rich environment that the cognitive infiltrators have taken full advantage of.

The QAnon movement, is almost certainly “cognitive infiltration”, with all of the crazy-pants ideas and narratives about the behavior of liberal elites, that made Americans who are upset about real government malfeasance sound deranged.  And, for anyone susceptible to QAnon the idea that a high-ranking Obama Administration official, like Sunstein, had previously suggested that the government employ online operatives to infiltrate and disrupt the conspiracy community would be like catnip.

Unz, again. “One of the most effective means of severely disrupting the investigation of a conspiracy has been to promote one or more closely-related but entirely fraudulent theories that are far more sweeping and exciting, and therefore draw enthusiasm from gullible conspiracy-activists. Serving as lightning-rods, such manufactured hoaxes also attract greater public attention and thereby discredit anyone seeking to challenge the official narrative of what had happened.”

I don’t know what the solution is to cognitive infiltration, but I do know that it’s not a new tactic. Cointelpro, the FBI’s clandestine war against dissidents during the Cold War, employed agent provocateurs to discredit revolutionary movements like the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panthers. Cognitive infiltrators are simply doing the same thing to online rebels.

Whenever there’s a conversation on controversial topics I can always get a laugh by confidently proclaiming specialized knowledge because I read it on the Internet. While I read a lot on the Internet, I try to read a wide variety of sources, ranging from Zero Hedge, a Libertarian site, to Jacobin, a Socialist site, then settling on Naked Capitalism, where they link to a multitude of mainstream and alternative media sources.

Halloween is coming so stay safe out there and watch out for the cognitive infiltrators.

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The Phoenix Program

Posted on October 11, 2024 by camelotkidd

I’ve come to believe that Israel has taken a page from US actions in Vietnam and instituted a Phoenix Program to eliminate the civilian cadre of Hamas and Hezbollah.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about Viet Cong combatants.  Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies.

Israel seems to be following the same playbook. In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of people in Lebanon who Israel claimed were Hezbollah combatants.

Contrary to US and Israeli commentators, the targeted were not military cadre but civilians who make up the administration side of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a resistance movement that emerged out of necessity to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression, especially during the occupation of South Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah has evolved into a multifaceted organization that encompasses political, social, and military dimensions, playing a pivotal role in safeguarding the country’s sovereignty.

As for Hezbollah’s role beyond Lebanon’s borders, Hezbollah has become a significant regional player. Its support for resistance groups across Palestine and its involvement in the global war against Syria demonstrate that Hezbollah’s role is much broader. This is not about interfering but rather about confronting a common threat. The group sees itself as part of a larger Axis of Resistance, countering U.S. and Israeli influence throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah’s significance goes beyond its military strength. It represents an ideological stance against occupation and domination, making it an indispensable part of the resistance framework in the region.

In Gaza, Israel is targeting civilian members of Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. There’s also an particularly diabolical AI targeting program called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks any Palestinian civilian, somehow associated with Hamas, home, then bombs and kills the whole family.

As for the empire, the US never really ended the Phoenix Program, it simply evolved. Phoenix was refined in the dirty wars in Central America, where it became the Salvador Option, a program of indigenous “death squads” trained by Americans to eliminate communist insurgents and the labor leaders, social workers and Catholic ministry, preaching “Liberation Theology,” who supported them.

In Chile, after supporting General Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The Salvador Option was resurrected after a deadly Ba’athist-led insurgency derailed the US occupation of Iraq. In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in Colonel James Steele, a veteran of Central America’s dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centers, torture and death squads. A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

While eschewing large occupation forces, the US has come to rely on proxies to manage the empire, however Phoenix remains standard SOP for the empire. For example: there’s the US’s penchant for using Sunni extremists–terrorists like al Qaeda–to attack and destroy Libya and attempt to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad. And, in Ukraine the use of Nazi snipers to murder Maiden protestors and Azov para-militaries to burn-alive Russian trade-unionists in Odessa in 2014.

Author of the Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine, says that the Phoenix Program has come home to the US, with the deployment of FBI Fusion Centers to track and surveil dissidents. “Only five percent of the people need to be organized in this fashion to install a fascist dictator in the United States. That is the ultimate objective of the greatest covert operation ever, the one in which the oligarchs steal everything you own.”

What’s abundantly clear is that the US empire and its murderous proxies have replaced counter-insurgency with counter-terror. Terrorizing hearts and minds has come to replace winning them over.

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October Surprise?

Posted on October 4, 2024 by camelotkidd

Wow!

Leave town for a while and all hell breaks out, although I suppose that’s to be expected when we’re living through the the Raging Twenties.

Historically an October Surprise occurs when when one of our political parties utilizes a foreign policy event to change the election trajectory but with both Republicans and Democrats committed to the proxy war in Ukraine and ironclad support for Israeli genocide it’s hard to see any surprise. Neither candidate talk about why we are engaged at all in conflicts that could have been resolved in various ways very early on and there is a certain similarity in how Democrats and Republicans respond to the fighting: both tend to support both Ukraine and Israel with only minor objections to some details in what is taking place. Both parties regard cooperating with Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu as unshakable rock-solid foreign relationships.

The most famous October Surprise took place in 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey conspired with several senior CIA officers in Europe to convince the Iranian government to delay the release of the American Embassy hostages until after the November election against Jimmy Carter. Since that time “October Surprise” has become shorthand for playing a political dirty trick shortly before the election to directly impact negatively on a candidate’s credibility or ability to respond to problems.

What certainly won’t be mentioned in the upcoming presidential election is the rapid decline of the American empire and the strategy of savagery and terror embraced as its modus-vivendi. The last twelve months have demolished any notion of Western morality, with the US and European active backing of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the terrorist pager-attack and Israel’s carefully planned assassination campaign against Hezbollah’s military leadership in Lebanon, including Hassan Nasrallah with 2000 pound bunker-busters. 

US officials are not shy in displaying their savagery, with representatives, officials and defense intellectuals rejoicing at Israel’s assassinations and terrorist pager attack. “I don’t think anyone is mourning the loss of Hassan Nasrallah,” John Kirby, the Biden regime’s national-security spokesman, told Jake Tapper on CNN last weekend. “Having decimated the command structure of Hezbollah is good for the region, good for the world.”

The hypocrisy is stunning. Ask yourself how a similar attack targeting Americans would have been depicted? Yet the rejoicing reflects a pernicious perspective that seems nearly ubiquitous in the Western post-democracies, where we’re in the garden while our enemies live in the jungle. Moreover, if you oppose the Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic-cleansing, you stand with terrorists.

The most important thing to remember about the period we’re living in is that we’re in a transition between world orders. We’re exiting US hegemony and entering an new order. However, the US refuses this reorder and the Pentagon’s vast killing machine along with its proxies, will continue to bomb, assassinate and murder – mostly civilians, unarmed women and children, who will be depicted as terrorists by the corporate media.

Since 9/11 Americans have been indoctrinated to view US actions as a war on terror but using terrorism as an excuse to kill civilians is terrorism. America’s rabid attack-dog, Israel maintains the  Dahiyeh Doctrine, where in response to any attack the Israelis bomb and kill numerous civilians.

What’s humorous is that the corporate media, which is largely in the tank for Team Blue, depicts the Biden Administration as seeking peace. “Democrats increasingly suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and by confronting Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election. The rapidly escalating confrontation between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, has undercut Biden’s efforts to achieve peace through diplomacy.”

The reality is that the Biden administration has dropped any pretense that the United Sates is not directly involved in a conflict that, like the proxy-war in Ukraine, has the potential to spiral into a nuclear exchange. Contrary to all the rah-rah triumphalism, I believe that Biden’s decision to provide “unconditional” support for Israel’s apartheid regime has put the US on a suicidal trajectory that will undermine America’s global interests while accelerating the emergence of multipolar world order.

Unfortunately, in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the Biden administration has reportedly deployed a significant number of fighter jets—including squadrons of F-15E, F-16, A-10, and F-22’s—to assist Israel in its attempt to overpower Hezbollah and cut a path to the Litani River. Biden has also sent thousands of additional troops to the region to “bolster security and…. defend Israel if necessary.”

After Iran’s recent ballistic missile strike on Israel Joe Biden stated: “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel…” And just today here’s what Biden said when asked about Israeli attempts to sway the election. “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none, and I think Bibi should remember that.”

The Democrats used to be the political party that at least pretended to oppose war and the excesses of empire but after the election of Donald Trump and Russia-gate those days are a quaint relic of a bygone era. And lest you think this belligerence is confined to the Biden Administration, Kamala Harris and her campaign have welcomed the endorsement of despicable war criminal–Dick Cheney–and his demon-spawn daughter Liz.

Update: While an October Surprise might not be in the cards perhaps there could be a November one? An Israeli false flag attack, possibly after the U.S. presidential election, for instance on a NATO vessel or on U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, to lock up the new administration into the long-planned U.S. war on Iran. The idea will be to draw the United States into the conflict to do the real fighting to destroy Iran.

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Freedom

Posted on September 28, 2024 by camelotkidd

It’s a pretty fucking cool that nobody reads this little shitty blog.

I get to write whatever the fuck I want.

Cool, huh?

As a bonus I get to avoid the mental health issues that plague Americans.

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Down in a hole

Posted on September 20, 2024 by camelotkidd

When you’re down in a hole it’s a good idea to stop digging.

If you’re a fading empire it’s a good idea to not accelerate the descent, but the geniuses that are managing the US empire didn’t get the memo as every day it’s an endless parade of self inflicted wounds.

Here’s Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt speaking at the 2024 Financial Times Global Commodities Summit–“I can’t preview future sanctions actions, but what I can tell you is we’re very focused on ensuring that Russia is not able to develop new projects in order to re-destine the gas that it previously sent into Europe. And I think especially because I’m talking to an audience in Europe, one of the points that’s worth emphasizing for a second is just how extremely successful Europe has been over the past two years in dramatically reorienting its energy system, de-risking its exposure to Russian oil, gas, coal supplies.”

And here’s Victoria Nuland, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of NATO war against Russia, in a March 2022 interview with TASS–“If Russia does not end this war and get out of Ukraine, it will be isolated on a small island with a bunch of sub countries and the rest of us 141 countries will go forward and build a prosperous future, while Russia suffers a complete economic and technological isolation…”

Things haven’t quite worked out the way Nuland, Pyatt, and the rest of the American imperial lackeys wanted them to. in fact it’s more of the US and NATO shooting themselves in the foot. In essence, Russia keeps taking everything the West throws at it and emerging stronger. Sanctions from the West continue to drive Russia to accelerate its development efforts in its East and reorient its trade wholly towards Central Asia, China, India, and others, and away from US and European markets.

Prior to the war, the Russian government was trying to find a way to force businesses to stop sitting on financial reserves and prevent them paying gigantic dividends. Businesses complained that they would rather not invest because of a poor investment climate, state interference, and an unpredictable taxation policy. Now, everything has changed. The biggest reason for the jump is simply that the US and Europe have forced them to.

Chinese automaker Chery just became the biggest foreign company in Russia after its revenue quadrupled in 2023 to more than $6.63 billion. According to Forbes Russia, 50 of the biggest foreign companies in Russia are now Chinese. That’s up from only one two years ago. The number will likely only grow as Russia and China strategically develop the former’s Far East regions. ​​That’s because Russia has substantial reserves of virtually every commodity required to help a modern economy flourish.

Couple this with China’s manufacturing dominance, and the neocons at the US State Department really outdid themselves by driving Beijing and Moscow together. The crazy thing is this could be the US investing and helping Russia while US plutocrats helped themselves to healthy profits. Instead they wanted it all, wanted to bring down Putin, and plunder the resources. Lo and behold, Russia and much of the rest of the world is plenty able to move on without them.

And most ironic part is so many in the US formulating policy against Russia have no clue how spectacularly they failed. There are still US officials demonizing Russia, like Hillary Clinton on the Rachael Maddow Show, recently. I wonder what planet they live. Totally out of touch with the real world.

Yet the failures and the doubling-down have real world consequences. Last week one avid U.S. supporter of the fascists in Ukraine, Ryan Routh, who appeared in a propaganda video for the Azov battalion in May 2022, tried to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Bygones.

These are the same feral elite that decided to offshore American manufacturing to China, the country that they want to have a war with now. But their subservience to corporate financialization—the obsessive focus on shareholder value and personal gains—threatens investment in the productive capabilities that enable crucial innovation. Financialization has turned many an American powerhouse into a shadow of its former self: see Intel, IBM, General Electric, and Boeing, among others.

Then there’s the recent terrorist pager attack by Israeli Mossad on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mossad somehow managed to manipulate pager shipments to Lebanon some of which would be acquired by Hezbollah and its affiliates. Yesterday specific encoded messages were sent to the manipulated pagers. Some moments later they started to blow up. Eleven people were killed and some 4,000 were wounded.

Not all people killed or wounded were members of Hezbollah. Pagers are also used by emergency and volunteer services. Western media avoid to call this attack a terrorist operation. But just ask yourself how they would describe the attack if this had happened to the other side of the conflict.

Pagers are not an exclusive means of Hezbollah. The attack was indiscriminate. The explosions happened in many situations of daily life – during visits in shops (vid), in driving cars in the middle of traffic, near to bystanders including children.

Once again, in addition to the terrorist aspect, this attack will have far reaching repercussions. Will anyone in the Global South buy a US, Israeli, or Western electronic device after this?

America’s determination to prolong its global primacy has led the world to another point of danger such that violence and lawlessness have reached catastrophic proportions but these are the sorts of boneheaded decisions that end of empire flunky’s make in a desperate bid to maintain power.

As the American empire enters terminal velocity expect more of them.

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The corporate media today

Posted on September 13, 2024 by camelotkidd

It used to be that the press understood their job as a check on the powerful but those days are well behind us. The corporatization of the media is a big reason for the change. Moreover, the press used to expose government malfeasance especially the workings of the national security state and those politicians and officials involved in it but now they view their job as narrative management rather than reporting “news”.

With economic conditions deteriorating rapidly after decades of rampant financialization and corporatization the social contract is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. Even the World Economic Forum admits that corporations, its main constituency, have turbocharged inequality. Populism is on the rise just about everywhere and angry and fragmented protest movements have been growing since at least 2019.

As a result there’s an information war being waged as the US and other so-called liberal democracies as they attempt to gain much greater, more detailed control over the information being shared on the internet. And in the endeavor they have the corporate media as partners in crime.

There are plenty of examples of corporate media enlistment in the new propaganda/censorship crusade but their treatment of the Nord Stream bombing offers up a fine example of their servility to power.

The Nord Stream bombing was immediately blamed on the Russia, but any sort of honest appraisal would have asked the basic question of qui bono? Instead the corporate media immediately and uncritically repeated this preposterous charge. In that the corporate media’s behavior has exposed that when it comes to truly serious issues, especially involving geopolitics, Western mainstream media no longer investigate, criticize, or expose Western elites. Instead, they help them spread lies and distractions, while blaming geopolitical opponents and helping mobilize Western populations for the fight against them. In short, Western media now behave as just another weapon in the Western arsenal, forming, in effect, the information war branch of its hybrid warfare.

 Numerous details in their reporting on the bombing–TV and in print–do not add up. But that is not even the most suspicious part. What is especially strange is that they do not come up with these inconsistencies and contradictions themselves. Instead, they are simply reproducing official narratives with a total lack of criticism and alertness.

Then there’s the corporate media’s role in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Our political class is still totally down with the genocide as demonstrated by Netanyahu’s 58 standing ovations in Congress, but the corporate media propaganda barrage in support of Israel has been pushed to its limit, perhaps severely overtaxing that vital tool. Many tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones, have become fully aware of the total disconnect between the mainstream media portrayal of events in Gaza and what they have been seeing with their own eyes on TikTok, Twitter, and other relatively uncensored social media platforms. The resulting collapse in media trust among young Americans may permanently cripple the powerful pro-Israel media network that has dominated American society since forever.

Anyone who’s been paying attention is aware of the total disconnect between corporate media and reality. Meanwhile, most intelligent observers have now quietly recognized that our media has been totally dishonest and unreliable on any matters pertaining to Israel, and once they begin to consider that this may also have been equally true in the past, the implications are enormous. The Matrix is probably the best depiction of the reaction to waking up in a simulation.

The biggest takeaway is that important, controversial events of our history that might have previously been disregarded or ignored are now suddenly reconsidered in a very different light. The upshot is that the corporate media simply pass along, reinforce, and pleasantly embellish official narratives. All of this–just like the neoliberal hellscape that out elite have constructed–has a price. For one thing, mainstream journalists who turn themselves into information warriors, whatever their motives, mightily contribute to the decline of their own credibility.

An eco-system of propaganda does not restore trust. It erodes it.


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Skunked

Posted on September 6, 2024 by camelotkidd

You may have noticed that I despise both of our political parties. There’s a reason for that: Both Republican and Democrats portray themselves as alternatives to the other but when it comes down to important economic and foreign policies there’s really no alternative at all.

Even before the end of the Cold War, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed “there was no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. With the demise of the USSR and communism this condition soon afflicted the Democratic Party in the US. Thanks to the malign influence of the Clinton, Obama, Biden and Pelosi crime families, as well as the Wall Street billionaire mega-donors, the Democrats embraced neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative foreign policies.

When it comes to our neoliberal economic system, both Democrats and Republicans pretend that the government is powerless to affect a global economy. The problem however is not that the US lacks power in a globalized economy. The problem is that both parties have been captured by vested interests, who benefit from the neoliberal economic dispensation. As the New Deal was dismantled beginning in the 1970s, neoliberal snake-oil was peddled by ideological economists as the “New Economy”, under the theory that economic ‘science’ claimed it to be the road to broad prosperity. Five decades later, a tiny cabal of rich own everything and the productive economy has been gutted in favor of financial gamesmanship.

US foreign policies of never ending war similarly enjoy bipartisan support, driven by both parties slavish devotion to the American empire and the military/industrial/complex. Nowadays, with overt invasions discredited, the neocon infected national security establishment has seized upon “color revolutions and proxy wars as their MO, while the corporate media gaslights Americans into a sullen acquiescence.

The truth is that American politics is now entirely unresponsive to popular demand. The last vestiges of democratic accountability were gutted many years ago as the US’s political systems were completely captured by powerful globe-spanning corporations.

We need a political party that represents average Americans, one that eschews war and neoliberal, financial austerity. It’s time to rebuild an American left for the working class and destroy the current finance-centered political party that deploys identity politics as liberalism. It is essentially an attempt to return the left to what it once was, and in that we are being helped by the fake left neoliberals so discrediting themselves over the past few years. What’s hilarious is that Trump and conservatives depict Kamala Harris, as a “communist”, even as the Democratic Party she leads consists of spooks, neoliberal bureaucrats, regime-change think tanks, and the military-industrial complex, that is leading a neoliberal return to serfdom, mass censorship, and an increasingly reactionary foreign policy that rehabilitates Nazis and supports proxy wars and genocide.

I hate to break it to you but the communist party in America has been hunted to extinction and the nominal left has been destroyed by the increasingly neoliberal/neoconservative Democratic party.

And, what about the populist right, represented by Trump?

The increasingly likely outcome is that the centrist representatives of both parties uses the ethno-nationalist, populist right (Trump, MAGA, etc.) to deflect criticism of their neoliberal and pro-war policies that have the US where it’s at today. Under such pressure, Trump and the populist right abandons their anti-war and anti NATO stances in order to be accepted in the “Beltway” but maintain the ethno-nationalism, militarization, anti-labor positions. With such a scenario, bargains between the “center” and far-right do nothing to disturb the neoliberal economic policies, immigrants will be scapegoated for economic problems caused by the financialization of everything, and attacks on anyone resisting austerity or war will increase.

This state of affairs was amplified recently at Naked Capitalism, when reader Anna K asked Yves if she could use a popular 2013 post, The Skunk Party Manifesto, as the basis for a new political party in Kentucky.

“I want permission to take her [Yves’] 2013 Skunk Party manifesto to use….as the basis for a political party’s platform.

I’m involved in an effort to start a third party in Kentucky, after the strong ceasefire candidate we ran as a Democrat was narrowly defeated in a nasty primary by Governor Beshear’s pick, who did not campaign at all. Here’s our candidate on the state’s premier political show before her defeat in the primary, sounding reasonable and saying the word “genocide” (she starts at 15:50, and was the only democrat who met the fundraising threshold to appear on the show): https://ket.org/program/kentucky-tonight/candidate-conversations-dana-edwards-and-shauna-rudd. Our petition drive is about halfway to gathering the needed signatures to get November ballot acces, with plenty of time left. Jill Stein (Green Party) agreed to be our presidential candidate. We expect to be visible in statewide news (Lexington Herald-Leader, Louisville Courier-Journal, and KET) after our public debut at Fancy Farm 3 Aug. We expect to be on the November ballot, running a candidate at least against 6th District of KY US Congressman Andy Barr (and Jill on the president line).

Things are moving too fast to develop a strong, well-written platform from scratch before Fancy Farm. So we want to borrow the Skunk Party platform, give credit where due, and modify it, specifically to address arming Ukraine and Israel and sabre-rattling against China. Our chops are stronger in foreign policy than domestic, so a strong domestic platform we can build on is important for orienting and educating our candidates and nascent party….

Kentucky punches above its weight class in foreign policy, as I’m sure you well know, and has since the days of Henry Clay. Time for more punching up, not down. We plan to have a small convention to continue work on our platform after Fancy Farm. We’re reasonably well-integrated with Palestine solidarity and anti-prison expansion grassroots groups. We’ll network a wider variety of groups in the valence of #OWS or late 19th-century populism with whom we’re loosely connected after
demonstrating viability with ballot access.

If we have Yves’s blessing, our party (The Kentucky Party, “Vote for Kentucky” official slogan, “KY against all y’all” unofficial stickers) will also adopt a stylized red-white-and-blue skunk as our mascot, to clear the room of the stylized donkeys and elephants.”

Yves Smith, the extraordinary writer and curator of Naked Capitalism, blessed the uprising. “So I hope you will support the Kentucky Party, even if not in Kentucky, by talking it up in social media. And if you are in Kentucky, please consider them as a November ballot option. Starting third parties in the US is very much an uphill battle. But even if one concedes that their odds of success is remote, they can serve as vehicles for calling attention to critical issues that the mainstream parties ignore as well as lodging a protest vote.”

I personally think we need a skunk party in every state, certainly here in the Beehive State, where the Republicans have a lock on power, with predictable results.

By the way, Naked Capitalism is the best website on the Internet and a valuable resource for anyone looking to educate themselves on the realities of our dystopian world. They are having their annual fund drive, so stop by and discover what a gem they are and throw a couple coins in their tip jar.

Update: If there was any doubt that both parties intend to provide no alternative to the toxic status quo, US Attorney General Merrick Garland just announced a sweeping set of actions to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday, including unveiling criminal charges against two Russian nationals, sanctions on 10 individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains.

More Russia-gate.

How novel.

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Hope and War

Posted on August 30, 2024 by camelotkidd

The Democratic party is increasingly unhinged, claiming to be protecting “our democracy” while dialing up militaristic foreign policies. They present themselves as the guardians of democracy and avatars of a progressive future. However, this narrative of hope and progress is increasingly overshadowed by a commitment to maintaining and even expanding American military dominance. Moreover, the Democrats’ “hopeful” justification of militarism represents a sophisticated form of propaganda, amplified by the corporate media.

 Kamala Harris, or the deep state operatives busily reinventing Kamala Harris, are selling “hope” and “joy” this political season, never mind the ugly reality. Harris is supposed to cruise into the White House on a carpet of positive vibes. This is not a new development. Russia-gate exposed the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state that’s busy censoring and blocking any deviant reality while pumping up the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The Democratic Party’s deep ties to the military-industrial complex cannot be ignored when examining their policy positions. Despite rhetoric about creating an “opportunity economy” and investing in social programs, the reality is that trillions of dollars continue to flow into military spending.

“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” Kamala Harris said during her keynote address at the DNC, while new posters depict her as some sort of refugee from the “Summer of Love”.. 

The Democrats maniacal focus on maintaining military supremacy comes at an enormous cost, both domestically and globally. This massive allocation of resources not only prevents real investment in creating a more equitable and sustainable society but also fuels global conflicts, instability and an all-to-real possibility of nuclear war. At home, the massive defense budget diverts resources from critical investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and environmental protection, while abroad our reputation lies in tatters thanks to the US’s ironclad support of Israel’s genocide

Though the corporate media ignored or downplayed it, Robert F Kennedy, denounced the Democratic neocon dominated US foreign policies, specifically the Ukrainian proxy war against Russia, in a speech withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump.

“The war is the predictable response of Russia to the neocon project to expand NATO and encircle Russia. We unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear weapons systems in Romania and Poland. This is a hostile, hostile act. And the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offers to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy Jr said.

“The Ukraine war,” he continued, “began in 2014 when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk Agreement, that had been negotiated between Ukraine and Russia and the European nations. In April 2022, we wanted the war. President Biden sent [then UK prime minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were already withdrawing troops.”

“That peace agreement,” Kennedy added, “would have brought peace to the region and allowed Donbass to remain part of Ukraine.”

Biden’s “objective in the war is regime change in Russia,” Kennedy said. “His Defense Secretary [Lloyd] Austin…explained that the purpose of the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight  fighting anywhere else in the world.”

“These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war and it’s a victim of the West…We’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth, as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids, and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning.… Ukraine’s infrastructure has been destroyed…The war has been a disaster for our country, too. We’ve squandered nearly US$200 billion already that was badly needed in our communities.”

“We’ve pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran,” Kennedy continued. “We’re closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962, and the neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all. Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threaten to replace the dollar as a world reserve currency.”

Preach, brother Kennedy.

Barak Obama campaigned on “Hope and Change”, but when he bailed out the bankers who wrecked our economy and continued the war on terror policies of the Bush administration, the hope died while the wars continued. Along with Wall Street’s implosion of the economy in 2008, public disillusion over the US war in Iraq represents a crucial juncture in the steep decline of the America empire.

President Biden and his national security state have only accelerated the descent, while Kamala promises more of the same.

What’s that quote about doing the same thing while expecting different results?

By framing military interventions and the maintenance of global military supremacy as essential components of preserving and spreading democracy worldwide, the Democrats have effectively weaponized hope. The “hopeful” militarism creates a false dichotomy: either support military action or abandon the cause of global democracy. By conflating military might with democratic values, the Democrats make it challenging to envision alternative approaches to international relations and conflict resolution.

This narrative effectively silences critics, painting them as pessimists or isolationists who lack faith in American ideals.

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