Lost in Space

Posted on August 23, 2024 by camelotkidd

Boeing is emblematic of the late stage American empire, where neoliberal, financial looting takes precedence over national security. The two lost astronauts, who NASA insists “are not stranded in space,” represent just how far a once great company–Boeing –and by extension–America have fallen.

The United States has been undergoing a profound and radical transformation and has lost ground in every single category that defines the power and status of a nation in relation to its rivals.
There are a range of factors of why this is so, from the economic, to cultural, technological and military factors. America’s de-industrialized economy is now deeply affected by a loss of small and middle-size businesses and the implosion of the US commercial aerospace industry. 

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station. As of late last week, NASA still had not decided whether the Starliner vehicle, which is built and operated by Boeing, should be used to fly its two crew members home. During its launch and ascent to the space station two months ago, five small thrusters on the Starliner spacecraft failed. After extensive ground testing of the thrusters, as well as some brief in-space firings, NASA had planned to make a decision last week on whether to return Starliner with crew. However, a Flight Readiness Review planned for last Thursday was delayed after internal disagreements at NASA about the safety of Starliner.

Boeing has been in terminal decline for years, culminating with their 737 Max debacle, where two 737 MAX planes crashed, killing 346 people on board in 2018 and 2019. Then there’s the 777, where Boeing has grounded its 777X test fleet after discovering a severed thrust link on one test aircraft during a routine inspection in Hawaii. Further checks revealed cracks in the assemblies of two other planes. And don’t forget about the 787 “Dreamliner,” where Boeing is investigating a new quality problem with the plane after discovering that hundreds of fasteners have been incorrectly installed on the fuselages of some undelivered jets.

What’s apparent is that a fixation on short-term earning, driven in large part by corporate stock buybacks has crippled American manufacturing. Thanks to the neoliberal economic policies, not only has the Western industrial base been outsourced to make rich people richer, young people are essentially being asked to fight in a future war that will defend an economic system that is fucking them over.

The apparent conclusion—uncomfortable if not unthinkable for neoliberal economists and their corporate media choir —is that MBA/finance thinking and decision-making is not just unhelpful but actively hostile and destructive to running a successful, functional company.

Who would have thought such a thing?

Every economy, as heterodox economist Michael Hudson endlessly asserts, is managed. The political question becomes just who manages it. Thanks to the successful neoliberal counterattack, the US transformed from the productive, New Deal economy, managed by our elected representatives to an extractive economy managed by Wall Street.

The wee, little problem is that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as your operating system. For example, the geniuses that outsourced American manufacturing to China want to have a war with China, even as China produces much of our high-tech systems critical to warfare.

Sigh.

Unfortunately, this development probably means that we’ll have war sooner than later. Let me explain: Presently the US plans to expand its defense production capabilities to engage in the new Cold War against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but because our reliance on China is only increasing and now China has announced export restrictions on critical metals and rare earths essential for high-tech weapons. Because of the various economic woes and deteriorating cultural issues, it’s difficult to imagine that the US will be in any position to achieve its aims, whether its nuclear arsenal or fighting a four front war. This makes a nuclear confrontation even more likely because the US national security state will be forced to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse, and will be left with little choice than to attack Russia, China, Iran and North Korea now.

Maybe I should start digging that fallout shelter?

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Rolling the Dice

Posted on August 16, 2024 by camelotkidd

All empires fall. And all empires experience a sort of go-for-broke response from the ruling elite, who fight to preserve their wealth and privilege, while committing monstrous atrocities along the way.

In Ukraine and the Middle-East, the American empire is rolling the dice in a desperate last measure to maintain power and control. Moreover, the empire managers are risking life on earth in while the American people remain somnolent.

Escalation is rampant across the board – in Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

There was the last gasp of the US’s Ukrainian proxy with their invasion of Russia. It’s beyond obvious that Kursk is a NATO operation, most certainly a joint Anglo-American combo supervising their Ukrainian fighters. Anything Kiev does depends on American ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and NATO weapons systems of course operated by NATO personnel.

In the Middle-East, the US is rushing in aircraft carriers, missile submarines and fighter jets to protect it’s attack dog, after Israel’s assassination spree. The Israeli provocations, especially the assassination in Tehran of Hamas negotiator Haniyeh, were a direct affront to three top BRICS members: Iran, Russia, and China. It’s clear that the maniacs in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. After all, control of Middle-East oil is crucial to the maintenance of the empire.

If Washington had forced a Gaza ceasefire last year, the risk of an apocalyptic war convulsing West Asia would have been avoided. Instead, the US on Wednesday approved a further $20 billion weapons package to Tel Aviv, showing exactly how committed the Americans are to securing a permanent ceasefire and halting the genocide carried out by its ally.

It’s telling that the late stage flailing of the American empire and frantic actions of the elite to stave off collapse receives scant attention in the corporate press. One would think there’s a story, especially in the aftermath of Biden bowing out of the 2024 presidential election because of senility, while still (supposedly) managing the multiple foreign policy debacles. Is Biden running the country, or is does Kamala Harris have the helm? Or is it someone else?

History is not kind to the desperate machinations of fading empires as they rarely work out as planned and instead accelerate the decline.

Recent events simply reinforce my opinion that American elites are totally clueless about diplomacy, foreign policy and war, but comfort themselves with the belief that their PR is better. It’s all just narrative, after all.

By the way, anyone reading who thinks I’m a one-dimensional America hater, I echo the great James Baldwin, who stated–“I love America more than any other country in this world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

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The Guns of August

Posted on August 9, 2024 by camelotkidd

August is usually a slow month where people are on vacation but this year feels different.

The Guns of August, written by Barbara W. Tuchman, in 1962, is centered on the first month of World War I, where Tuchman describes in great detail the opening events of the conflict. 

110 years later the world again stands on the edge of the precipice with multiple conflicts poised to draw larger powers into another world war that has the real possibility of going nuclear. And just like in 1914, everyone is sleepwalking into the coming conflagration.

In addition to the US and NATO”s provocative and dangerous proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has the Middle East is on the brink of regional war. 

The largest instigator of violence is our Middle East attack-dog, who appears hell-bent on drawing the US into the maelstrom. Israel’s latest assassination spree, culminated with the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, their negotiator in Tehran, provoked a promised response that has the world on edge. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that Israel acted on its own to attack Iran’s sovereignty, which is tantamount to an act of war, without some sort of US approval. It is this ‘known unknown’ factor that makes the situation very dangerous. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has already ordered a direct strike on Israeli territory.

The Washington Post, citing Pentagon officials, has written that keeping in view a possible escalation, the US Navy has already concentrated 12 warships in the region. Among them is the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which is located in the Persian Gulf with six destroyers. There are also five US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that Israel “faces difficult days” and is “ready for any scenario.”

In the context of a possible World War 3, the US and NATO plus Israel represent the American Empire, and the Axis of Resistance plus Russia and China represents BRICS+. Or if you want–a unipolar world vs a multipolar one. If there is a regional war in the Middle East, it will undoubtedly be between these two groups.

Ironically, the Biden Administration’s embrace of Israel has pulled back the curtain of US public diplomacy. Since WWII Americans have been led to believe that they are the “good guys” but backstopping a genocide with 2000 lb. bombs is hardly the actions of a benevolent empire.

Maverick investigative journalist Robert Parry explained how it all worked in 2014 before his untimely passing. “This commitment to what the insiders called “perception management” began in earnest with the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama. In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others depending on the U.S. government’s needs.

All of this is something to think about as we await a major joint military operation from Yemen, from Iraq, from Lebanon, from Iran, as a retaliation of the killing of Ismail Haniyeh.

Update: Earlier this week, Jared Cohen, President of Global Affairs and Co-Head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, noted in a conversation with another colleague, “We don’t know the timing of a potential Iranian retaliation, and it’s impossible to predict the scale with certainty. But a direct Iranian-led assault against Israel looks increasingly likely, and Israelis and their partners are preparing.”

Update 2: Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson writes. “With respect to Israel and Iran, Russia may be playing a key role to potentially defuse the situation. During the past two-and-a-half years, Russia and Iran have forged a de facto military alliance…I think it is highly likely that Russia has provided Iran with a full complement of advanced air defense systems — most likely the S-400 — and the crews to operate those batteries.

Having Russian troops on the ground in Iran presents Tel Aviv and Washington with a tripwire they may not want to cross. The Russian air defense systems probably have been deployed around critical installations in Iran that are high on Israel’s target list. An attack on those sites, particularly one that involves nukes, would likely result in Russian casualties and be seen in Moscow as a casus belli. In other words, an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran would risk bringing Russia into the war on Iran’s side. Let’s hope Netanyahu is unwilling to test the limits of Russian patience.”

Buckle up.

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How low can you go?

Posted on August 2, 2024 by camelotkidd

How low can the American empire go as it wobbles and spins out of control?

Judging by the behavior of its favorite Middle-East proxy the bottom appears limitless.

While Israel carries out a savage genocide in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, where he was worshipped by both Congress and the White House alike together with outright adulation from the corporate media. Netanyahu spoke for an hour in his address to the US Congress, emitting lie after lie. And the Congress critters responded with 53 standing ovations, close to one per minute. 

In his. speech Netanyahu claimed that the genocide is a “clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.” Ironically, Netanyahu was right about the clash of civilization though he was wrong about who represented which side: Israel backed completely by the US is pure evil.

American complicity in the genocide in Gaza is a national disgrace. The US has done many bad things, but this whole hearted alliance with unmitigated evil taints every American.

Netanyahu’s visit to Congress was soon joined by another truly awful story that demonstrates that there is no bottom to the evil in the minds and hearts of Israel’s leaders as well as among a large majority of the Israeli people.

It turns out that genocide is not enough to satisfy the Israeli bloodlust. There are a number of detention centers run by the Israeli Army that are generally used to torture Palestinians prisoners, not in the old fashioned “intelligence” role to obtain “information,” but just for the entertainment of the soldiers who are the jailers. Sde Teiman, one such center in the southern Negev desert region, recently made the news due to a particularly outrageous bit of torture engaged in by ten of the soldiers in charge of the prisoners. Conditions in Sde Taiman reportedly included “Electric shocks, amputations due to bad conditions, severe beatings, surgery without anesthesia, playing loud music until inmates’ ears bleed, deaths due to bad sanitary conditions, systematic torture and sexual abuse.”

A Palestinian from Gaza was reported serially sodomized and otherwise raped at the detention site using various implements even including a cell phone which was inserted in the man’s rectum and turned on for the amusement of the Israeli soldiers. The victim also had a wooden stick inserted in similar fashion and it was believed that he was only one of a number of other prisoners who were treated in that same way, which appears to be systemic throughout the detention facilities run by the army. The activity was only exposed when the victim began bleeding heavily both internally and externally and was unable to walk with a “serious wound in his rectum area”, which may have occurred if or when the phone was removed from inside of him and he was taken to a hospital where what had taken place was revealed. The army, somewhat uncharacteristically, sent some military policemen to the center to detain the soldiers for questioning but the suspects fought back using pepper spray and building barriers. When nine of the men (one went AWOL) were eventually taken to a nearby military base at Beit Lid, the MPs were confronted almost immediately by an angry crowd of civilians, consisting largely of settlers and ultra-nationalists, led by several Likud party parliamentarians who demanded that the soldiers be set free. Something like a melee ensued. The unruly crowd chanted its support for torture and even called for the summary execution of the Palestinian prisoners, which has been an “option” supported by some in the Netanyahu government.

The rioters were so aggressive that they actually broke into the Israeli military base and there was considerable support for their actions even coming from Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who said he was “shocked” to see IDF troops being detained for questioning “in a way that is suitable for arresting dangerous criminals.” He added that the soldiers were doing a “holy job” at the base. Far-right Knesset member Simcha Rotman called the troops “heroes,” instead attacking Israel’s “justice and enforcement systems” for detaining them.

Later in the day, when asked by the press about the rape accusations, US State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel refused to say whether gang raping and torturing Palestinian prisoners would be considered a war crime, even if conclusively demonstrated by witnesses and other evidence. Patel explained “So the reports of abuse are deeply concerning, and we have been clear and consistent with Israel and the IDF that they need to treat all detainees humanely and with dignity in accordance with humanitarian law.” He said that the US was going to let “due process” play out in this case. The western media that is bothering to cover the story are refusing to even use the word “rape” or “sodomy” in reference to the allegations, with the BBC describing how the soldiers are accused of “severely mistreating a Palestinian prisoner” while the New York Times prefers to call it “suspected abuse”.

So, this is our bestest ally, and loyal proxy who shares all of our values.

And judging by the spate of recent Israeli assassinations seems dead set on expanding the genocide into a regional war with the US along for the ride. The most egregious was an assassination of the Hamas leader on Iranian soil that appears to be a gambit by Israel to drag the United States into a regional war. Israel knows very well it cannot win the war against Hezbollah and Iran so it’s seeking to draw the U.S. into it. This is what makes the reception Netanyahu received in Congress on July 24 so dangerous.

Economist and geopolitical analyst Michael Hudson clarifies, “Well, you say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years…So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.

And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win… And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.”

All empires descend into savagery, torture and mass murder, the US prefers to outsource much of its brutality to proxies, with Israel leading the pack.

Antonio Gramsci–“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”

 

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Sullen Acquiescence

Posted on July 26, 2024 by camelotkidd

If neoliberal capitalism isn’t working for average Americans, how are they responding?

The neoliberal Great Transformation has massively changed the workplace, and as workers are increasingly squeezed by anxiety over personal economic prospects, they are responding with sullen acquiescence in that they just do the bare minimum, and sometimes not even that much, as they go about their “bull-shit jobs”. As the US increasingly resembles the late USSR a similar dynamic is playing out where–they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

Indeed, our milieu is marked by the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything–life in America keeps getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.

I know the feeling. I’ve watched the America I grew up in be demolished by neoliberal looters, cheered on by the corporate press.

Political scientist Wendy Brown assesses the damage. “Decades of neoliberal devastations of middle- and working-class prospects set the ground for our politics today. The dismantling of social states – the social provisions and social commitments that put a floor under working- and middle-class people when things go wrong – is key. That floor is gone. At the same time, wages became stagnant or worse. Unions became so severely weakened that they lost their capacity to work against capital, and states largely gave up regulating capital. The rise of finance capital which spikes the cost of everything from housing to health care made things worse.“

The science fiction I grew up with promised a future where technology provided fulfilling and meaningful jobs and a life of mostly leisure, where people, families and communities could flourish.

Looking around at our present milieu it’s amazing how naive it all sounded.

I’m not scared of technology, I’m scared of the sociopaths that wield said technology. And the same technology that could be used to ensure the sci-fi future I read about as a kid, is instead utilized to create more billionaires while workers are used up and tossed away like soiled rags.

The problem is political in that the billionaires control government and they like a desperate, surplus population that’s too cowed to rebel just fine. A big part of the blame goes to the political party that used to represents workers. The Democrats have been hemorrhaging support after abandoning nearly all of their former working class platform in favor of identity politics. The Democrats increasingly stand for neoliberal, pro-war and anti-Russia policies.

You’ve heard me drone on for years about the dangers of neoliberalism and the pronounced effect on American society but it’s gotten worse. The way in which government interacts with average Americans is a case in point. Instead of providing material benefits like during the New Deal era, neoliberal governance celebrates inequality and punishes those who resist.

In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”

The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “…Criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”

What’s so frustrating about American society is that it could be so much better, and we have almost everything we need to thrive. But we’re stuck in path dependence and power games, unable to imagine or build the good world our technology makes possible.

Reduce work. Let people find other, meaningful things to do with their lives. The worship of work is a relatively recent thing, coming mostly out of the Protestant revolution: virtually no one before that believed that work was a good thing: it was necessary, but the good life was about art, learning, athletics, civic involvement and so on.

To create this sort of world we need to do away with wealth humping. I can’t believe that I’m the only one to find it deeply embarrassing. You can get wealthy: say have four or five times as much as the median, but not billionaire rich and able to dominate the political space. Focus competition towards status and prestige, and towards living a good life and contributing towards others.

There is much work to be done. Meaningful work, not the least of which is fixing the environment. There will always be meaningful labour to do, just not bull-shit jobs so the rich elite can have another vacation home in Deer Valley.

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More basic shit

Posted on July 19, 2024 by camelotkidd

Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t work for average Americans.

To paraphrase James Madison, if bankers on Wall Street were angels there would be no need for government regulation, but you may have noticed that there is a distinct shortage there. And neoliberal economists are basically sock-puppets for capital, where their prescriptions always involve lowering your wages, preventing labor unionization and letting the wealthy people run our economy.

Heterodox economist Michael Hudson keeps it succinct when he explains that every economy is planned, it just depends on who gets to do the planning.

By empowering banks and corporations, we’ve put the reproduction of American society in the hands of sociopathic owners motivated purely by profit. Today instead of a government that works for the average American we have an oligarchic government that enslaves the public.

The short version is that the wealthy hated the New Deal and succeeded in overthrowing it, while building a second, high-tech Gilded Age, complete with robots, AI and total surveillance. See the Powell Memo for their assembly blueprint.

Architect of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.”

Last week I wrote that “we live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith,” and it well describes the overthrow of the New Deal. You can’t have a world of honesty and straight dealing while carrying out a vast project that’s impoverished the vast majority of Americans. You absolutely require the deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith to accomplish such a project.

Not to mention propaganda and lots of it. Edward Bernays describes the thought behind American propaganda in his 1928 book – Propaganda. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …“

The most detrimental (and brutally effective) propaganda sells the idea of individualism rather that the social or collective. The insidious concept of “human capital”, where you alone are responsible for literally everything with the market as the ultimate arbitrator. All of this combined with the exhortation for endless competition represents the intellectual kindling for an oligarchy rather than a republic, and has had a profound effect on American society.

High marginal tax rates, vigorous anti-trust and high corporate tax rates with laws forbidding stock options, brought about by New Deal reforms, produced the best economy in US history. But now that the US has financialized its economy there’s no way that it can somehow rebuild industry without de-financializing the economy, without getting rid of the whole debt overhead and without raising the wages and the living standards of labor.

In other words, we’re talking about a revolution, which is precisely what our feral elite are determined to prevent, as the latest revelations from Democratic insiders reveals.

When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020 he told a group of wealthy donors that if he was elected nothing would fundamentally change. At the time many of us argued that the Democratic Party was less interested in stopping a second Donald Trump term and more focused on crushing the ascent of socialist Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him. Yet now, as the president fights for his political life, centrist Democrats are just coming out and saying it.

“I’ve said this over and over again,” Rep. Adam Smith, who had days earlier publicly called for Biden to step aside, told MSNBC last week: “Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person that could beat Trump. He was picked because he was the only person that could beat Bernie Sanders, rightly or wrongly. … That conclusion was made, okay? “Oh my gosh, coming out of Nevada, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee!” And people, just like they are now, said, “Ahhh, I don’t think that’s going to work,” so they were looking for an alternative.”

As the Democrats continue to show us exactly who they are, the Republicans are posing as the party of workers (go figure) with their change in economic rhetoric and with Trump’s selection of Vance to be VP, even as they are all in on the continuation of neoliberal capitalism.

There seems to be a pattern emerging from all of the background noise. Times, as they say, are a changing. Although we’re living in a time of normalcy bias, all of the previously inconceivable scenarios have come to pass. As such, we can no longer dismiss the possibility that literally anything can happen.

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Basic shit

Posted on July 12, 2024 by camelotkidd

As the Democratic Party freaks out over Biden it’s probably a good time to review some basic shit.

Maybe the funniest thing has been how the political lemmings immediately began arguing over who should be president even as Biden’s condition demonstrates that it doesn’t matter who is. The American empire runs on autopilot, sanctioning, bombing and murdering around the world all by itself. Meanwhile liberals insist that it’s imperative that Trump not win the 2024 election because if he does America will descend into fascism–circling the planet with military bases, backing genocide and engaging in dangerous nuclear brinksmanship.

Oh, wait.

US has demonstrated its benevolence and humanitarianism for the last three decades by launching invasions and waging wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria. What’s savagely ironic is that democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the US’s concern in the countries it has destroyed. But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were always bull-shit. It was always about treating the world as the empire’s corporate playground, where “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the vulnerable.

We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. We live in a world where the powerful pretend to care about human rights and international law, and where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.

Meanwhile, in domestic affairs, a new study, entitled The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift (Part I) – How Corporate America Offset Liability Onto the Public, underscores how much power US corporations have over our lives, making a mockery of our noble democratic rhetoric–“land of the free,” “home of the brave”, etc. .

This is Part I of a two-part series on what we’re calling “The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift,” a process in which corporations deflect blame onto the relatively powerless. On this episode, we examine how corporations have shifted the burdens of liability onto “consumers” and other individuals, examining how the auto, fossil-fuel, and food and beverage industries have orchestrated media campaigns to frame the people they harm, whether directly or indirectly, as responsible for their own misfortunes.

Sure, everyone must bear some level of personal responsibility in matters of health and safety, obviously. But corporations from Chrysler to Nestlé, in concert with a compliant US media, have taken advantage of this truism to place a disproportionate level of obligation onto the people who work in their warehouses and buy their products. At the same time, they’ve been able to fend off even the most minor of structural changes–say, using less plastic or healthier ingredients–with often dangerous, even deadly, consequences.

“Choose the product best suited for baby,” Nestlé urged in a 1970s baby formula ad. “What size is your carbon footprint?” wondered oil giant BP in 2003. “Texting, music listening put distracted pedestrians at risk,” USA Today announced in 2012.

These headlines and ad copy all offer a glimpse into a longstanding strategy among corporations: place the burdens of safety, health, and wellbeing on individuals, in order to deflect responsibility and regulation. Whether in the areas of transportation, climate, or nutrition and food safety, individuals, namely “consumers,” are increasingly expected to assume full responsibility for their own wellbeing, and are blamed, shamed, and punished–or worse, made ill or injured–when they can’t live up to these unrealistic expectations.

All of this is a reminder not to get distracted by clickbait headlines and stay laser focused on the basic shit. Don’t let Whoopie Goldberg or George Clooney or Nancy Pelosi gaslight you into giving two shits about the presidential circus. To make sense of our modern world–follow the money, weapons and resources while ignoring the propaganda.

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Who’s minding the launch codes?

Posted on July 5, 2024 by camelotkidd

Democrats are rightly freaking out over Biden’s debate performance but I want to know who’s minding the launch codes?

The bigger question is who has the authority to launch the nukes?.

If it is Biden, then, God forbid.

And if it’s a deep state apparatchik, then who gave them the authority?

The person who debated Trump absolutely does not seem capable of going through such a launch procedure. 

 All of this raises a great many questions, starting with: why did the Democratic Party and the corporate media pretend that Joe Biden was capable of serving another 4 year term?

More importantly, Biden appears to be a figure head that has little affect on policy, while the alphabet agencies and their many intel blob subsidiaries conducted a silent coup and have been running the US’s affairs disastrously behind the “Joe Biden” wooden Indian. Going further, it’s become obvious that Biden’s rule is at the behest of an oligarch class, who are now in a panic. All we hear is that the donors have decided this or are going to replace Biden, and it becomes clear that the so-called democracy story we’ve been subjected to is nothing but an elaborate con.

Meanwhile, all the concern over Biden’s fitness to run against Trump raises a larger question. Is Joe Biden competent to serve out his term which ends in January 2025?

What’s infuriating is that Biden’s condition was obvious to anyone not ensconced in the “Blue bubble”. Yet after Biden’s debate performance everyone seems to be shocked. I’ve come to believe that Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. The Democratic Party, deep state and shadowy oligarch cabal that calls the shots wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on domestic and foreign policy fronts. 

 Of course they’re circling the wagons. The elite will do everything to cover up for their knowledge of Biden’s senility. Acknowledging that they knew about this would leave little doubt in the minds of many that the 2020 election was actually the elite’s latest coup.

And what about the other branches of government? Well Congress, if Representative Thomas Massie is to to be believed, has an AIPAC babysitter ensuring their compliance with Israeli interests. And the Supreme Court’s latest rulings should leave little doubt as to their subservience to capital.

So much for the myths we learned in civics class about separation of powers and the virtues of a representative republic.

In light of Biden’s debate performance the deep state conspiracy theory seem way more plausible. If the president and congress aren’t running things, then who is?

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Gunboat Diplomacy

Posted on June 28, 2024 by camelotkidd

The US doesn’t do diplomacy. Instead we send in the gunboats or, to be precise, the aircraft-carrier-battle-groups.

Like everything else these days the price of a modern aircraft carrier is astronomical. America’s latest carrier class, the Gerald R. Ford, costs $13 billion per unit. And so far, the entire Ford program has cost taxpayers $120 billion.

Due to the cost of the Ford-class carriers and the rest of America’s gold-plated weapon systems this imperial behavior has reached its pull-by-date. Advances in missile and drone technology allow a poor country like Yemen to essentially close the Red Sea to Israeli bound traffic. Conflict is, at the base level, about bang-for-the-buck, and when adversaries like the Houthis can fire hypersonic missiles and suicide drones that cost a fraction of expensive American carriers, the sort of gunboat force projection is a thing of the past.

Another reason is due to our Middle East proxy–Israel. The balance of forces in the world is shifting in favor of the Axis of Resistance as the entire Global South is appalled by this genocide and appalled by the American empire’s collusion in that genocide.  

And we’re also seeing that due to the stupidity of the managers of the U.S. empire, which of course is dominated by Zionists, that the war in Ukraine is actually playing out in favor of Palestine. As they attack Russia with long-range weapons, Russia is going to be offering similar long-range weapons to other forces, including presumably the Axis of Resistance. And there have been some reports along those lines. The Houthis, who are happily messing with Israel-related Red Sea shipping and even US naval vessels, have proven that insurgents, armed with drones and missiles can deny the effective use of carrier-battle-groups.

But, of course, the Pentagon hasn’t gotten the memo, or if they did they are resistant to change because the US military/industrial/complex (MIC) doesn’t do defense they do corporate enrichment and stock buybacks.

What’s ironic is that advances in missile technology is nothing new. By the 1980’s Soviet missile development had changed the calculus of Cold War conflict. US naval doctrine mandated carrier-battle-groups staying well away from Europe in the event of conflict due to the lethality of Soviet anti-shipping missiles.

And here we are, back to the essential conflict between neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The American (MIC) was originally conceived as a make-work program to prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression after WWII ended. However, beginning in the 1980s, private equity was used by MIC insiders to buy Federal assets for pennies on the dollar and load them up with debt to resell them to the public in order to enrich insiders. Wages were cut and production processes ‘streamlined’ in the companies bought by private equity, thereby erasing the public benefit of the MIC, such as it was. Neoliberal myopia went so far as to outsource military production to China, (go figure). And now, the same neocon politicians and intellectuals who thought outsourcing a great idea are today declaring China to be enemy number one.

And now the chicken have come home to roost. A new report warns that the United States is incapable of producing essential, high-tech weapons without continuing support from China: “If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.“

The problem for gunboat diplomacy is that it’s impossible to manage an empire with neoliberalism as your operating system.

Update: Heterodox economist Michael Hudson writes–“Wars could only be financed by running into debt, because populations would not support wars if they had to pay immediately the taxes needed to defray their full costs on a pay-as-you-go basis. But the commercial consequences of war debts would burden the economy and slow its economic growth, ultimately driving the nation bankrupt.”

Sound familiar?

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Source Documents

Posted on June 20, 2024 by camelotkidd

I’m fascinated by the history of ideas and ideologies, and no ideology has captivated me quite like neoliberalism. In our secular era, ideologies, like neoliberalism, with its admonishment that there is no alternative, take on articles of faith. Indeed, neoliberalism’s technocrats, market fundamentalists, and liberal authoritarians have all the trappings of religious deities.

Similar to the study of religions the best way to examine the history of ideas and ideologies is by reading source documents, articles and books. A lot of reading. The internet makes sleuthing far easier than poring over dusty religious manuscripts in the catacombs.

Thanks to the erudite and prolific Alastair Crooke, I have new insights into neoliberalism. “In 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) published a book entitled: Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.

In it, Brzezinski wrote: “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society…dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values…[and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behavior and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”

Sound familiar?

Brzezinski further argued that “the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”. 

David Rockefeller and the rest of the Trilateral Commission, a loose confederation of national security and financial elite, seized on Brzezinski’s insight to represent the third leg to ensuring the hegemony of the American empire. The other two legs were control of oil resources and dollar supremacy.

And, here we are. What Brzezinski, Rockefeller and the rest of the technocratic neoliberal elite plotted has become our reality, and average citizens are not thrilled about it. (See Brexit, Trump’s surprise 2016 election, the rise of the “populist Right” the Yellow Vests, and the latest European election results, etc.)

Kind of how the average Catholic wasn’t all that thrilled about the Spanish Inquisition.

Brzezinski’s book, a valuable source document, confirms the basic dishonesty of neoliberalism’s promise. Neoliberalism has been disastrous for America’s political economy, as austerity, privatization, and deregulation have led to crippling wealth and political inequality. More insidious though equally damaging, neoliberalism has also created a sort of cultural sickness; hyper-individualism and the ever-present narratives of deservedness, productivity, and merit have infiltrated our psyches, warping our sense of self, how we view others, and how we move through the world. It’s no surprise that we are facing loneliness and suicide epidemics, that overwork and burnout are commonplace, and that our society has become atomized.

 Brzezinski’s, Between Two Ages, like Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo, provides a clear window into elite thinking. After the turmoil of the 60’s with multiple demands for democratic participation there was a “crisis of democracy”. These documents demonstrate that democracy was for the oligarchy and freedom was to be reserved for capital.

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