Let them eat DEI

Posted on February 21, 2025 by camelotkidd

Democrats need to make a decision. They can either continue their decades-long accommodation of billionaires, banks and corporate interests, while deploying Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) to massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure, or embrace an agenda that directly challenges concentrated economic power. But simply condemning the Trump government will not be enough. 

The material needs of working-class Americans continue to be obscured and co-opted by team red and blue. While Republicans and the right address some of these problems, they do so by luring people through bombastic rhetoric and culture-war BS. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a DEI, cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that diverts working-class Americans from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

DEI draws it’s legitimacy from the civil rights movement but Martin Luther King Jr. was not just concerned with simply diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power. His goal was to redistribute economic power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people. In the run up to MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech the civil rights leaders discussed their goals. They spent little time discussing the need to train racist white people out of their attitudes. They didn’t talk about their choice of pronouns or how they pined for a black woman as press secretary at the White House. Instead, they talked about the needs of ordinary people who were being denied the opportunity to live decent lives. For example, the full name of the famous 1963 march was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

At the end of his life Dr King railed against American involvement in Vietnam and was organizing a Poor Peoples March on Washington before he was assassinated. I believe that his emphasis on economic justice and the American empire got him killed.

This story rarely gets told because any criticism of DEI gets you labeled as a racist or sexist or transphobe, but that’s unfortunate because Trump is doing liberals and the Democrats a favor in eliminating DEI and taking away their bogus cover story.

Now, instead of carping about Trump’s diabolical “populism” the Democrats have the opportunity to dial up an authentic economic populism and define themselves as the champions of working- and middle-class Americans against the oligarchs. The upcoming political battles with Trump will provide the Democrats a fresh opportunity for a resurrection of a New-Deal populism. Not just the extent of corporate power, but also over the wealth and influence of the 1 percent and oligarch class that will provide them an opportunities to declare a principled opposition to powerful corporations, condemn their lawbreaking, and put forward legislation offering concrete material benefits.

A capitalist country, such as the US, will always have a political party that represents capital, but it becomes problematic when both parties do. We desperately need a labor party in this country and presently the Democrats are not it. Rather than a liberal pejorative, populism is a political approach to thinking about the power big business and oligarchs like Elon Musk hold over our daily lives and finances, and addressing that power through policy and the law to ensure it is dispersed away from corporations and billionaires to workers, consumers, and honest businesses. It’s returning to the roots of a constitutional republic, where the present financial monarchy is to be restrained by the separation of powers and laws our founders envisioned.

It’s like politics for dummies.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are downright allergic to any policies their billionaire benefactors disapprove of, as the treatment by the Biden Administration of it’s amazingly successful anti-trust efforts. In one of the few bright spots, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department cracked down on corporate mergers and dusted off decades-old anti-trust laws as justification, but Biden and Harris treated this as radioactive. Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman provided a clue for this behavior when they instructed presidential nominee Kamala Harris to fire FTC head Lina Khan for her successful efforts at blocking more economic concentration.

As a result of this and decades of such behavior, I believe the Democratic Party is too far gone to change course. It’s human nature, when the magnitude of your error is so huge, there is no way you can have even reach self criticism. They can’t admit they were wrong. Instead, as we saw with the Democrats treatment of Bernie Sanders, the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who comprise the party, view left-wing populism with revulsion and project DEI as a magic-shield of virtue.

Diversity politics has long been an elite project–a way for major corporations or government offices to whitewash themselves with a few token hires or irrelevant seminars or programs that send the signal to America’s liberals that they’re the good guys. In the wake of de-industrialization and the off-shoring of millions of middle-class jobs the PMC sided with capital, preferring to kick down, while sucking-up to the billionaires it once despised.

In 2020 every Fortune 500 company in America was humping diversity, equity and inclusion, because it was painless. They certainly were not paying their employees more or urging the US government to implement universal paid leave and guaranteed health care. Diversity politics has given them a way to painlessly massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure at all. There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts were so comfortable embracing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. Instead, the focus on DEI is classic divide and rule, deployed by the PMC to maintain their status as the political and economic elite.

Leftist intellectuals used to recognize that identity-politics was a cul-de-sac. They properly understood that promoting ethnic chauvinism or racial set asides does little to solve the big problems in any ethnic community let alone the wider country. Today, this seems like something only Marxists and conservatives debate, as liberals have ceded the field to critical theory and DEI fixation.

The 2024 election made it obvious that voters comprehensively rejected this status quo which has been catastrophic for the majority of Americans, going all the way back to NAFTA, but also including Gaza and the proxy-war in Ukraine, and the neocon/Democratic foreign policy establishment that produced it.

Tellingly, the Democrats reject out of hand arguments that Trump’s victory signals a need to reconsider their neoliberal economic policies and continue to insist that redistributive social and economic policies are less meaningful to voters than cultural or racial group identities. For the past decade, neoliberal Democrats have been particularly insufferable in wielding it as a weapon to advance pro-corporate politics, whether it’s Hillary Clinton saying that breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and sexism, or MSNBC anchors and politicians like Barack Obama endlessly complaining about Bernie Sanders being a white man who didn’t talk enough about race and gender.

It’s fitting that the Democrats reliance on DEI and identity politics as their virtuous talisman has backfired, but it sucks for the rest of us. Now that Americans are tired of the hectoring Trump and the DOGE minions have hit on what they think is a winning formula. Whenever they want to eliminate government agencies, fire staffers or allow one of their crony corporations to plunder the commons, they just say they’re fighting “Wokeness” or “DEI.” 

The Democrats and PMC supporters have been “Hoisted by their own petard”.

Update: Lambert at Naked Capitalism lays out the stakes. “I think it’s pretty simple: The Republicans are directly assaulting the economic capital of the Democrat base, the PMC, by taking their jobs away. This is true whether the assault be on NGOs (foreign and domestic), DEI administrators, or government workers, including scientists (with more assaults on teachers to come). In addition, the PMC face the ascendancy, indeed the formidable combination, of two demon figures: Putin and Trump.”

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State Media

Posted on February 14, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US has long maintained a largely invisible, highly effective propaganda system, described by CIA official, Frank Wisner, as the mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any propaganda tune.

Back then the CIA maintained a network of writers, journalists and talking-heads, who operated as agents, disseminating an approved narrative, code named Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a large-scale CIA program that started in the early years of the Cold War and manipulated domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.

These days, they run the whole thing off-the-books, through NGO’s. President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing so-called independent media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world.

It was Obama who codified the new construct. “In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.

The collapse of the legacy, corporate media and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to sell a narrative, and reconfigure social attitudes, prejudices and policy preferences in entirely new ways.

Plus ça change.

Trump’s purge of USAID revealed the extent of Obama’s social-media Mockingbird. It turns out that the government organization had been funding numerous alternative media outlets. From Wikileaks: “USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives…“

Despite claims of “independence” these media organs amounted to a state media. USAID funded Politico, which was the source for countless other so-called independent media like the BBC, the New York Times CNN and NBC. In other words, in one way or another almost all of the western media is funded by the US government.

Something to think about.

Just like everything else in today’s “Newspeak“, the term “democracy” means the repression of dissenting voices, “peace” describes funneling more weapons to overt Nazi and genocidal regimes. Now, it turns out that “independent media” refers to an almost entirely government funded operation. The aim was for this “independent media,” funded by USAID, and armed with laptops and smart phones, to promulgate the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consent. And thus giving people the “permission structure” of apparent wide-spread public support to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.

If you have liberal family and friends, I’m pretty sure you understand what I’m talking about? Or, before Trump’s arrival, conservative family and friends mesmerized by Fox News?

In our post Citizens United world it’s more than apparent that with enough money, political operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely administered throughout the world by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the other alphabet agencies that make up the national security state.

Of course, the usual suspects chimed in to muddy the water. Liberals wailed that USAID was simply benevolent American foreign aid, administered by a cadre of dedicated public service workers, and that all the talk of USAID’s un-democratic actions abroad are conspiracy theories and Russian disinformation. while the right portrayed USAID as the second coming of the Comintern, busy spreading Marxism. Most Americans are only dimly aware of US foreign policy, leaving plenty of space for propaganda.

The reality is that US foreign policy has been outsourced to a bevy of NGO’s, funded by USAID, who operate a shadow government. Most of these NGOs were born during the Reagan years. While not all USAID and State Department funding flows through them, they control the purse strings for much of America’s global financial influence. Rather than altruism, the goals are corporate penetration, resource access, and a docile low-cost labor, in the countries targeted.

Matt Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South. Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. 

The crimes on the empire’s periphery always return to the homeland. All of the regime-change mischief and color revolutions carried out in hostile countries, came back when Trump was elected in 2016. The NGO’s funded by USAID were instrumental in Russia-gate, the two impeachments aimed at Trump, and the false claim that the Hunter Biden story was a Russian hoax.

Liberals used to believe in the 1st Amendment and support a polity that encouraged debate, dissent, skepticism and free speech, but now they have turned on a dime and advocate narrative control and censorship. Since Trump’s election liberals have become more authoritarian, and more repressive of dissent. What ironic is that liberals have come to believe their own propaganda and they’re trapped in an echo chamber of which the USAID. support of “independent” media plays a very significant role. 

It will be fascinating to read Noam Chomsky’s reaction to the further confirmation of the ways in which the American empire goes about Manufacturing Consent. In their groundbreaking expose Chomsky and Edward S. Herman detail a propaganda model enacted through government and corporations and “powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication.”

USAID funding and promoting “independent media” amounts to the a modern day manufacturing consent for the American empire. Moreover, the USAID exposure should call into question the campaign against “disinformation.” How is this not the biggest case of disinformation?

It’s also a blatant attack on the Constitution and represents a flagrant disregard for the role of an informed citizenry in exercising our rights and responsibility to freely elect to public office those whom we believe best represent our values, and to hold those thus elected accountable for what they do in our name.

Unfortunately, a state media can simply disappear such oddities and questions down the memory hole.

Update: USAID has many dedicated workers and engages in many charitable, critical activities worldwide: Social and economic development programs, health and nutrition programs, irrigation and drainage projects, disease eradication, environmental remedies. I would like to believe that if all the USAID did was dole out charity overseas, it would still be in business. 

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Thread the Middle

Posted on February 8, 2025 by camelotkidd

The next four years are set to be a wild ride, but I intend to thread the middle.

By that I mean that to defeat Trump we must scrutinize, modify and adapt our resistance. Furthermore, we cannot fail to acknowledge that the red/blue cultural war is a serious distraction from seeing the US economic/political/military reality, where both parties and their corporate media cheerleaders, not just Trump, are malign actors causing serious harm. I wrote this last week: “I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.”

I’m mulling this over as we make the transition from one evil to another. While a distraction, the red/blue cultural war is dangerous because ideologues on both sides are irrational, where reason is wasted and so there is a need to tread carefully. The tussle over Trump eliminating USAID is a good example. Liberals are defending a government entity they argue is spreading democracy and universal values but USAID is also a CIA cutout that facilitates color revolution regime-change ops, while propagandizing the American public.  The agency was created in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, by President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts. USAID quickly developed a reputation for savagery, where it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, and utilized black propaganda.

Naturally, the Democrats, who, with Russia-gate, have transformed into cheerleaders for the intelligence agencies that comprise the deep state, are opposed and have been protesting in front of USAID headquarters after President Trump agreed to shut USAID down. This is your Democratic Party, where there’s been no protest about Trump’s assault on the National Labor Relations Board, but they love them some spooks.

Nevertheless, Trump looks to cause serious disruptions in our world, not just with his actions but with the counter actions that will inevitably reverberate through the complex systems of our modern society.

It’s not that Trump’s actually popular, he’s not. After promising a populist revolution to help American workers it appears that he’s poised to govern like all of the Republicans since Reagan by reducing taxes on capital, on the rich, and increasing taxes on the labor on workers, especially the lowest income workers.

Here’s where we need to pause. Both parties and the corporate media have brought us to this point with their policies. The Biden Administration was mostly a continuation of neoliberal economics and one of the main reasons Kamala Harris lost was that the the Democrats were associated largely with an inflation driven by their corporate benefactors. Indeed, the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

But Biden, or whoever was running the government, was just following a bipartisan trend of socialism for the rich and savage neoliberalism for American workers. This allowed the oligarch’s to loot the country, courtesy of their bought and paid for politicians. Critical mass was reached in the 1990s whereby the wealth of the oligarchs was increased to the point where it bought explicit political control.

It’s fitting that Donald Trump is a buyer and a seller in our post Citizens United world, as well as the most transactional president in our lifetime but what do they say about chickens coming home to roost?

The rise of neoliberalism brought a concerted decision made by capitalists with the explicit backing of the government that they would offshore and outsource US production to other countries because, of course, they wanted to exploit labor arbitrage. Everyone wants to forget this history in their zeal to blame Trump but the plutocrats who own the country hated the New Deal compromise with labor and have long sought to break the back of unions. Then there was the privatization of the commons, where American infrastructure was seized by corporations in the process erecting tollbooths and making the US economy high-cost. These were choices made by both parties, the corporate media, and all of the leading economists, who cheered the privatization and assured us that it was way more efficient than “big government.”

(Picture of a mechanical ratchet)

Trump seems set to exacerbate the problems with his ham-fisted tariffs. Because even if you put tariffs on everything, the US can’t produce anything because they’ve lost our factories as well as all of the manufacturing workers. It’s gonna take generations to bring back. And because the costs of production in the US are so high, because you have to give workers healthcare. You have to give workers education to their children. You have to give workers housing, but if all of that is insanely expensive because it’s all been privatized, it doesn’t matter if you have tariffs because those wages have to be higher to make up for the cost of education and healthcare and housing.

Then there’s the American empire. Democrats seriously seem to think all the outrage over Trump is going to magically erase Biden’s wholehearted support for the Israel genocide of Gaza, where the US provided the weapons, bombs, intelligence and most importantly deployed the whole of the western media/propaganda machine in an effort that Winston Smith would have recognized. I really don’t believe that everyone has forgotten the Democrats culpability. I think permanent damage has been done, especially in the eyes of young people. I think Americans will focus on Trump because he’s the president now and his abuses need to be highlighted and criticized, but I don’t think they’ll ever forget the way Biden and the Democrats showed us who they really were through 15 months of mass atrocities.

If that was not enough, there’s the US sponsored proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where Blinken or Sullivan or one of the many deep state apparatchiks, thought it a good idea to lob rockets into Russia, while senile Biden nodded along.

The problems we face are bi-partisan yet there will be intense pressure to choose a side in the ongoing cultural war. A true intellectual critiques their country, party and themselves. The dirty little secret that none dare broach is that Trump is us. He represents and exemplifies what we’ve allowed this country to become, and we’re all culpable, myself included.

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 Authoritarian Conflict Management

Posted on February 1, 2025 by camelotkidd

Out of town.

So here’s a important article by Mike Whitney, detailing the ways in which Trump is responsible for Hamas’s bust out of Gaza and Israel’s genocidal response.

And a taste–“So, with a wave of his hand, Trump broke with all of his presidential predecessors, all the applicable UN Resolutions, and with traditional US foreign policy dating back five decades. And this was just the beginning because—as we know now—the Abraham Accords set the dominoes in motion leading inexorably to the flattening of Gaza and the displacement of two million civilians. As author of the Accords, Trump is largely responsible for the unfolding catastrophe. 

Keep in mind, the Accords really had nothing to do with peace or normalization. As senior fellow at the Arab Center Dana El Kurd said, “to frame the Abraham Accords as a “peace”(agreement) that increased stability between signatories is deliberately misleading….To be sure, Arab-Israeli normalization cannot be considered “peace,” but should rather be understood as authoritarian conflict management. Through this lens, it is possible to understand more clearly how the accords have changed the landscape of the region, and why pursuing such a policy makes for an unsustainable future…

“Authoritarian conflict management”?? What does that mean?

It means that the inducements for participation in the Accords had more to do with strengthening domestic repression than promoting regional peace.“

While it’s fun to laugh at the severe liberal butt-hurt caused by Trump’s re-election, it’s important to acknowledge the way in which the red/blue cultural war is a distraction from our comprehension of power.

I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.

Remember kids–follow the money, arms and resources, while disregarding the corporate media agitprop.

Stay safe out there.

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Gangster State

Posted on January 24, 2025 by camelotkidd

The US is a gangster state, where foreign policies mirror organized criminal behavior. Any cursory examination of post-war history reveals that the US operates like the Mafia, maintaining its empire through unceasing violence.

Liberals view Trump as a horrifying aberration but he’s the perfect mafia don for a gangster state. Trump’s re-election presents America with its mask removed. In a fitting reception, arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were former officials with more blood on their hands than any combination of serial killers in history. The gang was all there–the Clintons, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Joe Biden–all mass murderers yet with the gall to view Trump as an affront to decency and morality.

Like the mob, who maintains a legitimate front veneer to camouflage their criminality, our feral elite utilize patriotism as their cover, with Trump invoking Manifest Destiny as a Golden-Oldie. It’s fun to mock the ineptness of the neocons who manage the US empire, with neoliberalism as their operating system, but for our billionaire owners, it’s been the best of times even as it’s been catastrophic for the country. Maybe I’ve missed it, but while Trump may attempt to end some of the empire’s numerous conflicts, making America great again does not include a distribution of wealth from the top down, and at best there will be a shift in tactics on how to extort more wealth from the rest of the world. Gains are to be increased for American plutocrats at the expense of vassals and enemies alike seems closer to the real meaning of MAGA.

With that in mind, despite Ukraine’s impending defeat on the battlefield, are the US gangsters going to want to lose the lucre from splitting Europe from Russia? What about the bonuses of having a terrorist state in Europe funneling arms elsewhere and willing to do dirty work like trying to blow up the TurkStream Pipeline , all to benefit American energy companies. And in any settlement with Russia, will American oligarchs have any interest in abandoning their meddling in the Caucasus and Caspian where they are trying to control the flow of resources toward Europe?

And what of Gaza and Israel’s Yinon Plan for Middle East conquest? Trump may have engendered a cease fire but the he and the gangsters who make up his foreign policy claque are captured by Zionists, much like the Biden Administration was.

If the Biden regime made one thing clear above all others, it is that presidents and cabinet members are more like interchangeable figures, the deep state’s front men, whose function is not to affect policy but to present it to the public and the rest of the world. That Biden presided over a genocide and an incredibly dangerous proxy war with Russia just indicates the absolute bipartisan domination of Washington by the War Party. The imperium’s foreign policies do not change, one administration to another, if you have not noticed. Like a crime family, the business of plunder and murder goes on forever.

Syria is where we can most clearly see the gangster state in action. The Assad Administration refused to play ball with the capo and pay the Pizzo, so Syria was destroyed. The gangster state maintains proxies to do the dirty work–Sunni and Nazi terrorists. Arch-neocon Michael Ledeen spelled out the mob dynamic when he stated that: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

The best thing about Trump is that he makes the idea of the US as a gangster state completely obvious without pretension. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. He puts much less effort into disguising the true nature of the US empire than other presidents.

That’s pretty much the real reason various factions of America’s permanent government object to Trump. It’s not because he presents a threat to the establishment or because he’s trying to bring down the deep state, it’s because he is viewed as a loose-cannon. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the importance of keeping a polite face on the imperial machine.

Thankfully, some Americans are recognizing the nature of our government due to the breakdown in the social contract, sky-high inflation, vast inequality and endless wars combined with ongoing psyops to marshal support. Alternatives to neoliberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible with temps or to cutting Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. That Americans are angry is now an open secret, demonstrated most forcefully by the assassination of the CEO of United Health

American propaganda is world-class but its effectiveness fades the more citizens see of the true face of the empire. We live in a gangster state run by gangsters.

Spread the word

Update: More evidence that the US is a gangster state, with heterodox economist Michael Hudson explaining how the Biden and now Trump administrations pulled a “bust out” on vassal, Germany.

“Trump told the Davos Economic Forum January 23: “My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on earth.” Otherwise, if they continue to try and produce at home or in other countries, their products will be charged tariff rates at Trump’s threatened 20%.

To Germany this means: Sorry your energy prices have quadrupled. Come to America and get them at almost as low a price as you were paying Russia before your elected leaders let us cut Nord Stream off.”

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Traitors

Posted on January 17, 2025 by camelotkidd

Billionaires are traitors, actively sabotaging the general welfare of America with their insatiable greed, and yet we celebrate them. The only reason we don’t immediately recognize their betrayal is due to the mighty propaganda Wurlitzer that venerates sociopathic CEO’s in an endless loop. It’s Ayn Rand’s world and we just live in it.

In an ironic twist, the billionaires and their corporate media marionettes have realized that while they were busy extracting other nations were busy producing. In response, they’ve sought to shift the blame to a “foreign-devil”, hence their desire for a new cold war against China. I’ve written about this before but China has transformed into a industrial powerhouse, raising the standard of living for millions of Chinese by following the same playbook that America used to develop. Our billionaire elite have abandoned such a model for sustained policies of financial looting, rent-seeking, monopolization and corruption.  

The contrast between the US and China is where we can most clearly witness the treason. The US is falling apart around us, while the Chinese are building the future.

China is rapidly overtaking the United States in a number of areas that threaten to undermine America’s position in the world. Naturally, US leaders and their billionaire backers are concerned about this and have taken steps to remedy the situation. Of course, none of this includes looking in the mirror and acknowledging their own culpability in an economic system that allows Wall Street to siphon off too much of their company’s profits leaving insufficient capital to reinvest in productive activity, critical infrastructure or societal improvement (See Boeing for a how-to manual). Chinese policymakers have taken a different approach to this issue and the results speak for themselves. Standards of living have risen sharply, poverty has been eradicated, health care is universal, critical infrastructure is top-notch, and China is becoming a model for the rest of the world.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the economic data yourself. Or, better still, Google “Chinese cities” or “Chinese high-speed rail” or “Chinese ports” or “Chinese bridges” etc. See for yourself the miracle that is taking place in China today.

Someone forgot to tell the geniuses who want to have a war with China. Former Chinese Ambassador Chas Freeman, explains why a war with China would not end well. “Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.”

However, the US still dominates the informational battlefield and most Americans buy into the myth of Chinese intellectual theft, perfidy and villainhood. Incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, lays out the charges–“We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order and they took advantage of all of its benefits… Instead they have repressed, and lied, and cheated, and hacked, and stolen their way into global superpower status.”

That’s one way to put it, but the plan was to neoliberalize China like they did to the US. Decades of “color revolutions,” Gene Sharp, “non-violent” mischief, and NGO machinations were supposed to prepare the ground for a neoliberal revolution, where the Chinese would surrender their traditional culture. Their entire society then becomes a void that can be filled. The American system is then able to fill this void with their own consumerist culture, which neutralizes any country, putting it in a position where it can only be absorbed by the World Economic Forum, City of London and Wall Street.

The plan failed due to the strength of the Chinese traditional culture and the competence and integrity of their leaders. On the other hand, it doesn’t say anything good about America and points to the hollowness of our own culture. Our leaders are on the take and America has devolved into a culture of narcissism where it is every man/woman for themselves. The political/economic/cultural affect of not caring about people but, rather, money and materialism has become a nightmare.

Still, they persist. Along multiple lines of attack, the US corporate media criticizes Chinese “overcapacity.”, coupled with complaints that many Chinese businesses are state-owned rather than private. However, this criticism seems logically inconsistent. America’s reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of neoliberalism.

Then there’s the narrative that China is a totalitarian country controlled by the Communist Party, but it certainly appears that their government serves the the country and well-being of the Chinese people rather than a narrow elite. Here in the homeland the media informs us that we live in a free-market, liberal democracy, yet our government serves Wall Street and the billionaires.

Thanks to RedNote, young Americans are discovering the real China of today, rather than what the media portrays. TikTok influencers are going in RedNote and can’t believe how China has out achieved the United States. RedNote opened a window for Americans to learn more about China by directly interacting with Chinese people. These exchanges also seem to be sparking an even deeper appreciation among Chinese for their own systems. As usual, another epic fail by the neocon gang that can’t shoot straight. An all around massive PR fail for the State Department, USAID and NED.

But don’t expect our billionaire overlords to change. After all, they have won the class-war, the one that really mattered. Neoliberal economists, and their ideologies served their purpose of enriching billionaires. The ideology of neoliberalism promotes a fundamentalist free market concept, featuring privatization, deregulation, and formation of trusts. The resultant financialization of the economy directly led to deindustrialization and a crumbling of manufacturing and the real production and consumption economy. It featured such popular business practices such as asset-light strategy, offshoring and outsourcing which have hollowed out the productive economy. The current US economic system is a rentier oligarchic system where financial parasites feed on the real economy and will eventually subsume it. This economic system has led to unprecedented wealth gap and societal polarization.

The awakening of young Americans gives me hope but we have our work cut out. Neoliberal austerity needs to end, rents and housing and stock bubbles need to be drastically curtailed and it needs to be policy that if you want to get rich you have to actually make stuff and employ Americans. No more monopolies, no more financial looting, and no more rentierism.

The contrast between the Chinese quality of life and ours needs to be broadcast and the villains named. Billionaires are not role models and they are not heroes.

They are traitors.

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Pay the Toll

Posted on January 10, 2025 by camelotkidd

We have a tollbooth economy, where necessary components of modern life–education, healthcare, transportation and communication–have become prohibitively expensive, in the process erecting barriers to economic participation.

A major feature of the tollbooth economy is the increasing weight of rentier activities and how they drain income from workers and more productive sectors. The end result is a sort of neo-feudalism, created by privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly were kept in the public domain of American economies so as to keep their costs low and minimize their cost structure. The result is a high-cost economy, where US workers are uncompetitive.

40 years of neoliberal “reforms,” have slashed or privatized essential governmental functions including vital infrastructure installation, implementation and maintenance. And now the Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), wants to eliminate or further privatize infrastructure, even as they proclaim that they want to cut government “waste”.

The effort to cut “government waste” has a long, bipartisan, history. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who last balanced the budget, a feat that was rapidly followed by a deep and lasting recession. And Joe Biden dedicated his career to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s benefits. And, who doesn’t want to cut government waste? Many Americans likely share the view that much of what the Federal government does shouldn’t be done. For instance, why are the FBI and CIA interfering in US elections? Why is the US funding and arming Israel and Ukraine, while meddling in dozens of countries worldwide? Why is the Federal government militarizing the police by producing military ‘surplus’ to supply them with? And why is oligarchy the only choice on the ballot?

It might surprise you to find out that none of the before mentioned governmental expenditures are on DOGE’s cut lists, but the furor over “waste” points to a larger issue. What’s been lost is the awareness that every economy is planned, with the salient political issue being who gets to do the planning. The recent dominance of financial capital over industrial capital was not an accident, and it’s operating system–neoliberalism–minimized state intervention in the economy, and has led to a situation where government influence is overridden by corporate donors and financial interests, not to mention the military/industrial/complex (MIC), sidelining public welfare.

What’s frustrating is that the history of US economic development has been lost or falsified in a deliberate un-learning. In the early 20th Century, economist Simon Patten demonstrated the importance of government expenditures on basic infrastructure to create a low cost economic environment, while proclaiming that infrastructure is the forth means of production, after labor, capital and land. Patten, who led the Wharton School during the Progressive Era, was a pioneer of the economics of abundance, and a theorist of the second industrial revolution, and intellectual godfather of the New Deal. Patten believed that to have a true free market the state needs to subsidize infrastructure to keep costs down, rather than having powerful monopolies enacting tollbooths at critical chokepoints. While Patten said that public infrastructure is the fourth factor of production, its role isn’t to make a profit. It’s to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive.

The decades of elimination and privatization of government infrastructure, justified as “deregulation”, has been accompanied by a tsunami of corporate media propaganda, cheerleading the destruction. Our soi-disant elite never wanted voters thinking too deeply about politics, especially the populist kinds of politics, whether of the left or right, that risked disturbing the metastasizing corruption and the forever wars from which they profit so handsomely.

Partisan political frames detract from understanding the American political economy. The current Republican conceit that Elon Musk is a radical here to “move fast and break things” misses that every president over the last five decades has made a similar pitch. And while economic predictions are notoriously difficult to get right, this is a guarantee: should DOGE get up and running, the rich will be made richer and the rest of us poorer. This isn’t only because Trump and Musk are evil or singularly self-interested. It will because this is how the American economy has been set up to operate.

To point to a recent example, the debate over H-1B visa’s elides the real reason that the US is uncompetitive with China. By focusing on so-called American-worker mediocrity, our elite and their corporate media sycophants conceal the tollbooth economy reality that precludes any real competition with China, which is simply following the same path as the US in their development by funding infrastructure.

Here’s a thought experiment dear reader: see if you can recognize the “tollbooths at critical chokepoints” in your life.

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Blowback

Posted on January 3, 2025 by camelotkidd

Inquiring minds want to know if there’s a connection between the US’s weaponization of terrorist proxies in Syria to overthrow the Bashar Assad regime and the truck attack in New Orleans?  Has the war of terror come home?

A US military veteran killed 14 people when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans early New Year’s Day and was then killed in a shootout with police. The attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar, reportedly had an ISIS flag on his truck at the time of the incident

Could this attack be blowback from US covert ops utilizing Sunni terrorists? It’s not out of the question since the US has supported al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations including ISIS for almost half a century since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war. 

In Syria, the rebels that the US. Turkey and the Gulf State allies have supported have been Sunni-terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS. The number one reason is simple: Sunni-terrorists make fanatical fighters. A close second is the fact that Sunni-terrorists can be proxies, or, if need be, patsies to scare hell out of the American public to support endless war and militarization. This dynamic was on display in Syria, when after unleashing ISIS to affect regime change, the US turned around and used the threat of ISIS as a way to intervene in Syria.

It’s useful to remember that in 2015, at the same time that the world was recoiling from the head-chopping savagery of ISIS, the US was secretly aiding their escalations. The US preference for ISIS was explained by Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry shockingly admitted that US planners actually welcomed the ISIS push toward Damascus, which they felt they could leverage to put pressure on Assad to give up power to the US-backed opposition.

I realize that it’s the United States of Amnesia, but am I the only one who remembers this?

The dirty little secret of the war-on-terror, is that the US cynically employs terrorists as either proxies or patsies to carry out its war-of-terror while waging a pretend war on terror. It’s not that the US doesn’t bomb and attack al Qaeda and ISIS once in a while, but at the same time they’ve been useful proxies and opportunistic patsies. That’s right, every presidential administration since Carter has either employed Sunni terrorists as proxies to carry out covert US foreign policies, or like Bush in seizing upon al Qaeda’s attacks as a pretext to advance already agreed upon plans for Middle-East conquest.

The problem with terrorist proxy monsters is that they can turn on their master. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a warning, and it’s a lesson that the US should have learned after 9/11 when the Sunni terrorists utilized to drive out the USSR from Afghanistan flew planes into the Twin Towers.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going on with all this. All I know is that the US is an extremely violent empire striving to maintain primacy and I’m pretty sure that if one their covert ops blows back to the homeland, it will be written off as “collateral damage.” It’s also a good idea to remain intensely skeptical of any and all narratives which might be used to manufacture consent for more war and militarization.

Update: The Cybertruck bomber, Matt Livelsberger, was a Green Beret, intelligence specialist who claims to have witnessed US Air Force bombing of civilians in Afghanistan. “I have knowledge of this program and also war crimes that were covered up during airstrikes in Nimruz province Afghanistan in 2019 by the admin, DoD, DEA and CIA. I conducted targeting for these strikes of over 125 buildings (65 were struck because of CIVCAS) that killed hundreds of civilians in a single day. USFORA continued strikes after spotting civilians on initial ISR, it was supposed to take 6 minutes and scramble all aircraft in CENTCOM. The UN basically called these war crimes, but the administration made them disappear. I was part of that cover-up with USFORA and Agent of the DEA. So I don’t know if my abduction attempt is related to either. I worked with GEN Millers IO staff on this as well as the response to Bala Murghab. AOB-S Commander at the time can validate this.

You need to elevate this to the media so we avoid a world war because this is a mutually assured destruction situation.

For vetting my Linkedin is Matt Berg or Matthew Livelsberger, an active duty 18Z out of 1-10 my profile is public. I have an active TSSCI with UAP USAP access.”

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Concrete material benefits

Posted on December 31, 2024 by camelotkidd

The Trump-Vance administration can engineer a political transformation if they can provide concrete material benefits to working-class Americans, who have seen their standard and quality of living collapse. If so, Trump has an opportunity to consolidate a durable realignment of US politics and policymaking that could last for a generation. Even if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uni-party have done for the past 40 years.

It’s illustrative to ask if the US government promotes the common good of its citizens? Looking at health, education and housing, we can say no. It appears that the purpose of the US State is to enrich the owners of capital.

Americans increasingly recognize that our system is broken and understand that instead of a democratic republic, the US more closely resembles an oligarchy. The American working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. Concurrently, there is a growing conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle-class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. In the wake of Trump’s victory Bernie Sanders voiced a profound truth. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class and their increasing anger.

For example, it’s now a popular idea that powerful people should just be shot in the street because the American system is too corrupt for justice to be carried out any other way. This isn’t a right-wing or left-wing view. In a new poll, more than two-thirds of respondents said they believed denials of coverage and profits in the health insurance industry were partially responsible for the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in early December. The affect of all the wealth redistribution upward over the last forty-plus years has been building slowly but surely and it shouldn’t be surprising that Americans applaud when a CEO is murdered by someone frustrated with corporate greed.

The food fight between MAGA and the tech bros over immigration is a symptom of the angst, and offers clues to the paradigm shift in political parties, where the Democrats have transformed from the party of workers to one that represents the professional/managerial/caste, while the Republicans tentatively articulate policies to aid workers. All of it constitutes a meta-political shift the likes of which haven’t been seen in the US since 1968.

Lambert, at Naked Capitalism, lays out the case.  “It struck me forcibly than many MAGA supporters were in fact very well versed in policy, history, and data, and deployed their knowledge effectively against Musk and his tech bros. For example, H-1B is not about importing workers who are “highly skilled” (a pervasive, unexamined, and dishonest, tech bro talking point). That’s why, for example, Trump brought Mar-a-Lago waiters into the country under H-1B. Rather, H-1B is about importing workers who are cheap and compliant, because management can hold the threat of visa removal over their heads. That means that other things being equal, management will always prefer H-1Bs over citizens (the power imbalance, as idpol types would say).”

Axios has a good timeline of the immigration controversy, in “Trump sides with Musk in H-1B fight“

The elephant in the room is financialization. Tech and finance are so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where Silicon Valley ends and private/equity (PE) begins. And it’s apparent, by the destruction of labor wrought by PE over the last 40 years, how they feel about American workers. The capital behind Silicon Valley has successfully driven down STEM wages for American workers since the earliest days of globalization. The purpose of H-1B is, after all, labor arbitrage: cheap, compliant labor. It isn’t really complicated. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of American workers.

Furthermore, it’s quite apparent that the tech billionaires don’t care about Americans, or even believe in nation-states at all, while caring about Americans is the core premise of MAGA. The H-1B debate is simply this fundamental conflict boiling up for the first time.

As you can see with the H-1B controversy, the GOP is torn between the tech bros, who represent capital, and MAGA, which represents labor, for the direction of the party under Trump. It’s an amazing development, an outright rejection of neoliberal and individualist ideology replaced wholesale by defiant exhortations towards nationalism and collectivism, stoked even higher by the open contempt on display by the elites. The GOP is now riding the populist tiger, and the battle over H-1B visa’s will provide a useful predictor on whether or not Trumpism will provide material benefits to Americans, or if they will follow the familiar GOP script of tax cuts and billionaire fellatio.

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Hollow

Posted on December 28, 2024 by camelotkidd

I know I’m not the only one who feels that this years Christmas is hollow and artificial.

We are supposed to celebrate Christ–the prince of peace–even as our elite make a mockery of that with their embrace of genocide, bombing and mass murder.

But it is not just Christmas that’s become hollow and meaningless; our entire Western culture is toxic, where the US with its European allies tries to forcibly maintain empire, all while maintaining a forced semblance of civilization and “rule based” order.

In one of the darkest years in memory, rather than succumb to cynicism and despair I must believe that there are good people out there and it really is darkest before the dawn.

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