Hard men with guns

Posted on December 6, 2024 by camelotkidd

I knew that the deep state would not surrender the American empire without a fight and would go to extraordinary lengths to preserve it, but I underestimated their ruthlessness and depravity.

With their proxy war in Ukraine facing defeat and Israel’s failure to subdue Hezbollah they have turned to their old standby--terrorism. The U.S.’s aggressive neocon infused policies have again unleashed al-Qaeda linked rebels to wreak havoc in Syria.

To think that the all of these things are not connected is the height of naivety, in fact it’s clear that this is part of a complex interconnected operation . The US deep state’s tactics are not exactly new, and the Syrian gambit is similar to the reckless attack on Kursk. They are trying to divert Russia by focusing on Syria–overextending the Kremlin and relieving pressure on Ukraine–while attempting to curtail Iranian weapons supply to Hezbollah.

The CIA has renewed it’s dirty war with Sunni terrorist proxies, a reprise of Obama’s Timber Sycamore, in a renewed attempt to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The terrorist offensive is conveniently timed to coincide with the Lebanon “ceasefire,” and according to Yedioth Ahronoth, Israeli officials view the advance on Aleppo as an opportunity to weaken Syria. That is unsurprising as it’s widely believed that Israel, thwarted in its ground invasion of Lebanon, has circled back to its previous backup plan following its 2006 failure in Lebanon, which is to eliminate Iran’s ability to resupply Hezbollah via Syria.

The terrorist offensive is also a bid to distract and weaken Russia, who maintains several military bases in Syria as well as allying with the Bashar Assad government. The Sunni terrorists also received considerable support from Ukrainian special forces with a focus on drone warfare to target Russian and Syrian positions.

As you might expect, the US corporate media has turned on a dime, from enthusiastically supporting the “war on terror” attacks on al Qaeda, to cheerleading the new “war of terror” with al Qaeda as our allies. Even George Orwell would be impressed.

Author and analyst Max Blumenthal has done considerable research on the origins of these groups and presented his findings in a recent article titled The US has backed 21 of the 28 ‘crazy’ militias leading Turkey’s brutal invasion of northern Syria. Here’s a short blurb from his article: “Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United States,. In other words, virtually the entire apparatus of anti-Assad insurgents armed and equipped under the Obama administration has been repurposed by the Turkish military to serve as the spearhead of its brutal invasion of northern Syria. “

The Obama program to utilize terrorists to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, the before mentioned Timber Sycamore, was enthusiastically supported by the bi-partisan national security state including Senator John McCain and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When the later Sen. John McCain made his notorious surprise visit to the Turkish-Syrian border in May 2013, hoping to inspire a US military intervention, he was warmly welcomed by Salim Idriss, the then-leader of the US-backed Free Syrian Army, which was really al Qaeda of Syria.

Back in 2012 when Clinton was Secretary of State, she junketed to Istanbul to rally support for those very same militias during a “Friends of Syria” conference convened by Erdogan. She later remarked, “The hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip them…”

To place this in historical perspective–the US utilizes terrorism, including the latest attacks in Syria, as a means to thwart the growing power and economic integration of BRICS members Russia, China, Iran, as well as any other countries who go against Washington and Wall Street’s policies. US foreign policy, implemented by the CIA, following the British MI6 model, utilizes terrorism to dissolve the social cohesion of a targeted country. Coupled with the sanctions and color change toolkit this has proven to be model for western governments to keep the jungle at bay.

Terrorism helps explain why the US and NATO downsized their conventional military capabilities. Why have your own soldiers fight and die when there’s a terrorist proxy available?

They say that as one gets older they become more conservative but that’s not my experience. I’ve become more radical and my views more subversive. I have lost any illusions about the world I inhabit. There is simply too much power riding on the continuation of the American empire for those in control to allow a multipolar world and if terrorism is required to maintain it then that’s exactly what they will do.

Update: The deep state might want to reappraise their embrace of terrorism in the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. Two can play that game. Terrorism is a tactic of the weak and their are a lot of “soft targets” in the US.

Posted in deep state, neoconservatives, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Things behind things

Posted on November 29, 2024 by camelotkidd

We live in a interregnum, where everything, including reality itself, is in flux.

The paranoia and distrust of institutions that has taken hold in America is not a function of Donald Trump’s rancid populism no matter what the liberal, intellectual class may believe. The paranoia and distrust are a distillation of 40 plus years of neoliberalism, an economic and political project that funneled obscene wealth to the oligarchy as it impoverished the majority of Americans. The neoliberal consensus has for decades been utterly corporate, elitist, and narrow-minded to the exclusion of structural, nation-building policies that benefit working people, like Medicare for All or the return of American manufacturing from abroad. As a result the country is no longer capable of providing a good life for many of its citizens. In this light, we see a far more interesting picture emerge, where the rampant paranoia that is consuming the American body politic is the result of the capture and repurposing of the US government, combined with the extreme and accelerating decay of the American empire.

Trump is not going to “make America great again”. That ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are serious policies that our feral elite will hate. These, including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages, are anathema to America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement. What we have instead is a corrupt political system and their resulting failure to deliver the kind of decent, improving living standards for its people that was once the basic idea of the American dream. I mentioned this before but it bears repeating. An April poll of voters aged eighteen to thirty by the Democratic-aligned Blueprint firm found that, in the words of its lead pollster, young voters look at US politics and “see a dying empire led by bad people”.

It’s hard to argue with that appraisal.

The elephant in the room is the American empire. The latest, “most important election ever” was characterized by the refusal of the candidates or the corporate media to even broach the subject, let alone suggest ways that the United States can rationally deal with the decline of its own empire. The reality is that American elites are engaged in a combination of denial and desperate pretense.

The recent authorization of missile strikes into Russia illuminate the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation.

I never thought US leaders were capable of transitioning from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, just like I never thought they would be able to manage climate change. In fact it was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, being second rate leaders influenced by a coterie of insane neocons, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order. Increasing chaos and violence is baked in at this point, as recent events have made abundantly clear.

The loss of the American empire calls into question all of our political and economic actors. How does American corporate capitalism operate absent the US empire? I hate to quote Thomas Friedman but he has a point when he describes the US military as the backstop to American business. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, …”

Still, change is coming and it behooves us to imagine a future where the US is normal country instead of a global hegemon, circling the globe with military bases. And on that note, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff had a fascinating discussion recently that deserves our attention.

RICHARD WOLFF: “Yes, I want to throw an idea out for you and for Michael to play with. And I’ll be blunt, so I won’t be able to develop the nuances of this. A very short time ago the head of Apple, Mr. Cook, went on a trip to China. He’s made many trips to China but more than one this year, but he recently made one. And it was crystal clear by the very warm reception he got, and by his own very enthusiastic, positive commentary on China, that – and here comes the jump – that there are sections of America’s most important, biggest businesses that do not want a war with China. They do not want this conflict. They have become the giant successes they have been because of what China enabled them to do. They know it. They don’t want to lose that. There is nothing to substitute for what they get out of China which, to be blunt, is cheap labor and the biggest expanding market on earth. To give those up is to risk their entire business operation.

Okay, now at some point – especially were Mr. Trump to win – these people are going to possibly begin to think like Michael just spoke. They’re going to say, These two parties are a disaster. They are involving us in one dead-end war, or conflict, after another. And while it may be good for the Military Industrial Complex, we are after all a bigger section of this economy than they are: we, the high tech industries; we, all the rest of the economy, other than the Military Industrial Complex.

At which point an immense conflict breaks out in the ranks of capitalists: Those who want to cut a deal with China and the BRICS work out how we live and let live with one another on this planet; who don’t want war and who don’t want nuclear war and who don’t want Jake Sullivan-type people playing around that problem – versus the Military Industrial Complex and those who are won over by them.”

Wolff makes an interesting argument that rings true. Average Americans have almost zero influence on policies so any change will be driven by elite rivalry and competition. Other capitalist sectors will come to see the military/industrial/complex MIC as detrimental to their own future success in the zero-sum competition going forward.

But, there are things behind things. The MIC has a powerful lock on American policy due to the undue influence of the neoconservatives who permeate every aspect of the national security state, and who remain blinded by the myth of American exceptionalism and its attendant ills to such a degree that they are unable to discern things as they really are.

Posted in anti-imperialism, neoconservatives, neoliberalism | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sabotage

Posted on November 22, 2024 by camelotkidd

For the second time in 8 years an outgoing Democratic administration has sabotaged Donald Trump and his desire for improved relations with Russia.

In 2016, President Obama played a central role in initiating Russia-gate,  the nefarious scheme to portray Trump as a Russian agent. We know from emails released by WikiLeaks that early discussions regarding the Clinton campaign’s plot to associate Trump with Russia–what Clinton called the Swiftboat plan–were already initiated in February 2016. Over the following months, multiple aspects of the plan were assembled. These included the hiring of campaign operatives Fusion GPS, commissioning the Steele dossier, and composing a group of IT specialists who created a false data trail linking Putin and Trump. Whether Obama was involved with these efforts is unknown. The earliest documented date we have for Obama’s involvement in the scheme is July 28, 2016. On this day, Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, came to the Oval Office and briefed Obama on Clinton’s Russia-gate project. Thus, we can say for sure that it was on this day that Obama became aware that the allegations of Russian collusion was really a rat-fucking operation conceived by Hillary Clinton and her band of neocon war-hawks.

And now, President Biden, with his risky decision to allow long range ATACMS strikes into Russia, is attempting to lock Trump into an endless proxy war that has serious risk of a nuclear exchange.

President Joe Biden was too senile to stand for re-election, and was replaced on the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris. But he’s still president until January 20, and he or the-powers-that-be directing him have decided to leave Trump with two hot wars to contend with. Trump was, in part, elected by the American people because  he vowed to end the war in Ukraine. By taking this escalatory action two months before the end of his term, Biden could wreck any chance Trump might have to achieve peace.

This week the Ukrainian military launched multiple US-made ATACMS missiles at Russia’s Bryansk Region, some of which have been intercepted, the Russian Defense Ministry reported. Biden’s sudden reversal of policy represents a dramatic escalation in the war that will require a strong response from Moscow. Putin has repeatedly warned that firing missiles at targets located on Russian territory would trigger harsh retaliatory attacks not just on sites in Ukraine but also on those nations that are directly involved in the strikes, namely NATO and the United States. 

If that wasn’t enough, after ‘allowing’ Ukraine to fire U.S. controlled ballistic missiles onto targets in Russia, the Biden administration has approved largely prohibited antipersonnel mines for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Biden’s perilous actions are pushing the US towards World War III. But what is equally shocking is that Biden has been informed by his top advisors that using the ATACMS would have no material impact on the outcome of the war which is already a lost cause. Russian troops are currently advancing at the fastest pace since the war began while Ukraine’s frontlines continue to collapse. The only effect the policy-change will have is to put US and NATO military assets and bases at greater risk and to hobble Trump’s attempt to forge a peace plan.

If Biden was too decrepit to be the Democrats’ candidate in 2024, why does he still have the ability to drag the US into a nuclear war? In fact, the only way that Biden is doing what he is doing is with the consent of senior national security and military leaders, the so-called deep state. Of course, with Biden’s advanced senility, the neocons who make up his foreign policy staff could be freelancing. The neocons are nothing if predictable. When one of their plans goes awry (which they invariably do) they simply double down.

For the last year perceptive military analysts have been pointing out that Russia continues to roll up the Ukrainian army and move to militarily subdue, to demilitarize and de-Nazify, Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, as well as the Black Sea coastal regions all the way to the Danube, including Transnistria. They will very likely also move to secure a demilitarized zone that reaches much further west than the Dnieper, and demand neutrality for whatever of Ukraine remains.

And when all of this becomes apparent the US and NATO will do something really stupid like shooting missiles into Russia.

What could go wrong?

Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, neoconservatives | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The end of the end of history

Posted on November 15, 2024 by camelotkidd

Trump’s reelection has shattered the end of history narrative promulgated by Francis Fukuyama and the assorted coterie of neocons who plotted a perpetual American empire.

Former MI-6 military and foreign policy analyst, Alastair Crooke writes–“the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.

Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’, involved 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 behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].

Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that the nation-state … 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. Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.”

Back to yours truly. It’s funny how reality always has the last word when it comes to ideologies. And, that’s a problem presently as the US establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is disbelief or ridicule. Since the end of the Cold War the US and western intellectuals have controlled the meta narrative–the “end of history”, etc. and it went rather well as long as they could control the narrative, but they can’t control the narrative anymore. 

Hubris plays an oversized role in the notion of the end of history. The neocon intellectuals imagined a US that, like a colossus, stood astride the world. But, as I’ve discussed here, these same intellectuals were so blinded by their American exceptional ideology that they failed to understand that it’s not possible to maintain an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. For the U.S. today faces its own internal structural contradictions owing to the off-shored manufacturing base. A recent report by the RAND Organization states starkly however, that the U.S. defense industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the U.S. and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity. The U.S., the RAND appraisal continues, could in short order be drawn into a war across multiple theaters with peer and near-peer adversaries – and it could lose. It warns that the U.S. public has not internalized the costs of the U.S. losing its position as the world superpower.

Trump, almost certainly is a symptom of the neocon hubris. When governing institutions pass a critical threshold of unresponsiveness to the people, the reaction of the people is a wish for destroying the institutions even at the cost of social upheaval. All segments of the American and wider Western public are dissatisfied with their so-called representative government and its policies. What’s ironic is that America’s Cold War victory, used to justify its imperial dominance, was “bound to fail”, because the hyper-globalization of capital US neoliberals undertook detached the working- and middle-classes of the Western world from an economic and political regime which impoverished them.

We should not lament the collapse of the “rule-based international order” the neocons constructed post 1989. The unipolar era produced endless wars, regime-change efforts and a voracious financialization of the Western economies. The multipolar world we have entered has the potential to save the US from its own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, America will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for everyone except the oligarchy and their pet intellectuals.

Unfortunately there is no interest in the American Empire for “peace” because the need by the oligarchs is to maintain and enhance their control over their subject populations. How else are they going to maintain the rule of the corrupt and the ideology of hedonism and radical materialism? War is the answer to all their dreams and peace the major threat to the Imperial regime. Trump may not want any war, but the Deep State and the neocon intellectuals want war.

And they believe they can get one.

Posted in anti-imperialism, neoconservatives, neoliberalism, propaganda | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Landslide

Posted on November 8, 2024 by camelotkidd

There was a clear winner in Tuesday’s presidential election. Billionaires won in a landslide.

No matter what the public wants and no matter the outcome of elections, the oligarchs almost always win. They get a neoliberal government that does little or nothing to address the crises those same oligarchs are profiting off of. They get a government in which “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy,” as summarized by Princeton researchers.

Billionaires fund both American political parties and they have wants, needs and desires. Elections cost money–a lot of it. For the 2024 election, a staggering $15.9 billion was spent on ads and campaigning by both Democrats and Republicans, making it the most expensive election in history; in just one week, nearly $1 billion was poured into political ads. 

In other words: the country’s wealthiest are bankrolling the election, wielding political power and influence like never before. The U.S has strayed far beyond recognition from the Constitutional order crafted by the Framers and is corrupted systemically. The fact that billionaire dominate our political process proves it.

It’s not just the sheer scale of the political ad spend that’s worrying, it’s the disproportionate influence of billionaires. Eighteen percent of all political ad funding came straight from the pockets of a tiny handful of America’s mega-rich. In fact, according to USA Today, Harris had 83 billionaires supporting her—making up 6% of her campaign funds, according to Al Jazeera—while 52 backed Trump, but they were extremely generous donors, making up 34% of his total campaign fund. 

Let’s not forget that Donald Trump is a billionaire, and Republicans have traditionally been the party of the wealthy.

And don’t get me started on the so-called “opposition” party–the Democrats–who used to represent working-class Americans but who now caters largely to the professional/managerial/caste, with some assorted “socially liberal” billionaires tossed in. But, of course, the Democrats will rewarm their familiar tale of victimhood, where they lost because Harris was a woman of color, or too progressive. It’s like they learned nothing from 2016. They’re similar to the French Bourbons. “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

But, here’s the thing. Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black. She lost because the Democratic Party has turned its back on America’s working-class. At this point the modern Democratic Party needs to be burned to the ground and its ashes scattered to the wind. Furthermore there is a great demand for a non-billionaire party.

Kamala Harris lost because, if your political and media system is rigged by donors then it limits the choice to two neoconservative/neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline candidate has an edge. The United States political system keeps moving further to the right, pushed and pulled by both political parties. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

I hate to break it to you but voting at the national level is largely useless and no one is coming to save us. We are going to have to rise up against the malignant system itself. We can’t afford to have any illusions.

Posted in neoconservatives, neofeudalism, neoliberals, propaganda | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The F-Bomb

Posted on November 1, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until Trump came along.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in deep state, feral elite, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Market Mechanisms

Posted on October 25, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in neoliberalism, propaganda | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I read it on the Internet

Posted on October 18, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

Americans have noticed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Phoenix Program

Posted on October 11, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

October Surprise?

Posted on October 4, 2024 by camelotkidd

Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, neoconservatives, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment