What’s the plan Stan?

Posted on April 5, 2024 by camelotkidd

What is the plan for the American empire? Do our feral elite even have one or are they just winging it?

There was the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent competitors from rising to superpower status from the end of the Cold War, but that was the neocons pet project and they fucked it up thanks to employing neoliberalism as our operating system, with its emphasis on short term greed. The problems arise when attempting to parse out the details because it’s hard to tell where neoconservatism ends and neoliberalism begins and both ideologies involve large dollops of hubris mixed with incompetence.

For instance: our feral elite were the ones who chose to make China our factory and manufacturing workshop in large part to evade labor unions and environmental standards. They were the ones who ceded capacity and know-how. Not only did they export the skill chains that go with manufacturing technology, they degraded the workforce into one that would be hard pressed to engage in relatively well paid manufacturing. The result is that the US actively de-industrialized and off-shored production to China for short-term profits. And they did these things while also profiting off making public goods, housing, health care, education, healthy food, all prohibitively expensive.

So, the plan for the American empire is looting, or am I missing something?

I don’t think I’m missing something but our elite do have a nice ideological cover story of a new environment, where there is one superpower–the United States–and where the “rule based international order” supplants the rule of raw power relations, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.

What’s funny is that too many Americans and foreigners believe this nonsense, but the times, as they say, are changing.

The US was supposed to prevent genocide as the “good guys’ rather than aiding and abetting it as we’re doing in Gaza. Indeed, the greatest threat to the US’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. And that’s a problem because the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order was predicated on using the cover story of idealism.

And now, most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full US backing, committing Genocide – in real time, blatant and unrelenting.

I think a sizable portion of Americans are dimly aware that something is amiss. Recent polls show American to be desperately unhappy but poll questions make no mention of the American empire, or how the same feral elite who off-shored their jobs profit from the proxy wars and genocide that have made the US a pariah state.

Update: Heterodox economist Michael Hudson explains the economic costs of the present day American empire:

MICHAEL HUDSON: “Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.

But there’s no way that the American economy can be self-correcting without a few decades of new investment. You’d have to reinvent the educational system. You would have to take public health into the, health care into the public domain so that you could lower the cost of living so that employers wouldn’t have to pay such high wages. You’d have to provide freer education so that workers don’t graduate into the labor force with so much debt that they need high enough wages to pay the debt. And even so, can’t afford to buy houses.

America, and also, I think, Western Europe, has painted itself into a corner that is now systemic. The whole trend from 1945 to today, all of these 70 years have built up such rigidities that there’s no way that you can break them down. And the idea that somehow there’s a government policy that can fix things won’t work either, unless it’s so radical a policy that it won’t be the current economy anymore.

Nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. They just avoid talking about the debt problem, talking about what makes America high cost. And then, of course, there’s the war spending.”

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Schismogenesis

Posted on March 29, 2024 by camelotkidd

Thanks to Cory Doctorow I now understand why liberals lost their fucking minds when Trump was elected.

Doctorow says that there’s a name for this phenomenon: “schismogenesis.” Or when one group of people define themselves in opposition to another: That’s when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Doctorow says– “This notion grabbed me, because it explained so much about the changes in attitudes I’d seen among my (erstwhile?) friends and allies in the “progressive” world during the Trump years and through the covid pandemic. Specifically, it explained how people who considered themselves politically liberal or even leftist were transformed into defenders of voting machine companies and the pharmaceutical industry, and champions of the FBI.”

We witnessed this phenomenon in real time when Trump was elected and liberals embraced any and all unsavory characters who opposed him–like George W. Bush, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.

We observed it during the Covid pandemic with the treatment people that questioned the official story about vaccines.

Doctorow describes how this phenomenon influenced his Covid understanding. “But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I’d long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shit-heads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.”

I marvel at the effectiveness of US propaganda, and the ways in which they innovate. Schismogenesis literally means the creation of division. Turning liberals into fervent cold warriors and cheerleaders for the FBI, CIA and Big-Pharma all because of their burning hatred for Donald Trump was genius.

Evil and diabolical but genius.

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Are you a neocon?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by camelotkidd

Too many liberals have embraced regime-change for Russia due to their burning hatred for Vladimir Putin.

Are you one of them?

Much of the hatred derives from Putin’s association with Donald Trump thanks to the Russia-gate psy-op, but there is also the enmity due to Russia’s perceived anti-gay stance. However, despite what liberals think, Russians are very tolerant of gays.  It is no secret that a large swathe of cultural life in Russia is dominated by gays. Not just ballet, but in other performing and visual arts as well.

The problem for Russians was when gay-rights were weaponized as an essential aspect of the neoconservative/liberal interventionists color-revolution playbook. The key architect of theses color revolutions was Gene Sharp, Sharp, who wrote The Politics of Nonviolent Action, established the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in 1983, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, AEI and associate groups, like the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), tirelessly trained regime-change activists worldwide.

But, not in US client states like Chile, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Colombia and Israel. In two decades of AEI activity, there is hardly any mention of these countries. Rather, AEI and its offshoots emphasize training activists in countries like the Soviet Union, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and post-Soviet Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. These were countries thwarting the United States’ geo-strategic priorities, or otherwise resisting neoliberal economic “reforms”–deregulation, privatization, austerity-forcing social spending cuts, etc. 

After these US-backed, Sharp directed “hybrid wars”, the new leadership demonstrated greater commitment to the “Washington Consensus” and acquiescence to Western demands for neoliberal economic “restructuring” , even as “democracy”, “human rights” and LGBQT rights were the ostensible pretext. Instead, these “color revolutions,” thanks to the telltale use of official protest colors, per Sharp’s framework–were regime-change operations undertaken by the United States to punish apostates and install more compliant vassals.

The relentlessly aggressive Neocons gained control over the American foreign policy establishment more than thirty years ago, and despite their record of repeated disasters, they have successfully retained that unbroken control since then. Indeed, the very term “Neocon” includes nearly the entire Washington, DC policy establishment, including liberals, it now seems.

I would argue that a central asset of the Neocons has been their dominant control over the corporate media. Our world is ruled by the media, which functions as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of those individuals who deploy powerful physical weapons or possess vast financial resources. 

An essential component of the neoconservative”color revolution” toolkit has been social media. Indeed, the major reason for the attacks on TikTok is that it provides an alternative to the Silicon Valley, US intelligence, deep state propaganda nexus. TikTok is a problem precisely because it prevents them from effectively spreading American empire propaganda. Until very recently, social media was seen as the best kind of soft power–like a neoconservative “Garden of Eden”–totally controlled by the U.S. power clique.

It’s useful to read how the authors of the House bill to ban TikTok describe its pernicious effects–“Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.”

Talk about projection. How can you control the minds of Americans when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? With TikTok, what’s at stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world. Essentially, TikTok and China are thus demonstrating that the days of US exclusivity and control over the social media propaganda are long gone, just as Russia had already shown that the time for US/NATO encroachment on its territory is over.

It is one thing to have to finally, belatedly accepted that the deceptive “unipolar”moment of the 1990s has been over for a long time. It is much worse to gratuitously enter the new multipolar order with a stunning, avoidable self-demolition.

In entirely unforeseen ways, the increasingly evident failure of the neocons ill-conceived plan to divide and conquer vast Russia has brought into stark relief the internal contradictions, ideological incoherence, and vast endemic corruption of American foreign policy. What’s ironic is that despite their commitment to “democracy” in regime-change countries, the neocons have a serious problems with democracy itself.  The neocons hold democracy in contempt and understand there must be “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled. Like Plato’s cave, democracy is what they say it is.

What’s even more ironic is that the accelerating unraveling of the American empire has been brought about by the aggressive and intrusive neocon foreign policies. The growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, represent the multipolarity that’s anathema  to the neocons and proof of the bankruptcy of their blood-drenched ideology.

If you, dear liberal, support the US a proxy war against Russia in a desperate bid to regime-change Putin you are a monster, just like the rest of the chicken-hawk neocons who are desperate to prolong the bloodshed.  At this point there’s no excuse to not comprehend that the whole war was never about democracy in Ukraine but about the selfish aims of some lunatic clique in Washington DC.

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Ink Stained Wretch

Posted on March 15, 2024 by camelotkidd

The corporate media in America has been corrupted beyond redemption and any talk of political reform must acknowledge this reality. The Constitutional founders included the press, or 4th Estate, with its unique ability to hold the powerful to account, in their list of vital institutions purposely.

It’s suggestive that amongst all the wailing and rending of garments over disinformation, there is no discussion of revitalizing the 4th estate to its “unique ability to hold the powerful to account”, or any examination of the role the corporate media has had in its own repudiation. Thanks to the corporatization of the media, the press, as a unique institution, is on its way to decline if not ruin. The consolidation of corporate ownership, which has shut down scores of newspapers and hemorrhaged thousands of jobs, began in earnest around the time that the Reagan Administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, a development that led directly to the rise of Fox News and the Hate Inc., tribal discourse that has America on the precipice of a civil war.

Corporate control has been deleterious for the media for obvious reasons. Whoever controls the organs of opinion formation, the news and entertainment media, the schools, the universities, controls the mass mind, and therefore controls politics. The totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union did this blatantly, with direct state management of the press. The US does this clandestinely, with nominally independent, privately-owned media manipulated via back-channel communications, government grants, intelligence agency inserts (Project Mockingbird) and so on.

The New York Times is the key node in the US propaganda matrix because of its powerful impact on the professional/managerial/class. Lately they’ve been in over-drive, with the fake rape story, and the puff piece about secret CIA spy-bases, in a desperate attempt to preclude accountability for the Biden Administration’s disastrous proxy-war against Russia and complicity in Israels Gaza genocide. So far, the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has killed over 31,000 people, mostly women and children. The US has supported the massacre by approving over 100 arms deals for Israel since October 7.

But something is wrong with the rest of American society, especially the young people–the Israeli stories aren’t working out (Anat Schwartz troubles, the mystery of killing people in a breadline, the murders of Palestinians on the West Bank, a new atrocity every day…). Israel is now toxic and the entire history of ethnic cleansing, massacre and long genocide on which the very existence of Israel is based, is now laid bare. 

And, questions about the wisdom of the proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine continue to mount, even as it’s the first war in which Americans have been instructed that the narrative must be preserved as a strategic imperative–that Ukraine will win no matter what pesky, contrary truths emerge.

The political class and corporate media are now in a panic and lashing out everywhere, with the bipartisan attempt to ban TikTok the latest example. The bill that could ban TikTok took one step closer to becoming a law on Wednesday. After being introduced just last week, the bill was fast-tracked through the House of Representatives and will now head to the Senate.

Independent journalist Michael Tracy writes–“Lead sponsor of the TikTok bill, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) admits the real reason they’re rushing to ban TikTok — because it’s “becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30″ and the US government doesn’t control it like other platforms”

Then there’s that elephant in the room that we’re not supposed to mention. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a “TikTok problem.” Suddenly, a so-called partisan congress agrees in unison: Let’s ban TikTok.

The problem appears to be that young people can recognize a genocide when they see it despite the best efforts of the corporate media to portray it as anti-semitism. What we’re seeing is an attempt at state censorship whose aim is to shut down Americans’ ability to dissent from currently unfolding US foreign policy, driven explicitly by elite fear at a rapidly growing antiwar protest movement that has largely succeeded in persuading the US public.

Indeed, the urge to censor TikTok demonstrates the way in which our elite feel towards an independent media that “holds the powerful to account”. You can see it with the censorship/industrial/complex, which is partly a reaction to the loss of influence of these legacy institutions, and a panicked attempt to assert control over the unruly many-to-many communications networks that have been displacing them. This is the latest iteration of the undercurrent of contempt toward ordinary voters that has become central to political elites’ worldview, especially since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly in Washington the reaction was that if the American people held any views contrary to the elite: whether opposing fracking, being critical of Wall Street, protesting against war and police brutality, or voting for Trump, it had to be because they were propagandized by the evil Russians weaponizing social media. 

If you trust the media, you are a fool. That’s understandable. Most of us were brought up to think that authority figures were trustworthy. But at some point you have to look around and notice that the corporate media is your enemy, just like most other corporations, rich people and the US government. 

Personally–I don’t believe a word they say.

Update: Now we’re getting somewhere.

New York Post: “A swarm of anti-Israel protesters early Thursday targeted the New York Times’ printing facility in Queens and accused the center of manufacturing “consent for genocide.”‘

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The Cookie Monster exits stage right

Posted on March 9, 2024 by camelotkidd

The coming defeat for the US in their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has already claimed its first resignation.

Victoria Nuland’s “retirement” is a tell that Washington’s premier foreign policy project has failed. She was on the ground micro-managing activities during the 2014 coup, (even handing out cookies to protestors), and has overseen the State Department’s sordid involvement since the war began. No US official has been more culpable for the ill-fated NATO proxy war against Russia, which has resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians and the destruction of much of the country. 

If there was any true justice this neocon harpy would be cooling her heels in a Hague prison.

A guy can dream.

I’m pretty sure that Nuland was forced out because the loss in Ukraine is shaping up to be a Cat-5 shit-storm, a catastrophic political defeat, the like of which the US and NATO have not suffered in modern times. Some governments might fall, and there will be endless vitriol and blame as everyone else besides Nuland who was involved races to cover their ass. More significant though will be the psychological effects on the US and European foreign policy elite. For them the defeat in Ukraine seems unimaginable. It’s not hard to imagine a nervous breakdown among western elites, many of whom have probably never had no confront such a brutal reality before.

Meanwhile, they are freaking-the-fuck-out.

Last April, Poland’s President Mateusz Morawiecki gave away the mindset in a TV address when he said that, “If we lose Ukraine, we will lose the world for decades. Defeat of Ukraine could be the beginning of the end of the golden age of the West.”

I’m thinking that the rest of the world might welcome such a result. Indeed, Nuland’s departure is a sign of a deep, systemic flaw in the Western model of governance, especially the pernicious effects of neoliberalism and rule of a professional/managerial/class (PMC), who are poised to suffer extensive reputational damage.

What’s ironic is that during the first cold war, America stood for God and country against the atheist Communism of the USSR. But since the Berlin Wall came down our feral elite have been too clever by half, using multiculturalism, identity politics and neoliberalism as a solvent to dissolve societal bonds, all so they could rule unimpeded. In the USSR the governmental and intellectual elite formed a communist “vanguard of the proletariat”. Here in the homeland the PMC forms the multicultural, neoliberal “vanguard of the proletariat”.

Consider that : Russia, a state that publicly values religion, tradition, families, culture, language and history, has just defeated the Davos-directed, globalist ideology that denies and denigrates all these things. Not only will this cause an identity crisis within the PMC, it will also cruelly expose the fact that current globalist liberal ideology gives people nothing to fight for: indeed, it systematically denigrates and destroys all motives for which people have historically struggled, whether politically, industrially or militarily. Its ideology tells people that they live in evil societies which are structurally racist etc. and whose histories are a cause for shame and humiliation. Nothing is left except a society of interchangeable consumers, and you can’t require a society of consumers to die to defend the principle of markets.

Like I’ve stated repeatedly–you can’t manage an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system–and Ukraine is proving it. The loss of Ukraine and the policy changes that will follow will be a shattering blow to the self-image of the PMC and to their radical neoliberal ideology. Other countries that didn’t get with the plan were subverted, overthrown or destroyed, cheered on by successive administrations–Democrats and Republicans, all in thrall to the heady mix of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that signified the “End of History”.

So much for that nonsense. Reality has a funny way of demonstrating that “western values” and “the rules based international order” are essentially bullshit.

And now there’s nothing left for the PMC but to try to mobilize support through continued anti-Russian hatred.

Russia-gate 3.0 anyone?

Ukraine may be the rock on which the PMC and its neoliberal ideology ultimately founders, and takes the professional/managerial/class down with it. Their mistake was to eliminate society and culture in a mad pursuit of profit. For generations, we’ve all been educated to worship at the altar of private capital’s unrestrained pursuit of profit for the greatest benefit of its shareholders. This has been promoted in the academia most notably by Milton Friedman, who argued the case in his 1970 essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”.

You can’t fight something with nothing: still less can you persuade other people to fight something with nothing. And ordinary Americans may just begin to wonder whether the Russians may not be onto something with this history and culture and society stuff.

I’m not holding my breath. Like I’ve said before, it will take a monumental defeat, perhaps the end of the American empire for us to be rid of our feral elite

Victoria Nuland may be the first Biden Administration official to resign or be fired over Ukraine but she won’t be the last.

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The Primary Aim

Posted on March 1, 2024 by camelotkidd

I’m confused.

Is America spreading democracy or enriching the military/industrial/complex (MIC)?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Here’s arch-neocon Victoria Nuland, trying out multiple arguments for more Ukraine spending: “We will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy & freedom around the world … And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the U.S., to make those weapons”

Likewise, Biden has vacillated between narratives. At first it was plucky, democratic Ukraine defending themselves against the evil, autocratic Russia, but lately he’s been making the argument that arming Ukraine is good for our economy as he advocates for more money for Ukraine. “We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores… equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.”

So, the basic question remains–is it democracy or MIC enrichment? And, with the Blob, it’s hard to tell because of the sea of lies. If we are being lied to about the progress of the proxy war, and we are, there is a pretty good chance that we are also being lied to about every aspect of it.

And it’s not like this is a new situation. Does any American still believe that Washington was “defending democracy and freedom” when it used a pack of lies to get us into Iraq, where a country was destroyed and perhaps a million people were killed? Was Washington “defending democracy” when Nuland and the rest of her neocon buddies successfully overthrew a democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014?

And, what about our democracy? Does anyone believe we live in a democracy when soldiers are protesting US complicity in genocide by setting themselves on fire?

When you’ve got people setting themselves on fire, you’ve reached a point where the people really feel as if they have no ability whatsoever to influence the policies of the government. Democracy is now a fading myth, where the views of the people are effectively the diametric opposite of the policies of the government.

And that’s pretty much where we’re at. We’ve got an election coming up with two shitty candidates, and a deep state that is poised to continue the same shitty policies that we’ve come to know and loathe: more tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for the rest of us, and never-ending war.

In these years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.

Shockingly, the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, even as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports that it now accounts for 40% of the world’s military spending. Four times more than its closest rival, China. It’s more than the next 15 countries combined. It’s certainly not “defense” and long past time for reconsidering what kinds of investments truly make Americans safe and economically secure–an out of control military budget or money spent on meeting people’s basic needs.

To answer the original question, I lean towards Orwell’s 1984, where Emmanuel Goldstein explains: “The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”

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Halfway around the world

Posted on February 23, 2024 by camelotkidd

The ongoing Russia-gate psy-op is demonstrating Mark Twain’s adage that: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

For the national-security-state, deep state, Blob, Russia-gate is literally the gift that keeps on giving, with the suspiciously well timed death in prison of Aleksei Navalny being just the latest twist in the ongoing psy-op. For instance, the New York Times, immediately blamed Trump by not condemning Putin.

Thanks to tying Russia to Donald Trump, the Blob was able to accomplish the impossible feat of turning liberals into raving cold warriors all because of their rabid Trump/Derangement/Syndrome (TDS). The repetition of Russia-gate that connected Trump and Putin, has conditioned liberals to believe that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and invaded Ukraine because it “is a country that for decades has enjoyed freedom and democracy and the right to choose its own destiny”, among other tall tales.

According to the new and improved Russia-gate, (now with 30% more whitening power), Putin whacked Navalny in prison just because he’s the personification of evil, even as it would serve no purpose and moreover provide the West a propaganda coup. Likewise, all the good little liberals still believe that Trump was only elected due to the virulent racism of the MAGA deplorables and is in no way related to the off-shoring of American manufacturing and unchecked immigration that have provided liberals with cheap electronics, fattened stock portfolios and affordable nannies, gardeners and maids.

Sigh.

All of this proves once again that the main difference between our propaganda infused world and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that Winston Smith knew he existed in an open air gulag, whereas in America everyone believes themselves free. We imagine that we cultivate our very own ideas, worldview and political identities on our own, when in reality these belief systems have been “manufactured” by the planet’s most sophisticated propaganda machine.

In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays began his work showing that the American public can be steered into the proper channels through mass-scale psychological manipulation, and Russia-gate is proof of the ongoing sophistication of such efforts.

That the deep state, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, and have been condemned throughout the world for their fulsome support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

What’s ironic is that, thanks to the Herculean efforts of the corporate media to obscure and obfuscate, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are just now reporting all of the sordid details of the original Russia-gate psy-op. We now know that the CIA and the FBI, along with the Department of Justice, were weaponized to attack and try to destroy Donald Trump. 

Heads should roll, or at least careers should abort. But the greater its blunders, the stronger the Blob’s solidarity. And, yes, the corporate media is an integral part of the Blob. They have a story, and they will stick to it, hence the latest propaganda blitz. The Blob learned through decades of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will largely survive with their careers intact. The career trajectories of the policy makers and pundits who advocated for the invasion of Iraq exemplify this dynamic.

While the Blob’s blunders are so comprehensive that there is no short-term fix to the damage that the United States will suffer as a consequence, they have succeeded in at least one thing. Thanks to the ongoing Russia-gate psy-op, liberals will go on supporting the Biden Administration, while believing any sort of story about the sheer evilness of Russia and Putin because they have been irreparably linked to the Orange monster of their nightmares.

While the torrent of lies may convince gullible liberals, they are losing resonance in a world that is rapidly moving on from American rule, accelerated by the globe’s rejection of U.S. policy on Ukraine and Gaza. Gone are the days of governments and populations who accept at face value what the United States says about itself and about them. 

Update: “Obama’s CIA Asked Foreign Intel Agencies To Spy on Trump Campaign” [RealClearPolitics]. “The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries…. This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate. The alleged operation against Trump and his associates, which predates the official start of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, is a stark example of political weaponization of intelligence…. The narrative that has been pushed for years, that the investigation into Trump’s campaign began with an Australian tip about a boastful Trump aide, now appears to be a cover for a more extensive and coordinated effort to undermine Trump. If reports are accurate, British intelligence began targeting Trump on behalf of American intelligence agencies as early as 2015, long before the official narrative claims. The implications of this are profound. It suggests an unprecedented level of collusion between U.S. intelligence agencies and their foreign counterparts to influence the outcome of an American presidential election. The use of foreign intelligence to circumvent American laws and surveillance limitations represents a grave threat to our nation’s sovereignty and the principles of democracy.”

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Gradually, then suddenly

Posted on February 15, 2024 by camelotkidd

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, described how one went bankrupt–gradually, then suddenly.

It’s the same with empires. One day they’re fit as a fiddle, then the next day multiple crisis’s reveal a brittle shell.

The US is undergoing one of those moments, where the collapsing proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, failure to halt Ansar Allah’s Red Sea attacks on commercial shipping, and active backing of the Israeli genocide have exposed the rot at the core of the empire.

And now the Hur report, where the prosecutor declined to bring charges against President Biden because he’s suffering from dementia, made worse by Biden’s disastrous press conference where he stood revealed as an angry old-man yelling at clouds. Special counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report last Thursday that concluded Biden “willfully” retained classified documents but cleared Biden of any wrongdoing. The report also featured details about the 81-year-old’s memory and recall, describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” 

Inquiring minds want to know who’s minding the nuclear launch codes, given what we now know about the state of his cognitive decline?

Biden senility is emblematic of the decline of the American empire, but at this point we could have a bag of pretzels as president and it would look the same. Presently the US is struggling to manage the multiple crises, and compartmentalize issues: Ansar Allah’s Red Sea blockade is one thing; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated another, the catastrophic proxy war in Ukraine something different. But all know that such separateness is artificial. All of these crises represent things falling apart.

William Butler Yeats was prescient when he wrote the Second Coming, following World War I.

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity…”

Veteran British diplomat and MI-6 analyst Alastair Crooke, describes the ramifications of such developments. “Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture? The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing…”

What’s ironic is that the rapid decline of the American empire has been precipitated by the original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence by indiscriminately bombing Gaza’s civilians, ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the US empire, for obvious reasons. What’s worse is that there’s recognition that Israel was intended as a colonialist outpost, (“our land based aircraft carrier”) from the very beginning to control the fabulous petroleum resources of the Middle East, that fuels the American empire.

It’s not crazy to argue that Israel exists as our 51st state.

Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit? And, judging by Biden’s senility, maybe that’s the wrong question. Where is the deep state’s limit?

And this brings us to the heart of the matter. We have a shallow and incapable ruling class that are confronted with a series of subtle changes in the way the international political and economic system works, some linked, some not, that require the sort of careful analysis and thoughtful reactions of which they are increasingly incapable. The upshot is that Washington is showing itself to be intellectually incapable of understanding what is going on, or adjusting in ways in which to keep the American empire on track.

All of this confirms Lenin’s axiom that–“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.

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How should we then live?

Posted on February 8, 2024 by camelotkidd

The Doom Blogging post got me thinking that I should write about something positive, so here goes.

John Michael Greer wrote a novel, entitled Retrotopia, that imagines a possible future where faith in technology doesn’t equal prosperity. Greer, as an avid historian, employs retrovation, the strategy of using the past as a resource for problem-solving in the present, to describe a fictional society that had finally noticed the declining quality of technology and adjusted public policies accordingly.

To most Americans this idea is heresy. They believe with all their might in progress: that human history is hard-wired to move from worse things to better things over time. Yet if you ask them most Americans will admit that every software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features that what it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products is more shoddily made than the last. Somehow, though, a good many Americans that experience this reality still insist that the future will be a technological paradise. Of course, faith doesn’t depend on evidence, and yes, dear American reader, faith in technology has largely replaced faith in God.

In Retrotopia, Greer imagines the Lakeland Republic–where people are valued rather than markets, technology and machines. In a contrast to modern day America, where when a corporation spends money to buy machines they count as assets, and there are tax benefits from depreciation, but when the same firm spends money to hire employees to do the same tasks they don’t count as assets. Furthermore, when a company hires employees, it has to spend much more that the cost of wages and salaries. It has to pay into the social-security system, health-care, unemployment, etc. for the people it hires. If a corporation buys machines instead, it doesn’t have pay any of those things. Nor is there kind of tax to cover the cost to society of replacing the jobs that went away due to automation, or to pay for any increased generating capacity the electrical grid will require to power the new machines, or any of the other costs that automation places on the rest of the community.

In the US, tax codes and other government regulations subsidize automation and punish employment. But we’re meant to ignore how this public policy contributes to making one more “economical” and “efficient” than the other. However, in the Greer’s world, when a company hires an employee to do a job their only cost is wages and salaries, and any other money put into training counts as credit against other taxes since it helps give the fictionalized Republic a better trained workforce. Social-security, health care and the rest of it comes out of other taxes, rather than punishing employers for hiring people.

As the story progresses, there are many other examples of a world where people and society benefit from a different way of living. The biggest contrast to our present milieu is how people in the Lakeland Republic are valued rather than viewed as superfluous. Instead of giant corporations, factory-farms and consumers, there are small businesses, family farms and citizens. Instead of people buried in debt there’s public banking. Then there’s the difference in spending priorities, where instead of a world-wide empire of bases the Lakeland Republic Army focuses on the actual defense of their territory.

The caveat is that this fictional republic is only possible because of a brutal civil war that’s decimated the United States as we know it. As Greer relates: “The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes.”

Retrototopia, deconstructs not just our faith in technology but our faith in ideology and offers a lens to view just how dis-functional and deformed America has become and, more importantly, that there are alternatives to the frantic late-stage capitalist neoliberalism that’s subsumed us. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are always alternative ways of organizing our society despite Margaret Thatcher’s admonishment, an issue that has animated this blog since the very beginning.

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Eye of the Beholder

Posted on February 2, 2024 by camelotkidd

Since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 I’ve lost respect for countless liberal writers.

Count Rick Perlstein among them. In a new article, entitled American Fascism, Perlstein warns of the potential for American-style fascism should Trump win another term.

The problem with this analysis is that the US is already there, with the liberal stalwart–Joe Biden– and his administration, actively aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide unfolding in Gaza, while arming and training authentic fascists in Ukraine. What’s sad is that Perlstein, who brilliantly chronicled the rise of the modern American right-wing, seems to have forgotten the history of empires. Empires are always fascist on the periphery initially but the fascism always comes back to the homeland. Then there’s that whole aggressive war thing. The Nuremberg Trials in the aftermath of WWII severely punished the fascist leaders for the ultimate crime of aggressive war. The American empire has been waging aggressive war for decades, ramping up to a crescendo after 9/11, with Republicans and Democrats eagerly taking turns.

Nevertheless, that a Democratic president is engaging in genocide during a re-election year is surreal, highlighting the depravity of the American empire more starkly than anything else I can remember. Democrats and their liberal supporters like to think of themselves as responsible humanitarians who stand in opposition to the reckless murderousness and fascism of the Republican Party’s worst impulses, yet here they are openly falling all over themselves to justify mass atrocities committed, while arming and assisting the “only Democracy in the Middle-East”.

So it’s hard to get exercised about the potential for future fascism when the present provides daily horrors.

In the latest outrage, the US and eight of its allies have suspended funding to UNRWA, the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, following Israeli allegations that a dozen employees of the 30,000-staff organization were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas. The allegations conveniently sprung up at the same time as the International Court of Justice rulings against Israel in the genocide case brought against it by South Africa, quickly supplanting the ICJ ruling in western mass media headlines. The US has continued to dismiss the South African case as unfounded.

Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children. And, it’s certainly not by accident that Israel is attacking UNRWA. Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated: “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.”

Biden’s unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza gives the lie to the concept of a “rules-based order” that America allegedly upholds and protects. As Biden expresses his “grave concern” about Israeli war crimes in Gaza, he keeps sending the weapons that make possible the very crimes he allegedly deplores. At the same time, his administration is opening a new front in this war with its deadly attacks on Yemen. Biden has said the bombing raids against Yemen aren’t stopping attacks on shipping even as he vows to continue them.

Meanwhile, Biden continues to fight for at least $60 billion for real, honest-to-God fascists in Ukraine to prolong a stalemated war that’s killing untold thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. The aid that Biden wants to send this year won’t end that war; it won’t even give Ukraine a decisive edge. Most experts believe this aid will merely prolong the fighting, meaning more destruction and dead bodies on both sides.

The Biden administration’s embrace of genocide in Gaza and a brutal indecisive war in Ukraine highlights the moral bankruptcy of its foreign policy. On the campaign trail, Biden is increasingly being confronted by protesters calling him out for his brutal and militaristic foreign policy. “Genocide Joe” is a nickname that stings because it’s true.

Not to be outdone, former Speaker of the House, Democratic Nancy Pelosi shared her opinion on how American protestors are Russian dupes. “Protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is Mr. Putin’s message… Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see… I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.”

But, never mind all of that. Orangeman bad! Beware of future fascism, and don’t worry your pretty little head about the savage US imperialism managed by the “adults” in the Biden Administration.

Biden is doing all the very worst things Democrats claimed Trump would do if re-elected. If it had come out in 2020 that Trump was plotting a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign in which his victims would be cut off from humanitarian aid, the shrieking from Democrats would have woken the dead.

There’s a method to the madness for liberals and Democrats in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election in November. “The White House hopes – through containment – to ‘stroke’ the flames of war-fever raised by the Gaza assault down to ‘low heat’, and thus to slide the situation imperceptibly towards the regional ‘quiet’ that the Administration deems ‘appropriate’ to an Election Year.”

That’s the plan. Keep the genocide on the down-low while agitating about the threat of American fascism if Trump wins.

Future historians are going to look back at this interregnum and marvel. Perhaps they can label it Barbie fascism–where liberals are more incensed about the Barbie movie Oscar snubs than about the Washington’s fulsome support for genocide and endless war.

Greta & Margot, While it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you.  You’re both so much more than Kenough. #HillaryBarbie

Update: I couldn’t resist this picture.

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