It’s a pretty fucking cool that nobody reads this little shitty blog.
I get to write whatever the fuck I want.
Cool, huh?
As a bonus I get to avoid the mental health issues that plague Americans.
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Down in a hole
When you’re down in a hole it’s a good idea to stop digging.
If you’re a fading empire it’s a good idea to not accelerate the descent, but the geniuses that are managing the US empire didn’t get the memo as every day it’s an endless parade of self inflicted wounds.
Here’s Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt speaking at the 2024 Financial Times Global Commodities Summit–“I can’t preview future sanctions actions, but what I can tell you is we’re very focused on ensuring that Russia is not able to develop new projects in order to re-destine the gas that it previously sent into Europe. And I think especially because I’m talking to an audience in Europe, one of the points that’s worth emphasizing for a second is just how extremely successful Europe has been over the past two years in dramatically reorienting its energy system, de-risking its exposure to Russian oil, gas, coal supplies.”
And here’s Victoria Nuland, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of NATO war against Russia, in a March 2022 interview with TASS–“If Russia does not end this war and get out of Ukraine, it will be isolated on a small island with a bunch of sub countries and the rest of us 141 countries will go forward and build a prosperous future, while Russia suffers a complete economic and technological isolation…”
Things haven’t quite worked out the way Nuland, Pyatt, and the rest of the American imperial lackeys wanted them to. in fact it’s more of the US and NATO shooting themselves in the foot. In essence, Russia keeps taking everything the West throws at it and emerging stronger. Sanctions from the West continue to drive Russia to accelerate its development efforts in its East and reorient its trade wholly towards Central Asia, China, India, and others, and away from US and European markets.
Prior to the war, the Russian government was trying to find a way to force businesses to stop sitting on financial reserves and prevent them paying gigantic dividends. Businesses complained that they would rather not invest because of a poor investment climate, state interference, and an unpredictable taxation policy. Now, everything has changed. The biggest reason for the jump is simply that the US and Europe have forced them to.
Chinese automaker Chery just became the biggest foreign company in Russia after its revenue quadrupled in 2023 to more than $6.63 billion. According to Forbes Russia, 50 of the biggest foreign companies in Russia are now Chinese. That’s up from only one two years ago. The number will likely only grow as Russia and China strategically develop the former’s Far East regions. That’s because Russia has substantial reserves of virtually every commodity required to help a modern economy flourish.
Couple this with China’s manufacturing dominance, and the neocons at the US State Department really outdid themselves by driving Beijing and Moscow together. The crazy thing is this could be the US investing and helping Russia while US plutocrats helped themselves to healthy profits. Instead they wanted it all, wanted to bring down Putin, and plunder the resources. Lo and behold, Russia and much of the rest of the world is plenty able to move on without them.
And most ironic part is so many in the US formulating policy against Russia have no clue how spectacularly they failed. There are still US officials demonizing Russia, like Hillary Clinton on the Rachael Maddow Show, recently. I wonder what planet they live. Totally out of touch with the real world.
Yet the failures and the doubling-down have real world consequences. Last week one avid U.S. supporter of the fascists in Ukraine, Ryan Routh, who appeared in a propaganda video for the Azov battalion in May 2022, tried to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Bygones.
These are the same feral elite that decided to offshore American manufacturing to China, the country that they want to have a war with now. But their subservience to corporate financialization—the obsessive focus on shareholder value and personal gains—threatens investment in the productive capabilities that enable crucial innovation. Financialization has turned many an American powerhouse into a shadow of its former self: see Intel, IBM, General Electric, and Boeing, among others.
Then there’s the recent terrorist pager attack by Israeli Mossad on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mossad somehow managed to manipulate pager shipments to Lebanon some of which would be acquired by Hezbollah and its affiliates. Yesterday specific encoded messages were sent to the manipulated pagers. Some moments later they started to blow up. Eleven people were killed and some 4,000 were wounded.
Not all people killed or wounded were members of Hezbollah. Pagers are also used by emergency and volunteer services. Western media avoid to call this attack a terrorist operation. But just ask yourself how they would describe the attack if this had happened to the other side of the conflict.
Pagers are not an exclusive means of Hezbollah. The attack was indiscriminate. The explosions happened in many situations of daily life – during visits in shops (vid), in driving cars in the middle of traffic, near to bystanders including children.
Once again, in addition to the terrorist aspect, this attack will have far reaching repercussions. Will anyone in the Global South buy a US, Israeli, or Western electronic device after this?
America’s determination to prolong its global primacy has led the world to another point of danger such that violence and lawlessness have reached catastrophic proportions but these are the sorts of boneheaded decisions that end of empire flunky’s make in a desperate bid to maintain power.
As the American empire enters terminal velocity expect more of them.
The corporate media today
It used to be that the press understood their job as a check on the powerful but those days are well behind us. The corporatization of the media is a big reason for the change. Moreover, the press used to expose government malfeasance especially the workings of the national security state and those politicians and officials involved in it but now they view their job as narrative management rather than reporting “news”.
With economic conditions deteriorating rapidly after decades of rampant financialization and corporatization the social contract is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. Even the World Economic Forum admits that corporations, its main constituency, have turbocharged inequality. Populism is on the rise just about everywhere and angry and fragmented protest movements have been growing since at least 2019.
As a result there’s an information war being waged as the US and other so-called liberal democracies as they attempt to gain much greater, more detailed control over the information being shared on the internet. And in the endeavor they have the corporate media as partners in crime.
There are plenty of examples of corporate media enlistment in the new propaganda/censorship crusade but their treatment of the Nord Stream bombing offers up a fine example of their servility to power.
The Nord Stream bombing was immediately blamed on the Russia, but any sort of honest appraisal would have asked the basic question of qui bono? Instead the corporate media immediately and uncritically repeated this preposterous charge. In that the corporate media’s behavior has exposed that when it comes to truly serious issues, especially involving geopolitics, Western mainstream media no longer investigate, criticize, or expose Western elites. Instead, they help them spread lies and distractions, while blaming geopolitical opponents and helping mobilize Western populations for the fight against them. In short, Western media now behave as just another weapon in the Western arsenal, forming, in effect, the information war branch of its hybrid warfare.
Numerous details in their reporting on the bombing–TV and in print–do not add up. But that is not even the most suspicious part. What is especially strange is that they do not come up with these inconsistencies and contradictions themselves. Instead, they are simply reproducing official narratives with a total lack of criticism and alertness.
Then there’s the corporate media’s role in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Our political class is still totally down with the genocide as demonstrated by Netanyahu’s 58 standing ovations in Congress, but the corporate media propaganda barrage in support of Israel has been pushed to its limit, perhaps severely overtaxing that vital tool. Many tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones, have become fully aware of the total disconnect between the mainstream media portrayal of events in Gaza and what they have been seeing with their own eyes on TikTok, Twitter, and other relatively uncensored social media platforms. The resulting collapse in media trust among young Americans may permanently cripple the powerful pro-Israel media network that has dominated American society since forever.
Anyone who’s been paying attention is aware of the total disconnect between corporate media and reality. Meanwhile, most intelligent observers have now quietly recognized that our media has been totally dishonest and unreliable on any matters pertaining to Israel, and once they begin to consider that this may also have been equally true in the past, the implications are enormous. The Matrix is probably the best depiction of the reaction to waking up in a simulation.
The biggest takeaway is that important, controversial events of our history that might have previously been disregarded or ignored are now suddenly reconsidered in a very different light. The upshot is that the corporate media simply pass along, reinforce, and pleasantly embellish official narratives. All of this–just like the neoliberal hellscape that out elite have constructed–has a price. For one thing, mainstream journalists who turn themselves into information warriors, whatever their motives, mightily contribute to the decline of their own credibility.
An eco-system of propaganda does not restore trust. It erodes it.
Posted in deep state, feral elite, propaganda
Tagged neoliberalism, Nord Stream bombing, propaganda, Russia
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Skunked
You may have noticed that I despise both of our political parties. There’s a reason for that: Both Republican and Democrats portray themselves as alternatives to the other but when it comes down to important economic and foreign policies there’s really no alternative at all.
Even before the end of the Cold War, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed “there was no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. With the demise of the USSR and communism this condition soon afflicted the Democratic Party in the US. Thanks to the malign influence of the Clinton, Obama, Biden and Pelosi crime families, as well as the Wall Street billionaire mega-donors, the Democrats embraced neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative foreign policies.
When it comes to our neoliberal economic system, both Democrats and Republicans pretend that the government is powerless to affect a global economy. The problem however is not that the US lacks power in a globalized economy. The problem is that both parties have been captured by vested interests, who benefit from the neoliberal economic dispensation. As the New Deal was dismantled beginning in the 1970s, neoliberal snake-oil was peddled by ideological economists as the “New Economy”, under the theory that economic ‘science’ claimed it to be the road to broad prosperity. Five decades later, a tiny cabal of rich own everything and the productive economy has been gutted in favor of financial gamesmanship.
US foreign policies of never ending war similarly enjoy bipartisan support, driven by both parties slavish devotion to the American empire and the military/industrial/complex. Nowadays, with overt invasions discredited, the neocon infected national security establishment has seized upon “color revolutions and proxy wars as their MO, while the corporate media gaslights Americans into a sullen acquiescence.
The truth is that American politics is now entirely unresponsive to popular demand. The last vestiges of democratic accountability were gutted many years ago as the US’s political systems were completely captured by powerful globe-spanning corporations.
We need a political party that represents average Americans, one that eschews war and neoliberal, financial austerity. It’s time to rebuild an American left for the working class and destroy the current finance-centered political party that deploys identity politics as liberalism. It is essentially an attempt to return the left to what it once was, and in that we are being helped by the fake left neoliberals so discrediting themselves over the past few years. What’s hilarious is that Trump and conservatives depict Kamala Harris, as a “communist”, even as the Democratic Party she leads consists of spooks, neoliberal bureaucrats, regime-change think tanks, and the military-industrial complex, that is leading a neoliberal return to serfdom, mass censorship, and an increasingly reactionary foreign policy that rehabilitates Nazis and supports proxy wars and genocide.
I hate to break it to you but the communist party in America has been hunted to extinction and the nominal left has been destroyed by the increasingly neoliberal/neoconservative Democratic party.
And, what about the populist right, represented by Trump?
The increasingly likely outcome is that the centrist representatives of both parties uses the ethno-nationalist, populist right (Trump, MAGA, etc.) to deflect criticism of their neoliberal and pro-war policies that have the US where it’s at today. Under such pressure, Trump and the populist right abandons their anti-war and anti NATO stances in order to be accepted in the “Beltway” but maintain the ethno-nationalism, militarization, anti-labor positions. With such a scenario, bargains between the “center” and far-right do nothing to disturb the neoliberal economic policies, immigrants will be scapegoated for economic problems caused by the financialization of everything, and attacks on anyone resisting austerity or war will increase.
This state of affairs was amplified recently at Naked Capitalism, when reader Anna K asked Yves if she could use a popular 2013 post, The Skunk Party Manifesto, as the basis for a new political party in Kentucky.
“I want permission to take her [Yves’] 2013 Skunk Party manifesto to use….as the basis for a political party’s platform.
I’m involved in an effort to start a third party in Kentucky, after the strong ceasefire candidate we ran as a Democrat was narrowly defeated in a nasty primary by Governor Beshear’s pick, who did not campaign at all. Here’s our candidate on the state’s premier political show before her defeat in the primary, sounding reasonable and saying the word “genocide” (she starts at 15:50, and was the only democrat who met the fundraising threshold to appear on the show): https://ket.org/program/kentucky-tonight/candidate-conversations-dana-edwards-and-shauna-rudd. Our petition drive is about halfway to gathering the needed signatures to get November ballot acces, with plenty of time left. Jill Stein (Green Party) agreed to be our presidential candidate. We expect to be visible in statewide news (Lexington Herald-Leader, Louisville Courier-Journal, and KET) after our public debut at Fancy Farm 3 Aug. We expect to be on the November ballot, running a candidate at least against 6th District of KY US Congressman Andy Barr (and Jill on the president line).
Things are moving too fast to develop a strong, well-written platform from scratch before Fancy Farm. So we want to borrow the Skunk Party platform, give credit where due, and modify it, specifically to address arming Ukraine and Israel and sabre-rattling against China. Our chops are stronger in foreign policy than domestic, so a strong domestic platform we can build on is important for orienting and educating our candidates and nascent party….
Kentucky punches above its weight class in foreign policy, as I’m sure you well know, and has since the days of Henry Clay. Time for more punching up, not down. We plan to have a small convention to continue work on our platform after Fancy Farm. We’re reasonably well-integrated with Palestine solidarity and anti-prison expansion grassroots groups. We’ll network a wider variety of groups in the valence of #OWS or late 19th-century populism with whom we’re loosely connected after
demonstrating viability with ballot access.
If we have Yves’s blessing, our party (The Kentucky Party, “Vote for Kentucky” official slogan, “KY against all y’all” unofficial stickers) will also adopt a stylized red-white-and-blue skunk as our mascot, to clear the room of the stylized donkeys and elephants.”
Yves Smith, the extraordinary writer and curator of Naked Capitalism, blessed the uprising. “So I hope you will support the Kentucky Party, even if not in Kentucky, by talking it up in social media. And if you are in Kentucky, please consider them as a November ballot option. Starting third parties in the US is very much an uphill battle. But even if one concedes that their odds of success is remote, they can serve as vehicles for calling attention to critical issues that the mainstream parties ignore as well as lodging a protest vote.”
I personally think we need a skunk party in every state, certainly here in the Beehive State, where the Republicans have a lock on power, with predictable results.
By the way, Naked Capitalism is the best website on the Internet and a valuable resource for anyone looking to educate themselves on the realities of our dystopian world. They are having their annual fund drive, so stop by and discover what a gem they are and throw a couple coins in their tip jar.
Update: If there was any doubt that both parties intend to provide no alternative to the toxic status quo, US Attorney General Merrick Garland just announced a sweeping set of actions to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday, including unveiling criminal charges against two Russian nationals, sanctions on 10 individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains.
More Russia-gate.
How novel.
Hope and War
The Democratic party is increasingly unhinged, claiming to be protecting “our democracy” while dialing up militaristic foreign policies. They present themselves as the guardians of democracy and avatars of a progressive future. However, this narrative of hope and progress is increasingly overshadowed by a commitment to maintaining and even expanding American military dominance. Moreover, the Democrats’ “hopeful” justification of militarism represents a sophisticated form of propaganda, amplified by the corporate media.
Kamala Harris, or the deep state operatives busily reinventing Kamala Harris, are selling “hope” and “joy” this political season, never mind the ugly reality. Harris is supposed to cruise into the White House on a carpet of positive vibes. This is not a new development. Russia-gate exposed the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state that’s busy censoring and blocking any deviant reality while pumping up the Mighty Wurlitzer.
The Democratic Party’s deep ties to the military-industrial complex cannot be ignored when examining their policy positions. Despite rhetoric about creating an “opportunity economy” and investing in social programs, the reality is that trillions of dollars continue to flow into military spending.
“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” Kamala Harris said during her keynote address at the DNC, while new posters depict her as some sort of refugee from the “Summer of Love”..
The Democrats maniacal focus on maintaining military supremacy comes at an enormous cost, both domestically and globally. This massive allocation of resources not only prevents real investment in creating a more equitable and sustainable society but also fuels global conflicts, instability and an all-to-real possibility of nuclear war. At home, the massive defense budget diverts resources from critical investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and environmental protection, while abroad our reputation lies in tatters thanks to the US’s ironclad support of Israel’s genocide
Though the corporate media ignored or downplayed it, Robert F Kennedy, denounced the Democratic neocon dominated US foreign policies, specifically the Ukrainian proxy war against Russia, in a speech withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump.
“The war is the predictable response of Russia to the neocon project to expand NATO and encircle Russia. We unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear weapons systems in Romania and Poland. This is a hostile, hostile act. And the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offers to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy Jr said.
“The Ukraine war,” he continued, “began in 2014 when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk Agreement, that had been negotiated between Ukraine and Russia and the European nations. In April 2022, we wanted the war. President Biden sent [then UK prime minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were already withdrawing troops.”
“That peace agreement,” Kennedy added, “would have brought peace to the region and allowed Donbass to remain part of Ukraine.”
Biden’s “objective in the war is regime change in Russia,” Kennedy said. “His Defense Secretary [Lloyd] Austin…explained that the purpose of the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight fighting anywhere else in the world.”
“These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war and it’s a victim of the West…We’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth, as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids, and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning.… Ukraine’s infrastructure has been destroyed…The war has been a disaster for our country, too. We’ve squandered nearly US$200 billion already that was badly needed in our communities.”
“We’ve pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran,” Kennedy continued. “We’re closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962, and the neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all. Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threaten to replace the dollar as a world reserve currency.”
Preach, brother Kennedy.
Barak Obama campaigned on “Hope and Change”, but when he bailed out the bankers who wrecked our economy and continued the war on terror policies of the Bush administration, the hope died while the wars continued. Along with Wall Street’s implosion of the economy in 2008, public disillusion over the US war in Iraq represents a crucial juncture in the steep decline of the America empire.
President Biden and his national security state have only accelerated the descent, while Kamala promises more of the same.
What’s that quote about doing the same thing while expecting different results?
By framing military interventions and the maintenance of global military supremacy as essential components of preserving and spreading democracy worldwide, the Democrats have effectively weaponized hope. The “hopeful” militarism creates a false dichotomy: either support military action or abandon the cause of global democracy. By conflating military might with democratic values, the Democrats make it challenging to envision alternative approaches to international relations and conflict resolution.
This narrative effectively silences critics, painting them as pessimists or isolationists who lack faith in American ideals.
Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, neoconservatives, propaganda
Tagged Barak Obama, invasion of Iraq, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, neocons, Russia-gate, Wall Street
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Lost in Space
Boeing is emblematic of the late stage American empire, where neoliberal, financial looting takes precedence over national security. The two lost astronauts, who NASA insists “are not stranded in space,” represent just how far a once great company–Boeing –and by extension–America have fallen.
The United States has been undergoing a profound and radical transformation and has lost ground in every single category that defines the power and status of a nation in relation to its rivals.
There are a range of factors of why this is so, from the economic, to cultural, technological and military factors. America’s de-industrialized economy is now deeply affected by a loss of small and middle-size businesses and the implosion of the US commercial aerospace industry.
NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station. As of late last week, NASA still had not decided whether the Starliner vehicle, which is built and operated by Boeing, should be used to fly its two crew members home. During its launch and ascent to the space station two months ago, five small thrusters on the Starliner spacecraft failed. After extensive ground testing of the thrusters, as well as some brief in-space firings, NASA had planned to make a decision last week on whether to return Starliner with crew. However, a Flight Readiness Review planned for last Thursday was delayed after internal disagreements at NASA about the safety of Starliner.
Boeing has been in terminal decline for years, culminating with their 737 Max debacle, where two 737 MAX planes crashed, killing 346 people on board in 2018 and 2019. Then there’s the 777, where Boeing has grounded its 777X test fleet after discovering a severed thrust link on one test aircraft during a routine inspection in Hawaii. Further checks revealed cracks in the assemblies of two other planes. And don’t forget about the 787 “Dreamliner,” where Boeing is investigating a new quality problem with the plane after discovering that hundreds of fasteners have been incorrectly installed on the fuselages of some undelivered jets.
What’s apparent is that a fixation on short-term earning, driven in large part by corporate stock buybacks has crippled American manufacturing. Thanks to the neoliberal economic policies, not only has the Western industrial base been outsourced to make rich people richer, young people are essentially being asked to fight in a future war that will defend an economic system that is fucking them over.
The apparent conclusion—uncomfortable if not unthinkable for neoliberal economists and their corporate media choir —is that MBA/finance thinking and decision-making is not just unhelpful but actively hostile and destructive to running a successful, functional company.
Who would have thought such a thing?
Every economy, as heterodox economist Michael Hudson endlessly asserts, is managed. The political question becomes just who manages it. Thanks to the successful neoliberal counterattack, the US transformed from the productive, New Deal economy, managed by our elected representatives to an extractive economy managed by Wall Street.
The wee, little problem is that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as your operating system. For example, the geniuses that outsourced American manufacturing to China want to have a war with China, even as China produces much of our high-tech systems critical to warfare.
Sigh.
Unfortunately, this development probably means that we’ll have war sooner than later. Let me explain: Presently the US plans to expand its defense production capabilities to engage in the new Cold War against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but because our reliance on China is only increasing and now China has announced export restrictions on critical metals and rare earths essential for high-tech weapons. Because of the various economic woes and deteriorating cultural issues, it’s difficult to imagine that the US will be in any position to achieve its aims, whether its nuclear arsenal or fighting a four front war. This makes a nuclear confrontation even more likely because the US national security state will be forced to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse, and will be left with little choice than to attack Russia, China, Iran and North Korea now.
Maybe I should start digging that fallout shelter?
Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, neoconservatives, neoliberalism, propaganda
Tagged China, Iran, neocons, neoliberalism, North Korea, Russia, Wall Street
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Rolling the Dice
All empires fall. And all empires experience a sort of go-for-broke response from the ruling elite, who fight to preserve their wealth and privilege, while committing monstrous atrocities along the way.
In Ukraine and the Middle-East, the American empire is rolling the dice in a desperate last measure to maintain power and control. Moreover, the empire managers are risking life on earth in while the American people remain somnolent.
Escalation is rampant across the board – in Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
There was the last gasp of the US’s Ukrainian proxy with their invasion of Russia. It’s beyond obvious that Kursk is a NATO operation, most certainly a joint Anglo-American combo supervising their Ukrainian fighters. Anything Kiev does depends on American ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and NATO weapons systems of course operated by NATO personnel.
In the Middle-East, the US is rushing in aircraft carriers, missile submarines and fighter jets to protect it’s attack dog, after Israel’s assassination spree. The Israeli provocations, especially the assassination in Tehran of Hamas negotiator Haniyeh, were a direct affront to three top BRICS members: Iran, Russia, and China. It’s clear that the maniacs in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. After all, control of Middle-East oil is crucial to the maintenance of the empire.
If Washington had forced a Gaza ceasefire last year, the risk of an apocalyptic war convulsing West Asia would have been avoided. Instead, the US on Wednesday approved a further $20 billion weapons package to Tel Aviv, showing exactly how committed the Americans are to securing a permanent ceasefire and halting the genocide carried out by its ally.
It’s telling that the late stage flailing of the American empire and frantic actions of the elite to stave off collapse receives scant attention in the corporate press. One would think there’s a story, especially in the aftermath of Biden bowing out of the 2024 presidential election because of senility, while still (supposedly) managing the multiple foreign policy debacles. Is Biden running the country, or is does Kamala Harris have the helm? Or is it someone else?
History is not kind to the desperate machinations of fading empires as they rarely work out as planned and instead accelerate the decline.
Recent events simply reinforce my opinion that American elites are totally clueless about diplomacy, foreign policy and war, but comfort themselves with the belief that their PR is better. It’s all just narrative, after all.
By the way, anyone reading who thinks I’m a one-dimensional America hater, I echo the great James Baldwin, who stated–“I love America more than any other country in this world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, propaganda
Tagged China, Iran, Israel, neocons, Russia, Syria, Ukraine
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The Guns of August
August is usually a slow month where people are on vacation but this year feels different.
The Guns of August, written by Barbara W. Tuchman, in 1962, is centered on the first month of World War I, where Tuchman describes in great detail the opening events of the conflict.
110 years later the world again stands on the edge of the precipice with multiple conflicts poised to draw larger powers into another world war that has the real possibility of going nuclear. And just like in 1914, everyone is sleepwalking into the coming conflagration.
In addition to the US and NATO”s provocative and dangerous proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has the Middle East is on the brink of regional war.
The largest instigator of violence is our Middle East attack-dog, who appears hell-bent on drawing the US into the maelstrom. Israel’s latest assassination spree, culminated with the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, their negotiator in Tehran, provoked a promised response that has the world on edge. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that Israel acted on its own to attack Iran’s sovereignty, which is tantamount to an act of war, without some sort of US approval. It is this ‘known unknown’ factor that makes the situation very dangerous. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has already ordered a direct strike on Israeli territory.
The Washington Post, citing Pentagon officials, has written that keeping in view a possible escalation, the US Navy has already concentrated 12 warships in the region. Among them is the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which is located in the Persian Gulf with six destroyers. There are also five US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that Israel “faces difficult days” and is “ready for any scenario.”
In the context of a possible World War 3, the US and NATO plus Israel represent the American Empire, and the Axis of Resistance plus Russia and China represents BRICS+. Or if you want–a unipolar world vs a multipolar one. If there is a regional war in the Middle East, it will undoubtedly be between these two groups.
Ironically, the Biden Administration’s embrace of Israel has pulled back the curtain of US public diplomacy. Since WWII Americans have been led to believe that they are the “good guys” but backstopping a genocide with 2000 lb. bombs is hardly the actions of a benevolent empire.
Maverick investigative journalist Robert Parry explained how it all worked in 2014 before his untimely passing. “This commitment to what the insiders called “perception management” began in earnest with the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama. In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others depending on the U.S. government’s needs.
All of this is something to think about as we await a major joint military operation from Yemen, from Iraq, from Lebanon, from Iran, as a retaliation of the killing of Ismail Haniyeh.
Update: Earlier this week, Jared Cohen, President of Global Affairs and Co-Head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, noted in a conversation with another colleague, “We don’t know the timing of a potential Iranian retaliation, and it’s impossible to predict the scale with certainty. But a direct Iranian-led assault against Israel looks increasingly likely, and Israelis and their partners are preparing.”
Update 2: Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson writes. “With respect to Israel and Iran, Russia may be playing a key role to potentially defuse the situation. During the past two-and-a-half years, Russia and Iran have forged a de facto military alliance…I think it is highly likely that Russia has provided Iran with a full complement of advanced air defense systems — most likely the S-400 — and the crews to operate those batteries.
Having Russian troops on the ground in Iran presents Tel Aviv and Washington with a tripwire they may not want to cross. The Russian air defense systems probably have been deployed around critical installations in Iran that are high on Israel’s target list. An attack on those sites, particularly one that involves nukes, would likely result in Russian casualties and be seen in Moscow as a casus belli. In other words, an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran would risk bringing Russia into the war on Iran’s side. Let’s hope Netanyahu is unwilling to test the limits of Russian patience.”
Buckle up.
Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, neoconservatives, propaganda
Tagged deep state, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, neocons, propaganda
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How low can you go?
How low can the American empire go as it wobbles and spins out of control?
Judging by the behavior of its favorite Middle-East proxy the bottom appears limitless.
While Israel carries out a savage genocide in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, where he was worshipped by both Congress and the White House alike together with outright adulation from the corporate media. Netanyahu spoke for an hour in his address to the US Congress, emitting lie after lie. And the Congress critters responded with 53 standing ovations, close to one per minute.
In his. speech Netanyahu claimed that the genocide is a “clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.” Ironically, Netanyahu was right about the clash of civilization though he was wrong about who represented which side: Israel backed completely by the US is pure evil.
American complicity in the genocide in Gaza is a national disgrace. The US has done many bad things, but this whole hearted alliance with unmitigated evil taints every American.
Netanyahu’s visit to Congress was soon joined by another truly awful story that demonstrates that there is no bottom to the evil in the minds and hearts of Israel’s leaders as well as among a large majority of the Israeli people.
It turns out that genocide is not enough to satisfy the Israeli bloodlust. There are a number of detention centers run by the Israeli Army that are generally used to torture Palestinians prisoners, not in the old fashioned “intelligence” role to obtain “information,” but just for the entertainment of the soldiers who are the jailers. Sde Teiman, one such center in the southern Negev desert region, recently made the news due to a particularly outrageous bit of torture engaged in by ten of the soldiers in charge of the prisoners. Conditions in Sde Taiman reportedly included “Electric shocks, amputations due to bad conditions, severe beatings, surgery without anesthesia, playing loud music until inmates’ ears bleed, deaths due to bad sanitary conditions, systematic torture and sexual abuse.”
A Palestinian from Gaza was reported serially sodomized and otherwise raped at the detention site using various implements even including a cell phone which was inserted in the man’s rectum and turned on for the amusement of the Israeli soldiers. The victim also had a wooden stick inserted in similar fashion and it was believed that he was only one of a number of other prisoners who were treated in that same way, which appears to be systemic throughout the detention facilities run by the army. The activity was only exposed when the victim began bleeding heavily both internally and externally and was unable to walk with a “serious wound in his rectum area”, which may have occurred if or when the phone was removed from inside of him and he was taken to a hospital where what had taken place was revealed. The army, somewhat uncharacteristically, sent some military policemen to the center to detain the soldiers for questioning but the suspects fought back using pepper spray and building barriers. When nine of the men (one went AWOL) were eventually taken to a nearby military base at Beit Lid, the MPs were confronted almost immediately by an angry crowd of civilians, consisting largely of settlers and ultra-nationalists, led by several Likud party parliamentarians who demanded that the soldiers be set free. Something like a melee ensued. The unruly crowd chanted its support for torture and even called for the summary execution of the Palestinian prisoners, which has been an “option” supported by some in the Netanyahu government.
The rioters were so aggressive that they actually broke into the Israeli military base and there was considerable support for their actions even coming from Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who said he was “shocked” to see IDF troops being detained for questioning “in a way that is suitable for arresting dangerous criminals.” He added that the soldiers were doing a “holy job” at the base. Far-right Knesset member Simcha Rotman called the troops “heroes,” instead attacking Israel’s “justice and enforcement systems” for detaining them.
Later in the day, when asked by the press about the rape accusations, US State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel refused to say whether gang raping and torturing Palestinian prisoners would be considered a war crime, even if conclusively demonstrated by witnesses and other evidence. Patel explained “So the reports of abuse are deeply concerning, and we have been clear and consistent with Israel and the IDF that they need to treat all detainees humanely and with dignity in accordance with humanitarian law.” He said that the US was going to let “due process” play out in this case. The western media that is bothering to cover the story are refusing to even use the word “rape” or “sodomy” in reference to the allegations, with the BBC describing how the soldiers are accused of “severely mistreating a Palestinian prisoner” while the New York Times prefers to call it “suspected abuse”.
So, this is our bestest ally, and loyal proxy who shares all of our values.
And judging by the spate of recent Israeli assassinations seems dead set on expanding the genocide into a regional war with the US along for the ride. The most egregious was an assassination of the Hamas leader on Iranian soil that appears to be a gambit by Israel to drag the United States into a regional war. Israel knows very well it cannot win the war against Hezbollah and Iran so it’s seeking to draw the U.S. into it. This is what makes the reception Netanyahu received in Congress on July 24 so dangerous.
Economist and geopolitical analyst Michael Hudson clarifies, “Well, you say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years…So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.
And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win… And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.”
All empires descend into savagery, torture and mass murder, the US prefers to outsource much of its brutality to proxies, with Israel leading the pack.
Antonio Gramsci–“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”
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Sullen Acquiescence
If neoliberal capitalism isn’t working for average Americans, how are they responding?
The neoliberal Great Transformation has massively changed the workplace, and as workers are increasingly squeezed by anxiety over personal economic prospects, they are responding with sullen acquiescence in that they just do the bare minimum, and sometimes not even that much, as they go about their “bull-shit jobs”. As the US increasingly resembles the late USSR a similar dynamic is playing out where–they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Indeed, our milieu is marked by the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything–life in America keeps getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
I know the feeling. I’ve watched the America I grew up in be demolished by neoliberal looters, cheered on by the corporate press.
Political scientist Wendy Brown assesses the damage. “Decades of neoliberal devastations of middle- and working-class prospects set the ground for our politics today. The dismantling of social states – the social provisions and social commitments that put a floor under working- and middle-class people when things go wrong – is key. That floor is gone. At the same time, wages became stagnant or worse. Unions became so severely weakened that they lost their capacity to work against capital, and states largely gave up regulating capital. The rise of finance capital which spikes the cost of everything from housing to health care made things worse.“
The science fiction I grew up with promised a future where technology provided fulfilling and meaningful jobs and a life of mostly leisure, where people, families and communities could flourish.
Looking around at our present milieu it’s amazing how naive it all sounded.
I’m not scared of technology, I’m scared of the sociopaths that wield said technology. And the same technology that could be used to ensure the sci-fi future I read about as a kid, is instead utilized to create more billionaires while workers are used up and tossed away like soiled rags.
The problem is political in that the billionaires control government and they like a desperate, surplus population that’s too cowed to rebel just fine. A big part of the blame goes to the political party that used to represents workers. The Democrats have been hemorrhaging support after abandoning nearly all of their former working class platform in favor of identity politics. The Democrats increasingly stand for neoliberal, pro-war and anti-Russia policies.
You’ve heard me drone on for years about the dangers of neoliberalism and the pronounced effect on American society but it’s gotten worse. The way in which government interacts with average Americans is a case in point. Instead of providing material benefits like during the New Deal era, neoliberal governance celebrates inequality and punishes those who resist.
In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”
The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “…Criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”
What’s so frustrating about American society is that it could be so much better, and we have almost everything we need to thrive. But we’re stuck in path dependence and power games, unable to imagine or build the good world our technology makes possible.
Reduce work. Let people find other, meaningful things to do with their lives. The worship of work is a relatively recent thing, coming mostly out of the Protestant revolution: virtually no one before that believed that work was a good thing: it was necessary, but the good life was about art, learning, athletics, civic involvement and so on.
To create this sort of world we need to do away with wealth humping. I can’t believe that I’m the only one to find it deeply embarrassing. You can get wealthy: say have four or five times as much as the median, but not billionaire rich and able to dominate the political space. Focus competition towards status and prestige, and towards living a good life and contributing towards others.
There is much work to be done. Meaningful work, not the least of which is fixing the environment. There will always be meaningful labour to do, just not bull-shit jobs so the rich elite can have another vacation home in Deer Valley.
Posted in feral elite, neoliberalism
Tagged Ian Welch, neoliberalism, Wall Street, Wendy Brown
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