Doom Blogging

Posted on January 26, 2024 by camelotkidd

I have been accused of doom blogging because all I ever write about is bad news.

But, in my defense, chronicling the implosion of the American empire is good news because this state of affairs has become intolerable for a majority of Americans. As we’ve discussed here before, the late-stage American empire uses neoliberalism as its operating system, where the benefits of empire flow exclusively to a small segment of feral elite, while the average American faces increasing costs.

It’s worth acknowledging that America’s historic rise to great power status in the 100 years after the American Civil War demonstrated the importance of building a healthy mass-market economy that rested on the foundation of an incredibly productive scientific-industrial base. This was the American empire in which the benefits were widely shared. Since then, the steady financialization of the U.S. economy, reliance on debt-financed consumption together with an increasingly militarized, interventionist U.S. foreign policy shifted the balance dramatically in favor of the military/industrial/complex, with the result being to severely weaken America’s standard of living. 

Let’s examine recent events to keep score. Biden has turned out to be everything we were warned Trump would be: a genocidal monster fueling racist violence and crimes against humanity while imperiling the world with insanely reckless foreign policy decisions, even after liberals insisted at the top of their lungs that the adults were back in charge.

It’s likely that the main reason Biden’s administration has been more warlike than Trump’s is by sheer timing and coincidence; the US empire is managed by a deep state that continues from one administration to the next largely uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office, with wars occurring not because of who happens to be president in any given instance but because of whatever the empire’s needs happen to be at that time.

The lesson of Joe Biden’s depravity is not that it would be better to have Donald Trump in the White House, it’s that it doesn’t matter which one gets in, because only sociopathic monsters are allowed to be president of the American empire. Anyone who isn’t willing to inflict enormous amounts of violence on countries and citizens around the world will ever make it past the filters that have been placed between that office and the contrived notion of democracy that the American people have been deceived into believing is real.

“Nothing will fundamentally change,” to borrow Joe Biden’s assurance to Wall Street during his 2020 campaign. And nothing has. For all the shrieking about democracy, the Democrats have a strange way of enacting it. Joe Biden and the DNC have simply decided to use every tool at their disposal to freeze Democratic voters out of the process. Their whole message amounts to “Orangeman” bad, and that he’s a “fascist” threat to democracy, never mind what they’re doing behind the curtain. Right now they seem to be hoping their voters don’t notice the contradiction. It’s hard to miss the implicit message that actual governance should be left in the hands of competent liberal technocrats, and the role of all of the right-thinking Americans is to show up every two to four years to re-elect them.

This state of affairs should not be surprising. Since the 2016 election American elite have refused to examine the serial failures that led to Trump’s victory. Here we are 8 years on and still no reflection on their responsibility for Trump and his continued appeal. Any student of history familiar with the dynamic of late stage empires is aware of the pattern of a strong-man or “Caesar” arising who appeals to the common folk who are impoverished by a greedy yet dysfunctional elite.

Sound familiar?

When it comes to doom-blogging the pertinent question to ask is doom for whom? I’ve already mentioned that the American empire has become intolerable for the vast majority of Americans while the benefits largely accrue to the billionaires and the technocratic-elite that manages the empire. Let’s call them the professional/managerial/class (PMC’s). That the PMC’s were the instigators of Russia-gate and the ones wailing about “fascism” and “protecting our democracy” is just one more of life’s little ironies.

Unfortunately, even though Trump talked a good game about the costs of American never-ending wars and vowed to end or reduce US overseas commitments he was ultimately unsuccessful thanks to the sabotage of the functionaries in his administration, personal that he nominated, I might add.

What this all means is anyones guess at this point. 2024 promises to be a year of turmoil like we’ve never seen and the way Biden and his team of ham-fisted neocons are going the American empire could be toast by the time Trump is inaugurated.

Buckle-up

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Greenspan Moment

Posted on January 19, 2024 by camelotkidd

I keep waiting for a Greenspan moment from a prominent neocon where he admits that he has found a flaw in his ideological model. According to the wayback machine–in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, conceded that the global financial crisis has exposed a “mistake” in the free market ideology which guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy.

The problem for the neocons is that they failed to factor in the unbridled greed of their neoliberal fellow travelers. The neocons missionary zeal to extend Pax-America into ever corner of the world ran headlong into the neoliberals propensity to off-shore, outsource and ultimately financialize the US defense base, with Boeing being the the poster-child of this arrangement.

Because if there’s anything that symbolizes the pernicious effects of neoliberalism, it’s the door blowing off a 737 MAX, sucking a boy’s clothes out, and falling into a schoolteacher’s backyard. And that’s just the latest incident. The 737 MAX has crashed itself twice, killing hundreds, blown out doors midair, and the engine can melt itself if the pilot isn’t careful. These are not isolated problems, they are simply the malign effects of late stage financial-capitalism.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that we have an outsourced-empire, where looters can take advantage of unlimited military spending with zero oversight. The military/industrial/complex (MIC), along with other sectors is characterized by a high degree of monopoly, a high degree of rent-seeking in the sense that the MIC, for example, essentially relies on vast government contracts, which are risk-free in which they get to mark up costs as much as they like. The upshot is that the US produces high-tech weapons that often prove to be overly complex and fragile when actually deployed in combat, as the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is demonstrating.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual rot within the US military and foreign policy establishment. But, the neocons never noticed, or more likely because of the Atlanticist triumphalism that took root after the end of the Cold War, they viewed it as a “free market” triumph. I’ve become convinced that they really bought into the arms merchant’s sales pitch, of American technological wonder-weapons that would vanquish all before them.

A large part of the problem lies with the ideology of the US as the most technologically superior nation, relying largely on air power to maintain its military dominance. This worked when the US was attacking Third World nations lacking comprehensive air defense but has been exposed as a paper-tiger against a peer adversary, like in Ukraine, where superior Russian air defense has prevented the US from establishing a “no-fly-zone”. Furthermore, thanks to advances in cheap drones and missiles, Yemen is showing how a so-called third rate military can effectively bankrupt the US empire.

The neocons urging Biden to attack Iran are math challenged. Iran has more missiles, drones and rockets than Yemen. If little Yemen is doing this to the US, just imagine the havoc Iran could cause?

While any sane or sensible person would examine the evidence and make changes in their behavior, the neocons are anything but. When they make mistakes, and boy do they, they simply double-down. In fact that exactly what we’re seeing now as several neocons have taken to the pages of our most influential media to demand an escalation of the violence and that the United States help Israel strike not just Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon but Iran as well.

Of course, it’s not at all uncommon for the feral-elite of failing imperial powers to succumb to ideological pathologies in the last years of their power. 

Anyway, while it’s good for a laugh, pretty sure we won’t see a Greenspan moment from the neocons, whose motto is–if first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.

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Poisoned Chalice

Posted on January 12, 2024 by camelotkidd

An empire that lives by the the narrative, dies by the narrative.

Our feral elite spokespersons can insist at the top of their lungs that Russia is losing in Ukraine or that “democratic” Israel, is simply defending themselves, but in the age of social media reality always has the final say. Indeed, the wide adoption of the internet has caused an information revolution that, similar to the adoption of the printing press, has allowed dissent to grow and spread beyond the control of the ruling classes. And, ultimately the reliance on propaganda or narrative management becomes a poisoned chalice that withers away trust sip by sip until all that is left is sullen cynicism and widespread nihilism.

The late heterodox journalist, John Pilger, met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. “She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked.  ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.

Does that sound like our country in this present milieu? As we dumbly witness the unfolding genocide in Gaza, there is a sense that our national morality has been lost and never to be found again. Then there’s the plutocratic nature of our economy. When did our current society last offer any real growth or value to anyone except hedge funds? When have inventions and scientific progress last been made to benefit Americans rather than mechanize or off-shore jobs–like all the latest AI developments? 

There is a strange lack of purpose in America today, where it seems that everyone is holding their breath. The advertisements that once used to trap us in a common myth of salvation lie withered, exposed as fake symbols. American culture has become stagnant–a broken feedback loop of haunting isolation, loneliness, and alienation. 

The brilliant Mark Fisher, who popularized the Derrida-coined term Hauntology to describe the way our “lost futures seep through the pores of our collective present, synthesizing into an ever-visceral sense of not only loss for something once promised, but an inescapable feeling of gutting emptiness about tomorrow. In essence, lacking a real future, figments of the one promised us continue their seductive hold on our psyche like a hypnotic rhythm; blinking specters of what once was, and will have been. Post-modernity is a vacant lot haunted by the ghosts of a would-be future.”

This is the deep fear of US elite–they know the meta-narrative they’ve been pushing to be a fiction. Nonetheless, they go on telling it to themselves, despite knowing that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

When Edward Bernays began describing how the “engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest”, he was at least conscientious enough to keep the behavioral nudges only slightly offset to the habits of Americans. Society’s mores were preserved, with only careful and periodic retouching to suit the needs of the corporate managers.

Nevertheless, the narrative factory is hard at work, even as it throws off a bit of black smoke from time to time. For example: Israel is the only Middle-East democracy, simply defending themselves from murderous terrorism, and a new Ukrainian counter-attack in 2024 will take NATO all the way to Crimea.

Unfortunately, reality intrudes.

The Gaza genocide is being live-streamed. In Israel, the possibility of an investigation of the events of October 7th has reached a point that it can’t be denied. And likewise, the Zionists are losing on the battlefield. They’re unable to make significant military gains. All they can accomplish is mass murdering civilians. And now they are being prosecuted in the World Court for genocide. The corporate media in the US is doing their best to aid the genocide, willingly, and secretly, by submitting to an onerous Israeli censorship regime.

And in Ukraine, despite Russian battlefield success, the corporate media struggles with analysis of how to define a US/NATO victory. Is it possible to flip the narrative of Ukraine, to being another success, like Libya? Can they, at least, label the Ukraine conflict a ‘stalemate’, and insist that it represents a defeat for Putin and a win for Biden, since Russia was unable to seize the whole of Ukraine? This approach is thought rather sophisticated by the spinmeisters: Frame the narrative of a ‘win’ and ensure that from top-to-bottom of society, all adhere to the correct narrative, or else.

But this is little more than a simple projection from the YouTube influencer’ culture. The problem arises when the narrative become so divorced from reality that it becomes an episode on South Park.

Many people are rightly talking about a major crisis of credibility and trust taking over the US, but historically, this is what happens in the late stage of empires, when the imperial state is reduced to a massive but fragile shell, invincible in appearance but shockingly vulnerable in reality.

The bright spot is that the over reliance on a narrative management that’s so at odds with observable reality has the potential to snap Americans out of the matrix of illusion.

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This ain’t no fooling around

Posted on January 5, 2024 by camelotkidd

“Heard of a van that’s loaded with weapons
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
A place where nobody knows

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I’m getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto
I’ve lived all over this town

This ain’t no party this ain’t no disco
This ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey-dovey
I ain’t got time for that now…”

There’s a new movie entitled Civil War that’s hitting theaters in 2024, followed by a presidential election that promises to be the most contentious since 1968. With Joe Biden’s popularity plummeting, liberals have decided that “lawfare” is their best bet. Colorado and Maine just took Trump off the ballot, which almost guarantees the 2024 election to be explosive in ways never before seen. Either mass civil unrest or outright civil war.

Just imagine the reaction of millions of Americans, many whom are heavily armed, when they are not allowed to vote for their preferred candidate. I can, and it strikes me that liberals really didn’t think this through.

Going further, liberals, largely composed of the professional/managerial/class (PMC), and represented by the Democratic party would rather tear the country apart than put forth a progressive candidate and universal policies that benefit the vast majority of Americans. Instead liberals, allied with the deep state, have waged a no-holds-barred assault on the 1st Amendment and aimed the “Censorship Industrial Complex” at American citizens, all because of their strident hatred of Trump and his MAGA supporters. Russia-gate was the prime example of the lawlessness, but for liberals anything goes when it come to Trump.

Yet this behavior is hardly surprising considering American history.

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy trended towards fascism. Of course, thanks to the corporate media’s depiction of Obama as the saintly first-black-president, this was almost never reported. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded drone strikes and dirty wars as no other president had done since the Reagan Administration. According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and, ironically, people of color: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

And his successor, Joe Biden is made from the same cloth, presiding over an administration enabling corporate inflation and enthusiastically backing numerous proxy wars, while claiming to be an antidote to Trumpian fascism.

Some antidote.

There are myriad immensely destabilizing flash points all converging on the end of 2024 like we’ve never seen before. We already know the year is said to be the most politically charged globally, in history, as it has the most global elections total. With US veering into war in Ukraine, the Middle East, and potentially China, with the US elections certain to be highly contested and rife with civil unrest, and with the global economy going inverted, with US hyperinflation already shredding the now nonexistent “middle class”, there’s an extremely high probability that the end of 2024 will see something out of Ghostbusters.

Echoing my hypothesis, Samual Moyn claims there’s A Liberal Plot Against Democracy. “On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court held that Donald Trump isn’t allowed to appear on state ballots in the 2024 election cycle because the former president engaged in “insurrection,” disqualifying him for office under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Intended to finally write the former president’s political obituary, the decision is just the latest example of liberals helping dig the grave of our democracy.

The ruling sets up a dangerous new version of an all-too-familiar scenario: It transforms what ought to be a national referendum on the future of the country into a national spectacle of how judges will interpret a provision from its past. Doing so might for a moment save liberals—and, if the US Supreme Court goes along, conservatives, too—from their nonnegotiable responsibility to win power by winning elections. But it would do so by putting the very democracy such forces purport to want to save at greater risk and only postpones the need to rule by legitimate means, rather than through legal hijinks.”

I’ve come to realize that in their quest to vanquish the Orange monster liberals have become monsters themselves. They claim democracy is in a peril and a 2nd Trump administration would bring a descent into outright fascism, yet Genocide-Joe is what they are offering as an alternative.

Most importantly, it’s a strange way of responding to Trump’s truth, among so many obvious untruths, that America’s ongoing crisis is a result of elite failure, when their response is to pursue an undemocratic “lawfare” method of denying him the presidency. What’s even stranger is that the feral elite ruling America operate under the frantic delusion that if only they can make Trump go away, the populist movement that adopted him for its leader will vanish. 

Like I said before, I’m not sure liberals have thought this through.

Buckle up.

Update: “Joe Biden Makes Saving Democracy the Center of His Campaign” [The New Yorker]. 

You can’t make this shit up!

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David and Goliath

Posted on December 29, 2023 by camelotkidd

The Houthis of Yemen have demonstrated their courage and determination in standing up for the Palestinians as the rest of world silently witnesses the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza.

I fully support the Houthis because Israel’s savage attack on Gaza is exposing something toxic in the US and the rest of the Western world. It lays bare the primitive and ugly behavior that has been obscured for decades by a veneer of Western civilization, with all the faux concern for human rights, and the whole “rule based international order” bullshit that we are subjected to incessantly.

Yet, these claims were invariably bogus. Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine were all sold based on lies. The true goal of the US, and NATO, was plundering the resources of the Third World while maintaining Washington as the global hegemon, and enriching Wall Street. But there is nothing humanitarian about bombing trapped civilians in Gaza with US made bombs and missiles, turning their tiny prison enclave into rubble.

The Red Sea crisis is an extension of the Palestine-Israel conflict, exacerbated by the United States’ continuous support to Israel and its double standards in dealing with the Palestinian question. In recent weeks, Yemen’s Houthis have intensified their attacks on “Israel-linked” ships passing the Red Sea, demanding an end to Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip, and the delivery of food and medicines to the enclave. The Houthis have to date mounted 100–plus attacks on ships sailing the Red Sea.

This has led to major shipping and oil firms halting operations along this important trade route.

The US has responded by initiating the so-called “Operation Prosperity Guardian” to safeguard commercial ships passing the Red Sea. The Red Sea is a vital maritime transport corridor, whose importance has been further highlighted by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The security of transportation in this region is directly linked to US interests. In a paradigm shift in warfare that favors the insurgent, the Houthis are firing drones they make for $2,000 each. In response the U.S. Navy is trying to shoot them down with missiles that cost $1 million to more than $4 million a copy. 

By any conceivable metric, the Houthis strategy is working better than anyone could have imagined. In fact, the Houthis asymmetrical attack may be the most successful hybrid attack of all time. It would be impossible to overstate the impact this ingenious offensive is having on political leaders and elites scattered across the western world. They are freaking out. A smallish, unsophisticated militia has delivered a withering blow to the American empire’s Achilles heel—the vital transit corridor for global trade that is now under the de facto control of Washington’s mortal enemy, the Houthis. Is that not a victory for the majority of ordinary people around the world who oppose the US and Israel’s sadistic butchery of the Palestinian people?

What the Houthis are showing the world is that the Washington is no longer capable of controlling the Middle East, long considered primary to US power. This is no small problem. This is crisis of legitimacy. It is a question of whether the US can act as the guarantor of global security or not.

In addition the Houthis are bringing the biblical story of David and Goliath to life with their bravery displayed against Israel, the US and NATO.

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Reverse Touch

Posted on December 22, 2023 by camelotkidd

King Midas turned everything he touched to gold. The neocons who manage the American empire have the reverse touch. Everything they touch turns to shit.

Ukraine is the latest example but the way they have managed Russia since the end of the first Cold War is a case study in their particular brand of maladroitness. What’s hilarious is that there’s ample historical evidence demonstrating that Russia was its own worse enemy absent US meddling.

Russian author Dmitry Orlov, in a satirical article entitled: The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again, explains:

“Ostensibly, the plan was to weaken and destroy Russia; but then, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was weakening and destroying itself very well all by itself, no intervention needed. What’s more, every US effort to weaken and destroy Russia has made it stronger; had there existed even a most rudimentary feedback mechanism, so vast a discrepancy between policy goals and policy results would have been detected and adjustments would have been made. But that’s pure conspiracy theory and we shouldn’t want to go anywhere near that. Suffice to say, there is at present no adequate explanation for what happened. After the Soviet collapse, very little was needed to speed along the collapse of Russia itself. But none of these steps have been taken, and the steps that were taken (with the ostensible goal of weakening and destroying Russia) have done the exact opposite.”

The delusion of US policy makers seems to be one explanation, They have no idea how the real world works but think that they can create their own realities. Well, that and the fact that all of the failure has been vastly profitable for the corporations that comprise the military/industrial/complex (MIC), as well as the banks and hedge funds that finance them, along with the Congressional sock-puppets who Hoover up the accompanying campaign donations.

So, there’s that.

But you can’t underestimate the neocons “We’re an empire now”, arrogance, where in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, they saw military force as the only hammer in their toolkit. Diplomacy and negotiation in good faith was for wimps, whereas they could dictate to vassal’s and enemies alike from “Full Spectrum Dominance”. And, as far as Russia goes, the neocons goal has always been to remove Putin from power and install a Yeltsin-like clone in his stead. Russia stopped being a national security problem to be managed through effective diplomacy, but instead a domestic political issue which American politicians from both sides of the aisle used to scare the American people into supporting a new Cold War.

Then there’s the anti-communism hysteria that carried straight through to relations with Russia. US diplomatic, intelligence and university bureaucracy has reproduced two, maybe even three, generations of, first, anti Soviet and then anti-Russian exiles and then children and grandchildren of these exiles, as evidenced by the many foreign affairs experts in the United States and Canada – the Vindmans, Victoria Nuland, Christina Freeland, all with a nearly visceral hatred of all things Slavic and Russian.

This intellectual hothouse has had a deleterious effect. After observing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, I’ve come to believe that the neocons really do believe their own propaganda about the state of Russian military; that they were a bunch of drunks, who were poorly led, with inferior weapons. Which is quite insane as any student of military history can attest. Ironically, much of this nonsense is the result of the wholesale rehabilitation of the German military and intelligence agencies at the end of WWII, when the US pivoted to the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Still, it’s quite remarkable that after the Cold War ended, Russia was eager to join the West, absent the enmity, sanctions and eastward expansion of NATO, that taught the Kremlin that it was not Communism but Russia itself that engendered the hatred. The endless and ongoing sanctions were especially illuminating and valuable. Perhaps the clueless neocons missed the memo but Russia is an autarchy, where they posses all of the resources along with a sophisticated and educated populace to be self-sufficient. All of the aggression and color revolutions on Russia’s periphery had the added bonus of jump starting their defense base and spurring the development of new high-tech weapons systems that were far superior to US and NATO’s as Russia’s ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine is demonstrating.

Not just Russia, but the neocons along with their neoliberal soulmates have managed to make China great again too, with their oh-so cunning plan to decimate American labor unions by off-shoring US industry to China. The whole concept of “we will off shore the manufacturing, but retain the technology” has been a flawed approach for the last forty years. It allowed American CEOs to take advantage of cheaper labor, but losing the technological edge is almost inevitable, and losing your factories, and labor force is a given. This is not some sort of mysterious outcome, it was predicted in classified studies done for the DOD. Lately they have doubled down by imposing a ban on computer chips, spurring Chinese development of domestic chips to power the latest generation of Huawei smart phones.

All of this is a long winded explanation of the “Blob’s” antipathy towards Trump, who just wants to make America great again.

I’ve come too believe that all of the “lawfare” aimed at the ex-president, with the Colorado Supreme court case being the latest example, is the latest scheme to stymie Trump’s return. There’s a “little old lady who swallowed a fly”, aspect to the neocons behavior, where when one of their cockamamie plans goes off the rails they simply double down and move on to a more audacious one.

The neocons remind me of the French Bourbons, who as Talleyrand observed–“They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”

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Weaponized

Posted on December 16, 2023 by camelotkidd

The dollar goes abroad in search of greater profits and the flag follows, trailed by human-rights and identity politics that have been weaponized to facilitate capital penetration.

The US is the worlds leader in the hybrid-warfare that was developed by Gene Sharp, who wrote The Politics of Nonviolent Action, and who with Department of Defense funds, developed his core theory of nonviolent action: “a method of warfare capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots.” From his post at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against the Soviet Union. But Sharp made it clear that this is no mere pacifism. He presents nonviolent action as a style of combat he terms “political jujitsu”, that of using the stronger opponents’ energy against themselves, rather than confronting it head-on

Sharp, and his NGO followers spent the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s training activists, policymakers, and defense leaders around the world in Sharp’s nonviolent methods, supporting numerous “color revolutions”. Always in state socialist countries whose administrations were attempting to oppose neoliberal privatization, austerity policies, and deregulation being pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S. Treasury-led “Washington Consensus.” Sharp’s “people-powered” nonviolent “ju-jitsu” would prove surprisingly effective, distinguishing itself as a powerful weapons system in the U.S. regime change arsenal. 

Gene Sharp is someone that few Americans could identify but he was the unseen figure directing the ongoing “Color Revolutions” that have transformed our world. In Sharp’s “politics of nonviolent action, the state was not the prize, not even a terrain of struggle: it was the enemy, the object to be paralyzed and removed. And in this regard, Sharp fit neatly into the emerging neoliberal consensus’s pathological hatred of the state, and unerring faith in the “free market.” His theories work seamlessly with neoliberalism where the theory of state transformation easily compatible, philosophically and practically, with the free market fantasies and programs of vast privatization of the commons.

Of course, the US government uses this non-violent “political jujitsu” only on governments that fail to follow the Washington Consensus. The US express’s concern with human rights only when their concern is directed at their chosen enemies. You see this glaring inconsistency over and over again in US foreign policy, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or which party is in control. The criminality of US allies gets ignored, downplayed and frantically obfuscated, while the criminality of US enemies gets spotlighted, exaggerated, and pushed to the forefront of international attention.

The US certainly doesn’t try and regime-change allies like Saudi Arabia or Israel using Sharp’s “jujitsu”. That shit is reserved for enemies, like Russia, Iran and China. Or countries that fail to follow the neoliberal diktats from Wall Street.

It’s probably worth mentioning that a leaked 2017 State Department memo addressed to then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson explained that this inconsistency regarding the criminality of US allies vs US enemies is actually a standing policy within the inner workings of the US government. The leaked memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching the political neophyte Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. “In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.

All of the highlighting the human-rights abuses of US enemies while downplaying the abuses of US allies works because of the historical ignorance of the American public. The US maintains the worlds most profuse and diabolically effective propaganda apparatus by many magnitudes. The takeaway is that your leaders look at you as someone to be manipulated with endless psy-op’s. The intelligence services and politicians operate only with the moral imperative of: ‘the ends justify the means’, all means. Human-rights, concern for woman or concern for LGBT rights, these are just control terms used to pacify the gullible masses, especially the prized professional/managerial/class (PMC) cohort.

The upshot is that “concern” has been weaponized so that the sociopaths and psychopaths who run our country can continue the American empire unimpeded. The problem here is most definitely not “inaction” or lack of will to confront monstrous evil. It is that the US picks and chooses when and how it wants to be active in creating, sustaining and ending conflicts around the globe. The concern is not really about a rise in mass atrocities. The US is just fine with atrocities when it commits them or it helps others carry them out as we can observe live from Gaza.

Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that there is no society, only individuals and their families but in regards to wars and “color revolutions” it appears that there is always a society to be weaponized.

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Hey Genocide-Joe you gotta go

Posted on December 9, 2023 by camelotkidd

Israeli and American elites are pissed that Israel can’t genocide like they could back before social media.

Recently deceased war-criminal, Henry Kissinger was able to initiate a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia and Laos, deploying B-52 Arc-Light strikes, murdering millions, because these savage attacks happened out of view. The best eulogy to Kissinger was pronounced years ago by the late Anthony Bourdain who said–“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”

The funny thing about Henry Kissinger dying at age 100, as Caitlin Johnstone reminds us, “is that he lived long enough to become one of the least crazy warmongers in the DC swamp — not because he got saner, but because the US empire has gotten so much crazier. Almost everyone running the US government today is a worse warmonger than Kissinger was at the end of his life.”

And even though what Caitlin Johnstone says about Henry Kissinger is true, it’s also true that in our world of social media your ability to genocide is more limited. Today’s social media environment poses a problem for would be genociders who face instantaneous exposure. For instance, Israel’s western allies keep being confronted with the problem that they’ve been framing Israel all these years as a free democracy with liberal values, yet it keeps acting just like the “rogue states” the US is always trying to regime-change.

Speaking of rogue states. Everything the almost-entirely-Jewish Biden Administration did was calculated to encourage Israel to launch a genocide. And while Israel is the one pulling the trigger, so to speak, all of the genocidal devastation would not be possible without the fulsome support of America, as this quote made last month by a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick about the ongoing IDF assault on Gaza makes crystal clear. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” Brick said. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

The ongoing destruction overseen by the genocide duo has caused a dissonance between what Israel is seen doing and what Israel is presented as by the US and its western allies and its own PR, and now that dissonance has soared to unprecedented heights. This dilemma is not made any better by the pronouncements of US and Israeli leaders.

US Senator Tom Cotton loves war crimes and wants more of them: “In the Spring of 1945, we did much, much worse in Dresden and Tokyo than anything Israel has done in Gaza—and it was justified,” he pronounced.

And by now it’s well-known what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9th declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” They’re not even shy about their genocidal policies. The damage is being increasingly broadcast, justified and celebrated. Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” 

Israeli 972 Magazine reports that “the killing of civilians was all calculated and intentional.” Their investigation is “based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

What the investigation reveals is that “the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.” One source told them: “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Even more creepy and dystopian is that a lot of the targets are identified by AI: for instance they “use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.” According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora “allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives.”

It’s worth asking why has the American and European leadership class been falling all over itself competing to see who can move to the head of the line of genocidal war criminals? Can’t they see that the global majority is appalled by the wholesale Zionist atrocities and sides with Palestine? Don’t they realize that the US and West is hastening its own demise, and ensuring the rise of a non-Western-led world order, by undermining its pretense of concern for international law and human rights?

The corporate media bears a huge part of the blame as they bleat “anti-semitism” at anyone who decries the ongoing genocide. Then there’s the Ivy League colleges, where Jewish students complain of a hostile environment. Incidents on campus have become a flashpoint in the debate over protests and freedom of speech. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations feature chants calling for “intifada” or uprising, which has also been sprayed as graffiti across campus, alongside “Avenge Gaza.”

In response professors, administrators and students are being accused of anti-semitism for protesting the slaughter in Gaza of woman and children by Israel.

But, fuck that.

This is not anti-semitism it’s anti-genocidism.

The problem is the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Meanwhile, to their credit, a sizable cohort of Jewish individuals and groups also decry the ongoing genocide.

US officials, wealthy investors and the corporate media might be able to label these protests anti-semitism and punish the participants but the hypocrisy has consequences. By enthusiastically participating in the Gaza genocide, the US and the EU, starting with its media and political elites, has completely discredited itself in the eyes of the world.

The majority of the Earth’s population can now see that anything would be better than allowing these genocidal monsters to continue to dominate this planet.

Update: Sad news: Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 – 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza’s most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza’s voice to the outside world.

He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister’s home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids…

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The Dismal Science

Posted on December 1, 2023 by camelotkidd

Examining the power centers in the US entails examining the ideologies behind them and there’s no greater ideological power than economics as it promotes and justifies capitalism.

Economics and economists are ultimately political but this truism gets ignored in the service to power. A new book by Branko Milanovic, called “Visions of Inequality”, shows why that is so. Milanovic asks “how can you construct a theory of economic activity that excludes the power embedded in relationships between the various actors on the stage you are directing?  More to the point why would you?  To ignore power is to ignore reality.”

What I’ve come to realize is that the reason you ignore power is because the powerful want you to.

It’s that simple.

Economics as a discipline developed to analyze capitalism and since the beginning ambitious economists have exploited this dynamic, producing reports and papers that justify the rapaciousness of the era’s feral elite. In order to eliminate power, and more importantly class, economics reduced its boundaries and focused only on matters that did not disturb its patrons.  In the words of Milanovic:“With its main, or even sole, focus on price formation, it [neoclassical economics] leaves out class structure and the endowments of capital or skills with which individuals come to the market.  Wealth acquisition takes place offstage … Thus, the mathematically complex models of general equilibrium were only very distant relations of real-world phenomena.”

Milanovic asserts that economics, as an intellectual field of study, did not follow a dispassionate course.  It followed a path corrupted by the influx of money and support from business interests and the wealthy. Intellectual hegemony is a critical element that the wealthy employ to preserve their privilege. So we observe, according to Milanovic, that “inequality produces sufficient influence to dampen, if not eradicate, the study of that same inequality.” Thinking has been suppressed or channeled into benign and more comfortable topics. Economic departments and mainstream economists have obliged by largely avoiding some very sensitive subjects, including how economics relates to the American empire that our elite relay on to maintain their wealth and power.

The way in which the US economy is structured, with the fulsome support of neoliberal economists, has imperial ramifications. Just like domestically where the wealthy relies on parasitism and labor theft to keep its own luxurious standards afloat, as well as mediate the endless debt expansion and ever-ballooning inflation. To maintain the American empire they needed globalism to do this, as globalism allowed a form of Neo-empire that utilized economic methods as much as military ones to eliminate economic borders between countries and create a predatory pipeline enabling the “too big to fail” corporations and banks to keep themselves profitable by increasingly robbing the rest of the world via offshoring and other globalist techniques.

The use of the dollar as the worlds reserve currency and to decades of imperial economic policies like sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules and institutions such as the IMF and World Bank resulted in a systematic pattern of unbalanced exchange that funnel an oversized share of the world’s wealth into American hands. In the process the US transformed its own economy. The de-industrialization, off-shoring and financialization that accompanied our neoliberal empire was cheered on by American economists and political scientists, who celebrated the “end of history”, where neoliberal capitalism triumphed.

It’s all darkly comedic, especially since the term “dismal science” came into usage with early political/economy types, and most of them held Ricardo‘s deliberate opinion that a “substantial improvement in the condition of the mass of mankind was impossible.” And even though economists keep their disdain for the average citizen on the down-low and don’t talk about inequality doesn’t mean that Americans haven’t noticed how capitalists and their economic enablers have rigged the system to their benefit.

Right now, the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is the greatest that it has ever been in the entire history of our nation. And Americans aren’t happy about it. The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer, and this is causing all sorts of societal problems. Thanks to social media, the poor can see the incredible affluence that the wealthy are enjoying, and they are deeply envious.  

Bloomberg tell us that anger is driving Americans attitudes towards economic outlooks. A deep-seated resentment about a “rigged” system has been simmering since long before the pandemic and continues to affect consumer attitudes….Why is the gap between attitudes and action so large? Much of the economic anger expressed in the polls may be less about current economic conditions and more about the economy the US has built over the past 40 years: one of high and rising inequality, with greater economic fragility due to higher income volatility and a reduced safety net. A deep-seated anger about how the economy is “rigged” has been simmering since long before the pandemic.

Of course it certainly doesn’t help that flaunting wealth has become one of the favorite pastimes of the 1%. 

At this point the fact that economics and elite economists parrot the ideology of the wealthy should be taken for granted. We know full well that neoclassical theory has no relevance to life on earth. Re-connecting with reality implies such a radical reworking of the discipline that it is unlikely to take place unless topics such as inequality play a central part in the canon. 

Don’t hold your breath.

Update:

Henry Kissinger dead at 100.

Finally.

Lots more next week.

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Lesser Evil

Posted on November 25, 2023 by camelotkidd

It occurred to me that whole idea of the Democrats as the lesser evil is starting to look a bit frayed around the edges and shabby.

Back when Biden won in 2020 liberals celebrated, we were sermonized on how the adults were back in charge, America had dodged a dark fascist moment, democracy had triumphed, etc.

Sure didn’t turn out that way and it’s pertinent to explore why that is.

A lot of the lesser evil cachet has been due to a one Donald Trump. When Trump became president, Democrats predicted the worst. “Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy,” David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker the day after the election. Trump, Remnick said, was an authoritarian who disdained civil liberties and whose election was “surely the way fascism can begin.”

Democrats used this narrative to demonize tens of millions of voters, to justify their censorship efforts, and to weaponize the justice system against their political enemies. The Democrats, with the full backing of the deep state and corporate media, wielded Russia-gate as a cudgel to attack and hobble Trump during his entire presidency, even as they shrieked hysterically about fascism. Meanwhile, the Democratic party and the Biden administration have become precisely what liberals said Trump would be.

Talk about gaslighting.

Then there’s the ongoing evil of US foreign policy that has been thrust into everyone’s face with the Biden Administration’s facilitation and cover up for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to. The US is determined to back its proxy to the hilt, giving Israel license to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives.

But the optics are disastrous and it’s readily apparent that that is the main concern of the White House.

In an article titled “Biden admin officials see proof their strategy is working in hostage deal,” Politico describes how a supposed ceasefire to exchange hostages is being viewed with alarm. According to Politico’s sources there has been some resistance to the pause in fighting within the administration due to fears that it will allow journalists into Gaza to report on the devastation Israel has inflicted upon the enclave. “And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel,” Politico reports.

In other words, the White House is worried that a brief pause in the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza will allow journalists to report the truth about the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza, because it will puncture the veil of US and Israeli propaganda. They are worried that the public will become more aware of facts and truth.

And aware of the evil.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart. . . .”

What’s become clear in our neoliberal milieu is that the line between liberals and conservatives is imaginary. The unmistakable reality is that in the US conservatives and liberals only quibble on minor issues while they pursue the same agenda of zealously protecting elite interests.

The truth is that there can never be a lesser evil when they both are.

Update: Hoisted from the comments at Naked Capitalism. “Idea for a T-shirt–My country voted Democrat in 2020 and all I got was this lousy genocide.“

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