By their words you shall know them

Posted on September 8, 2023 by camelotkidd

There are bloodthirsty monsters in the Senate. Maybe it has always been thus but since 9/11 they have sanctioned an orgy of violence–bombing, assassinations, torture, invasions and proxy wars utilizing al Qaeda and Nazi terrorists. Their latest human sacrifice involves the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine where recent statements have dispelled any notions that Russia’s Special Military Operation was “unprovoked”. Indeed, they just can’t stop boasting about how this supposedly unprovoked war which the US is only backing out of its concern for democracy just so happens to serve US interests tremendously.

My senator, Mitt Romney (Mittens), called the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine: “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done. We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia,” Romney said. “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money … a weakened Russia is a good thing.”

Last month Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that Americans should support the US government’s proxy warfare in Ukraine because “we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” adding that the spending is helping to employ Americans in the military-industrial complex. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons…”

Not to be outdone, in a recent article for the Connecticut Post, Senator Richard Blumenthal assured Americans that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half,” writes Blumenthal.

Look how happy they are at the results of their glorious proxy-war. I think Senator Blumenthal has a boner going, and Lindsey never met a war he couldn’t dry-hump from the safety of his closet. But Pocahontas? She looks like she has developed a secret crush on the heroic Zelensky.

Americans should be outraged at what these monsters are doing in their name. As Caitlin says: “War is the single worst thing humans do. The most insane. The most cruel. The most destructive. The most traumatic. The least sustainable. Those who knowingly choose to steer humanity into more war when it could be avoided are the worst people in the world, without exception.”

And of course the mass media is composed of the same blood-thirsty monsters. A few weeks ago the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an article explaining why westerners shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about how things are going in Ukraine, writing the following about how much this war is doing to benefit US interests overseas: “Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

While for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost, it’s been a different story for the proxy.

A funerals of Ukrainian servicemen killed during combat with Russian troops. Military cemetery

‘Dying by the dozens every day’ – Ukraine losses climb, is posted at the BBC website. There has been a dramatic rise in Ukraine’s number of dead, according to new estimates by unnamed US officials. The reality of the scale of casualties is laid bare in Ukraine’s cemeteries. A year and a half into this war, few families here have been left untouched by grief.

No matter. For the fiends in the Senate they will wage the US proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian. Reportedly, the Western policy class knew Ukraine didn’t have the weapons or training necessary for success but hoped they would somehow triumph anyway. Now, with failure all but inevitable, after a year and a half of lionizing the Ukrainians, the brazen depravity of the of our Senators and their corporate media courtiers is on display for all to see: they have blamed the failure on Ukraine being too “casualty averse.” This implies, I suppose, that Ukraine should be casualty casual, and care about the lives of their troops even less than they have up to this point.

It was already well established that the Western proxy warrior class are monsters, but they have rarely exposed themselves as clearly as while talking about the young men they threw into the maw of Ukraine’s failed summer 2023 offensive.

As the Biden administration and Congress continue to pour billions of dollars into Ukraine as they pressure that unfortunate country into losing hundreds of thousands of lives in a war where the main beneficiaries are the holders of stocks and bonds in the U.S. military-industrial complex, we are also seeing disturbing news here in the Homeland.

Recent reports by the Centers for Disease Control that youth suicides and homicides for 2022 were at an all-time high. Added to more than 100,000 deaths annually from overdoses and the flood of fentanyl and crystal meth pouring across our open southern border, we are starting to look at a generation of young Americans with nothing to live for. 

What’s really tragic is that all the blood-thirsty bellicosity and constant warfare has left the US less secure, less respected and less powerful, all results that are anathema to the Straussian neo-con psychos in charge of US foreign policy who enacted their pet policies in the aftermath of 9/11 when the “gloves came off”.

The biggest loss was that of the traditional “soft power” that was always America’s greatest strength

And while Americans may not know about or understand the words that the bloodthirsty monsters in the Senate are articulating, you can bet the rest of the world does and is acting accordingly.

Update: The formation of BRICS and their recent addition of new members is a direct result of the neocon policies of world domination and endless war.

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Lies and Lying Liars

Posted on September 1, 2023 by camelotkidd

I don’t believe anything anymore. If CNN or Fox or MSNBC told me that the sun was going to rise in the East I would need to check. And US government agencies are no better. The State Department or the CIA or the FBI? Please.

The latest agency to demonstrate the full corporate takeover of our government is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with their admission of the safety of Ivermectin. This was prompted in part by government lawyers in a court hearing who confessed that for two years the FDA has been lying about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorized to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.

I know history isn’t our strong point but if you consult the wayback machine you might recall that the the FDA and every liberal outlet told Americans that Ivermectin was horse medicine. After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a narrative cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nut-jobs (ie. Trump supporters) talk about Ivermectin:

The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.

As a corollary the Biden Administration and liberal corporate media proclaimed the importance of vaccines and mass vaccination, and emphasized the safety and non-transmission of the new, experimental mRNA vaccines produced under emergency authorization by Pfizer, a company for which fraud is not unknown. Before assuming office, President-elect Biden promised the electorate he would make mass vaccination against COVID-19 central to his agenda. Not only should Americans get vaccinated to safeguard their own lives, the president declared, but also as good citizens to protect each other. Those who declined vaccination were not only foolish, but selfish.

Then there was the timing of the miracle vaccine’s release. I mean knowing what we know about how Big Pharma manipulates its trials, are we really to believe that Pfizer couldn’t have manipulated its own internal timeline, such that the data to evaluate its vaccines was only available after the 2020 election? 

“Pfizer CEO: Our vaccine timing had nothing to do with politics” [CNN]. From November 9, 2020. 

Tell us another one.

Now let’s look at the politics of these vital public health decisions. Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. This unmentioned reality should be a huge conflict of interest, but there are enormous political and economic pressures to keep Big Pharma happy. The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma–completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.

The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.

Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Chinese or Indian factory can produce the tablets for a few cents.

So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.

“BioNTech, Pfizer stocks soar after COVID-19 vaccine candidate achieves ‘success’ in first analysis” [MarketWatch] and “Stock futures surge, with Dow futures up 1100 points, after Pfizer vaccine news” [MarketWatch].

Cha-ching! as the cool kids say.

The FDA, like all of the rest of US regulatory agencies has been captured by the industries they’re tasked with regulating. In this case big Pharma ownes the FDA and the doctors and scientists who work there are not stupid. They know for their careers to advance they have to make Big-Pharma happy.

The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why is that?

Perhaps it’s because companies like Pfizer subsidize the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA.

We discussed this before but the pharmaceutical corporations and the corporate media are just separate wings of the same corporate empire headquartered on Wall Street. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for the military/industrial/complex is good for Big-Oil is good for corporate agriculture is good for corporate media, etc.

What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for corporate profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.

So Ivermectin had to be lied about by the lying liars.

It’s that simple.

Update: Just to make clear–I am not a Trump supporter. But I am extremely interested in the political, economic and social conditions that make Trumpism possible in the United States.

Lying about Ivermectin and demonizing those who would utilize it while screeching at the top of their lungs to “trust the science” it is not the winning issue that liberals imagine. Meanwhile, doubling down on the attacks against Trump and his supporters appears to supremely counterproductive. Of course the managers of the American empire are experts at keeping liberals generally unaware of the cruelty and tyranny of the empire overseas, with their political attention being directed toward Trump’s mugshot with the narrative that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today. The whole Russia-gate psy-op provides copious evidence of this phenomenon. Trump for liberals is like waving a red cape at a bull.

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A Natural State

Posted on August 25, 2023 by camelotkidd

With the trend of recent posts I feel it’s a propitious moment to resume our examination of power.

Capital has come to be the preeminent power in the US. And by capital I mean the corporations, banks, trusts and assorted financial entities, owned by the oligarchs, which composes American capitalism. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans, including members of the professional/managerial/class, make a living by selling their labor to an employer (Capital), making this the most important power relationship in their lives. However, thanks to the dedicated efforts of classical and now neoliberal economists this dynamic is considered economic instead of the most important political issue.

I’m reading a new book–Capital Control: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, by Clara Mattei, which details the history of austerity and demonstrates that neoliberal capitalism is just the latest itineration of liberal capitalism, as well as a successful counterattack against the New Deal, meant to reestablish capital control. In the words of the late Mark Fisher, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world that to imagine the end of capitalism.”

We think of austerity as a new set of policies but Mattei explains that austerity has been a cudgel used to discipline workers for over a century. “Economic experts, whether fascist or liberal recognized that in order to secure economic freedom–ie., the market freedom of the “virtuous” saver/entrepreneur–countries had to forgo, or at minimum marginalize, political freedoms.”

Indeed, Mattei’s examination of the conditions of capitalism in England and Italy during WWI, reveal the political nature of the “free market” and demonstrate that there’s nothing natural about it. “In sum, the war brought about an unprecedented degree of state control over labor. Insetting the price of labor, disciplining it, and controlling its supply, the Italian and British governments had exposed the profoundly political nature of the capitalist economy…The basis was set for those who were living through these changes to gain awareness of the link between economic power and political power. The full consequences were cropping up: if economic power is political, it means there is nothing natural about economic power, and the systems by which it is distributed can be changed through struggle.”

At the end of the WWI all of these contradictions brought about a crisis of capitalism. Mattei says that after the war many bureaucrats, politicians and intellectuals had been converted to belief in the benefits of nationalization and envisioned it as a long-lasting structural change. “The involvement of the state showed the irrationality of the market–that it was wasteful and anti-social.” Be that it may but the capitalists in England and Italy were the most powerful class and soon mounted a ferocious counterattack that reestablished capital control with the aid of classical economists who used austerity as their weapon of choice.

Neoliberalism advocates much more state involvement than laissez faire to nurture and protect an economic system dominated by markets but the modern state, wether liberal or fascist, has always favored the capitalist order. After all, capitalism is more than an economic arrangement. It’s system of social order.

What Mattei details is a familiar story that I have witnessed in my lifetime. American capitalists similarly mounted a successful counterattack against the US government’s uneven attempt to level the playing field between capital and labor that the New Deal represented. Moreover, the fact that capitalists have been so successful points to the power that they wield in American society. The unwelcome reality is that as a result of capitalist counterattack, the economic and financial policies since have transferred $50 trillion from labor to politically powerful capital. If this doesn’t seem possible, please read the RAND study in its entirety: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

You know, it’s quite interesting because I’m old enough to remember Obama-Biden back in 2008-2012, and they were talking about that, “we as Democrats support a redistribution of wealth. And at the time, it was assumed that this redistribution of wealth would be from upper income to lower income brackets. But now it seems that the redistribution of wealth is going the other way around, taking from the poor to give to the rich.

That’s what politics is all about in America. It’s about economic power. Voting and elections are just a small part of the ongoing struggle, while unfortunately economic matters are kept far away from the electorate.

And that just how the capitalists like the American political system especially the legalized bribery campaign funding mechanism codified by Citizens United. If you look at the donor class, who are the donors? The donors are the wealthy, the beneficiaries of government policy. The brutal reality the RAND study articulates is that over the past several decades, and especially over the past ten years, since the 2008 crash, we’ve seen the US slowly transform into a financial oligarchy.

What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Capital’s permanent profiteering.

Paraphrasing Kevin Spacey in–The Usual Suspects–the best trick that Capital pulled was convincing us that capitalism is the natural state of man rather than a political construct serving a narrow strata of oligarchs that can be changed.

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Most of the money

Posted on August 18, 2023 by camelotkidd

Sometimes US politicians blurt out the truth. Recently Mitch McConnell stated that: ” Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what lies ahead.”

So that whole narrative about defending Ukraine from “unprovoked” Russian aggression is just a cover story to disguise the real purpose, which is feeding the military/industrial/complex. Gee, who could have known?

War really is the health of the state. Sorry. The health of the deep state. The US is an empire that wages wars to maintain control, managed by a national security class, who’s members are never on the ballot. That permanent government structure is why the large-scale movements of the empire don’t change when a president is replaced by a new president from Team Red or Team Blue. America’s official elected government may have changed, but the real government that manages the empire did not.

This is a big part of what keeps the American empire acting the same way from administration to administration. Every president is stage managed by DC swamp monsters, like Victoria Nuland, who all went to the same universities and moved through the same revolving door employment circles of government agencies and think tanks and party politics and military-industrial complex advising/lobbying and media punditry, who all understand what’s required of the US president to facilitate the perpetuation of the American empire. 

All of this was set in motion decades ago when the US established a policy of ensuring that no other rival superpowers emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union. US foreign policy in the 2000s emphasized giant overt ground invasions (Iraq, Afghanistan). In the 2010s it shifted emphasis to arming proxies (Yemen, Libya, Syria). In the 2020s it upped the ante by staging massive proxy conflicts on the borders of its top two rivals (Ukraine-Russia, Taiwan-China).

Just to give you an idea of how much mayhem we’re talking about–the United States launched at least 251 military interventions between 1991 and 2022. This is according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, a US government institution that compiles information on behalf of Congress. The Military Intervention Project added: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad.”

And while war is the health of the deep state, for the American people it’s an ongoing disaster. For the first time under the Biden administration, food insecurity rates eclipsed 12 percent, marking a fourth consecutive month of increase. What’s more, average financial hardship and food insecurity rates this year exceed the previous three.

The temporary welfare superstructure erected for the pandemic is being dismantled with nothing to replace it, leaving tens of millions of Americans in the lurch. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Democrats and the Biden Administration led voters to believe that they wouldn’t be left high and dry — as the emergency benefits expired, they should have been replaced with permanent ones.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. 

Update: More honesty from US officials.

Last month The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an article explaining why westerners shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about how things are going in Ukraine, writing the following about how much this war is doing to benefit US interests overseas:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

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Our Democracy

Posted on August 11, 2023 by camelotkidd

I swear if I hear some liberal politician or pundit use the expression “our democracy” again I’m going to scream.

The whole idea of the US as a democracy is a joke. I don’t know exactly which cabal of Wall Street bankers, spooks and military/industrial denizens makes policy but it sure ain’t “we the people”. All of the pomp and ceremony of voting is to create the illusion that the US government is responsive to the will of the electorate. Meanwhile, we’re a plutocracy and have been for some time. Cory Doctorow says—“Our plutocratic, monopolized, unequal society is the worst of both worlds. Because companies are so big, they abuse us with impunity – and they are able to suborn the state to help them do it.”

And don’t even get me started on American foreign policy. “Our democracy”. Hah! The US maintains the largest, most powerful empire in history yet liberals use terms like “liberal democracy” and “international rules-based order” to describe this arrangement. These euphemisms might fool the American people but the rest of the world understands all to well what the score is. 

If you look solely at the raw data of the US power structure around the world (where the weapons are going, where the resources are going, where the money is and isn’t going, where the diplomats are and aren’t going, etc), you can’t tell which political party controls the White House or Congress. And Americans don’t get to vote on any of that stuff. The behavior of the American empire and the policies that maintain it are never on the ballot. 

The present embrace of Nazi’s in Ukraine and the history of US support of right-wing, business friendly governments in the Third World belies any sort of genuflection to democracy. Meanwhile, liberals are cool with all of this a long as appearances are maintained. I think that is one of the real reasons that they loath Trump, for showing the true face of American imperialism.

Ask an anti-imperialist what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about actual US aggression in places like Yemen, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, or the embrace of jailing or assassinating critics or foreign leaders, like Julian Assange and Qasem Soleimani. Ask a Democrat what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about pretend nonsense like Russian collusion and insurrection.

Meanwhile, the liberal guardians of “our democracy” have turned into the worst sort of authoritarians, embracing propaganda and censorship in their crusade against “disinformation”. All of the shrieking about not respecting the will of the voters and questioning the results of the 2020 election is pretty rich when they spent the entirety of the Trump presidency waging the Russia-gate coup. The hypocrisy is stunning.

It appears that “our democracy” means “their democracy”. Liberals deserve to rule the country and anything else is fascism.

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Absolution

Posted on August 6, 2023 by camelotkidd

David Brooks (of all people) has an op/ed in the Times, where he takes the professional/managerial/class (PMC) to task.

“What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” [David Brooks, New York Times]. “We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation…. Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject. It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we road in on. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “”History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

Ouch!

But, wait. Wasn’t Trumpism caused by racist Americans yearning to make America great again?

Or, weren’t the Russians responsible? I thought that absolving the PMC’s for their disastrous policies over the last 40 odd years was the whole point of Russia-gate?

Meanwhile, I don’t think this gambit will go over well with Brook’s fellow PMC’s. I mean, they bought into Russia-gate hook, line and sinker and are the most belligerent cold warriors now with a sizable majority of liberals preferring direct war with Russia in Ukraine. Not to mention, many of them suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Their reaction amounted to “he’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win! Or, if he won it’s due the diabolical actions of that nefarious Putin. It couldn’t have been our actions and privileges that caused Americans to lose so much faith in the political establishment that they were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. 

They are not about to drop all of that and look in the mirror and blame themselves. They went to the best schools, work hard, and dammit, they deserve to rule. Furthermore, the PMC’s have evolved into a social class in which the most ironclad rule is that nobody must ever suffer the consequences of their own choices.

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Traditional

Posted on July 28, 2023 by camelotkidd

In an article last month, Matt Taibbi, asked “where are the rest of the “card-carrying” liberals from the seventies, eighties, and nineties — people like me, who always reflexively opposed restrictions on speech?”

The short answer is, of course, Donald Trump.

But the longer answer is that they’ve been trending that way for a while. The term liberal original meant a capitalist whose sole concern was the treatment of property. Ultimately, the Industrial Revolution created a new power center apart from monarchy, and this new movement required an intellectual edifice, provided by Smith and Ricardo, hence liberalism, whose property trumped hereditary monarchy.

The modern version/definition of liberalism came about in the 1960’s and described baby-boomers who opposed the Vietnam War, supported Civil Rights, opposed censorship and propaganda, and were generally on the left. They were hippies.

But then the hippies became yuppies during Ronnie Raygun’s administration and it’s been downhill ever since. But Donald Trump really broke their brains. Liberals went into a sort of fugue state where hatred of the Orange Menace became their overriding concern. The national security state made good use of this hatred, utilizing the Russia-gate psy-op to transform liberals into the pro-censorship cold warriors, flying the Ukrainian flag that you see now. My working theory is that once the draft ended liberals could embrace war and empire since they and their children would not being coming back in body-bags. Only the dreaded MAGA infantry were now on the firing line thanks to an economic draft.

I realized that the transformation of modern day liberals into their long lost heirs is complete after watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. What was bizarre was the Democratic representatives reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that. 

This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It could have been part of a modern version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, if Lewis Carroll were alive to write it today. 

While it’s important to despise liberal political and media institutions and the capitalist, imperialist, authoritarian ideology they promote, conservatives as represented by the Republican Party are no better, just the other side of the coin. 

That’s my senator–Mittens–being Mittens.

During a Senate hearing Wednesday, Mitt Romney argued against an amendment proposed by Rand Paul to make it illegal for government to use social media and big tech companies to censor the views of Americans.

In theory both mainstream political parties compete to make your life better than the other does so you’ll vote for them; in practice both parties openly oppress and impoverish you while focusing on murdering foreigners, and compete for your vote based on your feelings about artificial wedge issues. They’ve rigged the political currency they’d normally use to obtain votes in a way that guarantees the continuation of the status quo in every meaningful way, so the gears of the empire keep turning uninterrupted while the riff-raff argue about volatile cultural issues which don’t affect power, like “wokeness” and prayer in schools.

Not only are liberals, represented by the Democratic Party, turning into authoritarians but their whole “woke” agenda seems to really be alienating average Americans. The party has long since turned its back on its old blue-collar constituency, engaging instead with an urban ‘creative class’ in an exalted, world-shaping ‘social engineering’ project of moral redress. Indeed, the Democratic wokish ideology of historical redress is separating the U.S. into two nations living in one land. Divided not so much by ‘Red or Blue’, or class, but defined by irreconcilable ways of being and ways of living

The old categories: Left, Right, Democrat or GOP are being dissolved by a Cultural War that respects no categories, crossing the boundaries of class and party affiliation. Conservatives serve capital openly while liberals, who have reverted to the traditional definition of liberalism, engage in identity politics and “woke” ideology because it doesn’t threaten the sanctity of capital which is the only true value their main constituents–Wall Street–cares about.

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Cheap

Posted on July 21, 2023 by camelotkidd

We are going to have to learn to care for one another again. Neoliberalism has turned us into selfish assholes. We have followed Thatcher’s maxim that there is no society only individuals, and in the process have lost our humanity.

Becoming cheap assholes is the other trick neoliberalism has played on us. We’re encouraged to seek out the lowest price even if it means outsourcing our jobs and transforming once American vibrant cities and towns into wastelands. Even as it means increasingly shoddy made products that fill our landfills to overflowing. Even if it means relying on child-labor in Third-World hellholes to supply us with the latest fashions that we casually toss away. Even if it means putting once vibrant small stores out of business so we can seek out the lowest, lowest price at Walmart.

Of course we aren’t all encouraged to be cheap. The marketing wizards invented a new product niche aimed at the professional/managerial/class (PMC’s). In a bit of evil-genius marketing they turned consumer ecological responsibility into this trendy elite thing priced way out of range for normal people. For example there’s the whole eco chic thing and Whole Foods and Tesla and the rest of this whole new luxury market designed to let rich people feel good about themselves while the world burns and create the narrative that buying stuff will fix our problems.

And if all of this sounds suspiciously like class-warfare designed to turn Americans against one another give yourself a cookie.

Like I repeat endlessly–evil is easy.

But, wouldn’t we hear or read about all of this on the news? The corporate media likes to portray themselves as an alert watchdog but the media is owned by billionaires, and serves as little more than the public relations arm of concentrated wealth and as cheerleader for a neoliberalism that normalizes the criminal profiteering of the monopolistic corporations that control America. The billionaire-owned media corporations are embedded in the same model of corporate profit as these corporations. Indeed, the media’s own corporate profits depend on the advertising and sponsorship of the same corporations they are supposedly holding accountable. It’s no wonder trust in the corporate media is at an all time low.

Going further, because I always do, we live in a world not, as we are told, of democratic accountability and transparency. Beyond formal, surface appearances, our system of political, economic and social control is designed to be unaccountable. We live in a world of illusion, of elites that look out for their own, that develop ever more sophisticated technological tools to manipulate and deceive us, and that have progressively rigged the system to accrue to themselves ever more wealth and power. They manufacture consent for our rugged-individualism and throwaway culture the same way they manufacture consent for endless warfare and empire.

I’m convinced that this is a huge factor in the mental health crises our society is experiencing today. We’re trapped in this system where we’re constantly being psychologically bombarded with an endless barrage of messaging trying to make us think and feel and desire and loathe specific things for no other reason than because it’s profitable.

Ultimately, being cheap has political ramifications. Neoliberalism encourages competition and an obsessive focus on maximizing “human capital”, while promoting frugality with care and concern for one another, in the process destroying any idea of republican self-government.

That’s why creating community is a revolutionary act.

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Fight for your right to loot

Posted on July 14, 2023 by camelotkidd

I welcome the collapse of the US empire due to the sociopathy of our feral elite.

The coming collapse could be brought about by the US and NATO’s defeat in their proxy war in Ukraine, hence all of the hysterical propaganda depicting the glorious success of their endeavor. The prevailing theory is that a Ukrainian proxy defeat would be the end of America’s world dominance militarily, and effectively the end of NATO, but also the end financially for the US, as the non-West abandons the dollar. In that scenario, the BRICs dump their trillions in US bond holdings, sending all that putative “money” back to America, stoking a king-hell inflation, effectively bankrupting us.

About the proxy war thing–it’s obvious that the Ukrainian military could only operate with US military intelligence, weapons and training. That’s why so much of our media is dedicated to normalizing the idea that Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin is uniquely evil and why they spend so much time manufacturing consent for the American empire. Despite Russia’s overwhelming upper hand in Ukraine, Western officials and media continue to flout reality and weave stories of Russian collapse. To truly understand the proxy war it’s key to realize the larger geostrategic goal. Ukraine was supposed to be a launching pad for spreading US military bases across Central Asia and (eventually) encircling, isolating and containing China. See Halford MacKinder’s The Geographical Pivot of History, for the long version.

Anyway, at this point the level of disinformation in the media is so far beyond the pale it is impossible for a normal person to wrap their head around it.

Just like the average American cannot wrap his or her head around the fact that the US empire does not work for them but only for our feral elite. Going further, the empire, in its current form is already bankrupting us. Just look around. Since 2009 US corporations have spent more than $7 trillion on stock buybacks which is an activity that boosts payouts to rich shareholders but fails to produce anything of material value. Had that capital been invested in critical infrastructure, every city in America would be linked to a gigantic network of high-speed rail, with parks, bike and pedestrian trails, etc. But that hasn’t happened, because the western model incentivizes the extraction of capital for personal enrichment rather than the development of projects that serve the common good.

Meanwhile, it’s just taken as a given that it’s fine for US oligarchs and empire managers to run our country. US policies are all set by the bankers and oligarchs who control the politicians, the media, and the sprawling deep state. Then there’s the brazen psy-ops and mass media propaganda, even as more and more internet censorship gets put in place. 

But, but, how will we go forward without our glorious American empire?

We can learn from the sanctions these very same elites have inflicted on the rest of the world that refuses their commands. Countries like Cuba or Venezuela or Iran or Russia or Syria or, you get the picture. All of these countries have had to create a domestic economy free from western banking interests. The US basically makes other countries an offer they can’t refuse. Not to bomb other countries, not to overthrow their governments, not to have a color revolution. They’ll say what we can offer: your life. We’ll agree not to kill you, not to overthrow you, not to bomb you, not to do to you what we did recently to Afghanistan, to Libya, to Iraq, to Syria.

Alongside the military there’s the financial warfare, where the US has perfected the art financial conquest. To conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing. Finance is just the gentle hand of neocolonialism.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy, while all of the right-wing juntas that have imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, are called democracies.

And that brings us too the crux of our problem. We are controlled by these same banking interests, who have been looting our country for decades. They ran out of foreigners to pilfer and have brought to the racket to a state and city near you. Heterodox economist Michael Hudson is very clear on this point. “So the problem is that both US political parties are committed to de-industrialization for the reasons that the head of the Federal reserve has explained over the last few months: if you have more industrialization, you’ll have more employment, and if you have more employment, you’ll raise wages. And our philosophy, Democrats and Republicans alike, is to keep wages down so that corporate profits can be higher. And it’s worth it to the employing class, it’s worth it to the corporate monopolies to impose a depression on the United States, as long as that will reduce wages and strengthen the power of the 1% over the 99%. So the 1% is willing to lose sales, to lose profits, as the economy falls into what they call a recession, as long as their power over the 99% increases…America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor.”

I written about it before but at this point it’s obvious that voting is a waste of time. Both political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats are controlled by the financial industry, which makes up the bulk of the 1%. To extend this dynamic back to the US empire, it exists to further the interests of Wall Street and the elites that make up the commanding height of corporate America.

They are getting desperate.  If the objective was to weaken Russia, it didn’t work out. Rather, it exposed the USA as a “reckless global psychopath bent on wrecking every country it pretends to help — including the major countries in NATO.” Unfortunately, the American empire won’t go quietly in the night. Our feral elite will not forgo their last looting opportunity without a fight. Despite military and economic losses suffered by Ukraine and its Western backers, US elites want to double down rather than negotiate a possible peace settlement. They simply cannot entertain the possibility of a Russian victory.

Apologies to the Beastie Boys.

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To Eleven

Posted on July 7, 2023 by camelotkidd

Seeing the polling results last week showing a majority of Americans support pouring more dollars down the Ukrainian rathole was depressing but not surprising. The US has a world-class propaganda system and the managers of empire have been bludgeoning the American mass mind relentlessly.

Since the start of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine the propaganda dial has been turned up to eleven. Bringing back serial murderers like Elliot Abrams is a sure sign of desperation for our feral elite, who are freaking-the-fuck-out about their loss of credibility as the American empire circles the drain.

As Caitlin Johnstone observes–“One of the weirdest things to happen last year was the entire western political/media class deciding to start pretending Ukrainian Nazis aren’t Nazis based on literally nothing whatsoever, just because it’s convenient, and a substantial portion of the population playing along.”

All of this is part and parcel of the larger propaganda assault against Russia. Washington had decided to continue on its goal of world hegemony and had prepared public opinion to believe that Putin was a dictator and that Russia was simultaneously a gas station in the wilderness and a diabolical enemy. The role of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and the attacks and relentless shelling of Russian separatists in the Donbass by Ukrainian forces had been deleted from Western news.

Logic is not a strong point in Washington, or among the American populace.

The 4th of July is a great time to witness the patriotic propaganda, where we’re encouraged to honor our armed forces as defenders of the nation when for decades the US military has been engaged in endless expeditionary actions to serve the oligarchic owners of the American empire. They con us into one war after another. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our own immiseration.

And now our feral elite seem hell bent on wars against both Russia and China. For example, the prestigious Foreign Affairs, mouthpiece of the American political establishment, carried a major article discussing the looming possibility of a simultaneous war against both Russia and China and how we could successfully triumph in such a difficult conflict. Since the first Cold War, no American president has seriously contemplated a war with either Russia or China, but our current national leadership seems quite eager to embroil us in a global war with both of them at the same time.

With the propaganda apparatus available I’m sure that the American people could be whipped into a war fever to support such madness. But I do wonder if there will come a point where the propaganda enters a phase of diminishing returns? As time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the effectiveness of such propaganda campaigns will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet Union.

The increased propaganda and censorship going on right now is a reflection of the loss of credibility, trust and the mandate of our feral elite, who are flailing about madly to ward off the inevitable. There is little doubt in my mind that the main motivation is to control Americans now groaning under the strain of neoliberal misrule. If the world didn’t hang in the balance it would be dark comedy.

Update: In a rare bit of good news, on Tuesday, the Fourth of July, a federal judge in Louisiana, struck a blow against the “Censorship Industrial Complex”, ruling that federal officials (with limited exception) can no longer communicate or collude with big tech companies to censor “protected speech.” This is a huge win for free speech – and comes on the heels of Twitter Files revelations of government influence and control over various hot button narratives. Meanwhile, journalists Matt Taibbi, Jacob Seigel and Michael Shellenberger deserve a well deserved victory lap.

Federal Judge Terry Doughty cited “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign. He wrote that the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. Here’s how he described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger:  “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

The censorship efforts of the government are, unfortunately, not new.  However, what is new is the support of the media and the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the recent opinion finding that the Biden Administration had violated the First Amendment in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” However, the New York Times immediately warned that the outbreak of free speech could “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”

Yet, no one expressed more simply and chillingly than CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly who stated that it “makes sense” for tech companies to go along with government censorship demands.

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