America is run by people who are both evil and stupid, and they are acting on the associated impulses, attempting to reestablish a unipolar world dominated by the United States, and doing so in a fashion that is maniacal and bound to end in catastrophic failure of some sort.
Then there’s our neoliberal-economic operating system, which admonishes that there is no society only individuals, resulting in a selfish and cruel environment dominated by assholes.
It’s no wonder I’m crazy and I bet so are you.
Perhaps we have reached the end state of neoliberalism that was always destined to be fascism. I’ve always thought that fascism is when liberalism reaches crisis, where oligarch control of the society can no longer be hidden under the comfortable veneer of a representative democracy, and more extreme measures must come out into the open to enforce their control.
Does this sound familiar?
The crucial development is that the US imperial dominance is in rapid decline and our ruling elites are panicking at their obvious loss of influence and legitimacy. How will they hold on to power?
They certainly aren’t going to regain legitimacy by giving voters what they want and with sensible, realistic economic and foreign policies so they have to be authoritarian. All of this has made the possibility of using violence and brute force more likely in relation to many situations. Most recently, of course, militarized police have swarmed campuses to help quell largely peaceful student protests over the war on Gaza.
Back to that crazy thing. Looking around it’s become apparent that we are dealing with an epidemic of trauma in this country on both a personal and collective level. People are traumatized by Covid, the crazy inflation, our dysfunctional healthcare system, the failure of educational and religious institutions, the endless war and genocide our government is supporting. The fucking 2024 presidential election, where both choices are odious. Add to that increased isolation from other people which predates Covid, as we’re increasingly trapped in our own tribal siloes. Everything is falling apart and one has to be braindead not to recognize it. We are on our own, indeed, and much worse off for it. We feel helpless and powerless, adrift in a mean world.
Update: In this milieu, creating community is a revolutionary act. If we’re honest, it will be up to us regular folks. Lets get to it.
I’m going to miss my senator Mittens. Not because he’s a good legislator, in fact he’s terrible, but because he blurts out things our feral elite keep on the down-low. When Mittens ran for president in 2012 against Obama he told a heckler who was bitching about the domination of the US political process by corporations–“Corporations are people too, my friend”. And in a private fundraiser he complained that “47% of Americans are takers”.
Mittens is retiring because his feeling were hurt by MAGA voters, but his story is illustrative. Mittens is portrayed as a “sensible centerist” Republican but the only reason that he’s portrayed as “slightly more moderate” is that he came out against Trump. What’s ironic is that private equity vampires like Mittens helped create the economic devastation that made a Trump presidency possible. Donald Trump’s value to the American people in 2016 was in shining a light on the political and economic power in the US that has impoverished the majority of us.
Mittens is nothing if not shameless. He epitomizes the financialization of the American economy, where an ethic of “productivity” was replaced by one of “looting.” Romney’s career at Bain Capital is an example of this phenomenon. His father got rich building cars at American Motors. Mitt made his millions buying existing companies—such as a now-defunct Toys R Us,—loading them down with debt, then collecting profits and management fees even as workers were turfed out onto the street.
Does Romney sound like a “maker” or “taker”?
I’ve long wondered at the motivations of our leaders. Is it money, ideology or blackmail that keeps the evil flowing? Mittens is representative of a certain kind of striver that seems to make up a sizable portion of our putative elite. Many of us strive because it gives us a certain kind of pleasure. Whether we strive for good or bad unfortunately seems to be highly choreographed. In earlier days, the most intelligent strivers among the 0.1% were to be found in the Ivy League schools ergo the CIA and FBI recruited from them almost exclusively. The theory was that if you caught them young and indoctrinated them well then they will take their places in the deep state.
Mittens and the so-called “sensible centerists” that manage the American empire have never met a war of foreign intervention that they haven’t cheered on. These are the same class who promoted the Iraq WMD and Russia-gate frauds, which were both politically motivated, state-sponsored, psy-ops. Their implied goals were to deceive the American public into supporting the foreign policy goals of the deep state. And they have all been rewarded and advanced by lying endlessly about terrorists, spies and fake threats to the republic. It’s illuminating that no one from the FBI or CIA has been arrested or charged for the Russia-gate fraud.
What’s striking is the shrill doubling down of support for Israel by the US political and media classes. In his latest reveal, Mittens, said that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle. “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
The official justification for targeting TikTok is the thus far unfounded allegation that it’sa Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.
And it’s not just Mittens, our political system has been sabotaged. For years the corporate media has been running a series of clueless articles wondering why Trump won the 2016 election, and why Americans continue to support him. Trump won because Republicans like Mittens are presented as respected job creators and a moral counterpoints to the president, while in reality they’re both criminals who’ve looted the republic under the watchful eye of the corporate media. Trump also won because of the behavior of the so-called opposition party.
The ultimate takeaway is that Mittens can pose as a “sensible centerist” because the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party also support the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Despite conventional, bi-partisan opinion America’s fulsome support for Israel is a fatal weakness.
The rest of the world can witness how a small country in the Middle East and a Zionist diaspora controls US foreign and economic policies. At the UN, the United States has used its veto to prevent ceasefires, aid and even a savage genocide, despite the rest of the world being in virtual consensus against it. Washington’s unconditional support for Zionism is not negotiable, albeit unpopular and controversial. Two-thirds of Americans want the government to force Israel to agree to a ceasefire, but this sentiment is being ignored.
Israel is presently attacking Rafah, the latest chapter of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. The Rafah invasion comes shortly after Congress approved the largest military aid package to Israel in US history. In an attempt to massacre Palestinians in the dark and silence those who speak up against genocide, Israel has expelled Al Jazeera, while the United States has potentially banned TikTok, clamped down on antigenocide protests on its campuses, and passed a new McCarthyite bill aiming at criminalizing criticism of Israel in the United States under the guise of fighting antisemitism.
Confronted by college protests against Israeli genocide, our ruling elites respond by angrily lashing out. Indeed, these actions reflect desperation and a touch of panic. What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?
And in response to a potential International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu, a bunch of senators, led by Cotton, claim that a threat to Israel’s sovereignty is a threat to American sovereignty. That is effectively a claim that Israel is a part of the United States, or that the United States is a part of Israel.
I mean, what the fuck?
At this point it’s imperative to discuss the neoconservatives who effectively operate as a 5th column influencing US foreign policies. Neoconservatism is better described in general as a complex interlocking professional and family network deployed to recruit the sympathies of both Zionists and non-Zionists in harnessing the wealth and power of the United States in the service of Israel. Since 9/11 the US has waged wars across the Middle East that by any honest appraisal seem to be in service of Israel. They certainly haven’t made America safer or respected, not to mention the costs of lives and treasure. I’m certainly not in favor of starting more wars but our elite inform us that China is actually our arch enemy and we need to confront them. And, just to play devils advocate, imagine that instead of using those trillions of dollars to set the Middle East ablaze we used it to rebuild our manufacturing infrastructure so that it would actually be possible to wage a war with China instead of realizing that much of our critical high-tech electronic components that make up modern weapons is made in China? Whoops. Or, hear me out as I know this is crazy talk, imagine that if instead of endless war, we had used those trillions of dollars to do what the Chinese have done with their Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the developing world, as a way to win friends, security and trade?
Even if most Americans remain blissfully unaware of such realities, other countries have taken notice. Perversely, America’s ironclad support for Israel has united all our enemies. As one Chinese scholar, describes the new security arrangement between Russia, China and Iran: “This time, the barbarians are facing a 5,000-year continuing written civilization, armed with Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Mao thought, Xi’s dual circulation strategy, Belt and Road, BRICS, renminbi digitalization, Russia and China unlimited, the world’s most powerful manufacturing industry, tech supremacy, economic powerhouse, and the backing of the Global South.”
China, Iran and Russia are using the Zionist stranglehold over Washington to begin rapidly improving their own reputations at the expense of the US’ diplomatic standing. Global approval ratings for China and Russia are rising throughout the world, thanks in part to their hardline stance against Israel, willingness to legitimize Hamas, and their leadership in advocating for Palestinian state.
Then there’s the fact that Russia and China have substantially increased their military cooperation with Tehran since tensions with Israel have increased suggests that applying special pressure to the Zionist regime is not inconsequential blowback, but part of a grand strategy to strike at the true heart of the American empire.
There is evidence that some American policy planners understand this. Four months before the TikTok ban, the US Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Aaron Keyak expressed fear that the Chinese could use the app to promote anti-Israel sentiment and discredit American institutions by pointing to the role Jews play within them.
Keyak’s fears are not groundless. In recent years, Chinese celebrities, academics, journalists and state officials have started openly discussing Jewish power as the hidden language needed to understand why America and its liberal vassal states behave as they do. One lengthy article in the Chinese language version of news outlet Global Times titled “Do Jews Control The United States?
It’s not like this is a mystery. Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
The last few weeks of Washington’s activity have been particularly unhinged: expanding FISA surveillance, $95 billion in weapons for Israel and Ukraine, violently suppressing peaceful protests against Israel, a sudden ban on a social media app used by 150 million Americans, and so on.
This does not look like a well thought out plan. Perhaps Xi and Putin have finally discovered Washington’s Achilles Heel: not the threat of nuclear war, not de-dollarization, but isolating Zionism, and by extension Israel. Furthermore, the US Congress and the Israel Lobby campaign against critics of Israel is bringing into stark relief the question of who controls the US regime.
It’s become blindingly obvious that Israel’s parasitical relationship with its host is hastening the end of the American empire, and the “seize ever-increasing power over the US and force America to do Israel’s dirty work,” has passed its expiration date, because the US empire is no longer what it once was—in large part due to the damage Israel has inflicted on it.
The student protest against Israeli genocide in Gaza have forced our feral elite to take their mask off, and what we are witnessing is monstrous. The fulsome US support of the genocide Gaza is simply indefensible. And the students sense this and are incensed by it.
The students at American universities are protesting an Israeli genocide that reaches new heights of savagery on a daily basis, but the establishment, including President Joe Biden, is painting peaceful protests on college campuses against the genocide as hotbeds of hatred and antisemitism. There’s a method to the charge of antisemitism as we’re supposed to focus on the college protesters rather than our vital ally–Israel–that murders 15,000 children, destroys hospitals, and hides bodies in mass graves. The IOF uses Lavender, an AI target-selection algorithm to drive their killing machine, for God’s sake!
And just when you think Israeli behavior has reached a new low there’s another outrage. Israel has escalated from sniping Palestinians running to get food and supplies from aid deliveries to leaving food-can-like explosives about to explode when starving children open them.
The student protesters are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students, in fact many of those protesting are Jewish, but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. Especially Congress, who’ve reverted to a McCarthy level of Kafkaesque hostility. It’s high time to inquire if our congress-critters represent America or Israel?
Indeed, two-thirds of Americans want the government to force Israel to agree to a ceasefire, but this sentiment is being ignored. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they are putting themselves at incredible risk by protesting. It’s important to understand how powerful their voices and protests are as a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds us.
Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel. Instead they’ve called in the police. Columbia calling on the police effectively paved the way for other universities to do so, most notably University of Texas and Emory. The result is videos of “security” forces brutally throwing students, media workers and even professors to the ground.
Our feral elite and their congressional marionettes have their priorities. “The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that conflates criticism of the modern state of Israel with antisemitism and will mandate that definition be used by the Department of Education when enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws. The bill can and will be used to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters at college campuses across the country, who have been falsely labeled ‘antisemitic’ despite Jewish students participating in the protests.
Remember kids, this is happening within a political climate in which the Israeli government publicly announces that “antisemitism” includes charging Israeli war criminals for extensively documented war crimes.
Once again, Orwell would stand gobsmacked at the sheer audacity of the propaganda.
And now it’s not just antisemitism. The Biden Administration is now openly stating that the student protesters are simply pawns of Russia, China and Iran. It’s the classic trope of “outside agitators”. These insane justifications are happening even as Israel’s prime minister openly calls for the the US government to crush the protests by any means necessary.
The short-sightedness of the US and Israeli governments is astonishing. Their repression is ensuring that a big portion of an entire generation of Americans – including its next elite – will view Israel as a genocidal, apartheid state.
For the rest of the world, America’s moral authority, what little remained, is toast. They understand that the genocide is the desired goal of the US. No other explanation is remotely plausible. There’s no way to believe that Joe Biden is trying to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu, while simultaneously arming and funding Netanyahu and using U.S. forces to fight alongside him. Biden is making no effort to restrain Netanyahu. Biden fully supports the genocide. Biden is not being outplayed by Netanyahu. He is actively abetting Netanyahu and shares with him the objective of full Israeli occupation of Gaza after the Palestinian people are killed or expelled into Sinai.
The mask has come off and we are seeing the iron fist.
Update: Police are in the process of violently arresting the student protesters at university campuses across the country following multiplestatements from President Biden attacking the students as “antisemitic” for opposing the Israeli genocide he and the US government have been enthusiastically facilitating in Gaza.
Update 2: Here’s what Glen Greenwald has to say: “If this were in Russia or Iran — a police force of this size deployed against students protesting the state’s war policies — it’d be universally denounced as evil tyranny.”
Current events are what drives this blog but originally I began writing about ideologies–specifically neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
The whole messianic belief in markets as a way to organize society with its insistence that there was “no alternative” made me furious. Of course I was right to view neoliberalism with suspicion and hostility. Treating markets as an end all subjects Americans to the orthodoxies of a very unforgiving form of financial capitalism. After 40 odd years it’s apparent that neoliberalism has impoverished many scores of millions and devastated our middle class.
Likewise, the messianic belief in the American empire whose mission is to spread democracy and free markets by force always seemed fated for disaster, especially as it has meant endless wars. In a clever bit of marketing the US and NATO dressed it up as what is called “R2P,” “the responsibility to protect.” We, the enlightened nations of the world, have a duty to protect others from such catastrophes as genocide, starvation, ethnic-cleansing and other such crimes against humanity. R2P licenses “humanitarian interventions.” This is now accepted as a guiding principle among the US and Western nations even as the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza makes a lie of all of it.
The funny thing about ideologies is that they don’t survive contact with reality. Some ideologies simply take longer than others. The only thing holding our precious ideologies together at this point is propaganda. A propaganda that becomes more threadbare by the day. I mean who believes in the stories our rulers tell us anymore?
Those regimes that rely on propaganda to present themselves to their people and to the world ultimately make themselves in the image of their propaganda. This is also true of America in 2024, where we’ve assumed the character of the propaganda that surrounds us.
Despite the propaganda, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, ironically, have led to disaster for the American empire. It’s ironic because the neocons want to wage war on the whole world but the neoliberals have looted the American economy and made it impossible. The US strategy can be summed up as a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is by prioritizing corporate needs, zero accountability, and hope that for-profit corruption can maintain the American corporate empire.
But I digress. I mean to discuss the Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel that provides further proof of the ongoing disaster. The Iranian missile attack on Israel was a surgical hit, meant to send a message, not killing people on purpose. And, no, Israel, the US and NATO did not achieve a 99% shoot down rate no matter what the corporate media tells you. My favorite part of the attack was Iran hitting the officers’ swimming pool at Nevatim Air Base. What’s clear is that the attack demonstrated that even well-guarded air defenses, like those of Israel and similar systems used by the US in the Persian Gulf, are, in fact, vulnerable.
Former intelligence officer and arms control expert Scott Ritter says that–“Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran.”
Ritter goes on to claim that Iran’s demonstrated capabilities “…has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. Not only have the enormous and ever-expanding missile arsenals of Iran and Hezbollah checkmated the Zionists’ regional nuclear monopoly, but by implication the at-least-equally-advanced missiles of Russia and China should have no problem defeating US air defenses. The US empire, with its flotilla of sitting ducks and its 800 now hyper-vulnerable bases occupying dozens of countries, is about as impregnable as the Maginot Line.”
What abundantly clear is that the US is at the end of the line with it’s all-war-all-the-time means of organizing the American empire, especially when the organizing ideologies underpinning its power are in conflict. The neocons dream of conquering the world by force, while the neoliberals want to profit next quarter. Something has to give.
But the attack also points to a larger problem. I cannot remember when the United States has not been at war somewhere on planet Earth. With more than 700 known military outposts circling the globe, it is difficult to see how this finally ends in anything other than catastrophe.
What infuriates me is that the notion of what it means to be a patriotic American has been diabolically twisted by the sociopathic neocons. In 1821, John Quincy Adams pointed to this in his call for America to avoid foreign policy adventurism: “[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own… [If America engages in militarism] the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world.She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”
What did you expect? The neocons that control both parties are extremist warmongers who are dedicated to keeping the United States empire in a position of unilateral hegemony even at the risk of nuclear war.
The Iranian drone, cruise missile and ballistic missile attack on Israel represents a new era in the Middle East.
I’m traveling and don’t have the time or bandwidth to put together a post detailing the momentous significance of Iran’s response.
Update: Now it appears that Israel has retaliated.
“US broadcaster ABC News reported Israel had launched a missile attack against a site in Iran, citing a senior US official, but there was no word from Israel and Iran on the alleged attack.”
Why are Americans so unhappy despite elite gaslighting that it’s the best economy ever?
I think the main reason is that the rents are too damn high.
And by rents I don’t simply mean the costs of a mortgage or fees for an apartment although that’s a huge problem. We have a high-cost economy, with financialization, corporate debt, personal debt, and privatized medical care, privatized education, where life is now a struggle because it’s no longer affordable for most Americans.
All of these developments affect the basic situation, in which reliable careers are scarce, college requires the burden of debt, health coverage is more expensive and less reliable, and housing is unaffordable. The “American Dream” of a good job, decent health care, homeownership, college education without crippling debt, and a better life for the next generation was once within reach of most Americans. Now, it’s far harder to attain.
Starting a small business is hugely problematic because rents, insurance, fees, utilities and regulatory compliance are all unaffordable, And so downtowns and once vibrant retail streets are half-empty or abandoned. All the little cafes, services, second-hand stores are all gone because these are inherently low-margin businesses that can’t afford rent in the thousands per month.
John Michael Greer calls our situation “lenocracy”, or a a government of pimps. “We live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place. Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally. Thus, lenocracy.”
And heterodox economist Michael Hudson characterizes the “rents” as tollbooths. Where decades of financialized neoliberalism advocating the privatization of infrastructure such as transportation, healthcare and education, have placed tollbooths that hinder economic activity, and create a high-cost economy that makes it increasingly difficult to operate a small business, gain an education or raise a family.
Because of the curtailment of competition, our present high-cost economy is advantageous to the large, powerful, politically connected corporations that I’m sure you’re familiar with. If you’ve paid any attention at all you have noticed that there are one or two dominant corporations that sit astride every sector of the economy. Wal-mart, Dollar General, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Moreover, when you have a monopolies in certain areas it has enormous economic and political ramifications. These mammoth corporations also have gained the ability to extract political influence because of their positions of economic monopoly.
All of what I’m discussing is basic political/economy, with its examination of power, but we don’t do that sort of shit anymore and it’s way more politically correct to blame white-rural-rage than the oligarchs and their professional/managerial/class (PMC) apparatchiks that have made out like bandits due to this state of affairs.
Unfortunately, this is not something you can cure by radical measures such as re-nationalization, because the technical and managerial skills now lost would take a generation to reconstitute, even if that were possible. The political and strategic consequences, if this judgement is correct, are obviously very profound. Truly, the marketization and financialization of the western economy since the 1980s looks more and more like a form of economic suicide.
Just the other day, in an unintentional bit of comedy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was in China hectoring them on manufacturing too much and outcompeting the US. “When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is called into question.”
About that outcompeting thing. Yellen and the rest of our feral elite were the ones who outsourced our manufacturing to China while advocating imperialist wars to “spread democracy”. What should have every American outraged is that the US has spent $15 trillion dollars on war since 9/11 while the Chinese invested in modern infrastructure and the betterment of their citizens.
Meanwhile, as both political parties battle to cheerlead the loudest for Israel’s Gaza genocide, nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. Neither dares admit the basic, long-term declining empire and the key problems accumulated by four decades of financial neoliberalism that make the rents too high.
What is the plan for the American empire? Do our feral elite even have one or are they just winging it?
There was the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent competitors from rising to superpower status from the end of the Cold War, but that was the neocons pet project and they fucked it up thanks to employing neoliberalism as our operating system, with its emphasis on short term greed. The problems arise when attempting to parse out the details because it’s hard to tell where neoconservatism ends and neoliberalism begins and both ideologies involve large dollops of hubris mixed with incompetence.
For instance: our feral elite were the ones who chose to make China our factory and manufacturing workshop in large part to evade labor unions and environmental standards. They were the ones who ceded capacity and know-how. Not only did they export the skill chains that go with manufacturing technology, they degraded the workforce into one that would be hard pressed to engage in relatively well paid manufacturing. The result is that the US actively de-industrialized and off-shored production to China for short-term profits. And they did these things while also profiting off making public goods, housing, health care, education, healthy food, all prohibitively expensive.
So, the plan for the American empire is looting, or am I missing something?
I don’t think I’m missing something but our elite do have a nice ideological cover story of a new environment, where there is one superpower–the United States–and where the “rule based international order” supplants the rule of raw power relations, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.
What’s funny is that too many Americans and foreigners believe this nonsense, but the times, as they say, are changing.
The US was supposed to prevent genocide as the “good guys’ rather than aiding and abetting it as we’re doing in Gaza. Indeed, the greatest threat to the US’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. And that’s a problem because the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order was predicated on using the cover story of idealism.
And now, most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full US backing, committing Genocide – in real time, blatant and unrelenting.
I think a sizable portion of Americans are dimly aware that something is amiss. Recent polls show American to be desperately unhappy but poll questions make no mention of the American empire, or how the same feral elite who off-shored their jobs profit from the proxy wars and genocide that have made the US a pariah state.
Update: Heterodox economist Michael Hudson explains the economic costs of the present day American empire:
MICHAEL HUDSON: “Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.
But there’s no way that the American economy can be self-correcting without a few decades of new investment. You’d have to reinvent the educational system. You would have to take public health into the, health care into the public domain so that you could lower the cost of living so that employers wouldn’t have to pay such high wages. You’d have to provide freer education so that workers don’t graduate into the labor force with so much debt that they need high enough wages to pay the debt. And even so, can’t afford to buy houses.
America, and also, I think, Western Europe, has painted itself into a corner that is now systemic. The whole trend from 1945 to today, all of these 70 years have built up such rigidities that there’s no way that you can break them down. And the idea that somehow there’s a government policy that can fix things won’t work either, unless it’s so radical a policy that it won’t be the current economy anymore.
Nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. They just avoid talking about the debt problem, talking about what makes America high cost. And then, of course, there’s the war spending.”
Thanks to Cory Doctorow I now understand why liberals lost their fucking minds when Trump was elected.
Doctorow says that there’s a name for this phenomenon: “schismogenesis.” Or when one group of people define themselves in opposition to another: That’s when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Doctorow says– “This notion grabbed me, because it explained so much about the changes in attitudes I’d seen among my (erstwhile?) friends and allies in the “progressive” world during the Trump years and through the covid pandemic. Specifically, it explained how people who considered themselves politically liberal or even leftist were transformed into defenders of voting machine companies and the pharmaceutical industry, and champions of the FBI.”
We witnessed this phenomenon in real time when Trump was elected and liberals embraced any and all unsavory characters who opposed him–like George W. Bush, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.
We observed it during the Covid pandemic with the treatment people that questioned the official story about vaccines.
Doctorow describes how this phenomenon influenced his Covid understanding. “But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I’d long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shit-heads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.”
I marvel at the effectiveness of US propaganda, and the ways in which they innovate. Schismogenesis literally means the creation of division. Turning liberals into fervent cold warriors and cheerleaders for the FBI, CIA and Big-Pharma all because of their burning hatred for Donald Trump was genius.
Too many liberals have embraced regime-change for Russia due to their burning hatred for Vladimir Putin.
Are you one of them?
Much of the hatred derives from Putin’s association with Donald Trump thanks to the Russia-gate psy-op, but there is also the enmity due to Russia’s perceived anti-gay stance. However, despite what liberals think, Russians are very tolerant of gays. It is no secret that a large swathe of cultural life in Russia is dominated by gays. Not just ballet, but in other performing and visual arts as well.
The problem for Russians was when gay-rights were weaponized as an essential aspect of the neoconservative/liberal interventionists color-revolution playbook. The key architect of theses color revolutions was Gene Sharp, Sharp, who wrote The Politics of Nonviolent Action, established the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in 1983, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, AEI and associate groups, like the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), tirelessly trained regime-change activists worldwide.
But, not in US client states like Chile, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Colombia and Israel. In two decades of AEI activity, there is hardly any mention of these countries. Rather, AEI and its offshoots emphasize training activists in countries like the Soviet Union, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and post-Soviet Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. These were countries thwarting the United States’ geo-strategic priorities, or otherwise resisting neoliberal economic “reforms”–deregulation, privatization, austerity-forcing social spending cuts, etc.
After these US-backed, Sharp directed “hybrid wars”, the new leadership demonstrated greater commitment to the “Washington Consensus” and acquiescence to Western demands for neoliberal economic “restructuring” , even as “democracy”, “human rights” and LGBQT rights were the ostensible pretext. Instead, these “color revolutions,” thanks to the telltale use of official protest colors, per Sharp’s framework–were regime-change operations undertaken by the United States to punish apostates and install more compliant vassals.
The relentlessly aggressive Neocons gained control over the American foreign policy establishment more than thirty years ago, and despite their record of repeated disasters, they have successfully retained that unbroken control since then. Indeed, the very term “Neocon” includes nearly the entire Washington, DC policy establishment, including liberals, it now seems.
I would argue that a central asset of the Neocons has been their dominant control over the corporate media. Our world is ruled by the media, which functions as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of those individuals who deploy powerful physical weapons or possess vast financial resources.
An essential component of the neoconservative”color revolution” toolkit has been social media. Indeed, the major reason for the attacks on TikTok is that it provides an alternative to the Silicon Valley, US intelligence, deep state propaganda nexus. TikTok is a problem precisely because it prevents them from effectively spreading American empire propaganda. Until very recently, social media was seen as the best kind of soft power–like a neoconservative “Garden of Eden”–totally controlled by the U.S. power clique.
It’s useful to read how the authors of the House bill to ban TikTok describe its pernicious effects–“Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.”
Talk about projection. How can you control the minds of Americans when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? With TikTok, what’s at stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world. Essentially, TikTok and China are thus demonstrating that the days of US exclusivity and control over the social media propaganda are long gone, just as Russia had already shown that the time for US/NATO encroachment on its territory is over.
It is one thing to have to finally, belatedly accepted that the deceptive “unipolar”moment of the 1990s has been over for a long time. It is much worse to gratuitously enter the new multipolar order with a stunning, avoidable self-demolition.
In entirely unforeseen ways, the increasingly evident failure of the neocons ill-conceived plan to divide and conquer vast Russia has brought into stark relief the internal contradictions, ideological incoherence, and vast endemic corruption of American foreign policy. What’s ironic is that despite their commitment to “democracy” in regime-change countries, the neocons have a serious problems with democracy itself. The neocons hold democracy in contempt and understand there must be “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled. Like Plato’s cave, democracy is what they say it is.
What’s even more ironic is that the accelerating unraveling of the American empire has been brought about by the aggressive and intrusive neocon foreign policies. The growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, represent the multipolarity that’s anathema to the neocons and proof of the bankruptcy of their blood-drenched ideology.
If you, dear liberal, support the US a proxy war against Russia in a desperate bid to regime-change Putin you are a monster, just like the rest of the chicken-hawk neocons who are desperate to prolong the bloodshed. At this point there’s no excuse to not comprehend that the whole war was never about democracy in Ukraine but about the selfish aims of some lunatic clique in Washington DC.
camelotkidd 