The Primary Aim

Posted on March 1, 2024 by camelotkidd

I’m confused.

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

Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Halfway around the world

Posted on February 23, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gradually, then suddenly

Posted on February 15, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How should we then live?

Posted on February 8, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Eye of the Beholder

Posted on February 2, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: I couldn’t resist this picture.

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Doom Blogging

Posted on January 26, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

Buckle-up

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Greenspan Moment

Posted on January 19, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Poisoned Chalice

Posted on January 12, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, reality intrudes.

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

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

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

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

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

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This ain’t no fooling around

Posted on January 5, 2024 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet this behavior is hardly surprising considering American history.

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

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

Some antidote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buckle up.

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

You can’t make this shit up!

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David and Goliath

Posted on December 29, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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