Reverse Touch

Posted on December 22, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

So, there’s that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Weaponized

Posted on December 16, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hey Genocide-Joe you gotta go

Posted on December 9, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, fuck that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Dismal Science

Posted on December 1, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

It’s that simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t hold your breath.

Update:

Henry Kissinger dead at 100.

Finally.

Lots more next week.

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Lesser Evil

Posted on November 25, 2023 by camelotkidd

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about gaslighting.

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

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

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

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

And aware of the evil.

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

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

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

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

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A Hole

Posted on November 17, 2023 by camelotkidd

As America sinks further into a moral abyss I think it appropriate to follow in the footsteps of the commentators at Naked Capitalism, who’ve changed the words of popular songs to offer up biting political satire.

Here’s my clumsy attempt, using the late John Prine classic–Sam Stone.

There’s a hole in my nations soul where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose
The MIC says it’s for defense
when they turn wedding parties into red mist

The empire’s soldiers came home
To their wives and families
After serving in the endless wars overseas
And the time that they served
Had shattered all their nerves
And left them with prosthetic arms and legs
But the Oxycontin eased the pain
Of a country that didn’t know or care to explain
About the bombing and torture and murder non-stopping
When they could just go shopping

The American empire is bereft
All its schemes have come adrift
For the whole world to gasp at
All the death and destruction that trail behind
And the smell of death that
Our feral elite don’t seem to mind

There’s a hole in my nations soul where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose
The MIC says it’s for defense
When they turn wedding parties into red mist

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The Unraveling

Posted on November 10, 2023 by camelotkidd

It’s only been 22 years since 9/11 but for the US empire it’s been a great unraveling. The American empire is now in unstoppable decline. Certainly there are things that could be done to stop it, but at this point it’s apparent that they will not be done.

Francis Fukiyama’s book should have been called the “End Of Empire”, rather than the End of History, and the whole Project for the New American Century should have been titled: the “Project for the Steep Decline of the American Empire”.

A large part of why this is so is because the people running the US empire are insane, but there’s also the elephant in the room that’s in the news lately with its focused genocidal project. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the forever wars in the Middle East post 9/11 were instigated by the neocons at the behest of Israel. The plan was, and is, to fragment the Middle East, to protect American and Israeli oil and strategic interests there, and to subdue any resistance to corporate capitalism. Indeed, the role of the US in the creation and ongoing support of Israel makes it uniquely culpable for Israel’s actions.

Professor John Mearsheimer said in his interview last Friday with Judge Napolitano (starting at 1:34): “The fact is the United States and Israel are joined at the hip. There are no two countries in recorded history that have a closer history that have a closer relationship than the United States and Israel. And when this crisis broke out on October 7, President Biden made it very clear we would give Israel whatever aid it needed, and that meant both weapons and money, that we would support Israel to the hilt. And we have done that.“

What’s ironic is that through their aggressive wars and belligerent foreign policies the neocons and their Israeli allies have made both Israel and the US less secure.

And now what is clearly a genocide and a massive violation of international law in Gaza by the IDF, with fulsome American support, is turning the whole world against Israel and the US. Not since Iraq has the American empire gotten caught looking this brazenly evil in front of everyone. It’s always been a murderous empire but the empire managers were able to keep it mostly on the down-low thanks to the best propaganda system in history.

By the way, if you’re among the millions of people who are coming to realize that the corporate media has been lying to you about Israel/Gaza, you should probably be aware that they’ve been lying to you about every other war as well.

They’re also lying when they report somberly that the US is powerless to stop the Israeli genocide. The Biden Administration has basically admitted that it’s all political. Even though Washington is Israel’s largest military backer, and the White House has asked Congress for an additional $14 billion in aid for Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks, administration officials and advisers say the levers the United States theoretically has over Israel, such as “conditioning military aid on making the military campaign more targeted, are nonstarters, partly because they would be so politically unpopular in any administration and partly because, aides say, Biden himself has a personal attachment to Israel.”

But now that the reality of the ongoing horror begins to permeate the halls of power in the Beltway the alarm bells are going off. Even NBC is reporting on this development. “The Biden administration knows its unconditional backing of Israeli war crimes is wrong, criminal even, and is now in full-on self-preservation mode. The Biden Administration officials are particularly concerned about a narrative taking hold that the US supports all of Israels actions and that the US supplied weapons used to kill civilians, many of them woman and children.”

Taking it further, many Americans are shocked and horrified by the support the US is providing to the Israeli genocide. I know I’m shocked and horrified. Worse, I’m ashamed of my country that despite the whole empire thing really did offer so much promise to the world as a beacon of “democracy” and “human rights”.

Elsewhere, the unraveling proceeds apace. The proxy war in Ukraine is just not going well. There is a dim awareness among Americans that in 2014 the US used CIA cutouts and self-described Ukrainian fascists to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine in order to install a government beholden to US interests. The US then spent the next eight years building a proxy army there to attack Russia with.

And now with the proxy war against Russia going south the American people are less than thrilled with their president sending hundreds of billions to the most corrupt government on the planet while homeless people roam the streets back home. Worse, Americans hate losers and the Biden Administrations fits the bill. Joe Biden and the American foreign policy establishment arrogantly dismissed the Russian military’s ability to crush the proxy force it created in Ukraine, making is appear delusional and stupid now that Russia has prevailed.

Speaking of delusional. According to the New York Times, (with regards to Gaza) aides to the president now report that he “believes history will remember him for how he defended democracy against forces of chaos, terror and dictatorship.”

Biden may believe such nonsense but I think history will remember him for his dedication to Israel’s genocide. In fact, protesters are already calling him genocide Joe.

Arnold Toynbee argued in his 12–volume  A Study of History that civilizations rise when creative elites respond to new circumstances with imagination and courage, while they decline, in turn, not in consequence of external factors but due to spiritual collapses within.

Update: An internal memo circulated by State Department staffers in the past week urged their political bosses to “publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets” and warned that the US government’s approach was undermining confidence in “the rules-based international order that we have long championed.”

The memo, marked “sensitive but unclassified’ was sure to leak, and that was likely the point. It bluntly underscores that Biden’s policy is hurting America’s standing in the world as much of global opinion has been appalled at the Gaza death toll which this week surpassed 11,000. 

The memo sates that the gap between Biden officials’ private and public messaging “contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide.”

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The Grifters

Posted on November 3, 2023 by camelotkidd

It’s almost impossible to manage an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system.

Matt Stoller’s latest article about how the US cannot manufacture ammunition goes into copious detail on why that is so, but the short answer is Wall Street.

Essentially the American empire has devolved into a vast opportunity for looting starting with the for-profit-privatized, so-called Defense Department that starts wars with no apparent competence, much less intention, to ever finish them. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending. Unlike the mid-20th century defense-industrial base, today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments. The essential idea to comprehend is that the military/industrial/complex (MIC) was never set up for national security but instead for profit. 

The consequences, as with so much of our economy that’s been financialized, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else. 

Stoller writes–“As stockpiles dwindle, there is now widespread agreement among policymakers that America must rebuild its capacity to arm itself and its allies. But according to a new scorching government report released this week, that’s mostly just talk. The Pentagon doesn’t bother tracking the guts of defense contracting, which is who owns the mighty firms that build weaponry. No matter how bad you might think the situation is with the United States and key munitions for the US, Israel and Ukraine… it is actually worse. Much worse. Stock valuations trump national defense. It isn’t even close.”

Ka-ching, as the kids say.

Don’t worry, our chief-executive has a plan. Joe Biden, the president from Visa, gave a speech where he announced the new emergency aid proposal, referring to the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy” and making a not-too-subtle pitch for the economic benefits of U.S. military aid: “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, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America…”

No mention of Wall Street enrichment but that’s to be expected. The president and congress can pontificate till the cows come home about American jobs but it’s the defense company CEOs who rake in tens of millions a year, and Wall Street shareholders, who are the real beneficiaries of the endless war for empire.

It should be axiomatic at this point but whenever you hear the phrase “American jobs” equate it with Wall Street profits. After all, Wall Street represents the most important political constituent. It’s not even close.

All of this is related. There’s been a giant grift in American life for decades and the MIC is just one part of a country dominated by banks and multi-national corporations, who manage the US empire for their exclusive benefit. Just ask yourself the question. Isn’t the entire point of having a Neo-colonial Empire to improve the well-being of the home populace at the expense of the nations being exploited and pillaged? Ha, ha, surely you jest. Who needs a healthy populace rich in well-being when you can have trillions in annual corporate profits?

As an anti-imperialist, who despairs of the lack of an anti-war movement, I laugh my ass off knowing that Wall Street greed is hastening the end of American hegemony.

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A PR problem from Hell

Posted on October 27, 2023 by camelotkidd

Israel is proving that it’s entirely possible to carry out genocide in the 21st century, while being left with a PR problem from hell. The US, as the dominant hegemon who wields Israel like an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to maintain control of the petroleum-rich Middle-East, bears significant responsibility for the genocide and also must deal with a PR problem from Hell.

Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.

Here’s where I’m supposed to do the obligatory condemnation of “terrorism” but what’s happening in Gaza is war and when you don’t posses an air-force, navy or army you tend to improvise. War is hell and the Palestinians weren’t the first ones to target civilians. Just as an example, a couple years back Palestinians in Gaza chose to protest their treatment non-violently, like all the bleeding-heart observers urged them to do. Israel responded by employing snipers to target the legs of protestors. As a result there are hundreds if not thousands of amputees crutching around Gaza while the open air prison continues as before.

Even the UN agrees with this assessment. Speaking at a UN general debate on the Middle East in New York, Secretary-General Guterres created fury when he said: “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

Most Americans remain oblivious to such realities thanks to the power of the Jewish Lobby but the rest of the world, especially in Muslim countries, knows the score and are up in arms, leading US officials to try and do damage control, following the tried and true Ike Turner play-book where the question becomes–who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Israel-Gaza: London protesters take to the streets in support of Palestine, UK

Indeed, US officials are making the rounds. According to an exclusive in Axios, Secretary of State Blinken on Monday said before a closed-door group of Jewish leaders that he “asked the Qatari prime minister less than two weeks ago to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza”, according to three people who attended the meeting. Blinken said he gave toning down Al Jazeera coverage of the war in Gaza as an example of steps the Qatari government can take to do this. Blinken said he asked the Qataris to “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement,” according to one source.

Blinken didn’t given any specific examples of what constitutes problematic coverage, according to the people who attended the meeting, but Israel has long accused the channel of being “a propaganda mouthpiece” for Hamas.

The US administration has not said so, but likely quietly agrees. Indeed, US spokespersons have recently dismissed or downplayed the soaring civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip as it’s being daily pummeled by Israeli airstrikes. 

And then on Wednesday, President Biden himself asserted, “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” He added: “I’m sure innocents have been killed. And that’s the price of waging a war. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

I’m not sure that the White House understands that it doesn’t matter if they have no confidence “in the number that the Palestinians are using.” The anger Israeli bombing is creating in the Arab world is overwhelming and they believe in the number of casualties, and going further many observers believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with the end goal being ethnic cleansing or worse extermination. After all, that’s the clear historical record since the Nakba.

Meanwhile the Biden Administration still believes they can convince “moderate” Arab leaders to press “moderate” Palestinians to form an Israeli-friendly government in Gaza that would displace Hamas and impose security and order. That the White House should be floating these cockamamie schemes shows just how severed is the US from reality. The anger across the region is real and threatens “moderate” Arab leaders, whose room for maneuver is now severely limited.

No amount of PR is enough to obscure the horror of what Israel and the US are doing as they wage siege warfare on the civilian population of Gaza and carpet bomb entire city blocks into rubble.

Update: Israeli ground forces have ramped up activities in Gaza in what anonymous US officials are reportedly telling the press is a “rolling start” to the long-anticipated ground invasion.

Israel has also concurrently crippled Gaza’s largest telecommunications service, which had been the enclave’s last remaining contact with the outside world after Israel knocked out all the others. Humanitarian organizations and mainstream press outlets now say they have lost communication with their contacts in Gaza in a level of information blackout we’re unaccustomed to seeing in modern times.

Update 2:

In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.

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Priorities

Posted on October 20, 2023 by camelotkidd

At the end stages of empires the priorities of its elite diverge radically from those of its citizens.

“The United States can certainly afford wars on two fronts,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Sky News.

Not to be outdone in the boasting department, Joe Biden announced– “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world! We can take care of Israel and Ukraine and still maintain our overall international defense.”

Once again I ponder what-the-fuck they are smoking? 

And let me get this straight–we are told endlessly that we can’t afford to feed and house homeless Americans, or provide childcare, or healthcare, or college education, but 2 wars, no problem?

Furthermore, a country that can’t manufacture enough ammunition wants to fight a two-front war?

The US may be able to afford to fight two wars, or three, but it physically cannot produce the goods to do so on a larger scale over the longer term, because of late stage financial-capitalism. The neoliberal geniuses shipped so many of its military industry supply-chains offshore, and left those at home as bloated monopolists so that the US can’t manufacture enough ammunition, weapons and armaments.

Ironically the endless wars are making the US less safe and bleeding out credibility and prestige on the world stage. All of this for an empire that largely doesn’t benefit the average American, which is why we’re subjected to non-stop propaganda.

As Caitlin Johnstone notes–“When empire simps berate you and accuse you of treasonous malfeasance for talking about the causes of terrible world events, what they are really saying is, “Stop asking questions. Stop thinking. Believe only what you are told. Become stupid. Become a drooling moron with American flags in your eyes. Stop using that tongue to question authority and affix it firmly to the imperial boot forever.”

So true. I’ve long thought that US propaganda can be boiled down to Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s South Park formulation–America-fuck-yeah!

The propaganda deluge may work on Americans but the rest of the world is not buying it. Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism, writes–“The US, in a continued demonstration of the degree of enbubblement of what passes for its leadership, seems to believe it still has the force and soft power to be able to bully talk its way out of its geopolitical messes. Yet this week we have stunning examples of how critical players in the rest to the world no longer buy what the US is selling. The gap between the American establishment’s connection to reality and facts on the ground has opened up to a yawning chasm…”

The Financial Times too is warning of the loss of American credibility. “Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned. We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” 

I don’t think our elite got the memo. In a live address last night, Biden told the country–“American leadership is what holds the world together.”

Unfortunately, this is the reality for late stage empires as they stumble from one crisis to the next, mismanaged by a clueless and corrupt elite that are in way over their heads.

Update: Apparently the adults in the Biden Administration plan to attack Syria and finally overthrow President Bashar Assad while the Russians are busy in Ukraine.

Update 2: Putin declares that the Russian Aerospace Forces will conduct patrols over the Black Sea with MiG-31 fighter jets armed with the Kinzhal hypersonic weapons, a move that puts the two US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean in the cross-hairs. “This is not a threat… Based on my instructions, the Russian Aerospace Forces will begin patrols on a permanent basis in the neutral zone of airspace over the Black Sea, and the MiG-31 aircraft will be armed with Kinzhal systems,” Putin said as cited by state news agency Interfax.

Buckle up.

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