Change of plans

Posted on May 19, 2023 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite have a new economic plan to re-shore American manufacturing, but it’s not in response to the bombed out cities and towns, the neglected infrastructure, or the deaths of despair that made the election of Donald Trump not just probable but inevitable. No, it’s because they want a war with China to maintain the neocon inspired imperialist strategy of seeking world dominance.

What’s humorous is that the US, after lecturing the world on the benefits of open markets and free flows of capital with a religious fervor, is enacting tariffs and planning on industrial policies. Secretary Yellen recently delivered a speech on the U.S.-China relationship, implying that China largely had prospered on the back of this Anglo, ‘free workings’ market order; yet now was pivoting toward a state-driven posture: one that “is confrontational towards the U.S. and its allies”. The U.S. wants to co-operate with China, but wholly and exclusively on its own terms, she said.

Then there’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan’s ‘New Washington Consensus’ speech in which the entire trend of policy, since the Reagan years, is scheduled to be reversed – from a return to protectionism; to central government intervention in support of industrial policy; to a bold investment in capacity-building;‘resilience’ and the re-appropriation of internal supply chains.

This is not however a true blueprint for reforming the U.S. economy – though it is billed as such. True reform would require huge structural change. In reality it’s all about re-orientating the economy for possible conventional war with China. The Biden administration has imposed unprecedented export bans on semiconductor technology to China. The U.S. wants to curb China’s economy for its own gain and to hamper the development of a multipolar global economy. The real concern is that U.S. dominance and its dollar hegemony are threatened by China’s growing economic power.

What’s ironic is that the US has spent the last 30 odd years shipping manufacturing to China as a way to screw workers and eviscerate American labor unions for the sake of short-term profits, while celebrating globalized supply chains. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the land of opportunity. Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities. In the process the plan was to financialize the Chinese economy and turn their elite into compradors. The aim of which was to transform them into becoming docile, compliant vassal colonies of the United States, using the illusions of democracy, human rights, liberty, and other Color Revolution slogans of political misdirection.

Funny how that’s not how our feral elite describe their project to colonize China.

“We saw a baby shark and thought that we could transform it into a dolphin over time, to become a friendly sort of system,” Pottinger said. “Instead, what we did was we kept feeding the shark and the shark got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now we’re dealing with a formidable, great white.”

“With a shark you put up a shark cage,” added Pottinger. “The shark doesn’t take it personally. It bumps into the cage. It respects those barriers.”

That one way to put it. Like I said before–the national security state doesn’t provide security for you and me. It’s geared to provide security for US multi-national corporations and their Wall Street owners, which is why they off-shored US manufacturing to begin with. Because it was profitable.

And, by the way, if John and Jane Q. Public embraces this narrative they’re even dumber than I thought.

But you never know.

What’s been absolutely astounding is the economic development subplot to the dust up. The US, for the last 40 odd years has devotedly followed the neoliberal playbook, privatizing, financializing, and undermining labor, while China has followed the model the US originally used to industrialize. While China has gone from strength to strength, the neoliberal transformation in the US has led to an economic catastrophe.

Even the “so-called” industrial policies called for in the manifestos mentioned earlier are bogus. If you look closely, what’s passing for industrial policy is essentially still neoliberalism, which is to say giving more subsidies to big corporations. Because neoliberalism, for all the talk about free markets and free trade, has ever been about governments favoring corporations by giving them low interest credit, privatizing assets so these companies can get even bigger, giving them subsidies, etc. Neoliberalism, in reality is a rentier economy that pretends to be pro-growth but it’s just an extractive economy rather than a productive one.

Then there’s the purpose of US neoliberal-based imperialism which is to constantly open up more and more of the world to US corporations so they could have access to markets, investment opportunities and profit opportunities and cheap labor and cheap materials. And that’s what really sticks in the craw of our feral elite. China was to be the big prize but instead, China has industrialized contra to neoliberal diktats. They have maintained a productive economy managed by the state rather than a rentier economy managed by Wall Street.

It’s no wonder they’re clamoring for war.

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Crazy

Posted on May 11, 2023 by camelotkidd

I’m surprised more Americans are not wandering around babbling and shaking their fists at the clouds because it sure is fucking hard to maintain ones sanity in our crazy world.

Stress, anxiety and depression are on the rise, and they have been for years. Studies have found that increases in cost of living have a lot to do with this deterioration in mental health, while others have linked it to widespread social media use, and the financial and social catastrophes ensuing from government Covid restrictions certainly haven’t helped. Then there’s the fact that highly unequal societies have lower life expectancy, even for high income cohorts, compared to the top wealthy in more equal countries.

What nobody seems to be doing any research at all into investigating is the possibility that all these mental health problems have something to do with the fact that we are ruled by sociopaths who are making the workplace untenable while plotting to deploy AI in a massive wave of layoffs, making millions of jobs unnecessary. That shitty Mac-job that you loathe could be a thing of the past, except now you’re out in the street joining the flotsam and jetsam.

With capitalism based on the surplus value of labor, there’s a sinister purpose behind homeless people wandering around. They are an object lesson for the rest of us–keep your nose to the grindstone and don’t make any trouble or this could be you. When you boil it all down homelessness and starvation are necessary sacrifices that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences the sociopaths who rule us want to have for themselves.

Some people wonder why mental health conditions are so bad, while I’m amazed that they’re not much worse. It’s pretty fucking unbelievable that anyone’s functioning at all in a civilization that’s ruled by exploiters and abusers who dominate using mass-scale psychological manipulation. It’s a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane. When everyone’s mind is always being pummeled with messaging that you’re deficient if you can’t thrive under our oppressive systems, that you’re flawed if you don’t look, think and act a certain way, that poverty is normal and endless war is acceptable, it’s a wonder we don’t all snap.

In a totalitarian dystopia that’s held together by mass-scale psychological abuse, it’s entirely reasonable that people are finding themselves overwhelmed with despair, alienation, depression and anxiety.

However, it’s important for your mental health to understand that it’s not you, it’s the system that we labor under that’s causing these feelings.

I never tire of Terence McKenna’s musings–“the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

Update: Your boss wants AI to replace you. The writers’ strike shows how to fight back” [Los Angeles Times]. “One of those workers put it to me bluntly on the picket line, where screenwriters were protesting, among other things, the entertainment industry’s openness to using artificial intelligence to churn out scripts: ‘F— ChatGPT.’

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Know your enemy

Posted on May 5, 2023 by camelotkidd

You can learn a lot about the American power structure by how unconventional presidential candidates are treated. Unconventional candidates for the US presidency offer a litmus test for establishment thinking, and the economics and foreign policy red lines that shall not be crossed.

The NY Times hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy is a good example. After all, the first thing they want you to know is that Kennedy is an “anti-vaccine activist”.

However, Kennedy, in his speech announcing his run, raised a whole host of questions about US domestic and foreign policies, that went way beyond questioning how big-Pharma has a lock on public health, questions that put him squarely in the sights of the establishment that’s represented by the Times. “I’m talking about issues that I think most Americans and probably most Democrats are concerned about: the systematic gutting of the middle class; the elevation of corporations — particularly polluting corporations; and, from the financial industry to the military-industrial complex, the corrupt merger of state and corporate power. Through wars, bank bailouts and lockdowns, we’ve been systematically hollowing out the American middle class, and printing money to make billionaires richer.”

Since 2016, we’ve had a front row seat to the treatment of presidential candidates who raised substantial economic and foreign policy issues during a campaign, as did Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders and his crowds, in city after city, month after month, reached critical mass in both 2016 and 2020. That size and persistence almost powered him to the nomination twice. It took the combined effort of many elites to keep him from being elected. The demise of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign marked the end of any meaningful push toward economic justice in the US. Ever since then all political oxygen has gone into ramping up culture war hostilities that won’t do a thing to create a broad-based prosperity.

Trump’s campaign caught elites by surprise as well, but because he ran as a Republican with the promise of historic tax breaks and right-wing Supreme Court justices, his campaign was allowed to proceed with the expectation of a humiliating drubbing by Hillary Clinton. Once elected, as evidenced by Russia-gate, Trump was met with a ferocious response since any deviation from empire-centric policies or actions that potentially threatening the agenda are either corrected or marginalized away from mainstream attention.

What was always good for a laugh is that many of the neocons, after setting the Middle-East on fire, became domestic “liberals” on trans rights, on gays, on abortion, as a response to Trump’s icky “populism”. During his four years in office we saw the wholesale rehabilitation of the most discredited neocon propagandists of the war on terror. After Trump called the Iraq war a “big fat mistake” in the 2016 Republican presidential debate, the neocons rebranded themselves as the ‘moderate’ voice against the danger of a Trump presidency. 

And liberals returned the favor. Joy Reid, maybe one of the most grating personalities on MSNBC, was positively glowing with praise of her new neocon allies: “One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.”

Good times.

Unfortunately, all of this is emblematic of the profoundly diseased civilization that we are living in, one where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious ways imaginable to get us to support capitalism, empire and oligarchy, where we are manipulated into espousing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes.

Hopefully the RFK campaign will breathe oxygen into issues that are rarely discussed but that’s not only why his candidacy is important. The main reason to pay attention to an unconventional candidate’s campaign is to highlight the elite attacks and manipulations that take place and to help people understand that the game is rigged. Only the most trustworthy empire managers get anywhere near the presidency, because the stewardship of a globe-spanning empire is too important to be left in the hands of the voters. (See Obama’s Hope and Change hustle for illumination of this truism). There’s a couple reasons for this. For starters, there’s the US empire and the costs borne by average Americans to maintain it, especially when the US empire disproportionately benefits the 1%.

Then, there’s those neoliberal economic policies. Since the late 1970s, American politics have been dominated by a strand of fiscal conservatism that views taxes as evil and the state as a quasi-illegitimate body that skims from the wealth ordinary citizens earn. There are many problems with this argument, but it’s especially difficult to take seriously given that its proponents always seem to exclude military spending from the equation. Considering how little scrutiny such spending receives, and considering that it continues to increase regardless of who’s in power, ordinary Americans are effectively being forced to subsidize a bloated military bureaucracy to the tune of hundreds of billions every year — all while having zero say in the matter.

The end result is a toxic mix of neoliberalism economic and neoconservative foreign policies. And in a neoliberal plutocracy, the most venal depraved moronic scum float to the top. In addition, end-stage empires often act irrationally. Both conditions explain current US predicament.

RFK Jr’s candidacy is a real, very rare bit of very good news, where a brave man has decided to sacrifice so much by trying to make things better in this country. Unfortunately he’s working within the Democratic Party structure right now. And they will have all the knives out to get him. Still, I’m betting that they’re going to have a hard time containing Kennedy’s message because so many people are sick of all the damn lies that they’ve been telling all these years.

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The end of neoliberalism?

Posted on April 21, 2023 by camelotkidd

I’ve been writing for a while about how you can’t run an empire with a neoliberal economy, but the contradictions can be overwhelming. As the late Mark Fisher wrote about neoliberalism –“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

People think our rulers have some grand conspiracy to create a dystopia where they can force us all to do as they wish, not realizing that we’re already in a soft-dystopia. What we have right now is not democracy. It is oligarchical tyranny: the rule of the few over the many.

The problem with this arrangement is that our feral elite have been running our country terribly. They have operated the economy for the 1% repeatedly, have completely monetized climate change and ecological collapse, have made the middle and working classes poor and the rich richer. As Caitlin Johnstone writes–“So many emerging technologies would be cause for celebration if our rulers weren’t so damn evil and our systems weren’t so damn oppressive. In a healthy society we’d be celebrating automation and AI giving us more and more abundance and free time; instead we’re terrified of police robots and technocratic dystopia.”

If that’s not bad enough, Jeff Bezos, who more and more resembles a Bond villain, wants to ship humans off of earth to live in floating cylinders in space.

So we have that to look forward to.

Thankfully the world is going through a momentous transition period as economists Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai detail in a must read discourse on the end of neoliberalism and the emerging multipolar world. The upshot is that the geopolitical consequences over the last year have been enormous, even transformational. This ongoing global transition is as much economic as political, with the reigning neoliberal international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank now facing a severe financial challenge from their newly established counterparts aligned with China.

Soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine War, the eminent historian Alfred McCoy argued that we were witnessing the geopolitical birth of a new world order, one built around a Russia-China alliance that would dominate the Eurasian landmass. 

One of the first things the geniuses who manage the US national-security-state did was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Since World War II one of the central pillars of global American dominance has been the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and our associated control over the international banking system. Until recently we always presented our role as neutral and administrative, but we have increasingly begun weaponizing that power, using our position to punish those states we disliked, and this is naturally forcing other countries to seek alternatives. 

For instance, Saudi Arabia—the linchpin of the petrodollar system—is openly agreeing not to sell its oil exclusively in US dollars. It signals an imminent and enormous change for anyone holding US dollars. The implications are enormous, as the WSJ states. “The Saudi move could chip away at the supremacy of the US dollar in the international financial system, which Washington has relied on for decades to print Treasury bills it uses to finance its budget deficit.”

Instead of endless warfare and chaos, Russia and China are engaging in diplomacy. All these diplomatic moves in such a short time are almost dizzying. They were opened up by China’s masterful initiative with Iran and Saudi Arabia helping bring the war in Yemen to a close. Meanwhile, Russia has brought Syria and Turkey into negotiations. All of these actions are designed to bring stability and peace to the region which the developing nations there desperately need if they are to move forward. And that development can help the economies of the world.

Of course, the neocons are not amused with this outbreak of peace and reconciliation. It’s divide and rule, bitches! In fact, you might be among those who have noticed that the people in authority in our country appear insane. But maybe that’s going to turn out to be a good thing because they’re also the gang that can’t shoot straight. It’s almost comical in that neocon blunders have now produced an entirely different correlation of forces, one so unfavorable to our own country that any armed conflict has become much less likely.

In essence, the neocons have pursued a policy of forcing China and Russia into a new multi-lateral power center, effectively challenging American hegemony. I pretty sure that that’s not what they were going for. Meanwhile, it’s causing a lot of angst across the whole sweep of national security, political and media elite as the outlines of this transformation become apparent.

Many American find the end of empire to be a cause for concern but their patriotism is misplaced. Instead of democracy and freedom, US foreign policy, in practice, has meant the neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony through aggressive projections of military and sanctions power. Permanent war is government policy with military bases, CIA and special forces all over the world but they hardly make Americans safer. The empire doesn’t work for average Americans. It works for Wall Street. Like Michael Hudson states repeatedly–every economy is planned, it just depends on who gets to plan it. Same with the American empire. Is it we the people, through our elected representatives? Or is it Wall Street?

I’m pretty sure you know the answer.

It’s a similar dynamic with the corporate media. Their real mission, that we can deduce from their behavior, is that they too work for Wall Street. They don’t work to inform you. They serve to obfuscate and propagandize, and lately to police discourse on the revelations from the Discord leaks, even acting as the actual police in pursuit of the leaker. Even worse, the corporate media’s non-stop rah, rah patriotic bullshit is a major reason why Americans are so misinformed about the American empire.

I stated at the outset that there are contradictions inherent with the US empire running neoliberalism as its economic operating system but neoliberalism and the US empire are so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The upshot is that the end of neoliberalism will mean the end of empire and vice versa.

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Freedom

Posted on April 14, 2023 by camelotkidd

Lambert at Naked Capitalism has a neoliberalism formulation: 1) Because Markets 2) Go die, that has always appealed to me for the conciseness. Let’s tease out some more of the political and social implications of such an explanation.

The dominant trend in the US is a stagnating and declining life span. There are many reasons for this but one of the most compelling is that under a neoliberal economic system, with its obsessive focus on markets, you get the life span you can afford. Covid-19, suicides, diet, opioid addiction, gun violence, auto accidents and deaths of despair, have brought about a mass die-off. Of course, we can’t forget our for-profit health care system. Not being able to afford care when you need it is associated with higher levels of death and permanent injury. More fundamentally, knowing that there are no systems in place to protect or care for you undermines any sense of hope.

The political salience is that both political parties and America’s interlocking political, security and media elites–its establishment–are down with this arrangement. In truth the US economy operates for the exclusive benefit of a small minority of oligarchy and both political parties are onboard. This has resulted in the sort of bifurcated–1st world, 3rd world country, where American lifespans are linked to income. After all, neoliberalism is social Darwinism, cranked up to eleven with its intense focus on competition, and the ultimate penalty is death.

The Democrats used to concern themselves with working-class Americans but those days are well behind us. Now their core constituents are the PMC’s (professional/managerial/class), and their method of liberalism is identity politics (Id/Pol) and DIE (diversity, inclusion, equality). Instead of a national economy focused on universal public benefits the Donkey Party has embraced one where social and national policies are dictated by private wealthy individuals, just like their comrades in the Elephant Party. Republican have long been the party that dry humps wealth and power, and they make no bones about it. They have also long favored a survival of the fittest ethos and point to market-based outcomes as a sign of ones worth. The wealthy, as my senator Mittens blurted out, are “job creators”and market players while the rest of us are “takers” who should get with the program or better yet–go die.

Because markets, go die. It should be in our Pledge of Allegiance, National Anthem and Bill of Rights. Maybe we could chant it during the 7th inning stretch?

That the Democrats are focused on diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE), rather than on policies offering real material benefits to average Americans through class-based policies, only adds to the irony. As a result the Democrats have largely abandoned the white working-class Americans who used to be the backbone of their New Deal coalition. Of course, abandoning “flyover America” as racist is hardly inclusive, and this elite snobbery contributes mightily to the political nihilism plaguing our country. Going further, one of the manifestations of Democratic abandoning workers is that the Republicans been able to portray themselves as populists.

Go figure.

There’s also an ideological dimension to because markets, go die. If markets are efficient by definition, then any state intervention must make things worse. So the market paradigm becomes a one-size-fits-all cudgel against regulation, progressive taxation, wage regulation, public investment, and the rest of the arsenal to produce a more just society. And if the math is impenetrable to common folk all the better. Milton Friedman claimed that market freedom is the essence of liberty. By contrast, the things most of us value like: job security, the ability to get good health care and education irrespective of private means, or freedom from hidden toxic substances, workplace hazards, and ruined environments, are not really freedoms.

Freedom.

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Censorship/Industrial/Complex

Posted on April 6, 2023 by camelotkidd

I’m old enough to remember when liberals believed in free speech, but the election of Donald Trump broke something in their brains. Since then the pandemic and now US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine have exposed an ominous new development that’s become obvious with the release of the Twitter Files and now Jacob Siegel’s–A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.

Both of these accounts detail the struggle against “disinformation”, the new bête noire of the liberal–professional/managerial/class (PMC). All of the animus towards disinformation in reality has been a cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government, government contractors and social media corporations.

Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns.

The FBI, CIA, DHS, and many other agencies, via hijacked social media, have worked tirelessly to confound and bamboozle the public debate about, really, everything that matters. Russia-gate appears to be the disease vector. The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification–just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War–to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.

The odd part is that roughly half of America is down with this development. Of course, that is the same half of the country that has fallen in love with surveillance, censorship, political prosecutions, and a general canceling out of flyover America. Autonomy for the individual and a search for a life, lived with meaning now is displaced by its opposite–the instinct to subjugate and dominate. Liberals seemingly want to construct a hygienic society, un-besmirched by anything so tawdry as MAGA. To be very plain, the western liberal cultural revolution has shifted from being merely adversarial to a project aimed at rejecting previous cultural norms and even history itself.

The upshot of this project is that politics has become an existential conflict, similar to the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism efforts at the heart of the war on terror, and, ominously, tens of millions of Americans are the enemy.

The RESTRICT Act, purportedly aimed at Tic Tok, is being rushed through the Senate to formalize the current government censorship apparatus. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner introduced last month the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act). The bill is being marketed as a way to protect Americans from foreign governments that use social media to spy on Americans.

The TikTok controversy has taken attention away from the fact that US social media corporations spy on Americans too. Even worse, if the RESTRICT Act becomes the RESTRICT law, any site that refuses to cooperate with future efforts by the US government to suppress certain stories and individuals on social media could find itself accused of working to advance the “strategic objectives of a foreign adversary.”

Those who doubt this should consider how people who question US foreign policy are smeared as Russian agents. 

While all of this might seem at first glance simply related to domestic affairs, I remain convinced that the impending loss of empire is at the heart of this liberal-managerial-state nervous breakdown. The US empire has placed all its chips on black in a desperate bid to maintain the 30 year run as the unipolar hegemon. The Biden Administration, and now Congress demonizes critics at home, casting them as “enemies of democracy”, while the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is depicted as a Manichean struggle between lightness and dark.

It gets better.

Censorship proponents insist that fighting disinformation is not a free speech issue but rather a national security one. This is a nice move since it allows the liberal-managerial-state to claim that the overarching framework is the legitimacy of governing institutions, allowing them to control what information the public is allowed to consume. Liberals will furiously deny this, as they shriek for more censorship of dissent and cheer for actual Sieg-heiling Nazis. 

Liberals dim view of the First Amendment was on full display during the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee meeting where Democrat members attacked witnesses Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger for their apostasy.  In her opening statement, Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee, attacked them as “so-called journalists” and said they were “a direct threat” to the safety of others by reporting the censorship story.

The Democrat decision to make this hearing a partisan political issue and attack the journalists who brought us the truth about secret US government censorship-by-proxy of Americans who hold views unacceptable to government elites is extremely unfortunate but hardly surprising. Big Tech and the U.S. Security State are the two entities the Democratic Party most passionately and aggressively serves. Indeed, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security and FBI are working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to censor dissent from the Internet because Democrats rely on this censorship regime for their own interests. 

This turn of events follows a pattern. The Democrats had an opportunity in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 to conduct a critical self appraisal but they settled instead on Russia-gate. They faced a similar choice in regards to the growing power of the internet corporations.

In A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, Jacob Sigel asks–“What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.

They chose option B.”

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Oligarchy

Posted on March 31, 2023 by camelotkidd

The US corporate media demonizes foreign oligarchs without looking closer to home.

In a nutshell the US has devolved from a republic to an oligarchy. The US oligarchy is made up of people with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. America has always had regional elites. What is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class that crucially believes that only they can be allowed to lead the country. Even worse, the ruling class refuses to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling oligarchy is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.

Can you see how Trump posed a grave danger to this arrangement, and why they are still determined to get him by hook or by crook?

Our oligarchs are largely financial in nature, maintaining their power through debt. The US economy has devolved into a system in which financial claims on current and future production in the form of debt rise exponentially, outpacing any conceivable increases in physical production. Heterodox economist Michael Hudson lays the blame of oligarchy and the concomitant deindustrialization on the financial parasites who control the government. “The banks are responsible for de-industrializing the country by squeezing labor’s living standards while raising the price of everything that labor needs to buy. That’s why American companies have all moved abroad. They can’t afford to pay American labor when American labor’s living costs have to be paid to the financial sector and the real estate sector — which is part of the financial sector — that you’ve just been describing. That’s the real problem.”

I believe that Americans becoming wealthy through productive activities is good for the economy and society but when they become fabulously rich and powerful through extractive means it spells doom for our republic. To wit, the financial billionaires in the US are powerful enough to radically skew our political process. Private creditors translate their economic gains into political power, polarizing the distribution of wealth and income by deregulating and untaxing financial gains. The result is two Americas–the entitled Oligarchy and the Other America.

A couple of recent developments exemplify this dynamic:

First, Norfolk Southern, a billion dollar rail corporation, was allowed to burn the hazardous chemical contents of the railcars that derailed in East Palestine Ohio.“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said hazardous materials expert and retired Youngstown, Ohio Fire Chief Sil Caggiano. With deregulation of the rail industry in the 1980s, which included Wall Street mergers and ​“short term profit imperatives,” trains have been getting longer and longer while the number of train workers gets smaller and smaller. Cost cutting by Norfolk Southern and other carriers has, according to Railroad Workers United, ​“eliminated many of the critical mechanical positions and locations necessary to guarantee protection against these kinds of failures.” Railroad corporations, meanwhile, continue to rake in piles of cash: In 2022, Norfolk Southern reported a record $4.8 billion in income. Compare that to the $3.4 million the company has offered to residents of East Palestine.

Then there is the way in which the government responded in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown. After wealthy venture capitalists and their media buddies panicked, sparking a digital bank run, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve stepped in and bailed out these modern day robber barons. Indeed, anytime the banking sector experiences a major financial crisis, they’re among the first to receive taxpayer-funded bailouts at Middle America’s expense.

Crucially, there’s an unspoken impetus in bailing out SVB–war. Oligarchs and their venture capitalist hirelings invest in war. Today private equity has taken on an even wider role in the armaments industry than in the 1990s, responsible for thousands of investments in aerospace and defense firms. The Pentagon has even established an office dedicated to facilitating the linkages between start-ups with military potential and venture capitalists. Industry leaders thus unsurprisingly see private equity and venture capital as the future of military innovation. While SVB’s heavy concentration of VC-backed tech firms makes it a particularly clear example of these industries’ ties with the US military-industrial complex, it is not unique. Indeed, the US financial system writ large is intertwined with US war-making in the twenty-first century–creating a dangerous situation for the world.

Decades of endless war have dramatically increased the opportunities for militarized profit-making–making military industries an ideal investment for financial capital, and a growing number of financial firms are expanding their military sector investments. This draws the interests of financial capitalists together with those of military-industrial firms and hawkish officials.

As the cool kids say–ka-ching!

The problem with war as an enrichment process for our oligarchic welfare system is that the US is choosing to fight peer competitors like Russia and China, countries that have industrial means of warfare. Here’s the New York Times bemoaning the fact. “The US isn’t ready-if a war with China were to break out. Perhaps most worrisome: The US cannot manufacture enough precision missiles, a key weapon in any fight.”

The reason, that I’ve talked about in earlier posts, is that the US makes weapons for profit rather than for defense.

Endless war and austerity for ordinary citizens coupled with bank rescues for the affluent is a toxic mix. As oligarchs grow richer the general public becomes poorer. Poverty breeds crime and dangerous protest movements. Going further, a society ruled by wealthy criminals needs lots of cops, paramilitary organizations and death squads.

Our oligarch problem will continue until we the people take matters into our own hands, like the French are doing. France should be a model for more countries. When your oligarchs commit crimes with impunity, take to the streets.

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Mackinders Nightmare

Posted on March 24, 2023 by camelotkidd

Wow! Take a week off from blogging and all hell breaks loose.

First there was the surprise agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner, and Iran, a longtime enemy, had negotiated a normalization agreement on their own to restore diplomatic ties. The final meeting to conclude the agreement took place in the Chinese capital of Beijing. The news was followed by the Saudi finance minister who said Saudi Arabia could start investing in Iran “very quickly.”

Then there was Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia. It’s far from coincidental that Xi’s trip to Moscow exactly coincides with the 20th anniversary of American ‘Shock and Awe’ and the illegal invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq.

Of course these developments went over like lead balloons in Washington. Because, after all, the US is the world leader and how dare those Russian and Chinese presume to challenge the dominant hegemon. Besides, there’s appearances to maintain. Ever since it pushed aside colonial Britain and France, the United States has prided itself on being the dominant outside power in the Middle East. That lofty image was shaken this past week by the surprising developments.

Meanwhile, it’s a sad state of affairs when the western political/media class is so bereft of new ideas that they’ve resurrected the phrase “Axis of Evil” from the invasion of Iraq propaganda. On Tuesday former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told Fox News that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are “two dictators that have said they are unlimited partners,” asserting that “This is the new Axis of Evil, with Iran being their junior partner.”

I swear to God, the discourse is so juvenile that it feels like we entered some sort of time warp between South Park and a Mike Meyers movie–Dr. Evil and America-Fuck-Yeah.

It’s getting more than a little disorienting.

The deal reached between Iran and Saudi Arabia especially has produced neocon angst because of the unspoken undercurrent of Israeli interests. Mark Dubowitz of the neocon Foundation for the Defence of Democracies think-tank whined “[It is] a lose, lose, lose for American interests. It demonstrates that the Saudis don’t trust Washington to have their back, that Iran sees an opportunity to peel away American allies to end its international isolation, and it establishes China as the majordomo of Middle Eastern power politics”. 

Translated: lose, lose, lose for Israeli interests. The dirty little secret is that US foreign policies in the Middle East favor Israel even to the detriment of America. From the time of the 9/11 attack, neoconservatives, of primarily (though not exclusively) Jewish ethnicity and right-wing Zionist persuasion, have tried to make use of 9/11 to foment a broad war against Islamic terrorism, the targets of which would coincide with the enemies of Israel.

The neocons need to look in the mirror. In their blind obsession to advance Israeli interests they’ve managed to not only fuck the US but to fuck Israel too, all while coming off as intellectual gangsters. For decades the US has eschewed diplomacy in lieu of threats and extreme violence. “You’re either with us or against us”, encapsulated this sentiment as did the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, destruction of Libya and Syria, and endless drone strikes.

What’s priceless is that the new multipolar alliance between Russia, Iran and China is based on diplomacy. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement was actually jump-started by Russia in Baghdad and Oman: it was these negotiations that led to the signing of the deal in Beijing. Moscow is also coordinating the Syria-Turkey rapprochement discussions.

US empire managers have long planned the acquisition of post-Soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against China, but instead the exact opposite happened. Russia, China, Iran and other unabsorbed governments have all been driven closer and closer together by the hostility of the United States toward all of them, and now they are overcoming some significant differences to rapidly move into increasingly intimate strategic partnerships to protect their national sovereignty from a globe-spanning empire which demands total submission from every government on earth.

Halford Mackinder must be rolling over in his grave.

Update: Ian Welsh nails it. “The level of incompetence and stupidity required to turn Russia into China’s firm ally is awe-inspiring, and I truly do feel awe.”

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They’ll do it again

Posted on March 11, 2023 by camelotkidd

We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq, a horrific period in US history that left over a million Iraqis dead and thousands of US soldiers in body bags. Meanwhile, the neocon monsters who organized and carried it out are still in positions of power and authority. Even worse, they’re not the least bit sorry for having killed a million innocent people and the minute they get the chance, they’ll do it again.

That’s why we’re constantly being bombarded by war propaganda, from sinister Chinese spy balloons to evil Russian bots manipulating our precious democracy. Sometimes I have to stop and stare in wonder at how insidious the US empire is at manipulating the ways Americans think about the world. It’s depraved, it’s abusive, and it’s profoundly destructive, but damned if isn’t stupefyingly effective.

Basically, US intelligence and the accompanying news reports based on this intelligence are no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, have become tools to falsify a nuanced reality and propagandize a poorly educated populace. In other words, our discourse no longer revolves around a grasp of reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism, or narrative, which produces a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.

Unfortunately, the managers of empire have become enamored by the manipulation as well. It’s not just the poorly educated that have been propagandized. One of the most amazing developments since the election of Trump has been the mass formation psychosis that’s taken hold of well educated liberals. The truth is that the establishment in Washington DC has become so detached from reality that they live on a different planet. Russia-gate is a case in point.

And in this environment the neocons hold the whip hand with their control over the dominant organs of the corporate media–New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox, MSNBC etc. We saw this dynamic 20 years ago in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq when the neocons and their corporate media insiders–read Judith Miller and Michael Gordon–were allowed to fix the intelligence around policies, rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.

They even had a term for it–stove-piping. The politicization of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the “anti-intelligence” to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre, just as Cheney had intended. After all, he had a war to sell.

Recently Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, told the world that the US supports Ukrainian attacks on military targets on the Crimea peninsula. “Crimea, which includes the port of Sevastopol where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, is seen by Western and Russian diplomats as the biggest flashpoint of the Ukraine war.”

I’m sure that will turn out just swell, in fact I’ll start work on the fallout shelter.

What’s not surprising is that Victoria Nuland was also Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advisor during the early years of the Iraq war. After all, the show must go on.

In a healthy society they lock up mass murderers and throw away the key.

They certainly don’t celebrate their achievements.

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If the right hand doesn’t get you the left hand will

Posted on March 3, 2023 by camelotkidd

Isn’t it great that in America we have a robust democracy where each political party represents a clear coalition and is responsive to the will of its voters?

Oh, wait.

At a Friday event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) hosted by the George W Bush Institute, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke glowingly of the president who instituted the program in 2003. “I’ll just say this honestly, that the Bush family, it’s because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion,” said Pelosi. “Once again, it’s an honor to be associated with President Bush in this.”

According to the way-back machine, 20 years ago George W. Bush was also preparing to launch the invasion of Iraq, which would inflict unfathomable death and destruction upon our world which continues to unfold to this day. Historians in the future will not use “humanity, faith, generosity of spirit and compassion” to describe Bush’s behavior, but Nancy’s praise offers an unintended view into the “supposed” venomous partisanship that bedevils our fair republic.

It’s possible that public opinion plays some role in the functioning of a democracy, but no one has been able to explain what that role is. Instead, they will talk about voting as the way the public is able to express themselves. However, it’s an obvious fact that voting does not change the course the US government. I mean, just look around at the actions of the US government, under Republican or Democratic rule and compare their behavior to opinion polling and see that there is a vast chasm.

Now that monarchies have been reduced to a ceremonial function we are left with autocracy, democracy and oligarchy, usually in that specific historical sequence. In America we celebrate our “wonderful” system of representative democracy even as we are way closer to an oligarchy. It appears that democracies are easy to subvert with money and power. And by oligarchy I mean the relentlessly advancing, immoral rule by the rich, whose predatory governance benefits only themselves.

To understand how we got here it imperative to focus on the function that our political parties play in this transformation from representative democracy to oligarchy, and not be fooled by the cultural wars both Republicans and Democrats utilize to divide and rule for their true constituents. The reality is that our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified corporate media.

Just as an example of the malign dynamic: Both Democrats and Republicans are braying for a conflict with China, in addition to advocating total war against Russia.

I know.

Do you think there might be a backstory to this belligerence towards China that they’re not talking about?

US corporations, with the cover of both political parties, betrayed American workers by moving their manufacturing and production to China. In other words, Republicans and Democrats aided and abetted a massive theft from American workers. $50 trillion to be precise. So who is actually responsible for the rise of China? Western corporations are responsible. If Americans want to blame someone, blame them. Only now our political class, with their corporate media cheerleaders are busy advocating war with China. These same corporate mandarins and other elites are unhappy with China because China will not allow them to take control over their markets, financial system and currency as they have in America.

What’s amazing is that even a few years ago US elites imagined that globalization was unstoppable and they were the “masters of the universe”. We would all bow down before their techno-futurist imaginings of our shared global future. And it was to be too a clear validation that it was they who were on the “right side of history”, in stark contrast to those “others” (Russia, China and Iran) who stood unmasked as history’s autocrats. 

Who says that history doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Meanwhile, another train in the US has derailed. 

It’s ironic that the party that claims to be the party of workers-the Democrats-is AWOL leaving the field open for Trump and other faux-populist Republicans to grandstand. Last week, ahead of either President Joe Biden or Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Donald Trump paid a visit to East Palestine, Ohio, and denounced the administration for its response to the catastrophic train derailment that devastated that community earlier this month. The Democratic Party has been trending away from representing working-class Americans since Carter but the election of Donald Trump sent this into overdrive. Many commentators ask. “What happened to the Democrats? Why do they support war, why are they aligned with big business, why are they openly disdainful of the working class while embracing Identity Politics?”

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the modern Democratic Party has come to worship markets as the solution to governance, aping Republicans. We can’t have government doing anything positive for Americans, after all. Even after Covid the Biden Administration let broader social programs enacted during the pandemic, like universal free school lunch and an expanded child tax credit, expire before they had time to take root.

What’s fascinating is that Republicans have been forced by their base to adopt a certain amount of populist rhetoric since Trump’s rise. Meanwhile, none of the conditions that led to Trump’s surprise win have abated. Even on the conservative side there is a growing sense that all of these corporations are against us — not only are they trying to screw us over on the woke stuff, but generally, they just don’t care about ordinary people.

Gee, you think?

Unfortunately, both political parties are treacherous, nothing more than delivery systems for the oligarchs, where the Democrats and Republicans are payed handsomely to reliably deliver voters.

I hate to be a drag but absent a calamitous event or authentic revolt I don’t think that our oligarch owners and their Republican and Democrat sock-puppets will change course. All they know how to do is double down.

Update: I repeat myself but you can’t make this shit up.

“Cheney joining University of Virginia politics center as professor” [The Hill]. “Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is set to join the University of Virginia as a professor at its Center for Politics. ‘With democracy under fire in this country and elsewhere around the world, Liz Cheney serves as a model of political courage and leadership,’ the center’s director, Larry Sabato, said in a statement. ‘Liz will send a compelling message to students about integrity. She’s a true profile in courage, and she was willing to pay the price for her principles — and democracy itself.’ Cheney will participate in university-wide lectures, serve as a guest lecturer in student seminars, contribute to the department’s research, and participate in university and community events, the center said.”

“Democracy under fire”, to be saved by Liz Cheney?

Jesus wept.

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