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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Sacrifice Zone

Posted on February 25, 2023 by camelotkidd

Is it just me or are America’s priorities seriously fucked-up?

While our feral elite blather on about freedom, democracy, rule based international order, etc., the American people are discovering that they live in a sacrifice zone.

On Monday, President Biden, who has barely mentioned the rail disaster, decided to visit Ukraine instead of East Palestine. During an appearance on Fox News that same day, Mayor Trent Conaway said the president’s visit overseas was the “biggest slap in the face” as his town continues to suffer following a freight train crash carrying hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride. Despite state officials’ claims that air and water in the area remain safe, thousands of fish have died in polluted local waterways and people in the vicinity of the derailment have reported headaches, eye irritation, and other symptoms.

The brutal reality is that a billion dollar rail corporation can cause a chemical disaster and poison 3 states with impunity. Notably, Norfolk Southern announced a $10 billion stock buyback program last March. The company has routinely raised its dividend, rewarding shareholders while refusing to invest in safety upgrades or basic benefits such as paid sick leave. Norfolk Southern, which reported record-breaking operating revenues of $12.7 billion in 2022, originally offered to donate just $25,000 to help affected residents—an amount equivalent to about $5 per person—but recently announced the creation of a $1 million charitable fund instead.

To add insult to injury Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw failed to show up for a town hall meeting, citing “not feeling safe” as his reason for absence. Maybe he didn’t feel safe because of the bright red, pad-locked plastic cages blocking the water fountains with “danger” written on them in seven different languages?  

The juxtaposition couldn’t be clearer with President Biden flying into Kiev to pledge billions more while residents in East Palestine, Ohio were left to suffer. Meanwhile, Secretary Buttigieg and the Transportation Department signaled to the railroads that this type of incident will be tolerated. Here’s what The Boot said when asked about the disaster. “While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing.”

So suck it up losers, a little collateral damage is just the cost of doing business, and our elite have other priorities. They could not give a damn how many people fall sick and even die. Their only concern is protecting profits from any challenge from working-class Americans. Besides, they made it clear what our nations priorities are when Biden and Congress joined forces with rail companies last November to end a rail worker strike over such issues. They forced the railroad workers union to concede in their strike demands, rewarding the exact rail corporations like Norfolk Southern. Despite obvious issues, as pointed out here by Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, “The massive reduction in the workforce, attendance policies that encourage people to come to work when they’re sick or exhausted, lack of access to [paid] leave, the stress that is constantly put on workers because of how lean the workforce has become, it creates a negative culture in terms of safety.”

Railroad workers have been warning about the conditions that resulted in the derailment for years. They include the impact of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) and similar attendance schemes, endless cost-cutting by the railroads, a massive reduction in the size of the nationwide workforce, and a relaxation of inspection and maintenance. These have made the trains ticking time bombs. I wonder if there’s a connection between PSR that the unions were so concerned with and the derailment?

Just spitballing here, but maybe this sort of corporate malfeasance ought to have political consequences?

And, that didn’t take long.

“Trump visits East Palestine in wake of train derailment” [The Hill]. “Former President Trump plans to visit the town of East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment led to the release of toxic chemicals, next week. Trump posted on Truth Social in response to a report that he was planning to make the trip that the residents of East Palestine are “Great people who need help, NOW!”

Paraphrasing Lambert at Naked Capitalism–These fuckers keep asking for my vote.

On February 19th there was an anti-war demonstration in Washington involving left and right leaning groups uneasily united against America’s endless wars. Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging wars.

It seems obvious that the anti-war forces need to make the connection between the worsening conditions at home with the enormous expenditures abroad on war and destruction. What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex and the aristocratic-financial owners. In America the reality is environmental destruction, economic injustice and inequality. Rentier capitalism. Corruption. Steadily escalating police militarization. Soaring incarceration. Increasing internet censorship. And all while wealth and resources are taken from the people and poured toward global power agendas which do not benefit them, and which in fact impoverish them and endanger them as the empire’s “great power competition” against Russia and China threatens their lives with nuclear brinkmanship.

Going further–the political moment seems ripe for a red/blue convergence to end the American empire and heal our nations sacrifice zones.

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Shine a light

Posted on February 17, 2023 by camelotkidd

I blog to cope with the deluge of propaganda, and to deal with the alienation that comes with attempts to stay sane in an increasingly insane world. Like Diogenes, who searched for an honest man, I search for the truth in a world of lies.

When much of what the media prints is fake news to serve an oligarchic regime, and a censorship consortium consisting of the press, Big Tech, and U.S. spy services calls facts “disinformation,” it’s hard to keep things straight in a labyrinth of lies. It seems that we are now living in a society openly based on lies or even the repudiation of the concept of truth, increasingly backed by the threat of violence and terrorism. The truth of the matter is that fact don’t matter anymore. The word “narrative” has replaced the older term “party line” that was used in the USSR, but the meaning is similar. Furthermore, if you believe the lies and repeat them you are a valued member of the party or tribe. Conversely, if you reject a lie because it is simply obviously counter-factual, then you are not “just” wrong, you are the enemy.

An example of the extreme censorship is the explosive article that Seymour Hersh had to publish on Substack because none of the legacy media would touch it. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Indeed, western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that? This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. The systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further.

The lies and silencing are part of a mass-formation phenomenon that rises as a function of suppressed panic over America’s wobbling empire and business model, especially among the managerial class and the “experts” who are supposedly in charge. The more the management and expertise fails, the more desperately they seek to control every lever of daily life.

Matt Taibbi writes: “In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.

The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda.”

Remember the “Matrix”? Morpheus defines it as “the wool that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Those who have become red-pilled, then, are likewise persons who recognize that the wool has been pulled over their eyes. They see things as they really are and not as the government nor as prevailing opinions would have us believe.

I took the red pill and have broken from the prevailing worldview which most people share. I see the “system” for what it is, and recognize that it does not have my best interests at heart. I realize that everything that I’ve learned since elementary school has been based upon the same underlying set of falsehoods. I guess I’ve always been anti-establishment in my thinking and for support for political dissidents, but since I was discharged from the military I’ve become more and more distrustful of my own government and its complicit media. I have come to see the wizard behind the curtain who uses illusions, sleight-of-hand and artful flourishes to deceive the gullible masses.

I blog to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we’ve been taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world is a lie. 

That’s just me, what about you? Will you help me shine a light?

Update: What gives me hope is that trust in the corporate media is plunging to historic lows.

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Disconnect

Posted on February 10, 2023 by camelotkidd

I have never witnessed such a disconnect between the narrative promulgated by the corporate media and reality. I know I’ve talked about this before but every day brings a new example.

These types of disruptive narratives are far more common than is acknowledged. One aspect to this infowar revolution has been the inversion of the western media business model: Its revenue no longer derives from readers who buy or subscribe​,​ and who want, and expect​,​ reality.  

At the national level, it is government and its agencies which now pay millions for their narratives to be put forth.  There is no standing apart from this discourse; there is no thinking outside of the dominant narrative as the Twitter Files have revealed. And now thanks to the Columbia Journalism Review, and Jeff Gerth’s four-part series, we know a lot more about the “real disinformation”, especially the way in which the national security state, in league with their corporate media pals whipped up a new Cold War with Russia. Russia-gate seriously fucked-up the function of media, and media’s understanding of its function, beyond repair. Over the past seven years mainstream American media have come to see and embrace their task as the conveyance of official propaganda.

And it works​. People repeat narrated realties. They embrace tribal-narrated messages. Ideology has replaced reality. This has become a big problem since intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality, which is inconsistent with willfulness and fantasy.

So arguments no longer revolve around truth. They are judged by their fidelity to the tenets of tribal messaging. You are either with the narrative or against it. Remaining loyal to ​team blue or red becomes the highest morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking. And to further reinforce conviction in the rightness of the narrative,​ the other team must be marginalized and mercilessly ridiculed to make them seem stupid or crazy.

To comprehend how we got to this era of disconnect it’s useful to go to the way back machine. The Reagan Administration, created an office of Public Diplomacy and brought C.I.A. tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world. Writing for Consortium News, investigative journalist Robert Parry revealed  the existence of a C.I.A. perception management program begun during the Reagan administration. It had the aim of selling false stories to the American people to further the interests of the national security state. “In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others depending on the U.S. government’s needs.” The ultimate outcome was articulated by CIA Directer William Casey: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”

Perversely, Casey’s outcome has come to pass for America’s elites as well. They have become consumers of the very same propaganda they’re foisting on the rest of us. The point here is that this methodology for the American ruling class has become mandatory. It is as self-destructive for those individuals who try to move beyond it​,​ as it is to question its core tenets. In the process, the American ruling class, led by the neocons, has become overtly hostile to empiricism and truth.

It’s no wonder the United States is in such a mess economically, socially and morally when unabashed delusion is our national pastime. And rather than a corrective to corporate media, social media has only intensified the disconnect as Americans find comfort in their own tribal narratives.

Update: Seymour Hersh has moved to Substack where he just confirmed that it was the US who destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines.

What a surprise.

Whodunnit? – Facts Related to The Sabotage Attack On The Nord Stream Pipelines

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