Me, myself and I

Posted on October 14, 2022 by camelotkidd

Identity politics is the perfect embodiment of neoliberalism. Arch-neoliberal Margaret Thatcher articulated it when she proclaimed that “there is no society, only individuals…”

Moreover, identity politics is designed to divide and rule.

They’re not even being subtle about it. In an astonishing clip from the Cato Institute, economist, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute, says a focus on domestic manufacturing is simply a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”

I can’t think of a more effective divide and rule strategy than having neoliberal economists financed by Wall Street pushing offshoring and then saying that anyone who opposes having their community and livelihood destroyed is racist.

I love it when influential elites are so arrogant that they say what they really mean without all the usual nuance. Too bad we can’t offshore Posen’s job but that will never happen. Sociopaths like Posen are payed princely sums and rewarded with prestigious positions precisely because the policies they’ve promoted have allowed the 1% to Hoover up $50 trillion from middle-class Americans over the last 40 odd years as the American economy went into financial hyper-drive

This kind of open disdain for maintaining American manufacturing and decent, middle-class jobs is discrediting neoliberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans alike and has led directly to the type of populism that Trump’s emergence represented. I mean what’s the point of these political parties if they both support policies that empower the wealthy and crush everyone else? Indeed, it seems governing has become performative, rather than actual. Of course, we’re not supposed to talk about this, hence the maniacal focus on identity politics and the cultural war domestically.

Meanwhile, the neocons have gotten religion on identity politics. Which makes sense. The neocons prefer to scheme from the shadows while infesting influential US think tanks. They move between political parties while utilizing prevalent cultural trends to craft fresh justifications for American exceptionalism. Meanwhile they’ve assigned themselves license to lie and defame anyone who dissent from neocon orthodoxy as “Russian agents” or “Kremlin assets.” In this way id-pol help’s obscure the US’s ruthless foreign policies, like the recent sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. The only conclusion we are left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire. The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American empire, and a ferocious warning for Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

But it’s ok because we use the proper pronouns and perpetuate liberal-woke, activist-driven, social justice-oriented identity politics and Putin is a monstrous autocrat who persecutes gay people. Since the Russia-gate psy-op the neocons have realized that linking Donald Trump to Putin and Russia and demonizing the alleged intolerance towards homosexuals, provides a massive payoff with liberals now the most fervent Russia-phobes.

By the way, I’m not criticizing anti-racism, feminism, or other movements for social equality, but the way in which id-pol emphasizes social constructs like race or gender, rather than on material conditions and class. Identity politics is what we get after neoliberal capitalism has cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, and this is why there’s such a frantic emphasis on being “woke”, with the accompanying censorship and propaganda. Empires and nations don’t fall because of external forces, usually, even when those get assigned as the proximate cause in history books. Rather the failures are due to inability to manage internal contradictions.

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We’ve got to stop there

Posted on October 7, 2022 by camelotkidd

The US corporate media more and more resembles the Soviet media. The censorship, propaganda and conformity are startling.

For example, when Professor Jeffery Sachs observed that it was probably the US that sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines, the Bloomberg host interrupted him, “Uh, Jeff, we’ve got to stop there”. 

Actually I think the US corporate media environment more resembles Orwell’s 1984, with it’s emphasis on group-think and avoidance of wrong-think. We can look no further than the treatment of Ukrainian neo-Nazi’s for evidence of this Orwellian dynamic. The US corporate media continue to denazify Ukraine by pretending that the Nazi formations in that country, which they had long decried, are now brave warriors resisting Russian tyranny. What was once “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” which even the FBI said is notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” was first relabeled as merely “far right” before it became a normal “unit in the Ukrainian military”.

The other day the New York Times finished the progression by turning a Ukrainian government press release into a tear dripping story about the reunion of freed Azov neo-Nazi’s with their families: Released Azov commanders have an emotional reunion with family members in Turkey.

I guess we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Meanwhile, here in the homeland, liberals hate them some Nazis, especially if they’re only Trump supporters sporting a Confederate flag patch.

It’s simply remarkable.

Actually the war against Russia is not about values or a rule based liberal order or any other nonsense you might hear or read about, it is about the United States maintaining global dominance. That’s all it’s about. However, our political elites apparently assume that their tight media control will ensure that their ignorant citizenry could be made to believe–or at least pretend to believe–almost anything, even that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines. Remember, everything bad that can’t be attributed to Trump must be due to Putin.

It just says so much about the overwhelming success of Russia-gate as a PSY-OP that the most surefire way to enrage a liberal is to say that nuclear escalation with Russia is probably a bad idea but here we are. Since 2016 progressive Democrats have been worse than useless on the single most important issue in the world, namely de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia. Because of Russia-gate they’ve been feeding into the Russia hysteria and passionately backing proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Other heretics have noticed the trend. Journalist Glenn Greenwald says that talks to de-escalate or end the conflict in Ukraine are virtually nonexistent because the corporate media and political elites have nurtured an atmosphere where to do so is considered unpatriotic. “Because everyone knows that the minute you step up and step out of line, there’s a hoard of people ready to call you unpatriotic, or a traitor, or an admirer of Vladimir Putin”. “It’s a really repressive atmosphere and squashing a debate that we absolutely have to have,” Greenwald further urged.

Strong, confident countries don’t engage in propaganda, censorship and conformity, but that’s not the US in 2022. The corporate media is telling us what to say and what we cannot say. In this way they are destroying public discourse and a vibrant public discourse conducted in public space ranks among the important sources of strength. They are also destroying people’s abilities to discern, to think, and to judge for themselves–another source of a nation’s strength.

Update: Too funny.

FT MYERS, FL — In a desperate attempt to get help for its citizens and deal with the growing humanitarian crisis in the area, a Florida town devastated by Hurricane Ian has taken the unusual step of raising the Ukrainian flag, hoping to convince Congress to send aid.

“The Ukrainian government flies this flag, and they’re just swimming in billions and billions of dollars in support from the United States. We’re just swimming in sewage,” said Ray Valdivia, the Response Coordinator working to assess the damage in the town. “We tried going through the normal channels to get help from the government, but Biden just sent us a letter of “best wishes” that looks like it may have been written in crayon.”

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The March of Folly

Posted on September 30, 2022 by camelotkidd

I’ve come to believe that our leaders are insane.

What the latest developments on and off the battlefield make undoubtedly clear is that the US and NATO are willing to use Ukraine for as long as it takes to achieve the stated aim of leaving Russia “weakened” or even achieving regime change, no matter the damage knowingly inflicted on Ukrainians, Russians, the Global South, and their own citizens.

Starting a land war with Russia is never a good idea as a certain Mr. Hitler and General Napoleon could attest but neither is invading Iraq or attempting to occupy Afghanistan.

Of course historians have written enormous volumes on the folly of elites. Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. If she were still alive, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine into account.

“They were deaf to disaffection, blind to the alternative ideas it gave rise to, blandly impervious to challenge, unconcerned by the dismay at their misconduct and the rising wrath at their misgovernment, fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt existing system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.”

Here we are headed into winter with the threat of nuclear war a real possibility, doubling down on support for a corrupt regime in a bankrupt failed state infested with Nazis, running out of weapons, facing economic decline, collapse even, a cold winter, rising inflation. Does that sound like something designed by smart or sane people? And it didn’t just suddenly happen–it’s been building for years.

In truth it goes back to the first Cold War. C. Wright Mills wrote of a “crackpot realism”, where US foreign policy mandarins evoked national security to build a military/industrial/complex bent on nuclear supremacy and to disguise the operations of the corporate and financial deep state. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ’emergency’ without foreseeable end.”

And just like the first Cold War, the corporate media is a large part of the problem. All the cool kids love war. I mean check out this editorial. The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think-tanker titled “Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us“.

This would be Joe Biden, who has never met a war he didn’t back and who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy. With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the most bellicose foreign policy of any president in history.

You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned. Absent a miraculous appearance of diplomacy, historians who survive to record the imminent nuclear war will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok.

It’s “crackpot realism” once again, where the conventional wisdom is that the US needs more war and any leader–like Trump–who calls for ending NATO, is portrayed as an authoritarian madman. It’s also the idea among elites and the chattering-class that endless war for empire is the norm and anyone who suggests otherwise is either a Russian sympathizer or a kook.

The neocons who are running amok have never known anything but American hegemony. The Wolfowitz Doctrine, set up after the fall of the USSR, made it US policy to ensure no other superpower develops which can rival US supremacy. It is part of a long term neoconservative plan for continued U.S. supremacy over the world. These same small group of neocons rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations or Brookings or the AEI, before being called back into government. They have been as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House, as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended, and the world remains binary – ‘us and them, good and evil’.

And now the plot thickens:

“Three offshore lines of the Nord Stream gas pipeline system have sustained unprecedented damage in one day,” Nord Stream AG, the operator of the network, said on Tuesday in what one German official has suggested is a “targeted attack”. Nord Stream 2 suffered a gas leak which was then followed by a drop of pressure on Nord Stream 1. The company also said that “it was impossible to estimate when the gas network system’s working capability would be restored.” As both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 both suddenly lost pressure last Monday, Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions. The pipeline director reports unprecedented damage. Clearly this is deliberate sabotage.

Gee, I wonder who done it?

US official statements offer a clue. Here’s Victoria Nuland in January. “One way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”. And Biden in February. “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?” Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

And now US Secretary of State Blinken has said the pipeline damage presents a “significant opportunity” for Western Europe to abandon Russian natural gas in favor of liquified natural gas from the US.

This fits a pattern. As empires come to the end of their life cycle desperation sets in. The Big Picture reveals the US in absolute panic, with“elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geo-economic abyss. Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal. If we’re going down then so are you.

Meanwhile, no one is pointing out that the present moment is more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis and we seem to be sleepwalking towards Armageddon.

Sorry, marching towards Armageddon.

Update: US officials keep warning that Russia will use nukes but this is projection. It’s the US that would be forced to use atomic weapons because they lack the requisite conventional ones. Russia, because of it’s advanced conventional weapons, such as hypersonic missiles, has escalation dominance.

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The Jackpot

Posted on September 23, 2022 by camelotkidd

Author William Gibson came up with the formulation of a massive societal die-off that he called the “Jackpot” in his novel the Peripheral.

Gibson is also famous for his quote–“The Future is Already Here, it’s Just Not Very Evenly Distributed.”

Putting the two together, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Jackpot is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.

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Waiting for the Flood

Posted on September 16, 2022 by camelotkidd

The US corporate media have transformed into empire cheerleaders, abandoning any pretext of being a Forth Estate holding power accountable. This dynamic took hold after 9/11 and the War on Terror era but the US proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine has only solidified it. Nothing can contradict the narrative that the US is a noble force for good while our enemies are the personification of evil. Indeed, the neocons who are engaged in the inexorable march by the US and its allies to turn the Ukraine crisis into World War III surely have learned the lesson that managing the narrative of what is taking place is the greatest weapon that they have in their possession.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the non-coverage of the explosive charge that Covid 19 was a US bio-weapon unleashed on China and Iran by rouge elements of the Trump administration. Ron Unz, the brilliant writer and editor of the Unz Review has put forth a well argued series of articles making the case that Covid was American made, a product of the US bio-warfare laboratories that was unleashed on foreign enemies, but now his case is bolstered by Jeffrey Sachs, chairman of the Covid Commission, recent pronouncements about the origins of the virus.

“Over the last couple of years a fierce debate regarding my Covid hypothesis has raged on the discussion-threads of our own website, encompassing over 18,000 comments totaling more than 2.6 million words. During these lengthy exchanges, I have encountered few strong arguments against this scenario, other than the claim that even rogue elements of the Trump Administration could not have possibly done anything so reckless and foolish, having such disastrous consequences.

But I think the most plausible reason a casual reader might have for disregarding my analysis has been the argument from silence. If my case were actually as strong as I claimed, surely it would not have been totally ignored for so long by virtually every mainstream and alternative journalist in America. Only obviously fatal flaws in logic could explain such a lack of coverage.

However, the utter silence that has similarly greeted the public revelations of Jeffrey Sachs and the accusations of top Russian generals suggests otherwise. If almost every media outlet in the West can ignore the headline-worthy public statements of the chairman of the Covid Commission, it is easy to understand why they would have done the same to my own far more controversial and far less solidly-established analysis.

But I’d like to believe that once there is a major breach in the dam, an enormous flood of long-avoided information will soon flow outward. In effect, the American public has been bamboozled into supporting a costly and risky proxy war against Russia. Then, it was actively led to believe that Ukraine was winning the fight, despite later reports that the U.S. intelligence community has lacked an accurate portrayal of the war on the ground from its very onset.”

Unz is spot on about the state of the US corporate media but I’m not holding my breath on there being a flood of information. The US corporate media would make Pravda and Izvestia envious with their serial lying and omissions. Their coverage of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a case in point. I continue to wonder what the plan is when said facts can no longer be obscured, when cheerleading no longer does it, when it proves no longer enough simply to repeat falsified accounts and judgments as if by dint of repetition they will come true. 

Before the latest barrage of relentless propaganda there was Russia-gate. Russia-gate was a massive psy-op against American liberals, who because of their antipathy towards Trump were primed to support the US proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine. I’ve also come to believe that Russia-gate inoculated the deep state against any suggestion that they were responsible for Covid since liberals came to love them some deep state while many conservatives will never believe that their sacred America would willingly release Covid.

Meanwhile the total information warfare that the corporate media has committed to is unprecedented and, remarkably, it tells you everything you need to know about the weakness of the system where the only thing they know how to do is double down on the mendacity.

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Democracy also dies in the daylight

Posted on September 9, 2022 by camelotkidd

On Thursday night, Joe Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia about how Donald Trump supporters are violent extremists, and then claimed once again that election fraud is impossible, and that anyone who disagrees is a violent threat to democracy.

It echoed the Washington Post’s concerns about the fragile state of American democracy with their masthead since Trump’s election–“Democracy Dies in Darkness”.

Democracy also dies in the daylight, by which I mean that since at least the Powell Memo both political parties and the corporate media have played no small part in drowning it in the bathtub.

Biden claimed that the Republican party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans and that is a threat to this country… MAGA Republicans do not respect the constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law.

This warning comes from a Democratic administration in thrall to a national security state that used Russia-gate as a slow motion coup against a sitting president and covered up blatant evidence of Biden’s son’s criminal and deviant behavior in the run up to the 2020 election using their Big Tech partners.  Late last month, the world was treated to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg confessing on Joe Rogan’s podcast that, yes, the FBI did in fact put pressure on the social media giant to bury news about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”—news that very likely would have changed the results of the 2020 election had it been allowed to circulate.

And they’re warning about threats to democracy.

Man, the projection, it burns.

Of course, the Democratic Party are not the only ones pulling our legs. The Republicans want to blame America’s malaise on socialism or gasp–communism, but this is intended to obscure their role in the descent. In truth, our problems are bipartisan with both parties turbo-charging the looting of our country for the benefit of their campaign supporters. The result is that the US is ruled by billionaires, it’s an oligarchy, not a democracy.

What’s truly ironic about all this wailing about fascism is that the Democratic Party, starting with Hillary in the 2016 election, actively pushed for Trump, the most extreme candidate, to be the candidate on the Republican ballot because they thought that they could beat Trump like a gong. Of course, it also allowed the Democratic Party to move further to the right to balance out the extreme policies of the Trump Republicans, so there’s that. The Democrats have been doing this shuck and jive since Carter but it finally bit them in the ass. You’d think they would have learned their lesson after the election of Trump but while warning about fascism, the Democrats are still actively attempting to get the most extreme Republican candidates on the ballot with the calculation that they will be easier to beat while the Democrats can move even further to the right.

How’s that for cynical and hypocritical? Not to mention self-defeating?

Who am I kidding? This strategy works very well for the billionaire donors that run the show.

The Democrats can pose as the lesser of two evils to their PMC stalwarts, even as they serve Wall Street and the national security state, while the billionaires are down with fascism as long as it keeps the rubes distracted and focused on the other party. The only difference between the red propaganda and blue is that the ongoing disasters are always the other teams fault. It’s either the fascists or the socialists that done it, never in a million years is it the wizard behind the curtain.

However, fear works well as a means to divide and rule. As H.L. Mencken noted, “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

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Public Diplomacy

Posted on September 2, 2022 by camelotkidd

The US doesn’t do diplomacy. Diplomacy is seen as a sign of weakness. Understanding your enemy is viewed as treasonous. Moreover, American foreign policy relies on force, either economic or military to achieve its aims. Because of this reality much of the rest of the world has come to view the US as not agreement capable.

The US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has brought all of this into focus. The US refused to negotiate with Russia to alleviate Moscow’s justifiable security concerns about Ukrainian membership in NATO and since then has actively sabotaged any and all negotiations to end the fighting. Indeed, the US provoked this war and sabotaged peace at every opportunity

Instead, the US engages in “public diplomacy” aka–propaganda, to sell the proxy war against Russia to the American public, chiefly liberals, who were already primed to despise Russia thanks the national security state depicting Trump as a Russian spy the entirety of his presidency.

Public diplomacy was developed during the Reagan Administration to sell a skeptical public on war with Nicaragua. It was first exposed during the Iran-Contra hearings but received very little attention.
As the Washington media grew bored with the Iran-contra story, articles focused on the celebrity of Lt. Col. Oliver North and narrow questions, such as who authorized a diversion of Iran arms sales profits to the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Yet, the “public diplomacy” campaign was a dramatic tale, too. It was the story of how the top level of the CIA had circumvented law and manipulated U.S. public opinion in support of CIA covert operations in Central America.

Public diplomacy is basically perception management, with the perception of war being the product that needs to be managed. Remember when Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff admitted that war was a product that you don’t introduce in August?

Good times.

Public diplomacy exists to influence the opinions of the American people as well citizens of foreign countries, as we can see since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. Europe, in particular has been targeted by a vast public diplomacy campaign by outfits like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). The Atlantic Council is a NATO narrative management firm that is funded by NATO, the US government, the UK government, various other US-aligned states, the arms industry, and numerous billionaires. CEPA’s donor list looks similar to the Atlantic Council’s and includes US arms manufacturers and the US government through both the US State Department and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. Both are used to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America.

And now the US Congress is toying with the idea of declaring Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” when it is Washington-ally Ukraine that is in fact using terror and the US has a long history of employing terrorists to carry out its foreign policies.

But this brings us back to the depressing reality of US foreign policy. Being diplomatic, realist and or conciliatory are problems when every issue is framed through the lens of domestic politics. Moreover, the strongest domestic actor for bellicose foreign policies are the weapons industries, shilled for by the neocons, who have a financial interest in endless war. And when it comes to Russia, the neocon hawks are both bipartisan and firmly in control.

Ambassadors are nominated by incoming administrations for their fundraising prowess, while the State Department and  the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy spend their waking hours fomenting coups and whipping up “public diplomacy”. That “public diplomacy” is predicted on American exceptionalism where we are noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. We must believe we are the Good Guys because to think otherwise–when we elect our rulers–would make us directly responsible for the suffering of others. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy. 

US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of an continuous national security state, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy. 

And, it’s not just Russia but China that the US seems bound and determined to enter into conflict with. Lately we’ve had a Congressional trifecta of hubris-laced ignorance, which saw the dispatch of three consecutive delegations that threaten to propel China down the path toward a war with Taiwan it doesn’t want to wage, climaxed by the visit by Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia.  It’s crazy dangerous with the district possibility of ending life on earth. However, the neocons, since Reagan Administration, when the term “public diplomacy” came into being, have understood the need to salve the public’s conscience, and the apparent willingness of the citizenry to collude in the deception. Indeed, it’s only because of this ongoing “public diplomacy’ that the American people are not demanding that the US cease its provocations that have the potential for life ending nuclear war and engage in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente with Russia and China.

Instead, our rulers tell us they have our interests at heart at home, and that they are protecting us from terrorists or communists or the Chinese and or Russians. Domestic politics both reassures us of the establishment’s benevolence or encourages us to become bickering partisans, pitted against each. Meanwhile, we are kept in a state of constant alarm over scary attacks on US interests in foreign lands. And if we want change, we are told, we can always vote for team blue or team red, even if in practice nothing fundamentally alters whichever party is in power.

Meanwhile, the US remains the world’s dominant power. No other country maintains hundreds of military bases scattered throughout the world. The US has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. Presently the US is starving entire populations with economic sanctions, military blockades and brazen theft. No other country has been interfering in foreign elections anywhere near as often, while terrorizing populations around the world with wars, covert ops, drone strikes, proxy conflicts, and staged coups and uprisings.

But, thanks to decades of “public diplomacy”, this state of affairs is depicted as mainstream or centrist, not extremist like the icky Trump and his band of MAGA marauders and both political parties are down with it. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find out that massive amounts of narrative management have gone into creating that consensus. The fact that the social engineers of the oligarchic empire have poured vast fortunes into making sure Americans consent to capitalism, corruption, militarism and murder is the only reason those perspectives are so mainstream that they can be labeled “moderate” or “centrist”.

Unfortunately, all of this lack of real diplomacy and emphasis on “public diplomacy” was manageable when the US was a unipolar power. But the times, as they say, are changing with Russia and China creating a multipolar world that opposes US hegemony.

Reality, to paraphrase Game of Thrones, is coming and promises to be just as brutal as the coldest winter.

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Here We Go Again

Posted on August 27, 2022 by camelotkidd

I hate the fact that I end up defending an asshole like Donald Trump in my efforts to illuminate the machinations of the deep state, but it’s crucial to understand that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is the continuation of Russia-gate.

Indeed, whatever your views on Trump, it is undeniable that the permanent military-intelligence bureaucracy in Washington does not see him as one of their own, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to target him when it sees fit. The FBI investigated Trump as a suspected Russian conspirator and asset, not just once, but twice. First as a presidential candidate, and then months after he took office. To undertake this, they relied on the Hillary Clinton-funded Steele dossier’s conspiracy theories as source material. They repeatedly lied to a FISA court and, despite the full knowledge that they had come up empty, prolonged their investigation with media leaks and court filings that falsely suggested that Trump had initiated a Russian collusion.

The hostility continued throughout Trump’s presidency resulting in two impeachments by the Democrat-controlled House. For the entire four years, there was an atmosphere of crisis surrounding Trump’s presidency, and this has continued with the January 6 Committee hearings. And now the desperate attack on Trump with the Mar-a-Lago raid to make sure he can not run again. Even more suspicious is that all of the actors from the FBI counterintelligence division that carried out Russia-gate were present when agents broke into the estate and ransacked the rooms looking for documents Trump possessed that demonstrated the coup against him.

To recap: The FBI lied on FISA warrants to spy on Donald Trump in 2016, they fabricated the Russia hoax, they worked with Facebook (and probably Twitter) to censor a damaging true story about his opponent in 2020 while they had the laptop the whole time, and they raided his home in 2022.

What drives the deep state and their corporate media lackeys wild is that Trump was somewhat beyond their control. Indeed, Trump owes his success to popular mistrust of the national security state that’s embroiled the country in endless wars and the corporate media that cheers them on. In the past, whenever the media attacked a politician, that politician was never heard from again. But Trump, like a horror movie zombie, just keeps lurching across the political landscape, and even worse, the more the corporate media attacks him the more the MAGA crowd supports him.

Those nostalgists who yearn to reconstitute the good old days when corporate media could dictate reality and force people to believe it are becoming ever more hysterical in their censorship and propaganda campaigns. They are now openly deeming conspiracy theorists “enemies of the state.” Black Americans who oppose the war in Ukraine are getting their doors kicked in by the FBI. CIA whistleblowers who provide proof of Agency crimes to Wikileaks face up to 80 years in prison. Assange awaits death-by-extradition, while Snowden claims asylum in Moscow.

Meanwhile liberals are cheering on the odious Espionage Act because it’s being used against their bête noire–Trump. Ironically, by pursuing him under this provision, the Justice Department just did Trump the mother of all favors, adding his name to a list of some of the most famous political martyrs in our history. “Ellsberg, Hale, Winner, Snowden, Assange, and now Trump. It’s mind-blowing.

With the release of the Trump Mar-a-Lago affidavit pundits are proclaiming the search was validated by the contents of documents found but why would the Justice Department pick an Epstein-complicit Trump-hating judge to sign off on the search warrant? The choice of going to federal magistrate Bruce Reinhart for the Mar-a-Lago warrant sure looks crude and desperate. Only weeks ago, he was presiding over the Trump v Clinton lawsuit. How did that even happen, given Mr. Reinhart’s role defending Jeffrey Epstein’s associates — many of them Clinton-connected — in the 2007 sex-trafficking case? And only after the spectacularly weird act of switching sides from the federal prosecution team to Epstein’s defense team. Not to mention Mr. Reinhart’s record of public statements denouncing Mr. Trump. There are twenty-five other magistrates who rotate their duties in the Southern District of Florida, why pick him?

Inquiring minds want some answers and not the usual handwaving about Trump’s dangerous fascist tendencies.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago should be viewed as part of a larger pattern. Namely the collapse of US hegemony. This is why nearly all foreign policy types in Washington, the heads of international institutions and thinktanks are going apoplectic right now. Their order is collapsing, and their decisions and actions appear to be done in desperation. Unfortunately, there is no sign that these policy makers are willing to change course. They are living examples of Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” 

They seem wholly unable to extricate themselves from a mindset that, in terms of foreign policy, has already run its course. If they don’t change their policies, then the American people will change their politicians.

The charge against Trump is that he represents a crude sort of American fascism but what is the national security state that uses right-wing death squads, al Qaeda terrorists and Neo-Nazi’s as surrogates except fascist? What’s become apparent is that there are two types of fascism in present day America: The right-wing, populist type epitomized by Trump, who has taken full advantage of the 40 odd year decline in living standards for the majority of Americans. And the fascism represented by the national security state–deep state–cheered on by liberals because of its antipathy towards the Donald.

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of all-American fascism. Chose your monster–right-wing populism, Trump style. Or the national security state, cheered on by liberals.

Everyone is a winner.

Meanwhile, the left in America is dead. They didn’t just sabotage and destroy the left, they burnt it to the ground then burnt the blueprints for how to rebuild it. The deep state’s propaganda campaign against the left has been so successful that people don’t even know where “the left” is anymore. Most have it confused with identity politics like having pink hair and saying your pronouns, or outright right-wing like the Democratic Party.

Historically, when the left fails to articulate an answer to working-class suffering, there is a corresponding rise in right-wing populism. To the extent that there is anything left involved with the Democratic Party or the class-blind identitarianism it wholeheartedly embraces, the visible left’s contemporary answer to working class suffering is to say that the white workers just need to “check our privilege” and get on with the belt-tightening.

I’m not sure that’s a winning political issue to run on.

Update: The deep state must not possess incriminating pictures of Trump on Epstein’s pedophile island or else would they go to all the trouble?

Update II: Like minds think alike. Lambert at Naked Capitalism has come to the same conclusions I have. “Speculating freely, let me put an alternative thesis: Trump kept documents — some of them, at least — that implicated the operatives of RussiaGate 1.0. First, it would enable Trump to take revenge on the “Deep State” factions who attempted to destroy his first presidency. Second, it provides a natural issue to campaign on if and when he runs for his second.”

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Multipolar

Posted on August 19, 2022 by camelotkidd

The neocons are sure to lose their shit but what did they expect with their inept machinations and insane war mongering? Instead of a glorious neoliberal market utopia undergirded by American “full spectrum dominance” the rest of the world is headed to a multipolar future.

End of history my ass.

The financialized neocolonialism overseen by Wall Street is coming to a screeching halt, thanks to a large part due to Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine that is really a proxy war against the US/NATO. The opening was quickly exploited. In quick succession, we have had a number of potentially strategy re-defining summits: The Caspian, the Tehran and Russia-Turkey reset conferences. These are all examples of the new political dynamics beginning to manifest. These confabs, nonetheless, are buttressed by solid economic interest, centered around the advent of new trade and economic connections, in ways to mitigate the US’s barrage of sanctions, whilst at the same time, generating new commercial initiatives to lift these regions out from their economic servitude.

Taken together, this represents a strategic move to take commerce, its transportation corridors and all payment systems out of the control of Wall Street financiers. A multipolar world order is taking shape. Instead of a “rules based order” directed by the US an increasing number of countries are choosing a different path of sovereign development based on their own distinct identities, traditions and values.

Meanwhile the neocon infestation of both Republican and Democratic parties has resulted in an increasingly unhinged foreign policy. This has become so dangerous that even Hague fugitive Henry Kissinger has felt the need to issue a warning. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

The defining event that may tie all these Russian initiatives together took place thousands of miles from the Ukraine–the Pelosi visit to Taiwan that so infuriated Beijing. Thanks to Pelosi’s stunt China now realizes, like Russia has come to, that the US is not agreement capable, and they are girding for a new stage of conflict. Indeed, the pace and intensity of US-China tension is set to go up–changing that relationship forever.

Thanks to the deluge of propaganda most Americans conflate the US empire with America the country and therefore support US imperialism. But the unipolar US empire is detrimental to the vast majority of citizens and only serves the elite. Paradoxically, during the Cold War the USSR, by providing an alternative to capitalism, kept our feral elite somewhat concerned with our well being, if only for the optics in the competition between operating systems. But once the Soviets quit there was, as Margaret Thatcher warned, no alternative to the savagery of the neoliberal market. And now the malign effects of the unipolar period of American hegemony are on full display: The manufacturing offshoring that has left many formerly vibrant communities abandoned husks as our feral elite embraced the neoliberal way of outsourcing to low wage nations to destroy labour. The diversion of wealth from middle -class Americans to the billionaires. The ongoing opioid epidemic and deaths of despair. The decaying infrastructure. The trillions squandered on weapons as millions of Americans lack healthcare–the total national security state budget for early 2019 was over $1.25 trillion, and it has grown exponentially since that time.

It is, of course, unpopular in any instance to be an apostate, to be the child suggesting the emperor has no clothes, and to challenge the corporate media narrative that has been broadly accepted by a trusting public.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that the era of the United States as the supreme military and economic power in the world is over so we can prepare accordingly.

Moreover, we should celebrate rather than mourn.

The real patriotic response is to advocate for the end of empire and a restoration of our republican values.

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August

Posted on August 13, 2022 by camelotkidd
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